As though they had befallen some other person - E.T.A. Hoffmann's double-novel The Devil's Elixir

German Literature Month, via Lizzy’s Literary Life and Beauty Is a Sleeping Cat, plus a bicentennial anniversary means that I read The Devil’s Elixir by E. T. A. Hoffmann, the first of his two novels.   Maybe it is just two hundred years since the publication of Part I of the novel, with the entire thing only published in 1816.  Close enough.

An insane monk decides he will either be Saint Anthony or a murderous villain.  He is pursued by a mysterious double who is also a villain, or perhaps a supernatural force, or possibly a close relation, or possibly the monk himself.  They both lust after a beautiful woman who is – I have misplaced my family tree – the cousin of both?  She may also be a saint.

A cursed bottle of wine, one of the temptations of Saint Anthony, may be the cause of some of this confusion, but as usual in Hoffmann strong drink, even when it is evil, only removes inhibitions.  Hoffmann was an innovative psychologist.  Sigmund Freud was his greatest disciple.

This line describes the general scheme of the book:

Such were my thoughts whenever my dreams brought back to me the events in the palace, as though they had befallen some other person; and this other person was the Capuchin again, not I.  (95)

The joke behind this, again, is that the narrator here is a Capuchin monk, and the person he describes as “the Capuchin” is his double who is not a monk but who is wandering around in the narrator’s discarded habit.  Probably.  Unless the monk who narrates is actually the other monk, who then would be - . Anyway, radically dissociative personality, that is one of the conditions explored by Hoffmann.

Similarly:

Feeling turned to thought, but my character seemed split into a thousand parts; each part was independent and had its own consciousness, and in vain did the head command the limbs, which, like faithless vassals, would not obey its authority.  The thoughts in these separate parts now started to revolve like points of light, faster and faster, forming a fiery circle which became smaller as the speed increased, until it finally appeared like a stationary ball of fire, its burning rays shining from the flickering flames.  “Those are my limbs dancing; I am waking up.”  (229)

This just under the chapter heading “Atonement.”  Hoffmann is not a first-rate prose writer, but he excelled at embedding passages of great strangeness amidst his more ordinary stuff.  The pattern is to start flat and add ripples of weirdness, then waves, then hurricanes.  The Devil’s Elixir is a joyfully disorienting novel.

Anyone who has read Matthew Lewis’s 1796 kitsch Gothic novel The Monk will find all sorts of suspicious similarities, especially in this passage (this is the female saint writing, not the murderous monk-saint):

In my brother’s room I once saw a new book lying on the table, and opened it.  It was a novel called The Monk, translated from the English.  A shudder went through me at the thought that my unknown lover was a monk; never had I suspected that it could be sinful to love a priest.  I felt that the book might help me in my perplexity, and taking it up, I began to read.  (218)

Any character who gets her moral education from The Monk is on the naïve side and is going to run into trouble.

I read the 1963 Ronald Taylor translation, which briefly returned to print as a Oneworld Classic.  It is the only modern and only complete translation.  The 1824 version, which is the free one, is abridged.  Too scary, I guess.

Blind man who thinks \ He reads, fool who thinks he knows! - Victor Hugo's God

And the luminosity said: silence!  Blind man who thinks
He reads, fool who thinks he knows!  I tell you:
For all eternity does the wondrous emerge from the mysterious!  (God, The Ocean of the Heights, IX, ll. 314-6, p. 133)

The End of Satan (1886) has the advantage of familiar stories.  Hugo makes them less familiar, sometimes, but I have a baseline.  I know where the story has to go, whatever ornamentation Hugo piles on.

But Dieu (1891), God, Hugo’s other big posthumous semi-unfinished epic, it’s a tough one.  More philosophical.  More abstract.  It is a series of encounters between a Hugoish narrator, who has become a winged ghost (“because Man becomes wingèd when he muses”), flying upward in a kind of inverted abyss, and a variety of voices and semi-allegorical figures, most of them also winged figures, who deliver a monologue full of anti-wisdom, a perspective to be rejected.  I think.  For example, The Bat, which is atheism (Hugo says so), who declaims:

And all of Creation, with Man,
With what the eye sees and what the voice names,
Its worlds, its suns, its rare currents,
Its dazzling, streaking, mead meteors,
With its golden globes like great domes,
With its eternal passage of phantoms, waters,
Swarms, birds, the lily that we believe blessed,
Is only a vomiting of darkness into the Infinite!  (The Ocean of the Heights, I – The Bat, ll. 92-9, p. 91)

A hundred and thirty lines of this black spew, in the original in rhyming couplets.  Thank goodness the translator, R. G. Skinner, did not try to reproduce the rhyming couplets.  They don’t sound ridiculous in French, but in English ruin the poem.

However, the translator does omit most of the animals, so I have no idea what the owl or eagle are supposed to represent.  The griffin, included is Christianity, progress, human thought moving in the right direction, but still, to Hugo a now unnecessary mediation between himself and a direct encounter with God.  I guess.

Oh wait, I see that the eagle is Judaism.  “You hail from Sinai, but I come from Golgotha,” says the griffin to the eagle.

It is all a bit like a compressed, misty Divine Comedy, with the spirit ascending towards a direct encounter with God, and thus with death.  As programmatic as the scheme of the poem is, even in this abridgment, the end, what I take as Hugo’s death, or his preparation for his death, has power.

Listen – Up to now you have seen only dreams,
Only vague glimmers floating on falsehoods,
Merely the muddled appearances which pass in the winds
Or tremble in the night for you living creatures. (Epilogue, ll. 1-4, p. 135)

Hugo demands his encounter with God, knowing that it means death – “Yes! – I shouted. / And I felt that creation trembled like a fabric.” 

Specter, you misled me, I still know nothing.

     (God is infinite.  He keeps withdrawing perpetually –
         No transformation of life ever reaches
            him. – One only advances into the
            light.)   (Epilogue, p. 137)

Some kind of gnosticism is where Hugo is going.  I don’t know why I am worrying about the poem’s ideas, rarely a great strength with Hugo, rather than the imagery to be found within the monologues of the bat and griffin and so on.  I suppose because I understand the poem so poorly that I have to work on the structure first, just to see what it is.  The quotation up top, that is pretty funny.

Hugo plunges into chaos and writes in the margins of the abyss - the end of The End of Satan and also the middle

Victor Hugo, in The End of Satan (1886), is describing the Gospels and their authors (“four simple men”):

This story seems added by them to God,
As if they wrote on the margins of the abyss;
Their entire book resembles a shaft of light from a summit;
Each page thrills there under the sacred shudder;
And that is why the earth said: I shall read it!  (The Gibbet, Jesus Christ, VI – After Passover, ll. 200-5, p. 261)

A big part of the translation covers Christ’s death and resurrection.  This passage is a perfect Hugolian blend of devout Christianity and outright heresy.  It also serves as a good self-description.  Then a bit more modestly, a good description of creativity, of art.  Written on the margins of the abyss – a rich metaphor.

The section with the crucifixion is titled “Le Gibet,” “The Gibbet,” for didactic reasons.  Hugo is continuing his lifelong argument against capital punishment.  Christ as Everyprisoner.  His death is shocking; the world takes on a Gothic tinge:

Tombs, suddenly opened wide,
Revealed their caverns where the moles dug up
Fragments of skeletons lying in shrouds;
The ghastly dead, having emerged from their graves,
Were seen by several of those who dwelled in the city.”  (The Gibbet, The Crucifix, ll. 105-9, p. 293)

Those skeletons return after a lecture on the death penalty, now prisoners – former prisoners, I guess – in the Bastille. 

