Dr Tony Shaw

13 February 2014

Jules Machard in Meudon-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, France

Libellés : France, Hauts-de-Seine (92), Île-de-France, Machard (Jules), Meudon-sur-Seine

'JULES MACHARD
PEINTRE D'HISTOIRE, GRAND PRIX DE ROME
CHEVALIER DE LA LÉGION D'HONNEUR 1839 – 1900'

The above monument is by Machard's uncle Gustave Crauk (1827–1905), whose brother was the painter Charles Crauk (1819–1905).

12 February 2014

Ivan Turgenev in Bougival, Yvelines

Libellés : Bougival (Yvelines), Île-de-France, Turgenev (Ivan), Viardot (Louis), Viardot (Pauline), Yvelines (78)

The Musée Ivan Tourguéniev (Ivan Turgenev in English) is hidden away in a large park in Bougival, Yvelines.

Turgenev lived at 'Les Frênes' ('The Ash Trees'), popularly known as 'La Datcha', between 1875 and his death in 1883.

The museum entrance is at the back, and unfortunately (it's not an uncommon story) photography stops there.

Turgenev's French writer friends included Maupassant and George Sand, but there was a special group that he jokingly called the 'groupe des auteurs sifflés' (literally the 'group of whistled authors'), who used to gather here once a month for a big meal from 1874. He called them this after the whistles of disapproval they had received because they hadn't produced a successful play. The group consisted of Turgenev of course, Gustave Flaubert, Edmond de Goncourt, Alphonse Daudet and Émile Zola.

The house is essentially two large rooms on the ground and the upper floor. Downstairs one room is dedicated to the rights of man and called 'Salle des Droits de l'Homme' (or 'Salle Françoise Sabatier'): Turgenev was a tireless fighter of injustice, and his Les Mémoires d'un chasseur (1852) paved the way for the abolition of serfdom in Russia. He also hated slavery in the USA, anti-Semitism in Russia, the death penalty in France, etc.

The second room is concerned with his life in Europe, and upstairs is his workroom and his bedroom.

Outside, La Feuille de frêne is a sculpture by Grigori Pototsky.

On one side of the leaf is Turgenev.

On the other side is Pauline Viardot (1821–1910).

Villa Viardot is just a few yards away from Les Frênes.

Pauline Viardot (née García) was the woman with whom Turgenev fell hopelessly in love. She was a singer and a composer who had married Louis (1880–83) – a writer, art critic and translator – in 1840. He translated Cervantes, and – with the help of Turgenev – Gogol and Pushkin. He died four months before Turgenev.

Parc Monceau (revisited), 8th arrondissement

Libellés : Carmontelle, Garnerin (Jacques), Parc Monceau, Paris

I've already written about a number of the features of the wonderful Parc Monceau, but I felt that it was worthy of another post. The original creation of the painter, engraver, playwright and landscape architect Louis de Carmontelle (1717–1806) – often simply called Carmontelle – Parc Monceau was designed for the Duke of Chartres in the final quarter of the 18th century. Some original features remain, although it has changed a great deal since then.

The rotunda is by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736–1806).

The Corinthian colonnade is from Saint-Denis church, which was destroyed in 1719.

The Egyptian pyramid (1778).

'ICI

LE 22 OCTOBRE 1797

LE FRANÇAIS

ANDRÉ-JACQUES GARNERIN

RÉALISA À PARTIR D'UN BALLON LIBRE

LA PREMIÈRE DÉSCENTE EN PARACHUTE

DE L'HISTOIRE'

'HERE

ON 22 OCTOBER 1797

THE FRENCHMAN

ANDRÉ-JACQUES GARDERIN

EXECUTED FROM AN AIR BALLOON

THE FIRST PARACHUTE DESCENT

IN HISTORY'

The Italian bridge, or Petit-Pont.

A newer addition, representing an earthquake.

Hôtel à insectes. I'd noticed a very different insect hotel in Auvers, although I don't think I've noticed any elsewhere.

My other Parc Monceau post is below:

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First Parc Monceau post

11 February 2014

Hector Guimard and Castel Béranger

Libellés : Art Nouveau, Guimard (Hector), Paris, Signac (Paul)

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'Histoire de Paris

Le Castel Béranger

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Né à Lyon le 10 mars 1867, Hector Guimard entre

en 1882 à l'École des Arts décoratifs de Paris,

dans l'atelier de Charles Genuys, puis à l'École

des Beaux-Arts en 1885. Destiné à l'Exposition

universelle de 1889, le Pavillon de l'Électricité

préfigure dejà son goût pour le néo-gothique et

l'emploi des matériaux modernes, très influencé

par "les Entretiens sur l'Art" de Viollet-le-Duc.

