#66: Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, by Simone de Beauvoir

You learn as much about Simone de Beauvoir from the way she writes her memoir as you do from what she tells us about the first twenty years of her life (this is the first of four volumes of her autobiography). She was given the nickname Castor, French for beaver, by one of her friends at university, for two reasons: one, because Beauvoir sounds something like the English word beaver, but also because of her relentless diligence, her need to work work work. The nickname stuck. This book is a good demonstration of why: it’s a kind of snowplow of facts and information pushed ahead by her pen (typewriter, more likely): steady, workmanlike, and powerful. There are few if any jokes or digressions.

This suited me fine because I’m comfortable processing information in much the same way that de Beauvoir provides it. I like information intake. Writing that requires some additional mental processing (such as poetry or philosophy) isn’t quite as satisfying to my mind as direct accounts like de Beauvoir’s. I couldn’t always keep track of the many names and details, but I could appreciate the way she uses everyone she meets and everything she learns as fuel for her engine of a mind. That’s an awkward metaphor, but it captures the idea: she was furiously determined to make sense of the world and to make something of her self, and all her energies and resources were directed toward these ends.

Having made this point I suspect I’ve managed to make de Beauvoir sound robotic or joyless, but while I’m sure she was formidable and had no time for fools, she was also a passionate lively person with an enormous appetite for knowledge, experience, and, most especially, other people. Fortunately for those of us reading this book, she is a good enough student of human nature, and a good enough writer, to provide fascinating portraits of all the people who captured her imagination—I’ll quote liberally from one such portrait at the end of this piece.

In her youth, de Beauvoir was an academic star, claiming one prize after another until she found herself sharing classrooms at the Sorbonne with the likes of Claude Lévi-Strauss and John-Paul Sartre. Her family had started off rich but had then come down in the world, and her parents saw her education as an accomplishment that might appeal to a potential husband, like playing the piano. She was compliant with this view until she realized that the conventional rewards of a conventional life—children, a house, money—held no appeal for her. Education went from being a means to an end to being the key to her future.

It was never an easy path. De Beauvoir’s parents, like the parents of other young women of her class, managed their daughter’s life to an extent that seems outrageous to modern sensibilities. They screened her mail and ruled on what books she was allowed to read until she was 18. Her mother saw it as her ultimate duty to help her daughter find a suitable husband. De Beauvoir’s close friend Elizabeth Mabille (whom she knew affectionately as Zaza) waged a kind of war with her own mother. She was in love with a fellow student, but when he would not commit it left her with no recourse but to capitulate to her mother’s will in the matter. The struggle left her so exhausted that she succumbed to a fever and died; this episode comes at the very end of Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. The implication is clear: for a woman of de Beauvoir's class in the 1920s, living life on one’s own terms required certain psychological and emotional resources, along with enormous strength.

The French title of the book is Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée. The word rangé translates as tidy, steady, or level-headed. This word captures a lot more of de Beauvoir’s personality than “dutiful,” especially since de Beauvoir becomes steadily less dutiful during the course of the book. But she never ceases to be steady and level-headed.

Though de Beauvoir was a serious and determined student who had the fortitude to spend entire days studying, her existence was far from monkish. She went to concerts, plays, and lectures and even developed a taste for drinking cocktails and flirting with men in cafés, though, during the period covered by this volume, she most emphatically remained chaste:

I frankly detested the Roman Catholic religion; watching Lisa and Zaza fighting for their lives against ‘this self-martyring religion,’ I was more and more thankful that I had escaped from its clutches; in fact, I was still contaminated by it; the sexual taboos still haunted me to such an extent that I longed to become a drug-addict or an alcoholic, but never for a moment did I contemplate sexual indulgence.

A reason to investigate subsequent volumes, perhaps, is to find out how and when she overcame this taboo.

But perhaps the finest thing in the book is de Beauvoir’s accounts of her numerous friendships. When de Beauvoir made a new friend it was as though she were taking the next step in her own evolution—she would catalog the person’s various qualities and traits, but she also had a way of adding their ideas and experiences to her own. She learned them, like books. I could cite many examples of this phenomenon, but my favorite was the one I was waiting for but wasn’t sure would be covered in this volume: her friendship with Sartre. I discovered it just 20 pages from the end—it was worth the wait. Here are some samples.

‘He never stops thinking,’ Herbaud had told me. This didn’t mean that he cogitated over formulas and theories all the time: he had a horror of pedantry. But his mind was always alert. Torpor, somnolence, escapism, intellectual dodges and truces, prudence, and respect were all unknown to him. He was interested in everything and never took anything for granted. Confronted with an object, he would look it straight in the face instead of trying to explain it away with a myth, a word, an impression, or a preconceived idea: he wouldn’t let it go until he had grasped all its ins and outs and all its multiple significations. He didn’t ask himself what he ought to think about it, or what it would have been amusing or intelligent to think about it: he simply thought about it.

= = = =

We used to talk about all kinds of things, but especially about a subject which interested me above all others: myself. Whenever other people made attempts to analyse me, they did so from the standpoint of their own little worlds, and this used to exasperate me. But Sartre always tried to see me as part of my own scheme of things, to understand me in the light of my own set of values and attitudes.

And finally:

He certainly had no intention of leading the life of a professional literary man; he detested formalities and literary hierarchies, literary ‘movements,’ careers, the rights and duties of the man of letters, and all the stuffy pompousness of life. He couldn’t reconcile himself to the idea of having a profession, colleagues, superiors, of having to observe and impose rules; he would never be a family man, and would never even marry. With all the romanticism of the age and of his twenty-three years, he dreamed of making tremendous journeys: in Constantinople, he would fraternize with the dock-workers; he would get blind drunk with pimps and white-slavers in sinks of iniquity; he would go right round the world, and neither the pariahs of India nor the monks of Mount Athos nor the fishermen of Newfoundland would have any secrets from him. He would never settle down anywhere, and would never encumber himself with possessions: not merely in order to keep his freedom of movement, but in order to prove how unnecessary possessions are. All his experiments were to benefit his writing, and he would sweep aside all experiences which would in any way detract from it.

No other passages in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter are as lyrical or as moving. I can’t claim to know that much about either de Beauvoir or Sartre, but it’s wonderful to think that two people could form such a mutually satisfying life partnership and at the same time enhance and amplify each other’s talents to such an extent.

#65: At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, by Sarah Bakewell

After reading Sarah Bakewell’s previous book, How to Live: or, a Life of Montaigne, I was hoping she’d follow up with something in a similar vein before too long. Montaigne had been someone I was curious about, and Bakewell’s book did exactly what I hoped it would do: it told me about who he was, and also about what makes him unique and interesting. One problem with innovators from earlier times is that it’s hard, without the proper guide, to feel the impact they made on their world. Montaigne introduced a way of thinking and writing that has since become familiar; so in reading Montaigne, or reading about him, it can be hard to recognize that he was the first to think and write as he did. I’m always wanting to bring up Elvis Presley regarding this notion: it’s easy for me to hear that Elvis was a good singer (though often of bad songs), but the oft-cited claim that he was “the first white man to sing like a black man” has never resonated with me, perhaps because I grew up in a world where Elvis’s example had already been copied by any number of other singers. I was born too late to hear Elvis as people heard him in 1955 and ’56.

I haven’t been as curious about Sartre and the existentialists as I was about Montaigne, at least not lately. Sartre was a big deal in the third quarter of the 20th century when I was in school; he has largely fallen out of fashion in this century. Back in the day, Sartre was a figure to be reckoned with—a philosopher who became involved in radical politics, a communist sympathizer with intellectual credentials, a real troublemaker. Early in his career, in the 30s and 40s, he’d written quite a bit of fiction—his short novel Nausea was a staple of comparative literature courses in the 70s. I’d read one of his novels and a book of stories, and enjoyed them quite a bit. At one point I purchased his magnum opus, the philosophical tract Being and Nothingness, but never had the fortitude to even open it. It might still be in a box in the basement.

So although I’d not thought about Sartre and existentialism for a while, the fact that Sarah Bakewell had written a book about them was enough to get me interested. It isn’t that hard to see what connects Montaigne to Sartre: they were both philosophers, more or less, but they were both known as much for the lives they led as for the books they wrote. I’m fascinated by philosophers, but intimidated by actual philosophy. As soon as I start reading about inquiries into the nature of being and the like, my eyes start to cross.

Bakewell is unlike me in that she has an appetite for philosophical texts, but I was pleased to read that she also feels that philosophers’ lives illuminate their work and vice versa:

When I first read Sartre and Heidegger, I didn’t think the details of a philosopher’s personality or biography were important. This was the orthodox belief in the field at the time, but it also came from my being too young myself to have much sense of history. I intoxicated myself with concepts, without taking account of their relationship to events and to all the odd data of their inventors’ lives. Never mind lives; ideas were the thing.

Thirty years later, I have come to the opposite conclusion. Ideas are interesting, but people are vastly more so.

Precisely. Knowing about the person opens me up to wanting to know about their work. Though Sartre is definitely the presiding presence in Bakewell’s book, she name checks seven philosophers on the front cover of her book, and devotes a fair amount of space to each: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Most of these names were familiar to me—all except Merleau-Ponty. Heidegger, Husserl, and Jaspers were German; the rest were French (with the appropriate caveat about Camus being Algerian French, a pied-noir). I get the impression that there can be no formal list of existentialists, any more than there can be any formal definition of existentialism. Bakewell takes this question on in her first chapter, where she provides a nine-point definition of existentialism. But she seems to regard this exercise as something of a chore:

…[H]ere is my attempt at a definition of what existentialists do. I put it here for reference, but by all means skip it and come if the need or want arises.

The notion that arose in my mind as I read the book is that existentialism is the opposite or “fate” or “determinism”: it’s the idea that the world is what we make of it. It’s freedom: the notion that life is a series of often difficult choices and that we are the authors of our own lives. Life is a wave to be surfed.

It’s true, some of us are more constrained in our choices than others; the people that Bakewell writes about certainly lived through times of difficult choices: the primes of these writers’ careers coincided with World War II, so you could say that their various theories about how to live were often put to very challenging tests.

The war was also the time when the philosophers Bakewell considers were most unified. In the late 40s and 50s, as communism became intellectually respectable (or fashionable) in Europe, rifts began to appear. You could either focus on the promise of communism—“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” according to Marx—or the reality of Stalinism. Sartre was drawn to radical positions, which aligned him for a time with Stalin, and later with Mao. While others would watch political conflicts carefully, awaiting the verdict of history, Sartre was determined to exercise his freedom of choice to influence and be part of history while it was happening. Near the end of his life he was asked to name his worst failing, and this is how he responded:

Naturally in the course of my life I have made lots of mistakes, large and small, for one reason or another. But at the heart of it all, every time I made a mistake it was because I was not radical enough.

But choices were difficult, and mistakes were inevitable. What was Sartre’s guiding principle? According to Bakewell:

Sartre had sketched the outline of a bold solution: why not decide every situation by asking how it looks to ‘the eyes of the least favoured’, or to ‘those treated the most unjustly’? You just need to work out who is the most oppressed and disadvantaged in the situation, and then adopt their version of events as the right one.

Bakewell connects this notion of looking at the world through the ‘gaze’ of the least favoured to various writers and movements in the intervening decades, from Frantz Fanon to James Baldwin—even Normal Mailer makes an appearance. The notion of “identity politics” is very much at the center of our culture and politics today, and it all leads back to Sartre. He didn’t just anticipate our world—he helped to create it. Is the world better for his efforts? Some would say yes; many would say no. I’m sympathetic to both perspectives. It might depend on where your gaze is situated.

At the opposite end of the spectrum from Sartre was Martin Heidegger. Heidegger is considerably less interesting to me precisely because he sought to maintain a barrier between his life and his work. I gather that Heidegger might be the most profound philosopher of the group that Bakewell considers, but I labored through the chapter where she explains his concepts and terminology. As for his life, there are two facts that stick in memory: one, that he had an affair with Hannah Arendt when she was his pupil in the 1920s, and two, that he had an early affiliation with the Nazi party that he terminated but never attempted to justify, excuse, or explain. Of course, these two facts amplify each other, because Arendt was Jewish and later wrote one of the most famous and provocative books about the holocaust: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Strange bedfellows, indeed. Arendt and Heidegger resumed their relationship after the war, though only through letters.

