The Counterfeiters
Page 37
Cuverville, 20 June3
A day of abominable lethargy, the like of which, alas, I think I have never known except here. The influence of the weather, of the climate? I do not know; I drag myself from one task to another, incapable of writing the least letter, of understanding what I read, or even of doing the simplest piano scale correctly; incapable even of sleeping when, in a desperate attempt to escape from myself, I stretch out on my bed.
As a matter of fact, the moment I start to lie down, I feel my thoughts spring to life; and, ashamed of having put my day to such poor use, I prolong my reading of Browning’s Death in the Desert until midnight. I miss many details, but it sets my brain in ferment like the headiest of wines.
I say that man was made to grow, not stop;
That help, he needed once, and needs no more
Having grown but an inch by, is withdrawn,
For he hath new needs, and new helps to these,
(etc. V, 425)
which I copy out for the use of Lafcadio.
6 July 1919
Work cut short by the arrival at Cuverville of Copeau,4 back from America. I go to fetch him at Havre.
I read him the still tentative opening of the book; became rather clearly aware of the use I could make of this unusual form.
It would be wisest not to worry too much about the sterile periods. They ventilate the subject and instill into it the reality of daily life.
I think I can find a better setting than a café for the conversation on general topics I should like to use to open the book. I was tempted by the very banality of the locale. But it would be better not to make use of any setting unrelated to the action. Everything that cannot be of use encumbers. Thus this morning I have been considering the Luxembourg Gardens—more precisely, that part of the park where the traffic in counterfeit gold pieces takes place behind Lafcadio’s back and without his suspecting it—at the very time he is listening to and noting down that conversation on general topics, so very serious, which, however, one small definite fact is presently to render meaningless. Édouard, who sent him there to spy, is to tell him:
“My boy, you don’t know how to observe; this is the important thing that was going on”—thereupon producing the box full of counterfeit coins.
11 July
Furious with myself for having let so much time slip away without profit for the book. I tried in vain to persuade myself that it is ripening. I ought to be thinking about it more and not allow myself to be distracted by the petty details of everyday life. The truth is that it has not advanced a step since Cuverville. At most I have felt more urgently the need of establishing a relationship between the scattered elements. Yet I should like to avoid the artificiality of a “plot”; but events must fit into a pattern independently of Lafcadio: behind his back, so to speak. I expect too much from inspiration; it should come as the result of seeking. I am willing that the solution to a problem should appear in a sudden flash, but only after it has been studied at length.
16 July
This morning I took out once again the various newspaper clippings concerning the case of the counterfeiters. I am sorry not to have saved more of them. They are from the Journal de Rouen (Sept. 1900).5 I think I shall have to begin from there without trying any longer to construct a priori.
I am saving the following, which I have a notion to use as the motto for the first book:
When the judge asked Fréchaut if he had been a member of the Luxembourg “gang”:
“Let’s call it ‘the coterie,’ your honor,” he replied warmly. “It was a gathering where we dealt in counterfeit money, I don’t deny that; but we were principally concerned with questions of politics and literature.”
Essential to connect this to the case of the anarchist counterfeiters of 7 and 8 August 1907—and to the sinister account of the schoolboys’ suicides at Clermont-Ferrand (5 June 1909). Weld this into a single homogeneous plot.
25 July
The pastor, upon learning that his son at twenty-six is no longer the chaste youth that he thought, exclaims: “Would to heaven he had been killed in the war! Would to God he had never been born!”
What judgment can a decent man make of a religion that puts such words into the mouth of a father?
It is out of hatred for this religion, this morality that oppressed his whole youth, out of hatred for this puritanism he himself has never been able to shed, that Z. strives to debauch and pervert the pastor’s children. Some rancor is involved in this. Forced and counterfeit sentiments.
The counterfeiters’ company (the “coterie”) admits only compromised persons. Each one of the members must offer as a forfeit something by which he might be blackmailed.
