Adventures in the French Trade: Fragments Toward a Life - Brossura

Mehlman, Jeffrey

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0804769621 ISBN 13: 9780804769624

Casa editrice: Stanford Univ Pr, 2010

Riassunto

This memoir is less a chronicle of the life of a leading scholar and critic of matters French than a series of differently angled fragments, each with its attendant surprise, in what one commentator has called Jeffrey Mehlman's amour vache—his injured and occasionally injurious love—for France and the French. The reader will encounter masters of the art of reading in these pages, the exhilaration elicited by their achievements, and the unexpected (and occasionally unsettling) resonances those achievements have had in the author's life. With all its idiosyncrasies, Adventures in the French Trade depicts an intellectual generation in ways that will attract not only people who recall the heady days of the rise and reign of French theory but also those who do not. This provocative book should be of interest to students of intellectual history, literary criticism, Jewish studies, the history of American academia, and the genre of the memoir itself.

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Informazioni sugli autori

Jeffrey Mehlman is University Professor and Professor of French Literature at Boston University. He is the author of eight books, including Walter Benjamin for Children: An Essay on his Radio Years (1993), Genealogies of the Text (1995), and Emigré New York: French Intellectuals in Wartime Manhattan, 1940–1944 (2000).

Jeffrey Mehlman is University Professor and Professor of French Literature at Boston University. He is the author of eight books, including Walter Benjamin for Children: An Essay on his Radio Years (1993), Genealogies of the Text (1995), and Emigré New York: French Intellectuals in Wartime Manhattan, 1940–1944 (2000).

Jeffrey Mehlman is University Professor and Professor of French Literature at Boston University. He is the author of eight books, including Walter Benjamin for Children: An Essay on His Radio Years (1993), Genealogies of the Text (1995), and Emigre New York: French Intellectuals in Wartime Manhattan, 1940-1944 (2000).

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ADVENTURES IN THE FRENCH TRADE

Fragments Toward a LifeBy Jeffrey Mehlman

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6962-4

Contents

Preface..................................................................xi1. Beginning and end.....................................................12. Initiation: Bcheron..................................................33. New York/Angoulme....................................................174. Boston/Vichy..........................................................215. Hugo 2000: Fiction....................................................376. Kandahar 2001: Fact...................................................457. Chiasmus..............................................................558. Derrida...............................................................729. Bellow in Boston......................................................8010. Antinomian Steiner...................................................8411. A Professor Retires..................................................10012. Genet in New Haven: Repercussions and Resonances.....................10513. Mother Harvard.......................................................11314. The Heart of the Matter (A Graduation Speech)........................11515. Louis Wolfson........................................................12316. Walter Benjamin......................................................13517. Afrancesado: Coda in Buenos Aires....................................154Acknowledgments..........................................................159Notes....................................................................161

Chapter One

Beginning and End

One grows up with the stoical passions of a would-be hero and ends up, with any luck, an epicurean, savoring pleasures too nuanced and fleeting to be compatible with the monumental aspirations of youth. The template is from Montaigne but carries a validity that stretches at least as late as the Antimmoires of Malraux: an all too Western world of resistance heroics yields to an aesthetic realm of ongoing metamorphosis as the author-psychonaut makes his way to India and points east. I too appear to have followed the template, but in my own case what strikes me is how French the fantasies informing beginning and end, the stoical and the epicurean, turn out to have been.

The beginning: It all made sense, the kind of fantastical sense that has always intrigued me, when I one day attended to the specifics of one of the family legends of my youth. I had been, I was told, a miracle child, not by virtue of any talents but by dint of my survival. I had been born in 1944 with a hematological complication resulting from what was beginning to be known as RH factor, a condition that at the time was tantamount to a death sentence for the newborn child. The miracle was that I was one of the first children in medical history (or at least in the medical history of Yorkville, the new York city neighborhood in which I was born) to avert the curse through a total blood transfusion. No doubt the sense of threat was compounded by the fact of being born a Jew in 1944 in the deeply German neighborhood of Yorkville. But it was only years later that the true allure of my survival, its coherence with a life attending to matters French, was revealed to me. For the RH condition, I learned, was in fact the result of a reaction of rejection induced in the mother by the birth of a previous child. Now, it happens that my mother, who knew not a word of French, was named Frances. And my elder brother just happened to be born on June 13, 1940, the day of the entry of the nazis into Paris. Under the circumstances could I have any more apt task in life, which I entered in the glory days of the resistance, than to liberate occupied France(s)? And thus it may have been that the well nigh universal tendency to stoical heroics that affects many a youth should choose, in my case, the world of the anti-nazi resistance as its arena.