Sarah Bakewell’s books always leave me hungry for more. After reading her Montaigne book I plowed through the first volume of his essays. Volumes two and three still await. After reading this book, I went down to the basement and found the book of Sartre stories I'd read a few decades ago—its title is Intimacy—and re-read it. The stories are intriguing psychological portraits of rather extreme characters. The one story I still remembered after all these years, titled “The Childhood of a Leader,” is almost novella length, and describes how a pampered and confused child somehow blossoms into a fascist leader. The portrait is not entirely convincing, but I admire Sartre for at least trying to imagine how such a person comes to exist. What would Hitler have been like as a six-year-old or as a twelve-year-old? It’s relatively easy to point to the usual signposts: lack of empathy, torturing animals, and so forth, but it’s another thing to try to enter into the mind of such an individual. Sartre gives it a good try.

But from the group that Bakewell describes, the one who is most interesting to me as a writer is Simone de Beauvoir. Bakewell writes:

…[a]mong all the existentialist works, the one I am least likely to tire of is Beauvoir’s autobiography, with its portrait of human complexity and of the world’s ever-changing substance. It gives us all the fury and vivacity of the existentialist cafés, together with ‘a sulphur sky over a sea of clouds, the purple holly, the white nights of Leningrad, the bells of the Liberation, an orange moon over the Piraeus, a red sun rising over the desert’—and all the rest of the exquisite, phosphorescent bloom of life, which reveals itself to human beings for as long as we are lucky enough to be able to experience it.

That’s how Bakewell ends her book, and that’s how I’ll end this post.

#64: Within a Budding Grove and The Guermantes Way, by Marcel Proust

I’ve just spent a little over 100 hours in the company of a young Frenchman in the years just before and after 1900. In other words, I’ve now reached the half-way point of In Search of Lost Time. For the most part, it’s a first-person account, so what we read is the unnamed narrator’s thoughts and experiences. What usually happens when you spend so much time looking over someone’s shoulder this way is that you slip into their skin to some extent. Literary transference. But that has not happened in this case—Proust is profoundly unlike me, to the extent that I am at various times bored, entertained, confused, and occasionally even a bit shocked by the way he sees the world. I was debating with myself whether this was necessarily a bad thing when I came upon the following quote from critic William Empson in a New York Review of Books article (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/10/26/empson-praise-ambiguity/):

The main purpose of reading imaginative literature is to grasp a wide variety of experience, imagining people with codes and customs very unlike our own.

Which makes sense, except that to some degree you also have to be able to connect with or empathize with a character if a book is to mean much of anything to you. It’s a balancing act for writer and reader. There has to be enough of a connection that your ego can stretch to cover the gap, but not so much that your imagination doesn’t have to work.

Marcel (as I’ll call the narrator, who is unnamed in the book) begins as a sickly child with a powerful imagination. He forms ideas about certain things—flowers, young girls, and aristocratic families—and then shares his impressions with us in great cumulonimbus paragraphs. You get the impression that he forms his view of the world from books and his own meditations, as many a literary child will, but to a greater extent than most. Here, for example, is what Marcel thinks as he observes two noble ladies—the Princesse de Guermantes and the Duchess de Guermantes (cousins by marriage)—at the theater. He is describing their clothing:

For my own part, I never doubted that their garments were peculiar to themselves, not merely in the sense in which the livery with red collar or blue facings had once belonged exclusively to the houses of Guermantes and Condé, but rather as for a bird its plumage which, as well as being a heightening of its beauty, is an extension of its body. The costumes of these two ladies seemed to me like the materialization, snow-white or patterned with colour, of their inner activity, and, like the gestures which I had seen the Princesse de Guermantes make and which, I had no doubt, corresponded to some latent idea, the plumes which swept down from her forehead and her cousin’s dazzling and spangled bodice seemed to have a special meaning, to be to each of these women an attribute which was hers, and hers alone, the significance of which I should have liked to know: the bird of paradise seemed inseparable from its wearer as her peacock is from Juno, and I did not believe that any other woman could usurp that spangled bodice, any more than the fringed and flashing shield of Minerva. And when I turned my eyes to their box, far more than on the ceiling of the theatre, painted with lifeless allegories, it was as though I had seen, thanks to a miraculous break in the customary clouds, the assembly of the Gods in the act of contemplating the spectacle of mankind, beneath a crimson canopy, in a clear lighted space, between two pillars of Heaven.

Nice outfits, apparently. Proust’s prose is the honeysuckle that ascends the trellis of the ladies’ haute couture. Both may be a bit overdone (sort of like that metaphor). This is about half of the full passage—it’s almost impossible to pull a succinct quote from Proust. Such rhapsodies make up a significant portion of In Search of Lost Time, and they can be strenuous.

After I had read dozens of pages devoted to Marcel’s fascination with one or another young girl, I would be a bit scandalized to discover that he eventually “falls out of love” with them at exactly the point when they begin to reveal themselves to him, despite not having passed through the expected intermediate phase of actually having a romantic relationship. I expected some interpenetration of consciousness, because that’s how I think about love. But the point at which women become real to Marcel is exactly the point at which his passion begins to recede.

He feels the collapse of his cloud castles as a kind of victory over his passions. Indeed we learn that this Marcel, so sickly and delicate, so likely to be overwhelmed by sensations, also becomes an habitué of brothels, though this information is related only in passing, for example to explain how he knows that the object of his friend’s obsession is in fact a prostitute.

Marcel’s love is a kind of visual stimulus that provokes an outpouring of elaborate prose, like the grain of sand that provokes the oyster. This extravagance seems a bit ridiculous in 2017, and I think it might have in 1900 as well, but maybe not in 1300, when knights in romances were going on quests to prove their worth to women they had only glimpsed from afar. And if there is irony or humor to be derived from the juxtaposition of stained glass windows and brothels, Proust doesn’t seem to be interested in exploiting it.

