| The next day we had the pintaudou, the day after that
a pièce de boeuf du Charolais so remarkable that I never eat
a steak without thinking how far short it falls. And never were the checks
less than "staggering," and never did my father complain. Those meals constituted
a high spot in my gastronomic life, but before long my mother and sister mutinied.
They wanted a restaurant where they could see some dresses and eat meringues
glacées and homard au porto.
So in 1939, on my first evening in wartime Paris, I went straight
from the Louvois to the Rue Sainte-Anne. The Restaurant Maillabuau had vanished.
I did not remember the street number, so I walked the whole length of the
Rue Sainte-Anne twice to make sure. But there was no Maillabuau; the horses
at Longchamp had eaten him.
Museum entry
Reflections in a Cul-de-sac
From
A.J. Liebling
The Road Back to Paris, reprinted in Liebling Abroad (Wideview
Books, 1981), pages 15-20.
Headnote: Liebling's piece is a presentation of what it
means for France to go to war in 1939, but it is not a description either
of France or of war. It is highly idiosyncratic because it depends upon his
happening to know three individual people and happening to know enough about
their personal history to connect them with the previous war. But it is
not reflexive: it does not begin with hedges about the inevitable inadequacy
of any meditation on such a vast subject as a nation at war; instead, it unhesitatingly
moves to three individuals and their experience, as if this were a natural
and inevitable way to think about this subject. It is remarkable that a
reader of this passage who knows nothing that Liebling knows about these
people accepts this eccentric motion without resistance, without even feeling
that it is eccentric. His treatment of each of them, confined as it is to
one or two paragraphs, is ruthlessly selective and clearly redacted from
a vast store of unmentioned experience. The work of redaction is completely
invisible, so that the reader enjoys the product without noticing there
was any work involved. Liebling eschews the roles of teacher and rhetor:
ostensibly, he is neither teaching nor trying to persuade. From the first
words, Liebling has assumed a reader who recognizes the appropriateness
of his presentation, but who, for merely accidental reasons, lacks acquaintance
with his material.
On Sunday, September 3, 1939, everybody with the price of a newspaper knew
that Great Britain and France were about to declare war on Germany, which
had already invaded Poland. I was living down on East Thirty-third Street
then, but I drifted up toward the New Yorker office because I thought
that even though it was a Sunday I might find someone there to talk to. It
was a hot afternoon, I remember. Wolcott Gibbs had a radio going in his office.
I went down the fire escape from the main editorial office on the nineteenth
floor to the cell on the seventeenth where I did my writing and sat there
for a while, at moments glad because France still had pride, at others feeling
guilty because I would not share the fight or the risk. I was sorry that
I had left daily newspaper work four years before then, because if I had
stayed on a paper I might have a chance to go to the war. The New Yorker
appeared a cul-de-sac.
As I sat there I thought of M. Lebourgeois, a traveling salesman
I had met in the billiard room of the Hôtel du Cheval Blanc at Vire
in 1926, and also of M. Perrin, the patron of the hotel in the Rue
de l'Ecole de Médecine at Paris, where I had lived for two years while
pretending to study medieval literature, and my good friend Henri, who was
the French representative of an American silk firm. All three had shared
the quality of having escaped from a great danger with honor intact. None
of them had come through the war unwounded, and none had achieved any great
position since the armistice of 1918. But each took immense pleasure in not
having been killed and in not having to be ashamed of himself.
When M. Lebourgeois had patted his stomach, while telling me of
the table d'hôte at a favorite hotel in his territory, he had clearly
been glad that the stomach had survived—the bullet had broken his left leg,
which bothered him hardly at all except in wet weather. The merchants of
the United States, M. Lebourgeois had told me, had absolutely the right idea—le
big business. Undoubtedly, in that country of large orders, he had said,
it was a pleasure to be a salesman. The retailers had vision; they were not
like these retrograded types of the Department of Calvados, who bought a
few articles at a time and those only with the most apparent misgivings.
He had had one period of relative affluence, he had said—almost le big
business, it had been—directly after the war, when he had gone about
selling to small communities those life-size cast-iron figures of poilus
which served as war memorials in most of rural Normandy. On the base of each
statue was the inscription "Morts à l'Ennemi," and under it the twenty
or thirty names of the late heroes. The figure of the poilu was always poised
on the ball of the right foot, the bayonet stuck out before him, the iron
face constricted in defiance. "These opportunities don't recur often in
a man's lifetime," M. Lebourgeois used to say when he told about it. "Figure
to yourself—it is necessary to have a war before you can sell something in
this bugger of a department." If M. Lebourgeois was sufficiently fortunate
to survive this new war, he might make more sales, I figured to myself.
M. Perrin, my landlord, had taken a Chinese pleasure in disingenuous
self-abasement. It was a privilege he had earned in the war. If he had
deprecated himself before that, nobody would have contradicted him, because,
as he used to say, he was a small, insignificant man without capacity or
cultivation. Then, in order to survive, it would have been necessary for
him to assert himself. He would have disliked that. But he had won the
Legion of Honor for bravery under fire, and although he always shrugged away
references to his decoration, he never left the ribbon off his coat. Also,
he had been a captain. Intelligence is not requisite for a captain of infantry,
he used to assure me. An officer of artillery or engineers, that
required culture, but a captain of infantry, and especially one who began
the war as a private, might be very stupid. It was a matter of luck, of
survival, one might say. We would sit at a table in front of the Soufflet—which
was later to be replaced by a gigantic modernistic chain-store café
called Dupont—watching the Danish and Rumanian students and their girls,
and the little waiter with the reddish eyes and the carroty mustache would
not be so brusque with M. Perrin as with the other clients. M. Perrin's
suits had been shiny, but the ribbon had given him an air. Almost, one would
say, an instructor at the Ecole des Chartes near by. The instructors' suits
were shiny too. The possibility of such a mistake had flattered M. Perrin,
and he had tried by his manner to convey to strangers the idea that his ribbon
was an academic honor.
M. Perrin was a native of Lille. He had lived with his wife, a
large, hot-tempered Orleanaise, his mother, who was very old, and his daughter,
who was adolescent, on the street floor of the hotel. Without the red ribbon
to enhance his dignity, without the head wound he had received at Douaumont
to explain his flightiness, M. Perrin, it was easy to see, would have been
familially submerged. "My wife is very bitter after gain," he had sometimes
said over the apero. But he had never refused to accept payment
of a bill which she had harried some student into meeting. His mother had
been in Lille during the occupation of 1914-18. Her confidence had never
wavered, she had once told me, since the day when she had seen some German
officers eating lettuce. "They put sugar on it," she said, an indication
to her of cretinism on a national scale. The reason I thought so long of
M. Perrin was that he had lived in what he and I and everybody else had thought
was a comfortable aftermath. Another decoration would bring him no satisfaction
commensurate with the first. Neither would another head wound.
Henri had been most pleased to survive the war of any of them, because
to him it had seemed especially horrible. He was a sensitive man, extremely
tall, with a long, doleful countenance, watery blue eyes, and a great, drooping
Gallic mustache. In 1914 he had been in the United States—it was there
I had first known him—and he had returned to fight. Sometimes I used to
have dinner with Henri's family in their apartment on the Avenue de la Motte-Picquet,
a neighborhood roughly equivalent to Central Park West, and after we had
eaten, Henri would tuck a violin under his chin and his daughter Suzette
would go to the piano, and then he would play and sing "J'Avais Perdu la
Tête et Ma Perruque," from Les Cloches de Corneville. His
son Jean, who had spent most of his young life in America, would sit silent,
uninterested, and slightly embarrassed. Jean liked to talk about automobile
engines, using a good deal of American slang. "He should be a handy man
around a tank now," I thought, "he's just the right age." Henri had preferred
to talk about "before the war," a period, he would say, when Paris really
had been fit to live in. Eglée, his wife, had sometimes pretended
to be bored by his reminiscences. I reflected that Henri, with luck, would
be able to talk someday about "before the war before last." As a matter
of fact he was not to survive this second war. He was to die of cold and
malnutrition and chagrin, "but principally of chagrin," his daughter would
later write to me, in Paris in February of 1941.
Museum entry
Prime Numbers
From
G. H. Hardy
A Mathematician's Apology. [1940] With a foreword by C. P. Snow.
Cambridge: University Press, 1967, pages 88-92.
Headnote: Given that Hardy begins with a claim, you would
think that he is going to offer an argument. Instead, he offers a demonstration
that depends upon an appealing grammar of understanding. To present the superiority
of serious mathematics over trivial mathematics, he assumes our familiarity
with something he takes to be trivial—chess, in this case—and guides us
through a piece of serious mathematics. His position is that if he can just
show us an example of the best mathematics, it will of course be obvious
to us that it is serious in contrast to chess, which, however intricate it
may be, is always trivial. He takes the stand that any reader can see the
truth of his claim. He is a guide who selects the appropriate proof and
walks us through it. The claim is open to many objections and qualifications,
but Hardy relies upon a basic premise of classic style: truth does not require
argument, just an unobstructed view. The reader may lack that unobstructed
view by lacking mathematical training, but this is merely an accidental lack
which Hardy will remove by lending us his training.
A chess problem is genuine mathematics, but it is in some way "trivial"
mathematics. However ingenious and intricate, however original and surprising
the moves, there is something essential lacking. Chess problems are unimportant.
The best mathematics is serious as well as beautiful—"important"
if you like, but the word is very ambiguous, and "serious" expresses what
I mean much better.
I am not thinking of the "practical" consequences of mathematics.
I have to return to that point later: at present I will say only that if
a chess problem is, in the crude sense, "useless," then that is equally true
of most of the best mathematics; that very little of mathematics is useful
practically, and that that little is comparatively dull. The "seriousness"
of a mathematical theorem lies, not in its practical consequences, which are
usually negligible, but in the significance of the mathematical ideas
which it connects. We may say, roughly, that a mathematical idea is "significant"
if it can be connected, in a natural and illuminating way, with a large complex
of other mathematical ideas. Thus a serious mathematical theorem, a theorem
which connects significant ideas, is likely to lead to important advances
in mathematics itself and even in other sciences. No chess problem has ever
affected the general development of scientific thought; Pythagoras, Newton,
Einstein have in their times changed its whole direction.
The seriousness of a theorem, of course, does not lie in
its consequences, which are merely the evidence for its seriousness.
Shakespeare had an enormous influence on the development of the English
language, Otway next to none, but that is not why Shakespeare was the better
poet. He was the better poet because he wrote much better poetry. The inferiority
of the chess problem, like that of Otway's poetry, lies not in its consequences
but in its content. . . .
It will be clear by now that, if we are to have any chance of making
progress, I must produce examples of "real" mathematical theorems, theorems
which every mathematician will admit to be first-rate. . . .
I can hardly do better than go back to the Greeks. I will state
and prove two of the famous theorems of Greek mathematics. They are "simple"
theorems, simple both in idea and in execution, but there is no doubt at all
about their being theorems of the highest class. Each is as fresh and significant
as when it was discovered—two thousand years have not written a wrinkle
on either of them. Finally, both the statements and the proofs can be mastered
in an hour by any intelligent reader, however slender his mathematical equipment.
I. The first is Euclid's proof of the existence of an infinity
of prime numbers.
The prime numbers or primes are the numbers
(A) 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, ...
which cannot be resolved into smaller factors. Thus 37 and 317 are prime.
The primes are the material out of which all numbers are built up by multiplication:
thus 666 = 2 . 3 . 3 . 37. Every number which
is not prime itself is divisible by at least one prime (usually, of course,
by several). We have to prove that there are infinitely many primes, i.e.
that the series (A) never comes to an end.
Let us suppose that it does, and that
2, 3, 5, . . . , P
is the complete series (so that P is the largest prime); and let us, on
this hypothesis, consider the number
Q = (2 . 3 . 5 . .
. . .P) + 1
It is plain that Q is not divisible by any of 2, 3, 5, ..., P; for it leaves
the remainder 1 when divided by any one of these numbers. But, if not itself
prime, it is divisible by some prime, and therefore there is a prime
(which may be Q itself) greater than any of them. This contradicts our
hypothesis, that there is no prime greater than P; and therefore this hypothesis
is false.
The proof is by reductio ad absurdum, and reductio ad
absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician's finest
weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess gambit: a chess player may
offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers
the game.
Museum entry
The Role of the Bishop
From
Jacob Aagard
"The Classical Endgame" in Easy Guide to the Panov-Botvinnik Attack.
London: Cadogan Books, 1998, page 26.
Headnote: The classic writer has no hesitation in using
a word or term that does not belong to the diminished vocabulary of Basic
English, provided it is the right phrase to use to present what the writer
wants to present. The classic writer takes the stand that the reader is competent
and the language is sufficent; the reader will already know this perfectly
accurate and normal phrase, or, if not, look it up. In the classic stand,
the writer is using the phrase not because it is rare or decorative or learned
and not to draw attention to either the writer or the prose, but simply because
it is the right phrase. A classic writer can present a nuanced technical
matter to a highly specialized audience by assuming the classic stand and
taking its technical vocabulary for granted as a branch of the language.
In this scene, the technical terms do not count as jargon - they are not
substitutions for straightforward terms already in the language and their
purpose is not to exclude possible audiences while demonstrating the writer's
membership in a private tribe. Instead, they are simply the right words,
and the reader is competent to know them or learn them.
In "The role of the bishop," Aagard takes a thoroughly classic
stand to present an extremely narrow technical subject in the game of chess
- the role of the bishop in the bishop ending to the classical endgame of
the Panov-Botvinnik Attack, which is a strategy for White against the Caro-Kann
opening. He is using as his illustration a game in 1995 between Onishchuk
and Summerscale, who is the "young Englishman" Aagard mentions.
The role of the bishop naturally differs from White to Black. For White
there are two important ways of using the bishop. The first one is the natural
development square e3, from where it threatens a7 and has the following latent
manoeuvre:
26 bishop-b6! rook-d6 27 bishop a5!
White takes the d8-square from the queen's rook, and thereby makes the
defence of d5 very hard.
27 . . . rook-e8 28 rook-c5 bishop f4!
A good decision by the young Englishman (an international master at the
time). Defending the pawn would tie down his pieces and almost surely lead
to defeat. Instead he gives up the d-pawn, and in return gets his rook to
White's second rank.
29 rook-cxd5+ rook-xd5 30 rook-xd5+ rook-e5!
After 31 rook-xe5+ bishop-xe5 the black king is ready for the dish of the
day.
31 . . . rook-e2 32 bishop-b6 bishop-e5 33 rook-d3
Onishchuk believes he is better here, and although he may be right, Black
was still able to make a draw by at the right time sacrificing a pawn on the
kingside to push the h-pawn.
The second role the bishop can play is closely connected to the
black d-pawn. Alone or together with the king, it can block the pawn, and
at the same time keep an eye on the key squares b4 and a5 on the queenside
. . .
Museum entry
A presentation of a Person, 1
From
David Bellos, Georges Perec: A Life in Words (London: Harvill, 1993),
pages 11- 12.
Headnote: The writer Georges Perec was born in Paris to
a family of Polish Jews. His father was killed in action during the German
invasion of France in the spring of 1940, when the writer was just a few
months past his fourth birthday. His mother was deported and killed at Auschwitz,
and his paternal grandfather never made it out of the Jewish neighborhood
in eastern Paris where his intrepid wife–who survived the war in an Alpine
village with her daughter, son-in-law, and grandson–ran a small grocery
store. In gathering information about his family, Georges Perec consulted
his aunt Esther who, with her husband, David Bienenfeld, raised him. The
following selection from David Bellos’s biography offers a presentation
of the writer’s paternal grandparents by considering their relationship
to Jewish faith and practice.
David Peretz was a traditional Jew and a pious man, an unworldly
observer of the Talmud and Torah, of the kind gently mocked in many of I.
L. Peretz’s stories of life in the shtetl. It is quite possible that he
was a Hasid, or close to the Hasidic movement . . . since his daughter, Esther,
when explaining the family background to her nephew in 1967, spoke at some
length about what Hasidism was: a cult of joy through prayer and song, a
fervently religious branch of orthodox Judaism, intent on achieving spiritual
elevation through strict observance of the law. Long after the family had
left Poland, when David Peretz was a kindly old man behind the counter of
a Paris grocery store, his wife was not keen to leave him in sole charge.
He might give away the whole stock of sweets to children who came in and
asked for them.
[He] . . . was married in 1895. His bride Rojza Walersztejn, was
short, dark-haired, energetic, and just sixteen. She became a mother within
a year. She held different views from her husband and soon became the family
provider, setting up a business to supply timber to local builders. David
spent much of his time in prayer rooms but was not allowed to bring his piety
into the home: Jewish rites were not observed by Rojza, according to Esther’s
later account of her home life in Poland. In fact, if we are to believe
a scribbled line opposite Rojza’s name in Perec’s notes, his grandmother
refused even to give alms to the poor. Giving alms is the very basis of
traditional Jewish social life; you cannot refuse to give alms without making
quite a stir in the world in which David and Rojza lived. In the eyes of
a Hasid, or an orthodox Jew, refusing to give alms is tantamount to refusing
to be Jewish.
