There is something intriguing about second-hand books; I don’t really mean the celebrity memoirs that end up in charity bookshops after Christmas, or best-selling novels which fall out of fashion, or the novelty books, often humorous which are bought as presents for people who are difficult to buy for… I mean books which have been read, and even loved, and somehow come to rest in a box of others waiting for a new home. I find them hard to resist.
I bought two second-hand books today, one which I think may be a Dutch teach-yourself English book (I thought maybe I could teach myself Dutch with it) the other, because I go to a French conversation class, a book of French poetry.
Des Vers de France, selected by Lawrence Bisson was published by penguin and when I looked through it to find out when, I came across this little paragraph at the front which begins: “owing to copyright during the present emergency…” I wondered what emergency and looking more carefully I came across another little note: “leave this book in a Post office when you have read it, so that men and women in the services may enjoy it too.” This made me think it was published during the Second World War.
Lawrence A. Bisson, the blurb tells me, was a reader in French Literature at Oxford, where he had himself been educated having been born in Jersey; he was also at the University of Bordeaux. During the First World War he was an intelligence officer in the Royal Engineers in France, and had also taught in Canada and Birmingham. he lived in the Gironde and wrote several books. The blurb finishes by saying “Since the fall of France, Dr Bisson has co-operated with the Board of Education and the British institute of Paris in organising courses for teachers and schools to provide a substitute for direct contact with France.”
I couldn’t find out much more about Lawrence Adolphus Bisson except on German Wikipedia; my German is negligible but sufficient to learn that he was born in 1897 in Saint Helier in Jersey, and he died in Belfast in 1965 where he had been a professor of French literature at the University ((actually he died in Oxford, but he was working in Belfast). He wrote about André Gide and Victor Hugo, as well as this little book, and a novel, Amédée Pichot.
Researching him myself, I found out that his father was Adolphus Bisson, his mother was Lillian, née Delorme, born in Avranches in France. Lawrence’s parents were both wealthy, and as a child his grandma Marina Delorme lived with the family. There are records of Lawrence travelling to Montreal in Canada three times, in 1923 on the Andania, 1924 on the Antonia, and in 1925 on the Megantic. I can find no record of him marrying… so maybe he didn’t… but I will keep looking!
Lois Elsden 