Before his disillusionment became complete, Gourmont was sufficiently inspired by the possibilities of sexual experience to endeavour to rework theology and ritual so as to produce a more honest and more life-enhancing species of Christianity, and the primary result of this endeavour is the transfiguration of the Mass outlined in Le fantôme. Unfortunately, this is unsuccessful even in its own terms. In order to redeem the perverse demons of sexuality one must do more than simply redefine them as angels, for the retention at the core of a re-sexualised religion of all those martyred saints and the crucified Christ inevitably places a kind of sado-masochism at the presumed heart of sexual experience – a move which the protagonist of “Le fantôme” ultimately finds self-defeating. Other strategies outlined in the various histoires magiques are similarly revealed as direly destructive or ultimately self-contradictory.
Later in his career, Gourmont laid aside the elaborate metaphorical coat-of-many-colours which decorates – but also confines – the works in this volume. He abandoned the intricate network of symbolic references which is displayed here in favour of a very different ideative context. He was aided in making this move by his reading of Nietzsche, whose attacks on the life-denying aspects of Christianity were even fiercer than his own, and whose interest in venturing “beyond good and evil” to a new and better morality he shared. He combined this influence, rather eccentrically, with inspiration obtained from his reading of the works of the celebrated entomologist J. H. Fabre and other contemporary naturalists and evolutionists. He drew upon observations made by Fabre and others to construct a “physiology of sex” which placed human sexuality firmly in the context of a universal, multi-faceted and intrinsically eccentric biological phenomenon.
Given the astonishing range of sexual behaviours to be found in the animal kingdom, especially among the invertebrates, the whimsicality of the human sexual impulse came to Gourmont to seem entirely expectable. In Physique de l’amour and many other essays he extensively elaborates an argument briefly cited (credited to Schopenhauer) in Le fantôme, to the effect that there is no fundamental difference between intelligence and instinct, and that the phenomena of the human mind cannot and should not be attributed to the workings of some divinely-created soul which merely uses the body as a habitation. In this view, the variety of human sexual behaviour becomes a mere phenomenon of nature, to which moral commandments are essentially irrelevant:
“There are species in which the position of the organs is such that the same individual cannot be at the same time the female of the one for whom he is the male, but he can at that moment when he acts as male, serve as female to another male, who is female to a third, and so on. This explains the chaplets of spintrian gasteropods which one sees realizing, innocently and according to the ineluctable law of nature, carnal imaginings of which erotic humanity boasts. Viewed in the light of animal customs, debauchery loses all its character and lure, because it loses all claim to immorality. Man, who united in himself all the aptitudes of the animals, all their laborious instincts, all their industries, could not escape the heritage of their sexual methods: and there is no lewdness which has no normal type in nature.” (1)
The literary extension of this philosophy is seen in Une coeur virginale, which carries a preface explaining that it ought to be deemed a “physiological novel”. It is, in essence, an elaborate account of how mate-choice in humans ought to transcend the customary romantic illusions, allowing itself to be dictated instead by the complementarity of physical needs – a complementarity which is much better reflected in the patterns of conventional immorality than in the sentimental mythology of “falling in love”. The uncompromising cynicism of this attitude – which leads to a bitterness more extreme, in its way, than the conte cruel aspects of the histoires magiques – is manifest in the reflections of several of the characters in Une coeur virginale, in such passages as this:
“He had often pondered on the mystery of intelligence among children. How is it that these subtle creatures are so quickly transformed into imbeciles? Why should the flower of these fine graceful plants be silliness?
“‘But isn’t it the same with animals, and especially among the animals that approach our physiology most closely? The great apes, so intelligent in their youth, become idiotic and cruel as soon as they reach puberty. There is a cape there which they never double. A few men succeed; their intelligence escapes shipwreck, and they float free and smiling on the tranquillized sea. Sex is an absinthe whose strength only the strong can stand; it poisons the blood of the commonalty of men. Women succumb even ‘ more surely to this crisis.”’ (2)
The extrapolation of these ideas provides a series of excuses for Gourmont’s particular species of misogyny, whose beginnings – which may owe as much to the influence of the woman-hating Villiers de l’Isle Adam as to the disenchanted aftermath of his affair with Berthe Courrières – can be seen in “Le fantôme”. By the time he wrote Une Coeur virginale he was easily able to make such off-hand observations as:
“Women are ruminants: they can live for months, for years it may be, on a voluptuous memory. That is what explains the apparent virtue of certain women; one lovely sin, like a beautiful flower with an immortal perfume, is enough to bless the days of their life.” (3)
The ideas of this phase in Gourmont’s career were a significant influence on the theories of that other well-known misogynist Ezra Pound, who had assisted in the translation of the earlier novel Les Chevaux de Diomède as well as composing the English version of Physique de l’amour. It is notable, however, that Gourmont’s last novel, Une Nuit au Luxembourg, drifts nostalgically back to a more sentimental view of womanhood, which is reclothed in a contentedly pagan religious imagery. It seems that his dreams became more of a consolation to him as his long exile progressed, and that he was forced in the end to a lachrymose lamentation of the evil circumstances which had thwarted his ambition fully to complement the education of les livres with that of l’amour.
