I had promised back in May a group read of Arnold Bennett’s The
Old Wives’ Tale for July, so since it’s already past the middle of July, I
want to give those who are still interested (especially, perhaps, myself) an
update - and a bit of breathing room. While I’d expected to be done with the
book by now, I am scarcely a third of the way through, and hope that potential
participants will not be disappointed if I postpone the group read until Labor
Day week (September 5-12), perhaps a fitting time given the book’s concerns with the world of
work and economics, and certainly a more propitious time for me given an
unexpectedly challenging spate of work and other commitments these last couple of
months.
In lieu of a post about literature, I’ll just add to this
update a couple of quotations from my recent reading, offered as a promise of
more attention to the blog to come soon.
The first is from Nicolas Bouvier’s The Way of the World,
an account of an 18-month journey Bouvier made with his artist friend Thierry
Vernet in a Fiat from Geneva to the Khyber Pass between 1951 and 1953. I
thought it a marvelous travel book (albeit one that rather exudes male privilege,
so one might read Bouvier’s Swiss compatriot Isabelle Eberhardt or the works of
Freya Stark, who visited western Iran 20 years before Bouvier, to regain a bit
of balance). Anyway, here is the 24-year-old Bouvier in the Balkans - the
“heart” of Europe, if France is said to be its “brain” - early in his journey,
early in his growth:
The invited us into
dark kitchens, into little, ugly, comforting sitting-rooms for enormous
bellyfuls of aubergines, kebabs, melons which sprayed open under a pocketknife.
Nieces and frail old relatives – because at least three generations would be
sharing these cramped quarters – would have already, excitedly, set the table.
There would be introductions, low bows, phrases of welcome in charming,
old-fashioned French, and conversations with these old bourgeois who were
passionate about literature, who killed time by re-reading Balzac or Zola, and
for whom J’accuse was still the
latest literary scandal from Paris. Spa waters, the ‘colonial Exhibition’…when
they reached the end of their recollections, there would be silence, and then the
friend who painted would go off in search of a book on Vlaminck or Matisse. All
the dishes would be cleared from the table, and we would leaf through the book
while the family looked on in silence, as though a ceremony they couldn’t
participate in was taking place. This gravity touched me. During my years as a
student I had earnestly potted ‘culture’, done my intellectual gardening,
analyses, glosses, taken cuttings; I had dissected various works of art without
grasping their dynamic value. At home the stuff of life was so well cut,
distributed, cushioned by habit and institutions that there was no space for
invention, it was confined to decorative functions and only thought of as
something ‘agreeable’ – that is, immaterial. In Serbia, things were quite
different; being deprived of necessities stimulated, within certain limits, an
appetite for what was essential. Life was still demanding and greatly in need
of form, and artists – by which I mean any peasant who knew how to hold a
flute, or daubed their wagons with sumptuously mingled colours – were respected
intercessors, or bonesetters.
The second quotation is from Jean Giono’s Que ma joie
demeure, which I’m re-reading in the French original, though the passage is
copied from Katherine Allen Clarke’s English translation, Joy of Man’s
Desiring. The setting is the Plateau de Valensole, in the southern part of
Giono’s beloved Alpes de Haute-Provence, sometime in the late 19th
or early 20th century. Bobi and Jourdan, a stranger and the farmer
who has welcomed him and asked his help, are returning to the farm on a cold
winter’s night after a journey to see a man about a horse. They are a bit lost.
The
lights had disappeared. They had been slowly turning away from them. The ground
rose gently. The cold solidified the night like cement in the bottom of the
mortar box.
“Look at the signs,” said Bobi.
Before them, in the distance, golden
signs had just blazed forth. They looked like letters. One was a capital L. And
after this letter was a sort of apostrophe. They were level with the ground.
There was a sign that made a capital E, but the E from time to time became an
F. They were really signs and they were indeed of gold. But they could not be
read.
Jourdan tried. He squinted his eyes.
He said: “L-apostrope-e-f, l-apostrophe-e-f. What does that mean?” As they drew
nearer, the letters changed shape. The one that was an L had almost become an
O, a little square, and the apostrophe had melted into it. The other letter
became an M laying on its side. “We ought to mark them down on paper,” said
Jourdan to himself. To know. Prescriptions are sometimes written out like that
in strange letters, and he who does not know them looks at them and does not
understand.”
“L-apostrophe-e-f-o,
l-apostrophe-e-f-o-m,” he said to himself, like one of those great, formless
words that must have signified the sun, the moon, and the stars in the mouths
of the first men.
“Is it the house,” said Bobi.
Jourdan pulled in the reins. The
horse stopped.
“What?” asked Jourdan.
“The signs,” said Bobi; “it is the
house. Marthe has lit the fire. She has closed the door and the window
shutters, and there in front of us is the light flowing through the joints
around the door and the shutters.”
Jourdan remained silent for a
moment.
“One who knows is worth ten who
seek,” he said.
Until next time…
Edith Berger, Les Foins dans le champ, 1948 (collection C. Perous)
Nicolas Bouvier photographed by Thierry Vernet, Turkey, 1953