After the stoical, the epicurean. Some years ago I found myself particularly drawn to a strikingly trivial poem of Mallarm. It was a mere four lines in length and was addressed-indirectly-to one of the poet's friends, Louis Metman:

Tant de luxe o l'or se moire N'gale pas, croyez-m'en, Vers! dormir en la mmoire De Monsieur Louis Metman.

Not all that shimmering gold, the poet teases his verse, could equal the sheer luxury of reposing in the recesses of the memory of the poet's esteemed friend. Yes, one wanted to say, there could be no more lavish pleasure than to find oneself the site in which the various intricacies of Mallarm's poems would emerge from their dormant state and coalesce into new coherence. Indeed, for years Mallarm had struck me as a limit case in literature, and I had secretly coveted the prospect, as a critic, of disclosing a Mallarman dimension in writers one would otherwise not suspect of such an affinity. Yet the words dormir and mmoire de-"sleeping" in "memory of"-pointed to a second dimension that seemed almost funereal; and it was then, upon realizing that this exquisite quatrain was no doubt the only poem in the French language in which I could substitute my own name (at the rhyme, no less!), without any appreciable poetic loss, that I found myself indulging the plagiarist's fantasy of having stumbled upon my own ideal epitaph. Surely, to have spent one's life as the locus in which the implicit intricacies of a great poet's work might achieve their maximal resonance would not be a negligible way of summing up an existence. not in all the pages of the great Blanchot has the intimate bond between l'espace littraire and death-that "all too shallow stream," a peu profond ruisseau, as the poet calls it-affected me as deeply as in my plagiarist's fantasy of an epitaph to die for.

Chapter Two

Initiation: Bcheron

The annual holiday party at the R*** home, just off Harvard square, was always a pleasure, with its assortment of local literary types and ample punch bowl, but this year's celebration was slightly different for us. Our son was arriving that night from college and was now so presentable, so alert, that it seemed almost an act of generosity on our part to ask to bring him with us. There were the affinities, of course. Ezra was completing his studies at Washington university in St. Louis, the university founded by the grandfather of T. S. Eliot, and our host's distinction was such that he had been granted by Eliot's widow the assignment of editing the juvenilia of the St. Louis-born poet. Each, that is, represented differently a legacy of the family Eliot. Then there was the sheer grace of our host. It was more than ten years earlier that Ezra had first caught sight of Christopher R***. He had come to a dinner at our home and immediately walked over to our then six-year-old son and introduced himself: "Hi, my name is Christopher. I'm fifty-nine; how old are you?" Coming in Christopher's Oxbridge English, the introduction had made an impression on Ezra, and I could sense that he was not uninterested in seeing what a decade or more could do to a fifty-nine-year-old.

I had another reason for being happy to bring our son along. My first night in France, forty-five years earlier, happened to have found me, an exhausted sixteen-year-old, arriving near midnight at a comparably elegant (and emphatically European) gathering. The venue was Bcheron, a sixteenth-century manor in Touraine. That evening had a determinative effect on the course of my life. I still dimly recall the elegantly angled cigarette holders, the men in smoking jackets, the appreciative smiles of a series of stylish French women as they welcomed me (in French I struggled to understand) to what was the fiftieth-birthday party of their host, the owner of the manor. Forty-five years later, at the holiday gathering chez R***, attire was informal, there were no cigarette holders (or, for that matter, cigarettes), but there was a palpable and very adult elegance in the air, and I had the wistful thought that my son, in a position to take it all in, might know an elation in some way comparable to the one that I had experienced that late June night in 1960.

