Phantoms on the Bookshelves (10 page)

You can of course find some features which the two categories of person do not share. The author never tells us everything about his characters. Nowhere in
Moby-Dick
are we told
which
of Captain Ahab's legs has been lost and replaced with a wooden one after his struggle with the white whale (an ambiguity, according to Umberto Eco, which John Huston was unable to respect when he had to take a decision about equipping Gregory Peck for the film). Since Melville didn't tell us, we shall never know. We can ask the same question about Byron—which was his club-foot? Apparently there are no clear indications (not that I have checked this out). But in the latter case, it is always possible to hope that one day someone will find the unpublished diary of a Venetian contessa who met him in Florian's, or crossing the Campo San Samuele, and noted this detail. And when I come to think of it, what about Talleyrand? When Sacha Guitry made his film
Le Diable boiteux
(The lame devil), did he know which leg to limp with when he played the famous bishop-minister? Did he take the time to check, or was it a deliberately arbitrary choice, because in fact nobody knows?
³

One extravagance is allowed to authors—and it adds a further dimension to their fictional nature: they can choose a pen name. When a literary character chooses a pseudonym, the author has to tell us about it so that we can appreciate it: for instance, when Jean Valjean in
Les Misérables
passes himself off as the honorable Monsieur Madeleine, or when in Balzac's
Père Goriot
, Jacques Collin registers at the Vauquer boarding house under the name of Vautrin. It would be pointless and completely irrelevant if Julien Sorel's real name (in Stendhal's
Scarlet and Black
) had
secretly
been Georges Bouton, or if Flaubert's Frédéric Moreau (in
Sentimental Education
) had been Auguste Lampin. The art of the novel is partly the art of omission, but some things can not be concealed from the reader.

It is hard to guess, unless you are a specialist, that Pierre Mac Orlan's real name was Pierre Dumarchey, Jean-Louis Curtis was Louis Laffitte, and that Anatole France's birth certificate says Anatole François Thibault. There may be good reason for publishing under a pseudonym—it may be out of discretion by people in certain senior posts (Saint-John Perse or Pierre-Jean Rémy), in order to reject their fathers (Stendhal), out of a wish to distinguish
between different books (Cécil Saint-Laurent/Jacques Laurent), or to simplify a foreign name (Henri Troyat started out as Lev Tarassov, Elsa Triolet as Elsa Kagan, and Teodor Józef Konrad Korzeniowski fortunately shortened his name to Joseph Conrad); from a desire to avoid a certain connotation (Marguerite de Crayencour chose to drop her aristocratic family name and become Marguerite Yourcenar); to disguise oneself during wartime (Jean Bruller took the name Vercors); or because one's original name had distracting connotations—so Georges Courteline dropped his name Georges Moinaux (which sounds like
moineau
= sparrow), and Philippe Sollers chose not to be the more precious Philippe Joyaux (which sounds like
joyau
= jewel); Gérard de Nerval went the other way, wanting to upgrade from his more ordinary name of Gérard Labrunie. Some cases might, however, require a more thorough psychological explanation: “Sébastien Japrisot,” as a writer of crime novels, sounds fine, but what was wrong with his original name of Jean-Baptiste Rossi? And as for William Falkner altering the spelling to Faulkner, despite various scholarly explanations, I am still no wiser.

Authors and their characters do have something in common: they almost always have love lives. It is very rare for a novel to contain no love story at all. This subject is so huge and obvious that I will not go into it. But they also have sex lives. The narrative approach of an author to this subject will vary with style and temperament but also with the period of writing or the literary effect desired. It would no doubt be interesting, but not to our
purpose here, to compare the ways novelists tackle physical sex. From Madame de Lafayette's
The Princesse de Clèves
to
L'histoire de dom B., portier des Chartreux
(The Story of Dom B., porter at the Charterhouse), ascribed to Jean-Charles Gervaise de Latouche, from complete silence to precise indeed anatomical detail, the variations are infinite. By the same token, one could look at the way people in novels eat—which might run from the briefest description (“They stopped at Mantes-la-Jolie where they consumed a light supper”) to the most detailed: “He dipped a piece of rye bread into the sauce from the veal casserole whose aroma had pervaded the whole room, then, wiping his lips, tried the white Sancerre—it was a La Croix de Roy 1998, from the vineyards of Lucien Crochet—which the sommelier had served.”

