The Book of Lost Books

by Stuart Kelly

  Jean Racine

  {1639–1699}

  IN ERIC LINKLATER’S satirical novel Magnus Merriman (1934), the eponymous hero and his friend Meiklejohn end up spending the night in the cells of Edinburgh’s Central Police Station after an argument gets out of hand. The dispute was occasioned by Merriman’s assertion that Shakespeare is “the greatest poet of all time.” When asked to “name a better poet,” Meiklejohn had retorted, “Racine.” Magnus responds:

  That dull, pedantical schoolroom exercise! That prosy, plodding, weary, unimaginative padding for a deserted library! That’s not poetry: that’s route marching to Parnassus with a full pack and a sergeant alongside to see that you keep step.

  Though they did not use this as their defense the next morning, their contretemps enacted cultural assumptions that stretched back 150 years. Praising Shakespeare over Racine was a convenient shorthand for any number of political or aesthetic debates. Johann Gottfried von Herder thundered, “Woe betide the frivolous Frenchman who arrives in time for Shakespeare’s fifth act, expecting it will provide him with the quintessence of the play’s touching sentiment.” William Hazlitt denounced the “didactic” Racine, saying, “tragedy is human nature tried in the crucible of affliction, not exhibited in the vague theorems of speculation.”

  An easy method of extolling the northern, natural passion of Shakespeare was to set it in invidious comparison with the perceived courtly froideur of Racine. For example, Pyrrhus in Racine’s Andromaque (1667) attempts to force the reluctant Andromache (whose husband has been murdered by Pyrrhus’ late father) into marriage by threatening to kill her son; he does so nonetheless in tones of stifling politesse.

  Well, then, my lady, you must be obeyed.

  I must forget, or rather hate you. Yes

  My passion’s violence has gone too far

  Ever to halt in mere indifference.

  The original French elegantly rhymes leur violence with l’indifférence.

  Moreover, as the influential critical theorist Roland Barthes observed, Racine’s plays rely upon stylized chains of romantic disappointment. Orestes loves Hermione, who loves Pyrrhus, who loves Andromache. Amurat is married to Roxane, who falls for Bajazet, who loves Atalide. Theseus is married to Phaedra, who lusts after Hippolytus, who is forbidden to love Aricie.

  It is, however, a mistake to suppose Racine was merely the “literature which appealed to our great-grandfathers,” as Stendhal claimed in Racine et Shakespeare. In his day, he was the very archetype of the rebellious avant-garde.

  Jean Racine was born in 1639, in the backwater village of La Ferté-Milon, to a family of minor bureaucrats. He was orphaned at the age of four and subsequently brought up by his grandparents. When his grandfather died in 1649, his grandmother decided to retire to Port-Royal, a center of religious seclusion inextricably associated with the movement known as Jansenism. Cornelius Otto Jansen, the bishop of Ypres, developed his theology after studying the works of St. Augustine. Pope Urban VIII condemned the Jansenist movement in the 1641 papal bull In Eminenti. Jansenism, however, had a secure foothold in France, and included among its adherents the philosopher Blaise Pascal.

  Jansenism taught of an immeasurably distant God, whose grace alone could redeem man from a state of ingrained and perpetual sinfulness. It was outspoken about the moral laxity of the age, dismissive of the carnivals and gallantries of Louis XIV, and positively puritanical about the theater.

  We do not know exactly when Racine became dissatisfied with the piety of his guardians, nor do we know when he first entertained thoughts of a dramatic career. He was, however, a truculent pupil. He was taught Greek by the sacristan Claude Lancelot, and it was undoubtedly from him that he first learned of the works of the Athenian playwrights. According to one anecdote, he was caught reading a less than ennobling Greek romance called the Aethiopica, attributed to Heliodorus of Emesa. Lancelot threw the book in the fire. Racine, undeterred, found another copy, read it through, and gave it to the sacristan, saying, “You can burn this one now as well.” A boast about his memory or a judgment on the literary merit of the tale? The Aethiopica resurfaced during Racine’s faltering steps toward theatrical acclaim.

