Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

 “WAR AND PEACE” by Leo Tolstoy (first published in 1869; many English language translations)

I’m a firm believer in the notion that the conditions in which you read a book greatly influence the way you respond to the book. And part of those conditions must be the edition of the book you read.

I have tackled Tolstoy’s War and Peace twice in my life, and both times in the same translation – indeed both times reading the same volumes that still sit on my shelf. They are a well-preserved three-volume Everyman’s Library edition which was, according to the publishing history on the reverse of the title page “last reprinted in 1949”. I bought it from a second-hand bookshop when I was a student, and that must have been quite a few years ago, as the pencilled price on the flyleaf tells me that I paid only $1:50 for all three volumes. I used to believe that this was the translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude, as it was their (1920s) translation that the Everyman’s people later used when they reissued the novel. In fact, looking closely at the introductory matter in the first volume, I discover that my three volumes are an anonymous translation made way back in 1886, but “revised” (also anonymously) in 1932, when some passages omitted by the 1886 translator were restored.

Now hereby hang many, many tales. As anyone who has read a translation of a canonical Great Book will know, there are always many competing translations and there are always scholarly quarrels at to which translation is the best, the least error-filled, the most euphonious, the most faithful to the original author’s style and intentions. Often these quarrels are advantageous to new translators, who are trying to promote their wares – but even so, I have often come to understand that the earliest translations into English are usually the most error-filled. This is very perturbing to me. I do not want to believe that the 1260 pages of the 1886 English text, which I have twice marched through, are a defective text. Indeed, I refuse to believe that I have not actually read Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Yet I am aware that this is a translation that rigorously Anglicises all proper names. Count Pyotr Bezukhov becomes Peter Bezukhow, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky is Andrew Bolkonsky, Countess Natalya Rostova is Natacha Rostow and her brother Count Nikolai Rostov is Nicholas Rostow. So I have twice read a novel about Peter, Andrew, Natacha and Nicholas rather than Pyotr, Andrei, Natalya and Nikolai. I suppose, cumulatively, it does alter the way one sees these Russian characters.

It would be rude, foolish and presumptuous of me to start giving you a plot-summary of this novel, especially as you have probably got the gist of it either from your own reading or from one of the many film and television versions that have been made from it. From 1804 to the 1820s, we follow the reactions of a select group of Russian characters to both personal and great public events – notably Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.

I will content myself with reproducing the hasty reaction I scribbled out in my reading diary after my second encounter with the novel.

I noted first the sheer skill of the novel as a piece of storytelling. The personal and the historical combine and become interdependent. I was interested to find, especially in the first volume, that many of the most memorable episodes were based on a savage and witty social comedy (or social satire?) that I had not expected in an author whose work is most often described as “epic”. There are the political twitterings in the drawing rooms of St Petersburg and Moscow in 1805 (their fatuity later contrasted with the disaster that overwhelms Russia). There are the unseemly scramblings over the old Count Bezukhow’s will; the manoeuvres of Prince Basil (i.e. Vassily) as he contrives to have Peter marry his daughter Helen; and Maria Bolkonsky’s failed courtship.

Then there are the historical events, where Tolstoy’s god-like omniscience is

contrasted with the limited knowledge that any character caught up in the novel’s events can possibly have. Thus we have both Andrew Bolkonsky and Nicholas Rostow at the Battle of Austerlitz only half understanding what is happening, and Andrew, in his brief vision of peace, realizing that ultimate truth must lie outside the conflicting reports of which all historical records are made. In the fiercely satirical scenes where the Peace of Tilsit is negotiated between the French and the Russians, there is Nicholas Rostow’s half-articulated desperation, and his confusion that the tsar can be so easily bested and compromised. [This prepares us for the heavily authoritarian views Nicholas holds by the end of the novel – he is a man who cannot live with uncertainties.] The most vivid use of the “partial view” – the limited view of one individual – comes in Peter Bezukhow’s view of the Battle of Borodino, where the cannonades and attacks become a swirling confusion. Similarly, Napoleon’s capture of Moscow is dramatized first in the absurd demands that Count Rostopchine makes upon the city’s inhabitants, and then in his own callous desertion of the city. In so many cases we follow momentous events through the eyes of someone we know has only a very limited view. Cumulatively, this reinforces Tolstoy’s philosophy of human beings as subject to historical necessity.

Some moments in this great novel I found murky – or simply uninteresting. Natacha’s abortive elopement with Anatole merely tells us what we already know – that she is at this stage an immature young woman. The attraction of Nicholas and Sonia seems without conviction. Only one episode in the novel, however, strikes me as melodrama. It is too neat and convenient that Peter’s wife Helen happens to die when she does – after Andrew is dead and at such a time that the scrupulous Peter is thus left free to marry Natacha. Oddly, I did not find one of the novel’s most iconic episodes melodramatic at all. After the Anatole episode, Natacha’s return to, and nursing of, the wounded Prince Andrew is well prepared-for with the confusions of the household trying to escape Moscow and with Sonia’s eagerness to reunite Natacha with Andrew.

