A return to the Camargue with Joseph d'Arbaud

We all enjoyed our trip, several months ago, to the Rhone River delta, the Camargue, when we poked around in in Henri Bosco’s Malicroix (1948).  The narrator of that novel, though, barely set foot in the Camargue itself.  Joyce Zonana, Malicroix’s translator, published a second Camargue book recently, one that makes for much better tourism, Joseph d’Arbaud’s novella La Bête du Vaccarès (The Beast of Vaccares, 1926).  This time we get to really see the landscape, the rills and reeds and ponds (Vaccarès is a pond – maybe more of a lake), and also the famous black bulls and white horses and French swamp cowboys.

As with Malicroix, I read d’Arbaud’s novella in French, the 1969 Grasset edition, not having seen Zonana’s translation.

La Bête du Vaccarès is also La Bèstio dóu Vacarès; d’Arbaud wrote versions both in French and Occitan, and the book I read contains both.  I was able to occasionally look at the Occitan text and see that I could not read it.  I do not know how useful that was.  D’Arbaud was one of the writers active in the early 20th century Provençal revival, alongside, most famously, Frédéric Mistral (Nobel 1904), which mostly involved poetry.  D’Arbaud took two unusual steps: first, he returned to the Camargue and worked as a cowboy, and second, he wrote prose fiction.

French literature had had a longstanding debate over – prejudice against – the merits of “regionalist” literature that looks a lot, to me, like similar arguments about American literature, even given the enormous difference that French regionalist literature is not even in French. But I may be deceiving myself.  What do I know about this.  Faulkner demolished the argument in both countries.  What I want to say is that the tourist to the Camargue ought to read this book.  It is micro-regionalist, not about Provence in the sense that the books of Marcel Pagnol or Jean Giono are about Provence – the hill country, basically – but a more specific place.

I am digressing about tourism, obsessed by not being able to travel, but I want to point to the second story in the book, “Le Regret de Pierre Guilhem” (“Pierre Guilhem’s Regret”), which takes place behind the scenes at a bullfight in Arles, which means, although d’Arbaud takes this for granted, that the setting is a two thousand year-old Roman arena, one of the most famous tourist attractions in the region.  This is what I mean by micro-regionalist.  I have not been to the exact spot where the character stood, but I have been quite close, as have millions of visitors.

Pierre Guilhem is a cowboy who has gone to work for the rodeo – bullfight – and tries to rescue a horse that he knew and loved back when he worked in the Camargue.  I urge interested readers to investigate the Arles Arena website, from which I stole the images above and below.  Those parasols are in the story.

Boy am I ever ready to go back to France.  I have not written anything for a while; thus the babble.  I will get to The Beast of Vaccares tomorrow, I guess.  There are reasons to read it aside from tourism, although tourism is a good reason.

Tender Is the Night has some good writing - Fitzgerald's Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!

Tender Is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1934 novel about the decline and fall of a talented psychiatrist, is full of fine writing, beginning with the bit of “Ode to a Nightingale” that supplies the title.  Maybe Keats should not count.  “O for a beaker full of the warm South…,” Keats demands, a wine “[t]asting of Flora and the country green, / Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!”  Fitzgerald gives me plenty of that.  This is, I hope it is obvious, not the bit of “Ode” that supplies the title, but a different, relevant bit.

On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about halfway between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel.  Deferential palms cool its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach.

I take “deferential” and “flushed” as the nice touches here, adjectives I would not expect.  The beach is new, not fashionable, so some old villas “rotted like water lilies.”

“The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one.”  That is nice, right, a postcard view but who would see that rug?  The narrator lingers.  A man appears, “floundered a minute in the sea,” and disappears.  “When he had gone, beach and bay were quiet for an hour.”  Iambs in front of the comma, trochaic pentameter after.  The effect of watching the empty beach for two hours, while “bus boys shouted in the hotel court; the dew dried upon the pines,” while actually spending a couple of minutes reading the paragraph, is sharp.  This is 1923 or so, and the rich Americans have only barely started to descend on France.

Here are two, a young actress, fresh with her first taste of celebrity , and her duenna mother, “[the actress’s] cheeks lit to a lovely flame, like the thrilling flush of children after their cold baths in the evening…  she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her.”  I have made it to the second page of my copy of the novel.

The two uses of “dew,” are they too close together?  In writing like this, made up of hundreds of arresting little effects, and by “arresting” I mean that I stop and enjoy them, I often ask if Fitzgerald went too far.  What is overwritten?  What is beautiful and what is kitsch?  It is a dance.  His first novel and bestseller, This Side of Paradise (1920), I remember as a mishmash of undergraduate jokiness and overwritten kitsch.  The first-person narrator of The Great Gatsby puts a brake on the purple prose.  Now, the more mature Fitzgerald can show off:

… the hot light clipped close her shadow… a faded Buick cooked on the hotel drive… Three British nannies sat knitting the slow pattern of Victorian England, the pattern of the forties, the sixties, and the eighties, into sweaters and socks, to the tune of gossip as formalized as incantation. (still on the second page)

Maybe something in one of every three sentences where I think “Oh, that’s good.”  When the story gets moving, maybe more like one in ten.  I think this is the third time I have read Tender Is the Night, so I am in no hurry to see what happens.

This is a remnant of the old fraternity style – the actress has been on an all-night spree in Paris:

Later Rosemary and the Norths and a manufacturer of dolls’ voices from Newark and ubiquitous Collis and a big splendidly dressed oil Indian named George T. Horseprotection were riding along on top of thousands of carrots in a market wagon.  The earth in the carrot beards was fragrant and sweet in the darkness…  (I.xviii)

I like those carrots but that first sentence is packed with what I mean by overwriting.  Maybe it is directly drawn from life, manufactured dolls’ voices and Mr. Horseprotection and all, but it is, as the expression goes, too cute by half.  Case by case, adjective by adjective: too cute by 30%? 10%?  Just cute enough?

The ride on the carrot wagon is stolen directly from the opening of Zola’s The Belly of Paris (1873); a slightly earlier paragraph about the ludicrous “car of the Shah of Persia, “a new facet of the fabulous,” is likely pinched from Radiguet’s The Ball of the Count of Orgel (1924), although maybe it is an authentic contemporary detail used by coincidence by both writers.  I had not known any of this whenever I last read the novel.  What will I see next time?

Maybe I will have made it to the French Riviera by then.  The Riviera is the part of France that I am least interested in visiting, but in fairness it is now a lot more crowded than it was in Tender Is the Night.  It is a lot more crowded by the end of the novel than it is on the still, quiet first page.

My April in Paris - Radiguet, Cendrars, and Janet Flanner - plus James Agee, who I forgot yesterday

I forgot a book yesterday, an odd bird.

James Agee, Permit Me Voyage (1934).  A few good lyric poems.  A weird prose dedication/manifesto.  Some perfect imitations of 17th century forms.  A lot of this book felt like the portfolio of a brilliant undergraduate. I suppose that’s what it is.  The sonnet sequence in particular is full of beauties.  A tribute to Hart Crane ends the book and gives it a title.

Agee was the Hot Young Poet for a couple of years because of this book; a perverse cuss, he immediately abandoned poetry for journalism.  Perfectly consistent with his strange career.  The only other book of his I’ve actually read is a collection of his movie reviews.

***

What did I read in French in April?

