If you be honest and fair - poem by Karen Chamisso

Everything was major

She made the decision

Wrapped in the xray love blazer

To trouble the division

Between the kitchen and the lawn.

The grass whispered under her feet

Slanders older than the jewels she pawned

While God peeped

Like one of the Elders out of a cloud.

Everything was major.

I can’t do it, she said out loud

I can’t

I just can’t

do

do or feel.

In the kitchen she slew

The roast beef made England-red

She slew the puree, she slew the peas

Then she took her head

And slew with the greatest of ease

Every highwire, every antic thought

Burned recipe after recipe.

Later, it was the smell that caught

their attention. Olly olly oxen free.

Colette

 

This year – this shitty shitty year – opened in France on a hopeful note: it was the 150th anniversary of Colette. Everybody party!

So I dutifully decided to buckle down to Colette.

However, Colette is a writer who exists not to give you a buckle down experience, but an unbuckled one. And certain of her more famous novels – like the Cheri – make me a little nervous. Like the famous Maurice Chevalier song, Thank Heaven, for Little Girls, there’s the perv undercurrent here.

Yet it is true that, once you discard this, and once you appreciate that Colette had, very much pre-social media, a strong sense of the self as selfie, you can surrender to the wonderful French. I have been reading La naissance du jour, a book from Colette’s second phase. Her first phase, or so the Colette-ologists tell me, begins with the legendary story of how she discovered writing up through Cheri, in 1920.

Colette came out of the demimonde. It is hard to find a  parallel to her career in the Anglophone world. Jean Rhys is a sort of parallel, but not very. Imagine a softcore actress from some ludicrously lecherous Showtime series becoming one of the greatest American writers – that is the sort of the thing that happened with Colette.

 Married to an unbelievably disgusting man, “Willy”, who was an impresario of a stable of writers all churning out “sexy” novels for the market in the first decade of the 20th century, she was, as legend has it, locked in her room until she turned out her first Claudine novel. She gave Willy what he deserved as he kept coming home with younger and younger women he'd seduced – a divorce. Also, she made his posterity in a series of later description in her autobiographical writings where he writhed like a worm on her hooked prose (hey, I wrote it, I stand by it!). After Willy, to pay the bills and for the hell of it,  she became a dance hall performer, took for a lover a woman named Missy, la marquise de Morny, and staged a play with her, the Egyptian dream, where she gave her a French kiss at the end – which was too much for even the Moulin Rouge crowd.

Did I mention she performed topless?

Colette is a strong contrast with, say, Marianne Moore, although they were both, in their own ways, exhibitionists. Hell, can you write and not be an exhibitionist? Even Emily Dickenson, even Fernando Pessoa, were, when all is said and down, showing and telling.

The biography naturally lights up the writing, and not in a bad way – so often, in French lit, writing well and being, outside the text, a Grade A asshole go together. Need I mention Celine?  It is a standard that certain American writers, like John Updike, strove to emulate. But they just didn't have the style, although Updike descibing himself masturbating some women in the back seat while his wife in the front seat was driving does, well, get some sort of prize.

Colette is, on the contrary, a likeable working woman. Of genius.

Here is a passage from the NdJ:

« Elle a donc pu, elle, se pencher impunément sur la fleur humaine. Impunément sauf la « tristesse » – appelait-elle tristesse ce délire mélancolique, cet ennoblissement qui nous soulève à la vue de l’arabesque jamais pareille à elle-même, jamais répétée, – feux couplés des yeux, calices jumeaux, renversés, des narines, abîme marin de la bouche et sa palpitation de piège au repos – la cire perdue des visages ?… Penchée sur une créature enfantine et magnifique, elle tremblait, soupirait d’une angoisse qu’elle ne savait nommer, et qui se nomme tentation. »

So much of this, like so much of Henry James, seems, out of its framing here, merely ordinary. Colette uses magnifique often to speak of bodies, but its coupling – and everything is coupled here – with enfantine renews its sense: the selfie becomes self. As for the phrase, « abîme marin de la bouche et sa palpitation de piège au repos », well, Nabokov eat your heart out.

Rabbits, up and at em!

