What’s needed, it seems, is the right verisimilitude - Alcott, Baudelaire, Austen, and Knausgaard - highlights from The Hudson Review

Now I am going to look at the highlights of the Winter 2015 issue of The Hudson Review, my favorite literary journal.

For a long time, The Hudson Review had nothing online, and then a few things, and now quite a bit.  But not everything, so I can only insist that poet David Slavitt’s peculiar idea to write fake choruses to lost Sophocles plays, based only on the titles of the plays, is promising; or that classics professor Bruce Heiden’s translation of Charles Baudelaire’s “Les Chats” is perfect.  I can give a hint of the latter, I guess:

Their haunches emanate unnatural fires;
And golden speckles, fine as desert sand,
Constellate the marble of their eyes.

And I bought the Slavitt book, so more of that later.  The poetry in this magazine is usually strong.

Even with more articles given away online, I never see anyone promote it.  The piece that should be circulating widely is Bruce Bawer’s review of the Karl Ove Knausgaard My Struggle novels, the best thing I have read on them.  Bawer has the advantage that he has 1) read all six books, 2) read them in Norwegian, and 3) read them in Norway.  The latter point especially:

Sometimes it can seem as if every second or third novel you pick up in an Oslo bookstore is about a man (a literary type, naturally) in late middle age who’s lived alone in some remote place since his divorce and who, one day in dark midwinter, is given a grim diagnosis by his doctor, after which he goes home to reflect on his life – his failed marriage, disappointing career, estranged children – and to contemplate stoically his impending death.   (588)

While jolly Knausgaard is seen by Norwegian readers to offer “a naïve, credulous, American-style enthusiasm about life.”  How can an American reader know that Knausgaard was writing a complex parody?  By the way, anyone who has commented on the oddity of the English translation – Bawer says you are right: “innumerable errors that are minor but whose cumulative effect is distracting” (594).

I have not read Knausgaard, so I only care because the review is so good.  Of more direct interest was a long piece on “Mind and Mindlessness in Jane Austen” by Wellesley English professor Timothy Peltason, a careful ethical argument that pushes well past Austen’s romantic plots towards the inner lives of her characters, including those with no inner lives, or “inner lives that are astonishingly unvaried and unimaginative, so much so that the narrator pauses frequently to wonder, and obliges us to wonder with her, what it can possibly be like to inhabit such a consciousness, or such a lack of consciousness” (611).  Lady Bertram from Mansfield Park or the awful Elliots from Persuasion are examples.  “[T]he comic horrors of inward vacancy,” Peltason calls the theme.

The larger point is to contrast the mindless characters with the mindful, the heroines and their successful suitors.  The marriage plot is not just about the search for love, but the search for morally intelligent life in the universe.  Austen fans should seek out the magazine for this one.

Alexandra Mullen’s review of the latest Library of America collection of Louisa May Alcott novels is also excellent, and luckily it is online.  If Work or Rose in Bloom are not first-rate works of art, they are still of high interest, moralistic, improving fiction with artistic ambition and real humor.

One of her sons makes the argument [for Horatio Alger novels!] from verisimilitude: “A bootblack mustn’t use good grammar, and a newsboy must swear a little, or he wouldn’t be natural.”  His mother replies: “But my sons are neither bootblacks nor newsboys, and I object to hearing them use such words as ‘screamer,’ ‘bully,’ and ‘buster.’”  Genteel fictions meet with her disapproval when both the virtue and rewards lack verisimilitude – when boys run away to sea and behave so nobly that Admiral Farragut invites them to dinner.  What’s needed, it seems, is the right verisimilitude…  (680)

And even I agree with the aunt on that.  Mullen’s and Peltason’s  essays are model for something I never do but maybe should, working through the ethical argument in good fiction with clarity and force.

For The Hudson Review, routine stuff.

Are there flowers at all? - Swinburne's elegy for Baudelaire

One more great Swinburne poem before I give up on him for now, “Ave Atque Vale,” his 1868 elegy for one of his favorite poets, Charles Baudelaire, who had died in 1867.  How will Cecil Lang help me with this one?  “It will be read with pleasure by any reasonably well-informed person, but the choicest appreciation is reserved for those who can take the elegiac tradition for granted and whose pulses beat, like Swinburne’s own, with the poetry of Aeschylus, Dante, and Baudelaire” (The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Circle, 517).  And people say academic writing has no personality.

The title, from poem 101 of Catullus, is something like “Hail and Farewell.”  Horace Gregory’s translation of Catullus ends:

I shall perform an ancient ritual over your remains, weeping,
(this plate of lentils for dead men to feast upon, wet with my tears)
O brother, here’s my greeting: here’s my hand forever welcoming you
and I forever saying:  good-bye, good-bye.

Loose, but accurate.  I mean it describes Swinburne’s poem well, although not, obviously, his language.  The Roman lentils are replaced with flowers – of evil!

Hast thou found any likeness for thy vision?
    O gardener of strange flowers, what bud, what bloom,
    Hast thou found sown, what gathered in the gloom?
What of despair, of rapture, of derision,
    What of life is there, what of ill or good?
    Are the fruits grey like dust or bright like blood?
Does the dim ground grow any seed of ours,
    The faint fields quicken any terrene root,
    In low lands where the sun and moon are mute
And all the stars keep silence? Are there flowers
    At all, or any fruit?  (Stanza VII)

The conceit that fills most of the poem’s eighteen stanzas is simple enough.  Swinburne is directly addressing the dead Baudelaire, assuming that he is in the Greek underworld.  What do you see there, Charles, the first line above asks?  Any poetry?  “Are there flowers \ At all” – that is a sad line.

The usual Swinburne stuff recurs: Proserpine, the sea, Tannhauser (I did not write about Swinburne’s bizarre Tannhauser poem), an entire stanza about Sappho (“the supreme head of song”).  The flowers and fruits are something different, imported from Baudelaire’s poetry:

Sleep; and if life was bitter to thee, pardon,
    If sweet, give thanks; thou hast no more to live;
    And to give thanks is good, and to forgive.
Out of the mystic and the mournful garden
    Where all day through thine hands in barren braid
    Wove the sick flowers of secrecy and shade,
Green buds of sorrow and sin, and remnants grey,
    Sweet-smelling, pale with poison, sanguine-hearted,
    Passions that sprang from sleep and thoughts that started,
Shall death not bring us all as thee one day
    Among the days departed?  (Stanza XVII)

The description of Baudelaire’s poems – his flowers – could well be about Swinburne’s own verse.  A wonderful poem.

The lion appeared completely oblivious - Atxaga, Baudelaire, Sebald - looking for patterns

What is Bernardo Atxaga up to in his Belgian Congo novel Seven Houses in France?  What patterns should an attentive reader see?

Friendly, thoughtful readers supplied some good ideas which I will ignore in favor of Atxaga’s Baudelaire theme.

Lalande Biran, the commanding officer, is a published poet.  Specifically, he is a disciple of Charles Baudelaire, who he occasionally quotes and even met:

Sleep overwhelmed him as he was searching for the next line of the poem, and the word that had been in his mind shortly before – syphilis – stirred in his head, presenting him with the image of the Master as he had seen him in Paris once when he was very young and the Master was ill and ugly and contorted with pain.  (46)

Biran’s section of the novel climaxes with two triumphs, an enormous killing in the corrupt mahogany and ivory trade, and the composition of a poem.  The novel is typically written in a realistic mode, so this passage is unusual:

The two numbers [“the price of mahogany and ivory: 330 and 370”] began to change shape in his mind…  First, he saw them floating in the air and then, immediately, they were transformed into birds flying over a vast green meadow…  Except they weren’t birds now, but two bats.  ‘Yes, bats,’ said the voice.  (101, ellipses mine)

The numbers and the dream-bats together form the poem, “those two numbers – 330, 370 – as the title, but without telling anyone why” and the bats in the text:  “But, friends, Sisyphus cannot stop.  If he does, he will be assailed by ravenous bats” (103).

