On Folly

And here we have the tailor and inventor Franz Reichelt, on February 4, 1912, the day he leapt off the Eiffel Tower. Just looking at him, in his ridiculous homemade parachute, we already know how this will turn out; we don't have to see the newsreel footage, shot on that cold morning, which documents his fatal descent. (For the curious, the whole sorry incident is outlined at Wikipedia, and more photos are available at La piedra de Sísifo, with a brief text in Spanish.)

It's impossible not to wonder about Reichelt's state of mind that day. Did he not at least half-intuit, as he prepared to step off the tower, that he was signing his own death-warrant? Had he simply gone too far to pull back without losing face? How long did it take him, as he began to fall, to realize his miscalculation? Did his limbs desperately try to regain the safety of the tower, when it was already too late?

But we shouldn't judge him too harshly. Two years later, the great statesmen of Europe, counseled by the finest and best-informed diplomatic, political, and military minds of the day and bolstered by countless reports, cables, secret agents, alliances, and maneuverings, would collectively plunge their countries and their peoples into the abyss of the Great War. In the unimaginable carnage that ensued, millions would die, empires would fall, and a cascade of destruction, hatred, and oppression would be set in motion that would take decades to exhaust itself. How long did it take those statesmen (and they were all men, of course) to understand the consequences of their actions? Reichelt, icon of inanity that he has come to be, harmed only himself.

Next to Me

The Yellow Hope is the stage name of the singer, songwriter, guitarist, and applied mathematician Arnold D. Kim, who when not recording and performing is deputy director of the UC Merced Center for Computational Biology (not your typical day job, but hey, you do what you gotta do). He has put out two CDs, Even the Beautiful Get Lonely (Sometimes), from which this track is taken, and the recently released Fifty Shades of Yellow, which features a duet with Syd Straw, no less.

A fine guitarist with an unassuming but appealing singing voice, Kim is content not to try to push his songs too hard. His subject matter pretty much hews to the usual range of romantic infatuation and disappointment, and at his best, as in this quietly affecting little song, he's quite good. The place names mentioned in the lyrics trace a stroll through the streets of Madrid, described in more detail (and with pictures and a map) on the Yellow Hope Project blog.

The two Yellow Hope Project CDs are available from CD Baby.

Update: Kim has now posted a video of the song.

Dear Mother (Primo Levi)

I haven't been able to determine whether "Cara Mamma," the Primo Levi story from which the following excerpts are taken, has been translated into English. In any case, I came across it in a French translation, on a website with a Japanese-English name, and it's written in the form of a letter home from an ancient Roman soldier stationed in Britain, so we're well into international waters here.

Dear Mother,

I beg your pardon if I haven't written you after receiving the letter that you sent me last March, and which arrived just as the spring was reaching its end. In this country, spring isn't like it is back home; here, the seasons have no frontiers, it rains winter and summer, and the sun, when it shows itself from behind the clouds, is as feeble in summer as it is in winter — but it rarely shows itself.

If I've been slow to respond, it's because the public scribe to whom I've addressed myself in the past has died. After so many years and so many letters that he wrote for me, we had become friends and I didn't have to explain to him each time who I was and who you were, to tell him where you live, where our village was and what it was like, and everything that one needs to know so that a letter could speak as a messenger might speak.

The public scribe who transcribes my words today arrived a little while ago. He's a wise and educated man, but he's not Latin, nor even a Briton, and he still doesn't know much about the way they live here, so it's I who am helping him more than he helps me. He's not Latin, as I said, he comes from the country of Kent, which is to say from the south, but he has always worked in public service, and he speaks and writes Latin better than I do, now that I'm beginning to forget it. He's also a good magician, who knows how to make it rain, although that's a task that I am equally able to perform, since it rains almost every day. [...]

