Word: guerard
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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...
...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...
...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...