Du Bos, Charles (1882-1939). Born into a rich cosmopolitan family, with a knowledge of languages and a European education, Charles du Bos was the archetype of the leisurely man of letters with immense cultural knowledge and broad interests. Among his wide circle of literary friends were Gide, Schlumberger, Ghéon, Valéry, Maurois, and Rivière. He contributed to many reviews, including the Gazette des beaux-arts and the Nouvelle Revue Française; his articles are collected in Approximations (1922-37). As a critic he moved easily through different art forms (literature, painting, and music) and through different cultures, producing works on Goethe, Byron, the Brownings, Mérimée, and Benjamin Constant. He kept up an extensive correspondence with the German scholar Curtius, Gide, and Valery Larbaud, among others.
His journal, begun in 1908, revealed behind the urbane, cultured conversationalist the drama of Du Bos's inner life; the search for an impossible happiness, the problem of reconciling individualism and self-fulfilment with the possibility of loving someone other than oneself, the attainment of spiritual values in art while rejecting God, a desire for total sincerity. The battle between intelligence and God was resolved with his conversion in 1927, and in 1932 appeared François Mauriac et le probléme du romancier catholique. In 1937 he left France for the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, where he wrote What Is Literature? (1940).
[Ethel Tolansky]
