Masters and Servants

July 31, 1997
Michon is one of the best-kept secrets of modern French prose, a living refutation to pundits who regularly tell us that French writing is dead. Because he lives outside Paris, Michon, whose prose poems have charmed a discerning few readers in France, has still not gained the wide celebrity of a number of less talented co-writers. Author of such books as Rimbaud the Son and the remarkable Minuscule Lives (neither of which are available as yet in the U.S.), Michon must be classed with his friend, the equally talented, equally obscure Gerard Mace, as writer of prose-poems so imbued in literary or visual arts that their essays seem like extensions of the works in question. Here, in five pieces, translated with unusual sensitivity by Mason, Michon examines the lives of artists such as Watteau, Goya, Piero della Francesca, and van Gogh, with obligatory bows to previous poetic biographers like Vasari. These texts are not for art history classes, except for students who may want to understand what sort of artistic emotions may be provoked by paintings, flights of the imagination that are not tied to prosaic biographical data. Another influence in this exquisite sort of exercise is the mostly-forgotten imaginative "biographer" of legendary lives, the turn-of-the-century writer Marcel Schwob. It is hoped that Michon will have a less obscure fate, especially if confided into caring hands like those of his present translator, who seems so besmitten with this prose that the present book even includes a portrait sketch of the author by Mason.