Chaucer reading to King Richard II, in an early fifteenth-century manuscript of Troilus and Criseyde. (photo credit 18.1)
As Pliny had explained, public readings by the author were meant to bring the text not only to the public but back to the author as well. Chaucer no doubt emended the text of The Canterbury Tales after his public readings (perhaps putting some of the complaints he heard into the mouths of his pilgrims — such as the Man of Law, who finds Chaucer’s rhymes pretentious). Molière, three centuries later, habitually read his plays out loud to his housemaid. “If Molière ever did read to her,” the English novelist Samuel Butler commented in his Notebooks, “it was because the mere act of reading aloud put his work before him in a new light and, by constraining his attention to every line, made him judge it more rigorously. I always intend to read, and generally do read, what I write aloud to someone; any one almost will do, but he should not be so clever that I am afraid of him. I feel weak places at once when I read aloud where I thought, as long as I read to myself only, that the passage was all right.”28
Sometimes it was not self-improvement but censorship that led the author back to reading in public. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, forbidden by the French authorities to publish his Confessions, instead read throughout the long cold winter of 1768, in various aristocratic Paris households. One of these readings lasted from nine in the morning until three in the afternoon. According to one of his listeners, when Rousseau came to the passage describing how he had abandoned his children, the audience, at first embarrassed, was reduced to tears of grief.29
Throughout Europe, the nineteenth century was the golden age of authors’ readings. In England the star was Charles Dickens. Always interested in amateur theatrics, Dickens (who did in fact act on stage a number of times, notably in his own collaboration with Wilkie Collins, The Frozen Deep, in 1857) used his histrionic talent in readings of his own work. These, like Pliny’s, were of two kinds: reading to his friends to polish his final drafts and gauge the effect of his fiction on his public; and public readings, performances for which he became famous in later life. Writing to his wife, Catherine, about reading his second Christmas story, The Chimes, he exulted, “If you had seen Macready [one of Dickens’s friends] last night — undisguisedly sobbing, and crying on the sofa, as I read — you would have felt (as I did) what a thing it is to have Power”. “Power over others,” one of his biographers adds. “Power to move and to sway. The Power of his writing. The Power of his voice.” To Lady Blessington, regarding the reading of The Chimes, Dickens wrote, “I am in great hopes that I shall make you cry, bitterly.”30
Dickens reading “The Chimes” to a group of friends. (photo credit 18.2)
At about the same time, Alfred, Lord Tennyson began haunting London drawing-rooms with readings of his most famous (and very long) poem, Maud. Tennyson sought not power in the reading, as Dickens did, but rather continued applause, confirmation that his work did indeed have an audience. “Allingham, would it disgust you if I read Maud? Would you expire?” he asked a friend in 1865.31 Jane Carlyle recalled him going about at a party asking people if they had liked Maud, and reading Maud aloud, “talking Maud, Maud, Maud” and “as sensitive to criticisms as if they were imputations on his honour”.32 She was a patient listener; at the Carlyle home in Chelsea, Tennyson had forced her to approve the poem by reading it to her three times in succession.33 According to another witness, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Tennyson read his own work with the emotion he sought in his audience, shedding tears and “with such intensity of feeling that he seized and kept quite unconsciously twisting in his powerful hands a large brocaded cushion”.34 Emerson missed that intensity when reading Tennyson’s poems aloud himself. “It is a pretty good test of a ballad, as of all poetry,” he confided in his notebooks, “the facility of reading it aloud. Even in Tennyson, the voice grows solemn and drowsy.”35
Dickens was a much more professional performer. His version of the text — the tone, the emphasis, even the deletions and amendments to make the story better suited to an oral delivery — made it clear to everyone that there was to be one and only one interpretation. This became evident on his celebrated reading tours. The first extensive tour, beginning in Clifton and ending in Brighton, comprised some eighty readings in more than forty towns. He “read in warehouses, assembly rooms, booksellers, offices, halls, hotels and pump rooms.” At a high desk, and later at a lower one, to allow his audience to see his gestures better, he entreated them to try to create the impression of “a small group of friends assembled to hear a tale told”. The public reacted as Dickens wished. One man cried openly and then “covered his face with both hands, and lay down on the back of the seat before him, and really shook with emotion.” Another, whenever he felt a certain character was about to reappear, would “laugh and wipe his eyes afresh, and when he came he gave a kind of cry, as if it were too much for him.” Pliny would have approved.
