Proust remarked about Stendhal that he may have used rudimentary and banal descriptions but that he lights up when he pinpoints an elevated place, such as Fabrizio del Dongo’s and Julien Sorel’s prisons or the Abbé Blanès’s observatory, in which the characters cast aside their cares and take up a “disinterested voluptuous life.” Julien Gracq’s descriptions are wonderfully worked, but if he had a characteristic and favorite place in which to situate his action, a place that excited all his creative powers, it would be the seashore enveloped in fog. His world is one of decaying grandeur, palaces reverting to mold and swamp, mud-silted battleships, official inertia, the odor of stasis when “the familiar rotting smell passed over my face like the touch of a blind hand.” Fog and moonlight are what might be called the emblems of his fiction.

In a 1959 essay about the mysterious German writer Ernst Jünger, perhaps his major influence, Gracq said of Jünger’s 1939 novel On the Marble Cliffs that it is “an emblematic book” rather than a livre à clef or an “explanation of our period.” Gracq prefers to invoke the lore of heraldry, images drawn from our life but resistant to interpretation, chess pieces that “burn the fingers” just to touch. Writing about On the Marble Cliffs, Gracq could be describing one of his own novels: “We could call it a symbolic work but only on condition of admitting that the symbols can only be read as enigmas seen in a mirror.” Nothing is autobiographical or political; everything is mythic.

Julien Gracq was the pen name of Louis Poirier (1910–2007). He took the first name from Julien Sorel of The Red and the Black, his favorite Stendhal novel, and the last name from the Gracchi, the ancient Roman brothers who defended the rights of the poor. In a passage from 1980 imagining the complete surprise that the French Revolution represented for the people of the day, he quoted a line from the Roman satirist Juvenal: “Who could endure the Gracchi railing at sedition?”

Gracq grew up in Saint-Florent-le-Vieil, near the mouth of the Loire and twenty-two miles from Angers in western France. He studied in Paris and became a friend of “the pope of Surrealism,” André Breton, who hailed his 1938 novel Château d’Argol as the first Surrealist novel, though the Surrealists took a dim view of most novels. Gracq himself thought of Surrealism as less a movement than a way of practicing poetry, a “dynamic, active search for all the paths and all the methods leading to a poetic state.”

As a soldier during World War II Gracq was captured and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in Silesia. After the war he taught history and geography in a lycée in Paris for twenty years; he studiously avoided publicity and thrice refused to dine with French president François Mitterrand, and he rejected the Goncourt Prize. He never married, though his writing makes it obvious that he was a lover of women; after his retirement he returned to Saint-Florent-le-Vieil, where he lived with his sister.

Gracq wrote only a handful of novels, each one dense and richly wrought. The first one, Château d’Argol, distinctly recalls Edgar Allan Poe, whom Gracq considered a writer that Americans from the land of “the cow catcher” and “the redskin” completely misunderstood and who was fully embraced only by Europeans, who knew how to appreciate “these immemorial colors” and “this delirious and funereal majesty.” The action in his novel, such as it is, comes out of the same universe as “The Fall of the House of Usher”; in Gracq’s hands it is set in a seaside castle next to a windy (and of course foggy) seaside forest. Two men, friends and rivals since childhood, and the mysterious, witchy woman one of them introduces, are virtually the only characters. Murder and suicide ensue, but the plot is insignificant next to the long, “decadent” sentences, the seemingly random but menacing words cast into italics, the remarkable unity of place, the use of all those adjectives creative writing classes forbid: implacable, unbelievable, incomparable—words that Joseph Conrad also relied on and that announce that the writer has been defeated in his attempts to describe the (what else?) ineffable.

Château d’Argol, like Poe’s stories, emphasizes the landscape as the dark sublime. The characters are static. Everything, from start to finish, is moving toward death, and the prevailing mood is one of terror or doom. Words repeat as in Poe: “In the very middle of the long December night, down the deserted stairs, through the deserted rooms where the candles were burnt out, where the candles were overturned, he left the castle in a traveller’s attire.” Compare Poe’s “Ulalume”: “The leaves they were crispéd and sere—/The leaves they were withering and sere” or “As the scoriac rivers that roll—/As the lavas that restlessly roll.” All the poetic props are in Poe: the “lonesome October,” the “most immemorial year,” “the ghoul-haunted woodland,” as well as demons and mist. In Gracq there are “meshes of mist” and “unavowable bonds.” Then there is this characteristic passage:

And nature, restored by the fog to its secret geometry, now became as unfamiliar as the furniture of a drawing-room under dust-covers to the eye of an intruder, substituting, all at once, the menacing affirmation of pure volume for the familiar hideousness of utility, and by an operation whose magical character must be evident to anyone, restoring to the instruments of humblest use, until then dishonoured by all that handling engenders of base degradation, the particular and striking splendour of the object.

This contempt for anything useful, this admiration of transforming difference, is not so far from Huysmans’s Against the Grain, nor is the comparison of nature to the furniture in a salon draped in Holland cloth.

Gracq’s second novel is difficult, starting with its title. In English it is called A Dark Stranger, but in French Un beau ténébreux has richer connotations—“a handsome man” who is “gloomy,” or “dark” or “mysterious” or “shadowy,” derived from tenebrae, in Latin a holy office preceding Easter during which the lights are turned off one by one to signify Christ’s death. In this case, the beau is Allan, a rich young man, half-French and half-English, who comes to an elegant seaside hotel in Brittany and has soon become the obsession of all the other guests, members of la jeunesse dorée. They are so obsessed that they are unable to leave the summer resort at the close of the season or well into the autumn. The mood of the book is sounded from the very beginning:

Sand drifted across the dunes, the air snapped like great banners, standing up against the cutting edge of the wind with a feline flick of the tail. And out on the horizon the hurried toing and froing of the waves, always this commotion of foam, this riotous churning, a confusion of clouds lined with squalls and sunshine, this fierce train of swells, the unfailing impatience of the sea in the background.

In his wonderfully inventive and totally original literary criticism, Gracq praises the “slowness pills” that the novel ideally administers. He admires “narrative pauses” that fulfill the function “of an organized delay, a braking in the action, whose goal is to let all the reserves capable of orchestrating and amplifying it flow towards the dramatic apex already in view.” A Dark Stranger is constructed out of such organized delays. We know that Allan is self-destructive and half in love with death; we guess through heavy foreshadowing that the end of the book will be his suicide. But we take a long, foreboding path to get there.

For one thing, Allan is a compulsive gambler. He plays for ruinous stakes that would destroy any fortune, no matter how great. The other gamblers look on as he loses—“and, offensively, impertinently, mercilessly, he was taking his time over it, arranging it in clever stages, removing the veils of benign, bland, mollifying assumptions one by one and standing upright in the unbearable and now indisputable nakedness of scandal.” There is something theatrical, indeed tragic, in Allan’s headlong course toward death. (Gracq wrote plays and translated Kleist’s great play Penthesilea, about an Amazon queen in conflict with—and in love with—Achilles.) Another of the novel’s characters, a young man named Gérard Kersaint, challenges Nietzsche’s view of tragedy as founded on the passions; he argues, however, in an entry from his diary,

that somewhere in the plot there’s always an unjustifiable urge in one of the characters, a sudden inspiration as violent as a change in the wind, which deep down can’t be justified by any motive…. A form of holy madness, an infectious state of trance, a solstice bonfire that spreads from one character to the next.

The first 180 pages of A Dark Stranger are leaves from Kersaint’s diary like these reflections on tragedy. He’s an intellectual, ruminating on Molière, Chateaubriand, and Baudelaire. The owner of the hotel tells Gérard that he’s worried about Allan, who deposited a vast sum of money in the hotel coffers and now has spent half of it, as if the charismatic young heir wants to die penniless. Gérard runs into his friend and says, “You frighten me, Allan. I’ve sensed it since I’ve been here: you’re on the brink of something irreversible.”

Gérard brings up a young woman, Christel, who is in love with Allan and seems likely to follow him into death. Gérard asks Allan if he feels he has the right to take on this somber part, focused as Christel is on his tragic destiny, something “which isn’t focused solely on you as a person—but on some revelation beyond you.”

“And why not?”

“Fine I don’t think I’ve got any more to say to you.”

We left each other in a heavy silence.

On September 1 the guests stage a fancy dress ball, which people call “the party with no tomorrow.” Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” comes to mind. Everyone is nervous and excited, as they wouldn’t be with a normal party. Allan and Dolorés, his date, are costumed as suicidal lovers out of a poem by Alfred de Vigny, each with a bloodstain over the heart. When Gérard stops to talk to Dolorés, she says, “At a dance like this it’s easy to take yourself for a god paying an incognito visit to the world in your grey cloak.” She also tells him that whereas death for most people is the end, for others it might be a “vocation.”

As dawn approaches at the end of the party, the guests feel that something is about to fall apart. With the autumn’s first frost “it was as if they’d suddenly been transported to the wardroom of a ship trapped in winter ice floes.” The hotel emptied of most of its guests is like a “body drained of its lifeblood and commotion.” Page after page the imagery becomes relentlessly funereal: “The extraordinary stillness of the moon sucked the life out of this dark sombre room through the windows, as an embalmer drains a skull through the nostrils.” Would Gracq have been so in control of this morbid language if he hadn’t been sensitized by the Surrealists?

Christel barges into Allan’s room: “The pallid face crouched beneath the heavy dark hair like a crime in the depths of a darkened house” (is this what Freud would call “displacement?”). Suddenly she says accusingly, “You’re going to die. You want to die, I know it. I’ve known for days, weeks.”

After demurring for a moment, Allan confesses, “It’s true, Christel. This is my last night.” When she tells him that she loves him, he replies, “You love me, but only mingled with my death.” Such a Byronic hero could be maddening, but due to Gracq’s elegant indirection and strategic pauses the text is so suspenseful (we know what is going to happen but not when or how) that it never becomes predictable or pretentious.

A Dark Stranger observes the classical unities (well, two months but one place and a restricted cast of characters and a single situation). That and the central premise make it feel avowedly theatrical. Why write such a book? It came out in 1945 but is set in the pre-war period; it expressed the anxiety of 1945, but also the vague hopes and fears of rich idlers in 1939. No one knew exactly what would happen at that time, but the future seemed tragic and inevitable.

Gracq alternated between realistic novels and mythical ones. The Opposing Shore may be a masterpiece, but to my mind it’s a botched one, like Nabokov’s Ada—admirable, fertile as a subject of reverie, totally tedious. In both cases we are in a made-up land, and the plot involves a love affair that has been nourished on archetypal romances. In The Opposing Shore the country, Orsenna, may be something like Venice with its dated but institutionalized customs. Its long-standing enemy, Farghestan, with which it has been in a hazily defined state of dormant war for three centuries, may be something like the Ottoman Empire. The plot concerns a young aristocrat, Aldo, who is sent to a naval base on the Farghestan border. After endless, almost Jamesian dithering and the steady if oblique opposition of Marino, his commander, Aldo finally goes over to the opposing shore, to Farghestan.

Marino argues that it would have been better to leave Farghestan unknown and to keep Orsenna “a land where it’s good to lie down and go to sleep.” Only an accomplished poet and utterly civilized man such as Richard Howard could have translated this dialogue spoken by articulate but devious hysterics, this narrative so rich in evasions, and these Proustian sentences:

The intimate feeling that had drawn taut the thread of my life had been that of an ever deeper aberration; starting from the broad ways of childhood, when all of life closed over me like a warm embrace, it seemed to me that gradually I had lost contact, turned away with the passing days toward ever more solitary roads where at times, disoriented, I stood still a moment and caught no more than the brief and lonely echo of a nighttime street emptying of all traffic.

Baffling as these abstractions and metaphors might be, we feel they might make sense if we only concentrated harder. They don’t seem to repel meaning, just resist it. This novel is full of mist and moonlight, old men “ill-defended against a long memory,” and we learn that the harbor of Sagra

was a baroque marvel, an improbable and disturbing collision of nature and art. Very old underground canals, between their disjointed stones, had ultimately managed to spew through the streets the waters from an underground spring which they had brought from leagues away; and slowly, with the centuries, the dead city had become a paved jungle, a hanging garden of wild trunks, a frenzied gigantomachia of tree and stone.

Although The Opposing Shore is worlds away from A Dark Stranger in its pacing, both are about attractive young men who are drawn toward a catastrophic act. In Balcony in the Forest, Gracq’s last and best novel, the catastrophe happens to Lieutenant Grange and his men as they wait through the “phony war” in 1939 for the real war to begin. First published in 1958, two decades after the time described, it is again full of sea-girt forests and mist, but this time the telling is the most realistic Gracq ever managed.

The lieutenant, we learn, is “a great Poe enthusiast.” The jerry-built fortresses and bunkers are already subject to “rust and ruin,” well before the actual fighting. Living with a handful of soldiers, whom he mostly likes, the lieutenant is no shirker but he doesn’t want to “participate” with total conviction—though in this case his reluctance is not some metaphysical rejection, just a temperamental disinclination. Now the poetic images are much more muted, more ideographs than elaborated metaphors: “He fell asleep, one hand hanging out of his bed over the Meuse as if across the gunwale of a boat: tomorrow was already very far away.” His men come down the stairs for a first inspection, “clumsy, circumspect, and squinting like suspicious Berber tribesmen.” In the small rooms Grange’s “feeling of confinement became oppressive: his body moved here like the dry kernel inside a nutshell.”

This is what is called sensible, masculine writing, an Englishman’s writing, such as Graham Greene’s. Nothing embarrassing or over-the-top. The stagnant conflict was “a curtain accidentally dropped by a remote stagehand at the play’s most exciting moment.” Although the sentences can be long, they no longer teeter on the edge of the incomprehensible: “The air was soft and warm, heavy with the smell of plants.” Further on:

The night protected him, gave him this easy breathing and this prowler’s freedom of movement, but it was the night that brought the war closer: as if a fiery sword were writing great pure characters above the world that cowered in primordial fear; roused, the sky over the woods watched dark France, dark Germany, and between the two the strange, calm scintillation of Belgium, whose lights died away at the horizon’s edge.

Richard Howard masterfully renders the crescendo of the fiery characters and the rumbling diminuendo of the last phrase—thunder after lightning.

Fed up with the preening, “carefully groomed” soldiers in town, with their womanizers’ soft gaze (“like officers during the Dreyfus Affair”), Grange wanders the Ardennes forest, where he chances upon a young woman whom he dubs “a rain-sprite.” She pays no attention to him, “like a kitten that ignores you for a ball of string.” Suddenly she wants to walk with him (“It’s more fun”). He asks her if she, improbably enough, is vacationing here, and she responds, “Oh no!… I’m a widow,” and with childish glee announces, “I have a family ration book!”

Mona and Grange become lovers; she is as antic and supernaturally wise as Pearl in The Scarlet Letter, as warm as an “unmade bed.” She “lived and grew against him like a tree espaliered on a wall.” Their affair has no future, and one day she simply disappears.

To a remarkable degree, Balcony in the Forest seems distinctly conscious of moments of being, the startled, inconsequential, unmotivated awareness that we exist, are living—and living now: “How dense, how concrete the present became, in her shadow. With what force of conviction, with what energy she was here!” After more endless waiting for battle, these are Grange’s thoughts:

It was as if everything were dissolving under his eyes, disappearing, cautiously evacuating its still intact appearance down the cloudy, sluggish river, and desperately, endlessly going away—going away.

As the waiting continues,

Perhaps for the first time, Grange told himself, he was mobilized in a dream army. “I’m dreaming here—we’re all dreaming—but of what?” Everything around him was anxiety and vacillation.

Using one of his newly spare, chthonic images, Gracq writes: “The earth was like a dog showing its teeth.” When the war finally begins: “‘The forest,’ he thought again. ‘I’m in the forest.’ He couldn’t have said anything more than that: it was as if his mind were yielding to a better kind of light.” This ecstatic apprehension of existence may have been Gracq’s most powerful gift. For the last three decades of his life Gracq wrote travel books and criticism, but no fiction.

The post Ecstatic Truth appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Ford Madox Ford said that one had to read Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education fourteen times in order to fully grasp it; he had memorized whole sections of it. Franz Kafka said it was one of his favorite novels. Not bad for a book that was widely criticized for its heartlessness and cynicism when it was published.

People speak glibly about Flaubert’s style. I’ve noticed that the best way to get people to talk about your “style” is to talk about it yourself. That’s what Flaubert did, and Truman Capote as well. Flaubert’s correspondence attested to his hours spent on his couch, his “marinade,” searching for le mot juste; he would write just a few paragraphs a day.

What are the earmarks of Flaubert’s style in Sentimental Education, the subject of Peter Brooks’s Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris? Short sentences and mostly short scenes, more actual dialogue than in the earlier Madame Bovary, but most of the dialogue summarized in free indirect discourse, which has none of the intimacy of actual, stuttered, circular, self-serving talk but makes the scenes move along at a clip. The descriptions (unlike Nabokov’s, say) never draw attention to themselves but are an exquisite assemblage of closely observed, muted details, as in this one of the novel’s main character, Frédéric Moreau, dining with Madame Arnoux, the married woman with whom he is in love:

He scarcely uttered a word during these dinners; he gazed at her. On her right temple she had a little beauty-spot; her bandeaux were darker than the rest of her hair, and always seemed a little moist at the edges; she stroked them occasionally, with two fingers. He knew the shape of each of her nails; he loved listening to the rustle of her silk dress when she passed a door; he secretly sniffed at the scent on her handkerchief; her comb, her gloves, her rings were things of real significance to him, as important as works of art, endowed with life almost human; they all possessed his heart and fed his passion.

