Agota Kristof: Le Troisième mensonge |The Third Lie (1991)

This, then, is Le Troisième mensonge, the third volume of La Trilogie des jumelles (The Twins Trilogy), and it changes a great number of things. I'd begun to wonder if there were any hard-fast truths to the books, as there seemed to be so many 'lies', so much unreliable narration.

And that is one thing that's true: a lot has been unreliable, and although this doesn't stop in the final volume, all becomes clear in the end. However, if La Preuve began to set my head turning, this one made me feel on several occasions as if it were being kicked like a football. Because of its many mind-boggling twists, I can easily understand a number of people just giving up on this volume – or far more likely just skimming through it and missing vital details – but careful reading really does pay off.

So the second volume ended with Claus in prison, although it's really just a police cell where he's being held until he can be sent back home. And through the lies that have come before we begin to see how the notebook to a certain extent fed on reality but often changed it, moulding it to a different shape. And we're in for a number of surprises, shocks even, of which I can only give an indication of the main ones.

Unlike the first two books in the trilogy – which are told in the first person plural and third person respectively – Le Troisième mensonge is told in the first person singular. As a child Claus spent some years in hospital recovering from a (war) injury and when he got better was sent to live with an old woman who wasn't his grandmother at all, and he had no brother there and had no idea where he was. The man who died crossing the border before him was a deserter, not his father, and once over the border he meets Peter (depicted as a very discreet homosexual in La Preuve) who is living with his wife Clara (Lucas's lover in the second book).

It is over the border that Lucas decides to call himself Claus, and where he lives for many years before deciding to return to the country of his birth. There are dream sequences in Lucas's story, and it seems as though my suspicions were right about Claus and Lucas being the same person (just an anagram), as Lucas here (who's called Claus of course) doesn't believe he has a brother, thinks he's just created him in his dreams.

Le Troisième mensonge is in two parts and begins normally enough in the first person, although the second part seems to begin in a dream sequence: but the difficulty is the staggering revelation that the first person narrator of this half is the poet Klaus [sic] Lucas, whom Lucas (aka Claus) correctly thinks is his brother. Lucas is spending his last hours in the capital of the country, and he rings up Klaus and goes to his house with his passport (which calls him Claus of course) although Klaus (whose mad mother is in the house in bed) refuses to recognise him. So Lucas goes away bitterly disappointed.

The truth of the matter is that the brothers were separated by 'la chose' ('the thing') at the age of four. We learned in the highly unreliable first book that Grand-Mère killed her husband – twice-married Kristof hated marriage, but that's another story – but in fact it was Mère who killed her adulterous husband, whose forename was incidentally Klaus-Lucas and the twins were named after him. For some years while Mère was in a psychiatric hospital Klaus was brought up by Antonia, his father's lover, his younger half-sister Sarah living there too.

One day when Klaus is back at Mère's, where he has lived from the age of eleven up to the end – he never married as he only ever loved Sarah, but of course that would have led to incest – the ambassador tells him that Lucas has thrown himself in front of a train and had requested to be buried with his family. Klaus thinks it would be churlish not to allow Lucas this last wish, even though he doesn't recognise him as a brother, so OK he can be buried there. And he thinks that when Mère dies, jumping in front of a train will make as good a death as any for himself: he'll no longer have any reason for living.

Amazingly, Agota Kristof had no intention after the first book to write a second, or after the second a third, but they fit together ingeniously and I'm not surprised that they've been published in French and English in one volume – the first two may stand on their own, but I don't really see how a reader could get a great deal from reading the third without the others.

But Le Troisième mensonge is far and away the most complex and the most challenging, it's a wonderful book that beautifully completes the trilogy. And although I may well come to change my mind, at the moment it feels that taken together these three books are among the most absorbing reads I've ever come across. And that's saying something.

Agota Kristof: La Preuve | The Proof (1988)

La Preuve (The Proof) is the second volume of the Trilogie des jumeaux (The Twins Trilogy) and is considerably different from Le Grand cahier, the first volume.

