Palace of Books

by Roger Grenier

  This is because waiting is both hope (in Spanish espera is not very different from esperanza) and resignation. In one of the essays in Nuptials, “Summer in Algiers,” Albert Camus writes: “From the mass of human evils swarming in Pandora’s box, the Greeks brought out hope at the very last, as the most terrible of all. I don’t know any symbol more moving. For hope, contrary to popular belief, is tantamount to resignation. And to live is not to be resigned.”

  Another champion of waiting is John Marcher, the main character in Henry James’s The Beast in the Jungle. From his earliest youth, he has the feeling that he’s destined for something rare and strange, for some terrible, prodigious possibility that will emerge sooner or later and that will probably overwhelm him. By virtue of waiting for the Beast, “He had failed, with the last exactitude, of all he was to fail of.” Suddenly he understands the meaning of waiting. He had been the man to whom nothing must ever happen. He missed out on the woman he loved and who loved him in return. That was the Beast that struck him.7

  For Henry James, waiting is a nearly constant and varied source of inspiration that adds up to a philosophy of the “too late.”

  In Baudelaire’s “Dream of a Curious Character,” the poet waits for death: “I seemed a child, so keen to see the Show / He feels a deadly hatred of the Curtain. . . .” But nothing happens: “The curtain rose—and I stayed waiting still.”

  Doesn’t Kafka express the inevitable disappointment that comes from waiting when he writes to his family: “In the end, the most likely is that we’re going where we’d rather not go, and we’re doing what we’d rather not do, and we live and die in a different way than we’d ever want, without any hope of a reward.”

  “Are we going to the lighthouse?” a child asks at the beginning of Virginia Woolf’s famous novel. We know they won’t go for another ten years, that the very fleeting moments of consciousness experienced by each character will finally accumulate into a huge block of time, and that by the end, several major protagonists will have died. But Virginia Woolf’s consummate art and her very personal use of time prevent this novel about a ten-year wait for a walk from being reduced to just that.

  Samuel Beckett gave us the title that has become synonymous with the value we place these days on waiting. But for Beckett, time is immobile or, at best, it comes in the circular form of an eternal return—an eternal return reduced to a “structure by refrain,” as Ludovic Janvier calls it. “Will it not soon be the end?” Beckett’s creatures say, when they don’t shout—which is even worse: “Another happy day!” They’re locked in time, “Balue’s cage.”8

  Maurice Blanchot likewise suggests in his book with a syncopated title, L’attente l’oubli [Awaiting Oblivion]—that waiting is a value in and of itself: “However important the reason for waiting, it is always infinitely surpassed by the process of waiting.”

  André Gide’s effervescent Fruits of the Earth, where waiting is merely annoying and meaningless, now seems dated: “How long, O waiting, will you last? And once over, what will be left to live for. ‘Waiting! Longing! For what?’ I cried. ‘What can come that is not born of ourselves? And what can be born of us that we do not know already?’”

  Conrad’s short story “Tomorrow” is about perverted waiting. “It’s all tomorrow, then,” repeats Captain Hagberd, former sailor and widow whose son Harry has disappeared. The captain has settled in the little port town of Colebrook, convinced that his son will return. His neighbor is Carvil, a blind man who lives with his daughter Bessie. The invalid behaves like a tyrant, screaming at her constantly. The townspeople make fun of Hagberd, an eccentric, a real madman. Bessie is his only friend, and little by little she comes to share his delusions. She falls in love with the missing boy and imagines that when he returns, she’ll marry him. It helps her tolerate her father’s brutality: “You are not an impatient woman, my dear,” Captain Hagberd tells her.

  Then a young man appears and indeed he’s none other than Harry, the son. But the old man refuses to see him and keeps saying he’s waiting for his son “tomorrow.” He wants to smash the intruder’s skull with the garden spade. Bessie, in conversation with Harry, tells the young man her strange thought: “It is you who come tomorrow.” Seeing that his father and the young woman are both deranged, he replies, “But why won’t today do?”

  He ends up figuring it out: “Awkward this, eh? . . . It’s all tomorrow, then, without any sort of today, as far as I can see.”

