Funeral Rites Revisited

In a 2013 post I juxtaposed the self-glorifying funeral instructions left by Oscar Thibault, the patriarch in Roger Martin du Gard's multi-volume novel Les Thibaults, with the intricate and preposterous obsequies commanded by the "wealthy eccentric" Grent Oude Wayl in Harry Mathews's 1962 novel The Conversions. Above is one more: Willie McTell's 1956 rendering of "Dyin' Crapshooter's Blues," which tells how the last wishes of the gambler Jesse Williams were carried out.

Though McTell recorded the song three times, the version above being the last, his repeated claim to have written it is open to question. Elements of the lyrics can be traced back to at least the 18th century (blues scholar Max Haymes has untangled some of the tangled strands of its prehistory), and Robert W. Harwood has attributed the song's creation in the form in which we know it to the elusive African-American composer and bandleader Porter Grainger. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that McTell's versions are the definitive performances.

De Thibaults

I won't be reading this new translation of Roger Martin du Gard's multi-volume novel Les Thibaults for the very good reason that I speak no Dutch, but they look like handsome editions and I'm glad there's still a market somewhere for this kind of writing. The translator is Anneke Alderlieste. They're not cheap: € 49.99 per volume. The publisher is Meulenhoff.

Loss of faith

This 1913 novel by Roger Martin du Gard may come across today as a somewhat curious project, a book that is not only a "novel of ideas" in the sense of being about ideas or structured around ideas but which in fact is largely composed of discussions of those ideas. The period is the late 1890s and early 1900s, a time of open conflict in France between the forces of traditional authority, both clerical and secular, and a vigorous positivism bolstered by scientific advances and by the undermining of religious faith by scholarly criticism. The book consists in large part of responses to that conflict, particularly as viewed through the life of the title character, who inherits both the scientific outlook of his physician father and the pious Catholicism of his mother. In the course of his own intellectual development, the young Jean comes to question and eventually to wholeheartedly reject Catholic teachings; his militant public atheism provokes a breach with his wife, Cécile, with whom he separates brutally shortly after the birth of their daughter. Barois becomes the editor of a prominent freethinking journal, Le Semeur, and is caught up in the Dreyfus Affair, during which he vigorously denounces the decisions of the military courts; later, as his health declines, he is overcome with existential horror at the thought of death and finally relapses into Catholicism. His daughter, whom he does not see again until she turns eighteen, becomes a nun, in part, it is suggested, to ransom her father's soul.

Martin du Gard was not religious, but for the most part he is too scrupulous both as a scholar and as a novelist to openly take sides. A broad range of views are put forward, each of them plausibly articulated, from the uncompromising materialism of Barois's middle years to his daughter's unshakable piety in the face of objections posed by science and reason ("Mais, père, si ma certitude était à la merci des objections ce ne serait plus une certitude..."). Ironies and subtleties abound. Barois, devastated by illness and personal estrangements, reverts to Catholicism; a steadfast friend and collaborator, Marc-Élie Luce, dies serenely an atheist, surrounded by his large and loving family. The priest who guides Barois in his return to faith, secretly troubled in his own convictions, is a longtime admiring reader of Le Semeur who, at the end of the novel, stands by as Cécile burns a document, penned years earlier, in which Barois, foreseeing the possibility of a deathbed conversion, had explicitly denounced it in advance. As the pages burn, the priest thinks of the Church, which had eased Barois's last days, and to which, he concludes uneasily, this sacrifice is due "— peut-être."

Jean Barois looks back at the Dreyfus era, but also prophetically ahead to the debacles of twentieth-century Europe. Before his final return to faith, Barois, like his allies, looks confidently forward to an age in which scientific progress would solve not only medical and technical problems but social ones as well. Martin du Gard foresaw that even as the disappointment of those expectations would lead some, like Barois, to reach for the familiar emotional comforts of faith, it would lead others — notably two young Catholic nationalists who debate with Barois near the end of the book — to an irrational politics that arguably prefigures Fascism. Some, like Luce, face the void bravely and with eyes open; others spiral into despair. One hundred years later the terms of the debate are very different, but the stakes remain the same.

Echoes of war

Coincidence or fate put an advance copy of Jean Echenoz's fine, slender novel about French soldiers in the Great War into my hands just as I was reading the last few pages of Les Thibault, Roger Martin du Gard's anything but slender roman fleuve, the latter sections of which span the war years. (Spoilers ahead, so be advised.)