Bats, you don’t say:

When earth becomes a trickling dungeon where
Trust like a bat keeps lunging through the air,
Beating tentative wings along the walls
And bumping it head against the rotten beams  (from “Spleen (IV)” tr. Richard Howard)

And take a look at “Spleen (III)”:  “I’m like the king of a rainy country, rich \ but helpless…”  Even before this point in the novel I began to wonder if there could be a series of encoded Baudelaire references that I was missing because I do not know his poems well enough.

Maybe this is nothing more than a simple reminder that culture is no defense against barbarism, that the elegant poet can be a monster, too.  Baudelaire himself merely played at monstrousness.  Or maybe Biran is just a derivative poet.

Two more ironies come with Baudelaire.  One is that Biran is old-fashioned.  It’s 1903!  Get up to speed, ya dinosaur.  The other is that Baudelaire, as we all know, loathed Belgium.  “Don't ever believe what people say about the good nature of the Belgians” and on and on in that vein.  Baudelaire’s letters are something else.

W. G. Sebald writes in the same spirit in The Rings of Saturn:

And indeed, to this day one sees in Belgium a distinctive ugliness, dating from the time when the Congo colony was exploited without restraint and manifested in the macabre atmosphere of certain salons and the strikingly stunted growth of the population, such as one rarely comes across elsewhere.  At all events, I well recall that on my first visit to Brussels in December 1964 I encountered more hunchbacks and lunatics than normally in a whole year.  (122-3)

But “the very definition of Belgian ugliness, in my eyes, has been the Lion Monument and the so-called historical memorial site of the Battle of Waterloo.”  The lion takes me back to Atxaga, to the final lines of the novel:

The lion did not move a muscle.  It remained lying down, watching the men unload the cargo.

Near the beach, a monkey screamed.  The lion appeared completely oblivious.  It seemed to be deaf.  (250)

Symbolism has intruded.  Forget Baudelaire – work backwards from the end.

The translation of Seven Houses in France is by my hero Margaret Jull Costa from Atxaga’s Spanish, which was itself translated from Atxaga’s original Basque.

The Wuthering Expectations Best of 2009

Three extra-large Humiliations were crossed off my list: Walden, The Scarlet Letter, and The Flowers of Evil, all highly rewarding.  Let's set those aside, though. 

Some fleeting highlights:

1. Thoreau recommends the "rich sweet cider" of the frozen-thawed apple.  "Your jaws are the cider-press."  ("Wild Apples").

2.  Charles Baudelaire smashes an itinerant glass saleman's backback of samples with a flower pot, just to hear the smash ("as of lightning striking a crystal palace"), to introduce some beauty into this ugly world of ours. "Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!"  (Paris Spleen, "The Bad Glazier").

3. We spend eighteen hours or so sitting next to Judge Pyncheon.  Hawthorne tells us about the Judge's big day.  They're going to nominate him for Governor!  Why won't Judge Pyncheon move?  "Rise up, Judge Pyncheon!" (Chapter 18 of Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables).

4. A Kazakh railroad worker battles his prize bull camel.  We gaze upon a sturgeon; the sturgeon gazes upon us.  (Chingiz Aitmatov, The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years).

5.  All that Yiddish literature, so much, so good.  The futile attempt of I. L. Peretz's poor student to come up with a story that's not about the blood libel. ("Stories").  Hodl's farewell to her father, Tevye the Dairyman.  "Let's talk about something more cheerful.  Have you heard any news of the cholera in Odessa?" (Sholem Aleichem, "Hodl," Tevye the Dairyman).

