Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

SOMETHING THOUGHTFUL

HOW NOT TO HONOUR AUTHORS

            I’ve just been commenting on Eca de Queiroz’s novel The Maias, and it has set me thinking about how authors are sometimes honoured in public places. I don’t mean with awards, grants and speeches or obituaries. I mean with statues. If statespersons, military persons or scientific persons are honoured with public statues, then I see no reason why important writers shouldn’t be. My problem is, however, how godawful so many attempts to thus honour authors are. By the end of this little rant, you will see where Eca de Queiroz comes into it.

            I’ll begin by saying that some funerary monuments to authors are sheer abominations. Visiting the Pere Lachaise cemetery  in Paris three years back, I recoiled in horror from the hideous tomb that Jacob Epstein made for Oscar Wilde. I have nothing against Jacob Epstein and admired those few of his other sculptures I have seen. But this square and ugly monstrosity was not be to admired. It doesn’t exult. It weighs the man down with a solid block. Poor Oscar is much better honoured in the lazy, laid-back statue of him found in Merrion Square in Dublin.

            Some  statues of authors are unsatisfactory because of historical circumstance. The statue to Heinrich Heine in Hamburg is a mediocre piece of modernism, halfway  representational, but moving towards cartoonish caricature. How did this happen? In the early 20^th century there was a fully representational statue of Heine here – but it was pulled down and destroyed by the Nazis. They weren’t going to honour a Jew as Germany’s best lyrical poet.  So we now have what is a replacement. It depicts Heine in the same pose as the original statue had, but reduces it to weak-lined silliness.

            Some authorial monuments are a little pompous and pretentious, but do at least witness to the author’s importance. See the red stone tomb of Emile Zola, looking like yesterday’s idea of the future,  which I snapped up in the Montmartre cemetary. 

            Some are almost poignant in their accidental irrelevance. The tomb of Charles Baudelaire in the Montparnasse cemetery is really the tomb of three family members; and the one given greatest prominence in the epitaph is Baudelaire’s step-father General Aupick, who would now be completely forgotten if it were not for his connection with the poet.

            Just to show how puerile and uncouth I can be, let me note that in the same Montparnasse cemetery there is a perfectly adequate double-tomb for that charlatan pair Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. I took great delight being photographed poking my tongue out, and making an extremely vulgar gesture to, this pair. But that was because of them – not because of the tomb’s commonplace and functional design.

            So at last to why writing about Eca de Queiroz made me think of monuments to authors – and give a gasp of distaste.

            In Lisbon in January of 2019, I sought out the little square in which there is a statue dedicated to Eca de Queiroz. The statue  is representational. It shows de Queiroz himself with almost photographic reality. But – oh dear! – what a silly thing it is. Apparently the sculptor intended to show the author being inspired by his muse. But his muse is a naked young woman whom the author appears to be sizing up. It resembles an old roue gazing at a young woman with seduction in mind. A dirty old man, in fact. I let myself be photographed in front of it, but sighed a bit.