  After schooling, Racine went to Paris to study philosophy. With his distant, and dissolute, cousin, the fable writer La Fontaine, he was “un loup avec les loups”—running with the wolves. He wrote eulogies for Cardinal Mazarin, Louis XIV’s chief minister and an implacable opponent of the Jansenists, and received one hundred louis d’or from the king for a poem on the Nymph of the Seine. He frequented the court, where showmanship and elegance glossed over realpolitik.

  Racine’s first attempt at a dramatic composition was entitled Amasie. Apart from the title, all we know is that the Marais Theatre accepted it in 1660, but never performed it. The title itself adds nothing more: it may, perhaps, have been about the Egyptian ruler Amasis, and offer an early indication of Racine’s interest in exotic locales.

  In 1661, the Hôtel de Bourgogne turned down a tragedy, now lost, called Les Amours d’Ovide. The Roman poet Ovid, who was exiled to Tomis for an unspecified indiscretion, had appeared on the stage before: he is the hero of Ben Jonson’s comedy The Poetaster. Racine obviously took some care in the plot construction, and, in a letter, he described how writing the well-turned verse was an easy matter once he had streamlined the actions, choices, and consequences. Drama was plot, not poetry.

  The tragedy lingered in Racine’s mind, and, when he wrote to his friend L’Abbé le Vasseur from the small town of Uzès, where he was studying theology with his uncle, in late 1661, he compared himself to Ovid, the “si gallant homme,” languishing with the barbarous Scythians.

  The next year, after he returned to Paris, Racine’s third attempt at theatrical success was offered to the company of the comic playwright Molière. It was based on his childhood reading of the Aethiopica, and took its name from the hero and heroine, Théagène et Chariclée. Chariclea is the daughter of King Hydaspes of Ethiopia. Her mother, Queen Perside, unfortunately looked at a marble statue during her pregnancy, with the unforeseen outcome that the girl is born with white skin. Terrified that Hydaspes will think she has been unfaithful, she secretly sends the child to Delphi to become a priestess. Theagenes, the prince of Thessaly, falls in love with her, and the two elope. After various shenanigans involving pirates, disguises, and the like, all the characters converge on Meroe, where, through another series of improbabilities, Hydaspes is going to sacrifice Chariclea. As luck would have it, all the convolutions and contortions of the plot are resolved in the nick of time.

  Although the plot may seem artificial and melodramatic, it was not without appeal to earlier writers. Torquato Tasso based the early life of Clorinda in his epic Gerusalemme Liberata on the story, and Miguel de Cervantes wrote the first part of a version of it in Persiles and Sigismunda. The climactic scene, with the father preparing to sacrifice his daughter, would be reprised in Racine’s Iphigénie (1674).

  Although the play was not performed, it did provide Racine with his debut. The Parisian theaters were engaged in serious rivalries, and were not averse to a little one-upmanship. The Hôtel de Bourgogne was rumored to be rehearsing a play called La Thébaïde, by Boyer, and Molière asked Racine to adapt the story for them. Jean Racine’s La Thébaïde was performed on June 20, 1664.

  Racine did not repay Molière’s kindness with loyalty. His next play, Alexandre le Grand, was to be performed in 1665, by Molière’s company. After the success of La Thébaïde, Molière had invested in elaborate sets for the new play, depicting the shores of Hydaspe (an odd echo of the lost Théagène et Chariclée) and the first instance of the shoreside setting of many of Racine’s tragedies: Racine, incidentally, never saw the sea.

  Secretly, and perhaps as some form of insurance, Racine had the manuscript sent to Molière’s rivals at the Hôtel de Bourgogne. He also persuaded one of the actresses, Mlle. Duparc, to transfer with him—not wholly because of her acting ability. She would later become Ra
cine’s mistress. In an unprecedented move, Alexandre le grand played in both theaters on December 18. Molière was livid, and never spoke to Racine again.

  Was it ambition, or arrogance, or some real or imagined slight that led Racine to double-cross Molière? Racine’s son, in his biography of his father, claims the split was due to Racine’s frustration at the lackluster delivery and diction of Molière’s players. His next play, Andromaque (1667), with Mlle. Duparc in the lead role, certainly drew some comments about the hyperbolic acting style. In a satirical snipe at Racine, a poem called Le Parnasse réformé, the renowned actor Montfleury, who played Orestes and died in 1668, is made to say, “If anyone . . . should wish to know what I died of, let him not ask whether it was of fever, dropsy or gout, but let him know that it was of Andromaque.”