Entre 1894 et 1895, deux étés de voyages en

Angleterre, en Hollande et en Belgique, où il

fréquente Paul Hankar and Victor Horta,

achèvent sa formation intellectuelle. Dès

la réalisation de ce Castel aussitôt sur-

nommé "Dérangé", édifié entre 1895 et

1898, son architecte de vingt-sept ans

fait figure de grand-maître de l'Art

nouveau. Manifeste artistique, cet

immeuble d'habitations à loyers

modérés, dont Guimard lui-même

occupe le rez-de-chaussée à

partir de 1897, est primé au

premier concours de faça-

des de la Ville et célébré

avec enthousiasme par

ses premiers locatai-

res, ldont le peintre

Paul Signac.'

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'History of Paris

Castel Bérenger

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Hector Guimard was born in Lyons on 10 March 1867, and

in 1882 went to the School of Decorative Arts in

Paris, in Charles Genuys's workshop, then to

the School of Fine Arts in 1885. Destined for

the Universal Exhibition of 1889, the

Pavilion of Electricity already prefigured his taste

for the neo-gothic and the use of modern materials,

very influenced by Viollet-le-Duc's "Interviews on Art".

Between 1894 and 1895 he completed his intellectual

training with two summer trips to England, Holland

and Belgium, where he met Paul Hankar and

Victor Horta. As soon as he finished this

"Castel" – built between 1895 and 1898 and

immediately called "Dérangé" – its twenty-

seven-year-old architect was looked upon as one

of the great masters of Art Nouveau. An

artistic manifesto, this building – divided

into flats at moderate rates, in which

Guimard himself occupied the

ground floor from 1897 – won

first prize for the town's facades,

which was enthusiastically celebrated

by its first tenants, one of whom was

the painter Paul Signac.'

Castel Béranger is in the 16th arrondissement.

My other Guimard post is linked below:

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Hector Guimard's bouche du métro, Porte Dauphine

Ossip Zadkine in the 6th arrondissement

Libellés : Paris, Zadkine (Ossip)

The unimposing entrance to the Musée Zadkine in rue d'Assass in the 6th arrondissement. It's very easy to miss, but well worth the visit. The sculptures below are all by Ossip Zadkine (1890–1967).

Torse d'Hermaphrodite (1925–31).

Projet de Monument à Guillaume Apollinaire (1948).

La Mélancolie (1929–37).

Rébecca ou la grand porteuse d'eau (1927).

La Forêt humaine (c. 1947).

Statue pour une montagne ou cœur venteux (1958).

Statue pour un jardin (1943–44).

La Ville détruite (1951).

Orphée (1956).

Torse de la ville détruite (1951–63).

Tête de Prométhée (1956–7).

Projet pour le monument aux frères Van Gogh (1963).

Auguste Comte in the 3rd arrondissement

Libellés : Comte (Auguste), Paris

5 rue Payenne.

'CHAPELLE

LUMANITÉ

MONUMENT HISTORIQUE'

The Chapelle de Humanité was built by Brazilian positivists in 1903, being a smaller replica of the Templo da Humanidade in Rio de Janeiro. Auguste Comte (1789–1857), the founder of positivism, had drawn up the plans but was of course unable to see the building in his lifetime.

10 February 2014

**Édouard Louis: En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule | The End of Eddy (2014)**

Libellés : Eribon (Didier), French Literature, French working-class literature, Gay Literature, Louis (Édouard)

En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (translated as 'The End of Eddy') is Édouard Louis's first novel, published when he was twenty-one, and is highly autobiographical. Louis is also strongly influenced by the work of Pierre Bourdieu. 'Eddy' is obviously not a 'natural' French name and was chosen by his father to make it sound American, a bit 'tough guy', and indeed much of the book is about Eddy failing to be a tough guy, or 'un dur', not being a 'man' but more like a 'woman'.