As it turns out, the books have some curious similarities. Some of these, like the scenes narrating the mobilization of the French army at the outset of the war and the loss of one limb by a major character in the course of it, might be plausibly dismissed as inevitable given the nature of the subject. On the other hand, the fact that both novels are primarily concerned with two men, and that in the course of each narrative one of those two men will die in the crash of the two-seater aircraft in which he is a passenger (and leave behind a pregnant girlfriend) may be a coincidence or may be a sly hommage on Echenoz's part, a hommage that would not be out of character given that the opening pages of 1914 feature a pointed allusion to Victor Hugo's novel of the 1793 Vendée uprising, entitled Ninety-Three. (The French title of Echenoz's novel, by the way, is not 1914 but a simple 14, and it also begins in the Vendée.)

Be that as it may, the novels have little in common in tone, with Martin du Gard's being (for the most part) earnest and analytical, and the newer book more graphic in its depiction of warfare but also leavened with a bit of playful postmodernism. As a case in point, we only find out about halfway through 1914 that its two chief characters, two men named Anthime and Charles who have been strangely circling around each other for several chapters, seemingly both attracted and repelled by some connection whose nature is unclear, are in fact brothers, as are, of course, Jacques and Antoine Thibault in Martin du Gard's novel.

Jean Echenoz's 1914 will be published by the New Press early next year, and will doubtless be one of many new books released in conjunction with the centenary of the beginning of the war.

Rereading Martin du Gard (IX): Night raid

It is springtime in Paris, 1918. The youngest of the Thibaults, Jacques, has been dead since the beginning of the war; his older brother, Antoine, a medical officer in the French army, has inhaled mustard gas while conducting an inspection tour aimed, ironically, at determining why so many members of the medical corps have been gassed. He survives, but with aftereffects that sap his energy, leave him short of breath, and make it difficult for him to speak. He has been recuperating — if that is the accurate word — in a hospital in southern France, but has obtained leave for a few days to return to Paris in order to attend the funeral of an old family retainer. While in the city, he consults with a senior colleague, Dr. Philip. As the two doctors go over the details of Antoine's case, he reads in his old mentor's eyes what at bottom he has already known but refused to admit to himself: that the course of his "recovery" is in fact a downward spiral of remission and relapse that must, inexorably, lead to his death within a matter of months.

For Antoine, who has taken great pride — that stubborn Thibault pride, the family crest — in his own skill and drive, in his scientific knowledge, in the bright future that lay ahead of him, this death sentence produces a paroxysm of horror. Naturally he has known all along — and he is not a religious man — that his life would one day end, but he has always been confident that his death would come only after a long life filled with accomplishments and laurels; there would be a sense of satisfaction, a legacy to leave behind. Abruptly, confronted with his own annihilation, he realizes that it will all come to nought.

The chapter that narrates Antoine's return home that evening is one of the briefest and most extraordinary in the book. Reeling, he first takes the boulevard Malesherbes to the rue Boissy-d'Anglas, "passing so close to the façades that his elbows at times struck the walls."

He found himself under the trees of the Champs-Élysées. Before him, through the trunks, barely illuminated but visible under the nocturnal light of that beautiful spring night, stretched the Place de la Concorde, crisscrossed by silent automobiles which appeared like beasts with phosphorescent eyes and then vanished into the darkness. He saw a bench and approached it. Before sitting down, out of habit, he told himself "Don't catch cold." (And at once he thought, "What does it matter, now?") The blinding verdict that he had read in Philip's face had taken posssession of his spirit, and not only his spirit but his body, like an enormous parasite, a devouring tumor that would crowd out everything else in order to bloom monstrously and occupy his entire being.

The lyricism at just this point in the narrative, this nocturnal urban sublime in the face of the abyss, is remarkable, but it is about to become more so. He hears a distant howling noise in the night. At first he is barely aware of it; then:

Two shadows, two female forms, emerged at a run from beneath the trees, and, almost at the same time, all the warning sirens began to scream at once. The sparse points of lights that blinked feebly around the Place de la Concorde were instantly extinguished.

It is a night raid by German bombers, and the city is quickly blacked out. He hears distant detonations, the sounds of anti-aircraft guns, and rises from his bench.

Above Paris, an astonishing sky came to life. Emanating from every part of the horizon, luminous beams swept the vault of the night, their milky trails moving off and intersecting, scrutinizing the jumble of stars like a face, brutal, swift, or at times hesitating, stopping suddenly to examine a suspect spot, then recommencing their gliding investigation.

He looks for a taxi,

But the square was now deserted, dark, immense and could only be discerned at moments. Its outline would suddenly appear, rising out of the gloom in the intermittent reflection of the searchlights, with its balustrades, its pale statues, its Obelisk, its fountains, and the funereal columns of its tall lampposts, like a vision in a dream, a city petrified by some enchantment, the vestige of a vanished civilization, a dead city, long buried in the sands.

As the detonations and the sounds of machine gun fire rage on, he skirts the Tuileries and approaches the Pont Royal, watching halos of red flame rise all over the city.