 

Consider a person who had every reason to be happy but who saw continually enacted before him tragedies full of disastrous events, and who spent all his time in consideration of sad and pitiful things. Let us suppose that he knew they are imaginary fables so that though they drew tears from his eyes and moved his imagination they did not touch his intellect at all. I think that this alone would be enough to gradually close up his heart and to make him sigh in such a way that the circulation of his blood would be delayed and slowed down…”

Thus Descartes, quoted in Stephen Gaukroger’s  Descartes: an intellectual biography. Descartes imaginary person has become the man in the street, whose moments are taken up by flash ads on the telephone, cable tv, porno, and the garden of earthly delights that is the internet. We know, now, or think we do, what is fabulous and what is intellectually objective. Yet with such constant parallel networking between the two, the happy – the comfortable, the housed, the fed, the educated – have the imagination of catastrophe constantly before their eyes, while the conditions of catastrophe, the actual loss of dwelling, food, children, clean water, security and all the rest of it is for other people. So much “only connect”, so much “what can you do?”

 I am exhausted by catastrophes like Gaza. I’m exhausted by the gradual shutdown of all the institutions and values that made for social democracy, once, and the substitution of competition – read Hobbesian anarchy – and powerlessness, which we are led to think is the very summit of democracy. But my exhaustion is no argument at all. It is simply a condition.

No good can come from the exhaustion we feel as political agents.

Brecht said that humans learn as much from catastrophe as laboratory rabbits learn about biology. This phrase is rich in implications, one of which might be that just as there is a science that registers the rabbit in a certain order that is beyond the rabbit’s capacity to understand, so, too, there is a science, or at least an art, to catastrophe. Biology isn’t expressed in any one biologist, and catastrophe isn’t expressed in any one powerbroker. Rather, the artists of catastrophe exist in a community that works to make sure that the conditions of catastrophe bear down with a crushing weight on its victims. The members of that community don’t recognize themselves as artists of catastrophe at all, perhaps, but only in terms of the individual roles. They support. They oppose. And so instead of the rabbits pondering the experimenters, you hear, for instance, the X “supports” Hamas because X – in this case, me, but many others – supports a ceasefire. Support doesn’t mean, as it does among the experimenters – as it does for Netanyahu, for instance – material support, a system of arranging money and favors to keep Hamas in business. That type of support is beyond our rabbit-y remit. No, support means you open your moth and say something.

We, as rabbits, have to get out of the cage and bite the experimenters. Enough with “supporting”..

Neoliberal culture and Ivy-ization

Neoliberal culture and Ivy-ization have gone hand and hand in our Post Cold War World.
How’s that for a hook?
When I was a whippet, I went, as an undergrad, to Tulane, Emory, Centenary College of Shreveport and, via a Louisiana scholarship, Paul Valery Université, aka Université de Montpellier. I never met anyone at that prelapsarian time who was hung up on the Ivies. A friend from High School went to Harvard, but this friends stands out, to my mind, more for an accident that happened to him one summer when he was on a crew building warehouses. On this I-Beam about twenty feet up from concrete pad he sawed into his shoe with a mechanical saw, and had to hop to the outer wall and climb down the ladder to get help. This was a glory that surpassed all mere feats of grade-pulling.
To return to the hook. In the semi-social democratic Sputnik era, the top was filled with the products of state universities and small private liberal arts schools. Although Kennedy brought in a buncha Harvardites, and Nixon had his Kissinger, there was not another Ivy league prez until George W.H. Bush. And after that, ca, c’est le déluge.
Harvard Business school has always been, for me, the epicenter of neoliberal culture. It wasn’t just the churn of awful lawyers finding their way to the Supreme Court from Yale, like some radioactively mutant salmon, it was the Business school’s discoveries: for instance, that the upper management could never be paid too much. You see, the CEO isn’t in anything so vulgar as a labor market – no, he was a conquistador, or an entrepreneur, and thus amply deserved the hundred mill comp package. The use of management as a pillaging device, true, goes back a long way, and achieved its present for in the LBO years of Reagan: but the moral smugness, which is the true cultural content, stemmed from the HBS. And then, suddenly, social media moguls, and moguls of all types ,nepo sons and daughters, swarmed out of the Ivies and into our administrations and businesses, our Silicon Valleys and K streets, and life and its dreams visibly worsened.
Exhibit one: teen tv series. Adam is now eleven, and he has suddenly, and I suppose rationally, fixated on the teen rom com. Now, I remember the teen series from my youth, vaguely. It was very oriented towards the blue collar – the descendants of the Honeymooners. That is no longer the case. A stereotypical plot device, used over and over, is some California high school students dream of Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Stanford. The viewing audience is supposed, evidently, to sympathize. Not that there aren’t a few outliers about, say, community college kids, but these people are comic fodder, of course. The college acceptance letter scene now looms larger than the first sex scene – it organizes our disappointments and surprises. And yet, never has there been a phonier representation of high school. The percentage of people who care if their darlings get into the best schools of all times is equal to the percentage of the population who owns more than they are in debt. Okay, equal to the percentage who owns more by 2 or three times that quartile that just barely owns more than they are in debt. Apparently, a lot of producers and writers of tv shows are among those vomited out of the Ivy League and laying around the beaches of Santa Monica and Malibu, entertaining peak tv dreams.
It is no coincidence that the era of Ivy-ization and the era of monopoly capital trek each other. Any trustbuster from the good old days – I’m talking about 1890 – would recognize the university situation for what it is: a congery of monopolies that should be broken up. But no: regulation of private colleges and universities is shockingly absent. This regulatory vacuum has been filled up by the swinish ways of overpaid, way overpaid, just way way overpaid freaks and failures like the president of the University of West Virginia, a flameout named E. Gordon Gee who, like an academic Jack Dunlap (oh, my references age me!), is well on his way to undermining his third major university. It is like Elm University hiring Dutch Elm Disease to be its president.
One of the unexpected features of neoliberalism is that it flips quite placidly into neo-fascism. I didn’t see that coming! But as we allow an aristocracy of the wealthy to take over our policies, fuck up our atmosphere, decimate our land, and cheer our wars, I guess it makes sense. We’re fucked. Now, who wants my Yale Tshirt?Like