Our hostess, Judith A***, was a photographer. She had done a number of portraits of literary eminences, many of whom had no doubt come her way through her marriage to Christopher. At present, I learned, she was planning an album of such literary portraits for publication, an attractive proposition which put me in mind of a memoir I had recently been reading by an American portrait sculptor of the first half of the twentieth century, Jo Davidson. As we approached the punch bowl, I mentioned that her current project reminded me of the impressively illustrated volume, Between Sittings, of a portraitist she might or might not have heard of, one Jo Davidson. Whereupon her eyes lit up, she expressed a measure of disbelief, and told me that she was very much aware of Jo Davidson's sculpture, since his works were everywhere to be found in the sixteenth-century manor, Bcheron, in Touraine, where she had spent a number of unforgettable days during a fabulous summer of her early adolescence. I was the first person she had met in fifty years who had also been there. Whereupon I had the pleasure of compounding her surprise by telling her that not only was that not-quite-the case, but that another guest at her party that evening had had a comparably indelible impression of Bcheron at mid-century. she was the novelist-journalist Renata A***, then engaged in conversation with a graduate student on the other side of the room.

As the three of us gathered to share recollections of the place, it occurred to me that all three of us (and here I take the license, le punch aidant, of conflating host and hostess, Christopher and Judith) had something else in common. All three of us, Christopher, Renata, and myself, had suffered in one way or another for expecting that others (and, it is to be hoped, ourselves) live up to extremely-perhaps excessively-high standards. The most spectacular case was Renata's. A prominent critic in the pages of the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the New York Review of Books from a young age, she had recently suffered a fall in public esteem after publishing a rather vitriolic attack on the most prestigious of the three, which, to the disbelief, then anger, of much of the journalistic elite, she declared to be "dead" in the first sentence of her book. The journalistic closing of ranks in the face of this assault against the most revered of its sacred cows was perhaps to be expected. But it was the hauteur of Renata's tone from the beginning which no doubt put her in the sights of those who eventually made her their target. Here is one evocation of that tone that I culled from an online journal: "You never knew, when you began [one of her] reviews, whether you would finish it upset at the sharp cruelty of her tone or elated at her knack for getting what's wrong with a movie exactly right." It was, presumably, the elevation of those standards that accounted for the off-putting cruelty of the tone.

As for Christopher, the eminence of his accomplishments granted him a certain immunity, but within the university his relations with his colleagues in the English department, none of whom could be other than admiring of his work, had become so vexed that he had seceded from the department, setting up shop in another precinct of the university. It seemed probable to me that that vexation had something to do with holding his colleagues to standards they felt less than comfortable attempting to meet. As for myself, I have mellowed considerably over the years, but i take it that there must have been an element of truth in a review of my first book, in Encounter, claiming that my contentiousness of tone, in its intolerance, reminded the reviewer of no one so much as Andr Breton. Several years ago, the then master of Christ's College, Cambridge, visiting Boston, quipped that when he read my first book, he encountered a tone of such startling "self-assurance" that his initial impulse was to close up shop and change professions. (happily for the future of criticism he did not.) I have always assumed that when, in 1979, I was denied tenure (shortly after my nemesis, fresh from his much-touted critique of sacrificial violence, informed me that the university in which we both taught was the only one in the country in which I might be denied tenure and that he was going to make sure that happened), one of the reasons that the profession as a whole failed to rush to my rescue was relief, perhaps delight, that so much "self-assurance" should be followed by a fall ...

Three figures at the holiday party that night-Renata, Christopher (par pouse interpose, such cases of conjugal contagion being more common than is appreciated), and myself-had had an indelible exposure to the charms of Bcheron, and all three had suffered for their exaggeratedly high standards. Might there be a connection? it all put one in mind of certain analyses of anti-semitism. The specialty of Judaism, as George Steiner memorably put it, was a certain "blackmail of the ideal," precisely what I have called exaggeratedly high standards, which led him to conclude: "Of this pressure, I believe, is loathing bred." There was, then, something faintly religious about this communion of souls around a privileged site, Bcheron, and the call to transcendence seeming to issue from it. It is time to speak of that shrine.

