Verlaine, "Les faux beaux jours"

A work "These false sweet days" by this French poet.  You can read the original here.

These false sweet days, O my poor soul, now wane: 
The brassy vibes now bid us sleep the night.
So close your eyes, poor soul, in homeward flight;
The worst of all temptations: flee ill fame.  

Illumined days in hailstones long of flame,
All hillside grapes so crush'd in harvest's blight;
Amidst the valley sky, all blue and bright, 
The singing sky that cries for you by name.  

Wax pale and leave but slowly, with joined hands: 
What if past days devour'd tomorrow's plans? 
What if past madness were to come anew?  

Are we to purge again these memories borne?
Mad surge, far greater yet than all we knew! 
O, go pray now, go pray against the storm.

Gespräch mit dem Beter

A short story ("Conversation with a Worshipper") by this Czech writer.  You can read the original here.

There was a time when I would go to a church day after day because a girl with whom I had fallen in love would pray there on her knees every evening for half an hour, and during this time I could watch her in peace.

One time, as the girl had not come and I loitered there unwillingly gazing upon the worshippers, I noticed a young man who had prostrated his entire meager self upon the floor. Now and then he would seize his skull with all his bodily force and plummet it sobbing into the palms of his hands which lay spread out upon the stones.

In the church there were only a few old women who would often turn their kerchiefed heads to the side to look at the worshipper. Such attention seemed to make him happy, for before every one of his pious outbreaks he cast his eyes around to determine whether he had a large audience. I found this unbecoming and resolved to speak to him when he walked out of the church as to why he prayed in this manner. Yes, I was annoyed that my girl had not shown up.   

Yet it was an hour before he stood up, carefully crossed himself, and lurched over towards the basin. I placed myself in his path between the basin and the door and knew that I would not let him through without clearing up matters. As I always do while readying myself to speak with determination, I contorted my mouth. I placed my right leg out and leaned on it, while my left foot casually rested upon its toes; this attitude also strengthened my position.

Now it is possible that this man was already peering at me as he sprayed holy water upon his face; perhaps, in fact, he had already noticed me and become concerned because all of a sudden he ran out towards the door. The glass door banged hard. And as I then stepped out of this door right after him, I could not see him since before me stretched a number of small alleyways, all teeming with traffic.   

He did not come by the church for the next few days, but my girl did. She was wearing a black dress with transparent ends on the shoulders – the crescent of the blouse's edge lay beneath them – from whose lower edge the silk descended into a finely made collar. And when the girl arrived I forgot about the young man; nor did I pay him any attention when he started coming back regularly, praying as always according to his own peculiar custom. He would always pass by me in a great rush, his head always averted. Perhaps that was because I always thought of him as being in motion, and so even when he was standing, he seemed to be creeping.   

One time I was delayed in my quarters; nevertheless I still made it to the church. When I got there I did not find the girl and wanted to return home, but then I saw the young man lying there. I recalled our encounter and it made me curious.   

I glided over on my tiptoes towards the door, gave the blind beggar sitting there a coin and hid myself near him behind the open wing of the door. There I sat an entire hour, probably with a cunning look on my face. I felt well there and resolved to come more often. As my second hour began I decided it made little sense to remain beside the beggar. And yet, irate as I was, I nevertheless spent a third hour there, as spiders crawled all over my clothes and the last people, breathing noisily, exited the darkness of the church.   

Then he appeared. He was walking carefully, his feet airily touching the ground before stepping on it fully.

I stood up, took a broad step squarely in his direction and laid my hand upon his collar. "Good evening," I said, and pushed him down the steps onto the well-lit square.   

When we were down on the square he spoke to me in an utterly unfortified voice:

"Good evening, my dear, dear sir. Please do not take umbrage at me; I am, after all, your most humble servant."

"Yes," I said.  "I, sir, want to ask you a few things. The last time around you escaped me; today you will hardly be so lucky."

"I see that you are merciful, sir, and that you will let me go home. I am a pitiable creature, and that is the truth."

