Written Lives

by Javier Marías

  Lowry suffered from numerous phobias, one of the most acute being a fear of crossing frontiers, something he had to do on innumerable occasions throughout his itinerant life. When the moment came to set off on another trip, he would spend the preceding days sweating and trembling at the prospect of having to deal with customs officers. He also suffered from persecution mania and, especially in Mexico, he was convinced that Dark Powers were following him from cantina to cantina, among the tequila, mescal, pulque and stout.

  The success of Under the Volcano unsettled him, accustomed as he was to all those failures, and at the end of his life, he could no longer write, instead dictating to his wife Margerie, for to do the former he had to stand up, without moving, and this caused circulatory problems in his legs. After his many wanderings, he returned to England, to the village of Ripe, where he died on the night of June 27, 1957, a month before his forty-eighth birthday. For some time, it was thought that he had died “by misadventure”, but now it seems certain that there was nothing adventurous about it, or perhaps the attempt was merely less experimental than on previous occasions. After a row with Margerie, she threw a bottle of gin on the floor, smashing it. He tried to hit her and she fled to a neighbour’s house. She did not dare to go back until the following morning, when she found him lying on the floor, dead, and the supper she had prepared for him, and which he had not eaten, scattered about the room, as if he had finally decided to try a mouthful and had dropped the plate. He had taken fifty sleeping tablets that belonged to Margerie, who chose not to have inscribed on his gravestone the epitaph he himself had written: “Malcolm Lowry/Late of the Bowery/His prose was flowery/And often glowery/He lived, nightly, and drank, daily,/And died playing the ukulele.”

  Madame du Deffand and the Idiots

  MADAME DU DEFFAND’S life was clearly far too long for someone who considered that her greatest misfortune was to have been born at all. It would be wrong, however, to conclude that she spent her nearly eighty-four years waiting for death. She set out the problem clearly on more than one occasion: “To live without loving life does not make one desire its end, and it barely diminishes one’s fear of losing it.” She never despaired, as did her friend and enemy Julie de Lespinasse, and she probably never suffered deep wounds of any kind. It was simply that she was bored.

  While it is true that the French word ennui cannot be translated entirely accurately as boredom, it comes close enough in meaning and, of course, includes it. Madame du Deffand was bored and she fought against her boredom, which only bored her still more. Not that she gave in to it, indeed she owes her place in the history of literature to one of the weapons she used in this fierce but tedious battle: she was an indefatigable writer of letters and, it turns out, one of the finest. Her correspondence with Voltaire and with others is vast; indeed, the correspondence she maintained with the English dandy, politician and man of letters Horace Walpole comprises eight hundred and forty letters written in her hand, and these are only the ones that have come down to us. It is even more amazing when one realises that all the letters were not, in fact, written in her hand, but dictated, for Madame du Deffand was already blind by the time she knew Walpole. Thus she never saw the man who was the object of her almost only (albeit epistolary) love, a middle-aged man, twenty-one years younger than her, and she was sixty-nine when that cross-Channel exchange of letters began. It is possible that had she seen him, her enthusiasm and her eager wait for the postman would have been diminished, since, to judge by the portraits of him painted by Reynolds and others, the author of The Castle of Otranto had eyes like two hard-boiled eggs, and a nose that was too long and too far from his mouth, which was, in turn, somewhat twisted. What captivated people apparently, apart from his pleasant personality, was his voice, with the added attraction that he spoke French with a slight English accent, which made his frivolous spirit still more agreeable. Whatever the truth of the matter, the Marquise du Deffand, who, in both youth and maturity, had known no weak passions, only overwhelming ones, came to depend on letters and on herself for her survival, for, as everyone knows, the pleasure of receiving letters lies not so much in reading them as in the opportunity they bring to respond.

  Madame du Deffand had been of a highly sceptical bent since childhood. Whilst at convent school, she preached irreligion to her classmates, and the abbess sent for the then famous and very pious Bishop Massillon to convert her. When he emerged from their conversation, this saviour of souls said only: “She’s delightful.” When pressed by the abbess, who wanted to know what holy books they could give the girl to read, the bishop threw in the towel: “A cheap catechism” was his glum response. At the end of her life, the Marquise tried being slightly devout, to see if this might distract her as it did other ladies of her age. Being less frivolous by nature, she did not go as far as the Maréchale de Luxembourg, who, it is said, after one glance at the Bible, exclaimed: “The tone is absolutely frightful! What a pity the Holy Spirit had such poor taste!” Nevertheless, the Marquise had her maid read St Paul’s Epistles out loud to her and grew very impatient with the apostle’s style, which she judged to be inconsistent. She shouted at her maid, as if the maid were to blame: “Can you make head or tail of it?” The manner in which she received her father confessor during her final illness was not exactly resigned either. She did, it is true, allow him into her house, but with these words: “Father, you must be very pleased with me; but I ask of you just three things: no questions, no reasons, no sermons.”

