Authors: Alberto Manguel
Douglas LePan, writing to me in the fall of 1995, shortly before his death, had this to say: “I regard it as slightly unfair that I must be preparing to take my leave at just the moment when the game here is beginning to become interesting.”
I read Chateaubriand as my contemporary.
I have a literary interest in religions. I have no formal training in any of them, so my religious practice (or rather, lack of it) is piecemeal and haphazard. Yehuda Elberg gave me, a few years ago, an eighteenth-century silver mezuzah which I fixed onto the right-hand doorpost of my writing room, as the injunction in Deuteronomy commands. Following tradition, I placed it diagonally, a compromise reached between those medieval talmudists who argued for the horizontal position and those who preferred the vertical.
I read somewhere of a debate on whether Jewish prison cells should carry a mezuzah, since only permanent
residences require one and it is hoped that residence in a prison is not permanent. The scripture inside the mezuzah promises, among other things, rain in due season: “the first rain and the latter rain, that thou mayest gather in thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil.” In my case, I take these to be metaphors of writing.
Chateaubriand, wondering whether God is satisfied with one’s work as with one’s life, succinctly asks, “Is a book enough for God?” I should hope so.
A year ago today, my daughter Alice called me from Ottawa to tell me the unbelievable news, that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Throughout the day she called back, sobbing, with updates. She was alone in her apartment and needed to share the horror. Since I didn’t have a television set, I listened to the radio. Not seeing the images allowed me room, I believe, for reflection while the carnage was being described. The hatred explicit in the act seemed overwhelming. How far does someone need to be pushed to breed such hatred of the Other?
The Other, defined in two lines by Browning that have troubled me since school:
I never saw a brute I hated so;
He must be wicked to deserve such pain
.
The nineteenth century called terrorists Nihilists, those who care for nothing. They are not afraid of dying; their slogan is the one chanted by the fascists during the Spanish Civil War:
!Viva la muerte!
That evening, before going to sleep, I opened Chateaubriand and read how he confesses that the Revolution would have caught him up in its flow, had he not seen the first head carried at the end of a pike. And then I came upon this: “Murder will never be in my eyes an object of admiration and an argument for freedom; I know nothing more servile, more despicable, more cowardly, more narrow-minded than a terrorist.”
On the train, a week ago, I read Thomas Harris’s sequel to
The Silence of the Lambs
. The hero-monster with no purpose in life except his own satisfaction: has that character been created at any other time in history? Hannibal Lecter is our egotistical role model, and ours a society in which an acceptable image of revenge is literally eating your enemy’s brains out. How can we then complain of other people’s madness?
I mention this on the phone to Katherine, who says that I always exaggerate.
The West recognizes the Other only to better despise it, and is then astonished at the answer reflected back. Ferdinando Camon once said to Primo Levi, “There is something in Christian culture that recommends relations with ‘the Other’ with the sole purpose of achieving his conversion. … The fate of’ the Other’ is considered as nothing compared to his conversion. If you look into this assertion, at the end of a certain time you can see extermination.”
The old truisms still hold: that violence breeds violence; that all power is abusive; that fanaticism of any kind is the enemy of reason; that propaganda is propaganda even when it purports to rally us against iniquity; that war is never glorious except in the eyes of the victors, who believe that God is on the side of the big battalions.
Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.
Chateaubriand: “We live only by means of style.”
The horror felt at acts such as those of last year echoes back throughout history: the horror of the Arabs at the brutality of the first crusaders; the Incas disbelieving that anything human could be as sanguinary as the hordes of Pizarro; the Tasmanian aborigines unable to put into words (their language did not possess the terms) the brutishness of the European settlers.
History, in our eyes, seems to take place through comparisons.
A few days after the tragedy, I heard of someone who had been trapped that morning inside a bookstore close to the World Trade Center. Since there was nothing to do but wait for the dust to settle, he kept on browsing through the books, in the midst of the sirens and the screams. Chateaubriand notes that, during the chaos of the French Revolution, a Breton poet just arrived in Paris asked to be taken on a tour of Versailles. “There are people,” Chateaubriand comments, “who, while empires collapse, visit fountains and gardens.”
In 1930 André Breton outrageously suggested that “the simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can
pull the trigger, into the crowd.” He meant the action to exist only in the sphere of the unrestrained imagination. He was writing about literature; reality co-opted his writing.
I meet Mavis Gallant at La Rotonde for coffee. She tells me how struck she was last year by the French need to show sympathy for America, and how anyone with the slightest “American” accent (Canadian, Australian or whatever) received condolences; she felt obliged to accept them graciously. A friend of hers went into a shop in Paris and, having shown herself by her accent to be “American,” was immediately surrounded by well-wishers and sympathizers, only to discover, minutes later, that her credit card had been pinched.
In his memoir on Torquato Tasso, Chateaubriand notes how convinced the poet was of a numinous presence in the world. One day, sitting by the fire, he saw a ray of sun enter through a window and remarked,
“Ecco l’amico spirito che cortesemente è venuto favellarmi.”
(“Here’s the friendly spirit that has so politely come to converse with me.”)
A few months ago, C. tried to save a magnolia tree that we had to remove when we decided to rebuild the collapsing barn in order to lodge the library. He replanted it and hopes it will survive. The tree looks terribly frail, cut back
and thin. Chateaubriand begins his
Memoirs
with a few trees he has planted in his garden in Aulnay, so small that he would cast them into his shadow when he stood “between them and the sun.”
Mavis sent a card with something she had forgotten to tell me—how someone described the people throwing themselves out of the World Trade Center: “They looked like commas in the sky.”
All day it has been sunny. There are bees flying very low, buzzing around my ankles in the grass.
I feel exhausted by the news (the invention of the “war on terrorism,” the justifications for invading Iraq) on our newly acquired television, and by the recapitulations of last year’s events.