It is one special strength of the novel that the lives of three separate families (and especially of Peter, Andrew and Nicholas) all assume equal interest and importance. There is never the irritating sense (as is sometimes the cases in Dickens) that one is being diverted away from the novel’s major concerns and into a “subplot”. Each of the three households is essential to the overall interest and design of the novel, even if Peter ultimately seems a more complex character than either Andrew or Nicholas. Perhaps it is for his structural control, rather than for his depiction of momentous events, that Tolstoy deserves the name of “epic” novelist. In the mass of characters who are introduced, the design of the novel is never lost. Nearly every character contributes a new and interesting perspective to the historical situation. For example young Petia Rostow’s dreams of military glory, and then his sudden death, are necessary to depict the initial naïve patriotic fervour of 1812; but they also counterpoint the life of Nicholas Rostow, whose military career starts with similar fervour but ends quite differently.

There is one matter which troubles me, however. Are Tolstoy’s women entirely believable? Certainly their husbands are men of firm character, but do Maria and Natacha have to so completely submit to their husbands’ wills in the novel’s denouement? Both seemed to have more independent spirit than they finally display. Or was this in tune with Tolstoy’s odd views on marriage?

We let a writer of genius have his eccentricities and peculiarities of style. I am not at all worried that Tolstoy has some favourite metaphors that he repeats often and often. He loves comparing human society with a beehive, and he frequently has variations on the image of a frustrated leader “raging like a child who beats his hand against the floor which has hurt him.” Somehow these repetitions, like the novels interlocking family concerns, make the novel’s rhetoric tough and forceful.

Now what of that matter which deters so many readers of War and Peace? Tolstoy interlaces his narrative with historical and philosophical lectures, delivered in direct address to the reader. This is especially true in the last volume and after the campaign of 1812 is underway. I am the sort of eccentric reader who actually enjoys the self-contained lectures, essays and homilies that appear in novels by George Eliot, Henry Fielding and (in chitter-chatter form) Thackeray. Tolstoy’s lectures therefore did not upset me. Indeed I find, looking back through my three volumes of War and Peace, that I have often marked the lectures marginally to highlight their importance.

In some respects Tolstoy’s expressed philosophy of history altered the views I had before I first read this novel. For the first time I saw Napoleon, Murat and the others as a real menace rather than as picturesque figures from the distant past. This is as much a matter of Tolstoy’s commentary as of the historical events that are depicted – the tragic account of the Grande Armee’s winter retreat and dispersal. As Tolstoy presents him, there is something fatuous in Napoleon, who cannot see that many of his own actions are sheer play-acting, and that he himself is not in control of the direction of history. This is particularly true in the novel’s episode of Napoleon displaying his nephew’s portrait as if this is a security of his dynasty’s future.

Yet there is another strain in this novel that I find harder to accept. Tolstoy does not gloss over the confusions and petty rivalries within the Russian camp (particularly at the beginning of Book 10), but he does ask us to admire Koutouzow’s military waiting game – the Fabian tactic – much more than I am inclined to do. At certain points, this novel is, after all, the great hymn to Russian national feeling, and this motif does become oppressive – perhaps because subsequent history tells us that Russia has never found a higher unifying ideal than national chauvinism.

There is another matter, too. Directing his spleen (justifiably) at Napoleon, Tolstoy sets out to damn the “Great Man” theory of history by showing us that the force that moves history is beyond any individual’s control. In the process, however, he also damns any “progressive” view of history. He is on the side of deep-rooted national feeling – not of schemes to better the lot of humanity. Now I could happily join in any discussion on the shortcomings of Western European “Enlightenment” thought, and its nonsensical ideas of human perfectibility. Even so, I do not think Tolstoy depicts such ideas accurately or gives them a fair hearing. In the character of Peter Bezukhov, we are given one who becomes disillusioned in romantic illusions, in the illusions of class and in the silly clannishness of Freemasonry – but Tolstoy appears to believe that these represent the sum of modern Western European thought. In this he was, of course, quite wrong.

And yet this is a novel filled with such a wealth of insight into human behaviour that it is probably blasphemous of me to raise these objections.

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There now. That is how I skewered War and Peace in my reading diaries after I had given the great novel two readings. It remains to add that I am obviously no expert on Tolstoy (1828-1910). Apart from War and Peace, I have read his odd religious novel Resurrection, the Master and Man parables and his tales of military life in Sevastopol. But (despite having seen Greta Garbo, Vivien Leigh and various other actresses performing in the role) I have never made my way through what is regarded as Tolstoy’s other great masterpiece, Anna Karenina. I began reading it some years ago, got sidetracked by other things, and never resumed it. For this I am occasionally rebuked by a very good woman I know who tells me that Anna Karenina is her favourite novel and that she re-reads it every year. I must get back to it some day, as it hangs over me accusingly like four or five other Great Canonical Novels that I have never cracked.

