A Book Interrupted by Love

Not long ago I wrote about Andre Breton’s 1928 novel Nadja, which includes embedded photographs.  In 1937, Breton wrote another photographically-illustrated novel called L’Amour Fou, or Mad Love.  Oddly, it took half a century for an English translation to appear from the University of Nebraska Press (by Mary Ann Caws).  Mad Love begins as a meandering essay about love, lovers, beauty, crystals, symbols, and much more.  Breton’s agenda in these early pages is to redefine these terms within the context of Surrealism.  The greatest kind of beauty “would not come to us along ordinary logical paths,” but will come about “convulsively.”  He points to the pleasures of automatic writing: “what is delightful here is the dissimilarity itself which exists between the object wished for and the object found.”

“Convulsive beauty will be veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magic-circumstantial, or it will not be.”   And lest anyone try too hard to understand this kind of love or beauty, he warns that “interpretive delirium begins only when man, ill-prepared, is taken by a sudden fear in the forest of symbols.”

About a third of the way through the book, Breton explains what he is doing:

I had just some days earlier written the beginning text of this present book, a text which takes full account of the mental and emotional dispositions at that time: a need to reconcile the idea of unique love with its more or less sure denial in the present social framework, the need to prove that a solution, more than sufficient, indeed in excess of the vital problems, can always be expected when one deserts ordinary logical attitudes.

But at this moment, a woman appears who makes him desert “ordinary logical attitudes.”  She approaches him, probably in a cafe where he is writing.  It is a moment that a smitten Breton notes with unexpected precision.  “And I can certainly say that here, on the twenty-ninth of May 1934, this woman was scandalously beautiful.”

This young woman who just entered appeared to be swathed in mist – clothed in fire?  Everything seemed colorless and frozen next to this complexion imagined in perfect concord between rust and green…This color, taking on a deeper hue from her face to her hands, played on a fascinating tonal relation between the extraordinary pale sun of her hair like a bouquet of honeysuckle…

A few pages later, however, the unnamed woman disappears from the book for a long spell and Breton’s convoluted unfolding of Surrealism begins anew.  Mad Love concludes with an utterly remarkable letter addressed “Dear Hazel of Squirrelnut,” to be read in 1952 on the girl’s 16th birthday.  “Hazel” is the eight-month old daughter that resulted from this liaison.  On one level, Breton’s letter is a typical mix of fatherly advice, hyperbole about love and pain, and a wistfulness for a future he feels he’ll never witness.  But it is also a deeply moving document of Breton’s struggle.

I was thinking of all this, feverishly, in September 1936, alone with you in my famous unliveable house of rock salt.  I was thinking about it between reading newspapers telling, more or less hypocritically, the episodes of the Civil War in Spain, the newspapers behind which you thought I was disappearing just to play peek-a-boo with you.  And it was so true, because in such moments, the unconscious and the conscious, in you and in me, existed in complete duality near each other, keeping each other in total ignorance and yet communicating at will by a single all-powerful thread which was the exchanged glance between us.  To be sure, my life then hung only by the slightest thread.  Great was the temptation to go offer it to those who, without any possible error and any distinction of tendencies, wanted at any price to finish with the old “order” founded on the cult of that abject trinity: family, country, and religion.  And still you held me by that thread which is happiness, such as it pierces the web of unhappiness itself.  I loved in you all the little children of the Spanish militia, like those I had seen running naked in the outer district of Santa Cruz, on Tenerife.  May the sacrifice of so many human lives make of them one day happy beings!  And yet I did not feel in myself the courage to expose you with me to help that happen.

This section of the letter is followed by a cropped version showing the right half  of the now famous photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Children in Seville, Spain, 1933, one of twenty photographs in Mad Love by artists such as Man Ray, Dora Maar, and Brassaï.

The unnamed woman in Mad Love is a fictionalized version of Breton’s second wife Jacqueline Lamba (1910-1993).  They had a daughter named Aube (Dawn).  Breton and Lamba divorced in 1943, and she later married the American artist David Hare.

