Palace of Books

by Roger Grenier

  Witold Gombrowicz’s unusual personality, in combination with the quirks of history, gave birth to a book that is both finished and unfinished. While he was still a law student, he decided to write a novel with a schoolmate “for chambermaids,” to make a lot of money. But “writing a bad novel is doubtless no easier than writing a good one.” The idea continued to preoccupy him and then he tackled Possessed, a higher quality novel, which appeared in installments beginning in 1939 in two Polish dailies, the Warsaw Red Courier and The Kielce-Radom Morning Express. He used a pseudonym, Z. Niewieski. The novel was both gothic and “grotesque,” as those terms were understood in Polish literature—meaning it was full of bitter irony. Then came the German invasion. The newspapers ceased publication. The Polish people, who had greater dramas to deal with, would never know how Possessed ended.

  In 1969, the year of his death, Gombrowicz admitted that he was the author of a novel that was finally published in French, not Polish, in 1973, by the Editions Kultura—still without an ending.

  Gombrowicz had been assigned to cover the maiden voyage of a shipping line between Poland and South America, and he arrived in Buenos Aires on August 21, 1939, never imagining he would stay for twenty-four years. People thought he had gone into exile without having finished the final episode of his serial novel, which he normally would have written last. But in 1986, it was discovered that an ending had in fact appeared in the Warsaw Red Courier in the very first days of September 1939. Which confirms what people suspected: it was a happy ending, since the two major possessed characters, Walchak and Maya, are saved from evil and are finally able to admit that they love each other.

  “I climbed several peaks. From one of them, I looked down into the valley”: so ends a text published by another remarkable Pole. Followed by a note in manuscript: “Count Jean Potocki had these pages printed in Petersburg in 1805, shortly before his departure for Mongolia [where he was part of a diplomatic mission to China]. He gave neither a title nor an ending, reserving the right to continue or not continue it at some future date when his imagination, to which he has given free rein in this work, might tempt him to do so.”

  The count returned from China and wrote the sequel to what would become The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. Can the actual text, written in French, translated into Polish, retranslated into French—parts of it lost, found, pillaged, rediscovered—be considered finished? Even its structure is designed to make you spin out in an endless nightmare. It’s made up of stories nested one inside the other, yet they all recount the same story of a man who falls into a bed shared by two enchanting sisters. After having tasted their delights—but was it only a dream—he wakes up in a ditch, beneath a gallows. The situation repeats itself, “as if,” Roger Caillois writes, “evil mirrors reflected it over and over.”

  Unfinished should not be confused with abandoned—Lucien Leuwen, for example. Doubtless abandoned because Stendhal knew he could never publish it, at least not as long as what he called the “current experience” would last, i.e., as long as Louis-Philippe remained on the French throne and Stendhal remained a civil servant. We can question, as does Claude Roy, “our naïve desire to know how it ends”: “Stendhal’s intentions, however, are known to us, and clear: the hero would have ended up reunited with the heroine, the imbroglio designed by Dr. Du Poirier to separate them would be foiled, and Lucien and Madame de Chasteller would be happy and have many children. Very well and good. But what also tantalizes us is not only not knowing where we would have been (we know, more or less), it’s not knowing how the author is going to surmount the obstacles he has encountered.”

  In the seventeenth century, at the end of his more or less autobiographical novel, Le page disgracié [The disgraced page], Tristan L’Hermite declares that his hero’s adventures are not finished and promises another two volumes. He died twelve years later without having written them. He would produce tragedies, poems, a pastoral novel, but nothing personal. Doubtless because in the course of his first adventures, the page, much like the author himself, took a dislike to “many diverse societies” and had only the slightest desire to live in the company of men. Melancholy, disabused, he chose silence.

  By its very nature, the diary remains unfinished, since only death can interrupt the author’s chitchat with herself.

  “I want fame!” wrote young Marie Bashkirtseff in her Journal. And she hastened to add, “It is not this journal that will give it to me. This journal can only be published after my death, for I am too naked in it to show myself while I’m still alive.”

