HL: By the time I settled down in Paris, which I had wanted to do ever since college, my original purpose for going abroad had to be reconsidered. For I thought that I’d write novels — isn’t that what one is supposed to do in Paris? — but I discovered that I couldn’t create credible stories or characters. We were then living in an era of fact and not fiction, and so I'd begin by writing for newspapers and magazines. When at last I sat down to do a book it had to be non-fiction.

I was a Joycean-card-carrying member of the James Joyce Society — and my Bible was Richard Ellmann’s exhaustive biography of Joyce. I didn’t realize this at the beginning, but in fact Ellmann’s incredibly finicky book was the model for what I was going to attempt to do.

Living in France, dedicated to fact, I’d obviously have to choose French-based subjects. It turned out that neither of the two personalities who interested me most, Flaubert as the writer’s writer, Camus as a product of the politics of his time, had ever been subjected to the Ellmann treatment. Naturally, since he died nearly a century earlier, Flaubert had been written about quite often, sometimes with charm (I am thinking of Francis Steegmuller’s work). But too much remained unknown, and Jean-Paul Sartre’s imaginative study had only served to confuse. So I'd “do” Flaubert. But my first publisher decided that a definitive biography of Camus — who had died 17 years earlier — was more urgent, and I went along with that. In fact I was delighted, for Camus had turned himself into a recluse, protected by his friends, his publishers, and his family, and I’d have much digging to do. That suited me fine. After the book was published one critic in Paris sneered that I was “the detective” (while Sartre was the good professor). Another reviewer wrote disdainfully: “Mr. Lottman seems to prefer fact.”

GE: What led to your interest in French literature and culture?

HL: My childhood and college years coincided with the persistence of the American-in-Paris legend. In the early days of the Fulbright program it was easy to get sent to France on a fellowship (and I wasn’t even fluent in French). But I learned a good deal in that year, and as soon as I could I returned to stay.

GE: In a brief piece you wrote that appeared in the New York Review of Books in 1997, you made a firm distinction between literary biography, the subject you did like Camus and Flaubert, and your biography of Jules Verne. Could you talk about this a bit more? Verne was a writer yet you say your work is not a literary biography. What made Verne, in your mind, unsuitable as a subject for a literary biography?

HL: I’d rather not put down an author — Jules Verne — with whom I spent a couple of years of my life-researching his life. But Verne was very much a hired hand, with a facility for concocting tales of unforgettable characters in extraordinary places and situations. He could as easily have done this in comic strips. I think that I did a credible job of reconstructing his development, and I paid due respect to the power of his imagination. But when a man sets out to write one hundred books and achieves his goal, he can’t be writing at the top of his form all the time. Verne had an immense career, but (to my mind) not quite a literary one.

GE: Could you discuss your book on Man Ray? What led you to him? Were you a bit daunted by the fact that there have been several fairly recent books about him?

HL: This book was not intended as a biography (indeed, there is a rather complete one in print), but as a panorama of Montparnasse in its most exciting decades-the 1920s and 1930s, tucked between two world wars. By luck Man Ray was in Paris exactly then, available to serve as an observer of this extraordinary mix of artists and writers. Because he had a camera, everybody wanted to know him. Through his camera we can meet Dada, the Surrealists, Picasso, the School of Paris painters and sculptors, and of course the Americans who chose Paris for their apprenticeship in letters. Hence my title: Man Ray’s Montparnasse.

HL: Were I doing a market study I’d say that the overflow of biographies of just about anybody is going to spoil the business. Such overwriting can be found in literary biography as well. One of my favorite bad examples is a two-volume life of an American Nobel Prize author — let’s leave his name out of this — allowing important information to be lost in an ocean of inconsequence. My favorite line in this 2000-page book has the subject going to Paris, where he “visited Shakespeare & Company, but never saw Sylvia Beach, the proprietor of the well-known bookstore....” He “did not see Ernest Hemingway, who frequented it, or another American celebrity of Paris, Gertrude Stein....” (Once the subject of this biography saw-or thought he might have seen-Ezra Pound.) You can easily fill 2000 pages this way.

GE: Which of your biographies do you feel was the most rewarding for you as a writer and thinker?

