Dedalus would like to thank the French Community of Belgium and Arts Council England, London for their assistance in producing this book.
Mike Mitchell
For many years an academic with a special interest in Austrian literature and culture, Mike Mitchell has been a freelance literary translator since 1995. He is one of Dedalus’s editorial directors and is responsible for the Dedalus translation programme.
He has published over seventy translations from German and French, including Gustav Meyrink’s five novels and The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy. His translation of Rosendorfer’s Letters Back to Ancient China won the 1998 Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize after he had been shortlisted in previous years for his translations of Stephanie by Herbert Rosendorfer and The Golem by Gustav Meyrink.
His translations have been shortlisted three times for The Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize: Simplicissimus by Johann Grimmelshausen in 1999, The Other Side by Alfred Kubin in 2000 and The Bells of Bruges by Georges Rodenbach in 2008.
Phil Baker
Phil Baker has written two books for Dedalus: The Dedalus Book of Absinthe and The Devil is a Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley. He reviews for a number of papers including The Sunday Times and The Times Literary Supplement.
He is the author of critical works on Samuel Beckett and William Burroughs, and has recently published a biographical study of the London artist Austin Osman Spare.
Contents
Title
Mike Mitchell
Phil Baker
Introduction
Hans Cadzand’s Vocation
Part One
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
Part Two
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
Part Three
I
II
III
IV
V
At School
The Urban Hunter
A Woman in the Jardin du Luxembourg
The Dead Town
Out of Season
Who is it?
Love and Death
Consecrated Boxwood
Pride
The Canons
Epilogue
Copyright
La Vocation was first published in 1895; the other stories are taken from the posthumous collection Le Rouet des Brumes, first published in 1901.
Introduction
“Very beautiful and very Poe” was Mallarmé’s comment on the poetry of Georges Rodenbach, and Rodenbach’s work – like that of Edgar Allan Poe – is heavily concerned with the aesthetics of death.
Rodenbach (1855-1898) will always be remembered for his novel Bruges-la-Morte, one of the great works of Belgian Symbolism: published in 1892, it immediately became a literary sensation and established something of a cult of Bruges among the French Decadents. It is the story of a man for whom the melancholy of “dead” Bruges – with its deserted streets and its silent canals – provides a perfect equivalent to the endless mourning that he feels for his dead wife. Bruges offers him a lugubrious mirroring of city and soul, and this idea of mirroring takes a new twist when he sees a girl who seems to be the living image of the dead woman; after which events slide inexorably towards their fatal conclusion.
Bruges (with its “air of a ghost town”) once again casts its grey spell over the protagonist in Hans Cadzand’s Vocation, published three years after Bruges-La-Morte. Well-to-do and well-respected, Hans Cadzand and his mother walk the canal paths like a devoted but mysterious couple, “at such a funereal pace and so shut off from everything outside their own selves” that even the nervous swans barely notice them, or feel “the shadow of the couple in black stain their white silence with mourning.” The almost Beckettian elegance of this image – blackness, whiteness, stain on silence – is matched by an earlier one at the start of Hans’s overshadowed life, when his father dies soon after his birth and his cradle is dressed in black mourning crepe.
When he was young Hans developed a religious vocation but it became more complicated with the onset of adolescence, when he found he had a particular feeling for the Virgin Mary. Sexuality is never far from Rodenbach’s vision of religion, if only by repression, as in a memorable line from Bruges-la-Morte: “A contempt for the secret roses of the flesh seemed to emanate from countless convent houses” [my emphasis].
Hans’s mother feared being left alone if he entered a monastery, and tried to match him with a suitable girl. What actually took place, instead, has left their lives blighted, although the situation still has its compensations – and the same could be said of Rodenbach’s story. In outline it might seem to have some common ground with the world of Joyce’s Dubliners – as a short but thorough study of an underlived life, paralysed by religion, family, and provincialism – but Rodenbach is a more extreme writer than Joyce: where Joyce prided himself on his fine tenor voice, like a singer of airs and ballads, the work of Rodenbach, once the reader develops an ear for its themes and motifs, is more like a fugue by a crazed organist.
