Parting Valentine Thought

I like Lady M[ary] Cooke extreamly. You will be supriz'd at this Sentiment when she is the present Envy of her Sex, in the possession of Youth, Health, Wealth, Wit, Beauty and Liberty. All these seeming Advantages will prove snares to her. She appears to me walking blindfold upon Stilts, amidst precipices. She is at a dangerous time of Life, when the passions are in full vigour, and we are apt to flatter our selves the understanding arriv'd at Maturity. People are never so near playing the Food as when they think themselves wise. They lay aside that distrust which is the surest Guard against Indiscretion and venture on many steps they would have tremble'd at, at fiveteen, and like children are never so much expos'd to falling as when they first leave of leading-strings. I think nothing but a miracle o r the support of a Guardian Angel can protect her.

That's lady Mary Wortley Montagu, writing to her daughter and confidante, Lady Bute on 16 March 1752; Mary Coke was a cousin of Lord Bute, reprinted in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Selected Letters 399-400 (1997). Balzac says somewhere (can't put my finger on it) that no woman learns the truth until she is 35, becuause who would want to tell the truth to her before? Mozart (more precisely, Lorenzo da Ponte) reflects the sentiment here, and here:

Afterthought: Hey, I was there! I was on TDY in New York that fall; Mrs, B came to visit and we indulged ourselves with grand circle seats for Cosi at the Met. The rendering of "Soave sia il vento," is a moment I will never forget. Her's a Youtube link.

So That's Our Problem

We're not poor enough:

[T]his poor young man experienced that desperate poverty which is a kind of melting-pot whence great talents emerge pure and incorruptible, just as diamonds can be subjected to any kind of shock without breaking. In the violence of their unleashed passions, they acquire the most unshakeable honesty, and by dint of the constant labour with which they have contained their balked appetites, they becomde used to the struggles which arre the lot of genius. ... He wore his poverty with that gaiety which is perhaps one of the greatest elements of courage, and like all those who have nothing, he contracted few debs. Sober as a camel, brisk as a stag, he was unwavering both in his principles and in his behaviour.

--Honoré de Balzac, "The Athiest's Mass," in
Selected Short Stories 217-234, 221 (Sylvia Raphael trans., Penguin Books 1977)

"He" is Dr. Horace Bianchon, first encountered by most readers of Balzac as one of the residents of (as B says) "a miserable boarding-housse in the Latin Quarter, known by the name of La Maison Vaquer"--i.e., center-stage for what is perhaps Balzac's best-known novel, Le Père Goriot.

Learning the New Ways

Il Teatro Buce last night featured a showing of The Duchess of Langeais, a sort of a French Mawsterpiece Theatre costume drama drawn from a Balzac novella. It was okay, a bit slow, not nearly as bad as the Observer reviewer thought, nor as good as the New York Times'.

But we're Balzac fans and we decided it might be fun to read the story aloud in the original. A quick check of Palookaville's excellent second-hand bookshop turned up no copies, but then it occurred to us--online?

Sure enough. A momentary search turns up more than one version, including this Adobe file in which you can adjust the type size. So it looks like a Mr. and Mrs. Buce Readaloud first: a book to be read from a computer screen (yes, I know I could print it out, but why bother?). So it's in the queue. Behind some other stuff, but we'll keep you posted.

Hopkirk and Balzac and Unremembered Memory

History, said Marx, lies like a nightmare on the backs of the living. “Another Munich…” “Another Viet Nam…” “Another 9/11…” It’s remarkable how much our politics is shaped or determined or distorted by our fears of disappointments of what went before. Stuff I’ve been reading lately offers a couple of remarkable instances of how much this true not only of things that we remember, but of things we don’t even know we remember.

One: here’s Peter Hopkirk, bard of the century (plus) long conflict between Russia and Britain over Central Asia and ultimately, over India itself. Hopkirk’s half dozen or so books are a marvelous catalog of thrust and counterthrust of (the title of his magnum opus) the “Great Game.” I happened to be reading Hopkirk’s In Search of Kim (1996)—in which Hopkirk seeks the truth behind Kipling’s novel— at just about the same time that I was reading Legacy of Ashes (2007), Tim Weiner’s new history of the CIA. After a while I got a curious kind of doppelganger: I told myself we have seen all this before—the tricks and counter-tricks, the plotting and the paranoia: so much of what the Americans and the Russians did for 50 years after World War II served to mirror what the British and the Russians had done for the 100 years before. Certainly Hopkirk felt he understood the moral:

…I am forced to share Kipling’s view of Russian duplicity and everything that has happened since—during both world wars, between the wars, and throughout the long years of the Cold War—has simply enforced this view. (`40)

So Hopkirk in 1996: I wonder what he would think of Putin’s Russia today.