  During her youth, having already been married and almost immediately separated (“Feeling no love at all for one’s husband is a fairly widespread misfortune”), she had taken part in a number of orgies, to which she had doubtless been introduced by her first lover, the regent Philippe d’Orléans. Thus, Madame du Deffand began her rather brief career as a libertine at the top, and, as she herself confessed, her direct and possibly exclusive relationship with the most powerful man in France lasted two whole weeks, which, in that court, was an eternity. An exaggerated and malicious description of those gatherings has this to say: “Around supper time, the Regent would closet himself with his lovers, sometimes girls from the opera or other women of that ilk, and ten or twelve close male friends, to whom he referred as his libertines … Every supper was an orgy. Unbridled licence reigned; filth and impieties were the content or condiment of every conversation, until total drunkenness left the guests unable either to speak or to listen. Those who could still walk withdrew; the others were carried out bodily.”

  Madame du Deffand’s bad reputation pursued her for some time, but could not outrun her talent. Once past the first flush of youth, the kind of prestige she wanted was intelligence, and with the birth of her salon was born her legend: when she was very old, foreigners and young Frenchmen with a future would go to extraordinary lengths to get invited to one of her suppers, in order to be able to tell their descendants that they had met the friend of Voltaire, Montesquieu, D’Alembert, Burke, Hume and Gibbon and even of the lately deceased Fontenelle. One of those young men was Talleyrand, who, at eighteen, had a rather ingenuous view of the Marquise: “Blindness,” he said, “confers on the gentle placidity of her face an expression bordering on beatitude.”

  Her eyes did, it seems, preserve to the last their permanent beauty, but to see in that lady “unequalled kindness”, “great beauty” or “beatitude” was perhaps another form of blindness, since age never changed Madame du Deffand’s character, for she had always been indifferent and, on occasion, cruel. She usually had her reasons for being cruel, and her indifference was a matter of self-defence: according to those who thought they knew her well (but it woul
d have been hard for anyone to know her very well), she was so afraid of being hurt that she always got in first and rid herself of any person likely to hurt her. Her letters reveal the restraint with which, more than once, she reacted to the news of the death of a friend. She ends a letter to Walpole by saying: “I forgot one important fact: Voltaire has died; no one knows at what hour or on what day; some say that it was yesterday, others the day before … He died of an excess of opium which he had taken to ease the pain of his strangury, and, I would add, of an excess of glory, which took its toll on his feeble mechanism.” This reveals a highly suspicious excess of coldness in recounting the death of someone who had, over a lifetime, been her close friend and correspondent and who had written: “I desire resurrection only in order to be able to fall at the feet of Madame du Deffand.” Of the accidental death of a servant called Colman, she remarked: “It is a loss; he had served me for twenty-one years and was useful to me in many ways, I regret his passing, but then death is such a terrible thing that it cannot but be the cause of sadness. In such a mood, I thought it best not to write to you; however, today I have changed my mind …” Her reaction to the death, at the age of forty-four, of Julie de Lespinasse, was even harsher. Her only comment was: “She should have died fifteen years before; then I would not have lost D’Alembert.”

  While Voltaire had been her friend and Colman her servant, Julie de Lespinasse was probably her illegitimate niece and doubtless one of the people she had most loved. She had brought her from the provinces to live with her in Paris, she had introduced her into her social circle, and, in the end, Julie, a young woman as beautiful as the Marquise had once been and as intelligent as she continued to be, had formed her own salon and “stolen” from her a few of her habitués, including the aforementioned encyclopaedist D’Alembert, for whom the Marquise had done so much when he was still unknown. D’Alembert, who tended to sarcasm, loved Julie, and that, in part, explains his defection, but not his subsequent coarseness: “I know that the old whore Du Deffand has written to you,” he said to Voltaire, “and she may still write to you against me and my friends, but all these old whores are good for is be laughed at and screwed.” One has the impression that D’Alembert, despite their many years of friendship, had remained untouched by the wit and expository elegance of his patroness.

  Madame du Deffand loathed artificiality, although if one looks at her supposed naturalness through modern eyes, one can only think that in her circle there was, at the very least, a somewhat distorted view of what was natural. Her life followed a slightly disorderly timetable: she would get up at about five o’clock in the afternoon and, at six, receive her supper guests, of whom there might be six or seven or even twenty or thirty depending on the day; supper and talk went on until two in the morning, but since she could not bear to go to bed, she was quite capable of staying up until seven playing at dice with Charles Fox, even though she did not enjoy the game and was, at the time, seventy-three years of age. If no one else could keep her company, she would wake the coachman and have him take her for a ride along the empty boulevards. Her aversion to going to bed was due in large part to the terrible insomnia from which she had always suffered: sometimes, she would await the early morning arrival of someone who could read to her, and then, after listening to a few passages from a book, she could at last fall asleep. She always liked to be liked, but this did not mean that she could remain silent in the presence of fools: on one famous occasion, a cardinal was expressing his amazement that, following his martyrdom, St Dionysius the Areopagite had managed to walk with his head underneath his arm all the way from Montmartre to the church that bears his name, a distance of nine kilometres that left him, the cardinal, speechless. “But, sir,” broke in Madame du Deffand, “the distance does not matter, it is only the first step that is difficult.” Of the ambassador from Naples she wrote: “I miss three quarters of what he says, but since he says a great deal, the loss is bearable.” The problem was that almost everyone seemed idiotic to her, including herself: “Yesterday, I had twelve people to supper and could only marvel at the different sorts and varieties of imbecility: we were all perfectly imbecilic, but each in our own way.” She could also be almost philanthropic: “I find everyone loathsome.” Or even optimistic and trusting: “One is surrounded by weapons and by enemies, and the people we call our friends are merely the ones we know would not themselves murder us, but would merely let the murderers have their way.” Or rather more general: “All conditions and all species seem to me equally wretched, from the angel to the oyster; what is really tiresome is to have been born at all …” Or rather more personal: “I am never contented with myself … I heartily detest myself.”