Authors do sometimes describe their own sex lives. This might be a literary exercise of complete sincerity (but is it really?); it might indicate a propensity to exhibitionism; and it might simply be a narrative procedure required by the text. I am quite certain, for example, that the famous book
My Secret Life
, which is supposed to be the exhaustive diary (in eleven volumes!) covering the sex life of a Victorian Englishman, is simply an erotic novel taking the form of a thoroughly explicit and total confession, in order to provoke the reader's interest. Yet Michel Foucault, in his preface to the French translation of extracts from it (
My Secret Life, Récit de la vie sexuelle d'un Anglais de l'époque victorienne
) presented the text as an authentic journal. And Jean-Jacques Pauvert, in his long preface to the full translation by Mathias Pauvert (
Ma vie secrète
),
does not seem to doubt for a moment that this really was the autobiographical account of one Henry Spencer Ashbee. Ashbee may indeed have been the author, but it is obvious to the reader that this is a novelistic narrative, a mixture of real-life experience and free-ranging fantasy.

Where sex life is concerned, the main difference between literary characters and authors is what I would call “sexual accounting”—not so much a matter of description but of numerical listing, usually in code, of a person's private sexual activity. It is of course so dry as to be virtually unreadable, and offers virtually no interest to the reader, so I do not think any author has taken the risk of depicting a character with this habit. One can indeed wonder what the point is (and that is the real mystery) even for the individual concerned to note down in a kind of technical way, without any sensual detail, what happened with whom, on what day. Perhaps since writers may have a heightened sense of the passage of time, of which sexuality is a critical symptom, the (male) writer may yield to the peculiar temptation of repeating these fleeting acts by committing them to the apparent eternity of writing.

My library contains at least two documents of this type: Benjamin Constant's
Journal
and Victor Hugo's
Carnets
(Notebooks).

Benjamin Constant kept a journal during three periods of his life: from January 6 to April 10, 1803; from early 1804 until the end of 1807; and from May 1811 to September 1816. What is relevant here is the “abbreviated journal” from January 22, 1804 to 27
December, 1807. He explained this decision, which followed the death of his friend Madame Talma, the wife of the celebrated actor: “Madame Talma's death had thrown me into such deep depression that from that time, my journal, in which I had noted all the details of her illness, and sometimes passed a severe judgment on her character, became intolerable to me. But not wanting to abandon it completely, I decided to write it in a very abbreviated form, mostly in numbers.”

The result for the reader—who was of course not supposed ever to see it—is rather astonishing: every day there are a few words and then some numbers from one to seventeen. For example the last few days of August 1804 are summed up as follows:

27: 4.2.2

28: 4.2

29: 4

30: 4.3

31: 4

That is an extreme example but not unique, so on October 1, 1804 we read: 4.3.2.3. More often words and numbers appear side by side: March 5, 1805: “Visit to Lacretelle. 4. Madame Dutertre 11. Letter from Minette 2.2.” Or another example, June 6, 1805: “Letter to Madame Dutertre, 2.12.4. but not much.” This is of course completely meaningless to us—as it was meant to be—but I doubt whether even experts on military decoding or even computer analysts could manage to interpret the events which
Constant wanted to keep a note of, if it were not that he unintentionally helped us himself. Since he was afraid he might forget his own code, he wrote down the key to it at the end of the
Journal
. It goes like this:

1. signifies physical pleasure. 2. desire to break my eternal bond, so often considered. 3. return to this bond by memory or some momentary charm. 4. work. 5. discussion with my father. 6. feelings of affection for my father. 7. travel plans. 8. marriage plans. 9. fatigue. 10. touching memories and revival of love for Mme Lindsay. 11. hesitation over my intentions towards Mme Dutertre. 12. love for Mme Dutertre. 13. uncertainty about everything. 14. plan to settle in Dole to break with Biondetta. 15. plan to settle in Lausanne, for the same reason. 16. plans for overseas travel. 17. desire to be reconciled with certain enemies.