Herewith a definition of friendship I got from Méral:6 “A friend,” he says, “is somebody with whom you’d be happy to do a bad deed.”
X. (one of the pastor’s sons) is led to gamble by the debaucher. To provide for the expense of M.’s childbirth (his final charitable action) he had set aside a comfortable and painfully acquired sum saved (or perhaps diverted from the family budget). He loses it; then, several days later, wins part of it back. But an odd thing takes place: during the time he had given it up for lost, he became so resigned to the loss that when he wins it back, the money seems no longer assigned to M. and he thinks only of spending it.
The periods will have to be clearly distinguished:
1ST. A noble (or charitable) motive that he advances to clothe a cheap trick. He knows very well that his family will need the money, but he is not diverting it out of selfishness (the sophism of the virtuous motive).
2ND. The sum recognized as insufficient. Chimerical hope and urgent necessity of augmenting it.
3RD. Necessity, after the loss, of feeling “above misfortune.”
4TH. Renunciation of the “virtuous motive.” Theory of the gratuitous and unmotivated action. Immediate joy.
5TH. Winner’s intoxication. Absence of reserve.
Dudelange, 26 July
I am working in Mme M.’s library—one of the most delightful laboratories one could imagine. Only the fear of interfering with her own work now hampers my studious satisfaction. The idea of obtaining anything whatsoever at someone else’s expense paralyzes me. (Incidentally, this is no doubt one of the best of moral curbs; but it is with difficulty that I persuade myself that others can find the same joy as I do from aiding and encouraging.)
The first big question to be examined is this: can I portray all the action of my book through Lafcadio? I do not think so. Probably the point of view of Lafcadio is too narrow to make it desirable to use it all the way through without a break. But what other way is there of presenting the remainder? It might be foolish to seek to avoid at all costs the simple impersonal narration.
28 July
Yesterday I spent the day convincing myself that I cannot make everything take place through Lafcadio; but I should like to have successive interpreters: for example, Lafacadio’s notes would occupy the first book; the second book might consist of Édouard’s notebook; the third of an attorney’s file, etc.
I am trying to wind up the various threads of the plot and the complexities of my thoughts around the little living bobbins that are my characters.
30 July
I cannot aim to be simultaneously precise and timeless. If my story leaves any doubt whether it is before or after the war, it will be because I have remained too abstract.
For instance, the whole story of the counterfeit gold pieces can only occur before the war, since at present gold pieces are outlawed. Likewise, thoughts and preoccupations are no longer the same; in seeking a more general interest, I am taking a chance of losing my footing.
It would be better to go back to my original idea: the book in two sections—before and after. This could be turned to good account: everyone finding corroboration of his ideas in the war, and emerging from the ordeal a little more rigid in his opinion. The three positions, socialist, nationalist, and Christian, each edif
ied and strengthened by events. And all this through the fault of half-measures which allow each party to believe that if its interests had not been compromised, the thing would have worked out better and nothing disastrous would have taken place.
It is not so much by offering a solution to certain problems that I can render a real service to the reader as in actually forcing him to think for himself about these problems, for which I am loath to admit that there can be any other solution than an individual and personal one.
The tramp that Lafcadio meets on his way back from Marseille must serve as a connecting link between him and Édouard. It would be totally useless at present to try to write the dialogue between Lafcadio and the tramp; I can’t even sketch out the later until I know a little more about the role I want him to play in the end.
1 August
Groped in the clouds for hours on end. This effort to externalize an interior creation, to objectify the subject (before having to subjectify the object) is peculiarly exhausting. For days and days you can make nothing out, and it seems as though the effort has been useless; the important thing is not to give up. To navigate for days on end without any land in sight—this image must be used in the book itself; most artists, scholars, etc., are coastwise sailors who imagine they are lost as soon as they get out of sight of land.—The dizziness of empty space.