The first obvious difference is that the second volume is written from a non-omniscient third person point of view, and  the use of people's names is a novelty: all the action is still in the (unnamed) Little Town, but we learn near the end of the novel that Grandfather was called Claus-Lucas: the twins Lucas (who has stayed in the Little Town) and Claus (who escaped over the frontier) were named after him.

There are eight main sections as opposed to about sixty in Le Grand cahier, making it far less episodic, and whereas the principal theme in the first novel might be said to be survival, in the second it is loss.

The main character in the novel is Lucas, who – deeply affected by the loss of his brother to another (unnamed) country – stays on at Grandmother's house and willingly accepts Jasmine and her (slightly disabled) baby Mathias into the household. Mathias is the product of fifteen-year-old Jasmine's long-term sexual relationship with her father, who is now in prison, and the teenaged Lucas has an occasionally sexual relationship with Jasmine.

A little later, though, Lucas starts to stalk thirty-five-year-old Clara, who works in the town library. Although there is no specific reference, it is clear that postwar Soviet occupation of Hungary is being evoked here, and some of the absurdity of the first volume is obviously repeated when the intellectually hungry Lucas learns that it is not only highly unusual to lend a book from the library, but that probably all the books there will be put on the censored list.

As Lucas wheedles his way into Clara's life we find out that she too is suffering from grievous loss: her husband Thomas was (mistakenly, we learn later) killed as a traitor. And although Lucas also wheedles his way into her bed and spends every night with her, when the counter-revolution comes she will leave for the Big Town to protest against the occupying country, her thoughts still with Thomas.

Before this though, Lucas has to tell Mathias (whom he has come to love as a son) that Jasmine has left for the Big Town and thought it wise to leave him in his care. Mathias is painfully aware of his physical defects, but (quite unlike the twins in Le Grand cahier) insists on attending school: he is horribly bullied there and can never overcome his feelings of physical inferiority, although he is by far the most intelligent child in the school. His suicide by hanging (in his bedroom in the newsagent's Lucas has bought from Victor) calls to mind Little Father Time's in Hardy's Jude the Obscure.

At the end of the book Claus returns to the Little Town on a short-term tourist visa, eager to meet with his brother. Lucas's friend Peter now runs the newsagent's, and he gives him Lucas's notebooks which he kept up through the years. But Peter hasn't seen Lucas since he disappeared on learning that the remains of a woman had been dug up on the land he inherited from his grandmother, and he (a little oddly?) mentions that no investigations were made that could tie those remains to Jasmine's.

Lucas disappeared several years before, and Peter not unnaturally believes that his twin brother Claus is in fact Lucas returned, but Claus thinks he can prove his identity by his passport, although that in no way convinces Peter. The reader begins to question Claus's real identity, and as his visa expires after being renewed three times he is imprisoned and the town authorities decide what to do with him. Although he claims to have been born in the country they have no record of him, his brother or any of his relatives. And furthermore, he claims that the notebook proves the existence of Lucas, but all the entries are in the same hand and all have recently been written within six months of each other: it all seems to be an invention.

So are Lucas and Claus the same person? And why is the third novel called Le Troisième mensonge – The Third Lie? Unreliable narrators?

Agota Kristof: Le Grand cahier | The Big Notebook (1986)

Agota Kristof (1935–2011) was born in Hungary but left the country with the Soviet invasion of 1956 to spend her life in French-speaking Switzerland, where she came to write her 'Trilogie des jumeaux' ('Twins Trilogy') in French some years later. This consists of Le Grand cahier (The Big Notebook) (1986), La Preuve (The Proof) (1988), and Le Troisième mensonge (The Third Lie) (1991) and is largely fictional: Kristof was a tomboy, although her brother was not a twin but a year older than her, for instance.

Le Grand cahier is written entirely in the first person plural, the twins being the narrator(s), considered as one entity. They mention no specific date, country or geographical feature, and in fact no names of characters can tie the book to any particular place: the people are named according to their position in the family, and non-family are named either according to their profession or just given a nickname. However, it's probably reasonable to assume that the first invading country is based on Germany, and toward the end Russia emerges.