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Character and coincidence

 

Nabokov translated Lermontov’s A Hero of our Time in collaboration with his son. It was the father, however, who wrote the preface. In it, he remarked on the mechanisms that Lermontov uses to move the story of Pechorin forward, in a matter of speaking.

 

“A special feature of the structure of our book is the monstrous but perfectly organic pat that eavesdroppiing plays in it. Now Eavesdropping is only one form of a more general device which can be classified under the heading of Coincidence, to which belongs, for instance, the Coincidental Meeting – another variety. It is pretty clear that when a novelist desires to combine the traditional tale of romantic adventure (amorous intrigue, jealousy, revenge, etc.) with a narrative in the first person, and has no desire to invent new techniques, he is somewhat limited in his choice of devices.”

 

Although Nabokov was famously anti-bolshie and refused even to meet Andrei Bely because Bely was “squishy”, the notion of the device is exported straight from Skhlovsky. But Nabokov could rightly claim, I suppose, that it had become part of the repertoire of slavic literary criticism. What it shows, here, is that Nabokov is making a formalist analysis of the text, viewing the text’s coincidence as evidence of a choice among a range of devises that would unite the plot.

One might wonder as well as, however, whether the plot, that ueber-device, is not itself, necessarily, a coincidence-making machine. In any case, for Nabokov, the coincidence must have been chosen because Lermontov was eager to move his total story along:

 

… our author was more eager to have his story move than to vary, elaborate and conceal the methods of its propulsion, [and thus] he emplyed the convenient device of having his Maksim Masimich and Pechorin overhear, spy upon, and witness any such scene as was needed for the elucidation or the promotion of the plot. Indeed, the author’s use of this devise is so consistent thoughout the book that it ceases to strike the reader as a marvelous vagary of chance and becomes, as it were, the barely noticeable routine of fate.”

 

I am reminded here of the physicist E.T. Jaynes’ remark that “entropy is an anthropomorphic concept. For it is a property not of the physical system but of the particular experiments you or I choose to perform on it.”  It is striking that many protagonists in novels are, in a sense, experimenters in coincidence. That is, they take coincidences as signs, and follow them so that they produce more coincidences. In a sense, what Nabokov says about Lermontov, the writer of the novel in which Pechorin is the chief protagonist, could be said, as well, of Pechorin, in as much as he makes a plot out of his life, or a portion of his life. To do such a thing, to incorporate the adventure form into a life, turns coincidence into the “routine of fate.”

 

Nabokov is right to mention the adventure form as that in which coincidence plays the greatest role. The adventure form, of course, has fissioned into many forms today – the crime novel, sci fi, and, often, the modern and po mo variants of the novel. I think, for instance, of Patricia Highsmith, who wrote a number of novels in which the motive force that moves the plot is the impression that the appearance of a character is coincidentally like that of another character. For instance, in The Faces of Janus, the entire motive for the engagement of the poet, Rydal Keener, with the crooked businessman, Chester McFarland, and his wife Colette, is that Chester vaguely  looks like Rydal’s father and wife like the cousin that Rydal had a crush on when he was a teen. Even before Rydal is involved with the couple, the author presents Rydal’s habit of looking a little too long in the eyes of strangers, seeking Adventure.  In a variation on this theme, in Strangers on the Train, the architect, Guy Haines, meets a rich playboy type named Bruno, and the two recognize that they are in similar situations: Guy is frustrated by his wife’s refusal to divorce him so he can marry his girlfriend, and Bruno is frustrated by his father, who is keeping him from enjoying the family fortune. They jokingly trade “murders”, except that Bruno actually commits one, the murder of Guy’s wife. This is a particularly vivid instance of how the device of coincidence is not something that is confined to a single accident, but extends into an adventure that is much like a previous state of order becoming a more and more pronounced disorder. 

