The Other Shore. Michael Jackson

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СКАЧАТЬ took work as a relief teacher in a Wairarapa high school, hitchhiking back to Wellington every Friday to spend the weekend with Pauline. In my free time during the week, I tried to write. Poems about the Congo.¹ An essay on the Congolese painter, Albert Nkusu. An occasional piece of journalism, or a translation of something by Blaise Cendrars.² But I could make nothing substantial of these fragments, and confessed my frustration to my old mentor, Herman Gladwin.

      Herman immediately threw three questions at me. “What is your aim in writing? Have you anything to say? Do you want to build or destroy?”

      Feebly, I asked what he meant by “destroy.” “Masturbating,” he said. “Feeling sorry for yourself. Wishing you were somewhere else, or someone else.”

      I recalled the fin-de-siècle Viennese poet Hugo Von Hofmannsthal whose “Letter to Lord Chandos” describes the despair of a writer who has become so disenchanted with language that he can longer write. In the late 1960s, something akin to Von Hofmannsthal’s “inexplicable condition” afflicted me. At first I suspected that my inability to write stemmed from a disenchantment with language that would only deepen in the years to come—a doubt that words could ever capture or convey a sense of the life one lived or the world one lived in but would only gesture pathetically and longingly toward experiences that remained forever beyond one’s grasp. Most writers are all too familiar with the sense of disillusionment and disgust that overwhelms them when they return to passages that they believed to have captured the vitality of an event only to find no trace of what had been so vividly in mind during the act of writing. Some, like T. S. Eliot, have likened the poet’s “intolerable wrestle with words and meanings”³ to the existential plight of humanity, waiting for God to reveal Himself, to illuminate the dark cold and the empty desolation⁴ of life on earth. The fictitious Lord Chandos, whose “inner stagnation” imposed on him “a life of barely believable vacuity,” admits to being able to keep his despair from his wife and servants, going about his business as if nothing untoward had occurred, “rebuilding a wing of his house” and “conversing occasionally with the architect.” But I was not sure how long I could pretend that I had not lost my way in Dante’s selva oscura.

      That summer, I rented a house in the Wairarapa, and when Pauline had finished her exams in Wellington, she came to live with me.

      The paddocks were dry, divided by dark green shelterbelts. The heat shimmered above the road, distorting the landscape as if it were behind molten glass.

      Late one afternoon, we drove to the Tauherenikau River in a borrowed car. After swimming, we threw ourselves down in the long grass. Fantails flickered in the manuka. Red commas of flax flowers punctuated the bush. I confessed that I could not live with the thought that I could not write. Pauline consoled me with the words of Trollope. “They are most happy who have no story to tell.” She reminded me of the stories we don’t have a hand in making. How they affect us more deeply than the stories we tell ourselves.

      I was not consoled. It would take me years to realize that writing must be allowed to come to us, like life itself, and not be hassled into answering our summons. And yet an immense happiness flooded through me in that arid landscape, dusk already falling on the ranges, the river out of earshot and the moon rising. I was in love. The past had no hold on me. There was nothing outside that moment.

      When we returned to the car, the dark green world of night birds and foliage was tinged with the spilled milk of the moon. Pauline said she would like to walk into the night, to sleep under the stars, bathed by the moon.

      “Bitten by mosquitoes,” I added.

      I drove slowly along the darkened road. Once, our headlights startled a rabbit that bolted ahead before swerving suddenly into the grass.

      I knew now that if I were to become a writer I would need something real to write about. My essay on Nkusu failed because I had known him only in passing. Like my other Congolese sketches, it went nowhere because the experiences that inspired it were fugitive and fragmentary.

      I became convinced that ethnography would provide the depth of engagement that I had sought, but not found, in the Congo. Ethnography would give me a pretext for returning to Africa. It would give me the raw material with which to write. My “spoils,” as Conrad put it. In the meantime, I would turn to translation. I would attach myself to Blaise Cendrars as he had attached himself to Moravagine. “—Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère!”⁵ And I would begin by writing about not being able to write and the reasons why a writer might voluntarily desist from writing and prefer silence.

      In the summer of 1938, Cendrars was planning to circumnavigate the world in a four-masted sailing ship when war intervened. Following the fall of France in May 1940, he retired to Aix-en-Provence and three “agonizing years of silence.”⁶

      In Aix, he lived alone. In the kitchen of his small apartment, a portable Remington collected dust. His books remained unopened, though he immersed himself in the life of Joseph of Cupertino, the patron saint of aviators—probably because his two sons, Odilon and Rémy, were fliers. In his garden he grew some salad greens and medicinal herbs. Though editors and journalists implored him to write, he wrote nothing.

      There are certain events and experiences of which we choose not to speak. Not because they hold us in thrall, stilling the tongue. Nor because we fear they might reveal our flaws or frailty. Still less because we feel our words can never do them justice. Silence is sometimes the only way we can honor the ineffability and privacy of certain experiences. And so, in silence, we dwell upon, rather than seek to override or alter, the way things are. This, said Miriam Cendrars, was why her father could never write his book on the life of Mary Magdalene.

      Cendrars would always refer to this work as his “secret book.” Entitled La Carissima, it was a fictional life of Mary Magdalene, “the lover of Jesus Christ, the only woman who made our savior weep.”⁷ Though the book was never written, Cendrars considered it “the most beautiful love story and the greatest love that have ever been lived on earth.” But the same experiences that compelled Cendrars to write this book also demanded silence. “His silence was its truth,” writes Miriam Cendrars. “Had he written it, it would have been, for him, a negation of this truth. Its truth is preserved in his silence.”⁸ One thinks of Wittgenstein, who fought in the same war as Cendrars, though on the other side. “Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent....”⁹

      On August 21, 1943, Edouard Peisson, a friend (“une main amie”) and fellow writer, dropped in on a regular visit. The men chatted about mundane things, then fell to reminiscing about the war. It was the spark that touched off a fire, for that same day Cendrars dusted off his Remington and began the first of his three great autobiographical novels.

      I read L’Homme Foudroyé¹⁰ in a Livre de Poche edition when I was living in the Congo in 1964. The novel begins with a letter to Edouard Peisson, who was also living in Aix. This letter, which explains how a visit from Peisson inspired Cendrars’ return to writing, would become a text to which I would return many times in the years ahead, for it was a touchstone, a luminous example—in its tone, phrasing, and evocations—of how I wanted to write. Translating it into English and mindful of how much of its beauty is tarnished and betrayed in this process, I am no longer in the Wairarapa but back in Elizabethville, recalling the spellbinding impression these paragraphs made on me when I first encountered them.

      My dear Edouard Peisson—this morning, you told me that the German officer who has been billeted at your place in the country came looking for you in your kitchen last night so that you might observe a perfect eclipse of the moon, only to leave you lying flat on your back while he went up to his room with an unlikely-looking whore he’d picked up in Marseilles... and you had remained there, alone, on the terrace, long into the night, contemplating the СКАЧАТЬ