Among the many quintessentially Symbolist motifs within Rodenbach – including silence, water, Woman, hair, mirroring, dead women, and roses – eyes seem to take on a hallucinatory life of their own. The large eyes of a seductive servant girl named Ursula settle on Hans until he can feel her gaze on his skin: “the strange, brushing caress, the tingling the inert canals must feel, at night, when the star-studded sky is reflected in them.”
Before long these eyes of Ursula are everywhere. They seem to lie beside him at night – while her blond hair grows on the pillow like a cornfield – and they follow him to church. When the priest makes the sign of the cross with a monstrance (a kind of reliquary, used for the consecrated wafer or host) “it was a huge blue eye instead of the pale host… [that appeared] captive, behind the glass.” When Hans dreams, the eyes become signals at a railway station, and a peacock displays its tail as a fan of a hundred eyes. Darting all over Hans like tiny spiders, and tickling him with “a thousand invisible tiny feet”, these eyes – as much as Odilon Redon’s Smiling Spider or Eye Balloon – demonstrate the bizarre and proto-surreal tendencies latent within Symbolism.
The French critic and artist Philippe Jullian linked Rodenbach to the surrealism of Magritte: “are not some of Magritte’s landscapes suburbs of Bruges-la-Morte?”. He made this connection within a larger comparison that included their fellow Belgians Ferdinand Khnopff, who drew the frontispiece for Bruges-La-Morte, and Paul Delvaux, whose paintings of dream suburbs and old railway stations, where nude women lie on chaise longues, seem to melt the distinction between domestic interiors and streetscapes; between the mind and the world.
Symbolism and surrealism overlap in the way they give primacy to mental reality over objective reality, and this in turn gives rise to a certain kind of space: Rodenbach describes the room that Hans Cadzand’s mother occupies, all decked out in mourning, as “her soul”, and her house has a ghost “drowning in the mirrors.” The troubled feelings she has when she overhears Hans and Ursula upstairs (in “a nocturnal scene, as disturbing and moving as a play or crime”) provoke another of Rodenbach’s looking-glass images, suggesting the significance of all these reflections as an essentially mental reality: in her imagination “The scene was there for her in the way objects are there for the mirror, she had to suffer it despite herself, to live it out in reflections.”
Rodenbach’s Symbolist aesthetic – with its preference for the ideal over the real – makes
him equally impressive when he writes about the world that Hans is losing; the otherworldly sphere of his religious vocation, where prayers “fill his mouth with flavours as delicious as a ripe fruit melting on his tongue.” However mean-spirited and damaging religion can be in Rodenbach, there is an ambivalence towards it, a constant two-way transformation, like his freezing of “the most ardent tears” into “funerary pearls”. Rodenbach’s art is less concerned with social critique or realistic indictment – he is no Zola – and instead with an indulgent exploration of certain corners and essences within his own mind.
Again, however damaging the enclosed and cloistered melancholy of Bruges might be to his characters, he seems to understand it because it reflects something that remains essentially within himself. This is no less than we would expect from the poet who could write – in a poem entitled ‘Aquarium Mental’, within a volume entitled Les Vies Encloses – about the “intimate and submarine” life of his soul:
Thus is my soul, alone, and influenced by nothing!
It is as if in glass, enclosed in silence, entirely given over to its interior spectacle…
The shorter stories in this book are taken from Le Rouet des Brumes (Spinning Wheel of Mists), a posthumous collection from 1901. Frankly minor for the most part, they still offer poetic pleasures of their own, in addition to the further insights they give into a great writer, the Rodenbach of Bruges-La-Morte; into Symbolism; and into their times.
