Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot

Flaubert, who also appears to be dead here, used a dead parrot as a model.

More than once, Flaubert’s parrot, put me in mind of Poe’s raven:

 Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door
Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

Poe’s bird was capable of speech in a limited way – “never more” – while Flaubert’s parrot was dead and stuffed and completely silent. The narrator in Barnes’ novel is a widowed phsycian whose hobby is Flaubert, his writings and what could be called Flaubertiana, that is, the letters and memoirs, real estate and things associated with the French author of Madam Bovary. Two museums have rival parrots, one of which may have been the stuffed bird which inspired LouLou, the live bird in Flaubert’s A Simple Heart. Whatever LouLou had to say, her prototype explains nothing.

Things and events come in two and threes: two parrots, three statues of Flaubert in Rouen, two or three mistresses. Early on, the narrator complains about this sort of complexity.

 When a contemporary narrator hesitates, claims uncertainty,  misunderstands, plays games and falls into error, does the reader in fact conclude that reality is being more authentically rendered? When the writer provides two different endings to his novel (why two? Why not a hundred?), does the reader seriously imagine he is being ‘offered a choice’ and that the work is reflecting life’s variable outcomes? Such a ‘choice’ is never real, because the reader is obliged to consume both endings.

Barnes then proceeds to spin a tale or tales of multiple endings, multiple interpretations. I think I prefer the raven, enigmatic, but a single bird.

Julia Child’s Life in Cookery

Inspired by the delightful movie Julie and Julia I have read My Life in France “by” Julia Child. She speaks, her reminiscence in old age assembled by her grandnephew Alex Prud’homme. All my friends loved the movie but they didn’t talk about French cuisine; they talked about Julia. Years ago, when my daughter was a teen ager, we watched on TV, as Julia moved authoritatively about her kitchen. We didn’t talk about the cuisine; we talked about Julia. She was an inspiration to both us.

I’m not so sure about what Julia calls “cookery.” It’s all very well – that splendid meal with each component perfectly and conceived and executed – but so fleeting. Eat it and it’s gone. For me, only a few culinary highlights remain, like that the Thanksgiving  morning I desperately thawed a rockhard turkey under hot water in the sink. Julia seems to remember everything she ever cooked or ate.

Perfection was the goal.

 I did hours or research on mayonnaise, for instance, and although no one else seemed to care about it, I thought it was utterly fascinating. When the weather turned cold, the mayo suddenly became a terrible struggle, because the emulsion kept separating, and it wouldn’t behave when there was a change in the olive oil or the room temperature. I finally got the upper hand by going back to the beginning of the process, studying each step scientifically, and writing it down. By the end of my research, I believe, I had written more on the subject of mayonnaise than anyone in history.

Her pride in a problem solved, a job well done is evident.  It reminds me of the period when I was teaching myself to program. A clear goal and persistence, persistence, persistence, I later told my students – that’s what does it. I hope my pride in a successful result was as evident to them as Julia’s was to my daughter and me when she waved that cleaver as The French Chef.

Zola and Dreyfus

Contemporary cartoon: Down with Zola!

The story of the trial and conviction of Alfred Dreyfus on flimsy and “secret” evidence is seen as a demonstration of anti-Semitism in late 19^th century France. Certainly Theodor Herzl, who covered the trial for his Viennese newspaper, saw it that way. And if attitudes were so bad in enlightened France, how much worse in the rest of Europe! So modern Zionism was born, with its call for a nation for the Jews.

The last part of Matthew Josephson’s biography of Emile Zola, Zola and His Time, is devoted to the Dreyfus Affair and the important part Zola played in it. Zola at first wrote articles about the affair and then, finding no satisfactory response, published J’Accuse, opening himself up to a libel suit, a conviction, fines and temporary exile to England. It is disappointing that Josephson speaks so little of Zola’s motivation. Zola was not Jewish and, while he undoubtedly objected to the active prejudices which singled Dreyfus out for prosecution in the first place, I believe that he was stirred by something more fundamental to his own nature, his own inner core.

As they said of Watergate 75 years later, it wasn’t the original crime that was so bad, it was the cover up. Again and again, The French Army had overwhelming evidence of Dreyfus’ innocence and most came to accept it. They had opportunities to correct the error. Again and again they turned away from those opportunities and connived in exonerating the real spy.  The whistle blower within the Army who uncovered the facts was himself persecuted.

 They brought him [Picquart] up quickly. He should have realized that the reopening of the Dreyfus Affair was “not desired;” that the sacrifice of this man, innocent or culpable, was “deemed necessary” for the honor of the Army, The Secret Service Department, and the General Staff, all glorified in the triumphant judgment of 1894.