A rather disorienting list! It somewhat recalls Sei Shonagon's list which contains among other headings: “Things that cause distress/Things that one has neglected the end of/Things that make one's heart beat faster/Things that annoy one/ Things recalling a sweet memory from the past/ Things that are painful/ Things that fill you with anguish/ Things that appear upsetting/ Things that are incompatible/ Things that are distasteful to see/ Things that distract you when you are bored” and so on (
The Pillow Book
). In Constant's case, all sorts of things are mixed up: emotions and
plans, factual details and complex states of mind, simple elements and others which are more involved: “the desire to be reconciled with certain enemies”! But it does give some idea of the confusion of his feelings—see, for example, the entry for September 30, 1804: “Dined at Bosset. 3.2.3” and other days full of different emotions: “Write to Mme de Staël. 2.8.7.12.4. Went well. Spent the day alone. 1.”

More details would be informative not only about Benjamin Constant but about the human condition more generally. To be honest, number 1 is not the one that crops up most often, certainly less than 4, but it does appear fairly regularly, either without any context (so how did Constant know what he meant, if he read it a few years later?) or with some annotation suggesting a regular practice. So in 1804, on May 26, June 22, June 28, June 30, July 3, July 18, the famous 1 is preceded by “Went to Geneva,” which of course tells us nothing, but must have reminded him of the circumstances. Fortunately he took this secret to the grave.

Victor Hugo, in this domain as in so many others, had more baroque practices. He didn't keep a journal but wrote entries in his private notebooks, which were a form of domestic and sexual accounting. The two were sometimes combined, since he sometimes paid the “ladies” who provided him with certain services: prostitutes during his stay in Brussels, servants or infrequent visitors in Jersey, or the actresses, would-be actresses and women in need who flocked round him when he made his glorious re-entry to Paris after the fall of the Second Empire. I don't intend to go into either his love life or his sex life—they fairly quickly became
separate compartments in his case. But his meticulous accounts covered several decades. Like Benjamin Constant, he used code or foreign languages, chiefly to evade the jealous curiosity of his lover, Juliette Drouet. A few examples among thousands of these jumbled notes, with decoding assistance from Henri Guillemin,
Hugo et la sexualité
(Hugo's sexuality):

January: 27 Charlotte
cloche
[= “bell,” an allusion to ringing the bell in Scene One of his play
L'Epée
(The sword)].

April: 28 Mlle C. Rosiers,
piernas
[=legs]

May: 3 B.C.R. [=
Baisé
Catherine Rosiers = sex with Catherine Rosiers]

July: 22 3 francs [French equivalent of] f.w.f.m.i.b.n. (“for waiting for me in bedroom, naked”)]

March: 13 Catherine.
sub clara nuda lucerna
[naked under lamplight]

[undated]: Emile [for Emilie] Taffart, rue du cirque, 21, 6e,

osc [osculum = kiss, in Latin] 4 fr 50

September: 8 Marie. Saints [=
seins
=breasts]

September: 10
Misma. Pecho. Todo
. [“Same, breast, everything”]

February: 17 Marietta: Garter [in English in the original]

February: 20 Mme Robert [Zélia] b.d.b. [=
besa de boca
= kiss on the lips]

November: 24 E. G.
Esta manana. Todo
[Elisa Grapillot. This morning. Everything]

As well as this mish-mash of abbreviations, borrowings from Spanish, English and Latin, and puns, Victor Hugo also played word games with women's names, no doubt amusing himself:
Esther
hazy (Esther); Natte-à-lit (Nathalie); Eb
louisse
ment = “dazzling,” contains the name Louise; Alphonse Inn (= Alphon-sine);
“Anna
les de Schaerbeck” (Anna); “Question deli
cate: rhin
oceros” (Catherine) and so on. And a certain number of cabbalistic signs (crosses, wavy lines, circles, underlinings and dashes, a sort of capital T on its side) probably meant something too, but they are still awaiting the literary equivalent of the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone.

I don't mean to belittle Hugo by referring to this sort of accounting, just to express my astonishment at how important it evidently was to him. As Guillemin tells us, Victor Hugo expressly ordered all his manuscripts to be deposited in the French National Library, “even fragments of poetry or a single line; any text which is written in my hand.” In other words, so that we, his posterity, can find them and read them: “When I am no longer there, people will see what I was like”—a strange sentence.