The art of disappearance - meeting the art of finding
Every great story has one line that is its heart, its vital essence concentrated in but a feThe art of disappearance - meeting the art of finding
Every great story has one line that is its heart, its vital essence concentrated in but a few words, its lambent core. This is the one line that illuminates everything, that lets us feel the story, a story of things that flicker, things that fade.
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Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea is an amusing, imaginative and playful collection of 19 short stories which revolve around recurrent and connected motives and themes like time, disappearance, vanishing, getting lost and found – the evanescence of things, people and words. In the story What remains of Claire Blanck only the footnotes remain, the actual story they are commenting on has vanished. Nonetheless the footnotes give the impression to reflect on other stories in the collection, the blanked out words on the almost white pages illustrating the leitmotif of disappearance, emphasizing what went missing, was omitted or deleted: All short stories are about loss, but more, perhaps, about the traces things leave behind. All short stories are ghost stories.. A man witnesses how his belongings and furniture are gradually disappearing from his flat (One art). A brother tries to keep an eye on his sister but cannot hold on to her (Sister).
All these books, she said, their pages are empty, perfect blanks until you begin to read.
There is a sense of gentle enchantment to these dreamlike stories, of which some have a fabular quality (The Neva Star, Violons and pianos are horses, with a nod to Nietzsche). A few are inspired by factual material drawn from the history of film and photography, forgotten pioneers like a Hippolyte Bayard who protested against the lack of recognition he faced by staging a picture of himself as a drowned man.
Photography is a way of creating permanence where none exists.
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Some stories – in a way perhaps all the stories - thematize the art of storytelling, reflecting on the process of writing, documenting how the aspiring short story writer correlates to the masters of the short story genre – Chekhov inevitably but also French and American and other Russian authors (Gogol, Kharms, Dovlatov, Zoshchenko ) (A brief history on the short story: I wish for a skilled pen, the careful placing of each element, the timing of a slow reveal to a crushing truth. On the moment you might pounce Borges! Carver! Rose steals your thunder and throws the name on the table himself. Rather than simply exaggerating in casual namedropping however, Rose makes it part of the fun, toying with Bergson, Walter Benjamin and St Augustine in an airy and humorous way that reminded me of the short stories of Antonio Tabucchi. Only in one – rather sweet - story I wondered about the need to give away the author of the story that is on the menu of the English class (Proud woman, pearl necklace, twenty years). A story titled by the song I’m in love with a German film star that is entirely constructed from and structured through songs made me smile. There is nothing like music from one’s younger days that can rekindle memories of strong feelings (All cats are grey, Struggle for pleasure, Four hours).
If only life had a shape. If only life had the sense of a story.
The titular story – an exercise in alternate history - and the focus of the art of storytelling reminded me that for a short time I had access to a digital copy of Walter Benjamin’s own fiction The Storyteller: Tales out of Loneliness that expired before I could read it, which in the light of Rose’s theme strikes me as apt as well as ironic. An adroit, cheerful and charming collection which is well-worth reading, Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea also has the merit to rekindle my curiosity about that collection, if only to experience these acute words of Benjamin on storytelling within the text they belong: The storyteller: he is the man who could let the wick of his life to be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story.
Thanks to the author, Melville House Publishing, and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC.
Luminous, iridescent, glowing joy. A joyous multitude of shades of green and blue. Art as jubilant as Händel’s music. Is it possible that paint[image]
Luminous, iridescent, glowing joy. A joyous multitude of shades of green and blue. Art as jubilant as Händel’s music. Is it possible that paintings make you want to sing and dance?
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Last year I was thrilled hearing the news that a double exhibition comprising both a broad overview of David Hockney’s work and the I-pad ‘paintings’ Hockney made in Normandy during the first pandemic lockdown in 2020 would come to BOZAR in Brussels from 8 October 2021 until 23 Januany 2022. Hockney’s art had only shortly before caught my attention, when I was reading three episodes of Ali Smith’s seasonal cycle with his colourful arboreal tunnel paintings and the catalogue of the Hockney–Van Gogh exhibition held in Amsterdam in 2019, Hockney/Van Gogh: The Joy of Nature: The Joy of Nature. The possibility of seeing some of his work in the real was quite exciting.
