Phantoms on the Bookshelves (9 page)

Once again, my mania for collecting all the books in a series makes me buy books which are on subjects that don't necessarily interest me—until the day when … ah, now I need it! One of the most unusual collections on my shelves is the art historical series “Histoire de l'art” published by Julliard from 1962. This is unusual because of the personality of the general editor, Jean-François Revel, who is much better known for his writings on philosophy, literature and gastronomy, or for his journalism (he was at one time editor of
L'Express
, then a columnist for another weekly,
Le Point
), as well as current affairs debates and several best-sellers such as
Ni Marx ni Jésus
(
Without Marx or Jesus
) and
La Tentation
totalitaire
(
The Totalitarian Temptation
). But his role in producing this art series is much less well known. Having discovered the subject during a long stay in Italy, when he made the acquaintance of André Fermigier and Jacob Bean (the future curator of the drawings and engravings department of the Metropolitan Museum in New York), and having met both Bernard Berenson and Roberto Longhi, on his return to France he made a proposal for the series to René Julliard, and then recruited authors, all of whom were specialists. But none of the books has the same format: the French translation of Anthony Blunt's
Artistic Theory in Italy
is twenty centimeters high, whereas the French edition of Max Friedlander's
From Van Eyck to Bruegel
stands at twenty-seven centimeters. Nor do they have the same appearance: they all have a paper jacket except Bernard Teyssèdre's
L'Histoire de l'art vue du Grand Siècle
(Art history as seen from the
grand siècle
—seventeenth-century France). Two of the jackets are illustrated—Emil Kaufmann's
Architecture in the Age of Reason
and
Philibert de l'Orme
by Anthony Blunt—but the others carry only typography. Four of them have the series colophon, the other five do not. The Kaufmann, the Friedlander, one of the Blunts (
Artistic Theory in Italy
), and Kenneth Clark's
Landscape into Art
, all give the name of the translator, but we are not told who translated Michael Levey's
Painting in Eighteenth-century Venice
, John Golding's
Cubism
; Gombrich's
The Story of Art
, or Blunt's
Philibert de l'Orme
. To publish these books, all of them significant, but appealing to a fairly limited readership, and many of which had been published elsewhere, and to do so without any conformity of
presentation, was asking for trouble in a commercially difficult area. After these nine titles were published, the collection came to an end in 1965.

So for me, books have been a way of “seeing something” in painting, but they have done other things too. For instance, I was able to decode a Benetton advertising campaign for students in the Paris School of Political Science (Sciences-Po), using the analytical tools of art history, which applied very well. And it is not so difficult to understand why St Barbara is particularly honored in the Brazilian mining region of Minas Gerais—one of the biggest cities there is named Santa Barbara after her—if you know about Christian iconography: she has always been the patron saint of miners, protecting them from the dangers of their work. When Panofsky paid a visit to Henri Focillon in the 1930s—or perhaps it was to his daughter Hélène and her husband Jurgis Baltrusaitis (I can't remember and nobody can tell me now)—they took him to Colombey-les-deux-Eglises, and he went off looking for the second church. I have just discovered from a recent book,
Relire Panofsky
(Re-reading Panofsky by Georges Didi-Huberman et al.) that his visit to Focillon in Maranville took place in August 1933. The story is told of Bernard Berenson, on learning that the Virgin Mary had appeared to Pope Pius XII, he immediately asked the first question that would occur to an art historian: “And in what style?”

The best bacon omelettes I have eaten in my life have been with Alexandre Dumas.