Henri Bosco’s novel Malicroix (1948) I covered earlier.

Blaise Cendrars, Vol à voile (Glide, maybe or Gliding, 1932), a short autobiographical prose piece about the time Frédéric-Louis Sauser ran away from his boring bourgeois Swiss home and especially his fat, sad father to begin his life of adventure and eventually literature.  It is probably mostly invented, fiction, which is fine with me.  The telling is enjoyably scrambled, with the story beginning on the Trans-Siberian railroad, where a Jewish merchant is telling Cendrars all about the functioning of the tea caravans.  Then back to Switzerland.  The last episode, is about Sauser / Cendrars applying for a job in a Munich piano store.  I don’t know how any of this really fits together.

Cendrars’s French is quite difficult.

***

Raymond Radiguet, Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel (The Ball of the Count of Orgel, 1924).  Another child star.  He wrote Le Diable au Corps (Devil in the Flesh, 1923) when he was seventeen.  It is about a teenage sociopath’s sexual affair with the young woman, barely older, whose husband is away at the front.  Even a teenage prodigy only has so much autobiographical novelistic material, so this next novel is an elaborate pastiche of classic triangle novels like The Princess of Cleves (1678) and Dangerous Liaisons (1782), updated to contemporary Paris.  I felt it should have been more fun than it was, more fizzy, more like Ronald Firbank.  One character, for example, is a Persian prince “with the largest car in the world” (“la plus grosse voiture du monde,” p. 38 in the original edition).  But there was only a little bit of that kind of jolly nonsense.

Radiguet, who died at age 20, spent his last year, whirlwinding literary Paris as Jean Cocteau’s boyfriend.  I will bet that would have made for a good novel.

Radiguet’s French is not so hard.

***

Joseph Kessel, Les Jours de l’aventure: Reportages, 1930-1936 (The Days of Adventure).  Journalism.  I want to save this one for its own post, when I finish the last adventure, The Snipers of Barcelona.

***

Janet Flanner, Paris Was Yesterday: 1925-1939.  Not in French, merely about.  Flanner was inventing her role as the New Yorker’s Paris dispatcher, and she becomes better at it – she becomes a better writer – as she figures out what she is doing.  The idea is to tell New Yorker readers what is happening in Paris, in politics and the arts and the crime report.  She becomes expert at sharp, short biographical profiles, often obituaries or some kind of anniversary piece, or covering a new celebrity, like Georges Simenon in 1931:

He is of Breton Dutch stock, is handsome, can write an excellent book in four days (one was started in a glass cage, for publicity’s sake), lives on a yacht in canals, and has used sixteen pseudonyms, of which Simenon (the signature of the latest dozen of his books) will probably become permanent. (77)

A writer could learn something from a sentence like that.  Flanner is never present in her pieces.  She is not like her successor.  No Gopnikizing.

Near the end of the book, Flanner’s job shifts.  Her columns often bear the ironic label “Peace in Our Time,” and she shifts to a different kind of journalism, until it becomes “War in Our Time,” and the book ends.

Malicroix's mythology - white bulls, sun gods, east versus west - this evening, there is nothing in the east but night

It was the East-West motif that helped me solve the Malicroix puzzle.  Our hero Martial comes to the island that is at the center of Malicroix from the East, from Puyloubier.  His home in Puyloubier is Eden, or Arcadia, or Hobbiton, except matriarchal. The penultimate chapter of Malicroix is about Martial’s return to and renunciation of his home; it is filled with fascinating things, but I can’t write about everything in the novel.  Home is extremely familial and social.*  Anyway, it is East.

West is the old home of the Malicroix family is to the West, visible from the island where Martial is trapped.  The history of the family is to the West, in particular the pivotal moment when the patriarch killed the legendary white bull that was threatening his nude niece, Delphine d’or – Golden Delphine.

Martial cannot go West until he completes the first part of his quest.

That bull was hauled across the Rhône and buried under a cross, le Calvaire, which is also visible from the island.  This stuff is so odd that for much of the novel I thought I was misunderstanding the French.  Mais non!

The person who moved the bull – no, I won’t go into all of this.  Malicroix feature a blind ferryman, the sacrifice of a white bull, a revelation on December 25th, a ritual where a character is born or reborn from a rock, and another character who is an avatar of the sun god.  Bosco pulls in elements of Christianity and Greek mythology – Odysseus in the underworld, for example – but all of this stuff has a name, and it’s Mithraism.  Malicroix is a pagan fantasy novel where the hero must complete the ritualistic quest of his ancestor, but for the right reason, for redemption and rebirth rather than revenge.

Readers of William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955) will know all of this, although will perhaps be disappointed to learn that Bosco beat Gaddis to the full incorporation of Mithraism into fiction.  Bosco has the advantage that Mithraism probably has some genuine relationship to Catharism, and the novel’s setting is more or less in Cathar territory.

The hero, Martial, and the heroine, Anne-Madeleine, lovers who barely speak, directly discuss the East-West motif:

I would leave for the east in a few days.  That space was empty and my heart clenched.

“It’s from there that the night comes,” she told me.  “Let’s go back; I’m cold.”

“But the day also comes from the east, Anne-Madeleine.”

“That’s true; however, this evening, there is nothing in the east but night.” (296-7)

Anne-Madeleine is the avatar of the sun god(dess), and/or of Golden Delphine.  For a while I thought she might turn out to be some kind of ghost.  But no, just an avatar.  Here we see, in the pages before the hero successfully completes the long-deferred Mithraic ritual, the sun / Golden Delphine gives him her approval:

I went to bed and slept for a long time.  When I awoke, the sun was low.  A long finger of light entered through the half-closed shutters.  All gold.  (353)

Readalongists can help me, since I lost track.  Whose room is Martial in at that moment?

The Rhône river runs from north to south – please see the map from a couple of days ago – which with the east-west theme forms another cross, with Martial and his island and his little house in the center.  I have not mentioned but only implied the “four elements” theme.

I will not worry much about what all of this means.  It is enough that it exists.  It would not be quite true to say that there is nothing like it in French literature.  Alain-Fournier and Gérard de Nerval are clear antecedents.  But there is not much like it.

*  This chapter features the uncle who dreams all day, and then at night dreams that he dreams.  For a moment Bosco was writing a Lewis Carroll novel.  P. 329 in the French edition; I am not making this up.  Amazing things in this chapter.

Henri Bosco's mystical Malicroix - the five other songs of silence

A translation of Henri Bosco’s mystical swamp-quest novel Malicroix (1948) recently appeared, translated by Joyce Zonanna, who fell in love with the novel when she was eighteen and has been carrying around her translation for decades.  Dorian Stuber suggested a readalong.  A number of people have been reading along.

All of the many readers of Malicroix have been building the above map in their heads, if they did not happen to come across it earlier.  It is based on Bosco’s own map of his novel.*  The scale is not to be taken entirely seriously.

I was delighted to find the map after I had finished the novel, since I read the book in French and heaven knows what errors that has made in my understanding of it.  But that map was the map I had constructed, element by element, which was reassuring.  I would make the entire west channel of the river more narrow – shift the entire island west a little.