And two: Balzac in The Wrong Side of Paris (Jordan Stump trans. 2003). I won’t labor out the whole plot; I want to focus on the point where old Bernard tells Godefroid how he dreams of getting good medical treatment for his daughter:

Five days ago, Monsieur, the neighborhood doctor…told me that he was not up to the challenge of curing an illness that takes on a new form every two weeks. Neuroses are the despair of medicine, he told me, for their roots lie in the system that cannot be explored. He told me of a certain Jewish doctor, widely considered a charlatan, it seems; but he observed that the man is a foreigner, a Polish refugee, and that he has earned the bitter jealousy of his fellows through his patients’ extraordinary recoveries, which have caused a great stir… (134)

No points at all for the reader who mutters “Sigmund Freud,” and marvels that Balzac is writing in the 1840s (and about the 1830s), so a generation before the eminent Viennese was even born. The doctor—his name is “Halperson” –clearly fascinates Balzac; he comes to dominate the latter portion of the novel. He’s a species of wandering Jew: a person of great insight and great evil: wise, compassionate, insightful, grasping and vainglorious—in short, the bearer of almost every stereotype that non-Jewish Europeans in the 19^th Century visited upon Jews (not incidentally, Balzac makes a dreadful hash of Jews Polish politics, but leave that for another day).

I don’t for a moment begin to suggest that Balzac “had it right” about Halperson, any more than Hopkirk necessarily “had it right” about the Russians—Balzac, at least, is far too confused and self-contradictory to be said to be “right” in measurable sense at all. I would say that reading either Balzac or Hopkirk is a bracing reminder of just how deep and durable and persistent our cultural equipment can be.

Balzac Brings Himself Full Circle

God bless the brave or persistent soul who persuaded Modern Library to republish Balzac’s Wrong Side of Paris in a splendid new translation by Jordan Stump (2003). Brave, because it is almost impossible to imagine what sort of audience the publisher foresaw. Not many people read Balzac at all any more (not even in France, they say). And if you do care about Balzac, this would be about the least promising item with which to start. But if you have read some Balzac—three-four-five of that dozen-odd titles kept in print at Penguin, perhaps, or the few other scattered remnants from other houses--then Wrong Side can serve as an almost perfect pendant, completing, as it were, the monde de Balzac as completely and convincingly as anything you could imagine.

This may sound like a perverse kind of a pitch, because in some ways, Wrong Side is absolutely representative Balzac. It’s got a young man at sea in the great city; it’s got an old man obsessed with his daughter; it’s got a scheming landlady; it’s got crimes and betrayals, and long, loving detailed descriptions of person and place (and he wrote it to pay his bills, which is as typical as you can get). And wait, folks, there’s more, all within 208 pages.

Yet in another way, this is the least typical Balzac you are likely to read. We think of Balzac as the poet of the city, the passionate bard of Paris under Louis-Philippe. This is the Balzac of his most familiar work: of Cousine Bette, Le Père Goriot, La Rabouilleuse>, Illusions Perdues.

In one face, Balzac surely was a city man, as much as Dickens or Dostoevsky or James Joyce or Robert Musil. But it’s easy to forget that he was in the city but not of the city—that at the end of the day, he was a high-church royalist whose fascination was always animated by a kind of revulsion at what he saw. Indeed we forget that his first successful book—the first he counted as part of his Comedie Humaine—is Les Chouans, a story of a reactionary military revolt in the countryside against the revolution.

Wrong Side—it says here it was the last work he completed—give him a chance to bring the wheel full circle, or better, to set things right. This time we are remain in Paris, and in the narrative (near) present. But this time, we have the services of the church, to provide order, to set a standard for decency, and to put things right.

Balzac wrote and published Wrong Side in two parts, and it reads like two loosely-jointed stories. The first is a kind of manifesto—the “last lecture” of an old man (he was not yet 50, but he was working himself to death). It’s hard to imagine anyone reading it today without irony—yet clearly Balzac was not ironic: he meant every word.

The second part shifts gears somewhat. In the context of his previous manifesto, Balzac here lets loose a plot so full of melodrama that it makes the plots of his contemporary Donizetti look like stark realism. Readerly irony helps again, although it is so fast-paced and full of invention, you find yourself sucked along in spite of yourself.

But the end, you reflect on the whole novel not just as itself, but as a coda, or criticism or commentary on everything that went before. This is why I did it. This is what it was all about. Now you understand.

Understand: you may or may not “understand” Balzac’s world, so diverse and inconsistent, but you probably do understand Balzac a little better, and every part of his world is richer as a result.

Afterthought: There is a fine, warm-hearted, appreciative introduction by Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker that may help to reassure you that you are not wasting your time. Also a crisp introductory note from the translator, who has turned out as convincing a Balzac translation as any I know.