The exhibitions blew me away (and were also a nice occasion to bring into practise what Ben Street taught me in his How to Enjoy Art: A Guide for Everyone : the enlargements of the I-pad prints put me in motion, circling around searching for the optimal distance to look at them). I was so enthralled I went to see the exhibitions three times, each time finding the art works as fresh as the first time and discovering aspects that hadn’t occurred to me the previous time. Forgetting time and space, I didn’t noticed the presence of one of my nephews who was visiting the exhibitions with his girlfriend. Later, gathering with the family at the Christmas table, he revealed he had been there too, poking fun at me for being so transported. Even my daughter, who accompanied me the third time (coaxed by the promise of eating ramen for lunch) and isn’t so keen on staring at paintings was enchanted, disagreeing quite firmly with her teacher of aesthetics who had dismissed Hockney’s work in class as banal and artificial.
Some of the art criticism of the spring works was rather harsh (the prints aren’t true paintings, the style of them is simple and uniform, ugly and unpersuasive, the multitude of them repetitive, the vibrant colour palette synthetic, the register false and fudged). It might just be my (decadent?) proclivity to enjoy art more than nature, but just looking at these pictures made me more happy than actual spring ever did – where I live spring is mostly a mixture of wetness and cold greyness- a period of fruitless yearning for a few (at best watery) beams of sun.
Perhaps because of my gushing about the exhibitions, I was gifted this lovely book which accompanied the exhibition as a birthday present. It includes three short pieces preceding the pictures: a brief, lovely introduction by the organizers of the exhibitions (The London Royal Academy of Arts and Bozar in Brussels), Edith Devaney interviewing David Hockney on what inspired him to create his spring works and his use of the I-pad as a medium to create them and a few pages by the novelist Willam Boyd in praise of David Hockney (a piece somewhat veering into an sweeping mode, stating that the comparison of Hockney’s genius to Mozart’s (a similar kind of effortless, unchallenged mastery of many forms characterising them) goes not quite far enough, ascribing Hockney a ‘shapeshifting liberation that Mozart could never even have dreamed of).
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It are however not these words but the 116 pictures documenting and celebrating the unfolding of spring – grass, ponds, blossoming trees - that are the essence of this book. They are a wonderful memory of the exhibition that will make me return to it time and again.
Following on his spring paintings in Normandy, David Hockney continued creating new work with his I-pad, resulting in a new exhibition to open in galleries in London, Paris, and the US, 20 Flowers and Some Bigger Pictures, concentrating this time on flower vases he could draw inside and containing this playful autoportrait as a centrepiece.
All immigrants have narratives in which the mundane is ripe with symbolism, centred on moments in which the diff[image] (Mabel Royds, 1932, Dandelions)
All immigrants have narratives in which the mundane is ripe with symbolism, centred on moments in which the difference between them and us, the natives and the newcomers, are somehow distilled. We recycle abstruse parables, pass them down the generations, and find in them nourishment, confirmation a-of something never fully articulated. We keep the lines of the stories more or less straight, because embellishment, like questions, only complicates.
Dandelions is a family memoir stretching over four generations who move back and forth between England (Sheffield and Manchester) and Italy (Maniago, Friuli- Venezia Giulia region), weaving a tapestry of stories of love and loss and family myths and legends interstitched with essayistic ruminations on topics that seem to come to Lenarduzzi in a process of free association when reflecting on bicultural identity and exploring what it means to live in between two different cultures: food, vegetation, the sense of (not)belonging, linguistic observations, piecing together fragments and anecdotes drawn from social and political history of England and Italy.
