The artificers give the last nudge - Jules Laforgue's pubescent princess and Taciturn Monster

Jules Laforgue’s story “Perseus and Andromeda, or the Happiest of the Three” (1887) was the highlight of French Decadent Tales.  Laforgue, you will remember, was the inventor of vers libre among other poetic distinctions.  I had not even know that he wrote any fiction.

The story is a retelling of the Greek myth in the title, but now from the point of view of Andromeda, trapped on an island by a monster, waiting to be rescued by a hero.  The tone is light, sweet, and melancholy, worthy of a poet who wrote an entire book of poems about clowns on the moon.  It has the sort of reversed plot that is now common in fantasy stories, with the focus turned away from the usual hero, giving the heroine and even the monster their say.

‘Monster!’

‘Poppet?...’

‘Hey! Monster!...’

‘Poppet?...’

‘What are you doing now?’

The Dragon-Monster, squatting at the entrance to his cave, turns round, and in turning all the rich, sub-aquatic, jewelled impasto along his spine shines out, and with compassion he raised his multi-coloured cartilaginously fingered eyelashes, to reveal two large, watery-glaucous orbs, and says (in the voice of a distinguished gentleman who has fallen on hard times):

‘As you can see, Poppet, I am breaking and polishing stones for your train; further flights of birds are forecast before sunset.’  (174, ellipses in original)

A little too much on the cutesy side, maybe, but the crash of tones is what turns a story of heroism into a tragedy – a tragedy for the wide-eyed monster, a victim of fate, or perhaps fatalism.

Let’s look at the hero:

Perseus rides side-saddle, his feet crossed coquettishly in their yellow linen sandals; from the pommel of his saddle hangs a mirror; he is beardless, and his pink and shining mouth might be described as an open pomegranate, the hollow of his chest is lacquered with a rose and his arms are tattooed with a heart pierced by an arrow; a lily adorns the swell of his calves and he sports an emerald monocle and several rings and bracelets; from his gilded cross-belt hangs a little sword with a mother-of-pearl dagger.  (185)

What a dreamboat!  Perfect for the pubescent princess heroine, herself wearing nothing but “espadrilles of lichen” and a “necklace of wild coral attached by a twist of seaweed round her neck,” yet in the end he is more interested in his mirror, and he also turns out to be a bit handsy, and maybe Andromeda really loved the monster all along.  How sad that he is dead.

Along the way, the princess recites Schopenhauer, a poem from his book The Truth about Everything,  and there is a sunset that Laforgue presents in vers libre.

The Star!...

Over there, on the dazzling horizon where the mermaids hold their breath.

The sunset sends up its scaffolding;

From footlight to footlight the theatre stalls rise up;

The artificers give the last nudge;

A series of golden moons blossom out, like the embouchures of cornets from where phalanxes of heralds would thunder out!  (183)

Etc.  Sexual awakening, love, beauty, music, the sky.

‘Fabulous, fabulous!’ gushes the Taciturn Monster in ecstasy; his huge watery eyeballs still lit up by the last streaks in the west.

Other than the invocation of Schopenhauer, I am not sure how this wispy thing is so Decadent.  As if I cared.  Unique.

The whole Baudelairean aesthetic is brought to life again - some French Decadent Tales

Now I’ll write a post or two about a collection of stories titled French Decadent Tales that came out last year as an Oxford World’s Classic.  It is a gift from translator and editor Stephen Romer to curious readers like me, since it is full of samples of many writers whose names I have tripped across but never read: Léon Bloy, Octave Mirbeau, Remy de Gourmont, writers like that, all active in the last third or so of the 19th century, a few slipping into the 20th.

What does decadence involve?  Some combination of weirdness, Schopenhauer , repellent attitudes towards women, mental illness, attention to prose style, prostitutes, artists, over-aestheticized attitudes, and some move towards the destruction of human values – unpunished murders, that kind of thing.  No single story has all of these features, thank goodness.  Perhaps I most strongly identify Decadence with outrageous or at least anti-conventional sexual behavior.  There is plenty of that.  Two stories featuring Don Juan, for example.  As Jean Lorrain writes in “The Man with the Bracelet”: “[T]he whole Baudelairean aesthetic is brought to life again” (141).