 

It is the relation between adventure, coincidence and disorder that makes coincidence loom so large in crime novels. The very activity of “looking for clues” is a way of scripting an adventure – a thematically connected series of social events, in which the social can, unexpectedly, slip away (which is the fright is meant to be evoked by the lone person entering into some isolated space, the isolation being defined by the fact that the criminal doesn’t risk being seen by anyone but the victim. At this point, the criminal operates as the writer’s surrogate, even if the writer demonizes him or her, for both are engaged in the scripting of coincidence.

Martin Buber's zionism

 

Martin Buber, more than most European philosophers, made a substantial effort to think outside of the European tradition, at least as that tradition had been codified by the early 20^th century. He wrote about Chinese wisdom literature and Indian theology. In the book, Images of Good and Evil, he sought those images not just in the Hebrew tradition, but in the Iranian one too, finding in the Zend-Avesta one of the most powerful reflections on the two forces, as they are presented in myth.

"In the most archaic part of Avesta, which contains the hymn-like speeches and conversations of Zarathustra, we read of two primal moving causes [»Bewirkern«“]: the good, in meaning, word and act, and evil, in meaning, word and act. “Twins in sleep“ they had been, as is testified, that means, as sleeping partners in the primal body. But then they stand one against the other, and the holy one spoke to the bad one: neither our senses nor our judgment, neither our inclination nor the direction of our choices, neither our words nor our works, neither our selves nor our souls agree. And so they continued to stand in opposition, settling together life and death, for in the end, those who depend on deceit endure in evil, and on the contrary those who depend on the truth persist in the best sense. This is how the two causes chose: the deceitful chose to do the evilest thing, but the true chose to be the cause of the holiest, clothed in the hardest heaven.”

The image of good and evil, asleep in the primal belly, is a strange and estranging one.

Buber continues, using this text: "With his choice their Daena, his self, steps on his earthly way; but eve again he must divide and decide in the face of ever new mixtures of deception and truth. One must be helped from above: „because the better way does not stand open to choice”, says Zarathustra, “I come to you all, so that we can live according to the truth”; his task is to put human beings before the choice and point out to them the right way, so that they, as it is written at the ned of the verse, will act from the choice of the twins, out of their own decision go to the wise Lords  with acts of truth. To the one who does this, they will help him “to transfigure his Being.”

That evil and good come as twins, sleep as twins, is a more startling image than that of the tree of good and evil – but in both stories, there was a primal time in which good and evil were, as it were, muted.

I’ve been thinking about Buber as we are going through this horrific passage in our newspaper and real history: a passage that has converted the Holocaust itself into an excuse for mass murder.

Dominique Borel, in her essay, Buber and the Arab Question, gathers together some interesting remarks of Buber on the question of Zionism. Buber was a strong Zionist, one of the intellectual archons of Zionism in the early twentieth century. But he was also a strong proponent of a Jewish ethic, a liberal ethic, that came to expression in the I and Thou book.

Stefan Zweig, shortly after WWI, wrote about a question he posed to Buber in a letter.  »I wanted to talke to him in order to know how the national circle worked: whether as a confession of faith, or as the denial of the idea. Then I have clearly decided that the more the dream threatens to become a reality, the dangerous dream of a Jewish state with cannons, flags and orders, to instead love the painful idea of the diaspora, Jewish fate more than Jewish well being.”

Buber replied that he knew nothing about any „Jewish state with cannons, flags and order”, not even in the form of a dream. What will be depends on how we create it, and just because of this must those like me must build a community that is humane and human, in this time now that we can lay our human hands on.”