Central in the memoir are Thea Lenarduzzi’s (mostly telephone) conversations with her nonagenarian grandmother Dirce. Lenarduzzi interviews her (sometimes reluctant and taciturn) nonna on her memories and the family’s past, in which she almost seems to approach Dirce as a potentially inexhaustible receptacle of tales and anecdotes, ever hoping to find more beneath the shrugs of her nonna, eager to find stories - where there maybe are none. Touching on events and significant figures in Italian History (from Garibaldi over Mussolini, the assault in Bologna, the assassination of Aldo Moro), if this memoir makes anything clear it is that much of History passes by people unnoticed and that is very hard to access it again, the past being a foreign country, even for the contemporaries who lived it.
Experience becomes language becomes story becomes identity, and everyone’s place is settled. Each family has its own ‘dictionary of our past’.
Despite Thea Lenarduzzi’s beautiful, elegant and eloquent writing, quite early on I realised Dandelions wasn’t a book for me. It is hard to read a family memoir making abstraction from one’s own family history and memories. I acknowledge I don’t like to be reminded of that when I am reading – reading has always been my main refuge from what I experienced as stifling. Readers who are more comfortable with their own family relationships might enjoy this a lot more. The book left me mostly cold and even slightly rubbed me in the wrong way. Reading along until the end, I also felt trapped as when meeting with a friend who is eager to show thousands of holiday pictures or who cannot stop spinning endless stories on their incredible wide network of relatives and acquaintances, basking in every detail in these lives full of interest and meaning to that friend, but insignificant and colourless to an outsider who has no connection to them. With this memoir Lenarduzzi seems have Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon in mind as a model– a book she also explicitly mentions – and though I admire Ginzburg’s fiction and essays, I recall struggling with that book as well.
Photographs are like paragraphs, words written in light and dark.
Gradually I felt myself turning overly critical and ungenerous towards Lenarduzzi’s reflections. As much as the metaphors on the dandelions are a fascinating angle to capture both immigration (the spreading of the fluffy seeds), strangeness and xenophobia (dandelions as food; dandelions that are considered weeds in a lawn and so to eradicate) in one strong, multifaceted image, I was put off by the underlying tone of exceptionality of her family’s story and their position in a foreign country. Neither was I able to believe that eating dandelions – gathered and served up by her grandmother - is so uniquely Italian (it used to be common in the low countries before the second world war too). But maybe that is the whole point of the book, highlighting the exceptionality of experiences for the individual, in which it is actually unimportant if these experiences really are exceptional or not, the only thing mattering being how they are individually experienced? Lenarduzzi’s book reminded me of Bertolt Brecht’s song The Ballad of Mack the Knife And some are in the dark, and others are in the light. But one only sees those in the light; those in the dark, one doesn't see. However laudable Lenarduzzi’s venture to shed a light on people who would likely have remained in the dark, for me it missed the compaction in storytelling I enjoy in fiction.
Many thanks to Fitzcarraldo Editions and the author for kindly granting an ARC via NetGalley....more
The Kimono is a wistful and bittersweet story on the disruptive power of desire. It equally There is no conscience in passion.
Or is there?
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The Kimono is a wistful and bittersweet story on the disruptive power of desire. It equally grated me by its representation of the attractive, sensual woman to whom passion was as essential as bread making a decent, stable chap losing his mind, seducing the common sense out of him like a pear, soft and full- juiced and overflowing with passion as impressing me by its bold and frank acknowledgment of female sexual desire, which struck me as audacious for its time (the story was published in 1937). To butter the picture up even more thickly, the temptress’s name is Blanche - as French as the kiss –a touch of the Frenchness always so willing and able at one’s disposal for romantic expression when love is in the air.
In its fine balance of darkness and light, the story reminded me of this cheerful poem:
When I am sad and weary When I think all hope has gone When I walk along High Holborn I think of you with nothing on — Celia Celia by Adrian Mitchell
Gilbert Clandon’s wife Angela was recently killed in a car accident. He is waiting at home to meet his wife’s secretary, Sissy Miller,Some fine legacy
Gilbert Clandon’s wife Angela was recently killed in a car accident. He is waiting at home to meet his wife’s secretary, Sissy Miller, who he will hand over a pearl brooch that Angela intended to bequaethe on her as a legacy. To him, her husband, she only left the diary that she has been keeping constantly during their marriage, fifteen green leather-bound volumes which she had always scrupulously shielded from his eyes, shutting it or putting her hand over it when he was entering the room.
