Victor Brombert, the Henry Putnam University Professor of Romance and Comparative Literature, scholar of French literature, and World War II “Ritchie Boy,” died on Nov. 26, 2024. He was 101.
Victor Brombert, the Henry Putnam University Professor of Romance and Comparative Literature, scholar of French literature, and World War II “Ritchie Boy,” died on Nov. 26, 2024. He was 101.
Victor was surely one of the greatest post-war professors to grace a podium. I was privileged to study with him as a graduate student at Yale in the 1960’s, and then to become friends with Victor and Beth when I moved with my family to Cranbury, N.J. in the 70’s. I cherish fond memories of sharing elegant, lively, always stimulating evenings together and can still picture Victor’s special, sweet smile and hear his sonorous voice when he would break into spontaneous song. He brought so much to so many of us, not least his love of learning, his profound erudition, and his bountiful joie de vivre.
As I’ve thought in the last few weeks about Victor Brombert’s amazing life, I keep coming back to my recollections of what a captivating and effective teacher he was. (I took his seminars on Victor Hugo and on the Romantic writer as artist in 1976 and 1977.) His success was grounded not just in his brilliance and personal charm, but in his eclectic yet distinctive intellectual background. By the time he began teaching at Princeton in 1975, he was well versed in traditional French literary history, in Anglo-American New Criticism, and the phenomenological criticism that flourished in Switzerland and France in the 1950s. He was also conversant with the still relatively new structuralist and deconstructive criticism that was coming to be known as “French theory,” though in this case his familiarity was not without ambivalence and even reticence. This intellectual depth and multiplicity of focus enabled his seminars to play an important mediating role for the many students (such as myself) whose undergraduate training was grounded in New Criticism and literary history but who found ourselves needing to get up to speed quickly in newer developments. No one taught me more about how to read and interpret literature.
Victor Brombert was not my dissertation director, but I have always been proud to consider myself his student. He guided me to writing my best term paper and then helped me publish it as my first scholarly article. Once I had left Princeton, it was always a pleasure to get back in touch with him, whether in person, by letter, by email, or in the Zoom chats we had during his hundredth year, when with characteristic generosity he was reading my unpublished papers on Stendhal and sending me the articles and drafts that would soon come together in his last book, The Pensive Citadel.
His eminence and elegance, even his love of literature and his joie de vivre, may have put some people off in our age of suspicion and disillusion. But he was approachable and open-minded, always willing to admit that he might be wrong, ready to revise his views. He truly believed in, and tried to live out, the intellectual and social freedom for which he fought, with sharp wits and courage, as a young man. Reading the end of his New York Times obituary, I was moved by his negative reaction to the extreme orderliness of the cemetery and memorial that overlook Omaha Beach in Normandy, where he had come ashore under fire as a frontline interrogator on D-Day in 1944. “I know that no memorial can ever tell the truth,” he wrote, “and that stones are not alive.” Whatever literary grandeur we may have thought he embodied, Victor was honest about life’s messiness and uncertainty, his joy a treasure preserved out of and against dark times.