Verlaine, "Adieu"

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

For this contempt, alas, I was not made;  
A longer path than my hate's chart. 
But why then was a shorn lamb for me laid,  
And why, o why, this outraged heart?   

'Twas mildly proud souls I was born to please, 
The gifted dreamers who shan't try; 
At times all smiles, at times on pious knees,  
Their glance e'er searching tender sky. 

On lives the goodness of sincere caress,
Despite all that which could appear;
With prudish fear of daily shames' distress,  
Through brutal money and rut's blear. 

On live forgiveness and sweet sacrifice! 
Oft wrong was I, beset with woe.
Your mother was my minion: tender, nice;
But she, at least, my cares would know.

For your loss peace she sought for me, not stress;
She's dead; her grave heard my soft plea.
But I doubt much that she'd approve or bless
This current life or find it sweet.  

I fear to think, so earthbound lonely we,  
That the poor child, your son and mine,
Won't greatly venerate your memory,  
O you who shun us both in mind. 

Such things I was not made to say, I whose
Epithalamium, once my pride,  
Exhaled in glory as my lips would choose,   
That morning song where your voice lied. 

'Twas noble souls whom I was born to please, 
Consolement for a world impure;
With songbird's golden crest and fire-red sleeve, 
I shed my Knight's blood on azure. 

I who must die a soft and modest death,
By eagle envied, and by swan;
Despite its harm to you, in final breath  
A spouse's glory shall be won! 

For Esmé - with Love and Squalor

We've all heard that adage about bad peaces and good wars, and on this matter historians will continue to dig in opposite directions – until, perhaps, they both meet in China.  Countless horrors are born from war, and lucky are those who convert those experiences into fortitude of mind or body; luckier still are those who pledge henceforth to quell all conflict forever.  But luckiest of all are those select few who funnel their experiences into artistic creation.  We could never imagine Böll not having been a soldier, or Solzhenitsyn not having been a prisoner of war as well as a prisoner of conscience.  And our imagination likewise cannot but dwell on the military past of the author of this magnificent tale.

Like war itself the story's beginning is a mere excuse for its middle, and its end is, shall we say, a great relief.  A former U.S. military officer, who shall abide no name other than Sergeant X, has received a wedding invite from a girl he knew six years ago in England.  Attendance at this event is unlikely for a number of reasons, most of all the distance and expense; but our sergeant takes advantage of this occasion to "jot down a few revealing notes on the bride."  We may expect something awkwardly prurient, the bitter send-off of a jilted lover, but nothing of the kind is portrayed.  It is April 1944 and Sergeant X is in Devon participating in a "rather specialized pre-Invasion training course"; later, the Sergeant will receive a letter dated the day after that 'special invasion.'  When the rains come, as they must in that part of England, the sergeant usually finds himself sitting "in a dry place and read[ing] a book, often just an axe length from a ping-pong table."  What we discern about the sergeant's personality is gradual, but disturbing, even if we know that he is writing well after the traumatic wartime events:

I remember standing at an end window of our Quonset hut for a very long time, looking out at the slanting, dreary rain, my trigger finger itching imperceptibly, if at all.  I could hear behind my back the uncomradely scratching of many fountain pens on many sheets of V-mail paper.  Abruptly, with nothing special in mind, I came away from the window and put on my raincoat, cashmere muffler, galoshes, woolen gloves, and overseas cap (the last of which, I'm still told, I wore at an angle all my own – slightly down over both ears).  Then, after synchronizing my wristwatch with the clock in the latrine, I walked down the long, wet cobblestone hill into town.  I ignored the flashes of lightning around me.  They either had your number or they didn't.

One wonders whether a military unit would be more effective or less effective if all its members shared such opinions – but we digress.  The narrative needs to furnish us with our title character, and we wince slightly when the sergeant's eyes are drawn to a very young girl in a church choir, "about thirteen, with straight ash-blond hair of earlobe length, an exquisite forehead and blasé eyes that, I thought, might very possibly have counted the house" – and with an introduction like that, we know we've found her.   