"No!" I screamed into the blare of the passing streetcar. "I will not. These are precisely the stories I like. I congratulate myself: you are quite a find." 

Then he said: "Oh God! You have a lively heart and a head made of cinder block. You call me a lucky find, how fortunate then you must be! For my misfortune is unsteady, an unsteady misfortune faltering atop a narrow peak. And if one were to touch it, it would fall upon its head. Good night, sir."

"Alright," I said and held on firmly to his right hand."If you do not answer me, I will start shouting right here in the middle of the street. And all the shop girls running out of the stores and all their lovers looking forward to seeing them will gather because they are going to think that a droshky horse fell over or something like that happened. Then I will show you to the people."

Crying, he kissed both my hands in turn.  "I will tell you what you want to know. But I beg you, we had better go into the side alley over there." I nodded and there we went.

But he was not satisfied with the darkness of the alleyway, lit as it was only by distantly spaced lanterns. So he took me into the first floor entrance of an old house beneath the light of a lamp sagging at the foot of a wooden staircase. With a gesture of importance he took out his handkerchief, spread the handkerchief on a step and said: "Please sit down, my dear sir, so that you may better ask your questions. I will remain standing so that I may better answer. But please do not torture me."

I sat down and spoke, looking at him through a squint: "You're a real loon, aren't you! How you behave yourself in the church! How annoying and unpleasant for onlookers! How can one be forced to look at you and remain devout!"

He had pressed his body against the wall; only his head was moving freely in the air. "Do not be annoyed. Why should you get annoyed over things that do not concern you? I get annoyed when I behave myself clumsily; when another behaves himself badly, however, I am pleased. So do not get annoyed when I say that the aim of my life is to be looked upon by others." 

"What are you saying?" I called out, a bit too loudly for the first floor, but I was afraid to have my voice sound weak. "Really, what did you say?  Yes, I suspect, that is to say, I already suspected, since I saw you that first time, in what condition you would be. I have experience and I'm not joking when I say that this is a seasickness on dry land. Its nature is such that you have forgotten the true names of things, and in your haste bestow upon them random names. Rush, rush, rush! But hardly have you escaped them than you've forgotten their names again. The poplar in the fields which you called the 'Tower of Babel' because you didn't know or didn't want to know that it was a poplar, sways namelessly again, and you would then have to call it 'Noah, when he was intoxicated.'"      

I was a bit dismayed when he said: "I'm happy that I did not understand what you said."

Excited, I said quickly: "The fact that you are happy about it means you understood."

"Of course, my dear sir, I showed I have; but you also spoke quite strangely."

I laid my hands on one of the upper steps, leaned back and asked in this almost unassailable stance, which is the last resort of the wrestler: "You have a funny way of saving yourself: you assume that others have your condition as well."

Here he became bolder. He placed his hands together to give his body a wholeness and said with mild reluctance: "No, I do not do that against everyone, for example not against you, because I cannot. But I would be glad if I could, because then I would not have any need for the attention of those churchgoers. Do you know why I need it?"   

This question led to my awkward silence. Surely, I did not know why; I also believed that I did not want to know. I hadn't even wanted to come here, I said to myself then, but the fellow had forced me to listen to him. So now I only needed to shake my head to show him that I didn't know.  And yet for the life of me I couldn't move my head. 

The man standing across from me smiled.  Then he crouched down on his knees and began to talk with a sleepy expression: "There was never a time in which I was convinced of the life I had.  As it were, I comprehend things in notions so decrepit that I always think these things had once lived but now they are sinking.  Always, dear sir, do I want to see things the way they might be instead of the way they appear.  So do they become beautiful and calm.  It must be so, because I often hear people speaking about them in such a manner."

Since I was silent and only revealed my discomfort through uncontrolled contortions in my face, he asked: "You don't believe that people talk that way?" 

I thought I must have nodded, but I couldn't.

