The Attraction of Things

by Roger Lewinter

  Jean-François, whose invitation I now declined, during a first dinner arranged in 1963 in Paris — when, wanting to become a film director, I was studying for the entrance exam for the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques, which I made a point of failing while writing, as a pastime, a paper on Diderot, which led me to the edition of the Complete Works — one muggy evening in May, on the patio of the Dôme, had launched me on a path: he wanted to know whether I would be interested in taking over the maid’s room that Geneviève Serreau was renting to him, because, after a year of studious wandering having decided to learn Chinese, he had just received a grant to go to Beijing; and since, at the time, I was thinking about leaving the Swiss House, I accepted; while incidentally he spoke to me about a book he had discovered, by Wilhelm Fränger, devoted to the Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch, more accurately titled The Millennial Kingdom, about which he demonstrated that it traced, not, as was commonly believed, the follies of the Fall, but, referring to a Judeo-Christian heresy, a means of salvation centered on an amorous practice the knowledge of which could not have been the product of the painter’s free imagination; a hypothesis evidently imposed by certain details of the painting, which were otherwise inexplicable, and which were restructuring the entire body of work of Hieronymus Bosch, which, ceasing to be a series of commissions, articulated an inspired discourse: a gospel that, to the initiated, passed on the teaching of the life of a master; Jean-François suggesting that, since he had decided to learn Chinese, I translate this book in his place, even as he insisted on the difficulty of the work, which, blindly, in the enthusiasm that gave rise to this choice, I took on: because Jean-François, when I had known him in Geneva, in 1961, while we were both completing a degree in the humanities, had so impressed me with his intelligence that, not thinking myself at his level, I hadn’t sought to pursue his company; and it was he who, unexpectedly, having gotten my contact information from a common friend, had recently called me.

  At the time, connection by means of cross-invasion, where the question of knowing who is who ceases to be relevant — because one becomes the other, completed through him —, was, I thought, of no interest to me; while I had prepared myself for it by studying, for a year and a half, through an arbitrary choice that I couldn’t really explain to myself, since it vaguely annoyed me, The Man without Qualities, by Musil, the theme of which is the approach, by a novice, of this state; and when I had taken on the task of translating the Fränger into French, I discovered that it had been translated into English by precisely those who would afterward translate The Man without Qualities; while twelve years later, in 1976 — after having translated, in 1969, a first collection by Groddeck, and identified, in 1974, through the objective and apparently fortuitous sequence of the translations, a convergence between the redistribution of sexual roles that implicated the Groddeckian understanding of sickness and, in Bosch’s work as interpreted by Fränger, the disintegration of the body, which the spirit, through Adamite eroticism, masters even in its transports —, I discovered that an American psychoanalyst, Grotjahn, in The Voice of the Symbol, published in 1972, had already drawn a connection, through reading Fränger, between Bosch and Groddeck; when in June 1963, with Geneviève Serreau, during the course of dinner in the kitchen, the conversation naturally turned to The Man without Qualities, I noted how much I preferred Tonka, a novella that, in sixty pages, incomparably condenses that which remains vague in the two thousand pages of the novel; not learning until October 1981, after her death, that what had struck Geneviève Serreau in 1954, leading her to work for twenty years for Les Lettres Nouvelles, was her reading Tonka, which Les Lettres Nouvelles had just published in translation; and while I didn’t succeed Jean-François in her maid’s room, I recommended to Geneviève Serreau, in September 1963, the Fränger, about which, inexplicably, Jean-François hadn’t spoken to her; and, equally captivated by this book, she had it accepted for publication by Les Lettres Nouvelles; with a patience that I didn’t understand was intended for me, orienting me then in the space from which, through her gaze, radiated the highest pitch of divine madness.