Buber did not like the way Zweig laid out the choices – Zweig’s way of looking at the sleeping twins, good and evil – because Buber wanted a community that included Arabs. Indeed, Buber campaigned for Arabic representatives at the Versailles conference, in which the great push for the identity of ethnicity and nationhood was codified. This, to Buber, was a great evil. Buber met the Zionists who were pushing for a majority rule that would drive out the Arabs – he spoke of his heaviness of heart, in a letter, upon talking to Victor Jacobson, who advocated a “majority” solution. Jacobson, it should be said, was a leader in Jewish-Arab dialogue, and no pre-Likudist. But what Buber feared was the contamination of the Zionist ideal with the European ideal:

“We must not fool ourselves: the great majority of the leading (and the led) Zionists of today are thoroughly limitless nationalists (after the European model), imperialists, unconscious mercantilists and worshippers of success. They speak of rebirth and mean free enterprise. If we don’t succeed in setting up an authoritative counterpower, the soul of the movement will be corrupted, perhaps forever. I have in any case decided to go into this as far as possible, even if my life-plans  are thereby wounded.”

Often the story of Israel is told in terms of the mass murder of the extermination and concentration camps, but this story ignores the fact that Zionism arose as a nationalist dream in the same crucible that all the nationalist dreams came from, in the aftermath of WWI.

Flags, cannons, orders, slaughter. In this choice lies every evil.

 

Free love and alienation - the proverbs of hell, rewarmed

 

1.

Free love is a phrase that is well and truly dead – dead of mockery, dead of the emotional exploitation of which it became the instrument, deniability raising the old ghost of guilt in the service of nubile bodies forever lined up at the porn shoot. Yet it had a long, long career, and it is still not so dead that the phoenix of some kind of program joining sex, liberty and utopia cannot leap from the ashes of lovers, factual and fictional, who took the principle of free love with deadly earnestness.

Free love was the politics of Bohemia, and Bohemias were political entities as well as artmaking contexts. A Bohemia that does not contrast love, as the central socially binding feeling, to the bourgeois compromise with desire – happiness – is no bohemia at all.

We must begin with alienation – when have we ever not?  Alienation, in the Cold War, found its advocates – the German sociologist Arnold Gehlen, the sort of house philosopher of Adenauerism in Germany, saw alienation as the great civilizing process. But more generally, throughout the 19^th and 20^th century, alienation was a negative. There were, by my count, three great separate interpretations of alienation:  the reactionary, the liberal and the radical – all in one way or another turned from happiness to love as the foundation of society. That perfect bourgeois conjunction of happiness and utility – consumerism – lead to alienation, which was akin to but causally different from the alienation resulting from the social conditions of the working class.

Yet in these traditions, it is the liberal that is most critical of love. I remember once talking with a Mexican Trotskyist friend of mine, who remarked that love was the most important thing in life. At that time, I found that an astonishing statement. I found it shockingly sentimental. Looking back today, I can’t say I disagree so much about the love part as about the ‘most important’ part – my perpetual inner émigré has a hard time believing that lives happen in such a way that there is a most important part to them. This might be either the wisdom of the Dhammapada, or cheap nihilism, or a little of both.

 

Still, love has been a pretty powerful legitimating force in face of alienation - it has provided the single biggest rival to the modernist cult of happiness. The idea that love is the foundation of the truly human community is perhaps central to the counter-traditions that emerge under capitalism.  The critical viewpoint on happiness is drawn back to love by the force of historical events, as the family is reconstituted around the love match, and the sovereign is reconstituted as either the state or the “people”.  Of course, from the liberal point of view, there is a strong critique of the notion that love is the foundation of community. The word for that is totalitarianism. It is, perhaps, no coincidence that Hannah Arendt went from doing dissertation work on love to writing her massive opus, The Origins of Totalitarianism. When Calasso speaks of how the ancien regime sweetness of life turned sour – how Wormwood fell to earth and turned the waters bitter – he is touching on the fact that what volupte loaned the incipient happiness culture – a more and more simple tie between pleasure and happiness – produced, as it were, a cultural vacuum which the literature of sentiments, that quasi-institutionalisation of romantic love, filled. A dangerous void.

There is a dimension of the alienation from the happiness culture which seeks, in the mythic, to re-discover the human limit. At first, this might seem an entirely reactionary program. Yet it turns out not to be so simple.

The symbolic definitely does battle with the utilitarian. The two arise in a shared cultural space. And the fatal tendency of the utilitarian to take its claim to the concrete, its grasp of pleasure and pain, and turn them into abstractions – the decisive step of which is turning them into units, as if, like a stream of light in Newton’s sense, we were talking about corpuscles – means that utilitarianism has a secret need of symbols. On the side of myth, however, the tendency is to look for the secret histories of the great tradition – surely there is a minotaur of some kind at the center of the encyclopedia. This brings us, by sure steps that have been repeated over and over again, to conspiracy and chance. To which the gnostic historian must dedicate, finally, his narrative, these being his tropes for cause.