Museum entry
A presentation of a cultural institution
From
David Bellos, Georges Perec: A Life in Words (London: Harvill, 1993),
pages 348-349.
Headnote: Ouvroir de Littéature Potentielle
(OuLiPo), a private initiative of the French writer and editor Raymond Queneau
and a few mathematicians, sounds as if it is a parody of the French Academy.
Its sense of fun is a surface feature of an intensely serious effort to
"generate" literature by using mathematical concepts. Its crowning success
to date is its signal contribution to Georges Perec’s La vie mode d’emploi
(1978), which David Bellos translated as Life: A User’s Manual. The
passage on OuLiPo from Bellos’s biography of Georges Perec shows a confident
and knowing selection from a much larger array of facts. Bellos
deftly avoids going down at least a dozen side-paths in his three paragraphs
(Surrealism, Pataphysics, Bourbaki, Queneau’s interest in vernacular French,
what kind of mathematical concepts can "structure" literature and how, and
so on). The passage has some of the virtues of an entry in an ideal reference
work, one whose editors pick the best person they can find to write an article
and then get out of the way. Because it is not an article generated by an
editorial template, it projects a personal authority and a certain informality,
as if it were the ideal spontaneous answer of a well-informed friend to
whom you addressed a question. "David, what on earth is OuLiPo?"
The name OuLiPo stands for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle,
or "Workshop for Potential Literature". The idea arose in 1960 at a ten-day
conference at Cérisy-la-Salle, a country estate in the Cotentin, not
far from the Normandy beaches, used, like Royaumont, as a cultural center.
The conference itself, entitled "Une Nouvelle Défense et Illustration
de la Langue Française, " in imitation of Du Bellay’s 1549 manifesto
for the enrichment of the French language, was held to honor [Raymond] Queneau
for his long efforts on behalf of néo-français–"French
as she is spoke"–a campaign crowned by the popular success of Zazie in
the Metro (1959). What emerged from Cérisy-la-Salle was a group
intent on the further study of a different aspect of Queneau’s achievement:
the overlap between, or intersection of, mathematics and poetry. The first
meeting of the group was held in Paris in November 1960; soon after, members
began convening for an irreverent monthly lunch party, with huge ambitions.
The founding group consisted mostly of writers and mathematicians.
Not all the writers could do mathematics, and not all of the mathematicians
(Claude Berge, François Le Lionnais, for example) were writers. Some
early members (Ross Chambers and Albert-Marie Schmidt) were literary historians,
and some (notably Latis, but also Queneau and Le Lionnais) were Pataphysicians.
There were fewer than a dozen of them to begin with. Under Queneau’s guidance
they undertook a vast programme of investigation into the formal devices
used by writers over the centuries ("analytic OuLiPo") and into the literary
potential of patterns that could be cannibalised from formal languages such
as mathematics, logic, computer science, and–why not?–chess ("synthetic
OuLiPo"). OuLiPo was not a sect, or a chapel, or a campaign for an "ism";
indeed it was not really a writers’ group at all. It was a research team
that aimed to fashion new tools for writing and to refurbish old and forgotten
ones. Its operational model was Bourbaki, the group of anonymous French
mathematicians who had reinvented their entire discipline by starting afresh
from first principles.
Membership in OuLiPo was not secret, as was that of Bourbaki, but
it was meant to be confidential. Queneau wished to create something quite
different from the surrealist movement, which with its infighting and public
disputes, had hurt him deeply thirty years before. OuLiPo’s constitution
stipulates that a member is a member once and for all time. No one can be
expelled; deceased members are excused from attendance at meetings but are
not allowed to withdraw. (Only by committing hara-kiri at a properly constituted
meeting, specifically, explicitly, and exclusively in order to resign, can
a member win the right to claim ex-membership. No one has yet taken advantage
of this provision of the group’s constitution.)
Museum entry
A presentation of a person, 2
From
George Perec, La vie mode d’emploi (Paris: Hachette, 1978), pages
131- 133; English version from Perec, Life: a User’s Manual, translated
by David Bellos (Boston: Goldine, 1987), pages 95-97.
Headnote: The narrative presentation of Madame Moreau, from
the beginning of chapter 23 of La vie mode d’emploi, concentrates
heavily on things one can see, making adroit use of lists (of jobs, of tools,
of her activities during her active years), while narrating a radical and
mysterious movement of the invisible will that transforms a woman who was
half of a mom-and-pop enterprise into the formidable head of a major business–a
transformation she neither liked nor understood.
Madame Moreau détestait Paris.
En Quarante, après la mort de son mari, elle avait pris la
direction de la fabrique. C’était une toute petite affaire familliale
dont son mari avait hérité après la guerre de Quatorze
et qu’il avait gérée avec une nonchalance prospère,
entouré de trois menuisiers débonnaires, pendant qu’elle tenait
les écritures sur des grands registres quadrillés reliés
de toile noire dont elle numérotait les pages à l’encre violette.
Le reste du temps, elle menait une vie presque paysanne, s’occupait de la
basse-cour et du potager, préparait des confitures et des pâtés.
Elle aurait mieux fait de tout liquider et de retourner dans la ferme
où elle était née. Des poules, des lapins, quelque
plants de tomates, quelque carrés de salades et de choux, qu’avait-elle
besoin de plus? Elle serait restée assise au coin de la cheminée
entourée de ses chats placides, écoutant le tic-tac de l’horloge,
le bruit de la pluie sur les gouttières de zinc, le lointain passage
du car de sept heures ; elle aurait continué à bassiner son
lit avant de se coucher dedans à prendre le soleil sur son banc de
pierre, à découper dans La Nouvelle République
des recettes qu’elle aurait insérées dans son grand livre de
cuisine.
Au lieu de cela, elle avait développé, transformé,
métamorphosé la petite entreprise. Elle ne savait plus pourquoi
elle avait agi ainsi. Elle s’était dit que c’était par fidélité
à la mémoire de son mari, mais son mari n’aurait pas reconnu
ce qu’était devenu son atelier plein d’odeurs de copeaux : deux milles
personnes, fraiseurs, tourneurs, ajusteurs, mécaniciens, monteurs,
câbleurs, vérificateurs, dessinateurs, ébaucheurs, maquettistes,
peintres, magasiniers, conditionneurs, emballeurs, chauffeurs, livreurs,
contremaîtres, ingénieurs, secrétaires, publicistes,
démarcheurs, V.R.P., fabriquant et distribuant chaque année
plus de quarante millions d’outils de toutes sortes et de tous calibres.
Elle était tenace et dure. Levée à cinq heures,
couchée à onze, elle expédiait toutes ses affaires avec
une ponctualité, une précision et une détermination
exemplaires. Autoritaire, paternaliste, n’ayant confiance en personne, sûre
de ses intuitions comme de ses raisonnements, elle avait éliminé
tous ses concurrents, s’installant sur le marché avec une aisance
qui dépassait tous les pronostics, comme si elle avait été
en même temps maîtresse de l’offre et de la demande, comme si
elle avait su, au fur et à mesure qu’elle lançait de nouveaux
produits sur le marché, trouver d’instinct les débouchés
qui s’imposaient.
Jusqu’à ces dernières années, jusqu’à
ce que l’âge et la maladie lui interdisent pratiquement de quitter
son lit, elle avait inlassablement partagé sa vie entre ses usines
de Pantin et de Romainville, ses bureaux de l’avenue de la Grande Armée
et de cet appartement de prestige qui lui ressemblait si peu. Elle inspectait
les ateliers au pas de course, terrorisait les comptables et les dactylos,
insultait les fournisseurs qui ne respectaient pas les délais, et
présidait avec une énergie inflexible des conseils d’administration
où tout le monde baissait la tête dès qu’elle ouvrait
la bouche.
Elle détestait cela. Dès qu’elle parvenait à
s’arracher, ne fut-ce que quelques heures, à ses activités,
elle allait à Saint-Mouezy. Mais l’ancienne ferme de ses parents
était à l’abandon. Des herbes folles envahissaient le verger
et le potager ; les arbres fruitiers ne donnaient plus rien. L’humidité
intérieure rongeait les murs, décollait les papiers peints,
gonflait les huisseries.
Avec Madame Trévins, elles allumaient un feu dans la cheminée,
ouvraient les fenêtres, aéraient les matelas. Elle, qui avait
à Pantin quatre jardiniers pour entretenir les pelouses, les massifs,
les plantes-bandes, et les haies qui entouraient l’usine n’arrivait même
plus à trouver sur place un homme qui se serait un peu occupé
du jardin. Saint-Mouezy, qui avait été un gros bourg, un marché,
n’était plus qu’une juxtaposition de résidence restaurées,
désertes la semaine, bondées les samedis-dimanches de citadins
qui, équipés de perceuses Moreau, de scies circulaires Moreau,
d’établis démontables Moreau, d’échelles tous usages
Moreau, faisaient apparaître les poutres et les pierres, accrochaient
des lanternes de fiacre, montaient à l’assaut des étables et
des remises.
Alors elle revenait à Paris, elle remettait ses tailleurs
Chanel et elle donnait pour ses riches clients étrangers des dîners
somptueux servis dans des vaisselles desinées spécialement
pour elle par le plus grand styliste italien.
Elle n’était ni avare ni prodigue, mais plutôt indifférente
à l’argent. Pour être la femme d’affaires qu’elle avait décidé
d’être, elle accepta sans efforts apparents de transformer radicalement
ses manières d’être, sa garde-robe, son train de vie.
[Madame Moreau hated Paris.
In 1940, after her husband’s death, she took over the factory. It
was a very small family business which he had inherited after the 1914-18
war and which he’d run in relaxed prosperity with three cheerful woodworkers
at his side whilst she kept the books in big, black-cloth-bound registers
with ruled paper and pages she had numbered in violet ink. The rest of the
time she led an almost peasant-like existence, busy with the backyard chickens
and the kitchen garden, making jams and pâtés.
She’d have done better to sell up and go back to the farm where she’d
been born. Rabbits and chickens, some tomato plants, and a couple of beds
for lettuces and cabbages–what more did she need? She would have sat by
her fireside amongst her placid cats, listening to the clock ticking, to
the rain falling on the zinc drainpipes, and the seven-o’clock bus passing
by in the far distance; she’d have carried on warming her bed with a warming
pan before getting into it, warming her face in the sun on her stone bench,
cutting recipes out of La Nouvelle République and sticking
them into her big kitchen book.
Instead of that, she had developed, transmogrified, metamorphosed
her little business. She didn’t understand why she’d done so. She had told
herself it was out of fidelity to her husband’s memory, but he would not
have recognized what had become of his old workroom with its smells and
shavings: two thousand people, millers, turners, fitters, mechanics, installers,
electricians, testers, draftsmen, roughers-out, model- makers, painters,
warehousemen, treatment specialists, packers, drivers, delivery men, foremen,
engineers, secretaries, publicity writers, commercial agents, and sales reps,
making and marketing every year more than forty million tools of all kinds
and calibres.
She was tenacious and tough. She rose at five, went to bed at eleven,
dealt with all her business in exemplary fashion, punctually, precisely,
firmly. She was authoritarian and paternalistic, trusted nothing and nobody
save her own intuitions and her own mind; she wiped out all her competitors
and took a share of the market larger than anyone had predicted, as if she
were mistress of both supply and demand, as if she knew instinctively, on
launching each new product, where the real opportunities lay.
Up until the last few years, until age and illness virtually confined
her to her bed, she had divided herself tirelessly between her factories
in Paris and Romainville, her offices in Avenue de la Grande Armée,
and this luxury flat which was so unlike her. She inspected the shopfloors
at a gallop, terrorised accountants and typists, insulted suppliers who didn’t
keep delivery dates, and chaired Board Meetings energetically and inflexibly,
making all heads bow when she opened her mouth.
She hated it all. Whenever she could tear herself away, even for
only a few hours, she went to Saint-Mouezy. But her parents’ old farm had
gone to ruin. Weeds grew wild in the orchard and vegetable garden; the fruit
trees no longer produced. Damp was eating the walls, unsticking the wallpaper,
warping the doorframes.
Madame Trévins would help her to light a fire in the fireplace,
open the windows, and air the mattresses. She who had four gardeners at
Pantin to tend the lawns, flowerbeds, bushes, and hedges surrounding the
works couldn’t even manage to find a local man to keep an eye on the garden.
Saint-Mouezy, which used to be a sizable little market town, was now a mere
juxtaposition of houses restored as second homes, empty all week and chock-full
on Saturdays and Sundays with townsfolk who, as they brandished their Moreau
hand-drills, their Moreau circular saws, their Moreau portable work-benches,
their Moreau all-purpose ladders, laid bare old beams and old stone, hung
coachlamps, and rallied to the attack on barns and cartstalls.
Then she would come back to Paris, don her Chanel two-pieces, and
for her wealthy foreign customers would give lavish dinners served in crockery
designed especially for her by the greatest of Italian designers.
She was neither a miser nor a spendthrift, but simply indifferent
to money. In order to become the businesswoman she’d decided to be, she
accepted without any apparent effort a radical transformation of her habits,
of her wardrobe, of her style of life.]
Museum entry
How Wrong We Were!
Blaise Pascal. "Letter One," The Provincial Letters. Translated
by A. J. Krailsheimer. New York: Penguin, 1967. pages 31-40
Letter Written to a Provincial Gentleman by one of his Friends on
the Subject of the Present Debates in the Sorbonne.
Paris, 23 January 1656
Sir,
How wrong we were! I only had my eyes opened yesterday. Until
then I thought that the arguments in the Sorbonne were about something of
real importance and fraught with the gravest consequences for religion. So
many meetings of a body as famous as the Faculty of Paris, at which so much
has occurred that is extraordinary and unprecedented, raise expectations so
high that it seems incredible that the subject should be anything but extraordinary.
Yet you will be very surprised when you hear from the present account
the upshot of so great a commotion; which is what I am briefly going to tell
you now that I am fully informed on the subject.
There are two questions under examination; the first of fact, the
other of law.
The question of fact is whether M. Arnauld is guilty of temerity
[translator's footnote: a technical term for an error short of heresy] for
asserting in his Second Letter: "that he has carefully read Jansenius's
book, that he has not found in it the propositions condemned by the late Pope,
but despite this, since he condemns these propositions wherever they may
be found, he also condemns them in Jansenius if they are there."
The question is whether he can, without temerity, thus express doubts
as to whether these propositions come from Jansenius when the bishops have
declared that they do.
The matter comes up before the Sorbonne. Seventy-one doctors come
to his defense, maintaining that his only possible answer to those who asked
him so often in their writings whether he held these propositions to be in
the book was that he could not find them, but none the less condemned them
if they were there.
Some, going even further, declared that however hard they looked
they could never find them there, and had even found quite contrary ones,
earnestly requesting any doctor who might have found them to point them out:
something so simple that it could not well be refused, since it was one sure
means of dealing with all of them, including M. Arnauld; but their request
has been constantly refused. So much for what happened in that quarter.
On the other side stood eighty secular doctors and some forty from
the Mendicant Orders, who condemned M. Arnauld's proposition but would not
examine whether what he said was true or false, going so far as to declare
that it was not a question of the truth, but solely of the temerity of the
proposition.
That is how they settled the question of fact, which causes me little
concern, for whether M. Arnauld is guilty of temerity or not my conscience
is not affected. If out of curiosity I wanted to know whether these propositions
are in Jansenius, his book is nether so rare nor so bulky as to prevent me
from reading it in full and clearing up this point for myself without reference
to the Sorbonne.
But, if I were not afraid of being guilty of temerity myself, I
think that I should share the opinion of the majority of the people I see;
so far they have believed on the strength of public assurances that these
propositions are in Jansenus, but they are beginning to suspect the contrary
because of this strange refusal to point them out, so strange, indeed, that
I have never yet met anyone who claims to have found them there. So I am
afraid that this censure may do more harm than good, and give those familiar
with its history quite the opposite impression to what has been concluded,
for people are really becoming suspicious and only believe things they can
see for themselves. But, as I said before, this point is unimportant, because
it involves no question of faith.
As for the question of law, it seems to be of much greater moment
in that it affects faith. Thus I have been particularly careful to find out
about it. But you will be pleased to see that it is just as unimportant as
the other.
The point at issue is to examine what M. Arnauld said in this same
Letter: "that the grace without which we can do nothing had
failed in St Peter when he fell." You and I both thought that this meant
examining the basic principles of grace, for instance whether it is not given
to all men or whether it is efficacious, but we were quite mistaken. I have
become a great theologian in a short time, as you will see.
In order to know the truth of the matter, I saw M. N., a doctor
at the Collège de Navarre, who lives near me, and is, as you know,
one of the most zealous opponents of the Jansenists. As my curiosity made
me almost as eager as he, I asked him if they would not formally decide that
"grace is given to all men" so that there should be no more doubts expressed
on that score. But he rebuffed me rudely, saying that that was not the point;
that there were some of his party who held that grace is not given to all;
that the examiners themselves had said before the whole Sorbonne that this
opinion was problematic, which view he shared himself; and he confirmed
it for me from a passage of St Augustine which he described as famous: "We
know that grace is not given to all men."
