Marginalia, no.86

There are no friends, only moments of friendship.

~ Jules Renard, Journal

Yes, but with certain persons we seem always able to find our moment, a perpetual interval come loose from the tyranny of sequence and forever close at hand.

Marginalia, no.85

Man was entering under false pretenses the sphere of incredible facilities, acquired too cheaply, below cost price, almost for nothing, and the disproportion between outlay and gain, the obvious fraud on nature, the excessive payment for a trick of genius, had to be offset by self-parody.

~ Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles

Schulz is musing on the old velocipedes and how they made their riders look ridiculous.  Having now progressed far enough into the Sphere of Incredible Facilities to enjoy the benefits of karaoke, breast implants, spray-on tans and Segway scooters, we see that while Man will always want super powers, he’ll always look silly in tights, and you can’t have one without the other…  In more philosophical moments I wonder if it’s really possible to defraud nature, since that would require being outside nature onself, which is absurd.  It could be, after all, that global warming is nothing more than Mother Nature blushing at her children trying to keep upright on two wheels.

Suffer the Little Children

What people believe is a measure of what they suffer.

It’s been a couple weeks now since I finished Peter De Vries’ book and I still can’t bring myself to begin another novel.  I pick here and there at Chekhov stories, at Montaigne and Emerson and DeQuincey.  I read magazines.  But in between and throughout the day I return again and again in my mind to The Blood of the Lamb.

My father used to say so, and having been a father myself now for six years, I suspect it’s true: Until you have children of your own it’s impossible to understand the burden of heartache that comes with parenthood.  It weights your steps like leaden boots.  It bounds your vision in every direction.  It colors every thought.  It groans perpetually in the nerves and in the marrow of your bones, sharp, but vaguely sweet.

That people are ever able to survive the suffering and death of their children is incomprehensible to me.  I think about the quote above and I think about De Vries’ own loss.  The Blood of the Lamb is more than a tragicomic (and more tragic for all its comedy) fictional re-creation of his own daughter’s death by leukemia.  It’s also very much about faith, and the death of faith.

I wonder why he didn’t write ‘love’ instead of ‘believe.’  In its power to evoke it, love seems almost a form of suffering in its own right, and it’s not hard to imagine that the more objects you give your heart to in a world of universal transience, the more you open yourself to pain at their inevitable loss.  But he didn’t write ‘love.’

Perhaps he meant that the more we suffer, the less we are likely to believe; or, conversely, that the more things we believe, the more we are bound to suffer over them.  Or perhaps he meant that the particular things we believe (religiously, personally) grow naturally out of our individual fears, as a way of counteracting those fears and pushing them – and the psychological suffering they entail – farther away.  But I don’t think so. 

I wonder, instead, if De Vries was simply saying that we suffer according to the terms of our personal creeds.  The believer in Self, then, suffers specifically in terms of the self; the believer in Nothing in terms of the void; the believer in a personal God in terms of close acquaintance with unobliging omnipotence.

What does it mean for a believer in Love (as every parent must be) to suffer in terms of love?  Maybe The Blood of the Lamb is De Vries’ answer to that question.

Marginalia, no.84

Even as Must implants distaste, so does Can’t stir sweet longings…

~ Max Beerbohm, ‘Books Within Books’

A nice capture of that universal law which explains, among other things, why children hate Brussels sprouts and want dessert before dinner, and why the books you’ve been looking for for ages and can never seem to find always sound so much more interesting than those you already own but can’t bring yourself to read.

Less Praise, Please

Solon famously recommended calling no man happy until he was dead.  It’s just as advisable, I think, not to call him great.  There are some compliments that should only be paid after the object of admiration is safely deceased.  Otherwise it gets embarrassing.

Consider the biographical note written by Cécile Buffet for Alain Planes’ Harmonia Mundi CD, Haydn Piano Sonatas, Vol. 2.  Planes is a gifted pianist and (to judge by his photograph) he’s been on this planet much longer than I have, so it’s only right that his accomplishments are noted.  Buffet’s fawning idolatry, however, is too much:

A great lover and connoisseur of painting, no less learned in his passion for poetry, Alain Planes enjoys a career in his own image: right from the start he has followed the path of life rather than the siren songs of a glory that demands too many compromises. 

From a mother with an artistic temperament…he has inherited and retained fervent humility and disinterestedness of gesture.  In the end it is this that creates style – rigor is of little use without grace.

The man is still alive, for God’s sake.  Let’s not jinx him by smothering any perfectly adequate virtues he may posses with so much saccharine flattery.  If Plaines is as humble and disinterested as Buffet claims, he can only blush at this.  But then, did he have no say at all in the liner notes for his own CD?  No one should take himself this seriously.

Perhaps it’s just Gallic effusiveness.  I ought to be happy, I suppose, for the opportunity to be mildly scandalized, and for the laughs:

There is in him something of a curious blend of Proust and Wilde.  With the first he shares his relationship with time, profound, expanded, Schubertian.  With the second, a certain intellectual dandyism, a form of refined cynicism that nonetheless does not sacrifice tenderness.

Thankfully it’s the Expanded Schubertian and not the Intellectual Dandy that comes through in Planes’ music.  But if there is a bit of Wilde about him, it might serve as inoculation against his admirers’ excesses.  “Praise makes me humble,” Wilde once wrote, “but when I am abused I know I have touched the stars.”

Marginalia, no.83

My pen makes a noise like a goose eating grass.