[image] (Gustave Courbet)
Opening the diary Gilbert - a busy and rather successful conservative politician - at first is a little amused and endeared by Angela’s naieve musings on her life and pride as his wife. He is basking in the memories in which he sees his younger self and her admiration reflected. Browsing on, he is more and more skipping when his own name occurs less frequently, as he isn’t – nor ever was - really interested in the life of his wife which he always considered trivial He cast his eyes rapidly over more pages, full of the little trifles, the insignificant, happy, daily trifles that had made up her life. However, by leafing through those pages, he gets intrigued by the sudden appearance of some initials he cannot make sense of, a name that is scratched out and some radical political views.
The Angela-in-the box that spring out of the diary, the secrets and lies gradually unveiling show that his wife unexpectedly had a life of her own while he was too busy and too full of himself to notice. Angela’s pages reveal Gilbert’s own blindness, shedding quite a different light on her sudden demise. They shatter his illusions on his wife, who he looked down upon as a simple creature without any needs or thoughts of her own – a docile extension of him, only existing in function of his needs for flattering and comforting, a creature which charity work could easily be bantered and minimalised.
Written in 1940, expounding on some of her reflections in A Room of One's Own and the ideas expressed in the lecture Professions for women rebelling against that obnoxious ideal of the angel in the house, thematically The Legacy is quintessentially Woolfian. As Woolf saw killing the angel in the house as a part of the occupation of a woman writer, she puts her money where her mouth is in this story.
While The Legacy is a powerful, sharp, cleverly composed and well-paced story on vanity, egoism, a woman’s need for independency versus the trap that marriage can be, as to narrative perspective and style, it comes across as surprisingly more straightforward and less experimental than earlier short fiction of Woolf - it missed the finesse and enchantment I found in Kew Gardens, The Lady in the Looking-Glass, A Haunted House, In the Orchard, which all left me slightly inebriated drinking from the blissful well of her words.
[image] (Pierre-Olivier Joseph Coomans)
A loving intimacy and understanding might go without words, resting on a few tender assumptions, but there might be a reason or two why the person you are quietly lying back to back with at night doesn’t share their innermost thoughts or feelings with you – or not anymore.
The flat was empty. I wondered where you'd gone. But all the time the answer was in front of me. You took your clothes, left a little note, but all it offered was your sympathy. I should have seen those tell-tale signs. It seems so obvious now. The way I felt about you, it's blinded me. Now all those fights we had seem so childish now. Just wish I could turn the clock back Any way... any how. All I've got is a a legacy of regrets. I'm forgetting how to smile. I watch a lot of TV these days, living on borrowed time. Too many tablets and too much wine. There's nothing left to dream about. I've got no aspirations. I thought about a hobby but I've got no patience. Some fine legacy you left me. Some fine legacy. You always hurt the one you love. You always hurt the one you love. Some fine legacy (Legacy, The Legendary Pink Dots)
George became engaged to Mabel when he was back in England on leave. They planned to get married in six months, but for several reasRun, baby, run
George became engaged to Mabel when he was back in England on leave. They planned to get married in six months, but for several reasons she couldn’t join him since he returned to Burma after their engagement. They haven’t seen each other for seven years.
When the great moment they will be reunited and married approaches and with Mabel on her way to Rangoon, George gets second thoughts on having to marry someone who is a total stranger to him, fearful of how Mabel may have changed over the last seven years since he last saw her. Lacking the courage to await her venue and finding it awkward to tell her she travelled more than six thousand miles for nothing, he writes her a letter with some lame excuse for his absence and advising her to return to England, hoping she will get the hint – and leaps on board of a boat to Singapore to flee from her.