I apologized for misunderstanding his views and asked him to tell
me if they would not then at least condemn the Jansenists' other opinion,
which has caused so much fuss: "that grace is efficacious and determines our
will to do good." But I fared no better in my second question.
"You do not understanding anything about it," he said: "that is
no heresy, but an orthodox opinion. All the Thomists hold it, and I maintained
it myself in my doctoral thesis."
I did not dare put any more of my doubts to him; and indeed I no
longer knew what the difficulty was when, for my own enlightenment, I begged
him to tell me what made M. Arnauld's propositions heretical.
"The fact," he said, "that he does not recognize that the righteous
have the power to fulfil God's commandments in the way in which we understand
it."
I left him after this instructive talk, and, very proud of knowing
the nub of the matter, went off to find M. N., who is getting better and better,
and was in good enough health to take me along to his brother-in-law, a Jansenist
if ever there was one, but a very good man for all that. In the hope of
a warmer welcome I pretended to be one of their fervent supporters, and said:
"Could the Sorbonne possibly be introducing into the Church the
error: 'that all the righteous always have the power to fulfil the commandments'?"
"What are you saying?" my doctor said. "Are you describing as an
error so Catholic a view, which only Lutherans and Calvinists oppose?"
"What," said I, "is that not your opinion?" [Mark Turner's clarification:
the speaker is asking: Isn't it your (Jansenist) opinion that the Sorbonne
is in error when it asserts: "that all the righteous always have the
power to fulfil the commandments?" The answer given to this question is "No,
we Jansenists do not believe that the Sorbonne is in error. We Jansenists
agree with the Sorbonne. It would be heresy to deny that all the righteous
always have the power to fulfil the commandments."]
"No," he said, "we anathematize it as heretical and impious."
Surprised at this answer, I realized that I had overdone the Jansenist
role, as I had overdone the Molinist one previously. But, feeling quite uncertain
how he would answer, I asked him to tell me in confidence whether he held
that: "the righteous always have real power to observe these precepts."
My man became very excited at this, though with a holy zeal, and said that
nothing would ever make him disguise his feelings; that this is what he believed,
and that he and his friends would defend it to the death, as being the pure
doctrine of St Thomas and of St Augustine, their master.
He addressed me so earnestly that I could not doubt him. With this
assurance I returned to my first doctor, and told him, with some satisfaction,
that I was sure the Sorbonne would soon be at peace; that the Jansenists agreed
on the power of the righteous to fulfil the commandments; that I would vouch
for it, that I would get them to sign it in their own blood.
"All very fine!" he said; "you must be a theologian to appreciate
the finer points. The difference between us is so subtle that we can barely
point it out ourselves; you would have too much difficulty in understanding
it. Just be satisfied with the knowledge that the Jansenists will indeed
tell you that the righteous always have power to fulfil the commandments:
that is not what we are arguing about. But they will not tell you that this
power is proximate: that is the point."
This was a new word to me, and unfamiliar. Up till then I had understood
the business, but this term plunged me into obscurity, and I think it was
only invented to confuse people. So I asked him to explain it, but he was
very mysterious about it, and sent me off, with no further satisfaction, to
ask the Jansenists if they admitted this proximate power. I fixed
the term in my memory, for my intellect did not come into it, and for fear
of forgetting it, I went straight back to my Jansenist, to whom I said forthwith,
after the opening courtesies:
"Please tell me whether you admit proximate power."
He began to laugh and said coldly:
"You tell me yourself in what sense you mean it, and then I will
tell you what I think about it."
As my knowledge did not extend that far I found myself faced with
the impossibility of answering him, but all the same, to save my visit from
being fruitless, I said to him at random:
"I mean in the sense of the Molinists."
Whereupon my man, quite unmoved, asked:
"To which of the Molinists are you referring?"
I offered him the whole lot together, as forming a single body acting
in the same spirit, but he said:
"You do not know much about it. Far from all having the same views
they are in fact quite divided amongst themselves. But as they are all at
one in their intention of destroying M. Arnauld, they have decided to agree
on this word proximate; they will utter it in unison, though each man
means something different. Thus they can all speak the same language and
use such apparent consistency to form a considerable body and constitute a
majority, the surer to crush him."
This reply amazed me, but without accepting such an impression of
the Molinists' evil designs, which I am not ready simply to take at his word
and which is none of my concern, I concentrated merely on discovering the
different meanings given to this mysterious word proximate. But he
told me:
"I should be glad to enlighten you, but you would find such inconsistency
and gross contradiction that you would hardly believe me. You would be suspicious
of me. You will feel surer if you hear it from their own lips, and I will
give you the addresses. You need only to see M. Le Moine and Father Nicolaï
separately."
"I do not know either of them," I told him.
"Well," he said, "see if you know any of those whom I am going to
name. For they follow M. Le Moine's opinions."
I did in fact know some of them. Then he said:
"See whether you know any Dominicans, who are known as neo-Thomists,
for they are all like Father Nicolaï."
I knew some of those he named also, and determined to profit by
this advice and settle the business, I left him and went first to one of M.
Le Moine's disciples.
I begged him to tell me what it meant "to have proximate power to
do something."
"That is easy," he said, "it means having everything necessary for
doing it, so that nothing more is needed in order to act."
"And so," I said, "having proximate power to cross a river
means having a boat, boatman, oars, and so on, so that nothing more is needed."
"Quite right," he said.
"And having proximate power to see," I said, "means having
good sight, and being in good light. For anyone with good sight in the dark
would not have proximate power to see according to you, since he would need
light, without which no one can see."
"Spoken like a scholar," he said.
"And consequently," I went on, "when you say that all the righteous
always have proximate power to keep the commandments, you mean that they always
have the grace necessary for fulfilling them, so that they lack nothing as
far as God is concerned."
"Wait a minute," he said, "they always have what is necessary for
keeping them, or at least for praying to God."
"I quite understand," I said; "they have all that is necessary for
praying God to help them, without it being necessary for them to have any
fresh grace from God to pray."
"You have understood correctly," he said.
"But then do they not need an efficacious grace in order to pray
to God?"
"No," he said, "according to M. Le Moine."
To save time I went to the Dominicans and asked for those whom I
knew to be neo-Thomists. I asked them to tell me what is meant by proximate
power.
"Is it not the power," I said, "which contains everything needful
for action?"
"No," they told me.
"What? But, Father, if this power is short of something do you
call it proximate, and would you say, for instance, that a man in the
dark, with no light, has the proximate power to see?"
"Indeed he has, according to us, if he is not blind."
"I do not mind," I said, "but M. Le Moine understands just the opposite."
"That is true," they said, "but that is how we understand it."
"Agreed," I said, "for I never argue about a name so long as I am
told in what sense it is being taken. But I see from this that when you say
that the righteous always have the proximate power to pray to God
you mean that they need extra assistance to pray, otherwise they never will
pray."
"That is fine," answered my Reverend Fathers hugging me, "fine;
for they must have in addition an efficacious grace, not given to all, which
determines their will to pray. And it is heretical to deny that this efficacious
grace is needed for prayer."
"Fine," I said in my turn, "but according to you the Jansenists
are Catholics and M. Le Moine a heretic, for the Jansenists say that the righteous
have the power to pray, but that they still need an efficacious grace, and
that is what you approve. While M. Le Moine says that the righteous can
pray without efficacious grace, and that is what you condemn."
"Yes," they said, "but M. Le Moine calls this power proximate
power."
"What! But Reverend Fathers," I said, "it is playing with words
to say that you are in agreement because you both use the same terms, when
you mean different things."
The Fathers did not answer. At that moment the disciple of M. Le
Moine turned up so opportunely that I found it extraordinary, but since then
I have learned that they meet quite often and are constantly involved together.
So I said to M. Le Moine's disciple:
"I know someone who says that all the righteous always have the
power to pray God, but that they would none the less never actually pray without
being determined to do so by an efficacious grace, which God does not always
grant to all the righteous. Is he a heretic?"
"Wait a moment," said my doctor; "you might catch me out. Let us
then take it in easy stages: distinguo; if he calls this power
proximate, he is a Thomist, and so Catholic, if not, he is a Jansenist,
and so a heretic."
"He does not call it," I said, "either proximate or not proximate."
"The he is a heretic," he said: "ask these good Fathers."
I did not ask for their verdict, because they were already nodding
agreement, but I said to them:
"He refuses to admit this word proximate because no one will
explain it to him."
At that one of the Fathers was about to offer his definition, but
he was interrupted by M. Le Moine's disciple who said to him:
"Do you want to start off our squabbles again? Did we not agree
not to explain this word proximate, and both to utter it without saying
what it signifies?"
The Dominican admitted this.
That showed me what they had in mind, and as I got up to go I said:
"To tell the truth, Reverend Father, I am very much afraid that
all this is pure quibbling, and whatever comes of your meetings, I venture
to predict that, even if the censure is passed, peace will not be established.
For even if it is decided that we must pronounce the syllables prox-i-mate,
is it not obvious to anyone that if they remain unexplained each of you will
claim the victory? The Dominicans will say that the word is understood in
their sense, M. Le Moine in his, and so there will be far more argument over
explaining it than introducing it. For, after all, there would be no great
danger in accepting it without any meaning, for it is only the meaning that
can do any harm. But it would be something unworthy of the Sorbonne and theology
to use equivocal and captious words without explaining them.
"Now, for the last time I ask you, Reverend Fathers, to tell me
what I must believe to be a Catholic."
"You must," they all said in unison, "say that all the righteous
have proximate power, leaving aside all question of meaning: 'leaving
aside the Thomist meaning and the meaning of other theologians.'"
"In other words," I said as I took my leave, "one must pronounce
this word with one's lips to avoid being called a heretic. Is this word Scriptural?"
"No," they told me.
"Does it comes from the Fathers, the councils, or the popes?"
"No."
"What about St Thomas?"
"No."
"Then why is there any need to say it, since it has no authority
behind it nor any meaning in itself?"
"You are stubborn," they said. "You must either say it or be heretical,
and the same with M. Arnauld. For we are in the majority, and if necessary
we shall bring in enough Franciscans to ensure victory."
Leaving them with this solid argument, I have just come away to
write you this report. From it you can see that none of the following points
is in question or condemned by either side: 1. That grace is not given
to all men. 2. That all the righteous have power to fulfil God's commandments.
3. That in order to fulfil them, and even to pray, they still need an efficacious
grace which irresistibly determines their wills. 4. That this grace is not
always given to all the righteous, and depends on the pure mercy of God..
Consequently the only risk left lies in this meaningless word proximate.
Happy the people who know nothing of it! Happy those who came before
it was born! For the only cure I can see is for the gentlemen of the Academy
to use their authority to banish this barbaric Sorbonical word which is causing
so much dissension. Otherwise censure seems certain, but I can see that
the only harm it will do is to bring the Sorbonne into contempt for such
behaviour and deprive it of the authority it needs on other occasions.
However I leave you free to decide for or against the word proximate;
for I love my neighbour [translator's footnote: the word "prochain" means
both "proximate" and "neighbour"] too much to use this excuse to persecute
him. If you find this account to your liking, I will continue to keep you
posted of any developments.
I am, etc.
Museum entry
Les Enfants Gâtés
copyright © Francis-Noël Thomas 1997
Two of the most immediately obvious differences between English
and French are the inflected article in French and the explicit distinction
between the whole of something and part of something. Les enfants gâtés
means the spoiled children and is a set-phrase used in French where its
English equivalent would never be used. A French art historian, one of
my guests at a leisurely lunch in a luxurious Paris restaurant, said after
we resolved the problem of choosing between two especially attractive desserts
by ordering both, "Nous sommes vraiment des enfants gâtés!"
No one at the table was under fifty, and there was no sense of reproach
in the phrase. I cannot imagine anyone saying in such circumstances in English
"We really are spoiled children." But the phrase in French also insists
that we are some spoiled children. In French the partitive
some (des) cannot be omitted; otherwise you would be saying that we
are (all) the spoiled children (in the world). This is not an issue in
English. "Shall we have chicken or fish?" is good English but its literal
equivalent would be bad French. In French, in order to sound normal, it
would have to be "Shall we have some chicken or some fish?"
One day in May 1985, I was walking in the Marais, an increasingly
chic area on the right bank that has the greatest concentration of seventeenth-century
buildings in Paris, and stopped in a salon de thé I had never
noticed before called Les Enfants Gâtés. I loved it at once
and continued to do so for years. A salon de thé is not a café,
of course, nor is it a restaurant. Unlike a café, it has no bar; unlike
a restaurant, it serves anything on its menu from the time it opens (usually
noon) to the time it closes (usually six or seven in the evening). A salon
de thé implies casual leisure. A customer can have tea (chosen from
a long list of teas), coffee (unlikely), or chocolate but might also have
lunch (quiche or a salad), perhaps followed by a dessert (le cheesecake, for
example). There is often reading material in a salon de thé and the
chic ones have charming servers who manage to give you the impression that
they are not working but rather serving you as a friend would serve a friend.
These servers have a certain chic of their own, and help to create an ambiance
because that is really what a salon de thé has to sell—an ambiance.
In many cases, there is nothing distinguished about the food; all of it
is ordered from outside anyway, and in principle, anyone can open a salon
de thé and serve the identical food.
Parisian Salons de thé were once something reasonably close
to what an American who had spent a little time in England would expect a
tea room to be, quiet oases of a middle-aged person's idea of comfort. These
institutions are, in my own experience, uncommon in the United States, although
self-consciously sophisticated hotels in big cities often serve tea in their
lobbies at about the hour tea is normally served in the United Kingdom. There
are still middle aged salons de thé in Paris (a classic of the genre
is The Tea Caddy, facing the exquisite little church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre.)
Les Enfants Gâtés has little in common with The Tea
Caddy. Not only is its core clientele younger, but the atmosphere is hardly
one of detente; the defining posture is rather affected indolence. Affected
indolence is, of course, work. Its accomplished practitioners are self-conscious
about how they look and who is noticing them while apparently being completely
absorbed in reading A Suivre or smoking a cigarette. Someone
accomplished at this sort of performance gives no evidence even of noticing
the devastatingly beautiful young woman in the skin-tight leather outfit who
has just uncoiled herself from her battered leather armchair and is now unhurriedly
walking the full length of the room deftly slipping between tables she does
not glance at on her way to what could never be called by its English cognate
in an American establishment, la toilette.
Except for the fact that there were too many low tables and battered
leather armchairs in the room, the premises of Les Enfants Gâtés
might almost have been a 1967 graduate student apartment at the high end of
graduate student prosperity in the vicinity of one of the more reputable universities
in the United States. A poster of Louise Brooks, a poster for Baby
Doll, just the right combination of the exquisite and the (apparently)
careless. The faint but persistent suggestion that "We don't take anything
too seriously here," combined with those carefully selected three dozen teas
and a ritual of service as carefully choreographed—albeit in a very different
style—as the tea ceremony in a sixteenth-century Kyoto tea hut.
On an early visit to Les Enfants Gâtés, perhaps on
my very first visit, I encountered one of its three owners, Laurent, and had
the first of many pleasant talks with him. Whenever I was in Paris on Sunday,
I stopped in for "le brunch." The tiny kitchen impossibly overextended, the
two (smashing) servers continually on the run but always projecting the laid-back
tone that is the signature of this place, and a steady stream of would-be
customers turned away while Laurent encouraged anyone who might be feeling
a little pressure to leave to have another drink, to relax, to read another
bande dessinée, to enjoy the sense of being an enfant gâté.
On an ordinary afternoon, it was a place that offered a sort of
personal haven. I often walked there the first day I arrived after the long
flight from Chicago. It was just the right distance, and I could have just
the right sort of meal when I got there. Once when the leaden curtain of
jet lag caught up with me before I got back to my bed, I dozed off in my easy
chair, and then fell into a deep sleep. When I woke up after a few hours,
surprised to find myself in a private nook at Les Enfants Gâtés
on a quiet afternoon, the server said, "I knew you had just arrived today,
so I thought I'd just let you sleep." I was sitting at the same half-hidden
table that serves as a retreat for a top model—easy to recognize because
she hides under a large hat—who lives in the neighborhood.
Les Enfants Gâtés is not the sort of place that exemplifies
the virtues beloved by La Défense de la langue française.
For one thing, a lot of its customers do not speak French. The music that
is sometimes oppressive is almost always American, so are most of the actors,
actresses, and films seen in the pictures and posters that hang on the walls.
Laurent is more Jack Lang than he is Musée des monuments français.
He has a Parisian's love of Paris, to be sure, and can speak with almost
Proustian feeling about the Place Maubert and the Place de la Contrascarpe,
but the cities that have captured his imagination the way Paris has captured
mine are Amsterdam and New York.
Laurent is filled with enthusiasm for the Barnes & Noble bookstore
on Broadway and 86th Street. A huge bookstore on several floors with armchairs
and a café! And Amsterdam's "brown cafés" have been an inspiration
to him. In fact, they have led him to alter Les Enfants Gâtés's
self description. Salon de thé has been painted out of its shop sign.
