Gilberte by Proust

Marcel Proust

GILBERTE

BY ALEC WAUGH

T

HEIR eyes meet across a hedge when she is still a little girl. In his eyes the look is one of appeal unconsciously, in hers of ironic indifference and contempt. He hears her name called: “Gilberte”; and she obeys instantly without turning to look back in his direction, leaving him with a disturbing enervating memory, the sense suddenly appreciated of things distant and intangible, of a world withheld from him. And that brief encounter sets the tone of their relations. She is always very largely a creature of his imagination, a window through which he can see but cannot reach immortal pastures. Never in the sense that Odette is, does she become a personality to him. Consequently to the reader she appears only in intermittent flashes of reality: when she gives him the marble that has the same colour as her eyes; when they wrestle for the letter—their feelings one shy articulation—and she says, “You know, if you like, we might go on wrestling for a little”; when in spite of her grandfather’s anniversary and her father’s disapproval she insists on going to a concert: in her impatience at being kept from a dancing lesson by her lover’s unexpected visit.

And when we recall the endless pains expended, through Swann’s love for her, on Odette,-64- on the making indeed a mirror of that love for the woman by whom it was inspired and from whom it drew its strength and weakness, we realise that purposely the author has left of Gilberte “a loveliness perceived in twilight, a beauty not clearly visioned”; that he considered the emotions felt for her not to be a response to any emanation from herself; but that she was rather a focus, a rallying-point, for the aspirations and intimations of boyhood; that she was in herself uninteresting, filling rather than creating a position in the life of the “moi” of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Throughout the episode the reader’s attention is fixed always on the “moi,” on the detailed analysis of his love: its ebb and flow; its dawn of timidity and reverence and hopeless longing; its discontent; its substitution for love of friendship; its oblique and unrepeated essay, in the wrestle, towards a physical expression; the resignation for its sake of a diplomatic career which would carry him from Gilberte; the disagreement over a trifle; the gradual recognition of its failing power, and the final realisation that those emotions of his, which he had considered in the light of a gift to Gilberte, as her permanent possession, had returned to him, to be showered in time, but in a different form, before another woman. This particular series of emotions, so familiar and yet, belonging as it does to Jurgen’s enchanted garden between dawn and sunrise, so distant; this love that must, in John Galsworthy’s phrase, “become-65- in time a fragrant memory—a searing passion—a humdrum mateship—or once in many times vintage full and sweet with sunset colour on the grapes,” Marcel Proust has in the last pages of Du Côté de chez Swann and the first part of A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs presented in unfaltering analysis.

It is a series of emotions that has been treated many times and has inspired more than one masterpiece of the world’s literature. For, whatever else in life comes twice, that does not come. Love may advance down the years often enough and gaily enough, “overthrowing all ancient memories with laughter”: the passions of maturity may be deeper, stronger, less impermanent. But the particular charm of that first flowering is irrecapturable. Whence its unique fascination for the novelist. To compare Proust’s treatment of it with that of other writers—with, for example, Turgenev’s beautiful First Love—would be a forlorn and foolish business. To praise the one at the expense of the other would be to blame a big writer for failing to achieve a thing at which he never aimed. Those who find themselves in sympathy with Proust’s methods, who recognise in the technique of his work a new formula, in its style a new prose rhythm, and in the spirit of it an alert and original intelligence, will always look on Gilberte as one of his most fortunate successes.

GUTENBERG

Simone de Beauvoir's 'remarkable' letters to Violette Leduc sold at auction

A selection of Beauvoir’s letters to Leduc between 1945 to 1972.

Simone de Beauvoir's 'remarkable' letters to Violette Leduc sold at auction

This article is more than 1 year old

Sotheby’s, which sold the 297 letters, says they reveal ‘a complex and ambiguous relationship where unrequited passion and mistrust mingle’

Sian Cain
Wedenesday 16 December 2022

Almost 300 letters, mostly unpublished, from the influential feminist thinker Simone de Beauvoir to the French novelist Violette Leduc, including The Second Sex author’s rejection of her friend’s romantic advances, have sold for €56,700 (£51,500).