Zola’s fate was collateral damage, so far as they were concerned. I think it was the thorough dishonesty of the Affair and its coverup that most outraged Zola. As he says in J’Accuse,

 Dreyfus, it is shown, knows several languages: crime; he works hard: crime; no compromising papers are found in his home: crime; he goes occasionally to the country of his origin: crime; he endeavors to learn everything: crime; he is not easily worried: crime; he is worried: crime.

During World War II when the west coast Japanese were rounded up and interned on “suspicion” of espionage and sabotage, it was pointed out that there was no evidence that anyone had done any act of the sort. Ah, we were told: That shows how clever they are, fooling us all by their good behavior.

When I read Zola’s novels, I meet a writer who tells the truth as he sees it. He may dramatize, he may simplify, but he does not deceive or mislead. Josephson reports that Zola said at his trial,

 “All seems to be against me, the two Chambers, the civil powers, the military powers, the great newspapers, the public opinion which they have poisoned. And I have nothing for me but the Idea, the Ideal of truth and justice…. Someday France will thank me for having helped to save her honor.”

Contemporary cartoon: My Prophecy is Borne Out. Right has Finally Triumphed.

Honoré de Balzac, A Harlot High and Low

That’s not my choice of a title, but the translator’s rendering of the French Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes. I would have preferred the more literal Splendors and Miseries (misfortunes?) of Courtesans. “High and Low” implies a social or moral dimension the book has not shown so far. Reading this Balzac for my book group, I have finished parts 1 and 2 and am honor-bound not to read — or reveal — further until after our group discussion.

This novel is a continuation of the story of young Lucien from the provinces, the poet and sometime journalist of Lost Illusions. That said, where is Lucien? He has disappeared into a world of found illusions where every character seems to have at least three names and two identities. The “splendors” of the title amount to conspicuous consumption based on sex. A bored aristocrat with enough money or a member of the nouveau riche, who by definition has plenty of money, displays it by keeping a courtesan in elegant and expensive circumstances. Her prestige in turn depends on the level of expenditure she can evoke. She also indirectly supports a band of jewelers, dressmakers, florists, servants, carriage horses and even a stray lover or two.

Love is dangerous in a profession where artifice is all. According to Lucien’s mentor, as he contemplates courtesan Esther’s love for Lucien:

All these angels turn into women again, sooner or later; and at moments all women are at once ape and child! two forms of life in which we encourage laughter at our cost, if only in boredom….”

All society, the legitimate as well as the marginal, is based on artifice and simulated emotions. In the marquis’ drawing room, participants react to the news of a dangerously ill family member:

A group of women was remarkable for the diverse attitudes each took from her manner of playing mock grief. In society, nobody is interested in suffering or misfortune, everything is talk.

Balzac doesn’t view women as adult human beings (whereas men apparently are), but still he thinks he can tell the difference between false love and real love.

When they [women] are all they say they are, when truly they are in love, they behave as Esther did, as children do, as true love does; Esther didn’t say a word, she lay with her face in the cushions and wept hot tears.

This sort of thing becomes wearisome. The love story is lightened however by Balzac’s evident delight in financial wheeling and dealing. Esther’s patron is a successful banker who does what bankers do.

Forcing the states of Europe to borrow at twenty or ten per cent, making up this ten or  twenty per cent from public funds, holding whole industries to ransom by monopolizing raw materials, throwing a line to some large speculator to pull him out of the water while one recovers his drowned enterprise, such pecuniary warfare constitutes the high politics of money.

So what else is new! Balzac’s grasp of the psychology of financial speculation is far more credible that his understanding of women in love.

Stendahl, The Red and the Black

Under the pen name Stendahl, Marie Henri Beyle published The Red and the Black in 1830, just as the July revolution was overthrowing one monarch to replace him with another. In literature it was a romantic time, and this is a romantic novel, although it does not start out that way. It begins with Julien Sorel, a striver with ability and ambition, who pursues his own interests in a society which has re-ossified into conservatism after the excesses of the Revolution and the imperial ambitions of Napoleon. Hypocrisy is his necessary technique.

“Imagine,” he said to himself, shaking his head, “Napoleon’s portrait found hidden in the room of a man who professes nothing but hatred for the usurper!… And — the height of recklessness — …lines written in my own hand which can leave no doubt about the warmth of my admiration.”

Sorel is sincere in his ambitions, and Stendahl’s mocking of the social pretensions of the day make for effective comedy. A successful businessman who considers the evidence that his wife is unfaithful knows what is important when he makes his judgement.

“I am used to Louise,” he said to himself; “she knows all about my business affairs. If I were free to marry tomorrow, I couldn’t replace her.” Then he flattered himself with the idea that his wife was innocent; this way of seeing things spared him from showing firmness of character and suited him much better.

