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Stormy riders or when I read my first western
Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey. 1912. Not translated into French.
An’ I’d like you to see jest how hard an’ cruel this border life is. It’s bloody. You’d think churches an’ churchmen would make it better. They make it worse. You give names to things—bishops, elders, ministers, Mormonism, duty, faith, glory. You dream—or you’re driven mad. I’m a man, an’ I know. I name fanatics, followers, blind women, oppressors, thieves, ranchers, rustlers, riders. An’ we have—what you’ve lived through these last months. It can’t be helped. But it can’t last always. An’ remember his—some day the border’ll be better, cleaner, for the ways of ten like Lassiter!”
I have to confess that all I know about westerns are clichés. When I was a child, I wasn’t allowed to watch TV at night and I missed the opportunity to see the most famous ones. As an adult, I have trouble watching films on DVDs and on TV. I tend to fall asleep or be distracted. I find it difficult to be absorbed in a movie seen on a television screen. For me, cinema means going out to see a film in a dark room among strangers and if you pick the right films, you might even avoid the pop-corn munchers. This explains why I have seen so little old movies and thus have not caught up with all the westerns I should have seen at my respectable age. But back to the book.
Riders of the Purple Sage opens with a typical western scene. We’re in 1871 at the border of Utah. A young Gentile* man, Bern Venters is about to get whipped in the sage for befriending Jane Withersteen, a Mormon young woman. Tull, the Minister of the Mormon Church in Cottonwoods wants to whip and exile Venters and intends to marry Jane. She’s the richest person of the village; she owns a ranch, herds and the only source of water. She’s a catch. Jane refuses Tull and Venters is in a desperate situation when Lassiter shows up and drives Tull and his men away. This dramatic scene is the start of everything. Lassiter, a well-known gun-man arrived at Cottonwoods to understand what happened to Milly Fern. His interfering in Jane and Venter’s business will break the peace. Tull now craves for revenge and will do everything in his power to ruin Jane, morally and financially. The neighbourhood is also hunted by rustlers led by Oldridge accompanied by his Masked Rider. They steal cattle and nobody knows where the animals are led. When Jane’s red herd disappears, Venters heads for Deception Pass, where the herds vanish, decided to avoid Tull and discover where Oldridge and his riders hide. His encounter with Oldridge’s men is violent and he almost kills the Masked Rider, only to discover that he’s a she, Bess.
The novel follows two story strands, one with Jane and Lassiter in Cottonwoods and another one with Venters and Bess in the sage. Their paths cross, they help each other as they’re on the same side. The four main characters have to go through their personal journey and the events unravel before our eyes. The four of them are tortured souls, for different reasons. The four of them will have their epiphany.
Jane Withersteen is a very pious woman. She was raised a Mormon, she has a deep faith and she respects her bishop and her minister. When she refuses Tull, here’s what she’s told:
Marry Tull. It’s your duty as a Mormon. You’ll feel no rapture as his wife—but think of Heaven! Mormon women don’t marry for what they expect on earth. Take up the cross, Jane.
Isn’t that cheerful and awfully tempting? The American version of “Close your eyes and think of England”. I found Zane Grey extremely hard on the Mormon community in Cottonwoods. They are Christian zealots who preach a message they don’t practice. Women are oppressed and churchmen take advantage of their spiritual power to keep a hold on the population. Gentiles are discriminated. Jane is brainwashed and doesn’t see them as men with flaws but as churchmen, better men than others, by definition. The events force her to acknowledge the truth and Lassiter will be the messenger.
Lassiter is also a broken soul. He’s driven by his quest: what has become of Milly Ern? It makes him relentless and lonely. He has everything of the ragged hero hiding a heart of gold. Jane will force him to reconsider his lifestyle and his goals in life.
Venters the Gentile was a pariah and his encounter with Bess will change him. He will find his true self in the wilderness and the passages of his exploration of the canyons and the valleys are simply beautiful. They echo his stormy inner mind and he becomes one with his surroundings:
When he gained the cover of cedars he paused to rest and look, and it was then he saw how the trees sprang from holes in the bare rock. Ages of rain had run down the slope, circling, eddying in depressions, wearing deep round holes. There had been dry seasons, accumulations of dust, wind-blown seeds, and cedars rose wonderfully out of solid rock. But these were not beautiful cedars. They were gnarled, twisted into weird contortions, as if growth were torture, dead at the tops, shrunken, gray, and old. Theirs had been a bitter fight, and Venters felt a strange sympathy for them. This country was hard on trees—and men.
Venters discovers a secluded valley that be baptises Surprise Valley. Its description is like a time machine, bringing back Venters and Bess to Paradise before the fall. Grey pictures striking landscapes inhabited with lively fauna:
Out of his cave he saw the exquisitely fine foliage of the silver spruces crossing a round space of blue morning sky; and in this lacy leafage fluttered a number of gray birds with black and white stripes and long tails. They were mocking-birds, and they were singing as if they wanted to burst their throats.
I wanted to go there and see everything with my own eyes. He has a gift for cinematographic descriptions. There’s a superb scene where Venters chases after another rider. It’s gripping, the ride described so precisely I imagined I was on horseback with Venters. He also knows how to build tension, like here when Venters is in a critical situation:
Perceptions flashed upon him, the faint, cold touch of the breeze, a cold, silvery tinkle of flowing water, a cold sun shining out of a cold sky, song of birds and laugh of children, coldly distant. Cold and intangible were all things in earth and heaven. Colder and tighter stretched the skin over his face; colder and harder grew the polished butts of his guns; colder and steadier became his hands as he wiped the clammy sweat from his face or reached low to his gun-sheaths.
Can’t you imagine him? This book also came with a mental soundtrack. I know I should have been hearing music by Ennio Morricone when I was reading but all I could think about was the haunting Riders on the Storm by The Doors. Add to the mix that I had reached the page of Red River Valley in my piano textbook and there was no room left for classic western soundtrack. I was all with riders and cowboys. Sorry.
Considering the time this book stayed in the Currently Reading box, you’d think it’s 800 pages long instead of 300ish. It took me ages to go through the descriptions of the landscapes, of the rides and of Vender walking in the canyons. I had trouble with the vocabulary related to herds and had to pause to imagine the men riding in the different paths. I paused to polish mental pictures of the scenes I was reading. I had also to deal with the spoken language with sentences like this “An’ they jest froze up—thet dark set look thet makes them strange an’ different to me.” or this “Wal, hev it your way, Bern. I hope you’re right. Nat’rully I’ve been some sore on Lassiter fer gittin’ soft. But I ain’t denyin’ his nerve, or whatever’s great in him thet sort of paralyzes people. I had to tell the words in my head to figure out what they meant and imagine the accent. Since I have a terrible French accent when I speak English, I’m not sure I really figured out how these men were speaking. However, I will always marvel at the elasticity of the English language. You can’t really do that in French; it’s hard to transcribe accents.
Although it demanded a tremendous amount of concentration to me, I highly recommend Riders of the Purple Sage. It has all the qualities of a great book. It’s gripping, well-written and well-constructed. I need to thank Max for recommending this novel to me. So thanks, Max, that was a treat and I didn’t know Zane Grey. I looked him up on Wikipedia, though. He was the first writer to become rich thanks to his books. His novels are currently out of print in French and that’s a shame. I suppose westerns aren’t fashionable anymore.
* All along the novel, Gentile will be used to define non-Mormon characters. Don’t ask me why. Lack of a better word?
Extreme mid-life crisis and artistic calling
The Moon and Sixpence by William Somerset Maugham. 1919. French title: L’Envoûté.
Things have been a bit hectic for our book club this month with flus, business trips and heavy workload. So we skipped the February meeting and I’m not able to share with you a discussion about The Moon and Sixpence, which was this month’s choice. I was delighted to read another Maugham since I loved The Trembling of a Leaf and Cakes and Ale.
The Moon and Sixpence is a first-person narration about a famous painter named Charles Strickland. Our narrator is a writer who relates how he met Strickland through his wife who had a literary salon at the end of the 19th century in London. He met the man once at a party organized by Mrs Strickland for his husband and his business associates:
The respectability of the party was portentous. The women were too nice to be well dressed, and too sure of their position to be amusing. The men were solid. There was about all of them an air of well-satisfied prosperity.
He found this broker on the stock exchange boring and didn’t befriend with him. Strickland appeared to be the perfect bourgeois, stable, reliable, perfectly happy in his daily routine and not interested in anything artistic. So, when at nearly forty, he flees to Paris, leaving his wife and children behind and alone in London, Mrs Strickland is flabbergasted. She asks our narrator to go to Paris and try convincing her husband to come home. As long as she thinks he left her for another woman – because for what other reason could he make such a radical change in his life? –she fosters hope to see him return to his former life. To our narrator’s surprise, Strickland left everything behind to become a painter. Talk about a hell of a mid-life crisis. It appears that Strickland had been taking painting lessons for a couple of years and now wanted to follow his heart and be a painter.
