Saturday

This weekend, I shall try to do a better job of jotting down the odd note. So much happened last week (even if very little of it merits writing about) that I don’t have a sense of the beginning of endings of things; impressions swirl through my mind like the salmon in Lasse Hallström’s new movie. (I keep hearing Ewan McGregor say to Tom Mison, “No, I love her.”)

Last night, at Herbie Hancock’s Rose Theatre concert, I let my mind drift a bit every now and then, and here is one of the things that it bumped into, a formulation that I believe is rather neat while at the same time fearing that it may be trite. It is a general Rule for the Literate. Speak as carefully as you write, and write as naturally as you speak. Have I poached this, or did I think it up myself? It has an odd vibe when I mull it over, as though it were something that I used to say all the time.

As long as we’re on the subject of aphorisms, here’s something that occurred to me a few weeks ago; I jotted it down but did not mention whatever it was that gave rise to the idea, which must have been to obvious to mention at the time. I was thinking through the relationship between the Enlightenment and Modernism, and it occurred to me that Modernism is a late flare of the Enlightenment that sought not enlightenment but transfiguration. It occurs to me now that the much same can be said of Romanticism. The Modernists, however, were determined to avoid Romanticism’s solipsism and general lack of rigor. What we learned from the consequences of their experiment was the horror of rigorously suppressing individual distinctions.

Chou En-Lai is still right: it’s too soon to talk about the consequences of the French Revolution as if we knew what they were.

***

At the end of the afternoon, I had to sit down, and I happened to sit down next to two piles of old photographs that had turned up in the course of a long chain of minuscule reorganizations; it would be better to say that the photographs had been turned out. Their hidey-hole was no more. It was time to cull.

I went through about half of the prints, of which there were about a hundred, perhaps more. Perhaps two hundred. Almost all of them were taken around 9/11. The clearest indicator was the series of shots that Kathleen took from her last office, when she was working at 2 Wall Street. The remains of the South Tower had not been cleared away, and a corner joint of two façades rose up to a point about ten stories tall. Other photographs in the pile showed Singapore and Amsterdam, which Kathleen traveled to about a month later. There are photographs of Chicago and London, and of a trip that Kathleen made with an old friend to Eton and Oxford — I think. Horseshoe Beach in Bermuda is represented, along with the lantern of Bermuda Cathedral. There are quite a few pictures of the kitchen, taken during a re-painting; I can’t think why anyone would want to look at those. I can’t think, once I start thinking, why anyone would want to see any of these photographs, aside from the 9/11 ones. That’s why I didn’t put them in a box and shove them back into a closet.

We grow up looking at pictures everywhere, and the ones that we take ourselves are just extra pictures, more of the same, if maybe not so competent as the ones that we see in magazines and on billboards. But that impression is shared by no one else. To everyone else, our photographs are ours, meaning, not theirs. We know the stories behind our own photographs, but nobody else does. Even if we tell them. If the image does not stand out as a photograph, it’s dead to everyone but ourselves. That’s the way it is, and it’s not easy to accept.

I called them “old photographs,” but in fact the prints that I went through this afternoon are just about the last ones that we had made. (I culled a grand total of about fifteen; but then I was only pulling out the really bad ones.) I am not going to open a box and find two hundred pictures from 2005. The 2005 pictures are stored on a NAS backup drive, as well as on several computers. Culling them will be another sort of project altogether. It won’t be motivated by a lack of house room.

Sunday

Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel — would I have liked it when I was younger? I don’t think so. What begins as a drily funny story about a dreadful girl, peppered with notes of the burlesque — such as the impudently sudden moment in which the Oxford University Press, no less, is revealed as the schoolgirl author’s publisher of choice, faute de mieux; you laugh, but first, you gasp — gradually becomes the sympathetic portrait of an unusual woman whose pride prevents her from accepting sympathy — something of a puzzle, in short. It is managed by degrees, this shift in coloration. There are many books that begin with gales of satiric giggling or outright laughter, only to settle down sadly into disagreeable consequences, but Angel is not one of them, even if the comic shrieks abate. At the end of the book, Taylor gives us two views of Angel Deverell that strike the same strange note.