  Harry is a rolling stone who has wandered the world without ever being able to settle down, who has never stayed with the same woman more than a week, who likes his chums, his liquor, his gambling. He explains that his father wanted him to be a lawyer’s clerk and that’s why he ran away. He hasn’t come back to be shut in or be married, only to borrow five quid. As soon as Bessie gives him a little money—all the money she has—he leaves. That’s when Captain Hagberg explodes with joy at having got rid of “that ‘something wrong.’”

  The young woman returns to her horrible blind father, her hell. “It was as if all the hopeful madness of the world had broken out to bring terror upon her heart, with the voice of that old man shouting of his trust in an everlasting tomorrow.”

  Not many writers know how to deal with waiting as successfully as Boccaccio, during the great plague that ravaged Europe in 1348. We know there were ten young people—three men and seven women—who fled Florence for the countryside, in Villa Palmieri, in Fiesole, where they entertained one another, passing the time by telling a hundred stories, The Decameron. As Antonin Artaud put it, Boccaccio, with his “two well-endowed companions and seven women as lustful as they were religious. . . .” waited patiently for the plague to take its leave.

  Some people take pleasure in waiting for what will never happen, what can’t happen. Alain-Fournier confessed his tormented love affairs to his sister Isabelle and his brother-in-law Jacques Rivière in a letter dated October 19, 1910: “There it is: this woman has returned. She waited for me on a bench on the street for one evening, two evenings, ten evenings. She said: ‘Time passes quickly when you’re sure the person you’re waiting for isn’t going to come.’ Once she even fell asleep.”

  Alain-Fournier was an expert, since he had spent days and weeks and years waiting for Yvonne de Quiévrecourt, the woman who inspired his novel The Lost Estate [Le Grand Meaulnes].

  “Formally speaking, masochism is a state of waiting; the masochist experiences waiting in its pure form,” writes Gilles Deleuze.

  Mrs. Raddick’s daughter, Katherine Mansfield’s “Young Girl,” behaves on the outside like a capricious spoiled girl, but ends up stammering:

  “I—I don’t mind it a bit. I—I like waiting.” And suddenly her cheeks crimsoned, her eyes grew dark—for a moment I thought she was going to cry. “L—let me, please,” she stammered, in a warm, eager voice. “I like it. I love waiting! Really—really I do! I’m always waiting—in all kinds of places . . . .”

  She makes this speech on the front steps of the casino where her mother has gone to gamble.

  When waiting becomes a habit, it takes on an odor, a color, connected to the light of the sky, the neon of a café, the shadows of a room, the noise of footsteps on a sidewalk. . . . Waiting makes us into Pavlov’s dogs, for whom a certain odor, a certain color, a certain noise resonates, plunging us into an anguish as new and as old as our unhappiness.

  Some men and women thus cultivate impossible love affairs, eternally secret passions. Waiting in love brings them more delight than the accomplishment of love. A silly ditty from the 1930s has some truth to it:

  Je t’attendrai

  Tu m’attendras

  Even truer is the Jacques Brel song where a man waits eternally for Madeleine, “Madeleine qui ne viendra pas.”

  Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion describes in clinical detail the type of relationship whose essence is anguished waiting: waiting for a phone call, for a visit that may or may not happen, who knows when. “From September last year, I did nothing e
lse but wait for a man. . . .” Ernaux sums up her alienation: “I would have liked to have done nothing else but wait for him.” It’s rather commonplace to see passion flourish between two people whom everything separates. Chained to lives they can’t relinquish, sometimes living thousands of miles apart, they still want to believe in the beauty and in the truth of feelings that torture them. Sometimes at the heart of their waiting they give in to other adventures, to fake passions, to interim affairs. You can cheat on waiting the way you cheat on hunger.

