A House of Air

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  from the Virago edition, 1983

  Vous Êtes Belle

  A Review of Alain-Fournier: A Brief Life, 1886—1914, by David Arkell, Henri Alain-Fournier: Towards the Lost Domain, Letters from London 1905, edited and translated by W. J. Strachan, and The Lost Domain, by Henri Alain-Fournier, translated by Frank Davison

  By the time he was twenty Henri Fournier wasn’t able to say whether it was the country itself that he missed—Epineuil-le-Fleuriel, in the heart of the old Berry province—or the time that he spent there. He shared his country schoolhouse childhood with his young sister Isabelle and their most intense memory was the arrival, at the end of the year, of the livres de prix. They hid themselves, and read every book. But though the dreaming reader persisted in Henri, he became tough and intransigent. He was sent to the Lycée Voltaire and didn’t like it, started to train for the Navy and didn’t like it, prepared for the entrance exam for the Ecole Normale Supérieure and didn’t pass it. In June 1905, however, while he was still a lycéen in Paris, he saw (almost as if he had been expecting her), and spoke to, and walked a few hundred metres with, a tall, blonde jeune fille. Her name was Yvonne de Quièvrecourt, and she was of good family, staying with her aunt. He told her, in the words of Pelléas: ‘Vous êtes belle.’ She dismissed him, saying they were both no more than children, and for the next eight years, during which he never saw her, she was his Mélisande, and (transferred to the deep country) the Yvonne de Galais of Le Grand Meaulnes, which was published in 1913. Meanwhile, Fournier—he used the pen-name Alain-Fournier from 1905, partly to avoid confusion with a racing driver—had become a journalist and had a succession of mistresses, the last being the strong-minded actress Simone Benda, who pulled every string, in vain, to get him the Prix Goncourt. He took to racing cars and flying—‘like Peter Pan,’ he told Francis Jammes. Le Grand Meaulnes was written, for the most part, in Rue Cassini. If he had survived the war, what would he have written? Not, probably, Colo mbe Blanchet, which he had begun, but, as he put it himself, about ‘the countries behind the painted doors of the Paris café-concerts; a world as terrible and mysterious in its own way as the world of my other book.’

  The oddness and the great beauty of the ‘other book’ come partly from the dissonance of its elements. James Barrie noted in 1922 that ‘long after writing P. Pan its true meaning came back to me—desperate attempt to grow up but can’t.’ Le Grand Meaulnes is about adolescents who want to want not to grow up, but fail. Alain-Fournier, as has been pointed out more than once, divides himself between his three main characters: Seurel, the ambiguous onlooker, Meaulnes the romantic, and Frantz, the spoilt son of the Domain. Meaulnes disturbs for ever the quiet existence of the school at Ste Agathe, that strange school where the pupils range from the petite classe to eighteen-year-olds studying for a teacher’s certificate. (One of them, Jasmin Delouche, goes bird-nesting at the age of twenty.) This school, set in its reassuringly familiar French village—the blacksmith’s, the washhouse, the smell of the boys crowding round the stove—is the only place of security in the book. Any venture into the world means loss: Meaulnes can’t find his way back to the Domain, Frantz loses his child-fiancée, his parents can’t find Frantz, Meaulnes can’t find Frantz, Seurel in the end loses everything, even the child he had hoped to bring up as his own, while Meaulnes loses the purity of vision which gives him the right to search at all. Gradually, however, it appears that the mysterious Domain is within easy distance of Nançay, where Seurel’s uncle keeps a large grocery store. It could always have been found (as in the end it is) without difficulty.

  Alain-Fournier was, of course, literary, if the word is anything like strong enough. Le Grand Meaulnes, with its forests and midnight fête and pale, dubious pierrot, is a conte bleu of the 1900s, a paradise for source-hunters. But Alain-Fournier had arrived at his own idea of the relation between actuality and dream. The fantastic, he thought, must be contained within the real, and by ‘the real’ he meant ‘a really quite simple story which could very well be my own.’ He made no secret at all of the way be used his own experience. The school is his parents’ school at Epineuil, the store is his uncle’s shop at Nançay. When Meaulnes first meets Yvonne de Galais, he tells her: ‘Vous êtes belle.’ When his sister Isabelle married his best friend, Jacques Rivière, Fournier seems to have felt a tormenting mixture of affection and jealousy. So, too, in the closing chapters of the book, does Seurel.