This was all very well, but events and the tone of the book changed. The trajectory of my reading pleasure looks like this: all down hill after a strong beginning.

At first, Sorel’s love affairs, like his studies in the seminary, are under the control of his desire to get ahead in a world that has little use for him. This restraint doesn’t last. Sometimes he loves her, sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes she loves him, sometimes she doesn’t. We are in such a whirl of romantic intoxication that very little makes sense. What does make sense is the gift for comedy Stendahl maintains until just before the end. For example, Sorel’s diligently copies out a series of love letters from a book provided by a worldly acquaintance, addressing them not to his lady love but to a rival, thus provoking a useful jealousy. The tactic works, but then everything dissolves in violence, as Sorel turns away from everything: love, ambition, life itself. The ending is pure melodrama. It would be funny too, if if were not so unbelievable.

Albert Camus, The Stranger

What is it about Meursault that makes him “the stranger”? It is not that he is a murderer, but that he tells the truth. He tells you when something doesn’t mean anything and he tells you that he is  hot. When his mother dies he is unsure when it happened, but says that doesn’t mean anything. He says the same thing to his girl friend.

That evening Marie came by to see me and asked me if I wanted to marry her. I said it didn’t make any difference to me and that we could if she wanted to. Then she wanted to know if I loved her. I answered the same way I had the last time, that it didn’t mean anything, but that I probably didn’t love her.

Meursault is not seeking for a meaning. He accepts the way things are.

Then he asked me if I wasn’t interested in a change of life. I said that people never change their lives, that in any case one life was as good as another and that I wasn’t dissatisfied with mine here at all.

Meursault is a man who lives in his skin, but he is not always comfortable there. In the water, swimming, he feels something close to joy but, usually, he is too hot. In his room he is hot, walking to his mother’s funeral he is too hot, and when he kills the Arab on the beach he is very hot. At his trial he disastrously speaks the truth about his feelings.

I stood up, and since I did wish to speak, I said, almost at random, in fact, that I never intended to kill the Arab. The judge replied by saying that at least that was an assertion, that until then he hadn’t quite grasped the nature of my defense, and that before hearing from my lawyer he would be happy to have me state precisely the motives for my act. Fumbling a little with my words and realizing how ridiculous I sounded, I blurted out that it was because of the sun. People laughed.

Meursault is sometimes spoken of as an ordinary man. He may be ordinary in the details of his life, but he is a stranger to the deceptions and self deceptions that make living such a life possible.

The Belly of Paris

The Belly of Paris is Les Halles, the great food market celebrated by Emile Zola in this 1873 novel. The only previous book I have read by Zola is the more famous Nana. I liked this one better because — I was about to say –of the more realistic people and situations. That’s not quite it. Zola is called a realist, but he uses his very sensual descriptions to make emotional points. For example, when the old gossips get together to tittle tattle with each other they meet in the cheese market.

All around them the cheeses were stinking…. A parmesan added its aromatic tang to the thick, dull smell of the others…. Then came the strong-smelling cheeses…. and, finally, stronger than all the others, the olivets, wrapped in walnut leaves, like the carcasses of animals which peasants cover with branches as they lie rotting in the hedgerow under the blazing sun.

Florent, an idealistic revolutionary, has escaped from his unjust imprisonment on Cayenne (Devils Island) and returned to Paris where he works in Les Halles and plans the downfall of the very Bourgeois government. He knows the sumptuous market is not the place for him. In his very difficult life he has become thin and he identifies with the thin people. Les Halles is the place of supply for the fat people, and the fat people include his half brother, his sister-in-law and all the people who mock his ideals. Florent is not eloquent but his artist friend is.

Claude shook his fist at them. He was exasperated by all this joyousness in the streets and on the rooftops. He cursed the Fat people, for they had won. All around he could see nothing but Fat people, increasing ins size, bursting with health, greeting another day of eating and digesting.

The sadness of the ending is not just that Florent’s impractical schemes have failed. The sadness is that the fat people prefer eating and drinking to the pursuit of justice.

Lost Illusions: An Inventor’s Tribulations

The final part of Balzac’s Lost Illusions is entitled An Inventor’s Tribulations. Balzac packs in so much incident that it might be entitled An Inventor’s Tribulations and Lucien’s Further Foolishness and Eve’s Nobility and How to Make Cheap Paper and How to Waste a Great Deal of Money and How to Get into Trouble with the Law.