A while later, our narrator moves to Paris and is again in contact with Strickland through a friend who is also a painter, Stroeve. The narrator reveals fragments of Strickland’s life in Paris and later in Tahiti as our narrator crosses paths again with the famous painter. Because Strickland did have a gift for painting and did make a breakthrough in painting…after his death.
The Moon and Sixpence has the same kind of structure as Cakes and Ale and adds the Tahiti theme predominant in The Trembling of a Leaf. Cakes and Ale is about a writer and his posterity (allegedly Thomas Hardy) while The Moon and Sixpence explores painting and artistic calling. (Gauguin inspired Maugham)
More than the story in itself, what’s interesting in The Moon and Sixpence is the questioning about Art and artists. Strickland is an unpleasant man. It’s as if he had consumed all his stock of social niceness during the years he was a married man and worked as a broker. After he decided to drop everything to follow his calling, he stopped yielding to social conventions. So he’s very rude, selfish, taking what he needs without thinking and thanking. He’s a man who shrugged off social polish to come back to “nature”. He only wants to paint, paint, paint. He interacts with others when required and doesn’t take into account their feelings. He doesn’t try to sell his paintings, doesn’t want to surrender to any social rule, any relationship that could get in the way of his painting. He’s possessed and it’s the title of the book in French.
The narrator is appalled by his behavior but also admire his strength and his talent. Strickland was brave enough not to let go of his dream and turn his back to comfort, friends and family. He never went back to England. The narrator has mixed feelings about him: Strickland was an odious man, but I still think he was a great one.
The underlying question is: Do we forgive any kind of behavior from an art genius for the sake of art? We seem to tolerate actions from artists that we would never tolerate from common people. The beauty they bring to the world appears to be worth their living out of social conventions. I’ll go a bit farther: Do we even expect a gifted artist to be a difficult character? Don’t we expect extravagant gestures, fits of despair and mercurial moods? Maugham made me think about the myth of the artiste maudit. I have no idea of how to translate this concept in English. damned or cursed artist would be the literal translation. I wonder when this concept of the gifted artist living from hand-to-mouth, full of angst and dominated by an urge to create started to emerge. In the Romantic Era with Byron? In France with Baudelaire, Verlaine and Rimbaud? In a way, The Moon and Sixpence explores this myth, which is still alive if I think of the book Literary Rogues by Andrew Schaffer that Guy reviewed recently.
Another question raised by this novel is about whom we live for. The narrator also mentions another man, Abraham, who left behind a brilliant future as a hospital surgeon to live abroad in miserable conditions. He dropped everything in an instant, feeling he belonged to this place and not to London, just as Strickland found peace and home in Tahiti. As the narrator discusses Abraham’s choice with the man who had his life since he vacated the prestigious position, this man considers that Abraham lacks character and the narrator disagrees:
Character? I should have thought it needed a good deal of character to throw up a career after half an hour’s meditation, because you saw in another way of living a more intense significance. And it required still more character never to regret the sudden step.
This is why Newland Archer never left New York with the Helen. He was intelligent enough to acknowledge he lacked the character. This is why a lot of us give up dreams and live a quiet life. The narrator admires both Strickland and Abraham for following their instinct and their dreams, for being able to disregard money, comfort and social status to follow their dream. He thinks they might be right:
I wondered if Abraham really had made a hash of life. Is to do what you most want, to live under the conditions that please you, in peace with yourself, to make a hash of life; and is it success to be an eminent surgeon with ten thousand a year and a beautiful wife? I suppose it depends on what meaning you attach to life, the claim which you acknowledge to society, and the claim of the individual.
That’s a good question. The other question is: since you have only one life, why sacrifice it to respect social conventions, to protect your family’s feelings? Why should you give up your dreams or a life according to what suits you for someone else’s sake? Is it selfish or is it making the most of your life?
I don’t have the answer but it leads to another question that the narrator muses over: “Is it possible for any man to disregard others entirely?”
Along with these ruminations come the usual issues around artists and fame. How contemporaries have a hard time recognizing a genius (and I can’t help thinking that the fear of missing the new Van Gogh impacts the prices of contemporary art) and how an artist’s family soaks up their fame and live upon it by procuration. There’s also a belief that beauty crosses the border of intellectual knowledge, that when it is genuine, it touches the philistine as well as the cultured person:
I cannot agree with the painters who claim superciliously that the layman can understand nothing of painting, and that he can best show his appreciation of their works by silence and a cheque-book. It is a grotesque misapprehension which sees in art no more than a craft comprehensible perfectly only to the craftsman: art is a manifestation of emotion, and emotion speaks a language that all may understand.
The vision of women is the one thing I didn’t like in this novel. How misogynistic. Women aren’t praised here, they are materialist, taming men with domestic comfort, unable of intellectual elevation, enjoying mistreatments. They aren’t muses but balls and chains attached to the artist’s ankle. Mrs Strickland’s portray isn’t favourable to her sex and neither is the depiction of Stroeve’s wife. The civilized woman is awful in this book. Only the Tahitian companion of Strickland has a positive description but she’s submissive and behaves more like a loyal dog than like an equal partner. I frowned when I read judgements like this one:
As lovers, the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long, but men only at times.
Yes, they have nothing else to do since they can’t have a profession of any kind. Who decided to have women at home and only occupied with fascinated things as cooking, tidying, washing and then has the nerve to complain that they are boring?
In my opinion, The Moon and Sixpence is an excellent novel but it’s not as good as Cakes and Ale. Perhaps it’s because I felt more interested in the portray of a writer than in the portray of a painter. Maugham’s style is always exquisite, he handles irony with panache and spreads little bullet sentences everywhere in the book.
“The mystic sees the ineffable, and the psycho-pathologist the unspeakable.”
“Only the poet or the saint can water an asphalt pavement in the confident anticipation that lilies will reward his labour.”
“There is no object more deserving of pity than the married bachelor.“
And there’s this incredible little phrase she’d love it if you’d join our little coffee klatch. that went straight to my heart. In my region, we say “faire café-klatsch” to say you’re spending some time around a coffee and chat. This expression isn’t French but local patois coming from French mixed with German. I didn’t know this existed in English as well. Do you know it?
Guy recently reviewed The Moon and Sixpence here, it’s worth reading. It tackles with other aspects of the book.
Ah yes! Something else: if someone could explain the title of the novel, I’d be grateful.
A quote from The Moon and Sixpence
A quote from The Moon and Sixpence by William Somerset Maugham.
But there is in my nature a strain of asceticism, and I have subjected my flesh each week to a more severe mortification. I have never failed to read the Literary Supplement of The Times. It is a salutary discipline to consider the vast number of books that are written, the fair hopes with which their authors see them published, and the fate which awaits them. What chance is there that any book will make its way among that multitude? And the successful books are but the successes of a season. Heaven knows what pains the author has been at, what bitter experiences he has endured and what heartache suffered, to give some chance reader a few hours’ relaxation or to while away the tedium of a journey. And if I may judge from the reviews, many of these books are well and carefully written; much thought has gone to their composition; to some even has been given the anxious labour of a lifetime. The moral I draw is that the writer should seek his reward in the pleasure of his work and in release from the burden of his thought; and, indifferent to aught else, care nothing for praise or censure, failure or success.
This was written in 1919. I wonder how puzzled the narrator would be if he had to face the French Rentrée Littéraire…
The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton
The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton. 1913. French title: Les beaux mariages.
The turnings of life seldom show a sign-post; or rather, though the sign is always there, it is usually placed some distance back, like the notices that give warning of a bad hill or a level railway-crossing.
I’m really happy my 200th post is a review of a book I truly loved. This one will be my last read for Sarah’s Challenge Not a Rat’s Chance in Hell’s Challenge, category A Book Previously Abandoned.
Undine Spragg, the beauty queen of Apex, has just arrived in New York with her parents. Her father enriched in his Western city of Apex through some shady business. Her parents adore her and spoil her. She’s young, gorgeous, ambitious and in search of a rich and aristocratic husband. After a few months, she manages to break into the New York high society and marries Ralph Marvell, a well-bred man but not rich enough to satisfy all her fantasies. Will she manage to adapt to her conventional step-family? How will she accept that Ralph has a good breeding and open access to the most select salons in New York and nonetheless not enough money to afford all her whims? But who is Elmer Moffatt, a ghost from her past, looming over her recent success? I don’t want to tell too much about the plot, even if it’s a classic that many people have read.
