Rather, World War II is like a character in a play who remains offstage throughout the action — a character often talked of, whose appearance is at times anticipated and even feared, but who is ultimately removed from the real drama.

Leon Edel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a multi-volume biography of writer Henry James, died in Honolulu in 1997, at age 90. His widow, Marjorie, and colleagues saw his "recollections," as he called them, into print, released by the UH Press earlier this year.

World War II reminiscences have emerged by the dozen in recent years as the half-century mark was reached. But this memoir has nothing in common with these. It is another genre entirely: that of the bystander biography. Edel plays the role of the extra gentleman at the literary dinner party, one who is interesting and erudite enough to be invited to meet the literati, but who is not himself the focus of the event.

Edel, then a newspaper reporter, was drafted at the ripe age of 35, in the waning months of the war in Europe, and found himself assigned to the "psychological warfare" corps, a klatsch of multi-lingual intellectuals who are trained to confuse and thwart the enemy with false reports and rumors. (Although they seem to do little of this in the course of this book.)

Author Leon Edel would complete his duties as part of the "psychological warfare" corps by lunchtime, leaving his afternoons and evenings free to explore Paris. Advertiser library photo • 1992

He is sent to France where, while the battle of Saint-Lô rages nearby, he lounges in a hammock reading Walter Scott and Jane Austen, drinking Calvados provided by an obliging farmer who appreciates an Army that arrives with its own supplies and speaks French. He bumps into Ernest Hemingway, swaggering about with a group of maquis (French guerrillas), toting a gun in direct violation of the military orders governing war correspondents. (Edel's observations are mildly phrased, but it's clear what he thinks of Hemingway's pretensions.) He is served a passable blanquette de veau in a war-ravaged cafe. He helps a farmer rescue a cow. And, like all soldiers, he waits for the brass to tell him what to do.

Eventually, Edel and his company enter Paris, familiar to him because he had studied there in the 1920s and '30s. They ride literally in the train of DeGaulle himself, one of a long line of military vehicles strung out behind the French general as the populace mobs him with flowers, kisses and shouts.

Edel spent most of the next nine months in Paris, during which he scribbled nightly notes in a journal; this period is the primary focus of the book. Many people were moving through Paris at this time, a staging point for the mop-up operations that would follow the anticipated end of the war. Edel encounters a steady stream of them; some play roles in his later life, others he will never see again.

Between August 1944 and V.E. day in May 1945, Edel pays a respectful visit on Edith Wharton's former lover, dines alongside composer Arthur Honneger and recalls James Joyce with the owner of the famed author's Latin Quarter hangout, Shakespeare and Company.

His daytime duties — a job description he devised for himself in order not to be shipped off to less-pleasant places — involves making a nuanced precis of the news and views found in Parisian newspapers, which proved helpful to the language-challenged Allied officer ranks. This he submits around lunchtime each day, leaving his afternoons and evenings free.

He attends a retrospective of Picasso's work, hears "Boris Godunov" at the Paris Opera, gets a refresher course in Moliére and Victor Hugo at the Théâtre Français and befriends an impoverished dancer, Jewish like himself, who spent the war hiding from the Nazis.

Throughout this book, Edel is very much inside himself. Even when he admits to moments of fear, his stance is that of the observer, who carefully notices the effect on himself of traversing an area in which German tanks are still operating. He is eloquent even in terror: "In such moments, we seem to become a switchboard of charged nerves. I was in a world I had known only in dreams — monsters, shadows, voracious mountains, tempestuous waves."

Throughout, Edel's tone is circumspect, detached, careful. At times, he seems unbearably snobbish, dismissing American recruits with whom he first served as "empty and culturally pallid." Still, it seems fair to say that he was probably the only soldier in Normandy who spent his night patrols pondering the Bayeux Tapestry and his days discussing Proust in an apple orchard.