A LADY CALLED SYLVIA BEACH

FROM TLS

Sylvia Beach, the midwife of Modernism

From the Red Cross to the rue de l’Odéon: how the smallest of small publishers produced the biggest of big books

Sylvia Beach was a midwife of Modernism, and she adored her blue-eyed boys. F. Scott Fitzgerald she liked “very much, as who didn’t? With his blue eyes . . . he streaked across the rue de l’Odéon, dazzling us for a moment”. Paul Valéry gave his daughter “beautiful blue eyes, like his own”. Beach grafted blue eyes, with matching shirt, on to Ezra Pound in an article she published in Mercure de France, “but he wrote to me immediately to say that he never had blue eyes at all”. There was no doubt about James Joyce, however. His eyes were “a deep blue, with the light of genius in them . . . extremely beautiful”.

The genius visited Shakespeare and Company in Saint-Germain-des-Prés for the first time in the summer of 1920. “Joyce came walking up my street”, Beach wrote in the charming and whimsical memoir she named after her creation. “He stepped into my bookshop . . . he inspected my two photographs of Oscar Wilde. Then he sat down beside my table.” On being introduced at a dinner party the day before Joyce’s arrival at the bookshop, the pair shook hands: “That is, he put his limp, boneless hand in my tough little paw” – where she intended it to stay.

The Letters of Sylvia Beach relates the stories of Shakespeare and Company (1959) in rough-draft form, often with the same affectionate humour and self-effacement. Beach had originally thought of situating the business in London, but a visit there in 1919 “was enough to show me that London was not the town to start my shop in”. Her mother – invariably addressed as “Dearest Little Mother” – who was to finance the project, had proposed Greenwich Village as a likely place, tempting us to wonder how the history of Modernism would have looked if Beach had been an obedient daughter. By this time, however, newly discharged from war duty in Serbia, she had met Adrienne Monnier, proprietor of La Maison des Amis des Livres in rue de l’Odéon. “Monnier herself”, she told her mother, “the Pope-to-be-ere-long-throughout France in that Branch of art”, meaning bookselling.

Beach conceived the idea of a companion establishment, catering to British and American readers, as well as French and other seekers after English books. Dearest Little Mother sent “all her savings” – $3,000 – and on November 19, 1919, Shakespeare and Company opened its doors for the first time. In the window were the works of “our Patron” – Shakespeare – of T. S. Eliot, and a copy of Monnier’s favourite English novel, Three Men in a Boat. Beach not only sold books but lent them out via her subscription library, which attracted young writers to the shop. Among her favourites was Ernest Hemingway, who invited Beach to a boxing tournament where the bloody noses shocked and thrilled her. He elected himself her “best customer”, and she was pleased to agree; one who was “not only a regular visitor, but spent money on books, a trait very pleasing to the proprietor of a small book business”.

The original shop was at No 8 rue Dupuytren, not far from rue de l’Odéon, but in 1921 Beach found premises opposite Monnier’s, and the scenery was in place for the drama of Ulysses, with cameo appearances by Hemingway, Pound (“I saw Mr Pound seldom”), Valery Larbaud, André Gide and others. The friendship between the neighbouring booksellers developed into deep and lasting companionship, but Beach might have been surprised to read the claim by Columbia University Press that The Letters of Sylvia Beach “reveals . . . her long love affair with the French bookstore owner Adrienne Monnier”. It doesn’t. There is no indication in the letters that Beach or Monnier is involved in any love affair, with one another or with outside parties. The editor Keri Walsh says that their relationship “would grow into a lifelong mutual devotion, one rooted in a shared commitment to writing, reading, and serving the artistic community”, for which there is abundant evidence. “Everybody assumed that they were lovers”, Brenda Maddox wrote in Nora (1989), her biography of Joyce’s wife, and perhaps they were. Monnier had “blue-grey” eyes, after all, which “reminded me of William Blake’s”. But don’t look for revelations here.

Nancy Woodbridge Beach, called Sylvia by her father Sylvester, a minister, and her mother Eleanor, the daughter of a missionary, was born in Baltimore in 1887. When she was fifteen, Reverend Beach was appointed assistant minister at the American Church in Paris, and the Beaches moved to France for three years. Family friends included the future US President Woodrow Wilson, of whom Beach writes warmly in her letters. Her younger sister Cyprian appeared in silent films and later lived with a somewhat better-known actress, Helen Jerome Eddy. “How successful you’re being in films!”, Beach congratulated her sister in 1917. Four years later she informed their elder sibling Holly that “Cyprian did some film in [Paris] the other day and there were crowds of star-gazers”.

While Cyprian cultivated stardom, Sylvia and Holly were active with the Red Cross in Belgrade. “The r.c. has made a regular feminist of me”, she told her mother in 1919:

It’s seeing men doing all the managing and helping themselves to all the pleasant things that come along – the women are subjected to humiliations that American women are not at all accustomed to . . . . A mere nothing of a man is a Lt, but the women at the head of their departments rank as nothing whatsoever.

Wondering how best to dispense her literary enthusiasm when the war ended, she studied French poetry. In 1950, her translation of Henri Michaux’s poem Un Barbare en Asie was published by New Directions as A Barbarian in Asia and won the Denyse Clairouin Memorial Award. Beach welcomed it, while characteristically informing the administrators: “I am well aware of the shortcomings of my translation”.

We learn from Beach’s letter to George Macy that the honour brought with it some “generous Prize money” – but how much? Who was Denyse Clairouin? Who was George Macy, and what are the George Macy Companies, which sponsored the award? Keri Walsh, an assistant professor at Claremont McKenna College, CA, does not think it worthwhile telling us, though on the same page she offers the information that the “F. M. Ford” mentioned in a letter to Pound is “Ford Madox Ford”. (Denyse Clairouin, French translator of D. H. Lawrence, Graham Greene and others, died in a concentration camp in 1945. George Macy was the founder of the Limited Editions Club, publisher of fine illustrated books.) Likewise, it would have interested readers to learn something about Cyprian Beach’s screen career, beyond the information that she “played ‘Belles Mirettes’ in the French silent film series Judex”. A reference to George Bernard Shaw’s famous letter to Beach, setting out his reasons for not subscribing to Ulysses, is footnoted “see Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, 104–105”. For those who don’t have a copy of Fitch to hand – or, for that matter, Shakespeare and Company, where the letter is helpfully reproduced – the relevant information is as follows: Shaw told Beach that, having read parts of Ulysses in serial form, he found it “a revolting record of a disgusting phase of civilization”; but, he added, “it is a truthful one”. Readers are expected to work out for themselves that between the letter of August 27, 1919, to Dearest Little Mother and that which follows it in this volume, of May 5, 1920, to Gertrude Stein, Beach’s bookshop opened for business. The information is contained in the idiosyncratic chronology – “1921. Shakespeare and Company relocates to 12 rue de l’Odéon . . . . The Harlem Renaissance begins in the United States” – but Walsh neglects the duty of conveying readers smoothly from one bumpy patch in an eventful life to the next, with as little head-scratching – or dashes to the library to consult Fitch – as possible.

