Larbaud, Valery (1881-1957). Novelist, poet, essayist, and translator. He was an angliciste by training. His immense Vichy-St-Yorre wealth and taste for travel coloured the cosmopolitanism of his fictional Barnabooth, whose Poèmes par un riche amateur (1908) comfortably pre-date the internationalist currents in Apollinaire or Cendrars and are a neglected marker in modernism. A 1913 re-edition added to them a short story and a journal intime, under the title A. O. Barnabooth: ses œuvres complètes, revealing in the diary a Barnabooth (Perec's Bartlebooth in La Vie mode d'emploi is an obvious avatar) of more humanist bent. From 1910 his literary erudition and appetite for translation made him a mainstay of the NRF, where he also published novellas, essays, and poems. He translated Italian, Spanish, and much British writing, including that of James Joyce. Inspired by Joyce and Dujardin, he experimented with interior monologue in the novella ‘Amants, heureux amants’ (NRF, 1921).
His Beauté, mon beau souci (1920) is more sharply worked than his better-known study in adolescence, Fermina Marquez (1911), though it too resorts to the curious, self-effacing narrative displacement in midtext that makes so many of his protagonists seem ineffectual. Larbaud is to the novella what Balthus is to painting—witness his Enfantines (1918)—for much of his writing is a delicate meditation on the mysterious graces and favours—invariably ungranted—of young girls, known or dreamt-of. Yet for all its genteel fantasies and cossetted comforts, his fictional world, where libertinage and emotion play awkwardly together, appears pervaded by solitude. A subtle psychologist and a travel writer of charm (Jaune bleu blanc, 1927; Aux couleurs de Rome, 1938), he was a pivotal figure in the Anglo-French literary landscape of his day.
[David Steel]