The effect was laboriously obtained; Dickens had spent at least two months working on his delivery and gestures. He had scripted his reactions. In the margins of his “reading books” — copies of his work which he had edited for these tours — he had noted reminders to himself of the tone to use, such as “Cheerful.… Stern.… Pathos.… Mystery.… Quick on”, as well as gestures: “Beckon down.… Point.… Shudder.… Look Round in Terror.…”36 Passages were revised according to the effect produced on the audience. But, as one of his biographers notes, “he did not act out the scenes, but suggest them, evoke them, intimate them. He remained a reader, in other words, and not an actor. No mannerisms. No artifice. No affectations. Somehow he created his startling effects by an economy of means which was unique to himself, so it is truly as if the novels themselves spoke through him.”37 After the reading, he never acknowledged the applause. He would bow, leave the stage and change his clothes, which would be drenched with sweat.
This was, in part, what Dickens’s audience came for, and what brings the audiences of today to public readings: to watch the writer perform, not as an actor, but as a writer; to hear the voice the writer had in mind when a character was created; to match the writer’s voice to the writing. Some readers come out of superstition. They want to know what a writer looks like, because they believe that writing is an act of magic; they want to see the face of someone who can create a novel or a poem in the same way that they would want to see the face of a small god, creator of a little universe. They hunt for autographs, thrusting books under the author’s nose in the hope that they will come away with the blessed inscription “To Polonius, best wishes, the Author.” Their enthusiasm led William Golding to say (during the 1989 literary festival in Toronto) that “one day, someone will find an unsigned William Golding novel and it will be worth a fortune.” They are driven by the same curiosity that makes children look behind a puppet theatre or take apart a clock. They want to kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses even though, as Joyce remarked, “it did lots of other things, too.”38 The Spanish writer Dámaso Alonso was not impressed. He considered public readings “an expression of snobbish hypocrisy and of the incurable superficiality of our time.” Distinguishing between the gradual discovery of a book read silently, in solitude, and a quick acquaintance with an author in a crowded amphitheatre, he described the latter as “the true fruit of our unconscious haste. That is to say, of our barbarism. Because culture is slowness.”39
At authors’ readings, at writers’ festivals in Toronto, Edinburgh, Melbourne or Salamanca, readers expect that they will become part of the artistic process. The unexpected, the unrehearsed, the event that will prove somehow unforgettable, may, they hope, happen in front of their eyes, making them witnesses to a moment of creation — a joy denied even to Adam — so that when someone asks them in their gossipy old age, as Robert Browning once asked ironically, “And did you once see Shelley plain?” the answer will be yes.
In an essay on the plight of the panda, the biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote that “zoos are changing from institutions of captu
re and display to havens of preservation and propagation.”40 At the best of literary festivals, at the most successful public readings, writers are both preserved and propagated. Preserved because they are made to feel (as Pliny confessed) that they have an audience that attaches importance to their work; preserved, in the crudest sense, because they get paid (as Pliny wasn’t) for their labours; and propagated because writers breed readers, who in turn breed writers. The listeners who buy books after a reading multiply that reading; the author who realizes that he or she may be writing on a blank page but is at least not speaking to a blank wall may be encouraged by the experience, and write more.
