WELL THEN!
From Collected Works of Paul Valery, Volume 15: Moi (edited by Jackson Mathews)
OOOF!
I found myself hopping through the cosmos today . . . by which I mean to imply that this “nebula to nebula” happened to coincide with another cosmos: an encounter with two cosmonauts dressed as characters in a projected novel. Paul Valery’s spirit hovers near the threshold of what is to follow, namely, a strange intersection between writers I love, an intersection based on a guess or an excessively-close reading on my part.
Yes. Earlier this year, I wrote a bit about Witold Gombrowicz while admiring Matthew Zapruder’s “Poem for Witold Gombrowicz”— and then spiraling into my Bruno Schulz obsession. Tonight, at 10:41 PM, I find myself mentioning Witold again. He seems to enjoy this sort of thing: bursting onto the page and being a source of consternation to his audience.
While reading Paul Zweig's Three Journeys: An Automythology, I think the aforementioned figure did it again. Like any mammal whose middle school teachers labeled “a little too sensitive,” I paused and re-read the section before finally picking up a pen to mark the spot in the second journey where I recognized Gombrowicz. Even though Zweig doesn't name him, it sounds like Gombrowicz: I recognize his silhouette in the pessimism that permits absurdity, though Zweig actually credits him with something more interesting.
In the interest of literature and not-sleeping, I will share my possible misreading here by excerpting some chunks (see the end for a lengthier PDF of this section should thee like a copy), and also noting that all italics belong to yours truly:
SIX YEARS LATER, sunk in a deep chair in the salon of the Abbaye of Royaumont near Paris, he would listen to the asthmatic breathing of an older man whose face he could hardly see. For minutes they had faced each other without talking. It was not his place to speak first, for the man, with cruel irony, had let him know that, as a mere boy, he possessed an attribute which the man loathed but was drawn to nonetheless, as to a vice and a humiliation: it was youth, which the older man, a great Polish novelist, had described provocatively as a sort of original sin which time and pain alone absolved, time and pain being one and the same.
The novelist seemed to be thinking the breath into and out of his lungs, trying to catch the discordant inner music which would mark the final cure of what the other day he had called, with something like self-hatred in his voice, the only antidote for youth.
From the first, he had been fascinated by a leathery, boyish quality in the novelist's face. They had taken long walks together in the park of the Abbaye. They had talked about narcissism and philosophy, above all they had talked about youth. The paradox of the novelist's cynicism was that, in a way, youth had been his only homeland for almost thirty years, during which time he had lived obscurely in South America, his only human connection being to groups of adolescent boys which he seemed to attract, becoming their elder guide and counselor, as he would say, their pied piper to nowhere. His pleasure, he said, had nor been to debauch the boys—bleak lines in the man's face made this believable— but to inject an element of vice into their simplest thoughts and feelings, so that even the most ordinary acts would come to seem, and would become, transgressions.
"I will tell you what I think of you," he said, breaking the silence, "and then, when I am finished, you will tell me what you think of me."
Immobilized by the novelist's passionate cynicism, and by a quality which he sensed, although he was far as yet from understanding Immobilized by the novelist's passionate cynicism, and by a quality which he sensed, although he was far as yet from understanding it, his vulnerability, he listened, as the man began to speak: "My impression, first of all, is that you speak French too well. Even the muscles in your face seem French, and the way you use certain words, 'alienation,' for example, when you mean unhappiness. Yet unhappiness is an ancient, lovely word. It has a patina which comes from many mouths forming themselves around it. God and the devil are enclosed in the word unhappiness. But as a French intellectual you say, 'alienation,' and you feel the march of history at your side. You imagine Karl Marx approving of your ingenuity in finding this new use for a word which was so much more limited in his time.
"I will tell you what I think: this Frenchness of yours is an impersonation caused by fear. You are afraid of being ridiculous. Have you noticed how childish foreigners always seem? When you hear them fumbling for words as I am doing now, or peering from under their eyelids to see how one peels an orange in this country, you can't help wondering if they're not a little stupid. By impersonating a French existence, you conceal your clumsiness from everyone as well as the fact that you feel a little blue most of the time, as if you were looking at people through a glass pane. When a smile or a caress is directed toward you, it stops short by the thickness of a skin, because you're a foreigner. Is it possible that you left America because you were a foreigner even there, and weren't ready to find it out yet?
"You're not so young that this innocence should be permitted you any more, therefore you ought to remember what I'm saying. a Polish Catholic as you know. I am also an anti-Semite. You smile, because you don't believe that an intelligent person can be an anti-Semite. Nonetheless, it's true, so you may consider that I'm telling you this through malice; that I'm simply trying to put some scratches on the pane in front of your face. Well, that may be true too. It is hard to see you, because the room is so dark. But even in daylight one doesn't see you very well. If I ignore the impersonation which, by the way, is more artistic than you know, and actually quite unusual, if I disregard it, I see a graceful boy slipping away, but glancing over his shoulder, coquettishly, as if he wanted to be found out.
