1953
Page 13
***
Sitting across from her friend Brigitte, Élizabeth cannot speak of the peaceful images and sensations which have infiltrated her being. She feels incapable of manipulating the words so as to pass them unbroken through the enormous wall of concrete that surrounds her friend and herself. And yet, something strains to break through this incommuni-cativeness. Some tiny something that is still communicative, and that might slice through the thickness of this moment and set life going again. But, unable to work it out clearly, Élizabeth resigns herself to telling her friend that she is going to have her hair cut before starting back for Moncton. This declaration almost startles Brigitte. She is astonished by the offhand manner of her friend, who has always resisted any change to her hairdo. Taken aback also by this departure which seems precipitated, Brigitte struggles to understand the haunting impression that something will be left unfinished. She is suddenly aware of a kind of hyper-present, and an imminent rearrangement of sorts. She did not see this rearrangement coming, though it directly concerns her, completely disrupts her internal balance, leaving her caught between feelings of affection and desire. Surprise. Slight skip of the heart over the abyss. A burst of laughter from Brigitte, who cannot restrain this loving laughter at the sight of Élizabeth looking for the hairdresser’s number in the phone book. She rises. Takes Élizabeth by the arm and leads her to the closet mirror.
Standing behind Élizabeth as they face the mirror, Brigitte gathers her friend’s hair to create the effect of short hair. Élizabeth turns her head to one side and the other, the two of them trying to decide just how much needs to be uncovered. Uncovered. To see in Brigitte’s gaze that something which cuts through to the reality of the moment, that something that goes beyond the present, that something that allows Élizabeth and Brigitte to look at each other, to really look at each other. And this look is good. It is clear and honest. It is enough to carry Brigitte’s hand, as it caresses, ever so lightly, the side of Élizabeth’s face. Then the neck, ever so lightly. And onward, extending, to stretch across, to lie for a moment on her breast, before once again taking up its movement straight down along the sternum. Two women. Not understanding entirely what is being said, but allowing it to be said. Brigitte’s hand continuing to follow the straight line, over the stomach, the abdomen, to finally press lightly, ever so lightly, the mound of desire. While their eyes remain locked together. For there is no elsewhere.
And though the ball returns, followed by another, and yet another, Brigitte refuses to be rushed.
Epilogues
The royal family’s instinct for self-sacrifice and survival— Frogmore and Buckingham gardens — Firm extensions of continuity — Writing versus the inability to communicate — Optimism or pessimism of Samuel Beckett — Alfred Nobel and the pure poetic folly — Science and language: a rereading of radioactivity — The thirteenth train — Another Marian coincidence in Acadia — Three hundred days of indulgence and the double waffle-maker — Aerial perspective of desire — Sooner or later the ball — A colossal labour of creation — Rereading of the demise of l’Évangéline and the parable of the reconstructive effort— The Corfu impulse — Primordial undifferentiation and the dangers of a distorted image of oneself— The reign of necessity
THE DUKE OF WINDSOR paid the rest of his life for dishonouring his family. His dishonour was compounded by the fact that, at the end of the First World War, the royal family had come to represent all the best qualities of the English race. Such prestige was at least in part attributable to George V, father of the man who would be demoted to the ducal rank. The former’s behaviour, “full of good sense and dedication to his duties,” had renewed the British subjects’ confidence in the Crown. In 1915, for example, as the English were beginning to worry about the effects of alcohol on their nation, George V decreed that his family and the court would abstain from any consumption of alcoholic beverages until the end of the war. This was by no means an inconsequential decision, since it was general knowledge that the king “bore no personal hostility to the bottle.” For their part, his subjects continued to drink as before, but “they appreciated their monarch’s sacrifice all the more for being able to measure its magnitude.” Two years later, when ties to Germany, no matter how slight, became particularly unseemly, George V decided to change the name of his dynasty from Hanover to the typically English Windsor, and suggested that “those of his cousins who bore a Germanic patronymic exchange it for an English-sounding one.” These measures, along with the fact that the royal couple’s eldest sons “wore the uniform and were occasionally exposed to the risk of being hit by shell fragments,” propelled the royal family into the hearts of the entire nation. But there was a price to pay for this favoured status. The royal family was obliged, in a sense, to be virtuous in place of the English people themselves, who had begun to take pleasure in a degree of moral freedom. Strengthened by the love of his treasured Wallis, Edward VHI refused to comply with this game of purity by proxy. As a consequence, he lived his entire life burdened by his family’s disapproval. Even Elizabeth II, in spite of all her qualities, did not seem prepared to forget the past and establish openly cordial relations with her uncle the duke and his wife the duchess.
