L'artiste moderne

An essay ("The modern artist") by this French poet.  You can read the original here.

My dear M****, when you did me the honor of asking for an analysis of Salon, you said: "Be brief, do not compile a catalogue.  Give me a general impression, something like a narrative of a spirited philosophical stroll through a gallery."  Well then, you will be served heartily, and not because your program agrees (and, as it were, it does agree) with the manner in which these deadly articles in Salon are actually conceived; or because this method may be easier than any other – brevity always takes more effort than prolixity; but because, very simply and most of all in the present case, no other program is possible. 

Certainly, my burden would have been greater still if I had been lost amidst a forest of originalities; if the modern French temperament, suddenly modified, purified, and rejuvenated, had yielded flowers so vigorous and of a scent so varied that they would have created irrepressible astonishment, provoked an abundance of praise and chatty admiration, and required the formation of new categories in the critical lexicon.  But thankfully (for me) none of this occurred.  No explosion; no unknown geniuses.  The thoughts suggested by the aspect of this Salon are of an order so simple, so old, so classic, that it would undoubtedly take but a few pages to develop them.  So do not be surprised that the banality of the painter engendered the commonplace in the writer.  Besides, you would lose nothing in such a belief, for could there be anything more charming (it pleases me to think that we share an opinion on this matter), more fertile, and of a nature more positively exciting than the commonplace?     

Before I begin, allow me to vent one regret that is, I believe, only seldom expressed.  We had been informed that we would be receiving guests, and not exactly unknown guests, as the Avenue Montaigne exhibition already made the Parisian public aware of some of these charming artists who had wallowed in anonymity for far too long.  For that reason I held a party to renew my acquaintance with Leslie, that rich, naïve, and noble humourist, one of the most accentuated expressions of the British mentality; with the two Hunts, the first an opinionated naturalist, and the second the ardent and witting creator of pre-Raphaelism; with Maclise, the audacious composer, as enthusiastic as he is sure of himself; with Millais, that meticulous poet; with J. Chalon, that mixture of Claude and Watteau, historian of beautiful afternoon events in the great Italian parks; with Grant, that natural heir to Reynolds; with Hook, who knows how to flood his Venetian Dreams with a magic light; with the strange Paton, whose mind veers towards Fuseli and then wanders with the patience of another epoch, that of the graceful chaos of the pantheists; with Cattermole, the watercolor painter of history; with that other fellow, so surprising that the name escapes me now, that visionary architect who on paper can construct cities whose bridges have elephants as columns and let pass between their colossal limbs all the sails of the world, the gigantic three-masted ships!  Lodgings for these imaginary friends were even prepared and of a singular color for these favorites of the bizarre muse.  But, alas!  For reasons which I do not know and whose explanation, I think, cannot be articulated on the pages of your journal, my expectations were disappointed.  In this way, tragic ardors, gesticulations in the manner of Kean or Macready, intimate kindnesses of home, Oriental splendors reflected in the poetic mirror of the English mind, Scottish greenery, enchanting freshnesses, and fleeting depths of watercolors like that decor, however small, we will not be able to consider in this "philosophical stroll," at least not this time around.  Enthusiastic representatives of the imagination and of the soul's most precious faculties, were you then so poorly received the first time that you might judge us unworthy of understanding you?

In this way, my dear M***, will we be obliged to adhere to France.  And please believe that I would experience immense joy in assuming a lyrical tone to speak about the artists of my country.  But unfortunately in a critical mind exerted so rarely, patriotism only plays an absolutely tyrannical role, and we have to make some humiliating confessions.  The first time I set foot in Salon, I made, on the stairs themselves, the acquaintance of one of our most respected and subtle critics, and to my first question, to that most natural question which I simply had to ask, he responded: "Flat, mediocre; I have rarely seen Salon as bleak."  He was at once both wrong and right.  An exhibition which possesses a number of works by Delacroix, by Penguilly, and by Fromentin cannot be bleak.  But generally speaking I see that his assertion was correct.   That mediocrity has dominated every age is indubitable; but that it reigns now more than ever, that it has become absolutely triumphant and cumbersome, this is as true as it is distressing. 

After my eyes had wafted for some time over these platitudes put to good use, all this silliness painstakingly polished, all these stupidities or falsehoods so expertly constructed, I of course was led in the course of my reflections to consider the artist in the past and to place him beside the artist of the present.  And then the terrible, eternal question arose, as it inevitably did at the end of these discouraging reflections.  It seemed like pettiness, puerility, a lack of curiosity, the flat calm of fatuousness have succeeded ardor, nobility, and turbulent ambition, both in the fine arts as well as in literature, and that nothing, for the moment, can furnish us with any hope of the spiritual blossomings as abundant as those of the Restoration.  And I am not the only one oppressed by these bitter reflections, believe me, and I will prove it to you at once.  So I used to say to myself: back then, what was the artist (Lebrun or David, for example)?  Lebrun was erudition, imagination, a knowledge of the past, a love for the great and the magnificent.  David, that colossus injured by myrmidons, wasn't he also the love of the past, the love of the great and magnificent united with erudition?  And now, what is an artist, that old brother of the poet?        