“Already the publicity is beginning, and swarms of people visit the shop on hearing the news”, Beach wrote to her sister Holly on April 23, 1921. The news was Ulysses, which at that stage existed only in Maurice Darantière’s printer’s shop in Dijon. “All American & Eng subscriptions are to be sent to me and if all goes well I hope to make some money out of it.” She became fully occupied with coping with demand, at the same time as arranging for the last chapters to be typeset and for Joyce to receive his latest proofs. Unfortunately, there are no letters to or from Darantière in The Letters of Sylvia Beach, though it would be a surprise to learn that none existed. A more conspicuous absence is the lack of any letters to Joyce concerning the production of Ulysses. Walsh explains that the 108 letters Beach wrote to Joyce, “which form part of the Jahnke Bequest at the Zurich International James Joyce Foundation . . . are closed to scholars indefinitely”, which to the innocent ear sounds like an outrage. The earliest letter to Joyce here is an incomplete one, dated July 16, 1924; the next is May 15, 1929 and concerns “the volume with the long, long title”, Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, a collection of essays on “Joyce’s experiment”, Finnegans Wake, by Samuel Beckett, Eugène Jolas, Robert McCalmon and others. “Dear Mr Joyce”, Beach wrote, “This is the proof of the ad in Transition. What do you think of one in the New Statesman as well as Times Lit Supplement?” (An advertisement duly appeared in the TLS of May 30, 1929.) By this time, Beach was devoting a large portion of her energy to catering to Joyce’s ever-increasing demands, caused partly by his failing eyesight, while attempting to fight off bowdlerizers and pirates taking over her delicate craft. Beach was editor, publisher, distributor and seller: wholesale, retail, mail order. The most intimidating pirate was Samuel Roth, who included abridged chapters of Ulysses in his journal Two Worlds Monthly, then issued an unauthorized edition of the entire novel in the United States in 1929. It bore the false imprint of Shakespeare and Company, and is now advertised by second-hand book dealers as “the true First American Edition (unauthorized)”, fetching up to $16,000. The authorized Random House edition (1934) had to wait for Judge John M. Woolsey to overturn the decision of an earlier court that Ulysses was obscene. Again, there is next to nothing about this in The Letters of Sylvia Beach, only a complaint to her sister Holly, made in 1926:

The reason I haven’t written is that there’s this awful pirating of Ulysses business that takes all my time. Douglas sent me a clipping of the Roth interview in the NY Evening Post and we had to take action at once. The enclosed will tell you all about it.

The “enclosed” and the action must remain mysteries to readers of The Letters. The Douglas who kindly sent the clipping may have been her cousin Douglas Orbison, or else Norman Douglas, who hoped that Beach’s improbable renown as the publisher of an unprintable book would encourage her to champion other casualties of censorship and suppression:

Oh dear! What does Mr [Norman] Douglas take me for . . . ? a rich amateur no doubt.

Oh dear oh dear oh dear! I haven’t the slightest desire to have those de luxe copies made for Shakespeare and Company nor to pay forty pounds or anything although I like his book and D. H. Lawrence deserves to be held up as an example.

The book was Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which Douglas helped to have printed in Italy in 1928, after Beach’s refusal. “It’s all preaching, preaching”, she later told the Guardian journalist Peter Lennon about Lawrence’s novel. “It’s nobody’s duty to go in for sex if he doesn’t want to, is it?”

Walsh writes in her introduction that Beach enjoyed refusing “hot books”, which she would pass along to the Obelisk Press, run by the Mancunian Jack Kahane, though this is to compress the chronology, as Kahane did not begin publishing until 1929. He was keen to take over Ulysses but had to be content with a portion of Finnegans Wake – Haveth Childers Everywhere (1930) – and a de luxe edition of Pomes Penyeach with illuminated capitals designed by Lucia Joyce (1932). Originally published by Shakespeare and Company in 1927, Pomes Penyeach is one of only three titles to emerge from Beach’s press, the other being “the volume with the long, long title”, what she called “Our Exag”.

Beach’s faux-naif humour, familiar to readers of her memoir, is genially displayed all through the letters. Pound had made a recent visit to Paris, she wrote to Hemingway in 1931, “and an Italian tried to stick a stiletto into him during a soirée given in his honor at the Brasserie de l’Odéon. I think people should control themselves better”. By then her business, like many others, was suffering from “le Krach americain”. Joyce had become an insupportable burden, and, it seemed to her, an ungrateful one. Only the survival of his offspring concerned the Irishman, not the welfare of the midwife. A fairly stiff communication of November 10, 1931, returned to Joyce “herewith Mr Pinker’s letter of the 6th”. The literary agent Pinker was one of several intermediaries who were colluding to prise the rights to Ulysses out of Beach’s tough little paw. “As regards ‘Pomes Penyeach’”, she wrote, I took out the American copyright of the book this summer and I do not consider its publication in a volume with Chamber Music at all opportune at the present moment. The 5,000 copies of my 1927 edition being now exhausted, I am arranging about a second edition.

Three months later, in February 1932, she told another of Joyce’s advisers, Paul Léon, that she had “made a present to Mr Joyce” of her rights to an authorized American edition of Ulysses which, had she retained them, could have made her rich: the Random House edition immediately sold 35,000 copies. She also revealed that “Mr Joyce was not satisfied with the contract between us for ULYSSES ‘because neither party was free to act without the consent of the other’. I replied that I supposed it resembled other contracts in that way”.

