December 1960
M. Mauriac is now an old man: one who has been a practising artist and a Catholic for many attentive years, and this book is almost entirely composed of his reflections and experiences of these two forces which are illuminated by sharp, sunlit patches of his childhood, and his memory of how certain books - sometimes written for his contemporaries - first impressed him. Although, as the title suggests, it contains almost nothing about his external life, it discovers a great deal of what he holds most dear, or most real about himself. He re-reads books now, he says, in order to seek the truth about the author: writing of Emily Brontë, for example: ‘I know the precise places in Wuthering Heights where it is she who is speaking and making a direct confession. I recognise her voice: a moment more, and I shall be pressing her hot and feverish hand.’
On the whole, he says that he no longer wants to read either novels or poetry - although the desire to read poetry persisted longer in him - that now he contains such an accumulation of impressions and echoes that he needs no more: it is music and silence that sustain him. ‘A book is delivered into our hands, and with the book, its author. In the case of music, however, it is we who are delivered. The music enters into us and acts upon us like a developing fluid and “brings out” all that is most secret in ourselves, but without any sense of heartbreak, or, if heartbreak there is, it is sweet.’
M. Mauriac’s methods of discourse are both simply personal and deliberate oblique, and his writing has a kind of profound accuracy which is seldom achieved and can never be contrived. Primarily, perhaps a book for those who write or are interested in the processes of literature, this work is also for those who are unable to agree with Sartre that ‘no man is ever anything but a swindle’, exposing this pernicious and narrow-hearted attack upon the uses and possibilities of life as not only general and direct, but partial and untrue.