HL: I find myself hesitating between my Albert Camus and Flaubert. Camus the witness, Flaubert the magician of language. Perhaps because I had to do so much scratching and digging to unearth the details of Camus’s secret life — in childhood as well as adulthood — I had more stimulating adventures with my Camus, and certainly came out of the project a different person. Tracking down the teacher who taught the great Flaubert how to write French was perhaps more significant to readers and scholars, but finding examples of Camus’s heroism that he had kept a deep secret was perhaps more exhilarating. After finishing that book I don’t think that I should have rejected any other project offered to me as impossible. When I was asked to do a similarly deep investigation of Philippe Pétain I took on another exciting exploration, but I have regretted ever since having had to learn so many of those depressing things.

GE: Is there a figure who comes to mind for you that you are surprised has not been the subject of a major biography?

HL: I might have replied to this with facility twenty or thirty years ago, but not today. Or perhaps I should say that all the conceivable biographies have been written — yet some would be worth improving on.

GE: Could you talk a bit about your interest in Vincent Carter, the late black American expatriate writer, for whom there seems to be increased interest here in the United States?

HL: Vincent Carter is a long story — nearly half a century long. When I was still a very new Parisian, Vincent wrote to introduce himself to me from the small town that serves as its country’s capital — Berne, Switzerland. He had gone there from Kansas City, via Paris; he first thought of actually settling in Paris, but found the noise level too great. Carter had a desperate need to write-but not about black power, which was then the only subject one expected of a black writer. He rather needed to explore himself, as so many other expatriates had done before him. The manuscript he sent me, The Bern Book, was a meandering reflection on being the only black man in town. It was more a kin to Robert Burton’s 17th-century An Anatomy of Melancholy than to Jimmy Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (to mention one of the angry books that came out of France in those years). I tried without success to get Carter’s manuscript published, and then wrote an essay on this author too far away from the madding crowd. After my essay appeared in a cultural quarterly a New York publisher decided to bring out The Bern Book after all-using my essay as the introduction. Curtain to the first act.

Later, nearly thirty years later, the publisher of a small press in New England came across a second-hand copy of The Bern Book, and contacted me to find the author. For in my original piece I had described another unpublished book by Carter, an astonishing story of growing up black in Kansas City, a novel both frank and tender — one of the most moving stories of a childhood I had ever read. I informed the inquiring publisher that unfortunately Carter had since died. He'd lived with a companion in Berne, but I couldn’t even recall her last name or address, nor was I sure that she had the manuscript. I contacted a Swiss friend for help; he got in touch with one of his countrymen teaching in an American university, who in turn queried another Swiss then in Greece. The reply came in the same roundabout way, and at last we had located Liselotte, who possessed both the lost manuscript and publication rights. It will soon be published by Steerforth Press in Vermont.

By the way, I still don’t think that I know enough about Vincent Carter to do his biography. But he certainly wrote a considerable portion of it himself.

HL: Writing about Camus, who died young leaving a wife and young children and many other women, would have been difficult anywhere; in France, where omertà overrides libel law, it was a tight-rope act. For example, I had tracked down a still young woman who had been Camus’s last love; they were pledged to marry. But after talking to me she had second thoughts, for she had a husband, a new life ... So I removed her name from my manuscript, and described the relationship as best I could all the same, for the important thing was that Camus was about to take up a new life just before dying in a fatal automobile accident. Names didn’t matter here. I think it made for a better book: All the essential truths were here, except certain details that might have prevented the book from reaching the public with these essential truths. That’s not a bad barter for a biographer.

Of course the Camus estate tried to block my book, both for what I said about Camus’s romantic adventures and his politics (he leaned toward Algerian independence; his heirs would have liked to portray him as an ardent advocate of French Algeria). Since these revelations were not sufficient to justify confiscation they tried another pretext — accusing me of making use of unpublished material, but my publisher’s attorney proved that they had no case.

Usually readers who are upset by what I write have simply misread their hero-or heroine. The preferred image of Colette is of a fairy-like creature caressing a kitten while tripping among the flowers; I showed a hard-working woman who had to write every day of her life in order to survive. Jules Verne was actually a stay-at-home with considerable imagination but no charm, little generosity of spirit; furthermore, some of the 100 books he boasted of writing weren’t as good as his best. Verniens hate me for saying so.