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PERSONAL RECORD--Julian Green--Harper ($3). Once or twice in any year, irrelevant to the fashion and the praise of the season, a book quietly appears which, no less quietly, adds itself to the serious and valuable writing of the world. Personal Record is such a book.

Julian Green is a Paris-born Southerner who has preferred to spend most of his 39 years in France, and to write in French. His novels are disturbing, as distinguished, and as subtly disciplined as the dreams they resemble. Last week he set beside them selections from a journal (1928-39) in the editing of which his chief concern has been "to interest a reader whom doubtless I shall never meet."/- As frequently happens in the handling of serious work in the U. S., his publishers tried by various jacket ruses to disguise the book as a popular commodity; but from its opening pages onward it steadily gave them the lie.

Green's journal is an anthology of the things which an intelligence of a high order has seen, heard, talked of, cared for, feared, felt, thought, during the past ten years. There is an obsession, as readers of his novels would expect, with death; a strong interest in the "macabre" (a word he nowhere uses); a pervasive fear of war, of revolution, of the end of civilization; the constant meditation of a devout man who has abandoned formal religion. There are "portraits" of Gide, Stein, Cocteau; excellent observations on painting, sculpture, music, films, above all on writing.

There is also some superb writing on certain sinister essences of the American South. In the later pages there is a slow withering of gaiety, of wit, of external interest, a dark and deepening absorption in the study of Buddhism, of the Bible in Hebrew, of the nature of reality, and of death, which at length is no longer feared. The journal ends in the aftermath of a gentle and casual dream: "Perhaps we shall be talking just like that when we awake from this life. Who could say that all our waking life was not a dream?"

/- There are some interesting differences between the U. S. and French editions.

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