6.  Arthur Hugh Clough can't get milk for his coffee.   ("Amours de Voyage").

7.  Cranford, Silas Marner, Villette.  Three perfect novels, allowing for some variety in one's standards of perfection.  The methods varied, too: Eliot compressed, Gaskell tied up loose ends, and Brontë pushed, hard.  If I end up marvelling more at Villette, it's because it is so complex, and because after just a bit of looking at secondary souces I have developed the crackpot notion that I possess an original idea about the novel.  Forthcoming in 2010, if I can bring myself to do the work, which I mightn't.

8.  The moment in Flaubert's "A Simple Heart" when they put the stuffed parrot - no, you'll have to go see for yourself.  Is this story the best thing Flaubert ever wrote?  Talk about perfection.

I just want to keep going.  The Mountain Poems of Meng Hao-jan.  Edouard Mörike's  Mozart's Journey to Prague.  Gérard de Nerval's Sylvie.  "The benediction of the air."  John Galt!

I should skip this last part.  No, it's eating at me, since I just read it.  Worst of the year:  the second half of A Study in Scarlet (1887), the first Sherlock Holmes novel.  The Holmes-free Utah section is so, so bad, an undramatic jangle of clichés.  It's not only terribly written on its own, but once we return to Holmes, its dreadfulness has somehow even soaked into Watson's journal, tainting the rest of the novel.  The first half was all right!

Crime is by origin natural. Virtue is artificial - Baudelaire and Modern Life

"Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation. Crime, which the human animal took a fancy to in his mother's womb, is by origin natural. Virtue, on the other hand, is artificial, supernatural, since in every age and nation gods and prophets have been necessary to teach it to bestialized humanity, and since man by himself would have been powerless to discover it." Charles Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life," 1862.

I find it hard to know when to take Charles Baudelaire's pronouncements, of which there are many, seriously and when to try to tamp down his hyperbole. This passage I take as something close to a true vision of the world for the poet. It's hidden in section XI of his influential essay "The Painter of Modern Life." The section is titled "In Praise of Make-up," and Baudelaire means that, too.

It seems unlikely that the real Baudelaire, whatever that might mean, is on display in a piece of writing praising make-up. Quite the reverse, really. The Penguin Classics collection Selected Writings on Art and Literature I read contains Baudelaire essays on Edgar Allan Poe, Théophile Gautier, Madame Bovary, Richard Wagner, and many visual artists, especially Eugène Delacroix.

Every piece is about its subject - Baudelaire's reputation as a critic is deserved, and his writing, if rhetorically quite different than modern critical writing, is insightful - but also about Baudelaire, and the poet's views on the proper functioning of and approach to art. In this way, his appreciation of the epic works of Wagner is not so different than his enthusiasm for Poe, his poetic soulmate ("And then - believe me if you will - I found poems and short stories that I had thought of, but in a vague, confused, disorderly way and that Poe had been able to bring together to perfection," letter to Armand Fraisse, 18 Feb 1860).

"The Painter of Modern Life" is nominally about the artist Constantin Guys, now best known as the subject of this essay, but at the time an illustrator for the Illustrated London News. "Illustrator" is not quite right, since he was more like a photojournalist in water colors - some of his best known pictures are from his coverage of the Crimean War for that magazine.

Ma femme warned me that Guys's work may not be what I expected, following Baudelaire's praise. See left and judge for yourself; I also found an old volume titled The Painter of Victorian Life, 1930, that consists of Baudelaire's essay interspersed with dozens of black and white reproductions of Guys. I see what she means. Guys is deft and likable, but is not the neglected rival of Édouard Manet. Baudelaire praise Guys for being what he says in the title - not Modernist, which did not exist, but modern. He sees the details of dresses, carriages, uniforms, makeup, and mustaches and gets them right. Other painters in other times did the same thing. Baudelaire's aesthetic program is more important than his particular esteem for Guys.