The single piece of paper devised in 1930 (Ulysses had existed for eight years without a contract) was torn up. She wished Joyce now to “consider himself free from all obligation to me”. The feeling of being badly done by was not new to her. Five years earlier, in a letter never sent which is included as an appendix to The Letters, Beach told Joyce that “as my affection and admiration for you are unlimited, so is the work you pile on my shoulders”. Sustaining not only Joyce but the Joyce family had become “a very terrifying project”. Joyce made her presents of manuscripts, including those of Stephen Hero and Chamber Music, which she stored carefully and later sold. In 1959, her hoard formed the basis of an exhibition, The Twenties, organized by the American embassy in Paris.

Shakespeare and Company staggered on through the 1930s, with ever fewer American and English patrons. To boost funds, readings were organized. Gide led off the programme in 1936; afterwards there was a reading by André Maurois, followed close at hand by Hemingway and Spender . . . . They had just arrived from Spain where Hemingway was doing some articles, and insisted on having a double reading. Spender is a gentle boy with nice manners . . . . Hemingway is, as everyone knows, a Tough Guy, and several times while he was reading one or two of the older un-married ladies almost got up and left, but stayed hoping for worse, which they got.

When the Nazis entered Paris, Beach, who had lately made a visit home to the United States where she underwent a hysterectomy (she was also “knocked out by headaches” all her life), declined to leave rue de l’Odéon a second time. In her memoir, she told the almost too-cinematic story of how a “high-ranking German officer” entered her shop one day and, “speaking perfect English”, asked to buy the single copy of Finnegans Wake (published by Faber and Faber) displayed in the window. Beach told him it was not for sale, and duly removed it.

A fortnight later, the same officer strode into the bookshop. Where was Finnegans Wake? I had put it away. Fairly trembling with rage, he said, “We’re coming to confiscate all your goods today.” “All right.” He drove off.

Within a few hours, she had boxed up the stock, removed the sign and painted over the patron’s name. The Germans did not get Finnegans Wake, but they did get Beach. She spent six months in an internment camp at Vittel, alongside Jewish prisoners who would later be removed to Auschwitz. When she returned to Paris, she thought it prudent to “disappear”, and lived for a time in a student hostel in Boulevard Saint-Michel. In an endearingly vertiginous piece of hero worship, she credited Hemingway with ridding rue de l’Odéon of German snipers: “He got his company out of the jeeps and took them up on the roof”, she wrote in the final paragraph of Shakespeare and Company. “We heard firing for the last time in rue de l’Odéon.”

She lived above the shop until her death in 1962, but Shakespeare and Company never reopened for business. Its spirit would be reincarnated by other shops: first Gaïte Frogé’s English Bookshop on rue de Seine, then George Whitman’s Librairie Mistral, which after Beach’s death became the second Shakespeare and Company. The Letters of Sylvia Beach tells the story, though only partially, of how the smallest of small publishers produced the biggest of big books. “Sylvia Beach would have been more staggered by her own intrepidity”, Richard Ellmann wrote in his biography of Joyce, “if she had not been so busy” with preparations for Ulysses.



Keri Walsh, editor
THE LETTERS OF SYLVIA BEACH
376pp. Columbia University Press. $29.95; distributed in the UK by Wiley. £19.95.
978 0 231 14536 7



James Campbell’s books include Paris Interzone: Richard Wright, Lolita, Boris Vian and others on the Left Bank, first published in 1994. A collection of essays, Syncopations, appeared in 2008.

IMAGINED LIVES FROM PAINTINGS TO LITERATURE

Un esperimento bellissimo. Quando l'arte chiede aiuto alle parole della letteratura...
From The Times

Imagined Lives: Mystery Portraits: who’s that ruff guy?
The National Portrait Gallery asked leading novelists to create stories about some of its subjects whose names are lostTerry Pratchett, Tracy Chevalier, Joanna Trollope

Rosy

Tracy Chevalier

I am still wearing the white brocade doublet Caroline gave me. It has a plain high collar, detachable sleeves, and intricate buttons of twisted silk thread, set close together so that the fit is snug. The doublet makes me think of a coverlet on a vast bed. Perhaps that was the intention.

I first wore it at an elaborate dinner her parents held in our honour. I knew even before I stood up to speak that my cheeks were inflamed. I have always flushed easily — from physical exertion, from wine, from high emotion. As a boy I was teased by my sisters and by schoolboys — but not by George. Only George could call me Rosy. I would not allow anyone else. He managed to make the word tender. He said it described not just my cheeks, but my lips as well, smooth and crimson as rose petals.

When I made the announcement, George did not turn rosy, but went pale as my doublet. He should not have been surprised: it has been a common assumption that I would one day marry his cousin. But it is difficult to hear the words aloud. I know: I could barely utter them.

Caroline bent her head, the pearls in her smooth hair catching the light. Her eyes remained on her small, graceful hands folded in front of her. Her half-smile looked rationed. She has done nothing wrong.

Afterwards I found George on the terrace overlooking the kitchen garden. Despite drinking steadily all afternoon he was still pale. We stood together and watched the maids cut lettuces.

“What do you think of my doublet?” I asked. George always noticed clothes. He glanced at me. “That collar looks to be strangling you.”

“We will still see each other,” I insisted. “We can still hunt, and play cards, and attend court. Nothing need change.” George did not speak.

The Tale of Joshua Easement

Terry Pratchett

Sir Joshua Easement, of Easement Manor, Shrewsbury, was, in his own estimation at least, one of the last of the old Elizabethan seadogs — an ambition that was somewhat thwarted by a total lack of a grasp of the principles of navigation. Documents in the National Maritime Museum reveal that Sir Joshua’s navigational method mainly consisted of bumping into things, and this was exacerbated by his absolute blindness to the difference between port and starboard. It was a joke among those seafarers who were lucky enough to have sailed with him and survived that this was because he had never drunk starboard, but had drunk practically everything else.

Such of his papers that survive give a tantalising hint that in failing to discover the Americas, he may nevertheless have discovered practically everywhere else. What can we make of the hint of a land of giant jumping rats, found in the southern oceans, but, owing to Sir Joshua’s recordkeeping, lost the following day?

Nevertheless, quite late in the reign of Elizabeth I, he succeeded not only in finding the Americas but also in finding England again. He then, with much ceremony, presented to Good Queen Bess a marvellous and intriguing animal from that far-off country whose black-and-white fur he deemed very attractive and fit for a queen.