JACQUES LAURENT

Hundreds of thousands of people live in my library. Some are real, others are fictional. The real ones are the so-called imaginary characters in works of literature, the fictional ones are their authors. We know everything about the former, or at least as much as we are meant to know, everything that is written about a given character in a novel, a story or a poem in which he or she figures. This character has not grown any older since the author brought him or her into existence, and will remain the same for all eternity. When we hold in our hand the text or texts in which such a person appears, it feels as if we are in possession of everything the author wanted us to know about the character's acts, words and, sometimes, thoughts. The rest doesn't matter. Nothing is hidden from us. For us, a novel's characters are real. We may be free to imagine what we don't know about them, though we know quite well that these are just guesses. And we are free to interpret their words or their silences, but again these will just be interpretations. We know
quite a lot about Odysseus, Aeneas or Don Quixote, correspondingly little about Homer, Virgil or Cervantes. Sometimes characters are even deprived of an author as if their creator had discreetly slipped away. Who made up the first version of Don Juan? Who invented Faust? And while we feel sure that Harpagon, Tartuffe or Monsieur Jourdain undeniably exist, what do we know in the end about a certain Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, whose stage name was Molière? Not very much, not even whether he really wrote all the plays attributed to him. Pierre Louÿs devoted his final years to trying to establish that Molière's plays were in fact written by Corneille—which is not as far-fetched as it might at first appear according to Goujon and Lefrère. Hamlet is a great deal more present to us than Shakespeare, about whom we have only a few scraps of information. Without even going into the question of whether he wrote the plays, no traces remain (apart from his recorded marriage to Anne Hathaway and the births of the children, Susanna and twins Judith and Hamnet) of his activity during his early manhood, 1579 to 1588, the period Shakespeare scholars call “the lost years.” So we shouldn't assume too much.

It's even worse, in fact, when we think we
do
know the author. And this despite our knowledge that we know little or nothing even about our contemporaries. Every day one learns with surprise from the newspapers that, for instance, a certain notoriously homophobic conservative member of parliament has been arrested for soliciting in the men's lavatories of an airport, or that a prominent advertising man has been accused by his daughters
of sexual abuse, that the helpful neighbor was really a dangerous psychopath, that the women's downhill ski champion turned out to be a man, or that a respectable accountant was actually embezzling thousands to finance his addiction to the gaming tables. And yet we carry on believing what we read in biographies. (Curiosity is too strong: I have masses of biographies in my library!) They are simply im-aginary reconstructions based on the necessarily fragmentary elements left by someone now dead, whether long ago or in the recent past. And as for autobiography, it is no more than a pernicious variant of romantic fiction.

We may be lacking many elements in the life of Henri Beyle, but the features Stendhal gave his fictional alter ego, Henry Brulard, are undeniable. Whole chunks of the life of Benjamin Constant are lost to us forever, but his
Adolphe
is sufficiently realistic to have tempted at least four writers to set out to write the novel from Ellénore's point of view: Gustave Planche,
Essai sur Adolphe
(Essay on Adolphe) of 1843; Sophie Gay,
Ellénore
, of 1844; Stanislas d'Otremont,
La Polonaise
(The Polish woman) of 1957; Eve Gonin,
Le Point de vue d'Ellénore
(Ellénore's point of view) of 1981. This is because literary figures are so real that writers borrow them from each other as they navigate from one book to the next (there are countless Don Juans and Wandering Jews). They can even come unexpectedly to life. Apparently Balzac on his death-bed called for Horace Bianchon, his fictional doctor in
La Comédie Humaine
. (“Yes, that's it! Bianchon's the man I need! If only Bianchon were here, he'd save me!”) The story is probably quite untrue, but it does
suggest that in the moment of dying Balzac was aware that his characters would survive his death.

We are so anxious to maintain the illusion that the author is a real person that we cannot be satisfied simply with an orphan work of literature. It took centuries to identify Gabriel-Joseph de Lavergne, vicomte de Guilleragues, the supposed author of
The Portuguese Letters
(1669): this book was published as “Lettres portugaises traduites en françois, A Paris Chez Claude Barbin, au Palais, sur le second perron de la Sainte Chapelle, MDCLXIX” (“Portuguese Letters, translated into French, available at Claude Barbin's, Paris Palais de Justice, second staircase, Sainte Chapelle”). As for
Madame Solario
, an English novel published anonymously in 1956 (and translated into French by R. Villoteu in 1985), the theories about its authorship are legion, the most far-fetched being that it was written by no less a person than Winston Churchill.
²

Authors are just fictional people, about whom we have a few biographical elements, never enough to make them truly real people. Whereas the biography of a literary character, even if it is incomplete—and explicitly so—is perfectly reliable: it is whatever its creator decided. So are his or her acts and words. All the same, we readily refer to biographies, after reading them (or even without), and quote them as if they were authentic. Anecdotes and
bons mots
from historical persons—including writers—often turn out, when you check them, to be apocryphal or mythical.

