Written Lives
Page 1
Javier Marías
* * *
WRITTEN LIVES
Translated by Margaret Jull Costa
Contents
Prologue
William Faulkner on Horseback
Joseph Conrad on Land
Isak Dinesen in Old Age
James Joyce in his Poses
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa in Class
Henry James on a Visit
Arthur Conan Doyle and Women
Robert Louis Stevenson Among Criminals
Ivan Turgenev in his Sadness
Thomas Mann in his Suffering
Nabokov in Raptures
Rainer Maria Rilke in Waiting
Malcolm Lowry Beset by Calamity
Madame du Deffand and the Idiots
Rudyard Kipling Without Jokes
Arthur Rimbaud Against Art
Djuna Barnes in Silence
Oscar Wilde After Prison
Yukio Mishima in Death
Laurence Sterne at the End
Fugitive Women
Lady Hester Stanhope, the Queen of the Desert
Vernon Lee, the Tiger-Cat
Adah Isaacs Menken, the Equestrian Poetess
Violet Hunt, the Improper Person of Babylon
Julie de Lespinasse, the Amorous Mistress
Emily Brontë, the Silent Major
Perfect Artists
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WRITTEN LIVES
Javier Marías was born in Madrid in 1951. He has published sixteen novels, including most recently The Infatuations, as well as two collections of short stories and several volumes of essays. His work has been translated into forty-two languages and won a dazzling array of international literary awards, including the prestigious Dublin IMPAC award for A Heart So White. He is also a highly practised translator into Spanish of English authors, including Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Thomas Browne and Laurence Sterne. He has held academic posts in Spain, the United States and in Britain, as Lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University.
Prologue
THE IDEA FOR this book arose from another in which I was also involved: an anthology of very strange stories entitled Cuentos únicos (Unique Tales—published in 1989 by Ediciones Siruela, Madrid), in which each story was prefaced by a brief biographical note about its extremely obscure author. The majority were so obscure that any information I had about them was sometimes both minimal and difficult to unearth and, therefore, so fragmentary and often so bizarre that it looked as if I had simply invented it all, a conclusion reached by several readers, who, logically enough, also doubted the authenticity of the stories. The fact is that, when read together, these briefest of brief biographies constituted another story, doubtless as unique and spectral as the stories themselves.
I believe, and believed at the time, that this was due not only to the strange and disparate nature of the information available about these ill-fated and forgotten authors, but also to the manner in which the biographies were written, and it occurred to me that I could adopt the same approach with more familiar and more famous writers, about whom, conversely—as befits the age of exhaustive and frequently futile erudition in which we have been living for almost a century now—the curious reader can find out absolutely everything, down to the last detail. The idea, then, was to treat these well-known literary figures as if they were fictional characters, which may well be how all writers, whether famous or obscure, would secretly like to be treated.
The choice of the twenty who appear here was entirely arbitrary (three American, three Irish, two Scottish, two Russian, two French, one Polish, one Danish, one Italian, one German, one Czech, one Japanese, an Englishman from India, and an Englishman from England, if we are going by place of birth). My one condition was that they should all be dead, and I decided, too, to exclude any Spanish writers: on the one hand, I did not want to encroach, however tangentially, on territory that is food and drink to so many of my expert compatriots; on the other hand, some critics and certain fellow indigenous writers have denied my Spanishness on so many and various occasions now (both as regards language and literature and, very nearly, citizenship) that I have, I realise, ended up feeling rather inhibited about discussing writers from my own country—even though these include some of my favourites (March, Bernal Díaz, Cervantes, Quevedo, Torres Villarroel, Larra, Valle-Inclán, Aleixandre, as well as other living authors)—and among whom I continue, despite all, to count myself. But it’s as if those critics had convinced me that I had no right to do so, and one acts according to one’s convictions.
This book, then, recounts writers’ lives or, more precisely, snippets of their lives: I rarely make any judgement about the work, and the sympathy or antipathy with which the characters are treated does not necessarily correspond to any admiration or scorn I might actually feel for their writing. Far from being a hagiography, and far, too, from the solemnity with which artists are frequently treated, these Written Lives are told, I think, with a mixture of affection and humour. The latter is doubtless present in every case; the former, I must admit, is lacking in the case of Joyce, Mann and Mishima.
There is little point in trying to draw conclusions or lay down rules about the lives of writers on the basis of these portraits: what I reveal in them is very partial, and it is precisely in what is included and what omitted that the possible accuracy or inaccuracy of these pieces partly lies. And although almost nothing in them is invented (that is, fictitious in origin), some episodes and anecdotes have been “embellished”. Anyway, the one thing that leaps out when you read about these authors is that they were all fairly disastrous individuals; and although they were probably no more so than anyone else whose life we know about, their example is hardly likely to lure one along the path of letters. Luckily, at least—and this should be emphasised—it is clear that none of them took themselves very seriously, apart perhaps from the above-mentioned exceptions, the ones who failed to win my affection. However, I wonder if the lack of seriousness in these texts emanates from the characters themselves or from the views of their accidental, extempore and partial biographer.
