Proust and Balzac are the ‘2 greatest novelists in the French language’ Daudet shows ‘a mixture of glibness and sometimes vulgarity yet there’s talent there.’ Much later, turning down a proposal for a film of Proust’s Swann in Love, Truffaut says ‘only a butcher would be prepared to film the Verdurin salon,’ and remarks that the producer seems already to have found ‘just such a butcher’ in René Clément. ‘It’s better than The Thief of Bagdad.’ He reads Graham Greene, offers his young literary judgments. He’s received the Balzac, he tells his friend he’s been to see A Thousand and One Nights. He loved books and movies, though, and the earliest letters collected here show his splendid scrambling appetite for them. He was something of a delinquent, and when he ran away from home ended up in a reformatory, a so-called observation centre at Villejuif. Was he unloved? Well, he was certainly left to his own devices. He got most of what we wanted, and he often speaks happily of his daughters, seems with them to have reversed his own unloved childhood. Was the prince happy? That’s harder to say. The story that emerges from these letters, well translated, admirably annotated, is that of a strange success and sudden ending: the drop-out became a prince and then died early. ‘Film criticism,’ he says in the last letter printed here, from early 1984, ‘was twenty years ahead of conventional medicine’ since it was sure Shoot the pianist ‘could only have been made by someone whose brain wasn’t functioning normally’.

Truffaut was born in 1932 and died, of a brain tumour, in 1984.

Or did he turn them too thoroughly into art, smooth them away, lose the friction he had found on the borders of art and life? What he seems not to have known, after those first films, was how to turn those fidgets into art. He jokingly remarks in one of these letters that he is going to take tap-dancing lessons – ‘not to launch a new career à la Fred Astaire but because I’m not relaxed enough and too fidgety’. Truffaut was the artist of a particular kind of restlessness: the wonderful restlessness of his early films – Les 400 Coups (1959), Shoot the pianist (1960), Jules and Jim (1962). Truffaut was himself anxious enough, and a great admirer of Hitchcock, but his own best films are a mixture of lightness and weight, as Kundera might say, of gaiety and distress plenty of pain, tragedy even, but nothing as taut, as possessive as anxiety. Truffaut called Hitchcock an ‘artist of anxiety’.

Francois truffaut films