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.

If there are no games, what is left?

Tolstoy at 20

Early on in his memoir Childhood, which he started writing in Tbilisi (which is written თბილისი in the beautiful Georgian alphabet, or "anbani") at the age of 23, Tolstoy recalls his disappointment when he was around the age of 10, and his brother, a couple of years older, declined to play make-believe while the family are out on a picnic after a hunt. The ten-year-old Tolstoy saw his older brother's point, but reflected: "Ежели судить по-настоящему,  то игры никакой не будет. А игры не будет, что ж тогда остается?" (translated in the 1964 Penguin Classic edition by Rosemary Edmonds as "If you only go by what's real there won't be any games. And if there are no games, what is left?").

Los pasos perdidos

I have been rereading Alejo Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos — The Lost Steps. After about 20 years I have been surprised at how much I misremembered the book, as though the jungle of my thoughts had destroyed the image of the book the way the jungle burst apart the hut at the Greeks' abandoned mine.

The main character is a composer who has lost his way in the modern world of city life & its pressures to earn a living which he says "que había torcido mi destino" (that had defelcted my destiny p.11 of the 1956 edition translated by Harriet de Onís) It was "como la de vender, de sol a sol, las mejores horas de la éxistencia. "¡Vacío!" "Además — gritaba yo ahora — ¡estoy vacío!" (like selling the best hours of your life from sunrise to sunset. "Besides I'm empty" I screamed at him "I'm empty" p.24)

He travels up remote South American rivers, and is awakened by the simple pre-historic directness of existence there ... "Por lo menos, aquí no había oficios inútiles, como los que yo hubiera desempeñado durante tantos años." (At any rate, here there were no useless callings like those I had plied for so many years.  p.173)

The narrative traces a classic hero's journey, as per Joseph Campbell's analysis, and presents the protagonist's return to the modern world, and the difficulty of integrating the knowledge/treasure found on the adventure. There's also a final failed attempt to re-enter the dream, to retrace the steps of the adventure.  "He tratado de enderezar un destino torcido por mi propia debilidad y de mí ha brotado un canto —ahora trunco— que me devolvió al viejo camino" (I had tried to make straight a destiny that was crooked because of my own weakness, and a song had welled up in me - now cut short - which had led me back to the old road, p.274)

A way of seeing, a stance, an aesthetic

I'm reading in Mark Doty's memoir Heaven's Coast, and he talks of the lasting influence on him of his close friend, the poet Lynda Hull, who died in a car accident at the age of 39.

"We shared a sensibility, so much so that I can't help but think of Lynda now as almost a way of seeing, a stance, an aesthetic. (Is that one thing the dead do for us, become a set of codes, an approach to describing the world?)"

Die Männer waren vollauf damit beschäftigt

"Die Männer waren vollauf damit beschäftigt, Geld zu verdienen, den sozialen Aufsteig der Familie zu betreiben und gegebenenfalls für einen aus der Art geschlagenen Sohn oder Neffen zu sorgen, der sich irgendeiner künstlerischen oder sonstwie brotlosen Laufbahn verschrieben hatte." — Friedrich Torberg, in Die Tante Jolesch.

The men were very busy trying to make money, improve on the family's social standing, and, where appropriate, support those stricken sons or nephews who were dedicated to artistic or otherwise unprofitable careers.

Just a lot of things to do

I'm listening to Leonard Cohen's new album Old Ideas. An early stanza from the song 'The Darkness' stands out with its plain-speaking directness & economy, and marvellously effective internal rhymes in lines 3 & 5. There is a Buddhist stripping away in this stanza & the song, and it reminds me of something Cohen said in an interview in 2005 about his time in a monastery ... "there you get so tired that you can’t pretend, and that’s all that a monastery is. They make you so tired that you give up pretending."

I got no future
I know my days are few
The present's not that pleasant
Just a lot of things to do
I thought the past would last me
But the darkness got that too.

How easily the habits of luxury take root

When did the long trajectory to consumerism start? The burgeoning wealth of 17th-century Amsterdam in its mercantile heyday gave rise to a genre of domestic portraiture where families were depicted with their prized stuff. It's not a big step from bourgeois figures showing off & memorialising their purchases, to our advertising-bombarded world where the good life is a photogenic one.

And we have always known that it is essentially a one-way road, and the mechanism by which we easily morph our natures into dependence on comfort, and the innate programming of ambition for worldly success (which pays off in reproductive success) is today exploited by manufacturers and lending institutions to entrap us into slavery. Dostoevsky captures the essence of the demon: "В эти пять лет ее петербургской жизни было одно время, в начале, когда Афанасий Иванович особенно не жалел для нее денег; он еще рассчитывал тогда на ее любовь и думал соблазнить ее, главное, комфортом и роскошью, зная, как легко прививаются привычки роскоши и как трудно потом отставать от них, когда роскошь мало-помалу обращается в необходимость." ... "There had been a time, at the beginning of those five years of her Petersburg life, when Afansy Ivanovich had been particularly unstinting of money for her; he was then still counting on her love and thought he could seduce her mainly by comfort and luxury, knowing how easily the habits of luxury take root and how hard it is to give them up later, when luxury has gradually turned into necessity." (Pevear & Volokhonsky).