Eddy lives in a small village in Picardy which is governed by a defiantly working-class masculinist culture. This is a place where political correctness is unheard of, where the men leave school as fast as possible for the factory and the women get pregnant in their teens and marry shortly after. Eddy's parents did just that: Eddy's father went straight to the brass factory like his grandfather before him, and his great-grandfather before that. His father married a woman in her mid-twenties who had been previously married when she got pregnant at seventeen. The naturalistic nature of the novel suggests a twenty-first-century Zolaesque creation. Only this was written by someone who, unlike Zola, was in fact born into the working class. Internal working-class novels (that is, by and about the working class) are relatively rare in France.

Leisure time involves drinking, and it seems as though all the men in the village soak themselves in either pastis, or wine from five-litre boxes. Television is almost as essential as air to the Bellegueule household, and is turned on full volume and never switched off during waking hours. There are four TV sets in Eddy's family, one in the living room and one in each bedroom, and they have never had an internet connection. When Eddy is born he has an elder half-brother and a half-sister, and by the time he begins his story he has a younger brother and sister.

It's perhaps needless to say that this is a poor family surviving on its wits. The TVs were all fished out of the village tip and made functional by Eddy's father, meals are often of poor quality and occasionally they have to use the Restos de Coeur charity, noise is all around, the conversation is banal and frequently racist and homophobic, and all the five children have to take a bath in the same water. When Edouard Louis left home his new friends couldn't understand why he spoke so loudly, and he explained his bad teeth away by inventing 'bohemian' parents. Several publishers turned the novel down because they found it too caricatural, although Louis drew from his own experience.

Eddy begins his narrative by speaking about the 'two boys' who haunt the book, the bullies who taunt him, bang his head against the wall in the corridor where he tries to hide at school during breaks, and spit at him in the face or on his sleeve and force him to suck it up. Frequently on waking up the images of the two boys is the first thing on his mind, and it is with relief that occasionally his mother wants him to stay away from school and help her in the house.

The problem Eddy has is that he is perceived to walk like a girl, have the mannerisms of a girl, speak affectedly, and that he doesn't like to join in 'men's' games, such as football. And of course everyone around him sees him as different, his father despairing that he isn't fitting into the niche that he has tried to create for him. His father reacts to his son taking medication with 'Comme dans les asiles de dingues' ('Like in loony bins'), although the irony is that the father is given to punching holes in the walls of the house, and these have to be concealed by the children's drawings. (The narrator nevertheless defends his father by saying that he avoids the genetic trap of hitting his children, unlike his grandfather.)

The mother appears as far more complicated than the father. In one paragraph the narrator adopts a Foucauldian stance and says that it took him years to realise, for instance, that his mother isn't being incoherent or contradictory by sometimes saying that she could have continued her studies to a high standard, then at other times saying that she has never really been interested in studying – on the contrary, she is attempting to resolve a conflict between what I choose to call the naturalistic discourse and her son's oppositional discourse, which is fighting against parental and general local familial values.

The narrator sees his mother as torn between various discourses, such as the shame of not having studied, and the pride of having produced beautiful children. Certainly, one not specifically underlined conflict of discourses is between the naturalistic and the economic: it is the norm in this society to go as soon as possible from school to factory, which would not normally represent a clash between discourses. Here, however, Eddy's health and temperament would probably mean that he had to stay at home if he left school, meaning the parents would lose his family allowance: much better, then, that he continue at school.

The crunch comes as a result of Eddy watching a porn film with three other kids, one of whom is an older cousin. They decide it's unfortunate that they can't do the same as in the movie, but then realise that they can make do with second best – if two of the boys wear a ring they can play the girls and the other two the boys. Although Eddy understands that the difference here is that the other three are merely playing at homosexuals when he's doing it for real, he obviously goes along with it and allows himself to be sodomised by one, and then he in turn sodomises another. This continues until the day his mother walks into the shed where they're playing porn stars and finds her son's cousin buggering him.

The story gets through to the whole village, via his cousin, and he has to bear increased bullying and insults: his cousin escapes with impunity because he doesn't act like a, er – the book is full of insulting terms for gay: 'pédé', 'pédale', 'tante', 'tantouze', 'tapette', 'tarlouze', etc.

Eddy tries, he really tries, to be un dur, tries to alter his walk, his voice, his mannerisms. He realises that he needs to prove the heterosexuality he doesn't have, so first comes the perceived salope ('slag') Laura. It's in the final fifty pages that the tension loosens and self-parody kicks in big time. Eddy has been going out with her, and they've kissed a lot, and finally on one occasion he actually gets an erection: the internal monologue screams 'guéri', 'guéri' ('cured, cured'): his heart hammering against his chest, he arrives home thinking his parents will see a change in him, and he even cheerily greets his father, only to receive back: 'Ta gueule je regarde ma télé' ('Shut your gob I'm watching my telly'*). Needless to say, Laura hasn't failed to notice the slights she's getting for going out with un pédé, so she soon ditches him for un dur.