The twins are sent from the Big Town, where the war is increasingly worrying people, to the quieter Little Town to live with their maternal grandmother. As it's ten years since Mother went to see Grandmother (who poisoned Grandfather), the twins weren't born at the time; but they quickly discover that this old woman (nicknamed 'La Sorcière' ('The Witch') by townfolk) is egotistical and filthy, never takes a wash and smells very bad, and the boys have to find their way around the many problems this throws up, such as the fact that in the beginning Grandmother sells the twins' belongings and pockets the money that Mother periodically sends.

Time and again, the book shows the child as father of the man, and the twins have an intelligence that greatly transcends that of any adult in the book, a fact which is highly useful in a wartime context when everything – money especially – is scarce. They soon learn how to manipulate, to double guess, to steal when necessary, and to plan with great skill and dexterity, although – having learned earlier on that war breeds greed and egotism – they are content to get by by living on only what is necessary for survival, and go out of their way to help people who are in grave need of assistance.

To survive they develop a series of strategies, such as the 'toughening' one (which strongly reminded me of the Doubles game played by African Americans); they educate themselves way beyond the level of schooling for for their age; and they are always eager to discover new things about everything, such as learning different languages with great facility. They become fearless, unshockable, and to a certain extent (but only at times) frighteningly callous.

Above all, this book is a criticism of war. In the drinking den where the twins sing, a woman who criticises men's attitude is told she has seen nothing of war, but she replies:

'Seen nothing? Twat! We have all the work, all the worries: the children to feed, the wounded to look after. As soon as the war's over, you will all be heroes. Dead: heroes. Survivors: heroes. Invalids: heroes. That's why you, the men, invented war. It's your war. You wanted it, so get on with it. Heroes my ass!' (My translation.)

War poisons everyone: this is a lovely female take on soldier boys and their gruesome toys. The book-within-a-book is in fact this notebook they're writing, and although they say it should be entirely objective and very realistic, very often it takes on a rather surrealistic tone.

Depressingly, 'l'affaire Abbeville' came in 2000 when a number of parents – twenty-first century French spiritual descendants of the dreaded Mrs Grundy – complained vociferously that Le Grand cahier was being taught at a French school. The kind of thing that offended them was: the young pubescent Bec-de-Lièvre (Harelip) encouraging the twins' dog to have sex with her; the parish priest paying her to see (and sometimes put his finger in) her 'fente' ('crack'); the priest's servant sucking the twins' cocks and bringing herself off as they suck her nipples; the foreign officer having the twins fiercely whip his back and piss on his face; and Bec-de-Lièvre literally being, as her mother put it, 'baisée à mort' ('fucked to death') by twelve or fifteen soldiers. Police officers actually broke up one of the schoolteacher's lessons to arrest him for teaching a 'pornographic' book, although sanity prevailed in the end and a number of literary people (who of course knew what they were talking about) defended the novel.

This book is fascinating and I couldn't put it down until I'd finished it. It's not just war that Agota Kristof aims at, but religion, the family, hypocrisy and lying in general, the education system, sentimentalism, etc. Great stuff.

Strawberry Studios, Stockport, Greater Manchester

Strawberry Studios, Waterloo Road, Stockport.

 

'STRAWBERRY

RECORDING STUDIOS

1968 TO 1993

Association with the band 10cc

resulted in some of the most memorable

music being produced at these Studios.

Paul MacCartney, Neil Sedaka, [The] Stone Roses,

The Syd Lawrence Orchestra and

many others also recorded here.'

 

One of those 'many others' were Joy Division, who recorded their first album Unknown Pleasures here in April 1979.

 

The Waterloo pub opposite was the watering hole.

Mick Middles & Lindsay Reade: Torn Apart: The Life of Ian Curtis (2006)

I was aware of Deborah Curtis's Touching from a Distance (1995), but wasn't aware of this book until I stumbled on it last weekend. Co-authored by the journalist Mick Middles (who says he 'hovered around Joy Division for a while') and Lindsay Reade (Tony Wilson's first wife), this gives a much fuller picture of the life of Ian Curtis, the lead singer of the post-punk band Joy Division, who was born into a working-class family in Old Trafford, Manchester in 1956, and who killed himself in Macclesfield, Cheshire in 1980 at the age of twenty-three.

