ANATOLE FRANCE—Edwin Preston Dargan—Oxford University Press ($5).
When Anatole France (Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault) died in 1924, the younger generation of French writers swarmed to the scene with strong antiseptic criticism intended to fumigate the world of his reputation as the equal of Montaigne, Rabelais, Renan, Voltaire. Most contemporary writing about him has reflected this opinion. With the possible exception of Proust the most-written-about French writer of the last century, Anatole France has not yet been the subject of a definitive English biography. Why biographers have been scared away may be surmised by reading Author Dargan's volume, a 729-pager which took ten years to write and covers only 52 of France's 80 years. Author Dargan, Professor of French Literature at the University of Chicago, excuses himself from covering the last 28 years by saying that the facts are too hard to get straight, that France only repeated himself during that period. A painstaking job, Anatole France is a scholarly juggling of biography and criticism aimed at separating the tangle of legends (including many an anecdote told by Anatole France's secretary Jean-Jacques Brousson) and the blind-man-&-the-elephant judgments of fellow-writers. Except to suggest that France lived 28 years too long, Author Dargan believes the younger critics have carried literary hygiene too far.
France's own accounts of his childhood should not be taken too literally, warns Author Dargan. Only child of a famed Paris bookseller who rose from an illiterate peasant, little Anatole arrived at his first opinions by taking the opposite side from his father, one of whose opinions was that his son would never amount to much. His mother, who tucked him into bed until his marriage at 33, was the first woman to spoil him; of the others, he remembered back to the ''fair ladies" who, while he was still in his cradle, aroused his "precocious sensuality" with their tender duckings. At kindergarten age he acquired his "abiding penchant for actresses" when Actress Rachel patted him on the head. In clerical college he smarted, did little studying, because the main honors went automatically to sons of the nobility. Smarting ever after, as an old man he let loose against the college a blast of irony that all but put it out of existence, having first advertised it as the place where he picked up his ideas on "social iniquity and inequality" and his anticlerical bent.