To know an author …
<<To know an author, personally, is too often to destroy the illusion created by his works; if you withdraw the veil of your idol’s sanctuary, and see him in his night-cap, you discover a querulous old crone, a sour pedant, a supercilious coxcomb, a servile tuft-hunter, a saucy snob, or at best, an ordinary mortal. Instead of the high-minded seeker after truth and abstract knowledge, with a nature too refined to bear the vulgarities of life, as we had imagined, we find him full of egotism and vanity, and eternally fretting and fuming about trifles.>>
— Edward Trelawny
The Human Stain
<<He knew from the wrath of Achilles, the rage of Philoctetes, the fulminations of Medea, the madness of Ajax, the despair of Electra, and the suffering of Prometheus the many horrors that can ensue when the highest degree of indignation is achieved and, in the name of justice, retribution is exacted and a cycle of retaliation begins.>>
— Philip Roth
Victor Audouin
‘I went to the Jardin du Luxembourg. The weather was magnificent. I found that I could not think. No idea presented itself to my imagination, which had been so lively a moment before. A melancholy, which was not without charm, captivated me entirely… Tears ran down my cheeks, which had no cause in my thoughts and which no amount of reasoning could halt. Finally, seven o’ clock came and the drum woke me from this strange ecstasy. I walked home.’
First line idea
I don’t know what the novel is about, though.
Once a month I run a hot bath, rise out of it a pink, pectoral-fin-flailing seahorse, towel myself speedily, and finger my balls in search of incipient tumours.
My First Fib
Maysie sent me a link about the London Word Festival’s ‘fib’ competition (a fib is a poem based on the Fibonacci Sequence), suggesting I enter. So I wrote this:
‘Entente Cordiale’
I
hide
behind
platitudes,
safe in the knowledge
that we’re speaking the same language.
Excerpt of a letter from Robert Frost to Lionel Trilling (quoted in N.Y.R.B.)
‘No sweeter music can come to my ears than the clash of arms over my dead body when I am down.’
Excerpt of untitled Edmund Wilson poem (from New York Review of Books)
— And if you say a turtle stalks
This stream, debating as he walks
Where best to burrow in the slime,
To wait the proper snapping time;
Remember that I say the snails
That leave their little hollow trails
Along the bottom that stays white
Are tiny beasts that do not bite.
Like A Fiery Elephant
I’m reading Like A Fiery Elephant, and it is every bit as brilliant as the critics said. Quoted from Albert Angelo:
I hate these women who only want bits of me. I offer her the enormous totality of me, and she says, yes, I’ll have the conversation bit, and the company bit, but not the bed bit, nor even the handsonmybigtits bit. I hate the partial livers. I’m an allornothinger.
Christopher Hitchens on the limits to self-improvement
‘In my squandered youth I was a friend of Ian Hamilton, the biographer of Robert Lowell and J. D. Salinger and a justly renowned figure in London’s Bohemia. His literary magazine The New Reviewwas published from a barstool in a Soho pub called the Pillars of Hercules, and editorial meetings would commence promptly at opening time. One day, there came through the door a failed poet with an equally heroic reputation for dissipation. To Ian’s undisguised surprise, he declined the offer of a hand-steadying cocktail. “No,” he announced dramatically. “I just don’t want to do it anymore. I don’t like having blackouts and waking up on rubbish dumps. I don’t like having no money and no friends, smelling bad and throwing up randomly. I don’t like wetting myself and getting impotent.” His voice rising and cracking slightly, he concluded by avowing that he also didn’t like being repellently fat, getting the shakes and amnesia, losing his teeth and gums, and suffering from premature baldness. A brief and significant silence followed this display of unmanly emotion. Then Ian, fixing him with a stern look, responded evenly by saying, “Well, none of us likes it.”’
Fool!
I wrote a poem for competitions. It failed to win them. So now I am going to work it into F.A.: the Napoleon theme is central to it, after all.