2.

Free love, then, might not be so silly after all. Or rather, it is so massively silly that it poses a question that eventually undermines all social arrangements that deny that the question has any validity. To deny, for one thing, that there is anything free save free enterprise. Against which, we can put Novalis’s manifesto-like remark: “Love is the end of ends of world history, the amen of the universe.”

Novalis is not a nobody in the history of free love, but a clue. Myself, I think of the “free love ideology” as a product not of the libertines of the 18^th century in France, but of the German romantics of the end of the 18^th century in various little burgs in Germany. Like Therese Huber.

3.

These are some facts about Therese Huber between 19 and 25.

 

She was born in Gottingen, the daughter of a wellknown professor, Christian Gottlob Heyne, and Therese Heyne, born Weiss, in May, 1764. She was thus a little older than the revolutionary generation, those born in the 1770s.

According to Therese Huber’s correspondence, her first memories were of her mother – of her mother being ill. This was when she was three. “I was never my Mother’s favorite, certainly not, I was ugly, bulky and probably never brilliant. Until my thirteenth year, I don’t remember anybody ever tell me I had a mind or that I was droll.” Of her mother she says, further, that she was “no housewife, we were raised in filth and disorder.” Her earliest memories were of her stained clothing. Moreover, her mother had “a lover until she died, almost in her forty fifth year.” Her lover lived in the house. He was a music student by the name of Forkel.

Therese always had the fantasy that she had been adopted.

Therese Huber later wrote about her first husband, Georg Forster: “He had the fortune of unpretty men, that women had to come to meet him half way, which, with his very soft heart, always vouchsafed the joy of a very intense friendship.”

At eighteen, Therese was mad to get out of her house and the town of Gottingen. By this time, she had a stepmother. Georg Forster, her father’s friend, though much older than her, promised to get her out of the house. So she accepted his proposal for marriage in early 1784.. He promptly took off for Vilnius, where he’d been promised a position. He was gone for eighteen months.

Therese promptly set out for Gotha to care for a sick friend, Auguste Schneider, the mistress of the Baron of Gotha. In a letter, Therese wrote a friend that “people’s image of me as a coquette, the girl in a novel, had begun to disappear, and one sees only the girl of reason, whose lively foolishness is forgiveable on account of her good heart.” But if she thought of herself, now, as calming down and assuming the dignity of the betrothed woman, she found, on her return to Gottingen, that things were difficult for a headstrong girl whose older, ugly fiance was in Vilnius. She was surrounded by admirers in her father’s house, while her father remained at his desk and her stepmother remained unconcerned – a situation that Henry James would have known what to do with. It was now that she encountered a man, FLM Meyer, who proved to be, as her biographer Geiger puts it, ‘fateful’ – misfortunate - to her. Later she wrote a friend that “Meyer led or ruled me, for he took my childish virginity in thought and deed.”

Meyer was a well known writer at this time. He was, according to Geiger, ‘shamelesslessly” egotistical. And he couldn’t do without women. He moved in that Enlightenment society under the motto that he couldn’t, ‘for the sake of one woman, be untrue to the whole sex.” The Casanova type. One of Sade’s fuckers.

At the same time there was a friend.

Henry James, too, would have given Therese the ambiguous friend.

This friend was the most ambiguous of the Romantic divas, Therese’s “evil spirit”, according to her biographer: Caroline Michaelis. “Sensuous and without morals already as a girl.” Over her lifetime, Caroline was married thrice, once to a man named Boehmer, then, when he died, to August Schlegel – this marriage was partly because she’d been banned for revolutionary activities in Gottingen when it was occupied by the French, and partly because she’d scandalized the town by having a child as the result of an affair with a French soldier, a situation Schlegel volunteered to remedy - and then finally, in Jena, marrying Schelling. According to Geiger, this woman urged Therese to marry Forster, who she – Karoline – knew Therese didn’t love – out of jealousy. When Karoline and Schelling were living together in Jena, Hegel came to stay with them for a year. He knew the two well. When she died, Hegel wrote a letter to a friend, expressing his relief and joy that she was gone. She had an effect on people.

In 1785, Forster came back from Vilnius. He then “committed out of weakness or goodness or blindness one of the unbelievable errors of his error strewn life: instead of standing apart from the third man [Meyer], coolly, peacefully, with the intention and the hope of driving the memory of his intruder gradually out of the heart of his bride … he entered into the intoxicated state of friendship, full of illusions, that filled both of them. Soon he was using the brotherly ‘du’ on the newcomer and the secret lover; Meyer became his “Assad”, he appeared as a member of the “trinity” in the letters to theological friends. “Forster was more enthusiastic than both of us,” Therese wrote 20 years later, “had us all swear eternal love, and never asked for a kiss from me that I should not also offer Meyer.”