The narrator and protagonist, young Martial Mégremut, spends most of the novel in the one main room of the little house right in the center of the map, in the center of the island in the Rhône.  For long stretches he does as close to nothing as is novelistically possible.  He sits in an armchair, stares into the fire, eats meals prepared by a servant invariably described as “taciturn,” although there is really only one character in the book who talks much, and goes to bed.  Sometimes he is joined at the hearth by an outstanding Briard shepherd dog.  It has become a cliché in contemporary literature to drop in “A dog barked in the distance” or something like it as color, I guess, but in this novel the line is meaningful.

Up to the middle of Malicroix, the novel could be described as “plotless.”

There is a major episode, for example, in which the servant, who is also a shepherd, brings a mysterious beast to the island.  It smells like wool, it has horns, it bleats – what could it be?

Near him, Bréquillet [a Briard shepherd dog], sitting in the grass, contemplated the scene and lifted his sensitive snout towards the moon.  The moon enchanted the clearing, Bréquillet, Balandran [the servant], the beast.  When a breeze touched them, the acid odor of wool crossed the woods. (168, tr. mine, don’t blame Zonanna for my clunks)

Did you guess that the beast is a sheep?  It is, I learn two pages later!  A ram.  This is the art of symbolic anti-climax.  “The next day winter came” (170).  Brought by the ram, in some sense.

Why does Martial spend months on this island with little human contact or other activity?  Some nonsense about a will.  He’ll inherit the island, and a flock of sheep, if he can stay on it for three months.  Psychologically, the interest is that he never quite decides to stay.  Sometimes the weather stops him, and at one point he is ill for quite a while, but even when he has the choice he prefers to let his unconscious mind do the work.  He is not passive, exactly.  He is a mystic.

Martial spends Christmas wandering around the island in blizzard-induced trance, falling deeply into the silence of the snow.  This is what he means by silence; this is what I mean by mysticism:

And wave [of solitude] succeeded wave, solitude succeeded solitude.  Sometimes, as if several chords had composed the inaudible song from it, a silence lifted itself from the silence, a silence more gentle, or more serious, or more pure.  And when the serious silence slid under the pure, the songs superposed from the secret waves called from the great chords the five other songs of silence, and all the snowflakes became stars… (178-9, ellipses in original)

My impression is that readers have been enjoying reading about solitude, watching the fire, and the weather, the wind and rain that keeps Martial from even going for a walk.  This is certainly part of the novel.  But the mysticism is central to what I take the novel to be, as is the quest story, which I am not seeing anybody mention.  Zonanna, in the article I linked above, describes her early reading of the novel: “Having grown up speaking French, I was able to make my way through it–but much of the novel, with its long poetic passages and mysteriously mythic plot–eluded me.”

The mythic plot was exactly what I was looking for, as I was working through the basic “What is this book?” question.  Tomorrow, I will push on to the magical white bull, the sun goddess, the scheming illegitimate son.  East versus West.  Real names versus earth names.  Malicroix is, in a sense, a strange, strange novel, a little bit crackpot.

Page references are to the original NRF edition.

* The map is from Geneviève Lévesque's Une écriture à l'oeuvre dans "Malicroix" d'Henri Bosco, p. 542, her 2010 PhD thesis, available here as a PDF.

The birds, the birds, sir! - visiting the Camargue and other marshes with Henri Bosco

A number of people are readalonging or have readalonged Henri Bosco’s 1948 novel Malicroix, newly translated by Joyce Zonana.  I’ve mentioned that French literature lacks nature writing, which is widely read in its English and American incarnations, but somehow not much produced by French writers.  Bosco is an exception, a novelist known not just for a strong sense of place but for writing seriously about nature.

Malicroix is set on an island in the Camargue, the delta of the Rhone River, my old friend from Lyon, although with a different character further south.  I hope the novel’s readers have been looking up the Camargue.  Much of It is a nature reserve now, known for its superb migratory birds, including France’s flamingos.  A character in the novel calls the marshy plain a harsh country, but concedes:

“When one goes to the shore of a pond, especially at dawn, when the water barely ripples, the coots, the flamingos and even the sacred ibises fish solemnly in the warm mud.  A little before winter a flight of cranes and ducks fly very high in the air in quest of clouds…  The birds, the birds, sir!...  ah! the birds…” (p. 67 of the 1948 French edition, translation mine, ellipses in the original)

The region is also famous for its herds of white horses, it herds of black bulls, and, logically, its cowboys, who ride the white horses to round up the black bulls for use in French bullfighting.  French cowboys!  French swamp cowboys!  There is a lot here that violates received ideas of France.  Part of the history, within the novel, part of the conflict, is an old feud between cattlemen and sheepherders, like in an American Western, except this one also involves a legendary white bull that almost – well, we know what crimes white bulls on Mediterranean shores commit.

I have stolen all of the photos from the Arles tourism site.  I have meant to go the Camargue, and in fact planned to go on three separate visits to France, but I have not yet made it.  Someday.

I’m about a quarter into Malicroix.  Another Bosco book, The Boy and the River (1945), was one of the first novels I read in French.  It is a juvenile novel, a real boy’s book, where one boy rescues another from a kidnapping, and they escape down a river to a hidden marshy area where they simply enjoy nature for a while.  The beginning is exciting enough, an adventure story with a bit of a Tom-and-Huck flavor, but the middle third of the novel is more like pure nature writing.  The boys fish, swim, mess about in a boat, hide from a wild boar, watch birds:

At dawn, nothing at first was visible but one great bird.  It stood, utterly motionless, upon the thing line of a mudbank, fifty yards or so from our boat.  Its pointed beak hung threateningly above the surface.  High-perched upon its legs, with pouter breast, the grey heron was fishing solemnly.  We looked at it with wonder, but in silence, for the slightest sound would be enough to startle it.  (p. 68, tr. Gerard Hopkins)

L'enfant et la rivière is a terrific book for language learning because it is full of bird, plant, boat, and river vocabulary.  Just the verbs describing the movement of the river, how useful.  I read an edition that had, in the back, labelled drawings of the novel’s plants and animals – now that was handy.

At some point, the nature idyll has to turn back into a novel, and the boys have to find families.  To my surprise, the novel moved from the real to the unreal, becoming an imitation of Alain-Fournier’s Goethean Le Grand Meaulnes (1913), including a several-page recounting of a symbolic puppet show.  I don’t know if Malicroix will follow the same path.  It seems likely.  Maybe no puppets.

Given the pace of my French reading, it will be, or at least feel like, approximately forever before I write more about Malicroix, and it’s not even especially difficult.

I counted American books in French bookstores - a study, with methodology and results and so on

Now, something about the French reading Americans, rather than me reading the French.

In July, I counted the titles by American fiction writers on the shelves at a French bookstore.  I even made a few notes, although most of what I include here is from memory.

The exercise was just to count the number of titles.  Prestige as measured by the proxy of shelf space.  Likely also sales, but who knows.  These are for-profit bookstores.  I doubt they have much on the shelf just for show.  They want to sell books.  They know their readers.

So, which American authors had the most titles on the shelves of a particular French bookstore in July?  There was a tie, two authors with 21 titles each.  You can guess while reviewing my methodology.

The bookstore I studied carefully was Librairie Passages, an exemplar of the mainstream bookstore.  I checked my results, pretty casually, at Le Bal des Ardents, Lyon’s most picturesque bookstore (see left), and the Decitre at the mall, which is the closest bookstore to the main public library.  The library is almost in the mall.  French life is well organized.

