Elsa Triolet: Le Cheval blanc (1943)

At five hundred tightly packed pages, Elsa Triolet's Le Cheval blanc (a reference to protagonist Michel Vigaud's recurring vision) is no quick read. It's invigorating, infuriating, bewitching, fascinating, dazzling, and many more strong adjectives, and I suspect that I may at some time in the future re-read it and come to different conclusions, but for the moment this'll have to do.

Lachland Mackinnon, in The Lives of Elsa Triolet (1992), says that Triolet claimed that the novel owes something to André Gide's notion of the acte gratuit by Lafcadio in Les Caves du Vatican (1914), and he adds that he finds it 'Hemingwayesque'. Neither Gide nor Hemingway came to my mind, but Sartre, with whom Triolet doesn't appear to have got on at all, definitely surfaces to my consciousness.

Mackinnon, for what his comments may or may not be worth, states that Triolet considered this her most autobiographical work. Michel, the son of a Russian opium addict, has a restless life in which he becomes a drug smuggler, a kind of tramp, the husband of a rich American whose lifestyle he exploits to the full and owns houses, a plane, etc., and also is a globetrotter, a successful singer, and so on. But his trump card invariably involves walking out when he doesn't like things, or when it gets too hot (or cold).

He dies a heroic death in war, but is he a hero? I'm not too sure, but then I suspect that many readers must have given up on this meandering, almost plotless tale before the end. Probably their mistake, that one, and the more I think of it the more I feel inclined to re-visit this novel.

Lachlan Mackinnon: The Lives of Elsa Triolet (1992)

About fifteen years ago Alison Macleod phoned me to talk (with some incredulity) about my interest in Lionel Britton, about which she'd noted in the TLS (Times Literary Supplement), although she failed to understand my concern with a writer of 'pretentious piffle'. (I have to add that the Alison Macleod I'm writing about is the former TV critic of the Daily Worker and the author of The Death of Uncle Joe (1997), not the novelist Alison MacLeod).

The Alison Macleod speaking to me not only considered Britton's writing to be bad, but also called Britton's great friend Herbert Marshall's translation of Mayakovsky's poetry 'cloth-eared'. Which is where Lachlan Mackinnon's The Lives of Elsa Triolet comes in, as Mackinnon mentions Marshall's Mayakovsky (1965) as one of the key five works he consulted in the writing of this book. Mayakovsky was the lover of Elsa Triolet's sister Lili (and perhaps briefly the lover of Elsa herself), but more importantly was responsible for introducing Elsa to her second husband Louis Aragon.

Does Herbert Marshall's translation of Mayakovsky matter here? Probably not at all, although I'd have appreciated the knowledge that Mackinnon was quoting Marshall long before I searched for translation sources at the end of the book. In fact, I'd have appreciated knowing who translated the many quotations from French into English, because I suspect they come from the author himself. In a word, I find it difficult to accept this as a scholarly publication (in spite of the knowledge on the back flap that Mackinnon regularly writes for the Times Literary Supplement), and I can't bring myself to trust it. There is a Bibliography, but no footnotes or endnotes to support quotations used.

As a general introduction to Elsa Triolet's life and work (and indeed to some extent the life of Aragon) I find this perfectly acceptable, although as I'm relatively new to Triolet and Aragon I shall wait to read deeper into the lives of the pair from more scholarly works written in French.