  But she kept writing in it until she had no more strength. As she lay dying, Jules Bastien-Lepage, another painter, was carried to Marie’s bedside. The two of them despaired that they could no longer paint. She wrote, “Heaven have pity on us both! And to think that there are porters who enjoy robust health! Emile is an excellent brother; he carries Jules on his shoulders up and down stairs to their apartment on the third story. Dina shows equal devotion to me. For the last two days my bed has been in the salon; but as the room is very large, and divided by screens, sofas, and the piano, it cannot be seen. It is too much exertion for me to go up and down stairs.”

  Eleven days later, on October 31, 1884, she was dead.

  Rousseau took notes on playing cards during his walks. On one of them you can read, “While death advances with slow steps and forestalls the progression of years, while it makes me see and feel freely its sad advances. . . .”

  This unfinished sentence, holding out the promise of the second half of its rhetorical florish, reinforces its tragic intensity. By its unfinished nature, Reveries of the Solitary Walker is also a diary. The tenth walk is cut short. For those who love Rousseau, it is nevertheless the most moving: “Today, Palm Sunday, it is exactly fifty years since first I met Madame de Warens.”

  *

  What does Nerval mean, in his enigmatic sonnet “Artémis,” which he also thought of calling “Ballet of the Hours”?

  The thirteenth returns . . . She’s again the first;

  and still the only one—or the only moment:

  for are you queen, O, are you the first or the last?

  Are you king, are you the only lover or the last. . . .

  Here the unfinished becomes the eternal return.

  Paradoxically, Bruno Schulz’s mystical vision of perfection in Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass seems incompatible with any kind of finishing: “There are things that cannot ever be finished. They are too big and too magnificent to be contained in mere facts. They are trying to emerge, they are testing the ground of reality: can it hold them? And they quickly withdraw, afraid they will lose their integrity in an imperfect execution.”

  In life as in literature, certain love affairs never stop ending, fraying. Lovers promise they will conquer the obstacles, they’ll be able to live together. But the deadline is constantly extended. They continue pronouncing the same phrases, making the same promises, believing in them a little less each time. Their great love becomes an empty shell.

  On the other hand, some people who think they are having a brief adventure find themselves caught in the net of endless love. Thus the characters in Chekhov’s “Lady with Lapdog”: “Now he could see clearly that this was no short-lived affair—and it was impossible to say when it would finish. Anna Sergeyevna had become even more attached to him, she adored him and it would have been unthinkable of him to tell her that some time all of this had to come to an end. And she would not have believed him even if he had.” The new life, the life as a couple they had started to long for seemed far far away, and “the most complicated and difficult part was only just beginning.”

  Others, more naïve, have the impression that nothing is ever over. In the amorous domain, passions are interrupted by life’s tribulations. But perhaps they are only suspended. New circumstances, reunions could make things start up again. At least that’s what they think.

  Aren’t many of us this way? We continue in our imaginations to live with th
e dead and with those who have left us—loving them, hating them, breaking up and reconciling with them. We take up the story the day it ended. We try to imagine what comes next. The relationship will only end when we do. It is much simpler than the memory that makes the hero of If I forget thee, Jerusalem (once entitled Wild Palms) say, “When she became not, then half of memory became not and if I become not then all of remembering will cease to be—Yes . . . between grief and nothing I will take grief.”

  In George du Maurier’s Peter Ibbetson, love triumphs over separation and even death. But in the end, Peter’s diary stops in the middle of a sentence: “First of all, I intend,” as if the author had understood that despite all his efforts to execute his brilliant and moving fable, the universal law of the unfinished is inevitable.

  Penelope and her weaving represent the unfinished at the service of the greatest fidelity in love. While Odysseus takes his time getting home, either because the gods are punishing him or for more frivolous reasons, she will undo by night what she’s done by day, endlessly. But once the King of Ithaca comes home, what will become of her tapestry? It will remain unfinished, probably forever.