"You really don't think so?  Now you had better listen: when I as a child opened my eyes after a short midday nap, I heard – even though I was still mired in sleep – my mother ask in her natural speaking voice from the balcony below: 'What are you doing, sweetheart?  It's so hot.'  A woman answered: 'I'm have a snack out here on the lawn.'  She said it without hesitating and not very clearly, as if it were to be expected by everybody."

I thought I was being asked, so I reached for the back pocket of my pants as if I were looking for something there.  But I wasn't looking for anything; I only wanted to change my appearance to indicate my participation in our talk.  So here I said that this event was rather remarkable and that I could not understand it at all.  I added that I did not believe it was true and that it must have been invented with a particular aim in mind – which for the moment I did not see.  Then I closed my eyes because they hurt.     

"Oh, it's good that you share my opinion, and it was rather nice on your part that you interrupted me to tell me that. 

"Now really, why should I be ashamed – or why should we be ashamed – that I walk arduously and not upright, that I do not tap my stick on the pavement and graze the clothes of noisy passers-by. Perhaps it would be more appropriate if I defiantly complained that I bound along the houses with my narrow shoulders like a shadow, sometimes even disappearing into the panes of the store windows.

"What kind of days are these that I spend! Why is everything so poorly constructed that sometimes tall buildings collapse without our ever finding an outward explanation? I climb over the piles of debris and ask everyone I meet: 'How could this happen! In our city – a new house – that is already the fifth one today – just think about it.' And no one can answer me.

"People often fall down in the middle of the street and lie there dead. Then all the shopkeepers open their doors draped with goods, come by swiftly and take the dead person into a house, come back out smiling with both their mouth and eyes, and say: 'Good day – It's overcast – I sell a lot of handkerchiefs – yes, yes, the war.' I go inside and after timidly waving my hands numerous times I finally knock on the caretaker's window. 'My good man,' I say amicably, 'a dead person was brought to you.  Please show him to me, I beg you.' And as he shakes his head as if he can't make up his mind, I say in a resolute tone: 'My good man, I am an undercover police officer. Show me the dead person immediately.' 'A dead person?' he then asks, almost offended. 'No, we have no dead person here. This is a respectable house.' I pay my regards and leave.

"And yet whenever I have to traverse a large square, I forget everything. The difficulty of such an endeavor confuses me and I often think to myself: 'If one built these huge squares in a fit of immense courage, why don't we also erect a stone railing that could lead one through the square? Today there is a wind from the southwest. The air in the square is agitated. The city hall spire seems to be tracing small circles. Why don't we bring peace and quiet to the throngs? All the window panes rattle and all the lantern poles droop like bamboo. The stormy air is tearing at the shroud of the Virgin Mary wrapped around the column. Does no one see this? The gentlemen and ladies who are supposed to walk on these stones float. When the wind catches its breath, they stand still, exchange a few words, and bow to one another in greeting, but the wind keeps pushing and they cannot resist the wind, and all of them simultaneously raise their steps to go. They literally need to hold on to their hats, and yet their eyes seem amused, as if this were only mild weather. Only I am afraid.'"

Mistreated as I was, I said:"The story that you told me earlier about your dear mother and the woman in the garden I do not find remarkable or odd. Not only because I have heard and experienced many such stories, but also because I have even taken part in many of them. This matter is quite self-evident. Do you mean to say that had I been on the balcony I wouldn't have been able to say the same thing or reply from the garden in the same manner? A very simple case."

As I said that, he seemed very content. He said that I was dressed very well and that he particularly liked my necktie. And what fine skin I had! And confessions will always be the most clear when they are remembered.

Those Who Walk Away

Peggy was very romantic – in a dangerous way. She thought marriage was another world – something like paradise or poetry – instead of a continuation of this world. But where we lived, it couldn't have been more like a paradise. The climate, the fruit on the trees right outside the door. We had servants, we had time, we had sunshine. It wasn't as if we were saddled with children right away and up to the elbows in dishwater.