The sergeant proceeds from that church into a café – pardon me, we're at war, so a café has been replaced by a "civilian tearoom" – and does what soldiers tend to do on such occasions, loiter and marvel at being part of normal life.  Well, perhaps "normal" is too strong a word.  Soon Esmé, her little brother Charles, and their governess Miss Megley appear and make a "good" table selection, "as it was just eight or ten feet directly in front of" our American serviceman.  Conversation is inevitable, but what could a thirteen-year-old girl say to capture the attention of a man roughly twice her age?  Thankfully, the excitement the sergeant displays at Esmé's choice of seats is never repeated, and no agenda of any kind is furthered.  Rather, it is she, the newly minted teenager, who mixes fine English expressions that have no meaning to children, a smattering of French, and more than the occasional malapropism to convey to our sergeant that she appreciates an American presence just as the war seems to be on its last act.  And what about Esmé and Charles's family?

'He misses our father very much.  He was s-l-a-i-n in North Africa.'  I expressed regret to hear it.  Esmé nodded. 'Father adored him.'  She bit reflectively at the cuticle of her thumb.  'He looks like very much like my mother – Charles, I mean.  I look exactly like my father.'  She went on biting at her cuticle.  'My mother was quite a passionate woman.  She was an extrovert.  Father was an introvert.  They were quite well mated, though, in a superficial way.  To be quite candid, Father really needed more of an intellectual companion than Mother was.  He was an extremely gifted genius.'

From this remarkable passage an entire blueprint of Esmé's familial relations may be extrapolated: that her parents favored Charles; that Esmé favored her father; and that her mother favored men who were not her husband.  Without fear of perjury one may also conclude from this and other snippets that Esmé believes herself to be a remarkable person (she even refuses to give the sergeant her surname because, she tells him, "I have a title and you may just be impressed by titles.  Americans are, you know"); and although she stands out among her coevals in the choir owing to her physical gifts, it is clear that the most remarkable thing about her is to what degree she deems herself remarkable.            

The story's author died last year, one of the great losses of American letters as his reclusive nature and spiritual searches seem to have conspired against his artistic ambition.  That Salinger continued to write extensively, to borrow a Russian dissident expression, "for the drawer," that is to say, with neither hope nor intention of ever having the works published, and that there may be around a dozen unseen novels pending must remain, at this time, rumors of the utmost interest.  What can be substantiated, however, is that Salinger was an artist of the top rank.  He seems to modern ears overly concerned with and knowledgeable about youth – not surprisingly, since he effectively ended his career in his forties.  But his genius is obvious in the details: "The two sat quiet for a moment, hating Bulling"; "Clay left his feet where they were for a few don't-tell-me-where-to-put-my-feet seconds, then swung them around to the floor and sat up"; "He thought he felt his mind dislodge itself and teeter, like insecure luggage on an overhead rack"; and "She wrote to him fairly regularly, from a paradise of triple exclamations and inaccurate observations" – one of the most sensational sentences in the English language.  I must admit that another mention of "house-counting eyes" was a unforgettably beautiful reference when I thought it was an epithet for the children's governess, but this is a minor regret.  Observers far more politically-minded than I will assume that little Esmé and her rather unpleasant sibling represent those who are born into privilege and think themselves above the world's petty conflicts; indeed, those conflicts are definitely for others to handle.  And we haven't even gotten to the squalor.

http://www.artilim.com/painting/m/modigliani-amedeo/the-zouave.jpg

Las vísperas de Fausto

A short tale ("The vespers of Faustus") by this Argentine.  You can read the original here.

That June night in 1540 in the tower chamber, Doctor Faustus ran his eyes over the shelves of his expansive library.  They stopped here and there; he took out a book, leafed through it nervously, then left it back where it had been; at length, he selected Xenophon's Memorabilia.  He placed the book in his lectern and began to read.  He looked towards the window.  Something outside had trembled.  Faustus said in a low voice: "the wind blowing in the woods."  He got up and threw open the curtains.  He saw the night, which was enlarged by the trees.    