There is another point worth making. Probably like some readers of this blog, I had seen two detailed film versions of War and Peace, and one long TV serial version, before I ever read the novel itself. This does influence the way one reads a novel, no matter how much one tries to resist such influence. In some part of my brain Prince Andrew / Andrei will always be Mel Ferrer, and Natalya / /Natacha will always be Audrey Hepburn in King Vidor’s 1956 three-and-a-half-hour compression of the novel. As for Peter / Pyotr / Pierre, he can be either Henry Fonda in the 1956 movie, or the more meditative Anthony Hopkins in the BBC’s 1972 TV series. From King Vidor’s film, I particularly remember the scene of Henry Fonda standing on a hillside and shaking his rhetorical fist at the invading French armies, shouting “Damn you, Napoleon!” The implication is that this Russian intellectual thinks Napoleon has betrayed the liberal ideals of the French Revolution in becoming a dictator and conqueror. Perhaps this influenced my view that Peter / Pyotr / Pierre was intended to represent liberal Western European ideas facing their betrayal. This interpretation is not really sustained by the novel itself.

The other film version I saw was Sergei Bondarchuk’s mammoth 4-part, eight-and-a-half-hour-long Russian War and Peace, filmed in 1965-67 and the most expensive film ever made in Soviet Russia (huge contingents of the Red Army played the masses of French and Russian troops). This film – shown in separate parts both in Russia and internationally – is sometimes taken to be the definitive version. Certainly its spectacle is impressive, it was honoured with an Academy Award and it is not to be sneezed at. But (mea culpa!) I found much of it overblown and confusing, and its key characters not particularly memorable. There is an interesting backstory to this. King Vidor’s 1956 Italian-American co-production was actually released in the Soviet Union in 1959 and proved to be immensely popular with Russian audiences. The huge Bondarchuk version was consciously undertaken to show that Russia itself could do better at Tolstoy than Hollywood could. It too was immensely popular in Russia. But it’s a point of interest that many younger Russian critics said they preferred the King Vidor version. They said that real cinema requires dramatic compression and that three-and-a-half hours made for better cinema than an eight-and-a-half hour version which tried to film the novel literally. I think they were right. Though made for the cinema, Bondarchuk’s film has the ploddingness of a long TV adaptation.

Silly Francophile Footnote: By the way, for the honour of French literature, I feel bound to point out that Tolstoy’s view of Napoleon as a fatuous role-playing charlatan was anticipated by a French writer. In his Servitude et Grandeur Militaires, published in 1835 (over thirty years before War and Peace), Alfred de Vigny has his wrenching satirical chapter in which Pope Pius VII, imprisoned by Napoleon, has a private conversation with the emperor and quickly diagnoses him as histrionic, role-playing and an historical mountebank. Tolstoy goes no further.

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.   

PREMATURE EVALUATION

There is a sad mental dysfunction that haunts both critics of the arts and political commentators.

I have christened it “premature evaluation”.

This is where things are pronounced loudly as masterpieces or great and immortal works before they have even established any sort of reputation with connoisseurs or general readers. And it is when newly-elected political leaders are crowned as messiahs.

We can all have great fun scoffing at old bestsellers that were written for the mass market (I often do). We can note with malicious pleasure how dated their attitudes are, how tawdry their prose, and how they express, at best, a mentality that was once shared by the unthinking herd, but from which even the unthinking herd has now moved on. How superior we feel, we literate people, as we make such snobby judgments.

But then we are forced to consider how transitory the judgments of highbrows are too. Please look at the pages of the TLS, the London Review of Books, the New York Times ditto from twenty or thirty or more years ago, and see which books their best critics were praising to the skies. Then consider the reputation and fame of those same books now. As often as not, they are forgotten, or regarded as dated, or simply never found a large readership (and never will).

As a reviewer, I have always been led by this phenomenon to one simple conclusion: It is imprudent and foolish to pronounce any book a masterpiece until quite some time has gone by from its first publication. Only after decades have passed can we judge if it has any staying power, if it still speaks to readers in any meaningful way, or if it is anything more than a period piece. Time is the only real judge of what is a masterpiece.

Praising a newly-published book as a masterpiece is, therefore, premature evaluation.

What is true in judging literature is also true in judging political leaders.

Recently, by Facebook, I have been bombarded with articles telling me what a wonderful person Canada’s newly-elected and youngish (45-year-old) Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is. The son of an earlier prime minister Pierre Trudeau, who shook Canada up a bit a few decades ago, young Trudeau is said to be inclusive, choosing a cabinet of many ethnicities, progressive, and dedicated to the task of redefining what a Canadian is. He has a “vision”. He is going to change things.

Very nice.

But something keeps screaming in my head: “He’s only just been elected. His government has only begun to construct legislation. And it’s too early to tell what the outcomes of that legislation will be.”