He had forgotten his misery. Beneath that invisible, imprecise menace that hovered like the blind wrath of a god, an artificial excitation spurred his blood; a kind of furious inebriation gave him strength. He quickened his steps, reached the bridge, crossed the river, and plunged into the rue du Bac.

A few moments later he is standing outside the building where he lives, resigned to his fate but dreading the solitude of rooms where he knows that no one awaits him.

These few pages are the last chapter of third-person narration in The Thibaults; the more than one hundred pages that follow are composed of letters and of entries in Antoine's journal, which he continues to the day of his death. It's almost as if Martin du Gard, who generally took a more scientific, matter-of-fact approach to narration, decided to pull out all the stops for a set-piece that would combine existential horror, the nightmare of modern warfare, and the beauty — and unexpected, evocative solitude — of the monuments of Paris into one final dazzling flourish.

[Image above: Yvon, Pont Royal and Quai des Tuileries. The translations are mine rather than Stuart Gilbert's, but in any case they pale beside the original.]

Reading Martin du Gard (VIII): Flight

As the seventh and longest of the eight parts of The Thibaults draws to a close, armies have been mobilized, fighting has broken out across Europe, and Jacques Thibault and Jenny de Fontanin have become lovers. Jean Jaurès, the one Socialist leader who seemed most likely to resist the march to war, has been assassinated before their very eyes; to Jacques's disgust, Jaurès's former comrades quickly fall in step with the patriotic march to war. Because Jacques holds forged Swiss papers, he plans to take Jenny to Switzerland and escape service in the army. In no case is he willing to fight or to kill his fellow man; the divergence between his views and those of his older brother Antoine, in regard to the civic obligation to obey the country's call to arms, is absolute. (Though Martin du Gard was a pacifist, he characteristically gives Antoine the most persuasive lines.) At the last moment, Jenny has a terrible row with her mother and decides to remain behind in Paris, temporarily, to patch things up. Jacques leaves for Switzerland; the couple will never see each other again. Despite his genuine love for Jenny, the truth is that he is relieved. He has set himself a mission, to which Jenny would only be an obstacle.

The mission, such as it is, is utterly insane: with a comrade, a pilot named Meynestrel, he concocts a plan to drop hundreds of thousands of leaflets along the battlefront, leaflets calling on soldiers on both sides to lay down their arms and rise up against the politicians and capitalists who have sent them to war. Does he really believe that the soldiers will heed the call, or does he simply welcome the chance to sacrifice his own life in a doomed effort that he knows is likely to prove fatal? The chapters describing the preparations for the flight have an adventurous, even lyrical tone, but it all ends too soon, and the final pages of L'éte 1914 are grueling to read. The plane malfunctions and crashes, Meynestrel is killed, the leaflets are consumed in flames, and Jacques, horribly injured, is pulled from the wrecked plane by French soldiers. Unable to speak, fitfully conscious, he is mistaken for a spy and bound to a stretcher. (In what may be an echo of the Passion, he is taunted and pelted with gravel.) As the French army retreats in the face of a German offensive he is carried along with them; when the retreat degenerates into a disordered rout one of the stretcher-bearers, terrified of his own act, administers a hurried coup de grâce with his pistol.

The novel will resume with a book-length Epilogue set four years later. But after some 1,750 pages, Martin du Gard has dispensed with one of the two Thibault brothers by giving him a death that accomplishes nothing, that has no meaning. Jacques was never a good fit for his world; he seemed to know this, and for that reason willed his own death. But the redemption he sought to achieve in dying is completely denied him. Like the war itself, it is ghastly and without purpose.

(The cover shown above reproduces an image from the 2003 French television adaptation of the novel, featuring Malik Zidi as Jacques.)

Reading Martin du Gard (VII): Residue

One of Roger Martin du Gard's first published works was a dissertation on the ruins of the abbey of Jumièges in Normandy, and it's often been observed (sometimes disparagingly) that his scholarly training as an archiviste paléographe carried over into his literary works. Perhaps it was simply that he had an underlying disposition towards the methodical. In any case, I can't help thinking that he must have taken particular pleasure in writing the tenth chapter of La mort du père (the sixth part of Les Thibault), in which Antoine Thibault goes through the abundant personal papers of his father after the latter's death. The papers include not only Oscar Thibault's will and the instructions regarding his funeral arrangements, but also bundles of letters between him and his wife (who had died giving birth to Antoine's younger brother Jacques many years before), an aborted "History of Paternal Authority" that he had embarked on before either of his sons had even been born, various testimonial letters from former inmates of the reformatory for boys that he had founded, and a kind of commonplace book in which he had recorded quotations from various worthies as well as some more personal reflections that hinted obscurely at temptations, possibly but not necessarily of the flesh. And then there is this:

In the bottom of the drawer, a little box without a label: three amateur photographs with curling corners. The largest showed a woman of some thirty years of age, in a mountain landscape, at the edge of a group of fir trees. Antoine leaned over under the lamp; the woman's features were completely unknown to him. In any case, the ribboned bonnet, the muslin collaret, the puffed sleeves bespoke a very old-fashioned style. The second, smaller photo showed the same person, seated this time, hatless, in a square, perhaps in the garden of a hotel; and, under the bench, at her feet, a white poodle, crouched like a Sphinx. In the third image the dog was alone, standing on a table in the garden, its muzzle upright and a ribbon on its head. An envelope in the box contained the negative of the large photograph, the mountain landscape. No name, no date. Looked at more closely, and even though her figure was still slender, the woman appeared to have reached or even passed forty. A warm regard, serious in spite of the smile on her lips. An attractive physiognomy which Antoine examined, intrigued, without deciding to close the box again. Was it his imagination? He was no longer certain that he had never seen the woman before.

The photographs are not the only surprise Antoine comes across in his father's papers. He finds several pages of a letter from a woman who identifies herself only by initials. A longtime widow, the woman had taken out an advertisement in a newspaper in hopes of finding a second husband; Oscar had apparently written to her once before. The letter ends in mid-sentence at the bottom of the fourth page; its conclusion is missing. From the date, Antoine is virtually certain that the writer of the letter could not have been the woman in the photographs.

A lesser novelist would weave whole Gothic tales out of the hints offered by these discoveries, but that's not what Martin du Gard is up to. He isn't quite done with these mysterious women — one of them, if it is indeed her, will privately leave flowers on Oscar's grave — but what interests Martin du Gard is not uncovering some profound secret but the very fact that people are, ultimately, to a large extent unknowable to each other, even to those who supposedly know them best. The seemingly meaningless details — the picture of the dog standing by itself, the lost final pages of the letter — are just the kind of evidence a trained archivist or archaeologist would be used to dealing with on a daily basis. That is the pattern of how human lives leave traces behind them: a bit here, a bit there, sometimes planned, sometimes by chance, and more often than not with all of their associations and connections stripped away forever.

In the end, Antoine is left reflecting on how little he knew the father who had dominated his life for thirty years, and whom he will now never have the chance to know better.

"The residue of an existence," he thought. "And, in spite of everything, the breadth of such a life! A human life always has infinitely more breadth than one knows!"

(I have reworked Stuart Gilbert's translation but have taken his word for it about the "muslin collaret.")

Re-reading Martin du Gard (VI): Funeral Rites

After a long illness, Oscar Thibault, the grand paterfamilias of the Thibault family, has died, and among his papers his son Antoine finds instructions for his funeral which demonstrate the same robust mixture of self-regard, compulsion for control, pious embarrassment, and rationalization that had characterized Oscar's entire adult life. In the version below I have retranslated the funeral instructions but used some of Stuart Gilbert's readings from the original translation. The "Institution" at Crouy is a reform school, and the "pupils" could equally well be called "inmates."

I desire that after a low mass has been said at Saint Thomas Aquinas, my parish, my body be brought to Crouy. I desire that my obsequies be celebrated there in the Institution's chapel, in the presence of all the pupils. I desire that, in contrast to the service at Saint Thomas Aquinas, the funeral service shall be carried out with all the dignity with which it may please the Committee to honor my mortal remains. I would like to be led to my last resting place by the representatives of the charitable works that have, over the course of many years, accepted the good offices of my devotion, as well as by a delegation of that Institut de France of which I have been so proud to have been welcomed as a member. I also wish, if the regulations permit, that my rank in the Order of the Legion of Honor might assure me of a military salute from that Army which I have always defended in all my words, writings, and my votes as a citizen. Finally, I wish that those who express the desire to pronounce a few parting words over my grave be permitted to do so without restriction.

In writing this, it is not that I hold any illusion about the vanity of these posthumous glories. I am already filled with anxiety at the thought of having one day to make my reckoning before the Supreme Tribunal. Nevertheless, after exposing myself to the illumination of meditation and prayer, it seems to me, that in those circumstances, the true duty consists in imposing silence on a sterile humility, and to arrange matters so that, at the time of my death, my existence may, if it please God, be held up one last time as an example, with the aim of inspiring other great Christians among our grand French bourgeoisie to devote themselves to the service of the Faith and Catholic charity.

This is all, by the way, prefatory to the "detailed instructions" Antoine also finds, which Martin du Gard spares us.