I'm not sure I've gotten any closer to Baudelaire here, to his poetry or to Paris Spleen. Ah well, I'll try again some time. Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, who knows. The whole nerve-wracking crew.

I heard a hoarse and charming voice, a hysterical voice - Charles Baudelaire makes me nervous

Why do I have so much trouble with Charles Baudelaire? I have read four of his books recently, which helped some, but I remain nervous. What were they? The Flowers of Evil (1857/1861), Paris Spleen (1868), a modest collection of his letters, and a more comprehensive collection of essays (Selected Writings on Art and Literature, Penguin Classics, 1972).

The puzzle, to me, is that, looked at poem by poem, Baudelaire is not so intimidating. His famous albatross poem, for example, is perfectly straightforward, an ordinary sonnet with (in French) regular rhymes:

Often, to amuse themselves, the men of the crew
Catch those great birds of the seas, the albatrosses,
Lazy companions of the voyage, who follow
The ship that slips through bitter gulfs.

***

The Poet is like the prince of the clouds,
Haunting the tempest and laughing at the archer;
Exiled on earth amongst the shouting people,
His giant's wings hinder him from walking.

I omitted additional, excellent, description of the albatross. The translation is by Geoffrey Wagner, and other translations are at the link. The albatross is a graceful bird in the air, but clumsy on land. The poet is like the albatross.

What's so hard about that? I know, I know. The anxiety is the result of the cumulative effect of Baudelaire, the series of poems about vampire lovers and sexualized wounds and opium and wine and beating up beggars and other bizarreries. Perhaps reading him in any bulk is exactly the wrong approach.

More accessible, to me, although still quite mysterious, is the volume of fifty prose poems, generally titled Paris Spleen, although I read a version (tr. Edward K. Kaplan, 1989) titled The Parisian Prowler. That gets at one of the themes that links the short, odd poems, the great joys of the wandering around Paris, the thrills of crowds and street musicians and clothes and noise, of being a poet in the city. Some of those joys are not necessarily so joyous:

The Soup and the Clouds

My little crazy beloved was serving me dinner, and through the dining room's open window I was contemplating the moving architectures that God fashions from vapors, the marvelous constructions of the impalpable. And I was saying to myself, through my contemplation, "All those phantasmagorias are almost as beautiful as the eyes of my beautiful beloved, my little green-eyed monstrous madwoman."

And suddenly I received a violent punch in the back, and I heard a hoarse and charming voice, a hysterical voice and husky as if from brandy, the voice of my dear little beloved, which was saying, "Will you ever eat your soup, you goddamn cloud peddler!"

Poor Belgium! - Brontë, Baudelaire bash Belgium

I don't spend much of my imaginative or literary life in Belgium. But lately I've been spending time with two vicious Belgium-bashers. Oddest thing.

Charles Baudelaire lived in Belgium from April 1864 to July 1866, hating every minute of it, apparently. He had gone to deliver a series of paying lectures, and stayed for complicated reasons involving debt, illness, publishing, his mother, and contrariness. From a letter to the painter Manet, 27 May, 1864, just after arrival in Belgium:

"The Belgians are fools, liars, and thieves... Here deceit is the rule and brings no dishonor... Don't ever believe what people say about the good nature of the Belgians. Ruse, defiance, false affability, crudeness, treachery - now all of that you can believe."

Some more abuse: "the stupidest race on earth (at least I presume there's none stupider)" (13 Oct 1864). "You know there's no Belgian cuisine and that these people don't know how to cook eggs or grill meat... The sight of a Belgian woman gives me a vague desire to faint." (3 Feb 1865)

Almost as soon as he arrives, Baudelaire begins working on a book attacking Belgium, Pauvre Belgique!, or A Ridiculous Capital, or Belgium en déshabillé. It will be "a means of trying out my claws" in which "I'll patiently explain all the reasons for my disgust with mankind." Never finished. Such a shame.