  On Friday, May 27, at noon, while, at my father’s, I attended to the meal — for about ten days, having broken two fingers on his right hand, he had been at Thônex; I insisted, however, that he call me each day at his apartment, so that in giving me his news he would observe a daily routine always at his disposal —, he had just called me, when the telephone rang again: it was Michèle, who, before Pentecost, wanted to let me know that the manuscript of her book was at the publisher’s; so that I asked her whether she had gotten married: “No, but it’s strange you should ask me that, because I’m getting married in two hours”; seized then by a fit of anger, as if, after this probationary period, in which no one had ever deviated from his choice, fate had thus cast its lot; and, spending the afternoon rereading Zen in the Art of Archery, which I had first heard about from Geneviève Serreau — surprised that she had been interested in something I believed to be a form of physical exercise —, I got ready to go to the flea market, where, the next morning, on my arrival, I noticed, gesturing to me eagerly, my lieutenant, whose name I didn’t know — it would take another year for him to tell me —, but he was an accountant, like my father, moreover in a casino — we had come into contact at the time of the red G&T from Saint Petersburg: picking through things at the same time I was and having noticed that I was looking for opera, he handed me the items he found; during which I learned that he was interested in the fox-trot; and, having sometime later asked him to buy a Marcella Sembrich for me, because I had had an argument with old mother Janner, who, seeing that I wanted it, had tripled the price, we had agreed, ever since, to be on the lookout for each other; thus procuring for him the fox-trot, while he attended, with surprising efficiency, to bringing in my unspecified Russian orders — : “Quick, over here, I was afraid you wouldn’t come,” and he held out to me a red G&T — Marcella Sembrich in the “Ah! non giunge uman pensiero,” from La sonnambula —, “and then here’s a Patti; and there are others, tons of them, four crates full, quick”: at Csillagi’s stand, in the middle of the flea market, on the ground, in four crates, there were stacks of G&Ts, red and black, of Fonotipias — mostly “advance copies” —, of Odeons; I stopped picking through them: the rarity within the profusion, the dream of a collector: and, to the accountant, who awaited my verdict: “In twenty years I haven’t come across anything like this; it’s the find of a life”; to Csillagi, without thinking about it: “I’ll take the whole lot”; then, the four crates having been put aside, beginning my tour of the market, I arrived, at the avenue du Mail, to help Audéoud unfold a square Kashmir shawl whose softness, elusively, captivated me — I noticed only, in contrast with its solidity, a single tear from enigmatic wear at its black center —, and, as if everything were understood, asking for time to think — even though Kashmir shawls are snapped up at the flea market —, while the accountant continued to make the rounds, I went to have a coffee with Leuba, who had lent me the 300 francs for the records, and I spoke to him about the Kashmir shawl, putting him in charge of the negotiations on my behalf — since he regularly went to Nepal and India on vacation, I had tossed out the idea, two years earlier, of his finding me “a Kashmir,” and he, not knowing what it was, had at first believed I meant a sweater —; late in the afternoon I would reimburse him for everything, and we would go have dinner; then, without giving another thought to the Kashmir shawl, I returned to the accountant, to transport in his car the four crates of records.

  Kashmir shawls, even before I knew the name — when at five years old, with a little garnet-and-white tablecloth wrapped into a turban, I obstinately disguised myself as a raja —, an enigma — when in Paris, during my pilgrimages to the Louvre, the index finger of the angel in The Virgin of the Rocks pointed at my eyes —, fascinated me even in the oblivion in which I believed myself to be when, in 1972, Svetlana, one night when I was cold giving me a black cashm
ere sweater with a red wax stain, reminded me of their constellation, of which, in 1976, at Csillagi’s, I glimpsed the tattered emblem — twists of roses sewn in gold brocade —, which I couldn’t make up my mind to buy; from then on accumulating missed opportunities, each time there was an imitation at the flea market — a jacquard from Marseille —; one Wednesday morning in particular, at the Ange du Bizarre’s stand, in front of a small orange rectangle, for thirty-five francs, when I hesitated, returning afterward, in vain, since it had been sold, but specifying then to Sabine the shades I wanted; while in February 1977, at an auction whose preview I visited with Michèle, I found the Kashmir shawl that I had sought ever since I had glimpsed its possibility: a large rectangle in which, in volutes of foliage, winding diagonally from two black hearts, one of which bore an indecipherable white signature, crimson roses burst from a lattice, in bud, newly opened, in full bloom; and, describing it to my mother, who, already sick, was at the time going to the auctions to show my father and me that she, too, knew how to buy, furnishing under this pretext the apartment into which I had just moved, I ordered her to buy it, in vain: she had agreed to bid 150 francs; a lady had outbid her; my mother had failed to follow suit; although after the auction this lady, the original owner of the shawl, had offered it to my mother, she alone being interested in it, for 200 francs — taking fees into account, that exceeded the initial bid by only 20 francs —; but, at the flea market, one Wednesday morning, six months after the death of my mother, I noticed on the ground, crumpled in a heap, a Kashmir shawl, which, with Lionel’s help, I unfolded, and without any doubt, by the signature inscribed in the dome, I recognized the Rose Garden, which, two years earlier, had eluded me — Lionel wanted 200 francs for it, I got it for 180 francs, the agreed-upon price —; and when I hung it, I saw that it was designed around two wedges closely notched in the form of a tulip, green and bright turquoise blue, stuck horizontally on either side of two black hearts — where an ace of spades, green and dark blue mixed with ochre, depicted in a filigree of blood the face of a genie —; sea-green eyes that pierced, to the point of rendering it invisible, the profuse splendor surrounding them; identifying the garden of the Millennial Kingdom, also illumined by the light of a look whose penetration articulated in austerity its glory: the Rose Garden, a celebration of the beauty of the world, in order to materialize had required a life that, in embodying it, had offered it a hold; disappearing in its texture, an intersection of gift and loss sustained in their motion, a manifestation of the universe, at its extreme, precisely, in its radiance, transmission.