Few of Frédéric’s thoughts are given, but when they are, they are often of a sudden romantic élan, a shiver of the old romantic agony, almost immediately neutralized by a mundane detail or cynical thought. Thus when his old friend Deslauriers wants to meet his beloved Madame Arnoux, Frédéric thinks he would gladly risk his life for his friend, but then he is worried that Deslaurier’s shabby “black coat, his attorney-like behavior, and his extravagant remarks, might annoy Madame Arnoux, compromise him and lower him in her estimation.”

Frédéric nurses romantic impulses, but he doesn’t have the genius to lend them substance or to pursue them. He feels that Madame Arnoux’s husband Jacques is a “kindly, intelligent man,” but a moment later, when Jacques insultingly chucks Frédéric under the chin, the younger man immediately demotes him in his mind—and his wife as well. The essence of romanticism is that every serious passion is forever; lovers take vows for all “eternity.” But the essence of realism is that emotions contract and expand and drift second by second. In Flaubert’s world, ambitions and passions are unstable:

He asked himself in all seriousness whether he was to be a great painter or a great poet; and he decided in favour of painting, for the demands of this profession would bring him closer to Madame Arnoux. So he had found his vocation! The object of his existence was now clear, and there could be no doubt about the future.

Flaubert’s descriptions are rarely flashy, but they reveal carefully pondered, almost scientific observations. “Science” was a fundamental word in his aesthetic vocabulary. He complained to his best friend, the writer George Sand, that his contemporaries were insufficiently devoted to “science,” by which he meant economics, history, and politics. Even political sentiments are very unstable in Flaubert’s world. At one point in Sentimental Education a professor who has challenged those in power is extremely popular with the mob. Yet when a moment later he takes a position contrary to popular sentiment, he is instantly despised. “He was hated now, for he represented authority.” These mercurial sentiments are true both intimately and as social phenomena.

Flaubert took years to write Sentimental Education. He was an ardent researcher who applied to his new book the methods he had previously employed in preparing Salammbô, set in Carthage in the third century BC. He retraced the walk Frédéric and the courtesan Rosanette take through the forest of Fontainebleau almost minute by minute, researched the manufacture of porcelain (one of Arnoux’s businesses), plotted out the various combats in the streets of Paris during the 1848 insurrection, and studied the stock market and female fashions year by year.

Of course there are the more familiar stylistic elements in Flaubert’s writing. Words are not to be repeated in close proximity. One scene must grow seamlessly out of the preceding one, the famous progression d’effet. The beginning of chapter 19 is the single sudden rupture of this rule:

He travelled the world.

He tasted the melancholy of packet ships, the chill of waking under canvas, the boredom of landscapes and monuments, the bitterness of broken friendship.

He returned home.

He went into society, and he had affairs with other women. They were insipid beside the endless memory of his first love. And then the vehemence of desire, the keen edge of sensation itself, had left him. His intellectual ambitions were fading too. The years went by; and he resigned himself to the stagnation of his mind and the apathy that lived in his heart.

Although this is a celebrated passage, it’s not really characteristic because it groups sustained emotions over long periods. Flaubert is both a romantic and a realist, but realism, with all its subversions of the grandiose, usually prevails.

Another feature of the style of the novel is its many topical references to political events and crises and to artistic and political figures who had been quickly forgotten. It is a strange practice, requiring footnotes even for the French reader. It goes to prove that Flaubert’s ideal reader really was a contemporary. He said that he was writing “the moral history of the men of my generation.”

This is the starting point of Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris. After twenty years of being the richest and most powerful world capital, Paris was in ruins. In 1871 the French had been defeated in the Franco-Prussian War and the emperor Napoleon III had been deposed. The Commune of Paris was furiously battling the forces of the French government headquartered at Versailles. While the fighting continued, Flaubert was in constant touch by post with Sand; seventeen years older than Flaubert, she was a socialist of long standing while he had long been staunchly conservative.

When the fighting stopped (and after the Communards had destroyed the Tuileries Palace, the Hôtel de Ville, and many other government structures), Flaubert visited the ruins with Maxime Du Camp, a close friend with whom he had traveled through the Near East between 1849 and 1851. Tourists were already visiting the ruins, which many people admired more than the buildings that had once stood there. Everything was carefully recorded by photographers. Du Camp later recalled:

As we were looking at the blackened carcass of the Tuileries, of the Treasury, of the Palace of the Legion of Honor and I was exclaiming on it, he said to me: “If they had understood L’Education Sentimentale, none of this would have happened.”

The claim was, in one sense, absurdly arrogant. The far-left Communards were not likely to read difficult fiction by a writer who was anything but engagé. After eighteen months, much of the novel’s first printing of three thousand copies was still unsold. Whereas a censorship trial had assured the success of Madame Bovary, no such scandal publicized Sentimental Education.

Then what could Flaubert have meant? As Edmund Wilson once noted, he “seems always to see humanity in social terms and historical perspective.” Ever since the French Revolution, writers and “intellectuals” (a word not yet invented) viewed themselves as participants in history. Before the Revolution, society had changed at a geological pace; after the Revolution there were constant changes in the French government: Napoleon I, the Restoration of the Bourbons in 1814, the July Revolution of 1830 that overthrew Charles X, and the ascent of the “bourgeois king” Louis-Philippe, who ruled until 1848. Then a new republic was declared, with Napoleon’s nephew Louis-Napoleon elected “prince-president.” In a coup d’état four years later he declared himself Emperor Napoleon III and ruled for eighteen years.

What did it mean to be an actor in history? For one thing, it meant that a Parisian such as Frédéric (or Flaubert, who had been born in 1821) could trace his emotional development in parallel to the shifts in national history, just as an American of my age (born in 1940) came of age in the bland 1950s, felt that human nature was changing forever in the exciting 1960s, no longer believed in “human nature” in the 1970s, became cynically materialistic in the 1980s, and so on. I doubt that even Flaubert would claim that his protagonist’s “sentimental education” was in lockstep with the zeitgeist, but he could justifiably argue that Frédéric could not have remained indifferent to coming of age during the reign of Louis-Philippe or living through the revolution of 1848 and the creation of the Second Republic—the period of the major events of the novel, which begins in 1840, when Frédéric is eighteen.

Brooks, who has written extensively about France as well as the mechanics of the novel, here combines the two, as he did in Henry James Goes to Paris (2007). As he points out in his subtle, wonderfully informed book, in Sentimental Education there is “no morally sensitive protagonist in the manner of Henry James’s Lambert Strether or Maggie Verver. That role is passed on to the reader, who must ultimately draw the lessons from the colossal failure of a generation unequal to its rendezvous with history.”

Brooks also draws our attention to the fact that the historical novel, as invented by Walter Scott, took place in the distant medieval past. By contrast, in Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma, Fabrice del Dongo fights at Waterloo. Referring to Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Brooks writes: “As Stendhal’s narrator explicitly tells us, politics has become the context of everyday life in a country excruciatingly aware of an underlying class warfare.” Sound familiar?

Brooks argues that the factual historical novel set in the recent (as opposed to the mythic) past is “to represent, by means of an invented action, the true state of humanity in a past and historical epoch.” If that epoch is fairly recent, an autopsy might reveal how we got to where we are now. Gravity’s Rainbow, by looking at corporations profiting from both sides of World War II, might tell us something about the effect of international business on politics today (Paul Manafort springs to mind). One Hundred Years of Solitude shows us how a people can almost instantly forget a troubling episode (the United Fruit Company’s violence in South America or our war in Vietnam).

This new historical fiction often illustrates the lives of minor characters in the past, so Brooks claims: “The historical novel is not supposed to be merely costume drama or historical flight of fancy. It is meant to get at a kind of truth of everyday life—customs and ways of being—that political histories tend to scant.” In other words, it has the same mission as the Annales historians.

Whereas Gone With the Wind, say, puts modern characters—with contemporary feelings and ambitions—into historical drag, a true historical novel, such as Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower, manages a kind of archaeology of the sentiments. We discover entirely different ideas about religion (pervasive, Lutheran) and the marriageable age for girls (twelve). The end-of-the-year family confession of sins and the hesitation of a poor aristocrat to marry a rich bourgeois girl—this is all strange to us and true to the period in which it is set, nearly two hundred years before it was written. Fitzgerald’s Russian novel, The Beginning of Spring, takes place in 1913 but was written in the 1980s. Once again with admirable authenticity she rendered class relations, the emotions of a dour Tolstoyan, the hospitality of a rich merchant with his array of liqueurs, and so on.

But Flaubert was trying something more difficult. Brooks argues that he wanted to portray the lives of ordinary people, not the renowned. And he adds:

I have suggested that the “realist” novel of the nineteenth century comes about when Balzac shortens the distance between the represented historical moment and the moment of writing—reduces it to some ten or twenty years, looking back from the 1830s and 1840s to the 1820s, so that he is writing about near-contemporary society, attempting to see it in the same totality as the earlier periods represented in the historical novel.

Today many people seem to be disdainful of historical novels, as if they were all costume dramas or invitations to sentimental nostalgia. Perhaps history has sped up so much that there is nothing to learn about where we are now from even the recent past. What can the Beatles and the King assassination tell us about Trump and Avatar? Maybe we prefer to slip into the distant past, an alternative universe that has the advantage at least of not being ours. Maybe that’s why we like the works of Penelope Fitzgerald and Beryl Bainbridge so much.

Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris covers not only the political events of the time but also Flaubert’s tender relationship with George Sand. They had a rich correspondence, which was adapted for the stage by Irene Worth and Peter Eyre twenty years ago. Sand admired Flaubert and wrote one of the few favorable reviews of Sentimental Education, though privately she reproached him for being so unfeeling and ironic with his hero. I’ve noticed that it’s not uncommon for writers to invent characters with ten points fewer of IQ but otherwise based on themselves, characters they proceed to torture for three hundred pages.

Flaubert loved Sand, who combined masculine and feminine qualities; he called her Chère Maître. She wanted him to get married, but he dismissed her “fantastic” suggestion, saying, “There is an ecclesiastical side of me that people don’t know.” He thought of himself as a monk in the service of art.

To please her and to prove that he was a better person than most people thought, he wrote for her his story “A Simple Heart” (Sand died before he finished it). In it a pious, uneducated servant woman, who can picture the Father and the Son but not the Holy Ghost, shifts her affections over the years from the family she works for to a sailor-nephew to the parrot that her employer gives her—and finally, after the parrot dies, to the stuffed parrot itself. When the servant is dying, she sees the gates of heaven opening to reveal the Holy Ghost: her stuffed parrot.

This is the perfect example of progression d’effet, in the way that love, by gradually shifting from one object to another, makes us weep over what sounds like a bad joke: an old lady confuses her parrot with the Holy Ghost. That transformation is, in a sense, the work of the story, just as we could say that the work of Lolita is to turn the story of a scheming pedophile and the girl he exploits into one of the great heartbreaking novels about love, in a direct line of descent from The Princess of Clèves to Adolphe to Anna Karenina. Brooks quite properly observes that far from being the ironic tale of a batty old peasant, “A Simple Heart” is a feeling testament to human goodness—the perfect memorial to Sand.

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There is something somber, spooky, certainly humorless about the salon originally curated by Joséphin Péladan and now recreated in New York’s Guggenheim Museum. Though largely forgotten, this salon of Symbolist painting, sculpture, and graphic and decorative arts was enormously popular in the 1890s and an important step toward the modernist abstraction that was to follow, including the work of such figures as Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian (undoubtedly the reason a museum of modern art like the Guggenheim would be interested in organizing such an exhibition). Symbolism was a movement that rejected concrete reality, science, and positivism in favor of ideas that “are developed into works of art,” as Remy de Gourmont once wrote.

To get a sense of the belief in material progress against which Symbolism was rebelling, we could take a look at a novel, The City and the Mountains, by the Portuguese writer Eça de Queirós, written in the 1890s. The dandified Portuguese hero, Jacinto, born and raised in Paris, tells a rustic Portuguese friend that civilization can exist only in the city:

My super-civilized friend could not even comprehend how nineteenth-century man could possibly savor the delight of living far from the stores employing three thousand cashiers, the markets receiving the produce from the gardens and fields of thirty provinces, the banks clinking with universal gold, the factories frantically spewing out smoke and smart new inventions, the libraries bursting with the paperwork of the centuries, the long miles of streets crisscrossed in all directions by telegraph wires and telephone wires, by gas pipes and sewage pipes, the thunderous lines of buses, trams, carriages, velocipedes, rattletraps, and deluxe coach-and-pairs, and the two million members of its seething wave of humanity, panting as they scrabble to earn their daily bread or under the vain illusion of pleasure.

This is the confident, progressive world the Symbolists were rejecting, the soulless treadmill of urban life.

Although it is difficult to define a particular painting style the salon was encouraging, Péladan (who gave himself the Akkadian royal title “Sâr”) identified many things he was against, including the “theogonies” of “the yellow races,” history paintings, seascapes, landscapes, still lifes, all representations of contemporary private or public life—and of course “all humorous things.” The purpose of his Salon de la Rose+Croix was “to ruin realism” and in its place to “create a school of idealist art.” A striking afterthought: “P.S. Following Magical law, no work by a woman will ever be exhibited or executed” in the salon. Of course some women painters did submit work under male or ambiguous names—and quite a few portraits were done of Péladan himself.

The entire project was inspired as a movement against Impressionism, with its scientific color theories; its interest in everyday life, flowers, beach scenes; its practice of working outdoors rather than in the studio; its inclusion of female painters such as Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt; its commitment to observing rather than moralizing. Péladan, by contrast, saw artists as “saints” who “put their hearts full of God into works that are…sublime.”

Péladan was only thirty-four when he began organizing mystical artists. He had grown up as the son of an occultist in Lyons, which was the center of reactionary occultism. His brother became an alchemist and advanced a Taoist-sounding belief that spiritual development depended on never ejaculating. Joséphin was a conservative Catholic who joined a Rosicrucian sect but broke with them over loyalty to the Church (“Outside the Church, no salvation,” Péladan declared, echoing church doctrine). The Rosicrucians were secretive oddballs who traced their origins back to ancient Egypt or sometimes to a fourteenth-century knight called Rosenkrenz; their modern movement, loosely linked to Masons and Theosophists, was revived in 1888 by the Abbé Boullan, who reportedly sacrificed his own newborn baby during a Black Mass.

After Péladan left the Rosicrucians, he established a sect of his own, L’Ordre de la Rose+Croix du Temple et du Graal, and between 1892 and 1897 organized in its name the six exhibitions of art and music from which the Guggenheim exhibition is drawn. Rosicrucianism has always been kept a mystery, but it is a pseudoscience that combines alchemy, the Kabbala, and the interpretation of words and visual symbols. What the mystical Symbolists derived from it was a rejection of real life in favor of an inner, secret meaning, occult yet universal.

Although the mystical Symbolists were misogynistic, they favored androgyny. They saw men as too angular, women as too soft and unstructured; the androgyne was the ideal combination of both. Jean Delville’s wife, for example, is said to have modeled for the face of Orpheus in his The Death of Orpheus (1893) in this exhibition. Orpheus was a popular mythological figure in this period, representing the seer who transcends death, a notion that appealed to the mystical side of the Symbolists (Cocteau was peddling his version of Orpheus into the middle of the twentieth century).

The Symbolists revered Puvis de Chavannes (who executed the murals for the Panthéon in Paris—with their bleached colors, classical scenes, and simple, rhythmic compositions) and Gustave Moreau (who turned his house into a temple of his own art, with thousands of examples full of biblical female sadists like Salomé and Judith and male masochists like the crucified Jesus and Saint Sebastian). These earlier painters had nothing in common in technique but shared a taste for remote subjects. Chavannes stood for a melancholy paganism, whereas Moreau represented a hectic cast of biblical characters.

The late, Polynesian Gauguin was also an inspiration, partly because his images and their written captions were literally symbols, drawn from a mythology approvingly deemed “primitive,” and partly because of his use, after his return from his first Tahiti trip, of woodcuts. This long-forgotten technique, quickly taken up by other Symbolists, reduced the illusionistic details of an image to the bare minimum—flattening perspective and simplifying color—and openly announced its working methods. No longer was an image a creamy imitation of nature but rather the harsh invention of the artist.

The visitor will discover many unfamiliar names among the painters represented at the Guggenheim; some of these will enjoy a revival, based on their originality and talent. The strongest canvases are those by the Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler (The Disappointed Souls), Jean Delville (The Idol of Perversity), Henri Martin (Young Saint), Alphonse Osbert (Vision), and especially Charles Maurin (The Dawn of Labor). Hodler, usually associated with his mountainscapes, in this instance gives us five defeated-looking men, rendered with Michelangelesque muscularity. Hodler didn’t really have much in common with the others and he may have joined the group as an act of self-promotion. Delville’s Idol of Perversity has a radiant crown, trance-like eyes, dangerously pointy breasts—inarguably a fatal femme fatale. If she is pure evil, then Martin’s and Osbert’s young women are pure peasant good.

