Palace of Books

by Roger Grenier

  But whether love is thwarted or successful, what’s new about it comes from what writers do with it.

  André Malraux (him again) said that Stendhal cheated by not showing us how Julien Sorel and Madame de Rênal make love. Doubtless Stendhal, whose letters and diary show that he feared neither situations nor words, was constrained by the conventions of his era, not to mention by the rigors of the courts, and preferred to let readers imagine for themselves how Julien Sorel operated and what exactly was the nature of Madame de Rênal’s sexual response. Likewise Flaubert, in his drafts for Madame Bovary, which he calls “scenarios,” doesn’t hold back from writing about what he calls, crudely, “getting ass.” That his novel avoided explicit sex didn’t prevent him from being taken to court on charges of obscenity.

  In many novels today, writers no longer write about love. Instead, they write about how love is made. And I have the impression that women writers go further with this kind of description than men. Read Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion, Alina Reyes’s The Butcher, Catherine Cusset’s Jouir [Pleasuring], Ghislaine Dunant’s L’Impudeur [Shamelessness]. Enough is enough.

  There is another way of approaching writing about love. Writing is more or less an enterprise of seduction. Seduction of the reader, of course. But also, secretly, seduction of him or of her with whom everything can begin, or with whom all other means have failed, or even with the person with whom it has ended—the lover with whom you have a score to settle.

  In specific cases where you are inspired by someone specific, whether they’re close or far away, there remains a problem. Which is that you never know how she, or he, will react. I said in an earlier chapter that things can turn out for the worse. How could the women who inspire female characters be satisfied by their reflections in the novel, that mirror deformed by passion and by the misery of loving? Maybe they realize that when the author wrote about the love story that once dominated his life, the true lover was not the woman he was talking about, but literature itself. Kafka has his own special way of delivering messages about love, or nonlove. Take his unfinished story, “Blumenfeld, an Elderly Bachelor.” A bachelor dreams of having a dog. But numerous objections come to mind. Dogs are dirty and the bachelor is obsessively clean. Dogs carry fleas. They can get sick and the disease may or may not be contagious. In any case, it’s repulsive. Then one day you grow old. You haven’t had the courage to get rid of the dog in time. “Then comes the moment when one’s own age peers out from the dog’s oozing eyes. Then one has to cope with a half-blind, wheezing animal encased in fat, and in this way pay dearly for pleasures the dog once had given.” So, no dog for him. The egotistical bachelor regrets it. The ideal would be an animal he wouldn’t have to worry about, that he could kick from time to time, send off to sleep in the street, just as long as this dog remained available the minute the bachelor wanted him to come lick his hands and greet him with his barks.

  This horrible story is obviously intended to show Felice Bauer that its author is unfit for marriage.

  The imaginative Audiberti has given an extremely subtle example—or rather a twisted example—of the secret intentions of an author and of the way a book can transform itself into a secret love message. This is in connection with his novel, Le Maître de Milan [The Master of Milan]. A man tells the story of his experience with a young woman, so that her aunt will read the story and recognize her. But that’s not all. Audiberti has suggested that he, the author, intended this novel to function as a message to be read by a certain person: “It could be consequently that, like the Master of Milan, I may have written this novel tongue-in-cheek for someone to whom I hoped to tell, through the considerable detour of this book, the story I couldn’t risk telling out loud in a flat-footed way.”

  Better yet, Audiberti thinks that if the person he has in mind understands that the novel is a message, she won’t read it. She won’t need to, because “the content of the message lies entirely in the existence of the message.”

  This may be too good to be true. We know about Audiberti’s extraordinarily fertile imagination.