I am old enough to remember the great wave of optimism that greeted Tony Blair when he brought Labour back to power in Britain after years of Tory government. And where is Tony Blair’s reputation now?

Then there was that Kevin Rudd fellow in Australia. When he was elected PM, the press basically told us that he could walk on water. He could speak fluent Mandarin (unlike his Liberal opponent) and was apparently the chap who would bring a new understanding to world affairs, negotiate directly with the Chinese, and apologise to the Aboriginal people for past wrongs. But even before his first term was out, his own party was undermining him and he was rolled for the leadership by Julia Gillard. (Rudd later counter-rolled Gillard, but returned as PM for only one month). Rudd is now remembered as a not-particularly-forceful leader.

Let me make it clear that I wish Canada’s new PM well and hope he can deliver on his initial promise, even if I’m a little alienated from somebody whose election campaign sometimes looked like the PR of a rock star. Let me further make it clear that I don’t know enough about Canadian politics to make a sound judgment on them anyway.

But I am firm in my conviction that the right time to make a judgment on any politician is after he or she has actually achieved something substantial.

Until then, all the ra-ra about young Trudeau on Facebook and elsewhere is so much premature evaluation.

Something New

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We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“GIVE US THIS DAY – A Memoir of Family and Exile” by Helena Wisniewska Brow (Victoria University Press, $40)

            Sometimes great events in history are seen more clearly by us in the form of the individual memoir.

I am sorry that I did not get to review Helena Wisniewska Brow’s excellent family memoir and personal history Give Us This Day when it first came out in 2014. But I am delighted to do so now that Victoria University Press has produced a paperback edition.

Middle-aged and married with a family of her own, Helena Wisniewska Brow is the New Zealand-born daughter of a New Zealand-born Jewish mother, and a Polish father who was one of the 732 Polish children refugees welcomed to New Zealand by Peter Fraser’s government in 1944. Inevitably this memoir focuses on Stefan Wisniewski, 14 years old when he landed in Wellington and now an old man in his eighties. The trials and hardships of young Stefan and his family in wartime provide the book’s most dramatic moments. But Give Us This Day is also a book about an adult daughter coming to understand more fully who both her parents are; and it is a book about the condition of being an exile and the extreme difficulty of connecting with a new society – even one that is largely welcoming and friendly.

The author writes throughout in the first person and records events in both her parents’ lives, not in chronological order, but in the order in which they were revealed to her. Twice she and her father (and sometimes her younger sister Zofia) travelled to modern, post-communist Poland and sought out the places her father would have known when he was a boy. Once she and her father travelled to modern Iran, where wartime Polish refugees were based before being dispersed to various countries. Of course she also researched in archives, looked at other books written about the Polish children refugees, and interviewed a number of people. But the main interaction was with her father, so that it is Stefan Wisniewski’s voice which plays second only to the author’s.

The big events that influenced his life go something thus: Pre-war Poland was not a paradise, as in its eastern areas there were racial tensions between Lithuanians, Jews and the Poles who ruled. There was indeed some Polish anti-Semitism, which the author does not skip over. However, things were relatively peaceful in the area, and for the very small child Stefan it was almost idyllic. When Hitler and Stalin went into alliance in 1939, however, catastrophe followed. While Hitler overran and annexed west and central Poland, Stalin claimed all the eastern areas and incorporated them into the Soviet Union. About 20,000 of Poland’s intellectual elite were murdered by the NKVD at Katyn Wood, to prevent a new nationalist leadership arising. From early 1940 to mid-1941, over 500,000 Polish citizens (c.25% of them Jews) were deported to labour camps in Siberia. Additionally, when Hitler double-crossed his fellow gangster and invaded the USSR in June 1941, retreating Russian troops massacred about 150,000 Polish POWs whom they were still holding in prisons. Later, the USSR did a deal with Britain, which allowed a Polish fighting force to be formed. Between March and September 1942, 116,000 Poles, 20,000 of them teenagers and children, were evacuated from the USSR to what was then called Persia. This was only a fraction of all those who had been deported from Poland, many of whom went on to die in Soviet camps. (Helena Wisniewska Brow gives these well-attested facts at p.134 and pp.89-90).  

How was young Stefan caught up in this? His family farmed just to the east of the River Bug, which marked the boundary of what Stalin had grabbed. Their hometown, Brest, is in what is now Belarus. As many others have similarly recalled, old Stefan remembers the invading Red Army in 1939 as a raggle-taggle peasant bunch, envious even of the meagre wealth that Polish peasant farmers owned. One assumes they were the survivors of the collectivisation and mass starvations that had happened in Stalin’s tsardom:

“My father remembers the mass arrival a few days later of the underwhelming Russian conquerors. After the smart and well-equipped German invaders, the Russian soldiers were disappointing. ‘They looked terrible,’ my father says, ‘so awful.’ Old rifles were held to their chests with pieces of string rather than leather straps; many had no boots. Some were starving and begged locals for food. ‘They couldn’t get over how well off we were,’ Dad says, laughing now. ‘Us!’ ” (p.56)

In 1941 Stefan, his mother and most of his siblings were loaded onto cattle trucks and taken to Siberia. In Siberia they were “settled” in such a way that they had to scrabble for food and were often on the verge of starving. The book’s title is explained when Stefan’s daughter records:

 “I remember him telling me when I was a child how he’d made a deal with God when he was in Russia. If God gave him enough bread to eat, he would remain a faithful and devoted Catholic for the rest of his life. This made perfect sense to me at the time. Give us this day our daily bread. It’s the deal I would have made too, I remember thinking, and clear evidence that God must have been listening to his prayers.” (p.101)

The person who kept up Stefan’s spirits the most, and basically kept the siblings together, was his big sister Hela. The cover photograph of Give Us This Day shows 14-year-old Stefan and Hela mourning at their mother’s grave in Tehran.

Then there was New Zealand.

For the young Poles, this should have been a happy ending and parts of it were. There was a real welcome. Many people were generous with their time, even if the refugees’ camp at Pahiatua was a little regimented. Stefan recalls an idyllic brief holiday with the family of a New Zealand teenager with whom, in old age, he has an emotional reunion. But there was also the ache of exile, the alienness of New Zealand and a chronic inability to either fit in or feel at peace.

Stefan met and married a New Zealand woman, Olga, in 1959. Helena Wisniewska Brow is very even-handed about both her parents and it is clear that in some ways the marriage was one of two lost souls. Olga was Jewish. She came from a divided and dysfunctional family. Her daughter’s version suggests that Olga was running away from her family in marrying Stefan, and Stefan was trying to find stability in marrying Olga. It was unusual for a Polish Catholic to marry a Jew, but Olga agreed that the children would be raised as Catholics and on that level there was a certain stability. Even so, there were arguments, moody nights when Dad would disappear to the pub, and suggestions of things in the past of both parents that were not being told to Stefan’s and Olga’s two daughters.

If the most traumatic events in this memoir concern Stefan’s childhood, the author’s own most painful memories concern her attitudes towards her parents when she was a teenager. Growing up in Whakatane in the 1970s, young Helena was embarrassed by the shabbiness of her family home; embarrassed by her father’s money-saving handyman activities, which sometimes went wrong; embarrassed by the unglamorous car the family drove; and embarrassed by some aspects of the family’s Polish heritage. Much of this is simple, predictable and excusable teenage angst (no parents are good enough, or cool enough, for a 16-year-old). But it is overlaid with the sense of a second-generation child alienated from her parents’ inherited culture and wanting to be just an “ordinary” New Zealander. Obviously these are not the attitudes of the adult Helena Wisniewska Brow who is writing this book and is fully aware of the impossibility of complete assimilation. But they were the attitudes of her former self.

Overcoming this mindset took growing up and researching and writing this book. Some of the sadnesses that visited the displaced adult Poles were relentless. Stefan’s admired older sister Hela also settled in New Zealand but – despite an apparently stable marriage – her mental condition deteriorated and she was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia. The author recalls from childhood some of her aunt’s odd or disturbing behaviour.

By middle age, Stefan desired more and more to revisit the country from which he had been uprooted. Recalling her journeys there with him, the author notes how different post-Communist, Westernised Poland is from neighbouring Belarus, which was once the eastern Poland in which Stefan was born. When they venture across the Bug River to what was once called Brest, she notes:

 “The following morning’s bleak autumn sunshine conformed my dismal first impressions of Brest. The Hotel Intourist was even less attractive in daylight, a blank block of socialist realist architecture on a wide thoroughfare, a broken fountain in its car park. Life-sized bronze children danced around an empty pool littered with autumn leaves…. In each direction, tidy streets were lined with blank-windowed buildings and badly lit stores. Locals wearing stilettos and leather jackets brushed past us, averting their eyes when they heard us speaking English. It was as if they were unaware that their city was only a few kilometres away from modern Europe. To the west, and across the broad, slow-moving Bug River skirting the city, was Poland, its back firmly turned on its poorer eastern neighbour.”(pp.46-47)

Both father and daughter are perturbed by how different Brest is from the homeland the father recalled, and how difficult it is for the father to identify places when there has been such change and when his memory is fading. He is uncertain about the exact location of what was once the family home:

 “ ‘I think this was our tree, our pear tree,’ Dad said, and then: ‘Actually, I’m not sure.’ He was muttering, walking in circles. I was worried. Did he really know where we were?.... The spot could easily have been another 100 metres that way – or that. There was no sign of a house having been there. How did he know it was there?” (p.49)

And yet, in Poland, Belarus and Iran, connections are made and memories are kindled and some surviving, aged members of Stefan’s extended family are met. There were those who had managed to make it back from their Soviet exile, and a very few who had prospered. For the New Zealand-born author, however, there is an unbridgeable gap between herself and those of her relatives who are still living a traditional Polish life. Meeting one such, Helena Wisniewska Brow reflects:

“Maria and her family were living the simple lives of my ancestors, but this place wasn’t mine. I understood my father’s wartime exile was a tragedy for him; I knew it was a blessing for me.” (p.222)

For Stefan, the return journeys are sentimental journeys. For the author, they are proof that she is a New Zealander after all, and not a Pole.

