Robert Desnos' Landscape

 

Landscape

A version 

I dreamt of loving. The dream remains, but love

is no longer those lilacs and roses whose breath

filled the broad woods, where the sail of a flame

lay at the end of each arrow-straight path.

 

I dreamt of loving. The dream remains, but love

is no longer that storm whose white nerve sparked

the castle towers, or left the mind unrhymed,

or flared an instant, just where the road forked.

 

It is the star struck under my heel in the night.

It is the word no book on earth defines.

It is the foam on the wave, the cloud in the sky.

 

As they age, all things grow rigid and bright.

The streets fall nameless, and the knots untie.

Now with this landscape, I fix: I shine.

 

-Robert Desnos (tr. Don Paterson)

 

Bit of a random pick this evening. I like it, I think, but I'm also still thinking about it. Your thoughts?

 

Robert Desnos (1900-1945) was a French poet. He was associated with the Surrealists as a young man, but broke with André Breton over Breton's support of Communism. During the war he was a member of the French Resistance, and was captured in 1944, with his ultimate destination Theriesenstadt. He survived the war, but had contracted typhoid as a prisoner, and only survived it by a month, dying in June of 1945. This is from the last book of poetry published during his life, Contrée of 1944.

 

Don Paterson is a contemporary Scottish poet. This translation (or version) first appeared in Poetry in the April 2006 issue.

 

Random? Well, I'm rereading Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives. There's a lot of young people talking about poetry in it...

"One night, a girl whose name was Marguerite and whom I wanted  to sleep with started to read a poem by Robert Desnos. I didn't know who the fuck Robert Desnos was, but other people at my table did, and anyway, the poem was good, it got to you." [271]

I was a bit like the speaker in that passage, and I didn't know who Robert Desnos was...but now I know a bit more. We don't ever learn which poem of Desnos, but there doesn't seem to be much Desnos in English on the web anyway.

 

The French, if it's helpful:

 

Le Paysage  

J'avais rêvé d'aimer. J'aime encor mais l'amour

Ce n'est plus ce bouquet de lilas et de roses

Chargeant de leurs parfums la forét où repose

Une flamme à l'issue de sentiers sans détour.

 

J'avais rêvé d'aimer. J'aime encor mais l'amour

Ce n'est plus cet orage où l'éclair superpose

Ses bûchers aux châteaux, déroute, décompose,

Illumine en fuyant l'adieu au carrefour.

 

C'est silex en feu sous mons pas dans la nuit,

Le mot qu'aucun lexique au monde n'a traduit

L'écume sur la mer, dans le ciel ce nuage.

 

À vieillir tout devient rigide et lumineux,

Des boulevards sans nom et des cordes sans nœuds.

Je me sens me roidir avec le paysage.

 

-Robert Desnos

 

 

 

Simone de Beauvoir's The Mandarins

 '"Why should people give a damn about what I think, what I feel?", Henri said. "My little personal stories don't interest anyone, and history, the big story, isn't in my opinion a fit subject for a novel."'

That's Henri Perron (a character in The Mandarins) who hasn't figured out how to encapsulate history in a novel, but Simone de Beauvoir has managed a pretty good job of it.

There are two conflicts that drive the novel that interlock with each other. The first is politics.

The Mandarins begins at a party that first Christmas in 1944 after Paris has been liberated. The war isn't over, but its end is in sight. With the US and Soviet Russia looking so dominant, what will happen to France? 

Perron had founded a Resistance magazine L'Espoir during the war; his friend and mentor Robert Dubreuilh had written for it. Resistance members had distributed the magazine; some had died in doing so. The fate of the magazine is one of the main drivers of the novel's plot. Dubreuilh creates a new left wing Socialist movement, non-Communist but still hopeful of establishing a Popular Front with the Communists. He wants L'Espoir to be the house organ for his new movement.

Perron is in general agreement with Dubreuilh's politics, but feels that L'Espoir should remain independent. If he isn't able to say what he thinks, he's going to lose some of his audience, he fears, and his fears prove true. Dubreuilh manipulates him into supporting his movement; Perron is no longer viewed as truth-telling; the magazine does lose readers and becomes dependent on deep-pocketed donors with agendas.