  This brings to mind an ancient but still relevant function of the love novel, which is what I call the password novel. A novel that symbolizes the feelings of two lovers and becomes a fetish, a material proof of their love. In the 1900s, when a man wanted to make a woman understand what he felt for her, he presented her with a book entitled, in all innocence, Amitié amoureuse [Loving Friendship]. How bizarre that there was no author’s name on the cover, only three stars. (The anonymous author was Hermine Lecomte du Nouÿ, Maupassant’s special someone . . .). If the lady took the bait of Amitié amoureuse, the novel became an eternal symbol, a secret talisman of their love. Le Grand Meaulnes also played this role. And when President François Mitterrand got interested in a woman, he always gave her a copy of Albert Cohen’s Belle du Seigneur. I know this from the woman who worked in the bookstore where he used to stock up.

  If our books aren’t destined for immortality, at least they can become the enduring passwords, the precious relics in lovers’ memories.

  A Half Hour at the Dentist’s

  My friend Georges Friedmann, the eminent sociologist, was someone I held in great esteem. But whenever we were together—on the street, in the bus, in a restaurant—as soon as the slightest thing happened, as soon as an unusual person appeared, he couldn’t resist saying: “There’s a short story for you!” Anyone cursed with the label “short story writer” has this problem. I swore to myself that if he said it one more time, I would never write another short story. What happened instead is that I ended up writing a short story about Georges Friedmann’s innocuous tic.

  In my youth there was one book that irritated me to no end, The First Forty-Nine Stories of Hemingway. The guy had written forty-nine short stories! I was sure I’d never get there. And lo and behold, by now I’ve written more than a hundred. Nothing compared to Pirandello: 237, not to mention Chekhov: 649! Yet Chekhov and Pirandello are better known for their plays than their stories. This injustice deserves to be analyzed.

  Why did Stendhal claim, “When you’ve written a dozen of them, the reservoir is empty, there’s no way to continue”?

  Flannery O’Connor, invited to give a talk on the meaning of the short story at a convention of artists in Lansing, Michigan, declared, “I don’t have the foggiest notion what the significance of the short story is but I accepted at once as I like to make trips by plane, etc., and I figured I had ten months to find out. . . . I think I’ll tell them something very grand, such as that the short story restores the contemplative mentality, but I don’t know exactly how I’ll work it up.”

  She also said, probably attributing to an imaginary friend what she was feeling herself, “I have a friend who writes both, and she says that when she stops a novel to work on short stories, she feels as if she has just left a dark wood to be set upon by wolves.”

  A strict Catholic, O’Connor marveled: “I have also found that what I write is read by an audience which puts little stock in either grace or the devil.”

  As for myself, I’d gladly speak of grace, in the other sense of the word. Of what accounts for the fact that all her short stories succeed, when it’s so easy to fail. They are models for anyone who seeks to understand this art. What is remarkable is the surprise, the original angle by which she approaches each thought, each idea. A special kind of humor—which she calls the grotesque—emerges from her unusual, paradoxical vision of life and manages to impose itself as an unassailable truth.

  For her, the short story spoke to the reader by means of the senses. One must guard against abstraction. She insisted: “Now this is something that can’t be learned only in the head; it has to be learned in the habits.” Or again: “For the writer of fiction, everything has its testing point in the eye.” And also: “The fiction writer has to realize that he can’t create compassion with compassion, or emotion with emotion, or thought with thought. He has to provide all these things with a body.”

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nbsp; Like Flannery O’Connor, Marcel Arland thought that the short story had no need for theory: “What it demands of writers is love, and it has an interior rhythm that corresponds to its own nature.”

  It took centuries for the word “novella” to acquire the meaning it has today. In the eighteenth century, stories in prose or verse were called nouvelles. In fact they were often novels and could be as long as 500 pages. The novellas of the classical period are analogous to histories, to those digressions inserted within the thick novels of the baroque period. Sometimes the word conte was used. We refer to Voltaire’s Romans, et contes philosophiques [Novels and philosophical tales]. Not much of a distinction is made between conte, fable, and novel. Or it’s made by adding an adjective: moral novella, historical novella, Spanish novella. In the ninteenth century the novella parted ways with the novel, even if it was not yet distinct from the tale.