Maurin’s painting, the best in the show, is a vast allegory—but of what is not certain (vengeful miners is one possibility). There are many figures in the mysterious Dawn of Labor—including naked men, women, and children. The largest is a woman striding forward, squeezing her own breast, a child clinging to her. Behind her is a woman seated backward on a horse, holding tools that look like a hammer and a dagger. A greenish, full-fleshed woman with her hair in an androgynous bob seems to be rising out of the swamp. The miners in revolt are on the crest of the hill in the background; the red flag they hold aloft was a symbol of anarcho-communism during this period. (See illustration on page 68.)

The Symbolists prized obscurity. The poet Jean Moréas, who first named Symbolism, said “the fundamental nature of symbolic art means never going so far as to conceive directly the Idea itself.” Maurin, like Hodler, was Swiss. He taught Félix Valloton; they were both interested in printmaking, which obviously influenced Maurin’s painting, with its intricate marquetry of detail. He was also under the spell of the painter and poster-maker Toulouse-Lautrec. Like Toulouse-Lautrec, Maurin imitated the way Japanese prints cropped their subjects (as the man gnawing his own hands is truncated at the waist in the lower middle of the vast allegory). Maurin, like other Symbolists (and unlike the Impressionists), was influenced by literature; in subtitles to his mysterious paintings he cited Rimbaud and Baudelaire.

What is clear is that all five paintings listed above present large, bold, unforgettable images and that in all five line predominates over color—none could be accused of recreating everyday reality. No wonder the Sâr declared, “A nightmare out of Poe, that’s art,” and, given all the symbols of evil and sanctity, he announced, “Masterpieces are all religious, even those done by non-believers.” If Impressionism suggests (erroneously) that France is a country of endless sunshine, populated by tender mothers and rosy-cheeked babies and bright flowers or young, happy couples dancing, boating, or picnicking, then mystical Symbolism would have us believe that its images come out of an austere, wintry land of cruel fanatics and decadent royalty. (“Make room for hysteria, make room for neurosis!” declared the first issue of a Symbolist magazine in 1885.)

Péladan was a man of strong opinions. For instance, in one volume called Istar of his twenty-volume novel, Latin Decadence, he berates people from the French provinces as scarcely human compared to the enlightened Parisians:

The provincial never becomes civilized: in his land-owner’s belly he lodges the rudimentary soul of a barbarian. Without meaning to, you disturb his few ideas; and too skeptical to believe in the moral superiority of someone who’s not like him, in not admiring you he will despise you.

Here he sounds like Eça de Queirós, but for opposite reasons; the Sâr is touting the Parisian’s spiritual value, whereas Jacinto feels he is materially advanced.

Péladan was an amazingly prolific author, writing numerous plays and haranguing French publications that ignored or criticized him. When he published his “Novelistic Drama in Five Acts,” The Prince of Byzantium, he was careful to point out—bitterly, one supposes—that it was turned down by the Odéon Theater and by the Comédie-Française, two state-run theaters. Wagner was his idol, whom he ranked with Bach and Beethoven. He published a book on Wagner, giving extensive synopses of all eleven operas, and dedicated it to Judith Gautier, the daughter of the Romantic poet Théophile Gautier and, briefly, Wagner’s mistress. (Her paintings were shown with the Symbolists under a male name.) The Sâr informs us that in Wagner “poetry and music for the first time form a single expression,” which naturally is “androgynous.” To a French archbishop is attributed the remark that the prelude to Lohengrin was brought to earth by angels. The pro-Symbolist Revue wagnérienne, the best of the era’s numerous, short-lived “little magazines,” was published in Paris from 1885 to 1888.

Péladan’s only criticism of Wagner concerns Die Meistersinger, since it is a comedy (“this German realism, a little heavy”): “For an aesthete, comedy is an inferior art.” Of course the summit of Wagner’s art—or anyone’s, Péladan argues—is Parsifal, which Péladan links to the Rosicrucians (the Good Friday Spell from Parsifal is the music playing in the background of the Guggenheim’s exhibition). Much as he admired music, he thought it was inferior to words, which are better suited for rendering ideas. (Péladan contended that Wagner had been led astray by Schopenhauer’s theory that music, being a pure expression of Will, is superior to literature.) In the 1880s and 1890s, Wagnerism had become a religion throughout Europe, much to Nietzsche’s chagrin, the art that had replaced traditional religion. Parsifal even had the Holy Grail and the spear that pierced Christ’s side, Tristan und Isolde had a love philtre, and the Ring Cycle had Nordic heroes, warrior maidens, a magic ring, and the fall of the gods. At the Rose+Croix salon, a fanfare by Erik Satie was performed; Satie also wrote the incidental music for one of Péladan’s plays, though soon enough the two men fell out (perhaps Péladan didn’t at first suspect Satie’s satirical side). Some Symbolists were so taken with music that they gave opus numbers and dynamic markings to their canvases.

Wagner was presented by Péladan and his associates as a cornerstone of Symbolism, especially owing to his idea of a total artwork, Gesamtkunstwerk, one that would combine literature, painting, music, and all the other arts. Certainly his reimagining of mythology, as if it were a living counterpart to our experience rather than a long-forgotten curiosity, had an influence on these pictures of angels, the Holy Grail, demons, and Hades. The idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk may have met a cultural dead end in the 1890s, but it has been successfully revived by Robert Wilson and visual artists like Rebecca Horn, who works with sound, lights, structures, performance art, and poetry.

Decorative arts acquired a new status among the Symbolists. Several of them (like Georges de Feure) went on from making their own ingenious hand-painted picture frames to creating furniture and porcelain in the later Art Nouveau style. Ville Vallgren, also represented at the Guggenheim, designed a funeral urn in bronze. In general, the evolution toward the decorative and ornamental revealed the Symbolists’ interest in what was broadly human rather than quirkily personal, in the tribal rather than the individualistic. (Their figures are rarely recognizable people.) The ban on portraiture and the anecdotal erased the border between painting and decoration, just as it had in classical Muslim interiors and ancient Egyptian tombs. The decorative was no longer subsidiary to the fine art of painting; the two domains blended into each other in what was seen as a triumphant unity.

It seems the pendulum is always swinging back and forth between the idealistic and the realistic, between the spiritual and the material, and in the nineteenth century the two often get intertwined in pseudoscience (mesmerism, phrenology, Lombroso’s positivist criminology, spiritualism). The enthusiasm for science, industry, and invention give way to spirituality, arts and crafts, and medievalism. In the nineteenth century dandyism, decadence, and symbolism were usually associated with reactionary politics, though often the wires got crossed. Huysmans, the author of the bible of decadence, Against the Grain, the very book Dorian Gray is reading in Oscar Wilde’s novel, started out as a naturalist, following the example of Zola, but once he embarked on his “scientifically” documented portrait of his protagonist, Jean Des Esseintes, he was bewitched by his subject and became a Decadent himself (and converted to Catholicism). The poster for the fifth Rose+Croix salon showed a triumphant female figure holding aloft the severed head of Zola, an emblem of the victory of the imagination over documentation.

In America, perhaps because of puritanism, Symbolists avoided femmes fatales, hags from hell, and overactive devils. Nostalgia and dream-like states predominated, a subjectivity made objective, and artists became fascinated by the unconscious. Albert Ryder, for example, seems to have been a genuine American eccentric, mostly immune to outside influences, but he did travel to Europe four times, and his paintings of ships at night and sword-wielding horseback riders do seem an American equivalent to the mystical Symbolists in Belgium, England, and France. The doctrine of “art for art’s sake” and a corresponding rejection of “message” was advanced by Symbolism, an important step toward abstraction.

The Symbolists were associated with Félicien Rops, Edvard Munch, Gustav Klimt, and other major artists. Resistant to industrialization and technology, the end of religion, and the decline of the agricultural past, the Symbolists retreated into the realm of mythology and dreams. Simultaneously, they made advances in the use of photography and printmaking. Though this important show at the Guggenheim, curated by Vivien Greene, seems like a return to the Decadent past, in reality it marks a transition toward modern art.

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Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) was a controversial figure, during his life and now. He is the subject of Claude Arnaud’s magisterial and definitive biography, now translated from the French. Cocteau once told of someone placing a chameleon on a piece of plaid to keep it warm; except for the fact that the chameleon soon died of exhaustion, one could say he was that chameleon, a friend and defender of the bantamweight champion Panama Al Brown and just as intimate with Barbette, a transvestite high-wire artist from Texas. Cocteau was a poet and a sensationally successful playwright and cinema director (perhaps best known today for his masterpiece Beauty and the Beast). He admired his own long, white, nervous hands and had them frequently photographed. He was so productive that people said he was as many-handed as the Hindu god Vishnu—another idea for a picture of his hands and several additional ones.

Cocteau loved famous friends and would even swallow their insults masochistically. Picasso was certainly his most famous friend; it was Cocteau who had convinced him to design sets for the ballet Parade during World War I, a step that had cemented his international reputation. Cocteau admitted that meeting Picasso was the major encounter of his life. But years later when Picasso was safely off in Barcelona he gave an indiscreet interview in Spanish, assuming it would never get back to Paris:

Cocteau is a thinking machine. His drawings are pleasant; his literature is journalistic. If they made newspapers for intellectuals, Cocteau would serve up a new dish every day, an elegant about-face. If he could sell his talent, we could spend our whole lives going to the pharmacy to buy some Cocteau pills, and we still wouldn’t manage to exhaust his talent.

Cocteau was so distressed when this interview was translated into French in L’Intransigeant that he thought all the young artists he was trying to impress would suddenly doubt that he’d ever been Picasso’s intimate. Surprisingly, he thought these words were a real blow to his prestige. That his writings were “journalistic”! That his work was like “a new dish” or a “pill”!

Cocteau dashed off a letter to his mother, in which he invoked the family Catholicism, though he was nonpracticing (only much later, in 1924, would he make his spectacular conversion back to Catholicism as an adept of the theologian Jacques Maritain, though two years later Maritain published a letter announcing their rupture.) Cocteau wrote to his mother:

My dear, yesterday I received the hardest blow of my life…. Picasso expressed himself about me as only my worst enemies would…. I didn’t throw myself off the balcony only because of you and the Church…. I think I’ll never have the strength to come back to the city…. Pray for me. I’m suffering atrociously.

But then Cocteau had an inspiration. The Spanish were such idiots that they could have easily confused the name of the much less important painter Picabia with Picasso. Yes, he could tell everyone Picabia had said those terrible things about him. Soon afterward, during an intermission at the theater, Cocteau’s mother came swarming up to Picasso and told him that she and her son had been so comforted to discover that the horrible interview hadn’t been given by him. Then she asked Picasso directly, “It wasn’t you, was it?” Picasso’s Russian wife Olga, who was very fond of Cocteau, took pity on him and said, “No, it wasn’t him.”

Cocteau was born in the quiet, wealthy Paris suburb of Maisons-Laffitte in 1889, a few hours before the Eiffel Tower, that bold symbol of the modern, was inaugurated. It was a town devoted to horse racing. He came from a prosperous Catholic family of stockbrokers and notaries. His father committed suicide when Jean (the youngest of three children) was only eight; he didn’t leave a note behind but there are reasons to think he might have been homosexual. Cocteau was raised by his self-dramatizing mother and a German nanny. (He could speak German and right after World War I he surprised everyone by bringing out an anthology of German poetry—a palm branch extended to the enemy.) As Arnaud observes, “Not a word, not a regret, not even an allusion would recall—throughout their entire, abundant correspondence—the memory of the suicide. Did mother and son secretly take advantage of the father’s disappearance?”

Although he went to the elite Condorcet high school, where Proust had studied as well as the Goncourt brothers and a whole regiment of celebrities, and where Jean-Paul Sartre would teach philosophy, Cocteau was an indifferent student, remarkable for his lack of application. He who would become one of the two or three most brilliant conversationalists of his day and was curious about everything, from dance to religion to painting to poetry, evidenced none of this mental agility in school.

Cocteau, however, was precocious and enterprising and he arranged to have his poems published while he was still in his teens. His second collection was called, fatally, The Frivolous Prince, a name that stuck. In it we read:

Disdainful, frivolous and slender,
Daydreaming and childish,
I was born to be a prince,
A little prince in exile.

Cocteau arranged to have his poems read out loud by Édouard de Max, one of the leading actors of the day, in a theater to just a few hundred intimate friends. De Max was such a notorious homosexual that, as Cocteau recalled years later, his mother’s friends would say to her, “Your son knows de Max, he is lost.” The extravagantly dressed de Max would motor around Paris every afternoon with Cocteau and other high school boys as passengers.

Proust tried to warn Cocteau, who was two decades younger, that mixing with society people and frequenting their salons and dazzling them with his chatter would destroy his talent. Proust was shocked by how blasé the adolescent Cocteau had already become; he was, he said, like someone who’d nibbled on marrons glacés all day on New Year’s Eve and had no appetite left for real food. As Arnaud puts it, “Then life brought Proust back to his masterpiece, and Cocteau back to his flight into society.”

During World War I Cocteau, who was judged too weak to serve in the army, went to battle anyway in a uniform designed by Paul Poiret, the leading couturier of the day, and joined an ambulance corps where he met a fake officer (the inspiration of Cocteau’s insouciant war novel, Thomas the Imposter). Cocteau must have cut quite a figure in his chic uniform and heavy makeup. (The Comtesse de Chevigné, the main model for Proust’s Duchesse de Guermantes, once forbade Cocteau to kiss her lapdog: “You’ll get face powder on his nose!”) He struck his comrades as courageous and merry as bombs exploded on every side.

He smoked opium most of his life, as did many of his well-heeled friends. Colette, his celebrated and hard-working neighbor in the Palais-Royal, wrote about the smart opium set in her book The Pure and the Impure (though there is no evidence she was a user—nor did she write about Cocteau in that book). Cocteau loved to visit Colette and has left an indelible portrait of her:

Between the dust-cloud of her hair and the scarf knotted around her neck, set in that triangular face with its pointed nose and its mouth like a circumflex accent, were eyes of a lioness at the zoo who becomes the audience instead of the show, watching those who watch her, with folded paws, and a sovereign disdain.

Colette also wrote memorably about Cocteau in her World War II memoir, “Paris From My Window,” in which she described his apartment in the Palais Royal:

It’s just right for a man of the theater, since in order to reach his room, the daylight has to touch the pavement below and reflect back up under the arches, like footlights. If you happen to glance up as you pass by, you may see…even the author himself, with his tuft of frizzled hair, his greyhound leanness, his shirt-sleeves rolled back from hands with veins like branching vines.

Although Proust and Cocteau should have been friends (both homosexual, both fascinated by society, both famous writers, both sons of the rich bourgeoisie), Cocteau was often exasperated by the older and wiser but frailer Proust. Once toward the end of World War I Cocteau was reading a book-length poem to friends. They had assembled at ten and waited for Proust, who only arrived at midnight (because of his asthma he had to wait till the dust in the streets had settled). As Arnaud writes:

Suddenly, at midnight, Proust finally arrived, with a naturalness bordering on off-handedness. “Get out, Marcel, you’re spoiling my reading!” shouted Cocteau, with a virulence unusual for him. Then followed a cycle of letters and protests, reproaches and justifications, at the end of which Proust would accuse Cocteau “of being, beneath all the appearances of a young poet, an old dandy….” Proust then confided to a friend: “If I had Jean’s talent—something I’d like very much—I don’t think I’d attach any importance to my work, and even less to its reading.”

Proust was accompanied by the handsome bisexual American Walter Berry, whom both Edith Wharton and Henry James were infatuated with. Cocteau was very anxious because he had changed his manner from the transparence and charm of his early poems to something much more “modern” and difficult, dedicated to the heroic pilot Roland Garros and influenced by the experimental work of his new friend Guillaume Apollinaire. The society ladies were puzzled and confused; few had seen Cocteau since the beginning of the war. Now that the war was over, he had “molted” into something new, as his friends Stravinsky and Picasso would do so often in their long careers. The poem, called The Cape of Good Hope, was a flop.

It seemed that from one day to the next Cocteau had changed his graceful Symbolist style for something like Futurism, celebrating steel, propellers, and war. He was reading in his new machine-gun delivery in the stifling heat of mid-August; his audience was visibly wilting. Cocteau was furious at Proust for being so late and deflecting the audience’s attention. There followed an exchange of letters; to a friend Proust said that even though Cocteau was a young brilliant poet, he was acting like an old narcissist (“un vieux beau”)—like Robert de Montesquiou, the original model of Charlus.

Cocteau (people said his name was the plural of “cocktail”) wanted above all to be avant-garde. He was very taken by the Ballets Russes and its impresario Sergei Diaghilev and star male dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. It was Diaghilev who stopped one day on the Champs-Elysées and said to him, “Astonish me!” As Arnaud adds, “The impresario obviously meant: ‘Don’t imitate us, stop wanting to please us, become what you are.’” Cocteau liked nothing more than these arbitrary, imperious orders; soon he had conceived and plotted out a ballet, Parade, with Picasso’s sets and Erik Satie’s music. Now, in 1917, he had his own “scandal” to rival the earlier 1913 Rite of Spring Stravinsky-Nijinsky “scandal,” during which the audience became so violent, resorting to fisticuffs, that the stage manager had to raise the house lights.