Bruges is revisited in ‘The Dead Town’, where it becomes a “Museum of Death”, with a smell like a mummy’s tomb and a general air of forlorn belatedness: “In the churches a stench of dampness hung in the air, of stale incense, of faded altar cloths in a sacristy cupboard the key of which has been lost for hundreds of years.” As in the novel, where the city itself became a kind of character in the story and played its part in a way that we might now call “psychogeographical”, the ambience of the place once more governs the emotions and behaviour of individuals within it. A pair of lovers – an artist and his mistress – elope to the dead town, but it dominates them with a deathly influence that proves stronger than love.
‘The Urban Hunter’ is an unusually lively story for Rodenbach, and it is possible that it’s meant to be humorous, although – like nineteenth-century Punch cartoons – its humour might seem elusive to the modern reader. It is the story of a man who ‘hunts’ women by following them through the city, in this case Paris: he does them no harm, but he enjoys stalking them. Sometimes he makes a conquest, but more often the prey remains untouched, and he explains that there are many such hunters in cities, often with special tastes: fat women, thin women, redheads, and others (“Women in mourning have their connoisseurs, in public parks where their black crepe goes well with the dead leaves”). The sexual politics have not aged well, but it is an interesting period piece for its sense of city-as-nature; for its contribution to the history of the flâneur, and the sexual life of the metropolis; and for its depiction of our romantic fascination with people who are anonymous and above all fleeting, within the phenomenon that Walter Benjamin called “love at last sight”.
The idea of women is a familiar Rodenbach theme: women dead, women hunted, and – in two of the more minor pieces in this collection – women pregnant, casting further peculiar sidelights on Rodenbach, his strict Catholic upbringing, and his era. ‘Out of Season’ finds a sense of “sin” in pregnancy as it details a pregnant mother’s embarassment before the three daughters she already has, while ‘Who Is It?’ makes a grotesque and fleshy mystery out of Ursula the village simpleton – another Ursula, here a misshapen, bear-like creature – being impregnated by a man unknown.
Grotesque or idealised, there is something eternally ‘other’ about women in Rodenbach, and a sense of woman as a beautiful object underlies his poem-like story ‘A Woman in the Jardin du Luxembourg’. It opens with a superbly Symbolist description of the Jardin, where the landscape becomes a state of mind, before the protagonist sees a woman and picks her up with an appropriately dreamlike ease. Even as they live together she retains her mystery, keeping herself deliberately anonymous all the way to her early death: she has to die, of course, like an operatic heroine or a woman in Poe (who notoriously said “the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world”). Finally she becomes, for Rodenbach, like a beautiful portrait of an unknown woman, within a cemetery-cum-gallery.
Rodenbach probes his obsessions further in the story entitled ‘Love and Death’. This stages a group of male friends talking about love, and seems to give the author a free-associative latitude of the kind that people were soon to find by lying on an analyst’s couch. The discussion wanders through the idea of lovers committing suicide together; French historian Michelet taking his fiancée to Pere Lachaise cemetery; the erotic appeal of women in mourning; a sudden sexual liaison after a death; and more – and all because “love and death are linked by analogies, by underground passages…”
There is more confessional introspection into this theme of death in ‘At School’, where the narrator – to all intents and purposes Rodenbach himself – remembers that his young soul “fell out of love with life for having learnt too much of death.” He blames the priests for drumming death and the fear of sin into him, and three stories in this collection are directly concerned with death and religion, including a quietly gleeful anti-clerical piece about the death of a bishop, with its ensuing debacle.
Rodenbach said he wouldn’t want to live his life over again, specifically because he would never want to relive his schooldays with the Jesuits. Born in Tournai and raised in Ghent (he never lived in Bruges, although he had family connections there) he was schooled at the Jesuit College of Sainte-Barbe, where he was a contemporary of fellow Symbolists Emile Verhaeren and Maurice Maeterlinck. As members of the Flemish bourgeoisie they spoke and thought in French, rather than the community’s more normal Dutch, and Rodenbach’s cultural affinities were always essentially French; he experienced Belgium as a place of cultural exile, which must have made it doubly deadly, including his “gloomy” and “grey” provincial church school: “Those who went to school in Paris know nothing of this sorrow.”
