Verlaine, "Après trois ans"

A work ("Three years gone") by this French poet.  You can read the original here.

I pushed the narrow, wobbling door, 
And strolled within a budding grove,   
As morning light so softly strove,      
Wet sequins on each petal's shore.   

No thing had changed: the rattan chairs,      
The humble pipe of maddened vine, 
The purling spout, its silver spine, 
The aspen old as dullest cares. 

Still roses throb like wildest hearts,  
Still lilies preen to walk the wind,       
Still friends of mine these sweeping larks;

I found above the Veleda,       
Thin plaster flaked at avenue's end, 
Amidst faint scents of reseda.  

Comment on paie ses dettes quand on a du génie

A brief essay ("How to pay your debts when you're a genius") by this French man of letters on another French man of letters.  You can read the original here.

The following story was told to me with the request that I never repeat it; and for that reason I wish to tell absolutely everyone.

He was sad judging by his knitted brows, his large mouth less distended and lippy than normal; his manner of speaking was punctuated by brusque pauses as he paced the double passage of the Opera; he was sad.   

He it was indeed, the greatest business and literary mind of the nineteenth century; he, the poetic intellect lined in figures like the office of a treasurer; he, the man of mythological bankruptcies, and phantasmagoric and hyperbolic enterprises whose light he always forgot to turn on; the greatest pursuer of dreams endlessly in search of the absolute; he, the most curious, the most comical, the most interesting and the most vain character in The Human Comedy; he, that eccentric as unbearable in life as he was delicious on paper, that fat child and bloated genius so brimming with qualities that he hesitated to subtract some for fear of losing others, and to spoil that incorrigible and fatal monstrosity.

What could make such a great man fall into such a black mood and walk as he was walking, his chin on his paunch?  What could make him scrunch his forehead into The Skin of Chagrin?

Did he of dream of four-cent pineapples, a suspended bridge made from creepers, a stairless villa with boudoirs set in chiffon?  What princess approaching forty would have glanced at him with one of those deep looks which beauty owes to genius?  Or his brain, as heavy as an industrial machine, is it racked by all the Sufferings of an Inventor?

No, alas, no!  The sadness of a great man is a very commonplace form of sadness, earthly, ignoble, shameful and ridiculous.  He was in that mortifying situation we all know in which every passing minute carries on its wings the chance of salvation; in which, his eye pinned to the clock, the genius of invention senses the need to double, triple, decuple its forces in proportion to the time that remains and the approaching speed of that fatal hour.  The illustrious author of the theory of the bill of exchange had a bill of twelve hundred francs to pay by the next day and the evening was already getting on.

In these sorts of cases it sometimes happens that the mind – hurried, devastated, kneaded, and crushed by the cogs of necessity – suddenly hurls itself, by an unexpected and victorious burst, outside that very prison.

This is what probably happened to the great novelist, for a smile appeared on his lips at the contraction that inflicted upon him lines of pride;  his eyes gained their composure, and our man, calm and reseated, made his way towards Rue Richelieu with a sublime and cadenced step.

He entered the house where a rich and prosperous businessman had already abandoned the work of the day to tea and a fireside corner.  He was received with all the honors his name deserved, and after a few minutes expounded the purpose of his visit in these words:   

"Would you like to have, on the day after tomorrow, in Le Siècle and Les Débats, two fabulous articles along the lines of, 'Varieties of the French in their own words,' two fabulous articles written and signed by me?  My fee is fifteen hundred francs.  So for you this is a gold mine."  

It turned out that the publisher, in contrast to his counterparts in the industry, found such an argument quite reasonable because a deal was immediately struck.  Changing his mind, our man insisted that the fifteen hundred francs be delivered upon the appearance of the first article; then he returned peacefully towards the passage of the Opera.
   
A few minutes later he notified a small young man with an aggressive and spiritual physiognomy who had recently served as a breathtaking preface for the Rise and Fall of César Birotteau, and who was already known in journalistic circles for his clownish, almost impish verve; piety had yet to trim his talons, and to him the religious tabloids happily opened their candle snuffers:

"Edward, would you like to have one hundred fifty francs tomorrow?"  "Gee whiz!"  "Alright then, come have a coffee."  

The young man drank a cup of coffee which initially brought his little southern constitution to a fever.

"Edward, tomorrow I must have three large columns on 'The Varieties of the French in their own words'; by morning, mind you, and early at that.   The whole article has to be recopied and signed in my own hand; this point is paramount."

The great man said these words with such admirable accentuation and that arrogant tone which he sometimes offers to a friend he cannot welcome into his home: "A thousand pardons, dear friend, to leave you at the door; I have a private audience with a princess whose honor is at my disposal.  You surely understand ..."

Edward shook his hand as if he were his benefactor and ran off to the task.
   
The great novelist ordered his second article on Rue de Navarin.

The first article appeared two days later in Le Siècle.  Strangely, it was signed neither by the small young man nor by the great author, but by a third name quite well known at that time in Bohemia for his tomcat romances and Comic Opera.

His second friend was and still is fat, lazy and lethargic; moreover, he has no ideas whatsoever and can only string words together in the fashion of Osage necklaces.  And because it takes much longer to cram three long columns of words than to create a whole book of ideas, his article came out only a few days later.  It was included not in Les Débats, but in La Presse.

The bill of twelve hundred francs was paid; everyone was perfectly satisfied except the publisher, who was almost so.  And this is how to pay your debts ... when you're a genius.

If some smart Aleck took all this for a back-page joke, an assault on the glory of the greatest man of our century, he would be shamefully wrong.  I only sought to show that the great poet knew how to settle a bill of exchange as easily as he could write the most mysterious and intriguing of novels.

A Very Long Engagement

It is rare for me to praise a work of art whose plot convention is the raw futility of organized violence, that old pastime of the bully-boy and his mindless minions.  Nothing good ever comes from the promotion of strife, from bludgeoning other humans to get one’s point across or simply to protect one’s own interests, and, as the song goes, nothing ever could.  Yet for those who lived through the two global wars of the twentieth century this is the only event that has ever taken place, and one that keeps repeating like the death of Emanuel Zunz.  Schoolteachers were very adamant about making us read a litany of allegedly brilliant novels that dwelt in the dark and loathsome realms of these catastrophes, where morality was suspended because it was not practical and because – and here we shudder – the enemy was utterly and irrevocably immoral.  Readers of these pages know what I tend to think of such rot.  It is certainly more tragic for someone to die for nothing in combat than to die at peace and rest in the comfort of one’s own home, at a jolly old age, and surrounded by one’s loved ones.  But such tragedy does not make art; it does not make anything at all except death, the opposite of everything we want and cherish.  It strips us of this life, whatever you may think this life might be worth, and pushes us into a chasm with the rest of humanity, a strange hold in an infinite ship on course through some nebulous field.  Perhaps the best tonic to these horrors is a tale of love set against a motley assortment of effects that do not seem real because had we experienced their proximity ourselves, we would not be here to recount them.  And in this regard, we have a strangely modern film. 

It may or may not be symbolic that our heroine Mathilde (Audrey Tautou) is herself a cripple.  She was born with the century, on January 1, 1900, and has become engaged to her beloved Manech (Gaspard Ulliel); but he is young and French, and the year is 1917, so the prospects of future bliss are hardly dazzling.  Still, Mathilde persists in her faith that Manech, whom she truly adores in a way that we all hope to be adored at some point in our lives, will return, safe and sound, or at least healthier than she is.  Her shin splints allow her to limp about awkwardly and distract us from her angelic countenance enough for her to play her part (for all the vapid or cutesy roles that made her famous, Tautou does this simple bit remarkably well).  She waits for a sign of life at a small house in Brittany with her aunt, who makes her struggle with polio a tad easier.  When news comes at last, after the war itself is concluded, it is not what she expects: Manech and four other members of his battalion were convicted of voluntary self-mutilation and tried at a military tribunal as deserters.  Hardly renowned for their mercy, military tribunals often tend to look at deserters with as much disdain as they regard turncoats, which explains the horrific sentence of no man’s land.  Here they are sure to die, which Manech surely did, killed as he must have been by a German bomb at some point during his miserable incursion to the lowest ring of hell.  No cadaver, but no one survives no man’s land.  A preponderance of evidence that does little to convince Mathilde.

She departs to Paris and begins her investigation.  She hires a detective, asks all the persons who might be involved or might have heard of survivors all the questions movie heroines are supposed to ask, and gets some answers.  Most of these answers are confirmations of the impossibility of her quest.  A series of unfortunate events befalls many of these witnesses, whom guileless Mathilde could not have dreamed of harming.  We are then presented with her foil, another widow (Marion Cotillard), who has less patience for the squeaky crane that is the French bureaucracy and no sympathy for the officials who casually wave off names of dead young men as if they were cigarette ash.  In a way, both approaches – the waywardly optimistic and the vigilante – make perfect sense, although our instincts tell us the film will end with one path being the true path and the other simply mocking its audacity.  And nothing is more audacious than the cinematography, which should have won every award it could possibly have accrued.  You may have heard of Mathilde and Manech's story before, but you have never seen it in such uncompromising vividness, untenable in the bestselling novel which generated the script.  Some things, some wild, unorthodox, woeful things, are best left for the screen.