It was at this point that the court really understood that in addition to only a nodding acquaintance with the concept of direction, Sir Joshua had no sense of smell whatsoever. This led to the queen, despite her growing infirmities, going on progress again at quite a high speed. When frantic courtiers asked about the destination she said: “Anywhere away from that bloodyee man.”

Nevertheless, even as relays of servants were scrubbing the palace floors and the female skunk was giving birth in the cellars, the Queen gave Sir Joshua the office of Captain of the Gongfermours or, in other words, in charge of the latrines, a post for which he was clearly well suited. Oblivious to the sniggers of the other courtiers, he took this position extremely seriously and even adopted on his coat of arms the motto Quod Init Exire Oportet (What Goes in Must Come Out). John Dee said of him: “He is a man born under the wrong stars, and has never learnt which ones they are.”

Dogged to the end, and oblivious to the noxious gasses that only he could not smell, he spent the last years of his life in the following century trying to find a way to harness their igniferous nature, achieving an overwhelming success which led to his hat being found in Kingswinford and his head being found in a bear pit in Dudley.

A Hand on my Shoulder

Tracy Chevalier

I am not sure why I agreed to let William draw me. I certainly did not want a painting of me, not now. “A drawing, then,” he said. “That is all. One I can keep in my studio as a model for a dignified lady.”

Of course William was good friends with my husband, and has been so kind to me since his death, and my son’s. But I could have put him off longer, said I was too full of grief, and too weak from my own illness. Perhaps I simply wanted the companionship of a man again, to sit with him and talk to him while he drew.

He let me see the drawing today. Though he has done his best, William is too honest. He did not hide how thin I look, the flesh melted from my cheeks, my brow so bony. And something has happened to my eyes. The fever has made them lighter, if that is possible. I cannot seem to hide my thoughts — sadness and fear brim in my eyes like tears. The hand of Death has been heavy on my shoulder, and left its mark. I still feel its weight, though it is now only a ghost — a ghost waiting to return one day.

To distract others from my ravaged looks I have worn my widest collar and the topaz necklace Henry gave me after Harry’s birth. “Good girl,” he’d whispered as he hung it around my neck. “Well done.” Now he and Harry are gone, leaving my daughter and me alone — a household of women in a world of men, waiting to see what will happen to us.

Yesterday, Henry’s brother appeared, narrowing his eyes at William and insisting that my daughter and I were expected at his home for dinner. He fears any man who comes close to me, thinking they are sniffing my late husband’s estate. He would not have me marry again if it means his family is to lose Henry’s wealth to another. Better instead to march us across the cold fields, to dine with him and his wife in a draughty hall before an indifferent fire.

His little plan has had its effect. Already I feel a familiar pain behind my eyes and a hand scratching in my throat. It is just as well William has almost finished the drawing, for Death is impatient to visit again.

At least my daughter is healthy.

From the Diary of Paxton Whitfield

Joanna Trollope

This day was my likeness completed. I am at last well satisfied. I had much argument with the painter, who would not have me stand with my left hand towards my breast, saying that such a gesture was reserved for artists alone, when portraying themselves. But I held my ground in the matter. Indeed, I am known for holding my ground.

I am painted in my new black damask. It was exceeding costly, having to be thrice dyed to gain the depth of blackness that would satisfy me. I have also a falling collar in fine linen, but no other adornment, no sword belt, no seal upon my finger. I wish to stand as myself, for myself. I have no need of symbols.

Perhaps I am a little taken aback in the matter of my nose. My mouth is as I would wish, firm and well shaped, and my brow displays the breadth of a man of education and culture, such as I am. But my nose has about it a shine and a hint of colour which would indicate a propensity to being fuddled. I am, in truth, seldom fuddled, and never without severe provocation. I remonstrated with the painter, but he did merely say, over and over, that he painted what he saw with all the fidelity his skill could bring to bear. He told me that I had prevailed in the matter of my left hand, and that I should be content with my nose. I fear it must be so, for fear of incurring even greater expense.

I shall hang the painting in my library. I know the exact spot, upon the wall directly opposite the door, where it will immediately strike all those who enter. In her shrewish way, my wife has suggested that I might like to place a small table beneath, for candles and offerings, but I feigned not to hear her. She liked my looks well enough when we were wed, but custom has staled her admiration. And her courtesy.

I say again, I am on the whole well satisfied. It is something indeed for a man to possess his own likeness. When I look upon it, I have the sensation that indeed I have my place upon the Earth, and that place is manifest for all to see. It would be a joyous thing were my wife to be of like mind, but she prefers to make sport of everything that signifies to me. Including, it grieves me to say, this likeness.

The National Portrait Gallery’s Imagined Lives: Mystery Portraits 1520-1640 opens tomorrow at Montacute House, Somerset. The book of stories is available, priced £6.99, at www.npg.org.uk/shop

More mystery sitters

La maja desnuda y la maja vestida, Francisco Goya

Prado, Madrid

The two paintings in this scandalous pair are identical, except that in one the maja is completely bare, save a small tuft of pubic hair. Thought to be the first inclusion of such hair in Western painting, this obscenity led to Goya being summoned in front of the Spanish Inquisition. However, if he revealed the identity of the sitter it has not since resurfaced. Guesses range from the 13th Duchess of Alba, to the mistress of the then Spanish Prime Minister.

Portrait of a Lady, Dosso Dossi

National Gallery of Victoria

Since 1965, the National Gallery of Victoria has owned this mysterious Renaissance portrait of a beautiful young woman with a pointy nose and unforgiving eyes. In 2008 they made the happy discovery that she is in fact the infamous Lucrezia Borgia, though not all members of the art world were as willing as the Australian gallery owners to believe this grand claim.

Tank Man, Jeff Widener

The subject of this iconic photo committed the unimaginably brave act of stopping an entire column of Chinese Type 59 tanks in the middle of Tiananmen Squared. However, the Tank Man has never been able public receive international adulation as a symbol of freedom, as he disappeared into the crowd immediately following the incident and is believed to have been arrested, tried and possibly executed by the Chinese authorities.

Mona Lisa, Leonardo Da Vinci

Louvre, Paris

For such a famously enigmatic painting, it would not be right for the identity of the sitter to go completely undisputed. Although the common consensus is that the subject is Lisa del Giocondo, a member of the Renaissance Gherardini family and wife of a cloth merchant, there is no conclusive evidence. Da Vinci’s mother, Isabella of Naples, Costanza d’Acalos (known as “the merry one”) and da Vinci himself have all been declared the true sitter.

The Girl with a Pearl Earring, Johannes Vermeer Mauritshuis, The Hague

Known as the Mona Lisa of the north, Vermeer’s masterwork has long confounded viewers. The intimate gaze, the enormous earring and the mysterious turban all lend to the painting’s ambiguity. In 1999, Tracy Chevalier’s eponymous novel, inspired by the painting, gave a twist to the tale, introducing a fictional servant, Griet, into Vermeer’s household along with a convenient undercurrent of sexual tension between her and the painter, picking up on the girl’s somewhat come-hither expression.

Rob Peal

L'ENCRE ET LA FUMEE

DA LEFIGARO.FR
Quand la fumée inspire les écrivains

Par Astrid De Larminat
De Molière à Houellebecq, de Flaubert à Simon Leys, de Freud à Einstein, le tabac a fait couler beaucoup d'encre..

On peut s'en réjouir ou le déplorer, c'est un fait. À mesure que la cigarette s'efface du paysage, c'est toute une époque qui disparaît, un temps où l'on accordait plus de valeur aux choses de l'esprit qu'à la conservation des corps, dont on savait qu'ils étaient mortels. Bernard Pivot raconte qu'aux débuts d'Apostrophe, tous ses invités fumaient et portaient une cravate, tandis qu'à la fin de Bouillon de culture, les auteurs se présentaient sans cigarette et dépenaillés… En 1996, La Poste a gommé la cigarette de Malraux sur un timbre. En 2005, la BNF retirait sa cibiche à Sartre sur l'affiche d'une exposition. On frise le contresens, explique le romancier Benoît Duteurtre, qui n'est pas un militant du tabagisme mais un fumeur du soir, pour le plaisir : imagine-t-on Gainsbourg sans sa gitane ?

Un jour la Direction des musées fera-t-elle gratter le cigare et la volute de fumée bleue sur le portrait de Mallarmé par Manet ? Ou la pipe de Baudelaire sur le tableau de Courbet ? Mallarmé qui aimait tant les baisers de ses cigarettes d'été et sa fidèle amie la pipe, qui l'aidait à travailler en hiver (Poèmes en prose). Un petit Musée du fumeur s'est ouvert à Paris, sous le patronage prestigieux d'Einstein, qui disait : « Avant de répondre à une question, on devrait allumer une pipe. » Non, tous les fumeurs ne sont pas des abrutis. N'en déplaise à Balzac qui affirmait dans son Traité des excitants modernes que le tabac rend apathique, hébété, impuissant.

Tout le monde s'accorde à penser que l'excès de tabac est nuisible, comme l'excès de presque tout. Des écrivains, fumeurs modérés, s'offusquent pourtant de «l'idéologie sécuritaire» qui conduit une société, et les fumeurs eux-mêmes, à considérer le tabac comme si c'était le diable, au point qu'on en perd toute civilité - on envoie ses invités fumer sur le balcon en plein hiver, s'indigne encore Benoît Duteurtre (1). L'écrivain Simon Leys, qui ne fume plus guère mais opte, quand il en a le choix, pour la section fumeur des cafés ou des salles d'attente parce que «la compagnie y est plus sympathique», rapporte dans Le Bonheur des petits poissons (Lattès) une anecdote véridique : dans un train, deux amoureux fougueux exécutèrent un accouplement sous l'œil impassible des passagers, qui s'indignèrent en revanche quand les amants allumèrent une cigarette.



Le sein maternel


La querelle des fumeurs et des non-fumeurs remonte au XVIIe siècle. Sous Louis XIII, certains considéraient le tabac comme une panacée qui guérissait tous les maux, d'autres comme une herbe de dépravation. La noblesse prisait frénétiquement, comme notre jet-set se fait des lignes de coke. En forme de pied de nez aux dévots qui condamnaient cette pratique, Molière mit dans la bouche de Sganarelle cet éloge extravagant, qui serait censuré de nos jours : « Il n'est rien d'égal au tabac : c'est la passion des honnêtes gens, et qui vit sans tabac n'est pas digne de vivre. Non seulement il réjouit et purge les cerveaux humains, mais encore il instruit les âmes à la vertu. » Le roi hésitait à l'interdire. Richelieu trouva plus juteux de taxer le produit incriminé. Rien n'a changé.

Foin de poésie et de belles histoires, soyons prosaïque. Pourquoi tant de gens continuent-ils de fumer malgré les menaces de mort ? Chez les Mayas, rappelle l'auteur du Goût du tabac, jolie anthologie de textes d'écrivains, fumer était, pour les adolescents mâles, le symbole du passage à l'âge adulte. La chansonnette d'Eddy Mitchell ne dit rien d'autre : « Pour devenir un homme /Fume cette cigarette ».

Certains écrivains ne peuvent travailler sans fumer. Cioran : « C'est à coup d'excitants (café, tabac) que j'ai écrit tous mes livres. Depuis qu'il m'est impossible d'en prendre, ma production est tombée à zéro. À quoi tient l'activité de l'esprit ! » La romancière Catherine Cusset, fumeuse repentie, craignait de perdre l'inspiration en arrêtant la cigarette. Le résultat fut spectaculaire : elle a continué d'écrire mais a dû mettre fin à sa carrière universitaire parce qu'elle n'arrivait plus à lire d'ouvrages ennuyeux. Freud disait : « Je dois au cigare un grand accroissement de ma capacité de travail et une meilleure maîtrise de moi-même. » Mais il n'a jamais analysé sérieusement l'af­faire. Psychanalyste et romancier, auteur de Pas de fumée sans Freud, Philippe Grimbert explique que la cigarette, qu'on peut considérer comme un dérivé du sein maternel, est un « instrument de jouissance de l'instant et de protection contre la tension qui naît de l'environnement hostile ». Exemple : dans Les Âmes sœurs, Valérie Zenatti met en scène une mère de famille débordée pour qui chaque cigarette est prétexte à souffler cinq minutes, à échapper à tout ce qu'on exige d'elle à longueur de temps. Les cigarettes jalonnent sa journée, comme des nœuds sur une corde à grimper. Certains montent la corde lisse sans y penser. D'autres non.



