Going with the Gush

In​ ‘Dream Song 364’, quite close to the end of the sequence, John Berryman’s avatar/protagonist Henry is once more being remorselessly flattered. He has surely read everything there is to read. (One thinks of Mallarmé’s opening line from ‘Brise Marine’, ‘La chair est triste, hélas! et j’ai lu tous les livres.’) Not so, Henry says.

There is one book that Henry hasn’t read:
Ubu Roi. He feeling ignorant        whenever his mind brings it up.
Everytime anybody says
– Mr Bones, you has read everything – he singles out instead
Ubu Roi, to prove he is an idiot
and should be, as one, blest.

I am not Henry, much less Berryman, but there are odd books that have been present to me for decades but which I have never read. Chief among them until recently was Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste.

Would it have made a difference to read it earlier? I have always had a taste for not-quite-novels, but I suspect this would always have been too much of a not-quite-a-not-quite-novel for me: a strange, pert, bossy little fuck-you of a bibelot, fraying at the edges; a sputtering personality cult of the eponymous Teste, who is not Mallarmé and not Valéry, but all three. Singing its exceptional (only how?) fancy man, observed by a series of wholly undifferentiated fancy men and one ‘strangely married’ fancy woman; an arrangement of mirrors and megaphones placed in front of and behind and on all sides of Edmond Teste, all saying and showing largely nothing: not beautiful, not intense, not temperamental, not constructive. An evening with him and a stroll with him, a letter from his wife (the slavishly devoted Mme Émilie Teste, self-professed ‘plaything of a muscular knowledge’, who reminds me of a story about Wallace Stevens, once asked by a rather forward interviewer what his wife was called, and saying in surprise ‘Mrs Stevens’), a letter to him from an unnamed friend, a dialogue about him, extracts from his logbook, a portrait of him, a handful of his Pensées; all of it desultory, sputtering, barely distinct one from the other, strenuous, rather baffling and, so to speak, empty of itself. Not just the emperor’s new clothes, but the personality cult of the naked emperor on a revolving stage. Unmemorable, un-trenchant, unpersuasive. The whole thing is en plus unexpectedly imprecise – ‘a kind of anguish’, ‘vaguely animating’, ‘a certain way of seeing’, ‘a kind of confused vastness’, ‘a sky slightly downy with light’ – and, with its vulgar italics in almost every paragraph struggling for emphasis, not even subtle.

At the end of the 19th century, things were moving apace. And this Monsieur Teste, appearing in 1896, was neither a waggishly provocative locus classicus of synaesthesia like J.K. Huysmans’s À Rebours (1884), nor an anguished anticipation of modernity like Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos Letter (1902) or Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) or Gottfried Benn’s Brains (1916), but really stuck – and stuck in every sense – in the middle. The gist of it was written down when Valéry was 21, maybe a jeune parque, but certainly a young prig. ‘The crisis came at Genoa, on a stormy night in August 1892,’ according to Jackson Mathews, an earlier translator, reverential to the point of a kind of co-preciosity. Later Valéry added wings and staircases and buttresses; none of it, so far as I can see, makes a blind bit of difference. Where Huysmans gives you the olfactory keyboard and the jewelled tortoise and the Dickens-inspired-evening-spent-entirely-at-home-in-Paris, and Hofmannsthal has stubble-fields and rats drowned in buckets and Crassus’ pet lamprey and a sudden overpowering disgust for all forms of evolved and conceptual language, and Rilke delivers an epileptic fit on the public street and the pipes and wallpaper of the inner wall of a house being torn down and the grooved headrest of a decayed armchair, Valéry gives you Monsieur Teste, a man who lives to think and is therefore – no better than the figure of the writer in a Hollywood film – nothing. ‘He looks absolute – his face, his gestures, have an undefinable simplicity.’ And then: ‘Etc.’ A bad idea, poorly executed. One might vary Larkin and say: thinking, when it’s not about anything, writes white.

