Yet Chekhov — with his scrupulous intellectual honesty — did not altogether discount other elements in the student’s ecstatic happiness: “youth, health, strength”—for, after all, “he was only twenty-two years old.”
URINALS AND EDITORIAL PRACTICES
At the end of the nineteenth century, as France was swept by a wave of fanatical anticlericalism, many town councils and municipalities adopted the policy of erecting urinoirs along the walls of local cathedrals and churches; under the pretext of ensuring hygiene and public decency, the brilliant idea was to have the entire male population of the town pissing day and night against the most venerable monuments that the religious had built.
It seems to me that many modern editors of classic works of literature — and also many film-makers adapting literary masterpieces to the screen — are impelled by a somewhat similar desire for desecration. They append impertinent and preposterous introductions, they impose cover designs and presentations in complete contradiction with the expressed intention of the authors, they write film scripts that negate the meaning of the book they are supposed to adapt, they coolly chop off the epigraphs that the authors had lovingly selected — they generally display patronising arrogance and crass ignorance; they behave as if they were the proprietors of the works they should serve and preserve. Here are some examples (in no particular order). In the cinema, we recently saw what became of Graham Greene’s masterpiece The End of the Affair—no need here for further comment. With books, it is in the paperback reprints of classics that most sins are committed. Just a glance at my humble shelves brings at random Lady Chatterley’s Lover, with a lurid cover on which is printed in characters larger than the title, “Now a sensuous film starring Sylvia Kristel.” Poor Lawrence; you really did not deserve such an indignity. A new reprint of Lolita carries on its cover a reproduction of one of Balthus’s most patently paedophiliac paintings: a little girl caressing herself with an ambiguous smile — yet Nabokov, in his correspondence with his publishers, had taken pains to discuss at great length the question of the dust-jacket of this book, and he stipulated with utter firmness and clarity: “There is one subject which I am emphatically opposed to: any kind of representation of a little girl” (letter, 1 March 1958).
As if later editors would bother to follow authors’ instructions — they do not even read their writing. Conrad is particularly ill-treated, it seems; without any warning or justification, in a Penguin reprint of Almayer’s Folly, the editor took the liberty of simply dropping the famous epigraph that Conrad had borrowed from Henri-Frédéric Amieclass="underline" Qui de nous n’a eu sa Terre promise, son jour d’extase et sa fin en exil? (Who among us did not have his Promised Land, his day of ecstasy and his end in exile?) Not only is the sentence magnificent and provides the key to the entire novel, but it also supplies an important biographical clue to Conrad’s literary creation (Amiel, whose diaries Conrad first read during an early stay in Geneva, reappears, in a metamorphosed shape, as the placid Swiss narrator who witnessed the ravings of Slavic terrorists in Under Western Eyes). The paperback reprint of Heart of Darkness (Oxford Classics) carries a scholarly introduction that is grotesque and delirious: it proposes an elaborate phallic reading of the novel. I paraphrase: “Look at the Congo River on the map; don’t you see? It is obviously a huge, creeping phallus!” and so on. Literary scholars are particularly adept at cultivating this sort of nonsense: they seem permanently drunk on the psychedelic milk they keep sucking from the twin mammelles of Freud and Marx. Amazing examples of this merry art are too numerous to be quoted here.
The resolute and invincible blindness of some editors can also be quite impressive. Stendhal’s treatise On Love (De l’Amour, 1822) is invariably presented under this title; yet, when Stendhal published La Chartreuse de Parme (1839), he printed at the beginning of his novel a list of his other works in which he indicated the full and final title under which he intended his essay on love to be known thereafter: De l’Amour et des diverses phases de cette maladie. It was studiously ignored by all subsequent editors — though it should certainly not be irrelevant for us to know that Stendhal viewed love as a sort of illness.
THE PHILOSOPHER AND THE POET
Sometimes it takes a poet to deflate effectively the windy pronouncements of a philosopher. To Theodor Adorno, who declared that, after Auschwitz, no art was possible, Joseph Brodsky replied: “Indeed, not only art, but breakfast as well.”
OLYMPICS
I recently had a chance to see again the notorious (yet remarkable) documentary film that Leni Riefenstahl made of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. I was struck by one tiny detail, which certainly was not deliberate and could not have attracted anyone’s attention at the time. In a passage devoted to the sailing competition, the camera caught for an instant the face of a crew member on a boat, at the height of a race. He was hauling in the jib sheet with all his might, and a cigarette was dangling from his lips.
This image lasted for little more than two seconds, but for us it is stunning. At the time, it was so spontaneous, familiar and natural; today, it seems to come from another era.
In the Olympic Games nowadays, it is commonly accepted that many competitors show up stuffed to the gills with all sorts of drugs (which the relevant authorities are careful not to control, unless it is by methods whose ineffectualness has been duly guaranteed beforehand). Yet should any sportsman enter the stadium with a cigarette or a pipe in his mouth, one dares not contemplate the fate that would befall him.
Surely, at the least he would be locked in a madhouse, if not stoned to death on the spot by righteously angry crowds.
But why does this simple image from an old documentary fill us with so much nostalgia? Is it not because it suddenly brings back memories from a bygone age, when it was still possible to engage in a sporting competition just for the sheer fun of it?
AUTOCRATS
One characteristic of autocrats which is inimitable is their naïveté. After all, despots are perhaps less cynical than credulous. An example is the anecdote told by Shostakovich in his memoirs: a general of Tsar Nicholas I had a daughter who married a Hussar against her father’s will. The father begged the tsar to intervene, and Nicholas immediately issued two edicts: the first one, to cancel the marriage; the second, to restore the daughter’s virginity.
BUSHFIRE
By mid-afternoon, our entire street — a dead end, climbing halfway up a wooded hill — is shrouded in acrid smoke, as opaque as a thick fog, creating an eerie twilight. By five o’clock, this grey fog turns red — a diffuse colour of fire, though no flames are visible yet. Electricity and telephone have been cut. We load the car with some essential belongings; documents and papers fill our suitcase; in my briefcase, stacked with letters and manuscripts, there is room left for only one book. There are some ten thousand books in the house — old and new, read or unread, all equally loved, needed, irreplaceable; which one should I save? There is no time now to ponder this question; in a hurry, I grab a thick volume (1,000 pages) — recently arrived, as yet unread: Cioran’s Cahiers 1957–1972 (his posthumous masterpiece, as it turns out)…