Le clope du grand angoissé


«Ah sans la pipe la vie serait aride, sans le cigare, elle serait incolore, sans la chique, elle serait intolé­rable », écrivait Flaubert. Ça n'était pas une boutade. Retirer d'un coup son clope à un grand angoissé, c'est comme enlever ses bouées à un petit enfant. Le narrateur d'Extension du domaine de la lutte, gros fumeur, répond par une paire de claques à une collègue qui le sermonne sur le tabac. «Moralité , écrit Houellebecq : essayez d'empêcher un grand mélancolique dépressif de fumer, et l'on ne répond plus de ses actes.»

Et pourtant, fumer tue. Il est bon de le rappeler. Grâce aux messages apposés sur les paquets de tabac, écrit Simon Leys, «les fumeurs bénéficient d'une sorte de supériorité spirituelle sur les non-fumeurs : ils ont une conscience aiguë de notre commune mortalité ». Une manière de memento mori, cher aux sages de l'Antiquité, un équivalent du « Souviens-toi que tu es poussière et que tu retourneras à la poussière » du mercredi des Cendres. Est-ce un péché de fumer ? Les théologiens catholiques se sont emparés de la question. Réponse : non, à condition de ne pas dépasser quatre cigarettes par jour. Autrement dit : vive le plaisir de fumer, mais attention à ne pas tomber en esclavage.

Le goût du tabac, textes choisis et présentés par Jacques Barozzi, Mercure de France, 118 p, 6,50 €.

Traité des excitants modernes d'Honoré de Balzac, Editions de L'Herne, 60 p, 8,80 €.

(1) Voir le recueil «Je fume, pourquoi pas vous ? Contre la tabacophobie», avec Benoît Duteurtre, Philippe ­Muray, François Taillandier, Philippe Reynaud (Pauvert, 2005).

» INTERVIEW - Florence Delay : «Stylo et cigarette vont

THE SMELL OF THE BOOKS

Having a Nose for Degraded Documents
A scientific ’sniff test’ could aid museums and libraries in preserving their old works without damaging the actual documents.

By Matt Palmquist

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Ever wondered why your grandfather’s cherished, dog-eared copy of Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire smells like that? Or why the Declaration of Independence retains the unmistakable musk of 1776?

At long last, scientists have developed a “sniff test” to measure the telltale aroma of old books and irreplaceable historical documents. You know the smell — that “combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness,” as the authors put it. Inhale and smell the Industrial Revolution!

In a recent edition of the American Chemical Society’s journal Analytical Chemistry, professor Matija Strlic and colleagues describe their development of a method to gauge the degradation of paper pages based on their distinctive smell. The nondestructive technique, called “material degradomics,” could aid museums and libraries in preserving their old works without damaging the actual documents, the researchers say.

The smell of an old book, the study asserts, is caused by hundreds of volatile organic compounds that the paper releases into the air over time; those compounds also reveal changes in the paper’s condition. Strlic’s test was applied to “sniff” 72 historical papers from the 19th and 20th centuries; the documents contain rosin, pine tar and wood fiber, which are the materials that degrade quickest in old books. Binding and other media, including photographs, also contribute to the pace of a book’s degradation.

So the next time you pick up that copy of the family Bible, take a whiff of Deuteronomy and smell the volatile organic compounds. You’ll be glad you did.

THE MOST TALKATIVE NOVELS

FROM THE GUARDIAN

Frederic Raphael's top 10 talkative novels

From Petronius to John Steinbeck and Evelyn Waugh, the novelist considers books that have mastered the art of dialogue, ensuring that 'they always speak to us, not least between the lines'

Born in Chicago but educated in England, Frederic Raphael is probably best known as the author of Glittering Prizes, and its sequel Fame and Fortune, both of which he adapted into acclaimed TV and radio series starring Tom Conti as writer Adam Morris. This month, he publishes a third volume in this series, Final Demands, which finds Morris contending with middle age and its discontents and which he has also adapted for BBC Radio 4.

Final Demands
by Frederic Raphael
304pp,JR Books Ltd,£16.99Buy Final Demands at the Guardian bookshopRaphael is also a prolific author of some 20 other novels, as well as history books, biographies and film screenplays. Last year he completed a strikingly contemporary translation of Petronius's Satyrica, (published by Carcanet, priced £12.99).

Buy Frederic Raphael books at the Guardian bookshop

"Dialogue brings a novel to life. It is possible to compose fiction without it, just as Georges Perec was able to write an entire book without using the vowel "e", but one had better be a genius to affect such forms of composition. And once is quite enough. It may also be possible to contrive great blocks of prose, in which landscapes are described and psychological states analysed as never before. But a writer who cannot make characters talk, and have their conversations require us to listen to them, is locked into airless formality.

"Dialogue tells us what people say and it hints at what they do not. It encourages readers to bring a book to life by enticing their participation in it. They then supply their own reading of how loudly or softly, truly or falsely, words are exchanged. When a writer allows his characters to talk among themselves, he grants them their freedom. If only because the subconscious can then chime in, his premeditated scheme never wholly dictates what someone will say.

"Dialogue in a novel is like stained glass, the surrounding prose is there to frame and support it. Even Marcel Proust, who certainly delivers paragraphs of dense prose, used dialogue brilliantly; and silence too. His greatest character, the Baron de Charlus, is arrogant, garrulous and caustic. But when an arriviste hostess finds the nerve to banish him from her house, his inability to find any kind of crushing retort signals the moment when the narrator, Marcel, is able to stand away from his mentor's shadow. Thenceforth he is free to depict him with merciless accuracy. Dialogue can be used in various ways and various registers, but a writer who masters its nuances will produce novels that always speak to us, not least between the lines."

1. Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara
O'Hara was a keen observer, above all of the Pennsylvania Dutch inhabitants of the town he called Gibbsville (a permeable disguise for his birthplace, Pottsville). He could mimic local speech and vocabulary so that the reader can overhear it. The story of the life and death of Julian English is a masterpiece of erotic suggestion and narrative economy.