I can't help thinking that it would have been amusing if Harry Mathews had these instructions in the back of his mind as he drew up, for The Conversions, the elaborate Last Will and Testament of Grent Oude Wayl, which decreed, among other things:

That the organist of St. James's Church, Madison Avenue and 71st Street, Manhattan, choose a suitable musical composition to accompany the departure of my remains to their place of burial; that the score of this composition (notes, rests, clefs, key and time signatures, and all indications of speed, phasing and dynamics) be reproduced at fifteen times its printed size in the form of pancakes; and that these cakes be obligatorily eaten by any and all such persons who attend the reading of this my Last Will and Testament, excepting those specifically invited thereto. (In the event of non-compliance with this provision, I have instructed my faithful servant Miss Gabrielle Dryrein, of 2980 Valentine Avenue, The Bronx, to give to the press all information kept in my files concerning liable parties.)

I'll leave the unexpected outcome of Mr. Wayl's funeral for future readers of The Conversions to discover, but as for the pancakes, "The organist at St. James's, who had planned a twenty-nine minute Tragic Rhapsody of Widor, was warned of the consequences and changed to a unison version of O God Our Help in Ages Past; so that the forced feeders had only twenty-eight notes to swallow between them, and — the hymn being all in wholenotes and halfnotes — hollow ones at that."

Re-reading Martin du Gard (V)

Oscar Thibault, the grand Catholic autocrat who looms over the first six parts of Roger Martin du Gard's Les Thibault, has finally died, after a long and luridly described bout of uremia marked by episodes of horrifying convulsions. His long-estranged younger son, Jacques, has returned to Paris from Lausanne in time to see his father, but Oscar is too far gone to know him. Antoine, his older brother, a physician, finds among their father's papers detailed instructions for his funeral, which takes place, in bone-chilling weather and accompanied by resounding tributes from various worthies with whom the old man had been associated — at a reformatory for boys (Martin du Gard uses the word pénitencier — prison) at Crouy that Oscar had founded and for which he had long felt a special benevolent concern.

Jacques doesn't attend the funeral; years before, after running away as an adolescent, he had been confined, at his father's insistence, in that very institution, and had suffered isolation and abuse there for which he has never forgiven him. He does, however, go on his own to visit the grave, when he is sure that he will be alone. He takes a train from Paris, gets off at the Crouy station, and makes his way on foot through the snowy fields and past the inn where he had once been locked up in a laundry room while his keeper, under the pretext of taking his charge for a constitutional, had pursued amusements of his own. Finally the reformatory looms ahead of him:

He had reached the end of the village. As soon as he passed the last houses, he saw, in the middle of the plain, isolated behind its enclosure of high walls, the great edifice topped with snow and ringed with rows of barred windows. His legs trembled. Nothing had changed. Nothing. The treeless road that led to the entrance was a river of mud. A stranger, lost in that winter dusk, would no doubt have struggled to decipher the gold letters engraved above the first floor. As for Jacques, he had no trouble reading the proud inscription upon which his eyes were riveted.

I can't help, reading these lines, which I have re-translated with a few borrowings from Stuart Gilbert's version, but think of the following passage, written no more than five or six years before:

It was late in the evening when K. arrived. The village was deep in snow. The Castle hill was hidden, veiled in mist and darkness, nor was there even a glimmer of light to show that a castle was there. On the wooden bridge leading from the main road to the village, K. stood for a long time gazing into the illusory emptiness above him.

That, of course, is the opening of Franz Kafka's The Castle, as translated by Willa and Edwin Muir. It's not a question of influence; Kafka was dead before La mort du père was published, and there's only a slight chance that Martin du Gard had read The Castle at that time. But there seems, nevertheless, to be some very real affinity between these two haunting, snow-covered landscapes and the two towering edifices they reveal — or in Kafka's case, the edifice that is concealed in an emptiness that is not really an emptiness at all but only an illusory emptiness.

What a difference in literary fates between Kafka, the obscure, emotionally tormented insurance bureaucrat who struggled to complete many of his works and died young but who has come to be regarded as a pivotal modernist, and Martin du Gard, the methodical creator of one of the most ambitious novel sequences of the 20th century, a man who was awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature in his lifetime but who is now widely dismissed, at least in the English-language world, as the epitome of a kind of narrative that is now firmly regarded as passé if not downright reactionary.

Melvin Jules Bukiet — who to his credit is among the few recent critics to have defended Martin du Gard's legacy — has said of The Thibaults, "written a third of the way into the 20th century, it may be the last great 19th century novel." He intended that as a compliment, and so it should be taken, but I would argue that Martin du Gard might have been more of a 20th-century writer than he is generally given credit for. Though he chose not to pursue the techniques of formal experimentation pursued by some of his contemporaries, is there not something quintessentially modern in his relentless, unsentimental realism, his avoidance of narrative gimmickry, his meticulous delineation of the interior lives of his characters? Does he represent an arrière-garde or simply an avenue left unexplored?