~ Jules Renard, Journal

Writing in 1893, Renard could not have imagined the impoverishment of such moments after the advent of the ballpoint.  It’s a count against Argentina that it turned the birthday of Laszlo Biro into a national holiday.  Biro’s little machine has done more to hasten the death of decent handwriting than even the typewriter.  And my tapping at the keyboard, at least, sounds a little like the rain.

Marginalia, no.82

Perhaps T.B. had been a mistake.

~ Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

Contracting TB got Don Wanderhope out of one fix while putting him into another.  That’s typical of tuberculosis.  Its near-eradication in the twentieth century was a disaster for literature.  Among the more richly allusive ways to snuff it, TB had ranked up there with drowning at sea: Keats and Lycidas arm in arm.  Swine flu doesn’t have the same cachet.  One can only hope these new drug-resistant TB strains will re-light the chandeliers in the grand alpine sanitariums someday.

Japonais

When French was still lingua franca, you couldn’t get very far in education until you had learned to read it.  That was back in the Jurassic, of course.  But being a monoglot of the Anglicized Age, even when your native glot is the mono in every actual and virtual direction, a lack of French can still exclude you from certain categories of knowledge.

Consider the curious photograph above.  I don’t recall where I found it, but I understand the subject to be a Belgian by the name of Hans de Winiwarter (1875-1949).  That he was a great fancier of things Japanese is obvious.  In a memoir titled Mostly in the Line of Duty: Thirty Years with Books, Herman Liebaers, formerly of the Royal Library of Belgium and Marshall of the Royal Household to King Baudouin I, describes cataloging the deceased Winiwarter’s collection of Japanese books and art prints.  But unless I learn to read French, it seems, I’m excluded from easy (i.e. Google) access to any more of Winiwarter’s biography beyond the odd suggestion that he was also the same scientist who in 1912 estimated the number of chromosomes in male guineas pigs to be 47 (the correct number being 46). 

How to translate the dreamy look in Winiwarter’s eyes and reconcile the collector of Japanese curiosities with the counter of cavia porcellus chromosomes?  I don’t know.  It’s apparently a closely guarded francophone secret.

The Sufficient Beauty of Mr Polly

I read H.G. Wells for the first time this year.  I’d mentally set him aside as a purveyor of antique sci-fi thrills, which usually isn’t my cup of tea.  Then one day at the library, dull on the unread titles at home, I suddenly wondered if that particular cup wasn’t the one I was craving after all, and so I checked out The Island of Dr Moreau.  It delivered pretty much what I’d expected, until, that is, the final chapter, which shook halfway loose of the rest of the book and hinted, I thought, at something broader in Wells’ genius.

Looking for that broader Wells, I came across his neglected 1910 comic-picaresque, The History of Mr Polly.  Wells missteps in a couple places: putting too clinical a focus on Polly’s digestive troubles in the first few chapters and contradicting himself on his hero’s age, for example.  But Mr Polly himself – undereducated but word-drunk, virginal but affecting depravity, expecting illumination but stumbling blind into family, work and marriage – Mr Polly is the kind of character that marks the difference between author-as-storyteller and author-as-demiurge:  Mr Polly breathes.

Since he was an active socialist and sometime-member of the Fabian Society, we’re not surprised to find Wells here and there poking into issues of class and industry, but Polly is never flattened to symbol.  If there’s no proper place for him in the tumult of modernity, this is due as much to his personal idiosyncrasies as his background and status:

A man whose brain devotes its hinterland to making odd phrases and nicknames out of ill-conceived words, whose conception of life is a lump of auriferous rock to which all the value is given by rare veins of unbusinesslike joy, who reads Boccaccio and Rabelais and Shakespeare with gusto, and uses ‘Stertoraneous Shover’ and ‘Smart Junior’ as terms of bitterest opprobrium, is not likely to make a great success under modern business conditions.

It’s a very funny book.  Certain scenes read like a provincial Victorian precursor to Withnail and I.  But there’s a quality to the vaguely-yearning but downtrodden Polly that can remind us, between chuckles, of Naipaul’s Mr Biswas or John William’s William Stoner.  If life is a landscape of obstruction and discontent, then Polly is sustained, like these,  by occasional glimpses of beatitude, “the momentary vision of a very beautiful thing seen through the smoke of a passing train.”

The final quarter of the book I found somewhat weaker than the rest.  Perhaps it’s simply that Polly’s climb towards the light isn’t so funny as his fumbling in darkness.  We don’t want our windmill-tilters to snap out of it.  But their adversaries don’t have to be visible in order to be real:

Man comes into life to seek and find his sufficient beauty, to serve it, to win and increase it, to fight for it, to face anything and dare anything for it, counting death as nothing so long as the dying eyes still turn to it.  And fear, and dullness and indolence and appetite, which, indeed, are no more than fear’s three crippled brothers, who make ambushes and creep by night, are against him, to delay him, to hold him off, to hamper and beguile and kill him in that quest.

No matter how entertaining his trials, I suppose there’s always some satisfaction in seeing the hero come home in the end.

Marginalia, no.81

She had Parkinson’s. She shook like a leper in the wind.

~ Gore Vidal, on Katherine Hepburn

A good example of what we’ll call ‘charming uncharitableness.’  I read it, laughed out loud – and then felt like a perfect bastard.  But even when masked by genius (that simile!), unkindnesses like this remind us of the complications that come of saying something at all when you have nothing particularly nice to say.