Beauty & Sadness Read online

  BEAUTY AND SADNESS

  Or the Intermingling of Life and Literature

  ANDRÉ ALEXIS

  Copyright © 2010 André Alexis

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  This edition published in 2010 by

  House of Anansi Press Inc.

  110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801

  Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4

  Tel. 416-363-4343

  Fax 416-363-1017

  www.anansi.ca

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Alexis, André, 1957–

  Beauty and sadness / André Alexis.

  eISBN 978-0-88784-282-5

  1. Alexis, André, 1957–. 2. Literature — Appreciation. 3. Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.).

  4. Authors, Canadian (English) — 20th century — Biography. I. Title.

  PS8551.L474Z463 2010 C818’.5409 C2010-902001-4

  Cover design: Bill Douglas

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

  Also by André Alexis

  Fiction

  Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa

  Childhood

  Asylum

  Children's

  Ingrid and the Wolf

  Drama

  Lambton Kent

  For Adrina Ena Borde

  Marcher sur les deux rives d’une rivière est un

  exercise pénible.

  — Henri Michaux, “Au Pays de la Magie”

  To walk on both shores of a river is a painful exercise

  — Henri Michaux, “In the Country of Magic”

  INTRODUCTION

  I began to write Beauty and Sadness as I was finishing a novel called Asylum. I had originally planned a series of critical essays on literary subjects, but as I wrote my first essay, the idea of criticism began to perplex me. I’ve been a contributing reviewer to the Globe and Mail ’s book section for some time. I take the consideration of works of fiction as a happy duty, a chance to reflect on things I love: literary universes, worlds of words. But it occurred to me that in doing the kind of reviewing I’ve done in the past — read, reflect on, draw conclusions about a novel or collection of short stories — I was stuck in a voice.

  When I began writing reviews, the most difficult thing was to say what I meant in a tone and manner that didn’t sound pompous or peremptory. I wanted a voice that was considerate and genuine. And I found that voice, I think. The problem is, that voice was the one I instinctively adopted when I began writing Beauty and Sadness and, after a few paragraphs, I realized I’d grown tired of it. It works well for reviews, but I wanted something different for a book of essays. I began to think about other ways of paying attention to the literary “object.” It wasn’t only about finding a new voice. I wanted an approach that would allow for a different kind of attentiveness. That’s when I wrote the first of the pieces in this collection, “Maupassant.”

  The process wasn’t quite so straightforward. “Maupassant” first came into being when I read an article about the Welsh musician John Cale. At the end of the article, Cale mentioned a story by Guy de Maupassant in which a man is attacked and killed by his furniture. Lovely idea, I thought. I must read the story. So, I combed through the complete stories of Maupassant. It was a pleasure, a return to work I admire, but I never did find Cale’s Maupassant and to this day I don’t know if Cale had misremembered the author or misremembered the story or simply invented it all. I liked Cale’s account of the story so much, however, that I decided to use it. I wrote my version of John Cale’s version of a Guy de Maupassant story. The result, aside from being what I hope is an interesting piece, was an exploration of what I knew or felt about Maupassant’s sensibility. In writing the story, I found myself paying attention to Maupassant and I wrote something that is macabre, supernatural, and slightly off: just the qualities I love in Guy de Maupassant’s strongest stories — “La Horla,” for instance.

  For the second piece, I decided to repeat the process. This time, though, I used elements from the work of Jean Cocteau — poetry, the underworld, Orpheus, and the love Orpheus’s Death feels for him. Most of these come from Cocteau’s film Orphée, but Cocteau’s love of poetry, the mysticism of poetry that pervades his work, is what moved me as I wrote. With this story, I was even more aware of sharing the page with another writer, with Jean Cocteau, of working with some of his materials and, in this way, of both distorting and preserving something of Cocteau as he exists within me. I was, in other words, writing my version of Cocteau, using fiction to translate and criticize — in the sense of bringing forward or elucidating — the work of a writer whose films and prose have given me great pleasure.

  As I wrote “Cocteau,” I also became aware of my imagination as a kind of medium through which ideas are seen or through which they move. I distorted, perhaps even perverted, the ideas I took from Cocteau. The result is like the distortion that happens when you see something in clear water: aspects of an object curve strangely, appear larger than they are, refract when the surface ripples.

  And so it is with most of the pieces in Beauty and Sadness. In each of them, some aspect of the writer under consideration (Guy de Maupassant, Jean Cocteau, Henry James, Yasunari Kawabata, Leo Tolstoy, Dante, Samuel Beckett) is refracted or distorted. At the same time, of course, you’ll be aware of the element that is my imagination, and that, too, is essential. Well, un-avoidable, anyway, because this is a collection of essays/fictions written from my perspective and sensibility.

  The most difficult stories to write were those based on Kawabata and Henry James.