Le Bal des Ardents is weirder than Passages, with more tiny presses and oddities.  It is more highbrow, with, for example, the Complete Works of Antonin Artaud in 26 volumes on the shelf – who is buying this?  Decitre is populist – mall bookstore – but local, a branch of a century-old Lyon institution.

My American control is Prairie Lights in Iowa City, the best bookstore for hundreds of miles in any direction, which I visited in August.  It is not a typical bookstore, since Iowa City is the home of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is a UNESCO City of Literature.  All of these bookstores are roughly the same size, I think.

The non-American winner – I was not even counting non-Americans, but he stood out – was Stefan Zweig, who had 50 books (not titles, too many books to check for duplicates) on the shelf at Passages.  50 books!  Stefan Zweig!  Prairie Lights had one book, maybe.

The American winners at Passages were Philip Roth and Jack London.   Roth I had guessed myself.  But London!  London has a much higher status in France than in the U.S. Prairie Lights had a dozen or more Roth titles out, but just two by London, among the “adult” books, I mean, The Call of the Wild and I don’t remember.  Maybe there were more downstairs with the kid’s books.

The runners-up, all in the 10-to-12 title range:  Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, Jim Harrison.  Living writers in the same range: Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison (alive then), Don DeLillo, Paul Auster.  I may have missed some of these.  I would have thought that Poe would be out of the running by this counting measure, but his works are rearranged into enough editions that he was close.

I did not jot down the numbers, but at Le Bal des Ardents, the winner (with fewer than 20 titles) was easily Faulkner, and second, including Russian works, was Vladimir Nabokov, who only had a few books at Passages.

Prairie Lights was generally similar.  Big differences, besides London: just three books by Joyce Carol Oates, and two or three by Kerouac.  I was surprised that it had as many Jim Harrison titles.  Maybe an artifact of the special qualities of that store.

Harrison mentions, several times, in the essays in A Really Big Lunch (2017), that his popularity at some point moved to France:

Luckily my books do very well in France…  The French saved my little family for which I’ll always be grateful.  I had many bestsellers over there but never in America.  (p. 265)

I remember Roth somewhere describing the same phenomenon (substituting Europe for France – German readers buy a lot of Roth).  It has struck me that French readers, or some of them, a lot of them, are interested in outsized American masculinity, thus the relatively high status of London, Hemingway, Kerouac, Harrison, and also noir detective novels and maybe even Oates.

Or maybe they like Harrison because of his many passages like this:

I have often thought that if I received an early warning that I would pass on sooner than later, I’d get myself to Lyon and eat for a solid month, after which they could tip me from a gurney into the blessed Rhône.  (164)

A kindred spirit.  Classic Lyon cuisine is not the healthiest food in France.

At the mall bookstore, the Americans with the most titles were, maybe – I did not keep exact track – Stephen King and George R. R. Martin and Mary Higgins Clark, like that.  Actually, it was probably a comic book writer, Geoff Johns or Stan Lee.  This was not true at Passages (I checked).  Donna Leon was up there, but nowhere near 21 books.

Anyway, something a little bit more concrete to go with all of the other impressions I have picked up.  How do other people think about literature, that is the endlessly interesting question.

The Modern French poets of the 19th century - “Read me, to learn to love me.”

One good reason that these posts do not get written is that I start poking around in the texts themselves, and since I now want to race through post-Romantic French poetry, I find myself a bit crushed.  Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé – it is all so wonderful.  And those are just the giants of the period.

In his “Épigraphe pour un livre condamné” (“Epigraph for a condemned book”), Baudelaire urges his “quiet” and “sober” readers to throw away his book Les Fleurs du mal, leaving it to those who know how to plunge their eyes into the gulfs.  “Lis-moi, pour apprendre à m'aimer” – “Read me, to learn to love me.”

Well, we sure did, even many of us who have never read him. Baudelaire and Les Fleurs du mal (1857) are the beginning, or the beginning of the end if you think it was a wrong turn.  It is because of Baudelaire that Modernism is Modern.

There are many aspects to Baudelaire, even within Les Fleurs du mal; I guess my preferred Baudelaire is the one who brought Romantic ideas about nature to the city.  Romantic in theory, since the young French Romantics have a pretty darn tenuous relationship with actual living nature.  They are awful citified.  Baudelaire is really looking around and writing about what he sees.  If he lived in Jura and wrote about bird’s nests and yeast, he would have been a Romantic, but he lived in Paris and wrote about apartment buildings, which is Modern.

Paris change! mais rien dans ma mélancolie
N'a bougé! palais neufs, échafaudages, blocs,
Vieux faubourgs, tout pour moi devient allégorie
Et mes chers souvenirs sont plus lourds que des rocs.  (from “Le Cygne”)

Paris changes! but nothing in my melancholy
has moved! new palaces, scaffolding, blocks,
Old neighborhoods, for me it all becomes allegory
And my memories are heavier than the rocks.  (from “The Swan”)

I read Les Fleurs du mal in French about a year ago, so I can sympathize with the French students clawing through it for the Bac.  It is pretty hard in places.  Mallarmé is probably still too hard for me, I mean if I am trying to understand him.  Tristan Corbière is too hard, the language too crazy.  Jules Laforgue looks about right.  Arthur Rimbaud is clearly within my level.

The easy one is Paul Verlaine.  Much of his best work, entire (miniature) books, are readable by someone with a semester of French, a real beginner.  The beauty of his sound is audible.  He generally does not use too many words.  They are often such an obstacle to the language-learner, the words.  Verlaine felt like a reward.  When I could not read very much, I could read him.  I have read his first four books in French – “books,” they are such little things – and will keep going someday.

Anyway.  It’s all a marvel.  A rupture.  The beginning of “make it new,” the beginning of  poetic tradition that has stretched with real continuity until – I am not sure.  Possibly not today.  Poetry has a large place in French culture; contemporary poetry, maybe not much at all.  Who knows what will happen.  Meanwhile, French high school students will spend this spring cramming Hugo, Baudelaire, and Apollinaire.  Good luck.

19th century French fiction crammed into one post

What happens next?  The French novel, French fiction as we know it, finally comes to life in a blast of coffee-fueled energy.  Balzac, Sand, Stendhal, Hugo, then Dumas, Flaubert, Verne, and then Zola and Maupassant, just to stick to the most famous, lots of terrific books that are still widely read and have all kinds of continuity with the French fiction written today.

I’ll blast through them myself, just making a few notes about reading them in French.  Heaven knows if you want to know what I think about Flaubert, that is easy enough to find.  Much of this is familiar to anyone who has taken advanced French.  These are familiar writers, familiar texts.

1.  Almost all of these writers are ideally suited for the punishing or educating of French schoolchildren.  They have written texts of a variety of lengths and difficulties allowing all sorts of clever paths connecting this book to that.

Start Balzac with one of his many short stories or novellas, with Colonel Chabert, move up to Eugénie Grandet, end with Père Goriot.  Maybe put that one on the Bac.  I read one of the possibilities in French, “The Elixir of Long Life” (1831), my fortieth work in the Human Comedy, and the first and only in French.  It is a Don Juan story that otherwise goes pretty much where you would guess from the title.