Perhaps she saw nothing as it was, everything as it should be, though doubtless never had been; thought she retained whatever her hands had once touched: fame, love, money. Like a fortune-teller in reverse, he knew what she had been, and could tell what she had had by her assumption that it was all there still. (NYRB, 211)

To Lady Baines it seemed that Angel was deteriorating along with her dwindling fortune, but it was a decline of which Angel herself was quite oblivious. She was not so much living in the past as investing the present with what the past had had. To herself, she was still the greatest novelist of her day, and not the first in hisory to receive less homage than was her due. (233)

The note is that, without going to the trouble of shooting anyone, Angel is as mad as Norma Desmond, and as serenely triumphant. By any objective measure, the great good fortune that Angel experiences at the beginning of her career has almost completely dissipated by the time of her final scene, but Taylor has not written an object lesson. We’re not meant to learn from Angel’s mistakes; we’re meant to marvel at her ability to overlook the possibility that she has made any, and to learn something about humanity from the wonder.  

It did occur to me that Taylor’s book suggests that it there is nothing to stop popular artists from falling into hopeless delusion. When sales are brisk but the critics hate you, you’ve no good reason to listen to anyone but yourself. But, even before her success, Angel lives in a closed loop of enchanted imagination. Like an evangelist, she has but to write down the things that appear to her mind. She is both ignorant and incurious, but these characteristics, which would be liabilities to any normal author, free Angel not only to indulge but to capture the wishful thinking that her legions of readers crave. Indeed, it is only when Angel tries — when she rides her hobbyhorses of pacifism and vegetarianism — that her public grows impatient and deserts her. (And, beyond that, of course, every generation has its own brand of wishful thinking, with its own onrushing expiry date.) Angel has no way of understanding her own genius.

Not that it matters; Angel does, as she somewhat smugly reminds herself from time to time (or perhaps all the time), achieve everything that she sets out to achieve — fame and money for certain. It never occurred to her that she would have to hold onto them, so her failure to do so is somewhat beside the point. She breathes her last in the pile of a house that she dreamed of as a girl — you’ve got to hand her that.

I was surprised to learn that François Ozon has made a film of Angel, with a pretty heavy-duty cast (Romola Garai, Michael Fassbender, Sam Neill and Charlotte Rampling). I gather that the movie is a disaster, however — that Ozon completely fails to capture the irony of Taylor’s novel. Tant mieux, say I. I await the arrival of the DVD with exquisite anticipation. 

***

Speaking of movies, we need one about Charles De Gaulle. We need a movie that culminates with what’s called the Appel du 18 juin 1940, a BBC broadcast in which De Gaulle launched himself not only as the head of the Liberation forces that would drive the Nazis out of France (with a lot of help from the Brits and the Yanks — and also the Russkis) but as the conscience, and therefore ruler, of France itself. In my opinion, the only individual who achieved anywhere near as much for French self-esteem (amour propre) was Louis XIV, who made a hash of just about everything, when you get down to it. De Gaulle made a few hashes himself, but without his beaconic rectitude, it would have taken the French a lot longer to pull themselves out of the disgrace of Vichy. From the very beginning, De Gaulle announced that Vichy hadn’t really happened; it wasn’t over until it was over, and it couldn’t be over as long as he was standing up on two legs.

I thought these moving thoughts this evening while Kathleen took a nap before dinner. I had brought dinner prep to a point from which it would take no more than ten minutes to put spaghetti and meatballs, salad, and garlic toast on the table. I sat down with Lisa Hilton’s The Horror of Love, which I mentioned the other day. I want to say now that Hilton is a gifted writer; not only is her prose agreeable but her arguments are intelligent. More on that some other time. Right now, I simply want to praise her for copying into her text the entire Appeal (in English). In case you’re wondering what bearing it has on the love story of Nancy Mitford and Gaston Palewski (arguably De Gaulle’s first supporter), then you’ll just have to stay tuned. Just like the French in 1940.

But has the last word been said? Must hope vanish? Is the defeat final? No!

Believe me, for I know what I am talking about and I tell you that nothing is lost for France. The same means that beat us may one day bring victory.

For France is not alone. She is not alone! She is not alone! [I can hardly see to type this.] She has an immense Empire behind her. She can unite with the British Empire, which commands the sea and is carrying on with the struggle. Like England, she can make an unlimited use of the vast industries of the United States.

Pretty to think so: the United States continued to recognize the Vichy regime even after Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s declaration of war. De Gaulle was famous for making enemies, or at least for not winning friends and influencing people, but FDR must be one of the top Anglophones on the list of statesmen who loathed him.

Did someone say “Napoleon”? Staight to the back of the class with you, if you can’t tell the difference between a borderline grandiose patriot and a narcissistic opportunist.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Saturday, March 10th, 2012 at 12:40 pm.