  Her literary tastes were equally impatient: she adored Montaigne and Racine, and tolerated Corneille; she detested Don Quixote and could not read a history of Malta recommended to her by Walpole because it mentioned the Crusades, a subject that enraged her; she liked Fielding and Richardson, was passionate about Othello and Macbeth, but Coriolanus seemed to her “lacking in common sense”, Julius Caesar to be in bad taste, and King Lear an infernal horror that blackened the soul. Nor could she abide the young.

  She continued dining in society until the end of her life, which eventually arrived on September 23, 1780, two days before her birthday. And thus, despite everything, she lived as she had wanted to live: the central moment of the day, she had said, was supper: “one of man’s four aims; I have forgotten what the other three are”.

  In her last letter to Walpole, she had taken her leave of him: “Enjoy yourself, my friend, as much as you can; do not afflict yourself in any way over my state of health; we were, for all practical purposes, lost to each other and will now never see each other again; you will regret my passing because it pleases and contents one to know that one is loved.” One has the impression that nothing, not even her own death, would have surprised Madame du Deffand. Perhaps she was not joking when she wrote to Voltaire: “Send me, sir, a few trifles to read, but nothing about the prophets: everything they predicted I assume to have happened already.”

  Rudyard Kipling Without Jokes

  DESPITE BEING A very widely travelled man, Rudyard Kipling strikes one as more of a recluse or a hermit. He was born in India, worked as a journalist, found fame when still young, visited Japan, Canada, the United States, Brazil, Ceylon, South Africa (to mention only the most far-flung places) and yet the impression one has of his personality is that of a reserved and unsociable man, self-absorbed and, for no apparent reason, unhappy. He entitled one of his poems “Hymn to Physical Pain”, and his praise was based on pain’s ability to erase and nullify remorse, sorrow and other miseries of the spirit. The man seemed to know what he was talking about, from which one must deduce that he was desperate. Another of his poems, entitled “The Beginnings”, can be read as an apology for hatred, and although the circumstances of the Great War may help to explain the following lines, they still send a shudder down the spine: “It was not preached to the crowd,/It was not taught by the State./No man spoke it out aloud/When the English began to hate.” Kipling himself recognised on one occasion that he was perfectly capable of a personalised hatred that was slow to forget, but, fortunately, this does not mean that he put his loathings into practice, that he devoted himself to plotting his revenge: in keeping with the rest of his personality, he tended to brood on his aversions and fed them only in the silence of his heart.

  The truth is that he had few friends, either among fellow writers or among non-writers. His best friend was, perhaps, Wolcott Balestier, an American who died too young to fulfil Wilde’s adage: “Friendship is far more tragic than love; it lasts
longer.” Nevertheless, Balestier left as his legacy a book which they wrote together, The Naulahka, and love, in the form of his sister Caroline or Carrie, who became Mrs Kipling. It seems that this marriage, with the delightful brother-in-law already dead, was neither much celebrated nor very happy, at least in its beginnings (the rest belongs to the mystery of recluses). Henry James, another of Kipling’s few friends and twenty-two years older than him, was charged with giving away the bride at the ceremony, but his subsequent report of the event suggests that he acted rather reluctantly: “She was poor Wolcott Balestier’s sister and she is a hard, devoted, capable little person whom I don’t in the least understand his marrying. It’s a union of which I don’t forecast the future though I gave her away at the altar in a dreary little wedding with an attendance simply of four men—her mother and sister prostrate with flu.” The remark by Kipling’s father is even more enigmatic and troubling: “Carrie Balestier,” he said, “was a good man spoiled.” James was uncharitable and, having greeted Kipling initially as “a man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence)”, later felt disappointed in him and criticised him publicly and in writing. Despite this, however, James maintained a kind of friendship both with Kipling and with the hard little person, although that friendship was not without a degree of irony or a touch of cruelty: he not only made fun of the Kiplings’ almost senile passion for the motorised vehicles that were, at the time, a semi-novelty, he could also scarcely be bothered to visit the couple. One day in July 1908, James was very annoyed with himself for having accepted a luncheon invitation from them. It was raining, and he did not feel like going, and he was certainly not expecting his host to send his coveted car to fetch him. But Kipling did, thus exacerbating Henry James’s annoyance, for although he avoided getting wet, he was left with no excuse.