Summer in Baden-Baden, Part II

The literature of the second half of the twentieth century is a much traversed field and it seems unlikely that there are still masterpieces in major, intently patrolled languages waiting to be discovered.  Yet some ten years ago I came across just such a book, Summer in Baden-Baden, which I would include among the most beautiful, exalting, and original achievements of a century’s worth of fiction and para-fiction. Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag’s Introduction to Leonid Tsypkin’s novel Summer in Baden-Baden tells us that Tsypkin (1926-1982) wrote this remarkable novel while he worked as a scientist at Moscow’s Institute for Poliomyelitis and Viral Encephalitis.  It appears that he started writing in earnest in 1977 after being demoted as punishment for the fact that his son and daughter-in-law had just emigrated to the United States.  Tsypkin conducted archival research on Dostoyevsky and, Sontag tells us, made many photographs of “places associated with Dostoyevsky’s life as well as ones frequented by Dostoyevsky’s characters during the seasons and at the times of day mentioned in the novels.”  Faced with the realization that he would never receive his own exit visa Tsypkin decided in 1981 to ask a friend to smuggle the completed manuscript and some related photographs out of the Soviet Union.  The following year Tsypkin’s novel, illustrated with his photographs, began to appear in the weekly New York-based Russian-émigré periodical Novaya Gazeta.  Tsypkin never lived to see it.

In 1987, Summer in Baden-Baden was finally translated into English and published – without any photographs – in London by Quartet Books, and presumably this is the book that Sontag read.  Its romantic cover design suggests a marketing scheme more appropriate to a title like E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View than a frenetic book about Dostoyevsky’s summer in the gambling halls of Germany.

In 2001, New Directions took a chance on an American edition with a cover that more appropriately represents the intensity of the fiction within.  (It’s is a great example of the power of typography.)  This edition also included the newly-commissioned Introduction by Susan Sontag, but only one of Tsypkin’s photographs, which was placed opposite the title page.

The New Directions volume is the edition that I bought and read when it first came out, and then subsequently shelved for another eight years – until a reader of Vertigo asked me if I’d ever seen the photographically-illustrated version of Summer in Baden-Baden issued in London by Penguin in 2006.  Needless to say, I ordered a used copy immediately.

The Publisher’s Note in the Penguin edition explains “This edition is the first to be published in book form with the author’s original photographs.”  Full captions for each photograph are located at the end of the book.  Unfortunately, the reader is left not knowing if the author had a hand in placing the photographs within the text.  I tend to doubt it.  Tsypkin never traveled outside the Soviet Union and his photographs were restricted to Leningrad (Dostoyevsky’s St. Petersburg).   A main point of Tsypkin’s book is the suggestion that an authentic bridge can be erected between past and present, that we can temporarily comprehend some other time and become someone else through an act of the imagination.  Tsypkin, like W.G. Sebald, believed that the power of the imagination is strengthened – if not dependent upon – visiting the actual locations where events happened.   “In front of me was the Kuznechny Market, and to the right and behind me the Vladimir Church – I had reached exactly the right spot, and my heart was pounding with joy and some other vaguely sensed feeling…”  And he talks about making sure that the locations for his photographs were accurate: “I was anxious not to mistake the street or the number of the building supposed to appear before my camera lens.”  This does not sound like the kind of author who would shift images from Russia to Germany just for the sake of having photographs more or less equally spaced throughout his book.

Nevertheless, in the Penguin edition a number of photographs of St. Petersburg can be found in the areas of text relating to Baden-Baden.  While these images vaguely add to the atmosphere of Baden-Baden, this ambient use strikes me as inimical to Tsypkin’s methodical research methods.  For example, in the first example shown below, Tsypkin’s photograph of the the dark stairway leading to the location that Dostoyevsky used for Raskolnikov’s apartment is inexplicably dropped in the midst of a gambling scene in Baden-Baden.  On the other hand, the second example – a St. Petersburg street image appearing in the midst of a discussion of the streets of that city – is at least contextualized a little more closely.