  In September 1914, just before his twenty-eighth birthday, Henri Fournier was reported missing after a reconnaissance patrol in the woods between Metz and Verdun. His body was never recovered. Over the next fifty years, the evidence of the story he had left open to the world was published bit by bit: his correspondence with Jacques Rivière in 1926 (enlarged in 1948), his family letters in 1930 (enlarged in 1949), Simone Benda’s Sous de nouveaux soleils in 1964, Isabelle Rivière’s Vie et passion d’Alain-Fournier (which, among many other things, put Simone in her place) in 1964. Jean Loize, for his 1968 biography, turned up a letter from the stationmaster’s daughter who was Fournier’s first girlfriend in Paris. Now we are promised the text of a (dullish) letter from T. S. Eliot, who took French lessons for a while from Fournier. The quest continues.

  For 1986, the centenary of Henri’s birth, Carcanet have brought out Alain-Fournier: A Brief Life, by David Arkell, describing him as ‘the noted literary sleuth.’ This, I think, does Arkell an injustice. As a sleuth, he hasn’t been able to solve the long-standing problems: what was the surname of the stationmaster’s daughter? What was Yvonne de Quièvre-court’s address off the Boulevard St Germain? Did Simone abort Henri’s child in April 1914? On the other hand, he is an excellent biographer, giving a balanced view of the ‘brief life’ whose tragedy doesn’t need underlining, and he is particularly careful with the difficult relationship of Henri, Simone, Isabelle, and Jacques Rivière. Although this is a short, no-nonsense book, he manages to show that Alain-Fournier was, as he puts it, ‘the most French of French writers,’ the boy who repeated, as an incantation for difficult moments, the names of the railway stations between Bourges and La Chapelle. The illustrations are outstanding. When he went to the Lycée Voltaire in 1898 Henri was given his first 9 × 12 cm camera, and he produced a fine set of photographs, which are reproduced here from the collection of Alain Rivière. Henri’s father, his mother, the village postman, the juge de paix, all sat or stood and kept still for him, and there is a view from the schoolhouse of the Grande Place, Epineuil, almost empty in the midday sun, and looking as though nothing could ever disturb it.

  During the summer of 1905 Henri was sent to London to improve his English. He had been found a clerical job with Sanderson’s, the wallpaper manufacturers, and he lodged with the family of Mr Nightingale, the firm’s secretary. Most of his letters home have been printed, but it seems that a few passages were omitted, and some postcards escaped publication. Towards the Lost Domain is the complete London series, translated by W. J. Strachan, although unfortunately without any indication of what has been published before, or where. Some of Jacques Rivière’s replies are included, so are Fournier’s notes on his meeting with Yvonne—though not the final draft of 1913. The book gives an appealing picture of Fournier, not only as an energetic young romantic, haunting the Queen’s Hall to hear Wagner, and the Tate Gallery to see the Pre-Raphaelites, but also as a hungry French schoolboy. He even had to ask Isabelle to send him bread from Paris. All the more credit to him that by the time he left for the rentrée he had come to love England. Indeed, he was a connoisseur. His descriptions are as flattering in their way as Camille Pissarro’s views of Norwood. Writing from 5 Brandenburgh Road, Gunnersbury, he is moved by ‘windows of exquisitely coloured glass, differently coloured stones, lace curtains, absolutely everywhere, pianos and flutes sounding on every side.’ Even a burglary was welcome, reminding him of Sherlock Holmes. In life and art, he told Jacques Rivière, ‘I’ve always wanted something which touches, in the sense of putting a hand on your shoulder,’ and West London d
id touch him.