Imagine that everything here is different from the way it is in Italy: the vegetation, the sheep, the sea, the houses, the clothing, the fish, the shoes; so much so that one is naturally drawn to call these things not by their Latin names but but the names they use here. Don't laugh if I talk of shoes; in a country of rain and mud, shoes are more important than bread, to the extent that here in Vindolanda one finds more tanners and cobblers than soldiers. For three quarters of the year we wear hobnail boots that weigh two pounds each — everyone, even women and children. [...]

Dear Mother, write me and tell me the news from home; the postal service is quite good, your letters reach me in less than sixty days, and even your package arrived in just over sixty days. Here, one is in wool country, but the wool here isn't as soft and proper as the kind you spin. I thank you with all my filial affection; every time I put on my shoes my thoughts will be of you.

The above translation, which is now two removes from what Levi wrote, is mine. The "original" text (with the same ellipses) can be found at A Nice Slice of Tororu Shiru, where it is accompanied by a brief note and bibliographic details.

Update (2015): An authorized translation of this story will presumably be included in the three-volume set of The Complete Works of Primo Levi to be published by Liveright later this year.

The Waking Hour

I had never heard of David Francey until a few weeks ago, but already I'm a fan.

I wake to the radio morning news
Just as the day is dawning
And I watch from the window while a passing cloud
Dulls the hopeful morning
And I wonder will the girl I love
Come back with the morning
But the omen crow at the waking hour
Has given me fair warning

And the heart that's breaking
Never makes a sound

Born in Scotland in 1954, Francey has lived in Canada since he was twelve. He worked in the construction business for years and didn't cut his first record until he was well into his forties (so score one for the old guys). Since then he has released a CD every year or two and has emerged as one of Canada's most respected songwriters. The Skating Rink is the one I'm currently listening to, but this title song from The Waking Hour (which is available in the US from from Red House Records) is hard to get away from too.

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.)

Borges and Xul Solar

Americas Society in Manhattan is currently hosting an exhibition devoted to the friendship between Jorge Luis Borges and his older compatriot, the painter, astrologer, and mystical philosopher Alejandro Xul Solar.

Like Borges, Xul Solar (born Oscar Agustín Alejandro Schulz Solari) spent much of the second decade of the 20th century in Europe absorbing the latest currents in avant-garde literature, painting, and philosophy. They didn't cross paths during those years but they did meet in the 1920s, when both were playing a role in the shaping of Argentine modernism. During the Perón era their friendship seems to have cooled somewhat (Borges was a firm anti-Peronist), but some mutual loyalty remained, and Borges often spoke warmly about Xul Solar after the latter's death in 1963.

They were somewhat of an odd couple, Borges philosophically inquisitive but ultimately skeptical, Xul Solar an avid devotee of everything from astrology and Tarot to the I Ching. When the occult metaphysical systems the painter encountered weren't outlandish enough, he simply elaborated new ones, just as he concocted new languages called "Neocriollo" and "Panlengua." He invented a kind of intricate modified chess game based on his mystical principles (the set is displayed in the exhibit), though he seems to have been the only one who understood how to play it.

Xul Solar is mentioned by name in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," where he may also have been the model for the figure of Herbert Ashe, who, like Xul Solar, dabbled in the possibilities of duodecimal number systems. Eccentric as the painter was, it seems fairly certain that several of Borges's best stories would not have been written without his influence.

Some of Xul Solar's paintings, at the weakest, can seem a bit crudely executed, but at their best (and he seems to have been quite prolific) they display a knack for working together disparate elements of color, form, and symbolism into a visually satisfying whole that nevertheless invites closer inspection.

In addition to Xul Solar's paintings (and a rather nice gouache and pencil map by Norah Borges, the writer's sister), the exhibition features rare issues of some of the seminal literary magazines of the era, including Martín Fierro, Azul, Proa, and Revista de América. Another highlight is the manuscript of Borges's famous story "La lotería en Babilonia" ("The Lottery in Babylon"). Written in a tiny but easily legible hand and placed next to the printed version, it lets one see how Borges tinkered with the final wording as he revised the text for publication.

If you visit, ask to purchase the nicely illustrated but reasonably priced hardcover catalog. (It seems difficult to locate online, but the ISBN is 1-879128-82-9 if you want to try.) The show will be moving on to the Phoenix Art Museum in September 2013.

Nocturne

From the shore all that can be seen in the darkness is the flicker of lanterns on the long, low boat. The river's waters are moon-warm, but things unseen move in the murk, rippling the surface and bumping against the ankles of waders. We retreat to the safety of land.

No one here knows how to swim. If a fisherman falls into the water away from the shore and can't be pulled out by his friends, he will drown. They fish anyway because it's far better to drown than it is to starve, but the river remains alien to them. They pole from bank to bank gingerly, afraid of disturbing what may lie in the depths, and will cut their nets loose, no matter how great the sacrifice, if they sense something weighing them down that they can't explain. In some years, after the floods have receded, carcasses are found in the low-lying fields, unrecognizable, neither man nor fish nor anything else that could be given a name. We leave the bodies to be picked by birds and steer our ploughs around the remains; small trees may rise over the bones but if so no one, not even children, will take advantage of the shade.

The boat pierces the water in silence. The boatman lifts his pole and the slender bow glides to rest on the sand.

H. N. Werkman

Alston W. Purvis's volume in Yale's Monographics series brought this interesting Dutch printmaker to my attention. Hendrik Werkman was born in Leens in the Netherlands in 1882 and lived most of his life in the city of Groningen. A professional printer, he apparently didn't have much of a head for business, but he did have a rich talent for design and typographical experimentation. Though he became associated with a Dutch art circle called De Ploeg (The Plough), he retained a prickly independence, and his work was not widely distributed or recognized during his lifetime. One of his best-known projects was a kind of chapbook periodical entitled The Next Call, much of which (there were nine installments, some printed on a single folded sheet) is reproduced in Purvis's book. He was particularly adept at using found materials and printing furniture as elements in his work; in the image immediatly below, for example, the black element was printed using the key plate from a door.

Prolific and resourceful even in the face of difficult circumstances, he created a series of some 600 monoprints that he called "druksels," a name derived from the Dutch drukken (to print), for calendars, bookplates, and other ephemera, and for a suite of prints illustrating stories from Martin Buber's Chassidische legenden (published as Tales of the Hasidim in English). Though Werkman was not Jewish, these last, published under German occupation in 1942, may have contributed to his arrest and execution in March 1945, just days before the Allied liberation of Grondingen. A substantial portion of his work, which had been seized by the Nazis at the time of his arrest, was destroyed during the fighting for the city. Fortunately, much of it remains.

Purvis's H. N. Werkman seems to be the best current source on the artist's life and work. There is a substantial online collection at the Groningen Museum and a nice selection at www.druksel.com.

The Child Ghosts of Prague

Above is one of a series of brief animated shorts entitled Legendy Staré Prahy. This one is called "O neviňátkách z židovského hřbitova"; I don't speak Czech, but the story can be identified with a miracle-working tale associated with the Judah Loew ben Bezalel, a renowned 16th-century rabbi whose name came to be linked, long after his death, with the legend of the Golem.

In the original tale, the Jewish population of Prague has been visited with a terrible plague, leading to the deaths of many of its children. Convinced that this affliction must be a divine punishment of some sort, Rabbi Loew dispatches a young pupil to the Jewish Cemetery to steal a shroud from one of the young ghosts who emerge at midnight to play among the headstones. When the ghost comes to the synagogue to retrieve the shroud, Rabbi Loew demands that the child first reveal what has brought God's wrath upon the community. The child identifies two adulterous couples whose sins have been concealed from view, and once they are confronted and punished the curse is broken. (The film version seems to single out one woman, but perhaps the narration makes this clearer.)

