A village squabble, or querelle de clocher. Our mayor has decided to install mechanical bells in the church tower, since the old, hand-rung ones were riddled with bullets fired years ago by a drunken hunter. Several of the villagers gather outside the church door to discuss at what time the bells should start and stop ringing. They quickly vote down the traditional custom of ringing twice every hour, begun so that whoever has not started counting from the first toll may be able to start his count again. An ex-gendarme, who lives at the far end of the village and can therefore barely hear the bells, argues that they should begin with the angelus at six, and end with the angelus twelve hours later. Several others, who live close to the church, disagree because they don’t want to be woken up so early in the morning. The argument becomes heated. Finally, exasperated, my neighbour, a long-time socialist brought up on the secular legislation imposed by the French Revolution (which Chateaubriand so deeply regretted), blurts:
“You know what you can do with your angelus? You can go stuff it up your—!”
To which the ex-gendarme, drawing himself up very straight and very stiff, replies:
“Monsieur, if we lose the angelus, we lose France!”
An infinite number of tiny moments of bliss, almost always unexpected, very fleeting, unremarkable. The sight of the full moon outside the window, the taste of a certain apricot jam, the sudden pressure of a hand, a line by Stevenson in Kidnapped: “I’ve a grand memory for forgetting …”
The weight of happiness: Chateaubriand says that he has always gained strength from adversity. “If ever happiness had seized me in its arms, I would have suffocated.”
And yet not everything he recalls is adversity. He describes how, as a child, he lusted after Dido in the Aeneid and translated Lucretius’s Aeneadum genitrix, hominum divumque voluptas (“Mother of Aeneas’s sons, voluptuous delight of men and gods”) with such ardour that his teacher tore the poem from his hands and set him to study Greek roots.
Chateaubriand’s childhood reading: “I would steal small candle-ends in the chapel to read at night the seductive descriptions of the troubles of the soul.” I too remember reading, throughout a wonderfully long summer, all sorts of books in which I unexpectedly found an erotic apprenticeship, under the cool sheets, my skin hot from the sun, a flashlight shining its light on the page, driven by the unwillingness to fall asleep and let the story break off.
Beckford, at the beginning of Vathek: “He did not think, with the Caliph Omar ben Abdalaziz, that it was necessary to make a hell of this world to enjoy paradise in the next.”
SATURDAY
Pouring rain that steams on the hot earth.
Today we gave the son of the previous owners of our house an ancient stone capital we dug up during the renovations, so that he would have a piece of his childhood space in the new house he is building.
Chateaubriand: “The chain of historical events, the destiny of men, the destruction of empires, the designs of Providence, presented themselves in my memory as recollections of my own fate: after having explored lifeless ruins, I was called upon to witness the spectacle of ruins that were still alive.”
For Chateaubriand, the very notion of aristocracy is worthy of respect. Thirteen years after Chateaubriand’s Memoirs had been completed in 1847, Victor Hugo gave an example of how the nineteenth century now expressed its respect for aristocracy: “The Prince of Wales, in i860, visits Canada and the United States. The acrobat Blondin, in a letter to New York’s Evening Post, suggests that, in order to add to the solemnity of the prince’s entrance into the Union, he will without charge convey His Royal Highness in a wheelbarrow on a tightrope across Niagara Falls.”
LATER
Memoirs from Beyond the Grave is, among other things, a colossal anthology of brief lives, the portrait of a man acting as his own and his contemporaries’ Boswell.
Some examples:
Shortly before the Revolution, Chateaubriand is introduced to the queen. “Casting her eyes on me with a smile, she greeted me in the same charming style with which she had done so the day of my presentation. I will not forget that look, which was to be extinguished so soon after. Marie-Antoinette, smiling, displayed so perfectly the shape of her mouth that the memory of that smile (frightful thought!) allowed me to recognize the jaw of that daughter of kings, when the head of the unfortunate lady was discovered during the exhumations in 1815.”