To respond properly to this question, my dear M***, one should not be afraid of being too hard.  Scandalous favoritism sometimes provokes an equivalent reaction.  The artist today and for a number of years has been, despite his absence of merit, a simple enfant gâté, a spoiled child.  What amount of honors, what amount of money have been handed over to these men without souls or learning!  Surely I am not averse to the introduction into an art of means that are alien to it; nevertheless, to give one example, I cannot but feel sympathy for an artist like Chenavard, always pleasant, as pleasant as books, and graceful to the point of slowness.  At least with him (he may be the target of the plunderer's jokes, what do I care?) I am sure that he speaks of Vergil or of Plato.  Préault has a charming gift, an instinctive taste that throws itself upon the beautiful like a predator upon its natural prey.  Daumier is gifted with luminous good sense which colors all his conversation.  Despite the bewildering leaps of his discourse, Ricard lets us see at every moment that he knows a lot and has taken into consideration a wide number of different sources.  It is useless, I think, to speak of the conversation of Eugène Delacroix, which is an admirable mix of philosophical solidity, spiritual lightness, and burning enthusiasm.  In addition, I cannot recall anyone else who would be worthy of conversing with a philosopher or poet.  Besides, you would hardly find anything more than the enfant gâté.  I beseech and beg you, tell me in what salon, in what cabaret, in what earthly or intimate meeting you have ever heard a spiritual word uttered by an enfant gâté – a profound, brilliant, and concentrated word that might make us think or dream, a suggestive word, nothing more!  If such a word is uttered, it can only come from a politician or philosopher, or even from someone of unusual vocation – a hunter, a sailor, a taxidermist.  But from an artist, an enfant gâté, never.

The enfant gâté has inherited the privilege of his precursors, a legitimate privilege at that time.  The enthusiasm that welcomed David, Guérin, Girodet, Gros, Delacroix, and Bonington still illuminates his scrawny person in a charitable light.  And while good poets and vigorous historians labor to make a living, the imbecile sponsor pays magnificently for the indecent little stupidities of the enfant gâté.  Note that I would not complain if such good fortune befell deserving men.  I am not one of those who envy a singer or a dancer who has reached the zenith of her art, a fortune acquired by hard work and daily peril.  I fear I may fall into the vice of the late Girardin, of sophisticated memory, which would one day reproach Théophile Gautier for having his imagination cost more than the services of a sub-prefect.  This was, if you will remember, during those black days when the public was appalled at hearing you speak Latin: pecudesque locutae!  No, I am not unfair to such a degree.  And yet it is good to raise a hue and cry over modern stupidity, when in the same period in which a gorgeous painting by Delacroix would have difficulty finding a buyer at a thousand francs, Meissonier's imperceptible figures have gotten ten or twenty times that price.  But these lovely days are over: we have slipped even lower, and Mr. Meissonier, who despite all his merits, had the misfortune to introduce and popularize petit bourgeois taste, is a veritable giant compared to our contemporary bauble-makers. 

Discredit of the imagination, contempt of the great and magnificent, love – no, this word is too beautiful – exclusive practice of a profession: when it comes to an artist, I believe that these are the principal reasons of his debasement.  The more imagination he possesses, the better then must he master his profession so as to accompany his imagination on its adventures and surmount the difficulties which it so avidly seeks.  And the better he masters his profession, the less will he boast of it and showcase it, so that his imagination will shine in all its brilliance.  This is what wisdom says.  And wisdom also says that he who only possesses ability is a beast; and the imagination which he wishes to forsake means he is a madman.  Yet however simple things may be, they are above or beneath the modern artist.  A concierge's daughter says to herself: "I will go to the Conservatory, I will appear in the Comédie-Française, and I will recite the verse of Corneille until I obtain the rights of those who have recited such verse for a very long time."  And she proceeds to do exactly what she said she would.  She is very classically monotone and very classically annoying and ignorant; but she has succeeded in that which was very easy, that is, to obtain by patience the privileges of the member. 

And the enfant gâté, the modern painter, says to himself: "What is imagination?  A danger and a burden.  What is the reading and contemplation of the past?  Time lost.  I will be classic, not like Bertin (since the classic changes place and name), but like ... Troyon, for example."  And he proceeds to do exactly what he said he would.  He paints, he paints, and he clogs his soul, and he paints some more, until at length he resembles the artist of the moment, and by his stupidity and ability he gains approval and the money of the public.  The imitator of the imitator finds his imitators and each of them in this way pursues his dream of grandeur, clogging his soul ever the more tightly, and most of all, not reading anything, not even The Perfect Cook, which nevertheless could have opened up to him a less lucrative but more glorious career.  Once he masters the art of sauces, icing, glazing, smearing, juices, and stews (I am talking painting), the enfant gâté assumes proud attitudes and repeats to himself with more conviction than ever that all the rest is useless.

There was a German farmer who came to find a painter and told him: "Mr. Painter, I want you to paint my portrait.  You will picture me seated at the main entrance to my farm, in the large armchair bequeathed by my father.  At my side you will paint my wife with her bedpost; behind us, coming and going, my daughters who are preparing our family supper.  On the large street which runs to the left, some of my sons coming back from the fields after having rounded up the cows into the stable; others, with my grandchildren, are bringing back the carts full of hay.  While I am contemplating these sights, do not forget, I beg you, the smoke puffs from my pipe that emerge shaded by the setting sun.  I also want the sounds of the Angelus ringing in the neighboring church bells to be heard.  It is there that we all got married, parents and children.  It is important that you paint the air of satisfaction which I am enjoying at this moment of the day as I contemplate at once my family and my riches augmented by a hard day's work!"     