  In the case of “Kawabata,” I used what I remembered of a fictional world I adore. I tried to recreate Yasunari Kawabata’s aesthetic as I remembered it. I avoided rereading him. I took nothing directly from Kawabata but my memory of his tone and his ways of looking. I worked to keep “André Alexis” at a distance. What made the process difficult was just this wilful rejection of my own sensibility. I could not be absurd or ironic in my way. I couldn’t be quite so “interior.” (Though, on rereading Kawabata’s work after writing the story, I discovered how absurd, ironic, and interior he actually is — try the Palm of the Hand Stories. In rereading his work, I discovered how deeply his sensibility had influenced mine, without my being aware of it.) Yet, if “Kawabata” was one of the most frustrating things I’ve attempted, it was also the most intimately rewarding. In trying to keep myself out of the writing, I came to see my own style and approach more concretely, recognizing my usual swerves by trying — though not always succeeding — to avoid them.

  The Henry James piece was difficult for other reasons entirely. In fact, it is, judging by the rules I set out for this collection, a failure. I began, hopefully enough, with a number of Jamesian elements: a young woman in Paris, an instance of the supernatural, a narrator whose perversity is understated but notable. In working with these elements, however, my Jamesian “essay” was sideswiped by Carlos Fuentes’s Aura. I hadn’t thought about Aura for years. (It is, along with Yuri Olesha’s Envy and Ve
nedikt Erofeev’s Moscow to the End of the Line, one of my favourite short novels.) But, for some reason, the atmosphere I’d written was suggestive of Aura’s atmosphere and my story’s narrator, though he is not at all like Fuentes’s, brought the narrator of Aura to mind. (This is, perhaps, because Aura is Fuentes’s most Jamesian work.) For a week or so, I was completely blocked. I desperately wanted to write a Henry James narrative that would fit in with this collection, but I felt the story itself wanted to be its own creature. Remembering how strong the second-person voice was in Aura, I rewrote the story — now called “Mylène Saint-Brieuc” — in the second person, and it felt . . . right, somehow. It is a piece midway between what I remember of Aura and the remembered pleasure I’ve had with a number of James’s novellas and short novels (my favourites being Turn of the Screw, Daisy Miller, What Maisy Knew, and The Sacred Fount). “Mylène Saint-Brieuc” is a hybrid and, for that reason, probably doesn’t belong here. And yet, as the story is the product more of my literary imagination than of my personal vision (insofar as those things can be segregated), it isn’t entirely out of place, either.

  But why the subjects I’ve chosen? Why Cocteau or Maupassant? Why not Dostoevsky, E. T. A. Hoffmann, or Raymond Queneau, writers who’ve had a deeper effect on my imagination?1 The answer is, first, because one rarely has a chance to deal with writers one admires who haven’t been major influences. One is usually asked to comment on work that has had some fundamental effect on one’s life or art. But there are so many works of fiction (or poetry) that have given me intense joy without, for all that, leaving a deep mark. And it was wonderful to revisit some of the sites of that more fleeting pleasure. The other reason for choosing the writers I did was that I have come to a time in my life when leave-taking, death, and change have begun to seriously impinge on my imagination. Each of the authors I’ve chosen has dealt with death, the spiritual, the inconstancy of being. Beauty and Sadness, which takes its name from a novel by Yasunari Kawabata, is a collection of elegies. It is also an attempt to see over the fence of my own imagination, to look beyond the self into other worlds.

  I am an immigrant. I was born in Trinidad and came to Canada when I was four. The process of coming to know this country’s geography, its sounds, and its ways of dying . . . that process is mirrored in the literary process I used here. I explore literary worlds and use unfamiliar literary symbols as I explored Canada — this mysterious system of symbols — when I first came to the country. Beauty and Sadness is a work of geography as much as it is one of “criticism,” if you accept that there are countries named Cocteau, Kawabata, Maupassant, and so on.

  The second half of Beauty and Sadness, called “Reconciliations,” is different in approach and tone. Two of the three essays in the second section — “Ivan Ilych: A Travelogue” and “Samuel Beckett, or On Reconciliation” — are, on the surface, closer to traditional criticism, but they are essentially travel essays. Their objective is to return to the place they set out from, having followed unusual paths and byways in the work under consideration. Both pieces play with voice and narrative. And both are elegiac. “On Reconciliation” uses the work of Samuel Beckett as pretext for reflection. “Ivan Ilych: A Travelogue” uses Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilych as its point of departure, though it’s as much an exploration of André Alexis’s ideas of death as it is of Tolstoy’s.

  I hate speaking of myself in the third person but, in this book, “André Alexis” is not quite me. Aspects of my life — rather personal aspects of my life — have been given to the voices who narrate these pieces on Beckett and Tolstoy, but I have not hesitated to lie or stretch the truth about myself whenever it suited my needs. The point, for me, is the exploration of “other countries.” I myself, my concerns, my intellectual and emotional realities will, inevitably, make their appearance, but Beauty and Sadness is not, until its final piece (“Water: A Memoir”), autobiography. I have made use of my life in order to look at literary worlds. But I’ve tried to avoid using literary worlds as pretexts to exposing truths about myself. Which is a long-winded way of saying that, if at all possible, you should regard any “I” you find here with friendly suspicion.