Nevertheless, in 1960, following some delicate negotiations, the queen agreed to one of the duke’s requests: to be buried, when the time came, with his wife, in the gardens of Frogmore, which he adored. In 1964, the queen sent flowers to her uncle, who had undergone heart surgery in a Texas hospital. Three months later, after the duke’s eye operation in a London clinic, the queen sent him some foie gras, and then visited him herself. Here, Elizabeth II saw the Duchess of Windsor again for the first time since 1936. In the heat of the moment, the queen went so far as to authorize the duke to walk in Buckingham gardens, in the company of his valet, during his convalescence. Finally, three years later, in 1967, one of the duke’s fondest wishes was granted, a wish the duke had expressed in 1940, several years after his marriage to Mrs. Simpson. In the hope that an official royal audience would put an end to all the tongue-wagging and ugly rumours concerning the duchess, the dethroned king had asked the petrified royal family to receive his wife were it only for fifteen minutes. And so it was that, four days after their thirtieth wedding anniversary, the duke and duchess participated, for the first time, in a royal ceremony as husband and wife. The couple were permitted to take their place in the front row, beside Queen Elizabeth, her husband Prince Philip, and the Queen Mother. The ceremony — the unveiling of a commemorative plaque in honour of Queen Mary — lasted exactly fifteen minutes.
According to the biographer Michael Bloch, no other such invitation was ever extended to the Windsors, not even when the duke’s health failed in 1972. That winter, the duke’s illness caused great concern for British diplomats stationed in Paris, home of the duke and duchess. The diplomats had been instructed to make sure the disgraced uncle should not die during Elizabeth II’s upcoming official visit to Paris. British officials feared that the duke’s death at that moment might hinder the queen’s crucial mission, involving negotiations on the projected creation of the European Economic Community. The British ambassador in Paris went so far as to visit the duke’s doctor to inform him that it would be acceptable for the duke to die before or after the visit, but not during. In the end, the duke survived the queen’s visit; she even came to see him. Though extremely ill, the duke refused to receive his niece in his pyjamas in bed. The nursing staff helped him to dress appropriately and to sit in a chair in a sitting room adjacent to his bedroom. The intravenous tubes were concealed beneath his clothes, and the intravenous pole was hidden by a curtain behind his chair. The nursing staff watched, transfixed in fear, as the duke, in spite of his weakness, rose to salute his queen on her arrival. No such movement having been planned, the caregivers were afraid the entire trompe-l’oeil installation would collapse. Their fears were unjustified, as all the extensions held firm. The visit lasted a quarter of an hour. The duke’s h
ealth declined rapidly in the days that followed and the cancer carried him off ten days after he had greeted his niece Elizabeth, whom he had never ceased to recognize as his sovereign. Thus are the paths of continuity entirely hidden to us.
***
Much could be said regarding Élizabeth’s inability to communicate to her friend Brigitte the essence of the images flashing across her mind during the silence which preceded their scene before the mirror. At first glance, it might be tempting to attribute this inability to communicate to a degree of laziness on the novelist’s part. But a look back at the year 1953 provides a far more nuanced view. Because it was in 1953, as Winston Churchill was being recognized with a Nobel Prize for his qualities as a man of letters and for his rousing speeches on freedom and human dignity, a year, therefore, of wind and speech, that Samuel Beckett published The Unnamable. This writer who would end up describing “a large idiotic mouth . . . that speaks in vain” would also be Nobelized, but not until 1969, and not without a heated debate within the Nobel Committee. The argument ranged over the entire gamut of issues, from Alfred Nobel’s initial intention to the true import of literature. The process leading to recognition of Beckett’s work constituted a turning point for the Swedish Academy of Letters, resulting in important changes in the way the academy would thereafter consider literary works.
