A Reading Diary (8 page)

Today we gave the son of the previous owners of our house an ancient stone capital we dug up during the renovations, so that he would have a piece of his childhood space in the new house he is building.

Chateaubriand: “The chain of historical events, the destiny of men, the destruction of empires, the designs of Providence, presented themselves in my memory as recollections of my own fate: after having explored lifeless ruins, I was called upon to witness the spectacle of ruins that were still alive.”

For Chateaubriand, the very notion of aristocracy is worthy of respect. Thirteen years after Chateaubriand’s
Memoirs
had been completed in 1847, Victor Hugo gave an example of how the nineteenth century now expressed its respect for aristocracy: “The Prince of Wales, in i860, visits Canada and the United States. The acrobat Blondin, in a letter to New York’s
Evening Post
, suggests that, in order to add to the solemnity of the prince’s entrance into the Union, he will without charge convey His Royal Highness in a wheelbarrow on a tightrope across Niagara Falls.”

Memoirs from Beyond the Grave
is, among other things, a colossal anthology of brief lives, the portrait of a man acting as his own and his contemporaries’ Boswell.

Some examples:

• Shortly before the Revolution, Chateaubriand is introduced to the queen. “Casting her eyes on me with a smile, she greeted me in the same charming style with which she had done so the day of my presentation. I will not forget that look, which was to be extinguished so soon after. Marie-Antoinette, smiling, displayed so perfectly the shape of her mouth that the memory of that smile (frightful thought!) allowed me
  to recognize the jaw of that daughter of kings, when the head of the unfortunate lady was discovered during the exhumations in 1815.”
  
• Upon arriving in the United States, Chateaubriand is greeted by a young black slave selling corn cakes, chickens, eggs and milk. After paying her, he gives her his silken handkerchief and notes, “It was a slave who welcomed me to the land of freedom.”
  
• At the death of Pope Clement XII, the Cardinal Chamberlain, according to protocol, knocked two or three times on His Eminence’s forehead, calling him by his name, to make sure that he was dead. After describing this scene, Chateaubriand comments, “What would he have said if Clement XII had answered him, from the depths of eternity, ‘Well? What do you want?’ ”
  

Why do I enjoy this intimacy with Chateaubriand, privileged witness of a certain time and place? Above all, because of the sense of sharing secret stories, gossiping about things hidden and revealing. Proust to Philippe Soupault: “You know, I’m a bit of a concierge.”

Chateaubriand on journal-keeping and the need to write down one’s impressions immediately: “Our existence is so fleeting that if we don’t record the events of the morning in
the evening, the work will weigh us down and we will no longer have the time to bring it up to date. This doesn’t prevent us from wasting our years, from throwing to the wind those hours that are for us the seeds of eternity.”

He is also shameless in his literary intentions. History, yes, but above all it must suit his elegant imagination. He says that he needed “a useful purpose” for his voyage across the Atlantic, so he “proposed to discover the Northwest Passage.” “This project,” he says, “was not unrelated to my poetic nature.”

The American government announces in the press that it does indeed possess a “Department of Disinformation.” I can’t decide what is more outrageous: the existence of such a department, or the acknowledgment of its existence.

Chateaubriand, commenting on the lies contained in a political speech by Talleyrand, who had served as Foreign Affairs minister under Louis XVIII: “There are absences of memory, or lies, that frighten; you open your ears, you rub your eyes, not knowing whether you are deceived by wakefulness or by sleep. … You can’t tell whether this man has perhaps received from nature such authority that he has the power to recreate or annihilate truth.”

This promises to be a quiet week at home. There are writers I can read in the midst of a racket, but I need quiet to sit down with Chateaubriand; otherwise I miss too much of the tone under the style.

Much of Chateaubriand’s
Memoirs
concern themselves with Napoleon, first as a possible heroic figure, then as a tyrant. His chronicle of disillusionment reminds me of other similar attachments and disattachments: Gide and Stalin, Sontag and Castro. …

A reproach that sounds self-intended: “All that the world perceives in Napoleon are his victories.”

Chateaubriand’s account of Napoleon’s tyranny is applicable to almost any other dictatorship: “Those who were persecuted dreaded seeing their friends, for fear of compromising them; their friends dared not visit them, for fear of provoking even heavier persecution. The unfortunate outlaw, become a pariah, cut off from human company, remained in the quarantine of the despot’s hatred. Welcomed as long as your freedom of opinion remained secret, everything was withdrawn as soon as it became known; nothing was left to keep you company but the authorities spying on your relationships, on what you had
to say, on your correspondence, on your dealings with others. Such were those days of happiness and freedom.”

Chateaubriand as European. In 1934 Thomas Mann, recalling a meeting with his old mentor, the German publisher Sammi Fischer, noted in his journal an observation made by Fischer about a mutual acquaintance:

Borges reviewing James Whale’s 1937 film
The Road Back:
“Mere pacifism is not enough. War is an ancient passion that tempts men with ascetic and mortal charms. To abolish war, another passion must be opposed to it. Perhaps that of the
good European
—Leibniz, Voltaire, Goethe, Arnold, Renan, Shaw, Russell, Unamuno, T. S. Eliot—who knows himself heir and successor of all countries. There is in Europe a surfeit of mere Germans or mere Irish; what is lacking is Europeans.”

Now the church bells begin to ring at eight, too late to be of any use as an alarm clock.

