by David Miller
The contrast in styles is equally striking. The archaic style of Menard – who is, in addition, not a native speaker of the language in which he writes – is somewhat affected. Not so the style of his precursor, who employs the Spanish of his time with complete naturalness.
There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless. A philosophical doctrine is, at first, a plausible description of the universe; the years go by, and it is a mere chapter – if not a paragraph or proper noun – in the history of philosophy. In literature, that “falling by the wayside,” that loss of “relevance,” is even better known. The Quixote, Menard remarked, was first and foremost a pleasant book; it is now an occasion for patriotic toasts, grammatical arrogance, obscene de luxe editions. Fame is a form – perhaps the worst form – of incomprehension.
Those nihilistic observations were not new; what was remarkable was the decision that Pierre Menard derived from them. He resolved to anticipate the vanity that awaits all the labors of mankind; he undertook a task of infinite complexity, a task futile from the outset. He dedicated his scruples and his nights “lit by midnight oil” to repeating in a foreign tongue a book that already existed. His drafts were endless; he stubbornly corrected, and he ripped up thousands of handwritten pages. He would allow no one to see them, and took care that they not survive him.3 In vain have I attempted to reconstruct them.
I have reflected that it is legitimate to see the “final” Quixote as a kind of palimpsest, in which the traces – faint but not undecipherable – of our friend’s “previous” text must shine through. Unfortunately, only a second Pierre Menard, reversing the labors of the first, would be able to exhume and revive those Troys… .
“Thinking, meditating, imagining,” he also wrote me, “are not anomalous acts – they are the normal respiration of the intelligence. To glorify the occasional exercise of that function, to treasure beyond price ancient and foreign thoughts, to recall with incredulous awe what some doctor universalis thought, is to confess our own languor, or our own barbarie. Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he shall be.”
Menard has (perhaps unwittingly) enriched the slow and rudimentary art of reading by means of a new technique – the technique of deliberate anachronism and fallacious attribution. That technique, requiring infinite patience and concentration, encourages us to read the Odyssey as though it came after the Æneid, to read Mme. Henri Bachelier’s Le jardin du Centaure as though it were written by Mme. Henri Bachelier. This technique fills the calmest books with adventure. Attributing the Imitatio Christi to Louis Ferdinand Céline or James Joyce – is that not sufficient renovation of those faint spiritual admonitions?
* * *
1 Mme. Henri Bachelier also lists a literal translation of Quevedo’s literal translation of St. Francis de Sales’s Introduction à la vie dévote. In Pierre Menard’s library there is no trace of such a work. This must be an instance of one of our friend’s droll jokes, misheard or misunderstood.
2 I did, I might say, have the secondary purpose of drawing a small sketch of the figure of Pierre Menard – but how dare I complete with the gilded pages I am told the baroness de Bacourt is even now preparing, or with the delicate sharp crayon of Carolus Hourcade
3 I recall his square-ruled notebooks, his black crossings-out, his peculiar typographical symbols, and his insect-like handwriting. In the evening, he liked to go out for walks on the outskirts of Nîmes; he would often carry along a notebook and make ???
SUNDAY AFTERNOON
Elizabeth Bowen
Born in Dublin Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973) moved to England when she was eight, deciding at art school she should become a writer. She had a dull, sexless marriage, pepped up by a variety of affairs with either sex. Her books include The House in Paris, The Heat of the Day and Eva Trout. She died from lung cancer and was buried next to her husband in County Cork. Her Collected Stories was published in 1980. She once said she was interested in “life with the lid on and what happens when the lid comes off.”
“So here you are!” exclaimed Mrs Vesey to the newcomer who joined the group on the lawn. She reposed for an instant her light, dry fingers on his. “Henry has come from London,” she added. Acquiescent smiles from the others round her showed that the fact was already known – she was no more than indicating to Henry the role that he was to play. “What are your experiences? – Please tell us. But nothing dreadful: we are already feeling a little sad.”
