a date, a collectivity, a plot

 

Often, Ulysses is read as a novel that has a myth driven plot. And it is true that the Odyssey provides the framework within which Joyce does his magic. But I – who love and honor Ulysses above all other books – have always found fascinating is the idea of a plot that does not follow the usual script but that follows the city, over one day, in bits, as a supreme fiction. Immediately after Ulysses, there was an explosion of city novels, including Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, Doblin’s Alexanderplatz, and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway – the Woolf arising not out of a passion for Joyce, of course. As well, Bely out of another novelistic tradition laid down the tracks of Petersburg.

But gradually the “telling” of a collective deflated. Or perhaps I should say it went into the sci fi genre and the novels of Gaddis and Pynchon and Inga Schulze – among those authors I know – and the subjectivity of some protagonist within what Zadie Smith calls lyrical realism came back to haunt our “best books of the year” lists.

Still, I like collectives. Cities are one example, dates are another.

A day, a year, a decade, these measures have all acquired a rather unjustified weight in our historical consciousness. A history without dates is not only possible, but it is the goal towards which history trends, just as literature, according to Mallarme, aspires to music. One of the great properties of the internet is that, given the massive amount of digitalized material in hundreds of languages that are now accessible to the merest keyboard peasant, it is possible to create pluck a day in the past – say February 2, 1922 – and give it a material body – or at least a phantasmal one.

Which was my mad thought a couple of days ago. Since then, I’ve been gnawing at February 2, 1922 with all my might, and I have considered that maybe I have finally reached the down slope of senility. Or maybe I’ve been there all along!

Some notes:

-         On February 2, 1922, Kafka was on a four week vacation from work. He chose, tubercular weakling that he was, to spend it in the mountains of Spindelmuhle (or Špindlerův Mlýn) in Northern Czechoslovakia. In his journal, he wrote: “Struggle on the road to [the] Tannenstein in the morning, struggle while watching the ski-jumping contest. Happy little B., in all his innocence somehow shadowed by my ghosts, at least in my eyes [, specially his outstretched leg in its gray rolled-up sock], his aimless wandering glance, his aimless talk. In this connection it occurs to me—but this is already forced—that towards evening he wanted to go home with me.”

-         The program of queering the canon has, of course, enjoyed this moment of wobbling heteronormativity. B. with his rolled up stocking in those snowy mountains, and K. with his coughing, summons up another death: The Death in Venice. Although it isn’t as though Kafka was “home” – he took a room a Hotel Krone, which was not to his liking. At the same hotel, his physician and the physician’s daughter was staying. Kafka was writing The Castle – Reiner Stach, his biographer, pins the bits of the geography that went into the novel. Perhaps B. became Barnabas, the odd and awkward messenger sent by the Castle to serve the land surveyor. On the other hand, whatever sexual thoughts Kafka was entertaining, he was mostly a very exhausted man, on the verge of serious lung problems, who kept slipping in the snow. A sexually deflating experience.  

-         On February 2, 1922, the author of Death in Venice, Thomas Mann, sat at his desk in his great villa in the Herzog Park district of Munich and wrote a letter to his friend, Ernst Bertram. Mann was approximately 9 hours south, by bus, of the struggling skinny Insurance man in the health resort of Spindlemuehle. It had been a snowy winter in Munich. A railroad strike throughout Germany was stopping trains, but in Bavaria the railroad workers, and tram drivers, were still on the job.

-         Mann’s letter to Bertram was written a couple days after his brother, Heinrich, had been taken to the hospital in an ambulance in the snow because he was suffering from influenza and appendicitis. The doctors were worried. Thomas Mann’s wife visited Heinrich’s longsuffering wife. And the two brothers, who had avoided each other since 1916, due to their political disagreements – though they lived 15 minutes by tram from each other – reconciled over Heinrich’s “death bed.” Thomas does not foresee a friendship with Heinrich – a “decently human modus vivendi is all it can come to.” Thomas doesn’t say it in so many words, but he has come to a “turning” in his own viewpoint. The TM of that great anti-modern pamphlet, Observations of a Non-Political Man, which was aimed not so subtly at Heinrich’s socialist-humanism (in the midst of WWI, Heinrich wrote a book about Zola, of all people!), has come to realize the price of being celebrated by the extreme right. In the letter to Bertram, however, his complaint is that still, as he has been “assured”, Heinrich never read the ONPM! A deadly insult, this. But at the end of the letter, Thomas speaks of a “certain evolution towards each other” – which is more evident on Thomas’s side than Heinrich’s. Thomas Mann’s “Wende” is generally described as his acceptance of democracy. I think in his perspective this looks a little different. What he was accepting was civilization. The large structural binary of culture v. civilization, Mann’s version of the German Sonderweg, or alternative path, against French civilization and all it implied, was abandoned.