Long live this farmer!  Without suspecting it he has understood painting.  The love of his profession has elevated his imagination.  Which one of our fashionable artists would be worthy of carrying out this portrait, and whose imagination could attain this level?

El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (part 2)

The conclusion to a work ("The garden of forking paths") by this Argentine.  You can read the original here.

"The humid path zigzagged like those of my childhood.  We arrived at a library of Eastern and Western books.  I recognized, encased in yellow silk, several handwritten volumes of the Lost Encyclopedia, a project directed by the Third Emperor of the Tang Dynasty and never prepared for printing.  The disc on the gramophone spun adjacent a bronze phoenix.  I also remember a vase of the rose family and another, centuries older, of that particular shade of blue that our buildings copied from the potters of Persia ...

"Stephen Albert was observing me and smiling.  He was (as I already mentioned) very tall, with fine features, grey eyes and a grey beard.  He had something of the priest in him, but also of the sailor; later he clarified that he had been a missionary in Tientsin 'before aspiring to become a sinologist.'

"We sat down: I on a long, low sofa, he with his back to the window and to an old circular clock.  I calculated that my stalker Richard Madden would not arrive for an hour.  For one more hour, then, my irrevocable destiny could wait.

"'An amazing destiny, Ts'ui Pên's,' said Stephen Albert.  'Governor of his native province, learned in astronomy, astrology, and in the indefatigable interpretation of the canonical books, chess player, famous poet and calligrapher: all of this he abandoned so as to compose a book and design a labyrinth.  He renounced the pleasures of oppression, of justice, of his enormous bed, of his banquets, and even of erudition and ensconced himself for thirteen years in the Pavilion of Pure Solitude.  At his death his heirs found nothing but chaotic manuscripts.  His family, as you may happen to know, wanted to commit them to the flames; but his executor – a Taoist or Buddhist monk – insisted on their publication.'

"'Those of the bloodline of Ts'ui Pên," I replied, 'continued to curse this monk.  The publication was foolish.  The book is an indecisive heirloom of contradictory sketches.  I took a look at it once: in the third chapter the hero dies, and in the fourth he is alive.  As far as Ts'ui Pên's other project, his Labyrinth ...'

"'And here is the Labyrinth,'" he said, indicating to me an old lacquered desk.  

"'A labyrinth of marble!' I exclaimed.  'A miniature labyrinth ...'

"'A labyrinth of symbols,' he corrected me.  'An invisible labyrinth of time.  It is incumbent upon me, the English barbarian, to reveal this diaphanous mystery.  After more than one hundred years the details are irretrievable, but it is not difficult to speculate as to what happened.  Ts'ui Pên once said: I am withdrawing from the world to write a book.  And on another occasion: I am withdrawing from the world to construct a labyrinth.  Everyone thought he meant two distinct works; no one considered that book and labyrinth were the same object.  The Pavilion of Pure Solitude functioned as the center perhaps of such an intricate garden; and yet the fact would have suggested to the human mind a physical labyrinth.  Ts'ui Pên died; no one in the expansive lands that were his came across the labyrinth; the confusion of the novel suggested that this was the labyrinth.  Two circumstances told me the correct solution to the problem.  The first: the curious legend that Ts'ui Pên had proposed a labyrinth that was, strictly speaking, infinite.  The second: a fragment of a letter that I discovered.'

"Albert got up.  For a few moments he turned his back to me; he opened a drawer within the blackish-golden desk.  He returned with a paper that had once been crimson; now it was pink and faint and quadrangular.  It was indeed the renowned calligraphy of Ts'ui Pên.  With incomprehension and fervor I read the words which a man of my bloodline had edited with a tiny brush: I leave to certain futures (but not to all) my garden of forking paths.  I returned the paper in silence.  Albert went on:

"'Before exhuming this letter, I had asked myself how a book could be infinite.  The only procedure I could devise was a cyclical, circular volume.  A volume whose last page was identical to its first with the possibly of continuing indefinitely.  That night I also remembered that it was at the center of The Thousand and One Nights when the queen Scheherazade (in a magical moment of distraction on the part of the scribe) began to refer to the history of The Thousand and One Nights, with the risk of arriving anew at the night to which she was referring and so continuing into infinity.  I also imagined a hereditary Platonic work, transmitted from father to son, in which every new character added a chapter or corrected with pious care the pages of the older characters.  Such conjecture distracted me; and yet none of them seemed to correspond, not even remotely, to the contradictory chapters of Ts'ui Pên.  Still in this state of perplexity, I at Oxford was sent the manuscript which you have examined. 