This novel's title is ultimately explained in a casual aside from our third-person narrator who, we suspect, could have probably devised something saltier. It is only very late in our tale, when the narrator relinquishes her hard-won objectivity to excoriate one of her characters, that we realize the title's appropriateness. The accusation is cowardice, and the accused is a young, rich, intelligent, and decent-looking widower by the name of Rayburn "Ray" Garrett.

Ray has everything a young man could wish for materially, as well as something of infinitely greater importance: a taste and a love for art. He has little to say about literature (he quotes this poem in a fit of passion) or cinema, but this being the 1960s, there may not have been as much access to the plenitude of films now literally at our fingertips. No, Ray's love has always been and always will be painting. It is then a sad discovery, and one that occurs early on in our novel and Ray's fictional existence, that his taste and passion for painting do not extend into any creative talent. That is to say, while Ray Garrett may know a dazzling genius's landscapes and portraitures when he sees them, he cannot possibly mimic their accomplishments. So he is relegated, as are so many professors of English with vast and exquisite libraries, to collecting them. His family's fortune allows him an insouciant existence, one that takes a very unplanned turn when he meets Peggy Coleman. Peggy is even younger and richer than Ray; unlike Ray, however, she has not been afforded the bliss of an unbroken home. Her mother would die young and Peggy grew up with her foul-tempered and hack painter of a father, Edward, who will come to play a far more prominent role in Ray's life than either would ever care to imagine. Especially after almost a year of newlywed bliss, residence on Mallorca with "all the ingredients that were supposed to make a marriage go [–] time, money, a pretty place to live, [and] objectives," Peggy, not yet twenty-two years of age, decides that "the world is not enough," and that getting on in this world is not worth the trouble.

The rest of the novel could easily have comprised Ray's inner thoughts on why this all occurred, a diary, in other words, of his eternal guilt. For very laudable artistic reasons, Highsmith grants us only snippets, distant arias from a world Ray shall never know again. Instead of speculate desperation about someone who remained very much a stranger until her death, Ray digs into his own past, his own shortcomings, with the faint hope of excavating a golden key to his puzzle:

From his father, an oilwell worker in his youth, a self-made man, now a millionaire with an oil company of his own, Ray had inherited wide cheekbones. It was an American face, slightly on the handsome side, hopelessly marred by vagueness, discretion, the second thought, if not downright indecision, Ray thought. He disliked his appearance, and always saw himself leaning slightly forward as if to hear someone who was speaking softly, or as if incipiently bowing, kowtowing, about to retreat backwards. And he felt that because of his parents' money, he had had life too easy.

At first glance this passage may seem rashly composed (witness the echo of "thought" in the second sentence or the pleonastic "retreat backwards"), but this is in all likelihood intentional, the purling brook of worries and images that flow through every mind. A later comment will buttress the notion that Ray's greatest fear involves his own mediocrity, the newness of his family's affluence, and his inability to capitalize on what every artist dreams of having: namely the time and resources to realize his artistic potential. His compromise to himself was to marry a budding painter and establish a gallery of European painters in New York, both of which, of course, substitute a proximity to genius for a share in its creative acts. That Ray ends up in Venice with his former father-in-law, whom he rightly understands as someone of limited artistic ability who has long since forsaken any development in that field so as to cash in on faddish garbage, we must attribute to the conceits of fiction. How and why they will engage in one of the nastiest cat-and-mouse games undertaken by two otherwise well-adjusted citizens, however, we must leave to the curious reader.     

Critics have been predictably dismissive of Those Who Walk Away, perhaps because there are no compelling characters like Tom Ripley to loathe and envy. Yet in one respect, the novel remains one of Highsmith's defining works. You may consider Ripley's harpsichord lessons, leisurely readings in German, French, and Italian literature, and his beautiful French mansion and even more beautiful French wife all indications of high culture and great intelligence, and you may forget that all these niceties swathe a murderous psychopath. Ripley is a marvelously memorable literary creation, one that has been likened to Highsmith herself in her venomous disdain of her birthplace and its social Darwinism, but there is only so much to make of such a comparison. What really drove Highsmith we can only hope to uncover through the medium of her more introspective works, such as the terrible tragedy of Rayburn and Edward. It is in their tale that we find Americans of true artistic sensitivity living in Europe, understated but clear alcoholism, and a certain inability to express oneself fully that is the mark of self-imposed literary exile. The most eloquent words, some of which are quoted at the beginning of this review, are exchanged when the two Americans – one a failed painter, the other a sellout – are not impeded in their locutions by Italians or Edward's French girlfriend Inez. The city of Venice itself assumes the role of hero, an antagonist to both men, whose sins (Ray's being cowardice and, in a way, betrayal, Coleman's being wrath and its explosive consequences) will confound them in the end. So when Ray, who survives more than one brush with death, actually believes he may be dead and that the surrounding realm holds but phantasms and erstwhile joys, he is reminded that Venice's "dark canals were very real." And what could be realer to the weary than time's blackest shroud?

The Black Monk

You may have heard of something called genius and wondered why its application has broadened in recent years. Perhaps it is because science has forged ahead into blackest night and produced theories to explain why a billion stars still do not tell us precisely how we came to be on this earth. Perhaps it is also because so many nations have obtained their long-coveted self-determination and determined that their selves are no lesser entities than the selves that have existed for hundreds or thousands of years. Perhaps it is likewise because we have liberated people from the staid and dour mores that claimed, with some peremptoriness, that a woman should probably not dress like a prostitute for men to respect her. These are the same mores, mind you, that say we should work hard, share the wealth, think of others, and think of leaving our world better than how we found it, instead of simply looting it for all it could be worth. If the modern day's emphasis on sexual liberation – as if being obsessed with your sexuality could be deemed in any way liberating – non-conformity, and individual expression regardless of training, skill, or inborn aptitude seems to be not only missing the point, but obliterating it, we offer a lovely alternative. So for those of us who have forsaken sleep for life, for those of us who spend countless hours emboldened by art's eternal and indestructible magnificence, for those of us who believe that this earth is a game of shadows and that reality is but a cage, gilded or otherwise, we offer this classic story. 

The tale's first three words spell out a hero's name, a true hero's name because he will provide our narrative's epicenter from start to finish. If the story fails, it will be because Andrei Vasil'ich Kovrin has failed; were it, however, to succeed, a dubious proposition given the direction in which events career, all glory should be accorded to the same indefatigable scholar. I give nothing away by the admission that Kovrin's nerves, which betray him in the opening sentence of The Black Monk, will also betray him in its last. His remedy is an inward journey to countryside memories tucked away with the Pesotskii family, father and daughter, the former having been Kovrin's guardian through a childhood that seems in hindsight ever the more bountiful and warm, as all good childhoods do. Igor Pesotskii lost his wife to consumption, and he has always wished to give his daughter Tanya in marriage to his adopted son; the arrangement is made less unnatural by Peskotskii's primary concern: his lush and meticulously tended garden. There is nothing particularly despicable about horticulture, even if it does smack of the bourgeois hobbyist. One description of the estate boasts the indelible mark of long-proven truth:

The Pesotskii house was huge, with columns, leonine statues striped in plaster, and a tail-coated footman at the front door .... That said, next to the house itself, in the courtyard and the fruit garden ... it was merry and joyful even in bad weather. Such breathtaking roses, lilies, and camellias; such tulips of infinite colors, ranging from bright white to black as soot; Kovrin had never encountered anywhere else a wealth of flowers comparable to the Peskotskiis'. It was but early spring and the most genuine abundance of flowers still lay hidden in the hothouses, even if you could already see some of it along the pathways and here and there on the bushes. It was enough for anyone strolling around the garden to feel as if he were amidst a kingdom of gentle colors, especially during the early hours, when dew shimmered upon every petal.  