Re-reading Martin du Gard (IV)

The French text of Les Thibaults is readily available in a three-volume paperback edition, but I chose instead to read at least the first six parts in this motley assortment of well-worn volumes, which correspond to the format in which they were first published. (There are seven volumes shown because the third part, La belle saison, has been split into two.) Gallimard reprinted the books endlessly, so these are neither particularly rare nor valuable, and the paper they were printed on is not great, but this is more or less how the average reader from the 1920s until well after World War II would have experienced the novel. Does this matter? Is anything gained by reading Les Thibaults in this form rather than as, say, an ebook? Perhaps not, but I don't read ebooks.

Publishing books under paper covers was the norm in France long before the so-called "paperback revolution" transformed the industry in the UK and America. I don't know whether this was because it was assumed that many readers would choose to have their volumes rebound in any case, as was certainly often done. (Gallimard also issued deluxe editions on better paper.) Three of the volumes above, which are castoffs from a British library, are bound in plain blue buckram, though I can't tell whether it was the publisher or the library that bound them that way. They are wartime Canadian reprints, bearing the Gallimard imprint; one suspects that Gallimard might not have been reprinting these particular books in France, during the ocupation. La belle saison is in its original paperbound format, but the other two have been rebound.

La consultation, with the red spine, has a quarter-leather binding with marbled paper over the rest of the boards; the spine bears the imprint of Selections Sequana, but the interior is simply the Gallimard edition, paper covers and all.

Sequana was (and still is) a long-established French printing firm, and this was probably issued as part of some kind of book club; the firm's name is derived from the goddess associated with the river Seine, as well as with the ancient Gallic Sequani tribe familiar to Caesar. Printed on the spine are the words Fluctuat nec mergitur — it floats and does not sink — which make up the motto of the city of Paris. It is stamped with the number 5 though it actually contains the fourth part of the novel.

The last volume, La mort du père, may have been custom-bound for the owner; it has rather nice blue marbled paper on the boards. The author's name has been truncated as "Du Gard" on the spine.

Books are made up of words, symbols that by their nature can be replicated and reproduced in any number of forms, but in their physical manifestation they are also artifacts that bear traces, however faint, of the time in which they were created. One is under no obligation to read Roger Martin du Gard with this in mind, or even to read him at all, but I think, on balance, that some small advantage is obtained by doing so.

Re-reading Martin du Gard (III)

Much of La belle saison, the third part of Roger Martin du Gard's massive novel Les Thibaults, centers around the relationship between Antoine Thibault, a young physician, and Rachel, a young woman he has met while performing emergency surgery on an accident victim. Beautiful, intelligent, independent, and sexually uninhibited, Rachel seems like the ideal match for Antoine, who has previously satisfied himself with casual affairs with prostitutes. Rachel has had other lovers — a fact that doesn't disturb Antoine unduly — and one of them is a man named Hirsch, a shadowy character who spends most of his time in Africa. It is in relating her adventures with Hirsch that we — and Antoine — begin to discover her less admirable qualities.

Rachel has already told one appalling story of her time in Africa, about a woman who was buried alive with stones as punishment for bigamy. (Rachel, who had absented herself from the scene, reports that Hirsch, who had witnessed it, assured her that he did not participate.) One night, while she and Antoine are watching a documentary about the continent, she relates another incident, equally horrifying. During a hunting outing with Hirsch, she shoots an egret, which falls on the far shore of a river. Hirsch's "boy" (the word is in English in the original) is dispatched to swim across and retrieve it; while swimming, an unnamed animal (probably a crocodile) seizes him from below.

Hirsch was wonderful in that kind of situation. He realized, instantly, that the boy was lost, that he was going to suffer horribly: he put his gun to his shoulder, and pow! the child's head exploded like a gourd. It was better that way, no?

The next day, a porter is sent across for the egret, "and he had better luck than the boy." The bird is made into a hat, which she continues to own.

She enthuses over the unrestrained liberty — especially sexual liberty — that Europeans enjoy in their colonies:

In France, you see, we're stifled. One can only live free down there! If you only knew! The freedom of the whites in the midst of the blacks! Here, we have no idea what it's like, that freedom! No rules, no controls! You don't even have to fear the judgment of others! Do you get it? Can you possibly comprehend that? You have the right to be yourself, everywhere and all the time. You're as free in front of all those blacks as you are in front of your dog. And at the same time, you find yourself in the midst of these delicious beings, full of tact and nuances of which you have no idea. Around you, nothing but young, happy smiles, ardent eyes that divine your least desire...

She relates how she and Hirsch admired, without comment, two "fillettes délicieuses" belonging to a local caïd, and how the girls later appeared, unbidden, in their tent at night. "I tell you," she repeats, savoring it in her memory, "your least desire..."

You don't even have to make a signal. Your gaze rests on of one of those smooth faces, your eyes meet for an instant ... that's all, That's enough.