Upon arriving in the United States, Chateaubriand is greeted by a young black slave selling corn cakes, chickens, eggs and milk. After paying her, he gives her his silken handkerchief and notes, “It was a slave who welcomed me to the land of freedom.”
At the death of Pope Clement XII, the Cardinal Chamberlain, according to protocol, knocked two or three times on His Eminence’s forehead, calling him by his name, to make sure that he was dead. After describing this scene, Chateaubriand comments, “What would he have said if Clement XII had answered him, from the depths of eternity, ‘Well? What do you want?’ ”
Why do I enjoy this intimacy with Chateaubriand, privileged witness of a certain time and place? Above all, because of the sense of sharing secret stories, gossiping about things hidden and revealing. Proust to Philippe Soupault: “You know, I’m a bit of a concierge.”
Chateaubriand on journal-keeping and the need to write down one’s impressions immediately: “Our existence is so fleeting that if we don’t record the events of the morning in the evening, the work will weigh us down and we will no longer have the time to bring it up to date. This doesn’t prevent us from wasting our years, from throwing to the wind those hours that are for us the seeds of eternity.”
He is also shameless in his literary intentions. History, yes, but above all it must suit his elegant imagination. He says that he needed “a useful purpose” for his voyage across the Atlantic, so he “proposed to discover the Northwest Passage.” “This project,” he says, “was not unrelated to my poetic nature.”
SUNDAY
The American government announces in the press that it does indeed possess a “Department of Disinformation.” I can’t decide what is more outrageous: the existence of such a department, or the acknowledgment of its existence.
Chateaubriand, commenting on the lies contained in a political speech by Talleyrand, who had served as Foreign Affairs minister under Louis XVIII: “There are absences of memory, or lies, that frighten; you open your ears, you rub your eyes, not knowing whether you are deceived by wakefulness or by sleep. … You can’t tell whether this man has perhaps received from nature such authority that he has the power to recreate or annihilate truth.”
MONDAY
This promises to be a quiet week at home. There are writers I can read in the midst of a racket, but I need quiet to sit down with Chateaubriand; otherwise I miss too much of the tone under the style.
Much of Chateaubriand’s Memoirs concern themselves with Napoleon, first as a possible heroic figure, then as a tyrant. His chronicle of disillusionment reminds me of other similar attachments and disattachments: Gide and Stalin, Sontag and Castro. …
A reproach that sounds self-intended: “All that the world perceives in Napoleon are his victories.”
Chateaubriand’s account of Napoleon’s tyranny is applicable to almost any other dictatorship: “Those who were persecuted dreaded seeing their friends, for fear of compromising them; their friends dared not visit them, for fear of provoking even heavier persecution. The unfortunate outlaw, become a pariah, cut off from human company, remained in the quarantine of the despot’s hatred. Welcomed as long as your freedom of opinion remained secret, everything was withdrawn as soon as it became known; nothing was left to keep you company but the authorities spying on your relationships, on what you had to say, on your correspondence, on your dealings with others. Such were those days of happiness and freedom.”
Chateaubriand as European. In 1934 Thomas Mann, recalling a meeting with his old mentor, the German publisher Sammi Fischer, noted in his journal an observation made by
Fischer about a mutual acquaintance:
“He is no European,” he said shaking his head.
“No European, Herr Fischer? Why ever not?”
“He understands nothing of the great humane ideas.”
Borges reviewing James Whale’s 1937 film The Road Back: “Mere pacifism is not enough. War is an ancient passion that tempts men with ascetic and mortal charms. To abolish war, another passion must be opposed to it. Perhaps that of the good European—Leibniz, Voltaire, Goethe, Arnold, Renan, Shaw, Russell, Unamuno, T. S. Eliot—who knows himself heir and successor of all countries. There is in Europe a surfeit of mere Germans or mere Irish; what is lacking is Europeans.”
