Had it in my head that I’d have some summarizing thoughts on At Lady Molly’s (1957), Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant (1960), and The Kindly Ones (1962) but the reality is that they’re all so distinct in topic that the threads are hard to follow. Or, rather, the threads are there to follow (one of the great pleasures of A Dance to the Music of Time) but these three (books four, five, and six) have more tightly focussed, discrete thematic elements.
At Lady Molly’s continues some of the transitional elements of The Acceptance World, but Nick is more generally settled and at ease than before in the world of freewheeling London away from society events. Lady Molly herself typifies this energy: while connected with aristocratic circles, she will invite literally anyone to her house, including strangers off the street (in a later book, a temporarily homeless Moreland who happens to share her veterinarian). I get immense joy from the way characters return throughout these novels, always in new combinations, and these ineluctable encounters are direct results of the social fabric in which Nick is wrapped. For instance, a highlight of Dance so far: Nick joins Ted Jeavons (!) for a night getting boozed at a seedy nightclub (?!), where they encounter Peter Templer with a new sidepiece (!?!) who is also joined by a jaundiced Widmerpool (???!!!).
Casanova’s takes a turn for the sadder and the more serious. It begins to become clear that the men in Nick’s orbit treat their various arts as matters of life and death. McClintick, for instance, the night before committing suicide:
‘I obey you, Moreland,’ he said, ‘with the proper respect of the poor interpretative hack for the true creative artist.’
The only things that really take up any headspace for these men are women, marriage, and producing works of cultural significance. The artists in the group always seem to operate at some remove from the rest of the characters, including the grilfriends and wives, who find themselves alienated by the dogged pursuit of self-expression.
Throughout both At Lady Molly’s and Casanova’s, there’s a conspicuous absence of detail regarding how the main themes of marriage and artistic pursuit unfold in the life of Nick himself. Recalling the night he encountered Isabelle Tolland, his later wife, Nick explains that he knew even then that they would wed—but the passing comment is left completely unexplained, unjustified. There is no depiction of the courtship that must have followed; there are no intimate moments between Nick and Isabelle. Similarly, Casanova’s spends significant time detailing Moreland’s symphonies and their reception, McClintick’s never-ending book project, but none at all on Nick’s own novels. One comment by the narrator perhaps sheds light on the subject:
To think at all objectively about one’s own marriage is impossible, while a balanced view of other people’s marriage is almost equally hard to achieve with so much information available, so little to be believed. Objectivity is not, of course, everything in writing; but, even after one has cast objectivity aside, the difficulties of presenting marriage are inordinate.
For one thing, the passage at the very least puts in mind that Nick is concerned with objectivity, or presenting things as objectively as possible. But at the same time he’s acknowledging the arbitrary decision involved in declaring one’s own life off limits. The lack of personal details smacks to me of authorial cowardliness, a bit, as we must remember that many of the characters in the books have real-life equivalents, are thinly veiled, barely fictionalized, historical people. To write about Isabelle and Nick’s marriage would be, in some sense, to write about Powell’s own marriage—a boundary he seems unwilling to bridge. At the same time the division creates a privileged position for Nick as the observer of events, only half involved in the world he’s so committed to portraying; what Waugh calls in his review “the aloof and tolerant tone” of the cycle.
Anyways, great books. Starting The Valley of Bones; war is no longer approaching, it has arrived.
Père Goriot
Continuing with the books receiving treatment in In the Hotel de la Mole, I sped through Goriot over the course of Memorial Day. It feels both like a book that’s meant to be read quickly and like it was written at an even more furious pace. Balzac drags the characters behind him as he sprints through the streets of Paris, bouncing them about this way and that. The commotion around them being what it is, the characters seem unable to feel anything but the strongest of emotions: the highest of highs or the lowest of lows. The lack of intermediary gradations in feeling lends a certain irreality to the reactions and machinations of the personages in the book. For instance, as Goriot lays ill in his bed:
Did you see my daughters? They’ll soon be coming to see me. They’ll hurry here as soon as they hear I’m ill. They looked after me so well in the rue de la Jussienne! Goodness me! I wish my room were fit to receive them.
They are busy, they are sleeping, they won’t come. I knew it. You have to be dying to learn what children are. Ah! my friend, don’t get married, don’t have children! You give them life, and they give you death! No, they won’t come!
Back and forth he vacillates, torn between his paternal devotions and disappointments. Here, confronted with death, he’s unable to resolve the two to his very last. Many of the characters of the book likewise have some irreconcilable internal tension between extremes. I’d sometimes find myself thinking that I missed some inciting action that caused Rastignac to about-face on a given issue, flipping back through the last few pages searching for an explanation, finding none: he is just both a romantic and a social climber, and in one instant fully the former, in another, fully the later.
All in all, less stylish, insightful, and subtle than Bovary, but a fine read none-the-less. Funny and engaging throughout. Definitely interested in reading other books from La Comédie humaine, especially to continue with Rastignac’s development on the Parisian social scene. À nous deux maintenant!. Going to skip the other book dealt with by Auerbach (Stendhal’s The Red and the Black) for now to switch things up. 150 pages into At Lady Molly’s and so happy to be back in bohemian interwar London with Nicholas Jenkins.
Selective Writers
We hear the writer speak; but he expresses no opinion and makes no comment. His role is limited to selecting the events and translating them into language; and this is done in the conviction that every event, if one is able to express it purely and completely, interprets itself and the persons involved in it far better and more completely than any opinion or judgment appended to it could do. Upon this conviction—that is, upon a profound faith in the truth of language responsibly, candidly, and carefully employed—Flaubert's artistic practice rests.
— Erich Auerbach, In the Hotel de la Mole
The selection of events, the description of the surroundings, the pacing of paragraphs; the structure of Madame Bovary is fundamentally psycho-logical (that is, having the logic of mental processes and emotions). It marshals the many modes of realist literary depiction in service of communicating the inner conflicts of its cast. And make no mistake, the characters are modern, emblematic, contemporary for Flaubert, but description (diagnosis?) of contemporaneity is a second order result of an intense dedication to this affective language and scenography.
Obviously, a writer cannot write at all without first selecting a subject. But this idea of selection being in contention with description or narrativization finds resonance also with Ben Lerner’s recent Transcription. In one sense we’re being confronted with a narrator overeager to explain his own selection of events, so eager that the proliferating explanations themselves become the very content of the book. From this cyclical process—selection, explanation, absorption—some vision of subjectivity emerges. A way of thinking about Lerner’s autofiction is that we are being made privy to the narrator’s construction of a fictionalized self via his selection and languaging of fragments of reality.
I find this meta-fictional mode of selection most interesting when the narrator’s ability to self-reflect is problematized in some significant way, like for the young Adam in Atocha Station, riddled with drug-induced paranoias and anxieties. The middle-aged narrator in Transcription, instead, seems to be rid of these impurities of perception. Without that tension the end result loses the connection it had with Bovary; acts of selection become top-down manifestations of the author’s grand ideas about contemporary life.
Officier de santé
Finished Madame Bovary (And indeed, Madame Bovary is finished). The rain continues, a wet Memorial Day weekend.
Charles isn’t even a real doctor—impotent when faced with any real conditions of illness. We don’t see him successfully treat a single patient excepting Monsieur Rouault, a treatment consisting solely of rest and recuperation. As a result Homais, clueless as he is, is able to vacuum up much of the Yonvillian business that may have instead enriched the Bovary family. But even those doctors who command multiples more respect, considered competent in the extreme, they also falter in the face of Emma’s descent into sickness. There's no helping a patient who differs in their conception of good health. There’s no loving a wife who differs in her conception of true love.