  The destiny of the novella, in the modern sense, appears to be linked to economic conditions. It really took off in certain countries and at a certain stage when there were newspapers and magazines capable of supporting it: Maupassant’s France; Chekhov’s Russia; Faulker, Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s United States. If you write a short story in France today, you don’t know what to do with it. And if, as a beginning author, you bring a collection of short stories to an editor, there’s a good chance you’ll get this response: “This is promising. But couldn’t you give us a novel first?”

  To get back to Scott Fitzgerald, he claimed he was writing his stories for money, that it was a bother, and he would have preferred spending his time on a novel. He’d write them in three days, plus a day or a day and a half for revisions, then immediately send them off. The trouble was that The Saturday Evening Post, the best-paying and most prosperous of the “slicks”—magazines on glossy paper—protected its high-minded public. Any talk of suicide was forbidden. The magazine would have been happy to do without the “touch of disaster” that was Fitzgerald’s trademark, and keep only the glamor. It turned down a few of his best stories, in particular “Crazy Sunday,” set in a Hollywood where Norma Shearer, Irving Thalberg, John Gilbert, and Marion Davies would have recognized themselves. Hearst kept a watchful eye on the submissions. Sometimes the magazine would cut passages. Scott gathered up the outtakes in his Notebooks under the heading B (Bright Clippings). He also had a file for “junked and dismantled stories.” He claimed, though I doubt it’s true, that he wrote his stories as best he could and then added defects on purpose to make them appeal to magazine readers. He said they were good enough for whiling away a dreary half hour at the dentist’s office. He is at odds with Henry James, who was sure that you could both love money and have a high artistic consciousness.

  When he started to decline, Scott Fitzgerald moved from The Saturday Evening Post to Esquire and was paid less and less. Zelda didn’t pay much attention to her husband’s literary qualities (except when she felt the need to compete with him and started to write herself), but she thought that placing a story in The Saturday Evening Post was the best. Toward the end of Scott’s life, she suggested to him that he should start to write for the Post again. He responded that the new editor, Wesley W. Stout, was an ambitious young man who didn’t give a hoot about style and only published stories about fishing, football, or the far west. He added, “You no longer have a chance of selling a story with an unhappy ending (in the old days many of mine did have unhappy endings—if you remember).”

  What is the difference between a short story and a novel? The main difference lies in the experience of the author. The short story, extracted from reality, is a story with a beginning and an end that seems drawn from life (whereas in real life, most of the time you don’t know exactly when a story begins and ends). You write it quickly and then you forget about it. But a novel is a companion who lives with you for months, sometimes years. And that is quite delicious.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau declared rather oddly that the short story is the Corsica of literature, since nature is its only law. Goethe defined it as “an unheard of event that has occurred.” “A short story must have the precision of a bank check,” claimed Isaac Babel. The same Babel wrote a short story . . . about a short story. The narrator, who was helping a wealthy woman translate Maupassant’s “The Confession,” ended up in her arms.

  At first, probably because it was written for newspapers and magazines, the short story was neatly structured, and it ended with what the French call a chute, literally a “fall,” a surprise ending. You often have the feeling the whole thing was written to produce the surprise, the play of the final words.

  If you’ve been a journalist or simply traveled around in the world, the short story can be nothing more than a something seen, some spontaneous observation: Georges Friedmann wasn’t completely wrong. During the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway found an old man standing all alone near a bridge, after the other inhabitants of his village had fled. From this vision he created a gripping short story. Or rather an article he wrote for a news magazine that he decided to publish as a short story instead. He kept the title: “Old Man at the Bridge.”

  It’s the same for Maupassant, who feeds on stories that are sometimes mildly erotic, sometimes tragic and cruel, of the kind you hear on farms in Normandy. In “Pierrot,” which takes place in Caux, in the Normany countryside, they used to throw the dogs into a mud quarry, a deep pit, where they would devour one another. This was a short story from 1882, before the Turkish practice, circa 1910, of collecting dogs on the streets and abandoning them on the sinister island of Oxia.

