The Book of Illusions (9 page)

What a cheerful story.

Not so funny, I suppose, but let me tell you, the old viscount could write one hell of a good sentence. It’s an incredible book, Alex.

So you’re saying you don’t mind spending the next two or three years of your life with a gloomy Frenchman?

I’ve just spent a year with a silent-film comedian, and I think I’m ready for a change.

Silent film? I hadn’t heard anything about that.

Someone named Hector Mann. I finished writing a book about him in the fall.

You’ve been busy, then. That’s good.

I had to do something. So I decided to do that.

Why haven’t I heard of this actor? Not that I know anything about movies, but the name doesn’t ring a bell.

No one’s heard of him. He’s my own private funny man, a court jester who performs only for me. For twelve or thirteen months, I spent every waking moment with him.

You mean you were actually with him? Or is that just a figure of speech?

No one’s been with Hector Mann since 1929. He’s dead. As dead as Chateaubriand and Madame Récamier. As dead as Dexter What’s-His-Name.

Feinbaum.

As dead as Dexter Feinbaum.

So you spent a year watching old movies.

Not exactly. I spent three months watching old movies, and then I locked myself in a room and spent nine months writing about them. It’s probably the strangest thing I’ve ever done. I was writing about things I couldn’t see anymore, and I had to present them in purely visual terms. The whole experience was like a hallucination.

And what about the living, David? Do you spend much time with them?

As little as possible.

That’s what I thought you’d say.

I had a conversation in Washington last year with a man named Singh. Dr. J. M. Singh. An excellent person, and I enjoyed the time I spent with him. He did me a great service.

Are you seeing a doctor now?

Of course not. This chat we’re having now is the longest talk I’ve had with anyone since then.

You should have called me when you were in New York.

I couldn’t.

You’re not even forty, David. Life isn’t over, you know.

Actually, I turn forty next month. There’s going to be a big bash at Madison Square Garden on the fifteenth, and I hope you and Barbara will be able to come. I’m surprised you haven’t received your invitation yet.

Everyone’s worried about you, that’s all. I don’t want to pry, but when someone you care about behaves like this, it’s hard just to stand by and watch. I wish you’d give me a chance to help.

You have helped. You’ve offered me a new job, and I’m grateful to you.

That’s work. I’m talking about life.

Is there a difference?

You’re a stubborn son-of-a-bitch, aren’t you?

Tell me something about Dexter Feinbaum. The man’s my benefactor, after all, and I don’t even know the first thing about him.

You’re not going to talk about this, are you?

As our old friend in the dead-letter office used to say: I would prefer not to.

No one can live without other people, David. It’s just not possible.

Maybe not. But no one’s ever been me before. Maybe I’m the first one.

. . .

F
rom the introduction to
Memoirs of a Dead Man
(Paris, April 14, 1846; revised July 28):

As it is impossible for me to foresee the moment of my death,
and as at my age the days granted to men are only days of
grace, or rather of suffering, I feel compelled to offer a few words
of explanation
.

On September fourth, I will be seventy-eight years old. It is
full time for me to leave a world which is fast leaving me, and
which I shall not regret
….

Sad necessity, which has forever held its foot against my
throat, has forced me to sell my
Memoirs.
No one can imagine
what I have suffered in being obliged to pawn my tomb, but I
owed this last sacrifice to my solemn promises and the consistency
of my conduct…. My plan was to bequeath them to
Madame Chateaubriand. She would have sent them out into the
world or suppressed them, as she saw fit. Now more than ever, I
believe the latter solution would have been preferable
….

These
Memoirs
have been composed at different times and in
different countries. For that reason, it has been necessary for me
to add prologues that describe the places which were before my
eyes and the feelings which were in my heart when the thread
of my narrative was resumed. The changing forms of my life are
thus intermingled with one another. It has sometimes happened
to me in my moments of prosperity to have to speak of my days
of hardship; and in my times of tribulation to retrace the periods
of my happiness. My youth entering into my old age, the gravity
of my later years tingeing and saddening the years of my innocence,
the rays of my sun crossing and blending together from
the moment of its rising to the moment of its setting, have produced
in my stories a kind of
confusion—or, if you will, a kind
 
of mysterious unity. My cradle recalls something of my tomb,
my tomb something of my cradle; my sufferings become pleasures,
my pleasures sufferings; and, now that I have completed
the perusal of these
Memoirs,
I am no longer certain if they are
the product of a youthful mind or a head gray with age
.

I cannot know if this mixture will be pleasing or displeasing
to the reader. There is nothing I can do to remedy it. It is the
result of my changing fortunes, the inconsistency of my lot. Its
storms have often left me with no table to write on but the rock
on which I have been shipwrecked
.

I have been urged to allow some portions of these
Memoirs
to appear in my lifetime, but I prefer to speak from the depths of
my tomb. My narrative will thus be accompanied by those voices
which have something sacred about them because they come
from the sepulchre. If I have suffered enough in this world to be
turned into a happy shadow in the next, a ray from the Elysian
Fields will throw a protective light on these last pictures of
mine.
Life sits heavily on me; perhaps death will suit me better.

These
Memoirs
have held a special importance for me. Saint
Bonaventure was granted permission to go on writing his book
after he was dead. I cannot hope for such a favor, but if nothing
else I should like to be resurrected at some midnight hour in
order to correct the proofs of mine
….

If any part of my labors has been more satisfying to me than
the others, it is that which relates to my youth—the most hidden
corner of my life. In it I have had to reawaken a world known
only to myself, and as I wandered around in that vanished
realm, I have encountered only silence and memories. Of all the
people I have known, how many are still alive today?