5 August
I have been so exasperated by the difficulties of my undertaking—actually, I saw nothing else—that I have turned from the job for some time to get back to writing my Memoirs.7 Or at least I dissemble, I stray onto tangents, I beat about. But in spite of myself I am forever coming back to it; I think it seems the more difficult to me the more I aim to make it conform to the conventional form of the novel, and that many of these so-called difficulties will collapse as soon as I become definitely reconciled to its originality. Why, as soon as I accept it to be incomparable with anything else (and that’s the way I want it), why so much searching for a motivation, a development, the forming of a pattern around a central plot? Perhaps with the form I adopt I can find a way to have all that criticized indirectly: for example, Lafcadio could try in vain to tie the threads together; there would be unnecessary characters, ineffectual acts, pointless remarks, and the action would not get under way.
Dudelange, 16 August
In Stendhal no phrase evokes the one after it or takes life from the preceding one. Each one stands perpendicular to the fact or idea. Suarès8 speaks admirably of Stendhal; you couldn’t hope for better.
9 September
A month without writing anything in this notebook. An airing out. Anything is better than a bookish odor.
Book I: The Shrewd and Crafty.9
Book II: Old Wine and New Bottles
Book III: The Unfaithful Custodian
Of all the instruments that have ever been used for sketching or writing, Stendhal’s traces the most delicate line.
21 November 1920
Remained several months without writing anything in this notebook; but I have hardly ever stopped thinking of the novel, although my most immediate concern is for the writing of Si le grain ne meurt … one of the most important chapters of which (the trip to Algeria with Paul) I wrote this summer. Even while writing it I was led to think that intimacy, insight, psychological investigation can in certain respects be carried even further in the “novel” than in “confessions.” In the latter one is sometimes hampered by the “I”; there are some complexities one cannot try to disentangle, to expose without seeming self-centered. Everything I have seen, everything I have learned, everything that has happened to me for several months, I should like to get into this novel, where it will serve to enrich the texture. I should like events never to be related directly by the author, but instead exposed (and several times from different vantages) by those actors who will be influenced by those events. In their account of the action I should like the events to appear slightly warped; the reader will take a sort of interest from the mere fact of having to reconstruct. The story requires his collaboration in order to take shape properly.
Thus the whole story of the counterfeiters is to be discovered only in a gradual way through the conversations, by which all the characters will portray themselves at the same time.
Cuverville, 1 January 1921
I infinitely admire Martin du Gard’s assiduity, as I do Bennett’s.10 But I am not sure this system of notes and filing cards he recommends would have been of much help to me; the very preciseness of a recollection noted in such a way hampers it, or at least would hamper me. I stick to Wilde’s paradox: nature copies art. The artist’s rule should be never to restrict himself to what nature proposes, but to propose nothing to nature but what nature can and should shortly imitate.
2 January
The treatise on the nonexistence of the Devil. The more we deny him, the more reality we give him. The Devil is affirmed in our negation.
Last night wrote several pages of dialogue11 on this subject—which might very well become the central subject of the whole book; in other words, the invisible point about which everything gravitates.…
Success in the worst, and deterioration of the most exquisite qualities.
I shall take Martin du Gard to task for the discursive gait of his narrative. His novelist’s lamp, wending though the passing years, always illuminates head-on the events he is considering as each one in succession moves into the foreground. Their lives never mingle and there is no more perspective than there is shadow. This is just what bothers me in Tolstoy.12 They both paint panoramas; art lies in creating a picture. First study the source of the light; all the shadows depend on that. Every form rests on and finds support in its shadow.
Admit that a character who is exiting can only be seen from the rear.
To write this book properly I must persuade myself that it is the only novel and final book I shall write. I want to pour everything into it without reservation.
If Stendhal’s “crystallization” is sudden,13 the pathetic element lies in the gradual contrary process of decrystallization; worth examining. When time and age strip from love one by one all its points of reference and force it to take refuge in some mystical adoration or other, some altar upon which the lover hangs as an ex-voto all the souvenirs of the past: her smile, her bearing, her voice, the details of her beauty.
He comes to the point of asking himself: what does he still love in her? The surprising thing is that he still feels that he loves her desperately—I mean to say: with a hopeless love, for she no longer believes in his love because of his previous “infidelities” (I am purposely using the most deceptive term) of a purely carnal sort. But precisely because he loved her above and beyond sensuality (of a gross sort, at least), his love remains safe from any danger of ruin.
He is jealous of God, who is stealing his wife from him. Vanquished in advance, he feels incapable of struggle; but he conceives a hatred for this rival and everything connected with Him. What a paltry thing is this petty human happiness he is offering her, compared with eternal bliss!
13 January
I must note here nothing but remarks of a general sort on the planning, composition, and guiding motive of the novel. This journal must become to some extent “Édouard’s notebook.” In addition I am noting on cards things that might be of help: various materials, dialogues, scraps of conversation, and especially anything that may help me in sketching characters.
Of these I should like one character (the Devil) to circulate incognito throughout the entire book, his reality growing stronger the less the other characters believe in him. This is the distinguishing feature of the Devil, whose introductory motif is: “Why should you be afraid of me? You know very well I don’t exist.”
I have already written a section of dialogue the sole purpose of which is to introduce and explain this extremely important remark, one of the catchwords of the book. But the dialogue itself (such as I have scribbled it down) is very poor and will have to be completely recast
in the book, set into the action.
The great error of the dialogues in X.’s book is that his characters are forever speaking to the reader; the author has given them his job of explaining everything. Take constant care that a character speak only for the benefit of the one to whom he is addressing himself.
There is one sort of character who can speak only for an imaginary “gallery” (impossibility of being sincere, even in a monologue)—but this case is quite special and can stand out only if the others, on the contrary, remain utterly natural.
Paris, 22 April 1921
While I waited for my luggage, on the arrival of the train that brought me back from Brignoles,14 the opening scene of The Counterfeiters became clear to me in a sudden flash: Édouard and Lafcadio meeting on a station platform, the ice broken with the sentence: “I’ll bet you are traveling without a ticket.” (I used this sentence to approach the odd vagrant in the Tarascon station I speak about in my journal.) All this now seems quite mediocre to me, at least greatly inferior to what I visualize at present.
(There follows the draft of the episode that now appears in the book.)
3 May
To tell the truth, Édouard feels that Lafcadio, although he has returned all the letters, has an advantage over him; he feels that the most gallant way to disarm him is to win him over—and Lafcadio, offhandedly and tactfully, gives him to understand this. But soon this forced intimacy gives way to a genuine feeling. After all, Lafcadio is most attractive (he is not yet fully aware of this).
Yesterday I left Dent’s before noon and was not expected until 1:30 at Charles Du Bos’s.15 As I was dawdling in front of a second-hand bookshop, I caught an urchin in the act of pocketing a book. He took advantage of a moment when the proprietor, or at least the clerk in charge of the sidewalk exhibit, had his back turned; but only after he had crammed the book into his pocket did he become aware of my glance and realize that I was keeping an eye on him. Immediately I saw him blush slightly, then strive by some sort of hesitant gesture to explain his act. He drew back a few steps, seemed to be considering, returned, then ostensibly, and for my benefit, drew a little threadbare wallet from the inside pocket of his jacket and made a pretense of looking for the money he knew very well wasn’t there. He made, still for my benefit, a little grimace that meant: “Not enough!” shook his head, went back to the clerk in charge, and, as naturally as he could (in other words, with a sort of slow-motion, like an actor who has been told: “You’re going through it much too fast” and who forces himself to “put in pauses”), he finally pulled the book out of his pocket and put it back in its original place. Since he felt that I had never stopped watching him, he could not make up his mind to leave and continued to pretend an interest in the bookstall. I think he would have stayed there a great deal longer had I not drawn back a few steps, as though I were the cat in the game of “cat in the corner,” giving the mouse a chance to change corners. But he had no sooner broken away than I accosted him.