Point of view: When Watson is reflecting on the mysterious murder and looks back at Miss Morstan’s house, it isn’t only the thought of the woman he loves that consoles him. “It was soothing,” he writes, “to catch even that passing glimpse of a tranquil English home in the midst of the wild, dark business which had absorbed us.” The adjectives are significant.
WEDNESDAY
I’m astonished by the ease with which British xenophobia of the late nineteenth century slips into a particularly nasty anti-Semitism in the twentieth. By the ease with which the Jewish caricature is introduced into the plot of the detective novels of the golden age: Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, Dorothy L. Sayers, E. C. R. Lorac. … Even after Hitler, there seems to be, in the British imagination, a fixed caricature of the Jew, often damned with ludicrous praise, as in Anthony Berkeley’s The Silk Stocking Murders. The detective is an English gentleman, Roger Sheringham; his assistant, the murdered woman’s sister, Anne; the murderer (revealed in the last pages, of course) is a suave, rich, refined Jew called Pleydell. After meeting him, Anne comments, “I’ve never met a Jew I liked so much before.”
“The real pure-blooded Jew,” Roger tells her, “is one of the best fellows in the world. It’s the hybrid Jew, the Russian and Polish and German variety, that’s let the race down so badly.”
This is England, 1928.
FRIDAY
The wind last night broke a branch of one of the sophora trees, the one that is practically hollow. Nothing serious. C. wonders how a hollow tree can still keep on living, sprouting new leaves every year.
I return to this notion of balance. The foreigner (like the criminal) destroys the agreed-upon equilibrium. The world must be restored to a clear-cut vocabulary of white and black. There can be no ambiguity in the detective novel, at least not in the “classic” detective novel. Browning’s lines,
Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things.
The honest thief the tender murderer,
The superstitious atheist, demi-rep
That loves and saves her soul in new French
books …
cannot apply to the Holmes saga.
Graham Greene said that the Browning quotation could stand as an epigraph to any of his books. In The Power and the Glory he wrote, “When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity. … That was a quality God’s image carried with it … when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of the imagination.”
Kierkegaard: “Most people really believe that the Christian commandments (e.g., to love one’s neighbour as oneself) are intentionally a little too severe—like putting the clock ahead half an hour to make sure of not being late in the morning.”
SATURDAY
Thick, heavy rain. Impossible to see halfway down the garden. I have to imagine what is there: the back wall with the fig tree and the vines, the small cherry orchard (can an orchard contain only four trees?), the large drooping pines, the quartet of white birches where the hedgehogs like to hide.
Doyle quotes Goethe again at the end of the book (the lines are from Xenian, which Goethe wrote with Schiller in 1796): “Schade dass die Natur nur einen Mensch aus dir schuf,/ Denn zum würdigen Mann war und zum Schelmen der Stoff.” (“Unfortunately Nature made only one man out of you,/ Although there was material for both a good man and a scoundrel.”)
A variation on the theme of the double: the sleuth as criminal. Numerous detective novels (since Israel Zangwill’s The Big Bow Mystery of 1892) play on this conceit. Perfectly appropriate to describe the balance in Holmes’s double nature (perhaps not far from Wilde’s Dorian Gray), these words spoken by Watson: “So swift, silent, and furtive were his movements, like those of a trained bloodhound picking out a scent, that I could not but think what a terrible criminal he would have made had he turned his energy and sagacity against the law instead of exerting them in its defence.”
SUNDAY
Watson marries Miss Morstan. He tells Holmes that “Miss Morstan has done me the honour to accept me as a husband in prospective.” (To which the inveterate bachelor Holmes replies, “I really cannot congratulate you.”) Watson’s romance has always made me uncomfortable—as a child, because I squirmed when I had to witness adult displays of sexual affection; now, because I find the relationship so utterly unbelievable. Maybe that is the reason for the learned confusion regarding Watson’s wedded life in the Doyle canon (whether Watson married Miss Morstan secretly before the events narrated in The Sign of Four, whether she died in “The Adventure of the Empty House,” whether Watson married again in “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier” and, if he did, who the second Mrs. Watson was).
MONDAY
The rain has stopped. For several weeks now I’ve followed a certain routine: working on one book in the morning, on another in the afternoon. This is easier now that the days are getting colder. Two different voices or tones: the first tries to be coherent and follows the thread of a narrative or argument; the second (this diary) is fragmented, haphazard. The second allows me to think without an established destination.
The reader contradicts the writer’s method, whatever that may be. As a reader, I’ll follow a carefully plotted story carelessly, allowing myself to be distracted by details and aleatory thoughts; on the other hand, I’ll read a fragmentary work (Valéry, for instance, or Pío Baroja) as if I were connecting the dots, in search of order. In both cases, however, I look for (or imagine) a link between beginning and end, as if all reading were, in its very nature, circular. Maybe Joyce intuited this quality of reading when he decided to lock in the chaos of Finnegans Wake. The Sign of Four ends as it begins: with Holmes reaching for the cocaine bottle.