Each volume of In Search of Lost Time consists of a small number of extended episodes—in Within a Budding Grove there are two episodes: the first relates Marcel’s infatuation with a girl named Gilberte and his effort to become socially acquainted with her family. Really, he is as much infatuated with her parent as he is with her. They are Charles Swann and Odette (née de Crécy), whose love affair had made up the second half of the first volume, Swann’s Way. I was a bit surprised to learn that they are now married, since the earlier volume depicts the full course and eventual exhaustion of his infatuation with her. Proust leaves it to us to imagine how this transition was effected. The conception of a child may be relevant. Perhaps Odette had allowed herself to become pregnant for practical reasons.

The second episode is about Marcel’s season at the (fictional) beach resort of Balbec in Normandy, where he stays in a hotel with his grandmother. Here Marcel builds up his circle of acquaintance, meeting many of the characters who will populate the rest of the novel. There is Robert de Saint-Loup, the dashing military officer who doesn’t realize that his mistress is actually a prostitute. Robert pedigree is immaculate—at least on a par with the crowned heads of Europe. If Marcel’s notions of romance seem anachronistic, so too is his reverence for bloodlines:

But in Saint-Loup, when all was said, however the faults of his parents had combined to create a new blend of qualities, there reigned the most charming openness of mind and heart. And whenever (it must be allowed to the undying glory of France) these qualities are found in a man who is purely French, whether he belongs to the aristocracy or the people, they flower—flourish would be too strong a word, for moderation persists in this field, as well as restriction—with a grace which the foreigner, however estimable he may be, does not present to us.

The passage, with its Jamesian qualifications and elaborations, gets stranger and stranger:

Of these intellectual and moral qualities others undoubtedly have their share, and, if we have first to overcome what repels us and what makes us smile, they remain no less precious. But it is all the same a pleasant thing, and one which is perhaps exclusively French, that what is fine in all equity of judgment, what is admirable to the mind and the heart, should be first of all attractive to the eyes, pleasingly coloured, consummately chiselled, should express as well in substance as in form an inner perfection. I looked at Saint-Loup, and I said to myself that it is a thing to be glad of when there is no lack of physical grace to serve as vestibule to the graces within, and when the curves of the nostrils are as delicate and as perfectly designed as the wings of the little butterflies that hover over the field-flowers round Combray; and that the true opus francigenum, the secret of which was not lost in the thirteen century, and would not perish with our churches, consists not so much in the stone angels of Saint-Andre-des Champs as in the young sons of France, noble, bourgeois or peasant, whose faces are carved with that delicacy and boldness which have remained as traditional as on the famous porch, but are creative still.

This passage captures many of the weird crosscurrents the modern reader experiences in reading Proust. First of all it is as ornate and extravagant as a mediaeval cathedral. Secondly it is truly weird and rather homoerotic, though I’m pretty sure I could find similar passages describing female beauty. Thirdly it celebrates racial purity, though in the most discrete and indirect way. Many characters express anti-Semitic sentiments in In Search of Lost Time, typically in terms of taking sides in the Dreyfus affair. Marcel himself would seem to be a Dreyfusard—that is, in the not anti-Semitic camp—and Proust himself certainly was, but the currents of the novel flow both ways: to the extent that Marcel is under the spell of some count or princess, he partakes of their perspective, but as he begins to be disillusioned, he might undermine their pretensions, more by letting them ramble on idiotically than by commenting directly.

The third volume, The Guermantes Way, gives us Marcel’s obsession with the Duchess of Guermantes. His family has come to live in the “Hôtel de Guermantes—a hôtel in Paris is a sort of in-town chateau, large enough that various apartments can be rented out. But his family does not officially “know” the duke and duchess, so he is reduced, in order to be able to see her, to contriving to pass her on the street every morning as if by accident. This habit provides some potential for comedy that Proust doesn’t completely waste.

For a time Marcel is distracted from his infatuation by visiting Robert Saint-Loup at his military barracks outside Paris. Then he describes Saint-Loup’s peculiar relationship with his mistress, Rachel. This episode mirrors Swann’s infatuation with Odette in the first volume and also to some extent Marcel’s own various infatuations. The implication is that a woman is what you make of her and love is a kind of enchantment that blinds the lover to reality. Finally, there is a set piece on the illness and death of Marcel’s beloved grandmother, an episode rendered as finely as an extended death scene out of Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky.

But by page 500 or so we are back in the company of the Duchess of Guermantes. Marcel has gradually made his way up the ladder of Paris society, one drawing room at a time. He goes from encountering the duchess at the homes of others to eventually receiving an invitation to her own salon. He never tells us what sort of social capital enables him to become a regular at the very best gatherings, even as he assures us that no ordinary mortal without the requisite pedigree could possibly do so. Marcel exists in a very peculiar state—he is equal parts omniscient narrator and character, having characteristics of both roles but fully inhabiting neither. Thus we take his access to the highest levels of society for granted, without asking to see his credentials.

Of course, once Marcel is able to observe the duchess up close and converse with her, he no longer sees her as a goddess out of mythology. Instead he sees a woman with the skills and instincts (not to mention the pedigree) to position herself at the pinnacle of society. She is very well read with a good sense of humor, but also vain and insincere. Her husband the duke (first name: Basin) has long since devoted the majority of his attention to a string of mistresses, but he is still a connoisseur of his wife’s witticisms, and he feeds his prize show pony the requisite straight lines and takes care to explain the jokes for the benefit of anyone who might have missed the point. It’s as important for the duchess to be able to deliver an apposite quite from literature as it is for her to reject an invitation from the wrong person. Perhaps her greatest joy, though, is doing everything in her power to assure that one of her servants is prevented from having a few hours off to visit his girlfriend.