It has been replaced with a word apparently borrowed back from Dutch: caffé
(with two f's), a word he thinks better suited to describe his establishment's
ambience. Perhaps it is. To some French people, borrowing an originally
French word from Dutch might be a sign of just how bad things have become,
but just beneath the ruthless chic of Les Enfants Gâtés and its
self-conscious internationalism, there are bedrock French virtues: a profound
respect for the fidelity of its customers that translates into a personal
recognition and transforms a business into a privileged encounter; and a
sense of métier, even if that métier is the creation
of an ambiance. Although it is never allowed to surface, there is a rigor
and a sense of continuity in a place like Les Enfants Gâtés that,
if it exists at all in New York, is probably confined to the Pierpont Morgan
Library and the Frick Collection.
The last time New Year's Day fell on a Sunday, Les Enfants Gâtés
was open. It was almost empty, and Laurent received his clients in a sort
of analogue to the way generations of French people have received their relatives
on the Jour de l'An. There was no overt sentimentality, just the unspoken
sense that he regards his clients as his family. This tender and familial
side of Les Enfants Gâtés runs like a vein of gold just under
the surface of the place and even if it too is a performance, its art is beyond
the reach of any Barnes & Noble.
Museum entry
Progress
copyright © Francis-Noël Thomas, 1988
The week that Richard Nixon described as the greatest in history—an
astronaut had walked on the Moon and Edward Kennedy had driven off a bridge—was
the first week I spent in Amsterdam. I was there to see the Vermeers. There
are four of them in the Rijksmuseum and three more at the Mauritshuis in The
Hague, fifty minutes away by train.
I had begun my trip in Vienna, as far East as there are Vermeers,
and then followed a jagged line West: Berlin, Braunschweig, Dresden, Frankfurt.
But the Dutch towns were best because there it still is possible to see the
spatial relations the painter knew and the objects he loved: the low windows,
narrow streets, seventeenth-century brick façades, the unself-conscious
Turkish carpets on wooden tables. The only discordant note was the shock
of seeing European papers with red, white, and blue American flags plastered
above hysterical headlines proclaiming to the inter-galactic ages America's
newest stunt: "Men from the Planet Earth Set Foot on the Moon."
Even Le Monde had a stupid headline, but I saw with relief
that someone there had kept his head. In the left-hand column there was an
editorial entitled "Oui, mais pourquoi?" I bought a copy and turned
the corner into the Thorbeckeplein without knowing where I was going.
The Thorbeckeplein, if it could be transplanted to Albany or Minneapolis,
might properly be called sleazy. If I had been more knowledgeable about it,
I should have been more surprised than I was to find there, tucked in among
the strip-joints and other places of naughty entertainment, an inviting little
sandwich shop—a broodjeszaak—called De Drie Musketiers.
I was served by its owner, a short, bald, moon-faced man of seventy-five,
glowing with energy and good humor. He was immensely excited about the
Moon landing. Le Monde did not fool him for a minute. I was American.
Subtle discouragements went unnoticed. He was going to treat me the way
an American should be treated today.
He exasperated me. I responded to his effusions by pointing out
to him in my most acid tones that I had had nothing whatever to do with the
Moon landing, that if I had been consulted, any fool who wanted to go to the
Moon would have had to pay for the trip out of his own pocket; I ended by
asking him to tell me just how he personally was better off for it.
He gave me one of those beatific smiles seen mainly on the faces
of babies and decent old people and said, "You know, you remind me of my father.
He hated machines. When I was seventeen, I built a radio—enormous thing.
I was crazy about it. My father hated it. Didn't want it in the house.
When I came back from my summer vacation, it was gone. He had buried it
in the back yard and refused to tell me where. Buried it!"
How can you help loving a man like that? Besides, his food was
excellent. I had lunch at his shop every day. He ran around energetically
taking orders, making "broodjes," fetching hot food from the dumb-waiter that
carried it down from the kitchen, and dispensed his charm.
One day a stout American woman marched up to him and enunciated
in the manner of a first grade reading teacher "DO—YOU—SPEAK—ENGLISH?"
"Anglisch, French, Dutch, German," he shrugged, "Do you want to
eat or is this a survey?"
Mr. Rosenthal and I became friends. He would sit at my table when
he wasn't too busy. He joked about his neighbors, asked if I thought he
should get a stripper to entertain at lunchtime, told me about his shop.
He had had it twenty-five years, and, like its owner, it had aged well. There
were ancient Coca-Cola signs in Dutch behind the counter and another sign
headed "PRIJS LIJST" which looked like "PRUS LUST" to me but advertised meals
at low prices instead of the attractive if incomprehensible cupidities it
conjured up in my imagination. His prices were really very low. "So many
young people in the summer without much money," he explained once, "They have
to eat too."
So there in Dutch, German, French, and "Anglisch" he advertised
"Extensive meats of f3.75."
Some days I would bring young women to lunch with me. On these
occasions, Mr. Rosenthal would pretend I was just another customer. Next
day he would give me his impressions.
"That one was a real beauty. Makes me wish I were young
again."
"Such an expression! She didn't like my veal?"
"That one has bubble gum in her head, but what beautiful hair!"
"Vermeer should have painted girls like that! I always like them
to show some evidence of being alive. Why don't you bring back the pretty
one with the red hair?"
Vermeer didn't paint girls to his taste; he didn't paint old men of beautiful
character either. But, as he sat at the big table in the window and joke
with his friends, Mr. Rosenthal might have been a subject for Frans Hals.
I used to sit half-way down the narrow room—with the counter, like a huge
Vanitas, at my right—looking out the big front window onto
the Thorbeckeplein. It was in that little shop that I came to know the very
Dutch comfort of being in small room with large windows.
One day a French group came in at the height of the lunch hour.
Mr. Rosenthal was running around at such a pace that I was a little uncomfortable
watching him. Surely at his age . . . .
The French group included several small children; one was a boy
of about three who was overtired and crying. He wandered around the table
unhappy as only a tired three-year-old in a foreign country can be unhappy.
The old man couldn't stand it. As he whisked by with a platter
in one hand, he swept up the stupefied little boy in the other. Then, while
he continued to dash around the shop, he jabbered atrocious French at the
tyke, fed him bits of cheese, showed him the dumb-waiter, and by a torrent
of energy and will amused him into a better humor.
It got so that if I were going to be out of town for a day—in Delft
or The Hauge—I would warn Mr. Rosenthal, "I won't be in tomorrow." One
day I came by very late—six o'clock was his closing time. I had got involved
in ancient numbers of Oud Holland at the library and had forgotten
the time. There was a chair propped in the door—his sign that he was closed
even though there were still customers in the shop. I was going to walk
on, but he saw me and quickly pulled away the chair.
"Come in, come in," he said, "for you I'm always open."
No one else could combine such sentiment with such briskness.
The day had to come. My last lunch at De Drie Musketiers.
When I finished, he refused to give me a check.
"From me," he said. "A way of being sure you'll come back."
It was raining the next time I was in Amsterdam. I had been on
the train from Frankfurt all day, and it was almost five when I got in. I
dropped my bags at the hotel and rushed off immediately to the Thorbeckeplein
to get there before Mr. Rosenthal closed. I concentrated my anxiety on the
danger that he would be closed for the day; it held off other possibilities.
He gave me his standard beam as I walked in, pointed me to my usual
table and said, "So. One May cheese, one roast beef, one coffee, one apple
cake." My standard order. It was as if I had been to The Hague for a day.
The gossip that summer ran to politics. "This Nixon—such a wicked
man!" My last day, I gave him a present. A good print of Vermeer's Milkmaid,
which he said he would hang over his counter.
"When you come back again you'll see it, and in the meantime I'll
look at it and be reminded that you're on your way."
As it happened, I was on my way a long time. My job disappeared.
My work on Vermeer was interrupted while I looked for another one.
The paintings too experienced unexpected hard times. The Guitar
Player at Kenwood House was stolen and damaged. A Lady Writing a Letter
was stolen, and The Love Letter, from the Rijksmuseum was stolen and
mutilated while on loan to an exhibition in Brussels.
It had been heavily restored. I was doing some seventeenth-century
restoration work myself shortly afterward. In the course of it, I was sent
to Holland to see the restored Love Letter and discuss some technical
details with the people who had worked on it.
I went to my usual little hotel in Amsterdam and was pained by what
I saw. Its once prosperous owner had been badly hurt by a sharp decline in
the demand for the kind of accommodations she offered at the greatly increased
prices she was forced to ask.
I went to the Thorbeckeplein my first afternoon but didn't rush.
De Drie Musketiers was gone. The wicked man's "new prosperity"
had delayed my return too long.
After a careful look, I could see where the door of the shop had
been. It was now a night club with glossy photographs of an ample blond "exotic
dancer" no longer in the first blush of youth. I seemed to know what had
happened to Mr. Rosenthal. Finally I heard from the counterman in a much
less pleasant broodjeszaak down the street—one of a chain—that he
thought the old man had died.
I didn't return to the Thorbeckeplein. With Mr. Rosenthal gone,
it was sleazy.
The restoration work on the Vermeer was, within its cosmetic limits,
good. "Professional." Of course, the restorers had the luxury of an almost
unlimited budget. I don't suppose a casual museum visitor will notice how
little of Vermeer's paint clings to the surface. You can still see his idea,
still grasp his character as a painter. The picture is, after all, over three
hundred years old. Time will leave its mark.
Museum Entry
Austerlitz
From W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, translated by Anthea Bell (New York: Modern Library, 2001), pages 7-8, 9-10, 12-13.
Headnote:
W. G. Sebald (1944-2001) is the author of four distinctive works of fiction. The passage that follows this headnote is from the last of them, Austerlitz, published in German and in English translation in 2001.
The Austerlitz of the title is an architectural historian whom the narrator first encounters in the waiting room of the Centraal Station in Antwerp. The waiting room is known as the Salle des pas perdus [The Lost Steps Room]. Almost the entire text of Austerlitz consists of what Austerlitz says to the narrator in a series of conversations.
Although both the narrator and Austerlitz meet in the waiting room of a train station, neither of them is waiting for a train. Austerlitz, who is familiar with the history of the building is looking at details, writing, making sketches; at one point, he takes a photograph. The narrator, feeling hot and indisposed after arriving in Antwerp for the first time that morning and then walking at length in the city, visits a zoo next to the station. Upon leaving the zoo he is struck by the façade of "that fantastical building, which I had taken in only vaguely when I arrived in the morning" and enters the waiting room. Taking in something only vaguely, then observing it more deliberately, and finally engaging in research in order to come to a more precise knowledge is, so to speak, the organizing principle of the book. The narrator directs the readers' attention to details first of Austerlitz's appearance and then of his speech even as he recounts Austerlitz directing his own attention to details of the "fantastical building" where they have met. Austerlitz goes from being a stranger in the waiting room to a person so distinctive that the narrator will later travel to London expressly so that they can continue to talk.
One of the people waiting in the Salle des pas perdus was Austerlitz [. . .] That day in Antwerp, as on all our later meetings, Austerlitz wore heavy walking boots and workman's trousers made of faded blue calico, together with a tailor-made but long outdated suit jacket. Apart from these externals he also differed from the other travelers in being the only one who was not staring apathetically into space, but instead was occupied in making notes and sketches obviously relating to the room where we were both sitting—a magnificent hall more suitable, to my mind, for a state ceremony than as a place to wait for the next connection to Paris or Oostende—for when he was not actually writing something down his glance often dwelt on the row of windows, the fluted pilasters, and other structural details of the waiting room [. . . . ] When I finally went over to Austerlitz with a question about his obvious interest in the waiting room, he was not at all surprised by my direct approach but answered me at once, without the slightest hesitation [ . . . ] Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Austerlitz began, in reply to my questions about the history of the building of Antwerp station, when Belgium, a little patch of yellowish gray barely visible on the map of the world, spread its sphere of influence to the African continent with its colonial enterprises, when deals of huge proportions were done on the capital markets and raw-materials exchanges of Brussels, and the citizens of Belgium, full of boundless optimism, believed that their country, which had been subject so long to foreign rule and was divided and disunited in itself, was about to become a great new economic power—at that time, now so long ago although it determines our lives to this day, it was the personal wish of King Leopold, under whose auspices such apparently inexorable progress was being made, that the money suddenly and abundantly available should be used to erect public buildings which would bring international renown to his aspiring state. One of the projects thus initiated by the highest authority in the land was the central station of the Flemish metropolis, where we were sitting now, said Austerlitz, designed by Louis Delacenserie, it was inaugurated in the summer of 1905, after ten years of planning and building, in the presence of the King himself. The model Leopold had recommended to his architects was the new railway station of Lucerne, where he had been particularly struck by the concept of the dome, so dramatically exceeding the usual modest height of railway buildings, a concept realized by Delacenserie in his own design, which was inspired by the Pantheon in Rome, in such stupendous fashion that even today, said Austerlitz, exactly as the architect intended, when we step into the entrance hall we are seized by a sense of being beyond the profane, in a cathedral consecrated to international traffic and trade. Delacenserie borrowed the main elements of his monumental structure from the palaces of the Italian Renaissance, but he also struck Byzantine and Moorish notes, and perhaps when I arrived, said Austerlitz, I myself had noticed the round gray and white granite turrets, the sole purpose of which was to arouse medieval associations in the minds of railway passengers. However laughable in itself, Delacenserie's eclecticism, uniting past and future in the Centraal Station with its marble stairways in the foyer and the steel and glass roof spanning the platforms, was in fact a logical stylistic approach to the new epoch, said Austerlitz, and it was also appropriate, he continued, that in Antwerp Station the elevated level from which the gods looked down on visitors to the Roman Pantheon should display, in hierarchical order, the deities of the nineteenth century—mining, industry, transport, trade, and capital. For halfway up the walls of the entrance hall, as I must have noticed, there were stone escutcheons bearing symbolic sheaves of corn, crossed hammers, winged wheels, and so on, with the heraldic motif of the beehive standing not, as one might at first think, for nature made serviceable to mankind, or even industrious labor as a social good, but symbolizing the principle of capital accumulation. And Time, said Austerlitz, represented by the hands and dial of the clock, reigns supreme among these emblems. The clock is placed above the only baroque element in the entire ensemble, the cruciform stairway which leads from the foyer to the platforms, just where the image of the emperor stood in the Pantheon in a line directly prolonged from the portal; as governor of a new omnipotence it was set even above the royal coat of arms and the motto Endracht maakt macht [Unity is strength or, more literally, Union creates power]. The movements of all travelers could be surveyed from the central position occupied by the clock in Antwerp Station, and conversely all travelers had to look up to the clock and were obliged to adjust their activities to its demands. In fact, said Austerlitz, until the railway timetables were synchronized the clocks of Lille and Liège did not keep the same time as the clocks of Ghent and Antwerp, and not until they were all standardized around the middle of the nineteenth century did time truly reign supreme. It was only by following the course time prescribed that we could hasten through the gigantic spaces separating us from each other. And indeed, said Ausrerlitz after a while, to this day there is something illusionistic and illusory about the relationship of time and space as we experience it in traveling, which is why whenever we come home from elsewhere we never feel quite sure if we have really been abroad. From the first I was astonished by the way Austerlitz put his ideas together as he talked, forming perfectly balanced sentences out of whatever occurred to him, so to speak, and the way in which, in his mind, the passing on of his knowledge seemed to become a gradual approach to a kind of historical metaphysic, bringing remembered events back to life. I shall never forget how he concluded his comments on the manufacture of the tall waiting-room mirrors by wondering, glancing up once more at their dimly shimmering surfaces as he left, combien des ouvriers périrent, lors de la manufacture de tels mirrors, de malignes et funestre affectations à la suite de l'inhalation de vapeurs de mercure et de cyanide. [How many workers perished during the manufacture of such mirrors from the malign and deadly effects of inhaling mercury and cyanide vapors.]
[Note: Sebald does not use chapter divisions, paragraph divisions, or quotation marks, although there are breaks in the text indicated by an asterisk (*) on pages 32, 117, and 254. Sebald includes uncaptioned photographs, a few reproductions of diagrams, engravings and maps, and one page reproduced from a book. There are eighty-seven such images in all incorporated in the two-hundred-ninety-eight page English edition; six of these images are full two-page spreads. The selection offered here is compressed. It begins on line 9 of page 7, omits almost six of the last eight lines on the same page, omits all but one line and one syllable of page 8, and almost five full lines from the top of page 9. In addition, it omits two photographs reproduced on page 11 and a footnote on the destruction of the Lucerne railroad station by fire. The footnote begins on page 10 and concludes on page 11.]
Student piece
The C. Burr Artz Library
copyright © Kate O'Leary, 1998. Used with permission.
The C. Burr Artz Library in downtown Frederick hides behind a deceptively
small facade. Past the circulation desk and magazine racks, straight back,
adult fiction is to the right and left, with non-fiction shelves to the
far left, then the reference desk on the left, and the card catalog, now
a collection of computers, to the right. The mystery section used to be
held right before the card catalog but it gets moved around a lot. The non-fiction
shelves are interrupted by the microfilm room, and resume with biographies.
Young adult fiction is next, opposite study tables and carrels to the right.
The children's section continues with books for increasingly younger ages
all the way to the back doors of the library. In the back left corner is
a large open space for storytellers and puppet shows.