On the door to my library I’ve written a variation on the motto of Rabelais’s Abbey of Thelême: “LYS CE QUE VOUDRA” (“Read what you will”).
November
Elective Affinities
MONDAY
Back in Canada.
I’m in Calgary for a short visit, to attend a conference at the Banff Centre for the Arts. The city seems to have extended itself in the past few years, allotment after identical allotment, an unstoppable growth, a horrible imitation of the American Midwestern model made up of crowded monstrosities with no urban heart—no squares, no schools, no churches, no small shops. What kind of dialogue or communication can take place in communities like these?
When I first read Goethe’s Elective Affinities—twenty-five years ago at least—I did so after a long conversation with Hector Bianciotti on Marivaux’s La dispute, which he had seen in Lavelli’s production and which I had had to miss because I couldn’t afford the price of the ticket. Like so many other Marivaux plays, La dispute explores the nature of love: Two aristocratic characters wish to resolve the question of who is more likely to be unfaithful, man or woman, and in order to reach an answer they place four children in solitary seclusion, each looked after by a couple of “savages.” Only once the children reach the age of puberty are they allowed to meet, and the aristocrats, from a scientific distance, can then observe and study the children’s behaviour.
Hector loved above all the final moment in Lavelli’s production, when, the experiment concluded, the aristocrats are about to cross over onto the island where the children are kept, but stop at the edge of the bridge; at this point the curtain falls. For Hector, the aristocrats’ true character lay in this hesitation: to observe but not to experience. (Earlier he had noticed the same hesitation in the film version of Hartley’s The Go-Between, when the matriarch refuses to go and see for herself her daughter’s infidelity.)
Somewhere I read that King Frederick II tried to conduct a similar experiment, not on the nature of love but on the nature of language. In order to discover what our “original” language was, he ordered that a number of newborn babes should be tended by wet-nurses who were forbidden to speak to them; in this way he imagined he
might hear the first words spoken “naturally,” untaught. The experiment failed because none of the babies lived. Apparently we need language as we need food, in order to survive.
That an experiment is doomed to failure doesn’t make it, of course, ineffective. In Werther, Goethe facetiously remarks, “If mutual trust had earlier brought them together again, if love and understanding had helped them open their hearts to each other, our friend might still have been saved.” Not so, as Elective Affinities proves, because it is in the characters’ own nature that they must fail, and in that failure lies the novel’s success.
TUESDAY
Elective Affinities has something of a soap-opera plot centred around its four main characters: the middle-aged Eduard and Charlotte, who loved one another in their youth, drifted apart and then finally married after their partners died; and Ottilie and the Captain, their long-term guests, with whom they fall respectively in love.
“Fate,” says Charlotte, late in the book, “takes command of certain matters, and is very stubborn. Reason and virtue, duty and everything sacred oppose it in vain; things are likely to happen that seem justified to Fate but not to us; and so Fate asserts itself, whatever choices we make.” And then she realizes the truth, which sounds like an accusation: “But what am I saying! In fact, Fate is trying to carry out my own wishes and intentions, which I, in my thoughtlessness, have acted against.”
I am puzzled and enchanted by this realization. Charlotte argues that Fate knows better than herself her own intentions. What is this Fate that is wiser than the protagonists? Not the Fate (in the guise of Death) of Cocteau’s story in Le grand écart, as helpless as his victims to know the future:
A young gardener said to his prince, “Save me! I met Death in the garden this morning and he made a menacing gesture. Tonight I wish by some miracle I could be far away, in Ispahan.”
The prince lent him his swiftest horse.
That afternoon, walking in the garden, the prince came face to face with Death. “Why,” he asked, “did you make a threatening gesture at my gardener this morning?”
“It wasn’t a threatening gesture,” answered Death. “It was a gesture of surprise. I saw him far from Ispahan this morning, and I knew that I must take him in Ispahan tonight.”
Eduard and Charlotte, the aristocratic gardeners in Elective Affinities, never shy away from the encounters that Fate prepares for them (even if sometimes they arrive, as Charlotte does, a little late). They merely follow the plot: Fate as story.
Where does this notion come from? Not from the imaginaire of the Greeks, as Paul Veyne makes clear in his lovingly written book on the “constitutive imagination,” as he calls it, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? The notion belongs to literature, or rather to the reading of literature, when the reader accepts what he reads as fiction and yet “willingly suspends disbelief” for the sake of the story; this is what we mean by the inevitability of the plot. All business is conducted between the characters and the reader; the author is absent, or (in the case of Goethe) he is merely a master of ceremonies who comments on but has no say in his characters’ behaviour.
The youthful Stephen Dedalus has this to say in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak. … The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
Today, playing with hypertext in the postmodernist sandbox, where we have the illusion of diverting the plot down a finite number of paths, we are like Eduard and Charlotte and Ottilie and the Captain; we choose possibilities that Fate (like an authoritative parent) has already chosen for us.
I’m reminded of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who jotted down this idea for a story in one of his astounding notebooks:
A person to be writing a tale, and to find that it shapes itself against his intentions: that the characters act otherwise than he thought: that unforeseen events occur; and a catastrophe comes which he strives in vain to avert. It might shadow forth his own fate—he having made himself one of the personages.