So that’s the world of Marcel, or at least the first 2400-odd pages or so. At this point I think it’s appropriate to take a break and consult some secondary sources—perhaps Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life. I can’t say I haven’t enjoyed Proust to a certain extent, but I’m pretty sure I’d have enjoyed the half dozen or so books I could have read instead in the same time at least as much. To this point, I’ve been strict about experiencing the text without consulting other sources, but I am sure that I will learn much—and be further entertained—when I dip into the ocean of content that has been created around Lost Time. There are works of literature, such as Don Quixote or Ulysses, that are best read in the light of what other skilled readers—critics, historians, philosophers—have learned and thought about them through the years. Interesting commentaries don’t just tell you what you did not or could not know about the original author’s mental universe, they can be creative works on their own terms, using the original text as a foundation to build upon. They are like 200-level courses, with the original text serving as the 100-level prerequisite. I’m ready to find out what I’ve been missing. Considering how bewildered I am much of the time as I read Proust, I'm sure to learn quite a bit.

#63: The Visiting Privilege, by Joy Williams

Writing stories like this must be like being able to fly. If you know how to do it, there’s nothing to explain. And if you don’t, well, there’s still nothing to explain.

Again and again I was amazed at Joy Williams's ability to hit the ground running—to establish characters, a setting, and a tone with just a couple of sentences. The effect is to dispel the sense that she is making stuff up and replace it with the sense that she is observing. It’s sort of the opposite of starting a story with “Once upon a time…”. One story, “The Little Winter,” begins this way:

She was in the airport, waiting for her flight to be called, when a woman came to a phone near her chair. The woman stood there, dialing, and after a while began talking in a flat, aggrieved voice. Gloria couldn’t hear everything by any means, but she did hear her say, “If anything happens to this place, I hope you’ll be satisfied.”

Having set a story in motion, Williams almost immediately begins introducing details that seem to erupt into the tale, almost as though there was a second author trying to wrest control from the first. As we’re learning about Gloria, Williams gives us this, at the beginning of the story’s second paragraph:

The plane pushed through the sky and the drink made her think of how, as a child, she had enjoyed chewing on the collars of her dresses.

I could cite a similar pair of passages from many if not most of the stories in The Visiting Privilege that accomplish this one-two trick. Not “trick” in the sense of gimmick, but rather in the sense of doing something that is both simple and astonishing. Here is how the story “White” starts:

Bliss and Joan were giving a farewell party for the Episcopal priest and his family, who had been called by God to the state of Michigan.

And then, in the second paragraph:

Joan was a fourth-generation Floridian who missed the garish sunsets and the sound of armadillos crashing through the palmetto scrub.

Crashing armadillos, chewed collars—these details do not necessarily move the story forward, rather they make the entire enterprise seem less deliberate, give us the impression that Williams is observing the action rather than creating it. They’re a kind of narrative ventriloquism, they displace the animating spirit right into the story. It occurs to me that Joy Williams must be a very good liar.

The Visiting Privilege is subtitled “New and Collected Stories,” so I take it this is sort of the culmination of her writing career, which stretches back to the 70s. The stories are arranged more or less chronologically, I think, and become stranger and more entertaining as you go along.

I read somewhere recently about a woman who takes “micro doses” of LSD to combat depression. I find this notion very appealing, though I suppose it’s a serious business and not all fun and games. Joy Williams’s stories contain micro doses of something like fictional LSD. They dart and wheel dependably, but never go completely off the rails. The typical Williams story features a first-person narrator, usually female, who is either herself a bit nutty or is interacting with person or persons who are a bit nutty. Sometimes they’re all a bit nutty, but in an earnest, unassuming way. The nuttiness is manifested by a tendency to free associate.

I fixed clocks in the garage for a while but then I stopped serving the public, who were never, ever satisfied. So it’s just a personal hobby, taking apart clocks and watches and putting them back together again. There was a Frenchman centuries ago, a watchmaker, who created a life-size mechanical duck. It could move its head, flap its wings, even eat from a bowl of grain. Then it could even shit out the compacted grain. It was all gears and springs. More than four hundred parts moved each wing. They call things like that automatons.

That selection is from a story that is a seemingly random series of recollections and meditations about characters identified as “Mother” and “the boy.” Along with the narrator, they are a family, but it takes us a while to establish that the narrator is the boy’s father and that “Mother” is (probably) the narrator’s wife. They go to New York and help a blind lady across the street. They discuss Rimbaud. They get a dog. But then:

It was around eleven in the morning. A beautiful desert day. You forget how pretty the sky can still be. Mother was over at the park fixing a sprinkler system for the fortieth time. I think they break them deliberate so they’ll have something to do. I’m in my shop thinking like I frequently do that the third cup of coffee tastes funny and then all hell breaks loose. People banging on the door and screaming and shouting and I even hear a helicopter overhead. And I say, “Stay, Amy, stay, stay,” and walk out of the garage and there’s law officers out there screaming, “sumabitch, sumabitch” and “the congresswoman” and “sumabitch” again, even the women, all of them in uniform and with guns, and I think whatever I was thinking a minute ago is the last peaceful thought I will ever have. Though sometimes now I try to pretend he’s still in the house, in his room with the door closed. I pretend he’s still living with us and eating with us and getting by with us. But of course he’s not and he isn’t.

No, we were never afraid of him. Afraid of Jared?

So “the boy” turns out to be Jared Loughner, perpetrator of the 2011 massacre in Tucson, Arizona that severely injured U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords. What’s strange is that everything leading up to this surprising conclusion seems like a completely typical Joy Williams story—there is no sense of impending violence. In fact, several of the stories feature violent episodes, but there is always also this sense of disassociation, people floating along, remembering snatches of conversation, relating arcane facts, describing the vegetation.

Of course, Jared Loughner did a horrible thing, but if you didn’t know about him I do not think you could infer the monstrous nature of his act from this story. It’s a surprising and unique synapse, a spark that leaps from the fictional universe to the real one. Joy Williams’s stories may say something about the lightly medicated sense of reality in 21st century America, but you would have to be a more sensitive instrument than I am to feel a strong moral current running through them.

#62: Swann’s Way, by Marcel Proust

This is volume one, of six, of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, formerly known as Remembrance of Things Past. In Search of Lost Time is regarded as one of the major literary accomplishments of the 20th century, right up there with Ulysses or The Waste Land. If you’re the bookish sort, you might hope to read it some day the way a traveler might wish to visit the Great Wall of China. It’s as extravagant a reading project as I can envision, on a par with reading all of Shakespeare at a go, or plunging into Greek and Roman literature.