… it is here that men’s steps tremble,
Here that their dark hair turns white.  (The Prison, The Skeletons, ll. 29-30, p. 395)

What is really curious is that the skeletons are a digression in the middle of a long Browning-like monologue by Satan in which he is a prisoner in a dungeon, or thinks of himself as such.  If he is a prisoner, he is owed a great deal of sympathy, and the monologue is a brilliant mix of sincere yearning and ironic self-pity (a Browning specialty).

I love him! – Night, sepulchral cell, living death,
Darkness that my sombrous sob frightens, [Skinner is squeezing in the word “ombre”]
Solitudes of evil where flees the great punished one,
Measureless glaciers of infinite winter,
O torrents of dark chaos which saw me banished,
Despair whose cowardly peal of laughter I hear,
Void where Being, Time, Place, vanish,
Deep chasms, hells, abysses!  I love God.
I love him.  That is all.  (Beyond the Earth III, Satan in the Night, I, ll. 1-9, p. 309)

But Satan can hardly remain in that last state.  He cycles through every injury done to him, vowing revenge, before collapsing back into the condition we see here.  Hugo’s vision of hell, of Satan’s punishment, is an endless loop of self-inflicted anger and despair.  But the poem ends, or almost ends, with a section titled “Satan Forgiven,” in which God, or Hugo, calls on him to “arise out of the darkness with the dawn on your brow” – “you need only say: I shall live!” (p. 409)

Hugo does not give Satan’s answer.  Perhaps God’s offer is another part of the endless cycle.  Instead, Hugo presents a vision of his death, of his own afterlife, in which he joins “[t]he plungers into chaos, the sounders of disaster,” like Moses, Michelangelo, and Shakespeare, “[a]ll the other shepherds of somber humanities,” who gather to “burst forth their thoughts which become / Stars.”

These comets are those we sometimes see passing
Though the heavens with an immense brilliance,
Stretching across the silent aether,
Formidable, amidst the eternal shadow,
Tongues of fire from off their crowns taking wing.  (p. 415)  

I already have dragons, I have no wish for men - Victor Hugo's The End of Satan

Victor Hugo is a giant in French poetry.  Why we do not have, in English, some kind of collected edition of his poems (in many volumes) I do not understand, except that almost no one wants to read poetry, even fewer old poetry, even fewer translated old poetry, etc.  Other than all of those reasons, I don’t understand it.

But last year translator R. G. Skinner and Swan Isle Press filled approximately half of a major gap in that imaginary shelf of books with the release of God and the End of Satan – Dieu et La Fin de Satan: Selections: In a Bilingual Edition, which contains – what a title – about half of each of Hugo’s two huge unfinished posthumous poems, The End of Satan (1886) and God (1891), the latter somehow the most Hugolian of all possible titles.  Victor Hugo thought big.

Today, Dieu is often considered Hugo’s single finest achievement.  There is nothing quite like it in our language.  Its first English readers compared it to the strange late poems of Blake; and that is possibly still the closest analogy.  (Foreword, p. xi, E.H. and A.M. Blackmore, themselves translators of Hugo’s poems)

Exactly how often, I would like to ask.  I will also note that the “first English readers” were Algernon Swinburne and his circle, the poets and critics who had rediscovered Blake’s cosmic poems.  I am not sure the fit with Blake is that good.  But then we are left with nothing.

The End of Satan is about the fall of Lucifer and – hey, wait a minute, maybe we do have something like this in English!  It is pretty strange reading this episode in an English so flat, even though as a translation it is fine.  But it’s not Milton:

The fall of the damned one began once again – Terrifying,
Overcast, and pierced with luminous holes like a sieve,
The sky full of suns vanished, the light
Trembled, and into the night this giant plummeted headlong,
Naked , sinister, and dragged down by the weight of his crimes;
And like a wedge, his head opened the abyss.  (Beyond the Earth I, And Then There Was Night, II, ll.29 – 34, p. 165)

No complaints about the imagery, or Hugo’s sense of scale, especially his conceit that Satan’s fall is in some way part of creation, that he creates the abyss and hell as he falls.

The original is in rhyming couplets, which, to my poor understanding, sound dignified and suitable for declaiming by a good actor:

Nu, sinistre, et tiré par le poids de son crime,
Tombait, et, comme un coin, sa tête ouvrait l’abîme.

Hugo works his way through the Bible, how thoroughly I do not know.  The abridgment includes the story of Noah but omits Adam and Eve, for example.  It includes a long part of Christ’s crucifixion, but how much of his earlier life I cannot say.  Noah is included, I assume, because the imagery is so strong:

And since Man had filled his squalid soul
With abysses, God could say to the abyss: Fill the world.

The urn of the abyss tilted, day fled;
And all that lived and walked became night,
While lifeless Eve trembled in her deep grave.  (The first page I, The Entry into Darkness, I, ll. 49-53, p. 185)

The world  is deluged not with rain, but something worse, whatever dark matter fills the abyss Satan created.  Hugo is doing something new, bringing his own coherence and imagery to the old stories, which is a bit like Blake.  Later Chaos and The Flood argue about the meaning of the destruction of mankind.  “I already have dragons,” says Chaos.  “I have no wish for men.”  In this big, mythic setting Hugo does not always sound like Hugo to me, but that sure does.

Literature indeed! This is life, this is passion! - no, this is Pirandello, so it is literature - and I do it very quietly

All I’m saying is that you should show some respect for what other people see and feel, even though it be the exact opposite of what you see and feel.  (It Is So! (If You Think So), 71)

Eric Bentley deserves conceptual credit for his bold stroke.  Given room for five Pirandello plays in Naked Masks, he leads with two that are by no means masterpieces – “[i]n reconsidering Pirandello today, fifteen years after his death, the first play to read is Liolà” (viii), Bentley writes, and he means it.  What is Pirandello trying to do?  These plays are as clear as any.  The quotation above could hardly be more direct. 

The three masterpieces Bentley includes – Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), Henry IV (1922), and Each in His Own Way (1924) – are all variations on the same theme.  All have thin, melodramatic plots behind them, but the clichés are now made necessary by the various ways each play toys with, mocks, or crushes the illusionism of theater, the great emphasis – hardly a discovery – of Pirandello’s.

A family crashes a theatrical rehearsal to demand that their story be told on the stage.  Or actually not just told but finished, since the members of the family are not real people but characters in an unfinished play that only has two scenes.  The author presumably gave up on the characters and their play because it was such typical, trivial stuff.  How the characters embody themselves as people is never explained, but is that not what typically happens on a theatrical stage?  So we have a play within the play I am reading, with characters who are characters and characters who are not characters, but rather the actors who are going to play the characters.  And then I have to remind myself that both the “characters” and the “actors” would all be played, if I went to see a performance, by actual actors.

The Son [contemptuously].  Literature!  Literature!

The Father.  Literature indeed!  This is life, this is passion!

The Manager.  It may be, but it won’t  act.

Now we are all used to this sort of fun.

Each in His Own Way plays the play within the play straight.  Its innovation is that the intermissions are performed on stage.  Does this mean that the actual audience gets no intermission?  When do I get my between-acts champagne?  I instead watch other, imaginary people, played by actors, drink imaginary, or worse, real, champagne while they discuss the dreary play we were all watching.  The trick is that the scenes taking place in the “theater lobby” during “intermission” is substantially more comic, dramatic, and interesting than the nominal “play.”

Voices from the Spectators.  Go on with the play!  Put them out!  Less noise!  Shut up!  Signora Moreno!  Put her out!  The third act!  We want the third act!  Pirandello!  Put him out!  A speech!  A speech from Pirandello!  Put him out!  A speech!  He’s to blame!  (355-6)

The ideal way to manage all of this would be to stage the intermission scene during the actual intermission in the actual lobby, while I am in the line for sparkling wine, and try to goose the audience members into joining in on the shouting.  I would not have been one of the people yelling for the third act.   More fun to be had in the lobby.