Next (and last) in Eddy's short-lived heterosexual life comes Sabrina, and this episode is – at Eddy's expense, it must be admitted – the funniest chapter in the book. Eddy's half-sister, who is now living in the house she's bought for a song from grandmother, fixes up the date. Sabrina doesn't live in the same village and is several years older than Eddy, but she's obviously attracted to him, and he tries to be attracted back. They go to the local club several times before Eddy's sister contrives to go home with Sabrina's mother, leaving the 'loving couple' to use the sister's bed that night. They get into bed and Eddy still has his trousers on and moves as far away from Sabrina as possible without falling out of the bed, although she attacks him, fishing out his cock and trying really hard to make it come to life, but even if he thinks about having sex with men he can't get hard. Sabrina cries when he says goodbye next morning.

After a half-hearted attempt to escape, Eddy finally does so with great panache: instead of going to the lycée in all-too-close-to-home Abbeville, he secures a place to study his beloved Drama at distant Amiens, where he has to live in. His father has inevitably tried to frighten him with stories about vicious Arabs in the town, but the lycée represents a major change in the narrator's lifestyle. Here are students from another class, some of whom even have his 'feminine' airs, and they seem far more welcoming. More importantly this is the beginning of the death of Eddy and the birth of Édouard, in effect killing the father.

I'm not too sure what the Sylvain chapter is doing in this, as it doesn't in any way appear to add to the story and just seems as though it's padding the book out. It's simply a further example of the negative lifestyle of the inhabitants of the area.

In spite of the self-tormenting comical bits, this is a very bleak vision of the underclass in Picardy. There was a danger, I felt, of creating a classist binary – a fact reinforced by the colloquial speech in italics which comes from the locals – although I think Édouard Louis just about escapes from it by depicting some of his characters in a sympathetic light, if not all the time then at least some of it.

I loved the book, and mostly cringed, occasionally laughed, and in the end cheered at Édouard Louis trying both to break into and finally out of the skin of Eddy Bellegueule. I have just one question: he's obviously waited all his life to write this book, so how will he follow it up?

*The use of the possessive adjective is an idiosyncrasy rather than a localism.

Below is a link to an interview with Édouard Louis discussing his book.

ADDENDUM 1: There is also a link to an article showing the reactions of the Bellegueule family in Hallencourt (Somme) to En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule. Interestingly, the article also contains a few paragraphs on the book's dedicatee: Didier Eribon, a sociologist and philosopher at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne, Amiens, is also gay and from a working-class background, and wrote of his return to Muizon, Reims, in Retour à Reims (2009).

ADDENDUM 2: I've just noticed that Édouard Louis's book is to be translated into English by Sam Taylor as The End of Eddy and will be published March 2017(?).

ADDENDUM 3: The second novel by Édouard Louis is Histoire de la violence and will be published on 7 January 2016. A résumé is here.

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Édouard Louis: En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (2014)
Courrier picard: 'Les deux visages d'Eddy Bellegueule'
Édouard Louis: Histoire de la violence

7 February 2014

**Maurice Leblanc: Arsène Lupin: gentleman cambrioleur (1907)**

Libellés : French Literature, Leblanc (Maurice), Lupin (Arséne)

And now for something a little lighter. I've been meaning to go to Étretat – in Marcel Leblanc's Pays de Caux territory – for several years, mainly to visit Leblanc's house museum, but also to see the Porte d'Aval and l'Aiguille. This is the stamping ground of Lupinophiles, although I can hardly count myself in their number as until yesterday I hadn't read a single Arsène Lupin book.

So I logically began with Arsène Lupin: gentleman cambrioleur, which is the first published book about this gentleman burglar. The cover shows him in a top hat and in evening dress with a flower in his button hole, a monocle, and carrying a cane: this is certainly the typical image most people have of Lupin. However, he reminds me of Woody Allen's Zelig, who is a kind of chameleon man, changing appearance, even changing shape to some extent to suit his surroundings. He turns up everywhere, frequently using a pseudonym.