These disturbing episodes — and it seems clear that Martin du Gard intended them to be disturbing — offer a sharp critique of the moral status of European colonialism at a time when it was still in full flower. They also, perhaps, implicitly offer a bit of a rebuke to Martin du Gard's great friend Gide, who had described, in L'Immoraliste, exactly the kind of personal liberation by means of sexual tourism that Rachel celebrates so effusively.

Re-reading Martin du Gard (II)

Una novela de Galdós, qué idea. Cuando no era Vicki Baum era Roger Martin du Gard, y de ahí el salto inexplicable a Tristán L'Hermite, horas enteras repitiendo por cualquier motivo "les rêves de l'eau qui songe"... — Rayuela, Cap. 31 ¹

As far as I know this is the only reference to Roger Martin du Gard in Julio Cortázar's writings. There's no mention of the French novelist in the three-volume Alfaguara edition of Cortázar's letters (I haven't checked the five-volume revised edition), although Gide, whom he translated, is mentioned, favorably, several times. If one thinks of the difference between Gide's approach to fiction, at least in The Counterfeiters, and Martin du Gard's as roughly corresponding to the divide between the modernist and the positivist novel traditions, then it's likely that Cortázar, a second-generation modernist, meant Oliveira to be dismissive of, or at best bemused by, la Maga's choice of reading matter.

Cortázar, of course, would explode the very notion of the novel in writing Hopscotch, in which he also drew a notorious distinction between the lector-hembra or "female reader" ("el tipo que no quiere problemas sino soluciones, o falsos pro­blemas ajenos que le permiten sufrir cómodamente sentado en su sillón, sin comprometerse en el drama que también debería ser el suyo" ²) and the lector-cómplice or "accomplice reader" who "puede llegar a ser copartícipe y copa­deciente de la experiencia por la que pasa el novelista, en el mismo momento y en la misma forma." ³

The naturalist or positivist novel assumes that there is a nature of things, which by dint of diligent effort one can ascertain and describe. (The implicit irony in the notion of describing reality by inventing stories is an old one, with which Cervantes was as familiar as anyone.) Oliveira, the ultimate anti-positivist, has no faith that the nature of things is knowable; Hopscotch mirrors that, using a variety of techniques that force the reader to come to terms with the author's own manipulations. Where a novelist like Martin du Gard sought to be invisible, Cortázar makes the reader the co-author of an impossible work.


¹ "A novel by Galdós, what an idea. When it wasn't Vicki Baum it was Roger Martin du Gard, and from there the inexplicable leap to Tristan L'Hermite, whole hours spent repeating for no reason 'les rêves de l'eau qui songe.'" Benito Pérez Galdós was a Spanish realist, and Vicki Baum the author of the novel that inspired the 1932 movie Grand Hotel; François Tristan L'Hermite was a seventeenth-century playwright.

² "the person who doesn't want problems but only solutions, or false problems belonging to others which permit him to suffer comfortably seated in his armchair, without being implicated in the drama which ought to also be his own." Although referring to the lector-hembra, a term he later apologized for, Cortázar here uses a masculine noun (tipo) and the possessives that follow are actually gender-neutral.

³ "who is able to be a co-participant and co-sufferer of the experience through which the novelist passes, at the same time and in the same form."

Re-reading Martin du Gard (I)

At least thirty-five years ago I greedily devoured this 871-page translation of a novel by the 1937 Nobel Prize-winning novelist Roger Martin du Gard, and eventually went on to its even longer continuation, Summer 1914. Both volumes of Stuart Gilbert's translation are long out-of-print, and the author, when he is mentioned at all in the English-speaking world, is generally dismissed (unfairly, I think) as one of those Nobel laureates whose existence proves the utter irrelevance of the prize. He seems to have retained a bit more respect, or at any rate to have stayed in print, in his native France.

Be that as it may, after all these years I'm reading the book in French for the first time, intending to make it at least as far as La mort du père, the sixth of the novel's eight parts. (The final two correspond to Summer 1914.) Because of the book's length and my indifferent French I never had any intention of reading it in the original, but I changed my mind and am now steadily making my way through, dictionary and the translation in hand.

The first six parts of Les Thibault are essentially a family saga, set in the years leading up to the First World War. The paterfamilias is a well-connected Parisian Catholic autocrat, a widower with two sons. The elder, Antoine, is in training to become a physician as the book begins, while the younger, Jacques, a teenager, has just run away to Marseilles in the company of a friend, Daniel, with whom he is suspected (incorrectly, as it happens) of having a relationship of a forbidden nature. Jacques is eventually retrieved by his older brother, then consigned by his father to a reformatory as punishment, which is about where I am now, in Part Two, Le pénitencier.