In Henry IV, the melodrama is shoved entirely into the back story.  An insane man thinks he is Henry IV, the Holy Roman Emperor, and has surrounded himself with actors playing his courtiers.  An attempt to cure him reveals that he had in fact been cured long ago, but preferred the illusion to reality; the cure thus drives him back to insanity.  Unlike in Six Characters or Each in His Own Way, all of the breaks in theatricality take place within the world of the play, which allowed the central character some pathos:

You know, it is quite easy to get accustomed to it.  One walks about as a tragic character, just as if it were nothing…  I am cured, gentlemen: because I can act the madman in perfection, here; and I do it very quietly, I’m only sorry for you that have to live your madness so agitatedly, without knowing it or seeing it.  (205-6, ellipses mine)

Henry IV was the only one of these three where the characters turned into, you know, characters, and I had some interest in what might happen to them as opposed to what Pirandello would do with them.

Please note the date of Each in His Own Way.  This post is my belated entry in the 1924 Club run by Stuck in a Book and Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings, a good idea.

Is Pirandello getting so low that he makes comedies on society gossip? Yes.

The logical place to go after the feminist domestic fiction of Matilde Serao and Maria Messina is to the plays of Luigi Pirandello.

That preposterous statement is almost true.  It contains the key to why I had never really understood Pirandello’s plays.  Now I understand them.   Oh sure.  If I go down that path, there is no point to any of this, so let’s all pretend.

The issue was all of the melodrama Pirandello uses, all of the soap opera stuff.  Also the clichéd characters that enact the melodrama.  Here we have, by reputation, one of the great originals of 20th century theater, yet his plays are full of all this old stuff, the furnishings of the well-made play.

And Pirandello… is Pirandello getting so low that he makes comedies on society gossip.  (p. 332, ellipses in original)

That line is a multi-level inside joke from Each in His Own Way (1924).  The great avant-gardist had been doing just that all along, going back even to his 1904 novel The Late Maria Pascal.  Early on, his characters were not making self-conscious references to what was going on in Pirandello plays, including the one they were in.  That kind of messing around with theatrical illusion did come later.

Liolà (1916) is about a man who cheerfully goes around his Sicilian village impregnating young women.  Uncle Simone and his young wife have not been able to have a child.  Liolà is happy to help them solve that problem.  Everyone in the village knows what happened.  The conflict, the drama, is about the difficulties in deciding exactly what everyone will agree to claim is true. 

Words, words, WORDS!  The deceit people see in us is no deceit at all.  The real deceit is in you – but nobody sees it!  (55)

By the end there is an agreement on which deceit does the greatest good.  Fortunately Liolà is a free spirit who is easy to please and loves to please others.

My page numbers refer to Eric Bentley’s 1952 Pirandello collection Naked Masks (various translators), which leads with Liolà, which is not a major play, exactly to make this argument, that Pirandello’s investigation of truth and illusion is not an artifact of art or the theater, but rather of life, and it is not just individual but social.

It Is So! (If You Think So) (1917) is more openly theatrical, but it still does nothing to violate the illusion of the stage.  A group of gossips try to learn the true story of a new family.  The mother says her son-in-law is insane due the loss of his wife; the husband says his mother-in-law is insane due to the loss of her daughter (here, again, is the core melodrama).  Neither one appears to be insane except in their insistence that the other is insane.  Meanwhile, who exactly is the husband’s current wife, who stays offstage until the final scene?  The gossips, like a more active theatrical audience, arrange several scenarios or tricks that they hope will reveal the truth.  In a Pirandello play, that won’t work.

Pirandello often has an observer character, Laudisi in this case, who can express something close to his own point of view – Pirandello can be pretty blunt:

Sirelli.  Oh, nonsense!  In that case neither of them would be mad!  Why, one of them must be, damn it all!

Laudisi.  Well, which one?  You can’t tell, can you?  Neither can anybody else!  And it is not because those documents you are looking for have been destroyed in an accident – a fire, an earthquake – what you will; but because those people have concealed those documents in themselves, in their own souls…  the result is that you are in the extraordinary fix of having before you, on the one hand, a world of fancy, and on the other, a world of reality, and you, for the life of you, are not able to distinguish one from the other.  (98, ellipses mine)

I think I expected Pirandello to be screwier than he really is, more clever or surreal.  More like Stoppard or Ionesco, descendants of Pirandello.  But no, in these earlier plays, as in the even earlier novel, truth is real but impenetrable because of the illusions with which people conceal it.

Such, however, are the lives of all wives - a grim feminist Sicilian novel from Maria Messina

I’ll follow Serao’s Neapolitan unmarried women with a Sicilian example from Maria Messina’s little novel A House in the Shadows (1921), one kind of feminist fiction with another.   Serao’s stories almost suffer from their abundance of characters and movement.  Messina’s book is in places almost static.  Serao’s women worry about the ways they are trapped by circumstances, but poor Nicolina can barely leave the house.

Nicolina’s sister makes what seems like a good match with an estate manager.  Nicolina goes along help establish the household and keep her sister company.  Soon enough they discover that Don Lucio is a petty tyrant – sometimes worse than petty – using everything, for example his health problems or his obsessive compulsive disorder, as a weapon:

Peeling fruit was the most delicate task…  Pears and apples, carefully peeled and cut in pieces, one piece already stuck on the little silver fork…  (31)

Neither the wife nor her sister do anything except serve this husband.  The house is a prison.  The title, even aside from the symbolism, is accurate.  A “narrow little street,” a view of nothing but “reddish, moss-covered roofs,” no neighbors, no family.  Serao’s book was of high interest just because of all of the detail about life in Naples.  A House in the Shadows is almost free of local color, or much color of any kind.

The novel begins with a young boy on his sickbed, with Nicolina doing everything she can to accommodate the father.  It is a relief when the son becomes old enough to become a character in his own right.  At least he can leave the house!  This is a grim novel.  “Such, however, are the lives of all wives” (29).  In this novel, actually, all women.

I hope it does not sound like I am complaining.  I can handle 125 pages of this stuff, and it should be clear enough how the tone of the novel is necessary for its argument.  But Messina does sacrifice some novelistic pleasures in the process.  I suppose I found the greater concentration of her short stories to be more artful.

Messina’s novel ends with, I was shocked to find, an element of hope.  For all of their suffering, Nicolina and her sister have perhaps succeeded in one way – they have protected the sister’s two daughters from their abusive father, Don Lucio.  Or so I understand the ending:

They listen.  A footstep, a voice in the street.  An impetuous exuberance surges in their young bosoms.  They are growing up like certain odd delicate flowers that appear between the cracks in old walls and that the rain will soon spoil.  Don Lucio clears his throat.  The two girls are startled, but then laugh for having been startled, and then they are silent, once again waiting, anxious and moved, while the heavy, silent hours pass across the starry sky.  (125)

The father is still there, in the middle of the daughters’ reverie.  But they are young and he is now old.  They can outwait him.

John Shepley is the translator.

as though she were fed up with so much foolishness - Unmarried Women in Naples

Scott at seraillon has been reading Italian literature this year, like I have, except more widely and deeply and etc.  Today we cross paths with the 1885 Unmarried Women, an accurately titled collection of short story-like texts by prolific Neapolitan journalist, editor, publisher, etc. Matilde Serao.

I understand there has been some recent interest in fiction about women in Naples.  People with such an interest should read Unmarried Women.  Maybe there will be a Serao revival.  Maybe two blog posts count as a revival.

Serao loves crowds.  She fills her scenes with people, with those unmarried women, whether the setting is a girl’s school on exam day, a religious festival with fireworks, a line to enter the bathhouses at a public beach, or, in Serao’s greatest stroke, the State Telegraph Office (Women’s Section).  Here the women are eavesdropping, so to speak, on a mushy love-telegram:

The girls all listened intently: Ida Torelli, the skeptic, snickered; Caterina Borelli, the wit, shrugged her shoulders, as though she were fed up with so much foolishness.  But the others were rather moved by this incandescent telegraphic prose and were already whispering about their own loves, for better or for worse.  Adelina Mark, the beauty, had two or three admirers she couldn’t stand, instead …  Peppina Sanna thought about her handsome naval officer…  Maria Morra, the amateur actress…  Annina Pescara…  (“The State Telegraph Office,” 145)

Those ellipses all hide interesting things, but I want to emphasize the bombardment by people.  Serao can be a little hard to follow.  Giovanni Verga did the same thing in The House by the Medlar Tree (1881), and he does it again in Mastro-Don Gesualdo (1889), all of the characters introduced at once.  If you are thinking of doing this in your own fiction, I tell you, it is hard to follow.

However, Serao follows the characters from story to story.  A number of the women working in the miserable telegraph office in the fourth story are able to work there because they passed their exams back in the first story.  Serao shows the same characters at school, work, parties, and so on.  The book is structured a lot like an ensemble television drama, with different “episodes” emphasizing the family or love life of different characters, with occasional pure ensemble pieces, like the zippy, exhausting episode about the telegraph office on election night.  A TV series about the young women working in the Neapolitan telegraph office in 1880, how would that not be great?

So eventually I pulled the mass of characters apart, is what I am saying.  One of them, the sassy bookworm, “the wit” up above, is, the introduction tells me, the author before she was an author, “a bit overweight, ‘nasty as a fat monkey,’ ‘a shameless sleepyhead, glasses slipping down her pug nose, given to too much reading: in short, a nerd” – I am quoting Scott’s post.

The women are often, but not always, desperate and miserable.  The depiction of Naples as a lived-in city is by itself valuable, a great contrast to the wealthy tourist cities I saw in The Portrait of a Lady.  The telegraph office was of especially high interest, but I read it all with pleasure.  How to make good fiction out of kids waiting in line to go the beach?  Serao did it.  A lot of people would like this book.

Paula Spurlin Paige is the translator.  The translation is recent, from 2007, so it is not well known yet.  Once again, I will point to seraillon, whose post is three times longer, has better quotations, and is decorated with relevant illustrations.

“you use too many metaphors” - something I missed in The Portrait of a Lady

Sometimes I wonder about the point of writing at any length about as complex a work as The Portrait of a Lady given that I have read it once and cannot possibly have caught much more than the central movement of the story.

One thing I missed and then missed some more was James’s use of metaphors. 

He expressed this view, somewhat after this fashion, to his mother, who looked at him as if he had been dancing a jig.  He had such a fanciful, pictorial way of saying things that he might as well address her in the deaf-mute’s alphabet.

“I don’t think I know what you mean,” she said; “you use too many metaphors; I could never understand allegories.”  (Ch. 26)

I was misreading so badly that I thought James was at this point making a joke about his lack of metaphors, when in fact he was directly telling me – well, indirectly – that he used them all the time.  There are two in the first two lines I quote!  I enjoyed them for their humor without registering their frequency.

Di at The little white attic has been reading The Portrait of a Lady, too – in fact she invited me to read it now instead of (vague gesture) some other time – and she saw the metaphors.  Look at all of those metaphors.  But I now see how I did not see them.  Look at the journalist Henrietta Stackpole, “strongly identified as a newspaper-woman,” as Di says, meaning as a woman made of newspaper:

She rustled, she shimmered, in fresh, dove-coloured draperies, and Ralph saw at a glance that she was as crisp and new and comprehensive as a first issue before the folding.  From top to toe she had probably no misprint.  (Ch. 10, the bold will be used in a minute)

And there’s more like that.  My first problem was that these clever comparisons are not actually visual, not meant to help me see what James is imagining, but rather to quickly get a sense of what Henrietta is like, or perhaps what Ralph is like, since the comparisons are his.  If I am looking for sensual precision, the way Zola or Nabokov or Bellow use metaphors, well, forget it. They want me to imagine the thing they are seeing, against the limitations of language.  James wants me to meet the person he has imagined.

Di has many more examples just as good, but I picked this one because of the second reason I missed it – it’s not in the book I read.  James made huge changes to the passage for the 1908 New York edition.  The original 1881 edition, which I read, has:

She was very well dressed, in fresh, dove-coloured draperies, and Ralph saw at a glance that she was scrupulously, fastidiously neat.  From top to toe she carried not an ink-stain.

I could go either way on the last example, but the first two, no contest, right?  1908 James came up with some good ones.  Eh, even “no misprint” is funnier.

So, maybe I missed less than I think, and, without denigrating the book I read, next time I am reading the New York edition.

I should point to more of Di’s posts.  The one on silence is the perfect counter to my complaint that Portrait talks too much.  She calls her wrap-up “The greatness of Henry James,” which is a good place for me to stop.

"Ah" - Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

Never before have I read a novel where so many characters begin their lines with “Ah.”  I have been using “Ah” while answering comments lately, to test it out.  It is annoying.

“Ah, too interesting; you shouldn't allow it to be that, you know!” (Ch. 1)

“Ah, happy boy!” the old man commented. (Ch. 2)

“Ah,” said Isabel slowly, “you must be our crazy Aunt Lydia!” (okay, I love this one, Ch. 3)

“Ah, we never know why!" said her companion, laughing.”  (Ch. 5)

A total of 96 “Ah”s going by the computer search, or almost two per chapter, and they feel more concentrated because some chapters are especially dialogue-heavy.  In Chapter 5 there is one on every other page.  The “Ah”s were useful in helping me notice how much banter there was in the novel, especially early on, as if the characters were in a Golden Age Hollywood comedy, like Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant trying to impress each other with their sharp wit.  Isabel Archer is Beatrice and every man she meets is Benedict – how exhausting for her.  And at times for me.

Most of the worst parts of the novel are in the dialogues:

“You are very selfish as I said before.”

“I know that.  I am selfish as iron.”

“Even iron sometimes melts.”  (Ch. 32)

Then the characters begin to banter around the word “reasonable.”  All so trivial, although given who one of those characters is, the best he could do.

The worst line in the novel – I want to be fair – replaces dialogue: “In that brief, extremely personal gaze, however, deeper meanings passed between them than they were conscious at the moment” (Ch. 43).  What novel is that from?  This one, really?

Everything in The Portrait of a Lady leads to something better.  The apotheosis of the banter is in Chapter 34 – James is explaining a one year gap and Isabel’s engagement, so this is before the three year gap and her marriage.  She is sparring with her cousin Ralph, one of her many men.  The situation has gone beyond banter, but Ralph has been poisoned by irony.

“Wait for what?”

“Well, for a little more light,” said Ralph, with a rather absurd smile, while his hands found their way into his pockets.

“Where should my light have come from?  From you?”

“I might have struck a spark or two!”

See, wit of a pretty low kind.  Ralph cannot resist.  But after a couple more pages, Isabel can. 

