Cottony sky. Walls of cork. Fine lace.
With this book—which neither exotic reveries nor concern for an improved social position prevents me from embarking on again, fully realizing that its purpose is more and more contained within itself and that, as it gradually eclipses my other preoccupations, it is becoming a reason for living when it was originally intended to be a means of enlightening me for a more coherent conduct of my way of living—isn’t the mad race I’m running (a dream gallop that is galloped without moving) a “race to the death”? Even if this book, once it reached its end, culminated in a discovery, this would no doubt occur so late that I would no longer have the time to profit from it. And I don’t even know how many more years I will be capable of pulling everything from my memory this way, as though by the strength of my arms! I must face this truth: more thankless than that of a scholar initiating an excavation or exhuming documents, my task will only be able to be pursued at the cost of increased difficulties—whether the memories already noted down which I am holding in reserve will have lost all their power when the moment comes to use them, or whether I will not have enough acuteness of mind at that point to relive them and, through my prose, make them come alive again, or even whether, like a swimmer that lets himself sink, I decide not to keep my notes up to date and neglect many facts that might have explained certain of those I recorded earlier, which, thus left in the condition of scattered materials, will remain—without even attaining the dignity of enigmas—mere things put down at random along my way, here and there, and denied, once I have set the final period to all this, the meaning that could have brought them to life.
A few mistakes I have made concerning the matters of detail; one or two assertions that—given the changes that have occurred during an intermission that was all too prolonged—I must reconsider if I don’t wish to be unfair toward anyone; one point, lastly, that I can now be more precise about and show in another light. While awaiting the moment when I will emerge from my hole (and as an initial removal of debris that will make my emergence easier, since, if one is to believe the proverb Each thing has its own time, so that I will have helped time if I make a clean sweep of the place by discharging these minor but tiresome obligations)—this is the substance of the work of adjustment I cannot avoid getting through, despite my eagerness to arrive at something positive.
As I am preparing to leave for the Antilles islands, wanting to familiarize myself with the popular speech common to those among them which are the goal of my trip, I read a Haitian work called La Philologie créole by Jules Faine, published in Port-au-Prince in 1937. In it I discover that in Norman patois (from which the author believes Creole borrowed a good deal) one says “s’éffants”instead of “ses enfants” [one’s children]. It was therefore a peasant expression, smelling of the farmer’s smock, that, knowingly or not, my father used in the old days when he amused himself by calling my brothers and me “les éfants.”
During a recent stopover in Paris, an English friend on her way to Sicily talks to me about the pubs in her part of town, pubs she considers to be the finest in London, and says that if I go into that area I will drink Guinness there; when I ask her if, where stouts are concerned, Guinness is truly better than Bass, she informs me that the Bass company makes ale and not stout. It was the severe aspect of the word Bass, no doubt, that always made me connect it, mistakenly—if I am to believe this friend—with a drink the color, almost, of black coffee; whence that awkward “stout Bass” [Bass stout] of which I was reminded by the expression “boire un glass” [have a drink; lit., drink a glass] called to mind in connection with verglas [ice crust on snow or rock; glaze of ice on road; freezing rain] (a feature of winter and bad weather whose image would be less easily associated, anyway, with that of a more transparent and golden beer).
Also, “Gaugé” and not “Gaucher” [left-hander]—according to a piece of information my brother gave me a few weeks ago—was the name of the avenue where the villa stood which our parents rented at Viroflay two consecutive summers. “Gaucher,” “Gaugé”. though minimal, this discrepancy introduces a certain change of perspective and it is no longer so much the creak of a pump—hissing slightly—that I hear (an old noise I neglected to speak of but which is evoked by “Gaucher,” toward which this analogy had perhaps diverted my memory, deflecting it from “Gaugé”);, ceasing to thrust antennae into the domain of hearing, the name corrected by my brother instead calls fourth—by reason of an actual proximity between the two roads in question—that of a street which was connected, I believe, by a narrow passage we called the ruelle [alley] to the avenue where we lived: the rue de la Saussaie [saussaie: willow plantation], in which there was (if my memory is not once again at fault here) a laundry and which contains in its very name—about which for a very long time I did not know that it referred to a spot planted with saules [willows], in other words a saulaie [willow plantation]—a sad, musty-kitchen or wash-house smell, like the vapor of doubtful hue that rises from a simmering sauce or from damp linen pressed by an iron.
Then, the song from the Dragons de Villars, whose authentic text I can now restore, whereas I had altered it somewhat when quoting it:
Blaise qui partait
En guerre s’en allait. . .
[Blaise who left
Went off to war . . . ]
was what I wrote; but actually, the song begins with the following lines:
Blaise qui partait
En mer s’en allait
Servir un an la patrie . . .