  The Kashmir shawl that I found that Saturday, May 28, before Pentecost, three years after the Rose Garden, technically differed from it — not made up of small embroidered patches assembled like the parts of a puzzle, it was woven all in one piece —; and, unfolding it for the first time, in the elation of the find of a life, I had perceived a powder trail, without attempting to look more closely, since everything, in the dazzling glimpse of it, was indelibly printed; but, in the horizontal rays of a late afternoon sun, at Leuba’s — who, at noon, as ordered, since no one else was interested in it, had bought it for me for 250 francs —, when for the second time I unfolded it, its serene luminosity at first deceived me; and it wasn’t until after dinner, at home, the third time I unfolded it, that there appeared to me, in its all-encompassing motion, the thread whose molecules, in equal parts solid, liquid, ethereal, according to the interplay of the colors, constructed, through a network of veins, ponds, ferns, a system of gray stills saturated with a reddish glow in which, like a rainbow, the result of focusing the eye on the beyond, from each side of the central black square structured in a Maltese cross by the alternation of four antennae of giant insects on four crystalline thrones, sitting in the lotus position, waist cinched with a pair of flames, torso erect, arms open, raised to shoulder level, bent at the elbow, head back in invocation to the four cardinal points of the universe, a vibration of the heart, suddenly appeared the Angel.

  June 12, 1982

  Duino

  WITH THE SUDDEN APPEARANCE of the Angel, drawing the conclusions that I had been certain of since the end of Le chercheur d’âme, I left the field of theory, the exterior explored, to define the void at its center and enter into it, writing, in three days’ time, from Thursday the third to Saturday the fifth of June, from a journal kept during those four years, Le centre du Cachemire, an aphoristic novel in which I caught hold of myself as I let go; after which I went, from Wednesday evening to Friday afternoon, to Paris, to discuss a translation that someone was asking me to undertake, and to announce, exultant, the good news; knowing that I had to be back in Geneva on Saturday for the flea market, where there would undoubtedly be a verdict on what I had written, which would show me how to proceed; and, at the stand belonging to the Chouans, who specialized in books, where each time I stopped, I found a collection that notably included, for one franc, a manuscript copy, roughly forty years old, judging by the ink and the pages, which it appeared no one had read, of the Poèmes mystiques of Saint John of the Cross, translated by Benoît Lavaud, a little notebook without a cover, like a packet of overdue letters reaching their destination; and, also for one franc, with signature, Poètes de l’univers, by Mercanton, which I wasn’t familiar with but which had, for some time, attracted me, discovering now, at a glance, why, since it dealt with the practice of poetry as a spiritual exercise, and with Rilke, the first poet who, because of his face, had appeared in my world, even if, until a short time ago, I had constantly felt myself drawing back from him.

  In Paris, where we were then living — I was twelve years old —, my mother, to supplement our income, did, on the side, when she found them, occasional secretarial jobs; thus coming to type up the manuscript of a play about Galileo, which was going to be performed at the Burgtheater in Vienna; and, one Sunday, I went with her to Chantilly, to the home of the author, himself an Austrian Jewish émigré, who, in his office, had, displayed everywhere, photographs, some enlarged, of a man whose face, in three-quarter and in profile, because of his nose and chin, made me stop: a poet, from what I learned, the greatest of our time, and difficult to understand; astonished that someone could so resemble, as it appeared to me, my father, who, eight years later, in Geneva, by Rilke, whose work I had neither read nor bought, brought back for me, found for one franc at the little secondhand bookshop on la Petite-Fusterie, book two of the first edition of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, which I didn’t even try to look at, putting it away on the shelf behind the headboard of my bed, to await the moment when I would no longer be unreceptive to it; and it was Geneviève Serreau who, according to the rules, by leading me to ask a particular question, opened me up to Rilke: when she died, in October 1981, I read the collections of short stories that she had published in 1973 and 1976, which I had previously been unable to fathom; and, in Dix-huit mètres cubes de silence, in the epigraph to “Dimanche,” last impressions in the throes of death, I discovered three lines by Rilke, amazed that she had quoted them and that their address was so direct; deciding, in their grip, to buy the poems at the flea market, at the first opportunity, in German — oddly enough, for a long time Leuba had been putting aside for me, when he had it, Rilke’s work, convinced, although he didn’t know him, that I had to like Rilke; and I had finally disabused him, admitting that I couldn’t stand Rilke —; and, by November, at Novel’s, for three francs, I found, in one volume, the complete poems: in the evening, when I wanted to search for where the lines in question could have been taken from, seeing that there was a bookmark, I opened to the marked page: “Solemn Hour”; it was the final stanza: “Whoever now dies somewhere in the world, dies without reason in the world: looks at me.”