She was, by now, in the throes of a particularly revolting literary seizure - Gary fights for the honor of the French uniform

I hadn’t really planned on spending more time with Romain Gary’s Promise at Dawn, but I got caught just leafing through it.  The structure is episodic both in the childhood and wartime sections, so it is easy to fall upon particularly enjoyable adventures.

Gary is in England, flying with the Free French.  It is 1940, during the Battle of Britain.  He has discovered that he has made a mistake at a London dance hall:

On the second day, while a more than usually violent raid was in progress, I found myself in the company of a young poetess from Chelsea…  My lady friend was a great disappointment for she never stopped talking and talking about T. S. Eliot, and about Ezra Pound and Auden, into the bargain, gazing at me with blue eyes literally sparkling with imbecility.  (Ch. 36)

Kissing provides only a temporary respite because “I was obliged, after a while, to abandon her mouth in order to breathe – and off she went again about E. E. Cummings and Walt Whitman.”  Gary thinks about faking an epileptic seizure (“it had worked before in similar circumstances”) and tries to fob her off on a series of Polish officers hoping that “with a little luck my Ezra Pound might find other points of contact besides literature, and I would be rid of her.”  But she always returns, “embark[ing] upon a dissertation on the symbolism in Finnegans Wake.”

Meanwhile, the rest of the officers in the nightclub are interpreting events a little differently – those Poles are stealing a French officer’s girl!  The “prestige” of the French uniform must be defended:

“Well what next?” I asked them.

“Duel!” barked one of the three lieutenants.

“Nothing doing,” I told them.  “No more audience, blackout everywhere, no more spectators, so no more need for heroics.  Get that, you stupid asses?”

“All Frenchmen are cowards,” stated the second lieutenant, with a polite Polish bow.

“All right: duel,” I said.

I mentioned yesterday that Promise at Dawn is in part about the Lithuanian Jewish Gary becoming French.  Here we witness a step in the process.  Heck if they don’t fight a duel, in a hotel corridor, in the middle of a massive air raid that could pulverize them at any time, all in the company of Ezra Pound:

She was, by now, in the throes of a particularly revolting literary seizure, and, raising her moist eyes to mine, kept murmuring, in erotic undertones:

“You are going to kill a man!  I can feel it!  You are going to kill a man!”

But of course he will do no such thing, “because Mickiewicz was a great poet but also because I did not want to get into trouble.”  The whole episode, which with some minor adjustments, might as well come from a Dumas novel.  It is funny, has several little twists I have omitted, and is extremely French.

I am not convinced I gave a good sense of the Gary’s voice yesterday.  This should do it – “eyes literally sparkling with imbecility” is representative.  I could do this several more times and cover Gary’s idealism, his fatalism, and of course the center of the book, his deep love for his titanic mother.  But the comedy and derring-do should be enough.  If this scene sounds good, the rest of the book ought to work out all right for you.

The patriotic Pan Tadeusz – Polish coffee, Polish frogs

Pan Tadeusz is mostly (mostly) not an obviously patriotic poem. One character claims that Polish coffee is the best, and at another point Mickiewicz tells us that Polish frogs sing the sweetest. Highly questionable sentiments.

At some point, though, the political undercurrent of the poem becomes clear. The story is set in the spring of 1812. Napoleon has appeared on the Polish border. French victory against Russia means, perhaps, freedom for Poland. The local story of the poem intersects with history.

The last canto of Pan Tadeusz (titled “Let Us Love One Another!”) describes “the last banquet in the old Polish style.” It’s a marvel. The plot, as such, is finished. The last canto has another purpose.

To begin with, a huge centerpiece, created as per the actual 18th century Polish cookbook The Perfect Cook:

Whipped cream and icing sugar white as snow
Covered the centrepiece, which seemed to show
A winter landscape.

Successive layers of icing melt, allowing the seasons to change. Next, royal beet soup, meat broth, sausage, caviar and:

The last of all, a rare and secret dish,
Consisted of a single uncut fish,
Fried at the head and roasted in the mid,
Its tail in a ragout with sauces hid.

The most remarkable section, hard to excerpt, is a dulcimer concert, followed by a polonaise, that embodies the finest elements and aspirations of Polish culture – a humanistic patriotism. The long section describing the dulcimer music, in translation, seems to me to mimic the tone and structure of the Eastern European wedding music that I’ve heard. I don’t see how its done. Maybe I’m imaging things. Anyway, the final pages really feel like the breathless party preceding the march to war. Here’s the end, toasts to:

Napoleon and the Generals of the host
Tadeusz, Zosia, and in turn the rest
Of the betrothed, and every present guest,
And all the friends of all the company,
And all the dead of hallowed memory.

And I was with them drinking wine and mead
And what I saw and heard all men may read.

That last couplet is the fairy tale ending. Pan Tadeusz resembles War and Peace in this regard – it ends on this lovely high note, before catastrophe strikes. Napoleon is crushed, Tadeusz and he Count are, presumably, killed or exiled, and Poland waits over a hundred years for independence. Mickiewicz himself more or less abandoned literature after Pan Tadeusz, spending the next twenty years roaming Europe, doing what he could for Polish independence.*

* Also, attending Goethe’s 80th birthday part and trying to seduce Margaret Fuller. Mickiewicz was an interesting fellow.