Having barely arrived in Singapore, he learns that he clearly underestimated Mabel’s stamina and determination. She already tracked him down and is not willing to take the hint, which results in a chase of an increasingly desperate and terrorized George, who in just one page changes ships a couple of times, climbs into trains and rickshaws and is carried by chair-bearers, travelling to Rangoon, Singapore, Bangkok, Saigon, Hong Kong, Manila, Shanghai, Yokohama, the Yangtze, Chungking, Hankow, Ichang to escape, only to be handed over cable messages from his loving Mabel at each of his destinations. Eventually, having arrived in Cheng-tu, from which ‘crenellated walls one could see the snowy mountains of Tibet at sunset’, we can almost hear his sigh of relief: Mabel will never be able to find him here. Or will she?
Like some of narrator’s musings in his The Moon and Sixpence, this mildly amusing, slightly hyperbolic story seems to reflect Somerset Maugham’s gamophobia –or perhaps rather his fear for women as a species in the grip of an eagerness to marry which is alien to men? Another echo of this theme can be found in his story The Escape starting also with an unsuccessful attempt from a man to flee the inevitable, having the narrator observing 'I have always been convinced that if a woman once made up her mind to marry a man nothing but instant flight could save him.' The Escape again features a protagonist who cannot bring himself to tell the lady the truth on his changed feelings and so resorts to exhaustive scheming clothed in velvet gallantry as an indirect breakup strategy instead.
As this is light-hearted comedy, Mabel’s pursuing of George comes across as playful and innocuous. The dynamism and stoic sense of humour of Mabel gives the impression that Somerset Maugham quite enjoyed himself writing this and gently toying with turning gendered stereotypes of men as natural born hunters and women as their prey upside town.
[image] (painting by Bojan Gurbaj)
However understandable the anxiety to admit one’s change of heart and the fear to hurt another one’s feelings, it isn’t a pretty sight when one behaves like a fig, even if an elegantly disguised one, just to run away from the awkwardness and discomfort one feels for jilting one’s lover. Ach ladies and gentlemen, why long for wedding bells when you can have a life - or at least some fun - instead?
Generations of sacrifice; hard work and harder living. So much suffered, so much forfeited, so much–for this opportunity. For my life. And I’ve tried,Generations of sacrifice; hard work and harder living. So much suffered, so much forfeited, so much–for this opportunity. For my life. And I’ve tried, tried living up to it. But after years of struggling, fighting against the current, I’m ready to slow my arms. Stop kicking. Breathe the water in. I’m exhausted. Perhaps it’s time to end this story.
I reject this life. The pain is transformational, transdescent - the undoing of construction. A return, mercifully, to dust.
You cannot expect a punch in the face to be subtle.
The elusiveness of colour, memory, swallows and kisses
Blue Postcards set mostly in Paris in the late 1950ies, laces three interlocking narratives The elusiveness of colour, memory, swallows and kisses
Blue Postcards set mostly in Paris in the late 1950ies, laces three interlocking narratives together, which gravitate around the short life and ground-breaking work of the French artist Yves Klein (1928-1962 ), famous for his monochrome blue paintings and for patenting International Klein Blue in 1957 – not the colour, but the chemical fixation process that made the colour hold its intensity and lustre – work that however encompassed much more than that, anticipating minimal art, performance, conceptual art and body-art.
Blue is obscurity become visible, a space of indeterminate reverie.
As the quintessential artist of blue, Bruton draws on the artist’s biography, from his love for the blue sky in Nice, portraying his wit and playfulness, not glossing over his mercantile spirit and mythomaniac quirks (selling the same paintings for different prices, the illusionism of his ‘Leap into the Void’). Just like Yves Klein, the narrator is unreliable and enigmatic, blurring memory, lies and truth, as are the two other characters bearing along the other two narratives, the narrator’s dream girl Michelle and the Jewish tailor Henri.
Bruton’s novella has a remarkable structure which reminded me greatly of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets as there are quite a few striking parallels in their composition – both evolve around a fascination for blue, both break down in numbered paragraphs (500 in Blue Postcards and 240 in Bluets), in both the narrator collects and surrounds himself/herself with things that are blue.