My father read to me the day I came home from the hospital, and
I spent a considerable part of my childhood reading library books. My mom
took my sister and brother and me to the library every few weeks and we would
check out ten books each, because that was an easy number to keep track of.
I remember getting my own library card, a small upright rectangle of stiff
white plastic. My last name had a comma instead of an apostrophe. A few
years ago my card was replaced with a credit card sized card made of flimsy
plastic and without my name stamped on it. The bar code fell off once and
I had to have it replaced.
A friend of mine grew up going to a library where children under
a certain age couldn't check out certain books, but the only censor I had
was my father. I think I might have gotten more upset when certain books
disappeared, but with so many left to read it really didn't make a difference.
I never read Beverly Cleary or Judy Blume, but I read Little Women three
times, The Little Princess, Kidnapped, and all the original Nancy Drew's.
I read a collection of E. B. White's novels with my mom, loving The Trumpet
of the Swan, and a little puzzled by The Mouse and the Motorcycle. I didn't
read Roald Dahl until my sister started reading his books, but if he were
still writing I would still be reading him.
I hope that my children will feel lucky for being spoiled with books,
and I hope they will enjoy reading them for the first time as much as I will
enjoy reading them again. There are too many books worth reading to buy
them all, so we will be familiar with the local public library. I hope they
will love reading enough to pass over whatever incarnation of RL Stine happens
to be popular. I don't know whether or not my love of reading was inherited,
but it was certainly nurtured. It is more than the difference between illiteracy
and literacy. It is the difference between literacy and love.
Student piece
A Presentation of Self
copyright © Jenny Miller, 1998. Used with permission.
When I was twenty I left Ohio State University and my hometown
of Columbus determined to experience "life." I landed in Olympia, Washington,
where it appeared I'd found the community of socially aware and environmentally
conscious people I'd always hoped was out there. I assimilated quickly and
merrily. When I returned home for a visit two years later, my friends didn't
know what to make of me. I'd shaved my head, but no longer shaved my legs;
I lived in a tipi on an organic farm, and had developed a strong distaste
for all things disposable, commercial, and artificial. I shunned cheap coffee,
macro- beers, and fast food, and I didn't watch TV.
When I returned to the Northwest the rainy season had begun, and
my tipi was suddenly a profoundly chilly, soggy habitat. My books and clothes
were molding when I was rescued by a band of middle-aged lesbian-separatists,
who came straight out of the seventies to offer me a cabin to live in on
"the land." I lived in this cabin for a year. I had no running water, and
I ran my stereo off a car battery. My only company was my beloved first cat,
Kitty, and the coyotes, who eventually ate her.
I had a wide variety of occupations in Washington, ranging from
ditch-digger to assistant to the lobbyist for Planned Parenthood Affiliates.
I learned how to sail, how to frame a house, how to navigate icy passes
in the Cascade mountains, and how to build a sweat lodge. But these days
I'm back on the East coast, doing East-coast kinds of things. Right now
I'm an English major at the University of Maryland, and I work at a video
store. I have hair on my head again, and none on my legs. I watch too much
TV, and I can occasionally be seen eating McDonalds French fries and drinking
7-11 coffee. Someday I hope to be a wealthy, well-loved genius, with a
gorgeous, perfect girlfriend and numerous acclaimed novels to my credit.
Student piece
A Presentation of Self
copyright © Todd Stephens, 1998. Used with permission.
School is a two-decade developmental internship. I knew English
was my calling because it was the only class I could consistently stay awake
in in elementary school. I found organized sports to be too organized the
moment the referee forbade me to run more than two steps with the basketball.
I spent more time outside than James Audubon, and I have the scars on my
knees to prove it. Since my independent sketch sessions in middle school
algebra class, I have become a capable sketch artist. Books have gone from
being cumbersome shoulder weights to being microcosms of the world. Once
I sobered up from my freshman year at Frostburg State University, I realized
the final four years of my unpaid internship were crucial. Although I'm an
English major, I find more excitement in the Starr Report than in Huck
Finn. Unlike my tie-dyed, bleary-eyed, open-toe-sandaled English brethren,
I have little interest in finding hidden nuances in Macbeth. I love
company, but the only person who can constantly stand my rantings is me. Writing
allows me to say authoritatively what I want without letting anyone know
I'm a tall, skinny, black kid who hates Literature.
Student piece
A Presentation of Self
copyright © James Kuzner, 1998. Used with permission.
I lived most of my life in Frederick County, Maryland's bottle-shaped
social abyss. I came to the University of Maryland with a strong aversion
to home and a vague desire for further education. I chose the English major
by default, because I was either uninterested in - or atrocious at - everything
else. I enrolled in a beginner's short story course having read maybe ten
books and having written nothing at all. I did well though, made imaginative
by my seventeen first, solitary years. I started reading a book each week,
mostly literature, and by the end of my freshman year I had written a hundred
pages of fiction. Things went well. My parents were mildly shocked when
the grade reports came home and I had a 4.0.
Lately I have begun a novella, read two or three hundred books,
and found an interest in postmodern metaphysics. My literary influences
include John Updike, Steven Millhauser, and Mark Turner. Currently I am
studying with Mary Kay Zuravleff and Howard Norman, and an MFA is probably
up next.
I have visited home little since coming to college. When I do,
I feel glad that I no longer live there, and grateful that I once did.
Student piece
A Fictional Presentation of Self
copyright © Amanda Bernhardt, 2000. Used with permission.
My mother always told me that men don't like girls who have slept
around, but at the wily age of fifteen, I knew that there were only two kinds
of bridegrooms on the wedding night. The first kind is made up of lovesick
blockheads who take no trouble at all to cuckold. Their wishes blind them
to reality, and the innocence of their minds translates into the imagined
innocence of their brides. Fill them with love, adoration and strong wine,
behave coyly, flush when they look at you and fix your eyes shyly to the
floor, and these men never suspect that their blushing brides have more
bedroom savvy than most whores. The second kind of bridegroom marries only
for money, or power, or some other unscrupulous reason. He jealously guards
the social opportunities his wife represents just as an unmarried man might
guard his lover's body, but the unscrupulous man does not care whether
there's a spot of blood on the sheets in the morning. And so I laughed at
my mother's old-fashioned fears and never hesitated to make love to those
I did not intend to marry, because, of newly-wed husbands, there are only
those who do not know, and those who know but do not care.
Student piece
A presentation of Self
copyright © Christy O'Hara, 2000. Used with permission.
I am 26 years old and live in a one-bedroom condominium on the
lake in Columbia, Maryland and have worked for Marriott hotels for three
years. I spent my childhood traveling through Europe because my father worked
for the Government and I was too young to stay home alone. The experience
would have been exciting if I had been older and had not spent my winters
worrying if Santa Claus could find us.
The University of Maryland has been my academic nemesis for four
years and I am now seven classes away from graduation. English majors have
the perpetual burden of having every written and spoken word reviewed for
syntax errors. I will have my Bachelors degree in English by May but I will
never be able to use the semi-colon correctly.
My family is small compared to the Waltons. I have three sisters,
three brothers, seven nieces and nephews and my parents are worried our family
will outgrow their three-bedroom waterfront property in North Carolina.
Four months ago I agreed to marry Jon Pettyjohn and my parents decided to
sell the house.
Student piece
England
copyright © Olivia Stewart, 2000. Used with permission.
Contrary to an annoying number of Americans' romantic visions,
England is a third-world country with beautiful architecture. Buildings
such as St. Paul's Cathedral or Warwick Castle do not make up for the absence
of water pressure, fairly regular oil crises, usurious tax rates, poor medical
attention that can take weeks, if not months, for someone to get, a class
system that more resembles a caste system and regular bar room and street
brawls over politics. Their food supply faces contamination regularly, and
mad cow disease was by no means the first problem with English food, even
if you don't count the taste of English food. The US socialist and communist
parties like to point to England's health care system as an example of what
we should do. Of course they fail to mention that even in a country as small
as England, those in poor and rural areas wait a month or two to see, if they
are lucky, a third rate doctor, but usually a nurse. In fact, the only thing
England can take pride in is their transportation system, but the best and
least confusing elements of that come from the Romans.
Student piece
Victoria
copyright © Patti Koch, 2000. Used with permission.
Victoria is a petulant young girl, talented at sustaining a pout.
The ease with which she manipulates her parents is recognized immediately
by strangers but not at all by her parents. When Victoria realizes she has
hit her parents' last nerve, she calmly saunters away from them with feline
disinterest and disdain. It is hard work for a nine-year-old child to outsmart
two adults. It leaves the child drained of energy but filled with power.
Student piece
A classic obituary of Anne Boleyn
copyright © Olivia Stewart, 2000. Used with permission.
When Anne Boleyn was born, it was such a nonevent that no one bothered
to record the year, let alone the date. But her execution on May 19th will
change how an English king is remembered. When she was born, she came into
a family of petty nobility. Her mother, Elizabeth, like a number of noblewomen
at the time, made claims to a royal descent that no one acknowledged, and
her father, Thomas, tried to hide the fact that he was a glorified merchant.
When Henry VIII came to the throne, though, her family rose considerably.
Thomas Boleyn liked to think his family's rise was due to own brilliant politics,
but he mistook politics for sycophancy and was not exceptional in either.
However, he was passable enough to get Anne a position as lady-in-waiting
to Mary, the king's sister and future wife of the King of France, but Thomas's
virtues could only take the family so far. It was his daughters' lack of
virtue that truly advanced their family. Anne's sister, Mary, readily let
the king into her bed and enjoyed the gifts that started filling her room,
and the titles that started filling the space after her father's name. But
Mary was neither intelligent nor scheming and she did nothing to secure her
power. Shortly after Anne returned from France, Henry abandoned her to pursue
Anne, which did more for his ruin then hers.
Unlike the rest of her family, Anne was intelligent, clever, and
ruthless. Though at the time of Henry's first attentions she was in love
with a nobleman, she quickly forgot that love and began plotting, using
her broken heart as an excuse to reject Henry. She learned well from her
sister's mistakes and began to ask Henry for everything, including the crown,
but gave him nothing. Between her resistance, his lawyers' scheming, and
his own greed and desire for a son, Henry went to great lengths to obtain
a divorce. He and Anne married in secret, England became a Protestant nation,
and five months after her coronation as Queen, Anne gave birth to a daughter.
Had her next two pregnancies not ended with stillborn sons, she would not
have been beheaded, but like her predecessor, her only surviving child was
a daughter. Unlike her predecessor, Anne bore no patience toward Henry's
affairs and by the end of 1535, he and his lawyer, Cromwell, were already
making plans to get rid of her. She was tried for adultery, a treasonable
offense for a Queen, in May of 1536, and found guilty because her musician,
her brother, and several of Henry's friends admitted under torture to being
guilty with her. Her daughter with Henry, Elizabeth, has not yet been executed,
and may not be since no one believes she is a legitimate heir. Her parents
still serve in court, and were in attendance when Henry announced his engagement
to Jane Seymour on May 20, 1536.
Student piece
A classic obituary of Bonnie Parker
copyright © Amanda Bernhardt, 2000. Used with permission.
Ms. Bonnie Parker, a ninety-pound outlaw from Texas who bloodied
up four states and shot thirteen people with her partner Clyde Barrow, met
her own death last Thursday from complications of thirty-six bullet wounds.
The freckled, strawberry-blond woman was twenty-three years old and possibly
two and a half months' pregnant at the time of her death.
She was born in Rowena, Texas on October 1, 1910 and began her
felonious career when she met Clyde in 1929, shortly after the collapse of
Wall Street. With the Barrow gang, Bonnie Parker is credited with robbing
seven gas stations, a hardware store in Waco County, the Alliance Bank of
Texas, the Laredo National Bank, and several grocery stores, including two
Piggly Wigglys and an A & P store in Arkansas. People followed the outlaws'
adventures in the newspapers, and Bonnie and Clyde frequently sent photographs
of themselves, in poses that parodied their own glamorized, Robin Hood images,
to the local press.
The police ambushed Bonnie and her partner in Bienville Parish,
Louisiana on May 23, pounding 167 bullets into their getaway car after Clyde's
gun jammed and he was unable to shoot back. Bonnie received the majority
of the bullet wounds and died immediately, her mangled head slumped between
her knees.
Besides committing robbery and homicide, Bonnie Parker also wrote
poetry and contributed her poems, "The Story of Suicide Sal" and "The Ballad
of Bonnie and Clyde," to the West Dallas Inquirer.
Student piece
A classic obituary of Faye Dunaway
copyright © Akbar Khan, 2000. Used with permission.
Faye Dunaway died in a car accident in Los Angeles yesterday. She
was 54.
Dunaway was the last of the Hollywood actresses who knew what it
was to be a star. Like Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, she ate chauvinistic
Hollywood bigwigs for breakfast and used her severe beauty to seduce and conquer.
Her steely sexuality and cold egotism made her intimidating but irresistible.
Those around her tolerated her diva-ish behavior because her talent, focus,
and dedication made it worth it. They knew she had fought her way from the
dusty streets of a Florida hamlet to play alongside Warren Beatty and Jack
Nicholson and to win an Academy Award. In her forty-year career she has
played the unforgettable roles of a young woman on a crime spree with her
boyfriend (Bonnie and Clyde), a ruthless TV executive (Network),
a delicate socialite widow (Chinatown), and Joan Crawford (Mommie
Dearest).
Dunaway stormed off the set of Chinatown for two weeks when
Roman Polanski pulled a stray hair out of her head, she battled Bette Davis
on the set of the TV movie The Disappearance of Aimee, and she refused
to continue her Broadway role of Maria Callas until the producers promised
her the same role in the movie version.
Today's stars throw fits and make petty demands on their coworkers,
but they just seem petulant and bratty. They lack the talent that would justify
their bitchiness. So many of them are, as Dunaway's Joan Crawford says in
Mommie Dearest, "spoiled Hollywood brats."
Student piece
Jesse Ventura
copyright © Christy O'Hara, 2000. Used with permission.
His immense body size and unscrupulous background have made Jesse
Ventura, the governor of Minnesota, the most publicized and feared political
figure since Ted Kennedy. When Governor Ventura retired from wrestling after
twelve years and needed a job requiring no experience, minimal schooling,
and passable social skills, he chose politics. On November 12, 1999, his
name appeared on the presidential primary ballot in Michigan because the Secretary
of that state can single-handedly add a worthy candidate to the ballot, but
Governor Ventura had it removed and avoids commenting on the current election.
The people of Minnesota feel that he would make a good President because
of his strong moral values and his quest to give the World Wrestling Federation
as much airtime as football.
When asked why he chose to run for Governor, Jesse Ventura explained
that after being a Navy Seal, a Vietnam Veteran, a wrestler, an actor, and
a sports broadcaster, he saw politics as the next obvious step. Of all his
accomplishments, he is proudest of his family, his championship wrestling
belt, and his status as the first politician to become a doll. Last year,
Mattel made a replica of the Governor that comes equipped with a business
suit and a torn tank top and directions on which outfit is for which profession.
Jesse Ventura's famous line in the movie Predator has made him a permanent
member of the Screen Actors' Guild, and they now pay for his health and
retirement benefits so the state of Minnesota doesn't have to. Currently,
Governor Ventura volunteers as a football coach at a local high school and
is thinking about making it his new profession.
Student piece
Guide To Inexpensive Hotels Of Europe
copyright © Maureen McGee, 1998. Used with permission.
Young, penniless American students have earned a reputation in Europe
for seeking the cheapest and crudest accommodations. Most guidebooks designed
for students present the basic, bottom-of-the-barrel picks among youth hostels,
often neglecting the reasonably priced, comfortable hotels and pensions that
remain vacant.
Amsterdam, The Bastion Hotel.
Holland's version of the Holiday Inn. The staff is tirelessly pleasant;
their cheery demeanor would be unnerving if it were not a trademark of the
Dutch. The hotel sits in the town of Bussum, about a twenty minute train
ride from downtown Amsterdam. The Bastion's halls are painted black with
purple doors and induce claustrophobia. The rooms themselves are decent and
clean, with a television, telephone, and a small but predictably expensive
mini-bar. The bathroom, included in the price of the room (60 guilder per
night for a double), is spotless, but guests should be prepared to confront
a shower that consists of a nozzle protruding from the wall, a flimsy plastic
curtain, and a drain in the middle of the floor. Breakfast, too, is included,
and the buffet is generous. Good for those looking to load up before a day
packed with sightseeing.
Berlin, Pension von Oertzen
This family-owned pension sits about three blocks from the Ku'damm, Berlin's
thriving commercial district, and about three yards from the city's most notorious
strip joints and nudie bars. Inside, the high ceilings, polished wood staircases,
and faded rose carpet muffle the noise and confusion that wafts up from
the streets. Rooms are available with or without baths; those without are
generally more spacious and comfortable. The tradeoff is a grimy, dimly
lit communal bathroom with an occasionally functioning lock and a shower
that emits sporadic bursts of hot water. The staff is eager to please, bordering
on nosy, but guests planning only a brief visit will be left alone.
Reykjavik, The Scandic Hotel.
Recently, Iceland's government began a campaign to promote tourism, reflected
in the arrangements made between the Scandic Hotel and the Keflavik International
Airport. Upon arrival at the airport, travelers may board the "Flybus," whose
final destination is Reykjavik, but which stops first at the Scandic Hotel.
