These four hundred pages are still many sizes too small for Emily Dickinson’s work. Whether one likes her poetry or not, whether it wrings one’s heart or sets one’s teeth on edge, nevertheless it exists, and in a world far removed from the defenseless people and events described in this infuriating book. Or, as a poetic friend of mine better summarized it:
“Kate Scott!
Great Scot!”
1951
What the Young Man Said to the Psalmist
Pantomime, A Journal of Rehearsals. By Wallace Fowlie (Henry Regnery; $3.50).
Mr. Fowlie is an unabashed New Englander, and, to him, “things are not what they seem.” “Art is long,” though, at least French literature is, and there is something very disarming about the picture of a serious little Boston, or Brookline, boy becoming so infatuated with a foreign language and culture that when he read Baudelaire’s Le Balcon it “flooded me with the desire to come to these poems with more experience than I had.”
Chapter III of his autobiographical book, Pantomime, begins with these sentences: “I must have been about fifteen years old when I rode on a swan boat for the first time. That ride marked my initial distinct awareness of Boston as a city.” He then describes a swan boat ride: the boats themselves, that “originated from Boston’s early enthusiasm for Lohengrin,” and the city, revolving about him “in a cyclical panorama.” These few pages give an almost too neat sample of the quality of Mr. Fowlie’s book. He says of himself: “Any happiness I have ever had … has been learned and rehearsed studiously, prepared and meditated on … a performance of a part fairly well insured against failure.” It is as if he had waited until the fairly advanced age of fifteen, waited until he had formed the association with Wagner and grown familiar with Boston’s buildings and statues, before he was ready to embark.
Tremont Temple and its Baptist sermons, Symphony Hall, the Harvard Glee Club, the Museum of Fine Arts — all these were part of my own childhood background, and as I read his book I could not help making comparisons between Mr. Fowlie’s early impressions and my own. My own first ride on a swan boat occurred at the age of three and is chiefly memorable for the fact that one of the live swans paddling around us bit my mother’s finger when she offered it a peanut. I remember the hole in the black kid glove and a drop of blood. I do not want to set myself up as a model of facing the sterner realities of swan boat rides in order to discredit Mr. Fowlie’s idealization, — but there is remarkably little of blood, sweat, or tears in Mr. Fowlie’s book.
It would be unfair to infer any lack of conflict in Mr. Fowlie himself; he is human and it must be there. However it is fair to criticize that lack as the chief literary fault of the book. These twelve episodic, carefully edited chapters from the life of a scholar and teacher are interesting and often amusing, but one wants more of the facts. The curious thing about it is that the one fact responsible for the lack of conflict is at the same time the most interesting fact of all.
Most children are fascinated by a foreign language; many make up a shared or solitary gibberish, or even pig-latin will serve to give them a sense of privacy and power. But Mr. Fowlie, as later for the swan boat ride, waited patiently for his own language to appear, and he was amply rewarded. In the seventh grade he began studying French, and immediately he became an enchanted boy. The accent, the grammar, the literature — everything about the French language was magical to him, and like Aladdin’s lamp, or the string that leads the hero through the maze, it solved his problems. It provided him with constant interest and, later on, work, and as a highly formalized exercise it offered him the “mask” he had been seeking without knowing it to put him at his ease in the world. Apparently it got him safely through the rigours of adolescence as well, although he presents these in all their solemnity.
The most entertaining sections of the book are those dealing with his early years of mastering French: Paul Claudel mystifying an audience at the Copley Plaza, his first Parisian pension, (“Mangez-vous les haricots à Chicago?”) the scenes with his diction teacher, Mlle. Fayolle-Faylis. He is capable of seeing a joke on himself, as for example in the account of his sedate evening “on the town” in Paris with a more worldly friend. His unnecessary asthma cure, and his life-long passion for the movies are equally real.
It is in these more casual episodes that the charm of the book lies, and in them Mr. Fowlie is more spontaneous than he gives himself credit for. The story of his work on Ernest Psichari, and his interviews with figures of French literature are laborious in contrast. And he has chosen to interpret his various experiences by means of a mystique of clowns and angels, as the spectator and/or actor, that I find hard to follow. But he has attempted to present or suggest some troublesome frames of mind, and being, as I said, a good New Englander, to give the psalmist an honest answer, even in arrière pensée.
1952
The Manipulation of Mirrors
Selected Writings of Jules Laforgue. Edited and translated by William Jay Smith (Grove; $4).
In this book, William Jay Smith, poet and translator of Valéry Larbaud, gives us a judicious sampling of almost everything Jules Laforgue wrote in his tragically short life: a generous number of poems, two of the Moralités légendaires, travel pieces and letters, and excerpts from hard to find or hitherto unpublished “Landscapes and Impressions” and criticism. At the end there is a biographical sketch of Laforgue and a bibliography. Mr. Smith’s introductions to each section are informal but informative; his translations, on the whole, are models of accuracy. The book is obviously a labor of love, and for the reader without French it should make an excellent introduction to Laforgue. The prose reads easily; the poems — but that, of course, is a different matter and perhaps it would be better for both reviewer and the reader new to Laforgue to begin with the prose.
The stories “date” more than the other prose, but they are still good and still amusing. In Hamlet, or the Consequences of Filial Piety (1886) Laforgue achieves what Warren Ramsey in his Jules Laforgue and the Ironic Inheritance, calls his “ironic equilibrium.” It is a sort of acrobat’s small landing-stage from which he surveys the scene of past flights of fancy and plans more daring ones — which, alas, he did not live to make. Hamlet says: “To be — well, to be if one must.” He complains: “There are no longer any fine young ladies; they have all taken up nursing.” After the debacle in the graveyard he tells himself, “Ah, how I must work this winter with all this new material!” It is all still recognizable and topical. The earlier story, The Miracle of the Roses, is much slighter, and mainly illustrates the poet’s obsession with death; it prefigures Zuleika Dobson and Firbank. Also — an old argument about translating — should the translator, when possible, limit his choice of words and phrases to the period of the text? I found expressions like “a real son-of-a-bitch,” “a hopeless ham,” “corny,” and “well-heeled,” grating badly on my ear.