A version of the above legend can be found in The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia: A Historical Reader, edited by Wilma Iggers; a very similar one is included in V. V. Tomek's Jewish Stories of Prague. More shorts in the series can be found at the Legendy Staré Prahy website; there is also a companion English-language page with one of the shorts in translation.

Update: There is now an English-language version of the above video.

Thank a musician week

Update (2021): Many of the links below are now broken.

There's a lot of hand-wringing these days about how the old model of compensating musicians is breaking down under the pressure of file sharing, piracy, and 99-cent downloads, and about how nobody has figured out yet just what new model might arise to replace it. As interesting and important as all that is, it's worth remembering that there are plenty of talented working musicians out there right now trying to make a living, driving themselves from gig to gig and hoping that their next royalty check — assuming there still is one — will help cover their medical bills. If those of us who make up their audience — because we get some kind of joy or consolation or amusement out of what they do — want them to continue doing it, we're going to have to keep supporting them, and that means, one way or another, supporting them financially.

Fortunately, there's still a way of doing that that benefits everybody. You purchase a CD (or a download, if you're so inclined), maybe go to a gig if you have the opportunity, the artist gets some cash and a reason to keep going, and you get some music and the feeling of having done your part.

One thing the musicians in the list that follows have in common (other than demonstrating my shameless musical prejudices) is that most are now either producing and marketing their own music or recording for small boutique labels, which means that if you buy music direct from them there's a chance that a fair portion of your dollar might actually go into their pockets. And although I derive no financial benefit from promoting them, I can't say that I do so entirely for selfless reasons; I promote them because I enjoy what they do and want to make sure that they're able to keep on doing it.

— Mary Chapin Carpenter, Ashes and Roses, available from Bandgarden.
— Lowry Hamner, American Dreaming, available from CD Baby.

— Robyn Hitchcock, Spooked, available from Yep Roc Records.
— Andy Irvine, Abocurragh, available from the artist.

— Leo Johnson, It's About Time, available from CD Baby.
— Freedy Johnston, Rain on the City, available from the artist.

— Los Lobos, Tin Can Trust, available from the artists.
— Kelly Joe Phelps, Brother Sinner and the Whale, available from Black Hen Records.

— Amy Rigby & Wreckless Eric, A Working Museum, available from Amy Rigby.
— Zachary Richard, Le fou, available from the artist.

— Chris Smither, Hundred Dollar Valentine, available from the artist.
— Syd Straw, Pink Velour, available from CD Baby.

— Gillian Welch, The Harrow and the Harvest, available from Acony Records.
— Scott Wendholt, Beyond Thursday, available from Double Time Records.

Finally, here are two excellent music documentaries by independent filmmakers:

— Tom Weber, Troubadour Blues, available from Tom Weber.
— Fred Uhter, Wide Awake, available from New Filmmakers Online.

Views of Bohemia

These two postcards were mailed five years apart, the first to an address in Kutná Hora (or Kuttenberg) in Bohemia and the second from Kutná Hora to Cleveland, Ohio. Both recipients were named Čermák, and if the abbreviated first name on the first card is Antonín, as I suspect, then the two cards were either mailed to the same person or to two (probably related) people of the same name.

Čermák seems to be a fairly common family name, but during the period these cards were mailed a prominent violin maker named Josef Antonín Čermák was active in Kutná Hora, and the later card appears to be signed either Jusef or Josef. Coincidentally or not, one of the violin maker's students, Jan Baptista Vavra, was active in Smichov in Prague, which was where the first card was postmarked. The signature on the front of the card, however, is definitely not that of Vavra.

The printed message at the top of the first card reads Podrav ze Smíchova! -- "Greetings from Smichov!" It was issued by F. J. Jedlička, a well-known publisher of postcards in Prague. There's a somewhat uncanny quality about the left side of the image, which shows a couple walking together along a deserted street that hardly seems to belong with the view of the Vltava to the right. The view of Kutná Hora was published by one Josef Zajíc.

I can't read Czech and can't transcribe the handwriting on the later card, so for now that's about as much as I can say.