Beneath the table slept Señor.  The dog's innocent breathing, as tranquil and persuasive as the dawn, confirmed the reality of the world.  Faustus thought about hell.

Twenty-four years before, in exchange for invincible magical power, he had sold his soul to the Devil.  The years had passed quite rapidly.  That time was set to expire at midnight.  It wasn't yet eleven o'clock.

Faustus heard steps in the stairwell; then three knocks cascaded off his door.  He asked: "Who is it?"  "I," answered a voice that was unrevealed by the monosyllable, "I."  The doctor had recognized it nevertheless, but, somewhat irritated, he asked his question once more.  With a tone of amazement and reproach, his servant replied: "I, Wagner."  Faustus opened the door.  The servant entered with a tray, a cup of Rhine wine, and some slices of bread, and commented with smiling approbation that such an addict was his master to these refreshments.  While Wagner was observing, as he had many times before, that the place was very solitary, and that these brief chats helped him get through the night, Faustus thought of the complacent custom that sweetens and quickens life, took a few sips of wine, ate a few mouthfuls of bread, and, for a moment, believed himself to be safe.  His thinking was: "If I do not stray from Wagner and the dog, there is no danger."

He decided to confide his apprehensions to Wagner.  Then he reconsidered: "Who knows what his comments might be."  He was a superstitious person (he believed in magic), with that plebeian affection for the macabre, the truculent, and the sentimental.  Instinct allowed him to be alive; crassness made him atrocious.  Faustus determined that he ought not to expose himself to anything that might upset his spirits or his intelligence.

The clock stated it was half past eleven.  Faustus thought: "They will not be able to defend me.  Nothing will save me."  Then there was something like a change of tone in his thinking; he lifted his gaze and went on: "Better that I be alone when Mephistopheles arrives.  I will defend myself better without any witnesses."  Moreover, the incident could cause an overly terrifying impression upon Wagner's mind (and perhaps also upon the defenseless irrationality of the dog).

"It's late, Wagner.  Go to bed."

When the servant was about to call Señor, Faustus stopped him and, with much tenderness, woke up his dog.  Wagner collected on his tray the plate of bread and the cup and made for the door.  The dog looked at his master with eyes in which there seemed to blaze, like a dark and feeble flame, all the love, all the hope, and all the sadness of the world.  Faustus gestured towards Wagner, and the servant and dog left the room.  He closed the door and took a look at his surroundings.  He saw the room, the desk, the private tomes.  He said to himself that he was not so alone.  The clock stated it was quarter to twelve.  With some liveliness, Faustus approached the window and opened the curtains halfway.  On the path to Finsterwalde, far off, the light of a coach flickered.

"To flee in that coach!" murmured Faustus, and it seemed to him that he was struggling for hope.  To get away, here was the impossible.  There was no steed fast enough, no path long enough.  Therefore, as if instead of night, he were to meet day at this window, he conceived of a flight into the past; he would take refuge in the year 1440, or even further back; he would postpone by two hundred years that ineluctable midnight.  He imagined the past as a tenebrous unknown region.  "And yet," he wondered, "if I wasn't there before, how can I get there now?"  How could he introduce into the past a new fact?  He vaguely remembered a verse by Agathon, quoted by Aristotle: "Even Zeus himself cannot alter that which has already occurred."  If nothing could modify the past, this infinite plane which extended from the other side of his birth was for him unreachable.  There remained, however, one escape: he would be born again, again arrive at that terrible hour when he sold his soul to Mephistopheles, sell his soul once more, and when he finally arrived at that night, he would retreat one more time to the day of his birth.

He looked at the clock.  Little time remained until midnight.  Who knows since when, he said to himself, has his life been one of arrogance, of perdition, of apprehension; who knows since when has he been cheating Mephistopheles.  Cheating him?  Wasn't this interminable repetition of blind lives his hell?