The same garden in which Kovrin, "as a child, sneezed from the smoke"; the same garden which "once made a magical, fairy-tale like impression upon [him]"; yet it is not the same garden because Kovrin is not the same Kovrin. Could it possibly be coincidence that Pesotskii is derived from pesok, "sand" – time itself, and average, nameless, indistinguishable mediocrity in a billion-year desert of the dead? Could it also just be fictional happenstance that Tanya, a woman not averse to bawling for hours on end, is presented two lines from this masterpiece that has its own Tanya? What can be said is that those melodrama set pieces have little in common with the rather fantastic eponymous anchorite. Admittedly, not all monks are anchorites, nor is the reverse necessarily true. Yet we suspect, given his antics, this one would really have to be.

Now about that monk. About a fifth through our story, Kovrin, who purportedly came back to his childhood home to soothe his nerves, has reassumed his manic, almost insomniac schedule ("In the countryside he maintained that unrestful and nerve-inducing lifestyle"). His days and nights are devoted to that sweetest of fruits, knowledge in its purest form of language, literature, and philosophy. Precisely at this moment, when reality and dream have begun to blur, he recalls a legend that is so ridiculous and un-legend-like as to persuade the reader of one of two possibilities. Firstly, that the "legend" he mentions is nothing more than a fictional strand unravelled from a rather gigantic ball of yarn in Kovrin's mind; secondly, that this same mind may be close to unravelling itself entirely. We will not say which interpretation Tanya, who has little to recommend her except typical bucolic frankness, chooses for Kovrin, who to no one's surprise will become her husband. But we do know what the monk, an omnipresent, water-skimming figure in a cowl, thinks of Kovrin, which may or may not be what Kovrin thinks of himself:

You are one of the few whom we may justly call God's chosen. You are in the service of eternal truth. Your thoughts, your intentions, your surprising knowledge, and all your life bear a divine, heavenly stamp, since they are devoted to the logical and the beautiful, that is, to that which is eternal.

Readers may find the words maudlin, but consider what you would anticipate hearing from what has been portrayed in descendant literature as a spectre on stilts. Our monk and Kovrin will convene on several occasions (precipitated by the very odd detail that the monk initiates each encounter by nearly running Kovrin over) and discuss what lurks in Kovrin's soul, which has its doubts like all intelligent people do from time to stressful time. And for Professor Kovrin it has been a most stressful time. The only question is whether the doubts he expresses are doubts in line with his own intellectual ambitions. 

The Black Monk remains one of Russian literature's greatest stories, which isn't to say it is necessarily one of its best. It is great because the story is about how greatness, or a delusion of greatness, is wrested away from one strange and intellectually curious man who may or may not be a scholar of genius (it also strikingly illustrates a famous quote on geniuses by this author). Chekhov's works invariably lend themselves to simple recapitulation because they are never abstract or impressionist: their brilliance lies in how blunt they allow themselves to become, what hatefulness or loveliness they permit the world to espy, a world, we should mention, that has come to expect literature to furnish it with vague images, inscrutable ideas, or mirages of remembrance upon which we are entitled to project our own visions. Kovrin makes a series of fateful decisions in the two years the story arc encompasses, but none more telling than the opening (raspechatat') of a sealed letter echoing the "divine, heavenly stamp" (pechat') that allegedly "distinguished him from ordinary people." Ordinary people who just want to plant a garden and watch it grow. 

Baudelaire, "Le parfum"

A poem ("Perfume") by this French master.  You can read the original here.

O reader have you ever breathed,                 
With drunkenness and greed's caress,         
The incense from a church recess,              
Or chronic musk in sachets sheathed?

O deepest magic charm's sweet thrall,                
In present or in past restored!     
As lovers place on their adored
Mnemonic petals of their fall.

From such elastic, heavy hair,          
Alive by alcove censer bright,           
A wild and savage scent emerged;

In vestments, muslin, velvet wear,  
Embalmed of purest youth's delight,   
A fur's perfume was once submerged.