The Best Books of 1913 - Loons with trumpets blowed a blare, blare, blare / On, on upward thro' the golden air!

This was a strange year for anniversaries.  It is usually the births and deaths of writers that are commemorated, but this year I noticed a lot of attention to books – two books, I mean, Pride and Prejudice and Swann’s Way (for that matter, the Gettysburg Address fits the pattern).  Perhaps this tells us something about what these books have become, how their meaning has expanded beyond their texts.  Austen and Proust both have industries around them.

Proust, or Swann’s Way, or at least the “Combray” section of Swann’s Way, deserves the honor of Best Book of 1913, I think, so I have no complaint about the attention it receives.  It is one of the great novels of the century.  Yet there is something arbitrary to its celebrity.  At least one more of the century’s greats was published in the same year, Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, a novel that is innovative like Proust’s book but has a tense thriller plot, including terrorists and a ticking time bomb.  Yet it is a cult novel in English.  I have no idea why.  It is not like English readers have been averse to Russian novels.

If you polled readers or critics fifty years ago, asking them which novel would get the most attention at its centennial, Swann’s Way or D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, I wonder if Lawrence would not top the poll.  How he has fallen.  Or how Proust has risen.  Some of both.  Sons and Lovers is doing all right for itself.

Perhaps a French reader can let me know if Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes has gotten much centennial celebration in France, where it is as well-known as, I don’t know, its titular cousin The Great Gatsby.  In English, another cult book.

I am never sure if I should do a Best of 191X post.  For the 19th century, I have read more of the books I am mentioning, so I know what the books are, not just how they are known.  In 1913, I see Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country and Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, which I have not read (nor have I read the Lawrence novel).  I just started the Cather, out of a sense of shame.

1913 was a deeply interesting year for poetry.  It produced a crop of first or second books by major poets, a number of which may well not be major books themselves – see above, haven’t read them – but remind me how quickly poetry was changing.  Maybe not as quickly as painting, but close.  D. H. Lawrence, again, Georg Trakl, Osip Mandelstam, Robert Frost’s A Boy’s Will, Guilliame Apollinaire’s Alcool, William Carlos Williams.

Subscribers to the hot new magazine Poetry would read Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees” alongside (more or less) Ezra Pound’s  “In a Station of the Metro”:

The apparition     of these faces     in the crowd   :
Petals     on a wet, black     bough    .

(for those who do not know it, that’s the entire poem) and Vachel Lindsay’s rather different “General William Booth Enters into Heaven”:

Hallelujah! It was queer to see
Bull-necked convicts with that land make free.
Loons with trumpets blowed a blare, blare, blare
On, on upward thro' the golden air!
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)

You’re supposed to sing this, accompanied by bass drum and banjos.  Pound and Lindsay support Kilmer’s argument, since neither poem is as lovely as a tree, although they have other virtues.  There is another line from the Lindsay poem that I was tempted to use as my title: “But their noise played havoc with the angel-choir.”  That was the poetry of 1913.  And the music.  And the painting.  And some of the novels, too.

Giorgio de Chirico’s The Transformed Dream, picked almost at random from a superb year of paintings, can be seen free of charge at the Saint Louis Art Museum.  How interesting, André Breton owned it for a long time.

An unbearable little cry, in which distress and satisfaction were equally mixed - the slimy, tattered little doll and The Goethean Meaulnes

Goethe has distracted me from Alain-Fournier.  I had hoped to pursue the Goethean thread, but I am not sure many people would understand what I was talking about, and I am less sure that I would understand it, either, so perhaps that should wait for another day.

I’ve wondered if a Goethe re-read is in order.  Goethe was a titan, but I am not sure any single work conveys his capaciousness.  He was, among other things, almost beyond form, meaning that his novels and memoirs and plays and poems do not look quite like novels and plays and so on should look, except that “should” is then demonstrably wrong.

Generations of German-language writers have benefitted from Goethe’s expansion of literary form.  Judging by the most recent German novel I read, a Jenny Erpenbeck novel that takes its title from Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Wandering (1821), they are not yet free of him.

Alain-Fournier borrows liberally from Goethe – form, theme, scenes, and, I suspect, images.   This is what I mean – I should go back to those Wilhelm Meister novels, and Elective Affinities, and [insert long list here].  Le Grand Meaulnes works within, for example, Goethe’s all-encompassing “renunciation” framework.  This is how I cope with the mass of Goethe, by the way – I reduce him to one word that I barely understand.  Goethe = renunciation.

I detected Goethe most strongly in Alain-Fournier’s theatrical interlude, right in the center of the book, where I picked up whiffs of the theatrical troupe arguing about Hamlet in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, and young Goethe or young Wilhelm, or both, staging puppet spectaculars.  But I do not quite remember the equivalent of the clown’s “falling act” in Goethe:

And every time, as he fell, he gave a little cry, different every time, an unbearable little cry, in which distress and satisfaction were equally mixed.  At the climax of the act, climbing on a heap of chairs, he made a tremendous, very slow fall, and his shrill, agonized wail of triumph lasted as long as the fall did, accompanied by gasps of terror from the women in the audience. (II.7.)

That may well be an act Alain-Fournier witnessed himself, but whatever its source, it is powerfully strange, as uncanny as Adalbert Stifter at his woozy best.  What does it mean?  It must mean something, yes?

This act is followed by a puppet show – I had known, per Goethe, that there would be puppets – although this puppet is actually “a little doll, stuffed with bran” that the falling clown has had hidden in his sleeve the entire time:

In the end, he made all the bran that was inside her emerge from her mouth.  Then, with doleful little cries, he filled her up with porridge and, at the moment of greatest concentration, when all the spectators were watching open-mouthed and all eyes were on the poor pierrot’s slimy, tattered little doll, he suddenly grasped her in one hand and threw her with all his strength into the audience…

Suddenly, I forget where I got the idea that Le Grand Meaulnes is much like Proust, or Hoffmann, or Goethe, or any other book ever written.