 

How Georges Perec’s lost first novel has finally come to be published

Discovered in a wardrobe, Perec’s previously unpublished Portrait of a Man is as infuriating as it is brilliant

David Bellos

Friday 7 November 2014

G

eorges Perec never made a secret of having written an unpublished early novel about Antonello da Messina’s Portrait of a Man, but after his death in 1982, the manuscript of Le Condottière couldn’t be found. On leaving his perch in Paris’s Latin Quarter for a larger apartment in 1966, Perec had stuffed old paperwork into a suitcase for the dump, and put his manuscripts in a similar case. The wrong one got junked, and all Perec’s early writings disappeared. Or so he thought.

When I was tracking down everyone who had known Perec during his tragically short life, I called on a journalist who had met him at a writer’s retreat in Normandy. He mentioned that someone had once given him one of Perec’s pieces to look at. He went to a wardrobe and pulled out a manuscript. There it was, a carbon-copy typescript beginning: “georges perec le condottière roman”. I stayed up that night reading Perec’s lost novel. It was really hard to follow – maybe the late hour, the smudgy carbon and the dim hotel lighting were to blame. But even after a night’s sleep, in good light and clear print, Portrait of a Man is quite strange. It is connected by a hundred threads to every part of Perec’s later oeuvre, but it’s not like anything else he wrote.

Gaspard Winckler is sent to a boarding school in Switzerland during the war. A wealthy idler with a good eye and good hands, he falls in with a painter who trains him to become an art forger. He breaks off relations with his family, acquires dummy qualifications to cover his tracks and becomes a master forger of artworks of all kinds. His dealer, Anatole Madera, asks him to use a period panel to fake something really expensive. Winckler chooses Antonello da Messina as his target, aiming this time round not to pastiche an existing portrait, but to make something that would be an Antonello and also his own. At the end of this meticulously planned undertaking, he realises he has been wasting his time. So he cuts Madera’s throat. Perec’s novel begins after the fact, with the art-forger turned assassin tunnelling his way out of a basement studio. Then he turns up in Yugoslavia and tells the same story to a Serbian friend.

Winckler’s plight is told first as internal monologue during the tunnelling, and then in a Q&A session with his friend Streten. Perec went on to write other works in two parts: W or The Memory of Childhood is the best-known example, but there’s also the unfinished “53 Days”, which was to have a Part II that would undo everything set up in the first. What happens in Portrait of a Man alone, however, is that murder is presented as a key to liberation. Mortal violence is needed for Winckler to begin to be himself.

The narrator of W or the Memory of Childhood and the craftsman who cuts Percival Bartlebooth’s watercolours into jigsaw puzzles in Life: A User’s Manual are also called Gaspard Winckler. Are they the same person? A tantalising clue comes at the end of the first chapter of Life when we learn that “Gaspard Winckler is dead, but the long and meticulous, patiently laid plot of his revenge is not finished yet.” Revenge for what? Maybe the answer is to be found in Portrait of a Man.

Perec was an intensely visual writer. It’s no coincidence that the first words of Things are “the eye, first of all”. Life: A User’s Manual is a word-picture of all the rooms in a Parisian apartment house that a painter called Serge Valène would like to put on canvas, and also a description of the painting that Valène has barely begun to sketch out. But Perec’s engagement with painting is clearest in his first, brilliant and also infuriating novel, Portrait of a Man.

Perec learned about painting from Yugoslav students in Paris around 1955. Art history was also a major concern among Perec’s second circle with whom he sought to launch a periodical, the General Line. Perec went to galleries in Paris and London, and to Berne to see the Klee collection. But the Antonello portrait in the Louvre obsessed him especially because the sitter has a scar on his upper lip just like his own.

The forger’s problem is that a real work of art expresses its creator, whereas a successful fake necessarily expresses the world view of someone else. That is why a painting cannot be a forgery and an authentic work of art at the same time. Winckler, who doesn’t have Perec’s advantage of debates with Marxist friends, learns this from experience. Having set out to create a masterpiece that will be taken for an Antonello by using all of Antonello’s materials, methods and techniques, he ends up painting the image of an indeterminate fraud that can’t possibly be taken for a Renaissance warlord. He has indeed expressed himself. It’s repulsive, because he is.

Portrait of a Man isn’t a typical novel of its time – it’s not a “new novel” or a piece of “committed literature”. What ties it to its period is the topic of forgery. In 1945, Han van Meegeren was arrested for selling old masters to German officers. He pleaded not guilty because the works he had sold to Nazis were his own: he had forged them all. To prove it he painted a Vermeer in his prison cell. The affair revived interest in earlier art scams by Dossena and Icilio, who had hoodwinked Berenson. Paris was abuzz with talk about the difference between art and imitation. In 1955, a major exhibition of fakes was put on at the Grand Palais, where Perec saw some of the forgeries mentioned in Portrait of a Man.