4.

For this little circle, the French Revolution came as a revelation.

I don’t want to claim for Caroline and Therese the “invention” of free love: but rather, its modelling, its performance. This circle did not arise out of the 18^th century’s decaying patriarchy as eccentrics, since all around them people were devising stories about the happy social order, the order of the future. Against Sade, who had a very darker vision of happiness – Sade realized deeply that the happiness of some not insignificant few depends very much on the unhappiness of others, and not some unintentional neglect of the exploited but a very intentional enjoyment of that unhappiness – there stands Swedenborg, Henry James’s father’s master thinker.

Even though Swedenborgians proper disclaimed the free love ideas that grew out of certain Swedenborgian factions in the nineteenth century, it is certainly true that Swedenborg was a great promoter of the notion that liberty is love. As his biographer puts it:

 

“We must guard, however, against supposing that the spiritual is not real and bodily; for everything inward has its last resort in substantive organization. The bodies of angels are as ours in every part, but more expressive, plastic and perfect. Their conjugal union, which is true chastity and playful innocence, is bodily like our own; nay, far more intimate: its delights, immeasurably more blessed.”

And this, from Conjugal love:

“The Lord provides similitudes for those who desire love truly conjugal, and if they are not given in the earths, he provides them in the heavens. The Divine Providence of the Lord is most particular and most universal concerning marriages and in marriages, because all the enjoyments of heaven stream forth from the enjoyments of conjugial love, as sweet waters from the stream of a fountain; and that on this account it is provided that conjugial pairs be born, and that these are continually educated, under the auspices of the Lord, for their several marriages, both the boy and the girl being ignorant of it; and after the completed time, then that marriageable virgin, and then that young man fit for nuptials meet somewhere as if by fate, and see each other; and that then, as from a certain instince, they know that they are partners, and, as if from a certain dictate within, think in themselves, the young man, that she is mine, and the virgin, that he is mine; and, after this has been seated for some time in the minds of both, they deliberately speak to each other, and betroth themselves.”

These words, abbreviated for conversation’s sake, could have issued from the mouth of Georg Forster.

5.

In 1792, Georg Forster had ended up in Mainz, a city in Hesse. The region had become a conflict zone between the French revolutionary armies and the various armies of the coalition formed under the terms of the Brunswick manifesto, to rescue the ancien regime, i.e. the house of Bourbon.

Forster was overworked as the head of the archive and library. At the beginning of 1792, he had not taken a public political stance, although in private letters he expressed a clear sympathy for the Jacobins. He was hiding from his wife Therese the exact extent of his indebtedness, which was crushing – Georg Forster was never a prudent man when it came to cash.

Therese seems to have been emotionally and intellectually of the left. Geiger, her biographer, in 1909, found this so scandalous that he tried to mitigate it by claiming that Therese was Forster’s ‘pupil’. It was far more likely she was his comrade. This marriage and its failure has attracted a host of commentators who have puzzled themselves over the fact that Therese left Georg for another man, and yet the two seemed to rely on each other even after the separation. The solution – that their sexual incompatibility did not hinder their affinity with each other on the basic level of friendship – seems too shocking to propose – especially for those who want to tell a story of betrayal. But Therese seems to have cared for Georg, although she didn’t love him.

The man she did love was Ludwig Ferdinand Huber, a Prussian official and intimate of Schiller. Therese met Huber through Forster, in 1788. In 1790, Huber was living with the married couple. Therese was moving in a direction taken by her mother – who lived with her lover in the house of her husband:

 

“We stood in a doubtful relationship one to another for 1 ½ years. In the beginning I pushed him away, everything now came together, he wanted to forget [his relationship to his fiancé, Dorothea Stock], and a miserable doctor pulled him away from the border of the grave. The noble, humane Forster saw a lot in the young man, drew him nearer, I became used to him, he saw me for a year and went through all the gradation of feeling, my unhappiness strengthened my love for him – although I though of none – finally circumstances offered a hand. I don’t know in which moment, before we could guess ourselves, he had exposed to me his relationship with that girl. I pondered the thing and found decisively the result: he must confess to her that he didn’t love her any more, that time had changed his feeling, that he had no more rights upon her heart. … “ As Therese says, it took 2 ½ years for Huber to come to this point.