The dead bishop in the final story ‘The Canons’ turns out to have been keeping a bachelor flat and enjoying himself in – where else? – Paris, and Rodenbach went there for a year in 1878, working as a lawyer and writing to tell Verhaeren that producing literature was “impossible” in Belgium, whereas in Paris “one is in a hothouse, and suddenly sap rises and thought flowers.” He moved to Paris permanently in 1888, where he was accepted into literary circles and regularly attended Mallarmé’s celebrated “Tuesdays”; soirées at his apartment on the Rue du Rome.
It was during this final Parisian period of Rodenbach’s life that his literary absorption in Bruges really rose and flowered. Bruges-La-Morte was the Paris literary sensation of 1892, and he followed it with La Vocation (now translated here as Hans Cadzand’s Vocation) in 1895, and Le Carilloneur (translated as The Bells of Bruges) in 1897. This kind of immersion at a distance is hardly unknown – think of Joyce, minutely anatomizing Dublin in Ulysses while living in Trieste – but it is also quintessentially Symbolist in its concern with the richness and plenitude of absence: “The essence of art that is in any way noble is the DREAM,” wrote Rodenbach, “and this dream dwells only upon what is distant, absent, vanished, unattainable.”
If Rodenbach had mixed feelings about Bruges, Bruges had similarly mixed feelings about him, and his morbid, melancholy and backward-looking vision of the city was resented by some of its inhabitants. In 1899 there was a suggestion that Bruges should have a statue of Rodenbach, but the good burghers of the town rejected it: instead they erected a statue to British guidebook writer James Weale, author of the tourist guide Bruges et ses environs.
Rodenbach has his final memorial in Paris. He hated provincial Belgian cemeteries (where his school walks always terminated, “so desolate in that austere province whi
ch had never acquired the art of decorating tombs”) so it was fortunate that he should have ended up in the beautiful Parisian necropolis of Père Lachaise, where his grave has a remarkable statue by the sculptor Charlotte Besnard (1855-1930). Extraordinary even by the standards of Père Lachaise, it features Rodenbach, alive in death, his skin copper-green as he emerges from his grey stone grave – reaching out, with a rose in his hand, into the city of the dead.
Prologue
At the same time every morning Mevrouw Cadzand and her son, Hans Cadzand, made their way back from eight-o’clock mass in the Church of Our Lady to Blinde-Ezelstraat, where they lived.
Bruges, the old grey town, was just waking. Passers-by were rare, only a few early beguines or the occasional peasant woman leading a dog-cart from door to door and selling milk out of copper jugs gleaming like patches of moonlight amid the fog. For the mists cleared very slowly, mist of the north breaking up, deathly pale morning twilight.
Bruges had the air of a ghost town. The high towers, the trees along the canals withdrew, absorbed by the same muslin: impenetrable fog with not a single rift. Even the carillon seemed to have to escape, to force its way out of a prison yard filled with cotton wool to be free in the air, to reach the gables over which, every quarter of an hour, the bells poured, like falling leaves, a melancholy autumn of music.
Hans Cadzand and his mother made a silent couple as they walked along the canals, taciturn. She was always dressed in dark material, he in black with something a touch old-fashioned, timeless, about the severe cut of his clothes, something self-enclosed and a little ecclesiastical. He looked still young, this side of thirty, with a nobility of feature which was dazzling. It was astonishing that one so handsome could be so sad: eyes blazing feverishly in a dull complexion and a turbulent mass of blond hair with a mingling of honey, amber and dead leaves.
Hans Cadzand's Vocation & Other Stories Page 1