Two points to a collection like this.

The lesser point is the one mentioned above, to allow the curious but non-specialist reader like me to quickly encounter a bunch of third-rank writers of period pieces, for context or to see how once-shocking ideas quickly turn into clichés or if nothing else to now have something to associate with Catulle Mendès when I come across his name, which has happened frequently.

Many of the stories in French Decadent Tales are period pieces, meaning interesting and useful examples of the kind of thing writers were doing in Paris in the late 19th century, which in turn helps me understand greater works of art, novels by Zola or paintings by Degas.  In this sense the collection is a huge success.

The primary purpose is to direct my attention not to useful and interesting art and artists, but to unusually good ones.  The book works here, too.  The most famous writer in the book is Guy de Maupassant, who is treated well, with three stories that emphasize his Weirdness, along the lines of “La Horla,” rather than his snickering smuttiness.  His snickering story about Schopenhauer disciples is also included.

But I knew about Maupassant.  Who else was especially good?  The best thing in the book is a longish – 19 pages, where most stories are five or six – fantasy by Jules Laforgue, who I had only known as one of France’s great poets.  Original and exquisite.  The five miniatures by Marcel Schwob are easily in a different category than most of the writers.  Better prose, more concentrated ideas, more frightening conceits.  Then there are the three stories by Jean Richepin, among the more obscure writers included, who is light and satirical but frightening in his own way.  Many of the Decadents are just goofing around, churning out the magazine fiction of their time.  Richepin, and Schwob, too, in their own ways take the Decadents' ideas seriously, and thus are harder to brush aside.

I got a lot of good out of 200 pages and 36 stories, enough to hold me for a couple of blog posts.  That Laforgue story, definitely.  Romer’s introductory essay is so good that the book might be of interest to some readers who could track these stories down in French.  I have borrowed and will borrow from it liberally.

De Waal looks at art - a long-lasting, covert way of staking a claim for who you are

Edmund de Waal is a potter, so sensitive to the fell of objects, to their place in a room, to their use.  The little Japanese sculptures that give The Hare with Amber Eyes are purchased by a one of the great French collectors of Impressionist paintings.  The netsuke sit in a glass case along with

Two fans by Pissarro, solidly constructed of painstaking small strokes.  The Sisleys, the Seine and the telegraph wires and the sky in springtime,  The barge near Paris, with that loafer in the lanes.  And Monet’s flowering apple trees scaling a hill.  And Renoir’s dishevelled little savage…*  (67)

And a Morisot, and “another Morisot,” and “the other Renoirs,” and Cassatt, Degas, and later more of everything, including a Monet and, surprisingly, a pair of Gustave Moreaus, mythological scenes – Jason and Medea – done in gold and gauze, perhaps out of place among the Sisleys:

I realise that I am trying to police Charles’s taste.  I am worried by gold and by Moreau.

The Moreaus actually made me warm to Ephrussi, and they eventually work on de Waal, too. 

Charles buys what he likes.  He is not buying art for the sake of coherence, or to fill gaps in his collection.  (87)

So, also, somewhere among these paintings in Ephrussi’s study is a first-rate collection of Japanese lacquer boxes, a yellow armchair, and the netsuke in their vitrine, the case an object almost as interesting to the potter as the sculptures:

This is what I realize now I failed to understand about vitrines.  I spent the first twenty years of my life as a potter earnestly trying to get objects out of the glass cases in which my pots were often placed in galleries and museums.  They die, I’d say, behind glass, held in that airlock…

But the vitrine – as opposed to the museum’s case – is for opening.  And that opening glass door and the moment of looking, then choosing, and then reaching in and then picking up is a moment of seduction, an encounter between a hand and an object that is electric.  (66)

Incidentally, de Waal’s book must set some sort of record for the use of the word “vitrine.”