Weary and confused tourists disembark there, and conclude that the Scandic
is the only decent hotel for miles. It is not; however, it is the only stop
the "Flybus" makes early each morning as it shuttles travelers boarding connecting
flights back to the airport. In spite of this underhanded maneuver, the
Scandic is warm and welcoming, and is staffed by stunning young Icelanders
fluent in several languages each. The rooms are standard and impersonal, yet
spotless, and the hotel's gift shop displays thick handwoven sweaters of
Icelandic wool.
Student piece
Fried Chicken
copyright © Margarette Vilfort, 1998. Used with permission.
In April 1986, Port-au-prince, where I was spending my annual fifteen-day
vacation, was a haven of peace and happiness. The fire of the popular revolution
that had destroyed the dictatorship of "Baby Doc" Duvalier was already extinguished.
Like a spring loaded with shining promises and lively birdsongs, a new era
was beginning. The most melodious birdsong my heart could then enjoy listening
to was my short stay in my birthplace.
Indeed my vacation was a source of keen pleasure from which emerged
moments of inexpressible delight that I could share with my parents and friends.
I was living the best times of my life in the best world ever created when
something happened that was going to bestow a new dimension to my vacation,
a new meaning to my dreamlike love of my homeland.
On the eve of my departure for the United States, just after a brief
but interesting shopping trip in downtown Port-au-Prince, I was waiting for
a taxi at the corner of two main streets. It was noon, and the tropical
sunlight, scattered under a sharply blue sky, was scorching my face, already
bathed with warm sweat. I kept turning my head in all directions, hoping
to see one of the turtle-cabs which always made one wait and wait until his
mind was crushed under the weight of impatience. For fifteen long minutes,
I suffered the burden of my own impatience. Suddenly, I saw a large crowd
coming down the street in my direction. At first, I thought it was one of
the carnivals that did not stop erupting in the streets of Port-au-Prince
as volcanic celebrations of the fall of Duvalier. A few seconds later, as
the dense multitude came closer, I could clearly read the political slogans
written on the banners and see the machetes whose edges were blinking like
the eyes of death. However, it was still obvious to me that these people
were not on the verge of perpetrating any political violence in the presence
of a happy humanity which I represented. With a loud voice once in a while
covered by some redundant music, the crowd was singing some political anthem
which ended with these words:
In the name of freedom,
we shall kill them like chickens
we shall fry them like chicken . . .
In the middle of the cross-roads, the crowd stopped like a moving
cathedral. As I could not see clearly from sidewalk, I climbed up a wall
nearby to get a panoramic view of the spectacle. Then I saw, in the heart
of the multitude, two men handcuffed with heavy rope; their clothes were
ripped off, their noses and their mouths were bleeding.
Suddenly, the crowd opened up, forming a large circle in the middle
of which the two prisoners were placed. Still I did not have the least feeling
that I was going to witness some strange rite inspired by an obscure priest
who wanted to celebrate the spirit of a pseudo-revolution with great pomp
and ceremony. To my surprise, two old men, who seemed to be the leaders,
moved toward the captives. One was carrying something that looked like a
gasoline tank; the other one had a big tire. One of the prisoners was taken
to the side and crowned with the tire, and a large amount of fuel was poured
over him, flowing from his head to his bare feet. Then, a match was lighted,
and the prisoner was set on fire. Instantly his body became a tree of flame,
walking, then falling, then rolling on the ground for a short instant that
seemed as long as eternity, and finally turning into a mass of dark ashes.
Meanwhile, the rejoicing crowd was singing and crying, "down with
the last Duvalierists! Death to tonton-Macoutes!"
Then, like a bird of ill omen, a heavy silence fell upon the crying
throng, as the two leaders grabbed the last prisoner and forced him to kneel
down. Three young and strong men in the crowd helped the old men subdue
the captive who refused to kneel. The struggle lasted a few seconds. Overpowered
by his assailants, the prisoner was compelled to drink the fuel that was
being poured from the small tank into his throat. The singular libation
continued until the victim's abdomen was quite filled up with gas. Then the
crowd moved backwards, opening the circle more and more. One old man, while
standing a few meters from the wet prisoner, threw a lighted match. The
body caught fire instantly and in less than five seconds exploded like a
bomb, throwing pieces of fried bones and meat into the air. There were no
ashes left, no trace of life, except maybe an unidentified part of the skull
which seemed to come from a fried chicken.
After the killing, the crowd moved away into the city a cathedral
of death. At the top of the wall, I was crucified. Silently, I climbed
down from there to stand and wait for the taxicab. I wanted to walk away
from that gruesome street corner, but I was immobilized by terror.
Student piece
Letter from Burkina Faso
Maureen McGee
30 June 1999
Dear M,
Today is my 384th day in Africa. It's a typical night au village:
20:45, just finished dinner, shortwave tuned to BBC, heat lightning flashing
close to the horizon, a premonition of the rain that will come around midnight.
I live in Perigban, a small village of about 1,000 people in southwestern
Burkina Faso. The dirt road which bisects the village continues across the
border to Côte d'Ivoire, about 40 km away. Perigban's close proximity
to Côte d'Ivoire means that many of the village's younger men and women
migrate to towns across the border, work for several years at coffee or cocoa
plantations, then return to invest the money they've earned in construction
projects. Their movement between the two countries represents one of the
major conduits for the spread of AIDS in the area. The subject remains something
of a taboo, and frequently when someone in the village dies, and it's widely
(if quietly) suspected or suggested that he died of AIDS, relatives will respond,
"He went to Côte d'Ivoire and came back sick; he was sick for a long
time."
I work at Perigban's health clinic, which lacks the materials to
diagnose almost any illness that can't be identified as malaria or dysentery.
I don't perform any curative services; those are left to the two nurses and
midwife who staff the clinic. My hands-on experience has so far been limited
to weighing babies and assisting with prenatal consultations, although I
have witnessed several births. My "assignment," according to Peace Corps
and the Ministry of Health, is to to help carry out an initiative to decentralize
health care by encouraging my clinic's management committee - a group of eight
villagers, all men - to become more autonomous. In concrete terms this means
training the members, most of whom are illiterate and speak little or no
French, to write an annual budget and action plan, conduct community needs
assessments, and execute "health promotion activities." Not an easy thing
to do in a place where meetings scheduled for 8am don't begin until 11, where
no activity requiring community participation can take place
during the planting season (June-October), where people have come to depend
heavily on outside funding, and where I am propositioned by just about every
breathing male over the age of twelve.
Fortunately, during the past year I've developed a thick skin, a
broad sense of humor, and the realism to accept that any changes I influence
won't take place on the grand scale. The most dramatic changes I've observed
so far have been the ones that have taken place inside me. I've never been
so independent in my life, or so dependent. I'm the only American in a relatively
isolated village with no electricity, running water, or telephone. I love
the solitude and freedom - most of the time. Except when, for instance, I
run out of propane gas and am unable to cook until I find a way to transport
the tank 25 km to be refilled. Or when the frustrations of living as an "étrangère"
in a third-world country threaten to push me over the edge. At those times
I realize how vulnerable I can be, and I gratefully - and humbly - accept
my neighbor's invitation to eat with her family, or seek out another volunteer
to engage in a bitch session.
I've also enjoyed some pretty remarkable insights. Number one:
human beings are incredibly adaptable. I could never have imagined I'd feel
comfortable doing things that come so naturally now: bathing outside with
a bucket and cup, bargaining at a market, sleeping outdoors, eating anything
from millet porridge to wild rat to python with the same degree of enthusiasm.
Insight number two: the less people have, the more generous they
are. I'm astonished by how willing people here are to share whatever little
they have. It's unthinkable to begin eating - even something like a handful
of peanuts - without first saying "vous êtes invité" to whoever
happens to be around. Since Peace Corps began in the 60s, volunteers have
been claiming that they learned more from the experience than they taught;
they received much more than they gave. It's easy for me to see how that's
true, as the contributions I'm making are minute and the kindness shown me
is boundless.
The kindness comes in spite of - or maybe as a result of, I don't
know - the widely-held belief that Peace Corps volunteers in Burkina Faso
are really working as CIA agents. I've tried to erase that suspicion from
people's minds by assuring them that I'm not supplying my government with
sensitive information about Perigban's high-tech military installments (yeah,
right). I think secretly they remain unconvinced. I guess they think all
my bumbling, my cultural and linguistic ineptitude, is an act.
I hope this letter reaches you eventually; campus mail is notoriously
slow. I've heeded your advice and have been keeping a journal. Maybe during
these next few rainy months I'll work on developing some essays. Wish you
the best -
Take care,
Maureen Mcgee
Student piece
Dear Jessica
Name withheld, but used with permission.
Dear Jessica,
My class in Classic Prose has brought René Descartes into
my life again. My meager acquaintance with Monsieur Descartes began in
1970. A few other students and I signed up for Philosophy 201. Philosophy
was a subject I believed to be essential to a complete education. It was,
and is, but the class's distance from my apartment, its 8:00 am hour, and
my laziness made the class memorably disastrous. My one sweet memory is
of the young Lancelot who sat two seats in front and to the side of me.
I studied his noble profile each morning we both made it to class. Your
father and I were newly in love but my mind's flirtation with this fair
student did not feel like a betrayal of trust. In fact, when I am in the
beginning of a passionate attachment my enthusiasm for love can hardly be
satisfied by one love object. What made the flirtation even more exciting
was Lancelot's likeness to your father. Frankly he was finer featured than
Mark. I sensed refinement and sensitivity in his character and high intelligence,
too, although I did not discover whether that was true. He was quiet and
so was I. We didn't have a chance to grade each other's intellect.
I did not learn my attractive fellow student's views on Descartes.
The only person in the classroom who showed genuine enthusiasm for Monsieur
Descartes was the professor. He was the stereotypic philosophy professor,
distant, obtuse, and rather sadly lonely. Those who dwell on the greatest
dead minds seem out of place in the living world, or what the world looked
like to a provincial young woman. At about the time the professor became
briefly animated, and this was because of Descartes, I was struggling with
a decision to stay in or drop the class. We had tackled Spinoza and a couple
of others and I felt I could get my mind around those fellows but Descartes
was elusive. The "cogito ergo sum" sounded a bit self-serving and fraudulent
to me, but I hadn't the confidence to offer the class my opinion. Distractions
were increasing daily: Fair Lancelot was beginning to follow me in my thoughts
after I left class and that did feel unfaithful to Mark. Students around
the nation were writhing in sorrow and rage after the Kent State murders,
and even our isolated college, more attractive to future foresters than
future politicians, was faced with having to react to this outrage against
perfect youth. I now thoroughly disliked Descartes and it was my annoyance
with his arrogance that forced my hand. I dropped the class.
The afternoon of the morning I dropped Philosophy 201 I went to
a rally in front of the student union. Policemen and students shared the small
semicircle that served as the university's town square. Some students called
the police "pigs" to their faces and I was embarrassed and angry for their
unkindness to fellow human beings. This was not love and peace; this was
rudeness and temper tantrums. I would not follow the advice of anyone who
spoke so hatefully. When the attempt was made to enter the Administration
building, I withdrew because I did not respect the messengers of revolt.
One scruffy, half-baked revolutionary after another spoke his incoherent
exhortations to take action. To what aim?, I asked silently. I wanted someone
to give me a logical reason to follow them and no one did. No one did until
the last speaker, an unlikely campus revolutionary, but I now see he had
the best reasons to revolt. After all, he had to teach his students in a
building with no windows that had once served as the animal sciences laboratory,
and was situated, ironically, under a permanent shadow cast by the football
stadium. His department received the least respect and money in the university.
This revolutionary had been properly seasoned. My philosophy professor
stood with arm upraised, shouting as incoherently as the students and calling
the police "pigs" too. I was alarmed for him. How could he get caught up
in this minor theatrical flop? Surely he would be fired. Spittle flew
from his mouth as he urged action. His rage pushed him to make the only
gesture of the day that had true political significance. He said at the
end of his speech that he would give every student in every one of his classes
an "A" as a protest against collaborative university administrations and
all oppressors. If it hadn't been for Descartes I would have stayed in that
class and earned an "A" - a free "A," not one borne of oppression. My skeptical
mind told me he wouldn't get away with this radical action. I never found
out if he did. I was out of the class and it was Descartes I blamed.
Student piece
Dear Jessica II
Name withheld, but used with permission.
Dear Jessica,
Mother and I spent two days and nights in the Veteran's Hospital.
The nights were courtesy of the Veterans Administration. Relatives of critically
ill patients are permitted to sleep over in the "Hoptel." This is, as you
would deduce, a hospital-motel merger. The arrangement allows the information
desk clerk in the hospital lobby to become, on occasion, a motel desk clerk,
who escorts you to your room and points out the amenities found there. The
amenities were the same as those found in all the other identically equipped
hospital rooms in the institution: Narrow low beds encased in plastic, television
sets hanging from the ceiling - designed for the bed-bound -, linoleum floors,
and a buzzer labeled "nurse" next to each bed. I naively hoped for more
of the Hyatt touch when we walked into the Hoptel wing with its pastel walls,
fuzzy impressionist prints, and community room. Of course, in the event of
an epidemic, or more likely, a cut in funding for frivolities like Hoptel,
our room would be ready for serious duty again.
Funding of only the sort Senator Byrd can will has rebuilt and
enlarged the pre-World War II graceful redbrick building. This place was
the permanent home to many West Virginia veterans disabled in Europe and
the Pacific theater. Today many old vets still come for treatment, or to
die, but none live there permanently. Nursing homes have cornered that trade.
Veterans of more recent actions come to a modern hospital built around the
original core structure. The design blending the old with the new is successful,
but as is so commonly found in construction today, the hidden systems of
plumbing and heating and cooling are substandard. For two days I avoided
using the toilet in our room because it did not draw properly, and bits of
bloody detritus from a former occupant, or more likely from another room,
floated in the basin. Mother and I enjoyed finding another proof of the
absence of pride in craftsmanship today. This is a subject we agree on,
and since there are so few proofs it is exhilarating when we hit on one.
Your uncle may or may not have known we were there to see him.
He exists now on a plane between dreams and reality. It seemed remarkable
at times that he and we shared the same room. He, at a primitive unconscious
level, struggled to breathe, and to live, and we at the foot of the bed laughed
and talked about my cousin's vacation plans for the beach. Even though his
eyes were open, he could not speak, and thus could not be part of our community.
When a patient cannot speak, there is nothing to do but ignore them most
of the time, attend their needs when they make a gesture that signals a want,
or fall into silent reflection about the patient's history or our own future.
Mother would go to the head of the bed from time to time, ask him some question,
like whether he was warm or cool, and deceive herself into believing his
head movements were indications of his answer. I found the practice bizarre
and embarrassing.
The medical staff was unusually stratified, with people of color
at the top and whites at the bottom. The physicians I either talked with
or observed were obviously "foreign doctors." I am not sure why there are
so many in one Veterans Hospital in West Virginia. Perhaps the government
finds physician émigrés willing to accept less pay and live
away from the choice cities American-trained doctors head to after medical
school. Nurses, technicians, and janitors were white, southern, and friendly
to an unnerving degree. The instant intimacy induced by the indecency of
a hospital room eliminates divisions of class and culture, except of course
with the doctors. The atmosphere in the room became charged when one of them
entered. It is impossible for me not to react resentfully to their dictatorial
rights over the futures of pathetic sick people, particularly since it has
been my theory for some time that most doctors can't stand sick people.
I don't believe they differ in this regard from the average person. intellectual
curiosity, family tradition, or a goal of status or money motivates most
of them to the profession. Certainly the love of healing does not motivate
most of them to endure the accepted hazing practices of medical training.
It was good that most of them avoided Uncle's room. He was dying, and there
was nothing of interest for them now.
During a break from the sick room one morning, I visited the lobby.
I was attracted to it because on our walk through the evening before I noticed
photographs of young soldiers displayed in glass cases on the walls. On
this morning, viewing the photographs could not be a private affair because
the chairs and halls were filled with old veterans waiting to be seen by
a doctor or to have their blood drawn in the lab. No one was looking at the
photographs except me. Gorgeous young faces smiled insouciantly out while
grim unsmiling ones surrounded me. I had to assume that many of the displayed
soldier had died - some in the war, some soon thereafter, some in this hospital.
The faces of these dead young soldiers excited me. The faces of the living
old soldiers enervated and depressed me.
One photograph of a scene familiar to all Americans who lived during
the war, or to those who read its history, is of President Roosevelt standing
in an open touring car looking at a newly commissioned submarine. The car
is parked at the edge of the pier with Roosevelt standing in it, or appearing
to stand, for he could not stand without the help of his staff and his braces.
Dressed in an elegantly cut suit, he stood facing the ship's officers and
crew lined up for review on the ship's deck. The ship was surprisingly small
and the crew made only a single line of men. The large car, the elegance
of Roosevelt's clothing, and that of his fellow riders, practically pushed
the ship and crew into insignificance except as an excuse for the display
of wealth and power of the country's leaders.