Then it was a dream like the one he used to have - Alain-Fournier, German Romantic

Le Grand Meaulnes, Alain-Fournier’s gentle little 1913 novel, is a German novella snuck into French.  It’s ancestors are not, decidedly not, Balzac or Hugo or, despite some fine writing, Flaubert.  I reserve judgment, due to my ignorance, about Zola, although I suspect that Alain-Fournier is an anti-Zola, opposed to each and  every Zola-esque principle.

I can see hints of Alain-Fournier in Rousseau and Chateaubriand, but I really know only one French precursor, Gérard de Nerval’s gentle little 1853 novella Sylvie.  I called Nerval “the most Germanic of French writers” – Alain-Fournier joins him.  Both stories are mixes of the idyllic and the ordinary; both feature heroines who are idealized to the point of unreality but also turn out to be characters with their own points of view and autonomy; both feature elaborate fêtes champêtres, country parties that take on strange dream-like qualities.  The parties are crucial.

Nerval and Alain-Fournier are borrowing their structures, and those parties, from Goethe and his followers, from Elective Affinities (1809) and Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795), and from any number of stories of E. T. A. Hoffmann.  A typical Hoffmann plot, or at least one that he used many times, involves young lovers who continually change identities, guided, perhaps, by a wizard figure.  Magic is common, but is seldom quite fixed in the real world; dreams or drunkenness or excess tobacco or high spirits are likely culprits of the hallucinations and weirdness.  The characters are shuffled around until they end up in the right combination, and the fête, often a literal one, a carnival or masked ball, ends along with the tale.  I’m thinking of Princess Brambilla here, but The Golden Pot and many other Hoffmann stories – honestly, too many – work similarly.

Alain-Fournier moves the Surrealist party, where, in this case, the activities are planned by children, and the guests are either juvenile or elderly (except, of course, for the wandering commedia dell’arte clowns), up into the beginning of the book, and thus makes it more of a violation of the ordinary world.  The dream world is introduced dramatically, and then vanishes.  But somehow it seeps into the “real” world, until by the end of the novel there is no point in trying to separate them.

Silently, while the young woman carried on playing, he went back and sat at the dining-room table where, opening one of the large red books scattered around it, he absent-mindedly began to read.

Almost immediately one of the children who had been on the ground came over, clasped his arm and clambered up on his knee so that he could look at the same time, while another did the same from the other side.  Then it was a dream like the one he used to have.  For a long time, he could imagine that he was in his own house, married, one fine evening.  And that the charming stranger playing the piano, close by, was his wife . . . (I.14., chapter-ending ellipses in original)

Readers made anxious by violations of their received notions of “realism,” beware.

haggard and distraught, the gypsy in his carnival dress - the weird and wonderful Alain-Fournier

Le Grand Meaulnes (1913) is a tricky little thing.  A charismatic new boy comes to school, and our lives would never be the same, and we all remember that magical summer, and on like that.  We have all read, or seen, plenty of versions of this story. They are rarely as well-written, or as surprising, as Alain-Fournier’s little novel.

The first surprise – this one comes early – is that the magical event is not caused by The Great Meaulnes, the natural leader, the friend of every schoolboy, but actually happens to him.  The narrator has to spend the rest of the novel assembling the fragments of the story.  It is as if Mary Poppins, rather than taking the Banks children on adorable adventures,  instead disappears for a long weekend, cannot quite explain what happened to her, and is frankly never again such a good nanny, always somehow distracted.

Let’s have a sample of Alain-Fournier:

The children, waking up in fright, pressed closer to one another, saying nothing.  And while he [Meaulnes] was shaking the window, with his face pressed to the pane, thanks to a bend in the road, he noticed a white shape running along.  It was the tall pierrot from the party, haggard and distraught, the gypsy in his carnival dress, carrying in his arms a human body , which he was holding against his chest.    Then they vanished.  (I.17.)

So that’s another difference from the usual schoolboy coming-of-age stories:  Le Grand Meaulnes is really desperately weird.  It keeps shifting back and forth between some semblance of ordinary life and these eruptions or invasions from Dream-world, often with no preparation, leaving the reader, or me, at least, pleasantly disoriented.   Not that I haven’t seen this before.  Le Grand Meaulnes is one of the two most German French stories I have ever read, if you know what I mean.  Maybe I’ll explain tomorrow.  This is another surprise, another trick, since the novel begins with an invocation that reminds me of that other great French novel of 1913:

At least, this is how I imagine our arrival today; because whenever I try to recapture the distant memory of that first evening, waiting in our courtyard at Saint-Agathe, what I remember are, in fact, other times of waiting, and I see myself with both hands resting on the bars of the gate, anxiously looking out for someone coming down the main street. (I.1.)

But Alain-Fournier’s search for lost time is of a different character and tone than Proust’s.

My understanding is that Le Grand Meaulnes is a genuinely beloved novel in France, spiritual kin to The Little Prince, Little Women and The Catcher in the Rye.  Why it is not better known to American readers is perplexing.  Is it the title, just the title?  Translators always want to fix it.  The Penguin Classics edition I read, translated by Robin Buss, goes with The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes), an admirable surrender.

The Great Meaulnes would be a fine title, accurate and perfectly, ironically analogous to The Great Gatsby, but I suppose we’re still stuck with the peculiar-looking Meaulnes.  It is very close to “moan” – now slip in the “l,” but gently, please, and go easy on the “n.”  Close enough, unless I am wrong – please let me know.