‘Kansas City, Kansas’
I
At clodville, on The Battleground of Freedom, along damp banks
In scarce-sunned woods – a ghost-verge relict, the Garden of the West -
Lungwort Oysterleaf grows bright green, and youth-pink blooms
Come as fading blue as the airless blood of field-dead men:
This is where I played emperor while the unregarding rabble (all rabbit heart)
Feigned buck-uppishness and called me Bonesapart.
Stalking the Kaw with bulrush sword, the slashed sky rings with shouts for my mount,
Wetted toes worry the mud at water’s lip, and there’s a whiff of grapeshot
To the rotted weed silent currents shoot south,
Where clearer flows meet the Dark River.
Battle joined and ended, the survivors retire, smeared cheeks and dry mouth.
I think, as usual, of eighteen hundred and three,
When with martial calculus you studied the accounts
And sold us these millions of unsurveyed acres, a leaf-swatch of continent,
For eighty million francs (a soldier’s supper, we thought),
To force with warships and barges a reckoning, and follow Caesar’s wake:
But the dénouement was wrong – and a dozen years long.
Eighteen hundred and four brought Lewis and Clark to Kaw Point
Three months after the Duc d’Enghien drank a lead cocktail and
Kissed the cobbles in the Fortress of Vincennes.
On the quick march home with my boko in the van,
Tired enough to eat, screwed-up eyes seek Dunand,
The shoulders droop – I can smell it from the porch;
She’s dancing with the griddle: it’s nigger and halitosis again.
My weary chops wanted Poulet Sauté Marengo;
When the slick mess hit the plate, these fingers ached to crack crawfish claws.
Suppertime was thinking time, but I was too green to know
That in every Little Boney lies Jean-Baptiste Carrier – the insane swish
Of unsheathed épée. ‘I trussed the opposite sexes two by two, naked and arranged
As if they were coupling,’ he bragged with lunatic glee.
II
Puny Nabulio knew the maquis; the pale little Corsican played alongside
Death-thickets in which aromatic oils met fatal alkaloids,
Where brigands and hunters trod stony goat tracks and
Birds died by lime and net and shot.
In Paris, hot as a pistol (but with a womanly figure),
Napoléon – first went the ‘di’, then the ‘de’ -
Now brigadier-general in the artillery, knew his cannons
Would quell muskets, pikes, swords, and clubs; but before all that
Lanjuinais foresaw civil war spreading its ravages everywhere
And tearing France apart, the monster Dictatorship advancing over piles of ruins and corpses.
(How did he elude the blade, Carrier, and the hedgerow-sniffing hounds?)
Blood-encrusted, doomed demagogues became seers too.
‘You will follow me!’ Danton screamed. ‘Your house will be levelled and the ground where it stood will be
sowed with salt!’
Lucidity returned to The Drowner of Nantes: ‘We shall all be guillotined, one after another.’
Ungovernable cannibals died, so did Holy Joes;
Napoléon, immutable, cheated at games; the slaps and pinches
Were just as strong, and more often than involuntary cries
Came hurried smiles and ‘Qu’il est drôle, Bonaparte!’
III
While Desaix lived there was always time to win another battle,
But the Austrians ironed him out. (I’m a student of history; this happens a lot.)
I no longer slosh in the shallows of the Kaw, but I still think about
Eighteen hundred and seven.
This is my River Niemen, so where is the barge? Where is the tent?
No boats, no oarsmen, attend to me: I’m no high-much-a-much, no emperor
Gross with victory, and the expansive plaudits of po-faced sycophants,
Hand rested on protuberant gut, the nervous twitches checked for now.
There’s a will to power in the Navel of the Nation:
The past is screaming, and I won’t stop my sighs and tears.
They kept him far away and close on a horrible rock;
Black basalt cliffs threw jags into the unending sea;
In gunpowder soil, thin lines of gumwoods set drooping flowers
Adry and unfed by the clockwork mists.
The handkerchief on his still-smooth face,
For bathetic rounds of blind-man’s-buff,
Sometimes slipped with an artful nudge.
(What’s a bit of chicanery between friends? he reasoned,
Then ran along in his unself-conscious way that was
Something between a strut and a waddle.)
