Recognition's curse

"One comes back to the thought that every recognition (with very rare exceptions) should make one mistrustful of one's own work. Basically, if it is good, one can't live to see it recognized: otherwise it's just half good and not heedless enough ... " Rilke, letter 16 October 1907

Bunting in a crossed out notebook entry wrote "The scholar ought to be like the poet, an Ishmael, scouted and feared" ... Wild Ishmael, scornful Ishmael (Milton)

Life over Art

"You know how much more remarkable I always find the people walking about in front of paintings than the paintings themselves" - Rilke, 7 October 1907

The calm of passions habitually appeased

"Dans leurs regards indifférents flottait la quiétude de passions journellement assouvies" - "In their coolly glancing eyes lingered the calm of passions habitually appeased." (p.48)

This is a succinct depiction of that possibly indefinable air of success - whether it be in terms of wealth or love or a happy lofe -that some people carry, as opposed to the pent-up frustrations and disappointments of so much of the population.

Chabrol, Gégauff and retracing old steps

In Chabrol's Une partie de plaisir (1975), the main character is played by the writer Paul Gégauff. Gégauff plays a troubled and domineering husband, his (de facto) wife is played by his real-life first wife Danièle Gégauff. In the movie he kills her by kicking her head in a graveyard; in real life they were already divorced by this time ... their real daughter also plays their daughter in the movie. In real life Gégauff was stabbed to death by his second wife on Christmas Eve 1983, at the age of 61. Chabrol and Gégauff worked together on fourteen films.

In the film at one point Gégauff's character drives in the night and stands outside the house he and his de facto wife and daughter lived in and rented, the house his grandmother had lived in and the house he was born in ... after disturbing the calm balance of his family life in that house, they packed and left and the family fell apart. After marrying another woman he drives at night to stand outside the house, recalling a line in Flaubert: "comme quelqu’un de ruiné qui regarde, à travers les carreaux, des gens attablés dans son ancienne maison." ... "like a ruined man gazing in, through the window, at the people dining in his old house." (Penguin Classics, p.40)

Gégauff takes his new wife back to the opening "idyllic" scene of the movie, re-enacting the scene with putting a small crab on a fishing hook, the girl catching a fish, a foghorn blowing eerily. This attempt to recreate an old vivid memory is repeated in Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977), but the Chabrol scene is more profound, more moving and more disturbing.

The cracking veneer of manners

Flaubert captures well the gap between feeling and politeness ... "et les mots de ma fille et de ma mère s’échangeaient tout le long du jour, accompagnés d’un petit frémissement des lèvres, chacune lançant des paroles douces d’une voix tremblante de colère."

"and the words mother and daughter went back and forth all day long, accompanied by a little quiver of the lip, each woman uttering sweet words in a voice trembling with anger" (Penguin Classics, p.40)

Incongruities and Absurdities

Mark Twain on how to tell a story: "To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they
are absurdities, is the basis of the American art." (From How to Tell a Story and other essays 1897).

This remark seems a century before its time. We are now well accustomed to the sort of short story scattered with quirky and off-beat observations that is the sort of "Mac Story" (to paraphrase Donald Hall) mass produced by MFA-style courses in creative writing.

Two camps

«Это ведь только в плохих книжках живущие разделены на два лагеря и не соприкасаются.» - Lara in Dr Zhivago: "It is, you see, only in bad books that people are divided into two camps and do not come into contact." Only in bad books and we might add post-Nazi-occupation western Europe.