Or is it that simple?

There is a great wrench in this book between the desire to exorcise, or come to terms with, the past; and the realization that the past, including the lives of our forebears, remains a part of who we are.

Sad and horrible in parts of the experience it records, Give Us This Day is an excellent example of the memoir where the personal meshes with the historical, illuminating the impact on individuals of those great events that the history books record. In the interplay of the father’s and the daughter’s voices, it is a layered and well-written book.

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Personal Footnote: Ten years back I wrote an article for Australian Historical Studies (issue of October 2006) called “Struggle for Souls”. It dealt with the clash in New Zealand between the Catholic Church and the tiny (and mainly insignificant) New Zealand Communist Party. Any strong evidence that all was not well in Stalin’s domain was anathema to the local Communists and was denounced as propaganda in their paper, the People’s Voice. Almost as soon as the Polish children refugees arrived in New Zealand, the People’s Voice began a low-level hate campaign against them, because the Poles bore such clear witness to the fact that Stalin had practised atrocities against the Poles just as Hitler had. So there appeared abusive pieces in the People’s Voice saying that the Polish kids were “agents of reaction” and so forth. Fortunately, as I found when I interviewed some elderly Poles for another project, this had absolutely no impact on the refugee Poles, who hadn’t even heard of the CPNZ. But then neither had most New Zealanders.

Here’s another memory. In the decade before I was born, a neighbourhood family billeted one of the Polish children. He acquired the nickname “Pete the Pole”. I was told by members of the family that when the kid arrived in New Zealand he knew only two words of English. They were “Shoot Russians!” Fair enough.

Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

 “FORT COMME LA MORT” (“Strong as Death”) by Guy de Maupassant (first published in serial form, then in book form, in 1889) 

“For love is as strong as death, its jealousy as lasting as the grave. It burns like a blazing fire, like a mighty flame”, it says in Chapter 8 of the Song of Songs (or Canticle of Canticles or Song of Solomon if you prefer). This seems an unequivocal statement of the power of (sexual) love, doesn’t it? But the realist in me immediately points out that if love is really as strong as death then, logically, death must be as strong as love. And in death love dies.

I’m not sure if Guy de Maupassant (1850-93) consciously worked it out this way, but in his novel Fort Comme La Mort (Strong as Death – I have yet to see an English translation of the novel) he is at least as fixated on ageing, decay and the inevitability of death as he is on love, even if an unconsummated and rather pointless love is ostensibly the focus of the novel.

As I have remarked before on this blog (look up the posting on Pierre et Jean), de Maupassant tends to be known to Anglophone readers solely as the writer of short stories, in which genre he was indeed prodigious. This ignores the fact that he also published six novels, and left two more incomplete when he died. Fort Comme La Mort is regarded by the French as one of his best, even if it is scarcely known to the outside world. (Only once has it ever been filmed – as a French TV drama.) What interests me is that the novel was written by a man who was about to turn 40, and it clearly reflects the sense many get at that age that youth is irretrievably gone. Indeed the middle age of the main character (who is nearly 50) is as crucial to the novel’s meaning as Josef K’s reaching the age of 30 is to the meaning of Kafka’s TheTrial. Only hindsight lets us know that de Maupassant, who died at the age of 43, never lived into the old age that he apparently feared.

Olivier Bertin is a successful society portrait painter. His long-term mistress is the Comtesse Anne de Guilleroy, whose husband is a conservative member of parliament.  (“Anne” is apparently an abbreviation of Antoinette, and Bertin frequently addresses her as “Any” i.e. “Annie”.) The time is the early Third Republic of the 1880s, but many tone-ier members of the possessing classes still hanker for royalty and its titles. Like husbands in so many of de Maupassant’s work, the Comte de Guilleroy is a harmless, complaisant, unsuspecting chap who thinks that his wife and the artist are “just good friends”, especially as Olivier Bertin once painted an admired portrait of Anne.

Bertin paints, goes to his club, visits Anne and her family, and joins in the social chitter-chatter with his pals, although when they boast of their sexual conquests he tactfully says “Moi, je me contente de mes modeles.” (Part One, Chapter 3). But Bertin is increasingly unhappy. He’s losing his touch as a painter. Like a “blocked” writer, he’s run out of ideas. Worse, while he can remember the happy days of his first seduction of Anne (it is recalled in the opening chapter), and while she is still his good pal and confidante, the fire has gone out of their liaison.