Undine is a perfectly disagreeable character. She infuriated me; she’s vapid, shallow and blatantly materialistic. She assesses people and things through the double lenses of their cash value and their society usefulness.
Undine’s estimate of people had always been based on their apparent power of getting what they wanted–provided it came under the category of things she understood wanting.
She has no interest in other people but for what they can bring to her, feels no love for anyone but herself and is as selfish as the daughters in Le Père Goriot by Balzac. She lacks compassion, motherly feelings and ability to listen. Nobody and nothing is sacred, neither family jewels or tapestries or not even a son. Her reactions and her actions horrified me. She’s perpetually dissatisfied with what she has. She has no conversation of any kind since she has no interest in books, politics, music, domestic issues or business. She can’t embroider, draw or play an instrument. Getting involved in charities is totally out of her character. She has no curiosity for anything but buying clothes and showing off at parties. She has no scruples and will bulldoze out any obstacle that could lie between her and what she wants. But she’s gorgeous, knows how to use her beauty and men are stupid enough to consider it a sufficient quality. Undine has incredible survival skills and in the surface adapts to her environment. But as she doesn’t really care about other people, she fails to understand them deeply and it backfires on her sometimes. She has a tendency to enjoy vulgar company and above all, she has no sense for Beauty.
All is said about the difference between Ralph and Undine when Mrs Spragg explains where Undine’s name comes from:
Her visitor, [Ralph] with a smile, and echoes of divers et ondoyant in his brain, had repeated her daughter’s name after her, saying: “It’s a wonderful find–how could you tell it would be such a fit?”–it came to her quite easily to answer: “Why, we called her after a hair-waver father put on the market the week she was born–” and then to explain, as he remained struck and silent: “It’s from Undoolay, you know, the French for crimping; father always thought the name made it take.
Ralph is the kind of man who thinks of the water divinity when he hears Undine. But Undine wasn’t named after a divinity. She was named after a hair-waver. Everything is said. He’s more intellectual, sensitive and poetical; she’s materialistic, uncultured and happy to be so.
I thought that Ralph Marvell was a wonderful character. It’s not often that a male character is described with so much sensibility. The description of Ralph’s disappointment with Undine, the strings she pulls thanks to her beauty and the different shades of his moods are really touching.
An imagination like his, peopled with such varied images and associations, fed by so many currents from the long stream of human experience, could hardly picture the bareness of the small half-lit place in which his wife’s spirit fluttered. Her mind was as destitute of beauty and mystery as the prairie school-house in which she had been educated; and her ideals seemed to Ralph as pathetic as the ornaments made of corks and cigar-bands with which her infant hands had been taught to adorn it. He was beginning to understand this, and learning to adapt himself to the narrow compass of her experience.
Ralph moved me, because he felt so much, was so lucid about his circumstances and yet couldn’t fight against the tide.
Apart from the private drama of Undine’s life, The Custom of the Country is also a harsh criticism of the emerging aristocracy of new money in America. It’s an X-ray of the American society, its interest in business and money, its vision of marriage and women. Undine invests in husbands like businessmen invest in Wall Street. She’s Elmer Moffatt’s feminine counterpart; they are made of the same clay. The novel takes place in New York and in France and Edith Wharton excels in describing characters and settings. She knew France very well and she portrays perfectly the difference of culture between France and the USA. Some of the ideas she develops in French Ways and their Meaning are already present in The Custom of the Country. The title refers to the difference of custom between Apex and New-York, between America and France. Edith Wharton preferred the French vision of marriage, more of a partnership. In French, you don’t belong to your spouse; you share your life with them. She tried to explain that the American vision of marriage and women creates monsters like Undine:
“The fact that the average American looks down on his wife.” (…) How much does he let her share in the real business of life? How much does he rely on her judgment and help in the conduct of serious affairs? Take Ralph for instance–you say his wife’s extravagance forces him to work too hard; but that’s not what’s wrong. It’s normal for a man to work hard for a woman–what’s abnormal is his not caring to tell her anything about it.” “To tell Undine? She’d be bored to death if he did!” “Just so; she’d even feel aggrieved. But why? Because it’s against the custom of the country. And whose fault is that? The man’s again–I don’t mean Ralph I mean the genus he belongs to: homo sapiens, Americanus. Why haven’t we taught our women to take an interest in our work? Simply because we don’t take enough interest in THEM.”
(…)
“YOU don’t? The American man doesn’t–the most slaving, self-effacing, self-sacrificing–?” “Yes; and the most indifferent: there’s the point. The ‘slaving’s’ no argument against the indifference To slave for women is part of the old American tradition; lots of people give their lives for dogmas they’ve ceased to believe in. Then again, in this country the passion for making money has preceded the knowing how to spend it, and the American man lavishes his fortune on his wife because he doesn’t know what else to do with it.” “Then you call it a mere want of imagination for a man to spend his money on his wife?” “Not necessarily–but it’s a want of imagination to fancy it’s all he owes her. Look about you and you’ll see what I mean. Why does the European woman interest herself so much more in what the men are doing? Because she’s so important to them that they make it worth her while! She’s not a parenthesis, as she is here–she’s in the very middle of the picture.
(…)
“Isn’t that the key to our easy divorces? If we cared for women in the old barbarous possessive way do you suppose we’d give them up as readily as we do? The real paradox is the fact that the men who make, materially, the biggest sacrifices for their women, should do least for them ideally and romantically. And what’s the result–how do the women avenge themselves? All my sympathy’s with them, poor deluded dears, when I see their fallacious little attempt to trick out the leavings tossed them by the preoccupied male–the money and the motors and the clothes–and pretend to themselves and each other that THAT’S what really constitutes life! Oh, I know what you’re going to say–it’s less and less of a pretense with them, I grant you; they’re more and more succumbing to the force of the suggestion; but here and there I fancy there’s one who still sees through the humbug, and knows that money and motors and clothes are simply the big bribe she’s paid for keeping out of some man’s way!” Mrs. Fairford presented an amazed silence to the rush of this tirade; but when she rallied it was to murmur: “And is Undine one of the exceptions?” Her companion took the shot with a smile. “No–she’s a monstrously perfect result of the system: the completest proof of its triumph. It’s Ralph who’s the victim and the exception.”
Divorce is actually a central theme of the book, a very modern one for a 1913 novel. Its modernity echoes that of What Maisie Knew. I wonder what Edith Wharton would make of the French divorce rates I heard the other day on the radio (67% of marriages in Paris and 50% in other regions) Undine, as a representant of the new generation thinks it a normal event in life. The older generation, like Mr Spragg and higher social classes, like Ralph’s family still regard it as dreadful.
Mr. Spragg did not regard divorce as intrinsically wrong or even inexpedient; and of its social disadvantages he had never even heard. Lots of women did it, as Undine said, and if their reasons were adequate they were justified. If Ralph Marvell had been a drunkard or “unfaithful” Mr. Spragg would have approved Undine’s desire to divorce him; but that it should be prompted by her inclination for another man–and a man with a wife of his own–was as shocking to him as it would have been to the most uncompromising of the Dagonets and Marvells.
Edith Wharton came from the same social circles as Ralph Marvell. They have strong values and this is why in life or business, the end doesn’t justify the means. But she blames his family traditions because they repress feelings and don’t want to face his misery. Edith Wharton had suffered physically from that oppressive atmosphere. She broke free when she came to France and that might explain why she’s such a blind Francophile.
Reading The Custom of the Country might be easier for a French than for an American, with all the French words included in the text and all the undercurrent comparison between French and American ways. Sometimes the words have a fantasist orthography (Allow me to escort you to the bew-fay. I had to pause to realize that bew-fay was buffet or undoolay for ondulé in the quote before.) or are correctly spelled (divers et ondoyant; réunions de famille, tisane and biscuits de Reims). I’ve read the free Kindle version, I suppose there are proper footnotes in the Penguin edition. Edith Wharton writes simply and manages to create powerful images with few words (He leaned over to give Marvell’s hand the ironic grasp of celibacy.) Her descriptions of homes and places are excellent and vivid, always giving an insight of the owner’s character through their home. There aren’t superfluous words or endless sentences like in Henry James. It runs and flows like cristallyne water.
The plot is gripping; I was impatient to read the twists and turns of Undine’s life. It’s wonderfully written, engrossing and intelligent. I found it thought provoking and entertaining. A masterpiece.
Short stories by Stefan Zweig
Die Hochzeit von Lyon by Stefan Zweig. (1881-1942)
My French edition entitled Die Hochzeit von Lyon includes seven short stories by Stefan Zweig. I picked up this book because of the title as I live near Lyon, irrational reason but who said we had to be rational? The stories are very different from one another and as they aren’t too numerous, I decided to give you a quick summary of each.