  The rivalry between Racine and Molière simmered on for years, and, not content with one enemy, Racine also took up against Corneille, the leading tragedian of the age, who had made some rather dismissive remarks about Alexandre le grand with the effect of cementing a relationship between his antagonists. Racine and Corneille competed with versions of the Emperor Titus’ relinquishment of love for duty, with Bérénice by Racine being premiered the week before Corneille’s Tite et Bérénice (at Molière’s theater) in 1670. Racine regularly sniped at Corneille in the prefaces to the printed editions of his plays, referring to “a certain malicious old poet.” Racine’s plays had the more modern edge: they presented amoral heroes who would sacrifice their honor for their desire, unscrupulous admissions of expediency, overwhelming urges that stripped their sufferers of each shred of self-control, and each vestige of self-interest.

  That year, Mlle. Duparc having died in 1688, Racine also obtained a new mistress, Mlle. Champmeslé. According to the rumors of Mme. de Sévigné, the actress enjoyed “diableries,” or orgies, with Racine and the poet-critic Nicolas Boileau. The boy educated by Jansenists seemed determined to conform to every cliché of the degraded stage.

  By 1677, Paris was enthralled by Phèdre, a drama about the tragic love of a stepmother for her stepson. Unfortunately for Racine, the plaudits were for a protégé of Cardinal Mazarin’s niece, Nicolas Pradon, who wrote a work of the same name as the play that many still regard as Racine’s masterpiece. His response has been a puzzle for biographers ever since: Racine did not write for the theater again for twelve years.

  Instead, he married a rich, childbearing woman whom he did not love, was appointed royal historiographer, and was reconciled with his Jansenist past to the extent that his children were brought up in its strictest devotions. Mme. de Sévigné wryly observed that Racine now loved God as much as he once had his mistresses. The enfant terrible became a stolid, churchgoing, academic historian.

  At the behest of Mme. de Maintenon, whom Louis XIV had secretly married, Racine wrote two final works: biblical dramas that were performed by the schoolgirls of Madame’s charitable foundation, Saint-Cyr. Athalie, the final work, is imbued with Jansenist theology. The pagan queen Athaliah is crushed by a God as unrelenting as a juggernaut. Imprecations cannot alter His Inevitable Plan. No pity, tears, or change of conscience can stay the executioner’s hand. To Voltaire it was “the work which closest approaches perfection by a mortal man.”

  No doubt many scholars would dearly love to pore over the pages of a rediscovered Amasie, or Les Amours d’Ovide, or Théagène et Chariclée. Interesting and salient material about Racine’s versification, narrative dynamics, or conceptions of heroism would certainly be forthcoming. But a glimpse into the twelve-year silence would outbalance all three. Was it professional pique, age, a handsome salary, or a profound change of belief that made him reject the theater? Had he come to agree with his Jansenist inheritance about the luxury and worthlessness of the stage, or merely retired, a comfortable bourgeois with no inclination to muddy his hands with greasepaint and fripperies? Behind the wig, thin lips, and hooded eyes, Racine is frustratingly, confrontationally silent, as silent as the God in whom he came to believe.

  Ihara Saikaku

  {1642–1693}

  APART FROM MURASAKI SHIKIBU’S The Tale of Genji, the most widely admired and painstakingly reproduced novels in classical Japanese are those of Ihara Saikaku. With works such as The Life of an Amorous Man, Five Women Who Loved Love, and The Eternal Storehouse of Japan, or The Millionaire’s Gospel, Revised Version, he revolutionized the form, breaking with tradition in a wholehearted embrace of modernity. Although he tried his hand at writing samurai classics, it was the depiction of the chnin class—the merchants—that typified his work. During the Tokugawa shogunate under which he was writing, the government’s strongly isolationist policy and ruthless enforcement ensured the longest period of uninterrupted peace in Japan’s history. It also encouraged the movement away from feudalism toward a more commercial society. Divorced from contact with other cultures, the old Buddhist ideal of the ukiyo, or “sad world,” was metamorphosing into its homophone, the more distinctively Japanese vision of “the floating world” of erotic abandon, eased by riches.

  Saikaku did not purvey stale melancholy and world-weary acquiescence, but a vivid bustle of getting, losing, cheating, pleasing, and changing. Bordering on the pornographic, replete with humor, cynicism, charm, and ribaldry, he had, as the saying went, “not one Chinese character in his stomach.” Widowed at thirty-four, he launched himself into society with vigor, and not without causing some offense. A notable criticism of his work was entitled Saikaku in Hell.

  Before his career as a novelist, Saikaku was renowned as a poet. He, and the Danrin School, opposed the preeminent haiku writer of the day, Matsunaga Teitoku. Teitoku, influenced by Chinese aesthetics, emphasized concentration, the honing and whittling of seventeen syllables into their most perfect balance. Saikaku, on the other hand, wanted spontaneity, brilliance, and improvisation. His formidable skill can be seen in the accounts of yakazu, or poetry marathons, in which he competed.

  In 1671, he astonished his contemporaries by extemporaneously composing 1,600 haiku in “a day and a night.” Nine years later, he notched up the almost fantastic rate of 4,000 in twenty-four hours. It was, however, in 1684 that he set his record: a phenomenal 23,500 haiku in the lifespan of a mayfly—slightly less than seventeen sets of seventeen syllables per minute. It is no wonder he was nicknamed “the 20,000 Poet.” Ephemerality was the quintessence of his genius: it is equally unsurprising that not all his work survived. He would not, one imagines, even have wanted it to.

  Saikaku’s method did have its detractors. His younger rival Bash, who became the most popular and renowned haiku writer, developed his own distinctive style of epiphanic compactness only after declaring himself dissatisfied with both Teitoku and the Danrin School. Others, disconcerted by the frequent oddness and impenetrability of Saikaku’s off-the-cuff cadenzas, referred to him with an epithet that was synonymous with everything extravagant, far-flung, and downright peculiar: Saikaku, they declared, must be Dutch.

  Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz

  {1646–1716}

  OF ALL THE infinite, hypothetical Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnizes, God chose to actualize the one that was born in Leipzig, on Sunday, July 1, 1646, to the professor of moral philosophy at Leipzig University and his third wife. This was the Leibniz who, since this is the best of all possible worlds, would develop differential calculus independently of Sir Isaac Newton, write the equation for a cycloid in parametric form (which, although he did not realize it, governs the destruction of matter in a black hole), and advance the System of Pre-established Harmony and the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles. He would, moreover, be paid for most of his life to write a book which he would never quite get around to, while researching a book that could never logically be written at all.

  Though Leibniz has often been described as an Enlightenment thinker, or at least a precursor to the rationalist eighteenth century, his diversity of interests and lifelong concern with synthesizing those interests seem more akin to the role of the Renaissanc
e man. Leibniz was, in short, a polymath of prodigious proportions. In addition to mathematics, theology, philosophy, and physics, he wrote on Chinese religion and the I Ching, silk production, fountain design, public health reforms, phantom-limb sensations, and inefficient heat loss in chimneys. He was also an alchemist and librarian, who spent years trying to drain the mines at Harz, and undertook the kind of diplomacy that edged into espionage.

  In 1668, during the Polish succession crisis, he used a geometric proof to promote the claims of the candidate favored by the House of Brunswick, his employers. To strengthen the claim, he had it printed under the pseudonym of Georgius Ulicovius Lithuanus, with a fake title page asserting it was produced in Vilnius in 1659, adding the mystery of prophecy to the indisputability of mathematics.

  After a spell in the service of Baron von Boineburg, Leibniz became court councillor to Duke Johann Friedrich of Hanover in 1676 (although it took a full year and several stern injunctions before he physically presented himself at court). He would remain with the family until his death, fulfilling a similar position for Duke Ernst August and George Ludwig (later George I), as well as being an intimate correspondent with the Electress Sophia and Queen Sophie Charlotte of Prussia.

  In 1685, Duke Ernst August suggested that, in addition to Leibniz’s supervision of the library and various political duties, he might write a history of the House of Brunswick, partially to codify their dynastic claims and partially, one suspects, out of vanity. The Brunswicks could trace themselves back to a semimythical family called the Guelfs: the d’Estes, another branch, claimed to be able to go back as far as their Roman ancestors. The courts of Hanover, Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, and Celle were all contributing to the project and making available their archives. Ernst August’s commission seemed clear: an account of their family from the earliest times.