De Waal is foreshadowing the netsukes’ eventual move to Vienna as a wedding gift, where they find themselves in, if possible, more rarefied surroundings, making them a problem to be solved (brilliantly, it turns out, by the new bride).  The objects are no longer handled by Charles’s artist friends but by the Ephrussi children who are allowed to play with them and arrange them while mama dresses.  This kind of handling is also foreshadowing.  It turns out actual life uses foreshadowing and other literary devices.

Charles Ephrussi’s Paris mansion is gone, but in Vienna, de Waal is able to tour the palace, to figure out the layout and distribute the furniture and art. Then the people – how do they use it? 

All I can see is marble: there is lots of marble.  This doesn’t say enough.  Everything is marble…  Everything in this place, I realise, is very shiny…  This is aggressively golden, aggressively lacking in purchase.  What was Ignace trying to do?  Smother his critics?  (124-5)

But then de Waal discovers, in the ballroom, ceiling paintings from the Book of Esther, “the only Jewish painting on the whole of the Ringstrasse,” “a long-lasting, covert way of staking a claim for who you are,” and he finds his way into this house and this family, his family.

*  This passage is not written by de Waal but is from a letter by Jules Laforgue, who for a time worked as Ephrussi’s enthusiastic assistant.  Jules Laforgue, one of the great French poets, inventor of vers libre, that Laforgue, yes.

Oh! At least, take care of yourself, I implore you! - singing and translating Jules Laforgue

Much of the fun of writing about Jules Laforgue’s Derniers Vers just comes from leafing through the book, chancing upon fine, or peculiar, phrases and images.  The text itself is not even thirty pages, but each page has its flavor.  So one more day of indulgence.

The poems in Last Verses are among the founding texts of vers libre.  That is vague and passive enough, isn’t it, “are among”?  Like I know the history of free verse.  The rules of classical French prosody are, as I understand them, strict and peculiar, but the authority of the rules had been eroding for decades by the time Laforgue was writing, since the Romantic poetry of the 1820s, at least, and I do not know exactly which strictures Baudelaire and Rimbaud had left intact for Laforgue to violate.

Where I am going is:  what a surprise how often Laforgue rhymes and uses more or less standard, musical lyric forms.  He sounds like Walt Whitman in patches, but more often sounds like this (“VII.  Honeymoon Solo”):

Où est-elle à cette heure?  (Where is she now?)
Peut-être qu’elle pleure….  (Maybe she’s crying…)
Où est-elle à cette heure?  (Where is she now?)
Oh! Du moins, soigne-toi, je t’en conjure!  (Baby, take care!)

The long last line is sufficient to show that Laforgue’s form is loose, but not only are the rhymes clear enough, the internal music of “Du moins, soigne-toi” is spectacular.  The music of the entire stanza is pleasing.

An interruption:  however much I enjoyed Donald Revell’s English, I most strongly recommend his book, and Laforgue more generally, and 19th century French verse even more generally, to anyone with any French at all, even French as sparse and bad as mine.

Even someone with no French at all might well guess that whatever the last line might mean it does not translate as the not-particularly-musical “Baby, take care!”  No.  A nearly identical line, without the “Du moins,” appears later in the poem; Revell translates it as “Honey, take care of yourself, I’m begging you,” which is close.

I picked this stanza not just because I enjoy singing it, but because that last line demonstrates Revell’s method.  He is not trying to recreate the French but rather to move the book into a current American poetic idiom, as if it were 1990, the poem is not a translation, and Laforgue is familiar with Robert Creeley and John Ashbery.  The translation is the poem Laforgue would have written if all of the above were true.  Prof. Mayhew just posted a couple of paragraphs describing translation “as the place where two poetic traditions meet up.”  Revell is following Mayhew’s principles.