Rilke at his window in the Hotel Biron in Paris. (photo credit 18.3)
THE TRANSLATOR AS READER
n a café not far from the Rodin Museum in Paris, I laboriously pick my way through a small paperback edition of Rainer Maria Rilke’s translations into German of the sonnets of Louise Labé, a sixteenth-century poet from Lyons. Rilke worked as Rodin’s secretary for several years, and later became the sculptor’s friend, writing an admirable essay on the old man’s craft. He lived for a time in the building that was to become the Rodin Museum, in a sunlit room with ornate plaster mouldings, overlooking the overgrown French garden, mourning something he imagined was always to be beyond his grasp — a certain poetic truth that generations of readers since have believed could be found in Rilke’s own writing. The room was one of his many transitory dwellings, from hotel to hotel and from castle to sumptuous castle. “Never forget that solitude is my lot,” he wrote from Rodin’s house to one of his women lovers, as transitory as his rooms. “I implore those who love me to love my solitude.”1 From my table at the café I can see the solitary window that was Rilke’s; if he were there today, he could see me far below, reading the book he was one day to write. Under his ghost’s vigilant eye, I repeat the end of Sonnet XIII.
Er küßte mich, es mundete mein Geist
auf seine Lippen; und der Tod war sicher
noch süßer als das dasein, seliglicher.
[He kissed me, my soul transformed itself
Upon his lips; and death was certainly
Sweeter than living, even more blessed.]
I stop for a long moment at that last word, seliglicher. Seele is “soul”; selig means “blessed” but also “overjoyed”, “blissful”. The augmentative, -icher, allows the soulful word to trip gently off the tongue four times before ending. It seems to extend that blessed joy given by the lover’s kiss; it remains, like the kiss, in the mouth until the -er exhales it back onto the lips. All the other words in those three lines ring out monochordally, one by one; only seliglicher holds onto the voice for a much longer moment, reluctant to let go.
I look up the sonnet’s original in another paperback, this time the Oeuvres poétiques of Louise Labé,2 who has, through the miracle of publishing, become Rilke’s contemporary on my café table. She had written:
Lors que souef plus il me baiserait,
Et mon esprit sur ses lèvres fuirait,
Bien je mourrais, plus que vivante, heureuse.
[When he softly kisses me further,
And my soul escapes onto his lips,
I will surely die, happier than when I lived.]
Leaving aside the modern connotation of baiserait (which in Labé’s time meant nothing more than kissing, but has since acquired the meaning of full sexual intercourse), the French original seems to me conventional, though pleasantly direct. To be happier in the death throes of love than in the miseries of living is one of the oldest poetic claims; the soul exhaled in a kiss is equally ancient and equally trite. What did Rilke uncover in Labé’s poem that allowed him to convert the ordinary heureuse into the memorable seliglicher? What enabled him to provide me, who might otherwise have leafed distractedly through Labé’s poems, with this complex and disturbing reading? How far does the reading of a gifted translator such as Rilke affect our knowledge of the original? And what happens in this case to the reader’s reliance on an author’s authority? I believe that some shape of an answer formed itself, in Rilke’s mind, one winter in Paris.
Carl Jacob Burckhardt — not the celebrated author of The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy but a younger, far less notorious fellow Swiss and fellow historian — had left his native Basel to study in France, and in the early 1920s found himself working at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. One morning, he entered a barbershop near the Madeleine and asked to have his hair washed.3 As he was sitting with his eyes closed in front of the mirror, he heard behind him a rising quarrel. In a deep voice, someone was shouting:
“Sir, that could be everyone’s excuse!”
A woman’s voice piped up:
“Unbelievable! And he even asked for the Houbigant lotion!”
“Sir, we don’t know you. You’re a complete stranger to us. We don’t take kindly to this sort of thing here!”
A third voice, weak and whining, which seemed to come from another dimension — rustic, with a Slavic accent — was attempting to explain: “But you must forgive me, I forgot my wallet, I’ll simply go and fetch it at the hotel.…”
At the risk of filling his eyes with soap, Burckhardt looked round. Three barbers were gesticulating wildly. Behind the desk, the cashier was watching, purple lips pursed tight with righteous indignation. And in front of them a small, unobtrusive man with a high forehead and a long moustache was pleading, “I promise you, you can phone the hotel to make sure. I am … I am … the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.”
“Of course. That’s what everyone says,” growled the barber. “You’re certainly not anyone we know.”