  Thus they live double or triple lives, no longer knowing where to turn in their ever-expanding culpability. Lovers like these don’t believe that the future belongs to them. They wait humbly for the distant moment of their aleatory and always brief meetings, for time stolen from everyday life. Love thus begins to resemble a religion, with its secret altars hidden deep within the heart. It can last until death, which becomes nothing but one more hurdle. That day too, we will be separated. Who will be able gently to tell my lover that I no longer exist? In Chekhov’s “A Boring Story,” when Katia, who would only visit him briefly, finally leaves, Nicolaï Stepanovitch is about to ask her “So you won’t be at my funeral?”

  I once had a colleague of advancing years—a discreet, reliable, and very married family man. He died suddenly. He was no sooner buried than a woman called the office. “I’m sorry to bother you. Is Mr. G. there? Today is Wednesday and every Wednesday, he comes to my place for lunch.”

  This woman had spent her life with a secret, waiting for Wednesday. She cheated time, apparently, by writing poems. Cheating time! What an expression. And killing time! Now there was no more reason to wait, but how could she have known? Mr. G.’s mistress could not even read the obituary in the newspaper: she was blind.

  Are the devotees of this type of love affair truly unhappy? I’m not sure. Madame du Deffand writes: “The only happiness I know is to be loved by what one loves, and although an eternal absence can be a terrible source of suffering, one tolerates it patiently when one can count on never being indifferent to that love.”

  In Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education, Frédéric Moreau is happy to spend his life waiting for Madame Arnoux. And she is happy waiting for him. Isolated in Brittany, she spends her time contemplating the ocean: “I go and sit up there on a bench that I call Frédéric’s bench.”

  She resembles the hero of one of Henry James’s most beautiful short stories. Resigned to his defeat, his financial ruin, and his unhappiness, making no effort to struggle, Herbert Dodd sits down at the end of a jetty, facing the sea, on “the bench of desolation.” In his case you can say that he is no longer waiting for anything.

  Madame Arnoux is satisfied with a love affair that is nothing but waiting and frustration: “Never mind, we shall really and truly have loved each other!” She takes off her hat and Frédéric experiences the sight of her grey hair “like a punch to the gut.” And when he suspects her of “having come to give herself to him,” he feels an “indefinable feeling of repugnance, a sort of terror of incest,” and he turns his back on her so as “not to tarnish his ideal.” Waiting has transformed the object of his desire into an untouchable idol.

  When the clock strikes eleven, Madame Arnoux decides to leave in fifteen more minutes. Another version of waiting. During fifteen perfectly empty minutes, “Neither could find anything to say to the other.”

  A thesis topic: “Compare Madame Arnoux’s waiting with Madame Bovary’s waiting.” Between the two of them, all there is to say about waiting has been said. They are the Bouvard and Pécuchet of waiting.

  Since time is the very substance of the novel, it would be impossible to account for every novel in which the by-product of time—waiting—plays a major role. What could be more novelistic than Gatsby at night, alone in front of his house in West Egg, looking across the bay for a green light, because that’s where Daisy Buchanan lives? With his “appalling sentimentality,” as the narrator puts it, Gatsby projects into the future his regret about what hasn’t yet happened: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us . . . So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

  Apollinaire evokes the return of Ulysses:

  His wife had been faithful to him

  In the plush corner her loom at hand

  Are we so sure of being the object of hope? It’s the aspiration of those without love.

  Yet we can read the ancient, venerable, and ever-poignant Odyssey as a poem about waiting. From that bed of pain where “my tears have streaked, year in, year out,” Penelope waits for her husband Odysseus, then for her son Telemachus. The suitors wait for Penelope to make up her mind. Elpenor waits for a proper burial. As for Odysseus, prisoner of Calypso, then Circe, even Nausicaa, isn’t his entire voyage marked by waiting? Towards the end, in Song XXIII, even Aurora, “dawn with her rose-red fingers,” waits. She waits to replace the night, waits for Odysseus and Penelope to have stopped weeping and to have found “their bed, the old familiar place they loved so well.” Waiting and movement are the paradoxical twins of The Odyssey.