As for what happens to both fictional and real people, they all do the same things: both kinds fall in love, deceive each other, murder, feel guilt, steal, run away, betray, make things up, sacrifice themselves, are cowardly, go mad, take revenge and end up killing themselves; but once again, even in such specific actions, the invented characters are the most real. We are certain that Carlos and Maria Eduarda in
The Maias
by Eça de Queiros have been incestuous lovers—even if they do not realize it themselves. But we don't know what happened between Byron and Augusta, George Trakl and his sister Margarethe, Egon and Gert Schiele, who as teenagers repeated their parents' honeymoon voyage, or Erika and Klaus Mann. We know more about the motives that drove Paulina Pandolfini to murder Count Michele Cantarini on August 28, 1880, thanks to Pierre-Jean Jouve's novel
Paulina 1880
, than we do about those of Louis Althusser when he killed his wife Hélène. We know that Zeno Cosini in Italo Svevo's
Confessions of Zeno
married Augusta, although he was in love with her sister Adelina, and why he did; but the real reason why Tolstoy proposed to Sofia Behrs, rather than to one of her sisters Tatiana or Liza, who both seem at different times to have attracted him, remains obscure; similarly Mozart, who was in love with Aloisa Weber, married her sister Constanza. What extravagant arrangement drove Pierre Louÿs to marry Louise de Heredia, the sister of his lover, Marie de Régnier, with the latter's consent? We will never know why certain writers (Herman Melville, Robert Frost, Hugo von Hoffmansthal, Thomas Mann) had a child who committed suicide; but the suicide of
Edgardo Limentani is completely understandable after the few hours that it takes to read Giorgio Bassani's
The Heron
—and a great deal more so than the suicides of Count Potocki, or Ernest Hemingway, or Cesare Pavese, about whom many commonplaces have been aired to explain an act which is never commonplace. Whether Pirandello, Scott Fitzgerald or T.S. Eliot had any responsibility for the mental illness of their wives, Antonietta, Zelda and Vivien, will always be a mystery: but the madness of Catharine Holly in
Suddenly Last Summer
, by Tennessee Williams, is undeniably prompted by her aunt, Mrs Venable. Was Gorky poisoned by Stalin? Was Zola assassinated by the anti Dreyfusards, or was he the accidental victim of carbon monoxide poisoning from his stove? We shall never know. Will we ever find out why Pushkin imprudently challenged the Baron d'Anthès to a duel? On the other hand, we are quite certain that Thérèse Raquin and her lover Laurent drowned Thérèse's husband, Camille; and we know that Count Serlon de Savigny, with his beautiful mistress, the fencing champion Hauteclaire Stassin, poisoned the count's wife, Delphine de Cantor, and lived happily ever after—in Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's, “Le Bonheur dans le crime” (Happiness in crime), a story in
The She-Devils
. As for Sherlock Holmes, Pierre Bayard recently demonstrated convincingly, in
Sherlock Holmes was Wrong: reopening the Hound of the Baskervilles Affair
, that the detective was on completely the wrong track, and that Conan Doyle, in his inquiry into the mysterious deaths on Dartmoor, did not actually know what was going on. (“Literary characters are not, as is too
often believed, paper creatures, but living beings who lead an autonomous existence within the texts and may even commit murders without their author realizing it!”) Finally, in the case of two historical persons, I am far more convinced of the authenticity of Alexandre Dumas's Henri III in
Chicot the Jester
and
The Forty-five Guardsmen
than by the one described by many historians, including Michelet. And Tolstoy's Napoleon, in
War and Peace
, has always seemed much more lifelike than the Napoleon of the countless so-called biographies. They both have that reality which their literary creator gave them, a much less shaky reality than an historical portrait trying to be accurate.