Parade had a strange assortment of characters: a Chinese man, a little girl, an acrobat, stage managers, and an anonymous voice crying into loudspeakers. Making the ballet sound like a John Cage–Merce Cunningham work avant la lettre, Cocteau wrote in a 1917 essay that later appeared in his collection Rappel à l’ordre, “Their dance was an organized accident, false steps that were prolonged and alternated with the discipline of a fugue.” Picasso did the Cubist sets and the curtain. Satie refused to adapt his existing music; he composed a brand-new score. To make it more “scandalous,” Cocteau added foghorns and typewriters to the orchestra. In writing the program notes Apollinaire invented the word “surrealism,” three years before the artistic movement began.

One of the young soldiers at his poetry reading who refused to praise him—and who walked out on his recitation—was André Breton, who eventually became the “pope” of Surrealism. He and his friends despised Cocteau, partly because they were hostile to all homosexuals, and partly because they disliked his particular brand of classical references and high-class kitsch. Cocteau was very “right bank,” with his titled ladies and couturiers and opium dreams; the Surrealists drew on a mixture of communism and Freudianism and left-bank bohemianism. Breton also despised writing, once his idol, Duchamp, had given up making art. As Arnaud puts it, he “dreamed of destroying literature, and so focused his aim at a man who could never do without it.” Until the Surrealists sputtered out after World War II (Breton sat out the war in New York), they were invariably hostile to Cocteau, even though he had probably invented Surrealism.

Cocteau was a master of the autobiographical essay. His essays are at once wonderfully intimate and revealing and philosophical. Opium is a journal kept during a detoxification cure and contains the memorable entry: “Picasso said that the smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world. You could compare it only to the smell of a circus or of a seaport.” He wrote it during a hospitalization in 1928 and it is scarcely a denunciation of the drug and its “euphoria superior to health.” More practically he tells us that the first sign of getting off opium is a return of sexuality as well as yawning, sneezing, and the production of snot and tears.

He also tells us that everything one does in life if one is not smoking opium is headed toward death, has to do with dying or death, whereas opium addiction is something else, a way of getting off the “train” that’s death-bound. Cocteau drew constantly while writing the book; he said, “Writing, for me, is to draw, to tie the lines together in such a way as to turn them into writing or to untie them so that the writing becomes drawing.”

In 1919 he met a brilliant young novelist, the fifteen-year-old Raymond Radiguet. Just as the nineteenth-century encounter between Paul Verlaine and the teenage Arthur Rimbaud changed the life and the poetry of the older, married Verlaine, in the same way Cocteau fell half in love with the myopic boy, who (like Rimbaud) was the dominant partner, both artistically and psychologically. Despite Radiguet’s inconvenient heterosexuality, he was willing to sleep (just sleep) with the infatuated Cocteau, and it is no accident that Cocteau’s most inspired collection of poetry, Plain Song, is about lying, pensive and awake, next to the sleeping beloved; Radiguet once bragged in his diary that he never “refused” himself to anyone. He couldn’t help it, could he, if his body didn’t happen to respond to a man?

The intellectual union between a prodigy and an experienced Parisian fourteen years his senior was very productive, and Arnaud calls it one of the richest collaborations in history. Both writers decided to submit to the influence of novels of the distant past that observed with restraint the workings of the passions—La Princesse de Clèves, Les Liaisons dangereuses, and Adolphe. Radiguet produced the impeccable The Devil in the Flesh and Cocteau eventually wrote his tragedy about brother–sister love, Les Enfants terribles (sometimes translated as The Holy Terrors). This short novel is chaste in its form and its language but transgressive in its sympathetic picture of brother–sister incest and the profligate, whimsical life of rich teenage orphans—a formula for tragic disaster. It made a splendid movie with a score by Bach and starring one of Cocteau’s boyfriends, Édouard Dermit, who’d been a coal miner before becoming a film actor. As Arnaud mentions, Cocteau attributed everything good to his young acolyte:

The pair’s influence on each other was reversed in Cocteau’s mind. He was convinced that his early advice—“Be ordinary, write like everyone else,” had in fact been uttered by Radiguet, probably because he had made better use of it than Cocteau.

Despite his literary success, Radiguet drank a bottle of whiskey and of gin every day; he contracted typhoid fever and died at age twenty leaving behind nine hundred pages of fiction, including the unfinished Count d’Orgel’s Ball, which Cocteau trimmed by 9 percent and spruced up with his natural gift for epigrams. Coco Chanel and the great patron of the ballet Misia Sert arranged for the funeral of Radiguet—all in white, the color consecrated to dead newborns and children. White coffin, white suit, white horses. For years afterward Cocteau was inconsolable; jeering enemies called him le veuf sur le toit, “the widow on the roof,” after the hotspot where Cocteau’s crowd dined and drank, Le Boeuf sur le Toit (The Ox on the Roof).

Cocteau’s memoir, The Difficulty of Being, has memorable pages on his eccentricities as well as his style:

I attach no importance to what people call style and by which they like to think they can recognize an author. I want people to recognize my ideas or, better, my way of doing things. I want to make myself understood in the briefest way possible. I’ve noticed that when a story doesn’t connect with the mind it’s because it can be read too rapidly, the slope is too slippery. That’s why in this book I contort my style….

He wrote this book in the late 1940s, after directing his successful movie, Beauty and the Beast, under wartime and postwar deprivations and while suffering from a painful skin disease. The title of the memoir is an echo of the eighteenth-century philosopher Bernard de Fontenelle’s remark to his doctor when he was dying at nearly age one hundred, “I’m feeling a certain difficulty of being.” He draws verbal portraits of famous friends and also, like Montaigne, dissects himself, even his looks:

I’ve always had my hair growing every which way, my teeth and the hairs of my beard as well. It must be that my nerves and my whole soul grow that way too. That’s why I’m so hard to figure out for people who go all in one way and can scarcely conceive of a colic. That’s what upsets those people who can’t cure me of my mythological leprosy. They don’t know by which end to grab me.

A glance at a chronology of Cocteau’s life, as compiled by Arnaud, reveals how hard he worked and how constantly and in how many media. For instance, he spent the month of February 1938 in Montargis with his lover, the movie star Jean Marais; there he wrote in eight days the play Les Parents terribles (it was produced in 1995 on Broadway as Indiscretions, starring Jude Law, Kathleen Turner, Eileen Atkins, and Cynthia Nixon). The following September he wrote a long poem dedicated to Jean Marais. On November 14, Les Parents terribles was premiered; it was forbidden at its original theater—it deals with mother–son incest—but it was a triumph when it opened at a second theater. The play was published in 1939. All this was the work of just one year.

In 1940 he not only wrote a play, Sacred Monsters, but also a one-act curtain-raiser, The Handsome Indifferent Man, which was a revised version of The Human Voice. This time the woman, who is pleading with her lover not to leave her, is talking directly to him, not on the phone as in the original. And now the role was assumed by Edith Piaf. He went for another opium detox. And he published a new book of poems and Sacred Monsters. The next year he wrote The Typewriter, a play, and a verse drama based on Tristan and Isolde as well as publishing two collections of poetry. When he couldn’t write he drew. As Arnaud puts it:

Though Cocteau needed to immerse himself [in the works of others], it was his own universe that he served. He produced Verlaine-like poems, a film that could be described as Surrealist, a Sartrean play, yet he can always be recognized in the least of his phrases or poems: flitting from branch to branch, chirping here and dancing there, but always in the same tree.

Cocteau had always wanted to write a novel about homosexuals, but he decided to wait until his mother’s death. She died in 1943 and he’d already been “scooped” by yet another of his discoveries, the thief and jailbird Jean Genet, who was already publishing Our Lady of the Flowers, a masterful account of Divine, one of the first drag queens in literature. Cocteau could console himself with Le Livre blanc, a rather tame gay book he had already published anonymously in the 1920s; but to the degree that the story was mild, the illustrations (added two years later in a second edition) were sulphurous—and acknowledged by Cocteau as his own work. “People have said that The White Notebook was my work. I suppose that’s the reason why you have asked me to illustrate it and for which I have accepted,” Cocteau coyly wrote in an open letter to the publisher.

Cocteau was a great impresario, the soul of generosity, capable of sponsoring younger, usually male talents. He was a man of excess—a nonstop talker, a passionate if short-lived Catholic convert, a drug addict, a devoted friend who was often lonely. His record as an anti-Nazi is ambiguous. During the war, one reason for his cooperating occasionally with the Germans was that the French fascist collaborators (of the Céline sort) were so hostile to him and Jean Marais, throwing ink on the actor during a performance of Britannicus and beating up the two of them one night on the Champs-Élysées. In order to win them some protection in high places, he wrote a positive article about Hitler’s favorite sculptor, Arno Breker, who was having an exhibit at the Orangerie. To be fair, Cocteau had known Breker since the sculptor studied in Paris in the 1920s, and he chose to be buried twenty years after the war under a statue by Breker. He remained postwar friends with Breker and his wife. But many left-wing French friends condemned Cocteau for praising the favorite of Hitler, who’d imprisoned and slaughtered so many of their friends.

Cocteau was notoriously criticized by André Gide, the Surrealists, and Catholics like François Mauriac (especially, as Arnaud makes clear, after Cocteau abandoned his spectacular conversion to the church in order to return to boys and opium). But he and Marais were idolized by the public, especially after Marais starred in a glossy wartime film The Eternal Return for which Cocteau wrote the script (it was a semi-mythical update of Tristan and Isolde). It is shot in sumptuous black and white but the acting is stiff and Cocteau’s scenario is portentous. Hordes of teenage girls lingered in the courtyard of the Palais-Royal hoping to get a glimpse of the movie star or even of their pet dog Moulouk. In fact, Cocteau and Marais were the first well-known gay couple in the world, though Cocteau was reluctant to pronounce the dreaded word “homosexual.”

Cocteau knew Sarah Bernhardt, the leading actress of the 1890s, as well as Andy Warhol in the 1960s. (Andy was a fervent admirer of this early genius of self-promotion.) His life was long and fruitful. He is perhaps most highly regarded today for his movie Beauty and the Beast, his screenplay for and narration of Les Enfants terribles, his book-length poem Plain Song, and his Portraits-Souvenirs. Like Colette, he never wrote a bad line or great book—his excellence was honored when he was made, improbably, a member of the august French Academy, just as she was the first woman received into the Belgian Academy. The beloved, hard-living legend Edith Piaf died just before Cocteau—just long enough for him to fire off his homage in carefully selected words before he expired.

Gide thought Cocteau was silly, and certainly his very virtuosity made him suspect. Gertrude Stein ridiculed his homoerotic drawings. The playwright Jean Giraudoux deplored his slick plays of the sort the French call “boulevard.” He was an intolerably brilliant conversationalist and in other ways exactly what the English, for instance, hate about the French—nimble, a constant source of paradoxes and ironies, a Jacques of all métiers.

The post The High Wire of Jean Cocteau appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

In his review of recent books on the campaign for marriage equality [“I Do, I Do,” NYR, August 14], Edmund Wilson makes misleading statements about my testimony in California’s Prop 8 case. First, he writes that my testimony “lost steam when he had to admit that his degree from Warwick University was granted not for his study of marriage or families, but of nineteenth-century cabinetmakers.” That’s an odd way to put it! I never stated or tried to pretend otherwise, and my academic career (such as it was) was part of the court and public record from the beginning.

More importantly, to justify his assertion that on the witness stand I “ended up expressing ideas that helped the pro-marriage equality side,” Wilson offers a long quotation from me, without attribution. What he omits to say is that the quotation comes from a book I’d written three years earlier that, again, was part of the court and public record from the beginning.

Probably the single most often-repeated and well-known “fact” about my testimony at the trial was that I “ended up” confessing the equal dignity of homosexual love as a result of the cross-examination of David Boies. But it’s not a fact at all. I’d written these sentences already, and when Boies said them back to me (without attribution) and asked me if I agreed with them, I answered that I agreed with them when I’d written them and that I agree with them currently.

These may seem like small details of interest mainly to me, but they do illustrate a larger trend. So often today, what someone in the public eye actually says doesn’t matter nearly as much as who’s able to control the after-the-fact spinning and legend-creating. What Wilson says here perpetuates this phenomenon. Relatedly, in today’s culture-war climate, many people, apparently including Wilson, simply aren’t prepared to believe that someone testifying as an expert witness would say, on purpose and not as a result of duress, that both sides have good points to make.

David Blankenhorn
President, Institute for American Values
New York City

Edmund White replies:

David Blankenhorn seems to have confused me with the late, great Edmund Wilson (so much for scholarly attention to detail). Nor does he seem to grasp that though he was presented as a witness for the anti-gay team, his remarks and writings actually strengthened the case for marriage equality.

The post How He Helped Marriage Equality appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

How many great writers of the last 150 years have turned out to be gay! In England they range from Oscar Wilde to Virginia Woolf to Christopher Isherwood to Alan Hollinghurst (though Wilde’s grandson once told me that Oscar should be considered “bisexual”); in France, from André Gide to Marcel Proust to Jean Genet to François Mauriac; in America, James Baldwin and Willa Cather and Hart Crane and Henry James and Walt Whitman and Gertrude Stein; in Germany, Thomas Mann and Stefan George; in Russia, Mikhail Kuzmin; and in Belgium, Georges Eekhoud.

It used to be a familiar practice among the self-hating homosexuals of my youth in the 1950s to list the greats in history who were gay, which both promoted them and discredited them in our eyes, so low was our self-esteem (“Leonard Bernstein? Oh, her, I’ve had huh”). But the more we read the letters and diaries of the artistic geniuses of the past, the more we discover that they were often either practicing or repressed homosexuals, which isn’t so odd, since homosexuality, given a chance, is a natural choice of a large part of our species. But it was such shameful, even criminal behavior for so long that it could become an obsession, and obsessions focus powers of observation, as Proust argued.

In The Master Colm Tóibín brilliantly dramatized the inner life of a closet queen, Henry James, who arguably never passed to the act. Tóibín has his ringmaster of “supersubtle fry” never even think about his dreadful temptations; it’s fascinating to watch him veer away from any overly clear sexual impulse. E.M. Forster seems to have been much more conscious of his suppressed (rather than repressed) desires, though he was thirty-seven before he got laid. In Howards End a character famously declares, “Only connect,” and Forster seems to have tried to live by that creed. In several novels he also declared that love truly is eternal, a surprisingly optimistic idea from such a disabused man.

Forster came to the expression of his urges late and after much fretting, which is the subject of Damon Galgut’s beautifully written Arctic Summer (the name of a novel Forster started but never finished). In 1906 he had fallen in love with a handsome, tall Indian grand bourgeois, Syed Ross Masood, a seventeen-year-old future Oxford undergraduate whom he tutored in Latin. Masood had a romantic, poetic view of friendship and confused his tutor by making constant avowals of his love. Alas, the two men had very different notions about what these words meant. Finally Morgan, as we shall call Forster’s character in Galgut’s novel based on the writer’s life, wrote in his diary, “He is not that sort—no one whom I like seems to be.”

I remember once having an old Indian, a regional minister of education, to dinner. I asked him if he had ever known Nehru and he replied, “I met a man and I fell in love.” Our eyebrows all shot up, but his son later explained to me that in the flowery language of his generation that just meant they were fast friends.

When Forster’s feelings for Masood weren’t reciprocated, even though he made a trip to India to cement the relationship, the Englishman found himself, during World War I, falling in love with a tramway conductor in Alexandria, where he’d been given war work as a “searcher” (someone who located missing wounded British soldiers). The young man (also heterosexual), named Mohammed el-Adl, was more obliging sexually than Masood, possibly because he was poorer. Outside the scope of Galgut’s novel lies Forster’s final, more satisfying love with a married English policeman named Bob Buckingham.

Whereas a biography might treat Forster’s homosexuality as something peripheral, in Galgut’s novel it is definitive. Morgan goes to India in search of a man, and ultimately his greatest novel, A Passage to India (a name derived from another homosexual’s Leaves of Grass), is the fruit of his two longish stays on the subcontinent. Although there is nothing homosexual in the book, he took years away from completing it in order to write Maurice, his unpublished (and unpublishable) homosexual romance (it was eventually published in 1971, a year after his death). He also wrote a few posthumously published short stories that had some mild homosexual content.

Galgut shows how Morgan’s desires played into his travels and his literary production—and shows it in a way that no biography could do without lots of those reprehensible sentences such as “He must have felt…” or “Inevitably he would have thought….” Throughout Arctic Summer there is a lot of intelligent analysis, a tracing of the stages Morgan (the character) goes through. The novel begins with his first journey to India in 1912. Another passenger is a British army man named Seawright who is heading for Lahore where, he confides, “the Pathans are a breed of young savages, and I intend to make friends with many of them.” The prissy Morgan is alarmed by the man’s assumptions. Seawright gloats with Morgan over nude photos of Sicilian adolescents by the German Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden. Seawright says, “And look at his sultry cock, angled to the left at about forty-five degrees. It’s a real beauty.”

Morgan has never before participated in such a frank and literally shameless conversation. For him “the world of Eros remained a flickering internal pageant.” The whole encounter translates itself into “the beginnings of a story.” We learn that for Morgan “there were times when lust felt like a kind of idealism”—that is, all his nobler sympathies were ignited by passion. For instance, he is infuriated by British racism in India and the condescending presumptions of empire—but his physical attraction to the “natives” raises troubling questions for his politics.

In India Morgan has to face the fact that his lust for Masood is not reciprocated. After two and a half weeks together, he tries to kiss his friend. “In the fizzing white burn of the lamp-light, his friend’s face had been at first astonished, and then shocked,” Galgut writes.

His hand had come up sharply, to push Morgan away, and that little movement had felt enormous, a force that could move a boulder. Morgan had accepted the refusal, because he’d known in advance it would come, and sat miserably over his kernel of loneliness.

Simultaneously Morgan is becoming more and more aware of the political tensions in India—between Muslims and Hindus and between Indians and the British. He perceives these conflicts in Masood, whose “political musings” back in England “had always had a theatrical quality, as if he were performing his beliefs rather than feeling them.”

While in India, Morgan becomes aware that for a Brit to befriend a wog is considered eccentric—which becomes one of the major themes in A Passage to India. Forster’s young Englishwoman, Adela, newly arrived in India and engaged to marry a British officer, wants to become intimate with Indians—as Forster himself did—and she is worried that she will become rude to them in a year, as she has heard every colonial does. All the seasoned Brits tell her that it’s impossible to befriend an Indian and that she will soon get over her naive enthusiasms. The English are portrayed as narrow-minded bigots, with few exceptions.

Masood gets married. He treats Morgan shabbily. Finally in a letter Morgan explodes: “You can now go to hell as far as I’m concerned.”

Forster himself, by our lights, could be quite incorrect politically. In Howards End Leonard Bast’s wife makes grammatical mistakes that prove she is hopelessly stupid. In A Passage to India he generalizes constantly about the “Oriental,” which can make us squirm: “Like most Orientals, Aziz overrated hospitality, mistaking it for intimacy, and not seeing it is tainted with the sense of possession.” Of a physically superb servant plying a fan in a courtroom, Forster writes:

Almost naked, and splendidly formed, he sat on a raised platform near the back…and he seemed to control the proceedings. He had the strength and beauty that sometimes come to flower in Indians of low birth. When that strange race nears the dust and is condemned as untouchable, then nature remembers the physical perfection that she accomplished elsewhere, and throws out a god—not many, but one here and there, to prove to society how little its categories impress her.

These aren’t unintelligent remarks, but they are racist.

Galgut brings complexity and compassion to his Morgan. Even though Morgan felt stifled by his suburban mother back in England, from the remove of India she seems more tolerable:

Time and distance had softened her outlines, so that he longed for her without ambivalence. Their alliance was occasionally sisterly, pinned together with cackling and gossip, and these moments had strengthened with her absence. Despite their difficulties, she had always been a good traveling companion and he imagined her beside him now, keeping pace in a rickshaw.

With Masood, nothing of value is happening. “They talked about food, or the weather, or problems of justice, but they didn’t speak about anything that mattered. Everything was jest, or chatter, or deflection, and all the while the days were passing.”

Back in England Morgan meets Edward Carpenter, the apostle of simple living close to nature and of sexual freedom. Carpenter lives with a younger, working-class man—quite fearlessly, since the memory of the dire Oscar Wilde trial was still in the air, and homosexuals could be arrested. Morgan has read Carpenter’s pamphlets on “homogenic love.” Carpenter’s lover, George Merrill, touches Morgan on the lower curve of his back. That touch inspires Maurice. When a university friend, Hom, reads the manuscript, he says:

What you want is to live with a man in a happy home. But you don’t know how trivial it is. Marriage is emblematic of modern life. The way men and women are together—it’s a silly business, it has no nobility.

This could well be a remark addressed to the contemporary gay fight for marriage equality.

D.H. Lawrence was a more perplexing figure. Although Forster fiercely admired his fiction, he felt that Lawrence disapproved of him, and that he would never want to live in the Utopia that Lawrence was scheming to develop. In real life Forster esteemed both Melville and Lawrence, visionary novelists so unlike him but both gifted with what he called (in Aspects of the Novel) “prophecy,” the knack for seeing mystical meaning in ordinary things. In A Passage to India Forster himself became prophetic in interpreting the echo heard in the Marabar caves.

Forster wrote two short books inspired by his love for Masood and Mohammed, though he scarcely mentions either man. The Indian book was The Hill of Devi, a charming account of his life at court in 1921 as the private secretary of the maharaja of Dewas Senior, a tiny principality. The ruler is a small, ugly, saintly man utterly consumed by his love for Krishna. Some of the most luminous pages Forster ever wrote are about the noisy, endless rituals devoted to the birth of Krishna. Pages of letters home reflect at once his very English impatience with the irrational and the superstitious, as well as his wholehearted generosity of spirit in understanding and absorbing another culture.

The book about Alexandria, Pharos and Pharillon, is less impressive, mainly because it is a rehash of the history and legends attached to the great Egyptian city. Perhaps its most remarkable contribution is a last chapter virtually introducing C.P. Cavafy to English readers, though typically Forster writes only of Cavafy’s historical poems and doesn’t mention the ones that deal with homosexual love and passion. In Arctic Summer, however, Cavafy ultimately reads to Morgan one of his gay poems:

It was an account, in the first person, of an erotic encounter on a bed in a dingy room above a squalid street. There was a delicacy to the language that refrained from being too specific, too physical, and yet it was obvious that the poet was writing down a memory, or perhaps a longing.

Morgan envies what he imagines are Cavafy’s rich erotic adventures, or at least those of the young men in his poems. Morgan’s

loneliness was now so big that it had become his life. With it there had grown a sort of finicky distaste, so that if the experience for which he longed had actually been offered to him, he feared he might refuse it.

No worry—right after this thought he has a charged encounter with a British soldier on the beach. And then he meets his eighteen-year-old tramway conductor, with whom he has real sex in a bed. Sex and friendship, though Mohammed is not a “minorite” (Morgan’s word for his vice).

Galgut, a South African, is one of the best writers in the English-speaking world. The Good Doctor and In a Strange Room, two earlier works both shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, are as mysterious and unsettling as a play by Harold Pinter and as well written (if not as funny) as a Beckett novel. If there is a hint of male–male attraction in both books, it is nearly effaced, rubbed out, like a word in a painting by Cy Twombly. Arctic Summer marks a decisive change. It is not mysterious, it follows the main lines of Forster’s life faithfully, and homosexual desire in it is quite explicit.

It is even less unusual formally than A Passage to India, which orchestrates complex social scenes in which little happens (what Katherine Mansfield derisively called Forster’s practice of “warming the teapot”), switches from a dozen different points of view (whereas Arctic Summer stays faithful to Morgan’s perspective alone), dramatizes the mutually uncomprehending Indian and English cultures, and interpolates wise interpretations of character and meaning in much the way a writer like Elizabeth Bowen might.

Forster disliked Henry James’s doctrine of limiting the point of view to one or two characters and of eschewing authorial generalizations. Forster wanted the freedom and authority to write of a minor character:

He had read and thought a good deal, and, owing to a somewhat unhappy marriage, had evolved a complete philosophy of life. There was much of the cynic about him, but nothing of the bully….

In Arctic Summer observations are fully grounded in character and situation and nothing is handed down ex cathedra. When Morgan, back in England, learns that Mohammed is dying from a recurrence of tuberculosis, he thinks:

There was nothing to be done. Mohammed’s life had been touched, but not changed, by Morgan’s, and his fate had been shaped by his station. Race and class were a kind of destiny; very little could dent them. Morgan himself had been decanted back into the vessel that had made him.

Where Galgut does echo Forster is in the subtle beauty of the language, in verbs such as “dent” and “decanted.” Anatole France once said that the best style was one that departed from the conventional only enough to make it striking; in Arctic Summer Galgut seems to be obeying this placid, unflashy aesthetic. Like Tóibín in The Master, he has decided not to compete stylistically with his subject.

Just as middle-class bigots often pretend to be “bored” by what really shocks them, so prudish intellectuals object to an “overemphasis” on a biographical subject’s sexuality, especially if that sexuality is “minorite.” Critics will complain that a biographer has “turned” Proust, say, or Frank O’Hara into a homosexual and not given enough space to his work. Galgut is to be applauded for showing that homosexuality was an integral part of Forster’s writing—and of his forty years of silence, once he realized he could not write about it.

The post Forster in Love: The Story appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

And then came the demand for gay marriage. At first many gay progressives (including me) frowned on this initiative, since it seemed only one more example of assimilation. But we began to see that it was a cause worth fighting for. If bigots oppose gay marriage so vehemently, it must be because marriage is a defining institution for them; gays will never be fully accepted until they can marry and adopt, like anyone else. It also seemed frivolous to object to same-sex marriage on any grounds, since permitting it would have a direct positive impact on countless ordinary families. As the lawyers David Boies and Theodore Olson put it in Redeeming the Dream:

We had said from the beginning that we intended to prove three things: first, that marriage was a fundamental right; second, that denying gay and lesbian citizens the right to marry seriously harmed them and the children they were raising; third, that same-sex marriage did not harm heterosexual marriage.

The culmination of a long struggle was 2013, which could clearly be labeled the Year of the Gay. State after state had legalized gay marriage, despite intense opposition from the religious right. The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was struck down by the Supreme Court; as a result, legally married same-sex couples, no matter where they were living, could file federal taxes jointly, even retroactively. Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the antigay policy of the armed forces, had been reversed in 2011. The Boy Scouts caved: gay boys can now become Scouts (though openly gay adults cannot become Scout leaders). In France (despite a surprisingly active opposition) marriage equality was legalized, as it was in many South American countries. The claims of conversion therapy, which had promised to turn gays straight, were renounced, even outlawed in some places.

Gays were never so visible—in politics, on television, on Facebook. It was no longer on to be discriminating against lesbians or gays. Comedians publicly apologized for using the f— word in a moment of anger. And gays were so prevalent they were becoming much more choosy about politicians; the openly lesbian New York City mayoral candidate Christine Quinn lost the gay vote to Bill de Blasio (whose black wife proudly announced that she had been a lesbian before her marriage).

AIDS had won gays sympathy; they no longer seemed the privileged brats that the general populace had resented in the 1970s. The disease had willy-nilly outed gays of all social classes and colors; whereas in the 1970s only young white men had, for the most part, dared to come out, now poor gays and rich gays and old gays and ghetto gays were all visible—and they were suffering from a terrible fatal disease. In 1996 triple retroviral therapies were introduced and the death rate from AIDS plummeted. Whereas in the 1980s hospitals were overflowing with terminal patients and the names of the AIDS deceased crowded the obit pages, now it seemed that few people were dying—in the first world where the life-saving drugs were affordable. This past May the dedicated HIV/AIDS ward in Vancouver closed due to a lack of patients. In the third world, however, the death rates—of men and women, straights and gays—were soaring. In 2012, over 35 million people were living with HIV/AIDS, 69 percent of them in Sub-Saharan Africa and most of them heterosexual.

If legislation in the US was mostly favoring gays, especially gay couples, in Russia, the Muslim world, and black Africa, opposition to gays was on the upswing. In every case bigotry could be attributed to religion, whether Russian Orthodoxy, shariah law, or African Christianity. American born-again right-wing federal legislators were feeding the religious frenzy in Africa (Uganda was even contemplating a kill-the-gays law); they must have recognized that their evil program had been defeated in America and that African religious conservatives provided them with the last chance to realize their fascist dreams. I say “fascist” advisedly since the Nazis were always banging on about the virtues of virility and the dangers of homosexual “decadence,” and they put gays in concentration camps.

Why did mainstream America come to accept marriage equality? Gay leaders had made a convincing case that gay families were like straight families and should have the same rights. The American spirit of fair play had been invoked. Gays had converted many people to the belief that they constituted a minority—like Jews or African-Americans or Asians. It was a strange sort of minority, truth be told, to which one’s parents didn’t belong and which was made up mostly of members who could “pass.” It was more an identity than a minority, an identity that one could assume at age six or sixty or never.

A large part of the acceptance of gays depended on the notion that they didn’t choose their sexual identity but that it was somehow genetically determined. Most out gays in the 1970s would have resented the genetic argument; we didn’t want to think our orientation was glandular but—what? Chosen? We didn’t like that option, either—we couldn’t pinpoint the moment we’d “chosen” to be gay. We decided back then that all theories about the origins of homosexuality were prejudicial. No one theorized about how children became heterosexual, we argued, which seemed equally mysterious. We said that if one got pulled into an argument about what caused homosexuality, nature or nurture, gays would always lose.

Defensible as that position seemed to us then, the genetic argument has in fact persuaded mainstream America to accept us. If the poor buggers can’t help being pansies, then why persecute them? You might as well persecute someone for the color of his skin.

At the same time gender boundaries became more and more porous. Transvestites and transsexuals became more common; in Germany a new law recognized that babies at birth can even be assigned to a third, intermediary gender. On the one hand our sexual orientation seemed to be determined while our gender seemed to be utterly fluid and arbitrary and porous.

I can remember in the 1960s I had a boyfriend who liked to take my hand in public, which made me intensely uncomfortable, even in Greenwich Village. Now it’s no big deal.

Of course there was a long history of lesbian and gay legal battles, well summarized in Law and the Gay Rights Story, a book that deals with many issues other than the right to marry: the workplace, freedom to serve in the armed forces, freedom from violence, freedom for open gays to teach in public schools. Between 2004 and 2013 the number of Americans who would be upset if they had a gay child fell from 60 percent to 40 percent—a remarkable transformation in less than a decade. The greater visibility of gay celebrities (such as Ellen Degeneres) and the higher profile of gay films (such as the Academy Award–winning Brokeback Mountain) and TV shows (such as Will and Grace and Modern Family and Glee) and plays (such as Angels in America and The Normal Heart) undoubtedly contributed to this change of heart.

The battle for gay marriage intensified after the passage of Proposition 8, a confusingly worded referendum in California declaring that only marriages between a man and a woman were valid. The case attracted the attention of Theodore Olson, the conservative lawyer who had won the Supreme Court battle of Bush v. Gore. He regarded the gay marriage issue as one of equal protection under the law, and he recognized that this was the civil rights struggle of our day. As Jo Becker writes in Forcing the Spring, he said he was honored to represent lesbians and gays and offered to do so at a discounted rate of $2.9 million plus expenses, even though he got considerable blowback from conservative friends, who objected on religious or constitutional grounds.

The people behind the legal battle were Chad Griffin, a gay political consultant and now head of the gay civil rights organization Human Rights Campaign, and his friend and business partner, Kristina Schake. They teamed up with two of their clients, the movie director Rob Reiner (When Harry Met Sally) and his wife Michele, both long-standing advocates of civil rights. The team was completed when they were joined by David Boies, who’d represented Gore in the Supreme Court. The “odd couple” aspect of the Boies-Olson partnership drew a lot of press attention.

The decision to challenge Prop 8 in the courts did not sit well with the established gay leadership, who felt that an adverse decision could set back gay rights by decades. Their motto was “Make Change, Not Lawsuits,” and their agenda was to fight for the passage of marriage equality laws state by state. Of the court fight over Prop 8, Jennifer Pizer of Lambda Legal told The New York Times, “We think it’s risky and premature.” When they realized that the Boies-Olson team was going to move ahead anyway, several gay rights groups wanted to join in, but the lawyers refused them, saying they did not want their cause to be “balkanized.” They knew about ferocious gay in-fighting. In the end only the City of San Francisco was permitted by the judge to file an amicus brief.

The judge on the District Court for the Northern District of California who heard the case was Vaughn R. Walker, a sixty-five-year-old Reagan appointee whose nomination had been violently opposed by the gay community. Somewhat surprisingly, he turned out to be gay, which those opposed to gay marriage said should have led him to recuse himself, though most people in the legal profession thought his orientation was irrelevant. (Would an African-American judge not be allowed to hear a case involving racial prejudice? Should a judge who has been raped never be permitted to hear a sexual assault case?)

Walker wanted to televise the proceedings, since they might be instructive to the public, but the Supreme Court forbade cameras to enter the courtroom, not wanting to subject its own deliberations by extension to the glare of publicity. This was not a jury trial; the judge alone would decide. Though television was banned, the whole team made sure that every stage of the trial was well publicized, since one of their main goals was education of the public.

Boies and Olson found as plaintiffs a model male couple and a model lesbian couple, Californians who, they correctly thought, would stay together and bear up under the strain of cross-examination over what turned out to be four years, and who sincerely wanted to be married, for the dignity of the institution and not just for the fiscal benefits. The two women were also raising children.

The lawyers lined up expert witnesses who would help them establish several points: that homosexuals had been severely mistreated throughout history and were even now a persecuted minority; that the people who had promoted Prop 8 were motivated partly by malice; that children raised by a loving same-sex couple could grow up normal and healthy; that homosexuality was not a lifestyle choice but an unchangeable orientation; that same-sex marriage would not discourage heterosexual couples from getting married; that marriage carried a dignity and societal prestige not conferred by domestic partnership.

Some of these points might seem self-evident or absurd or of minor importance, but the law, engaged as it is with precedents, must sometimes address bizarre questions. And the sponsors of Prop 8 had made some strange claims. The lawyer defending it, Chuck Cooper, could only produce two experts (whereas the plaintiffs called seventeen), and those turned out to be unsatisfactory. One, who claimed to have read a vast array of studies proving that gay marriage would be damaging, admitted under cross-examination that most of his bibliography had been assembled by his lawyers and he’d not consulted all the documents.

The second witness was David Blankenhorn, who lost steam when he had to admit that his degree from Warwick University was granted not for his study of marriage or families, but of nineteenth-century cabinetmakers. He ended up expressing ideas that helped the pro-marriage equality side:

I believe today that the principle of equal human dignity must apply to gay and lesbian persons. Insofar as we are a nation founded on this principle, we would be more American on the day we permitted same-sex marriage than we were on the day before.

Blankenhorn also agreed that there was no scientific evidence that children suffer from being raised by people of the same sex.

Even Cooper made a damning admission. When Judge Walker asked him, with regard to gay marriage, “to tell me how it would harm opposite-sex marriages,” Cooper said the fatal words, “Your Honor, my answer is: I don’t know. I don’t know.” What he meant to argue was that we have insufficient evidence of the long-term effects of gay marriage, but his actual answer was seen as an admission of defeat.

The plaintiffs needed to prove that there had been malice toward gays behind the campaign for Prop 8, which was easily established by looking at its scare-tactic television spots and by requisitioning its internal e-mails. These documents showed that the Catholic Church and the Mormons, ancient foes of homosexuality, had raised $37 million to support Prop 8. One of the most prominent sponsors, Bill Tam, a Chinese-American evangelical minister, was highly evasive but finally admitted that he had made public statements to the effect that gay marriage would lead to pedophilia, incest, and polygamy. He even said in a pamphlet that if Prop 8 lost, “one by one, other states would fall into Satan’s hand. What will be next? On their agenda list is: legalize having sex with children.”

Eventually, Tam half-admitted that there was no scientific evidence substantiating his points. The examination of him was so aggressive that one of the lawyers defending Prop 8 became indignant: “For the first time ever in an initiative process, a supporter of an initiative has been put on the stand to be examined about his political and religious views.” It was certainly true (if impolitic to say) that the three great monotheistic religions had been the most intolerant institutions against homosexuality throughout history.

Boies and Olson were able to invoke some important Supreme Court decisions to bolster their case. Loving v. Virginia (1967) was the most relevant. It had ended the ban on miscegenation and had found that “the freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.” This decision was extremely helpful to the plaintiffs. In Romer v. Evans (1996), the Supreme Court had struck down a Colorado amendment to the state constitution, approved by voters in a referendum, that had stripped lesbians and gays of certain civil rights protections. In Lawrence v. Texas (2003) the Court had struck down a Texas law criminalizing sodomy since it violated the Constitution’s due process clause, which says that the government may not “deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law.”

One of the most damaging statements against same-sex marriage had been made by the Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who had said that Roe v. Wade had been decided prematurely, before the country was ready for it. Perhaps, it could be argued, the country was similarly not prepared for gay marriage.

But the country was changing its mind at an astonishing pace. Ken Mehlman, a powerful gay figure in the Republican Party, joined the cause and staged an impressive fund-raiser. Obama’s opinions were “evolving.” Polls showed the rapid and widespread public change of heart. “This is the most significant, fastest shift in public opinion that we’ve seen in modern American politics,” an important Republican pundit said. At the same time there was a new wave of teenage gay suicides that proved that something needed to be done.

The closing argument in the Prop 8 case was heard on June 16, 2010. Two months later, Judge Walker handed down a decision that was a sweeping victory for the proponents of gay marriage. He wrote that “Proposition 8 was premised on the belief that same-sex couples simply are not as good as opposite sex couples…. This belief is not a proper basis on which to legislate.”

When the case appeared before the Supreme Court, it was joined by another on the Defense of Marriage Act. An elderly American woman, Edie Windsor, had legally married in Canada in 2007 another woman, Thea Spyer. Thea had died, Edie had been hospitalized with grief, and when she emerged she found that she owed the federal government $363,000 in estate taxes (had she married a man she would have owed nothing). Edie challenged DOMA on the basis that it treated married same-sex couples differently than heterosexual couples.

She won her case and toppled DOMA. There were some remarkable moments; for instance, when Cooper insisted that the purpose of marriage was procreation, Justice Kagan asked that if that were the case, would it be constitutional to deny marriage to straight couples over fifty-five? When Cooper had claimed such a couple might be fertile, Kagan assured him that “there are not a lot of children coming out of that marriage” if both partners are over fifty-five.

Uttering another memorable phrase, Justice Ginsburg observed that in the US there was “the full marriage and then this sort of skim milk kind.” In another discussion Justice Scalia demanded to be told at what precise moment denying marriage to homosexuals had become unconstitutional. As Boies and Olson argue in their amazingly lucid book,

The Court has never inquired, nor could it establish a precise moment in time, when it became unconstitutional to require students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, or to pray in school, or to use different drinking fountains.

On June 26, 2013, Justice Kennedy, in his majority opinion, found that DOMA was invalid and noted that the law served to “disparage and injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity.” Edith Windsor had the $363,000 she had paid in estate taxes restored plus interest. All legally married same-sex couples would be fully recognized by the federal government and would enjoy now some eleven hundred federal benefits they had previously been denied.

At the same time the Court, while clearing the way for same-sex marriage in California, left for another day the question of whether homosexual marriage must be legalized in all states where it was still banned. On the same day the Court had declared the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional but had ducked the larger question of national acceptance of same-sex marriage. A triumph for Boies-Olson, if a mitigated one.

The blowback to Jo Becker’s book has been considerable, especially from gay bloggers such as Dan Savage and Andrew Sullivan. As early as 1989 Sullivan had published an article in The New Republic giving the conservative case for gay marriage, formulating arguments about the value of family life that were later used by pro-gay theorists. Becker has been accused of the sin of “access journalism” by Sullivan (crediting all gay-marriage victories to Chad Griffin and the Boies-Olson team, because they gave her full access to their deliberations). She has clearly overlooked the major contributions of such pioneers as Evan Wolfson, who in 2004 published the groundbreaking Why Marriage Matters: America, Equality, and Gay People’s Right to Marry, and Mary Bonauto, a lawyer who won same-sex couples the right to civil unions in Vermont in 2000. That was a considerable first victory in a campaign that has led (at present) to same-sex marriage in seventeen states and the District of Columbia. And counting.

On the last page of Redeeming the Dream, we are told that Americans are accepting “gays and lesbians…as normal, loving, decent members of our lives and our communities.” I shouldn’t quibble, but as a gay man in his seventies I don’t quite recognize in that description most of the flamboyant, creative, edgy, promiscuous, deeply urban gays I have known. Kenji Yoshino, a law professor, wrote a book called Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights in which “covering” is seen as downplaying a discordant trait in order to blend into the mainstream. It seems to me that gays are in danger of “covering” in order to obtain the permission to marry. Perhaps that’s a small enough price. I can’t decide.

The post I Do, I Do appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Jean Giono (1895–1970), whose complete works are available in an eight-volume Pléiade edition, had a long writing career, from his first novel, Colline (translated into English as Hill of Destiny), in 1929, to his last, L’Iris de Suse, published in 1970, the year of his death. During several crucial periods he was deeply influenced by American writers. First, he discovered Walt Whitman in French and read Léon Bazalgette’s biography of him in 1924 (he later studied “the American Homer” in English). He loved Whitman’s all-embracing egalitarianism and his pantheism, and the first part of Giono’s oeuvre obviously owes a debt to this revolutionary, passionate figure.

In Colline he tried to illustrate two very Whitmanian truths: “The first of these truths is that there exist people who are simple and nude; the other is that this earth fleeced [entoisonnée] with woods…this living earth, exists without literature.” He decided to show the peasants of his region of Provence in all their particularity—and also to show the beauty and terror of nature in its raw state, stripped of its classical allusions (his juvenile poems had been full of Virgilian references). In these two respects he was like his contemporary the Swiss novelist Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz—today best known for his collaboration with Stravinsky, Histoire du soldat, but celebrated in the past for his novels of man vs. nature, such as When the Mountain Fell. Like Ramuz, Giono recorded the real speech of the ordinary people around him (but without resorting to Provençal, associated with a literary movement he disapproved of) and wrote about the natural world in simple, elevated prose mostly stripped of figurative speech.

For Giono to cut down on metaphor and simile (he could never altogether forgo them) must have been painful, since he was so naturally gifted for that kind of eloquence. As Aristotle suggests in Rhetoric, metaphor is one of the greatest ornaments of writing, but it is the one no one can learn. (“Metaphor especially has clarity and sweetness and strangeness, and its use cannot be learned from anyone else.”) The “clarity and sweetness and strangeness” of Giono’s writing, especially in his more generous, mature style, owes everything to its poetic strategies, as many other readers and writers (André Gide in France and the American Henry Miller) were quick to notice. Colline created a sensation when it was published; it soon led to other remarkable books.

In all these early novels Giono deals with the people of his town, Manosque, in the Haute-Provence and of the neighboring villages, though he shouldn’t be dismissed as a regionalist, any more than Faulkner should. He is aware of—but doesn’t dwell on—the eccentricities of his part of the world. Except for trips to Italy and to Paris, and to a few other parts of Europe, he seldom traveled—except in his armchair. He was widely read—in the classics, the great Russians, the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Americans, French fiction and poetry—and he was always emphasizing the universal aspect of his characters’ experiences, the exhilaration of being an animal and the tragedy of being a human being. Although he had dropped out of school early on to contribute to his family’s earnings, he was an ambitious autodidact who knew classical music and great painting (from reproductions); I was fortunate enough to visit his very impressive library. I only mention his wide and deep culture because even the French often dismiss him (without reading him) as a “primitive” or “Provençal colorist.”

Colline has a Desire Under the Elms quality about it (Giono knew the work of Eugene O’Neill) in that it is about violence and love among poor farmers. Regain (Second Growth or Aftermath, an agricultural term; translated as Harvest) is about a remote village that has slowly lost its population until it is down to just two inhabitants: Mamèche, an old witch from Piedmont, who lost her husband under a landslide and her son when he nibbled hemlock, and Panturle, a rough giant of a man who is a part-time poacher. The village comes back to life and the story has a happy end when Panturle marries Arsule, a traveling performer. The writing is obviously the work of a man who understands nature and agriculture:

Those who have already made the trip two or three times notice it [that the road is getting higher and higher] because at a given moment there are no more vegetable fields, then because the wheat stalks are getting shorter and shorter, then because you’re traveling under the first chestnut trees, then because you’re passing at a ford torrents of grass-colored water shining like oil, then because at last there appears the blue stem of the Vachère clock tower and that, that is the boundary.

Only someone who truly knows the countryside notices that the wheat gets shorter the higher the terrain.

Starting in 1916, Giono fought as an ordinary soldier and saw battle near Verdun. In 1918 his eyelids were burned with mustard gas, though his lungs were unaffected. His company suffered huge losses. The experience made him an uncompromising pacifist, during both the Spanish civil war and World War II. This alienated many leftists and eventually led to his imprisonment for “defeatism.”

He wrote a powerful novel against war called Le Grand Troupeau (The Big Herd, translated as To the Slaughterhouse), which shows the horrors of the front but also the hardships of the home front—the untended (or confiscated) livestock, the loneliness, the physical demands of running a farm without men or only with feeble old men. At the beginning of the novel all of the neglected sheep in the district have run away and banded together in a large, hungry, dirty herd; the air is filled with an odor of “wool, sweat and trampled earth.” Fish are dying in the stream, flies are everywhere, and stray birds are “sputtering like oil in a frying pan.”

Giono’s details are always well found. Big mountain bees, alive or dead, are trapped in the errant sheep’s fleece. “The foal has stopped nursing, he is drunk. He trembles on his hoofs. A thread of milk flows from his muzzle.” The ram has been injured: “All of his wool below, soaked with blood, uncurled, heavy, was hanging down like moss under a fountain.” A young woman, abandoned by her new husband who’s gone off to war, has to feed the horses: “Every time she would go to open the barn door, she would be embraced by fresh hay, this odor that made her temples ring like the basin of a fountain, this odor of hay and horse, this odor of thick life that grated against her skin like a stone.”

A young soldier arrives back in the village while the family is improvising a memorial ceremony for a friend, one of the fallen. He looks around and thinks that he could stay at home and not return to battle if he were a lamp—“If he were this lamp…the tree, this table, the sow, I could stay. If I were the dog, I could stay. If I were the dog….” The accumulation of these details becomes a burning indictment of war.

The second great American Giono discovered (in the 1930s) was Melville, whose Moby-Dick he translated with the help of two friends. The translation is accurate—but Melville’s strange turns of phrase, as elusive as Shakespeare’s, cannot be reproduced. When Melville, for instance, writes, “the devils also, add the uncanonical Rabbins, indulged in mundane amours,” it doesn’t sound exactly like “ajoutent les Rabbis peu canoniques, les démons se livrèrent à des amours terrestres.” But translating Melville was a labor of love—for years Giono would read him in the open fields—and his translation was the first in French and still the standard one. Is there any way to capture Melville’s biblical-Shakespearian prose in French? “La plus petite chose peut avoir une signification” doesn’t really capture the diction of “the veriest trifles capriciously carry meanings.” It was something Giono worked on and completed when he was imprisoned for being a pacifist. He earned the undying hatred of French Communists for not endorsing the war that the Soviet Union was waging against Germany.

To introduce Moby-Dick Giono wrote a preface using the biographical information available at the time—and then it ran away from him and became a novel, Pour Saluer Melville (To Salute Melville). Giono, one suspects, wrote a fantasy starring himself. Instead of the tormented, introspective, somewhat homosexual real Melville, deeply disappointed in the reception of his work, Giono names a character “Melville” who is burly and sleeps in the nude, is proletarian, bristling with self-confidence, successful, a smooth operator with the ladies, and tirelessly eloquent. Giono’s Melville has come to London to promote his work, becomes bored with city life and wearing a frock coat, buys himself a sailor’s old clothes—and chooses a carriage and an English destination almost at random.

During the trip he meets another passenger, a beguiling Englishwoman named Adelina White. “Melville” endears himself to her during a stroll through the woods while the carriage waits; he reinvents the natural world around them by describing it. This magical power to describe the natural world is something Giono revisited in his very last book, L’Iris de Suse; here Giono is a Prospero saying farewell to his powers. He has a very Whitmanian view of his Melville (“I am a man like all the others!”), who is far more egocentric than the historical Melville: “The real title of his books is Melville, Melville, Melville and still Melville, and always Melville.” He can make Adelina, herself a rural woman, perceive the birches anew:

Has she really noticed the birches with their horsehide bark? “No.” He called the birches. And the birches came. She not only had them against her as if she were standing in an ordinary field and she were pressed against a tree, she also had them in her heart. He took the tree with its honey, its noise, its smell, its shape, its leaves, its four seasons and no one knew how he did it but she had the tree in her heart….

What’s a little stranger is that he returns to America, writes Moby-Dick for her, sends it to her—and years later, on his deathbed, he’s still waiting for her to acknowledge his masterpiece as testimony to his love. What he doesn’t know is that she’s long since been dead and never received it. Despite its preposterous, contrafactual plot, Pour Saluer Melville, which has never been translated, is a powerful testament to the magic of words.

The third American who directly influenced Giono was Faulkner. His books were expertly translated—and possibly improved—by Maurice Coindreau, a French professor at Princeton. In any event Giono expanded his concept of the novel by reading Faulkner in translation. He began to experiment with multiple, not necessarily coherent narrators; he created his own “Provence,” just as Faulkner invented his Yoknapatawpha; finally, he dealt with incest and he followed the lives of several generations of the same family. After reading Sartoris Giono began to write about dynasties (the tragic fate of the Costes, for instance, in Le Moulin de Pologne, or the endless struggle between the two brothers in Deux Cavaliers dans l’orage).

If he learned these thematic and structural possibilities from Faulkner, he managed to avoid the verbal, seemingly drunken absurdities that can be found, for example, in one of Faulkner’s best books, Absalom, Absalom, where he wrote, “That aptitude and eagerness of the Anglo-Saxon for complete mystical acceptance of immolated sticks and stones.” Faulkner’s prestige in France (the French revived his fortunes and favored him for the Nobel) may owe something to Coindreau (who decided, for instance, not to try to translate Dilsey’s “Negro dialect,” thereby rescuing one of Faulkner’s most sympathetic characters from interminable—and untranslateable—folkloric nonsense).

Giono’s approach is always much more linear and chronological than Faulkner’s—avoiding Faulkner’s competing narratives and intelligent disorder. But Giono often introduced into this stew his own brand of rapturous nature descriptions, his eccentrics that owed more to observed village “characters” than to Gothic ravings, as well as his irony and comedy and his always rational, calibrated style spiced with vivid metaphors. Unlike Faulkner he never says anything hard to picture or that makes only approximate sense. Every page of Faulkner is littered with phrases such as “the augmenting and defunctive twilight” and “author and victim too of a thousand homicides and a thousand copulations and divorcements.” (These passages are from successive pages of Absalom, Absalom.)

The mysteriously named novel Le Moulin de Pologne (The Polish Mill—the name of an actual farm near Manosque that burned down; also Casanova, a writer whom Giono read, lived for a while in France at a farm called the Petite Pologne; it was translated as The Malediction) is Faulknerian in the best sense. On the first page the narrator refers to himself as “us” (nous) and we are often reminded that he speaks for the community (in French the use of on or “one” is often translated by the passive voice or by “we,” which discreetly suggests a collective chorus).