2. The Satyrica by Petronius Arbiter
Petronius, who lived during the reign of Nero, who ordered his suicide, wrote a sprawling picaresque novel of which only the chapters concerning the gross Trimalchio, a millionaire ex-slave, have survived in their entirety. Petronius was a master of elegance and of its low cousin, scorn. The adventures of Encolpius, his anti-hero, and his louche companions are salacious and farcical by turns, but they are brought to life by the often absurd and obscene chat which comes directly from the gutters of Roman life. As I discovered when translating Petronius, dead languages can still have raucous voices.

3. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
Lewis was nicknamed "Red", more for the colour of his hair and livid complexion than on account of his politics, but his capacity for catching the vocabulary and aggressive philistinism of middle-western America was as boundless in print as it was, we are told, in person. In company, he was a mimic who did not know when or how to stop; in print, he made accuracy into satire. Babbittry entered the American language as the style of salesmanship and humbug to which John Updike surely paid rhyming tribute in his creation "Rabbit" Angstrom, a salesman in the Lewis tradition.

4. A God and His Gifts by Ivy Compton-Burnett
The last novel published in Ivy's lifetime was one of the first I ever reviewed. I am glad that I recognised genius when I saw it; a limited genius perhaps, but there it was. Ivy's novels were always a tapestry of dialogue, formally phrased but full of hidden poisons and traps. Her milieu was the Edwardian upper middle-class, on the surface polite, savage underneath. She described very little, but lust, violence and greed all emerged from the seemingly prim dialogue. Melodrama was never more elegantly articulate.

5. A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch
Murdoch was a philosopher and a romantic, with a sensuous intelligence and a keen ear. Her novels contain slabs of rather too colourful landscape and gushing description, but her great strength lay in the clever edginess of her conversations. I wrote the movie script of A Severed Head and it was, I confess, an easy job: unlike most writers', much of her dialogue sounded good out loud. I remember, for instance, an unfaithful wife saying, "It's all or nothing" and the husband's answer: "Let me recommend nothing." Facile? You do it.

6. Cakes and Ale by Somerset Maugham
Maugham is regularly dismissed and as regularly resurrected. He had no grand opinion of his own work, but he learnt early on, when writing plays, that a capacity for amusing dialogue supplied the best means for capturing an audience. Cakes and Ale (the title comes from Twelfth Night) proves that the literary world of the 1930s, with its cliques and claques, is not very different from that dominated by today's Michaels and the ubiquitous Antonias. It is said that Hugh Walpole soon came to recognise his own voice, and character, in Alroy Kear and, no doubt, Thomas Hardy in Edward Driffield. What is a novel of manners without a serrated edge?

7. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
When I first opened Steinbeck's great novel about "the Okies" – migrant sharecroppers from the 1930s dust-bowl of Oklahoma – I found their dialogue, phonetically reproduced on the page, quite incomprehensible. But read it aloud and the voices of the Joad family come out fighting, as it were. The family's trek to golden California has plenty of cruel incident, but when I think of Rose of Sharon, for instance, I hear her name "Rosa-sharn" the way Tom Joad said it, and says it.

8. Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
Most pundits now proclaim Brideshead Revisited as Waugh's enduring masterpiece. Its purple passages have their nostalgic glamour, but isn't there something lamingly absurd in all that well-spoken snobbery? Waugh does so love a Lord. The earlier Scoop is a satire on pre-war Fleet Street and has a savage larkiness that never visits Bridehead. What does one remember in particular? The line "Up to a point, Lord Copper", the nearest an employee dares come to disagreeing with his tyrannical (Northcliffian) boss.

9. The Golden Fruits by Natalie Sarraute
Sarraute was one of the "new novelists" who set out to renovate French fiction in the early 1950s. Her novel, like Cakes and Ale, is a satire on the literary world, this time in Paris, written almost entirely in dialogue. Its title refers to a novel which is only talked about in her text. It is first saluted as a masterpiece and then slowly picked to pieces by critics and envious friends of the author.

10. A Roman Marriage by Brian Glanville
The story of an English girl seduced and enchanted by an Italian lover is told with appropriate irony by a man who knows and loves Italy almost as well as England. His novel Along The Arno is early evidence of his ability to bring characters to life by reporting them, so to speak, with curt accuracy. A Roman Marriage is a comedy of incompatible manners, Anglo-Saxon and Latin. I confess, if it is a confession, that A Roman Marriage is dedicated to me. It is not a sign of corruption to speak well of one's friends, not least when their work deserves it.

ARE THE WRITERS DOMESTICATED ANIMALS?

FROM THE INDEPENDENT

Portrait of the Writer as a Domesticated Animal, By Lydie Salvayre

A satire to tuck into with relish

Reviewed by Lee Rourke

Portrait of the Writer as a Domesticated Animal, as in the French writer Lydie Salvayre's other novels, treats us to a meditative work of fiction narrated by someone trying to find their foothold in the void. This time, Salvayre's void is high finance and the "free market". An unnamed female narrator has agreed to write the authorised biography of the richest man in the world, a fast-food magnate called Tobold the Hamburger King.


It is soon made clear he is a despicable man and, wherever he goes, there is bound to be conflict. Yet the narrator is quickly seduced by Tobold's world. She mixes with call girls and celebrities, falling under the spell of Robert De Niro, witnessing untold cruelty and distorted religious doctrines. Pen in hand, she follows Tobold's every move.

Tobold refers to his future biography as "the gospel". Such is the level of his megalomania that, bizarrely, he uses the life of Christ as his model. His worldview is devoid of altruism and filled with self-aggrandising philosophies, where the poor "never go out of style". For Tobold, the economic structure of the world must never change.

Such "economic messianism" is something his new-found biographer finds sickening, but still she is lured. It is this knowing slide into Tobold's sordid abyss that makes Salvayre's novel (translated by William Pedersen) so interesting. She has placed the writer in a world governed by the crass accumulation of profit. The narrator can only fall back on her own ideologies for intellectual succour, but reveals her own vanities. Likewise, all empires have to collapse. After an unannounced visit from Tobold's mother we, with the narrator, follow his descent into a crazed, remorseful wreck of a man seeking some kind of redemption.

Salvayre has created a satirical plunge into the abyss infused with absurdities and truisms alike. At once hilarious and damning, the novel can both repel and soothe. Perhaps most telling of all, like all great writers, Salvayre understands that all biography is fiction.