TUESDAY
Now the church bells begin to ring at eight, too late to be of any use as an alarm clock.
My son, Rupert, is here on a visit. We talk about the politics of absolute power and I read him these lines by Chateaubriand on Napoleon: “To become disgusted with conquerors, it would be necessary to know all the evils they cause; it would be necessary to witness the indifference with which the most innocent creatures are sacrificed to them in a corner of the world on which they have never set foot.”
Rupert tells me that he despairs of being able to remain true to his ethics in a world he perceives as corrupted, run by myriads of corporate Napoleons. How to know which of our acts are compromises, which are strategies of survival, which are sellouts? The tactics of greed (Napoleon’s desire to own everything, for instance) are astonishing; they have no limits, not even those of their own destruction.
At dinner, we recall reading Oscar Wilde’s children’s stories when he was seven or eight, in Toronto. I fetch a copy of the book and read Wilde’s description of a dream in “The Young King.” Avarice and Death watch a multitude of men toiling in the mud. “They are my servants,” says Avarice, holding in her palm three grains of corn. Death proposes a bargain: for one grain of corn, she will leave the men alone. Avarice refuses, and Death kills a third of them. Three times the offer is made and three times it is refused. In the end, no man is left alive.
WEDNESDAY
More rain, but it does not feel any cooler. It’s late at night. I listen to the 1893 version of Fauré’s Requiem, not the showy, loud version of 1900 but the version he imagined before it was rewritten for a full orchestra. Fauré had composed an even earlier version in 1887 (“for the pleasure of it,” he said), after the death of both his parents. That first version has no reference to the Day of Judgment, and the few strings mostly double the organ. Then, six years later, in January, he added two baritone pieces: the “Offertorium” and the “Libera me.” In this unostentatious version the composer disappears; only the listener remains present. In the “Introitus,” for instance, what we hear is ourselves, our own voice calling “from the depths.” Fauré is offstage, invisible. Reading Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, I forget that it is Chateaubriand, not I, who is mourning.
THURSDAY
In the end, says Chateaubriand, nothing perishes. “My faithfulness towards the memory of my dead friends should lend confidence to those friends who are left to me: nothing for me steps down into the shadow; everything I once knew lives all around me. According to the Indian doctrine, death, when it touches us, does not destroy us; it merely renders us invisible.”
Cocteau, in his diary: “Invisibility seems to me the condition of elegance.”
October
The Sign of Four
SATURDAY
I’m on a book tour in Germany, reading in a different city every day. It’s as if it were still summer: the outdoor terraces are open, the geraniums are in full bloom in the window boxes everywhere.
I’m in Münster today. I’m sitting at an outdoor café on a cobbled pedestrian street, reading Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four, close to a monument to the Holocaust showing a Jewish woman on her knees, cleaning the pavement with a toothbrush. I order a cup of ice-cream and red-fruit compote (Rote Grütze). The waitress, an East German woman in an embroidered white apron, trips against a chair and the cup falls on the stones. Catching the supervisor’s eye, she apologizes in a panic and goes down on all fours to clean up the red mess.
In Münster Cathedral, bombed by the Allies, a stone from Coventry Cathedral, “destroyed 4 Nov. 1940,” and the notice “Forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you.” I find in this an almost malicious irony, with a feeling of boasting on either side.
George Meredith in Modern Love:
’Tis morning: but no morning can restore
What we have forfeited. I see no sin:
The wrong is mixed. In tragic life, God wot,
No villain need be! Passions spin the plot:
We are betrayed by what is false within.
SUNDAY
Last Thursday, in Munich, at the Literaturhaus, I saw an exhibition of photographs of actors taken from many different performances; the ensemble of faces creates a new performance. The different arrangement of facts forms a new pattern, a new story, a new theory (if this were a detective story) of what really happened.
In a detective story, often the assumption is that anyone can be the murderer.
This morning, crossing the country by train: the wonderful German forests, so like the pictures in my fairy-tale books. Then the thought: through these forests, hunted prisoners ran.