Geschichte eines Untergangs (1910), aka Histoire d’une déchéance aka Twilight
A bit of historical context. This story takes place in France, in 1727. Louis XV was enthroned in 1715 but he was only five at the time. As a consequence, Philippe, Duke of Orléans was in charge of the country as a Regent until 1723. The economic situation was disastrous, people were hungry and angry. The Law scandal didn’t help the regime. Madame de Prie, the main character of Zweig’s story had been the Regent’s lover and had been most influential at Versailles during two years. It is even said she arranged Louis XV’s marriage with Marie Leszczyńska. When the story starts, Madame de Prie is exiled from Versailles to her castle in Normandy. Alone. How can she handle the loneliness, the quiet? She misses the noise, the parties, the intrigues and the fun. She needs to be adored and feared. She needs to show off, to put her life on stage. She needs to orchestrate her death.
For a more detailed review of Twilight, read Guy’s post here.
Die Hochzeit von Lyon (1927) aka Un mariage à Lyon, aka A Wedding in Lyon (*)
Another time in French history, another place. We’re in 1793, during the French Revolution. There had been a major Royalist uprising in Lyon in 1793. After a long fight, the Republicans took the city. During the Terror, the local administrator didn’t enforce the Parisian orders to destroy the rebellious city. When he was replaced, the newcomer put it into motion, killing people without trials. They were killing so many people at the same time that the guillotine wasn’t fast enough, they just shot them and threw the corpses into the Rhône. The story takes place in a prison, before an execution and relates the wedding of two condamned people.
Im Schnee (1901) aka Dans la neige aka In the Snow (*)
This one is about Jewish people who live in a small German town near Poland. It’s Hanoucka and they’re celebrating when they hear that the “flagellants” (i.e. Gangs of men who persecuted Jewish people. I have no idea of the English word for that) are coming. To fight or to flee?
Die Legende der dritten Taube (1916), aka La légende de la troisième colombe, aka The Legend of the third Dove (*)
This is supposed to be the story of the third dove mentioned in the Bible, the last one Noah sent to the Earth and that never came back. It’s obviously an allegory about peace as Zweig wrote this short piece (about five pages) during WWI.
Das Kreuz (1906), aka La Croix, aka The Cross (*)
This one takes place in Spain, in 1810 at the the time of Napoleonic wars. The Spanish fight the French. A French batallion is walking on a road, when the Spanish “rebels” attack them. The French colonel bumps into a tree, faints and when he wakes up, he’s all alone. He decides to follow the road, hoping to find other soldiers when he realizes that all the French soldiers are dead and hung at the trees along the road. What shall he do? How can he survive?
Episode am Genfer See (1919) aka Au bord du lac Léman, aka By Lake Léman (*)
This one relates the story of a Russian peasant who runs aground on the Swiss side of Lake Léman in 1918. He’s a deserter and wants to go home.
Der Zwang (1916), aka La Contrainte, aka Constraint (*)
Der Zwang is the most political story of the book. It’s WWI. Ferdinand and his wife live in Switzerland but they are from a country currently at war. It’s not mentioned but I guess they are either German or Austrian. Ferdinand receives an official letter telling him he’s mobilized and must join the army. He’s in Switzerland, he can hide there and not go. He feels the paper pushes the right buttons in him and he feels compelled to go even if he hates war, doesn’t want to kill and doesn’t agree with the idea of patriotism. Shortly said, he’s a pacifist. Where’s his duty? To be faithful to his ideas and stay with his wife or to go against his will?
There is no foreword, so I can’t tell why the publisher chose to gather these stories into a book but I suppose that war, power and the vanity of mankind is the common point of these tales. They all talk about war (except the first one, unless you consider politics as a battle field too) and the consequences of war on everyday life and on human behaviours. Zweig wonders at our ability to kill for ideas, to accept butchery. He questions our lack of reaction: why do people go at war like sheep? Why don’t the Jewish rebel? Why do people accept to endanger their lives for ideas they don’t share and fear to resist and die for their ideal of peace? What does power do to a humanbeing, creating an unquenchable thirst for honors and attentions?
So far, I’d only read non-historical fiction by Zweig and this was my first visit into this side of his work. (I have his Marie-Antoinnette at home too). As always, Zweig excells at describing landscapes and their interaction with people and at depicting the characters’ innerminds. If Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane is a symbol of the German literature of the period, I understand why Caroline says the Germans consider Zweig as “corny”. Compared to Effi Briest, Jane Eyre is pornography; so of course, Zweig is more effusive, openly sensitive and romanesque. He has a pessimistic vision of humanity though.
I enjoyed reading these stories but to someone who wants to discover Zweig, I’d rather recommend Journey Into the Past or Letter From an Unknown Woman.
(*) I have no idea of the English title used by publishers, so I added the literal translation of the German title. I’ll never thank enough French publishers for sticking to literal translations of book titles most of the time.
Weeks, bloody weeks
The Gods Are Athirst by Anatole France. 1912. Original title: Les dieux ont soif.
| On doit aimer la vertu; mais il est bon de savoir que c’est un simple expédient imaginé par les hommes pour vivre commodément ensemble. Ce que nous appelons la morale n’est qu’une entreprise désespérée de nos semblables contre l’ordre universel, qui est la lutte, le carnage et l’aveugle jeu de forces contraires. | We should love virtue; but it is well to know that this is simply and solely a convenient expedient invented by men in order to live comfortably together. What we call morality is merely a desperate enterprise, a forlorn hope, on the part of our fellow creatures to reverse the order of the universe, which is strife and murder, the blind interplay of hostile forces. |
1793. Citoyen Gamelin, an aspiring painter is nominated to be a member of the Revolutionary Tribunal. The novel unfolds step by step the terrible events that will lead this man to become a heartless judge who’ll send many people to the guillotine. Gamelin is a strong believer in the Revolution. He is coldhearted and it prevents him from understanding other people’s passions. He turns mystic about his mission and oddly, the memory of Nick Corey, the crazy sheriff of Pop 1280 popped up in my mind.
There are many valuable ideas in that novel, about politics, justice, the use of violence and the means we are entitled to use to defend a cause. It shows how an ordinary and virtuous man becomes a bloody judge, loses his mind and changes into a fanatic. Since Anatole France wrote this novel, sadly we’ve had many opportunities to challenge and check his theory. The capacities of humanity to behave in inhuman ways seem abysmal.
It also exposes Anatole France’s rejection to violent outbursts and revolutions (He had hated La Commune in 1870). An generous idea transformed into an official dogma becomes lethal:
| J’espère, du moins, citoyen Brotteaux, que, lorsque la République aura institué le culte de la Raison, vous ne refuserez pas votre adhésion à une religion si sage/- J’ai l’amour de la raison, je n’en ai pas le fanatisme, répondit Brotteaux. La raison nous guide et nous éclaire ; quand vous en aurez fait une divinité, elle vous aveuglera et vous persuadera des crimes. | I hope, at least, citoyen Brotteaux, that, as soon as the Republic has established the worship of Reason, you will not refuse your adhesion to so wise a religion!”“I love reason, but I am no fanatic in my love,” was Brotteaux’s answer. “Reason is our guide and beacon-light; but when you have made a divinity of it, it will blind you and instigate you to crime,” |
Enlightened by Winock, I noticed several passages where Anatole France addresses contemporary issues. Indeed, in 1910-1911, Jaurès had started working for the rehabilitation of Robespierre. Socialism was becoming an important political force and an international movement. The anti-clerical and clerical parties were still opposing arguments. Therefore I saw a reference to socialism in the following quote:
| Sous l’apparence de préparer le bonheur universel et le règne de la justice, ceux qui proposaient comme un objet digne de l’effort des citoyens l’égalité et la communauté des biens étaient des traitres et des scélérats plus dangereux que les fédéralistes. | These men who, under pretense of securing universal happiness and the reign of justice, proposed a system of equality and community of goods as a worthy object of good citizens’ endeavours, were traitors and malefactors more dangerous than the Federalists. |
My edition has an excellent foreword by Marie-Claire Bancquart, a specialist of Anatole France. His father owned a bookstore specialized in the French Revolution. The young Anatole had access to all his documentation (including the newspaper tainted with blood that Marat was holding when Charlotte Corday killed him). It was original documents, from books, to almanacs, pamphlets, letters, etc. Anatole France had an immense culture on the subject and knew very well the era, its politics, its famous people, its way of life. Bancquart says that his description of everyday life in 1793-1794, of the people’s state of mind, of the clothes, of the language and the songs, of the gardens in Paris are all accurate. As I said before, when France wrote his novel, Jaurès was trying to rehabilitate Robespierre and the discussion about the Terror was in the air. The novel is highly political, showing at the same time a bloodthirsty power and revolutionary ideas replacing religious faith, creating a violent and intolerant faith. It describes the not-so-slow evolution of a page of history that promoted justice and freedom to a paranoiac State that condemns people without a fair trial and on dubious testimonies.