As it turns out, the narrator is an impossibly egocentric snob of the pettiest, most provincial sort, who only on the last page admits in parentheses that he has a reason to be bitter. (“Have I said that I’m a hunchback?”) His prejudices are so hilariously narrow-minded that he almost seems like one of Nabokov’s crazed narrators rather than a Faulknerian old maid or Civil War hellion. Giono presents five generations of the Coste family, all doomed to a terrible death. Suicide, choking on a cherry pit, apoplexy, cardiac arrest, burning to death in a locked train car—these are just some of the gruesome fates suffered by the Costes. The petty narrator takes pleasure in all these tragedies:

The life of others, with their vicissitudes, their unhappiness, their defeats, is extremely pleasant to look at. It was a matter of, as always, fine hatreds, splendid nastiness, self-centeredness, ambition.

One of the Coste parents hopes to ensure a long, boring life for his two daughters by marrying them off to two utterly unexceptionable brothers “forgotten by God” who have eight hundred years of placidity behind them. But the father himself, while tranquilly fishing, hooks his hand with a fishing lure and dies of tetanus. His daughters are the ones who die in the locked and burning train compartment at Versailles, a famous catastrophe of the nineteenth century. There is no escaping the fate of the Costes—just as the curse on the Sutpens in Absalom, Absalom! is inescapable. But whereas Faulkner uses shifting, unreliable narrators, Giono is far more straightforward and readable, if less “experimental.” Of course Faulkner had the great subjects of the American Civil War and the abiding legacy of slavery; Giono’s is far more the tale of a family than an entire history of a people.

Perhaps the most memorable scene in Le Moulin de Pologne occurs when Julie, a beautiful Coste girl who has a great body (the narrator strangely adds “for those who like bodies”), but whose face has been blasted by a terrible paralysis, goes to a village ball and begins to waltz all by herself. The other guests are horrified and begin to laugh a torrential laugh:

If I take my own case, the laugh was a blessing for everyone. The spectacle of this girl with the torn face who revealed her shameless wishes burned me like an acid. You can’t let yourself go without the risk of being stripped bare to the bones, clothes and flesh, ruffles and skirts, shirt-fronts and cuffs. Everyone has his own despair—who doesn’t? What would become of us all if we were forced to stop playing the comedy? The laughter with its torrential noise was the simplest way to soothe the burn and spread the coolness. We went at it for all we were worth.

After being publicly mocked Julie rushes through the night and gives herself to the mysterious, attractive Monsieur Joseph, an outsider who irritates the narrator by not tipping his hat with much enthusiasm. What Giono lacks in historical Faulknerian resonance he gains in horrid village gossipiness. Giono is funny, something no one ever accused Faulkner of.

Of course Giono with his vast culture was not just influenced by his three great Americans. He was also shaped by his reading of Dante and Ariosto, his interest in local histories, his immersion in the classics, and his love of French writers, especially Stendhal. He was in particular smitten with The Charterhouse of Parma.

After the Liberation Giono was imprisoned again, this time for about five months for collaboration. To this day many French readers wrinkle their noses when his name is mentioned, though no one can point to actual crimes of collaboration with the enemy. As the great historian of the Vichy period Robert Paxton said to me, several of Giono’s views were convergent with those of Vichy. Giono was a pacifist because he’d been at Verdun; Vichy was pacifist because it wanted to surrender to Hitler. Giono was against industrialization and for agriculture because he lived in a peasant culture and was an ecologist; Vichy was pro-agriculture because cultivating the land was seen as admirably reactionary. I’ve never found an anti-Semitic word Giono wrote but I’ve heard he made some casual snide remarks in letters. He never made the trip to Berlin as other French notables did. Nevertheless in September 1944 he was placed on the blacklist of the Communist-organized Congress of Writers and was forbidden to publish till 1947.

While he could not publish he read extensively and wrote a novel, Angelo, which he read to friends, who told him it was too Stendhalian. Eventually his character, Angelo, an Italian young officer and the illegitimate son of a duchess whom the Austrian officials are pursuing, became the leading figure in Giono’s most famous novel, Le Hussard sur le toit (The Horseman on the Roof, the subject of one of the best historical films ever made, starring Juliette Binoche and Olivier Martinez, and directed by Jean-Paul Rappeneau in 1995).

The ingredient Giono added to strengthen and make personal this novel was a disaster: the cholera epidemic that decimated Provence in the mid-nineteenth century (Giono made it even more devastating than it was; historians estimate that only 5 percent of the population died annually). Just as Tolstoy relished describing the horrors of war, in the same way Giono took real pleasure, reportedly, in describing the agonies and deaths of cholera victims. He even added to the medical symptoms one of his own; he decided that at the moment of death the victims spit up a sort of milky white rice, copious and gluey.

And yet The Horseman on the Roof is anything but a harrowing or even gloomy novel. Though there are painful scenes of disease and death, the feeling one comes away with is of lightness, giddiness, pure pleasure. What becomes clear is that, contrary to Aristotle, metaphors that compare one dreary or frightening thing to another can have a dulling effect, whereas those that are striking, powerful, and vivifying contradict the spirit, while echoing the material reality, of what they are illustrating.

Giono’s brilliant Horseman on the Roof is a perfect illustration of this paradox. The epidemic is accompanied by (perhaps caused by) an unprecedented drought and heat wave:

At that moment Angelo saw the barbarous splendors of the terrible summer in the high hills: rusted oaks, charred chestnuts, verdigris starved pastures, cypresses in whose foliage shone the oil of funeral lamps, fogs of light which spread out around him in a mirage, and in the transparent warp of the tapestry worn down by the sun floated and trembled the design that remained grey of the forests, the villages, the hills, the mountain, of the horizon, the fields, the groves, the fields almost entirely wiped away under a burlap-colored air.

Angelo is a dandy who submits everything to his personal aesthetic; he supplants the world’s ethical code with his own aristocratic rankings. He observes the austere beauty and pitilessness of nature as a backdrop for the desperate egotism of human beings at risk. The entire book is a series of picaresque adventures that opens like a Chinese scroll of a pilgrim crossing the landscape, in this case blasted. Giono is careful to preserve the crisp outlines of his dashing hero by not excessively reporting his thoughts; he remains a silhouette seen rather than an interiority explored. He has the same endearing sprezzatura as Stendhal’s Fabrizio del Dongo.

Pigs eating cadavers, dying people turning blue and spitting milky rice, children with waxy, shrunken faces, the plague-ridden locked in a tower, and starved and the living forced to cohabit with the dead—every possible horror is detailed. Angelo becomes very attached to a small, young French doctor who risks everything trying to save the dying by feeding them herbs and rubbing their cold limbs vigorously, but the brave doctor dies on him. Angelo keeps judging his own behavior and worries that it (and his face and even his way of riding a horse) are becoming vulgar and base. Always obeying his own generous aristocratic code, he is horrified that fear has led some villagers to turn back suffering women and children—and he longs for a saber to attack the malefactors.

One striking scene occurs when Angelo observes a desperate orgy of sex and drink right out of Hogarth; when he comes back to the inn the next day the torches are still burning brightly but all the guests are dead, their bodies twisted in terrible paroxysms. The epidemic cannot help but recall the two world wars Giono lived through.

When Angelo is trapped in a street he tells himself that now he must either kill his pursuers or die: “This idea calmed him and even gave him a bit of gaiety.” He darts into a house where he tries to see what’s going on in the half-light. Proust once praised Mme de Sévigné for describing things in letters not in a logical order but in the order in which they occurred or were perceived (just as he praised Dostoevsky for presenting character and psychological traits in the order of an observer’s personal discovery). As Giono writes:

At the same time as a chill ran up his spine, Angelo saw something that jumped from the couch; it was a cushion! No, it was a cat, a big gray cat that arched its back and stretched its long trembling tail in a bishop’s crook.

The Horseman on the Roof is a love story between Angelo and a French noblewoman called Pauline Théus. They join forces as she attempts to return home to her husband. Like Giono’s Melville, Angelo loves but does not touch a respectable woman; both men are paladins of courtly love. Giono worked on the novel off and on between 1946 and 1951—a very long time for such an ordinarily fast worker. The book terminates in a startling but satisfying rush like the rapid ensemble at the end of Don Giovanni (Giono and Stendhal were both unconditional admirers of Mozart). So enamored of Angelo was Giono that he wrote four novels about him: Angelo, Death of a Character, The Horseman on the Roof, and Crazy Happiness.

The title of the novel Un Roi sans divertissement (A King without Amusements) refers to Pascal’s remark: “A king without amusements is a man full of misery.” It is about a minor state official, very intelligent but depressed, called Langlois, who tracks down V., a prosperous man from a neighboring village, Chichilianne, who has murdered several people just as an acte gratuit, because he is bored and is looking for distractions. Langlois recognizes the condition because he suffers from the same boredom (Giono himself often complained of bouts of ennui). None of this is spelled out; one of the things Giono learned from Faulkner was to keep the central character shadowy. There are no internal monologues for Langlois; he is as mysterious as, say, Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. Which doesn’t mean that Giono hasn’t worked out his psychology (he complained that thrillers, which he read compulsively, had no psychological depth); he just leaves it all to be worked out by the reader.

Some of the remains of the dead villagers are found high up in the branches of a majestic beech tree. The image of the beech cradling the skulls and bones is memorable, more like a woodcut than a snapshot. That and the sight of blood on snow are the two main motifs of the book. As in Faulkner there are multiple narrators.

The two principal female characters—Madame Tim, a rich Mexican, and Saucisse, an aging woman who runs the local café—are remarkable inventions. They are both companions to Langlois, though Saucisse, we gather, is secretly in love with him. She takes it upon herself to find him a wife, but she is careful to select a woman who is beautiful, virtuous, an agreeable companion and perfect housekeeper—and incorrigibly dull. Faced with a life with this woman, Langlois blows his brains out.

An American editor today, no doubt, would insist on explanations of why V. murders random villagers and why Langlois commits suicide; we no longer allow the reader to fill in such substantial blanks, and yet the haunting beauty of this novel lies precisely in its lacunae. This is a book rich with details (the stalking of V., the stalking of a wolf, the luxurious hunting costumes of Saucisse and Madame Tim)—everything except what we are most longing to know, Langlois’s thoughts. We must do all the work ourselves.

The post The Great Jean Giono appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

For a while in the 1940s John Horne Burns was widely considered one of the most promising American novelists, and his best-selling war novel, The Gallery, intimidated Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, and Joseph Heller. Then after not one but three dud novels he committed suicide at age thirty-six (or rather his death seemed to be self-willed, caused by epic drunks and exposure to the sun).

Other successful first novelists of the period killed themselves, such as Thomas Heggen (Mister Roberts) and Ross Lockridge (Raintree County). Burns was mostly forgotten, though over the decades Gore Vidal would frequently tell friends about the gay flash-in-the-pan author. Even Ernest Hemingway remembered him and as early as 1947 was recommending The Gallery to his Italian publisher, saying, “Very controversial book. Will raise hell to publish it. But really good.”

Those were the days when Americans still took new fiction seriously, and young novelists were fiercely competitive. Even friendliness took on a competitive tone. When James Michener beat Burns for the Pulitzer, he was quick to concede that Burns was the better writer; Burns turned around and said that Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific “will probably remain a minor classic”—damning with faint praise. Of course no one knew then that Michener’s book would be adapted into the blockbuster musical South Pacific, and that he would go on to write forty more doorstops that would gain him a fortune but little distinction.

In his 1991 memoir Michener wrote, “I think of John Horne Burns every week of my life,” and said he regretted the loss of the challenging competition that Burns would have represented: “I am sure he and I would have competed, honorably and vigorously, throughout our lives.” I doubt that many American writers today think in this way. The rewards are too few, the fame too fleeting, the terrain too parceled out in neat subdivisions of distinct minorities. No one talks anymore of “the great American novel.”

The Gallery is an excellent novel,^* a series of portraits linked by “promenades” that recall other places during the war. The unity of the book, such as it is, is established by the primary setting: Naples’s nineteenth-century glass-roofed shopping arcade, the Galleria Umberto I, which today is mostly deserted but which in World War II, after the Allied conquest, was a populous center for prostitution and the black market. The book is really more a series of vignettes than a through-composed novel with a plot.

Burns wrote it rapidly and for once in his often bitter and sneering life he was compassionate toward his strange assortment of characters. This is the same man who at the Excelsior Hotel bar in Florence shortly before his death would mockingly repeat the awkward banalities fans would address to him: “One of his favorite tricks was to parrot what was said to him in an imbecilic voice,” an observer commented. His second published novel, Lucifer with a Book, was so cruelly satirical that one man he skewered committed suicide. But no matter how briefly, during the composition of The Gallery, Burns was a better, kinder man. Maybe it was because he was so happy to be in Italy, a country whose language he had learned at Harvard (he translated Dante while there) and whose people he preferred to Americans:

I think Italians are the greatest people on earth. They’ve got everything Americans haven’t got. Italians are people of the heart; their country is the land of the soul. I love Italians. Italians love me.

Maybe the nearly universal sufferings caused by the war had shocked him into an affectionate toleration for all of humanity. Maybe his alcoholism was at a mellow stage before the nasty stage set in (if things progress like that). Or maybe he’d come to see himself not as one superior to others but just an interchangeable person: “I became aware that there are millions of other people in the world, and that they’re very much like me.” Perhaps in his job as an army censor, obliged to read thousands of letters first from Italian POWs and then from GIs in order to excise any strategic information that might fall into enemy hands, he had concrete proof before his very eyes of how similar we all are.

Many talented writers are from nouveaux pauvres families—Melville, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams, Pynchon to name just Americans. It’s as if the family’s romantic past gives them a nostalgia for lost prestige they are eager to win back through their mythmaking works. Burns certainly conformed to this pattern. The Burns family was wealthy for a time, with chauffeurs and gardeners, but as Catholics they felt excluded by their neighbors in very WASPy Andover, Massachusetts. Burns’s mother was caustic and friendless, her only companion the woman who did her hair. Burns took after his mother and felt himself (perhaps defensively) superior to the other boys at prep school and then at Harvard, where he roomed alone. Burns once told a wartime friend:

Shortly after my umbilical cord was cut I was aware that not much was to be hoped for from anybody, that I must live alone and die alone, and that just for my own satisfaction I owed it to myself to be as clever and as attractive as I knew how to be.

Despite this maddening smugness, Burns was inventive and observant and often profound in The Gallery. In the chapter called “Momma” he follows a sweet, middle-aged Neapolitan, the proprietor of a gay bar in the Galleria, through her day as she wastes time at a movie, preparing herself psychologically for her three hours “onstage,” the very limited time the US Military Police allow a bar to be open. She can understand but not speak English, but in spite of this barrier she feels very attached to her clients, all male except for one tough lesbian who’s always buried in a book. She thinks of them as smarter and better looking than the ordinary run of men:

Her dreams were always the same, of the boys who came to her bar. There was a heterogeneous quality about them. They had an air of being tremendously wise, older than the human race. They understood one another, as though from France and New Zealand and America they all had membership cards in some occult freemasonry. And they had a refinement of manner, an intuitive appreciation of her as a woman. Their conversation was flashing, bitter, and lucid. More than other men they laughed much together, laughing at life itself perhaps. Momma’d never seen anything like her boys. Some were extraordinarily handsome, but not as other men were handsome. They had an acuteness in their eyes and a predatory richness of the mouth as though they’d bitten into a pomegranate. Momma dreamed that she was queen of some gay exclusive club.

Burns seems to be subscribing here to the idea of a gay conspiracy or collective. It’s a little hard to imagine an Italian businesswoman in 1943 might be thinking all that; we hear the author’s voice. No other person from that period could remember Momma’s; perhaps Burns invented it.

Actually Burns, like so many old-style queers, was usually very cruel and dismissive to his fellow gays (oppressed people don’t like themselves). He hated Christopher Isherwood and especially Truman Capote; he predicted Random House’s infamous author portrait would do Capote in (“the fingernail polish, the waistcoat, the hairdo of a Mongolian idiot”). In those competitive times, Burns’s war novel (and everyone else’s) was eclipsed by Norman Mailer’s, just as Burns’s prep school novel, Lucifer with a Book, was overshadowed by J.D. Salinger’s.

At the time of its publication critics scarcely mentioned the gay content in The Gallery, though the book is saturated with it, and not just in the “Momma” chapter. One aspect of homophobia in those days was to ignore the gay “problem” altogether; it was only word of mouth that alerted me in the 1950s to gay-themed books such as those by Gore Vidal and James Baldwin.

One chapter in The Gallery, “The Leaf,” is an arresting and nuanced portrait of Major Motes, a self-important tyrant, head of a division of American censors, who is gradually seduced by Stuki, an ambitious subordinate. Stuki manages to move in with the major and before long he is sleeping beside him in the nude and giving him long massages—until Stuki himself is displaced by another up-and-coming officer. Every page is a little queer, at least to an initiated reader:

An elderly lieutenant colonel of the party lurched to his feet and cried whoopee. He grabbed the prettiest and youngest of the P/W waiters and pushed him into a tango over the floor among sparring junior officers and nurses and the girls of Algiers. From the club’s doorway came an MP to break up the clinch of the colonel and the Italian, who had begun to cry.

