Fortunate are those young men who have had masters!

Fortunate are the nervous youngsters who went and rang doorbells and received with flushed faces the encouraging word from the man whom they admired!

I grew up without any masters; in the years around 1928, I had a warm place in my heart for Claudel and I carried dog-eared copies of Shaw and Pirandello in my pockets, and yet, I was all alone. Alone with the anguish of one soon to be twenty years old, with a love for the theatre, and all the awkwardness of youth. Who would divulge to me the secret in those days in which only wellmade plays were performed? Musset, Marivaux reread a thousand times? They were too far off. They were from an era already fabulous in which spoken French still had periods and commas, from an era in which the very sentences danced.

In his own style, in his own creation, Jean Giraudoux is an accomplished playwright. If the reader of his plays or the theatregoer is an addict of the Giraudoux manner of writing, he will be enchanted and stimulated as long as the reading or as long as the play lasts. But the opposite reaction is equally possible for the reader or the theatre-goer who finds such a style antipathetic.

Ever since his first book appeared in 1909, a collection of stories and sketches called Provinciales, Giraudoux has been explained by almost every critic who has referred to him, by the term “preciosity.” He has been called a précieux with the same monotonous regularity that Gide has been called a “sincere” writer and Cocteau a “tight-rope walker.” The word is applicable, without much doubt, and yet literary styles are not easily classifiable.

Flaubert once said that a theme imposes itself upon the writer, that it demands to be treated. And Curtius remarked that the choice of a theme reflects an author’s basic attitude toward the world, that it indicates his typical reactions to given situations. But he also pointed out that he who has only a theme will not necessarily create great literature. No doubt, the theme alone cannot assure literary value to any work; nor does the particular orientation, the point of view from which the theme is treated, endow the work with stature. Broadly considered, war is the theme of La Guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu, and a despondent pacifism is its orientation. At first glance, the play appears to say either that war is in the hearts of men or that it is a pastime of gods indifferent to human will or human prayers.

Judith, written by Jean Giraudoux in 1931, and predecessor of Elèctre (1937), Sodome et Gomorrhe (1943), and Pour Lucrèce (1944), is the only one of his plays which Giraudoux himself labeled a tragedy. Critics of the work have not denied him this label, although views of what constitutes the tragedy differ widely. One of Judith’s translators rather frivolously calls it “a fable of sex and God.” A German writer terms it a tragedy of Nature wronged, with God the Worm, destroyer of all things, as the ultimate villain. It has been called “a magnificent tragedy of spoliation,” as well as “the most profound and the most ambiguous of all of Giraudoux’ plays.“ And finally, Mr. Bert M-P. Leefmans regards Judith as the 20th century’s cry of despair from a sink of iniquity, or, as he puts it: “In Judith … the Fall is total, the beasts take over from mankind, and Judith … chooses, or is forced, merely to survive.“

I “discovered” Giraudoux in the late nineteen-twenties when his Siegfried impressed me as an intelligent contrivance. His comment on the evils of nationalism did not exactly startle me with originality or stir me with passion, but he had an engaging way of projecting a point of view. He was suave, aloof, and ironic while other European pacifist playwrights of the period usually sputtered with anguish and worked themselves up to expressionistic frenzies of protest. He was as articulate as they were inarticulate, and as urbane as they were hysterical. The Giraudoux of my first encounter was an exquisitely civilized writer. And in contriving a tale of amnesia and mistaken identities in consequence of which a French soldier became a German after World War I, Giraudoux was plainly a “fabulist.” His favorite strategy, that of inventing or adapting a fable or myth, was also already in evidence, although Siegfried had originally been a novel by Giraudoux.

Until the curtain went up on The Madwoman of Chaillot in December 1945, Louis Jouvet, the producer and Giraudoux’ close collaborator since the production of Siegfried (1928), was tortured by uncertainty as to its reception. It was his opening play after a prolonged five-year absence from Paris. There were almost insuperable material difficulties, during this immediately post-war winter, in staging a play which requires some fifty highly fantastic characters to appear on stage. More serious, still, Jouvet suffered from the absence of Giraudoux who had unobtrusively died the year before, leaving his friend alone to select which of the two and sometimes three or more versions of scenes in the play was definitely to be adopted.

But most serious of all, the mood of The Madwoman of Chaillot, its lightness of touch, its colorful fantasy and ease seemed alien to the atmosphere of the day.

The professional critic, says Jean-Paul Sartre, too often sees literature as a perpetual conversation between Pascal and Montaigne. Like Joan of Arc he has his voices. Across the ages he hears the clamoring of Voltaire and Rousseau, Heine and Madame de Staël, Gide and Malraux. It is an “infernal dialogue” since it leads nowhere. Its purpose is never to make Pascal and Montaigne come alive, but to kill off Gide and Malraux.

This is brilliant and even true. Yet there is another truth. There is a dialogue, equally infernal, which is action and debate. The dialogue to which Sartre refers is most frequently only a monologue in which the critic has substituted his own voice, his own predetermined unifying point of view, for the opposing voices of two contestants. But the dialogue which is pursued within the rigorous confines of a restrictive truth cannot become a monologue.

Pour Lucèrce is Giraudoux’ last play, published posthumously in 1951, produced by the Madeleine Renaud—Jean-Louis Barrault company in Paris in 1953, and slated for Broadway production in an English adaptation by Christopher Fry.

On the face of it, the theme of outraged chastity, hallowed though it is by time, seems an odd dish to set before today’s theatregoers. Rape is not unknown on our stage; but chastity is rarely mentioned nowadays and Tarquin’s ravishing strides had quite subsided when Giraudoux came along with his Lucrèce. It should be noted, however, that he has given with one hand only to take away with the other.