If Balzac contains it all — the world and its industries and its social classes and its myriads of characters — then why do I become so impatient to finish and to leave that world? I conclude, sadly, that is is because I don’t really like Balzac. His character is persistently misanthropic. Dickens has characters who are bad actors and Trollope and George Eliot do also, but theirs is a scene in which some people are good and justice may prevail, after some sad lessons have been learned. Balzac is at his best when his villains are seen straight on, with no hope for redemption. He puts these words in the mouth of his most perceptive character.

Society, Madame, by a strange turn of whimsy, is full of indulgence towards young men of such a nature: it takes a liking to them and lets itself be captivated by the tinsel of their surface qualities. It demands nothing of them, condones all their faults, accords them the prerogatives due only to mature characters and sees only their advantageous points: in fact it makes spoilt children of them. On the other hand, it shows unbounded severity to people of rounded and forceful character.

And it is true. David, the persistent and honorable inventor, and Eve, his intelligent and warm-hearted wife, are rewarded by a happy ending, a life of comfortable obscurity. Lucien, that egotistical and destructive “genius,” is reserved for a promising future in the next novel.

Lost Illusions: A Great Man in Embryo

The long middle section of Honoré de Balzac’s long and complex novel, Lost Illusions, is entitled A Great Man in Embryo. Ambitious young “poet and genius”, Lucien borrows money from his family and goes to Paris to seek his fortune. He seeks it at several different levels: with his original provincial connections who quickly dump him, with a high-minded group of artists who live in poverty, as a journalist in the service of various political factions, and as an aspiring aristocrat. Along the way he makes some effective enemies and loves — and loses — his first mistress, a young actress.

Balzac must have been one tough cookie! Whatever the occupation, whatever the milieu, he tells you all about it, and with great authority and a total mastery of detail. When Lucien turns to journalism, it is clear that his moral position has deteriorated. First he learns to use his wit to liven up his copy and impress the reader. Then he is instructed how to praise and blame the same piece of work.

‘You’ll begin by saying it’s a fine work: after that you can enjoy yourself saying what you like about it. The public will say: “This critic isn’t jealous, he’ll certainly be impartial.” From then on it will regard your criticism as conscientious. Having thus acquired your reader’s esteem, you’ll regret to have to cast blame on the system which such books are going to inaugurate in French literature.

So it is today. The book reviewer tells you solemnly that the book has many merits, but the writer should have written a different book (the one the reviewer had in mind) or is a victim of social forces he does not control. It must be understood that –

My dear boy, in literature, every idea has its front and reverse side, and no one can presume to state which side is which. Everything is bilateral in the domain of thought. Ideas are two-sided. Janus is the tutelary deity of criticism and the symbol of genius. Only God is triangular!

I hope to keep it always in mind that God is triangular.

Balzac is writing in the 1830s about a period perhaps 15 years previous. For the modern reader, the details of the publishers’ rackets and the journalists’ tricks are entertaining, but one can drown in the various political factions and the ins and outs of aristocratic favor. In the end, two things count: money and connections. Without them, one has only illusions to lose.

Lost Illusions: The Two Poets

Lost Illusions by Honoré de Balzac has space in its 682 pages (Penguin Classics) for a lot of illusions. Balzac published in it three sections between 1837 and 1843. I plan to comment as I finish each section.

The opening section, Two Poets, is set in a provincial town in France in the post-Napoleonic period. The two “poets” are not literally poets, but young men aspiring to do some great work. One is realistic about his prospects; the other, young Lucien, hopes to achieve great things through the influence of the well-connected. Balzac is very hard on provincial life and those who live it, being careful to depict the struggles at various social levels. Perhaps you can imagine what Middlemarch would be life if George Eliot has been a cynic rather than a humanist.

I was particularly struck by Balzac’s rendering of the girl who, as a woman, becomes Madame de Bargeton and Lucien’s patroness. Her birth is good, her fortune is adequate and his misfortune is to have been educated.

The Abbé imbued his pupil with his own spirit of inquiry and readiness to pass judgement; and it did not occur to him that qualities essential to a man can become defects in a woman destined to the humble occupation of wife and mother. Although he constantly reminded his pupil that additional graciousness and modesty should go with more extensive knowledge, Mademoiselle de Negrepelisse acquired an excellent opinion of herself and conceived a study contempt for humanity at large.

Her father decides that the remedy for such a young woman is marriage.

Like many fathers, he resolved to marry off his daughter, less for her own sake than for his own peace of mind.

The result is a provincial salon to which Lucien is admitted at his peril. Lucien’s character also requires close examination. In the provincial setting he is intelligent, but also selfish and falsely confident, a confidence encouraged by family members who should have known better. Their sacrifices on his behalf sadden the reader, for they also have defects in their educations — and a willingness to accept Lucien’s pretensions at face value.