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.")

The platform

Three women in elaborate hats, two men in railway uniforms, a third man — and a very large dog. Real Photo postcard, location unidentified but evidently rural; printed on a variety of Azo photographic paper reportedly manufactured between 1904-1918. There's no inscription or address on the back.

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."

Sapporo to Boston

Dear Dr. Wight,

How have you been since I left M. G. H.? I have arrived at Yokohama at the beginning of last June and I am now with all my family having happy time. Since I returned to Japan, I have been so busy that I could not write you. I am always thinking of you and others in White 4 Lab. How pleasant my life in M. G. H. was! I am dreaming to come over there once again in future. I do hope you work hard and in future in best health. Please remember me to all members in White 4 Lab.

With all best wishes to you.
Your friend
Terry.

The sender, Dr. Teruyoshi Hashiba, was a fellow in the neurosurgery department at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1953-1954; from the stamps and partially legible postmark it appears that the postcard was probably mailed in 1954. The recipient may have been Dr. Anne Wight (later Anne Wight Phillips), said to be the first woman to perform surgery at Massachusetts General. Coincidentally, the head of the hospital's neurosurgical service at the time, a man who Dr. Hashiba must also have known, was named White (Dr. James C. White), but it seems unlikely that Dr. Hashiba, who demonstrates a meticulous if slightly unidiomatic command of English, would have confused the names. (The building that housed "White Lab 4" was probably the George R. White Memorial Building, completed in 1939 and named after yet another White, the onetime president of the Potter Drug and Chemical Corporation.)

After he returned to Japan, Dr. Hashiba authored a number of papers in the field of neurology. According to the Department of Neurosurgery at Sapporo Medical University he died on February 2, 1982. Dr. Anne Wight Phillips died in 2009.

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.

The exchange

This postcard of Stockholm was mailed from that city in 1903 by one Annie Sundberg and addressed to Mademoiselle Candelaria Benítez Inglott of Las Palmas in the Canary Islands. My first assumption, due in part to the vaguely Nordic sound of "Inglott," was that the two women (or more likely adolescents) were either cousins or schoolmates, though precisely how the Spanish-Swedish connection would have come about was a mystery. On further reflection and with a bit of research, however, it now seems likely that they had never met nor even corresponded before Annie sent this card.

The tip-off is the brief message on the front: "Acceptez-vous l'échange" — "Do you accept the exchange?" Knowing no Spanish, and suspecting that the recipient in her turn would know no Swedish, Annie Sundberg posed the question in French, the one language that two educated women at the beginning of the 20th century might have been expected to have in common. Note too, that in writing to a complete stranger she uses the formal "vous."

As to the nature of "l'échange," it almost certainly alludes to the early 20th-entury craze for sending and collecting postcards, the more exotic the better. How Annie Sundberg obtained Candelaria's name is unknown; it could have been through a mutual contact, but it's also possible that Candelaria had advertised publicly for correspondents, a practice which was not uncommon.

Thus far I haven't been able to identify Candelaria Benítez Inglott, but she was almost certainly at least a distant relation of the same prominent Canary Islands family that produced Wenceslao Benítez Inglott (1879-1955), a scientist and admiral in the Spanish navy; Miguel Benítez Inglott (1890-1965), a lawyer, composer, and friend of Federico García Lorca; and Luis Benítez Inglott (1895-1966), a poet, journalist, and translator of Shakespeare. The far-flung Inglott line, which appears to be ultimately of English origin but was long established in Malta, probably came to the Canaries as part of a significant wave of Maltese immigration during the latter half of the eighteenth century.



The word written in on the top of the reverse appears to be "trycksak": printed matter. The street address in Las Palmas, which Annie Sundberg may not have had correctly, may be "López Botas, 9"; if so, that address is now a nursing home run by the Hermanos de la Cruz Blanca.

Recent photographs of the Strömgatan show an almost unchanged view, except for the addition of another bridge.

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.