Student piece
Dear Lara
copyright © Alifya Vasi, 1998. Used with permission.
Dear Lara,
The first thing that struck me about the Bahamas was the transparency
of the water. Despite being in depths of thirty feet, I was still able to
see the seabed from the boat. Occasionally I saw a tropical fish swimming
alongside the boat. In the Atlantic on the way to Bimini the waves were ten
feet high. My shift happened to be during the Gulf Stream when the waves
are at their highest. After reaching the calm flats of the Bahamas I could
see a thin film of salt covering the boat. On the helm there were several
flying fish washed up on deck. The flats were a welcome change from the stormy
Atlantic and we all made the most of the serenity by sunbathing on the flying
bridge. It didn't take long for the guys to become bored, so they passed
the time fishing. But they caught nothing.
When we reached Bimini, after docking the boat we immediately filled
the water tank so we could take our showers. As soon as I jumped into the
shower the hot water ran out, after being used up by another girl who had
to condition her hair twice in case the salt ruined it. After hygiene was
taken care of, we strolled around the one-mile-wide island. At the other
end of Bimini was a graveyard and the only grass on the island. It was a soft
texture that felt like hair. Underneath, the ground was so springy it was
like a trampoline. On our way back to the boat we came across Ernest Hemingway's
old home. Inside, there were pictures and excerpts from Old Man and the
Sea. I wasted no time in sitting in his chair, hoping to receive some
of his talent through osmosis. Later that evening I got to sit in the chair
again, when the Hemingway home turned into a bar. I drank Bahama Mamas while
walking around Hemingway's dining room, and danced the Dollar dance in his
kitchen.
We ventured to the beach around noon the next day still recovering
from our over-indulgence in tropical drinks. The waves were very high and
the ocean was rough, but I was more afraid of having fish swim around me
than of being sucked into the rip current. After being hurled several times
into the sand by my wave surfing, I collected shells. I refused to snorkel
with the others. I had no desire to see what I was swimming above or with.
Student piece
L'Université de Fribourg
copyright © Maurice Champagne, 1998. Used with permission.
I lived with an elderly Swiss couple in Bourguillion while studying
at L'Université de Fribourg. The police never had to enforce the town's
law against noise after 10:00 p.m. because you could hear a pin drop in the
town square after 10:00 a.m. While studying one afternoon, I looked out
of my bedroom window to see where this strange noise was coming from. I
saw cows grazing in the field next to my house - the noise came from their
bells.
I rode my bike through the steep, well-kept streets of as a study
break and as a way of getting to and from the university. Much to my surprise,
the drivers always respected my space; in fact, some would give me an encouraging
honk and wave as I pedaled up some of the more difficult hills.
The steeple bells of the nearby Catholic church chimed precisely
on the hour, noting the start of mass as well as the town's daily two-hour
lunch break. There was a cemetery next to the church where some parishioners
would visit loved ones or sit quietly during the day. Others would kneel
and pray at the shrines on the road to the church. Someone regularly maintained
those shrines because I usually saw fresh flowers and lit candles around the
crucifixes and statues.
Many of the townspeople gathered in the local tearoom-boulangerie,
especially Sundays after mass. The scent of fresh baked bread filled the
air as customers enjoyed tea, pastries, jam, and, of course, chocolate. My
French would get a good workout each time I would go into the tearoom. Most
of the Swiss were patient with me as I tried to order food or hold a conversation.
I didn't see any stray dogs or cats running the streets of Bourguillion.
The people kept their pets either on leashes or in their houses and yards.
Most of the houses in Bourguillion were modern, two-story dwellings with
large basements and ample yard space. Like many residents, my Swiss family
maintained an abundant vegetable garden. They would pick their vegetables
daily and serve them for dinner in the evening. Their yard was large enough
to support a 35-foot vegetable garden, two twelve-foot clotheslines, and a
play area for their grandchildren.
Bourguillion sits atop a hill overlooking La Vielle Ville. I often
stopped to enjoy the view of Fribourg from the cobblestones of Chemin de Laurette.
Although menacing-looking bulls lined the pastures along Chemin de Laurette,
they never strayed too close to their surrounding electric fence. On the
other side of the road, there was a man-made waterfall that carries water
into the Old City. Deer would sometimes creep through the fields near the
waterfall, then scamper at the first sight of humans. Near the waterfall
was a monastery for nuns. I rarely saw the nuns; I don't think they came
out much because I walked by there nearly every day on my way to and from
the university.
I did, however, see a portly French-speaking man who cleaned the
streets everyday. "Bonjour, grand chef" is what he would say to me as I passed
by each morning. I knew that I could learn much from this man so I stopped
to talk whenever possible. Our early conversations were vain struggles on
my part to keep up with his native tongue. I'm sure he knew that I was having
a hard time understanding him. But he kept talking to me and never made me
feel awkward. If nothing else, I learned patience from that friendly man.
Student piece
Forks
copyright © Kieca Mahoney, 1998.
After almost two hundred years of problems with crazy foreigners,
Americans eventually got fed up with what they felt was snotty dining nonsense
and simply began wrapping all of their food in bread so that they could eat
it with their fingers and not get the important part dirty. Fast food chains,
combined with the wheel, flourished, creating a society that could steer
with one hand and eat with the other. Americans became obsessed with mobility
and forgot all about table etiquette, becoming rather like the early unimaginative
cavemen who didn't know about forks and spoons. Forks evolved into something
found only in the road and Americans managed to prove once again that history
is tiresome.
Student piece
Summer Time
copyright © Alifya Vasi, 1998. Used with permission.
The summer holidays were my mother's opportunity to broaden my cultural
exposure. I hated these days out, wondering what boring museum or painting
I would have to see. However, the worst part was having to write about what
I had seen each day. During the visit, I would collect lots of pamphlets
so when I had to do my write-up I could plagiarize. Obviously, my mother
found out. She knew that seven-year-olds did not know words like "exuberant,"
"quintessential," and "invigorating," nor did they know about Monet's cultural
influences. I quickly learned that this tactic was a waste of time. Each
time my mother caught me, I was made to rewrite my passage in front of her.
Recently I discovered that my mother had kept all my reviews. I was surprised
and relieved that they had not been thrown away.
Museums were the least boring of all the trips. I loved the British
Museum, and was always disgusted and enthralled by the mummy remains. Unfortunately,
my mother did not believe in repetition and we never went back after the
first visit. Looking at the reconstructed dinosaurs at the Natural History
Museum was also fun, but my mother wanted to teach me about evolution, so
the dinosaurs were only a transitory part of the journey. I was fascinated
by anything shiny, so I spent lots of time in the gem room. Nowadays, this
room has lost its charm and I'm back looking at the dinosaurs. One day when
I was particularly apprehensive about yet another outing, my mother took me
to the Bethnel Green Children's Museum. I remember spending a lot of time
looking at the dollhouses, imagining what it would be like to play with them.
It was almost as exciting as the mummies.
Sometimes I reluctantly enjoyed my trips and even admitted it to
my mother. Before attending the Proms, I wondered if I could sit still and
maintain interest in a classical concert for two hours. In order fully to
appreciate Mozart and Bach my mother felt that it was necessary to sit with
the music lovers in the gallery. I was horrified that the gallery consisted
of no more than a stone floor where I either had to stand or sit on the ground.
And the music lovers ended up being university students, who would talk
constantly through the performance. I was always confused because I had to
be quiet. Whenever I asked my mother when we could sit in the boxes, she
would say "next time." But I managed to sit through the whole concert quietly,
which to my dismay occurred because I loved the music. Unfortunately, I
have not gone back to the Proms, as the long queues and my expectations always
intimidate me.
The worst part of the cultural exploration days was carrying the
lunch bag. My mother would prepare all the food we needed for the day and
make me carry the bag. Being a fashion-conscious kid, I was embarrassed about
carrying the bright orange "Happy Sammy" bag around London, and made sure
it was my mother's turn to carry it when we were on the streets. But it
also served as a watch; I knew the lighter the bag got, the sooner we would
be in the tube on the way home. I wanted to do fun things like eat at McDonalds,
but my mother knew that picnics were cheaper and allowed us more time to look
at the museums.
When it was too hot to go into the city we went swimming. On these
days I had autonomy, while my mother swam laps. I used to play on the water
slide for hours, and thought that the ten-minute wait was always worth the
ten seconds of enjoyment. I was too afraid to use the diving boards because
I was not sure that I would float back up after jumping into the water. To
my horror, my mother found out about my fear and all my pool independence
vanished. To regain it, I agreed to jump. Jumping off the board was an exhilarating
moment. Shortly after, I abandoned the water slide for the diving boards.
My father was a realist and took me to the movies. Naturally he
chose what we were going to watch, which was normally action movies. It was
mother who took me to Disney's latest offering, while my father introduced
me to Indiana Jones. A bonus about going to the cinema was the food. We
had two cones of ice cream each, and always got different flavors so we could
share. Afterwards we would go to McDonalds, or whatever restaurant had greasier
food. But the best part about those days was coming home, and my father and
I lying to my mother about what we had eaten. My father and I would plan what
we were going to say in the car, but I was the one who later would tell my
mother what we really had eaten.
When my father had seen all the movies that he had wanted to see,
he used to take me to the library. We would spend half a day there. Even
though we were in two different sections of the building, I never felt lonely.
I liked to hide in the corner and read all the Dr. Seuss books even though
I had read them twenty times. When I got tired of being alone I would drag
my father to the audio section where we would pick records to take home.
Some days we spent lazily in the garden. My mother and I would
watch as my father barbecued our lunch. We would spread out a huge blanket
and all lie down and read. There would be a big bowl of grapes near by, which
was often finished before I had come to the end of the first chapter. But
the best days were those spent in my pajamas watching television. Although
the trips broke the monotony and were entertaining, being lazy was my favorite
summer pastime.
Student piece
Clearing
copyright © Alifya Vasi, 1998. Used with permission.
Near where my father used to work, there was a small clearing in
the middle of a forest. The only path to the clearing was through bramble
bushes and stinging nettles. On the way, I would eat raspberries from the
bushes, which would numb the pain of the stings and scrapes. After many treks
through the forest, it didn't matter whether the raspberries were sweet or
sour. They became part of the journey and as necessary as the scratches.
Although not the most magnificent sight I have seen, and with nothing there
to make it personal, the clearing was certainly my favorite place. No matter
how many times I went to the forest, each time I reached the clearing it was
an accomplishment. The clearing was very bare. It was a patch of tall grass,
with occasional poppies scattered about.
My father was the only person whom I thought worthy enough to take
to the clearing with me. Naturally I led the way, eagerly wondering if
he would have the same gratification I had upon seeing the clearing. When
we reached the clearing, my father marveled more at the journey we had just
made than at the clearing, as he was more impressed with the walk that I had
to make to keep me coming back here. Had the journey through the forest
not been so arduous the clearing would not have been as beautiful.
Student piece
11800 Twinlakes Drive
copyright © Olivia Stewart, 2000. Used with permission.
The hallway at 11800 Twinlakes Drives looks like the hallway of
a mid-grade hotel. The lighting is always dim and the fixtures aren't fashionable
at all but they aren't obtrusive. The walls are a very bland beige with textured
blue wallpaper around the doorways. The wallpaper is edged by wood which
is real, but with no particular polish or quality. Compounding this blandness
is an unaesthetic cleanliness. The maids clean without thought to much of
anything, including their paychecks, so while the place is never dirty it
is never impressive, either. However, there is a large mirror across from
the elevator which is good enough and useful since I only have a small mirror
in my bathroom and never would know if there was a run in my stockings otherwise.
Student piece
Tanzanian Peaberry coffee beans
copyright © Alexandra Griffin, 2000. Used with permission.
Tanzanian Peaberry coffee beans, when properly roasted, have a color
between caramel and deep tan. Each bean is a nearly perfectly spherical ball
the size of a pea, with a natural seam running across one side as if it were
a normal coffee bean made of clay and rolled into a ball. Actually, this
shape is produced by one special species of coffee tree which grows berries
that bear only one bean apiece, while average coffee berries must support
two beans each, which gives them the classic hemispherical shape. Since
each berry supports only one Peaberry bean, the beans have an intense and
inimitable flavor. This raw flavor makes for less roasting, and therefore
a relatively light brown color.
Student piece
My Neighborhood
copyright © Amanda Bernhardt, 2000. Used with permission.
The condition of the neighborhood in which I grew up displays both
desperate poverty and overflowing excess. The sunken houses, discolored
by rain, have walls that sag like wet cardboard and ramshackle porches that
the slightest breeze might collapse, killing the several youngsters and dogs
playing underneath. Oddly enough, these poor families, who often can't afford
shirts for their boys or hairpins for their girls, accumulate mountains of
junk in their backyards: rusted wheelbarrows, scorched pots, broken swing
sets, fleabitten sofas. It is as if, despite their poverty and the uselessness
of their trashy possessions, the poor are still driven by the all-American
instinct to acquire.
Student piece
Fairmont Street, Bethesda
copyright © Adam Rice, 2000. Used with permission.
People walk up and down Fairmont street in Bethesda. Most of them
have cell phones or breast implants or both as they walk briskly to their
jobs or luncheons or bars. During business hours the street serves as a runway
for an unconscious fashion show.
Student piece
Welch's Grape Girl
copyright © Leigh K. Challenger, 2000. Used with permission.
Kate Viggiano is not afraid of spiders, snakes, or heights. She
is not afraid of walking alone after dark, trying new food, or going up to
strangers and starting a conversation. Her only fear is of a four-foot-two,
perky blonde child. Ms. Viggiano is a confident, healthy, 20-year-old college
student with an overwhelming fear of the Welch's Grape Juice Girl. The child's
smile, which looks like as if she has a hanger permanently implanted in
her mouth to make her smile wide, "looks like the devil's grin" to her.
The child's dark, angular eyebrows and pointed incisors are also reminders
of The Prince of Darkness. Ms. Viggiano explains that the child "gives me
nightmares. That grin . . . It's just too scary to be forgotten." The fact
that the child is articulate and doesn't speak with a toddler's lisp is even
scarier to Ms. Viggiano. She claims that it's a conspiracy by the Welch's
company; the "child" is actually a "thirty year old in a five-year-old's
body."
Gallery
Non-Classic Voices in Classic Texts
Headnote to the Gallery: Classic style can present anything
- rocks, hurricanes, schizophrenics, babies, teenagers, rock stars - and what
it presents may have a non-classic style of its own. Thucydides, Theophrastus,
and La Bruyère, for example, provide memorable classic presentations
of hundreds of people who lack classic style. The classic writer often simply
quotes - or pretends to quote - the non-classic voice he is presenting. Thucydides,
for example, a thoroughly classic writer, quotes many long speeches in forensic,
deliberative, juridical, and oratorical styles. Here are passages from Jane
Austen and Gustave Flaubert in which non-classic voices are presented as
exhibits.
From Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813), edited by
R. W. Chapman [third edition, 1932] (London: Oxford University Press, 1982),
pages 62-63. Elizabeth Bennet's and Mr. Bennet's comments, quoted in the
headnote, are from the same edition, page 64.
Headnote to the passage from Pride and Prejudice:
A text in classic style can include elements in another style and can do
so without compromising the classic style of the whole. This is easy to see
in works of fiction that include texts "written" by fictional characters.
Jane Austen's novels quite frequently include characters who speak in non-classic
styles. Some of these characters write too. Pride and Prejudice
includes a letter from Mr. Collins to Mr. Bennet. No one in the Bennet
family, to whom Mr. Bennet reads the letter, has ever met Mr. Collins.
Five of the six members of the family make a comment about it. Elizabeth
Bennet raises the issue of style. For her, as for Jane Austen, style is
something that derives from thought. Mr. Collins's letter is a kind of pastiche
of ready-made phrases and what he imagines to be appropriate sentiments.
He reveals a cultural ignoramus's idea of what is suitable to a clergyman,
while affecting an assurance he obviously does not have. The sentiments,
not being his and coming from random sources, are both inauthentic and unharmonious.
What kind of person could think them appropriate? It is impossible to imagine
that Mr. Collins wants to make the impression that the letter actually does
make on Elizabeth and Mr. Bennet: "He must be an oddity . . . I cannot make
him out. - There is something very pompous in his stile. - And what can he
mean by apologizing for being next in the entail. - We cannot suppose he
would help it, if he could. - Can he be a sensible man, sir?" "No, my dear;
I think not. I have great hopes of finding him quite the reverse. There
is a mixture of servility and self-importance in his letter, which promises
well. I am impatient to see him." No one could improve the style of the
letter without being forced to change the content and the cast of mind as
well because Collins's cast of mind drives the surface decisions of the
writing.