The divisions which became public with the awarding of the Nobel Prize in literature to Mr. Beckett had already been germinating in the guise of a malaise at the time of Churchill’s Nobelization. To put it briefly, after Churchill, the Swedish Academy never rewarded another writer who was essentially a historian, nor an elected representative occupying public office, which disadvantaged André Malraux and Léopold Senghor. But these decisions only partially reflected the dilemma faced by the Nobel Committee for literature after the war, a dilemma that resulted in its oscillating between recognition of the works of masters on the one hand, and that of innovators on the other. The masters were recognized for their power and intensity (Russell in 1950, Lagerkvist in 1951, Mauriac in 1952, Churchill in 1953); the innovators for their audacity, resulting in the renewal of language, style, and form (Hesse in 1946, Gide in 1947, Eliot in 1948, Faulkner in 1949). Overall, the innovators dominated the period after the war, that is from 1946 to I960. In 1954, Hemingway was judged to be both a master and an innovator, Laxness in 1955 and Jiménez in 1956 were innovators, as was Pasternak in 1958, Quasimodo in 1959, and St.-John Perse in i960. Camus’s place in this portrait is difficult to fix. Nobelized in 1957, he was a writer of his time who was recognized as such.
The recognition of innovators lost some ground during the sixties. According to Kjell Espmark, historian of the Nobel Prize in literature, this loss of ground is related to the very nature of innovation, which, once it is initiated, never lasts long. Thus, Neruda (1971), Martinson (1974), and Milosz (1980) “do not belong to the heroic period of modernism but rather to the period in which it collects its laurels.” As for Beckett, although he was an innovator, his work required some innovation in the very criteria of innovation. Basically, the question was whether Beckett was an optimist or a pessimist and, consequently, if his work could be considered as idealistic, according to Alfred Nobel’s stipulation. In the end, it was demonstrated that the notion of idealism included that of integrity and, on that score, though “situated in the general neighbourhood of nothingness,” Beckett’s work “contains a love for humanity which is increasingly marked by understanding as it descends into abjection.” Another of Beckett’s defenders argued that “by an effect of sheer contrast, the myth of annihilation so dear to Beckett is coloured by the myth of creation,” which has the result of making nothingness “somehow liberating and stimulating.” After Beckett’s Nobelization, the optimistic or pessimistic nature of a literary work was never again a serious factor, and by the time Claude Simon’s work underwent Nobel scrutiny, in 1985, little attention was given to his “obsession with violence and brutal domination.” The jurists, recognizing in him one of the leaders of the French nouveau roman, concluded that he had enriched the epic art “with a dense and suggestive canvas of words, events, and places, including slippages and juxtapositions of elements according to a logic other than that imposed by the realist continuity of time and space.” In any case, in the interval between the Nobelization of Simon and that of Beckett, the members of the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy of Letters had taken a pragmatic turn in their pursuit of innovation. Armed with terms like “prolific,” “productive,” and “promising,” they no longer hesitated to bring pioneers out of the shadows and into the international spotlight, having decided that the literary award of awards should serve those who write as much as those who read.
***
As important as the Nobel Prize in literature is, most writers, having no hope of winning it, easily console themselves with the knowledge that their true reward is in the poetry itself. The impulse to write springs from an inexplicable hope, which makes life the fruit of a poetic folly as pure as Alfred Nobel’s testament. Just as Mr. Nobel’s will demonstrated the importance attributed to that which is written down, inscribed for all time, so all writing includes something of the testament. It perpetuates all of life into a great beyond occasionally open to speech, but upon which only writing can build. Thus, the writer, through his work, aims not at wrapping himself in the banality of personal immortality, but rather to become part of a force that moves, in a kind of current or tidal bore — why not! — stirring the fish and the algae for the benefit of the shore birds, who catch them on the fly, for they too are in a hurry to counter the mass defect. The mass defect. Something like a soul without strings, completely free to navigate the heights, in marvellous and supernatural flight, up where origins and meaning have no hold.