That touch—“who had begun to cry”—shows that Burns, despite the imperiousness of his manners and desires, understood that sexual abuse knows no gender.

“Dreadful” was a code word for “homosexual” that Burns used in letters to a homosexual student, who he hoped would be his Boswell (the word had been used by one of his aunts as a generic dismissal). Since Burns was a professing Catholic, there were no New England prep schools that would hire him—except Loomis in Windsor, Connecticut, which had been founded more recently than the others and specifically as a nondenominational institution.

For its generosity the administration was richly rewarded—Burns’s second novel viciously lampooned the headmaster and the teachers and the students. Nor was the book any good. It received unusually harsh reviews, partly because expectations were so high after The Gallery—and partly because the voice in it was so relentlessly snide. Vidal declared:

Burns was a gifted man who wrote a book far in excess of his gift, making a kind of masterpiece which will endure in a way that he could not.

Later Vidal said in an interview, “He was an awful man. Monster. Envious, bitchy, drunk, bitter.” One of Burns’s academic targets in Lucifer with a Book is described as a “eunuch” whose penis is “underdeveloped” and who is presented as a busybody. Only one of the teachers is admirable—the one based on Burns himself, called Guy Hudson. He is macho, clever, arrogant—all considered in the world of the novel as enviable qualities. Whereas his war experiences have lent Guy a certain depth, his colleagues “chattered as though life was an intellectual garden party and themselves sophisticated marionettes.” Even those dismissive adjectives (“intellectual,” “sophisticated”) are out of a pretentious moron’s vocabulary.

Even so, despite its bad press and word-of-mouth, Lucifer sold well, some 17,500 copies, only three thousand fewer than The Gallery. The critics dismissed it as a list of grudges. Canadian customs banned it for its lewdness. Burns just assumed Americans were thin-skinned and couldn’t bear to be satirized. He walked out on his teaching job and moved to Boston, where he wrote like a less talented but no less arrogant Nabokov:

I love to analyze the grime of Boston which silts up my windowpanes, and to savor the gentle and rather hilarious tempo of her society. And though it might sound pretentious, I’m aiming at a synthesis of naturalism and anthropomorphic ethics in the American novel. I will if I can, and I think I can.

Although Burns had always criticized expat writers, after the Lucifer disaster he moved to Florence. He lived in a villa in the hills and every evening stood at the bar at the Excelsior Hotel, virtually the only night life in the war-impoverished city. He fought with the translator Francis Steegmuller, befriended the young novelist and translator William Weaver, acquired a younger, handsome lover named Sandro—but mainly he drank himself blind. Patricia Highsmith observed Burns drinking himself to death.

He also managed to write another novel, A Cry of Children, so bad that his American and English publishers considered turning it down. It is about another sophisticated Burns surrogate, this time a handsome concert pianist, and his slatternly girlfriend. When the book came out, it was universally panned. Brendan Gill said in The New Yorker that the dialogue was “of sequoian woodenness.” Commonweal remarked, “It all seems like a waste of time: Burns’s writing it, Harper’s publishing it, the reader’s reading it.” Although critics had overlooked his sexuality in earlier books now they zeroed in on “the slime of neuroticism, homosexuality, and assorted perversions.” I remember that if critics liked a book back then they wouldn’t mention its homosexuality; only failures were singled out for the stigma of queerness.

Did Burns kill himself?

Despite the decades that have gone by, the lack of living witnesses, and the obscurity of his subject, Margolick has done a superb job researching this sad life. In the last weeks of his life, Burns went with his lover, Sandro Nencini, to Nencini’s family’s summer home south of Leghorn, in Marina de Cecina. It was, romantically enough, near the place where Shelley had drowned. On August 6, 1953, Burns went out sailing and got a terrible sunburn. He went to bed early but a few days later he was having seizures and had to be hospitalized. He was foaming at the mouth. He died on August 11, two months shy of thirty-seven. To have the body repatriated his family had to spend $950. At the funeral mass in Back Bay only four people attended.

When officials from the American consulate made an inventory of Burns’s belongings they found:

A tan leather Gladstone bag, worth $4.00. New shirts: $6.00. Worn ones: $3.00. Three pairs of pants—gray, flannel, gray denim, and blue denim: $6.50. A gray suit: $6.00. A gray tweed overcoat: $10.00. An Unda radio: $10.00. Eleven framed pictures: $5.00. Packages of typing and carbon paper: fifty cents apiece.

That was it. He had some more things of the sort. Not much.

The post The Lost Novelist appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Proust was a great reader, as are all his characters. He wrote, “Real life, life at last laid bare and illuminated—the only life in consequence which can be said to be really lived—is literature.” Books are often the subject of his characters’ conversations and disputes. Certain authors are associated with the leading characters (Racine is the narrator’s mother’s favorite). Books often influence the themes and even the structure of Remembrance of Things Past (Charlus is obviously a descendant of Balzac’s imperious, mercurial, homosexual master criminal Vautrin). Proust’s style seems to owe a lot to his translations of Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies and The Bible of Amiens; his complex syntax and parenthetical interpolations sound more like the great English Victorian writer than like his French antecedents or contemporaries, although a case can be made that he was influenced by Saint-Simon.

Anka Muhlstein, who most recently wrote about Balzac (Balzac’s Omelette), here turns her attention to Proust’s enthusiasms, antagonisms, and literary influences—a perfect subject during this centennial of Swann’s Way.¹ That she herself is French and was brought up in Paris and in a not dissimilar lycée system makes her a reader who is sensitive to nuances of style and echoes of older standard French authors.

For instance, she has examined the book—George Sand’s François le Champi—that the narrator’s mother reads him as a bedtime story when he is an anxious little boy. It is a peculiar choice on Proust’s part, given that it is the tale of a lad who is raised by a kindly older woman, Madeleine, and grows up to marry this maternal figure—especially since Proust himself worshiped his mother and, three years after her death, began his vast novel as a sort of Platonic dialogue one morning between the narrator and his mother as they discuss Sainte-Beuve, the critic who dominated French literature earlier in the nineteenth century.

In a fascinating new study called Tout Contre Sainte-Beuve by Donatien Grau,² we learn that Proust long hesitated whether to present his attack on Sainte-Beuve as a “classical” essay in the manner of the critic and historian Hippolyte Taine or as a dialogue with his dead mother. There are two letters he wrote to old friends, Anna de Noailles and Georges de Lauris, in which he asked their advice about which form he should choose. As Muhlstein quotes Proust: “Should I write a novel? A philosophical essay? Am I a novelist? I find it consoling that Baudelaire based his Petits Poèmes en prose and Les Fleurs du Mal on the same subject.” He was hesitating between the nineteenth century and the twentieth. He chose to be modern.

That the most respected novel of the twentieth century (in the last thirty years Proust has superseded Joyce) should have been generated by a debate about Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who ruled French literary life until his death in 1869, is one more indication of how besotted Proust was with books. In order to attack Sainte-Beuve he caricatured his “method” as insisting that one could not read Balzac, say, without first understanding everything about Balzac’s life. Like a good New Critic, Proust thought this biographical approach was absurd; it had led Sainte-Beuve to dismiss Stendhal, whom he had known in society as M. Beyle and who didn’t impress him. As Grau suggests, perhaps Proust feared that future critics would dismiss him as a Jew, a homosexual, and a dandy. No wonder, as everyone knows, the narrator is Catholic, one of the few heterosexual characters left standing at the end of the book, and a serious man who laughs at mere aesthetes such as Bloch and ridicules him for his grotesque Jewishness and pedantry.

What Proust doesn’t admit is how much he was influenced by Sainte-Beuve, especially in his youthful journalism. Just as Proust had written in Le Figaro portraits of his friends and their salons, so Sainte-Beuve had written about similar topics in his weekly column, Les Lundis, and in his Portraits. That Proust chose to refute this master who’d dominated his earlier writing reveals to what extent his thoughts about literature had evolved. Proust’s thoughts on Sainte-Beuve, rough drafts and sketches never intended for publication, were brought together only in 1954 by Bernard de Fallois under a title conceived by Fallois, Contre Sainte-Beuve.

According to Grau, Proust took the curse off fiction about oneself, which everyone likes but no one respects, by changing crucial details in his presentation of characters, in particular the narrator, thereby allowing him to devise a narrator derived from the part of himself that is the most noble, the strongest, and reduced to its very essence. What did Proust propose to replace the biographical method? He made a strong distinction between the “Moi Social” (the person one meets at dinner parties) and the “Moi Profond” (the person who expresses himself only in writing books). This distinction has attracted the attention of hundreds of commentators, overshadowing other issues Proust broaches such as the conversation among the different arts, the problems of metaphor, and the entire question of style.

We learn from Muhlstein’s book that Proust’s favorite novel was, surprisingly, Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. He had read and thoroughly explored Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov as well. His sometime friend André Gide had written an entire book on Dostoevsky, whose remarkable influence on the various European literatures is sometimes underestimated. During a conversation with his friend Gilberte, the narrator praises Dostoevsky’s method, which proceeds “as Elstir painted the sea, by reversing the real and the apparent, starting from illusions and beliefs which one then slowly brings into line with the truth, which is the manner in which Dostoievsky tells the story of a life.” In a letter to his editor Proust claimed that in The Guermantes Way there was much more of Dostoevsky than in the other volumes because, in Muhlstein’s paraphrase, “the characters will do the contrary of what one expects them to do.”

Proust was also an intense admirer of English literature and valued George Eliot above all her countrymen. As he wrote a diplomat friend: “It is curious that in all the different genres, from George Eliot to Hardy, from Stevenson to Emerson, there is no literature which has had as much hold on me as English and American literature…. Two pages of The Mill on the Floss reduce me to tears.” He studied German in high school but felt there were no contemporary German writers of value (he probably never read Mann or Freud, though he had heard of Freud from one of his brainy society friends, the Princess Bibesco).

If all of Proust’s characters read, some of them are bad readers. Saint-Loup’s tastes, for instance, vary with his politics or with mere fashion and are not born out of inner convictions or profound inclinations. As a child of the nineteenth century Saint-Loup admires Victor Hugo and prefers him to the outdated Racine. The absurd Bloch admits that Racine composed one good line in Phèdre, the nonsensical and purely euphonious “La fille de Minos et Pasiphaë.” (Proust apparently borrowed the remark from Théophile Gautier—or was it Mallarmé?) As often in society, people score points by saying ridiculously paradoxical things. For instance, the Duchess de Guermantes, famous for her wit, shocks and excites the dowdy Princess of Parma by claiming that Zola, the father of Naturalism, is a poet, not a realist. As Muhlstein observes, “For the Duchess, reading is less a source of enjoyment than a wonderfully subtle social instrument of domination.”

Proust himself may have esteemed the poets Alfred de Vigny and Baudelaire, but Proust’s character the snobbish Mme de Villeparisis dismisses Vigny because he didn’t know how to hold his hat. Only a few people belong to the secret order of sincere and insightful readers whom Proust respects and among whom there exists a powerful complicity. Lest one think this observation is merely novelistic, one can usually, and often instantly, sort out readers of genuine taste from the poseurs and they immediately feel a bond of confraternity among themselves.

And if one knows an author, one must guard against judging his or her work on the basis of his or her social persona, just as Proust warns us. For instance, in Paris through Michel Foucault I knew Hervé Guibert, whose novels I never bothered with since he was suspiciously good-looking and strikingly mannered. Only after his death from AIDS did I discover that he was one of the most original and captivating writers of his generation. (I tried to make up for my earlier mistake by writing a long essay about him, “Sade in Jeans.”) I mention that only because a familiar game among Proust readers is finding parallels in real life to those in his book. (Not to sound too much like Alain de Botton, whose pursuit of “rules for life” in Proust’s pages seems middle-brow, especially since he chooses to ignore Proust’s condemnation of both love and friendship and his many observations about male homosexuality and lesbianism.) I guess those thoughts about vice and talent aren’t sufficiently life-enhancing.

One of Proust’s good readers, according to Muhlstein, is Charlus, who values above all other writers the Duc de Saint-Simon, Mme de Sévigné, Racine, and Balzac. The prickly Saint-Simon is esteemed not only for the beautiful prose in his forty-volume memoirs but also for his obsession with the niceties of precedence at Versailles, which appeals to Charlus’s own touchiness. Saint-Simon’s obsession is Louis XIV’s ennobling of his bastards, which enables them to enter a door before a genuine duke such as Saint-Simon; he devotes hundreds of pages to this worrisome and maddening problem. Proust shows that even in a sleepy village such as Combray the routines of a shut-in invalid like his aunt are as inexorable and unvarying as the king’s at court.

Charlus betrays his almost feminine sensitivity by his love of Mme de Sévigné, the great letter-writer of the seventeenth century who was enraptured by her indifferent daughter and tried to amuse the girl by telling her court gossip (Thornton Wilder, incidentally, transposed their relationship to South America in The Bridge of San Luis Rey). When Mme de Villeparisis, overhearing a discussion of Sévigné, says that she believes the mother’s passion for her daughter was unnatural, Charlus revealingly remarks, sounding like Tennessee Williams decades later, “What matters in life is not whom or what one loves…it is the fact of loving…. The hard and fast lines with which we circumscribe love arise solely from our complete ignorance of life.”

Charlus’s affection for Balzac arises partly out of the great novelist’s examination of homosexual and lesbian passions. “Readers interpret the great books of the past in the light of their obsessions,” Proust observes. Although he found much to reproach in Balzac’s crude style, he was evidently impressed by his way of having the same characters reappear in successive volumes of The Human Comedy, a practice he adopted.

Charlus’s (and Proust’s) love of Racine can be traced to the playwright’s delineation of unnatural passion—in the case of Phèdre a near-incestuous love. He also liked the way Racine, in portraying passion, could break the rules of grammar. Proust moreover establishes a link between Jews and homosexuals—“the accursed race…brought into the company of their own kind by the ostracism to which they are subjected….” In his portrait of Nissim Bernard, the elderly rich homosexual Jew, Proust frequently makes reference to Racine’s two biblical plays, Esther and Athalie.

As Muhlstein points out, when Proust is searching for a comparison his mind automatically turns to Racine, whose lines he knows by heart. Thus, when he talks about the narrator’s tearful farewell to his beloved hawthorn blossoms, he compares himself to Phèdre being oppressed by the hair ornaments her maid attaches to her tresses. Racine’s words have become part of Proust’s spontaneous vocabulary.

In affirming his own way of reading (subjective, passionate), Proust chooses to attack the great chroniclers of the nineteenth century, the Goncourt brothers, who always wrote their daily journal together until one of them died and the other brother soldiered bravely on. Proust, who loved pastiche and used it frequently in his forma- tive years to isolate and purge the influences of other writers on his style, resorted to a mock entry by the Goncourt brothers in Time Regained. The narrator supposedly stumbles upon an entry by the Goncourt brothers (actually invented by Proust) on the Verdurin salon in the 1860s or 1870s. We know that in truth Mme Verdurin is cruel, a self-dramatizing hysteric, and ambitious, but the Goncourts present her as nothing but a charming hostess. To be fair, Proust did acquire from the Goncourts many details and anecdotes about an earlier period of Paris society, which he was able to use for Swann’s youth, for instance.

The principal writer in Proust is a fictitious character, Bergotte, loosely based on the Nobel Prize winner Anatole France, the older writer who wrote a preface for Proust’s maiden effort, Pleasures and Days. The three artists in Proust are all fabricated: Bergotte the novelist; Elstir the painter; and Vinteuil the composer. And yet all three contain recognizable elements of actual men Proust knew or knew of.

Proust regretted that France wasted his time running after second-rate writers and vacuous society people and was such a social bore himself, but he recognized that what counts in writing is the ability to transform common occurrences into art rather than an intrinsic intelligence or refinement. Moreover, Proust was grateful to him for his support in the Dreyfus Affair when so many reactionary, anti-Semitic people in society assumed Dreyfus’s guilt; he rewarded France with the gift of a Rubens sketch. When Proust was facing his own imminent death he felt the necessity to add details to his book about the death of Bergotte. The great invented author has gone to see a Vermeer show at the Jeu de Paume, as Proust himself staggered out on his last legs to see this very exhibition.

France may have been dull but in his best novels, such as The Red Lily, he shows a subtle, sophisticated knowledge of society, art, adultery…. Although Proust happened to have mainly secondary novelists in the generation before him, nevertheless he adhered to the best of the lot, France and Pierre Loti. Among the older poets Mallarmé was his god; indeed Mallarmé, with his adherence to art for art’s sake, can be placed in the spectrum of the mature Proust at the opposite end from Sainte-Beuve.

Proust, in contemplating his future readers in his last volume, returns to the essential strategy of realism, identification with the experiences recounted on the page:

For it seemed to me that they would not be “my” readers but the readers of their own selves…. With its [the book’s] help I would furnish them with the means of reading what lay inside themselves. So that I should not ask them to praise me or to censure me, but simply to tell me whether “it really is like that,” I should ask them whether the words that they read within themselves are the same as those which I have written….

Proust, as Muhlstein’s perceptive readings suggest, never seemed certain what genre he was writing, and in some letters he called his massive book his “autobiography,” but in the end he seemed to land on the side of the novel of psychological realism.

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