In re-reading the narrative I'm surprised at how much of it I had either forgotten or misremembered, and mostly this is due, no doubt, to the length of time since I first read it and the immense size of the book, but I'm also getting the feeling, when I do need to refer to the translation to clarify a passage, that part of the problem is that Gilbert's translation is not simply dated but actually quite bad. Some of his readings are all but unrecognizable when compared with Martin du Gard's words. The passage below, which describes part of a conversation between the brothers when Antoine visits Jacques in the reformatory for the first time, provides both an example and, in part, a possible exculpation. First the French text, with Antoine speaking first:

— « Mais non, mon petit, c’est juré, je ne ferai rien contre ta volonté. Seulement, écoute-moi. Cette solitude morale, cette paresse, cette promiscuité ! Moi qui, ce matin, avais cru que tu étais heureux ! »

— « Mais je le suis ! » En un instant, tout ce dont il venait de se plaindre s’effaça: la monotonie des jours, l’oisiveté, l’absence de contrôle, l’éloignement des siens.

And now Stuart Gilbert:

"But of course, old man; I've sworn it! I'll do nothing you don't want me to do. Only, listen. Do you want to go on like this, frittering your life away in idleness, with no one of your own kind to talk to, in these sordid surroundings? And to think that only this morning I imagined you were happy here!"

"But I am happy!" In a moment all he had complained of fled from his mind, and all he now was conscious of was the languid ease of his seclusion, the somnolent routine and absence of control, not to mention his isolation from his family.

Even with my deficient French, I can see that parts of this translation are absurd. Gilbert not only expands a simple list constructed out of seven words — Cette solitude morale, cette paresse, cette promiscuité — into a long-winded rhetorical question, he also arguably butchers the sense of promiscuité, which probably has nothing sordid about it (although there are some sordid aspects to the boy's confinement) and only means "overcrowding" or "lack of privacy." But the interesting thing is in the next paragraph. In the French text, the point of the last sentence is that, a few moments earlier, Jacques had been bitterly bemoaning his life in the reformatory; but now, all of his complaints — the monotony, idleness, the lack of control over his own life, the separation from his family — have apparently been forgotten. Gilbert seemingly turns this around: Jacques forgets his earlier complaints, and reflects on how good he has it in the reformatory: he has a soft life, an easy routine, no one controls him, and he's away from his family (which is apparently a good thing). How could Gilbert have misconstrued the whole thrust of the sentence so badly?

But in this case, the translator is off the hook. As I discovered when I researched this passage online, Gilbert must have used a different version of the final sentence, one that reads, "En un instant, tout ce dont il venait de se plaindre s’effaça: il ne vit plus que les douceurs de sa réclusion, la monotonie des jours, l’oisiveté, l’absence de contrôle, l’éloignement des siens." Gilbert's translation more or less adheres to this version.

The words in bold are not in the edition I own, which bears the Gallimard imprint but which was printed in Canada in 1945. Every online text of the book that I've looked at (I haven't tried to be exhaustive) contains the highlighted words, and it's obvious that the edition Gilbert worked from must have contained them (or something similar) as well. Gilbert's translation was published in 1939, which means there are two possibilities:

1) Martin du Gard made revisions to the original published text (specifically, deleting the words in bold) that are reflected in the Canadian edition, but Gilbert worked from an earlier version.

2) Martin du Gard made revisions to the original published text (specifically, adding the words in bold), and Gilbert worked from that text, but the Canadian edition continued to reprint the earlier version of the text.

The situation is somewhat puzzling, as the longer version of the final sentence seems a complete muddle. But it was apparently the author's muddle, not the translator's. In any case, literary market conditions being what they are, I suspect that it's unlikely that Gilbert's translation of this massive novel will ever be replaced by a better one.

Nobel Prize Pulp

Some souvenirs from the days before paperback publishing became entirely respectable.


The above cover may be the only time the French novelist Roger Martin du Gard, probably best known in the US (if at all) for his long friendship with Gide, was ever compared to Grace Metalious. I don't know what marketing genius back in 1955 thought you could sell minor Martin du Gard in American drugstores, but probably the cover was the real selling point. This edition did go through at least two printings, so maybe they were onto something after all.


I went through an intense Martin du Gard phase in my youth and actually looked all over for The Postman, which at the time was out of print. I finally tracked down a copy in French (the original title is Vieille France) and worked my way through it, dictionary in hand, which if nothing else says something for my attention span back then. I only vaguely remember it now; I suspect it was actually quite tame. I bought the copy shown above much later for old time's sake.



I've never read either of the two Faulkners shown here. I love the quotation at the top of the back cover of Pylon, which makes you think the book is about giant rats or something along those lines. The Signet edition is from 1951. The blonde man on the cover looks a little like Paul Bowles, and the man slouching in the chair has Robert Mitchum eyes. Probably a coincidence.

The 1947 edition of Sanctuary below is relatively dignified -- it is a Penguin after all.



All of the above imprints -- Berkley, Signet, and Penguin -- are now part of the same corporation.