  Yet we shouldn’t conclude that it’s easy to write a short story. As for writing a good one. . . .

  If we try to better define the genre, we come up against a major obstacle: Henry James. His example is worth a long study. He classifies his works as tales, novellas, and novels, and his only criterion seems to be length. He confesses, like the painter in his story The Real Thing, “Combined with this was another perversity—an innate preference for the represented subject over the real one: the defect of the real one was so apt to be a lack of representation. I liked things that appeared; then one was sure. Whether they were or not was a subordinate and almost always a profitless question.” So he does not recount the brute facts he’s learned from conversations at dinner parties, which he gathers into his Notebooks. He supposes, he insinuates, he suggests. And he never tires of analyzing his characters’ interior lives, by way of their personalities or through their dialogues. His short stories, differing little in narrative procedure from his great novels, are the opposite of what you’d expect from the genre. Which doesn’t prevent him from enjoying a few unforgettable successes. (I highly recommend J.-B. Pontalis’s insightful preface to the French translation of James’s “The Bench of Desolation.”)

  Another American writer, Sherwood Anderson, elder sibling to Faulkner, Hemingway, and the “Lost Generation,” was one of the first writers to save the short story from the straitjacket of the well-told tale, to liberate it. For that reason he’s been compared to Chekhov. He responded by saying the comparison was natural; people eat cabbage in Ohio, just like in Russia. That was why he was designated the Chekhov of the Midwest. Chekhov, who, better than anyone, dismantled the perfectly tied-up story.

  Anton Pavlovich’s stories often end on a kind of musical resolution that contradicts or puts into doubt what preceded. One example: “Betrothed.” A young woman from the provinces leaves her family for Moscow. But Chekhov adds, gently, “as she supposed, forever.”

  Or, according to Ionych, one of Chekhov’s characters, “People are not stupid because they can’t write novels, but because they can’t conceal it when they do.”

  Unfinished

  Death and frivolity condemn us never to finish. In literature, and more generally in art, what’s unfinished has a strong tendency to become posthumous. When Roger Martin du Gard was writing Le Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort, he watched the novel swell with endless digressions just as he was feeling his powers decline; he end
ed up giving in or rather rejoicing in the idea that Maumort would be posthumous. Is it a coincidence that he gave his hero a name that is a stuttered version of the French word mort—death? Martin du Gard imagined a subterfuge to make his endless novel publishable. All it would take was for the unfinished novel to be explained by the death of the character, i.e., the author: “This is a work that may conveniently be interrupted at any moment, since, according to the fiction, it’s the correspondence of a seventy-year-old who might die at any moment. In whatever state I leave the manuscript, all it will take to give it a plausible ending is adding a few lines to Maumort’s manuscript and an editor’s note.” Martin du Gard hesitated only about whether to write his novel in the form of a diary, a memoir, or letters. The device could work in each case.

  *

  Whereas Kafka left The Castle definitively unfinished. He compared himself to a man with a rundown house filled with memories who used it for materials to build another house—his novels. But he lacked strength as he was working, so he found himself with the first house half-demolished and the second unfinished.

  A word about In Search of Lost Time. Part of the novel is posthumous, so it can be considered either finished or unfinished, like life itself, since we imagine that if its author had lived for another ten, twenty, or thirty years, he would have endlessly corrected, revised, expanded. The narrator of Time Regained says so himself: “In long books of this kind, there are parts which there has been time only to sketch, parts which, because of the very amplitude of the architect’s plan, will no doubt never be completed. How many great cathedrals remain unfinished!”

  The true unfinished masterpiece comes to us from Musil by way of his Man Without Qualities, that admirable work in progress.

  Pascal Pia told me that Jacques de Lacretelle and Jean Cocteau were discussing how they were going to finish Radiguet’s Count d’Orgel’s Ball as they marched in his funeral procession.