-         On February 2, 1922, a 35 year old woman with her curly dirty blonde hair in a discombobulated bob could be seen at 7a.m at the Gare de Lyon. The weather outside the great vaulted building was cold and windy. The train arrived from Dijon. A man came out of the train and handed the woman a package. She hurried with this package outside, hailed a taxi, and gave the driver an address: 9 Rue de l’Université. The taxi stopped before the address, the woman got out, paid the taxi driver,  went to the door of the building – Hotel Lenox – and rang the bell of the room she was searching for. James Joyce came to the door, and the woman – Sylvia Beach – handed him his copy, the first printed copy ever, of Ulysses. She kept a copy for herself.

-         We know this day must have been windy, with sleet and rain. Benjamin Cremieux wrote his friend, Marcel Proust, on this day: “The glacial rain today is so saddening that I’m afraid you will be uncomfortable. It comes through the walls and spoils the joy of the fire [in the fireplace].” Did Proust read Le Matin, the paper owned by Colette’s husband, to which Colette contributed a column? Did he, as so many writers, follow certain faits divers? On February 2, 1922, the paper reported that  Hippolyte Ferrand had been pronounced not guilty in his trial in Lyon.  Ferrand was being tried for the murder of a trucker named Guillemen – which by itself would have merited little coverage. It was the backstory that drew readers. It was less a Proustian tale than something by Maupassant. Ferrand’s brother had been married to a pretty woman named Louise Grillet. Louise played around on the side. Hippolyte’s brother “coldly” slew his rival, and got off for it. Then the  brother had to march off to war. In the trenches, according to the paper, he received a letter. Who knows what the contents of the letter were! What is known is that he shot himself in the head. Louise went to stay with her husband’s family, and while there met a truck driver named Fayard. They courted, they married, Louise moved into the Fayard house. All would have been well, save for Guillemen – a fellow truck driver. Louise was enchanted, and began an affair. Guillemen, who is generally described as a brute (although his father claimed he was a happy go lucky lad who was always singing and gay), drove his truck to the Fayard house and started loading up Fayard’s furniture in his, Guillemen’s, truck. Hippolyte heard that this was going on, and went to talk to Guillemen, who cursed him out, threatened him, and was going to beat him when Hippolyte pulled out his revolver and shot him five times. At the trial, Le Matin’s reporter claimed, it was evident that Hippolyte, too, was enchanted by the “too beautiful” Louise.

-         A likely story. Perhaps it was read by a woman in the Victoria Place Hotel, about 18 minutes by foot from the Joyce’s place. That woman, Katherine Mansfield, had arrived two days ago from Montana, Switzerland, leaving her husband, John Middleton Murray, behind. She went to a clinic run by a Russian, Manoukhine, who had advertised a technique for treating tubercular cases. In a letter Mansfield wrote that she had 100 pounds saved up, but that she reckoned she’d need another 100 pounds at least to pay for the treatments and her stay in the Hotel. In her Notebook, Mansfield wrote: “ I have a feeling that M. is a really good man. I also have a sneaking feeling (I use   that word ‘sneaking’ advisedly) that he is a kind of unscrupulous imposter.” Sitting in her room and, perhaps, looking out the window at the miserably wet streets, Mansfield wrote to Murray that the other doctor at the clinic had reassured her that Manoukhine’s technique would work. “I am glad I saw this man as well as the other. But isn’t it strange. Now all this is held out to me – now all is at last hope real hope there is not one single throb of gladness in my heart. I can think of nothing but how it will affect us.”

-         Mansfield could call upon a ruthless reserve of common sense when she was face to face with bullshit. There is that beautiful putdown of Howard’s End, on par with any witticism of Oscar Wilde’s: E. M. Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot. He’s a rare fine hand at that. Feel this teapot. It is not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain’t going to be no tea.” I think she knew, in her heart, that Manoukhine was a rare hand at assuring desperate patients of a cure, but in the end “there ain’t going to be no cure.”

-         Shall I continue this, my own tea warming exercise? I have more on this day, but a little is perhaps too much. Others content themselves with crossword puzzles. These are crossword lives.