Faustus suddenly felt very old and very tired.  Nevertheless, his last thought was of fidelity to life; he believed that his rest was slipping, like some hidden water, not into death, but into life.  With courageous indifference he put off until the last moment the resolution as to whether he would flee or remain.  The bell of the clock sounded ...

Gabrielle

A romantic mind will always be drawn to an era he could not possibly have known: Europe between the Great Wars; America as it began its first free century; England when Dickens was its sole witness (upon me 1960s and 1970s Northern Europe has cast an everlasting spell).  Even an acute nostalgist knows that his sentiments are mostly based on unhappy persons' yearning for a past they cannot have, thus arming themselves for a future they cannot bear, and yet he still yearns.  He yearns for love and remembrance, sweetness and wonder, and the eternity of his wretched soul.  He will watch movies and read books, and dream himself the hero who simply must triumph in the end.  Life will continue to disappoint him mildly, but life is always disappointing to those who choose to dwell in the past.  What he wants is to be transported to that period, to breathe its air and darken beneath its sunsets and know beforehand that it will be the most glorious years of his existence.  Alas, such is not our fate.  We are doomed to do quite the reverse and live as if our better days are always a step ahead.  Which brings us to a work from one of the most romanticized of all periods.

We are amidst the Belle Époque, that generation of prosperity before an Austrian nobleman would die and Europe would bleed.  Like all such times, the label will come in hindsight, as its proponents firmly believed that nothing could have been worse than the First World War – a notion that would prove to be hideously mistaken.  Like all reminiscents, they predictably overlook the malaise and woe of the vast majority in order to celebrate the minority's advances; almost just as predictably, guilt prevents them from glorifying the very elite – statesmen, kings, and industrialist mega-moguls – because, well, no one should really have anything nice to say about people so privileged as rarely having to wear the same clothes twice.  Their focus then shifts to the upper middle class, the moneyed bourgeois who have neither blue blood nor courtier manners.  Many of this stratum were of humble provenance, and made their money the old-fashioned way: a lucky investment.  Such is the case of Jean Hervey (a magnificent Pascal Greggory), who took a flyer on a "failing newspaper."  It was "a horrible newspaper, with no opinions," and initially yielded nothing more than bromides and inoffensiveness.  But without the slightest indication – at least not to its new owner – the newspaper reversed its fortune and made Jean a permanent member of the urbanized rich (Jean claims he has "an easy relationship" with money).  We see nothing of the Jean the businessman, but we can expect him to resemble quite closely Jean the socialite: that is, stuffy, boring, and dapper, with the perpetual mild indignation that snobs seem naturally to exude.  Every Thursday, then, and we begin our film on a Thursday, a couple of dozen guests – it would be too presumptuous to call them friends – gather at Jean's palatial residence for dinner, gossip, and a ritual without which their lives might be totally meaningless.  Jean has plenty of almost robotic, identical female servants to do the heavy lifting, figuratively and literally, and gets away with practically saying and doing nothing at all.  But the main reason he can permit himself such insouciance is his lovely wife Gabrielle (an even more magnificent Isabelle Huppert).

