I slipped Disc 10 of the audio version of Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise this morning. Nemirovksy's skill, and her complex compassion for her characters, has not failed. Since she died in 1942--in the camps--she was in no sense a post-Holocaust or post-Nazi writer: she declines to demonize the German soldiers who occupy the second novel in the "suite" as they occupy the little country town--I wonder if she would have felt that luxury if she had walked out of the camps, or even if she had learned of their horrors from the safety of England or America in 1945. It is a salutary lesson for us: before they became a byword--a trite byword--for repression and evil, German soldiers were men.
And I feel the sorrow one does on finishing a great and important book for the first time. There is no recovery of that first naivete: it is like the uneasy transition from the "crush" to liking or love or indifference.
I drew my class--sleepy on a Friday--through poems by Anna Seward, William Wordsworth, and Charlotte Smith. I made a case for the true Romantic's benign narcissism: leaving the crowded highway of satire and social verse (Pope's Rape of the Lock, Goldsmith's Deserted Village, Crabbe's great narratives) for the lone poppy in the field, the solo vista over sleeping London, seeking the self mirrored in nature. It is interesting to see how loud and persistent that subjectivism is...
Seated in a miniature Adirondack chair that makes the base of a lamp in my kitchen is a mystifying figure--a jointed papier-mache woman, left behind by my former housemate years ago. For some time, she was seated a little precariously inside a papier-mache mold of my friend Rachel's foot, where she jostled for space with Maurice Sendak monsters and stale candied almonds. Now her repose has more dignity, undercut only by her casual attire. Looked at casually, she seems naked, or clothed in the least underthings, but I realized a few months ago that her clothing--painted on--is a faded acrobat's outfit. From this and from her fixed papier-mache coiffure, she could be a hundred years old. What was she?--an exile from a jointed circus? Too frail for dedicated children's play, she must have been created for display--but what?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment