Creative Critic

A compulsive concern with things creative may contrast strangely with an intense interest in varsity basketball and football, but for Albert J. Guerard, 41-year-old professor of English, the contrast is merely one of many that fill both his career and his personality. A Californian who wears a checked jacket but carries a staid green book bag, an American with an intimate knowledge of the wartime French underground, and a writer of fiction who also is a critic of writers, Guerard humorously regards himself as a "controlled schizophrenic."

Guerard began to split his personality at an early age, for with an American mother and a famous French father--a well-known professor emeritus of history and literature--he grew up with a natural knowledge of both languages and cultures. At the age of ten, he left the schools of Houston, Texas, for a Parisian ecole, which was a "nightmare" and "prison" with its 5:30 a.m. rising bell. A return to America and then another short stay in Europe eventually led Guerard to enter Stanford University, where he received his doctorate after graduate study at Harvard and in England. He returned to Harvard in 1938 as an instructor in English.

Between his shuttling and his studying, Guerard found time to do what he enjoyed most: write fiction. He won a national fiction contest at 15, and began his first novel, The Past Must Alter, when he was a 20-year-old Harvard graduate student. As usual, he drove himself as relentlessly as possible: "I was trying to catch up on Latin, get an M.A., and write my first novel, all at the same time. And those were the days when the graduate students didn't talk to each other; it was a real battle."

Guerard survived the battle but soon faced the War, and like so many other scholars, he entered the Psychological Warfare Division of the Army. With the job of doing political intelligence among the French underground, or "maquis," Guerard remained in newly-liberated towns and tried to set up the newspapers, the civil government, and occasionally even the water supply. He thinks that he must have talked with over a thousand young members of the Resistance in a four-month period as he took his own notes on these underground maquisards. "Much of my work was done in bars at the army's expense," he recalls. There he came in contact with all types of people--the tough and the disabled, intellectuals and workers, Communists and Catholics.

Guerard's contact with so many people under such tense circumstances, as well as his training in the psychology of warfare and propaganda, probably influenced his life more than any other experience. For the war seems chiefly responsible for the deep interest in people's emotions and behavior that underlies his fiction, his teaching, and his literary criticism. "It was the first big public thing that happened to me," he recalls. "I suppose I'll have to pay for that sin for the rest of my life."

Twice a week, Guerard pays some of the debt as he doles out sin in his popular course, "Forms of the Modern Novel." In Comp. Lit. 166, more famous as "one-sexty-sex," Guerard puts to work his precise and detached psychological analyses and seems to have great fun trying to shock his students. "The old-fashioned assumption which led to biographical studies of novelists," he says, "was that if you got the writer's public face and knew what he ate for breakfast, you could understand his books. But this overlooked the whole creative temperament or psyche that appears when the author begins to write the book." Guerard's own literary criticism of authors such as Gide, Conrad, and Hardy is largely an extension of this interest in the psychology of composition.

After Guerard became interested in psychology, his own fiction changed immensely. "My first three novels were realistic and conventional," he says. "But after the war and after reading in psychology, I felt that everything was too much on the surface." He feels that if his later novels such as Night Journey have any merit, an interest in hidden motivations should get a large part of the credit.

Actually, Guerard spends less time in the school year writing than he does aiding the students in his small creative writing course. "Often a student will come in thinking he wants to write like Hemingway, and my job is to help him discover what he really wants to do," he says. Students whom he has helped say that he has an extraordinary understanding of the creative process and that he is a hard but fair critic, with a detached, exacting, often cold attitude. At the same time, they say, he has an amazing sympathy and will always take hours to talk.

While Guerard may help others to write fiction during the school term, he saves his own writing for summers. "I couldn't start a novel during school. As a teacher, you're a respectable member of society, but if your inner life were so thoroughly respectable, you couldn't write at all. You have to regain a certain amount of naivete to write a novel, and at the same time, you have to break out of your academic shell." He adds that "a writer is a combination of audacity and innocence."

Next year, Guerard will bring these paradoxical traits of a writer into use as he takes a sabbatical to write a novel in Europe. He is not sure exactly where he will live, for as he says, "I don't like the idea of going to a predictable place." And in a sense, whether he is working with the French Resistance or watching the basketball team, whether he is writing fiction or criticizing it, Albert J. Guerard has been to very few predictable places.