Friday, January 11, 2013

Copying your brother

When the central character of Per Petterson's I Curse the River of Time (Jeg forbanner tidens elv) is twenty and attending a college he gets a student loan and moves out of his childhood home.

"The first thing I did was to go into town and buy a stereo with some of the money, a TR 200 Tandberg amplifier, a Lenco record player and a couple of 20 watt loudspeakers of a make I can no longer recall, but the sound was superb, and to be honest the whole thing was identical to the stereo my eldest brother had put together and bought with his student loan."

An remarkably similar thing is described by Tolstoy in Youth (Юность) when the central character, Tolstoy himself, passes his university entrance examinations, and is given money and access to a horse and trap (or drozhky) he also decides to copy his older brother, Volodya ... "I remembered that when Volodya entered the University he had bought himself some lithographs of horses byVictor Adam, some tobacco and several pipes, and I felt it essential to do the same." ("Я  вспомнил,  что  Володя  при  вступлении  в  университет  купил  себе литографии лошадей  Виктора Адама,  табаку  и  трубки,  и  мне  показалось необходимым сделать то же самое").

Petterson goes on to say that the older brother also tried to copy the younger brother's intense interest in books; Tolstoy later reveals that the older brother had in fact been copying one of his more worldly friends.

Saturday, January 5, 2013

La Règle du jeu

One of the pivotal scenes in Tolstoy's memoir Childhood is first time he is invited to join the grown-ups in the hunt.  The scene of the servants beating the birds and rabbits out of the woods, towards the waiting gentry is perfectly echoed in Jean Renoir's film La Règle du Jeu, which devotes an entire reel to depicting this cruel and pointless upper-class pursuit and the slaughter than ensues. Of course, both Renoir and Tolstoy were depicting the last throes of a doomed social class, that had enjoyed close to a thousand years' dominance since its establishment as a military strategy: when the idea of shock combat spread and the supremacy of making the momentum of knight and horse one, by the use of stirrups, the social order was quickly adapted to support the new military needs: aristocrats were given power and large tracts of land, the quid pro quo being that when the king wanted to go to war, the lord would provide a good number of trained knights: noblesse oblige.

There appear to be several parallels between Renoir's La Règle du jeu and the first volume of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, the book Justine.  Obviously the hunt, and its threatening and dangerous atmosphere is a clear link, as too is the story of a rich and powerful husband who suspects a somewhat bored and ill-at-ease wife of being unfaithful with a younger man whom has been accepted into the family circle and household on a friendly social basis.  But it is the smaller details that make me think that Durrell must have seen this film and been strongly impressed by it, and that certain images and ideas lodged in his mind, to later resurface, like drowned bodies.  There is the striking similarity of the use of field glasses in the hunt, which enables the wife to learn first-hand of her husband the Marquis' affair with the somewhat histrionic Geneviève; set this aside Nessim's downward directed telescope which Darley (whose name perhaps is not revealed until later in the quartet?) discovers by chance while looking for some notepaper to write Melissa a letter: when he puts his eye to the glass he sees the little hut by the bathing spot where only an hour before he and Justine, Nessim's wife, had lain together.

Another small detail is that the Marquis collects automatons: singing birds and other forms of musical machines, and a minor scene shows him upset and searching for the small key for one of them. This is echoed by Durrell in the scene where the character Balthazar is most upset at having lost the small ankh-shaped gold key which fits his pocket watch, which used to belong to his father, and has not - up to that point - been allowed to stop running. Darley helps Balthazar retrace his steps, but to no avial. Much later the key turns up in Nessim's possession.

Justine, Balthazar, and the other books of the quartet, made a big impression on me in my mid 20s, but now I have some difficulty with both the tone and the content, and at times it brings to mind Tolstoy's observations, in either Boyhood or Youth, or perhaps both, both about himself and about Dubkov at different times, how these young men tell the most shameless lies in society and everybody knows it. Everybody averts their eyes, or they smile politely, and they feel awkward and embarrassed for them, these silly boys who make up frightful nonsense. Now I get the same feeling at times reading Durrell: when he alludes to some particularly debauched excess I feel like averting my eyes from the page, embarrassed for the bluster and exaggeration of the prose.