‘Stupidity is not my strong suit’ is the boastful beginning (not a joke, not a provocation) and one wonders at the reputation of such a book, and already regrets picking it up. (Was there really a time when such a sentence was tolerable, or even seemed clever?) The rest of the paragraph is better, but it’s also as good as it gets:

Stupidity is not my strong suit. I have seen many individuals; I have visited a few countries; I’ve played a part in various enterprises without liking them; I have eaten almost every day; I have been with women. I recollect a few hundred faces, two or three epic events, and the substance of perhaps twenty books. I have not retained the best or worst of these things; whatever could remain has remained.

At least this comes with a little attack, a little acceleration, a bit of contemptus mundi, a bit of tone – there is nothing like it later – even though the whole thing feels like an idea of the semicolons.

Monsieur Teste is not a long book, and in my anxiety and mistrusting my own response I read it three times, hoping it would somehow come to life. It didn’t. It remains an attempt to delineate empty space. Because thinking is a blind alley, I then took to reading the book against itself. Not as mind-forg’d manacles and the temptations of etiolation and going with the gush: ‘You have to have seen him in these excesses of abstraction! His physiognomy alters – and vanishes! … A little more of this absorption, and I am sure he would make himself invisible!’ But physically, sceptically, like a policeman. I collected settings and sightings. Look, a Café Lambert, a theatre, a pavement. ‘The greenish room smelling of mint’ that he might have lifted from Huysmans, only later to be talked down to ‘the most general interior’. ‘He had, however, military shoulders, and his gait was of a surprising regularity,’ I learned, a little to my own surprise. Later, again, ‘his broad shoulders’. ‘His large feet.’ ‘His lean body.’ And finally: ‘He was snoring quietly.’ Hardly the wherewithal to make ‘the most satisfying being I have ever met – which is to say, the only individual who endures in my mind’. This is prose as overpriced barcode.

Just as Monsieur Teste is a product of the 1890s, I wonder if it’s not quintessentially French as well. The tolerance for imprudence, the homeopathic joys of the droppered language, the hushed cult of the austerely silly. I swear I don’t want to read anything cerebral ever again. I feel bad for France. I hunt up the beginning of the fantastic My Friends by Emmanuel Bove, published in 1924, which is so physical that even the sparse fittings in the hero’s room are body:

I lie on my back, the back of my neck warm, my eyes open, the sheets up to my chin so that the bed will not get cold again.

The ceiling is stained with damp: it is very close to the roof. In places there are air bubbles under the wallpaper. My furniture looks like the wares of a junk merchant out on the pavement. The pipe of my little stove is tied up with a rag, like a knee. At the top of the window a blind which no longer works hangs askew.

Like des Esseintes on his Dickens binge, I want to shrive myself and eat Brie and drink rouge and reread all of Proust, just for something compendious and real and language-affirmative.

I think wistfully of what can be and has been done with invented alter ego characters. Bertolt Brecht’s Herr Keuner (Keuner = keiner, i.e. no one), a clever clown, a resourceful dialectician, the witty hero of parables and deliverer of bons mots. (‘“What are you working on?” Mr K was asked. Mr K replied: “I’m having a hard time, I’m preparing my next mistake.”’) I think of shaky Berryman’s compensatory Henry, ‘Henry House, the steadiest man on the block.’ I think of Mr Cogito, Pan Cogito, Zbigniew Herbert’s sometime stand-in (‘Mr Cogito’s Alienations’, translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter):

Mr Cogito holds in his arms
the warm amphora of a head

the rest of the body is hidden
only touch sees it

he looks at the sleeping head
strange yet full of tenderness …
Mr Cogito removes
the sleeping head
gently
not to leave
on the cheek
the imprints of fingers
and he goes away
alone
into the lime of the sheets.

This is no more than Mr Cogito in bed with Mrs Cogitowa, but how there it is, how funny, how moving. Three things Valéry isn’t. À point.