My son, Rupert, is here on a visit. We talk about the politics of absolute power and I read him these lines by Chateaubriand on Napoleon: “To become disgusted with conquerors, it would be necessary to know all the evils they cause; it would be necessary to witness the indifference with which the most innocent creatures are sacrificed to them in a corner of the world on which they have never set foot.”

Rupert tells me that he despairs of being able to remain true to his ethics in a world he perceives as corrupted, run by myriads of corporate Napoleons. How to know which of our acts are compromises, which are strategies of survival, which are sellouts? The tactics of greed (Napoleon’s desire to own
everything
, for instance) are astonishing; they have no limits, not even those of their own destruction.

At dinner, we recall reading Oscar Wilde’s children’s stories when he was seven or eight, in Toronto. I fetch a copy of the book and read Wilde’s description of a dream in “The Young King.” Avarice and Death watch a multitude of men toiling in the mud. “They are my servants,” says Avarice, holding in her palm three grains of corn. Death proposes a bargain: for one grain of corn, she will leave the men alone. Avarice refuses, and Death kills a third of them. Three
times the offer is made and three times it is refused. In the end, no man is left alive.

More rain, but it does not feel any cooler. It’s late at night. I listen to the 1893 version of Fauré’s
Requiem
, not the showy, loud version of 1900 but the version he imagined before it was rewritten for a full orchestra. Fauré had composed an even earlier version in 1887 (“for the pleasure of it,” he said), after the death of both his parents. That first version has no reference to the Day of Judgment, and the few strings mostly double the organ. Then, six years later, in January, he added two baritone pieces: the “Offertorium” and the “Libera me.” In this unostentatious version the composer disappears; only the listener remains present. In the “Introitus,” for instance, what we hear is ourselves, our own voice calling “from the depths.” Fauré is offstage, invisible. Reading
Memoirs from Beyond the Grave
, I forget that it is Chateaubriand, not I, who is mourning.

In the end, says Chateaubriand, nothing perishes. “My faithfulness towards the memory of my dead friends should lend confidence to those friends who are left to me: nothing for me steps down into the shadow; everything
I once knew lives all around me. According to the Indian doctrine, death, when it touches us, does not destroy us; it merely renders us invisible.”

Cocteau, in his diary: “Invisibility seems to me the condition of elegance.”

I’m on a book tour in Germany, reading in a different city every day. It’s as if it were still summer: the outdoor terraces are open, the geraniums are in full bloom in the window boxes everywhere.

I’m in Münster today. I’m sitting at an outdoor café on a cobbled pedestrian street, reading Conan Doyle’s
The Sign of Four
, close to a monument to the Holocaust showing a Jewish woman on her knees, cleaning the pavement with a toothbrush. I order a cup of ice-cream and red-fruit compote
(Rote Grütze)
. The waitress, an East German woman in an embroidered white apron, trips against a chair and the cup falls on the stones. Catching the supervisor’s eye, she apologizes in a panic and goes down on all fours to clean up the red mess.

In Münster Cathedral, bombed by the Allies, a stone from Coventry Cathedral, “destroyed 4 Nov. 1940,” and the notice “Forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you.” I find in this an almost malicious irony, with a feeling of boasting on either side.

George Meredith in
Modern Love:

Last Thursday, in Munich, at the Literaturhaus, I saw an exhibition of photographs of actors taken from many different performances; the ensemble of faces creates a new performance. The different arrangement of facts forms a new pattern, a new story, a new theory (if this were a detective story) of what really happened.

In a detective story, often the assumption is that anyone can be the murderer.

This morning, crossing the country by train: the wonderful German forests, so like the pictures in my fairy-tale books. Then the thought: through these forests, hunted prisoners ran.

Berlin. Most German cities have an asepticized look that other cities (London, for instance) never have. This is, no
doubt, due to the eye of the outsider, who, like Watson, never sees beyond appearances. This week, everywhere I go, I see a series of posters announcing a new campaign against drugs, and even the addicts depicted on the posters look scrubbed and neat.

In my late teens and early twenties I believed that, at any moment, someone would see through my appearance and discover all my secrets. I was afraid that, under the right scrutiny, even my thoughts would not remain hidden for long, and that the keen observer, like a shrewd detective, would know that I was guilty of all sorts of forbidden things.

The first time I took LSD was in a cheap London hotel with three other people, one of them our high-school monitor from Buenos Aires. This was 1969 or 1970; I was twenty-one or twenty-two, and I had no definable expectations about the experience to come. I had read Huxley and Castañeda, but (as so often in those days) found it impossible to imagine that the literary experience of others might convincingly match my own. What took place on the page unfolded in a separate time, to which, yes, I had access, but as to a parallel universe, truer and more lasting than the one ruled by concerns of money, food, health, sex and the heart. So when the monitor suggested we all take the tiny blue pills he had with him, I said yes, of course, without any
inclination to compare what was to come with what I had read a long time ago.

But if the obvious books were not on my mind at the time, others fell open unbidden. Perhaps the distribution of comfit-like pills, the round Dodo eyes of my monitor, the street-name of the hotel (Lewis), the contradictory sensation of falling and floating, made me think of another fall and of other adventures, and I started scribbling in a large blue onion-paper notepad thoughts about
Alice in Wonderland
that appeared momentous then, and now read as banal, when not incomprehensible. On the seventh page, after noting something illegible about ceilings and the rhythm of my lungs, I wrote, as a sudden illumination with no reference to Alice,
THE SIGN OF 4!!!
in large block letters.