Torn Apart is an appropriate title not only because it alludes to the Curtis-penned Joy Division song 'Love Will Tear Us Apart', but also because the song's autobiographical lyric refers to Curtis himself being torn apart – not only by the triangle he was in with his wife Debbie and his soulmate Annik Honoré, but also by his worsening epilepsy and his ambivalence toward the fame monster.

This book is revisionary in that it finally reveals the truth behind Curtis's relationship with Honoré, often via his (always capitalised) letters to her, or by her correspondance with the authors. Formerly, it had been assumed that Honoré was 'the other woman', which to a large extent she was, but not in the usually accepted sense of that term, hence my use of the expression 'soulmate'. What impresses the reader here is a young woman very far removed from being a groupie or hanger-on, but who was in fact an extremely sensitive person whose relationship with Curtis was, as she says, 'very platonic and very pure and romantic'.

Perhaps Ian Curtis was in part attracted to Annik Honoré initially because she was foreign (therefore exotic), but it was important that they could talk about the music, literature and cinema that thrilled them. However, although this was an intellectual, very intense and very loving relationship, it was never sexual: Curtis's illness and the prescribed drugs he was taking meant a considerable reduction of sex drive, but then the sexually innocent Honoré was too shy to allow anything to develop in that respect.

There is a wealth of information here, much of it culled from people who were directly involved with Ian Curtis and/or Joy Division in general – parents, other relatives, old friends, band members, neighbors, etc. I could have lived without knowing about the accidental drinks from cans of piss, or the shit in hand game, but then this is a kind of warts-and-all book.

And there are a number of minor errors:

The book I have is the 2009 edition, in which Appendix 1 notes the death of Tony Wilson in 2007. However, the first paragraph of Chapter 19 still ends with the sentence '[Wilson] was and remains a very busy man.'

The (Fac 51) Haçienda club deliberately had an aberrant cedilla for a specific reason, but I didn't notice it receiving any cedilla in this book: surely the authors could have managed a few more ALT + codes?

I also noticed a few spelling errors, as opposed to typos. The singer in Echo & the Bunnymen is affectionately called 'enigmatic', although Ian McCulloch is referred to as 'McCullouch' on several occasions, including in the Index. Also, although the reader is overhelpfully (and slightly inaccurately) informed in a footnote that 'Honoré' is pronounced 'Honourey', such attention to detail is not repeated by writing Sartre's trilogy Les Chemins de la liberté as 'Les Chemims de la Liberte': even if a writer doesn't know a foreign language, that is no excuse to make two mistakes in a few words – such sloppiness seems almost wilful. (Yes, here too the errors are reproduced in the Index: errors which could easily have been corrected for this later edition.)

OK, I do pedantic well. Despite this, I thoroughly enjoyed Torn Apart, which is a genuine contribution to Joy Division knowledge: a very worthy effort.

Marie Cardinal: Les Mots pour le dire | The Words to Say It (1975)

Les Mots pour le dire (The Words to Say It) is quite a staggering autobiography, the account of a woman on the verge of madness and her journey not back, but into a new life, an authentic existence.

This is a long journey, very harrowing in the first part which begins with the thirty-year-old narrator's frequent pyschosomatic vaginal bleeding, her extreme panic attacks, her refusal to take medication and her flight from a psychiatric hospital to expensive three-times-a-week sessions with the psychoanalyst who will cure her, but only after seven years.

This is the story of a pied noir, an Algerian descended from comfortable European parents, but divorced before she was born. Now a non-believer, she was largely brought up by a pious Catholic mother of overwhelming hypocrisy, who never educated her in sexual matters and still mourns the earlier death of her infant daughter. The book steadily reveals, as if from the psychiatric couch, the reasons behind her mental illness and takes us through the childhood and adolescent traumas and the almost unbelievable callousness of the mother.