The other Belgium-hater is Charlotte Brontë, or at least her narrator Lucy Snowe. The Villette (Little Town) in Villette turns out to be Brussels, capital of Labassecoure (Poultry-yard). The inhabitants, including her students, regardless of social standing, are mostly fat peasants. It's not just Rubens and his fat women. See the parenthetical dig at her students in Chapter 9, for example, about "their (usually large) ears." Plus they spy, they're narrow in spirit, and, worst of all, they're Catholic.

Perhaps this is not really Belgium. Perhaps in the world of Villette, there is no Belgium, or it has a very similar neighbor named Poultry-yard. But I've become convinced that the mean names are not just Charlotte Brontë's joke. They're also Lucy's - it's merciless Lucy who identifies the Duke of Turkey (the Duc de Dindonneau) and calls professors who torment her Drywood and Deadrock. She's just like that.

Here, by the way is the Brussels Brontë Group Blog, where there are no hard feelings. That's the spirit.

This is what they call a transition - I'm going to spend the next two days with Baudelaire. Which is a shame, since I'm enjoying Villette so much. Plenty more Villette here.

All Baudelaire quotations from Selected Letters of Charles Baudelaire: The Conquest of Solitude, ed. Rosemary Lloyd, University of Chicago Press, 1986.

I've found the French Poe - the Cruel Tales of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam

And he's not Charles Baudelaire. He's Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, Count of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, a genuine impoverished French nobleman turned Bohemian writer. I just finished reading his collection Cruel Tales (1883), which I enjoyed a lot, even though its contents might not be quite as good as its title.

I'm just beginning to understand the extent of Baudelaire's role in creating the French Poe - he translated Poe, yes, but also championed him, privately and publicly. Baudelaire, by the time he discovered Poe, was already a mature artist. "I've found an American author who has aroused in me a sense of immense sympathy," Baudelaire wrote to his mother (Mar. 27, 1852). But it's hard to say that Baudelaire was much influenced by Poe. It was too late for that.

Villiers de l'Isle-Adam is sixteen years younger, and would have read Baudelaire's Poe in his teens. The impact was obviously profound. "The Sign," for example, about a premonitory vision of death, includes specific references to "The Fall of the House of Usher" ("Was this really the house I had just seen? What antiquity was revealed to me now by the long cracks between the pale leaves?").

More curious, more surprising, are the signs of the influence of Comic Poe on Villiers, seen most strongly in his tales of new inventions: "The Apparatus for the Cehmical Analysis of the Last Breath," "The Glory Machine" (designed for the theater, it includes not just a clapping machine, but "other tubes, containing laughing-ga and tear-gas"), and the brilliant "Celestial Publicity," about the Lampascope, a device that projects advertising slogans ("Heavens, how delicious!," "Are corsets necessary?") onto the constellations, or the moon. The author predicts that candidates for office will be particularly interested: "One might even add that, without [this] discovery, universal suffrage is a mockery."

A year or two ago, I did not even know that Comic Poe existed. His influence on English-language writers seems non-existent. But here he is in Villiers, alongside ghost stories, paradoxes, and weirdnesses that contain their own flavors of Poe. Villiers does have a strain or two that is not indebted to Poe. I don't want to exaggerate any of this, but I'd never seen such a thing.

If the Cruel Tales are not quite entirely original, that does not bother me much; they were easily worth reading. I hope to read more Villiers, in fact. Certainly his novel Tomorrow's Eve (1886), which is a Pygmalion story starring Thomas Edison, not even forty at the time of the novel's publication. The robot woman speaks by means of the phonograph. Also, at some point I put 2 and 7 together and got 16, as happens in Weird France, and realized that Villiers's play Axël (1890?) supplied the title to Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle, so now Axël's on my list.

More on Villiers tomorrow, more of his own strengths. Many thanks to commenter tcheni for recommending Villiers.

Quotations from the Oxford World's Classics edition (1985), translated by Robert Baldick.