AN INTALIAN ANTIHERO

FROM NYTIMES.COM

An Italian Antihero’s Time to Shine
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

ROME — By at least one amusing new metric, Michelangelo’s unofficial 500-year run at the top of the Italian art charts has ended. Caravaggio, who somehow found time to paint when he wasn’t brawling, scandalizing pooh-bahs, chasing women (and men), murdering a tennis opponent with a dagger to the groin, fleeing police assassins or getting his face mutilated by one of his many enemies, has bumped him from his perch.
That’s according to an art historian at the University of Toronto, Philip Sohm. He has studied the number of writings (books, catalogs and scholarly papers) on both of them during the last 50 years. Mr. Sohm has found that Caravaggio has gradually, if unevenly, overtaken Michelangelo.

He has charts to prove it.

The change, most obvious since the mid-1980s, doesn’t exactly mean Michelangelo has dropped down the memory hole. To judge from the throngs still jamming the Sistine Chapel and lining up outside the Accademia in Florence to check out “David,” his popularity hasn’t dwindled much.

But, charts or no charts, Mr. Sohm has touched on something. Caravaggiomania, as he calls it, implies not just that art history doctoral students may finally be struggling to think up anything fresh to say about Michelangelo. It suggests that the whole classical tradition in which Michelangelo was steeped is becoming ever more foreign and therefore seemingly less germane, even to many educated people. His otherworldly muscle men, casting the damned into hell or straining to emerge from thick blocks of veined marble, aspired to an abstract and bygone ideal of the sublime, grounded in Renaissance rhetoric, which, for postwar generations, now belongs with the poetry of Alexander Pope or plays by Corneille as admirable but culturally remote splendors.

Caravaggio, on the other hand, exemplifies the modern antihero, a hyperrealist whose art is instantly accessible. His doe-eyed, tousle-haired boys with puffy lips and bubble buttocks look as if they’ve just tumbled out of bed, not descended from heaven. Coarse not godly, locked into dark, ambiguous spaces by a strict geometry then picked out of deep shadow by an oracular light, his models come straight off the street. Cupid is clearly a hired urchin on whom Caravaggio strapped a pair of fake wings. The angel in his “Annunciation” dangles like Chaplin’s tramp on the high wire in “The Circus,” from what must have been a rope contraption Caravaggio devised.

Rome’s art establishment at the turn of the 17th century, immersed in the mandarin froufrou of Late Mannerism, despised Caravaggio for the filthy, barefoot pilgrims he painted at Mary’s doorstep. Out to “destroy painting,” as Nicolas Poussin, the most high-minded of all French artists, saw it, Caravaggio connected with ordinary people, the ones who themselves arrived barefoot and filthy as pilgrims in Rome. And fortunately for Caravaggio, he also appealed to a string of rich and powerful patrons.

But almost immediately after he died from a fever at 38, in 1610, on the beach at Porto Ercole, north of Rome, his art was written off by critics as a passing fad and neglected for hundreds of years, setting the stage for his modern resurrection. Connoisseurs like Bernard Berenson were still dismissing his work a century ago when Lionello Venturi, Roger Fry and Roberto Longhi, among others, finally revived his reputation as a protomodernist.

Mr. Sohm, who announced his findings during a talk at the College Art Association conference in Chicago last month, focused on publications, not tourist revenues or exhibition attendance figures, and his study says nothing about how Michelangelo and Caravaggio stack up against box-office greats like Rembrandt and van Gogh.

But his research does corroborate evidence plain to anybody in or out of art academe or who has browsed for scarves in Italian airports where motifs of Caravaggio’s “Bacchus” and head of Goliath have become as ubiquitous as coasters bearing bits of David’s anatomy and mugs with the figure of Adam from the Sistine ceiling. Caravaggios are now used to decorate the cover of “Emerging Infectious Diseases,” a medical journal, and to advertise a sex shop in London.

“The only way to understand old art is to make it participate in our own artistic life” is how Venturi phrased it in 1925. That Caravaggio left behind no drawings, no letters, no will or estate record, only police and court records, makes him a perfect Rorschach for our obsessions. He was outed in the 1970s by gender studies scholars, notwithstanding the absence of documents to indicate he was gay. Pop novelists and moviemakers have naturally had a field day with his life. Exhibition organizers cook up any excuse (“Caravaggio-Bacon,” “Caravaggio-Rembrandt”) to capitalize on his bankability. Newly discovered “Caravaggios” test the market every year.

Not long ago, two Caravaggios turned up in the French village of Loches in the Loire Valley, under the organ loft of a local church. Never mind that various Caravaggio experts have since doubted the pictures are by him: Loches is advertising itself as a Caravaggio town. And officials in Porto Ercole lately said his lost remains had been found in an underground ossuary, pending DNA tests with descendants of his brother, who still live near Milan. The iconoclast is even being turned into a religious icon, it seems: Caravaggio’s “bones” may soon become holy relics for art pilgrims.

Another Caravaggio retrospective has also opened, here at the Quirinale: two dozen paintings, on view through June 13, a blue-chip survey, installed ridiculously in darkened rooms with spotlights, as if his art needed more melodrama. But the pictures are glorious anyway. The exhibition is mobbed.

It happens that a show of Michelangelo’s drawings is at the Courtauld Gallery in London, through May 16. Gifts for a beautiful young Roman nobleman, Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, on whom Michelangelo had developed a crush, the drawings were ostensibly supposed to help Cavalieri learn to draw. Imagine Roger Federer handing you a DVD of himself at Wimbledon, saying “Just do this.” These are drawings of the most arcane refinement, unearthly beautiful.

By contrast, Caravaggio, wrestling art back to the ground, distilled scenes into a theatrical instant at which time seems suddenly stopped. That’s why his pictures can bring to mind movie stills. The art historian Michael Fried, who has just written a book about Caravaggio, notes the quality of the figures’ absorption. Life-size images, they share our space and we theirs, face to face, as another art historian, Catherine Puglisi, has pointed out (something that doesn’t happen with Michelangelo’s enormous sculptures or his frescoed ceiling that we only see from far away). The immediacy somehow dovetails with the tabloid tawdriness of his biography, with the whole modern celebrity drama.

The other afternoon endless scrums of tourists here jostled before the Caravaggios in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi and the Basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo, feeding pocket change into the boxed light meters. It was probably just coincidental, but in the Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, nobody stopped to look at the Michelangelo.