We create climates of hatred. During the military dictatorship in Argentina, the loathing and fear felt towards anyone in uniform was palpable. I’ve felt that on different occasions, when visiting Barbados, Iraq, Jerusalem.
Maybe our rulers and our gods must be made to look angry. Julien Green says that, in the eighteenth century in
Scotland, the word “wrath” kept coming up so frequently in the pulpit that a certain printer of sermons, having exhausted his provision of Ws, was forced to use two Vs instead.
Our god is the god of fairy tales, setting tests for his three sons, each of whom believes himself to be the best-loved, though none is ever truly “the chosen one.”
In Georges Courteline’s
Les Balances:
So tell me, you were mentioning God a while ago. Do you know him?
Yes and no. I know him in that I’ve heard him mentioned, but we’re not on such intimate terms that we’d play billiards together.
Chateaubriand assumes that a world has come to an end and that he, a shadow among shadows, will write down what he recalls of its destruction. Perhaps that is all we do: remember. Does all this dredging up of images and words serve a purpose? “The recollections that awaken in my memory overwhelm me with their power and their volume. And yet, what are they for the rest of the world?”
Doris Lessing, commenting on September n: “Americans felt that they had lost Paradise. They never
asked themselves why they thought they had the right to be there in the first place.”
David Wojnarowicz, from “In the Shadow of the American Dream: Soon All This Will Be Picturesque Ruins,” written in 1991: “Americans can’t deal with death unless they own it.”
The ancient Anglo-Saxons allowed Roman buildings to crumble and then wrote elegies to the ruins. Other examples? The correspondence of the illustrious French women of the eighteenth century; the English detective novel of the golden age; Joseph Roth and Sandor Marai; the novels and stories of Mavis Gallant; the
Pillow-Book
of Sei Shonagon … all these attempts to recapture the past have a deep elegiac quality.
For Chateaubriand, the world we see is
already
memory: of things fleeting, ephemeral, gone and yet unwilling to relinquish us entirely. The past will not go away: what we are experiencing only exists in the moment that goes by.
Chateaubriand tells the story of his sister’s spiritual director, a certain M. Livoret, who on the night of his appointment was visited by the apparition of a certain Count of Châteaubourg. The ghost pursued him everywhere:
indoors, in the forests, in the fields. One day, unable to bear it any longer, M. Livoret turned to the ghost and said, “Monsieur de Châteaubourg, please leave me,” to which the ghost answered, “No. ”
For us it is the present that is constant; we refuse to let it go. Newscasters take for granted a public infected with forgetfulness, unable to recall what occurred moments earlier; a public in need of the constant ghost of “the event.” Is this our attempt to eliminate mortality? Brief flashes, repetition, a sense of immediacy; we are offered something like a never-ending moment that allows no distance in time or space.
Another definition of hell: the eternal re-enactment of a deed purged of any possibility of passing.
Chateaubriand: “One thing humbles me: memory is often a quality associated with foolishness; usually it belongs to slow-witted souls whom it renders even slower because of the baggage it loads upon them. And yet, what would we be without memory? We would forget our friendships, our loves, our pleasures, our business; genius would be unable to collect its thoughts; the most affectionate of hearts would lose its tenderness if it did not remember; our existence would be reduced to the
successive moments of an endlessly flowing present. There would be no past.”
The last word in the
Memoirs
is “eternity.”
A village squabble, or
querelle de clocher
. Our mayor has decided to install mechanical bells in the church tower, since the old, hand-rung ones were riddled with bullets fired years ago by a drunken hunter. Several of the villagers gather outside the church door to discuss at what time the bells should start and stop ringing. They quickly vote down the traditional custom of ringing twice every hour, begun so that whoever has not started counting from the first toll may be able to start his count again. An ex-gendarme, who lives at the far end of the village and can therefore barely hear the bells, argues that they should begin with the angelus at six, and end with the angelus twelve hours later. Several others, who live close to the church, disagree because they don’t want to be woken up so early in the morning. The argument becomes heated. Finally, exasperated, my neighbour, a long-time socialist brought up on the secular legislation imposed by the French Revolution (which Chateaubriand so deeply regretted), blurts:
“You know what you can do with your angelus? You can go stuff it up your—!”
To which the ex-gendarme, drawing himself up very straight and very stiff, replies:
“Monsieur, if we lose the angelus, we lose France!”
An infinite number of tiny moments of bliss, almost always unexpected, very fleeting, unremarkable. The sight of the full moon outside the window, the taste of a certain apricot jam, the sudden pressure of a hand, a line by Stevenson in
Kidnapped:
“I’ve a grand memory for forgetting …”
The weight of happiness: Chateaubriand says that he has always gained strength from adversity. “If ever happiness had seized me in its arms, I would have suffocated.”
And yet not everything he recalls is adversity. He describes how, as a child, he lusted after Dido in the
Aeneid
and translated Lucretius’s
Aeneadum genitrix, hominum divumque voluptas
(“Mother of Aeneas’s sons, voluptuous delight of men and gods”) with such ardour that his teacher tore the poem from his hands and set him to study Greek roots.
Chateaubriand’s childhood reading: “I would steal small candle-ends in the chapel to read at night the seductive
descriptions of the troubles of the soul.” I too remember reading, throughout a wonderfully long summer, all sorts of books in which I unexpectedly found an erotic apprenticeship, under the cool sheets, my skin hot from the sun, a flashlight shining its light on the page, driven by the unwillingness to fall asleep and let the story break off.
Beckford, at the beginning of
Vathek:
“He did not think, with the Caliph Omar ben Abdalaziz, that it was necessary to make a hell of this world to enjoy paradise in the next.”
Pouring rain that steams on the hot earth.