Then the first reports of the Gulag start to arrive. Can Perron truly say nothing?  But if he reports on it, even with the hope of correcting what he sees as (excuseable) Soviet excesses, is a Popular Front still possible? Maybe he should just abandon politics? Go back to writing novels. But World War III feels close.

(One can ask was a Popular Front with Soviet Union under Stalin even possible after World War II? The character Scriassine says no.)

There's a second set of conflicts that also drive the novel; unsurprisingly (it is Simone de Beauvoir) it's the relationship between the sexes.

Both Perron and Dubreuilh are married at the start of the novel. Paula Perron could sing and used to do so, but she felt she could never be Edith Piaf. Now she's let her entire life be absorbed in promoting Perron's purported greatness. But Perron has fallen out of love with her during the war when they were generally separated, and he's no longer convinced of his own greatness. He tries to convince her to take an interest in singing again, or in something other than himself, but are his encouragements genuine? Or just selfishness? He's not entirely sure himself. In the meantime he has affairs.

Anne Dubreuilh is a psychoanalyst with a thriving practice of her own. She and Dubreuilh are no longer sleeping together, but she still finds him intellectually stimulating. But the war's over! She's still young! Pleasure is possible! After five years of chastity, she has a one night stand, with Scriassine, but it's not very satisfying. But the door is open.

With the end of the war travel again becomes possible, but nobody has money. Perron gets an offer to go to Portugal for a French cultural agency. Nadine, the Dubreuilh's daughter, desperate to go anywhere, convinces him to take her as his secretary; they become lovers.

Then Anne Dubreuilh gets an offer to go to a psychoanalysis conference in New York, with a subequent lecture tour. She hems and haws--she can't leave her husband, her daughter, her patients--but in the end she does go; in Chicago, she meets the writer Lewis Brogan, who becomes the great romance of her life.

What happens politcally? What happens romantically? Well, I can't tell you that, of course... 😉

The novel is structured in alternating chapters. It starts with third-person narration with Henri Perron as the focus character; the other chapters are in first person as written by Anne Dubreuilh. 

The novel is often called a roman à clef, though de Beauvoir didn't like that as a description. But if so, Henri Perron is Camus, Robert Dubreuilh is Sartre, Anne Dubreuilh is de Beauvoir herself, Scriassine is Arthur Koestler, and Lewis Brogan is Chicago novelist Nelson Algren, who is also the dedicatee of the book. But Dubreuilh is twenty years older than Sartre, Camus was much less sympathetic to Communism than Perron, de Beauvoir and Sartre didn't have a daughter. She does however say in her autobiography Force of Circumstance that Lewis 'is the one who approaches closest to a living model.' When Anne says to Lewis, "Why are all your best friends pickpockets, or drug addicts, or pimps?" that does feel very much like Algren.

Henri Perron says at one point: 

"If you spend the best days of your life trying to communicate with others, it's because others count..."

The novel came out in 1954 and won the Prix Goncourt for its year. I read it in the English translation by Leonard Friedman of 1957. 

It's a book off my Classics Club list:

and is my visit to Paris this July (hosted by Emma at Words and Peace):

 

 

 

Dream Song

 

Dream Song #14

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.

After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,

we ourselves flash and yearn.

and, moreover, my mother told me as a boy

(repeatingly) 'Ever to confess you're bored

means you have no

 

Inner Resources. I conclude now I have no

inner resources, because I am heavy bored.

Peoples bore me,

literature bores me, especially great literature,

Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes,

as bad as achilles, 

 

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.

And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag,

and somehow a dog,

has taken itself & its tail considerably away

into mountains or sea or sky, leaving 

behind: me, wag.

 

-John Berryman

 

I'm not especially bored at the moment, great literature does not bore me, but I do love this poem, which is pretty great literature. There's a new volume of Berryman, Only Sing, 152 Uncollected Dream Songs out recently, and I was reading a review of it, which brought me back to my favorite of the original dream songs.

 

John Berryman (1914-1972)  was an American poet. His volume 77 Dream Songs won the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Henry is his alter ego, or maybe better id, that shows up in the Dream Songs.

 

It was my Dad rather than my Mom who was likely to give me conventional advice of this sort, though there was never a line about Inner Resources that I recall. But: where's your vim, vigor, and vitality?