White

Until a recent reviewing of this film, the middle part of a legendary Polish–French trilogy, I had an odd conception of what actually took place.  Both the beginning and the end were, I discovered, perfectly etched in my memory.  But of the middle part, when our down-and-out protagonist Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski) escapes back to his native Poland and his fortune takes a sharp turn, I had but scraps.  I would like to think that this is owing to my internal ethical mechanism that purges me of the most superficial and materialist information to which I am exposed, leaving only the sweet and bittersweet traces of love, warmth, art, curiosity and nostalgia.  However much I wish to delude myself, my own disposition may indeed have had something to do with it.  But the main reason is because the film is really nothing at all without its climax, so perfectly woven and yet so cruel, and the whole tale resonates, stinks, and flashes with the slow destructiveness of revenge.

White is not about love, despite the fervid claims of Karol, who is impotent and married to the lovely Dominique (a nymphet-like Julie Delpy).  The film begins in front of a courthouse and ends with a strange exchange outside a prison, and both main characters have something to hide from their partner.  Karol is a hairdresser who has come to France to make his mark, leaving behind a rather popular practice outside of Warsaw.  We understand the changes that were occurring in Central Europe at the time (early 1990s), and sympathize with those who believed that the formerly socialist states might not survive the overhaul.  Karol, one of these sceptics, finds a way to Paris and then finds a French wife in Dominique.  One wonders what exactly Dominique might want with this small and scruffy Pole.  Looks notwithstanding, his French is limited to two- or three-word phrases that inevitably spurt out of his mouth once the other person has resumed talking, and we can suppose that advanced Polish was not an elective in her Paris lycée.  He is neither rich nor, as we are painfully informed, gifted in pleasuring his partners.  Love is blind, true enough.  But dumb, patient, and sexless?  The match is more than unlikely, it is nonsensical. 

You may retort that we are watching a fairy tale, and I concur.  Yet the result, while appropriate and correct, has little of the magical justice that a fairy tale espouses.  It then behooves us to determine why on earth this couple ever became a couple.  Dominique obviously has no interest in children, nor in learning Polish, but she does like both money and sex.  Karol was an award–winning hairdresser in the old country, and it is no stretch of our little grey cells to imagine that he could have saved up “quite a nest egg” (a line used in the film in a later context) in order to travel to France and set up shop under the Paris sky.  Just as easily, he could have made Dominique – who shows no signs of employment – a very generous offer in return for French citizenship.  This premise explains not only Dominique’s interest, but also why the dream wedding sequence that pervades Karol’s consciousness is just that, a dream.  They never had a white wedding, or anything more than a perfunctory mishmash of vows before a justice of the peace.  Once Dominique has Karol’s money, there is nothing left to do except throw him to the dogs.

Amidst these street urchins, Karol is found by Mikolaj (Janusz Gajos), who suggests that he return to Poland and work for him there.  Well, that’s not quite how the matter is phrased.  They take a walk by Dominique’s apartment, and he catches sight of his wife in the window with, Mikolaj informs him, no real intention of going to sleep.  A phone call confirms Mikolaj’s supposition, and Karol’s trust is won.  Then Mikolaj asks Karol for a favor in repayment, a favor so painfully clear to the viewer that we understand the significance of white’s symbolism.  Now, color coordination with symbolic meaning is a lowly pursuit best reserved for interior decorators with no imagination.  Yet the white in this sequence harks back to the whiteness of the wedding that never took place, the naïveté and innocence that Dominique is supposed to embody, but which more accurately characterize her husband.  White then becomes the symbol of purity in post-Communist Poland, of the ubiquitous snowfall that makes everything shine and glisten as if there were nothing filthy or reprehensible underneath.  Karol does proceed, in rather spectacular fashion, back home and begins to take advantage of the new economic freedoms granted to him and his countrymen.  Soon the old Karol, the stuttering doormat and cuckold, is replaced by an oily tycoon with infrastructure and influence.  The transformation is as preposterous as Karol and Dominique’s marriage, so we should not be surprised at the end when both absurdities merge into a coherent allegory.  And Karol’s sentimentality in the final scene, at once utterly sincere and utterly fraudulent, is not to be missed.    

Blame it on Fidel

I think that Communists are those who do not fear the Lord and move houses all the time.

One of the great platitudes of modern discourse is that we have a lot to learn from children.  Children, we are told, can distinguish good from bad so easily that they will be able to sense when something or someone is secretly evil; children also allegedly possess an innate ability to perceive the truth amidst the ruins of lies and deceit.  Whatever you may think of our younger generations, they certainly do not distinguish good and evil unless they have experienced both to a sufficient extent – usually, one hopes, the mark of adulthood.  For them what is good is what keeps their life running in their favor, which invariably entails a happy family, a certain amount of fun, and a small assortment of odds and ends that do not appeal to adults but perhaps once did.  Evil, in their view, may be loosely construed as whatever prevents them from achieving these goals.  So when a bully mocks a coeval, he probably does not know that what he is doing is morally despicable because he needs to put someone down to make himself feel better (alas, such weaknesses often extend well past our school days).  Yet small children can only do so much harm.  It is from the cruel and conniving teenager, often quite aware of what he should and shouldn't do, that we often avert our eyes in discomfort because his schemes could already be so diabolical as to impress the most ruthless of despots.  So perhaps we should forget the idea of children's moral barometers and address a much more valid point, that of truth and lies – which brings us to this film.

The plot is shoddy for one very good reason: our protagonist is a child and children care little for plots.  That child is Anna De la Mesa (Nina Kervel-Bey), a precocious little busybody who is nine as the film begins in the fall of 1970.  Anna loves her Catholic girls' school and daily routine, and is in general quite pleased with the bourgeois existence provided by her French mother Marie (Julie Depardieu) and Spanish father Fernando (Stefano Accorsi).  Yet on the periphery of this blissful realm lurk a few characters whose motives she cannot quite fathom.  These would include the family's acerbic Cuban housekeeper, who keeps blaming every global malfeasance on her country's dictator, and Marga and Pilar, her father's sister and niece.  Marga and Pilar are refugees from Franco's Spain where Marga's never-seen husband Quino, a militant communist, is murdered as an enemy of the state, forcing Fernando to bring them to France.  That same autumn two political occurrences overshadow the De la Mesas' personal life: the death of this local leader and the rise of a much more distant one.

While De Gaulle's death ushered in the possibility of a more socially liberal France (the war-weary discontent of the 1970s did the rest), Frei's deposition by Allende seven thousand miles away from Paris resonates more strongly in Anna's household.  Allende, you see, is the first democratically elected Marxist president in the Western hemisphere, and although the atrocities of the Soviet bloc were known at this time through the diaspora and defection of many famous figures, there persisted the stubborn and half-blind hope that socialism could triumph.  Not the fantastic social democracy that pervaded Northern Europe and made it the model of political and social development for the world, but a throwback Das Kapital sham of superefficient factories, genteel laborers, and uprisings that had already been proven to be an opium pipe dream.  Marie and Fernando (suddenly sporting a Fidelian beard) radicalize themselves by trading their lovely home for a more proletarian apartment, reducing their diet to simpler and coarser meals, and fighting for women's right to choose and Allende's dusty agenda.  We can wax sentimental about Allende in light of the brutality of his successor, but at the time he was not expected to do quite as much as the film suggests.  Still, a watershed had been attained, and once the De la Mesas turn towards a life of greater freedom from old and tired authorities, there is hardly any way back.

Anna, of course, finds all this either appalling or just plain stupid.  She waits in the car with her younger brother as Fernando visits the Chilean embassy and, appropriately enough, accrues a parking violation; she stares at the hairy monsters, apparently all Chilean dissidents, who smoke, drink, and conspire in her apartment; and, most importantly, she watches her parents scream and rant as if they themselves were an insidious cabal and not a pair of squabbling fools.  The silly political debates are stymied by the director's felicitous decision rarely to elevate the camera.  Most of the world is seen at Anna's level, and for that reason appears big, cumbersome, and goofy – which slowly starts to look less and less coincidental.  Critics most frequently mention Fernando's imbecilic decision to bring his daughter to a rally that will conceivably be dispersed by tear gas, but there are many other instances of a child discerning the uselessness of sudden communal radicalization.  The irony feeds off the incessant bickering, Marie's odd and very public lie, and the origin of Fernando's surname, all of which completely escapes little Anna.  What does Anna understand about communism apart from the quote that begins this review?  That communists like facial hair, eschew hygiene whenever possible, are obsessed with red (perhaps explaining Anna's aversion to a series of red foods dumped on her plate), and are amazingly frugal.  To that last end Anna assumes responsibility for pathologically cutting heat and electricity, even in coldest winter and regardless of whether anyone is still using the utilities.  But the perfect political metaphor comes when Anna, her brother, and Pilar all play tag around a group of cocktailing adults.  The adult world is tall, old, stodgy, faceless, and distant and at the same time clumsy and overbearing, as well as a bit mysterious.  Mysterious, mind you, in the same way that a foreign ritual or game is mysterious, because once you know the rules it doesn't look nearly as profound or intriguing as it did initially.  Perhaps the real secret is that once you get to adulthood, the rules seem just as arbitrary.