For the benefit of the suspicious reader who wants to check some fact or to detect any “embellishments”, I provide, at the end, a bibliography, although the said reader will find most of the titles listed very difficult to locate.
This series of Written Lives was first published in the magazine Claves de razón práctica (nos 2–21), while the section entitled “Perfect artists”, which closes the volume by way of a negative (it is solely about faces and gestures), appeared in the magazine El Paseante (no. 17). I am grateful to the editors of the former, Javier Pradera and Fernando Savater, for the gentle and encouraging tyranny they wielded over me and to which the writing of these lives is, in large measure, due.
J.M.
February 1992
P.S. Seven years and seven months later
This new edition of Written Lives contains only a few changes relative to the previous edition, but there is no harm in pointing these out.
A couple of “lives” have been slightly retouched and expanded, the rest remain unchanged. Most of the photographs that precede each �
�life” are different from those in the 1992 edition (the latter were chosen by Jacobo Fitzjames Stuart, the publisher, and those in this edition by me).
There is a new section, new, at least, to this book (I did at one time include it in Literatura y fantasma [Literature and Phantasm], 1993), entitled “Fugitive Women”, written after the 1992 publication of Written Lives, but very much in the same spirit, which is why this volume of brief biographies is the most suitable place for it. These pieces first saw the light in the magazine Woman (issues published May–October 1993).
As regards what I wrote in the Prologue seven years and seven months ago, the “conviction” I referred to then has become more widespread and more firmly established. And to my list of favourite Spanish authors I should now add—since he is no longer living—Juan Benet.
With the passage of time, I have come to realise that, although I have enjoyed writing all my books, this was the one with which I had the most fun. Perhaps because these “lives” were not just “written” but “read”.
J.M.
September 1999
William Faulkner on Horseback
ACCORDING TO SOMEWHAT kitsch literary legend, William Faulkner wrote his novel As I Lay Dying in the space of six weeks and in the most precarious of situations, namely, while he was working on the night shift down a mine, with the pages resting on an upturned wheelbarrow and lit only by the dim rays of the lamp affixed to his own dust-caked helmet. This said kitsch legend is a clear attempt to enlist Faulkner in the ranks of other poor, self-sacrificing, slightly proletarian writers. The bit about the six weeks is the only true part: for six weeks one summer he made the most of the long, long intervals between feeding spadefuls of coal into the boiler he had been put in charge of in an electrical power plant. According to Faulkner, no one bothered him there, the continual hum from the enormous old dynamo was “soothing”, and the place itself was otherwise “warm and silent”.
There is certainly no doubting his ability to lose himself in his writing or his reading. His father had got him the position at the power station after he was dismissed from his previous job as a post office clerk at the University of Mississippi. Apparently one of the lecturers there, quite reasonably, complained: the only way he could get his letters was by rummaging around in the garbage can at the back door, where the unopened mail bags all too often ended up. Faulkner did not like having his reading interrupted, and the sale of stamps fell alarmingly: by way of explanation, Faulkner told his family that he was not prepared to keep getting up to wait on people at the window and having to be beholden to any son-of-a-bitch who had two cents to buy a stamp.
Perhaps that is where the seeds were first sown of Faulkner’s evident aversion to and scorn for letters. When he died, piles of letters, packages and manuscripts sent by admirers were found, none of which he had opened. In fact, the only letters he did open were those from publishers, and then only very cautiously: he would make a tiny slit in the envelope and then shake it to see if a cheque appeared. If it didn’t, then the letter would simply join all those other things that can wait forever.
He always had a keen interest in cheques, but one should not deduce from this that he was a greedy man or, indeed, mean. He was, in fact, something of a spendthrift. He got through any money he earned very quickly, then lived on credit for a while until the next cheque arrived. He would then pay his debts and start spending again, mostly on horses, cigarettes and whisky. He did not have many clothes, but those he had were expensive. When he was nineteen, his affected way of dressing earned him the nickname “The Count”. If the fashion was for tight trousers, then his would be the tightest in the whole of Oxford (Mississippi), the town where he lived. He left there in 1916 to go to Toronto to train with the RAF. The Americans had rejected him because he didn’t have enough qualifications, and the British didn’t want him because he was too short, until, that is, he threatened to go and fly for the Germans instead.
On one occasion, a young man went to visit him and found him standing with his pipe, which had gone out, in one hand and, in the other, the bridle of the pony that his daughter Jill was riding. To break the ice, the young man asked if the little girl had been riding long. Faulkner did not reply at once. Then he said: “Three years,” adding: “You know, a woman should know only how to do three things.” He paused, then concluded: “Tell the truth, ride a horse, and sign a cheque.”
