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, his 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?

 

 

 

Layla Erbil's What Remains (#EuropeanReadingChallenge)

i've no idea why i'm telling you all this my dear readers

i can't know

i feel like i should know everything

before putting my other foot in the grave [208]

Laylâ Erbil's verse novel of 2011 was published by Deep Vellum last year in English translation. 

Lahzen is our narrator; she's an elderly woman of the secular, political left living in Istanbul. She's remembering the events of her life and of Istanbul, her home. She doesn't tell us her story in chronological order, but reflecting backwards on it. There are several recurring themes.

The first is her childhood. She grew up in Fener, also known as Phanar, the once Greek neighborhood on the Golden Horn, the European side of Istanbul. In her childhood, she had Greek, Jewish, Armenian friends. Rosa, the Jew, broke her pencil in half one day when Lahzen had forgotten hers; an act, she tells us, promising forty years of friendship. But in September of 1955, state-sponsored riots against homes and businesses drove out the non-Turks. Rosa's family goes to Israel. Lahzen remembers Greek songs, and songs in mixed Turkish and Greek. Her sister, her aunt go to Orthodox churches to perform magic with candles for good luck. The multicultural Istanbul of her youth is gone, and she misses it. A copy of Marilyn Monroe's skirt from the famous photo over the steam grate remains in a shop window in an arcade:

all that remained

was marilyn's pleated white skirt

in hristo usta's shop window

its white now blotched with purplish rot

the keys to the shop window

remained with hristo usta who fled to athens

do you think he'll come back

one day

you never know

they miss it here [210]

A second thread involves the deaths and disappearances during the years of the military dictatorship in Turkey. As she herself was a leftist, some are people she knew; some are just news items. Her second husband Sabit was in jail, but was eventually released. (There was an earlier husband who was good-looking and had a motorcycle, but oh, well, maybe not such great husband material.)

What it means to be a good person in such a world is a recurring thought for her; she often turns to Kierkegaard, and in particular Kierkegaard's retelling of the story of Abraham and Isaac (in Fear and Trembling):  

...yes we can defend søren as someone who was trying to make the best of the world's fear of raging hellfires in those times; in a sense his love was harmless. he said "how does one become a good christian, that's always been my priority." in his day and age that was what it meant to be a good person. [159] 

In the present her relationship with Sabit is difficult. While he was in jail, she had an affair with his best friend Zeyyat, and maybe she's still a bit in love with Zeyyat. Is Sabit holding that one time infidelity over her head? A bit.

What remains at the end of a life in such a place? History and stones.

The book is billed as a verse novel. I can't comment on the verse, and largely didn't feel it. Probably my limitations, but who knows? Traduttore, traditore. Though it feels like the three ranslators (Ersan, Spangler, Wyers) knew what they were doing. I know nothing about modern Turkish poetry. Mostly I read it as oddly punctuated and capitalized prose, but even as that I quite enjoyed it.

what could the content of the text

be

other than

the writer in her own way

struggling to capture the truth

knowing that it cannot be captured [27]

 I first came across the book here.

 

Dorothy Sayers' Whose Body

"He was so upset, poor little man. He'd found a dead body in his bath."

Mr. Thipps, "the little architect man who's doing the church roof", goes to take a bath in the morning, but there's a dead man in the tub, naked except for a pair of pince-nez. Nobody he knows, he swears. "Uncommonly awkward for him."

That same evening, Sir Reuben Levy disappears. He's a successful financier, with plenty of business enemies in the course of things, though he's considered a sweetheart by his family and domestic staff.

Are the two cases connected? Well...

Parker of Scotland Yard is assigned the Levy case, suspects they might be, and wonders if this unknown corpse is his man. But the dead man was not Sir Reuben Levy.

And Lord Peter Wimsey offers himself to help with the case of the dead man in the bath.

This is the first of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries and comes out in 1923, though we learn he's been involved in an earlier case. that of the Attenbury Emeralds. He took to crime-solving to help with his shell shock after World War I, and turns out to be good at it.

And are the two cases connected? Of course they are.

I've read a bunch of the Lord Peter Wimsey stories before, but not all of them and not this one, I think, all out of order. It is a series that benefits from reading in order, and I might go through the series. It certainly starts off well.

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Golden Age (1923). Piece of Furniture: Bathtub.  

Virginia Woolf's The Years

 

     "All talk would be nonsense, I suppose, if it were written down," she said, stirring her coffee.

     Maggie stopped the machine for a moment and smiled.

     "And even if it isn't," she said.

     "But it's the only way we have of knowing each other," Rose protested.

  

The Years was the last novel completed by Virginia Woolf during her life, and came out in 1937. It was the biggest financial success of her lifetime, though I have to imagine Mrs. Dalloway has sold more copies now. It's the story of the Pargiter family across three generations. Colonel Abel Pargiter, who served in India, and his wife Rose, are the parents of seven children; they form the core of the novel, though there are also cousins and family friends.

 

The novel is arranged in ten chapters, each labelled with a year. The longest are the first, 1880, and the last, 'The Present Day,' presumably 1936 or so, just before the novel appears. In 1880, we meet the seven children--Eleanor, Morris, Milly, Edward, Delia, Martin, and Rose. Mother Rose has been bedridden for years, and may finally be dying, and we see the children's (and husband's--who keeps a mistress) reaction to their mother's imminent death. Delia, the rebellious one, thinks it's time for her to go; others are more uncertain, but it's true Rose the mother doesn't have much of a life by then. At the end of the chapter, after a couple of dream-haunted days of collapses and rallies, she dies.

 

The other year chapters all take place on a single day, and are built around a meeting of family members. In 1891, it's the day of Parnell's death, the advocate for Irish Home Rule; Colonel Abel goes to visit his brother and sister-in-law for his niece Maggie's birthday. Abel, perfectly content in his imperialism, had no use for Parnell, but admires his sister-in-law's emotion at the death. In 1917 Maggie, now married to a Frenchman René (Renny), hosts Eleanor for dinner; German air raids on London occur that night. 1918 sees the day of the armistice; we follow Crosby, the Pargiter nurse and maid, now pensioned off, in the shortest chapter; she's annoyed by all the celebratory guns going off. In 'The Present Day', Delia and her husband Patrick, throw a party; all the surviving family members appear; there's a dance and dinner, and the party ends at dawn:

"The sun had risen, and the sky above the houses wore an air of extraordinary beauty, simplicity and peace."

So it's a family novel, but if so, it's quite different from what you might expect; it's impressionistic in its style, sketch-y, even, so long as you don't imagine that as a derogatory adjective. It's half the length of Buddenbrooks, for example, and avoids scenes that might have been expected: Charles, one of Maggie's children, dies in World War I, but we only learn that obliquely and long after the event.

 

Woolf conceived the novel after she'd given a lecture 'Professions for Women' in 1931:

"When your secretary invited me to come here, she told me that your Society is concerned with the employment of women and she suggested that I might tell you something about my own professional experiences. It is true I am a woman; it is true I am employed; but what professional experiences have I had? It is difficult to say." 

That set her to thinking and she initially imagined a novel-essay about the Pargiter family, a blend of essays about the status of women mixed with fictional episodes. That book was reconstructed after her death and is available, titled The Pargiters, but I haven't read it. In the end, though, the essays became her book Three Guineas and the fictional episodes became the novel The Years. That initial conception is still visible; in the first generation, there aren't many possibilities for women: Eleanor ends up looking after her widowed father, only becoming a great world traveler after his death; Kitty, a cousin, whom  Edward Pargiter loved and wanted to marry, marries instead a great lord and lives that lifestyle; Delia, in that first generation but somewhat younger, becomes a suffragette and is sent to prison for her agitation. It's only in the third generation that real professional possibilities open up for women: Peggy, Maggie's daughter, becomes a doctor, though it doesn't seem to make her very happy.

 

But a schematic essay-novel is not the novel Virginia Woolf has given us (though the idea of it definitely colors the criticism from what I've seen). Several of the male characters are also well-rounded, particularly Abel, the patriarch, and North, Peggy and Charles' brother, who also served in World War I, but then went to be a farmer in Africa.  Like any family novel of multiple generations, it's interested in the passing of time, and 1880 to 1935 are a time of great changes in England. In 1880, tea is being made with a spirit lamp and people travel in horse-drawn carriages; in 1936, the flash and circle symbol of the British Union of Fascists is graffitied on walls, and Eleanor discusses traveling by plane (though she doesn't).

 

It's also very good on family relations. As aunt and niece suggest in that opening quote, there's never perfect understanding or communication. During that final party, Edward, by then a professor, quotes Sophocles, but refuses to translate:

"It's no go, North thought. He can't say what he wants to say; he's afraid. They're all afraid; afraid of being laughed at; afraid of giving themselves away. He's afraid too, he thought, looking at the young man with a fine forehead and a weak chin, who was gesticulating too emphatically. We're all afraid of each other, he thought; afraid of what?"

And yet that's not the whole of the story either; again as that opening quote suggests, there is communication. North dances with a girl at the party, asks her for a date, she accepts. The next generation? Another way in which this would be unlike Buddenbrooks. This is a family with a decent amount of good will toward each other--not true of all families-- even if they don't always articulate it. The party is a success; it, and the novel, end with 'simplicity and peace.'

οὔτοι συνέχθειν, άλλα συνφιλεῖν ἔφυν

-Sophocles, Antigone, l.523 (Antigone speaking) 

And what was it Edward was unable to say in English? Elizabeth Wyckoff translates as, "I cannot share in hatred, but in love."

 

Nothing of Virginia Woolf's is exactly unknown or ignored. As I noted, you can easily enough find the novel The Pargiters she decided against giving us. But when I first was reading Virginia Woolf, thirty years ago or whatever, I read Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, Orlando, the Common Reader series, etc., but it didn't occur to me to read The Years. I don't know what bit of received opinion I picked up that I didn't need to read it, but it was wrong. 

 

This was my spin book for Classics Club Spin #44, and a very good spin it was!