This novella and Nelson’s essay are however quite different in tone and gravity, Blue postcards feels a feather-light story with fairy tale traits in comparison to the more heavy-handed reflections on pain, illness, art and the disintegration of a relationship in the long personal essay of Nelson – not that Douglas Bruton takes the easy way of rounding up his three storylines with a saccharine ending – some darker notes bring balance.
Blue is a feeling ad a time and a memory. Blue is distance and nearness and touch.
Now, the blue! Blue, apparently ‘the world’s favourite colour’, features in each and every one of the postcard-sized paragraphs. And as an aficionada of blue, enamoured with the deep cobalt blue by Yves Klein, how could I not be charmed by this lavish opulence of blue as well as by the discovery that Yves Klein is at the centre of this novella? Meeting his blue in the centre Pompidou in 1993 was love at first sight which a few years later winded up in decorating the house with a self-made assembly painting of Klein and Lucio Fontana, who was a friend of Klein (a lot of fun, the paint took weeks to dry so swishing along it in that tiny house wasn’t without risk).
Despite the brilliance, breadth and intensity of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets which I had been looking forward to read for years, her fragmentary, philosophical musings only partly spoke to me, while reading this novella, lacking Nelsons’s profundity and even containing a few pet peeves of mine (a rather facile use of Paris as a setting; a slight inclination to over-explicitism in the Holocaust narrative, subtly balanced however bringing in the theme of survival guilt) was a pure delight.
Bruton’s elegant novella bathes in a dreamy atmosphere comparable to Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain soaked in a melancholy which is gracefully colourful instead of worn-out sepia.
My thanks to the author and Fairlight Books for an ARC via NetGalley....more
Years ago I read and thoroughly enjoyed W. Somerset Maugham’s Theatre, so when I found a copy of Th
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Life isn’t long enough for love and art.
Years ago I read and thoroughly enjoyed W. Somerset Maugham’s Theatre, so when I found a copy of The Moon and Sixpence in the bookcase, it looked the perfect breezy weekend diversion I was looking for before I would embark on the finale of Thomas Mann’ s Doctor Faustus. Imagine my surprise having by chance run into a novel which also turned out to be a Künstlerroman , both novels sketching the development of two men who come to live only for their art, the (fictitious) composer Adrian Leverkühn in Mann’s novel, and Charles Strickland, a painter modelled on Paul Gauguin, in The moon and Sixpence - finding quite a few parallels between both novels.
Apart from narrators cultivating a peculiar friendship with the respective artists and who plead for compassion and understanding for the ordeal of the artists they admired, both novels in some sense have a common view on the Artist, the key – Romantic- belief that one cannot have it both ways, the Artist has to choose between love and art (Maugham makes this belief explicit from the very beginning, his narrator declares that the artist's personality is the most fascinating aspect of his art, however repulsive his character or numerous his flaws ). The outcome of that choice doesn’t have to come as a surprise, as Life isn’t long enough for love and art.While Adrian Leverkühn sorely forsakes love in his pact with the devil in exchange for granting him creative genius, Strickland is portrayed as indifferent to love, abandoning his wife and children for his artistic obsessions, which also have a demonic touch. In both cases their choice will have fatal consequences, at least for others. Both are portrayed as monsters in the sense that they are dedicated artists, whose life is totally devoted to their art and so they display monstrous features, even if only in the eyes of those around them. They both consciously choose a hermit's existence, rejecting commonplace life and participation in society, claiming the freedom to live in an ivory tower for themselves – whether on a farm in Germany or a mansard in Paris (and Tahiti later on). Unlike Charles Strickland, however, Leverkühn is vexed by the monstrous nature of his artistry – Charles Strickland couldn’t bother less.
There are many brilliant reviews and analyses of The Moon and Sixpence to find around here which do great justice to this novel as an outstanding work of literature. Nevertheless I am more on the side of these perspicacious reviews (here and here) which point out its inner contradictions and word astutely some of the impressions the novel left me with, encapsulating what becomes visible once the colours of Maugham’s glowing prose have stopped to bedazzle.
As much as the psychological portrayal of the selfish and obsessed painter is well done – from the little I recall from reading about the life of Gauguin the credibility is supreme (whereas assuaging some of the facts, for instance on his health condition, substituting syphilis by leprosy - it wasn’t the uncouthness, egoism and brutality of artist protagonist Charles Strickland that put me off– after all, haven’t those personality features turned into something one has almost come to expect in the Romantic view on the artist (the contrasts and tension between the ugliness and brutality of the personality versus the beauty he – as the genius is of course a man - pursuits to create)?
It were mostly the rather nauseating generalisations on the nature of women, by Strickland and by almost every character featuring in the novel including the narrator, a writer in who one can recognise Maugham himself which simply baffled me (and made me imagine the narrator/Maugham as an even less likeable person than Strickland/Gauguin, which is quite a feat). At times this misogyny turns so pathetic it becomes rather fascinating – even raking up the discussion if women actually have a soul (which was apparently a non-discussion). So this novel left me puzzled and with plenty of questions buzzing in my mind. What was the status quaestionis with regard to misogyny in 1919? Was Maugham representative for his times, or was it mostly the bitterness because of his personal situation (trapped in loveless marriage while being homosexual) that made him spit out his loathing so viscerally that it came to overcast whatever points he makes on conventionalism and creativity? I hope to find some answers in A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice, even if it seems too brief to have the space to mention Maugham.
When reading Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography I almost suspected myself of having turned into a sweet water feminist, as her recurrent blaming of patriarchy didn’t much resonate with me. If one however would feel the need to fuel feminist energy, The Moon and Sixpence would make good material to give to one’s children or simple anyone who thinks feminism has become evident or superfluous nowadays, if only to see where we have come from. It must have been from the moment a co-worker started to sing Girls from the Beastie boys in the nineties (‘girls do the dishes’) I was confronted with something as blatantly misogynist/sexist as this book (admittedly, apart from this forum dedicated to books and some newspapers I read little on the internet and so am only vaguely aware of trolling of women who twitter as happened to Mary Beard).
Just a few examples of statements to savour:
When a woman loves you she's not satisfied until she possesses your soul. Because she's weak, she has a rage for domination, and nothing less will satisfy her.
It requires a female temperament to repeat the same thing three times with unabated zest. Women are constantly trying to commit suicide for love, but generally they take care not to succeed.
I did not then know the besetting sin of woman, the passion to discuss her private affairs with anyone who is willing to listen.
Women are strange little beasts... You can treat them like dogs, you can beat them till your arm aches, and still they love you. He shrugged his shoulders. Of course, it is one of the most absurd illusions of Christianity that they have souls.... In the end they get you, and you are helpless in their hands. White or brown, they are all the same.
Because women can do nothing except love, they’ve given it a ridiculous importance. They want to persuade us that it’s the whole of life. It’s an insignificant part. I know lust. That’s normal and healthy. Love is a disease. Women are the instruments of my pleasure.
What I had taken for love was no more than the feminine response to caresses and comfort which in the minds of most women passes for it. It is a passive feeling capable of being roused for any object, as the vine can grow on any tree; and the wisdom of the world recognizes its strength when it urges a girl to marry the man who wants her with the assurance that love will follow.
On the plus side, the novel made me look more closely at some of the paintings of Paul Gauguin, which I now appreciate more, particularly the vitality of the colours in his still lives (Gauguin’s painting never particularly spoke to me, I find it particularly hard not to look at his paintings through the lens of an exoticism that reeks of a mythologizing of the noble savage; I admit my not so favourable view on him was also negatively affected by reading this loosely biographical graphic novel some years ago, Gauguin: Off the Beaten Track by Maximilien Le Roy).
Maugham’s novel offers lots of food for thought and could serve as an excellent exercise when one tries to consider a work of art independently from the personality of the creator – whether painter or writer. It made me aware I need more exercise on these issues and so I will definitely read more by Maugham....more
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