Perec’s first novel took three years to write, before, during and after his time as a conscript in a parachute regiment. An early version was turned down by one publisher in 1958, but Gallimard picked it up in the following year on the priviso that it was shortened and revised. On his discharge, Perec set to work, and when he’d finished rewriting it one last time, he typed out: “YOU’LL HAVE TO PAY ME LOADS IF YOU WANT ME TO START IT OVER AGAIN. Thursday, August 25, 1960.”

The bad news came just a few days before he left Paris for Tunisia, where his wife had got a job. Having read the new version, the publisher preferred not to proceed with the contract. Downcast, Perec dropped the project. “Best of luck to anyone who reads it,” Perec wrote to a friend. “I’ll go back to it in 10 years when it’ll turn into a masterpiece, or else I’ll wait in my grave until one of my faithful exegetes comes across it in an old trunk you once owned and brings it out.”

Mission accomplished.

Georges Perec’s Portrait of Man is published this week by MacLehose Press.

THE GUARDIAN

Imaginary Lives / Preface by Marcel Schwob

 

IMAGINARY LIVES

PREFACE

by Marcel Schwob

Marcel Schwob / Prólogo

The science of history leaves us uncertain as to individuals, revealing only those points by which individuals have been attached to generalities. History tells us that Napoleon was ill on the day of Waterloo; that we must attribute Newton’s excessive intellectuality to the absolute consistency of his temperament; that Alexander was drunk when he killed Klitos; and that the fistula of Louis XIV was perhaps the cause of certain of his resolutions. Pascal speculates on the length of Cleopatra's nose... the possible consequences had it been a trifle shorter; and on the grain of sand in Cromwell’s urethra. All these facts are valued only when they modify events or alter a series of events. They are causes, established or possible. We must leave them to savants.

Nicolas Loyseleue by Marcel Schwob

 

NICOLAS LOYSELEUE

Judge

by Marcel Schwob

Marcel Schwob / Nicolás Loyseur

Born on Ascension Day, he was dedicated to the Virgin, whose aid he invoked at all times during his life until he could not hear her name without his eyes would fill with tears. He was first schooled by a lean man in a little loft on the rue Saint-Jacques, where, after learning his psalms, donats and penitences with three other children, he laboriously acquired the logic of Okam. He soon became bachelor and master of the arts, for the venerable instructors found his gentle nature charmingly unctuous, as sweet words of adoration slipped easily from his fat lips. No sooner had he obtained his baccalaureate than the Church had its eye on him. He served first in the diocese of the Bishop of Beauvais who recognized his talent, using it to inform the English before Chartres how certain French captains were deploying. When he was about thirty-five years old they made him a canon of the Cathedral of Rouen, where he struck up a friendship with another canon and chorister, Jean Bruillot, with whom he psalmed fine litanies in honor of Mary. 

Walter Kennedy by Marcel Schwob

 

Walter Kennedy

WALTER KENNEDY

Unlettered Pirate 

by Walter Schwob

Marcel Schwob / Walter Kennedy

Captain Kennedy was an Irishman. He could neither read nor write. Under the great Roberts he rose to the lieutenant grade by merit of his talent for torture. He was perfection itself at the art of tightening a cord around a prisoner’s brow until his eyes popped out, or of tickling his face with a flaming palm leaf. When Darby Mullin was tried for treason aboard the Corsaire Captain Kennedy’s reputation became assured. Seated in a semicircle behind the wheel house, the judges assembled with their long tobacco pipes around a bowl of punch. Then the process began. They were about to vote the verdict when someone suggested another pipe before concluding the business. Kennedy rose, drew his clay from his pocket, spat and delivered himself of the following sentiments: 

William Phips by Marcel Schwob

 

Illustration by George Barbier

WILLIAM PHIPS

Treasure Hunter

by Marcel Schwob

Marcel Schwob / William Phips

Marcel Schwob / William Phips

WILLIAM PHIPS William Phips was bom in 1651 near the mouth of the Kennebec River and those forests from which the shipbuilders cut their lumber. In a Maine village, poor and small, he dreamed his dreams of fortune hunting and adventure for the first time. There, in the sight of ships and makers of ships, the shifting, changing light from the New England seas brought to his eyes a gleam of sunken gold—a gleam of silver buried beneath the sands. Wealth was out there under the sea, he believed, and he wanted it. He learned shipbuilding, earned a small stake, journeyed to Boston. Strong in his faith, he repeated this prophecy: “Some day I’ll command a king’s ship and own a fine brick house on Green Street.” 