WEDNESDAY
The Palliser Hotel in Calgary looks incongruously European in this Midwestern setting, like something out of Henry James. I sit in a red velvet armchair among potted palms, waiting for the car to take me to Banff, and watch the characters enter and exit a story.
Goethe never bothers with architecture in his novels. And though I wrote that he has no say in his characters’ behaviour, this formality isn’t coldness; one senses a raging passion behind the gilded façade, something torn between emotion, duty and an ultimate sense of helplessness. When Eduard, Charlotte and the Captain are discussing the elective affinities in chemistry and comparing them to human relationships, one knows that the carefully arranged words, exchanged as in one of those philosophical dialogues dear to Hobbes and Newton, betray a turmoil that is kept unseen, a rawness that (I like to think) is Goethe’s own. My fondness for the old man comes, I believe, from that brittle combination of strength and delicacy. There are times when the clean and proper shell of his prose moves me to tears, for the sake of the darkness it covers.
Like his beloved Diderot, Goethe always seems to be laying his working tools out for the reader’s inspection. There is a startling self-assurance in this, like a magician inviting the public to inspect his bag of tricks. Eduard, criticizing the author of the book he’s reading, calls the man “a true Narcissus: he finds his own image everywhere and sees the entire world against the background of his own self.” This Bespiegdung or “mirroring” is, of course, Goethe’s own, or rather, that of his characters.
The Colombian Fernando Vallejo, explaining why he will not second-guess his characters’ thoughts: “I am a first-person novelist.”
The physical landscape of Goethe’s novel becomes the landscape of the characters’ emotions; they attempt to domesticate nature much as they attempt to plan their affinities on an actual chart. Nature is seen as a sort of Carte de Tendre, the seventeenth-century allegorical map that traces the way to the loved one’s heart. Charlotte’s garden, for instance, is too easy a symbol for their experiment in the human world (the hut that can fit two or three or, as Charlotte heavily adds, “even a fourth,” etc.) and yet it matches the artificial tone of their dialogue—artificial, at least, to my foreign ears. There is something of the maxim-collector in their speeches (Charlotte ending the chapter with “And yet in many cases … it is kinder and more useful to write nothing of import, than not to write at all”). How different the tone, a little later in the book, when the irreversible nature of the present is described, and another voice, intuition or experience, not the mere imitation of Lichtenberg’s aphorisms or the Book of Proverbs, calls out: “And yet the present will not be deprived of its terrible rights. They spent part of the night in amusing conversation, which seemed all the freer because the heart unfortunately had no part in it.” These words are spoken from an intimate, visceral understanding of such a moment, one we all recognize.
Laurence Olivier was once asked how he managed to utter Oedipus’s now famous piercing cry of pain. “I heard about how they catch ermine,” he explained. “In the Arctic, they put down salt and the ermine comes to lick it. And his tongue freezes to the ice. I thought about that when I screamed in Oedipus.” An absolute grasp of a moment of truth.
“These analogies,” says Charlotte, “are effective and entertaining, and who would not gladly amuse himself with such similarities?”
THURSDAY
This morning, I read in the Calgary paper that once again the provincial government intends to cut all manner of social programs, including support for handicapped people. A legally blind man, whose wife was suffering from multiple sclerosis and couldn’t work, was threatened with having his government payments cut off because he had taken a par
t-time job. His disability benefit amounted to $800 Canadian a month; no one can live on that amount, paying for rent and food. The statistics of child poverty in Alberta are astounding, especially in one of the richest provinces in one of the richest countries on earth. In 1996, for instance, the number of children living below the poverty line was 148,000.
What did I do about any of this?
I feel like Mittler, the fifth character in Elective Affinities, the outsider who, on the one hand, will not “waste his time in any household where there was no help to give and no quarrel to resolve,” and, on the other, haughtily refuses to help out his best friends. Even though he fails, he seems to me to be a worthy Mittler (the word means “mediator”). “Those who are superstitious about names,” we are told, “maintain that the name Mittler had obligated him to take on this strangest of all vocations.” If so, my name would echo perhaps my countless Mangeln (“faults” in German), if Mangelhaftigkeit (“inadequacy”) is my lot. The English etymology is kinder, associating my name with “among” or “a person among many”—in other words, one of Dr. Johnson’s “common readers.”
SATURDAY
Back home to France. Every time I return, I’m astonished to see, after the immense prairie skies, the stinginess of the skies in European cities.
Goethe seems to be always thinking; anywhere you go in his writing, there is never pure narration, there’s always conscious, articulated thought, permeating every room like the smell of fried onions. I enjoy this pervasiveness; a character can’t make a simple gesture without it being reflected upon, after being caught in the all-seeing eye of this minor god. The omniscient Goethe; this reminds me of a calligraphic sign that hung in the bedroom of a schoolmate of mine when we were both nine or ten, in Buenos Aires:
A Reading Diary Page 8