[Blaise who left
Went off to sea
To serve his country for a year . . . ]
as I was able to read in one of the several opera and operetta scores that my sister keeps in her house at Nemours, along with all sorts of old programs—souvenirs from her evenings out as a young girl—and magazines devoted to the art of singing.
In this country house whose roof has just been redone, for it threatened to fall in, the room I had described as a chaos has been tidied, it seems, and the player piano finally repaired. During one of my last visits, my niece insisted on making me listen to it. Might I not, then, have entirely wasted my time writing Biffures [Scratches]—since my sister and my niece, by clearing the room and having the piano fixed (to the extent, at least, that such a thing was possible), had it in mind to contradict me affectionately on these two points—and might I not, without being too unreasonably demanding, hope to discover one fine day that I, too, without even noticing, have made some order in myself and put some dilapidated instrument in a condition to be heard, like that piano which I thought was forever silenced but which now manages, when one pushes on it with sufficient obstinacy, to exhale, at intervals, groups of jerky chords?
“Tu es rouge comme un coq” [you’re as red as a rooster], “Tu es en nage” [you’re bathed in sweat]: objurgations issuing from my mother, who feared I would catch a chill when I had run too much or moved around too much as I played.
Between Pointe Z’Oiseaux and Port-de-Paix, coming back by sailboat from Ile de la Tortue, my companions and I experienced, for hours, the sort of enchantment expressed more eloquently by the verb être encalminé [to be becalmed, in the doldrums] than the substantive accalmie [lull, calm], even though the former evokes in our minds the idea of an action undergone rather than that of flat calm or the absence, in fact, of any action. Torsos streaming, the boatmen had to go at it with their muscles, singing and sometimes rhythmically knocking the gunwale with their oars while a Haitian passenger and his wife—a Jamaican not at all pretty, but graceful, who spoke Creole and English—also beat in time on the planks of the boat to encourage them.
Martinique wooden horses worked by hand and turning to the sound of a clarinet or a flute, of a drum, of a nail box or chacha, plus a thick horizontal bamboo cane that amateurs in variable numbers strike with short sticks. Lambi conchs into which, in Haiti, I saw sailors blow in order to summon the wind. Voodoo drums from the rada ritual, incredibly percussive. Cracks of a w
hip and blasts of a whistle, which add to the percussion section in the ceremonies of the petro ritual and which I have never heard without being reminded—even though the baying of the hounds is missing from it—of the infernal hunt in the opera Der Freischütz, which was called by its first French adapters Robin des Bois [Robin Hood] even though this diabolical story of bullets melting on the stroke of midnight has nothing to do with the story of the English outlaw. Oratorical tremolos. Orchestral convulsions. Thunder. Fragments of that auricular world to which I have always been so sensitive, to my pleasure or displeasure.
On April 19 of last year—the day, therefore, before my forty-seventh birthday—finding myself in Nemours at my sisters house, sitting at a table in the garden and leafing through her collection of old periodicals and programs mixed in with menus from meals as well as invitation cards for dances or other festivities, I came upon an issue of Musica dated November 1906 and devoted to Jules Massenet, whom my father admired with such fervor (which was one of the reasons why, given the complete impossibility of their holding any views in common about poetry, he became friends with Raymond Roussel, whom he had known at the time when the latter was writing his first book, La Doublure, the hero of which is an actor who gets hooted off the stage). In this homage to the most popular, probably, of the French musicians, but unfortunately also one of the most, if not the most, vulgar, I noticed a portrait of the singer Lucy Arbell in the role of Persephone, from an Ariane composed from a libretto by Catulle Mendès by the master whose facile melodies, and the guaranteed pathos of whose subjects, are likely to satisfy an appreciable number of generations to come. In it she is shown standing, her hands loaded with flowers before her opulent hips, her head, with its long tumbling hair, crowned with a sort of helmet and her ears covered by two large metal ornaments, elaborate disks garnished with pendants. In the chapter, seven years old now, which I placed under the sign of the wife of the king of the underworld, the entire passage relating to the name of the subterranean goddess—a passage of which the larger part takes the form of a sort of poem—was certainly suggested to me by the lost memory of this photograph, as its recent rediscovery made me realize. The curved or spiraling elements that I enumerated in order to account for what Perséphone signified for me actually appear as a vague series of approximations by which I tried, proposing one after another without opting for any one, to replace these circular ear ornaments whose image had been obliterated (except for that barely perceptible vestige of their form) and which alone would explain why the divinity whose name I qualified with the word floral—as I could have been obscurely enticed to do by the sheaf that she holds in the photograph—seems to me so closely linked to the world of hearing. One of the two art nouveau busts that my father had in his house—and of which, on the very page where I reproached him for the dullness of taste that allowed him to delight in Massenet’s drawing-room ballads, I spoke in my first attempt at a denuded explication of myself—wore, I believe, a helmet and ear ornaments of the same kind, made of real bronze (with openings caused by the interweaving of complicated patterns) whereas the bust was of terra cotta or colored plaster. I recall, furthermore, having heard it said of this same Lucy Arbell, when I was a child (though she was generous in build, to judge from her photo as Persephone), that one would have thought, listening to her, that she was singing “dans un verre de lampe” [into a lamp glass]; but as to this last detail, except for the ironic reference to the overdecorated aspect of the chandeliers and other lighting fixtures of the time of my youth, I don’t see that it could be the source of any fragment whatsoever in any one of my writings.