Gabrielle is one of the screen's most original creations, in no small part because she is perfectly comfortable in her existence and yet perfectly miserable.  We do not immediately deduce the latter part of that equation, but an event barely twenty minutes into our film will make that agonizingly clear.  At this first Thursday gathering, however, she is anything if not the genteel hostess.  Her guests quack and croak in the pretentious tones of those who believe current events, strong drinks, and a bit of company lead to philosophical epiphanies.  One quips idiotically, without precedence or conclusion, that he dreams of strangers falling in love; a fat woman states that she never repeats what a stranger tells her, but keeps it for herself – which implies that she repeats everything her friends and acquaintances tell her; Jean, who narrates our story, hums complacently to himself that he knows "Gabrielle's dreams" so "she could not be unfaithful"; an elderly spinster grins and announces that, "we have a set of things to do in life.  When we finish, we collapse"; and another guest observes that "you don't have to know someone to enjoy his company," and we already understand that the whole film will come to be about knowledge, about whom we really know and whom we think we know, and those we think know us.  All these comments drown out the loudmouth rants of an obese and dishevelled drunk who just so happens to be the editor-in-chief of Jean's newspaper.  Our narrator informs us that he does not think much of this slob, but, being of the Philistine vanguard, is naturally prone to taking no action and hoping for the best.  I spoil nothing by saying that on the Herveys' ten-year anniversary, Jean returns home, slinks up the stairs and through a series of rooms only to find a letter sitting on his wife's boudoir.  It is very much a Dear Jean letter, and we know its contents even if we are given only a few gigantic words on screen.  But before Jean can even decide how to react ("You did not accustom me to this, Gabrielle"), Gabrielle does what no one could have possibly thought she would: after an absence of barely three hours, she returns.  

A tale of domestic deception is a dusty chestnut, and as such, the original story cannot be recommended because its intentions are hardly sincere.  Not only is there nothing shocking about such indiscretions, they are rarely if ever imbued with any pathos.  The paramount question would seem to be – as posed by Conrad's title, "The Return" – why Gabrielle comes back.  Is she simply inured to her pointless existence?  Does a part of her long for security and ease, things that her lover will not be able to provide her?  But the smarter viewer knows that the question is a McGuffin best left to hopeless graduate students who deem existentialism a profound path; thankfully, Chéreau seems to know it as well.  The victory of style in the cinematic Gabrielle is the transformation of a plain text that wishes itself dynamic and controversial into a dynamic and controversial stage piece that wishes itself plain.  In the hands and mouths of lesser actors, we would have a soap opera whose dénouement could have been predicted somewhere around the ninth minute; but Huppert and Greggory do something extraordinary.  They try as hard as they can to be run-of-the-mill citizens – Greggory the well-to-do dullard who never laughs, Huppert the delicately sturdy wife who never cries, both stock bourgeois roles – and yet they fail.  Their savage efforts to be like everyone else lay bare the originality of their minds, most evident in the bizarre scenes between Gabrielle and her domestic, Yvonne, when sexual tension mingles with a misty sense of oneupmanship.  When Jean the narrator tells us, and us alone, that Gabrielle is "not just any woman," we sense she will answer this thought aloud later in the film, and she most certainly does.  When she waxes poetic about the suffering she endured in not leaving Jean for good ("my body, my arms, and my legs could not take it"), he accuses her of plagiarism because that is precisely how those without taste or artistic sense confront flashes of genius.  It is no surprise then that Jean's line of sight is frequently screened by his large forelock, nor that the interchangeable female staff – who sometimes feel like a Greek chorus waiting to caption tragedy – seem much more alive than the guests.   And those two moments in life when Gabrielle was happy?  Let's just say they reveal more about her than any departure or return ever could.     

The Importance of Being Earnest

One of the tritest sayings in currency among literary frauds is "I am often asked," such as, "I am often asked why I read Oscar Wilde" – a phrase that Wilde himself would have skewered with some reference to the speaker's hopeless obtuseness outweighing his excellent taste.  There is only one reason to read Wilde, and it is the same reason that one might eat a delicious, delicate tart: both are made to be devoured and savored.  His works' structure have little originality (indeed, their plots are almost boilerplate farce), almost no emotional depth, and all the characters seem to chant in one brilliant, whimsical chorus that eerily channels the voice of their creator.  Yes, he sensed the differences between Victorian men and women with startling accuracy; but his primary contribution to literature is his understanding of how a group of people can agree to a myth – the myth of a family fortune, of a long-tempered love, of England as a society of manners and leisure – and on that basis let generations be nourished.  In that way, Wilde is the most Romantic of all writers because his characters are, to a man, so blind as to stumble upon truth after truth.  There is no real upper class in England, only a bunch of rich, lazy, entitled fools; there is no class struggle in England, because class struggles are for people incapable of being accepted into society; there is no England in the idealized sense of the word because England is composed merely of a long and magnificent series of traditions that gave the world one of its most majestic libraries and one of its stiffest upper lips.  What remains are wit, passion, and optimism, even if guised in the cynical snipes so commonly incident to a great mind who finds daily existence cruel and dull.  Which brings us to one of the most famous of English plays.