… If I should die outside of France, I request that my body
not be brought back to my native country until fifty years have
elapsed since its first inhumation. Let my remains be spared a
 
sacrilegious autopsy; let no one search my lifeless brain and
extinguished heart to discover the mystery of my being. Death
does not reveal the secrets of life. The idea of a corpse traveling
by post fills me with horror, but dry and moldering bones are
easily transported. They will be less weary on that final voyage
than when I dragged them around this earth, burdened down
by the weight of my troubles
.

I
started working on those pages the morning after my conversation with Alex. I could do that because I owned a copy of the book (the two-volume Pléiade edition compiled by Levaillant and Moulinier, complete with variants, notes, and appendices) and had held it in my hands just three days before Alex’s letter arrived. Earlier that week, I had finished installing my new bookcases. For several hours every day, I had been unpacking books and putting them on the shelves, and somewhere in the midst of that tedious operation, I had stumbled across the Chateaubriand. I hadn’t looked at the
Memoirs
in years, but that morning, in the chaos of my Vermont living room, surrounded by empty, overturned boxes and towers of unclassified books, I had impulsively opened them again. The first thing my eyes had fallen upon was a short passage in volume one. In it, Chateaubriand tells of accompanying a Breton poet on an outing to Versailles in June of 1789. It was less than a month before the taking of the Bastille, and halfway through their visit they spotted Marie Antoinette walking by with her two children.
Casting a smiling look in my direction, she gave me the same
gracious salute that I had received from her on the day of my
presentation. I shall never forget that look of hers, which was
soon to be no more. When Marie-Antoinette smiled, the shape of her mouth was so clear that (horrible thought!) the memory of
that smile enabled me to recognize the jaw of this daughter of
kings when the head of the unfortunate woman was discovered
in the exhumations of 1815
.

It was a fierce, breathtaking image, and I kept thinking about it long after I had closed the book and put it on the shelf. Marie-Antoinette’s severed head, unearthed from a pit of human remains. In three short sentences, Chateaubriand travels twenty-six years. He goes from flesh to bone, from piquant life to anonymous death, and in the chasm between them lies the experience of an entire generation, the unspoken years of terror, brutality, and madness. I was stunned by the passage, moved by it in a way that no words had moved me in a year and a half. Then, just three days after my accidental encounter with those sentences, I received Alex’s letter asking me to translate the book. Was it a coincidence? Of course it was, but at the time I felt as though I had willed it to happen—as though Alex’s letter had somehow completed a thought I was unable to finish myself. In the past, I had never been one to believe in mystical claptrap of that sort. But when you live as I was living then, all shut up inside yourself and not bothering to look at anything around you, your perspective begins to change. For the fact was that Alex’s letter was dated Monday the ninth, and I had received it on Thursday the twelfth, three days later. Which meant that when he was in New York writing to me about the book, I had been in Vermont holding the book in my hands. I don’t want to insist on the importance of the connection, but I couldn’t help reading it as a sign. It was as if I had asked for something without knowing it, and then suddenly my wish had been granted.

So I settled down and began working again. I forgot about Hector Mann and thought only about Chateaubriand, burying myself in the massive chronicle of a life that had nothing to do with my life. That was what appealed to me most about the job: the distance, the sheer distance between myself and what I was doing. It had been good to camp out for a year in 1920s America; it was even better to spend my days in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century France. The snow fell on my little mountain in Vermont, but I scarcely paid any attention. I was in Saint-Malo and Paris, in Ohio and Florida, in England, Rome, and Berlin. Much of the work was mechanical, and because I was the servant of the text and not its creator, it demanded a different kind of energy from the one I had put into writing
The
Silent World
. Translation is a bit like shoveling coal. You scoop it up and toss it into the furnace. Each lump is a word, and each shovelful is another sentence, and if your back is strong enough and you have the stamina to keep at it for eight or ten hours at a stretch, you can keep the fire hot. With close to a million words in front of me, I was prepared to work as long and as hard as necessary, even if it meant burning down the house.

For most of that first winter, I didn’t go anywhere. Once every ten days, I would drive to the Grand Union in Brattleboro to shop for food, but that was the only thing I allowed to interrupt my routine. Brattleboro was a good distance out of my way, but by driving those extra twenty miles I figured I could avoid running into anyone I knew. The Hampton crowd tended to shop at another Grand Union just north of the college, and the chances of any of them turning up in Brattleboro were slim. But that didn’t mean it couldn’t happen, and in spite of my cautious planning, the strategy eventually backfired on me. One afternoon in March, as I was loading up my cart with toilet paper in aisle six, I found myself cornered by Greg and Mary Tellefson. This led to an invitation to dinner, and even though I did my best to worm out of it, Mary kept juggling the dates until I had run out of imaginary excuses. Twelve nights later, I drove to their house at the edge of the Hampton campus, less than a mile from where I had lived with Helen and the boys. If it had just been the two of them, it might not have been such an ordeal for me, but Greg and Mary had taken it upon themselves to invite twenty other people, and I wasn’t prepared for such a crowd. They were all friendly, of course, and most of them were probably glad to see me, but I felt awkward, out of my element, and every time I opened my mouth to say something, I found myself saying the wrong thing. I wasn’t up on the Hampton gossip anymore. They all assumed that I would want to hear about the latest intrigues and embarrassments, the divorces and extramarital affairs, the promotions and departmental quarrels, but the truth was that I found it unbearably dull. I would drift away from the conversation, and a moment later I would find myself surrounded by another group of people engaged in a different but similar conversation. No one was tactless enough to mention Helen (academics are too polite for that), and therefore they stuck to supposedly neutral subjects: recent news items, politics, sports. I had no idea what they were talking about. I hadn’t looked at a paper in over a year, and as far as I was concerned, they could have been referring to events that had taken place in another world.