“I am sorry to hear that,” said Henry Russel, with the air of one not anxious to speak of his own affairs. Drawing a cane chair into the circle, he looked from face to face with concern. His look travelled on to the screen of lilac, whose dark purple, pink-silver, and white plumes sprayed out in the brilliance of the afternoon. The late May Sunday blazed, but was not warm: something less than a wind, a breath of coldness, fretted the edge of things. Where the lilac barrier ended, across the sun-polished meadows, the Dublin mountains continued to trace their hazy, today almost colourless line. The coldness had been admitted by none of the seven or eight people who, in degrees of elderly beauty, sat here full in the sun, at this sheltered edge of the lawn: they continued to master the coldness, or to deny it, as though with each it were some secret malaise. An air of fastidious, stylized melancholy, an air of being secluded behind glass, characterized for Henry these old friends in whose shadow he had grown up. To their pleasure at having him back among them was added, he felt, a taboo or warning – he was to tell a little, but not much. He could feel with a shock, as he sat down, how insensibly he had deserted, these last years, the aesthetic of living that he had got from them. As things were, he felt over him their suspended charm. The democratic smell of the Dublin thus, on which he had made the outward journey to join them, had evaporated from his person by the time he was half-way up Mrs Vesey’s chestnut avenue. Her house, with its fanlights and tall windows, was a villa in the Italian sense, just near enough to the city to make the country’s sweetness particularly acute. Now, the sensations of wartime, that locked his inside being, began as surely to be dispelled – in the influence of this eternalized Sunday afternoon.
“Sad?” he said, “that is quite wrong.”
“These days, our lives seem unreal,” said Mrs Vesey – with eyes that penetrated his point of view. “But, worse than that, this afternoon we discover that we all have friends who have died.”
“Lately?” said Henry, tapping his fingers together.
“Yes, in all cases,” said Ronald Cuffe – with just enough dryness to show how much the subject had been beginning to tire him. “Come, Henry, we look to you for distraction. To us, these days you are quite a figure. In fact, from all we have heard of London, it is something that you should be alive. Are things there as shocking as they say – or are they more shocking?” he went on, with distaste.
“Henry’s not sure,” said someone, “he looks pontifical.”
Henry, in fact, was just beginning to twiddle this far-off word “shocking” round in his mind, when a diversion caused some turning of heads. A young girl stepped out of a window and began to come their way across the lawn. She was Maria, Mrs Vesey’s niece. A rug hung over her bare arm: she spread out the rug and sat down at her aunt’s feet. With folded arms, and her fingers on her thin pointed elbows, she immediately fixed her eyes on Henry Russel. “Good afternoon,” she said to him, in a mocking but somehow intimate tone.
The girl, like some young difficult pet animal, seemed in a way to belong to everyone there. Miss Ria Store, the patroness of the arts who had restlessly been refolding her fur cape, said: “And where have you been, Maria?”
“Indoors.”
Someone said, “On this beautiful afternoon?”
“Is it?” said Maria, frowning impatiently at the grass.
“Instinct,” said the retired judge, “now tells Maria it’s time for tea.”
“No, this does,” said Maria, nonchalantly showing her wrist with the watch on it. “It kee
ps good time, thank you, Sir Isaac.” She returned her eyes to Henry. “What have you been saying?”
“You interrupted Henry. He was just going to speak.”
“Is it so frightening?” Maria said.
“The bombing?” said Henry. “Yes. But as it does not connect with the rest of life, it is difficult, you know, to know what one feels. One’s feelings seem to have no language for anything so preposterous. As for thoughts –”
“At that rate,” said Maria, with a touch of contempt, “your thoughts would not be interesting.”
“Maria,” said somebody, “that is no way to persuade Henry to talk.”
“About what is important,” announced Maria, “it seems that no one can tell one anything. There is really nothing, till one knows it oneself.”
“Henry is probably right,” said Ronald Cuffe, “in considering that this – this outrage is not important. There is no place for it in human experience; it apparently cannot make a place of its own. It will have no literature.”
“Literature!” said Maria. “One can see, Mr Cuffe, that you have always been safe!”
“Maria,” said Mrs Vesey, “you’re rather pert.”
Sir Isaac said, “What does Maria expect to know?”
Maria pulled off a blade of grass and bit it. Something calculating and passionate appeared in her; she seemed to be crouched up inside herself. She said to Henry sharply: “But you’ll go back, of course?”
“To London? Yes – this is only my holiday. Anyhow, one cannot stay long away.”
Immediately he had spoken Henry realized how subtly this offended his old friends. Their position was, he saw, more difficult than his own, and he could not have said a more cruel thing. Mrs Vesey, with her adept smile that was never entirely heartless, said: “Then we must hope your time here will be pleasant. Is it so very short?”
“And be careful, Henry,” said Ria Store, “or you will find Maria stowed away in your baggage. And there would be an embarrassment, at an English port! We can feel her planning to leave us at any time.”
Henry said, rather flatly: “Why should not Maria travel in the ordinary way?”
“Why should Maria travel at all? There is only one journey now – into danger. We cannot feel that that is necessary for, her.”
Sir Isaac added: “We fear, however, that this is the journey Maria wishes to make.”
Maria, curled on the lawn with the nonchalance of a feline creature, through this kept her eyes cast down. Another cold puff came through the lilac, soundlessly knocking the blooms together. One woman, taken quite unawares, shivered – then changed this into a laugh. There was an aside about love from Miss Store, who spoke with a cold, abstracted knowledge – “Maria has no experience, none whatever; she hopes to meet heroes – she meets none. So now she hopes to find heroes across the sea. Why, Henry, she might make a hero of you.”
“It is not that,” said Maria, who had heard. Mrs Vesey bent down and touched her shoulder; she sent the girl into the house to see if tea were ready. Presently they all rose and followed – in twos and threes, heads either erect composedly or else deliberately bowed in thought. Henry knew the idea of summer had been relinquished: they would not return to the lawn again. In the dining-room – where the white walls and the glass of the pictures held the reflections of summers – burned the log fire they were so glad to see. With her shoulder against the mantelpiece stood Maria, watching them take their places at the round table. Everything Henry had heard said had fallen off her – in these few minutes all by herself she had started in again on a fresh phase of living that was intact and pure. So much so, that Henry felt the ruthlessness of her disregard for the past, even the past of a few minutes ago. She came forward and put her hands on two chairs – to show she had been keeping a place for him.
Lady Ottery, leaning across the table, said: “I must ask you – we heard you had lost everything. But that cannot be true?”
Henry said, unwillingly: “It’s true that I lost my flat, and everything in my flat.”
“Henry,” said Mrs Vesey, “all your beautiful things?”
“Oh dear,” said Lady Ottery, overpowered, “I thought that could not be possible. I ought not to have asked.”
Ria Store looked at Henry critically. “You take this too calmly. What has happened to you?”
“It was some time ago. And it happens to many people.”
“But not to everyone,” said Miss Store. “I should see no reason, for instance, why it should happen to me.”
“One cannot help looking at you,” said Sir Isaac. “You must forgive our amazement. But there was a time, Henry, when I think we all used to feel that we knew you well. If this is not a painful question, at this juncture, why did you not send your valuables out of town? You could have even shipped them over to us.”
“I was attached to them. I wanted to live with them.”
“And now,” said Miss Store, “you live with nothing, for ever. Can you really feel that that is life?”
“I do. I may be easily pleased. It was by chance I was out when the place was hit. You may feel – and I honour your point of view – that I should have preferred, at my age, to go into eternity with some pieces of glass and jade and a dozen pictures. But, in fact, I am very glad to remain. To exist.”
“On what level?”
“On any level.”
“Come, Henry,” said Ronald Cuffe, “that is a cynicism one cannot like in you. You speak of your age: to us, of course, that is nothing. You are at your maturity.”
“Forty-three.”
Maria gave Henry an askance look, as though, after all, he were not a friend. But she then said. “Why should he wish he was dead?” Her gesture upset some tea on the lace cloth, and she idly rubbed it up with her handkerchief. The tug her rubbing gave to the cloth shook a petal from a Chinese peony in the centre bowl on to a plate of cucumber sandwiches. This little bit of destruction was watched by the older people with fascination, with a kind of appeasement, as though it were a guarantee against something worse.
“Henry is not young and savage, like you are. Henry’s life is – or was – an affair of attachments,” said Ria Store. She turned her eyes, under their lids, on Henry. “I wonder how much of you has been blown to blazes.”
“I have no way of knowing,” he said. “Perhaps you have?”
“Chocolate cake?” said Maria.
“Please.”
For chocolate layer cake, the Vesey cook had been famous since Henry was a boy of seven or eight. The look, then the taste, of the brown segment linked him with Sunday afternoons when he had been brought here by his mother; then, with a phase of his adolescence when he had been unable to eat, only able to look round. Mrs Vesey’s beauty, at that time approaching its last lunar quarter, had swum on him when he was about nineteen. In Maria child of her brother’s late marriage, he now saw that beauty, or sort of physical genius, at the start. In Maria, this was without hesitation, without the halting influence that had bound Mrs Vesey up – yes and bound Henry up, from his boyhood, with her – in a circle of quizzical half-smiles. In revenge, he accused the young girl who moved him – who seemed framed, by some sort of anticipation, for the new catastrophic outward order of life – of brutality, of being without spirit. At his age, between two generations, he felt cast out. He felt Mrs Vesey might not forgive him for having left her for a world at war.
Mrs Vesey blew out the blue flame under the kettle, and let the silver trapdoor down with a snap. She then gave exactly one of those smiles – at the same time, it was the smile of his mother’s friend. Ronald Cuffe picked the petal from the sandwiches and rolled it between his fingers, waiting for her to speak.
“It is cold, indoors,” said Mrs Vesey. “Maria, put another log on the fire – Ria, you say the most unfortunate things. We must remember Henry has had a shock. – Henry, let us talk about something better. You work in an office, then, since the war?”
“In a Ministry – in an office, yes.”
“Very hard? – Maria, that is all you would do if you went to England: work in an office. This is not like a war history, you know.”
Maria said: “It is not in history yet.” She licked round her lips for the rest of the chocolate taste, then pushed her chair a little back from the table. She looked secretively at her wrist-watch. Henry wondered what the importance of time could be.
He learned what the importance of time was when, on his way down the avenue to the bus, he found Maria between two chestnut trees. She slanted up to him and put her hand on the inside of his elbow. Faded dark-pink stamen from the flowers above them had moulted down on to her hair. “You have ten minutes more, really she said. “They sent you off ten minutes before your time. They are frightened someone would miss the bus and come back; then everything would have to begin again. As it is always the same, you would not think it would be so difficult for my aunt.”
“Don’t talk like that; it’s unfeeling; I don’t like it,” said Henry, stiffening his elbow inside Maria’s grasp.
“Very well, then: walk to the gate, then back. I shall be able to hear your bus coming. It’s true what they said – I’m intending to go away. They will have to make up something without me.”
“Maria, I can’t like you. Everything you say is destructive and horrible.”
“Destructive? – I thought you didn’t mind.”
“I still want the past.”
“Then how weak you are,” said Maria. “At tea I admired you. The past – things done over and over again with more trouble than they were ever worth? – However, there’s no time to talk about that. Listen, Henry: I must have your address. I suppose you have an address now?” She stopped him, just inside the white gate with the green drippings: here he blew stamen off a page of his notebook, wrote on the page and tore it out for her. “Thank you,” said Maria, “I might turn up – if I wanted money, or anything. But there will be plenty to do: I can drive a car.”