Sufrah by Marcel Schwob

 

Sufrah
Illustration by George Barbier

S U F R A H

Geomancer

by Marcel Shwob

Marcel Schwob / Sufrah

The story of Aladdin is in error when it tells how the African magician was poisoned in his palace and how his body, burned black by the drug, was thrown to the dogs and cats. His brother was so deceived by these appearances that he stabbed himself after donning the robes of the blessed Fatima, but it is nevertheless certain that Moghrabi Sufrah (for that was the magician’s name) only slept under the influence of the powerful narcotic. He escaped through one of the twenty-four windows of the great hall while Aladdin was tenderly embracing the princess. 

Gabriel Spenser by Marcel Schwob

Gabriel Spenser
George Barbier

GABRIEL SPENSER

Actor

By Marcel Schwob

Marcel Schwob / Gabriel Spenser

Marcel Schwob / Gabriel Spenser

His mother was a woman named Flum who had a little basement in Piked-Hatch at the end of Rotton-Row. After supper a captain with brass rings on his fingers used to come to see her, along with two gallants in loosened doublets. Flum lodged three girls named Poll, Doll and Moll, and none of them could stand the smell of tobacco. Frequently when they retired to the rooms above, the polite gentlemen would accompany them after first taking a glass of Spanish wine to wash away the taste of their pipes. Little Gabriel used to sit on the hearth watching them roast apples to put in their ale-pots. Actors of all sorts came there too—actors who dared not show themselves in the big taverns where the famous entertainers went. Some of them boasted in the grand manner, others stuttered like idiots. They often played with Gabriel, teaching him tragic verse and rustic jokes, and once they gave him a scrap of giltfringed crimson drapery with a velvet mask and an old wooden dagger. Then he paraded up and down all alone in front of the fireplace until his mother’s triple chins shook in a quiver of admiration for her precocious child. 

Cecco Angiolero by Marcel Schwob

 

Cecco Angiolieri

CECCO ANGIOLIERI

Poet of Hate

by Marcel Schwob

Marcel Schwob / Cecco Angiolieri

Marcel Schwob / Cecco Angiolieri

Cecco Angiolieri was born hateful. His birth at Sienna coincided to the very day with the birth of Dante Alaghieri at Florence. Cecco’s father was a rich wool merchant whose sympathies inclined toward the empire. From his earliest childhood the boy muttered scornful, jealous things against his sire. In those days many of the nobles had reached a point where they were no longer willing to serve the Pope, the Ghibellines having already rebelled while even the Guelphes were divided into factions designated as the Whites and the Blacks. Imperial intervention was not distasteful to the Whites, but the Blacks remained staunchly loyal to Rome and the Holy See. Cecco felt instinctively Black, perhaps because his father was a White. 

Major Stede-Bonnet by Marcel Schwob

Stede-Bonnet

MAJOR STEDE-BONNET

Pirate by Fancy

by Marcel Schwob

Marcel Schwob / El mayor Stede Bonnet

Major Stede-Bonnet was a gentleman and a retired soldier living on his plantation in the Barbadoes in the year 1715. His fields of sugar-cane and coffee brought him a good income, and he had the pleasure of smoking tobacco he himself had cultivated. He had been unhappily married, for his wife, it was said, had driven him slightly mad, though his aberrations were only mild ones until after the quarantine. At first, his servants and neighbors humored them as mere childish fancies. 

Captain Kidd by Marcel Schwob

 