"'I halted, quite naturally, at the phrase: I leave to certain futures (but not to all) my garden of forking paths.  Then I suddenly almost grasped it all: the garden of forking paths was the chaotic novel; the phrase certain futures (but not to all) suggested to me the image of the bifurcation in time, not in space.  A general rereading of the novel confirmed this theory.  In all the works of fiction, every time a man is confronted with various alternatives he opts for one and eliminates the others; in the work of the almost inextricable Ts'ui Pên, he simultaneously chooses all of them.  In this way, he creates various futures, various times, which likewise proliferate and fork.  Hence the contradictions of the novel.  Fang, let us say, has a secret.  A stranger knocks on his door; Fang resolves to kill him.  Naturally there are various possible dénouements: Fang could kill the intruder; the intruder could kill Fang; both could be saved; or both could die, etc.  In the work of Ts'ui Pên, all the dénouements occur: each one of them is a starting point for other bifurcations.  At some point, the paths of the labyrinth converge.  For example, you arrive at this house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy; in another you are my friend.  Should you resign yourself to this hopeless declaration, we will read a few pages.'

"In the vivid circle of the lamp his face was undoubtedly that of an old man, but with something unbreakable and even immortal.  I read with slow precision two versions of the same epic chapter.  In the first version an army marches towards battle across a deserted mountain; the horror of the rocks and the shadow make them depreciate the value of life and they gain victory with great ease.  In the second, the same army crosses a palace where a celebration is taking place; the resplendent battle seems to them to be a continuation of this celebration and they gain victory.  I listened with decent veneration to these fictions, maybe less admirable than the fact that it was my blood who had devised them and that a man from a remote empire had restored them to me in the course of a desperate adventure on a Western isle.  I remember the final words, repeated in each version like a secret commandment: Thus fought the heroes; calm was their admirable heart, violent their sword, resigned as they were to kill and be killed.     

"From that point on I felt in my immediate surroundings and in my dark body an invisible, intangible swarming.  Not the swarming of the divergent, parallel and ultimately coalescing armies, but a more inaccessible and more intimate agitation which they in some way prefigured.  Stephen Albert went on:

"'I don't think that your illustrious ancestor played with the versions idly.  I cannot deem it plausible that he would sacrifice thirteen years of his life to the infinite execution of a rhetorical experiment.  The novel is a secondary genre in his country; and in his time it was a despicable genre.  As a novelist Ts'ui Pên was brilliant, but he was also a man of letters who undoubtedly did not consider himself only a novelist.  The testimony of his contemporaries proclaims – and his life confirms this all the more – his metaphysical and mystical interests.  The philosophical controversy usurps a great part of his novel.  I know that of all problems, nothing disquieted and plagued him as much as the abysmal problem of time.  Now then, this is the only problem that does not figure in the pages of The Garden.  He does not even use the word that means time.  How do you explain this voluntary omission?'  

"I proposed various solutions – all of them insufficient.  We discussed them; when we finished, Stephen Albert said:

"'In a riddle whose theme is chess, what is the only forbidden word?' 

"I thought for a moment and responded:

""The word chess.'

"'Precisely,' said Albert. 'The garden of forking paths is a enormous riddle, or parable, whose theme is time.  For this recondite reason the riddle is prohibited from mentioning its name.  Always omitting a word, resorting to inept metaphors and obvious periphrases, is perhaps the most emphatic means of indicating its existence.  This was the tortuous method that he, the oblique Ts'ui Pên, preferred in every one of the meanders of his indefatigable novel.  I have gone through hundreds of manuscripts; I have corrected the errors introduced by the scribes' negligence; I have devised a plan for this chaos; I have reestablished – that is, I believe I have reestablished – the original order; and I have translated the entire work.  I can aver that the word time is not used at any juncture whatsoever.  The explanation is obvious: The garden of forking paths is an incomplete, but not false image of the universe as conceived by Ts'ui Pên.  In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in uniform, absolute time.  He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing and vertiginous network of different, convergent and parallel times.  The scheme of these approaching, nearing, forking, or intersecting times covers all the possibilities.  We do not exist in the majority of these times.  In some of them you exist but I do not; in others I exist, but you do not; in yet others, we both exist.  In this time, granted to me by favorable chance, you have come to my house; in another, you, while crossing the garden, have found me dead; in yet another, I say these same words, but they constitute an error, a ghost.'

"'And in all these times,' I articulated not without trembling, 'I appreciate and worship your recreation of the garden of Ts'ui Pên.'

"'Not in all of them,' he murmured with a smile.  'Time forks perpetually towards innumerable futures.  In one of those, I am the enemy.'

"Again I felt that swarming I mentioned before.   The humid garden that surrounded the house seemed infinitely saturated with invisible persons.  These persons were Albert and I, secret, busy and multiform in other dimensions of time.  I lifted my eyes and the faint nightmare dissipated.  In the yellow and black garden there was only one man, but this man was as strong as a statue.  And this man advanced towards the path and was Captain Richard Madden.

"'The future already exists,' I responded.  'But I am your friend.  May I see the letter once more?'

"Albert got up.  Tall, he opened the drawer of the tall desk; for a moment he turned his back to me.  I had the revolver ready.  I shot with the utmost caution: Albert collapsed without a groan, immediately.  I swear that his death was instantaneous, a fulmination.

"The rest is unreal and insignificant.  Madden burst in and arrested me.  I was condemned to hang.  Abominably I won: I communicated to Berlin the secret name of the city which ought to be attacked.  Yesterday it was bombed; this I read in the same newspapers which put forth the enigma regarding the famed sinologist Stephen Albert's assassination by a stranger, Yu Tsun.  The Boss deciphered this enigma.   He knows that my problem was that I indicated (through the din of war) the city called Albert and that I found no other means but to kill a person of this name.  He does not know (no one could know) my boundless contrition and fatigue."