  Oxford University Press, for their part, have reissued The Lost Domain, Frank Davison’s tried and true translation of Le Grand Meaulnes. It is a handsome edition in bold type, rather like a child’s book, although Le Grand Meaulnes, whatever it is, is not a book for children. In 1959, in the World’s Classics, it had an introduction by Alan Pryce-Jones, who saw the book as ‘the last novel of idyllic love which is likely to have universal appeal.’ He considered that nothing in it came up to the opening scenes, which established the ‘magic dependence’ of Seurel. (So did many others. Gide said that one should be loyal only to the first hundred pages, Denis Saurat to the first fifty.) The Pryce-Jones introduction has now been replaced by an afterword by John Fowles, less sensitive but more enthusiastic. Fowles, who follows Robert Gibson in taking Seurel as the central character, tells us that he was once under the influence of Alain-Fournier, and is still ‘a besotted fan.’ He deserts the text, however, when he says that Frantz de Galais, like Meaulnes, ‘strives to maintain a constant state of yearning.’ Frantz settles down happily in the end with his wife and his house. Again, the illustrator, Ian Beck, is true to one side of the book, its delicate nostalgia, but not to Fournier’s ‘reality.’ Meaulnes, for example, in the last illustration, ought to have a beard (un grand gaillard barbu). Does his beard matter? Fowles writes that ‘something elusive remains after all the learned analysis…some secret knowledge of how far a poetic imagination can outfly gross reality.’ And yet this ‘outflying’ was precisely what Alain-Fournier had hoped to avoid.

  London Review of Books, 1987

  Dame Cissie

  Rebecca West: A Life, by Victoria Glendinning

  There were giant-killers in those days. Storm Jameson, rallying English writers in defence of peace and collective security, had to toss up to decide between Rebecca West and Rose Macaulay for the place of honour. Between these three women enough power should have been generated even for an impossible cause. They were tireless collectors of facts—Rose used to take her newspaper-cuttings everywhere—and what courage they showed, what endurance, what determination to call the world sharply to order, what unanswerable wit, what impatience for justice. They were all prepared to outface the mighty, but they also judged themselves, on occasion, more strictly than anyone else would have dared. ‘When I come to stand,’ wrote Storm Jameson, ‘as they say—used to say—before my Maker, the judgement on me will run: she did not love enough…For such a fault, no forgiveness.’ ‘As we grow older,’ said Rebecca West, ‘and like ourselves less and less, we apply our critical experience as a basis for criticising our own consciences.’ It isn’t surprising that her son grew up with the ‘idea that a woman was the thing to be, and that I had somehow done wrong by being a male.’

  But Rebecca also wrote in her old age: ‘I was never able to lead the life of a writer because of these two overriding factors, my sexual life, or rather death, and my politics.’ Here she is both attacking and defending herself, for she felt that the world, on the whole, had treated her basely. From the age of eighteen she made her own life, but she was not altogether satisfied with the results. She would have liked to subsume, perhaps, the lives of both her sisters, Lettie, the correct benevolent professional woman, Winnie, the contented housewife, ‘living decently in a house with children.’ She would have liked to live in Rosmersholm without drowning herself, and in the doll’s house without letting it defeat her. Her voice, which she found so early, is that of an elder sister, not the youngest. Samuel Hynes has even called it ‘episcopal’—‘praising the righteous, condemning heretics, explaining doctrine.’ She found it easy to attract, almost as easy to dominate, and ‘if people do not have the face of the age set clear before them, they begin to imagine it.’ Authority, then, became a duty, and yet ‘I could have done it,’ she believed at times, ‘if anybody had let me, simply by being a human being.’

  Some of her first pieces, for the Freewoman, the socialist Clarion, and the New Statesman, were reprinted by Virago in 1982. They were written in her teens, or just out of them, when she first arrived in London, a phenomenon, a marvellous girl, reckless, restless, brilliant, and indignant. All her life she remained pre-eminently a journalist. To the very end, in illness, in fury, in distress, and when almost spent, she continued to react, as a plant does to the light, to new information or even to gossip. She was always on the alert, as Our Correspondent from the moral strongholds of the twentieth century. Her first novel, however, the beautiful Return of the Soldier (1918), seemed to class her as what was then called a ‘psychopathological writer’—with her older friend May Sinclair, who had organized London’s first medico-psychological clinic. The Return is the case history of an officer invalided home from the trenches. He is an amnesiac who cannot react either to his wife or to the memory of his dead child. His only surviving emotion is for a girl he once loved, who by now is a dreary little straw-hatted woman, ‘repulsively’ faded and poor. This woman courageously shows him the dead son’s clothes and toys, which have been locked away. He is cured, but this, of course, means that he will have to return to the Front.