And then he begins to notice Anne’s adolescent daughter Annette. To Anne, Bertin’s interest in Annette is at first unexceptionable. He is avuncular towards Annette and a part of a social group in which the girl is always chaperoned. But Bertin’s feelings for the girl become an obsession. In her, he sees a purer and more beautiful and more vibrant and (most crucially) younger version of his mistress. It doesn’t help that people often remark on how like the portrait of Anne (painted years previously) the young Annette looks. At first we think that this is heading towards the seduction of the girl by the middle-aged man – a “dirty old man” story verging on paedophilia, or a nineteenth century Lolita.

But that is not the way Fort Comme La Mort develops.

Step by step, and in painful psychological detail, de Maupassant shows how much the artist deceives himself in imagining that there is nothing sexual in his feelings and then how much he deceives himself in thinking that he can somehow recapture his youth through the girl. And it is clear that he hardly knows how the girl thinks or what the core of her being is anyway.

Stages of his obsession are chronicled. At one point, his mistress Anne’s mother dies. Anne goes into deep mourning. We as readers have the distinct impression that there is something as forced in her grief as there is in the attention that Bertin now pays to her, when his mind is preoccupied with her daughter. The trusting Comte de Guilleroy invites Bertin down to his country estate to comfort his wife and bring her out of her grief by taking her to Paris. But in the country setting, Bertin’s fixation increases. When Anne plays the piano for him, Bertin gazes instead at the listening Annette to the point where Anne asks him to look at her for a change. When the three of them walk in the country estate in the balmy summer season, far from the urban stinks of Paris to which Bertin is accustomed, the scene is like Eden to him. He watches the girl and

“… de plus en plus, d’heure en heure, elle activait en lui l‘evocation d’autrefois! Elle avait des rires, des gentillesses, des mouvements qui lui mettaient sur la bouche le gout des baisers donnes et rendus jadis: sensation precise, quelque chose de pareil a un present reve; elle brouillait les epoques, les dates, les ages de son coeur, les rallumant des emotions refroidies, melait, sans qu’il s’en doutat, hier avec demain, le souvenir avec esperance.” (Part Two, Chapter 2)

[“….more and more, from hour to hour, she aroused in him the sense of old times! Her laughter, her sweet manners, her movements all filled his mouth with the taste of kisses given and received long ago: it was an exact feeling, like a dream version of the present; she stirred up the eras, the dates, the different ages of his heart, lighting once again emotions that had long since died, mixing, without his fully suspecting it, yesterday with tomorrow, memory with hope.” – Pardon my clumsy translations in this notice.]

By this stage we realize that young Annette is as much pretext as object of desire. She is the past, which the roué cannot recapture. But also by this stage Anne is becoming aware of Bertin’s obsession. She begins to find stratagems to remove Annette from Bertin, especially when Bertin takes mother and daughter to his studio to paint a portrait of Annette as “Reverie”. The Comte and Comtesse de Guilleroy are in the process of arranging the marriage of Annette to the young, handsome, athletic and eligible Marquis de Farandal. The mere thought of this marriage overwhelms Olivier Bertin with irrational feelings of jealousy directed at the young marquis, directed at younger males, directed at the world in general. To make it more humiliating, Olivier Bertin is fully aware that his feelings are irrational and very nearly puerile.

But there they are.

The time comes when Anne at last sits down with her old lover and, as he frankly admits his obsession, she tries to persuade him that he will recover only if he never sees Annette again. Somewhere in their feverish exchanges, Bertin says: “Elle, je l’aime comme vous, puisque c’est vous; mais cet amour est devenu quelque chose d’irresistible, de destructeur, de plus fort que la mort. Je suis a lui comme une maison qui brule est au feu!” (Part Two, Chapter 6)

[“I love her like you because it is you; but this love has become something irresistible and destructive, stronger than death. I’m drawn to her as a burning house is drawn to fire.”]

            Like Pierre et Jean, Fort Comme La Mort is an intense study of the corrosive effects of an unhealthy obsession upon a single individual. For nearly the whole of the novel we are locked inside the head of this individual, although the narrative is in the third person. In Fort Comme La Mort however, there are some passages where we break free of Olivier Bertin’s thoughts to see what Anne is thinking – and here we discover her fear of being abandoned by her lover and her silent soliloquies before the mirror as she looks at her crow’s feet and compares herself with her daughter. Though not as irrational as her lover, she is just as consumed with time and ageing.