Gourmont’s attitudes to the world in general may be seen as an extension of his attitudes to sex, although he – like most people – would presumably have put it the other way around. Early in his career, under the influence of Schopenhauer, he became an out-and-out idealist, and found the rejection of materialism liberating. In Le Livre des masques (1896) he summed up his position thus: “The world is my representation. I do not see what is; what is, is what I see. So many thinking men, so many and perhaps different worlds. This doctrine, which Kant left on the way to go to the assistance of shipwrecked morality, is so beautiful and so supple that it can be transposed without harming free logic from theory to even the most exacting practice, a universal principle of emancipation for every man capable of understanding it.” (4)
The intellectual liberation which Gourmont derived from such ideas is perhaps most extravagantly displayed in Le Chemin de velours (1902), whose “velvet road” is strewn with a host of slick quasi-Nietzschean aphorisms:
“Christianity is a machine for creating remorse, because it is a machine for diminishing the subtlety, and for restraining the spontaneity, of vital reactions … What a triumph for the Jews to have forged for the multitude of Philistines such an instrument of degeneration!” (5)
And:
“It becomes certain that human intelligence, far from being the object of creation, is only an accident, and that moral ideas are merely vegetable parasites born from an excess of nutrition.” (6)
Such comments as these demonstrate that Gourmont’s journey into solitude, however much it may have been forced upon him, was a bold and determined one, and that he carried with him in his intellectual baggage instruments for the amelioration of his condition. He cut himself off not merely from his social and religious heritage but also from those aspects of contemporary philosophy which were useless to him; but the pride he took in being an individual, a man apart in every possible way, demanded respect with an ironically seigneurial hauteur. He earned that respect with both the quality of his scholarsh
ip and the individuality of his outlook. He became the leading literary critic of his day not merely by the breadth of his reading and the penetration of his intelligence, but also because he had a unique sympathy with many of the writers whose reputations he helped to establish and secure. He understood better than any other commentator the profound feelings of disenchantment, cynicism and alienation which the writers of the fin de siède inherited from Baudelaire and Lautréamont, and elevated as bloody banners of their own triumphant distress.
Although he enjoyed a high reputation in his own time – Anatole France once referred to him as “the greatest living French writer” – Remy de Gourmont is not much read today. He is little known in England even as a critic, and hardly at all as a writer of fiction. This is partly because the greater part of his fiction was long considered to be too risqué for translation. Arthur Ransome’s preface to A Night in the Luxembourg is defensive in the extreme, anxiously anticipating charges of indecency and blasphemy. In fact, the book was simply ignored.
The only other novel of Gourmont’s which is known in England is A Virgin Heart, whose publication here was presumably assisted by the fact that its translator was Aldous Huxley. Such English versions as there are of his other works were produced in America, where he was more highly regarded, but with the notable exception of the Pound version of The Natural Philosophy of Love his books never became significant elements of that dubiously celebrated “naughty library” of French books which were produced in illustrated editions “for private circulation only”; in consequence, he missed out on the kind of notoriety which attached itself to writers like Pierre Louÿs.
Few of Gourmont’s short stories have ever been translated into English, with the surprising exception of the somewhat anaemic stories original to Couleurs, which appeared twice in America – as Colors – in editions issued by the fancifully-named Blue Faun Press and Panurge Press. It is notable that the version of “The White Dress” which was prepared for the twenty-volume The Masterpiece Library of Short Stories in the 1920s is carefully distorted in its implications by a translator unsympathetic to its bitterness, although the version of “The Magnolia” which appears alongside it retains the nasty-mindedness of the original. The present volume will hopefully begin to redeem this aspect of Gourmont’s work from its long neglect.
Remy de Gourmont cannot have considered himself – as some others certainly did consider him – to have been a man “born out of his time”. We know this because he poured scorn on the very idea of a man’s being born out of his time. In a memoir of Villiers de l’Isle Adam published in Le Livre des masques he cited such judgments as instances of “disturbed admiration”, and opined that “a great writer is inevitably by his very genius one of the syntheses of his race and epoch … the brain and mouth of a whole tribe and not a transient monster” (7). But he was never afraid of apparent contradictions, especially if they were suitably ironic, and he came close to delivering some such judgment himself a mere two years later, in Le Deuxième livre des masques (1898), when he turned his attention to the work of a less celebrated writer. It is difficult to believe, reading what he wrote then, that he could have passed any other judgment on his own life or his own work:
“Some men are not in harmony with their time; they never live with the life of the people; the soul of crowds does not seem to them very superior to the soul of herds. If one of these men reflects on himself and comes to understand himself and to place himself in the vast world, he may grow sad, for about him he feels an invincible stretch of indifference, a mute Nature, stupid stones, geometrical movements; a great social solitude. And from the depths of his ennui he thinks of the simple pleasure of being in harmony, of laughing naturally, of smiling in an unreserved way, of being moved by long commotions. But there may come to him a pride in his renunciation and his isolation, whether he has adopted the pose of a pillar-hermit or whether he has shut the gates of a palace on his pleasures.” (8)
REFERENCES
(1) The Physiology of Love New York: Rarity Press, 1932. p.86.