“The steps leading up to the room where Raskolnikov lived.  These steps no longer exist as the building has been renovated.”

“Gorokhavaya Street, which frequently features in Dostoyevsky’s novels.”

Even though the Penguin edition has the advantage of being the first English edition to include some of Tsypkin’s photographs, Penguin didn’t seem to have really understood what kind of book it was dealing with.  Their disastrous cover design suggests a fin-de-siècle farce or light romance.  Innocent purchasers were probably more than a little surprised at the powerful – and heavy – work of art behind this loopy image .  Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that Summer in Baden-Baden has completely disappeared from Penguin’s website as if it had never been published.  What we need now is a new edition of Summer in Baden-Baden that answers questions about Tsypkin’s photographs and their placement.

My post Summer in Baden-Baden, Part I is here.

Nadja

I finally reread Andre Breton’s 1928 novel Nadja for the first time in many years and it was hard not to see intriguing parallels with the photography-embedded books of W.G. Sebald.   It was a little shocking to realize that Nadja, first published in Paris in 1928, wasn’t available in English until Richard Howard’s 1960 translation for Grove Press.  Nadja often gets referred to as a Surrealist love story, although Nadja doesn’t appear until more than sixty pages into this this brief 160-page novel (in the English version, that is).  Those first sixty pages or so are a blend of theory, Surrealist gossip, Breton’s back story, dreams, and assorted excursions through Paris.  When Nadja appears, the book briefly shifts to dated diary entries, as if the impact of their meeting momentarily demands immediacy.  Ultimately, Nadja is commited to a sanatarium and the novel returns to straightforward prose when the narrator finally has the distance to analyze Nadja’s impact on his life and thinking.

After Nadja, the second most important character in Nadja is the city of Paris.  Breton’s Paris serves a similar purpose as cities like London, Manchester, and Antwerp do for Sebald, acting as a kind of stage, potent for its ability to disorient the viewer and reward him with strange new sights and insights.

There are many ways of thinking about Nadja and what she represents for Breton.  She’s a free spirit who describes herself as a “soul in Limbo.”  She’s clinically unable to exist long in the normal world and ends up in a sanitarium, where she spends the remainder of her life.  “The essential thing is that I do not suppose there can be much difference for Nadja between the inside of a sanitarium and the outside,” the narrator grimly notes. Neverthelss, Nadja unlocks endless unforeseen possibilities for the narrator, who is immediately captivated by her eyes.  “What was it they reflected – some obscure distress and at the same time some luminous pride?”

The character Nadja reminded me of Ernst Herbeck, the prolific Viennese schizophrenic poet that Sebald visits Vertigo.  The two spend a long day taking a walk, during which they seem to exchange very little with each other.

When we parted, Ernst, standing on tiptoe and bowing slightly, took his hat from his hand and with it, as he turned away, executed a sweeping motion which ended with him putting the hat back on; a performance which seemed to be, at the same time, both childishly easy and an astonishing feat of artistry.  This gesture, like the manner in which he had greeted me that morning, put me in mind of someone who had travelled with a circus for many years.

Breton and Sebald find in Nadja and Herbeck a kind a inexplicable, inarguable authenticity that no “normal” person seems to offer up.

“Happily the days of psychological literature, with all its fictitious plots, are numbered,” Breton wrote early in Nadja, prematurely predicting the demise of traditionally plotted fiction.  Nadja is not too dissimilar to Sebald’s style of prose fiction in which history, autobiography, travel, literary criticism, and other genres coexist.  Curiously, both  Sebald and Breton elevate coincidence to a higher level of meaning; although for different ends, I think.  For Breton, good Surrealist that he is, accidents and coincidences are much like automatic writing; they are events that set aside the limits of traditional logic and perception and spontaneously create new, unexpected connections.  Sebald, on the other hand, often uses coincidences to suggest a sense of hidden interconnectedness.