“I don’t think I understand you,” she said at last, coldly.  “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

This was, I found, a shocking moment, the first time someone refuses combat.  Ralph refuses the refusal, which then becomes a new struggle which Isabel wins by treating the subject of her liberty, money, and love life with seriousness and sincerity.  It felt like the novel had swiveled.  “Isabel had uttered her last words with a low solemnity of conviction which virtually terminated the discussion,” and the loser enjoys his self-pity:

Ralph, standing there with his hands in his pockets, followed her with his eyes; then the lurking chill of the highwalled court struck him and made him shiver, so that he returned to the garden, to breakfast on the Florentine sunshine.

I should note that James, aware that he has perhaps overloaded the novel with dialogue, came up with another solution that was always a lot of fun when he deployed it, a breathless wall of text, often a paragraph of a page or two, of nothing but babble.  Another side of the conversation is implied, but it likely consists of little but nods and “Mm, yes.” 

“Papa left direction for everything.  I go to bed very early.  When the sun goes off that side I go into the garden.”  (Ch. 30)

That’s Pansy, of course.  Remember, there’s over a page of that stuff in one paragraph.  It’s often the dimmer characters who are given this treatment, characters incapable of wit.  Again, I am sure I am wrong, that James borrowed this trick from someone. (Note added later: from Jane Austen - see Miss Bates in Emma).

"He has a genius for upholstery" - not an ironic comment about the style of Henry James, but it could be

Chapter 36 begins strangely:

One afternoon, towards dusk, in the autumn of 1876, a young man of pleasing appearance rang at the door of a small apartment on the third floor of an old Roman house.

This is at the 65% mark.  Has the printer accidentally bound the beginning of a different James novel in the middle of my copy?  Why the sudden fuss about dates?  The man asks for Madame Merle, who is a character I know.  He turns out to be Mr. Edward Rosier, who I do not:

The reader will perhaps not have forgotten that Mr. Rosier was an ornament of the American circle in Paris…

This reader certainly had forgotten.  James has, it turns out, leapt ahead three years (thus the date) and reset the novel.  For three chapters he pretends, with a straight face, that having solved the problem of Isabel Archer’s marriage, he is now interested in the courtship of Mr. Rosier and Pansy Osmond, the strange, doll-like sixteen year-old who is now an odd, porcelain nineteen year-old.

I have a lot of skepticism about the practice of searching through James for homosexual characters, but Rosier is so gay.  He seems to want to add Pansy to his collection of knick-knacks.  “He thought of her in amorous meditation a good deal as he might have thought of a Dresden-china shepherdess.”  I am glad James provides no further details.

Later, Rosier proves his devotion by, well

“It’s very easily told,” said Edward Rosier.  “I have sold all my bibelots!”

Isabel gave, instinctively, an exclamation of horror; it was as if he had told her he had had all his teeth drawn.  (Ch. 50)

That’s one of my favorite lines in the novel.  He sells his trinkets for nearly a million bucks, current dollars, by the way.

Earlier, Isabel and Edward have this exchange, about Isabel’s husband:

“He must be very clever.”

“He has a genius for upholstery,” said Isabel.

“There is a great rage for that sort of thing now.”  (Ch. 38)

In some ways reading A Portrait of a Lady is akin to reading Jules Laforgue’s poems about commedia dell’arte clowns who live on the moon.  The characters in The Portrait of a Lady are a rarefied bunch.  The fiction of Ronald Firbank is now possible.

I did not mean to write so much about this marvelous minor character.  I meant to write about the subtly indirect ways James fills in three years of history for the important characters (it takes six chapters to finally get back to Isabel’s point of view).  But I might as well finish him off.

Whatever suspicions I have about Rosier’s love for a doll, the love affair turns out to be quite real for the doll herself, real to the point of genuine pathos, and real to Isabel, which is how the whole subplot transforms into the main plot.  I have some arguments with James’s bantering dialogue – maybe I will write about that tomorrow – but it allows Pansy one fine moment.

“Oh yes, I must indeed.  I can’t disobey papa.”

“Not for one who loves you as I do, and whom you pretend to love?”

Pansy raised the lid of the tea-pot, gazing into this vessel for a moment; then she dropped six words into its aromatic depths.  “I love you just as much.”

I so enjoy the line without dialogue that I almost wish James had left me guessing about the six words.

this young lady had been seated alone with a book - Henry James time-travels

Henry James does something so remarkable in the third chapter of The Portrait of a Lady that it is, now, almost invisible.  It is no longer remarkable, yet here I am remarking.

We left Isabel Archer on the lawn of an English country house with her uncle and cousin, whom she had just met.  It was her aunt who brought her to England, so we need a bit of the aunt, and chapter 3 begins with a long paragraph about the aunt, about her situation.  Then:

She had taken up her niece – there was little doubt of that.  One wet afternoon, some four months earlier than the occurrence lately narrated, this young lady had been seated alone with a book. To say that she had a book is to say…

James has shifted from the aunt to Isabel and he has also shifted to a scene, with weather and props and a setting, “an old house in Albany,” and something like action.  “The visitor had not been announced; the girl heard her at last walking about the adjoining room.”  James needs to move the characters into the same room, right?

But he puts that off for three pages so he can sit with Isabel and her book, and more curiously the room and window and sofa where she likes to read, where she – this is the most remarkable thing James does – where she has always liked to read.  The long paragraph moves from the aunt to the niece to the niece as a child.  “She had been in the house…  weeks of which Isabel had the happiest memory…  even as a child she thought…  somehow, all her visits had a flavour of peaches…”

Are we still with Isabel in the “present” of the novel (the new present, the one that is “some four months earlier”), with Isabel’s memories?  James is subtly moving the scene into the past. 

… she had uncontrolled use of a library full of books with frontispieces, which she used to climb upon a chair to take down.  When she had found one to her taste – she was guided in the selection chiefly by the frontispiece – she carried it into a mysterious apartment which lay beyond the library, and which was called, traditionally, no one knew why, the office…  There was an old haircloth sofa, in especial, to which she had confided a hundred childish sorrows.  [Some stuff about a door to the street].  But she had no wish to look out, for this would have interfered with her theory that there was a strange, unseen place on the other side – a place which became, to the child’s imagination, according to its different moods, a region of delight or of terror.

It was in the “office” still that Isabel was sitting on that melancholy afternoon of early spring which I have just mentioned.

It is as if James has filmed the child reading on the sofa, perhaps with a sepia filter, and faded to the adult Isabel in the same place and posture, although with a different book (she “had been trudging over the sandy plains of a history of German Thought”).  Finally, hey, the aunt is in the doorway resulting in a more ordinary dialogue-heavy scene.

So: the present to four months past to, subtly, Isabel as a child to, with a snap of the fingers (actually with a paragraph break), Isabel as an adult.  Some of James’s transitional language looks clumsy and unnecessary (“the occurrence lately narrated,” “which I have just mentioned”) but this is because later fiction writers have filed the technique down to a perfect smoothness.

In 1881 no one – no one­ – had written a scene like this.

Can that claim possibly be true?  I assume, actually, that it is not, that someone was constructing fiction like this.  Someone less canonical than my usual reading.  Victor Hugo had a relatively free conception of fictional time.  He gets close in a couple of places.  George Eliot was sufficiently innovative that I have mentioned, somewhere on Wuthering Expectations, every single instance in her fiction when she shifts time.  I have mentioned it every time I have seen it because it is so rare.  Or was so rare.

If there had been MFA creative writing programs in 1881, The Portrait of a Lady would have become the standard textbook.  It’s full of stuff like this.

her flexible figure turned itself lightly this way and that - James set The Portrait of a Lady in motion

The Portrait of a Lady begins as if it were a play.  A play of the George Bernard Shaw variety, with three and a half pages of scene setting and notes on the characters.  The scene is the lawn of an English country house at tea time – this takes two pages – the characters are an old American banker, his tubercular son, and a neighboring English lord, each of whom gets a paragraph.  Then the play:

The father caught his son’s eye at last, and gave him a mild, responsive smile.