* * *

My story with Bcheron, the sixteenth-century manor in the town of Sach, twenty miles from tours, begins before my birth, when the property was acquired, in 1927, by the sculptor Jo Davidson, whose name had so surprised Judith A*** at the holiday party just evoked. Davidson, a new Yorker, born in 1883, was adventurous enough to have exhibited in the legendary Armory exhibition of 1913, but was above all a remarkably successful portrait sculptor, whose success, beyond any aesthetic criterion, might be gauged by the number of early-twentieth-century eminences who sat for him. They ranged from Joseph Conrad and James Joyce, Anatole France and Andr Gide, to John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Mellon, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt-not to mention D. H. Lawrence and Rudyard Kipling, Frank Sinatra and Benito Mussolini. Will Rogers called him "the last of the savage head hunters." he was, in his way, the Richard Avedon of clay. And the fact that his way of working was to come to know his subject by getting him or her to talk (rather than hold still) must have made of him an endless source of irresistible anecdotes, some of which he recorded in the memoir I had mentioned to Judith A***, Between Sittings.

He was also a Francophile. The comment I had retained from a reading of his memoir years earlier was by Joseph Conrad. The great Pole, while sitting for the sculptor, insisted on speaking to him in French, a circumstance which led Davidson to inquire as to why he did not also write in French. Conrad's reply was immediate: "To write French you have to know it. English is so plastic-if you haven't got a word you need you can make it, but to write French you have to be an artist like Anatole France." it is a line whose enigma I periodically attempt to assess. Having settled in France, Davidson was utterly won over by the manor in Touraine as soon as he saw it. "Bcheron," he wrote, "had a beautiful gray faade and I was fascinated by its pigeon tower. The house was enclosed by old stone walls, and on the opposite side of the road there was a vegetable and flower garden. From its terrace you looked out over the lovely valley of the gently flowing Indre" (208).

The landscape of the commune of Sach had, in a previous century, already attracted the attention of another artist intent on portraying the full range of his age. Balzac, approaching the town from the neighboring village of Azay-le-Rideau, wrote in Le Lys dans la valle, which is set in Sach: "I climbed to a ridge and for the first time admired the chteau d'Azay ... and, then, in a hollow, I saw the romantic walls of Sach, that melancholy abode, full of harmonies too solemn for superficial people, but dear to poets whose soul is in mourning. Thus it was, in the years to come, I grew to love its silence, its great wizened trees, and the mysterious aura that pervades its solitary vale." Balzac, the fictive historian of the society of his day, had lived in the chteau on one side of the Indre, where he wrote Le Pre Goriot and Louis Lambert. Davidson, who thought of himself as the "plastic historian" of his age, set up shop on the other-all in a commune whose population is currently listed as little more than a thousand.

My connection to this world, the absoluteness of whose distance from my middle-class childhood in New York is hard to imagine in an age of mass air travel, was by way of an act of generosity. Jo Davidson had two sons, one of whom, Jacques, was living in New York with his family, where, for one reason or another, he was having trouble making ends meet. My understanding is that my parents, and perhaps above all my grandmother, the founder of Melnikoff's, the local dry goods store which she operated for about half a century, had been particularly kind in extending credit to Jacques's wife, Elisabeth, an interpreter at the united nations. A debt of gratitude was incurred. In addition, my grandmother, whose way of holding court to all and sundry in the store had a number of locals dubbing her the "mayor of Yorkville," the neighborhood in which the store was located, was the kind of individual who would have appealed to Zabeth, as she was known. There was, that is, a bond of affection as well.

In 1952, not long after the publication of his memoir, Jo Davidson, at age sixty-eight, was finally felled by the last of his heart attacks. His had been an extraordinary life, surrounded by eminence. In his later years, his career as a sculptor, which brought him into compacted but intense contact with so many of the world's celebrities, fused with an odd political vocation. An early supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt, he hitched his wagon to the waning political star of former vice president Henry A. Wallace, whom the democratic Party had replaced in 1944 with Harry S. Truman. Davidson was allied with the left wing of the party, becoming chairman of the independent citizens' committee of the Arts, sciences and Professions, an embryonic political action committee supportive of Wallace. By 1946, Time was describing him as "a political leader of considerable stature" and placed his portrait on the cover of its September 9 issue. The caption read: "Sculptor Jo Davidson, Amateur Politician: in Paris, the left bank; in Hollywood, the left wing." Having been asked by a grateful FDR whether the press had started calling him a Communist yet, he may nonetheless not have been prepared for the right-wing venom subsequently unleashed against him.

(Continues...)

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Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Stanford Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2010
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0804769621
• ISBN 13: 9780804769624
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 173
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile