There are good, questionable, and bad reasons for wishing to read someone’s collected letters. The sound reason is simply wanting to know that remarkable person better; to become, at least vicariously, a confidant and friend. The more dubious reason is wanting to impress people who haven’t read the book with juicy anecdotes—human, all too human. The unsound reason is trying to derive some previously secret formula for success and fame. No one became lastingly famous for aping someone else: originality is the minimum requirement.

Readers embarking on François Truffaut: Correspondence 1945-1984 will be foiled utterly in their baser expectations.¹¹ Not only is there no formula for success, there isn’t even much gossip. For the latter, the reason is twofold. Truffaut, who—like many, if not most, film directors—is known to have conducted love affairs with some of his stunning leading ladies, stipulated that none of his love letters be published for quite some years to come; and Truffaut’s family (for which read ex-wife) saw to it that the present editors, Gilles Jacob and Claude de Givray, omit passages or letters that might be considered embarrassing. After referring to the many Truffaut letters that were lost or thrown away (André Bazin, the critic who was Truffaut’s mentor and a sort of adoptive father, never kept any letters), they mention that some “letters were, rightly or wrongly, judged too intimate for publication.”

It is easy to overhear the plaintiveness in that “rightly or wrongly,” which refers, of course, also to