“I am getting on very well,” he said.

“Have you drunk your tea?” asked the son.

“Yes, and enjoyed it.”

“Shall I give you some more?”  (Ch. 1)

Ah, so this is apparently a parody of a play, the most boring play ever staged.  The younger men are in theory in motion (“strolling to and from, in desultory talk”), but once the play begins they might as well be frozen.  Even the dog in the scene is motionless.  The talk turns to women and then to a niece from America who will soon visit.  She is in the title; she is the most important character in the book.  This is a strange, static beginning.

I turn to Chapter 2, and look what happens.

While this exchange of pleasantries took place between the two, Ralph Touchett wandered away a little… his little rowdyish terrier at his heels.  His face was turned towards the house, but his eyes were bent, musingly, upon the lawn; so that he had been an object of observation to a person who had just made her appearance in the doorway of the dwelling for some moments before he perceived her.

Isabel Archer has literally set the novel into motion by her appearance.  She had in fact appeared and thawed Ralph and his dog before I even knew of it, at some point  (“while”) back in the first chapter.

This is an unusual effect, available only in fiction.  In a play or film you would have to show part of the scene twice, once still and once mobile.  Another way to think of the switch between chapters is that James moves from a play to film.  The rest of the chapter has lots of filmic equivalents – the camera moves and pans (“She had been looking all round her again – at the lawn, the great trees, the reedy, silvery Thames, the beautiful old house”).  The male characters, along with the reader, take a good long gaze at Isabel, “her eyes brilliant, her flexible figure turned itself lightly this way and that.”

Then after more like this Chapter 3 does something else entirely, as I will describe tomorrow as I march through The Portrait of a Lady chapter by chapter.  No, I will not go that far – although tomorrow really will cover Chapter 3 – but I could, because James uses chapters in interesting and novel ways.  He uses a large number of the tools of fiction in new ways.  Finally, I have seen the long-rumored master technician with my own eyes.  Much of what he does has been so thoroughly absorbed that it takes a strong sense of literary chronology to see it at all.  Don’t neglect your literary history.

"Rome is inexhaustible." - Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“I think he has quite exhausted Rome.”

“Ah no, that’s a shallow judgment.  Rome is inexhaustible.”  (The Portrait of a Lady, Ch. 46)

The Portrait of a Lady, the 1881 novel about a young American woman who travels to Europe and attracts a series of stalkers, has a peculiar relationship with Rome, the city, not the empire.  One scene in America, barely more than one setting in England, glimpses of London and Paris, a bit more of Florence, but plenty of Rome.

James reverts to the travel writing mode I noted in his 1871 story “The Passionate Pilgrim,” but now he integrates the plot more closely with the tourism.  The heroine, Isabel Archer, is attending church at St. Peters (as a tourist – she is not Catholic) when she comes across one of her many obsessive suitors, Lord Warburton, and a scene with him takes place amidst the service.  “In that splendid immensity individual indiscretion carries but a short distance” (Ch. 27) – that is James taking a jab at the suitor, who should know to behave better in church, more like the second suitor attending the service:

“What’s your opinion of St. Peter’s?” Mr. Osmond asked of Isabel.

“It’s very large and very bright,” said the girl.

An answer worthy of Daisy Miller, although Isabel is smarter than Daisy Miller, or is smarter than Daisy Miller acts.

In the next chapter, the encounter with the Lord Warburton takes place in front of “the lion of the collection,” (Ch. 28), the Dying Gladiator (“It is a work of profound interest and unrivalled excellence,” see p. 208).  Is James going to write his novel by working his way through his Baedeker, I wondered?  No, James used Murray, not Baedeker.

After her marriage, Isabel lives in Rome in a palace, “a dark and massive structure,”

which bore a stern old Roman name, which smelt of historic deeds, of crime and craft and violence, which was mentioned in “Murray” and visited by tourists who looked disappointed and depressed… (Ch. 36)

Whatever my frustrations with James, I have learned to get his humor, and also his indirection.  In this scene one secondary character (Mr. Rosier) is fretting over another (Pansy), but James has not yet described the living arrangements of the heroine; this is the way he slips that in, as if I care about where Pansy lives.

The theme culminates with Isabel taking a drive on the Campagna, on the Appian Way, thus connecting her to Carducci and Pater:

She had long ago taken old Rome into her confidence, for in a world of ruins the ruin of her happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe.  She rested her weariness upon things that had crumbled for centuries and yet were still upright; she dropped her secret sadness into the silence of lonely places, where its very modern quality detached itself  and grew objective…  (Ch. 49)

That last is a highly Jamesian phrase.  The pathetic fallacy amongst the ruins.  “[S]he had grown to think of [Rome] chiefly as the place where people had suffered.”  Thus her cruel husband who, a few chapters earlier, had called Rome “inexhaustible,” an irony for poor suffering Isabel.

Walter Pater's Rome - at no time had the winter roses from Carthage seemed more lustrously yellow and red

Marius the Epicurean is in form a historical novel about 2nd century Rome, but a historical novel that allows itself lines like:

And the scene of the night-watching of a dead body  lest the witches should come to tear off the flesh with their teeth, is worthy of Théophile Gautier.  (Ch. 5, describing The Golden Ass)

Here, then, was the theory of Euphuism, as manifested in every age in which the literary conscience has been awakened to forgotten duties towards language, towards the instrument of expression: in fact it does but modify a little the principles of all effective expression at all times.  (Ch. 6, from a rich argument about style and literary decadence)

A phrase from Goethe’s Faust, a long quotation from Rousseau’s Émile, offhand references to Cardinal Newman and Walter Savage Landor – one might think the book is in fact some kind of work of literary criticism.  In part it is.  Part of the challenge of reading Pater is that the art criticism, literary essays, and fiction are all in service of a long continuing argument.  The imaginary portrait of Marius is different in form than the historical portraits of Leonardo and Winckelmann in The Renaissance (1873), but not in purpose.

I am not convinced that all of these forms should be used like this.  Maybe they should have different purposes!  All part of learning to read Pater.

Regardless, if the historical novel is rarely convincing, the novelized history is often excellent, especially in the chapters about Rome, “that city of tombs, layer upon layer of dead things and people… heroism in ruin” (Ch. 12), as in the descriptions of the horrific “games” involving the slaughter of men and animals in Chapter 14 – Marius rejects Stoicism in large part because of Marcus Aurelius’s indifference to the cruelty of the arena combats – or the marvelous “day in the life of Rome” in Chapter 11:

They visited the flower-market, lingering where the coronarii pressed on them the newest species, and purchased zinias, now in blossom (like painted flowers, thought Marius), to decorate the folds of their togas.  Loitering to the other side of the Forum, past the great Galen's drug-shop [another celebrity cameo], after a glance at the announcements of new poems on sale attached to the doorpost of a famous bookseller [there is more reading, more book-buying in Marius than I would have guessed], they entered the curious library of the Temple of Peace, then a favourite resort of literary men, and read, fixed there for all to see, the Diurnal or Gazette of the day…

I began to wonder if Pater was secretly describing a day in London.

The twelfth chapter is one of the book’s hybrids, a “speech” by Marcus Aurelius that is – I think – an ingenious hodgepodge of Meditations, Ecclesiastes, and Shakespeare. The speech somehow ends with not just the fall of night but the coming of winter, “the hardest that had been known in a lifetime.” 