The conclusion to a work ("The garden of forking paths") by this Argentine.  You can read the original here.

"The humid path zigzagged like those of my childhood.  We arrived at a library of Eastern and Western books.  I recognized, encased in yellow silk, several handwritten volumes of the Lost Encyclopedia, a project directed by the Third Emperor of the Luminous Dynasty and never prepared for printing.  The disc on the gramophone spun adjacent a bronze phoenix.  I also remember a vase of the rose family and another, centuries older, of that particular shade of blue that our buildings copied from the potters of Persia ...

"Stephen Albert was observing me and smiling.  He was (as I already mentioned) very tall, with fine features, grey eyes and a grey beard.  He had something of the priest in him, but also of the sailor; later he clarified that he had been a missionary in Tientsin 'before aspiring to becoming a sinologist.'

"We sat down: I on a long, low sofa, he with his back to the window and to an old circular clock.  I calculated that my stalker Richard Madden would not arrive for an hour.  My irrevocable destiny could wait for an hour.

"'An amazing destiny, Ts'ui Pên's,' said Stephen Albert.  'Governor of his native province, learned in astronomy, astrology, and in the indefatigable interpretation of the canonical books, chess player, famous poet and caligrapher: all of this he abandoned so as to compose a book and design a labyrinth.  He renounced the pleasures of oppression, of justice, of his enormous bed, of his banquets, and even of erudition and ensconced himself for thirteen years in the Pavilion of Pure Solitude.  At his death his heirs found nothing but chaotic manuscripts.  His family, as you may happen to know, wanted to commit them to the flames; but his executor  -- a Taoist or Buddhist monk -- insisted on their publication.' 

"'Those of the bloodline of Ts'ui Pên," I replied, 'continued to curse this monk.  The publication was foolish.  The book is an indecisive heirloom of contradictory sketches.  I took a look at it once: in the third chapter the hero dies, and in the fourth he is alive.  As far as Ts'ui Pên's other project, his Labyrinth ...'

"'And here is the Labyrinth,'" he said, indicating to me an old lacquered desk.  

"'A labyrinth of marble!' I exclaimed.  'A miniature labyrinth ...'

"'A labyrinth of symbols,' he corrected me.  'An invisible labyrinth of time.  It is incumbent upon me, the English barbarian, to reveal this diaphanous mystery.  After more than one hundred years the details are irretrievable, but it is not difficult to speculate as to what happened.  Ts'ui Pên once said: I am withdrawing from the world to write a book.  And on another occasion: I am withdrawing from the world to construct a labyrinth.  Everyone thought he meant two distinct works; no one considered that book and labyrinth coincided in the same object.  The Pavilion of Pure Solitude functioned as the center of a garden so intricate

El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (part 1)

The first part of a work ("The garden of forking paths") by this Argentine.  You can read the original here.

On page 242 of Liddell Hart's History of the European War, one reads that an offensive of three British divisions (supported by one thousand four hundred artillery pieces) against the Serre-Montauban line had been planned for July twenty-fourth, 1916 and had to be postponed until the morning of the twenty-ninth.  Torrential downpours (Captain Liddell Hart notes) provoked this delay – nothing significant, certainly.  The following statement, dictated, reread and signed by Dr. Yu Tsun, former chair of English at the Hochschule of Tsingtao, throws an unforeseen light on the case.  Missing are the two initial pages:

"... And I put down the receiver.  Immediately thereafter I recognized the voice that had answered in German.  It was the voice of Captain Richard Madden.  Madden, in the apartment of Viktor Runeberg, wished to declare an end to our efforts and – but this seemed very secondary, or it ought to have seemed very secondary – to our lives as well.  He wanted to say that Runeberg had been arrested or assassinated.*  Before the sun set that day I would share the same fate.  Madden was implacable.   More specifically, he was obliged to be implacable.  An Irishman at the command of England, a man accused of halfheartedness and perhaps of treason – how could he not come to embrace and appreciate this miraculous favor:  the discovery, capture and maybe even the murder of two agents of the German Empire? 

"I went up to my room.  Absurdly, I locked the door; then I threw myself on my back onto the small iron bed.  In the window lingered, as always, the roof tiles and the hazy six-o'clock sun.  It seemed incredible that this day, without any premonitions or symbols, would become the day of my implacable death.  Despite my deceased father, despite having been a boy in the symmetrical garden of Hai Feng, I, now, was about to die?  Then I considered that all the things that occur to one person precisely, precisely now.  Centuries of centuries have passed and yet only in the present do things occur; innumerable men in sky, sea, and land, and everything that really happens happens to me ... The almost intolerable memory of Madden's equine features abolished all these digressions.  In the midst of my hate and my terror (now speaking about terror is of no consequence; now that I have mocked Richard Madden; now that my throat inhales the rope) I thought that this tumultuous and undoubtedly happy warrior did not suspect that I possessed the Secret: the name of the precise location of the new reserve arsenal of British artillery above the Ancre river.  A bird scratched the gray sky and I blindly translated it into an airplane and this airplane into many airplanes (in the French sky) annihilating the reserve arsenal with vertical bombs.  If my mouth, before it was destroyed by a bullet, could have screamed the name in such a way that it would be heard in Germany ... My human voice was very weak.  How could I get it within earshot of the boss?  Within earshot of that sick and odious man who did not know about Runeberg or about me save that we were in Staffordshire, waiting in vain for our news from his arid office in Berlin, endlessly examining the newspapers ...

