“In Mansfield,” Alan Pauls has written, “sickness is much more than a theme of the journal, it is its only subject matter, its obsession, its favorite prey, and at the same time what gives her writing a rhythm, a cadence, a regularity.”
Sickness was the axis of her tormented life and she spoke obsessively about her illness in the journal, just as the fly murdered by Tongoy — had it possessed the power of speech — could have spoken at great length about its own form of consumption: the moisture of the dry martini.
MAUGHAM, WILLIAM SOMERSET (Paris, 1874–Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, Nice, 1965). This English writer, who was born and died in France, published in 1949 a summary of the fifteen volumes of notes he had taken over more than half a century, a diary — entitled A Writer’s Notebook—which invariably took as its inspiration Jules Renard’s diary, one he regarded as a lesser masterpiece of French literature.
Maugham’s diary has always accompanied me over the years. “I am on the wing” is how it ends, and I have always considered this sentence and applied it to my life.
I share Maugham’s belief that “there is in the heroic courage with which man confronts the irrationality of the world a beauty greater than the beauty of art […]. I find it,” he goes on, “in the cool determination of Captain Oates when he went out to his death in the arctic night rather than be a burden to his comrades. I find it in the loyalty of Helen Vagliano, a woman not very young, not very pretty, not very intelligent, who suffered hellish torture and accepted death, for a country not her own, rather than betray her friends.”
Maugham always reminds me that nobility of spirit exists and this nobility does not come from thought or depend on culture and education. It has its roots in the human being’s most primitive instincts. The refuge against despair is perhaps to be found in the consciousness that the spirit’s salvation is a possibility.
MICHAUX, HENRI (Namur, 1899–Paris, 1984). It’s the end of the year, but it’s not the end of the century, nor are we in Valparaiso with Tongoy, we are with Henri Michaux at sea aboard the Boskoop, which takes him—“severe and reserved the boat,” he tells us in his travel journal — in the direction of Ecuador, final or penultimate day of 1927, I cannot be sure about the date. If private journals have one limitation, it is the calendar. As Blanchot has observed, the journal, so susceptible to the movements of life and capable of every freedom — since dreams, fictions, thoughts, commentaries about oneself, important or insignificant events, everything suits the journal, whatever their order or disorder — the journal is, however, subject to a seemingly trivial, but fearful clause: it must respect the calendar. It’s strange, but this respect for dates — I don’t know if Blanchot thought about it — vanishes at sea, as is evident in Michaux’s travel journal, which right from the beginning is tossed about by the waves: “Let me see, are there thirty or thirty-one days in December? And is it two or three days that we have been at sea? In the non-calendar of the sea? Poor diary!”
This morning, shortly after Rosa left for work, I went looking for Ecuador, I searched for the book in the library in order to reread it before tackling this author’s entry in my timid dictionary. While I was searching for it, perhaps providentially, I came across a short essay by Proust on Flaubert, an essay I had forgotten about, which, after I reread it, ended up influencing the construction of my entry on Michaux, as will now become clear.
Let us start anew.
MICHAUX, HENRI. All his life, Michaux thought of man as a “broken animal” with an unsatisfied hunger for the infinite. His style is always very dry. His style, did I say? All his writing is in fact a hard struggle against it: “Style, the ability to install himself and to install the world, is that what man is? That suspicious acquisition for which the jolly writer is praised? […] Try to get out. See far enough inside yourself for your style not to be able to follow you.”
Michaux’s travels were always really inner, almost armchair, travels, though we see him at sea or in the thick of the Ecuadorean forest. They were really journeys of self-study. In Ecuador we see him board the Boskoop and, although we pass through varied scenery, we soon notice that what most interests us is the traveler himself and that unique way of relating to the environment that leads him to revolutionize the typical travel journal or description of what is seen en route and to turn it into a distressing private journal of anxiety. His language travels inward and is quick as a whip. Sometimes a sentence consists of two bare and solitary words. “Radical introspection,” he writes, for example, or “intravenous connections with the landscape.”
This morning, while searching for Ecuador, I came across the essay by Proust I had forgotten about. I started flicking through it — only to find out what it was about — and in the end I couldn’t put it down. In his essay, Proust speaks of that confusion — still in force today, by the way — regarding the episode of the madeleine. He bemoans the fact that certain people, some of them extremely learned, ignorant of the rigorous but veiled composition of Swann’s Way, believed that the novel was a kind of book of memories, linked according to the accidental laws of the association of ideas. “In support of this He,” says Proust, “they quoted pages in which some crumbs of madeleine dunked in herbal tea remind me of a whole period from my life. Well […], to switch from one scene to another, I simply used not a fact, but the purest and most useful join I could find, a phenomenon of memory.”
Proust then suggests we read Chateaubriand’s Memoirs, in which he says it is perfectly clear that the author was also familiar with this method of abrupt transition, this phenomenon of memory. While in Montboissier, Chateaubriand suddenly hears a thrush sing. And this song he had listened to so much when he was young immediately takes him back to Combourg, urges him, together with the reader, to switch time and place. Immediately the narrative is situated somewhere else.
This technical device, this phenomenon of memory, this method of abrupt transition reminded me this morning of the overwhelming simplicity of a method I learned about from Jean Echenoz, the French novelist, who one evening, in the Aviador — a bar in Barcelona, decorated with propellers and shields, remains of airports and air disasters — talked to me about abrupt but effective transitions in his stories. “A bird goes by,” he said. “I follow it. This enables me to go wherever I like in the narrative.” It struck me as a very interesting lesson, one to bear in mind, and I remember that I thought that, viewed in this way, any line in a story could become a migratory bird, for example. I took note of all this because it struck me as a very good means by which, in the moment that a written sentence lasts, one can simply start listening to other voices, other rooms. In fact Echenoz applies his theory in Double Jeopardy, where the duke, Pons, handles some binoculars in the south of Asia and, on focusing them, sees the flight of some migratory birds — in a way that recalls those minute signs in Cosmos that reveal to Gombrowicz the direction of the flight of the narrative — which in arrowhead formation — apparently pointing to the next chapter — head straight for Paris. As a result, confronted by such an instantaneous change of scene, the reader is likewise obliged to get hold of some good binoculars.