When I returned to Buenos Aires for a year in 1973, the books I had left at home were no longer there.
FRIDAY
Don Quixote wants to be a just man for his own sake, not out of obedience to human or divine laws. “Ah, Lord! Give me the strength and the courage/ To look upon my heart and my body without disgust!” The prayer by Baudelaire sums up Don Quixote’s ethics.
The Hassidic master Rabbi David of Lelov, who died in 1813: “The web of just acts holds the world together, making it golden.” Don Quixote: “Sancho, my friend, know that I was born, by Heaven’s will, in this our iron age, to be reborn in that of gold, or golden, as it is often called.” For the Hassidim, the existence of the world is justified by thirty-six just men known as the Lamed Wufniks, for whose sake God does not annihilate the human race. Don Quixote sets out to act as a just man would act in a world whose main characteristic is injustice.
In the paper today, further indications that war in Iraq is unavoidable. An Iraqi friend asks, “What course of action is possible between the atrocities of Saddam, the extremism of religious leaders and the economic voracity of the United States? We have the choice of being beheaded, stoned or eaten alive.”
SATURDAY
Reading Don Quixote, I’m distracted by the world Cervantes has recreated and pay little attention to the unfolding of the story. The landscape through which the two adventurers travel, their daily conflicts, their pain and grime and hunger and friendship are so powerfully real that I forget that they follow a narrative, and simply enjoy their company. I am less interested in what will happen next than in what is happening now. I sometimes feel the same reading Conrad or Thomas Mann, or the Sherlock Holmes stories.
Lionel Trilling: “All prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote” Only if, by “theme,” he means the reality and truth of prose fiction.
My son, Rupert, tells me, once again, how difficult he finds it to hold out for what he believes in: to refuse buying this, subscribing to that. He is only twenty, and constantly tempted by offers of betrayal which he wants to resist. I imagine he feels like a chess player who wants to see where a move will ultimately lead but is only able to foresee the immediate consequences.
Don Quixote knows his acts will have consequences, even though these remain invisible to him. Macbeth’s dilemma is that he wishes for acts without consequences—the only real impossibility.
I remember a friend in Buenos Aires telling me of a woman who had to sit one day in a café next to the man who had tortured her son. That is the consequence of Argentina’s refusal to act justly. Will this ever change? Not until the impunity granted to the military murderers is lifted, since this infamous amnesty will endlessly invalidate any attempt to restore social order. No society can exist coherently without a functioning code of justice; it must be part of society’s definition of itself, and its citizens must believe in it, whether they uphold it or not. And abide by the consequences.
For Juan José Saer, Don Quixote is an epic hero because he is uninterested in whether his mission of justice will succeed or fail: “This is the essential point that must be retained,” says Saer; “that the clear or muddled awareness of the ineluctability of failure in every human enterprise is something fundamentally opposed to the moral of the epic.” Compare this to Stevenson’s remark: “Our mission in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in the best of spirits.”
Mysteriously, this faith in the ineluctability of justice survives even when the hero himself cannot carry it further; the faith then becomes contagious and infects others with just zeal. At the end of Part I of Don Quixote, when Sancho brings home his wounded master, there is no feeling of conclusion but rather a promise of new beginnings. To his wife’s demands for a cape for herself and shoes for their children, Sancho answers with the hope of other rewards, rewards that he may acquire some future day, after further adventures. This may seem mere greed, but then, while Don Quixote lies dazed in his bed and his niece and housekeeper curse the guilty novels that have made their master mad, it is Sancho who picks up the knight’s chivalrous ideal, telling his wife that “There is nothing better in the world for an honest man than to be the squire of a knight errant in search of adventures.”
Brilliant observation by Schelling in his 1809 Philosophie der Kunst: “The main idea in Don Quixote is the struggle of an ideal against the reality that dominates the entire book, in its most diverse variations. At first, it seems as if the knight and his ideal are defeated, but this is only an appearance, because what becomes manifest throughout the novel is the absolute triumph of that ideal.”
Don Quixote as Lamed Wufnik.
MONDAY
I have to stop working on the diary in order to write a bread-and-butter piece for a certain publication.
Virginia Woolf on the impossibility of writing a 25,000-word story on commission: “I think I’ve proved that to be true in this way: the humiliation, that is the obstinate refusal of the brain to comply & one’s drubbings, & re-writings, & general despondency, even for 2,000 words, make it not so much morally, as physically, intellectually a torture.”
Humiliation of the trade: I ring up a magazine editor, for the sixth time, to request the payment now three months overdue. After yet more excuses, she asks, “Do you really need £100 so badly?”
Dorothy Parker: “The two most welcome words in the English language are ‘Cheque Enclosed.’ ”
IN THE EVENING
Icy rain. C. lights a fire and we listen to Tom Jobim playing Vinicius, a gift my publisher, Luiz Schwarcz, sent us from Brazil.
About generosity: Saint Martin, Bishop of Tours, the saint to whom our village church is dedicated, is celebrated for having cut his cape in two and given half to a freezing beggar. Don Quixote observes that it must have been winter, “otherwise the saint, who was so charitable, would have given him the whole.” “No, that surely wasn’t the case,” Sancho answers. “Instead, he must have upheld the old proverb that says, ‘The man in wisdom must be old, who knows in giving where to hold.’ ”
FRIDAY
Something has been moving in the crawl-space all night. It sounds too big to be a mouse, too small to be a cat. I sit up, listening to it. Then I go downstairs and, in the dark, watch the very last red glimmers in the fire die out. After fifteen minutes, I go back to bed. When I was in my twenties, I was able to sit (at a café table, for instance) for hours on end, neither reading nor talking, not even concentrating on anything. Now I find it very hard to sit and do nothing.
Petra von Morstein, “Before Evening”:
A day
In which I don’t wish to find anything.
I should gather it up
And keep it safe.
There is no wasted time in Don Quixote. Reading Erec et Enide, the twelfth-century novel by Chrétien de Troyes, I come upon the word récréantise, a word that seems to combine “relaxation” (récréation) with “haunted feeling” (hantise), and which the annotator defines as a sort of lassitude, weakness, negligence, lack of caring that is deemed a vice in the novels of chivalry.
SATURDAY
More on consequences:
There are revelations that are not meant for us. Tchouang-Tseu (who in the fourth century B.C. Imagined the dreamer who dreams he is a butterfly and who, upon waking, no longer knows if he is a man who dreamt he was a butterfly or a butterfly who is now dreaming he is a man) wrote this story: The son of a poor family makes his living fishing for pearls. One day, he dives into the sea and emerges with a pearl worth a thousand gold pieces. Instead of congratulating him, his father orders him to take a stone and smash the pearl. He argues that a pearl worth a thousand gold pieces must be so rare that it could only be found in a chasm nine fathoms deep and under the chin of a black dragon. It therefore follows that the son has been able to take the pearl only because the dragon had fallen asleep. “O my son!” he concludes, “think of what would happen to you once the dragon woke up!”
SUNDAY
&nbs
p; This morning, reacting to yet another Le Pen assembly in France, my French publisher, Hubert Nyssen (who fought in the Resistance), says, “We’ll have to pull out the old rifles once again.”
Misery in our time: according to Le Monde, 53 percent of the children of London live below the poverty line. What action, then? The common argument: helping one beggar won’t alter the situation, won’t eradicate the cause, won’t change anything. But for Don Quixote there is no doubt that direct action is the answer. On his very first excursion as a knight, he hears cries of distress and sees a boy, naked from the waist up, tied to a tree and being flogged by his master. Don Quixote orders the man to stop: “Uncivil sir, it is unseemly that you should attack one who cannot defend himself; mount your steed, couch your lance, and I will make you see the cowardice of what you are now doing.” The boy’s master attempts to explain that he is punishing him for his carelessness, and not (as the boy claims) for demanding his wages. Undeceived, Don Quixote orders the man to untie the boy and pay him what he owes him; the man answers that for him to do so, the boy must accompany him home, since he does not have the money on him. The boy, foreseeing that he will once again be beaten when left alone with his master, begs the knight not to believe him. “He will not disobey me,” Don Quixote answers. “It is enough for me to give my orders and he will surely respect them.” Because justice, chivalrous justice, is for Don Quixote an immutable universal law, and he believes that breaking it will entail unthinkable universal catastrophes. But, as the reader suspects, as soon as Don Quixote turns and leaves, the master ties the boy to the tree again and beats him within an inch of his life.
Twenty-seven chapters later, when Don Quixote meets the boy again and wishes to prove to his companions the importance of knights errant by telling them the story of the rescue, the boy answers that the outcome of the adventure was exactly contrary to the knight’s intentions, and begs Don Quixote, if he ever finds him in trouble again, to leave him as he is and not attempt to save him. Sancho, giving the boy a piece of bread and cheese for the road, comments, “Take this, brother, for we are all affected in some part by your misfortune.” Reasonably, the boy asks in what part it has affected Sancho. “In this part of cheese and bread I give you” is the answer, but that is only one version of the truth. The boy’s misfortune, as Sancho intuits, affects us all, not in the physical pain, of course, not in the empty stomach and the flogged skin, but in the realization that injustice thrives and that we are (apparently) condemned to the impossibility of overcoming it.
André Gide on Gandhi’s assassination: “It is as if God had been defeated.”
The chapter ends with the boy cursing his rescuer and all knights errant, with Don Quixote sad and ashamed and his companions holding back their laughter at the scene they have witnessed.
I can no longer watch scenes of violence on television or in films, but I can read their fictional descriptions. Don Quixote is one of the most violent books I know.