This year, the big 19th century novel on the Bac is Stendhal, The Red and Black.  The standard shorter Stendhal is Vanina Vanini, which I have not read.  Italian stuff.  For Sand, it’s La Marquise (1832), where the title woman is in charge, pursuing the actor she desires, not a masterpiece but an antidote to the masculinity of a lot of French fiction.  For Flaubert, it’s the Trois Contes (1877), or maybe just the first and easiest story, “A Simple Heart.”  What a triumph, when I finished it – I had read Flaubert in French.  And my French was not that good.

2.  So what do we do with Hugo?  His novels are monsters.

First, there is “Claude Gueux” (1834), a heart-wrenching story about a prisoner, friendship, cruelty, the death penalty – distilled Hugo, champion of the powerless.  As art, if that matters, I thought it was better than the propagandistic novella Diary of a Condemned Man (1829).

Second, French pedagogists have carved up Les Misérables (1862) into many books, not just into abridged editions of a variety of lengths, but more curiously into rearrangements of the novel, often focused on specific characters, so that there is Cosette’s Les Misérables and Gavroche’s Les Misérables.  There is a book titled Jean Valjean (A Journey around some Misérables), like it is a city or a park.  One can imagine an entire Hugo-based curriculum.

There is at least one of these for Balzac, too, The Novel of Vautrin, pulling together scenes featuring Balzac’s great proto-superhero character from many novels.

I don’t know that I approve of this butchery, but I am amazed that it exists.  It is an interesting idea, taking a novel like Les Misérables and returning to it from different directions.  I don’t know that any French teacher is really doing this, but the books exist, and are in print right now.

3.  Zola’s short story “Le grand Michu” (1870) surprised me because of its multiple connections to later French fiction, the whole line of French schoolboy stories, and also to Jean Vigo’s 1933 anarchic masterpiece Zéro de conduite.  The riot at the end of Zola’s story is enacted by Vigo and his little maniacs.  No idea if this is in English.

4.  I discovered that I have more to say, or can babble at greater length, about Guy de Maupassant than I had realized, so let’s cut all that and write more about Maupassant some other time.  He is obviously perfect for infliction upon schoolchildren and French language learners.  His French, at least in his newspaper stories, is pretty darn easy.

The big good poets of French Romanticism - finally I make use of my French - for all of the good it does me

I have in front of me The Oxford Book of French Verse, first published in 1907, “Chosen by St. John Lucas,” a 500 page collection of French poems in French, with only the introduction and notes in English.  Just about half of the book covers the 19th century, and half of that is just four poets: Alphonse de Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, and Alfred de Musset.  Those are the poets I want to linger over here.  You may note that I have skipped the Revolution and the “little bad poets of the Empire,” as the saint calls them (p. xxx).  I was going to say something dismissive, but not that cruel.  For whatever reason, Bonaparte was not good for French literature.

It roared back to life in the 1820s, first with the poets, then the theatre, and then the novel and its variants, but that will be more in the 1830s.  It began with The Poetic Meditations (1820) of Lamartine, and for him that is almost where it ended, since he used his fame to go into politics.  Inventing French Romanticism was only one of his accomplishments.

I am not entirely sure what French Romanticism is.  It is in large part an argument with French Classicism, and I am not so sure what that is.  I am reading an old school edition of Hugo’s Les feuillles d’automnes (Autumn Leaves, 1831) which includes notes about Hugo’s many violation of Classical rules, such as when he uses feminine rhymes inappropriately or puts the caesura in the wrong place.  If you say so, I think.  An advanced topic in French prosody.  Anyway, these poets are doing it wrong, however subtly, which was once pretty exciting.

My memory of the relevant English translations:

There’s a pretty good translation of Lamartine’s Meditations.

There is a functional but dull translation of Musset’s complete poems.

Given his stature, there is not much Hugo in English.

There is close to no Vigny in English.  No idea why.

A short selected Musset and selected Vigny would be valuable additions to English literature, hint hint, poetic translators.  Vigny and Musset have plays available in good English.  See Vigny’s Chatterton (1835) for some intense French Romanticism as reflected in an imaginary version of an actual misunderstood, doomed teenage poet.

I read that one in French while reading Vigny’s complete poems, now that I could.  I have also been filling in some Hugo, a tiny fraction of his thousands of pages of poems.  That would be a feat, reading Hugo’s complete poems.

Vigny wrote narrative poems, mostly in rhyming couplets.  Stories about Roland, Jesus, “The Anger of Samson,” (the death of) “Moses,” “The Death of the Wolf” – how the French love stories about wolves.  I could not believe how many children’s books there are about wolves, both funny and scary.  The hunter in the poem kills the wolf, but learns that wolves are better than people, or no worse.

Early Hugo has been a surprise and just what I expected.  He was immediately Hugolian, from the poems written when he was 18, hugely skilled, confident or a blowhard depending on one’s taste.  His first few little books, collected in Odes and Ballads (1828), are all political, legitimist, about the great fallen heroes who fought the Revolution.  I certainly learned the word for “executioner,” since it appears in every poem.  This is not the Hugo who is the champion of the powerless.  The primary victim of capital punishment he has in mind is Louis XVI.

Hugo changed quickly.  Maybe the poor are the subjects of the last half of Odes et Ballades.  I only read the first half.  Hugo exhausted me.

I have one complaint, which I can at this point make about Vigny and Hugo: they were not great rhymers.  They use lots of conventional rhymes, and there is clearly no penalty for repeating them in poem after poem – ombre / sombre (shadow / dark) , orage / nuage or orage / ombrage (storm / snow, shady), essor / trésor (flight / treasure) – that last one is the worst, since it is so phony.  The poets of a couple of a generation later wouldn’t allow this.  Paul Verlaine put an end to it.

My shallow French 18th century - You believe me to have more qualities than I do

I’ll race through the 18th century.  I think I have read just one 18th century text in French.  The issues are:

1.  The French classics of the 18th century are not, currently, taught at the collège level.  They are all, for one reason or another, advanced texts, lycée texts.  Thus when my reading was more narrowly limited to collège books, nothing crossed my path, so to speak.  Or nothing should have.

2.  I am reading more freely now, but I tell you nothing from the 18th century has really tempted me yet.  There are certainly some things I have never read and in some sense should, but re-reading, I have not felt the urge.  This is because:

3.  I guess I am not convinced that reading much of this stuff in French will be particularly rewarding.  The translations I have read are likely adequate.  This is “the artless 18th century,” as Nabokov says somewhere (remembering that he had no understanding of music and excepted, I don’t know, Chardin and I am sure also whoever else you are thinking of right now).  It is the Age of Reason, the Age of Clear Prose, more so in France than in England, not the Age of Poetry.

Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, those are the core writers.  The French seem to have narrowed the many hundreds of works of Voltaire down to his satirical contes – Candide, Micromégas (another French giant), Zadig – just like we have in English.  The school editions of Rousseau’s works put him in another category, philosophy (Philo), not literature.  What else.  The Memoirs of Saint-Simon, Manon Lescaut, Les liaisons dangereuses.  This all looks pretty familiar (#2, above).

Less familiar – two playwrights have a much higher status in French than in English: Pierre de Marivaux near the beginning of the century and Pierre Beaumarchais near the end.  Marivaux has never caught on in English, and Beaumarchais is known only as the source of the opera versions of The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro, but not for the plays themselves. Not in France (Beaumarchais is on this year's Bac list). I should read Beaumarchais in French.  That is tempting.

The one 18th century work I have read in French was a Marivaux play, Le Jeu de l'amour et du hasard (1730, The Game of Love and Chance).  What a mistake!  Marivaux’s art is to reduce comedy to its essence, to create as pure a comedy as he can, as free of social context or individual characters as possible.  A handful of characters, all types (the valet in Game is even named Arlequin, so I know right way exactly who he is.  Plus, I had read it in English, so I knew the story.  A young fellow is meeting his fiancée for the first time.  He has his valet pretend to be him (that's the master in the yellow suit on the left, but I assume Arlequin switches into it); he pretends to be his own valet.  Meanwhile, the fiancée has had the exact same idea, so the valet is courting the maid, thinking she is the mistress, while the mistress banters with the master thinking he is the valet.

Fun!  But much less simple than I had thought, and above my reading level, although I shoved my way through it.  A great challenge was the amount of “negative” language in the dialogue, which even now is relatively difficult for me.  This was something of a discovery.  Much banter, in many plays, is constructed in this way, with the characters in some way saying what they will not do, or describing what they are not:

LISETTE (the maid pretending to be her mistress): Vous me croyez plus de qualités que je n’en ai.

ARLEQUIN (valet pretending to be his master): Et vous, Madame, vous ne savez pas les miennes; et je ne devrais vous parler qu’à genoux.

LISETTE: Souvenez-vous qu’on n’est pas les maitres de son sort.  (Act II, Scene 5)

LISETTE: You believe me to have more qualities than I do.

ARLEQUIN: And you, Madame, do not know mine, and I must not speak except on my knees.

LISETTE: Remember that we are not the masters of our fate.

That line is ironic, since it first means that the parents are arranging the marriage, and second that these people are themselves servants.  Maybe Lisette at this point already knows Arlequin is a servant.  I don’t remember.  It is an intricate plot.  What was I thinking.  But it was the negative constructions that really hurt.  Now they are not so bad.  Progress.

That is my shallow French 18th century.  Maybe yours is deeper.

The 17th century French novel – “May God defend all decent people against such a woman as Madame de Lafayette.”

The French 17th century was an age of novels, a heap of novels that nobody reads anymore and one that everyone reads.  “Nobody” and “everyone” are exaggerated, but only for emphasis, not to distort the truth.

The lone survivor is The Princess of Cleves (1678) by Madame de Lafayette, a historical novel set 120 years earlier in the court of Henri II.  The characters are almost all real figures; the surrounding incidents are real; the central romance is a novelistic invention.  Why is this book, preceding Walter Scott by 140 years, not the first historical novel?  Because there was no such thing as a “historical novel” and this book did not invent the category; Scott’s novels did.

Why is this book, among the dead novels of its time, still read?  Because it looks like a novel as we know it.  Characters have depth and the plot turns on a couple of seemingly minor but psychologically true moments.  It is not just a series of adventures tacked together, although there is a dramatic joust at one point.

Why is this novel so important, on the Baccalaureate exam and the French civil service exam?  Why has it become a symbol of Frenchness?  I do not know.  It is a good novel, but its status comes from something else.

Lafayette is herself a figure of high interest, or at least Nancy Mitford’s little biography that introduces her 1951 translation makes her seem so.  That line in my title is from p. xxvii, and the context is Mme de Lafayette’s strongarm tactics to get an heiress to marry her son.  She was ruthless.

The composition of the novel is of interest.  It was collaborative, in some way.  It was, as we would say now, workshopped.  Lafayette ran one of the great salons of her time.  It is where the Duc de la Rochefoucauld brought his maxims to be polished and perfected; they too were workshopped.  Members of the salon worked on not just the story and prose but on the research, supplying historical details of all kinds.  Too bad we don’t know more.

What I think of, perhaps incorrectly, as a more typical novel of the time is a monster like Artamène, or Cyrus the Great (1648-53) by Madeleine de Scudéry, possibly in collaboration with her brother.  Ten volumes; 13,000 pages; over two million words; among the longest novels ever written; likely the longest French novel.

A prince, the son of Cyrus the Great, spends a lot of time wandering the Mediterranean trying to rescue the princess he loves, who is kidnapped three times – only three times, given that page count, but my understanding is that much of the bulk is filled with digressions and inset stories.  A new character appears and recounts all of his many adventures.  The last chunk of the first volume of Don Quixote (1605), where the phony shepherds tell their boring stories, is likely how I should imagine things going, except at much greater length.

My other understanding is that many or most of the characters are clear stand-ins for people in the court and the salons of the time.  The novel was a big hit, but I wonder what that meant.  How many people could possibly be reading it?  How many could afford it?  A thousand, more, less?  No idea.  But one reason a certain crowd was so eager to read each new volume was because they were in it.  The nobility read the novel to read about themselves.  Talk about identifying with a character.

Scudéry followed the success of this colossus with another ten volume novel, Clélie (1654-61), and then several more novels of a mere eight or four volumes.

The Princess of Cleves is only two hundred pages!  No wonder everybody reads nobody reads etc. etc.  Both Artamène and Clélie are in print today, but in drastically condensed four hundred page editions.  Somebody is in some sense reading them.  Graduate students?  The French equivalent of bookish lunatics like me?

The “longest novel” business is so arbitrary.  How big have our long-running detective and fantasy series gotten?  Why don’t they count as one gigantic novel?  The odd thing is I know Madeleine de Scudéry not as a novelist but as a pioneering lady detective, as recounted in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Mademoiselle de Scudéry (1819), where Hoffmann invents the detective story, with numerous elements that later become widespread, yet somehow does not write the first detective story because, see above, there is as yet no such thing.  Literary history works backwards.

Molière and the short French 17th century

I have one point I want to make here about French literature of the 17th century.

Molière and his company played in Paris for only fifteen years, 1658 to 1673, before he died, not onstage but almost, at the age of 51.  Almost all of his surviving comedies were written in Paris.  Some are masterpieces, some are blatant rip-offs of Italian farces; some are prose, some verse.  They form a kind of backbone of the study of literature by French children who start with one of the Italian farces, Les Fourberies de Scapin (1671, Scapin’s Pranks gets the idea across), and move towards the complex verse masterpieces like Tartuffe (1664) and The Misanthrope (1666).

I will testify that this makes a lot of sense.  I have, myself, more or less followed the French youngsters, reading through most of the prose plays.  The verse plays are next.  You do not need much French, a year of college French, to read Les Fourberies de Scapin.  Then you have read – then I had read – Molière in French!  A triumph.

That exact period, when Molière was in Paris, is a miracle in French literature.  It includes the Maxims of La Rochefoucauld (1665), the first half of the Fables of La Fontaine (1668), Pascal’s Pensées (1670), and most of Jean Racine’s plays.  By 1678, just five more years – poor Molière, dead so young – I can add Racine’s Phèdre (1677), Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves (1678), and a couple more books of the Fables.  I can add a lot more than that, but these are just the big ones, the core of the 17th century, heck, of French literature, as it is read and taught now.

Twenty years.  Corneille’s plays precede Molière, and a number of important works, like Perrault’s Contes, are later.  But, I mean, wow, that one amazing stretch, 1659 (when Molière’s Les Précieuses ridicules, his first important play, was produced) to 1678.  It includes so much.

In 1659, Louis XIV was 21.  He and his court were not installed at Versailles.  This is exactly the period when the old hunting lodge was being renovated, and the Versailles as we know it, with its gardens and mirrors, was created.

It was a culturally energetic period.

My impression is that, over a long period, for example the 20th century, there has been a shift in French culture and education and theater performance from Racine to Molière.   Molière seems more alive, not that there are not plenty of performances of Racine and Corneille.  Not that the poor French students do not still have to read Racine.

There were other playwrights of the period, too.  I have seen the names of some of them.  I have no idea what they wrote.  I remember reading that French playwrights commonly stole from the Spanish stage as well as the Italian, but Molière just stole from the Italians, so I don’t know who was pilfering from Lope de Vega.  English playwrights freely looted all of them.

Next I want to write about 17th century French novels, a subject about which I know almost nothing.

Beginning the 17th century at a young age - La Fontaine and Perrault

In practice, for French readers, French literature begins in the 17th century.  Two works, really, that are not exactly children’s books but that are perfectly adaptable for children, the Fables of Jean de La Fontaine (1668-94) and the Contes of Charles Perrault (1697), or Les Contes de ma Mère l'Oye – Stories from My Mother Goose.

Early on, when my French reading level was that of a little child, I went to a Paris bookstore specializing in children’s books, Chantelivre, where I asked for the poetry section.  It was only a shelf or two, even in this store, and it was mostly illustrated selections of La Fontaine’s Fables, dozens of different editions of La Fontaine, a few poems, many poems, simplified poems, the real thing.  Luckily there was also a lonely copy of Les Plus Beaux Poèmes pour les enfants (The Most Beautiful Poems for Children), featuring a surprising number of poems about dead and dying mothers, which is more what I was looking for.  Still, I learned something about the place of the Fables in French culture just by looking at that shelf.

In a sense, we have them in American culture, too, and in a sense not.  The Fables are poetic versions of (mostly) Aesop’s Fables, beginning with “The Grasshopper and the Ant”:

La cigale, ayant chanté
      Tout l'été,
Se trouva fort dépourvue
Quand la bise fut venue:
Pas un seul petit morceau
De mouche ou de vermisseau.

The grasshopper, having sung
       All summer long,
Found himself much deprived
When the North Wind arrived:
Not a lone little bite
Of worm or of fly.

Look at the rhymes and sounds I was able to keep.  But why am I translating this myself, when I have Marianne Moore:

Until fall, a grasshopper
                 Chose to chirr;
With starvation as foe
When northeasters would blow,
And not even a gnat’s residue
Or caterpillar’s to chew…

I had wondered, reading Moore’s 1954 translation of the Fables long ago, how much of what I was reading was La Fontaine, and now that I have read (about half of) La Fontaine in French, I can see that the answer is that Moore includes a lot of herself and a lot of the original.  She keeps form, even line lengths, rhymes, plus the stories and characters and morals, some of which go on longer than the fable itself.

What a perfect match of translator to text.  But how many children find Aesop in Moore’s, or any, poetic form?  You likely remember that a big chunk of La Fontaine is on the reading list for next year’s Bac.  For many students, these will be poems and stories familiar from their earliest experience with books.

We have the Charles Perrault Contes, too, although I believe now we call them Disney stories.  Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard.  No Disney version of that, surely.  Retelling fairy tales was a popular activity in intellectual salons of the time, and I do not believe anyone knows whether the Contes were written for children or for an adult salon audience.  Both, I assume.  They are pretty sophisticated, rhetorically and linguistically, more so than the Grimm Brothers equivalent.   They are longer than the Grimm texts.  They are more composed.  But they lend themselves to simplification and illustration.  They lend themselves to rewriting.  There are a number of later periods in French literary history when writers become excited about the idea of the “conte” as opposed to the modern short story.  It is still a live form.

I had never, myself, read Perrault in English. Just versions of the stories.

Is there an equivalent in English literature, where children encounter the 17th century early on, and keep returning to it, even unto a painful exam to graduate from high school?  Maybe in the days of The Pilgrim’s Progress and Tales from Shakespeare, but that was before my time.  How much youthful Bible reading is of the King James Version?

In France, they start young.

"Of the Bac" by Michel de Montaigne - eight times I have abandoned them

Charles Dantzig, author of the Selfish Dictionary of French Literature, gives the impression that he has read everything, but not quite.  Of Montaigne (Michel de):

It will be for my old age, Montaigne.  Eight times I have decided to read the Essays: all right, this time, the whole thing, all the way to the end!  Eight times I have abandoned them, the longest after two hundred pages.  He does not speak to me much, or I don’t hear him much.  (654)

He dislikes Montaigne’s narcissism, his gossiping, his French.  His French!  But I have only read him in Donald Frame’s English.  No, as with Rabelais and Proust, I have read a few French pages extracted in a school edition of I do not remember what.  Montaigne is too hard.  He is hard enough in English – difficult rhetorically, really, the challenge being to follow the flow of thought and quotation.

They are hard enough that two essays count as a book.  What do I mean by that.  French students take a series of exams to graduate from high school, including a substantial baccalaureate exam, written and oral, on French literature.  I saw them in the library, coming back early from vacation to study for their bac.  The Lyon public library was never more full of high school students than on the last few days of vacation.

This year’s texts were announced in April.  “You can already begin the reading.”  I feel that should have an exclamation point.  It is quite a reading list, although the student is only responsible for one work from each category.  No, you don’t choose; your teacher chooses.  That website will croak, so here is the list:

Poetry of the 19th to the 21st century
Victor Hugo, Les Contemplations, books I to IV
Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil
Guillaume Apollinaire, Alcools

The literature of ideas from the 16th to the 18th century
Montaigne, Essays, “Of Cannibals” and “Of Coaches,” in modern French translation
Jean de la Fontaine, Fables (books VII to XI)
Montesquieu, Persian Letters

The novel and the story from the Middle Ages to the 21st century
Madame de Lafayette, The Princess of Clèves
Stendhal, The Red and Black
Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

The theater from the 17th to the 21st century
Jean Racine, Phèdre
Beaumarchais, The Marriage of Figaro
Samuel Beckett, Happy Days

Pretty good list, right?  If you are reading for fun, not for a test.  I have read two from each category.  Three works from the 17th century, two from the 18th, three from the 19th, three from the 20th – no idea why the headers say “21st” – and just one from the 16th, and that’s just two essays, 23 pages in Frame’s edition, big pages, admittedly.  There are suddenly a half-dozen school editions with just these two essays and another hundred pages or more of supplementary material.  Context, ideas, additional texts, relevant artwork.  “The important words,” writing exercises, analysis of grammar.  I am looking at the table of contents of this French edition.  Even for me, this is kinda painful.

Honestly, I like Montaigne plenty, but I hope my teacher picks Jean de la Fontaine.

Poetry, theater: French literature Petrarchizes - However well one may be educated / In Greek and Latin subtleties

More from the difficult French 16th century. I won’t get to Montaigne.

3.  French classical theater, this is just what I mean when I say that 16th century French literature is in some sense too hard.  French writers were absorbing and transforming a flood of new classical texts coming to France from Italy, plus what had already been a century or two of Italian responses to those discoveries.  With the plays of Seneca as the crucial example, a new kind of French theater came into being.

The English history is a little bit later, but parallel.  In England, though, the academic theater quickly turned into a chaotic popular theater, while in France it became more of a purely courtly form.  More intellectual, specialized, and boring.