Before I throw the stone, my fingers touch its rasping face -
Three seconds later it’s sinking in the Kaw.
No more activité, no more vitesse.
In your undressed thoughts you muttered ‘À la tête de l’armée’,
Unready to admit that besides the million, the thirty-eight per cent,
Who died under you, you first did away with common sense.
Those grey eyes, wet with pain from calomel, would not see
The legacy of Acre as hurt choked your stuffings.
I think of you often, because half the fear of dying is knowing you’ll be forgotten,
And there are hatfuls of worse times, worse places, than now, in K.C.K.
——-
NOTES
Historical information is drawn from The Age of Napoleon by Will and Ariel Durant, Napoleon: His Wives and Women by Christopher Hibbert, and Paris in the Terror by Stanley Loomis.
l. 1: clodville, a hick town; The Battleground of Freedom, Kansas.
l. 2: Garden of the West, Kansas.
ll. 3-4: The plant’s flowers mature from pink to blue.
l. 5: rabbit heart: from rabbit-hearted (cowardly).
l. 6: buck-uppishness, bravery.
l. 7: Kaw, the Ojibwa name for the Kansas River.
l. 8: whiff of grapeshot, Napoleon’s description of his cannonade, responsible for up to 300 deaths, in defence of the Convention on the Day of the Sections [13 Vendémiaire (5 October), 1795].
l. 10: Dark River, the Missouri River, known for its turbidity.
ll. 12-16: The Louisiana Purchase was concluded to finance Napoleon’s planned invasion of Britain.
l. 18: Between 1804 and 1806, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark made the first successful overland expedition to the American west coast.
ll. 19-20: Louis-Antoine-Henri de Bourbon-Condé, Duc d’Enghien (1772-1804) was arrested during the countermeasures against the Royalist-Chouan insurgency. He was tried by a military court, convicted of treason, and shot.
l. 21: boko, nose.
l. 22: Dunand, Napoleon’s chef, creator of the Emperor’s favourite dish, Chicken Marengo.
l. 24: nigger and halitosis, liver and onions.
ll. 28-30: Carrier (1756-1794) was made représentant-en-mission for the Loire in October 1793. Based in Nantes, he instituted les noyades (the drownings), in which prisoners bound in ‘republican marriages’ were piled on to barges, which were then sunk. He was guillotined in November, 1794.
l. 31: Nabulio, family nickname for Napoleon; pale little Corsican, taken from Hibbert.
l. 35: hot as a pistol, tough; womanly figure, Napoleon’s body shape was noted by many observers.
ll. 39-42: The words are Comte Jean-Denis Lanjuinais’. Lanjuinais (1753-1827) fled the Terror in Paris and went into hiding in the west. He re-took his seat in the Convention on 8 March, 1795.
ll. 43-44: His denunciation of Robespierre.
ll. 48-50: The cheating at games and harsh physical affection of the young rowdy never left Napoleon. See Hibbert. The quote is Josephine de Beauharnais’.
l. 51: General Louis Desaix de Veygoux (1768-1800) rallied the French for a counter-attack at the battle of Marengo, during which he was killed.
ll. 54-57: After the battle of Friedland, the Prussians and Russians requested a truce. Napoleon and Alexander met on a barge in the middle of the River Niemen at Tilsit, where they concluded the peace and formed an alliance against England. Each thought he had won a strategic victory over the other.
l. 58: Napoleon suffered from epilepsy and nervous tics.
l. 59: Navel of the Nation, Kansas.
l. 60: sighs and tears, ears.
1. 61: horrible rock, one of Napoleon’s descriptions of Saint Helena.
ll. 66-70: Napoleon played blind-man’s-buff with the Balcombe sisters on Saint Helena. The description of Napoleon’s walk is Betsy Balcombe’s, quoted by Hibbert.
l. 73: Napoleon’s motto was ‘Action and speed’.
l. 74: ‘At the head of the army’ were Napoleon’s last words.
ll. 75-76: The mortality rate in the Grande Armée.
sl. 78: The unsuccessful siege of Acre was Napoleon’s first defeat.