So Revell uses Laforgue’s slangy “Oh!” as license to be slangy himself.  “Baby” and “honey” are not from Laforgue’s French, but Revell finds them hidden behind the second-person pronouns and the “Oh!”  And these are hardly the largest liberties of the translator.

In the best of all possible worlds, I would like collections of translated poems to have the French on one page,  a pedantically footnoted, awkwardly literal English in the middle, and the translator’s best attempt at a good English poem on the right.  The world as it exists is not so bad, though.  Two out of three.

A sweetness that makes you wonder: “When did all this actually happen?” - strange Jules Laforgue

I have concluded that much of my difficulty writing about Jules Laforgue’s Last Verses is that I have trouble sticking with a single text, the French or Donald Revell’s English.  Both are interesting.  The French is more interesting.  Perhaps tomorrow I will malign and praise the translation, but today I will use this throat-clearing preface as an anchor to the English.  Let’s look at the strangeness of Laforgue.  Revell does a great job with that.

The November weather runs through the twelve poems of Derniers Vers (“Pitch-black northern gale and howling downpour”), and so does the November hunt.  The beloved woman is compared to a hunted animal, for example, and not without sympathy (“Poor cornered animal heart, look out!”).  That idea is clear enough.  More perplexing is the recurrence of the sound of the hunt, “The Mystery of the Three Horns,” as the title of the second poem has it.

Out of the plain a horn
Blows insanely
While deep in the woods
Another replies;
The first sings yoo-hoo
To neighboring treetops,
And the second, whoo-hoo
To the echoing hills.

The “dying sun” returns from the first poem.  While before the sunset was an unconscious drunk, now it strips off its “papal garments” (“pontifical étole”) and releases “bloody sewage” into the town, a metaphor for the sunset’s red slanting light even more hideous than the drunk’s drool.  This sunset may well be the same drunk, since “Unscrupulous bootleggers” have released “Asian vitriol” into the flood, a “deluge of Chinese New Year fireworks and booze!”

The three hunters, the horn-blowers, emerge from the woods and decide to “Grab a drink \  Before we go home,” but to what effect?

Poor old horns!
So much bitterness, even in their laughter!
(I can still hear them laughing.)

Next day, the barmaid from the Grand Saint-Hubert
Found the three of them stone dead.

The cops and the coroner
Were called in,

And in due course they wrote a report
Of this most depraved of mysteries.

Despite their death, the sound of the horns can occasionally be heard in later poems.

Laforgue is mythologizing the love story at the heart of the book.  Two people meet, have a fling, fall apart.  Who cares?  The poem creates significance, or so the poet hopes.

Oh, I see… it isn’t autumn anymore,
It isn’t exile.
It’s the sweetness of legends, of the Golden Age,
Of Antigones,
A sweetness that makes you wonder:
“When did all this actually happen?”

This poem (“VIII. Legend”) also ends with a sunset, one that is “faithful to the West” just as “I was faithful to her in absolute hyperbole.”

The importance of Laforgue’s book has little to do with any of this, even with the imagery, but rather with the form, the freedom with which Laforgue breaks the rules of French prosody.  More surprising to me is how often, in one of the first books of vers libre, Laforgue follows the old rules, giving the violations their piquancy, but that is a separate topic.  Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot now had the form they needed, so they could shake out Laforgue’s contents and stuff in their own hobbyhorses and images.  Such is the nature of progress.

And as for you, last of the poets, \ Get out a little. You look terrible. - Jules Laforgue's Last Verses

A couple of years ago I read parts of Jules Laforgue’s The Imitation of Our Lady the Moon, an 1886 collection of poems about clowns who live on the moon, as well as the rest of the old Selected Writings of Jules Laforgue.  That book is a treasure, but I do remember being a bit puzzled by the claim that Laforgue was the inventor of vers libre and central influence on Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.  I suspect that the variety of Laforgue’s writing, and the oddity of those moon clowns, blurred my focus.  A new book makes it all clear.

Derniers Vers (1890) is a posthumous collection – poor Laforgue died when he was twenty-seven – of twelve poems.  They may or may not be designed as a unit, although they feel like they are.  The poet, depressed by the oncoming winter, reflects on a love affair gone wrong; that, perhaps, is the story.  Or the November of the last poem could be a year, or many years, after the autumn of the first poems.  Within the sequence, though, the voice is indeterminate and likely moves among different characters or positions.

We begin in the rain, thinking of “The Winter Ahead:”

It’s drizzling;
In the sodden forest, spiderwebs
Bend under plops of raindrops, and that’s the end of them [et c’est leur ruine]…
Tonight the dying sun sprawls on a hilltop,
Turns onto his side, in the heather, in his overcoat.
A sun as white as barfly’s phlegm
On a litter of yellow heather,
Yellow autumn heather.

All of this is more or less literally translated by Donald Revell in Last Verses (2011).  On the one hand, the poet’s attitude is almost unbearably Romantic, abandoning himself to the pathetic fallacy, using the rain to reinforce his dismal mood, although what real Romantic would compare the setting sun to a disgusting drunk?

Even the blaring hunting horns do not move the sun:
He just lies there, like a gland torn out of somebody’s throat,
Shivering, utterly alone.

The poetic poet reasserts himself, though, with that final repetition, unfortunately much less song-like in English than French:

Sur une litière de jaunes genets
De jaunes genets d’automne.

I chose this passage because it has so many of the typical features of these poems, the mix of Romantic and anti-Romantic imagery, and the range of tone, from elevated to colloquial, even coarse.  A couple of poems later (“III. Sundays”), the love interest has been introduced, which hardly improves matters.  The poem ends with the poet trying to shore up his own confidence:

And as for you, last of the poets,
Get out a little.  You look terrible.
It’s a nice enough day.  People are out and about.
Take a walk to the drugstore.
Fix yourself up.

I fear this advice should also be directed at me, the last of the critics; my excuse is that it only amounts to thirty pages of text, the book is confoundingly complex.  I will try again tomorrow.  Perhaps this reviewer at Three Percent got it right.

The moon-clowns of Jules Laforgue

No one is more frequently mentioned in discussions of modern poetry than Jules Laforgue...

So says William Jay Smith at the very beginning of his Selected Writings of Jules Laforgue, Greenwood Press, 1956.  What a wonderful absurdity.  Readers more knowledgeable about discussions of modern poetry circa 1956 will please let me know which one of us is wrong.  Either way, I will mention him now.

The Imitation of Our Lady the Moon (1886) is a book of poems about clowns who live on the moon.  What?  You heard me.  "Tattooed upon their pure white hearts \ Are the maxims of the Moon."  They wear black silk skullcaps and use dandelions as boutonieres.

They feed on little but thin air,
On vegetables also at times,
Rice that is whiter than their costume,
Mandarins, and hard-boiled eggs.

Laforgue describes the moon-clowns, follows them around, eavesdrops on them.  They seem to have romantic problems.  They hope, as one might expect, to transcend lunar existence and become myth.

Let's see.  Those were the moon clowns.  What else do we have?

Laforgue rewrote Hamlet, so that the Prince, upon writing his revenge tragedy, becomes bit by the bug of authorship and runs off with the theater troupe.  Hilarious, although not the whole story.

He was a deft art critic.  Laforgue's articles about Impressionist painters feel entirely up to date.  I have seen Laforgue described as an "Impressionist poet," which means that he composed his poems in the open air with newly invented oil paints, and tried to precisely capture fleeting instances of light and life.  No, that's not at all what he did, so I have no idea what "Impressionist poet" means.

Poor guy died when he was twenty-seven, of tuberculosis, a couple of years after The Imitation of Our Lady the Moon.  He'd just married an English girl he had met in Berlin.  She sounds nice.  She died a year later.  It's all so, so sad.

It comes with the force of a body blow
That the Moon is a place one cannot go.
...
Descend and bathe my sheet tonight
So I may wash my hands of life!