Herbert R. Lottman, an American who fell in love with Paris as a young man and stayed to write detailed, influential biographies of giants of French culture, commerce and politics, died on Aug. 27 at his home there. He was 87.
Publishers Weekly, for which Mr. Lottman was the European correspondent for 30 years, confirmed his death, saying he had been treated for Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and other degenerative diseases.
In an interview with The New York Times in 1989, Mr. Lottman suggested that his work showed an American-like passion for hard facts that he believed some French historians and biographers ignored or fudged in favor of their own intellectual theories. Of his 17 books — published in English and translated into many languages, including French — 15 were about French intellectual, artistic and political life.
“The French continue to use the a priori method, which is to know in advance what you want to say about a writer and then find anecdotes to make the story interesting,” he said in the interview with The Times. “And so, I have in front of me very fertile fields and no competition.”
He added, “It may seem absurd that you can go back to the 19th century and still find virgin territory, but you do.”
His method, he said, was more that of the journalist than the professor. “A lot of so-called French biographers imagine that they can invent things, dreams and thoughts of the figure they are writing about,” he told a French literary journal in 2007.
In a review in The New Statesman, Christopher Hitchens lauded Mr. Lottman’s rigor in “Albert Camus: A Biography,” a 753-page work published in 1979 that was widely described as the first full-length biography of that author and philosopher. “The detail and care is extraordinary,” Mr. Hitchens wrote. “Further slipshod generalizations about Camus will simply not be tolerable from now on.”
For the book, Mr. Lottman tracked down Camus’s last love, a young woman whom he had pledged to marry. (He died in an automobile accident in 1960.) Mr. Lottman did not give her name because by the time the book was written she had a husband and a new life and had asked him not to. Camus’s estate tried unsuccessfully to block publication, partly because of this and other revelations about Camus’s romantic life.
The family also objected to Mr. Lottman’s portrayal of Camus as ambivalent about the Algerian uprising against France that grew into a successful war for independence in 1962. Camus supported Algerian rights but could not imagine an independent Algeria, Mr. Lottman wrote, as have other biographers. But in an interview in 2011 on the website of Gingko Press, he said that Camus’s family had wanted him to portray Camus as an ardent advocate of French Algeria.
Some critics found Mr. Lottman’s “just the facts” approach incomplete and uninspiring, particularly in his biography “Flaubert” (1989), about that 19th-century novelist. To them it paled before Jean-Paul Sartre’s “The Family Idiot,” a lengthy study that combined psychoanalysis, social psychology, linguistics, anthropology and other disciplines to theorize on Flaubert’s motivations.
Others, though, praised Mr. Lottman for mining Flaubert’s previously unpublished correspondence and undermining earlier, more sensational portrayals of him. “The myth that Flaubert was a backward child is convincingly demolished,” Heather Ingman wrote in The Guardian. “And Lottman brings common sense to bear on some of the wilder speculations about Flaubert’s sex life.”
Mr. Lottman found that sex was less a governing factor in Flaubert’s life than some accounts have maintained. He convincingly documents that Flaubert’s longest liaison was a discreet 30-year affair with an Englishwoman, Julie Herbert, the governess of a beloved niece of Flaubert’s.
Mr. Lottman had a knack for fascinating detail. In “The French Rothschilds: The Great Banking Dynasty Through Two Turbulent Centuries” (1995) he recounted that when Bismarck occupied the Rothschild estate during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), the caretaker barred him from the wine cellar while admitting to having only 100 bottles of Bordeaux ordinaire. When Bismarck, enraged, threatened to torch the premises, the caretaker suddenly remembered 17,000 other bottles.
Other French subjects of biographies by Mr. Lottman include Henri Philippe Pétain, a hero in World War I and a Nazi collaborator in World War II, and the novelist Colette. He also wrote about Left Bank intellectuals; the fall of Paris in 1940; the punishment of Nazi collaborators; and the Parisian neighborhood of Montparnasse as seen through the wanderings of the artist Man Ray.
Herbert Roger Lottman was born in Brooklyn on Aug. 16, 1927. His father was a Broadway press agent. At 6, Herbert produced, in pencil, a newspaper that covered events like a visit to his grandmother. By the time he was 14 he had upgraded to a mimeograph machine and charged 15 cents for the paper, The New York Herald Tribune reported in an article about him in 1942.
Mr. Lottman majored in English and biology at New York University and graduated in 1948. The next year he studied in Paris on a Fulbright scholarship. He returned to New York with a French bride, Michele, and earned a master’s in English from Columbia in 1951. That marriage ended in divorce.
He returned to Paris in 1956 to become a novelist but, he said years later, he had trouble creating credible plots and characters. He ran the Paris office of the publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux, sold articles to magazines and wrote his first book, “Detours From the Grand Tour,” in 1970. He started with Publishers Weekly in the late 1960s and continued until 2002.
Mr. Lottman was appointed chevalier of the French order of Arts and Letters in 1991, and promoted to officier in 1996. He remained an American citizen, and was to be buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery.
He is survived by his wife, Marianne Véron, a translator of American and English literature; his sons, Aurélien and Jérémie; and three grandchildren. His brother, Evan, a film editor nominated for an Academy Award for “The Exorcist,” died in 2001.
When Mr. Lottman wrote “Jules Verne: An Exploratory Biography” in 1996, he revealed that Verne was not much for leaving the house, except for cruises on his cherished sailboat. As if that were not shocking enough for science-fiction voyagers, Mr. Lottman deliberately played down Verne’s literary achievements. “Verne ain’t Camus,” he declared in a letter to The New York Review of Books.
He went on to pour salt on the wound. In some cases, he said, “he was simply filling up pages to meet contractual obligations.”
No comments:
Post a Comment