Alfred Nobel’s will did more than confirm the aura of writing. Because he was a genius with the means to exercise his genius, Mr. Nobel was able to celebrate the marriage of science and language. For science and poetry have always drawn from the same words to speak to each other, creating together the foundations of the real, at times virtually eliminating the gap between the language of science and the science of language. Like Élizabeth and Brigitte when their trajectories intersect. For that matter, the entire phenomenon of radioactivity is rarely if ever discussed in terms of the small poetic marvel that it is. In a world that swears by the hard work of knowledge, perhaps we should remember that the nuclei of certain atoms emit rays spontaneously, and that the principle characteristic of spontaneity is that it produces itself without constraint. There are also lessons to be learned from the power of these spontaneous emissions. About alpha rays, for example, we should know that they can be blocked by a few centimetres of air or a sheet of paper. A sheet of paper, so once again poetry! Beta rays, on the other hand, can travel through a metal plate several millimetres thick. Clearly, they are real go-getters. With or without a Nobel Prize, they work hard all their lives to make their way, to break through barriers. Because, in the scientific world, as in the world of language, it’s all a matter of barriers, of forging ahead. As for gamma rays, similar in nature to X rays, we might as well say that nothing can stop them, not even tens of centimetres of concrete. Unstoppable, they rapidly become absolutes themselves and new barriers for others to break through. Finally, the fact that these spontaneous emissions can be detrimental to the human body demonstrates that humanity is always vulnerable. In that sense, the impulse to write may in fact be a weapon, a defensive reflex, a spontaneous emission directed at the unfathomable, at once breath and breadth, desire for poetry, and poetry of desire.
***
According to l’Évangéline, the American singer Hank Williams died the first day of January 1953, struck down by a heart attack in Oak Hill, Virginia, en route to Ohio, where he was scheduled to give a concert. At the end of the same month, the Russians lost their twenty-five-year-old caviar concession in the Iranian waters of the Caspian Sea, as Iran decided to take up the
lucrative commerce itself rather than renew the agreement. In the spring, Jackie Robinson, the first black man to be admitted into major league baseball, announced his retirement. Several days later, jazzmen Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey reunited after a twenty-year feud. In Canada, farmers were preparing to sow twenty-six million acres of wheat and nine million acres of barley. This would yield a harvest of six hundred million bushels of wheat in the Prairies, the second largest in the country’s history. At the end of 1953, Canada was crowned producer of the best wheat of the year for the twenty-fifth time in the thirty years the contest had been held. Unfortunately, nothing could be worse for a celiac child than the gluten present in wheat and other cereals. But it was not gluten that stirred the entrails of Baby M.’s parents and Nurse Vautour that spring. In Louisiana, where a major branch of the Acadian tree flourished, bus drivers had launched a strike against a new by-law allowing blacks to sit in the front of the bus when the rear seats were all occupied.
The people of the Atlantic coast watched with similar astonishment mixed with incomprehension the conflict caused by the presence of a Russian religious sect, the Doukhobors, in the Kootenay and Okanagan valleys of British Columbia. These “sons of freedom” were suspected of having set more than twenty fires and planning to dynamite train bridges and other rail lines of the Canadian Pacific in the area. The authorities had imprisoned the 150 members of the sect who had paraded nude in front of the school in Perry Siding, where the government had consigned their children. For some reason, the Doukhobors did not want their children in school. They began a hunger strike in prison. On the sixth day of their fast, they had not yet received “the word of God to end the strike.” On the eighth day, they asked for fruit. Without saying whether the Doukhobors had received their divine message in the interim, l’Évangéline moved on to the discovery of the source of the Amazon, the turbulent Apurimac River, and to the global vagabond, Michael Patrick O’Brien, who had finally found asylum in the Dominican Republic. The ex-barman from Shanghai had lived on cargo ships and travelled the oceans for three years because no country would accept him.