From an historical, political and philosophical point of view, it’s an excellent novel. Accurate, insightful, meaningful. From a literary point of view, the style was a put off for me. Sure, the characters come to life under his pen, they sound real and the picture of Paris in that time was great. The beginning of the book was promising until Gamelin is appointed to the Tribunal. Then the style becomes heavy, complicated, too filled with many allusions and references I didn’t understand. The prose is too erudite for the modern reader. I have studied enough of Latin to understand that kind of references:
| – Dictateur, traître, tyran ! il est encore des Brutus.- Tremble, scélérat ! la roche Tarpéienne est près du Capitole. | “Dictator, traitor, tyrant! the race of Brutus is not extinct.”“Tremble, malefactor! the Tarpeian rock is near the Capitol!” |
But I missed many comparisons. Despite the end notes, I was totally lost in the name dropping of politicians and other famous people of the revolutionary period. And the pompous tone sometimes!
| Ô pureté ! ô douceur ! ô foi ! ô simplicité antique ! ô larmes de pitié ! ô rosée féconde ! ô clémence ! ô fraternité humaine ! | Oh purity! oh sweetness! oh faith! oh antique simplicity! oh tears of pity! oh fertilizing dew! oh clemency! oh human fraternity! |
OH DEAR!! As another example of old-fashioned ways, I took me a second or two to figure out who Guillaume Shakespeare was. It’s certainly well-written but it didn’t age well. Proust admired France so much that Bergotte is portrayed after him. Proust is a lot more gifted than him and it’s remarkable that this man who was so literate didn’t need to call his culture to back up his prose. In Proust’s novels, culture stays behind the curtains but nurtures his prose. In France’s book, it’s on stage.
Update on December 16th, 2018 : See Kaggy’s review here.
La Belle Epoque by Michel Winock. Part I
La Belle Epoque. La France de 1900 à 1914. by Michel Winock. 2002. 387 pages. Not translated into English.
I’m not a great reader of non-fiction; somehow I just have difficulties to concentrate on non-literary books. I hesitated before buying La Belle Epoque, wondering if I’d manage to read it. I’m happy I gave it a try, it’s a wonderful book, full of useful information about the society, the political forces and culture in La Belle Epoque. Most of all, it gave the right level of information to me: it’s detailed enough to teach me many things I didn’t know or to help me pull together pieces of knowledge I had grasped through literature but not too detailed. And, last but not least, Michel Winock often illustrates his speech with literary examples and compares France to other European countries, mostly England and Germany. It’s a gold mine for me, always in search of bridges between history and literature.
Michel Winock considers that La Belle Epoque corresponds to the years between 1900 and 1914. It had to be after the Dreyfus Affair and before WWI. He often needs to come back to the preceding decades to explain the events of these years, which is even more interesting. The book is divided in four major parts: the economy, the society, the politics and culture. I’m not going to summarize everything. Although I found the parts about economy and politics really interesting and enlightening regarding the roots of French unions and the DNA of our political parties, I’ll skip on these ones here. I’d rather share social and cultural elements because I thought they might be useful to you too, reader of French literature. I’ll need two posts and this one will be a hodgepodge of facts I gathered about the mores.
Marriage / Adultery / Divorce / Babies.
Marriage is seen as a financial and social decision. Love has nothing to do with it and love life is often outside of marriage. So is sex, especially for men who go to brothels; it sounds very common when you read In Search of Lost Time, as if it were a part of a boy’s education. The basis of Civil Law in France lays in the Code Civil, which dates back to Napoleon. The law punished differently adultery for men and women. A woman risked from 3 months to 2 years in prison when a man risked a fine from 100 to 2000 francs. Divorce wasn’t possible under Napoleon, it was restored by the Third Republic in 1884. These juridical elements might explain why writers drew so many portraits of miserable marriages and doomed destinies of people attached to the wrong person.
The husbands keep the money from dowries. Women can’t work without their husband’s consent. 38% of married women had a full time job, when we consider all social classes.
France’s birth rate was low compared to other European countries. People had already started to have fewer children to give them better chances to climb the social ladder. There’s a sort of concentration of financial means. Looking back on history, France was ahead of its time but it wasn’t analyzed that way at the time. The contemporaries were afraid of a “degeneration of the race”. Zola himself wrote a novel about it, Fécondité. The idea of decadence is also in Huysmans’s books. You can imagine all the stinking ideas that can stem from such disputable concepts.
We don’t know what kind of birth control was used, probably abstinence and coitus interruptus. As a consequence of political concern – without immigration, the population declines in numbers, which is not good for the Revanche, i.e. the next war with Germany that will erase the shame of the debacle of 1870 – the State strengthens the repression of abortion and puts into trial the “faiseuses d’anges”.
Women
I had gathered from different books (Like Madame Bovary by Flaubert, Une Vie by Maupassant, Le Rouge et le Noir by Stendhal, Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées by Balzac) that girls from the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie were educated in convents, with disastrous results. Michel Winock confirms my impression. The Third Republic changes that as it starts offering another alternative to convents. As a result, women’s education will be more republican and separated from religion.
Winock explains that the model for a woman is to be a stay-at-home mother. In the good society, girls are kept at home and don’t have a lot of freedom. It confirms my impression of Albertine in Proust: she’s far too free to be considered as a good match.
Some lesbians stand out, have famous literary salons and try to promote the feminist cause. The period offered small victories to women (1907: the right to keep their wages and spend it without their husband’s consent) but they’ll have to wait until 1945 for the right to vote. Indeed, in these years, women were considered as an ally to the Catholic church. After the separation between the State and the Church in 1905, the fight was hard between the clerical and anti-clerical sides. It didn’t help the feminists that the députés feared that women would support the clerical candidates.
Death / illness / doctors.
In these years, the attitude towards death shifted. On the one hand, dead people are worshipped and on the other hand, cremation was authorized in 1889. In 1907, the Préfet Lépine closed the morgue to visitors: it’s no longer a Sunday promenade. Death becomes hidden.
The government took seriously tuberculosis, syphilis and suicides. The tubercle bacillus was discovered in 1905. Health and hygiene campaigns were launched, it was a time of progress for medicine. At the end of the 19thC, there were still weird prescriptions, such as “spend the rest of your life on a steam boat commuting on the Rhône between Lyon and Avignon and eat in time with the orchestra” to heal …stomach cancer. Unbelievable. Monsieur Diafoirus and Monsieur Purgon had an offspring.
Syphilis was a great fear and a political concern as a proof of that “degeneration” I mentioned earlier and because, like AIDS, it passes from mother to child during pregnancy. If baby boys die or are in poor health, who’s going to fight the Germans? Humanism has sometimes twisted roots. According to estimations, 13 to 15% of adult males in Paris had syphilis. It seems a high percentage to me.
Suicide was a hot topic in that period, following a series of suicides among students and Durkheim’s work on suicide, which was published in 1897 and was much discussed.
That was the elements I thought relevent to better understand books regarding mores. In the next post, I’ll write briefly about social classes, the founding of a republican identity and a little about culture. I’m afraid my style is really clumsy, I lack the English words for that kind of posts. I did my best.
German Literature Month in November: my selection
After a moment of hesitation, I decided to participate to the German Reading Month hosted by Caroline (Beauty Is A Sleeping Cat) and Lizzy (Lizzy’s Literary Life). It will take place in November and will overlap my EU Book Tour project. After Dutch literature in June, German-speaking literature in November.
I’m not well read in German literature. When I think of the German books I’ve read and loved, most of them are by Austrian or Czech writers (Zweig, Kafka, Schnitzler, Rilke). Honestly, I wasn’t thrilled by the few books from Germany I’ve read so far. The Sorrows of the Young Werther by Goethe? Romanticism isn’t my cup of tea. Mademoiselle de Scudéry by E.T.A. Hoffmann? Not a remarkable landmark in my reading history. The Left Handed Woman by Peter Handke? Brr, terrible experience. Death in Venice by Thomas Man? I can’t recall a single thing from the plot. And I didn’t even remember I had read The Lost Honor of Katarina Blum until I started investigating Heinrich Böll for this event.
I think this was all bad luck and I’m sure there must be German books I will enjoy. I never picked up the right ones, that’s all. Anyway, I looked for the German books on my shelves and on my wish lists. I’m terribly lazy, so I eliminated big books and here is the dream list.
Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane (1895)
Caroline and Lizzy organize a readalong. I’ll probably read it at my own pace. Sorry Caroline and Lizzy, but reading determined chapters each week sounds like school and I’m not up for it. But I’m really interested in discovering Effi Briest.
Un mariage à Lyon by Stefan Zweig, a French collection of short stories including:
|
German Title |
French Title |
English Title |
| Die Hochzeit von Lyon (1927) | Un mariage à Lyon | A Wedding in Lyon (*) |
| Im Schnee (1901) | Dans la neige | In the Snow (*) |
| Das Kreuz (1906) | La Croix | The Cross (*) |
| Geschichte eines Untergangs (1910) | Histoire d’une déchéance | Twilight |
| Die Legende der dritten Taube (1916) | La légende de la troisième colombe | The Legend of the third Dove (*) |
| Episode am Genfer See (1919) | Au bord du lac Léman | By Lake Léman (*) |
| Der Zwang (1916) | La Contrainte | Constraint (*) |
(*) I have no idea of the English title used by publishers, so I added the literal translation of the German title. I’ll never thank enough French publishers for sticking to literal translations of book titles most of the time. For a review of Twilight, read Guy’s post here.
Lettres à Lou Andreas-Salome by Rainer Maria Rilke
This small book is a collection of letters Rilke wrote to his beloved Lou Andreas-Salome. I love Rilke. There’s nothing else to say. I’m looking forward to this bath in his soothing and wise prose. I also enjoy that collection of tiny books by Mille et Une Nuits. I have other titles from it and they’re always enchanting. I owe them a great translation of Ovide.
Hotel Savoy by Josef Roth (1924)
I’ve had in mind to read a book by Josef Roth for a while and this one seems just great.
Beton by Thomas Bernhard (1982)
The English title is Concrete and the French one Béton. I added it to my TBR after Guy’s review. You can read it here.
Der Mensch ist ein grosser Fasan auf der Welt by Herta Müller (1994).
The French title is the translation of the German, L’homme est un grand faisan sur la terre. The English title, The Passport, is totally invented by the publisher. Indeed, the original title means Man is a great pheasant on the earth, which is much more intriguing in my opinion. I was intrigued by the title and interested in reading a book by the Nobel Prize Winner of 2009.
Ruhm: Ein Roman in neun Geschichten by Daniel Kehlmann (2009)
The English title is Fame: A Novel in Nine Episodes. The French title is Gloire. I expect a lot of fun with this collection of short stories by an Austrian writer. Another reading idea I owe to Guy. Here is the link to his review.
I wanted to try another Heinrich Böll but I wasn’t tempted the blurbs of the books available in paperback. Ooops.Now that I look at my list again, I realize I’m not going to discover a lot of books from Germany. Tant pis. Of course, I’m not sure I’ll be able to read all this in time but I’ll try. Most of the books are short.
If anyone has read one of these, I’m interested in your take.
Do you need to be Irish to love Dubliners by James Joyce?
Dubliners by James Joyce. 1914.
I’m well aware that my post title will raise eyebrows or bring frowns on faces. I’ll explain later. I’m not going to introduce Dubliners here, I don’t see the point of poorly rephrasing what is already written on Wikipedia. So check here if you need explanations. This is my first James Joyce, a writer I’ve never read because I thought he was daunting. After several recommendations from readers I finally decided to try Dubliners. What can I say? I was stupid not to have read it before. It’s beautifully written and of course Joyce is a great author. So thanks for the recommendation.
Dubliners is a vivid picture of Dublin before the independence. He caught me with Araby, Eveline, A Painful Case and particularly with The Dead. I loved his style (“Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance.”), his quick thoughts about humanity (“Rapid motion through space elates one; so does notoriety; so does the possession of money”), his descriptions of faces (“His face, which carried the entire tale of his years, was of the brown tint of Dublin streets.” Or “He wore a round hat of hard black felt. His face, shining with raindrops, had the appearance of damp yellow cheese save where two rosy spots indicated the cheekbones.”). I really enjoyed his wit and his gift at describing characters:
She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed; and though she knew the small number of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male.
Sometimes I found French way of speaking with English words. “What age are you?” which is exactly what French pupils learning English would tend to say instead of How old are you? (Literal translation of the French Quel âge as-tu?) Same comment for “how goes it?” (Comment ça va?)
But he lost me sometimes.
He lost me in the language but that was predictable. So I asked for help and downloaded a French translation and went back and forth the original and the French. There were many expressions (“that emphatically takes the biscuit” or “He’s gone to the dogs.”) or sometimes acronyms (a.p. for appointment, g.p. for I don’t know what except that I don’t think they were drinking a doctor, so I assume, being in Dublin, that it was beer). The problem was that he lost the kindle’s dictionary too with words such as barmbracks or peloothered, which was less predictable. Hence the French translation. Then I got angry at the translator for unnecessary changes. Why does Maria from Clay became Ursule in French? And why a man of 66 became a man of 70? But all in all, it helped me with the original.
He lost me in Two Gallants, I never quite understood what the two guys wanted from the girl, even after reading it in French. Prostitution? Sorry for being slow…
He lost me in a sea of boredom in Grace. – Yes, holiday by the coast, can’t help sea metaphores – All that stuff about religion. Perhaps he wanted to show how boring religion was to him.
He totally lost me in Ivy Day in the Committee Room as it is rife with political issues. I knew about Parnell but my mind went blank when I read about all the details about politics, King Edward’s visit to Ireland and so on.
He lost me in the internal cracks and divisions about nationalism and independence, like here:
O, innocent Amy! I have found out that you write for The Daily Express. Now, aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” “Why should I be ashamed of myself?” asked Gabriel, blinking his eyes and trying to smile. “Well, I’m ashamed of you,” said Miss Ivors frankly. “To say you’d write for a paper like that. I didn’t think you were a West Briton.
I assumed the Daily Express was a pro-London paper and I guessed that West Briton is an insult. That’s the point: I guessed and I can’t tell if I guessed right.
He lost me in the streets and the public transports of Dublin, a city I’ve never visited although I’d love to. I felt I was missing something there, Joyce obviously loves his city and his people. I’m sure it’s pretty evocative for a native but I felt left aside from private jokes. And that’s the persisting feeling about it. Although I was blown away by The Dead, I felt I was intruding in a book written for Irish people about their lives, their customs, their history and their identity. I felt Joyce wanted to show them who they are, from childhood to old age and that they should stand for themselves.
Hence my post title.
But I’ll let Joyce have the last word with his observation of changes in the Irish society:
A new generation is growing up in our midst, a generation actuated by new ideas and new principles. It is serious and enthusiastic for these new ideas and its enthusiasm, even when it is misdirected, is, I believe, in the main sincere. But we are living in a sceptical and, if I may use the phrase, a thought-tormented age: and sometimes I fear that this new generation, educated or hypereducated as it is, will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humour which belonged to an older day.
For another review, read Sarah’s here.
Max’s review is available here
The Return of the Soldier, by Rebecca West
Warning: this is an “after-reading” review, without any summary of the plot and full of spoilers. I decided to participate to this month’s War and Literature readalong organized by Caroline. For a review describing the plot and without spoilers, see her post here.
This book isn’t at all what I expected. And what did I expect? The return of a soldier, broken by terrifying nightmares and experiencing difficulties to re-adapt to the quiet world of everyday life. Maybe I was unconsciously influenced by my memory of La Douleur by Marguerite Duras and by another French book about a Poilu coming back home whose title I don’t remember.
Here, Chris is suffering from shell-shock and doesn’t remember his last 15 years of life. War plays a role as a setting – it hovers over the characters’ life – and as a deus ex-machina. For me, the novel isn’t about shell-shock and honestly, I don’t care to know if the symptoms described here are accurate. This is literature, not a scientific publication. If I wanted to know what shell-shock is, reading literary fiction wouldn’t be my choice. Rebecca West could have written the same kind of story by making Chris fall off his horse, hit his head against a rock and suffer from amnesia. So, the point isn’t the war and what it does to soldiers, even if the reader can’t help thinking Chris’s mind wouldn’t have snapped if he hadn’t attempted to protect his sanity from the horror of the trenches by recalling the happiest days of his life. No, the core of the book is the pursuit of happiness and the dichotomy between what would make us happy and what we need to do to fulfil our social role.
Chris, after losing Margaret on a silly fight and because of a most inconvenient sequence of tiny events, such as other people not forwarding his letters, is called back to duty. The odds seem against Chris and Margaret and their wasted love story sounds like Romeo and Juliet. Chris’s father needs him to run the business. As Margaret is lost forever, he throws himself in expending his estate Baldry Court, marrying, redecorating the house. He acts according to other people’s expectations and has to support relatives and wife.