So here’s my first postcard from the farthest reaches of the literary outback. What’s it like? It’s difficult. More difficult than I had anticipated. The vast majority of books that I read assume a sort of contract with the reader. They propose to amuse me with wit, or entice me with suspense, or amaze me with insight. For Proust, the objective seems to be to render his perceptions and emotions in as complete and precise a way as possible. If I’m interested in his undertaking, fine; if not, he makes no concession.

Proust will elaborate and qualify his thoughts until he feels he has done them justice. His sentences descend on you like tsunamis. Some of the sentences are a page long and when you encounter a pronoun somewhere towards the end of one of them you practically have to send a search party out to find the antecedent. Here is an example. The author is recalling an occasion from his childhood when he encountered a Mademoiselle Gilberte Swann, who has held a place in his affections for no very clear reason—something to do with his fascination with her parents. He had seen her just once before, in the country; now he encounters her in Paris.

While I waited for [my nanny] I was pacing the broad lawn of meager, close-cropped, sun-baked grass, dominated, at its far end, by a statue rising from a fountain, in front of which a little girl with reddish hair was playing battledore and shuttlecock, when from the path another little girl, who was putting on her coat and covering up her racquet, called out sharply: “Good-bye Gilberte, I’m going home now; don’t forget we’re coming to you this evening, after dinner.”

A longish sentence, for sure, but it’s the next one that’s the tsunami:

The name Gilberte passed close by me, evoking all the more forcefully the girl whom it labeled in that it did not merely refer to her, as one speaks of someone in his absence, but was directly addressed to her; it passed thus close by me, in action so to speak, with a force that increased with the curve of its trajectory and the proximity of its target—carrying in its wake, I could feel, the knowledge, the impressions concerning her to whom it was addressed that belonged not to me but to the friend who called it out, everything that, as she uttered the words, she recalled, or at least possessed in her memory, of their daily intimacy, of the visits that they paid to each other, of that unknown existence which was all the more inaccessible, all the more painful to me from being, conversely, so familiar, so tractable to this happy girl who let it brush past me without my being able to penetrate it, who flung it on the air with a light-hearted cry—wafting through the air the exquisite emanation which it had distilled, by touching them with the utmost precision, from certain invisible points in Mlle Swann’s life, from the evening to come, just as it would be, after dinner, at her home—forming, on its celestial passage through the midst of the children and their nursemaids, a little cloud, delicately coloured, resembling one of those clouds that, billowing over a Poussin landscape, reflect minutely, like a cloud in the opera teeming with chariots and horses, some apparition of the life of the gods—casting, finally, on that ragged grass, at the spot where it was at one and the same time a scrap of withered lawn and a moment in the afternoon of the fair battledore player (who continued to launch and retrieve her shuttlecock until a governess with a blue feather in her hat had called her away) a marvellous little band of light, the colour of heliotrope, impalpable as a reflection and superimposed like a carpet on which I could not help but drag my lingering, nostalgic and desecrating feet, while Francoise shouted: “Come on, do up your coat and let’s clear off!” and I remarked for the first time how common her speech was, and that she had, alas, no blue feather in her hat.

This sentence tells you no more about Mlle Gilberte than a pearl necklace tells you about an oyster. I’ve underlined the word “them” in the middle of this sentence. It comes after a stretch in which there are three instances of the pronoun “it.” So the reader is expected to be holding at least two nouns in his head, one singular, one plural. Perhaps there are others? To which noun does this “them” refer? Perhaps it is “words,” six lines up, or maybe “impressions,” eight lines up. You may have a different candidate, perhaps even a better one. The point is that the syntax parsers in our brains will occasionally overheat and seize up as we read Proust. And if you’re the least bit tired or distracted, forget about getting anywhere with this book. You’ll wander off the path and into the trees, until you run smack into one of them and a large pinecone falls on your head.

But having read that long, long sentence a few times, and now having typed it, I have to admire what a fantastic Rube Goldberg-Chinese Dragon of a sentence it is. Our emotions are strange things: when we hear of a colleague’s good fortune, for example, we feel a vicarious pleasure at their success, some jealousy and resentment because they were able to achieve what we perhaps would have wished to achieve instead of them, shame at our recognition of the selfishness of this resentment, and perhaps three or four other subordinate emotion all at the same time. We watch ourselves watching ourselves watch ourselves. Proust has the absurd and impossible project of wanting to capture all such echoes and reverberations of the moment (as indeed it is a child’s cry that has set this all in motion); perhaps it is not so much a tsunami as a tornado, up into which various bits of the physical scene (blue feathers, dry grass, shuttlecock), extended metaphors (the Poussin landscape, the operatic clouds), events recently passed and soon to come, and various other perceptions and sensations have been whirled. I find myself writing longer and stranger sentences even just in thinking about Proust; he’s like a jazz musician, doing with words and thoughts what Charlie Parker might do with a Richard Rodgers show tune.

I’m so tempted to put Proust aside now that I’ve finished volume one and to take up a book that connects to what’s happening around me here in the United States in 2017. It’s a strange and disturbing time and it calls to me, insists that I put aside such a dilettantish, unworldly undertaking and read something with IMPACT, something that will feed into discussions, something that show me a reflection of myself in the modern world. Because whatever else I am, I’m not much like the protagonist of Proust’s novel, and so the narcissistic impulse that fuels much of my reading is an itch that isn’t getting scratched at present. As Billy Joel once wrote, “I don’t want clever conversation/I never want to work that hard.” It doesn't sound as if Billy would like Proust.

But I will press on for at least one more volume: Within a Budding Grove. Seven hundred and thirty pages. Full speed ahead.

#61: The Flame Alphabet, by Ben Marcus

I read this book and didn’t like it—it wasn’t really close. But it’s a strange and unique book and I feel on shaky ground telling you why I didn’t like it, because if I read it again in five or ten years I might discover that the things I disliked were superficial and that the enduring strangeness of this book and the sheer commitment of its author had somehow managed to get under my skin. The author clearly knows what he’s doing and goes about his task with intensity and intelligence. But there was little or no payoff for me as a reader.