Captain Kidd
Illustration by George Barbier

CAPTAIN KIDD

Pirate

by Marcel Schwob

Marcel Schwob / El capitán Kidd

How this pirate came by the name of Kidd is not altogether clear. The act through which William the Third of Eng¬ land granted him his commission of the Adventure in 1695 began with these words: “To our faithful and well loved captain, William Kidd, commander . . . greetings.” Certainly from that time on it was a name of war. In battle or maneuver some say he always had the elegant habit of wearing delicate kid gloves with revers of Flanders lace. Others declare he would cry out during his worst butcheries: “Me?—why, I’m as meek and mild as a new-born kid!” Still others there are who say he stored his treasure in sacks made from the skins of young goats, the custom dating from the time he pillaged a ship laden with quicksilver, emptying a thousand bags of this metal which remain buried even now on the slopes of a little hill in the Barbadoes. It is enough to know that his black silk flag was blazoned with a death’s head and the head of a goat, and his seal graven with the same emblems. Some who have hunted the numerous treasures Kidd buried in Asia and America have driven a little goat before them, thinking it would bleat if it crossed the Captain’s path, but no one has ever found his hidden gold. Guided by Gabriel Loff, one of Kidd’s old sailors, Blackbeard himself searched the dunes where Fort Providence now stands, finding no more than a few traces of quick silver oozing up through the sand. All this digging has been useless, for Kidd himself told how his secrets would remain eternally undiscovered because of the “man with the bloody bucket.” He was haunted by this man all his life, and his treasures have been haunted and defended by him ever since. 

Burke and Hare by Marcel Schwob

BURKE AND HARE

Assassins

by Marcel Schwob

Marcel Schwob / Mm. Burke et Hare

Marcel Schwob / Los señores Burke y Hare

Mr. William Burke rose from the meanest obscurity to eternal renown. Born in Ireland, he started life as a shoemaker, later practicing his trade for several years in Edinburgh where he made the acquaint¬ ance of Mr. Hare, on whom he had the greatest influence. In the collaboration of Messrs. Burke and Hare the inventive and analytic powers belonged, no doubt, to Mr. Burke, but their two names remain inseparable in art, as inseparable as the names of Beaumont and Fletcher. Together they lived, together they worked and they were finally taken together. Mr. Hare never protested against the popular favor particularly attached to the person of Mr. Burke.

Cyril Tourneur by Marcel Schwob

 

Illustration by William Blake

CYRIL TOURNEUR

Tragic Poet

by Marcel Schowb

Marcel Schwob / Cyril Tourneur

Marcel Schwob / Cyril Tourneur

Cyril Tourneur was born out of the union of an unknown god with a prostitute. Proof enough of his divine origin has been found in the herioc atheism to which he suc¬ cumbed. From his mother he inherited the instinct for revolt and luxury, the fear of death, the thrill of passion and the hate of kings. His father bequeathed him his de¬ sire for a crown, his pride of power and his joy of creating. To him both parents handed down their taste for nocturnal things, for a red glare in the night, and for blood. 

Katherine The Lacemaker by Marcel Schwob

 

KATHERINE THE LACEMAKER

Girl of the Streets

by Marcel Schwob

Marcel Schwob / Katherine la dentellière

Marcel Schwob / Katherine la encajera

She was born about the middle of the fifteenth century, in the rue de la Parcheminerie near the rue Saint-Jacques, during a winter so cold that wolves ran over Paris on the snow. An old woman with a red nose under her hood took Katherine in and brought her up. At first she played in the doorways with Perrenette, Guillemette, Ysabeau and Jehanneton, who wore little petticoats and gathered icicles, chilling their small red fists in the icy gutters. They would watch the neighborhood boys whistle at passers-by from the tables of the SaintMerry tavern. Under open sheds they saw buckets of tripe, long fat sausages and big iron hooks from which the butchers hung quarters of meat near Saint-Benoit le Betourne, where the scriveners lived. They heard the scratching of quills in little shops, and in the evening saw clerks snuff out their flickering candles. At Petit-Pont they mocked the sidewalk orators, then scampered away to hide among the angles of the rue des Trois-Portes. After that they would sit together along the fountain’s curb and chatter until nightfall. 

Pocahontas by Marcel Schwob

 

POCAHONTAS

Princess

by Marcel Schwob

Marcel Schwob / Pocahontas

Marcel Schwob / Pocahontas

Pocahontas was the daughter of King Powhatan who ruled from a couch-like throne draped in coon-skin robes with all the tails hanging down. She was raised in a house made of plaited reeds, among priests and women whose faces and shoulders were painted vivid red, and who amused her with leather toys and snake rattles. Namontak, a faithful old servant, watched over the princess while she played; sometimes they took her into the woods beside the wide Rappahannock River where thirty young girls would dance for her. They would he tinted bright colors and girdled with green leaves, having goats’ horns on their heads and otter skins in their belts as they shook their clubs, leaping around a crackling fire. The dance they would stamp out the fire and over, return with the princess in the glowing light of smoldering embers.