  *

  One of the Romantics’ favorite themes is stillborn love, where sudden passion and separation are simultaneous, and in the space of a second, two hearts catch fire and despair. It’s the ultimate sense of the unfinished. “A flash of lightning . . . then night!” Baudelaire cries out in “To a Passerby:” “You whom I would have loved. You who knew it!”

  Baudelaire’s passerby is in mourning, doubtless a widow, like Andromaque in “The Swan,” his great poem about loss, exile, defeat—everything that interrupts the course of a life.

  Before Baudelaire, a fleeting encounter with a passerby, bringing love and despair, had already appeared in Petrus Borel’s tale, Dinah, the Beautiful Jewess.

  Twice, Chekhov evokes a similar scene where a beautiful woman is sighted, only to be lost. In his story “The Beauties” which is actually autobiographical. And also in a letter to his sister, in April of 1887. He tells her how he noticed a “languorous and beautiful” woman at the window of the second floor of a train station. “My heart leapt and I continued on my way.”

  Anatole France speaks of “all the happy pleasures of the unfinished and the involuntary.” But in literature, the champion of the unfinished is Flaubert. The constantly abortive love affairs of Emma Bovary, the great unconsummated passion of Frederic Moreau and Madame Arnoux that lasts throughout an entire life, the insatiable encyclopedic appetite of Bouvard and Pécuchet. . . .

  I have a weakness for novels that end with a quiet murmur, like Tender Is the Night. In the last chapter, news of the hero, Dick Diver, gets more and more vague, intermittent. You learn that he set up a medical practice in Buffalo, then in Batavia in the state of New York, then in Lockport, where he had some trouble, then in Geneva, in the Finger Lakes region or “in that section of the country, in one town or another.” News of Dick Diver, and the novel, stops there. Which doesn’t prevent Nicole from declaring: “I loved Dick and I’ll never forget him.” To which her husband answers sensibly: “Of course not—why should you?”

  There are punctuation marks to signal the unfinished: the three-point ellipses (in Chinese, it’s six points!), but certain authors use them by the fistful, until they stop meaning anything.

  The four unfinished sculptures of slaves in the Accademia in Florence have only partially emerged from their block of marble. Michelangelo chose not to fully separate them from their gangue. The spirit is not able to escape matter. Thus Elie Faure wrote: “Once he had completed half the giant, other torments, other victories, other failures demanded his attention. He rarely finished his statues, his monumental ensembles.”

  And a still more profound thought: “The greatness of Michaelangelo is that he understood and said that positive happiness is not accessible to us, that humanity seeks repose so that it may escape further suffering and, in order that it may not die, plunges back into suffering as soon as it has found repose.”

  Rodin, too, often chose to leave his sculptures unfinished, to leave room for the imagination. In the case of Leonardo da Vinci, Vasari claimed that “he would without doubt have made great progress in learning and knowledge of the sciences, had he not been so versatile and changeful, but the instability of his character caused him to undertake many things which, having commenced, he afterwards abandoned.” Freud thinks that leaving things unfinished was Leonardo’s primary “symptom.”

  Henri Michaux chose this sentence from Tsuredzure Gusa, the work by the Japanese monk Yoshida No Kaneyoshi (1283–1350) as an epigraph for Passages: “In the palaces of old, the requirement was that one building was always left unfinished.”

  In his beautiful book of interviews, Quelque part dans l’inachevé [Somewhere in the unfinished]—the phrase is borrowed from Rilke—Vladimir Jankélévitch responds to Béatrice Berlowitz’s questions about music: “We understand why music, whose natural dimension is temporality, always expresses some greater or lesser sense of the unfinished: everything that transpires in the temporal domain, even when it’s a dance or a joyous piece, distills at one moment or another a few drops of melancholy.”

  But if music takes place in time, “It is no less true that it renders insensitive the misery of temporal flow . . . Music transports and retains the musician in a sort of eternal present where death no longer matters; even better, it is a way of living the unlivable essence of eternity.”

