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Lewis Galantiere
The Last Amateur

DAVID ALETHEA

' e was a small man, standing no higher than about S'6",
and he had a somewhat myopic look behind his thick
.glasses. But the impression he made was of someone
much larger as he spoke in flowing yet measured accents, with preci¬
sion and eloquence, almost as one might write. As his hand ele¬
gantly swept the air he held his trademark Turkish cigarette, the
kind he had smoked even as a penniless young man recently arrived
in Chicago from Los Angeles during the height of the Chicago Ren¬
aissance. His name was Lewis Galantiere, and it was perhaps the
fact that he carried such a fine old French name, despite the fact that
his father was a Jewish immigrant from Riga, that determined the
shape of his life, the persona he was destined to make for himself.

Fifty or so years later, within the subdued elegance of the Cen¬
tury Association, the Coffee House Club, or some other equally
exclusive locale almost invisible to the general public, the accom¬
plished raconteur might be talking of the early days in Chicago with
Sherwood Anderson, Ben Hecht, Carl Sandburg, and his closest
friend, the literary journalist Burton Rascoe, sitting around
Schlogl's tavern or frequenting the South Side salons where a new
literary vision was being shaped for our century. Or he might be
speaking of the Paris years, of the time of friendship with
Hemingway, of the literary and artistic life of France, or of the
many literary personnages he chaperoned around his Paris whose
contours he knew so well and whose language he spoke so perfectly
that he could, and often did, pass himself off as a native. Or he
might be talking of his friendship with the ill-fated author-pilot
Antoine de Saint-Exupery and of the trials of translating his works.

The man knew everybody, but nobody, it seems, knew him. He
carried within himself a compendium of the culture, the personali¬
ties, the politics and foreign affairs of our century. He was a writer's
writer and a critic's critic, as well as one of the finest French transla-