There are nine short stories in this book, only the first three of which – concerning Lupin's arrest in New York, his imprisonment in Paris, and his escape from prison – are consecutively linked. The other stories are almost entirely separate from the others, although the detective Ganimard makes regular appearances; and in the final playfully-named story – 'Herlock Sholmes arrive trop tard' (before the surname acquired a grave 'e') – the smitten Miss Nelly Underdown (who previously appeared in the first story) makes a second entrance.

Although Lupin is a professional thief it is impossible not to admire his cool, his aplomb, his sense of humor and justice, his generosity, his decency, even his sheer arrogance. Most of all it is his intelligence we admire, not just the cat and mouse games he plays with the police, but how he can think his way both out of and into even the most apparently impossible places.

The general public obviously love him and he can call upon seemingly endless numbers of people to assist him. More significantly, though, detectives – such as Ganimard and Herlock Sholmes – love pitting their wits against his.

It's perhaps hardly surprising – in a country that has so many streets named after anarchists – that Arsène Lupin should still be such a popular fictional character in France. But a very stylish one: in his Preface to this book, Pierre Lazareff says: [Lupin] isn't an aristocrat living as an anarchist, but an anarchist living as an aristocrat'.

My Maurice Leblanc posts:
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Maurice Leblanc in Étretat (76), Seine-Maritime
Maurice Leblanc L'Aiguille creuse | The Hollow Needle
Maurice Leblanc: Arsène Lupin: gentleman cambrioleur
Maurice Leblanc: Les Trois Yeux

5 February 2014

**Jérôme Ferrari: Le Sermon sur la chute de Rome (2012)**

Libellés : Corsica in literature, Ferrari (Jérôme), French Literature, Prix Goncourt

Le Sermon sur la chute de Rome was the 2012 Goncourt winner. Jérôme Ferrari's title relates to the sermons Saint Augustine made about the fall of Rome in Hippone, where he was bishop between 396 and 430, and which is now Annaba, Algeria. However, in spite of the quotations from Saint Augustine's sermons which introduce all sections of the book apart from the last one, and in spite of the final section relating to Saint Augustine's words on the fall of Rome, the book doesn't obviously concern the fall of Rome in any way: it ostensibly just concerns a village pub in Corsica.

There are seven sections, with the first, third and fifth detailing the grandfather Marcel Antonetti's life up to the present; all three consist of one long paragraph and total about forty pages. The much longer second, fourth, and six sections are essentially an account of the early adult life Marcel's grandson Matthieu and his long-term friend Libero, who like Matthieu lives in Corsica, although he is of Sardinian ancestry.

Libero and Matthieu go to Paris to study philosophy, and Libero is taking his master's on Saint Augustine, Matthieu his on Leibnitz, although they're both unhappy with their studies and then they see that the possibility of running a bar in the Corsican village so familiar to them is a chance to create, er, 'the best of all possible worlds'. Surprisingly, Marcel provides the necessary finances: he had previously taken out his anger on Matthieu because he is the product of his only child Jacques and Marcel's sister Claudie – making them first cousins.

Claudie and Jacques are initially far from happy with Matthieu abandoning his studies, although the bar – which has gone through several unfortunate unsuccessful incarnations – is soon not only thriving, but attracting a great number of locals and regular visitors who are far from local. The female staff are the major attraction – especially Annie, who kisses on the cheek all male customers entering, and discreetly has a feel of their balls: she finds she gets great tips if she regularly performs this service for customers staying for several drinks, because surely everyone is then happy, and who can complain? For a brief time, it really does appear that this is the best of all possible pubs.

The problems obviously begin when Matthieu brings a revolver into the bar, which he leaves in a drawer ready to act as a deterrent to any thieves. And there it stays, only occasionally mentioned in the narrative, just a memory to the reader that trouble will come at some time.

Matthieu has obviously been going to seed running the bar – he drinks a lot, is terrified of moving more than a few kilometres from the village, has sex with a member of staff, and is even prepared to go to his father's funeral in scruffy clothes, smelling of sweat and women: it seems likely that he's going to blow a fuse soon. However, the trouble comes from Libero, who discovers that's Annie's been pocketing some of the takings, and instead of accepting her repaying him he sacks a very valuable asset to the pub on the spot.

Things get worse and Libero realises that he doesn't like what he's become, that all they're doing is attacting brutalised men who have no future and merely want to spend their money drinking; they also entertain forlorn hopes of getting laid – they'd be far better off just going to a brothel. And when Matthieu loses the Castillian-speaking Izascun to the local Lothario Pierre-Emmanuel he contents himself with screwing drunken tourists, and it's Libero who loses it with Pierre-Emmanuel, even to the point of actually using that gun.