As far as I am aware, Nadja, with its forty-four illustrations, is just the second novel to appear with embedded photographs – the first being Georges Rodenbach’s novel Bruges-la-Morte (1892) which included a number of scenes of the city of Bruges.  Breton doesn’t embed photographs in the same way that Sebald does.  Instead, they are treated like illustrations in a typical work of non-fiction.  Each illustration is a full-page plate, with plate numbers, captions, and, on occasion, a credit to the photographer (Man Ray, for example).  To assure that the reader makes the correct connection between the illustration and text, each plate mentions the page number on which the related quote appears.  Nevertheless, Breton’s playful selection and use of illustrations foreshadows Sebald’s own practice.  In addition to portraits and buildings that let the reader visualize his text, Breton adds some Surrealist touches by reproducing incidental things like documents and drawings.

The great book cover for Nadja, by the way, which Grove Press has stuck with for nearly fifty years now, is by designer Roy Kuhlman, who did many of Grove’s classic book covers.

Sebald, Uncomfortable Modernist

Over at the Green Integer Blog there is a thought-provoking post in which the author tries to come to terms with his irritation upon reading W.G. Sebald’s Vertigo.  (Curiously, the essay was posted July 10, 2009, but it concludes with a writing date of December 23, 2001, about 18 months after Vertigo was released in the US.)  At first, the author of the post senses an internal contradiction within Sebald’s work, perhaps even a fatal failure:

In short, there is a sense of angst to Sebald’s world, and the writers he features, Stendhal and Kafka, share his feelings of displacement. It is as if Sebald were a high modernist who has discovered himself in a postmodern world, and he is not at all happy about that fact. He often seems to be working at odds to his own tales, as if all the disconnections, accidental photographs, and odd peregrinations he recounts were an expression of his failure to create a more coherent whole.

He points to one example in Vertigo (the rape scene involving the hunter Schlag and the barmaid Romona) where, he feels, Sebald “was purposely withholding information, refusing to reveal any logic in a world where he has painfully determined to be utterly mystifying.”  This leads the author to his final conclusion:

It is this desperate search for coherence under conditions where memory and significance are so vague, I believe, that draw so many readers to Sebald’s books. Like Sebald, they feel utterly ill-at-ease, even sickly, when they face the inexplicably dangerous terrain standing before them. I simply do not share the great dis-ease, and am somewhat irritated for having to endure it.

I think it is absolutely correct to say that Sebald was an uncomfortable modernist, especially in the sense that one of his basic concerns was epistemological: how do we know the past?  At the same time Sebald was deeply skeptical of modernism, having traced its true history from Napoleon through Hitler’s Germany.  As Sebald showed, modernism’s inherent belief in human progress was overtly false.  Only technology progressed, the very technology that made it easier and easier to enslave and murder millions, all the while hiding the truth behind a shimmering veil of lies.  In his conversion from pure academic to prose fiction writer, Sebald was venting his frustration with the limits of traditional scholarship to get at larger truths and, it seems to me, he dedicated himself to the task of trying to find a better way.  What Sebald did then was rather curious.  He borrowed some of the techniques of post-modernism – embedding photographs and the like -  and, in effect, smuggled them back across the border, brought them back through time, and he employed them in what was a very modernist enterprise.  I don’t imagine that Sebald ever had a desire to completely leave modernism behind, for modernism is, if anything, based on the firm belief that, at its very core, it is an undertaking of a very high moral order – as opposed to the seeming amoralism of the post-modernism.

Several times Sebald shows us his despair at his possibly Sisyphean task, and he does this most clearly in the final pages of Vertigo, where the narrator sits in a London train among a “defeated army” of commuters, reading Samuel Pepy’s diary, only to suddenly have a dream of walking through the Alps to come to the edge of a bottomless chasm.  Sebald briefly describes a post-human vision where “not a tree was there to be seen, not a bush, not even a stunted shrub or a russock of grass; there was nothing but ice-grey shale.”  The scene then shifts back to Pepys and another apocalyptic vision: Pepys’ description of the Great Fire of London.  The ending to Vertigo make me think of nothing so much as the conclusion of Melville’s Moby-Dick, which is just about as post-modern as any true modernist novel ever written.  In the end, mankind is nothing in the larger scheme of this universe.  Nothing.  (Perhaps Sebald was the last true artist of Romanticism.)