The wolves came from the mountains; and, led by the carrion scent, devoured the dead bodies which had been hastily buried during the plague, and, emboldened by their meal, crept, before the short day was well past, over the walls of the farmyards of the Campagna.  The eagles were seen driving the flocks of smaller birds across the dusky sky.  Only, in the city itself the winter was all the brighter for the contrast, among those who could pay for light and warmth.  The habit-makers made a great sale of the spoil of all such furry creatures as had escaped wolves and eagles, for presents at the Saturnalia; and at no time had the winter roses from Carthage seemed more lustrously yellow and red.

Now, this is not London, right?  This is Rome, Pater’s Rome.

So next, the Rome of Henry James.

living in that full stream of refined sensation - notes on Marius the Epicurean

This is the week – well, a week – in which I write about authors no one cares about, burning off any interest generated by my previously untranslated César Aira story (actual interest generated: none).  This is all leading up to Henry James, to The Portrait of a Lady.  But now, Marius the Epicurean (1885).

As a novel, a total failure.  Walter Pater had no gift for character or story, and as a result Marius was hard to read and will be harder to remember.  A young Roman explores a range of ethical systems, not just the Epicureanism of the title, before dying as a kind of non-Christian Christian martyr.  Characters include every celebrity of the time – meaning people I had heard of: Emperor Marcus Aurelius, Apuleius (a translation of the Cupid and Psyche section of The Golden Ass is inserted into the book), and Lucian, who stars in a fine, amusing Lucianic dialogue.

The novel is a hybrid, and should perhaps be more read than it is for that alone, since hybrids are in vogue now.  But how many readers at this point will care which ethical system Marius adopts?  Especially when the choice is an idealized, aestheticized early Christianity.

He has a strong apprehension, also, of the beauty of the visible things around him; their fading, momentary graces and attractions.  His natural susceptibility in this direction, enlarged by experience, seems to demand of him an almost exclusive pre-occupation with the aspects of things; with their aesthetic character, as it is called – their revelations to the eye and the imagination; not so much because those aspects of them yield him the largest amount of enjoyment, as because to be occupied, in this way, with the aesthetic or imaginative side of things, is to be in real contact with those elements of his own nature, and of theirs, which, for him at least, are matter of the most real kind of apprehension.  (Ch. 16)

The passage perhaps makes Pater seem even less readable than he really is.  I need two more lines:

As other men are concentrated upon truths of number, for instance, or on business, or it may be on the pleasures of appetite, so he is wholly bent on living in that full stream of refined sensation.  And in the prosecution of this love of beauty, he claims an entire personal liberty, liberty of heart and mind, liberty, above all, from what may seem conventional answers to first questions.

In other words, aesthetic concerns are ethical concerns, and are just as real as any other aspect of reality.  Even the turn to the early Church at the novel’s end is based on an aesthetic response to the service and music and iconography (see Chapter 23), much like the aestheticized defense of Catholicism Chateaubriand makes in The Genius of Christianity (1802).  For Pater’s Marius, his interest in Christianity is ethical because it is aesthetic.

I do not know if anyone else was thinking, when I was messing around with the English poets of the 1890s, “this dude needs to read more Pater,” but that is certainly what I was thinking, and here we have 500 words demonstrating that I have been reading more Pater.

The Barbarian Odes - Carducci on the Appian Way - Drive from here the new men and their trivial works

Giosuè Carducci’s best book is Odi barbare (1877+), The Barbarian Odes, inspired in part by his first visit to the city of Rome and its ruins at age 42, several years after Italian unification.

It is his best title, at least.  A rich title. 

The ruined tombs stand in the drab winter scene, clad still with their ivy
and laurel, along the Appian Way.

Shining white clouds scud across the pale blue sky, which gleams
still with the rain when the sun catches it.

Egle stands there, and gazes up at that clear promise of Spring.
watching clouds and sun.

She watches; and the clouds above the ancient tombs reflect more the light
of her pure brow than of the sun itself.  (“Egle,” 1889)

“Egle” is a naiad, and the embodiment of spring, and also a young woman who is acting as Carducci’s muse – I said the ruins were part of Carducci’s inspiration.

Put simply, the heritage of Rome (ancient Rome) is the heritage of Italy, but are we not also the barbarians?  Sometimes the ruins are just piles of stone.  Perhaps they have no significance at all.

As he aged, Carducci’s hatred of the Catholic Church eased.  Still a champion of reason and enemy of superstition, he began to  see it more as an imperfect carrier of culture, a vessel that preserved some part of Roman culture for his own time, part of the path from ancient Rome to Dante and Petrarch and then on to himself, the Classicist.

Febris [a minor Roman divinity], hear me.  Drive from here the new men
and their trivial works: they outrage
my religious sense: the goddess
Rome sleeps here.  (“By the Baths of Caracalla”)

The younger Carducci would not have admitted to any kind of religious sense.  It is strange to see Carducci imagine the death of the sun, previously his symbol of Reason, observed by

a single
woman and man,

who palely standing in the middle of flattened mountains
and dead forests, will numbly watch you,
O Sun, as you set for the last time over one
interminable icefield.  (“On Monte Mario” – this poem begins with a view of Rome)

Or to see Carducci treat the railroad, his Satanic symbol of progress, more skeptically as it carries away his muse (“At the Station, One Autumn Morning”).

Rome even reconciles Carducci with Romanticism, most movingly in “By the Funeral Urn of Percy Bysshe Shelley,” when, after  a tedious invocation of too many relevant mythic figures ranging from Homer to Wagner,  the poet collapses back into the scene in front of him, into Rome, into nature or some simulacrum of it:

O heart of hearts, the sun, our divine father, enwraps
that poor silent heart of yours [Shelley’s] in the radiance of his love.

The pine-trees coolly tremble in the broad-blowing winds of Rome:
Where are you now, O poet of the free world?

Where are you?  Do you hear me?  With welling tears I gaze
beyond the Aurelian walls, towards the mournful plain.

I do not know how much of the narrative I have built on top of Carducci’s poems is an artifact of the selection, translation and notes of David Higgins, but I will work with the text I have.  There is a translation of The Barbarian Odes, complete, from 1950 that I read several years ago along with the Higgins Selected Verse.  That book is one of the two worst books of translated poetry I have ever read.  The English poems were quite bad.  But in some thin, weak sense, I have read the entire book.

Giosuè Carducci hated the moon yet won the Nobel Prize

Giosuè Carducci may not be the best Italian poet of the 19th century – he might be the fourth best – Leopardi, Foscolo, Belli, Carducci; how does that sound – as if I have read any others, as if I have any idea – but my point is that he is the one who lived at the right time and barely long enough to be awarded the Nobel Prize in 1906.

There are a number of English translations of Carducci from around that time, but there has only been one in the last 65 years, the 1994 Selected Verse of David H. Higgins.  I have read it a couple of times.  It is pretty good: functional, informative, and at times even poetic.  Sometimes functional is enough:

Un bello e orrible                            Both beautiful and awful
Mostro si sferra,                              a monster is unleashed,
Corre gli oceani,                              it scours the oceans,
Corre la terra:                                   it scours the land:

Corusco e fumido                           Glittering and belching smoke
Come i vulcani,                                like a volcano,
I monti supera,                                it conquers the hills,
Divora i piani                                    it devours the plains.

We are approaching the end of “A Satana / To Satan” (1865).  Those punchy little Italian lines fly along like a steam train, which is what the “it” is.  The train is also Satan, which here is meant as a compliment.  Satan is reason, anti-clericalism, technology, and progress, everything that will defeat superstition and drag poor, backwards Italy into the 19th century.  Carducci’s is the least Satanic Satanism I have ever encountered, but still, he was thirty years old making what we now might call a punk gesture with his toast to Satan.

That Carducci was a classicist who believed in progress may give a hint as to why he died off in English once the Modernists arrived.  Even in Italian, he seems to have become a figure like Longfellow, Tennyson, or Hugo, someone for later advanced poets to reject and fight.  In a poem from the 1887 Rime nuove Carducci is so anti-Romantic that he criticizes the moon:

Ma tu, luna, abellir goli co ‘l raggio
Le ruine ed i lutti;
Maturar nel fantastico viaggio
Non sai né fior né frutti.

But they delight, O moon, is adorning ruins
and tombs with thy rays;
yet in thy fabled voyage thou art helpless
to ripen either flower or fruit.
…
Then thou fallest upon graveyards where vaingloriously
thou rekindlest
thy tired light, competing in the cold glow
with shinbones and skulls.

I hate thy idiotic, rounded face,
thy starched white petticoats,
thou lewd, prudish, impotent,
hevaenly hypocrite.   (“Classicism and Romanticism”)

Carducci favors the useful sun.  The poet is a craftsman, like a blacksmith.  What, though, is this if not a great Romantic gesture?

But for himself the poor craftsman
fashions a golden shaft,
and hurls it towards the sun:
he watches as it flashes upwards;
he watches and rejoices;
nothing more is his desire.  (“Congedo / Envoi” from Rime nuove)

As Carducci ages, he deepens, or so the selection fooled me into thinking.  The punk mellows.  He tempers his rejection of the Catholic Church, withdraws a bit from immediate political concerns, discovers nature, and discovers Rome, which is what I want to look at tomorrow.

Whether he had meant it as a joke - Aira's "Cecil Taylor" - She is not a story.

I doubt I was the only one who did this.  Roberto Bolaño had called César Aira’s “Cecil Taylor” (1987, I think) “one of the five best stories I can remember,” so even though it was not available in English I had to see for myself even if I could not exactly read it.  What I wanted to know was if the story was actually about Cecil Taylor, the thorny jazz pianist, one of the inventors of free jazz – he broke free from chords – and one of the few surviving giants of the 1950s.  One of two, I am afraid, along with Sonny Rollins.

Yes, the story is in fact about Cecil Taylor and his struggles early in his career not to be understood but just to be heard.  César Aira has now published something like ninety little books, sometimes producing three or four a year, but in 1988, well, I suspect there is some strong identification of the author with his subject.

His experience at Cooper Union was even less gratifying.  They used a blackout as a pretext to stop him halfway through; there was vigorous booing, and from what he heard later, his performance left the audience wondering about the limits of music, and whether he had meant it as a joke.  (349)

“Cecil Taylor,” now available in English via Chris Andrews in The Musical Brain and right here, was at that time only accessible in a 1992 collection called Buenos Aires: una antología de nueva ficción argentina (which someone should translate in its entirety).  Each story in the anthology was preceded by a new preface from the author.  How I wrote it; how I thought it up.  Aira prefaced “Cecil Taylor” with this (not in The Musical Brain):

On CECIL TAYLOR

The genie, outside of the bottle, tall like a twenty-story building, briefly instructed the young man:

“You will have in your life a beautiful woman who you will have at your whim.”

“Beautiful?”

“More than you can imagine.  And helpless, without resources or friends.”

“For me?”

“For you alone.  She will be yours.  But there is a condition,” advised the genie with severity, “Do not think for an instant that she is an example or a metaphor for some other thing.  She is reality.  She is happening right now.  She is not a story.”   (my translation)

The nature of personal pronouns in Spanish tempts me to translate the last sentence as the Diderot-like “It is not a story.”  A Musical Brain features several genies; Taylor is himself described as a genie:

His continual changes of address protected him; they were the little genie’s suspended dwellings, and there he slept on a bed of chrysanthemums, under the shade of a droplet-laden spiderweb.  (346, tr. Andrews)

I know too little about the actual Taylor’s biography to know much about what in “Cecil Taylor” is fact and what is plausible guesswork, but this bit, I assume, is taken from life.

Here you can see Aira meet Taylor earlier this year, when Aira was in New York to promote The Musical Brain.

To hear Taylor, please sample anything from Cecil Taylor in Berlin ’88, which is what Taylor was doing when the story was written, not what he was doing in 1956.  His early innovations have been so thoroughly absorbed that Jazz Advance (1956) or, even better, The World of Cecil Taylor (1960) now just sound like jazz.

A conventional musician, [Taylor] thought, is always dealing with music in its most general form, as if leaving the particular for later, waiting for the right moment.  And they did pay [Taylor]: twenty dollars, on the condition that he would never show his face there again.  (351, Andrews).

That is how Aira’s non-story ends, but In Berlin ’88 and The Musical Brain tell me what happened when these artists kept showing their faces, again and again.

Surrealism is so beautiful! It changes everything! - César Aira embarks on the great avant-garde adventure

In one of the mad scientist stories, Leopoldo Lugones explicitly invokes Poe’s “imp of the perverse,” Poe's greatest psychological insight:

The demon of scientific inquiry, which is nothing but the embodiment of the spirit of perversity, impelled me, nevertheless, to resume my experiments. (Strange Forces, “Yzur”)

I take this as a self-description, and also as a description of his countryman, future Nobel anti-Prize winner César Aira.

Surrealism is so beautiful!  It changes everything!  (“The Infinite,” 1993, p. 226)

As if Aira’s own fiction did not contain enough self-description.  That one is about a young Aira and a friend inventing a game in which the goal is to say a number larger than the previous number, children demonstrating a philosophical exercise about representation.

Daydreams are always about concepts, not examples.  I wouldn’t want anything I’ve written to be taken as an example.  (235)

My knock on Aira is that however inventive the surface variation he is always writing the same story, but perversely The Musical Brain (2015), a collection of short stories, mostly variations on the same handful of ideas, is the perfect introduction to Aira.  When surveying Aira, it helps to be able to triangulate, or at least it is easier to see Aira mention again and again, in story after story, the “fact” “that a piece of paper cannot be folded in half more than nine times” (“A Brick Wall,” 2011, 18) or to wonder about the surprising number of genies.

My friends and I had become experts in deciphering that perfect economy of signs [Aira means film narrative].  It seemed perfect to us anyway, in contrast with the chaotic muddle of signs and meanings that constituted reality.  Everything was a clue, a lead.  Movies, whatever their genre, were really all detective stories.  Except that in detective stories, as I was to learn at around the same time, the genuine leads are hidden among red herrings, which, although required in order to lead the reader astray, are superfluous pieces of information, without significance.  (“A Brick Wall,” 7)

The movies “seemed like a super-reality.”  Sometimes I wondered is Aira was being too bald, but can I blame him if once in a while he wants someone to understand him, or, speaking for myself, pretend to understand him, since it is more than likely that I have been distracted by the savory red herrings, so good on toast.

From outside, it [contemporary art] might have seemed like a meaningless eccentricity contest.  But when one entered the game, the meaning became apparent, and dominated everything else.  It was, in fact, a game of meaning, and without meaning, it was nothing.  (“The Two Men,” 2007, 272)

Aira was the impetus for and center of a week of writing about conceptual art I did a couple of years ago.  In a 2013 essay in The White Review that is only superficially distinct from a couple of the stories in The Musical Brain, Aira describes the avant-garde, his avant-garde, as “an attempt to recuperate the amateur gesture,” to “restore to art the ease with which it was once produced.”

We were embarking on the great avant-garde adventure.  (“Athena Magazine,” 2007, 38)

The result is, as in this story and often in so-called real life, not the creation of the thing itself, in this case a magazine, but the perfect idea of a magazine, which for Aira almost counts as a success.  Not quite, though.  Tomorrow, “Cecil Taylor.”