AFTERNOON
Berlin. Most German cities have an asepticized look that other cities (London, for instance) never have. This is, no doubt, due to the eye of the outsider, who, like Watson, never sees beyond appearances. This week, everywhere I go, I see a series of posters announcing a new campaign against drugs, and even the addicts depicted on the posters look scrubbed and neat.
In my late teens and early twenties I believed that, at any moment, someone would see through my appearance and discover all my secrets. I was afraid that, under the right scrutiny, even my thoughts would not remain hidden for long, and that the keen observer, like a shrewd detective, would know that I was guilty of all sorts of forbidden things.
The first time I took LSD was in a cheap London hotel with three other people, one of them our high-school monitor from Buenos Aires. This was 1969 or 1970; I was twenty-one or twenty-two, and I had no definable expectations about the experience to come. I had read Huxley and Castañeda, but (as so often in those days) found it impossible to imagine that the literary experience of others might convincingly match my own. What took place on the page unfolded in a separate time, to which, yes, I had access, but as to a parallel universe, truer and more lasting than the one ruled by concerns of money, food, health, sex and the heart. So when the monitor suggested we all take the tiny blue pills he had with him, I said yes, of course, without any inclination to compare what was to come with what I had read a long time ago.
But if the obvious books were not on my mind at the time, others fell open unbidden. Perhaps the distribution of comfit-like pills, the round Dodo eyes of my monitor, the street-name of the hotel (Lewis), the contradictory sensation of falling and floating, made me think of another fall and of other adventures, and I started scribbling in a large blue onion-paper notepad thoughts about Alice in Wonderland that appeared momentous then, and now read as banal, when not incomprehensible. On the seventh page, after noting something illegible about ceilings and the rhythm of my lungs, I wrote, as a sudden illumination with no reference to Alice, THE SIGN OF 4!!! in large block letters.
I first read the Sherlock Holmes stories in a rented summer house in Mar del Plata, on the Atlantic coast south of Buenos Aires, one book after another, unable to stop. I’m not certain what charmed me then; not the plots, since El Séptimo Círculo, the detective series edited by Borges and Bioy, offered far more intriguing puzzles and original solutions; not the words, which seemed to me far less enchanting than those of Stevenson or Kipling. Perhaps it was what Chesterton calls “the thread of irony which runs through all the solemn impossibilities of the narrative,” which he thought turned the Holmes stories into “a really brilliant
addition to the great literature of nonsense.” Perhaps it was the chilly yet reassuring presence of a place that was to become haunted by my daydreams.
For me, no German city (neither Döblin’s Berlin nor Thomas Mann’s Lübeck) ever had the reality of Conan Doyle’s London: the gaslit rooms in Baker Street, the evil winding streets, the genteel foggy squares. Years later I travelled to London, convinced that I would find that memorable geography. My first shilling-metered bed-sitter above a fish-and-chips shop disabused me.
I can’t remember my reaction to the discovery that Sherlock Holmes was a cocaine addict. The opening paragraph of The Sign of Four, describing the Master taking the bottle “from the corner of the mantelpiece” and the hypodermic syringe “from its neat morocco case,” and then, “with his long, white, nervous fingers” adjusting the “delicate needle” and rolling back “his left shirt-cuff” and finally thrusting “the sharp point home”—all this in the presence of Dr. Watson—gripped me without scandal. (I was far more scandalized by the intrusion of the demonic ghostly dog in The Hound of the Baskervilles, for instance.) And yet later, in a far different London than the one I thought I loved, enjoying my first chemical hallucinations, I remembered that scene above all. Holmes’s comment to Watson’s criticism—“I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one. I find it, however, so transcendingly stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action is a matter of small moment”—rang true. Three more times I took LSD. Then I stopped, not for cautionary reasons but because I felt the experience would simply repeat itself, like watching the same film again, for the fourth time.
A Reading Diary Page 6