Letters & Essays of the Day

Women Sweeping

Issue 239, Spring 2022

The woman in Édouard Vuillard’s Woman Sweeping, painted between 1899 and 1900, is Marie Michaud Vuillard, the painter’s mother. She is tall and stocky, her posture—that slight give of the back to the broom, without bending—marking a nonchalant style of carrying out a chore that routine hasn’t made any less complex. As Madame Vuillard sweeps, her gaze seems to fall on the broom or the floor. We might detect deference or humility in such a pose, but the turn of her head, her face ringed with a whitish glow as if lit by an inner ardor, conveys ease. We cannot see her gaze; we are given only the black slash of her eyelashes, which suggests an almost closed-eye intensity. Madame Vuillard is invested in her work and in herself, though perhaps in this moment she does allow herself to be mildly flattered by her painter son’s attention. The slash also conveys a quiet authority; you know that she need not look up to be heeded.

The Year in French Literature

By C. Chesnaie

In Saint-Germain-des-Prés, there is a lot of talk about publishers; in France as a whole, much less. In Saint-Germain people like to speculate about whether the winner of the Prix Goncourt will be published by Gallimard or Julliard; in France people look for and buy novels which they think they will enjoy. The war of the literary prizes is of interest primarily to publishers, and it would be a mistake to think that it influences opinion or affects the history and the future of the French novel. Here, at any rate, are some of the prize-winners:—

A Review of Italian Writing

By Giacomo Antonini

Since the end of the war, Italian literature has been arousing marked interest in almost all the countries of Europe, and particularly France and England. A great many people, however, seem to imagine that the termination of hostilities and the overthrow of the Fascists started a new era in Italian prose and poetry. Not at all: although even in Italy people expected a radical change just after the liberation, nothing came of it.

Paris Commentary

By John Train

The golden age of the expatriate literary life is already well past, there seems no getting around it, although like most golden ages it may never have existed and be simply a useful myth, a theme of conversation and art. Certainly the sympathetic enthusiasts of Mürger and du Marnier, and even of Imagism and Dada, seem as distant now as the shepherd-folk of the pastoral convention.

Letter to an Editor

By William Styron

Dear—:

The preface which you all wanted me to write, and which I wanted to write, and finally wrote, came back to me from Paris today so marvelously changed and re-worded that it seemed hardly mine. Actually, you know, it shouldn’t be mine.