  When Rebecca called this novel ‘rather Conradesque,’ she was thinking of the unvoiced struggle between good and evil, woman’s attempt to heal, man’s invention of war. In 1922, when Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle appeared in translation, she related his theory to her own view of the life-and-death struggle: it became, for her, part of the fierce self-justification of a natural fighter. She did not hold with Freud’s majestic hypothesis that human beings unconsciously recognized the ‘sublime necessity’ of the return to the inorganic state. Like many passionately committed writers, she created a God and then took Him to task for falling short of her standards. Her case against Him was that He made sacrifice and suffering a condition of redemption: ‘pain is the proper price for any good thing.’ This was also the basis of her complaint against Tolstoy and against St Augustine, whose life she was commissioned to write in 1933: he ‘intellectualised with all the force of his genius’ the idea of atonement through suffering. Rebecca set herself to wipe out not guilt but cruelty, by the exercise of reason. The Harsh Voice and the much later The Birds Fall Down, the monumental Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and The Meaning of Treason, are essentially variations of the same battle. Blake, she believed, was on her side, so was Lawrence—though this disconcertingly meant claiming both of them as champions of the mind. ‘The mind must walk proudly and always armed,’ she wrote, ‘that it shall not be robbed of its power.’ What was her mind like, though—‘her splendid disturbed brain,’ as Wells called it—and how far did she ever free it, if that was what she wanted to do, from her emotions? It has been called androgynous, but May Sinclair came closer to it when she said: ‘Genius is giving you another sex inside yourself, and a stronger one, to plague you with.’

  This plague took the form of an extreme temperament. All her life Rebecca West was betrayed by the physical, collapsing under stress into illness and even hallucination. She was a romantic in the highest sense of demanding universal solutions. ‘I believe in the Christian conception of man and the French Revolution’s interpretation of his political necessities.’ But she was also romantic in a much simpler sense. The Return of the Soldier takes place in ancestral Baldry Court, perfect in its ‘green pleasantness,’ except that the post arrives too late to be brought up with the morning tea. Parthenope is set in Currivel Lodge, with its haunted croquet lawn. The character of Nikolai in The Birds Fall Down was based on a Russian tutor—though he has become a Russian count. Isabelle, the heroine of The Thinking Reed, is young, exceedingly beautiful, ‘nearly exceedingly rich,’ tragically widowed. She hunts the wild boar, her underwear is made to measure, her first lover ‘was not less beautiful as a man than she was as a woman.’ As a novelist, Rebecca West liked to write about people who were rich or good-looking or high-born or all three, and her public liked to read about them. There was a converse: she found it difficult to forgive ugliness or coarseness—the crowds o
utside the court in the Stephen Ward case were worse because they had ‘cheap dentures.’ All this was part of the great impatient shake with which she left the narrowness and just-respectability of her early life. As her son was to put it, ‘shabby-genteel life in Edinburgh marked those who had to endure it to the bone.’ The Thinking Reed was said to be about ‘the effect of riches on people, and the effect of men on women, both forms of slavery,’ but, like The Great Gatsby, it shows that although money produces corruption, it also produces an enviable and civilized way of living, and there is nothing we can do about it. Good writers are seldom honest enough to admit this, but Rebecca West did admit it. With her limitless energy and enthusiasm, she called for harmony, but not for moderation. All that the reader can do, very often, is to trust the driver as her arguments bowl along in splendid sentences or collect themselves for a pause. ‘Men and women see totally different aspects of reality.’ ‘A great deal of what Kafka wrote is not worth studying.’ ‘Authentic art never has an explicit religious and moral content.’ These are sweeping statements—though sweeping, of course, can be a worthwhile activity.