Burckhardt, hair dripping, jumped off his chair, and putting his hand into his pocket, loudly announced: “I’ll pay!”
Burckhardt had met Rilke some time earlier, but hadn’t been aware that the poet was now back in Paris. For a long moment Rilke didn’t recognize his saviour; when he did, he burst out laughing and offered to wait until Burckhardt was ready and then take him for a walk across the river. Burckhardt agreed. After a while, Rilke said he was tired and, since it was too early for lunch, suggested that they visit a second-hand bookstore not far from the Place de l’Odèon. As the two men entered, the old bookseller greeted them by rising from his seat and waving at them the small leather-bound volume he had been reading. “This, gentlemen,” he called out to them, “is the 1867 Ronsard, Blanchemin’s edition.” Rilke answered with delight that he loved Ronsard’s poems. The mention of one author led to another, and finally the bookseller quoted some verses by Racine which he believed were a literal translation of Psalm 36.4 “Yes,” Rilke agreed. “They are the same human words, the same concepts, the same experience and intuitions.” And then, as if making a sudden discovery: “Translation is the purest procedure by which the poetic skill can be recognized.”
This was to be Rilke’s last Paris sojourn. He was to die two years later, at the age of fifty-one, on December 29, 1926, of a rare form of leukemia which he never dared mention, even to those who were closest to him. (With poetic licence, in his last days he encouraged his friends to think he was dying from the prick of a rose thorn.) The first time he had come to settle in Paris, in 1902, he had been poor, young and almost unknown; now he was Europe’s best-known poet, praised and famous (though obviously not among barbers). In the meantime he had returned to Paris several times, on each occasion attempting to “start again” on his quest for “the ineffable truth”. “The beginning here is always a judgement,”5 he wrote about Paris to a friend shortly after finishing his novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, a task which he felt had emptied him of creative sap. In an attempt to resume his own writing, he decided to undertake several translations: a romantic novella by Maurice de Guérin, an anonymous sermon on the love of Mary Magdalen, and the sonnets of Louise Labé, whose book he had discovered in his wanderings through the city.
A contemporary portrait of Louise Labé. (photo credit 19.1)
The sonnets had been writt
en in Lyons, a city which in the sixteenth century rivalled Paris as the centre of French culture. Louise Labé — Rilke preferred the old-fashioned spelling, “Louize” — “was known in all Lyons and beyond not only for her beauty but for her accomplishments. She was as skilled in military exercises and games as her brothers were, and rode with such daring that friends, in fun and admiration, called her Capitaine Loys. She was renowned for her playing of that difficult instrument, the lute, and for her singing. She was a woman of letters, leaving a volume published by Jean de Tournes in 1555 which contained a Dedicatory Epistle, a play, three elegies, twenty-four sonnets, and poems written in her honour by some of the most distinguished men of her time. In her library were to be found books in Spanish, Italian, and Latin as well as French.”6
At the age of sixteen she fell in love with a soldier and rode out to fight by his side in the Dauphin’s army, during the siege of Perpignan. Legend has it that from that love (though attributing sources of inspiration to a poet is a notoriously hazardous occupation) sprang the two dozen sonnets for which she is remembered. The collection, presented to another Lyonnaise woman of letters, Mademoiselle Clémence de Bourges, carries an illuminating dedication: “The past,” Labé writes there, “gives us pleasure and is of more service than the present; but the delight of what we once felt is dimly lost, never to return, and its memory is as distressing as the events themselves were then delectable. The other voluptuous senses are so strong that whatever memory returns to us it cannot restore our previous disposition, and however strong the images we impress in our minds, we still know that they are but shadows of the past misusing us and deceiving us. But when we happen to put our thoughts in writing, how easily, later on, does our mind race through an infinity of events, incessantly alive, so that when a long time afterwards we take up those written pages we can return to the same place and to the same disposition in which we once found ourselves.”7 For Louise Labé, the reader’s ability is to re-create the past.
A History of Reading Page 27