  Instead of exhausting the imagination by asking why Schubert left his most famous symphony unfinished (he drafted the scherzo and orchestrated only nine measures), it would be better to ask why he chose the key of B minor, with its mood of mystery and despair. And for those who love enigmas, the Unfinished Symphony is less of a challenge than the symphony he is said to have composed at Gmunden-Gastein, since no one knows whether or not it actually existed.

  Too great an ambition sometimes leads to a project the author cannot finish: Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica; Marx’s Das Kapital.

  Toward the end of his life, Georges Dumézil reproached himself for his lack of discipline: “My real work right now should be to concentrate on Ubykh, one of the forty languages of the Caucases.” A language no longer spoken except by a single person. “It would be wise of me to abandon all the rest to concentrate on that task alone. But I lack the courage. I am not truly conscientious.”

  Dumézil died. The last villager too. And with him, Ubykh.

  For the early psychologist Paul Janet, the feeling of not being finished is an ailment he called a feeling of incompleteness.

  The artist, the creator, is not the only person struck down with the illness of the unfinished—there is also the consumer. To tell you the truth, I’ve never read all of Joyce’s Ulysses, nor listened to Pelléas and Melisande all the way through, nor read Claudel’s The Satin Slipper in its entirety.

  My sister was twenty-one years old and she was dying. She had secrets to share and so did I. I had just written her that my marriage was falling apart. She wanted to know what I meant. But my mother or someone else was always at her bedside and we couldn’t speak freely. I answered: “Nothing. I’ll explain later.”

  But soon she began to suffer and she became delirious. She started to call for someone but I couldn’t tell if it was me or someone else. Also she said: “I know for sure that I. . . .”

  Even the first words of her unfinished sentence were excruciating. I often think about our interrupted dialogue, and then it occurs to me that she and I both lost the only confidant we ever needed.

  Which is worse? To be unfinished or to be finished?

  A strange dog starts to follow you in the mountains. Then suddenly he turns around. You no longer interest him.

  Do I Have Anything Left to Say?

  Is the final work of a writer—or for that matter of any artist—final according to the writer, or final for everyone else? Few writers have willingly put their last word to paper. Few have com
posed the literary equivalent of a last will and testament. And very few have proclaimed, with the poetic force of Saint-John Perse:

  Great age, here we are . . . here are the places we are leaving behind. The fruits of the soil are beneath our walls, the waters of the sky are in our cisterns, and the great porphyry millstones are resting on the sand . . .

  Listen, O night, in the deserted courtyards and under the lonely bridge-arches, among the hallowed ruins and the crumbing of the old termites’ nests, to the great sovereign tread of the lairless soul.

  Most of the time, the creator comes up dry. Joseph Conrad, who died on August 3, 1924, wrote to Gide two months earlier: “It’s been almost four years since I’ve done anything decent. I wonder if this is the end?”

  William Faulkner confessed, “I know now that I am getting toward the end, the bottom of the barrel.”

  There are those who have nothing left to say, but also those on whom the ax falls, who die making plans. Many were not aware that their time to live, and so to create, had expired. Tolstoy never stopped accumulating notes, projects, drafts—then suddenly he fled home to die in an out-of-the-way train station.

  Johann Sebastian Bach is the exception. He sensed the end was near. So he began to work on The Art of the Fugue. “He didn’t need it to be heard, nor played, nor even read, it was enough for him to write it,” Armand Farrachi recalls in his excellent book, Bach, dernière fugue [Bach, last fugue]. Sometimes Bach interrupted his work long enough to compose parts of the Mass in B Minor or Canonic Variations. His unfinished The Art of the Fugue gives no instructions on dynamics or instrumentalization—as though such things no longer concerned him. Tchaikovsky, on the other hand, wrote to his nephew Vladimir Davydov while he was in the midst of composing his Sixth Symphony, the Pathétique: “You can’t imagine what joy I feel at the conviction that my day is not yet done. . . .”