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818

The writer at Green Integer states a preference for a post-modern author like Javier Marias, who “is far more like a kind of amateur sleuth, who will gladly take on his adventures, but is more often just has happy to find no apparent answer.”  That’s the very premise of post-modernism – that there is no single answer, no single viewpoint.  In a funny, round-about way, this leads me back to my previous post on the exhibition at the Tate Britain called Altermodern.  Maybe it is time we defined something to supplant both modernism and post-modernism, something that can be committed to truth and history all the while knowing there is no single perspective.  It strike me that this is, in a sense, what a hologram achieves.  Every point of view is absolutely true and absolutely different from any other, yet it all adds up to one coherent image.  But I can’t bear the idea of calling this new ism “holomodernism.”

[Green Integer, in case any reader of Vertigo doesn't know, is an essential modern publisher dedicated to "Essays, Manifestos, Statements, Speeches, Maxims, Epistles, Diaristic Jottings, Narratives, Natural histories, Poems, Plays, Performances, Ramblings, Revelations, and all such ephemera as may appear necessary to bring society into a slight tremolo of confusion and fright at least." So says their website.  Go visit and buy books.]

Tel’s Beijing

Who can believe in Beijing?  Only those who’ve never been and those who’ve left…

Not too long ago I wrote about Jonathan Tel’s 2003 novel Freud’s Alphabet, which has embedded photographs at the head of selected chapters.  His new book of short stories The Beijing of Possibilities (Other Press, 2009) also contains embedded photographs, but this time they are more randomly placed in the manner of W.G. Sebald.  Tel’s cities (Freud’s Alphabet is really about London) are wonderful constructs of the imagination.  “While in New York he writes about Beijing, while in Beijing he writes about New York,” reads the blurb about Tel on the cover of Beijing.  His books continue a rich literary tradition going back at least to Baudelaire of presenting cities as juxtapositions of the random and the fortuitous, where it’s almost possible to believe in the impossible.

Tel’s Beijing is a vast, unknowable stage where opposites clash.  In a number of his stories, almost like a scientist working with lab rats, Tel drops honest but naive country people down in the midst of urban chaos to see how they manage.  Other stories pit sophisticated world travelers against Chinese who have never left their neighborhood, the technological present against the fading traditions of grinding hard work, people with scruples against those without.  In Tel’s world the result is not a morality play.  Instead, things are often resolved by blending, twining, or mirroring the protagonists.  People exchange lives, a maid and her employer’s daughter become one, characters disappear into their fate.

She slipped on her robe and got a screwdriver and went out into the corridor and removed the 23 from the apartment door – because those who know where they live, know, and those who are invited will be told, and those who neither know nor are invited really have no business here.

The book itself is set up like the ouroboros, the serpent which turns and swallows its own tail.  It begins with a Foreword about Beijing (“the center of the universe”) by a “Helan Xiao”, followed by Tel’s Preface, in which he mentions befriending the poet Helan Xiao.  In the book’s final story, The Most Beautiful Woman in China, Helan Xiao is a struggling writer who is given the opportunity to write the libretto for an opera called The Most Beautiful Woman in China.  In the end she is cheated out of both credit and fame and decides to write a book of short stories to be published abroad under a foreign pseudonym.  “She pretended a foreign author had made up these stories – a tall, handsome, courteous man – …[who] humbly requested the right to translate her own works into English and to publish it under his name…”  At the very end, The Beijing of Possibilities turns and swallows its own tale.

It strikes me as rather arbitrary that Tel uses one and only one photograph for each of his stories (plus a final photograph facing the Acknowledgements page).  The photographs – which I like as images – nevertheless seem incidental, contributing little to the text or to the sense of Beijing as a largely imaginary place.  If anything, the photographs seem more like source material for ideas and characters within the story.  Highly recommended.