The book is dedicated to 'Le docteur qui m'a aidée à naître' ('The doctor who helped me to be born'), and he is very much a listener as opposed to a talker, only speaking when it's really necessary, not taking notes but taking everything in. For instance, he coaxes from his patient the meanings of 'tuyau' ('tube'), which caused her shame as a young child when urged to piss down the tube of the train toilet by her mother and grandmother, or the makeshift one she (ignorantly) later uses to masturbate with, causing more shame.

But the key to a vital source of the victim's pain is her mother taking her, as an adolescent, into a crowded street and telling her that she did everything she could to induce a miscarriage to prevent her giving birth to her: this is a mother whose Catholic convictions mean that she sees it as a sin to have an abortion, but sees nothing wrong in attempting to perform her own abortion, nor in describing to her daughter how she wanted her not to be born.

The telling of this sickening act frees the patient from her loss of blood, and even the madness in her (which she calls 'la chose' ('the thing')) subsides to a large extent. But now she is really born she must learn to be a person in her own right, which is what the second and final part of this book is about, and which ends when she settles her final account with her psychoanalyst, just after being freed at last by the effective suicide of her mother drinking a bottle and a half of rum.

Unforgettable.

Southern Cemetery #8: Jerome Caminada

 

'JEROME CAMINADA

DIED MARCH 10^TH 1914, AGED 70 YEARS

 

ALSO AMELIA HIS WIFE

DIED AUG. 23^RD 1928, AGED 73 YEARS'

 

Police officer Jerome Caminada (1844–1914) has been called the Manchester Sherlock Holmes by some, and he was the city's first CID superindendent. He published a few books on his experiences – the most notable being Twenty-Five Years of Detective Life (1895) – and some of his work was published posthumously. This year of course marks the centenary of his death.

Southern Cemetery #7: John Cassidy

 

'IN LOVING MEMORY

OF

JOHN CASSIDY

SCULPTOR

DIED 18^TH JULY 1939

AGED 79 YEARS.

 

HIS HANDS FASHIONED

THE BEAUTY HE SAW.'

 

Cassidy was the sculptor of the original statue of Ben Brierley in Queen's Park, now reproduced in bronze in Failsworth by Denise Dutton, and of the statues of John Rylands and his wife Enriqueta in John Rylands Library.

Georges Duhamel: Le Désert de Bièvres (1937)

In December 1906 l'Abbaye de Créteil was formed and lasted until January 1908. Inspired by Rabelais's Abbaye de Thélème, it was intended as a kind of non-religious artistic commune, an escape from the commercialisation of the mind, from the slavery to which artistic people were subjected, printing its own works and leading a 'natural' life.

It wouldn't have been possible without the writer Charles Vildrac, who was strongly supported by his friend the poet Georges Duhamel. They found a rundown mansion – belonging to the automobile manufacturer Barriquand – for rent in Créteil and the poets René Arcos and (slightly later) Alexandre Mercereau, the painters Albert Gleizes and Henri Doucet, the printer Lucien Linard, and others, took part in the (very short-lived) experiment. The poet Henri-Martin Barzun was the patron. Thirty years after the event, Georges Duhamel gave a fictional representation of l'Abbaye Créteil in his novel Le Désert de Bièvres.

Le Désert de Bièvres is fifth in Duhamel's Chronique des Pasquiers series of novels, and it's easy to tell that there are a number of things about the protagonist Justin Weill that relate to Vildrac, just as there are a number of things that link the narrator Laurent Pasquier – who has put off his medical studies for the project – to Duhamel himself. There's a printer called Jules Piquenart who may well represent Lucien Linard, although little is heard of the patron the Marquis Farfreyde, and Duhamel seems to have jumbled the other characters about, perhaps to protect the guilty, perhaps just to fictionalize the issue more.

Almost from the start the poet Jean-Paul Sénac is trouble, perhaps indicated by the fact that he likes a drink (or two). But that is a relatively small thing, as there are a number of other bad habits he has: he stays in bed late, he's lazy and pisses out of his bedroom window rather that go to the toilet, and we discover towards the end that when he picked his nose he left the findings on his chair. He's a professional complainer, but most of all he can't live without mocking people, inventing all kinds of insulting names for them.

If this makes the book sound humorous, it certainly is in many parts – Sénac knows, for instance, from the creaking of the bed above and the sighing coming from it that the painter Raoul Brénugat is having fun with his wife again, and he must be in very good shape as he's at it not just every night but often in the morning, and at times after lunch. For a while though, Sénac will have to ease his frustration by bullying the stray dog who's made himself at home in the Abbaye and is rather taken to this poet-monster.

There's also Armand Larseneur the musician, the ardent vegetarian and philosopher Bernard Jusserand and his wife who turns out not to be his wife, and Testevel the editor, all more or less surviving through a number of months until internal conflicts and money problems mean that – slowly but surely – the utopia-turned-dystopia loses its inhabitants and only the original Justin and Laurent remain to concede defeat and make imminent plans for going back into the outside world.

Perhaps surprisingly, the real press managed (painstakingly, with a pedal machine) to produce about twenty books. This one is highly readable.

Links to my previous blog post of l'Abbaye de Créteil – plus a forty-minute video (including an aged Vildrac) relating the history of the Abbaye – are below.

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L'Abbaye de Créteil, Val-de-Marne
L'Abbaye (1906–1908) [Video]

Chopin in Manchester, UK

 

This sculpture, in Deansgate, Manchester, commemorates the bi-centenary of Fryderyk Chopin's birth. It is by the Polish sculptor Robert Sobocinski and depicts Baroness Aurore Lucile Dupon, Chopin's muse, on the right.

 

'Fryderyk Chopin

Fryderyk Chopin was one of the world's greatest musical composers.
His compositions combined elements of his his beloved Polish culture
with universal ones, which gave his music international appeal.

He visited Manchester in the year before his death, at the early age of 39.
On Monday, August 28th 1848 a gravely ill Fryderyk Chopin gave
a Gala Concert before a rapturous audience of 1200
at the Gentleman's Concert Hall, which was situated at the corner of
Peter Street and Lower Mosley Street.

Despite serious ill-health he insisted that he would perform, a fact which has forever endeared him to Mancunians and music lovers everywhere.'

John Rylands Library, Manchester, UK

The architect Basil Champneys designed the magnificent neo-Gothic John Rylands Library, which was opened to readers in 1900 after taking ten years to construct. It is a memorial by Enriqueta Rylands (1843–1908) to her husband John Rylands (1801–1888), and is now part of the University of Manchester. 

 

 

In the Reading Room is the statue of John Rylands at one end.

 

And Enriqueta at the other.

 

Both north and south windows are by Charles E. Kempe. Above is the south Arts Window. In the upper panels, from left to right, are representations of: Socrates, Epicletus, Marcus Aurelius, Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, Cicero, Aeschylus, Raphael and Beethoven; in the lower panels: Samuel Johnson, Wordsworth, Carlyle, Descartes, Locke, Kant, Hegel, Dante, Michelangelo and Handel.

 

North is the Theology window.  In the upper panels, from left to right, are representations of: St Anselm, St Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Moses, Isaiah, St John, St Paul, Richard Hooker, Thomas Cartwright and Hugo; in the lower panels: Erasmus, Beza, Melanchthon, Origen, St John, Chrysostom, St Jerome, St Augustine, Bishop Butler, Jonathan Edwards and Schleiermacher.

 

At the time of our visit a few weeks ago an exhibition called 'Bona Eek! The Polari Mission' by Jez Dolan and Joseph Richardson was coming to its end. Above is Dolan's 'A Polari Etymology', loosely based on Alfred H. Barr's 1936 programme cover for the MOMA 'Cubism and Abstract Art' exhibition. 

 

This is Dolan's The Lion of Chaeronea. Founded by George Cecil Ives (1867 –1950), a poet and gay rights campaigner, the Order of Chaeronea was a secret society of homosexuals named after the place where the Sacred Band of Thebes (150 pairs of male lovers) were killed in 338 BC. Quite possibly, Oscar Wilde and Bosie were members.

The Site of Manchester's Oldest Pissotière

'HERE WAS THE SITE OF
MANCHESTER'S
OLDEST
PISSOTIÈRE
RETAINED FOR
POSTERITY
LAST USED A.D. 1895'

This plaque is on the side of the Lass O' Gowrie pub in Charles Street, looking down onto the River Medlock, in central Manchester. A previous post I made about Carolina Nairne and the pub is below.

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Lady Carolina Nairne and The Lass O' Gowrie, Manchester.

University of Manchester plaques #4: Ellen Wilkinson

'THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER

commemorates

ELLEN WILKINSON

1891–1947

Labour Politician and

First Female Minister of Eduation

Graduate BA History 1913,

MA 1914'

The plaque is on the John Owens Building. What isn't mentioned here is that she also wrote several books, and her novel Clash (1929) is a significant example of inter-war working-class literature.

University of Manchester plaques #3: Peter Mark Roget

'THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER

commemorates

PETER MARK ROGET

1779–1869

Physician and Compiler

of the Thesaurus

Co-founder of Manchester's

Medical School'

This plaque is on Coupland III Building.

University of Manchester plaques #2: Alan Turing

'THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER

commemorates

ALAN MATHISON TURING

1912–1954

A Creator of Computer Science,

Code breaker and Mathematician

Reader in Mathematics

1948–1954'

This plaque is on Coupland I Building. My other Turing posts are linked below:

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Alan Turing, Mathematician (1912-54), Wilmslow.
Alan Turing, Sackville Park, Manchester

University of Manchester plaques #1: Alison Uttley

'THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER

commemorates

ALISON UTTLEY

1884–1976

Children's Author

Graduate

BSc Physics 1906'

This plaque is on the Rutherford Building.

Thomas Bailey in Basford, Nottingham

Thomas Bailey (1785–1856) was a journalist and poet and the father of the poet Philip James Bailey (1816–1902). He was born in Nottingham and was the owner and editor of the Nottingham Mercury, although in his article in the ODNB Thompson Cooper says that Bailey was 'too moderate for his readers', and that the paper suffered from declining circulation as a result and folded in 1852. Basford House in Church Street, Basford, Nottingham, dates from 1730 (or perhaps earlier) and was formerly named the Manor House. It was bought by Bailey in the 1830s, and he lived here until his death, 'writing and collecting books and engravings'.

Among Bailey's writings, Cooper lists A Sermon on the Death of Byron (1824), the four-volume Annals of Nottinghamshire (1852–5), Village Reform: the Great Social Necessity of Britain (1854), and Records of Longevity (1857).

 'THIS MEMORIAL WAS ERECTED BY
THOMAS BAILEY

THE HISTORIAN, IN THE GROUNDS
BELOW, (OPPOSITE THIS CEMETERY)
TO COMMEMORATE THE PASSING
OF THE REFORM ACT, A.D. 1852:
& WAS REMOVED HERE TO MARK
THE RESTING PLACE OF HIS MUCH
ESTEEMED & VALUED FRIEND.'

The old cemetery opposite the house. Writing in Old Nottingham Suburbs: Then and Now (1914) Robert Mellors states that Bailey also erected a column in the grounds of the house to commemorate the act, but that it was removed and re-erected in the old cemetery when the house was sold. Bailey's friend, anonymously mentioned above, was R. B. Spencer. The column is no longer there.

Many thanks, once more, to Dr Rowena Edlin-White for giving me directions to the memorial, and for drawing my attention to Mellors's article.

A link to my earlier post on Philip James Bailey is below.

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Philip James Bailey, Nottingham

Jean Cocteau in Maisons-Laffitte, Yvelines, France

The life of Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) was celebrated last year on the fiftieth anniversary of his death in his birthplace in Maisons-Laffitte, Yvelines. These information banners went around the town hall.

 

Cocteau's childhood home and place of birth is in the background here, while in the foreground is his birth certificate, giving the département as it was at the time – Seine-et-Oise – and his father Georges Alfred (47 years old, without profession) and mother Eugénie Junia Émilie (32 year old, without profession).

Cocteau in Maisons-Laffitte in about 1908.

 

Cocteau, his elder sister Marthe, mother Eugénie (née Lecomte), and a male and female cousin from the Lecomte family about 1908.

 

 Marthe Cocteau.

Eugénie Cocteau in the salon about 1910.

 

Emilie Lecomte, Cocteau's maternal grandmother, by Patrois in 1847.

 

Paul, Cocteau's elder brother, on a tricycle in about 1885.

 

 The transport in Maisons-Laffitte in 1909 or 1910.

A quotation from Cocteau, saying he grew up in a place where horse racing and cycling reigned supreme and where the Dreyfus affair divided the bourgeois world.

Natalie Barney in the Cimetière de Passy, 16th arrondissement

 

'NATALIE CLIFFORD BARNEY
ÉCRIVAIN
1876 – 1972
ELLE FUT L'AMAZONE DE REMY DE GOURMONT

JE SUIS CET ÊTRE LÉGENDAIRE

OÙ JE REVIS N.C.B.

ET SA SOEUR

LAURA CLIFFORD BARNEY
OFFICIER DE LA LÉGION D'HONNEUR
1879 – 1974
VEUVE D'HIPPOLYTE DREYFUS
MEMBRE
DE
LA COMMUNAUTÉ BAHA'IE'

In L'imaginaire du féminin dans l'oeuvre de Renée Vivien (2004), Marie-Ange Bartholomot Bessou writes that Jean Chalon says Barney was, in the final years of her life, particularly concerned with the choice of her epitaph, that it should be worthy of her perceived legend. Remy de Gourmont certainly did call her 'The Amazon', and Gourmont published his creative letters of their conversations in Mercure de France, later to be incorporated into the book Lettres à l'Amazone (1917). But 'I am this legendary being in which I live again'? That's strong stuff.

I spent some time looking for Renée Vivien's tomb in the Cimetière de Passy, and now realize that I was ignoring the absolutely obvious. A further search shall be for later this year, and with it must come a proper look into Bartholomot Bessou's work on Renée Vivien. This is really very interesting.

Laura Clifford Barney looks interesting too, but that's another story.

Virgil Gheorgiu, Cimetière de Passy, 16th arrondissement

Virgil Gheorghiu (1916–92) was a Rumanian writer whose most important novel was The Twenty-Fifth Hour (1949; trans. 1950), which was adapted into a film in 1967 by Henri Verneuil. It is a denunciation of totalitarian regimes and of the impersonalization of society, and the French Preface was written by Gabriel Marcel.

In 1952 Gheorghiu was vigorously accused of anti-Semitism by the press, the accusations dating from when he was a war correspondent. He refused to deny the charges, causing Marcel to demand that the publisher remove his Preface from future editions of the novel.

Paul Léautaud in Châtenay-Malabry, Hauts-de-Seine, France

'PAUL LÉAUTAUD

ÉCRIVAIN FRANÇAIS

1872 – 1956'

 

 

The circular shape here is all that remains of a stone, curled-up cat: Léautaud famously had a great number of them, and I photographed the reconstruction of his room in the Musée Carnavalet here.

André Malraux in Rueil-Malmaison, Hauts-de-Seine, France

The Théâtre André Malraux's impressive wall in Rueil-Malmaison, Hauts-de-Seine, with a very impressive quotation:

'La culture ne s'hérite pas; elle se conquiert.' André Malraux

'Culture is not inherited – it is acquired by great effort.'

Er...Discuss.

The other quotations are not quite as challenging:

'Nous voulons de la vie au théâtre, et du théâtre dans la vie.' Jules Renard

'We want life in the theatre, and the theatre in life.'

'Comme vous la lisez, sa lettre...' Roxane à Cyrano

'How you read it, his letter...'

'Un seul être vous manque et tout est dépeuplé.' Lamartine

'The lack of a single being can take everyone from you.'

'De la musique avant toute chose.' Paul Verlaine

'Music before everything.'

'L'éternité c'est long, surtout vers la fin.' Woody Allen

'Eternity is a long time, especially toward the end.'