The disagreement subsisting between yourself and my late honoured
father, always gave me much uneasiness, and since I have had the misfortune
to lose him, I have frequently wished to heal the breach; but for some time
I was kept back by my own doubts, fearing lest it might seem disrespectful
to his memory for me to be on good terms with anyone, with whom it has always
pleased him to be at variance. . . . My mind however is now made up on the
subject, for having received ordination at Easter, I have been so fortunate
as to be distinguished by the patronage of the Right Honourable Lady Catherine
de Bourgh, widow of Sir Lewis de Bourgh, whose bounty and beneficence has
preferred me to the valuable rectory of this parish, where it shall be my
earnest endeavour to demean myself with grateful respect towards her Ladyship,
and be ever ready to perform those rites and ceremonies which are instituted
by the Church of England. As a clergyman, moreover, I feel it my duty to
promote and establish the blessing of peace in all families within the reach
of my influence; and on these grounds I flatter myself that my present overtures
of good-will are highly commendable, and that the circumstance of my being
next in the entail of Longbourn estate, will be kindly overlooked on your
side, and not lead you to reject the offered olive branch. I cannot be otherwise
than concerned at being the means of injuring your amiable daughters, and
beg leave to apologize for it, as well as to assure you of my readiness to
make them every possible amends, - but of this hereafter. If you should have
no objection to receive me in your house, I propose myself the satisfaction
of waiting on you and your family, Monday, November 18th, by four o'clock,
and I shall probably trespass on your hospitality till the Saturday se'night
following, which I can do without any inconvenience, as Lady Catherine is
far from objecting to my occasional absence on a Sunday, provided that some
other clergyman is engaged to do the duty of the day. I remain, dear sir,
with respectful compliments to your lady and daughters, your well-wisher and
friend,
William Collins.
From Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1857), translated
by Alan Russell (New York: Penguin, [1950, reprinted 1977]), pages 213-215.
Headnote to the passage from Madame Bovary:
Jane Austen has an assured and seemingly natural command of classic style
and is a wonderful mimic, thoroughly aware that the surface of a style is
driven by the way a writer thinks. She was once charged, in a famous critical
essay, with displaying "regulated hatred" for her characters. It is a charge
that rests on slender evidence, skillfully magnified by isolation and greatly
assisted both by its novelty and by the admirably deft phrase that expresses
it. The great master of "regulated hatred" in novelistic fiction, however,
is not Jane Austen but Gustave Flaubert, the creator of Madame Bovary. When
it comes to relentlessly stripping fictional characters of every last shred
of self-respect, showing them in the very act of entangling themselves in
impenetrable webs of clichés, false sentiment, and vulgarity as the
novelist stands back like a connoisseur to comment on the style of their
performance, Flaubert has no equal. It is one thing for a great writer to
mimic the product of an affected one; it is another to show the affected
writer's thought process - a tangle of self-deception and deceit - in the
act of writing. When Emma Bovary's jaded and dishonest lover, Rodolphe,
decides to abandon her at the very moment when she expects to leave her husband
for him, he writes her a letter. Flaubert does not merely give his readers
the letter but represents Rodolphe in the act of writing it. Flaubert demonstrates
how surface features are the product of intellectual decisions. In this
case, surface features - from lexical choice to the decision to write adieu
as two words, À Dieu [to God] - are meant to accord with what
Rodolphe considers Emma's idiotic sentiments and ideas.
He wrote: " Be brave, Emma, be brave! I do not want to ruin
your life . . . " 'That's true, damn it all,' thought Rodolphe. 'It's
for her own good. I'm playing fair.' "Have you thoroughly pondered your
resolution? Do you know to what an abyss I was dragging you, poor darling?
No, I think you do not! You were coming in blind trust, believing in happiness,
in the future. . . . Ah, what poor senseless creatures we are! " Here
Rodolphe paused to think of a good excuse. 'Suppose I say I've lost all
my money? No. That wouldn't clinch the thing anyway; I'd have it starting
all over again. How can you make such women listen to reason?' After some
thought he proceeded: "Be sure I shall never forget you. I shall always
be deeply devoted to you. But one day, sooner or later, these ardent feelings
of ours would doubtless have cooled. Such is the human lot. We should have
grown tired of one another. Who knows but what I might have suffered the agony
of witnessing your remorse - of sharing it myself, since I should have been
the cause of it! The very thought of your suffering is torture to me, Emma.
Forget me. Why did we have to meet? Why were you so beautiful? Am I to
blame? No, by Heaven, blame only Fate! " 'Always an effective word,'
he said to himself. "Ah, had you been one of those frivolous-hearted women
one sees, then indeed, I might selfishly have embarked upon an adventure which
would in that case have had no danger for you. But that delicious exaltation
which is at once your charm and your torment, has prevented you from understanding
- adorable woman that you are! - the false position in which we should have
been placed. Neither had I thought of it at first. I was at ease in the
shade of that ideal happiness, lying under the mango-tree, as it were, regardless
of consequences." 'She may think it's the money I grudge. Can't help
it if she does; it's got to be finished.' "Society is cruel, Emma. It
would have pursued us everywhere we went. There would have been awkward
questions, ugly words. They might have snubbed you - insulted you! You,
that I would set upon a throne! You, whose memory will go with me as a talisman.
For I am leaving the country, as a penance for all the harm I have done
to you. I shall go at once. Where, I do not know, I am past thinking!
Good-bye. Be always good and kind. Keep a place in your memory for this
unhappy man who has lost you. Teach your child my name, and let her say
it over in her prayers." The two candles flickered. Rodolphe got up
to close the window, then sat down again. 'There, I think that's all. Oh,
just in case she comes to ferret me out . . .' "I shall be far away when
you read these sad lines. I have decided to leave immediately, so that I
shant be tempted to see you again. No wavering! I shall come back, and
some day, perhaps, we may talk to one another quite calmly of our past love.
Adieu! " And there was a final adieu - separated into two words, "À
Dieu!" - which he thought in excellent taste. 'Now, how shall I sign
it?' he wondered. 'Your devoted? No. Your friend? Yes that's it.' "Your
friend." He read the letter through, and felt satisfied.
From
Vladimir Nabokov,
The
Real Life of Sebastian Knight
(1941) (New York: New Directions, [reprinted] 1977), pages 16-17 and 24-25.
Headnote to the passage from The Real Life of Sebastian Knight:
Vladimir
Nabokov is a great virtuoso in many styles and is ingenious in deploying them
in fiction. The two passages that follow are in the voice of the fictional
Sebastian Knight's fictional half-brother. The first is a presentation
of Sebastian as a boy and an unconscious allegory of his half-brother's
project of discovering Sebastian's real life. The second is a poised and
assured presentation of the writer's escape with his mother and
half-brother from Russia in the first weeks of the revolution. Unlike Mr.
Collins (an affected and inept writer) or Rodolphe (a vulgar and transparently
dishonest one), Nabokov's fictional writer is a complex character, poor
at tactics, often argumentative and cranky, constantly second-guessing himself
on a quest that must end in failure but sometimes, as in these two passages,
deft and masterful. It is, in part, Nabokov's way of reminding us that
the connection between the person who writes and the persona assumed in writing
is a complex one. The assurance and confidence of the writing does not
necessarily come from a person who is assured and confident. We can inhabit a
style and speak from it, but we remain ourselves.
I
remember Sebastian as a boy, six years my senior, gloriously messing about with
water-colours in the homely aura of a stately kerosene lamp whose pink silk
shade seems painted by his own very wet brush, now that it glows in my memory.
I see myself, a child of four or five, on tiptoe, straining and fidgeting,
trying to get a better glimpse of the paint-box beyond my half-brothers moving
elbow; sticky reds and blues, so well-licked and worn that the enamel gleams in
their cavaties. There is a slight clatter every time Sebastian mixes his
colours on the inside of the tin lid, and the water in the glass before him is
clouded in magic hues. His dark hair, closely cropped, renders a small
birthmark visible above his rose-red diaphanous ear, - I have clambered
onto a chair by now - but he continues to pay no attention to me, until
with a precarious lunge, I try to dab the bluest cake in the box, and then,
with a shove of his shoulder, he pushes me away, still not turning, still as
silent and distant, as always in regard to me. I remember peering over the
banisters and seeing him come up the stairs, after school, dressed in the black
regulation uniform with that leather belt I secretly coveted, mounting slowly,
slouchingly, lugging his piebald satchel behind him, patting the banisters and
now and then pulling himself up over two or three steps at a time. My lips
pursed, I squeeze out a white spittal which falls down and down, always missing
Sebastian; and this I do not because I want to annoy him, but merely as a
wistful and vain attempt to make him notice my existence. I have a vivid
recollection too, of his riding a bicycle with very low handle-bars along a
sun-dappled path in the park of our countryplace, spinning on slowly, the
pedals motionless, and I trotting behind, trotting a little faster as his
sandled foot presses down the pedal; I am doing my best to keep pace with his
tick-tick-sizzling back-wheel, but he heeds me not and soon leaves me
hopelessly behind, very out of breath and still trotting. (pages 16-17)
In
November of 1918 my mother resolved to flee with Sebastian and myself from the
dangers of Russia. Revolution was in full swing, frontiers were closed. She
got in touch with a man who had made smuggling refugees across the border his
profession, and it was settled that for a certain fee, one half of which was
paid in advance, he would get us to Finland. We were to leave the train just
before the frontier, at a place we could lawfully reach, and then cross over by
secret paths, doubly, trebly secret owing to the heavy snowfalls in that silent
region. At the starting point of our train-journey, we found ourselves, my
mother and I, waiting for Sebastian, who, with the heroic help of Captain
Belov, was trundling the luggage from house to station. The train was
scheduled to start at 8:40 A. M. Half past and still no Sebastian. Our guide
was already in the train and sat quietly reading a newspaper; he had warned my
mother that in no circumstance should she talk to him in public, and as the
time passed and the train was preparing to leave, a nightmare feeling of numb
panic began to come over us. We knew that the man in accordance with the
traditions of his profession, would never renew a performance that had misfired
at the outset. We knew too that we could not again afford the expenses of
flight. The minutes passed and I felt something gurgling desperately in the
pit of my stomach. The thought that in a minute or two the train would move
off and that we should have to return to a dark cold attic (our house had been
nationalised some months ago) was utterly disastrous. On our way to the
station we had passed Sebastian and Belov pushing the heavily burdened
wheelbarrow through the crunching snow. The picture now stood motionless
before my eyes (I was a boy of thirteen and very imaginative) as a charmed
thing doomed to its paralysed eternity. My mother, her hands in her sleeves
and a wisp of grey hair emerging from beneath her woolen kerchief, walked to
and fro, trying to catch the eye of our guide every time she passed by his
window. Eight-forty-five, eight-fifty . . . The train was late in starting,
but at last the whistle blew, a rush of warm white smoke raced its shadow
across the brown snow on the platform, and at the same time Sebastian appeared
running, the earflaps of his fur cap flying in the wind. The three of us
scrambled into the moving train. It took some time before he managed to tell
us that Captain Belov had been arrested in the street just as they were passing
the house where he had lived before, and that leaving the luggage to its fate,
he, Sebastian, had made a desperate dash for the station. A few months later
we learned that our poor friend had been shot, together with a score of people
in the same batch, shoulder to shoulder with Palchin, who died as bravely as
Belov. (pages 24-25)
—->
Museum entry
A contemplative reaction to a cathedral contrasted
to a classic presentation of a cathedral
The first passage is from Julien Green, Œuvres complètes,
6. Paris: Gallimard (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), 1990, pages
385-386.
The second passage is from A. J. Liebling, Normandy Revisited as
reprinted in Liebling Abroad. New York: Wideview Books, 1981, pages
480-481.
Headnote: Julien Green, who was described as a French writer
and an American national (écrivain français, de nationalité
américaine), when he broadcast radio programs to occupied France
for the United States Office of War Information during the Second World
War, wrote prolifically in many forms (novels, plays, journalism, autobiographies,
a life of Francis of Assissi, a study of bilingualism) from his mid-twenties
to his death in August 1998 at the age of ninety-seven. He kept a journal
that presents a rich and complex inner landscape often through passages about
places, books, music, ideas and works of art.
The passage below on Durham Cathedral comes from the eleventh
volume of his Journal (La Terre est si belle [1976-1978]).
Like many of his passages on places and on works of art (especially religious
art), this one is essentially, if subtly, contemplative and is infused by
a kind of fantasy-personification. It is not just a church being presented
but a personality affected by and reacting to events. Reformed? Officially,
of course, but culturally never subdued. The beauty of the church that borders
on the fantastic is complemented by the fantasy of an architectural style
standing up to Protestantism and murmuring interminably and silently the
officially superseded liturgy that accords so perfectly with it. Green marks
this interpretation off as separate from the church itself.
In contrast, in the second passage, A. J. Liebling, also presenting
a Romanesque cathedral, combines his interpretations inseparably with the
church itself. Like Green, Liebling comments on the fortress-like appearance
of the church and employs elements of fantasy, but he presents an abstraction,
the decline of a warrior culture, as if that abstraction were as visible
as the Gothic additions made to the Romanesque church. In contrast to the
contemplative style of Green on Durham Cathedral–here is a Romanesque cathedral
and here is how I imagine its cultural personality–Liebling folds his interpretation
of the "progressive enfeeblement of the Middle Ages" into such facts as the
spires added to the towers of the Bayeux cathedral in the thirteenth century
and the tournament armor to be seen in fifteenth-century illuminated manuscripts
Green on Durham cathedral:
13 mai. Durham.–La cathédrale d’une beauté
proche du fantastique. Avec ses tours carrées hérissées
de clochetons, je la vois plutôt comme une forteresse que comme une
église, parce que nous avons perdu le sens de ces choses et nous ne
savons plus qu’une église est, en effet, une forteresse contre les
force des maudits. Celle-ci d’un brun-rouge domine la ville et se voit à
une bonne centaine de kilomètres. À l’intérieur, triomphe
le roman massif qui m’est si cher et on a le sentiment qu’il tient toujours
tête au protestantisme et que, si la Réforme a pu s’emparer
de ces gigantesques cathédrales pour y moduler divinement ses psaumes,
la liturgie ancienne y murmure encore son latin en silence.
[13 May (1977). Durham. Cathedral of a beauty bordering
on the fantastic. I see it, with its square towers bristling with pointed
turrets, as a fortress instead of a church, because we no longer know how
to make sense of these things and no longer understand that a church is,
in effect, a fortress to fight off the forces of damnation. This one, brown-
red in color, dominates the city and is visible for a good forty miles.
Inside, the massive Romanesque so dear to me is triumphant and one has
the feeling that it always stands up to Protestantism, that if the Reform
was able to seize these gigantic cathedrals in order to make the divine
pulse of its psalms course through them, the old liturgy still goes on there
murmuring its Latin in silence.]
Liebling on the cathedral at Bayeux:
There are only two cathedrals I have ever liked in my life. One
is Notre-Dame de Paris, but only at a distance. The other is the cathedral
at Bayeux, which is also called Notre-Dame but is about as ladylike as a
Norman knight whacking off a thane’s head. The knights who followed William
the Bastard wore simple shirts of chain mail, like iron mackintoshes and
about as ornamental; they rode short, strong horses they could jump down
from easily when they saw a dead man with a ring finger worth chopping off
and could jump onto again as nimbly when they saw his friends coming. They
were all muscle and business, like Moon Mullins. You can see them in Matilda’s
comic strip [the Bayeux tapestry]. To understand the decline of Western
chivalry as a military force, you need only compare Matilda’s pirates on
horseback with the gloriously illuminated fifteenth-century Livre des
Tournois of King René, in which manicured Clydesdales swathed
in robes de chambre transport knightly Fancy Dans encased in patent
burglarproof vaults–and at that the passengers used blunted lances to be
doubly sure of not hurting one another. Off their horses, they were as helpless
as sea turtles turned on their backs, and out of their armor as vulnerable
as hermit crabs drawn from their shells.
The cathedral offers corroborative reading matter for those enamored
of the past. The front consists of two great, blocky stone towers, combinations
of skyscraper and donjon, whose façades are broken only by slits of
windows with outlines like armor- piercing shells. These towers remain from
the Romanesque cathedral that William the Bastard ordered built after his
great amphibious operation. Most of the other elements of the original cathedral
were destroyed by fire in 1105–a great pity, because they were replaced
with comparatively namby-pamby Gothic. In the two original towers, William
built the kind of fortress for God that God would have liked had he been
William. They constituted a defensive position a small detachment of angels
could hold against all the Powers of Hell, pending the arrival of reinforcements.
The Powers must have been easy for William to visualize, because his direct
ancestors in the preceding century had been Norse pagans.
The later architecture is a clear record of the progressive enfeeblement
of the Middle Ages, like the transition from mail shirts to couturier armor.
Early in the thirteenth century, a bishop of Bayeux named Robert des Ableiges
surmounted William’s savage towers with spires, which was like putting New
Year’s Eve clown hats on busts of Sulla. In 1099, when William’s towers
still looked like fortresses, William’s son Robert and other rough men stormed
Jerusalem; by the late fifteenth century, when Louis XI was adding the last
style-flamboyant jingle bells to the cathedral, the Turks had
taken Constantinople, and Bayeux was a city of priests and rentiers.
[Notes: (1) The Bayeux tapestry–also known as the
tapestry of Queen Matilda–is described on page 476 as "a narrative cartoon
strip embroidered on linen, telling Matilda’s husband’s side of his conquest
of England, along with the events leading up to it. At the time the cartoon
appeared, her husband, William the Bastard, was just beginning to be known
as William the Conqueror." (2) Moon Mullens was a familiar newspaper comic
strip character in the 1950s.]
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