"In my opinion, you're a wandering Jew, someone who is forbidden to have a home. No power forces him to move on, but the law is applied from within. His existence therefore is bitter. But don't forget, God is a wanderer too. That is why He appears mainly to wanderers, because wanderers exist principally among abstractions. They have given up so much that they have become light and unstable, like winged seedlings never touching the earth.
By the time the novelist stopped, the afterglow of the stained-glass windows had dulled into opaque strips of night. Again the two sat without speaking. During this pause, must we imagine the boy pensive and mute? At the novelist's prompting, if only for a moment, has he glimpsed the vitreous pour of his inner existence? Has he felt the stir of massive roots fishing for moisture in the parched underground, and the vertical pressure of sunlight crushing all movement but that of the wind which gnaws, sucks, and grinds without end? We must not. As yet only nameless hints had reached him of that portion of his destiny which would be compressed into the arc between Saint Anthony and the Beni Hillal, between the Thebiade and the voluminous quiet of the Tanezrouft. To tell the truth, he wasn't thinking at all. He was waiting, and he was intimidated. It embarrassed him that this famous person should consider him, vacant and speechless, not entirely at any given moment a presence, a sufficient subject of interest. It made him doubt ever so slightly the incisiveness of the man's genius. He was, one might say, disappointed.
Happily, the tinkle of the dinner bell enabled him to escape his half of the bargain, for he had no idea how to go about telling the Polish novelist what he thought of him.
With the detachment which characterized so much of his personal thinking, he was aware of how literary their conversation had been. As extraordinary as it may seem, the old man had fashioned the scene in the salon after a scene in one of his own novels. In the novel, however, the words had been more savage. The accents of cynicism and disdain had been sharper. The boy in the novel had been a malleable material, his self-awareness had been cushioned by his smooth and supple body. In the novel, too, he had been bored by the old man's abstractions, but he had also felt sorry for him, as if he had guessed that the novelist's disdain for youth was a form of love, was, in fact, an elegy.
As he walked down the broad wooden staircase and headed for the rectangle of light which marked the open door into the dining room, he was filled with a feeling of exaltation. He began, inexplicably, to giggle, and then to laugh out loud, despite all his efforts to hold back.
He turned and walked outside into the park under the bulky shadow of the linden trees. There too he giggled uncontrollably. He felt a mysterious elation, as if a wish he could no longer remember having made had been fulfilled against all expectation, and almost inconveniently. Long after the giggles subsided, a feeling of inner certainty approaching self-confidence remained, combined with an undercurrent of surprise. What surprises most of all in a person who had once made a proclamation of complete inner limpidity was his failure to remember the "wish," so to speak, or to grasp (it kept eluding him) the nature of the fulfillment.
And yet it was simple. It was, one might say, childishly simple. He was simply flattered to the point of giggles at the thought that a novelist might fashion a scene out of his life; that a common sure existed, however fleetingly, between a "character" in a book, and the peculiar bundle of existences which he was. In the dark of his psyche echoed the long-forgotten plaint: 'How can I be a writer when I don't have any biography?'
And here, in the old man's novel, even if only at second hand, was a biography. Here was the idea—it was really too much to encompass—that he too, from a certain point of view, might be a "character."
At this point, Gombrowicz’s novel sauntered into my head… and now I leave it to you to guess which novel I suspect Zweig was referencing.
Nevertheless, guess or no guess, several pages later, Zweig returns to this mythical moment while comparing the Polish novelist to a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, and to the queer heavens that seem to taunt us:
Maybe such heavens are not meant to be had at all, but precisely to be longed for. In longing, their mineral clarity is softened by something human, something which comes from us: a blending of fulfillment and elegy, of having (like water after a long thirst) and remoteness (like the liquid flow of the mirage), of self-abandonment and awareness of loss. Maybe this blend is the state of mind we associate with art. When we read a book or contemplate a painting; when, taking a walk, we become estheti-cally aware of nature's profusion, or of the patina on old buildings or, even more acutely, of objects which a moment before seemed ugly: a subway platform, newspapers blowing against a house; at such moments we are turning our eyes toward heaven and, simultaneously, sharpening our awareness of loss.
What the Polish novelist had offered him that evening at Royaumont (a "biography") was the possibility that one day he might become a poet. From his laughter under the linden trees would come a perception of bright shapes softened by distance, darkened by longing. These would be the images of poems; rather, they would be the medium the images were plunged in, through which they swam and reached their destination, their meaning. His "style" as a writer and as a man would be rooted in a soil composed of his laughter and the pitch black dome of the linden trees.
If anyone has knowledge about whether this is based on Gombrowicz — I say ‘knowledge’ to maintain a qualitative distinction between facts and my late-night speculation— please let me know!
O! And that final mention of the dome of the linden trees reminded of Paul Celan and Jean Daive strolling beneath the domes of Paris in the elsewhere of a different book, although perhaps in a similar tender timbre.
ZUT ALORS!
Reading has eaten my life, and colonized my nebulae and nebul-eye! But, as promised, voici le PDF of the longer excerpt from Zweig’s “Polish novelist” scene.