            I cannot say that this novel is all of a piece. To round it off, de Maupassant dips (in the last fifteen pages) into pure melodrama, sparked by Bertin’s seeing a review in a newspaper condemning his art as old-fashioned. This denouement involves a lurid death scene and the burning of love letters. There are touches of heavy-handed symbolism. The humid streets of Paris in summer – oppressing the worn-out Bertin – contrast with the Edenic country estate where Annette walks. There is a scene where Bertin goes to a Turkish bath, which Annette’s young fiancé the Marquis de Farandal is also attending, and the younger man’s naked body contrasts with Bertin’s, like spring and autumn personified. Most obviously, there is a scene where the leading characters go to the opera. On stage is a performance of Gounod’s Faust. With Annette is his sight lines, Bertin identifies with the saturnine necromancer’s wish to be young again and to make love to a young woman. His ears prick up at Faust’s lines “Je veux un tresor qui les contient tous. Je veux la jeunesse.” (Part Two, Chapter 6) [“I want a treasure containing all the others. I want youth.”] De Maupassant obviously knew his Zola, as the scene is a dead ringer for the one in LaCuree (published 18 years earlier than Fort Comme La Mort) in which stepmother and stepson, involved in a quasi-incestuous relationship, go to the theatre and see a performance of Racine’s Phedre, which echoes their situation.

            So this sombre reflexion on getting old is not as tightly structured as Pierre et Jean and is unlikely ever to have been deemed “perfect” by Henry James. Indeed the biographer Francis Steegmuller, who is generally very sympathetic to de Maupassant, accuses Fort Comme La Mort of suffering from “a most pernicious form of anaemia” and says “it is especially Maupassant’s failure to leave anything unsaid, any action unexplained, any thought unrecorded.” He is, in effect, accusing de Maupassant of being too obvious, spelling things out, and leaving no room for subtext.

Even so, we could also remember that this was the novel which Ford Madox Ford was consciously attempting to emulate when he wrote The Good Soldier. Until Fort Comme La Mort falls apart in melodrama, it gives a bracingly dyspeptic view of Paris and its wealthier society and its artistic circles as seen by an author who, even in his late 30s, was blasé about it all. De Maupassant shows a weary familiarity with the art scene of which Bertin is part when he gives us a set piece (Part One, Chapter 4) describing an art show, with artists jockeying for attention and attempting to devalue one another’s work in subtle and unsubtle ways. (The character of the art critic Musadieu becomes sour comic relief in such scenes). Even when Bertin and Anne are first being introduced to us, we are given a sense of world-weariness in the way fashionable conversation is described:

“Connaissant tout le monde, dans tous les mondes, lui comme artiste devant qui toutes les portes s’etaient ouvertes, elle comme femme elegante d’un depute conservateur, ils etaient exerces a ce sport de la causerie francaise fine, banale, aimablement malveillante, inutilement spirituelle, vulgairement distinguee, qui donne une reputation particuliere et tres enviee a ceux dont la langue s’est assouplie a ce bavardage medisant.” (Part One, Chapter 1)

[“Knowing everybody in all sorts of high society, he as an artist to whom all doors were open, she as the elegant wife of a conservative member of parliament, they were drawn into the sport of French chatter – neat, banal, cheerfully malicious, pointlessly witty, vulgarly distinguished; the sort of chatter that can give you a special reputation, and is much treasured by those whose tongues are attuned to destructive gossip.”]

Then there is the advice, which Bertin gives to young Annette early in the novel, on how she can hold her own at dinner-table conversation:

“Ecoute bien, Nanette. Tout ce que nous disons la, tu l’entenderas repeter au moins une fois par semaine, jusqu-a ce que tu sois vieille. En huit jours tu sauras par coeur tout ce qu’on pense dans le monde, sur la politique, les femmes, les pieces de theatre et le reste. Il n’yaura qu’a changer les noms des gens ou les titres des oeuvres de temps en temps. Quand tu nous aura tous entendus exposer et defendre notre opinion, tu choisiras paisiblement la tienne parmi celles qu’on doit avoir, et puis tu n’auras plus besoin de penser a rien, jamais; tu n’auras qu’a te reposer.” (Part One, Chapter 2)

[“Now listen carefully, Nanette. Right up until you are an old woman, you’ll hear everything we say here repeated at least once a week. In a week, you will know by heart everything that everyone in society thinks about politics, women, stage plays and all the rest. You just have to change people’s names or the titles of shows from time to time. When you’ve heard us all expound and defend our opinions, all you have to do is choose your own opinion from among those people are supposed to have, and then you won’t have to think about anything ever again. All you’ll have to do is relax.”]

I do not think Fort Comme La Mort is de Maupassant’s best work, but it has its strong moments, both as a reflexion on ageing and the male ego, and as a disenchanted portrait of a society.

Silly Anglophone footnote: I am always interested in Anglicisms that are taken up as fashionable words in other languages. In Fort Comme La Mort, I find de Maupassant speaking of fashionable circles as containing “la fine fleur du high-life” (Part One, Chapter 2), describing Annette’s young fiancé as having “des allures anglaises de sportsman” (Part One, Chapter 2) and also speaking of people who make miniscule fripperies as “des bijoutiers de Lilliput” (Part One, Chapter 3). This is just a selection, although of course the novel was written long before franglais took hold of the French language.