"I said aloud: 'I have to escape.'  I sat up noiselessly in a useless perfection of silence, as if Madden were already there lying in wait for me.  Something – perhaps the mere ostentation of testing that my memories were naught – made me check my pockets.  I found what I knew I was going to find: the American watch, the nickel chain and the square coin, the key ring with the useless, compromising keys to Runeberg's apartment, the booklet, a map that I resolved to destroy immediately (and which I did not destroy), the fake passport, a crown, two shillings and a few pennies, the red-blue pencil, the handkerchief, the revolver with one bullet.  Absurdly, I brandished this last item and weighed it in my hand to give myself some courage.  I vaguely believed that a pistol shot could be heard from very far off.  In ten minutes my plan was fully ready.  The phonebook gave me the name of the only person capable of conveying the news.  He lived in a suburb of Fenton, at least a half-hour away by train.

"I am a cowardly man.  Now I say it, now that I have carried out a plan that no one would categorize as risky.  I know that his execution was horrible.  But I did not do it for Germany.  A barbaric country which has forced upon me the abasement of being a spy cannot matter.  Moreover, I know of a man from England – a modest man – who for me is no meaner than Goethe.  For more than an hour I did not speak to him, but for that hour he was Goethe ... I did it because I felt the boss had a bit of those of my race – of the innumerable antecedents which flow in unison into me.  I wanted to see whether a yellow man could save his armies.  Moreover, I wanted to escape from the captain.  His hands and his voice could pound at my door at any moment.  I dressed noiselessly, bid farewell to the mirror, went downstairs, looked closely at the tranquil street and went out.  The station was not far from the house, but I thought it preferable to take a car.  I deduced that in this way I would incur less danger of being recognized; the fact is that in the deserted street I felt visible and vulnerable, infinitely so.  I remember that I told the driver to stop a bit before the main entrance.  I got out with willful and almost laborious slowness; I was going to the town of Ashgrove but I took a route to the more distant station.  The train was leaving in a few minutes, at eight-fifty.  I hurried; the next one would leave at nine-thirty.  There was practically no one on the platform.  I went past the train cars: I remember some manual workers, a woman in mourning, a young man who was avidly reading the Annals of Tacitus, and a wounded, happy soldier.  The cars set off at the end.  A man I recognized was running in vain to the end of the platform.  It was Captain Richard Madden.  Annihilated, trembling, I cowered at the other end of the seat, far from the timid window pane.                                     

"From this annihilation I passed into almost abject happiness.  I said to myself that my duel was already determined and that I had won the first round by mocking, if for but forty minutes, if only for a pleasantry of fortune, the attack of my adversary.  I deduced that this minimal victory prefigured a complete one.  I deduced that it was not minimal at all, since without this precious difference in the trains' departure schedule I would be in jail or be dead.  I deduced (in no less sophisticated a manner) that my cowardly happiness proved that I was a man capable of crowning an adventure with success.  From this weakness I summoned forces that did not abandon me.  I foresee that man will resign himself every day to increasingly atrocious undertakings; soon there will be nothing but soldiers and bandits;  to them I give this piece of advice:  he who undertakes an atrocious deed ought to imagine it already completed, and ought to impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.  Thus I proceeded while my eyes of an already dead man registered the flow of that day which perhaps was the last, and then the diffusion of the night.  The train rolled along softly between ash trees.  It stopped almost in the middle of the field.  No one shouted the name of the station.  'Ashgrove?'  I asked some boys on the platform.  'Ashgrove,' they answered.  I got out.

"A light illumined the platform, but the boys' faces remained in the zone of shadows.  One of them asked me: 'Are you going to the house of Dr. Stephen Albert?'  Without awaiting a response, another said: 'The house is far from here, but you won't get lost if you take this road on the left and then turn left at each crossing.'  I tossed them a coin (my last one), went down a few stone steps, and started on the solitary road.  This descended, slowly.  Above the rough, plain earth crowded webs of branches, and a low, round moon seemed to be accompanying me.