The book tells us that Matthieu marries Judith, who's always loved him from university days, and they have kids and live in Paris and Matthieu avoids going back to Corsica, but it doesn't exactly tell us what becomes of Libero, although he's undoubtedly still in prison. What goes up must come down, and vice versa if you're lucky.

(Linda Lê's Lame de Fond, which I've yet to read, was also among the final five elected for the Goncourt in 2012. I'd like to see her get through to the end one day, as she deserves it.)

4 February 2014

**Marie-Claire Blais: Une saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel (1965)**

Libellés : Blais (Marie-Claire), Canada, Québec Literature

Marie-Claire Blais's Une saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel won the Prix Médicis in 1966, although it was seen by some in Quebec itself – the author's home and where the book is set – to show the province in a negative light.

The novel has a somewhat unreliable title as there is very little here about Emmanuel: it begins when the child has just been born in a very cold winter and ends with the coming of the warmer spring, although Emmanuel himself plays a very minor part in it. It is set in a nameless small village in Quebec and the narrative revolves around a family without a surname.

It is not only the weather that is bleak. It is the beginning of the 19th century, the family is very poor, the house has no electricity and modern appliances are frowned upon. The mother and father work in the fields and are unsympathetically portrayed. The mother has given birth to sixteen children and child or infant death is a common part of their existence.. Emmanuel seems to have been born with an intuitive world-weariness. While the parents are in the fields the matriarchal Grand-Mère Antoinette – who has a passive acceptance of death and poverty as the norm – looks after the house and the children, although she seems to view another mouth to be fed in a rather unwelcoming manner.

But by no means everything is negative, and a number of the characters are seen in a sympathetic light. The adolescent Jean le Maigre is tuberculous and will certainly die soon, although he is Grand-Mère Antoinette's favorite: he is gifted and spends most of his time reading and writing. His learning is – unexpectedly, and wholly contrary to the father's wishes – encouraged and much appreciated by Grand-Mère Antoinette, who is eager to see him join the noviciate.

Although unlike his younger brother le Septième, who wastes his time at school, Jean le Maigre enjoys drinking getting drunk with le Septième and masturbating him in the bed they share with two other brothers.

At the noviciate Jean le Maigre also sexually satisfies the other boys at night, although he soon dies there, Grand-Mère Antoinette devouring his writings.

The novel also concentrates on the strong religious behavior of one of the daughters – Héloïse, whose religious fervor later turns to sexual feelings – the brothers discover that she masturbates alone, for instance – and she goes to live in a larger village where she earns enough money through prostitution to regularly send back home.

The brothers le Septième and Pomme get a job in a shoe factory which makes 1700 shoes a day, Pomme cutting the soles and le Septième glueing them. Unfortunately Pomme loses three fingers while doing this and has to continue his 'career' selling newspapers.

Le Septième develops a taste for the learning he missed in his youth and goes to see Théo Crapula, who is in fact the disgraced Father Théodule, now teaching in the slum he lives in. Crapula doesn't charge le Septième for lessons and seems more interested in other things. He takes the rather reluctant le Septième for a moonlight walk, although the adolescent runs away when Crapula asks him to whip him. Crapula catches up with him and le Septième believes he's going to kill him, although he awakens alive.

Grand-Mère Antoinette thinks it's going to be a lovely spring, but regrets that Jean le Maigre won't be around.

If this account makes the book sound odd, that's because it is. But it's probably the oddness that makes for part of the appeal: its vision is pessimistic, but that's not the attraction as there's something endearing – in an essentially strange kind of way – in the characters. It was also turned into a film and translated (according to the by no means always reliable Wikipedia) into twelve languages.

My other Marie-Claire Blais post:

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Marie-Claire Blais: Les Nuits de l'Underground

31 January 2014

**Thomas Hal Phillips: The Bitterweed Path (1950; repr. 1996)**

Libellés : Gay Literature, Howard (John), Mississippi, Phillips (Thomas Hal), Southern Literature

The Bitterweed Path (1950) by Thomas Hal Phillips (1922–2007) is an interesting book in the history of homosexual literature. It features in Anthony Slide's Lost Gay Novels: A Reference Guide to Fifty Works from the First Half of the Twentieth Century (Routledge: 2003), which includes novels published from 1917 to 1950, and not necessarily written by authors who were gay.