The back cover of this book gives us the setup: “The sound of children’s speech has become lethal. In the park, adults wither beneath the powerful screams of their offspring. For young parents Sam and Clair, it seems their only means of survival is to flee from their daughter, Esther.” Interesting premise. But that summary doesn’t really even begin to convey the weird logic that rules the universe of The Flame Alphabet.

In Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon imagines an hallucinogenic drug he names oneirine. An oneirine trip is called a “haunting”:

Oneirine hauntings show a definite narrative continuity, as clearly as, say, the average Reader’s Digest article. Often they are so ordinary, so conventional—Jeaach calls them ‘the dullest hallucinations known to psychopharmacology’—that they are only recognized as hauntings through some radical though plausible violation of possibility: the presence of the dead, journeys by the same route and means where one person will set out later but arrive earlier, a printed diagram which no amount of light will make readable.

Kafka’s The Metamorphosis is something like an oneirine trip. The single detail that cannot be reconciled is given to us in the first line: “One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.” Every other detail of Gregor Samsa’s universe is pretty much as it was before his transformation. Nobody else turns into a bug. And that’s what makes the story so perfect.

Sam and Clair in The Flame Alphabet live in upstate New York, and that stray prosaic fact stayed with me because it was almost like the opposite of the oneirine trip’s single plausible violation. It’s the rare (if not single) detail that relates their universe to ours. Because we learn pretty quickly that we’re not in Kansas anymore, much less upstate New York. As the book progresses, it isn’t just children’s speech that makes people ill—all and any language, including written language, becomes thoroughly poisonous. Of course, this is a novel, made of language, so in a sense we are consuming a poison that Marcus has concocted for us.

Sam eventually ends up working for an organization that is trying to discover a form of language that isn’t toxic. We get endless pages about his inevitably hopeless endeavors, in this vein:

Of course I tried codes. In modern Roman letters I encrypted a suicide note, some gentleman’s last words, with the Caesar cipher. From there I recreated what I could remember from historical texts—the Gettysburg Address was one—and fed them into simple substitution ciphers, homophonic coding, and a modified Vigenère cipher. If this worked, it would mean that our own scripts were too obvious and needed to be concealed, encrypted. But it didn’t work.

He knows it didn’t work because these efforts are then sent down to a courtyard to be presented to test subjects, who promptly expire. Are we to equate the act of writing with the crimes of Josef Mengele? Marcus is nothing if not provocative.

Sam’s efforts become ever more bizarre. It wasn’t always possible to understand his strategy and objectives:

From my drawer I retrieved the Hebrew balloon shrapnel. The deflated letters had dried and curled over the last few days. Some of them stank of the sea. On a stretching board I revived the pieces, ladled oil into their skin until they were slick, pulled others too long until they tore, and with my molder I formed a new set of dense cubes, like square rubber erasers, with which to build, perhaps, a Hebrew letter heretofore unseen.

It’s obscure, and also a little disgusting. Sam is the narrator of The Flame Alphabet, and is forever explaining, elaborating, testifying to the reality of his experience. Alot of that experience takes place in various holes, ditches, and tunnels. Damp, dark, smelly places. Indeed, there is a relentless dreariness that pervades The Flame Alphabet. I’m pretty sure Marcus is counting on provoking a certain repugnance in his readers. I’m just hard pressed to know why—my best guess is that it’s a very dark kind of comedy, which is why I wonder if I might not be better prepared to get the “joke” on a second reading. I had a similarly negative reaction the first time I saw David Lynch’s first film: Eraserhead. There are interesting similarities: in The Flame Alphabet language is toxic; in Eraserhead, it’s febrile, meaningless. Both works are mildly disgusting, each in its own unique and charming way. The second time I saw Eraserhead I thought it was brilliant—and funny. But Eraserhead is a relatively short and simple movie—it’s like a dream. Similar to The Metamorphosis in this regard. It should really be the first thing they teach you in Surrealism 101: If you’re going strange, be brief.

But now that I think of it, not all dreams are simple. Sometimes you wake up and you remember a whole series of vaguely related episodes. For a few minutes you hold enough in your memory that you can imagine scribbling for hours to get it all down on paper. No doubt 98% of it would evaporate off the surface of your consciousness before you even sat down to get started. Maybe The Flame Alphabet is like that kind of dream. The kind that you might ponder for a few minutes, thinking “Did all that really come out of my brain?”

It’s not that the notion of “language as virus” isn’t both shocking and profound. We believe language is as essential to us as, say, our hands. But other creature walk, crawl, and swim the earth without language; what’s more, they have not come up to the point of destroying the planet. If there really was a “Great Designer,” he or she might be just at the point of backing this “feature” out right now. “No, no, that speeds things up too much and only leads to trouble.” But Marcus isn’t working this angle—he’s not asking “What if language is a virus?” He’s taking that as a given. It may be that he’s not giving us an idea, the product of his thinking, but a postulate, a starting point for our own ideas. But meanwhile, there’s a lot to slog through.

#60: Counternarratives, by John Keene

The title suggests an academic exercise, the work of a tenured PhD who’s in the habit of referring to a book or story as a narrative. But this is a book of “stories and novellas,” not a work of literary criticism. So perhaps then it’s fiction with a critical agenda? It’s more a cultural agenda. Keene is writing from the perspective of the non-white people invariably assigned to supporting roles in the standard histories—or cut out entirely. In his stories, he looks through the eyes and speaks through the mouths of the people who have been muted by the ethnic biases of five hundred years of American history. (And not just North American history—some of Keene’s stories are set in South American and the Carribean.) He doesn’t just bring these people into the picture—he puts them at the center, gives them agency (another word from the academic lexicon), the power to frame and control their narratives.

The most obvious example of this agenda is a tale narrated by Jim, Huck Finn’s black companion from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I would guess that most people reviewing Counternarratives would mention this story, titled “Rivers,” in the first paragraph or two because it’s such a perfect example of what Keene means by a counternarrative. Jim meets up with Huck twice in the years after they ride down the river together. The first time Huck is with Tom Sawyer, somewhere in Illinois in the years just before the Civil War. Huck is cordial enough, but Tom is more a man of his time:

“When did you get yourself down this way?” Sawyer said, his razor lips cutting me a smile. “Cause I reckon soon as you knew you had got your freedom we all woke up to find you gone.”

