Word: gramont
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...BECOMING AMERICAN by Ted Morgan (Sanche de Gramont); Houghton Mifflin; 336 pages...
First the bad news: Sanche de Gramont is not a French count any more. Now the good news: he became an American citizen last year and, in the process, shed his title and the name his family has borne since "the morning hours of Western civilization." He is now Ted Morgan. Big changes: De Gramont, says Morgan, was the strict, rather European father, for instance, and something of a male chauvinist; Morgan, says Morgan, is a permissive American father of two, and an earnest believer in feminism. De Gramont kissed the slender hands of titled ladies, the rascal; Morgan...
...becoming an American is readily apparent, especially to Americans. To him France is all but fossilized, and his highborn relatives there are wholly so, as the funniest parts of his account maliciously attest. (Ted Morgan's Uncle Armand once brought Marcel Proust to lunch. Afterward the due de Gramont, Armand's father, handed his guest book to the already famous author "and with the total disdain of the nobleman for the artist, said, 'Just your name, Mr. Proust. No thoughts.' ") The U.S. he sees as still an open society, free and easy, rambunctious, optimistic, cheerfully ready...
Baffling Travelers. A chronicle in which explorer after explorer vanishes into the jungle necessarily lacks the grand narrative sweep of Alan Moorehead's The White Nile and The Blue Nile. But Sanche de Gramont, an able journalist and popular historian (The French: Portrait of a People), has written a book, covering roughly the years 1790 to the present, with its own ironic fascination. At the outset, as was true of the Nile, no European knew the source of the Niger (in the mountains about 200 miles east of Sierra Leone). Its destination was also unknown. There were even disputes...
There is no falsity about the signatures that Africa has left on De Gramont's pages. Any flaws in this evocative account are those of omission, not commission. The emerging nation surrounding the Niger has great physical presence; it is its current political and social aspects that are largely unexplored...