I have recently had the opportunity of an interview with this brilliant young man, and it occurs to me to present a summary of his aspirations and an estimate of his accomplishments.
His history is brief. Early success, like a happy country, does not furnish history. He was born in Paris in 1884, the son of a physician and the grandson of a farmer. This evolution from farmer to littérateur in three generations Duhamel says is common in France, indeed in all Central Europe. His tastes seem to have been largely influenced, if not formed, by the setting and atmosphere with which his father's profession surrounded his early life. Until he was mobilised in 1914 Duhamel had not practised medicine. Even as a youth he had experienced the literary urge and felt that he would eventually succumb to it. He, however, devoted himself to the sciences and to medicine in the firm belief that such study provides the best preparation for the vocation of literature. In this M. Duhamel is in full accord with another famous theoretical world orderer, Mr. H. G. Wells, but in disagreement with a practical one, Mr. Charles E. Hughes.
“One does not learn life from letters, but from life, through seeing suffering and death,” said he when asked to speak of the factors that influenced him to abandon medicine for letters.
In the midst of his studies as a youth he had what he now calls rather a strange adventure.
“I spent much time in the society of friends: writers, painters and sculptors. All of us were seized with a strong desire to shrink from society as it was constituted. Although we were not all Fourierites, we decided to form a phalanstery in which we could live a community life, each one taking part in the work and in the joy of living in an atmosphere adapted to our tastes and our professions. We agreed to make our living by means of manual work, and to abolish the relation of master and servant. We decided to adopt the trade of typography, which would permit us to advance our art. Through mutual economies we bought a printing press and our first books were published by 'L'Abbaye de Creteil,' as our little publishing house was called. The phalanstery was disbanded for financial reasons, but we had a taste of an agreeable life, independent, oftentimes difficult, but in many respects quite ideal.”
When asked about his earliest literary productions and why he essayed poetry rather than prose, he replied,
“Generally speaking, all writers begin with poetry and gradually forsake metre. Our little group wanted to initiate a great literary epoch and we believed that this could be done only by creating an atmosphere favourable to intellectual work.”
He might have borrowed Socrates' reply when Cebes asked the same question: “For I reflect that a man who means to be a poet has to use fiction and not facts for his poems.” M. Duhamel's training had been in facts, and his greatest success in letters has been in the recording of facts. His smallest success has been in establishing postulates based upon them.
GEORGES DUHAMEL