I’m not sure Mark Twain would acknowledge this Tom as his own. But that’s kind of the point.

The second encounter is down in Texas toward the close of the Civil War. Jim is now in a black Union regiment. He spies Huck on the Confederate side as the opposing forces close for battle:

I looked up and he still had not seen me, this face he could have drawn in his sleep, these eyes that had watched his and watched over his, this elder who had been like a brother, a keeper, a second father as he wondered why this child was taking him deeper and deeper into the heart of the terror, why south instead of straight east to liberation, credit his and my youth or ignorance or inexperience, for which I forgive him and myself but I came so close to ending up in a far worse place than I ever was, and I heard Anderson or someone call out in the distance, and raised my gun, bringing it to my eye, the target his hands which were moving quickly with his own gun leaned against his shoulder, over his heart, and I steadied the barrel, my finger on the trigger, which is when our gazes finally met, I am going to tell the reporter, and then we can discuss that whole story of the trip down the river with that boy, his gun aimed at me now, other faces behind his now, all of them assuming the contours, the lean, determined hardness of his face, that face, there were a hundred of that face, those faces, burnt, determined, hard and thinking only of their own disappearing universe, not ours, which was when the cry broke across the rippling grass, and the gun, the guns, went off.

“Rivers” is a fine story, but it almost feels obligatory. If Counternarrives were a movie, you know that “Rivers” would make up the bulk of the trailer. The best stories in the book, to my mind, are the two longest ones—the novellas—where the reversal of perspective is just one element in the mix. These tales have a delicious element of the macabre in them. They remind me a bit of Isak Dinesen’s gothic tales. One is titled “A Letter on the Trials of the Counterreformation in New Lisbon.” Keene uses his knowledge of languages and history to frame his stories as documents from earlier centuries and cultures.

The story is in the form of a letter, from one Jesuit priest in 16th century Brazil to another. It is a report on what happens when a young priest, one Dom Joaquim D’Azevedo, is assigned to manage a small mission at the edge of a small settlement that is itself on the edge of the Amazon rainforest. The priest finds the mission in a rundown condition, and the three other clergymen somewhat lacking in zeal. The employees of the mission are natives and African slaves who have been converted to Christianity—or at least given Christian names. D’Azevedo does his best to bring order and a sense of purpose to the mission, even establishing a religious school for the Portuguese children of the settlement. But there are strange things happening—especially at night:

As he closed the door he [D’Azevedo] could again hear the drumming, faint but now accompanied, he perceived, by a low wail, like an animal caught in the crevice of a deep shaft, or wire upon wire. […] It was as he was opening the door to go back indoors that he again heard drumbeats and, our of the corner of his eye, he spied a shape, a shadow, moving along the rear wall, and he turned to spot something, someone, its hair fanning over its shoulders, gliding over the stone barrier.

Native drumming at night—is Keene teasing us with this classic cliché from the heart of darkness? The story is a first rate spooky tale, but when you add Keene’s particular theme of inverted history, it flips in a fantastic and unexpected way: nobody is who they seemed, not even our central character, Dom Joaquim D’Azevedo. There are occult elements, but when the story flips what had seemed sacred becomes superstitious and what had seemed superstition becomes sacred. And those converted natives? Not so much.

The other long story bears the rather intimidating title “Gloss on a History of Roman Catholics in the Early American Republic, 1790 – 1825; Or the Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows.” Three paragraphs into this pseudo-document we are directed to a footnote, and that footnote then comprises the remainder of this 100-page novella. It’s the story of a young Haitian woman who lives as a slave on a Haitian plantation. As a revolt sweeps the countryside the landowning white family escapes to Maryland, taking the young woman, called Carmel, as a companion for their daughter, Eugénie. But Eugénie is possessed of an “innate rebelliousness” and exhibits a “libertine attitude,” and so she and Carmel are dispatched to the western frontier of the young republic:

In the late summer of 1806 Eugénie de L’Ècart entered the Academy of the Sisters of the Most Precious Charity of our Lady of the Sorrows, near the village of Hurttstown, Kentucky. The small and elite order had originated in southern Wallonia in the waning years of the Counter-Reformation. It was known for its industry and thrift, as well as for its effectiveness at spiritually molding young women of means.

All this brochure-like prose notwithstanding, the school is little more than a prison for Carmel who is thrice-subjugated: she is a black girl in a slave territory, a Catholic (at least by association) in a land that sees Catholics with suspicion and hostility, and most immediately, the victim of an unscrupulous and sometimes cruel companion in Eugénie.

Keene outdoes himself in this story, trying out a whole range of effects. As Carmel is oppressed and enclosed and muted by her circumstances, so the telling of her story is constrained and occluded. For several pages, Keene gives us her diary entries:

V hot today men loadd up wagons we put in preservs sev trunks of cloaths also got much merchdse from east mlle E up and abt she doesnt eat look ill but face flush I combd her hair some fall out she big as a calabash v quiet stared at me but say noth when wagons & men leave PH and I hid und the stairs so we cd talk I gave her dr hid it in my hair & she sd your power is in here & touches my brow later mlle E sd where was you dont lie to me then she wd not talk again tryd a night visit no luck latin sentences & 2 rosaries

Lots of things are going on. Eugénie is carrying on with a man from the town and becomes pregnant. A flood devastates the town and the townspeople hold the Catholics in the school accountable. We know that Carmel is the daughter of a sorceress, but if she has occult powers, what are they and how can they help her as things come to a head? Once again there are goings on at night—whispered conversations on dark staircases and the like. The ending is suitably apocalyptic.

After this mad ride, the remaining stories in Counternarratives seemed anticlimactic. Not that they aren’t interesting and imaginative, but sometimes they felt a bit self-conscious and contrived. I hope that in future writings John Keene journeys as far into the dark country of his mind as he does in the two longer stories in this book.