"For a moment I thought that Richard Madden had in some way penetrated my desperate proposition.  Very soon I understood that this was impossible.  The advice to keep turning left reminded me that this was a procedure commonly used to discover the central clearing of certain labyrinths.  I understand something of labyrinths; not in vain I am the great-grandson of the same Ts'ui Pên who was once governor of Yunnan and who renounced his post temporarily so as to write a novel that would become even more popular than the Hung Lu Meng, as well as to build a labyrinth in which all men would get lost.  Three years he devoted to these heterogeneous travails but was slain by the hand of a foreigner; his novel was silly and no one found the labyrinth.  Below the English trees I pondered this lost labyrinth.  I imagined it inviolate and perfect in the secret summit of a mountain; I imagined it erased by paddies or underwater; I imagined it infinite, without those octagonal kiosks or turning paths, but with rivers, provinces, and kingdoms ... I thought about the labyrinth of labyrinths, about a sinuous, growing labyrinth which spanned the past and the future and which in some way involved the stars.  Absorbed by these illusory images I forgot my destiny as quarry.  For an indeterminate time I felt like the abstract perceiver of the world.  The lazy and alive field, the moon, the remains of the day, all of them acted within me; the decline likewise eliminated any possibility of fatigue.  The evening was intimate, infinite.  The road descended and forked between the confused meadows.  A sharp and almost syllabic music was approaching and then fading on the to-and-fro of the wind, blemished only by the leaves and the distance.  I thought that a man could be the enemy to other men, to other moments belonging to other men, but not to a country: not to fireflies, words, gardens, flowing waters, west winds.  In this way I arrived at an old rusted gate. 

"Between the bars I could make out a tree-lined avenue and some type of pavilion.  At once I understood two things, the first trivial, the second almost incredible: the music was coming from the pavilion, and the music was Chinese.  For that reason had I fully accepted it without actually paying it any attention.  I do not recall whether there was a bell or whether I called out slamming my fists.  The sizzling of the music continued.

"But from within the intimate chamber a lantern was nearing, a lantern that scratched and at times erased the trunks, a paper lantern in the shape of drums and the color of the moon.  It was being carried by a tall man.  I did not see his face because I was blinded by the light.  He opened the gate and spoke slowly in my language:

"'I see that the pious Hsi P'êng insists on correcting my solitude.  You doubtless would like to see the garden?'

"I recognized the name of one of our consuls and repeated, disconcerted:

"'The garden?'

"'The garden of forking paths.'

"Something agitated in my memory and I then spoke with incomprehensible assuredness:

"'The garden of my ancestor Ts'ui Pên.'

"'Your ancestor?  Your illustrious ancestor?  Come on in.'

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*An odious and outlandish hypothesis.  The Prussian spy Hans Rabener alias Viktor Runeberg assaulted the bearer of the arrest warrant, Captain Richard Madden, with an automatic pistol.  The latter in self-defense caused him injuries that would lead to his death (Editor's Note)

The Innocent

If you have ever lived in Germany, you will know three things: why its language offers endless riches to those who wish to adore it; why its politics, briefly the nadir of humanity, have resulted in the model state for the rest of Europe; and why it has produced the most magnificent music the world has ever known.  Perhaps these factors mean little; after all, Germany may have wine, women, and song, but it also has a reputation for precision and aloofness that frightens those who spurn discipline.  Since I spent many unforgettable years in the Federal Republic, I have always understood that old Latin phrase about home being that place in which you feel completely yourself.  My nostalgia, for better or worse, extends well past my personal experiences and into the early postwar years when the German economy began to recover at a rate unprecedented in history (a period still known in German as "the Miracle").  Why I feel this way I cannot know; I have never loved a German; I have no blood relatives of Teutonic stock; I did not grow up imbued with any particular fondness for this controversial bastion of order and knowledge, and some readers will surely smirk if I mention something about a prior existence.  Whatever the case, I firmly believe that we do not choose what we love, it chooses us.  Which brings us to this novel about a delicate time.

Our year is 1955 and our protagonist is the meek Englishman Leonard Marnham.  Twenty-five and not well-traveled either in persons or places, Leonard hails from a plain family of bourgeois attitudes that cannot so easily be shed.  What separates him from heroes of other compressed Bildungsromans is the mere presence of what we may term humility and what may be better described as incredulity: at numerous moments in his narrative, Leonard simply cannot believe that the world is real and pummeling him with all its ambiguities.  As the story opens Leonard, at home a post office employee with some expertise in the development of telephones, is dispatched to postwar Berlin to collaborate on a project so preposterous it must stem from the annals of historical truth: an East-West tunnel, from an American military compound, with the intention of siphoning communist phone conversations.  I shall not offer to explain what kind of tunnel the erstwhile Allies, in conjunction with the West Germans, were attempting to build at that time, its range of effectiveness, or why anyone ever thought they would be able to maintain the digging and signal interception in secrecy (never mind that the Allies do not have the personnel to make this a time-sensitive method of espionage).  Suffice it to say that the whole endeavor seems like the first, or at least the first known to us because it is the first known to Leonard, of many overwrought stratagems that can only result in heightened tension and a minimal amount of ground gained on a battlefield spread over three or four continents. 

Despite his obvious sincerity, friendliness and warmth do not come easily to our hero, who ends up spending many mornings eating alone in the compound's cafeteria.  One of his cohorts is Bob Glass, a vulgar American intelligence officer who does not live up to his surname in either fragility or transparency.  He instead embodies that other vitreous meaning, a reflection, if an opposite one.  While Leonard is callow, prudish, and staunchly British in his perpetual embarrassment over the awkwardness of human interaction, the thirtysomething Glass is back-slappingly loud and vulgar (his smug coercion of Leonard suggests a porn director).  Glass will constantly appear to be looking over Leonard's shoulder, a jurisdiction that extends into his private life and the young man's affair with Maria Eckdorf.  We cannot be sure from where McEwan, a researcher nonpareil, culled this thirty-one-year-old divorcée with no real personality apart from being a vulnerable woman who wishes to escape her native country, either physically or just in her mind.  Nevertheless, The Innocent crests when these two are alone and trying to make their love eternal, most gloriously in chapter six, Leonard's first visit to Maria's flat:

She sat across from him and they warmed their hands around the big mugs.  He knew from experience that unless he made a formidable effort, a pattern was waiting to impose itself: a polite inquiry would elicit a polite response and no other question.  Have you lived here long?  Do you travel far to your work?  Is it your afternoon off?  The catechism would have begun.  Only silences would interrupt the relentless tread of question and answer.  They would be calling to each other over immense distances, from adjacent mountain peaks.  Finally he would be desperate for the relief of heading away with his own thoughts, after the awkward goodbyes.  Even now they had already retreated from the intensity of their greeting.  He had asked her about her tea making.  One more like that, and there would be nothing left to do .... It was an assumption, lodged deep beyond examination or even awareness, that the responsibility for the event was entirely his.  If he could not find the easy words to bring them closer, the defeat would be his alone.

There are in this scene dozens of magnificent observations about two people who could be together, if they could simply find a hook, a joke, a commonality amidst a world of differences.  Apart from three short consecutive sentences that overdo an ironical situation, this remains one of the finest chapters I have ever read in any book, and may count as McEwan's crowning achievement as a novelist.  Their relationship blossoms ("when they were out walking they compared themselves favorably with other young couples they saw ... it gave them pleasure to think how they resembled them, how they were all part of one benign, comforting process") then collides one regrettable evening with Leonard's misplaced notion of masculinity.  This leads him to question how he comports himself with his work colleagues, his snoopy British neighbor Blake, and even his beloved parents who he cannot quite believe no longer tend to him.  The way Leonard writes to them, without affect or detail, implies that he cannot embrace or open up to them because his own life is unembraceable and closed.  Why closed?  Perhaps owing to that most melancholy of situations, his embarrassment at the immaturity of his ways; after all, he is a recently deflowered twenty-five-year-old.  Unsure of how he is supposed to act, as exemplified by his horrible assault on Maria, he certainly cannot convey subtlety or meaning of existence to the preceding generation.  But as youth is wasted on the young, so is wisdom on the wise, and Leonard is far too plain in his thinking to imagine a world terribly unlike the one he is in right this very moment.  In other words, he can neither abjure his realm nor get enough of it. 

Much later the novel shunts onto a track at which I shall not hint, but it spoils nothing to mention that one dramatic possibility usually present in these types of tales – Maria as a double agent – is not cultivated.  Consequently the love story slips into a metaphor for the spy story, or vice versa, which is why loving a woman and a country are the two strongest and most treacherous emotions a non-parent can experience.  We understand why Leonard loves Maria and we realize that Maria needs someone like Leonard who is unbesmirched by war.  But we are never really convinced that Maria could love Leonard, a fear sadly shared by our hero.  At one point he laments another disconnect between the couple: 

She was beautiful, he knew that, but he could not feel it.  Her beauty did not affect him the way he wanted it to.  He wanted to be moved by her, and for her to remember how she felt about him. 

Why Leonard arrives at such hippish conclusions provides much more than an allegory of Germany itself, the conquered and divided land, subjugated to the winners' whims, yet not entirely west or east, because such parables, while appealing to readers of quick judgment, are ultimately unrewarding.  Leonard rushes to judge Glass and Maria, and yet waits patiently for the rest of mankind to be pleasant to him before he settles his opinions – a recipe for disappointment if there ever were one.  And for that and other reasons the fourth thing you will know is why a cobbler should never quit his last.      

Vallejo, "Verano"

A work ("Summer") by this poet.  You can read the original here.

I leave now, Summer, and will rue   
Your evenings' soft, submissive hands.            
Arriving old, arriving true,            
You will in my soul find no man.      

My terrace, Summer, you will see 
With amethyst and golden beads,           
Like some sad bishop, quiet, bare,                             
Who's come from far to bless and seek     
The broken rings of now-dead pairs.    

I leave now, Summer, but a rose,  
September's best, I leave to you; 
May you let holy water flow          
On days of sin and days of tomb.  

And if this crypt for tears should shake    
Its marble in its faith's sweet light,            
So shall your answer rise and plead      
That God make sure this light abate.   
By now it must be all too late;    
For in my soul no man you'll see.  

Cry not, O Summer, in this earth  
There dies a rose of much rebirth.                 

Verano, ya me voy. Y me dan pena
las manitas sumisas de tus tardes.
Llegas devotamente; llegas viejo;
y ya no encontrarás en mi alma a nadie.
Verano! y pasarás por mis balcones
con gran rosario de amatistas y oros,
como un obispo triste que llegara
de lejos a buscar y bendecir
los rotos aros de unos muertos novios.
Verano, ya me voy. Allá, en setiembre
tengo una rosa que te encargo mucho;
la regarás de agua bendita todos
los días de pecado y de sepulcro.
Si a fuerza de llorar el mausoleo,
con luz de fe su mármol aletea,
levanta en alto tu responso, y pide
a Dios que siga para siempre muerta.
Todo ha de ser ya tarde;
y tú no encontrarás en mi alma a nadie.
Ya no llores, Verano! En aquel surco
muere una rosa que renace mucho...