Jill was not the first daughter Faulkner had with his wife, Estelle, who brought with her two children from a previous marriage. The first daughter they had together died only five days after being born. They called her Alabama. Her mother was still weak and in bed, and Faulkner’s brothers were out of town at the time and never saw the child. Faulkner could see no point in holding a funeral, since in those five days the little girl had only had time to become a memory, not a person. So her father put her in a tiny coffin and carried her to the cemetery on his lap. Alone, he placed her in her grave, without telling anyone.
When he received the Nobel Prize in 1950, Faulkner was, at first, reluctant to go to Sweden. However, in the end, he not only went, he travelled throughout Europe and Asia on “a State Department mission”. He did not much enjoy the endless functions to which he was invited. At a party given in his honour by Gallimard, his French publishers, it is said that after each succinct reply to questions put by journalists, he would take a step backward. Step by step, he eventually found himself with his back to the wall, and only then did the journalists take pity on him or else give him up as a lost cause. He finally sought refuge in the garden. A few people decided to venture out there too, announcing that they were going to talk to Faulkner, only to come straight back in again, proffering excuses in faltering voices: “It’s awfully cold out there.” Faulkner was a taciturn man who loved silence, and went to the theatre only five times in his entire life: he had seen Hamlet three times, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Ben Hur, and that was all. He had not read Freud either, at least so he said on one occasion: “I have never read him. Neither did Shakespeare. I doubt if Melville did either and I’m sure Moby Dick didn’t.” He read Don Quixote every year.
But then he also said that he never told the truth. After all, he wasn’t a woman, although he did have a woman’s love of cheques and horse-riding. He always said that he had written Sanctuary, his most commercial novel, for money: “I needed it to buy a good horse.” He also said that he didn’t visit big cities very often because you couldn’t go there on horseback. When he was getting older, against the advice of both his family and his doctors, he continued going out riding and jumping fences, and kept falling off. The last time he went riding he suffered just such a fall. From the house, his wife saw Faulkner’s horse standing by the gate, with its saddle still on and the reins hanging loose. When she didn’t see her husband there with the horse, she called Dr Felix Linder and they went out looking for him. They found him over half a mile away, limping, almost dragging himself along. The horse had thrown him and he hadn’t been able to remount, having fallen on his back. The horse had walked on a few paces, then stopped and looked round. When Faulkner managed to get to his feet, the horse came over to him and touched him with its muzzle. Faulkner had tried to grab the reins, but failed. Then the horse had headed off towards the house.
William Faulkner spent some time in bed, badly injured and in great pain. He had still not fully recovered from the fall when he died. He was in the hospital, where he had been admitted for a check-up on his progress. But legend refuses to accept that the fall from his horse was the cause of his death. He was killed by a thrombosis on July 6, 1962, when he was not quite sixty-five.
When asked to name the best American writers of his day, he would say that they had all failed, but that Thomas Wolfe had been the finest failure and William Faulkner the second finest failure. He often repeated this over the years, but it is worth remembering that Thomas Wolfe had been dead since 1938, that is, during nearly all the years that Faulkner used to give this answer and was himself alive.
Joseph Conrad on Land
JOSEPH CONRAD’S BOOKS about the sea are so many and so memorable that one always tends to think of him on board a sailing ship, forgetting that he spent the last thirty years of his existence on land, leading an unexpectedly sedentary life. In fact, like any good sailor, he hated travelling, and nothing consoled him more than being shut up in his study, writing with agonising difficulty or chatting with his closest friends. It has to be said, however, that he did not always work in rooms that were, in principle, intended for that purpose: towards the end of his life, he used to hide away in the most remote corners of the garden in his house in Kent, scribbling on scraps of paper, and once, it is said, he even annexed the bathroom for a whole week without a word of explanation to his family, who, during that time, enjoyed only very restricted use of that room. On another occasion, the problem was his clothes, for Conrad refused to wear anything but an extremely faded yellow-striped bathrobe, which proved most embarrassing when friends turned up unannounced or American tourists arrived, who claimed, oddly, to have just been passing by.
The gravest threat to family safety was, however, Conrad’s deep-rooted need to have a cigarette clamped between his fingers at all times, although this was usually only for a matter of seconds, since he would immediately put it down somewhere and forget about it. His wife, Jessie, resigned herself to the fact that books, sheets, tablecloths and furniture were all covered in burn marks, but she lived for years in a state of high alert lest her husband burn himself, for even when he gave in to her pleas and got into the habit of throwing his cigarette ends into a large jug of water placed there for that purpose, he had constant incendiary mishaps. On more than one occasion, his clothes nearly got scorched when he sat too close to a stove, and it was not unusual for the book he was reading suddenly to catch fire after prolonged contact with the candle illuminating it.