  The only person who doesn’t wait in The Odyssey—after having waited a very long time, it’s true, in The Iliad—is Philoctetes, shamefully abandoned on the Island of Lemnos because he was bitten by a snake and his infected wound gave off such a disgusting odor. The Greeks go back to get him because they need his magic bow to conquer Troy. He is one of the first to make it home. All these books. . . . It seems that one of the first acts inseparable from waiting is reading. Your eyes follow the length of a line and your mind waits for your eyes to advance, impatient to know what will happen next. But you have to be patient.

  I often have a dream that I can’t quite figure out. I dream that I am reading. I decipher the page, or even the line, word by word. How can it be that I, the author of the dream, if you can say such a thing—how is it that I don’t know what comes on the next line, on the part of the page that I haven’t read yet?

  Tyrants hate most to wait. Take Louis XIV, who said, “I was forced to wait.” This was about his carriage. Waiting can be understood in terms of power. In any meeting there is the person who is waiting and the person who makes him wait, who has the satisfaction of being waited for.

  For the line fisherman, waiting is a sport.

  For the man hunting his prey, waiting means identifying with death. He’s on the lookout for the moment when his victim arrives in his sight line.

  For some people, waiting means waiting for the right time. Like the pope’s mule.9 To stay in the ecclesiastical world, consider Father Meslier, who lived in the age of Louis XIV and Louis XV, and who spent his entire humble existence preparing his time bomb, a will and testament in which he proclaimed his atheism and wished for “all the great men on earth and all the nobles to be hanged and strangled with the priests’ guts.” But during the sixty-four years of his life, he uttered nary a critical word.

  Mink Snopes, one of Faulkner’s more primitive heroes, waits thirty-eight years in Parchman Penitentiary, perfectly patient, because he knows that at the end of those thirty-eight years he’ll do what he has to—seek his vengeance. Waiting occupies all his time.

  But one must finally come down from literary paradise and back to everyday life, where truth isn’t any truer than in books, just more difficult to bear.

  The human condition: on Monday, you wait for the weekend, and on Sunday you can’t stand the waiting for Monday. You wait for vacation and for vacation to end. You wait for retirement, all the while dreading it. You dream wistfully of the death of your partner, with whom you have waited too long. You don’t wait for death, despite the fact that this is the only thing it would be reasonable to wait for, indeed to wish for.

  And what to say about separation, so productive of great literature? After the war, a statistic went around: eighty-four out of every hundred repatriated prisoners of war got divorced.

  Religions make extensive use of waiting. For good
reason. According to Jewish belief, Judgment Day is supposed to take place in the Vally of Josaphat, also known as the Valley of the Desert or the Valley of the Decree. So people in a hurry went there to be buried, in order to be the first among the dead resuscitated. During a trip to Jerusalem, I took a walk in this vast cemetery. I was attacked by Palestinian kids throwing rocks. L’intifada, the ancient lapidation. A few more rocks and I too could have been in the first row, ready for the day I’m not waiting for.

  Once it becomes an instrument of religion, waiting itself can become a religion, since we have built temples for it: waiting rooms. Strange places of worship, not of an unknown god, but of the void. There are first-class and second-class versions. Airports use a euphemism for luxury waiting rooms. They call them “clubs” or “lounges.” Does the quality of waiting really change from second class to first? In train stations, the filth of the second-class waiting room, full of riffraff, has a compelling novelistic power.

  To say that men are always ready to love a woman who “possesses the advantages of beauty,” Pascal writes strangely in his “Discourse on the Passion of Love,” “There is a place for waiting in their hearts.”

  The bureaucrat, the dentist, the doctor, the analyst, the physical therapist—all have created an image of the waiting room. This is the place where, beset by boredom, anguish, and impatience, we read magazines we’d normally be embarrassed to be seen with. And if by accident we mention them, we compensate quickly by adding, “I read it at the dentist’s office.”

  What happens in waiting rooms deserves a sociological study. That’s precisely what I did a long time ago, without any qualification whatsoever. I was a ghostwriter for an eminent plastic surgeon who wanted to write his memoirs. He was very conscientious, so he had me observe numerous operations: removing bags under the eyes, fixing noses, reconstructing breasts. He got it into his head that I should spend entire mornings in his waiting room, listening to what the patients were saying and observing their behavior.