THE SELECTED LETTERS OF GUST AVE FLAUBERT.

Translated and edited byFrancis Steegmuller '27. New York: FarrarStraus and Young, 1953. 281 pp. $4.00.

As a master of self-portraiture, Gustave Flaubert - whose tenet it was that the author's personality must be rigidly excluded from his work — ranks not too. far behind Stendhal and Montaigne; not only because he consistently and admittedly violated his rule in his novels but also because he is the author of a voluminous correspondence in which the "I" which he tried to banish from his novels gets its full revenge.

Mr. Steegmuller's Flaubert and MadameBovary, which appeared some years ago, establishes his rank as a student and lover of Flaubert. His dual purpose in editing this selection from Flaubert's correspondence is to acquaint American readers with the rich and passionate humanity of the French author and to underline the importance of his message for men of our day. These letters, he points out in his introduction, "provide effective ammunition" against the many pressures, secret and overt, that concert to destroy intellectual and artistic integrity in our own time, and constitute "probably the most complete statement in existence of the artist's duty to maintain his independence - a statement even more valid to-day than when Flaubert made it."

The succinct biographical and critical essays with which Mr. Steegmuller prefaces the various groups of letters furnish background and a pattern of continuity to the letters themselves. As a further assistance to the reader, the book includes biographical sketches of Flaubert's principal correspondents.

The dust jacket achieves a new standard for modesty in blurb-writing when it terms this book "the first comprehensive selection of Flaubert's correspondence to appear in adequate translation." The fact is that Mr. Steegmuller's renderings of Flaubert's prose are so much more than "adequate" that they read as one can only imagine they would have read if English had been Flaubert's mother tongue.

Any reader whose only contact with Flaubert is through Madame Bovary and who has had that mighty book soured for him by such prissy tributes as "perfect," "meticulous," etc., owes it to himself and to Flaubert, the hater of niceties, to discover the real Flaubert that lives in his letters.