Shakespeare, or Kyd, or whoever, read Seneca and thought “Ghosts and murders!”; French writers apparently thought “Sententiae!”  The two plays I have read (in English) are not dramatic.  They are both by Robert Garnier, the most important French playwright of the century, although by no means the earliest.  I wrote about Les Juifves (The Hebrew Women, 1583) a few years ago, and have also read Marc-Antoine (1578), a tragedy about Anthony and Cleopatra, in Mary Sidney’s 1592 version.  These are plays where characters barely interact.  Anthony declaims a monologue and leaves the stage; Cleopatra ditto and ditto; Anthony returns etc.  The two characters do get to talk to each other at the very end of the play.

Sidney’s poetry is exquisite, and I assume Garnier’s is comparable, but you can’t give this stuff to high school kids, even French ones.  They are punished enough with Corneille and Racine.  The 16th century French theater is for graduate students.  I guess English is not so different – who outside of graduate school reads Gorbuduc (1561)?  Still, Garnier is contemporary with Marlowe and The Spanish Tragedy – dramatic plays.

4.  French poets are working on the same project, pulling the Italian Renaissance into French.  The parallel with English poetry is close.  The equivalent of Sir Thomas Wyatt, the first poet to bring Petrarch into the language, is Clément Marot, who I have not read.  The most important is Pierre de Ronsard, who is lying when he writes that his suffering is so powerful that he does not know how to express it, either “Tant lamenter, ne tant Petrarquiser” (Des Amours, sonnet 129) – “as lamenting, nor as Petrarchizing.”  This man knew how to Petrarchize.  He was the greatest of Petrarchizers.

One result, just like in English, was ingenious but esoteric demonstrations of poetic learning like the Délie of Maurice Scève, which I read some portion of in Richard Sieburth’s translation.  The reader is assumed to know his Petrarch, his Horace, and his Horace-via-Petrarch inside out, while also interpreting riddle-like emblems and so on.  Advanced intellectual pleasure.

By contrast there are The Regrets (1558) of Joachim du Bellay, expat poetry.  Du Bellay worked in Rome and missed France.  He wrote a 191-poem sonnet sequence on that subject, mostly in some way about life in Rome, although he makes it home at the end.  The poems are full of personality, and are almost conversational, a good trick in a sonnet.  Ronsard is a genius, but is always performing, however beautifully.  Du Bellay – well, he is performing, too, but he tricks me into intimacy.

However well one may be educated
In Greek and Latin subtleties, I think
The effect of this place is to teach something
One didn’t know before one came this way.
Not that one finds here better libraries
Than any that the French have put together,
But that the atmosphere, perhaps the weather,
Spirit away our less ethereal faculties.
Some demon or other, with his sacred fire,
Purifies even the worst of us, tempers and refines
Till our judgment is too wary to be misled.
But if one stays here too long, all one’s strength of mind
Goes up in smoke, and leaves nothing behind,
Or so little that one loses the thread.  (Sonnet 72 in C. H. Sisson)

It’s complex, but not because it is learned.  We are lucky to have C. H. Sisson’s 1984 translation of (most of) Les Regrets.  An all-time great translation, partly accomplished by a subtle mastery of slant rhymes.

Someday I should read the entire sequence in French.  I should read an entire book by Ronsard, too, Les Amours (1552) or something.  Long ago, I scoured the versions of Ronsard in English; they range from functional (the Penguin Classics edition, clearly meant for French students) to hilariously bad (there is one from the 1960s in free verse with “erotic” drawings by the author).  So without French, du Bellay yes, Ronsard no.

The great feminist rediscovery of the period is Louise Labé.  French critics spent the 1990s debating whether she existed, or was really a persona of Scève.  That’s some feminism!  Anyway, the consensus, now, is that she existed.  I should read her, too.  When you go to see Rabelais’s hospital in Lyon, look for the plaque identifying Labé’s childhood home, which is just across a little restaurant-packed plaza.

French literature from the beginning - let's get back to our sheep!

The foundation of French literature, as with English literature, lies in the 16th and 17th centuries.  French literature is perhaps even more narrow.  There is a twenty year period in the 17th century – well, I will return to that.

The origins of vernacular French literature go back to the 11th century, with some saint’s lives about which I know little and heroic epics like The Song of Roland and many other chansons de geste.  I say that as if I have the slightest idea what is in any of the chansons de geste besides Roland.  I do not.

The great, still entertaining, Arthurian poems of Chrétien de Troyes are from the late 12th century.

All of this is in Old French and, as I understand it,  is more or less unreadable for most French readers.  Looking at the text of La Chanson de Roland, I would say that Old French is nowhere as far from modern French as Old English is from modern English, but it is not nearly as close as Chaucer’s Middle English is to my English.  Somewhere in between.  Maybe like the Middle English of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  I can read Chaucer, but I can’t read that.

French readers, and certainly French students, read these works in modern prose translations.  The prose versions of the medievalist Joseph Bédier, for example Le Roman de Tristan et Iseut (1900), have become classics in their own right.  I should read that someday.

I have no idea what French schools do with medieval not-quite-French literature, like the poems of courtly love cooked up by the Occitan troubadours, the poems that would migrate into Italy and eventually return to France in the 16th century.

I also have little idea when French literature becomes modern, becomes reasonably readable.  Differences of spelling aside, are writers of the early 15th century like Christine de Pisan and Froissart accessible?  They must be.  I am examining Villon’s Testament (1461), the or anyways a French text, in Galway Kinnell’s The Poems of François Villon (1965), a masterpiece of translation, and it looks readable, goosed by Kinnell’s version, certainly:

Icy se clost le testament
Et finist du pauvre Villon
Venez a son enterrement
Quant vous orrez le carillon
Vestus rouge com vermillon
Car en amours mourut martir
Ce jura il sur son couillon
Quant de ce monde voult partir.  (ll. 1996-2003, p. 152)

Heck, it’s spelled all screwy but it’s practically English.  This is Kinnell:

Here ends and finishes
The testament of poor Villon
Come to his burial
When you hear the bell ringing
Dressed in red vermillion
For he dies a martyr to love
This he swore on his testicle
As he made his way out of this world.

Yes, that’s Villon.  Half of what I am doing here is thinking about what I should read in French, what I can read.  I should read Villon’s Testament; with Kinnell’s help, I can.

Myself, I have read exactly one pre-17th century French book, The Farce of Monsieur Pathelin (1457), an anonymous popular play.  The title character is a con man and a lawyer.  I am currently reading Johannes Fried’s The Middle Ages (2009, tr. Peter Lewis), an intellectual history of the thousand-year period named in the title.  One long chapter is on “The Triumph of Jurisprudence,” about the 13th century innovation of law and lawyers that began in the papal and imperial courts and spread everywhere.  A couple of hundred years later, the lawyers have diffused among the peasantry and there are hit comedies making fun of them.

The play climaxes with a scene where the lawyer represents a shepherd in court.  Their strategy is to pretend that the shepherd has gone nuts and thinks he is a sheep, so that he responds to every question with bleating.  In good hands, this scene must be a scream.  The play is performed to this day, and this scene is the reason.  It contains one line that has become a commonplace: “Revenons à nos moutons [Let’s get back to our sheep],” which I am pretty sure I myself heard in an ordinary conversation, although with my comprehension, who knows.

All right, on to the 16th century.