Victor Brombert takes the title of his new book from a sonnet written by William Wordsworth in 1807 in defense of the sonnet’s constricting form:
Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room;
And hermits are contented with their cells;
And students with their pensive citadels.
For Brombert, the image represents “the singular world of universities,” including his first glimpse of Yale, where he enrolled as a veteran after World War II. Brombert earned his Ph.D. in Romance languages and literature in 1953 and joined the Yale faculty. In 1975 he went on to Princeton, remaining there until his retirement in 1999, and published a dozen or so books, most of them devoted to French literature. He writes out of a nostalgia for a vanished era in education and scholarship:
To be sure, this nostalgia of mine is for an especially privileged era in privileged institutions—an era that recent generations might find hard to imagine, now that the humanities are threatened everywhere and traditional canons are discredited.
Brombert has not written a screed against the ongoing corruption of higher education, though he isn’t shy about recounting the crimes against humanistic scholarship he has witnessed and the “epidemic conformity” that inevitably followed. His instinct, rather, is to celebrate the glories of superior literature, and not out of snobbery. He is a veteran of the bloody twentieth century. Born in Berlin in 1923 (he turned one hundred last month, on Veterans Day), Brombert was the son of a family who had fled Russia after the Bolshevik coup d’état. When Hitler came to power, he, his parents, and his siblings left for Paris, where Brombert received his secondary education at the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly. As the German army advanced on the city in 1940, the Bromberts fled to the unoccupied zone under the control of the Vichy government. A year later they escaped via Spain to the United States. Brombert returned to Europe as an American GI on D-Day, landing with the American Second Armored Division on Omaha Beach and later participating in the Battle of the Bulge.
Brombert’s book mingles memoir and what might be called literary contemplation rather than conventional academic criticism. His text is an acknowledgment of intellectual and literary debts, and he celebrates our much-abused and neglected inheritance. Brombert devotes thematically linked essays to such topics as Candide, jealousy in literature, Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Molière’s Dom Juan, Baudelaire’s poetry, and France’s gift to the United States of the Statue of Liberty. “Variety,” he writes, “does not preclude coherence or unity.” At the heart of his book is a chapter titled “On Rereading”:
Most readers can surely distinguish between books admired, books from which one has learned, books that have unsettled and disturbed, and others—fewer no doubt—which have changed one forever. These distinctions are in all cases very personal. Names come to mind. Some figures from antiquity: Homer, Sophocles, Virgil. Certain masters of the novel: Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Dickens. A few modernist writers: James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Vladimir Nabokov, Alfred Döblin. All great, their works often moving and revelatory. But have they changed one’s life? Have they altered one’s vision of the world? Not in my case.
As with any seasoned critical reader, Brombert’s standards for literary excellence are high and all his own. He makes no mention of science-fiction thrillers or other potboilers and makes no effort to court popular approval. Unlike the functionaries of today’s literature departments, Brombert views books not as opportunities to demonstrate intellectual and moral superiority but as works that have “helped shape my character”—a quaint notion on contemporary campuses. He singles out for the highest praise three French writers read and reread since his student days: Proust, Stendhal, and Montaigne. The first “changed my mental landscape,” he writes, while Stendhal mastered and shared a “singular inner music, a blend of tenderness and irony.”
Like generations of earlier readers, Brombert experiences a kinship with Montaigne’s “restless curiosity, open-minded skepticism, and fondness for paradoxical ideas.” He defends the “unremitting interest” the essayist took in himself. Montaigne’s inward gaze, unlike Rousseau’s, should not be mistaken for narcissism or self-indulgence. “Human nature is,” Brombert writes, “multifarious and unstable. Life allows for no fixity.” In rereading books prized across a lifetime, Brombert sees “a wider common experience: the continuous shuttle, or to-and-fro movement, between art forms and lived life.” The “pensive citadel” is not to be confused with the ivory tower. Books and life not only intersect but also are mutually nurturing. In a later essay devoted exclusively to Montaigne, Brombert reveals something of his own sensibility when he lauds the Frenchman’s desire “to use the dialogue with the revered authors of the past largely as pretext for entering into a dialogue with himself.”
In retirement, Brombert has arrived at what he calls “the permanent sabbatical.” He has never stopped writing, though he now concentrates on essays rather than lengthier studies. During the early days of the covid-19 lockdown, as his centenary approached, while seated in his study like Montaigne in his tower, Brombert contemplated not the books he has read but those that remain unread. He opened the Decameron (in Italian) and read of the Black Death that devastated Florence in 1348, only to discover that he had read and even annotated Boccaccio’s masterpiece decades earlier without remembering having done so. The same occurred when he opened Ovid’s Metamorphoses and read the tales of Pyramus and Thisbe and Orpheus and Eurydice: “Why did I underline this sentence or line? It’s the next one that’s important!” And then he adds, “Clearly, my way of reading the text had shifted, and I myself had changed over the years.”