MONDAY
Don Quixote presents itself as a bewildering set of Chinese boxes. After only three chapters, Cervantes tells us that he has got this far and now realizes that he no longer knows how the adventures of his knight continue. By chance, he is offered for sale a bundle of old papers; being a compulsive reader who reads “even torn scraps in the street,” he leafs through them and sees that they are written in Arabic. Curious as to what these pages may contain, he seeks out a translator (Hebrew and Arab translators are easy to find less than twenty years after their expulsion from Spain, Cervantes tells us), and discovers that the manuscript is nothing less than the chronicle of the adventures of Don Quixote, written by the Arab historian Cide Hamete Benegeli—who, it turns out, includes Cervantes among the authors in our knight’s library. From then on, the spiral of authorship becomes vertiginous: The novel we read purports to be a translation from the Arabic, and Cervantes becomes not its “father” but merely its “godfather.” Later, in Part II of Don Quixote, the characters have read Part I and correct and revise its factual errors, even though, Cervantes tells us, its Moorish author swears that all the events are true, “even as a Catholic Christian might swear” (which, the translator explains to Cervantes, means that he swears nothing but the truth). At this point, the reader wonders: who is inventing whom?
Most writers possess a historical presence; not so Cervantes, who, in my memory, is less a real man than a character in Don Quixote. Goethe, Melville, Jane Austen, Dickens, Nabokov are more or less recognizable writers of flesh and blood; Cervantes seems to me invented by his book.
In May of last year, with Javier Cercas, I visited Cervantes’ house in Valladolid. The house is impressive. Here Cervantes lived when Part I of Don Quixote appeared in Madrid in 1605. The garden, the study, the bedroom, the room in which the many women of the family gathered around a Moorish coal-burner, the kitchen which he no doubt seldom visited—all these (we agreed) held more of the world of Don Quixote than of his creator. In spite of museums like this one, in spite of the reputation, of the monuments, of the literature courses, of the institutes named after him, of the enthusiasm of posterity and the generosity of curators, Cervantes remains unreal.
Proust felt he was condemned to be the fictional “I” he had created. In Don Quixote it is as if the fictional “I” is condemned to be Cervantes.
Sancho and Don Quixote compared to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: Nicholas Rankin, in his admirable travel book Dead Man’s Chest, observes that “perhaps it is no accident that the letter of the alphabet between H for Hyde and J for Jekyll is I.”
I found an engraving professing to be the portrait of Cide Hamete Benegeli. I’ve had it framed and have hung it on the wall next to my desk.
LATER
Subjects dealt with weakly by Cervantes in many of his other works mysteriously come to life in Don Quixote. Compare the tedious enumeration of good and bad poets in his Voyage to Parnassus (a kind of pedestrian commedia in which the author’s purpose seems to be merely to receive the approval of Apollo for his own poetic manifesto) to the book-burners’ census in Don Quixote.
Books within the book: When the Curate and the Barber ransack Don Quixote’s collection in order to purge it of “evil” books, they come across La Galatea by a certain Miguel de Cervantes. “This Cervantes has been a great friend of mine for many years,” says the Curate, “and I know he is more experienced in misfortune than in verses. His book has some good invention; it proposes something, and concludes nothing.” Regarding La Galatea, “concludes nothing” simply means that Cervantes never wrote the second part. But the same could be said of Don Quixote, and for a stronger reason: Don Quixote “concludes nothing” because the physical death of the hero is not the conclusion of the ethical argument.
Flaubert: “Yes, stupidity consists in the desire to conclude.”
Note: Flaubert could not have liked Don Quixote, written, as it is, without any visible effort to rein in the story or to master the prose. In a letter to a friend, Flaubert insists, “The weak passages in a book should be better written than the others.”
TUESDAY
Don Quixote tells Cardenio that he has “more than three hundred books” back home. Cervantes’ books (and books on Cervantes) occupy three shelves in my own library. I notice that I still have the book on Cervantes that Javier Cercas insisted on lending me. I must send it back. I feel uncomfortable having other people’s books at home. I want either to steal them or to return them immediately. There is something of the visitor who outstays his welcome in borrowed books. Reading them and knowing that they don’t belong to me gives me the feeling of something unfinished, half enjoyed. This is also true of library books.
What would happen if the Curate and the Barber purged my library of memoirs and diaries the way they purged Don Quixote’s of novels of chivalry?
“Saint Augustine’s Confessions. I’ve heard say that this was the first book of memoirs, and that all others have their origin in this one, so as the law-giver of such a pernicious sect, it shou
ld be thrown into the fire.”
“No, sir, because I’ve also heard say that it is the best of all books composed in this genre, and being unique of its kind it should be spared.”
“The Letters of Madame de Sévigné: brilliant and lively, therefore keep. Rousseau’s Confessions: maudlin, chuck away. Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit: half engaging, half presumptuous, tear it down the middle and keep the better half.”
“Bioy Casares’ diaries: they should have been ruthlessly pruned. Two things toll the death knell for such books, confessions of erotic seductions and descriptions of dreams. The first read as lecherous bragging; the second as painfully dull. Guilty of the first: Cellini’s Autobiography, Casanova’s Journals, Frank Harris’s My Life and Loves. Guilty of the second: Graham Greene’s A World of My Own. Out with all of them.”
“Let us move quickly through this section; we can’t stop at every single title. Amiel’s Diary: too long. Prokosch’s Voices: name-dropping and delusional. Strindberg’s Son of a Servant: self-pitying and complacent. Neruda’s J Confess I Have Lived: self-aggrandizing. All condemned.”
A Reading Diary Page 11