(2) A Virgin Heart New York: Modern Library, 1925. p.160–1.
(3) ibid p.195.
(4) Remy de Gourmont: Selections from All His Works Chosen and Translated by Richard Aldington New York; Covici-Friede, 1929. p.346.
(5) ibid p.422.
(6) ibid p.423.
(7) ibid p.353–4.
(8) ibid p.361–2.
STUDIES IN FASCINATION
PÉHOR*
Sensitive though poor, imaginative though forever hungry, Douceline learned early in life to delight in caresses and embraces. She loved to pass her hands across the cheeks of little boys, and to put her arms around the necks of little girls, stroking them as she might have stroked a cat. She loved to kiss the knitted fingers of her mother’s hands, and whenever she was banished to the corner to do penance for her petty sins she would occupy herself in kissing her own palms and her own arms, and the bare knees which she would raise up to her lips one by one.
Such was her curiosity in respect of her sensations that she was quite untroubled by modesty or shame. If she were scolded, roughly or ironically, for her narcissistic amorousness she would firmly deny that there was anything excessive in her tenderness, while hiding her eyes behind her hands. In secret, however, she maintained the habit of caressing herself, never admitting that it might qualify as a vice. She became so adept in concealing her predilection, even from herself, that she reserved her most intimate attentions to times when she was safely asleep.
When the time came for her first communion Douceline was enthralled by all the solemn preparations which had to be made. She was thrilled to be given a few sous in order to buy a holy picture of the kind which all the females of the region mounted upon their walls.
The images of the Holy Virgin did not attract her; Douceline preferred the portraits of Jesus, especially those which displayed his most gentle expressions – the ones which tinted his cheeks with rouge, and painted his beard with flames, and set his blue eyes alight with the reflected glow of a diffuse aureole. One picture of Jesus which she saw had a visitant nun at his feet, bathing in the glow of his redly shining heart and declaring: My saviour is everything to me and I am everything to him. In another he looked down, tenderly and a little ambiguously, at a worshipper who proclaimed: The sight of his eyes has blessed my heart.
One image, in which the Sacred Heart was pierced by a dagger, dripping blood the colour of red ink, carried a legend which debased one of the most beautiful metaphors of mystical theology: The Lord’s gift to his most favoured children is the wine which intoxicates the souls of the innocents. The Jesus from whose breast that jet of carmine sprayed had an infinitely loving and reassuring face, a blue robe decorated with little golden flowers, and delicate – almost translucent – hands where two tiny stars were made captive. Douceline adored this image absolutely, and when it became hers she made a vow, writing on the back of the picture: 1 give myself to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, because it is given to me.
Frequently thereafter, when she looked up from her half-open missal, Douceline would lose herself in contemplation of that loving and reassuring face, murmuring without opening her mouth: “To you! To you!”
As far as the mystery of the Eucharist was concerned, Douceline understood nothing of its intended significance. At communion she received the host without emotion, without any remorse for her incomplete and insincere confessions, without any experience of holy affection. Her heart was entirely reserved for the loving and reassuring face.
Douceline finally succeeded, by the force of dogged perseverance, in memorising the catechism. She noted therefrom the preference which Jesus had for beautiful souls and his corollary disdain for beautiful faces, and afterwards spent hours looking at herself in a mirror, utterly dismayed to find herself so pretty. Chagrined by this discovery, she prayed so fervently to become plainer that she gave herself a fever, awakening one morning with pustules all over her face.
In the delirium which attended her illness she proffered grateful words of love; when she had recovered she thanked Jesus effusively for the white pockmarks which now marked her forehead and cheeks. She offered up these thankful prayers while kneeling on a hard stone floor, and when her grazed knees bled she kissed the wounds and sucked up the blood, saying to herself: “This is the blood of Jesus, because he has given me his own heart”.
During the weeks which passed while she was weakened by the anaemia which followed her fever her secret habit was once again revealed to her conscious mind. She would occasionally wake to discover herself engaged in her caresses, but would quickly abandon them and return to sleep. One night, though, she woke to find her fingers sticky with blood. She was very frightened, and quickly got up to wash herself, but the blood had stained her nightgown too, and seemed to be everywhere.
Her mother was fast asleep. Fearfully, Douceline snatched up the consecrated picture from the shelf where she had placed it, and turned it around so that she might hide herself from the face of Jesus. She took off her nightgown and got dressed, all a-tremble; then she took the picture out into the fields, and buried it.
She returned, weeping and nearly fainting, to the house. Her mother had awakened by that time, and took care to explain to her what had occurred. Douceline accepted the explanation, as she was bound to do. Nevertheless, she could not believe that what had happened was entirely natural. She felt bitterly resentful of the fact that her own Jesus, whom she had felt compelled to suffocate beneath the soil, had borne silent witness to her sin and degradation. That Jesus now seemed to her to be dead.
The Angels of Perversity Page 2