Some biographers have said that Therese Huber used her status, when Forster was dead, to suppress much of the information about what was happening in Mainz in 1792.

If the scene was not loaded for an explosion yet – a disaffected couple, sickly children, an overworked world famous intellectual, the French revolutionary army in the area, the wife’s lover in the house – into this scene came the ambiguous friend: Caroline Michaelis.

Why Therese would invite her school friend Caroline, lately widowed, to stay with the household in Mainz is a puzzle. Or perhaps it isn’t – perhaps Therese, out of fairness, wanted Georg to have a lover too. Although Georg was not sexually faithful, apparently he had sex in the approved way, with lower class girls. The libertine solution.

Caroline was of course as strong willed as Therese. Caroline’s letters from Mainz give another account of the Forster-Huber household. It is a sign of how narrowly the circles intersect that he chief correspondent was Meyer, the writer who had been Therese’s admirer – who “took” her virginity from her, according to Therese in an ambiguous reference. Surely Caroline knew about that. Even before she went to Mainz,she had written to Meyer: “I have never depended on her friendship – among women, there can be none.”

Soon Caroline is writing in a more sympathetic way about Georg. In particular, she writes a letter linking the ugly men of the revolution – Mirabeau, ostensibly – with her own “beauteous” figure. Strikingly, Caroline “reads” herself into her situation – which has forever been the subject of speculation – with Georg by reading Mirabeau’s famous at the time letters to his lover, Sophie, of which she writes to Luise, her correspondent, that she should read them, except that she imagines Luisa won’t have time, and won’t read in bed, being more inclined to sleep, and is too “good” for a “ugly monster” [hassliche Bosewicht] as the extraordinary Mirabeau was, who had virtues and talents enough to supply a thousand normal people, and too much true intelligence to seriously be a monster, as one can conclude out of particular features. He may have been ugly, he says that often enough in the letters – but he loved Sophie, for women certainly don’t love the beauty of men – and yet the ugly man imposes himself through his exterior on the unruly masses…”

Caroline provides an interesting insight into a aesthetic dimension of the Revolution: the part played by ugly men. Mirabeau. Robespierre. Chamfort, the great pamphleteer of the revolution. Marat. It was a revolution of ugly men, diversified by a few beauties, who in the course of the revolution all had their heads chopped off.

6.

The triangles of the Therese and Georg Forster household seem to pop up in bohemias, to become its romantic myth. Jules and Jim, again and again. In the ruins of the patriarchy, in that wreck, we see how difficult it is to get away from the Father and his arts of sublimation.

7.

The anonymous genius of the fairy tale is the genius of history as well, with that same penchant for the fatally ambiguous symbol, where, as though in a besieged city in an endless backlands war, love and death exchange sniper fire with each other among bombed out buildings and constantly shifting zones of engagement. This city could be the New Jerusalem. It could be Stalingrad. It could be the Republic of Mainz, where Georg Forster assumed a revolutionary role in 1792, as his household expanded to include his wife Therese's lover, Huber, and the ever present Caroline Boehmer. It was in December of 1792 that Therese took the kids and her lover and left. Forster went to Paris, as a delegate.

One has to be sensitive enough, then, to the way the fairy tale sticks in the historic fact to understand the depth of certain symbols.

For instance: on November 19, 1831, Prosper Enfantin, responding to the uproar in Saint Simonian circle that had greeted his proposals for free love, responded with a speech in which he outlined the details of his system, which echoed Fourier and Swedenborg in separating marriage from “true” marriage, the latter of which would rekindle the numbed feelings of conjugal couples by giving them the theoretical liberty to love. It was hard to tell how this theoretical liberty translated into physiological fact, although by this time, Enfantin had, like Swedenborg before him, lowered the barrier between the symbol and the thing.

The uproar continued, with certain leaders of the Saint Simonian family denouncing Enfantin’s plan, and the newspapers reporting on his immorality. So he lead a retreat to his home in Menilmontant of forty male apostles, who attempted to live a life of pure communism. As one of the signs of sublime fraternity, Enfantin had shirts made for the apostles that buttoned down the back - and thus could only be buttoned with the aid of a helper.

Enfantin’s shirts deserve a place with Aristophanes unsexed circular human, in the Symposium, and Magritte’s hooded lovers blindly kissing – symbols that overwhelm one’s ability to immediately interpret them. Enfantin’s shirts hang over the whole impassioned debate about free love – half a sign of mutual aid, without which there can be no freedom, and half a strait jacket.