Our love trapezoid will become a hexagon by the end, but our primary male protagonists are two: Algernon Moncrieff, a good-for-nothing charmer in his late twenties, and the slightly older Jack Worthing, for all intents and purposes the straight man in their stand-up routine.  Algernon has money, looks, and education, and consecrates almost his entire existence to pondering why others are not as lucky as he.  Jack, at least, has an aim: he has focused his attention on Algernon's cousin Gwendolen Fairfax, whom he adores but who knows him as Ernest Worthing.  Why Ernest?  We get the first of many answers:

We live, as I hope you know, Mr. Worthing, in an age of ideals.  The fact is constantly mentioned in the more expensive monthly magazines, and has now reached the provincial pulpits, I am told; and my ideal has always been to love some one of the name of Ernest.  There is something in that name that inspires absolute confidence.  The moment Algernon first mentioned to me that he had a friend called Ernest, I knew I was destined to love you.  The name, fortunately for my peace of mind, is, as far as my own experience goes, extremely rare.

This extremely rare experience will be doubled when Cecily Cardew, Jack's comely eighteen-year-old ward, professes the same interest in Jack's brother Ernest – who we already know has never quite existed.  It goes almost without saying that Algernon has heard as much about Cecily as Cecily has about Ernest, so their meeting is a pleasant confirmation of mutual suspicions.  This would be enough for a plain romance, but for comedy we need ridiculous obstacles, and these come in the form of Gwendolen's mother Lady Bracknell, a reverend by the name of Chasuble, a governess by the name of Prism, and Algernon's imaginary valetudinarian chum, Bunbury. 

The rest of our plot will involved an Ernest or two, an outstanding dinner bill, some wooing and cooing, and more than a few of the most scintillating ripostes ever seen or heard on the English stage.  The Importance of Being Earnest is widely considered Wilde's finest dramatic work, although it contains as much drama as a toilet flush and only slightly more workmanship.  Its genius resides in the voices, which have separate agendas by defaulting to the necessities of the plot, but which rattle and hum as the soundtrack to a single vision.  Wilde believed that we had the ability to spend hours speaking about trivialities and yet, through their observation and broader reflection, outline a remarkably precise philosophy of humankind.  Such nonchalance yields some of the finest adages we have all come to know: "The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily.  That is what Fiction means"; "Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us"; "The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her, if she is pretty, and to some one else, if she is plain"; "All women become like their mothers.  That is their tragedy.  No man does.  That is his"; "If I am a little overdressed, I make up for it by being always immensely overeducated"; "Good memories are not a quality that women admire much in men"; "Dr. Chasuble is a most learned man.  He has never written a single book, so you can imagine how much he knows."  There is snobbery, sloth, affectation, hypocrisy, deceit, impetuousness, and unadulterated, barefaced lying – in short, the normal menu for any tale about the aristocracy.  There is also an underlying sense for the vigor and juice of life that was frowned upon in Wilde's day and is perhaps overemphasized in ours:

It is always painful to part from people whom one has known for a very brief space of time.  The absence of old friends one can endure with equanimity.  But even a momentary separation from anyone to whom one has just been introduced is almost unbearable.

Are we really supposed to live for the moment?  Is our favorite lover, to paraphrase a famous sportsman, always our next one?  We may ruminate on such matters, but we are better off simply enjoying the show, and in terms of wit and smoothness, the show is rather spectacular.  And then there's that perambulator in Victoria Station.