Thus, under the conscious thread of my book—the one that is artifice to the extent that, necessarily preexisting each page that I write, it imprints upon it ipso facto the character of a fabricated object—runs a thread of which I am unaware, or of which I never glimpse more than trifling elements, by chance, through an image or a vague recollection. An underground path, no doubt more important than the official route where everything (except, as it happens, the timetable) is foreseen, even including the tip intended to reward the zeal (here unilingual) of the guide. A pilgrimage to familiar local spots rather than monuments, to places without any spectacular signs that might, to their advantage, attract attention, and whose names, known to a certain number but unappreciated by most, remain the only witness to the real or fabled events that occurred there. Places about which the question would be to know if, once honors have been paid to each one that I have chanced to notice, I will or will not comprehend the hieroglyph inscribed, perhaps—on God knows what soil!—by the itinerary they all mark out, like the wayside shrines on a sort of initiatory journey. A series, also, of points irradiating forces, a series whose hidden presence poses another problem that is not unimportant either: can someone other than me—even in the no doubt frequent instances where I do not succeed in drawing them from secrecy—at least perceive (beyond any possibility of distinct apprehension) their clandestine existence, so that, once the book is finished, the succession of sentences he will have read will appear to him as a panorama whose most distant backgrounds, though almost invisible, are indispensable because—whether mountains or clouds, plain or sea—however incomprehensible they remain they are what gives the whole its living depth?
Aside from these suppressed images onto which hidden connections are grafted, generating this sort of margin of the unknown, there are also—digging holes in me like the intimate, obsessive emptiness so often created, in the dreams I used to have, by the phonograph record that was so rich with a marvelous music but that I never managed to recover, or like the emptiness I tried in vain to fill by finding an object, any sort of external thing, to which I could have clung or applied myself entirely—positive gaps in my memories. Without mentioning (of course) the infinite mass of things I lived through that have been obliterated forever though I was clearly aware of them at the time, many experiences—a little reflection must assure me that this is so—have marked me forever even though as events they left no trace in me. My memory proceeding like the schoolbooks that teach history, the elements that have remained fixed there are the elements whose appearance is even slightly theatrical, those which—to the detriment of elements which are more discreet though perhaps highly important—commend themselves above all by their capacity to be made into illustrations. Battles won or lost, convenings of parliaments, coronations, abdications and assassinations of sovereigns, the raising of sieges, signatures of treaties, excommunications, famines, peasant uprisings, discoveries of continents, great premieres at Court, delivery of memorable speeches—such, then, if my history were History, would be the special kind of events that would fill its pages. Yet, in the growth and decline of nations as in the maturing and decadence of cultures it is not these spectacular star attractions that are the determining elements. Events much humbler in appearance, not on the same scale as the figures of the great conquerors or those, even more engaging, of the great vanquished (the Emir Abdel-Kader, immortalized by Horace Vernet whose immense panoramic picture, La Prise de la Smalah, was once shown to me; Toussaint-Louverture, or the “black Napoleon” popularized by certain Haitian postage stamps with his effigy on them) represent the true turning points, and to convince oneself of this truth it is not necessary to appeal to the philosophy of history or to sociology either, for it is enough to read, for instance, the work in which Commandant Lefebvre des Nouëttes—about whom I’m not sure if he served in the cavalry, the artillery, or some other harnessed, if not mounted branch of the army, dating from before mechanization—establishes that a technical modification in the manner of harnessing horses was, in the ancient world, one of the decisive factors in the disappearance of slavery (this invention having allowed the use of animal strength for works which, up to then, had required human labor). In my own life, which I could regard as belonging, at the very most, to the domain of “little” History if a wind of megalomania were to rise in me suddenly, observations of the same sort could be made an
d there is no doubt that thresholds such as the one I crossed when I learned to walk constitute much more notable stages than a certain discovery which, from a distance, assumes the guise of a revelation. The pleasure I take, like everyone else, in cartoon strip images, combined with the esthete side of me which makes me prefer to attach myself to what looks pretty and may furnish the material for a story, no doubt strengthens the natural tendency of my memory to retain, out of the prodigious sum of things that have happened to me, as to everyone, only those assuming a form such that they can serve as the basis for a mythology.
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