Phillips was born in Corinth, Mississippi, and he was gay, and the Introduction to The Bitterweed Path (dated Atlanta, Georgia, 1995) is by John Haywood (author of Men Like That: A Southern Queer History: University Of Chicago Press (2001). Howard met Phillips in his later years, and mentions that he was not the kind of person who used expressions such as 'homosexual', 'gay' or 'lesbian': Phillips was from a different era, one in which homosexuality was not only different but also illegal, and this novel is a rare example – for the time – of an imaginative homosocial work with strong homoerotic undertones.

The Bitterweed Path is Thomas Hal Phillips's first novel, and his only novel to deal with a homosexual theme. It is set in rural Mississippi and essentially concerns the relationship between sharecroppers's son Darrell Barclay, the landowner Malcolm Pitt, and his son Roger. Phillips was consciously drawing on the Biblical story of David and Jonathan, which included Jonathan's father Saul's great admiration for David the giant-slayer. Phillips believed that this story could be interpreted in many ways, and so interpreted it in his own way.

Phillips's representation of the David and Jonathan story is of course essentially homosexual, but muted, although that in no way limits its importance in the history of the genre.

**André Birabeau: La Débauche (1924); trans. as Revelation (1930)**

Libellés : Birabeau (André), French Literature, Gay Literature

I can never stop repeating that I have a serious allergy to novels in translation, so it is very unusual for me to read one. As I can read French novels fluently in the original language, it is almost unknown for me to read a French novel in translation. However, La Débauche – apparently the only novel by the playwright André Birabeau (1890–1974) – was originally published in 1923 in Oeuvres libres, then the following year (probably in a very small print run) on its own by Flammarion, but seems unfindable at any price. So, it had to be Una Troubridge's translation into English as Revelation (1930).

I particularly wanted to read it because it is generally believed to be the first fictional representation of a mother's reaction to her son's homosexuality. I was very pleasantly surprised to find not only that the essential ideas of the book bear up to translation, but also that the book in general reads very well.

Mathilde Casseneuil is married to a 'special reporter' who has spent almost all of the twenty years of his marriage away from his Parisian wife, who now discovers that her son Dominique – in his early twenties and working for a car company in Avignon – has been killed in a car crash. Distraught, Mathilde flies (by train, as people of course had to do in those days) to Avignon.

The novel is interrupted at times by Mathilde's recollections of Dominique, who at the age of six wanted to marry a girl acquaintance of the same age who had 'masterful ways' and held a 'tyranny over him'. A sentence, addressed in thought to the tyrannical girl about Dominique, prepares the reader for the future 'revelation': 'Of the two of you, he was undoubtedly the girl', as does the knowledge that he was 'timid', '[f]ragile', and 'a mother's child': such language served to 'demasculinise' the male child, and (as I have acknowledged in my thesis on Lionel Britton) served to act as a code used by often homosexual writers – as in the examples I give by Rhys Davies and John Hampson – to suggest homosexuality.

Mathilde Casseneuil finds a cache of love letters written to Dominique, and at first believes them to be by a girl whose spelling is bad. As she reads on, though, she discovers that Dominique's lover was a man. She is shocked by what she considers to be an 'abomination', and returns to Paris feeling very differently, very negatively towards her son.

Mathilde eventually decides that Dominique had always been weak, 'too yielding', had become the victim, and she buys a gun to return to Avignon and kill 'the beast' who corrupted her son. But on meeting Gilbert Savinnes, her son's lover, she realises that they have a vital thing in common: her husband never really had the time to know Dominique, whereas here is a man who has something in common with her: they both loved him.

24 January 2014

**Joshua Cohen: Witz (2010)**

Libellés : Cohen (Joshua)

Joshua Cohen's Witz is a trade paperback containing 817 very densely-packed pages published by the wonderful Dalkey Archive Press of Urbana-Champaign, IL. When I began reading it I couldn't help but think of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, William Gaddis's The Recognitions, Jean-Pierre Martinet's Jérôme, James Joyce's Ulysses, Lionel Britton's Hunger and Love, Alexander Theroux's Laura Warholic, Marguerite Young's Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, and of other literary monsters I have known. Now I'm more or less back on planet Earth but still reeling a little from the after effects, I can see that it in some way resembles all of these books.

– Witz has the ambitious scope of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and that book is obviously a vague background influence – is it merely a coincidence, for instance, that Cohen also mentions Perdue chickens? – but although the word 'witz' means joke, I didn't (unlike Infinite Jest) find the book itself particularly funny.

– It is immensely digressive like Lionel Britton's Hunger and Love, but has an important Oulipian element: it's a book about Jews where the word 'Jew' is never mentioned, being substituted by the expression 'Affiliated'.

– It has an esoteric language in some ways similar to Alexander Theroux's Laura Warholic, although Cohen draws from a huge Yiddish pool. And there are similar long-drawn-out sentences and unconventional compound words.

– As with Marguerite Young's Miss MacIntosh, My Darling – whose sentences are also very long – there are long descriptive passages that hold up the story, only whereas Cohen is concerned with often violent external detail, Young is mainly interested in the lulling strains of the internal monologue.

– In Jonathan Frederick Post's 'An Infinite Frolic of His Own: Joshua Cohen’s Witz' (which of course alludes to works by both Foster Wallace and Gaddis) the author states that the main work he would compare Witz to is the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. The Jérôme Bauche in Jean-Pierre Martinet's Jérôme, as the 2008 Finitude cover transparently underlines, is clearly an allusion to Bosch.

– I was reminded of the difficulty of William Gaddis's The Recognitions, somewhat akin to E. M. Forster's bizarre but brilliant analogy, in Abinger Harvest, between the meaning of Virginia Woolf's writing and a pen trapped in his coat lining: 'So near, and yet so far!'

– Finally, it is evident that Joyce's Ulysses is an influence behind Witz, as it is an obvious influence (no matter how small) behind any serious work written after 1922.* But understandably, Joshua Cohen was annoyed when an unnamed friend of his father's described Witz as a 'like the Jewish Ulysses', completely ignorant of the fact that, as Cohen states in The Daily Beast (15 June 2010): 'James Joyce’s Ulysses is already the Jewish Ulysses'.

Cohen wrote this in an essay entitled 'The Heirs of Joyce's Ulysses', in which he names the works from twelve different countries as the 'Ulysses' of those countries, including Woolf's Mrs Dalloway as 'The English Ulysses', Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood as 'The Welsh Ulysses', etc. Oddly, there is no French Ulysses, although I certainly feel that Yann Moix's 1142-page Naissance (which I've not yet read but which begins with a baby born as a Jew (without a foreskin) to a Christian couple), which won the prix Renaudot in 2013, meets Cohen's criteria as a 'Jewish Ulysses'. But a French Ulysses proper? Something from Oulipo?

What is Witz about then? Well, Cohen says '[I]t’s about a Wandering Jew – the Last Jew in the world.' This is after all the Jews in the world (apart from first-born ones) die in a plague on Christmas Eve 1999, although very soon Benjamin Isrealien – a really nice innocent guy, born as an adult complete with glasses and beard and without a foreskin – becomes the only remaining Jew, and a superstar. But maybe that's going too far into the story.

For me, Witz may be very difficult – in fact it's a book I wouldn't recommend to many people because of those difficulties – but Joshua Cohen has produced a fascinating book: one he had a large number of problems getting published, one that at least one publisher wanted him to cut considerably, but that he in the end succeeded in communicating uncut to the world. It certainly won't make him a fortune, but then that clearly isn't his aim: he realises how destructive MFAs can be: 'The M.F.A. is a degree in servitude. [...] It is a way to keep writing safe – to keep reading safe from writing'. Obviously, writers in England would never be interested in such nonsense: they only want to pretend to be innovative, sell books, and, well, just get rich if possible.

At least Joshua Cohen, much as his work may be painful (because so difficult), is trying to push the envelope, not merely going for the cash. I have so much more respect for such writers, rather than those who insist on pretending that 1922 never existed.

*1922 was the year Ulysses and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land were published.

23 January 2014

Hyde Colliery Explosion, 18th January 1889

Libellés : Greater Manchester, Hyde (Greater Manchester), Tameside

'THE HYDE COLLIERY EXPLOSION
18th January 1889

This plaque is located near to the site where a
horrific gas explosion in the Hyde Lane Coal Pit
killed 23 men and seriously injured 5 more victims.

The inquest recorded that the explosion took place
at some distance from a shaft, which was known
as the "Two Foot Level", shortly after 9.00 a.m.

The verdict reported that the incident was
accidental and was caused by the use of
naked lights by the miners.

Unveiled by Councillor Joe Kitchen,
Cabinet Deputy of Lifelong Learning,
on February 21st 2001'

Related post below:

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Joseph Sidebotham and Haughton, Denton