  The book’s final essay, “Water: A Memoir,” is a look at the “literary scene” in Toronto. It is entirely personal, an autobiography, as I said. Here, though, I’ve used the work of my contemporaries, various encounters with writers, and my dissatisfactions and disillusionments as ways to explore the city I’ve lived in for half my life: Toronto.

  Though the two halves of Beauty and Sadness are distinct, they are more like mirror images than strangers. This is a book of literary worlds, literary speculations, meditations on literature. It is an illustration of how life and literature intertwine; and it is a (sometimes melancholic) homage to fiction and poetry.

  One last note . . .

  The four pieces that incorporate aspects of other writers’ sensibilities or works (“Maupassant,” “Cocteau,” “Mylène Saint-Brieuc,” “Kawabata”) are, more or less, the same story told four ways: a man confronts an avatar of death or chaos and is made aware of something within himself. It’s a story that can be told a million ways, of course, but it is also, I think, a model of the critical endeavour. The critic2 confronts something that, in the best of cases, disturbs his or her soul. It’s the cause of this disturbance — the book, the poem, the story — that he or she tries to understand, to situate within his or her life. Though they follow their own paths, the essays that resemble “normal” criticism (“On Reconciliation” and “Ivan Ilych”) and the memoir (“Water”) are very like the first four pieces. They are about encounter and disturbance, and they are elegiac.

  If I have any one hope for Beauty and Sadness, it’s that these pieces and essays will draw readers to the works of writers I’ve admired. In the end, this book is my own particular, and maybe peculiar, act of reverence for fiction and poetry.

  * * *

  1 And why no black writers? I am a black writer myself. It feels rather like hiding to leave out Ralph Ellison or Buchi Emecheta. The answer to this is relatively simple, though. I had planned to write an essay on black Canadian literature for Beauty and Sadness. But as I wrote the final piece in this collection, “Water: A Memoir,” I realized I wasn’t interested in merely mentioning a few black writers and giving my opinions of them. I want to think — at length — about Ishmael Reed and Leopold Senghor, Toni Morrison and Claire Harris. The subject of race and literature is too vast. It needs its own book, not a few pages in this one. So, I have saved my thoughts and feelings for a second volume of essays.

  2 I don’t consider myself a “critic.” I am a practitioner of an art form — fiction — who explores literary worlds not so much to assess and catalogue, though I do assess and catalogue, as to situate himself, to decide where he belongs or where he wishes to go. The criticism of a Northrop Frye or a Kenneth Burke is beyond me, because in order to do the art, in order to write fiction, one must be ignorant in a way that is, I think, contra-critical.

  PART ONE: ECHOES

  MAUPASSANT

  Perry Anderson had conscientiously done what was expected of him.

  He’d learned all there was to learn about the coming trial, for fraud, of his former colleague and friend Mark Beaumont. He would be testifying against Mark, but his part was relatively straightforward. There was record of an unexplained transfer of some two hundred thousand dollars to a personal account held by Mark himself. All Perry had to do was bear witness. He had only to tell the truth, to answer the most basic of questions.

  It had been annoying, going to Toronto to be briefed. It was always tiresome visiting what he thought of as an oddly hellish city. And he rather resented the time spent away from his wife (the very thought of her brought images of white cotton sheets and the sea sound of parted bedclothes) and his children (two wonderful girls: Imogene and Zelda). But in the end, of course, he had dutifully
spent his days in Toronto being briefed by a lawyer and attending meetings with the company’s board of directors. Now, his “prepping” over, and having called his wife to let her know he was on his way home, and having spoken with both of his girls, he was at Union Station waiting to board the train to Ottawa.

  Though he had seen Union Station countless times, had explored its underground concourse and wandered in its tall-ceilinged near-grandeur, he almost always found the station off-putting. It wasn’t church-like. It was too impersonal for that. Rather, it was a place in which the sacred was perpetually frustrated. He preferred Ottawa Station. There was nothing special about Ottawa Station. It was only a pause on the way home.

  At the announcement that first class was boarding, Perry picked up his modest suitcase and went to track 11. He was directed to the first-class car and he found his seat easily enough. The problem was that an old woman, thin, her hair chalk white, was ensconced in his place.

  — I’m sorry, he said, but I think you’re in my seat.

  — Oh, she answered. Am I? I don’t think so.

  — Well, said Perry. My ticket says 14B and that’s the seat you’re in.

  — I’m certain this is my seat, young man. You could sit somewhere else, you know.

  — Why don’t you let me see your ticket, said Perry. I think we can straighten this out.

  — I really don’t want to move, she answered. I’m simply too old.

  The steward approached.

  — Is there a problem? he asked.

  — No, no, said the old woman. There isn’t a problem. This young man is only confused, that’s all.