At his father’s death he had been obliged to take over a business that was weighted by the needs of a mob of female relatives who were all useless either in the old way, with antimacassars, or in the new way, with gold-clubs; then Kitty had come along and picked up his conception of normal expenditure, and carelessly stretched it as a woman stretches a new glove on her hand.
With that little sentence, Rebecca West brings on the advantage men could benefit from if the women in their lives (sisters, wives, mothers…) could make their own living. I pitied Chris for this. West describes him as being under a “yoke”, which is a very strong image. Chris puts up a good show, though. Even the watchful Jenny thought he was happy. But the fact that they have to say it aloud (“He was so happy here!” ; “He could not have been happier.” ; “This house, this life with us, was the core of his heart.”) may prove they unconsciously knew he wasn’t.
The narrator, Jenny, is Chris’s cousin and it sounds obvious right from the start that she is desperately in love with him. She notices physical details you don’t pay attention to when you love someone with a non romantic love. She does. (“As he bent over me I noticed once again how his hair was of two colours, brown and gold”). The way she talks about Chris betrays her:
To see him was to desire intimacy with him, so that one might intervene between this body, which was formed for happiness, and this soul, which cherished so deep a faith in tragedy.
Jenny is ready to befriend with any woman Chris loves, just to stay by his side and grab some leftovers of their happiness. Chris is more important to her than anyone else and she worries more about him than his wife Kitty. She shall do whatever it takes for him to be safe and happy. She’s pathetic but noble and loves him enough to be disinterested. However, she is lucid about her feelings and her jealousy.
As I went up-stairs I became aware that I was near to a bodily collapse; I suppose the truth is that I was physically so jealous of Margaret that it was making me ill.
She’s also very well aware that her love is unrequited:
I remembered it well, because my surprise that he passed me without seeing me had made me perceive for the first time that he had never seen me at all save in the most cursory fashion. On the eye of his mind, I realized thenceforward, I had hardly impinged.
But Jenny is a good-hearted woman. When Margaret first comes, she alone perceives her goodness and sees her human qualities beyond the poor clothes. Although she doesn’t hide that she’s repulsed by her appearance, she catches her merits.
And then Kitty.
Beautiful women of her type lose, in this matter of admiration alone, their otherwise tremendous sense of class distinction; they are obscurely aware that it is their civilizing mission to flash the jewel of their beauty before all men, so that they shall desire it and work to get the wealth to buy it, and thus be seduced by a present appetite to a tilling of the earth that serves the future. There is, you know, really room for all of us; we each have our peculiar use.
As long as Chris seems to love Kitty, Jenny restrains herself from disliking her. Kitty is a sort of vapid woman, interested in her beauty and in that of her house. She works hard to be pretty, to act prettily. Ugliness and poverty insult her and she can’t bear it. She can hardly be polite to Margaret during their first encounter. Kitty acts as if she were a work of art. Is she responsible for this? She was educated to be a perfect lady. In peace times, she is. In war times, her lack of personal qualities is brought out into the open when she has to face dramatic circumstances. There lingers the idea that hardship takes off her social mask.
The ending is what we call in French a “choix cornélien”, a “Cornelian choice”. The term comes from the French playwright Corneille (17th C). In his plays, the characters must always make a choice between passion and duty, between happiness and what is right. Here, Margaret and Jenny face a Cornelian choice: to cure or not to cure Chris. To cure him is to allow him to be a soldier and be sent to the trenches again, to lead him to a highly probable death.
When we had lifted the yoke of our embraces from his shoulders he would go back to that flooded trench in Flanders, under that sky more full of flying death than clouds, to that No-Man’s-Land where bullets fall like rain on the rotting faces of the dead.
Not to cure him would keep him safe at home but maintain his mind in his blissful oblivion. “He would not be quite a man”. Stay at home or go to war: very antique.
Jenny states:
While her spell endured they could not send him back into the hell of war. This wonderful, kind woman held his body as safely as she held his soul.
The use of “spell” is not neutral. It links Chris and Margaret’s story to fairy tales and myths. And indeed, I thought of Greek mythology. Monkey Island Inn looks like a Greek style construction. In Greek mythology, after they die, humans reach the Hades, the underworld, by crossing the Acheron, ferried across by Charon. 15 years ago, Margaret was a sort of Charon, bringing Chris to another world, the world of happiness. Chris losing his memory could be seen as Orpheus crossing the Acheron to find Eurydice again. For a while, he finds her. Then Jenny and Margaret force him to look back on the 15 years he left behind and face the truth: Margaret-Eurydice is dead and will disappear again. Chris will definitely stay in Present Time and Margaret in the Past.
Religion is also important in this text and Rebecca West being from Irish and Scottish origins, I suppose she was raised in catholic faith. She evokes churches in catholic countries and their specific scent due to incense sticks used during masses. Margaret is seen as a saint, transfigured. Margaret, M, like Mary or Maria-Magdalena. In addition, by obliterating 15 years of his life, Chris goes back to the Garden of Eden. The time he spends with Margaret is always in Baldry Court’s gardens. There’s a bucolic scene where Jenny spies on them and Chris is sleeping peacefully by Margaret’s side. Jenny and Margaret’s choice to cure him is a way to make him fall down from this. “He wouldn’t be quite a man”: man can be understood here as “human”.
Why did her tears reveal to me what I had learned long ago, but had forgotten in my frenzied love, that there is a draft that we must drink or not be fully human? I knew that one must know the truth. I knew quite well that when one is adult one must raise to one’s lips the wine of the truth, heedless that it is not sweet like milk, but draws the mouth with its strength, and celebrate communion with reality, or else walk forever queer and small like a dwarf. Thirst for this sacrament had made Chris strike away the cup of lies about life that Kitty’s white hands held to him and turn to Margaret with this vast trustful gesture of his loss of memory.
That passage is full of catholic vocabulary. To “raise to one’s lips the wine of the truth” makes me think of catholic mass and the Communion rite, when the priest drinks wine representing the Christ’ blood and the congregation’s acceptance of Christian faith as a truth. Later she uses “celebrate the communion” and “sacrament”, which enforces my theory.
By curing him, they give him back to Earth, knowledge and suffering. The apple is his dead son’s jersey, and his fall is due to a woman, like in the Bible. They also make him turn his back to myth, spells and paganism.
The only part I didn’t like is the one about the dead children. Chris and Margaret both lived through the death of their child. The boys died at the same time, from the same kind of mysterious illness. They withered inexplicably. Margaret is convinced that she should have had a son with Chris and that their sons born from relationships with wrong partners only had half a life and that’s why they didn’t survive. This made me think of the Platonic vision of love: two halves endlessly searching for one another. Under West’s pen, Chris and Margaret were meant for each other. The idea of half alive children is creepy.
I have so many things to say about the substance that I have no room left for the form and that’s a pity because I really enjoyed it. She has a delicate way to describe sentiments and landscapes, mixing the two sometimes like here “the Lebanon cedar, the branches of which are like darkness made palpable.”
I really love this book and I should re-read it later. I’m sure I would discover subtleties I have missed here. Thanks Caroline for proposing this title for the readalong, I wouldn’t have discovered this book by myself. I’m curious to read other people’s thoughts about it.
French Ways and their Meaning by Edith Wharton
French Ways and their Meaning by Edith Wharton. (134 pages)
Edith Wharton had been living in France since twelve years when she wrote these articles about France in 1917. These essays were aimed at American readers and their purpose was to explain how French people behave and think.
When I started to read Edith Wharton’s book, I had two available options: either take her uncontrolled enthusiasm for France literally and shut the book immediately or try to catch whatever was relevant in her exposé. Here is what I mean with “uncontrolled enthusiasm”
French people “have taste” as naturally as they breathe: it is not regarded as an accomplishment, like playing the flute.
Or
As life is an art in France, so woman is an artist. She does not teach man, but she inspires him.
I laughed at the possibility of being anybody’s Muse and mused over my above mentioned options with this book. I chose to keep on reading, taking what I was reading “au second degré”, which means with some distance and not literally at all.
It also took me a while to figure out how I would write about this book. Though it’s rather short, there’s a lot of material in it. So I decided to give an idea of the general tone of her essays and then unleash some of the spontaneous comments that came to my mind when I was reading. It is what we call in French a “liste à la Prévert”, which means a random list of items with no particular sequence or obvious link between them. I’m not sure it’s of interest to anyone but me, though. Anyway, back to the book.
After a brief introduction, Edith Wharton details in six chapters the main particularities of French ways.
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First Impressions
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Reverence
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Taste
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Intellectual Honesty
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Continuity
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The New Frenchwoman
She is well aware that writing about a people is tricky and begs the reader to accept the use of “Anglo-Saxon vs Latin” conventions as it is convenient. I will use them too, even if it is simplistic. Her main argument when comparing France to America is that France is an adult country whereas America is only a child. I first thought this statement ludicrous then recalled the childish “Freedom Fries” and revised my judgement. Then in each chapter, she explains how great the French are. That’s it, the general tone is of an undeserved and ridiculous great praise of France. I will not cover all the generalizations she wrote.
However, as I’m reading and writing in English, I was very interested in her conclusion, where she discusses the meaning “the four words that preponderate in French speech and literature”: Amour, Gloire, Plaisir, Volupté and how their immediate translation, Love, Glory, Pleasure, Voluptuousness doesn’t convey the same images and background than in French. I wish she had added Séduction to her list, I would have loved to read her take on this one. I’m not going to rephrase everything but I think it’s worth reading for someone who enjoys French literature and wants to understand it better. She has a point here and it was very educational for me. I’ve experienced difficulties to translate the concept of “pleasure” and the verb “jouir”, either in posts or in comments. Here is what Edith Wharton writes :
And from their freedom of view combined with their sensuous sensibility they have extracted the sensation they call “le plaisir,” which is something so much more definite and more evocative than what we mean when we speak of pleasure. “Le plaisir” stands for the frankly permitted, the freely taken, delight of the senses, the direct enjoyment of the fruit of the tree called golden. No suggestions of furtive vice degrade or coarsen it, because it has, like love, its open place in speech and practice.
It’s something that can be applied for very different situations such as enjoying the sun caressing your face, spending an afternoon with a good book, quietly walking in the nature and of course to sex. Is she right to say it’s a different meaning than “pleasure”?
In some ways, her enthusiasm blurred her vision but she does have a point on several subjects I don’t know if I must rejoice that these things are still relevant one century after she wrote them. Perhaps it proves her right when she assesses that the French are conservative. I don’t pretend to hold the truth. This is only my opinion and it should be taken as such.
Let’s start by clichés: wine and relationships between men and women.
About Wine.
Above all, the rich soil of France, so precious for wheat and corn-growing, is the best soil in the world for the vine; and a people can possess few more civilising assets than the ability to produce good wine at home. It is the best safeguard against alcoholism, the best incentive to temperance in the manly and grown-up sense of the word, which means voluntary sobriety and not legally enforced abstinence. All these gifts France had and the French intelligently cherished.
Um. Has she read Zola or was he too dirty? Sure binge drinking – now coming here too and regularly worrying the authorities – is not a French custom. But to say we don’t have any problem with alcoholism is wrong.
About casual relationships between men and women.
The French have always been a gay and free and Rabelaisian people. They attach a great deal of importance to love-making, but they consider it more simply and less solemnly than we. They are cool, resourceful and merry, crack jokes about the relations between the sexes. (…) They define pornography as a taste for the nasty, and not as an interest in the natural.
I can’t tell how it is abroad but what she writes about us is probably true. Take our presidents. One apparently died in action, meaning here, not arms at the ready but between the arms of his mistress. Another had a secret family. The current one got a divorce and married a former model when he’s still in charge. And no one is shocked.
About jokes about the relations between the sexes, sure, we have a lot of them. But I never considered this as a French thing. Should I?
As for the latest part, pornography, I’m sure comparing the rating of films regarding the age of the audience would be fascinating. Which makes me think I’ve always been astonished by the “explicit lyrics” stickers put on CDs in American stores.
About Theatre and Cinema.
“What the American public wants is a tragedy with a happy ending.”
This is exactly the sentence I was looking for to explain why Je vais bien, ne t’en fais pas would have had another ending if it had been shot in America. But I’d rather talk about “Hollywood films” vs “Indie films”, whatever their nationality.
About L’Académie Française and the fight for French language.
And Richelieu and the original members of the Academy had recognised from the first day that language was the chosen vessel in which the finer life of a nation must be preserved.
The Academy still exists and is still in charge with inventing new French words to address to new realities. Our government advertises about the proper way to say in French foreign words, mostly coming from the English. I blogged about that once here. I’m not sure that we keep a proper balance between “preserved” and “kept in mothballs”, though.
About Americans and Art.
It is the pernicious habit of regarding the arts as something that can be bottled, pickled and absorbed in twelve months (thanks to “courses,” summaries and abridgements) that prevents the development of a real artistic sensibility in our eager and richly endowed race.
Whereas I don’t agree with her on the last part of her statement and reject the word “race”, I chose this quote because it reminded me of the discussion about creative writing Max started on his blog. Somehow, Edith Wharton shows that a fertile soil for those classes has been there in America for a while.
In addition, when I first read it, I also thought about our position named “cultural exception” and the way our government usually refuses to consider art as any consumer goods in trade agreements.
About morality.
It distinguishes, implicitly if not outspokenly, between the wrong that has far-reaching social consequences and that which injures only one or two persons, or perhaps only the moral sense of the offender. The French have continued to accept this classification of offences. They continue to think the sin against the public conscience far graver than that against any private person. If in France there is a distinction between private and business morality it is exactly the reverse of that prevailing in America.
This reminded me I discussion I’ve had with Lisa from ANZ Lit Lovers on Madame Bovary. She asked me if it was taught in school and wondered how teachers “would handle the moral/ethical issues in it with school kids”. My answer was “This is a very Anglo-Saxon question! For me, and I believe for a French, it’s not a moral or ethical question. It’s a personal matter. It’s private and unique as these people are unique.”
I couldn’t properly explain why “private” was the word that came to my mind. Edith Wharton has put words on this. Emma’s cheating on Charles has no consequences for the society. It is sure a misfortune for Charles but I can’t blame her or judge her – Flaubert doesn’t either. It’s a “sin against a private person”. Teaching about this can’t have consequences on the morality of the students. There is nothing subversive in openly talking about cuckooed Charles in class.
That’s also why we don’t care about our presidents being faithful to their spouse – I was about to write “wives” but let’s be optimistic, someday a woman will be president – or not.
Women, men and business.
“In small businesses the woman is always her husband’s book keeper or clerk, or both; above all, she is his business adviser. France, as you know, is held up to all other countries as a model of thrift, of wise and prudent saving and spending.”
This hasn’t changed and I see it everyday at work. Is that something really French? After the divorce rate exploded and left women working with their husbands without any money, the law was changed to give them a status. It is aimed at protecting women and giving them social protection and a retirement pension if they get a divorce after working “for free” in their husband’s business.
The second part explains our incomprehension regarding junk bonds and the sub-primes crisis in America and also strikes against any attempt to change the retirement system to an Anglo-Saxon one, ie with money invested in the stock markets.
Leisure.
This point assured, they want only enough leisure and freedom from material anxiety to enjoy what life and the arts of life offer. This absence of financial ambition should never be lost sight of: it is not only the best clue to the French character, but the most useful lesson our own people can learn from contact with France. (…) The requirements of the average French man in any class are surprisingly few, and the ambition to “better” himself socially plays a very small part in his plans. What he wants is leisure to enjoy the fleeting good things of life, from which no one knows better how to extract a temperate delight, and full liberty of mind to discuss general ideas while pursuing whatever trade or art he is engaged in.
In presidential election of 1997, one of the slogans was “Work more to earn more.” OK, the candidate pushing that slogan won the election and put it into practice as soon as he could. He increased the possibility of doing overtime hours, allowed retired persons to work. It doesn’t seem to be a success. People would rather work less and earn less than lose free time. Somehow I thought it was a new tendency coming from a general eagerness for leisure. So I was surprised to discover this in Wharton’s little book.
Fortunately, everything is not as perfect as she says.
About the status of the Frenchwoman.
The French wife has less legal independence than the American or English wife, and is subject to a good many legal disqualifications from which women have freed themselves in other countries.
At least, some critic. Yes French women had to wait until 1944 to have the right to vote, years after American women (1919), British women (1928) or Brazilian ones (1932)
About politeness at tourists.
The complaint of Anglo-Saxons that, in travelling in France, they see little of the much-vaunted French courtesy, is not unjustified. The French are not courteous from any vague sense of good-will toward mankind; they regard politeness as a coin with which certain things are obtainable, and being notably thrifty they are cautious about spending it on strangers.
I’m sorry to say this hasn’t changed much. Stand in a street in San Francisco with a map and someone will come and help you. Do the same thing in Paris and see how long you wait until someone finally comes by you. I promise I don’t leave tourists in distress whenever I meet some.
In the end, she can’t avoid caricature, but it’s difficult to avoid short-cuts, clichés and generalizations in that matter. She’s really carried away by her enthusiasm, which is harmful to her thoughts. Most of the compliments are really undeserved. I far from agree with everything she says but it was interesting and thought-provoking anyway. So I’m glad I’ve read it.
Book Around the Corner 