Paul Morand: Tender Shoots

Let it not be said that this has to do with a particular period, and that at that time epistolary style was always like this. Without looking very far, on a certain Wednesday in 1673 (in December, as far as we know), that is to say just in between the Imaginaires in 1666 and the Lettres of Racine and Boileau in1687, Mme de Sévigné wrote from Marseilles: “I am charmed by the singular beauty of this city. Yesterday, the weather was divine, and the place from which I overlooked the sea, the farmhouses, the mountains and the town is astonishing. The throng of noblemen who came to see M de Grignan yesterday; well-known names, Saint-Hérems etc.; adventurers, swords, fashionable hats; people born to depict an idea of war, of romance, of embarkation, of adventure, of chains, of slaves’ shackles, of servitude, of captivity: I, who love romances, was delighted by it all.” Admittedly, this is not one of those letters by Mme de Sévigné that I like best. Nevertheless, in its composition, its colouring, its variety, what a picture for a “French gallery” in the Louvre this great writer succeeded in painting. Such as it is, in its splendour, I dedicate it to a member of the family to which Mme de Sévigné (she never stops saying this) was so proud to be related through the Grignans, to my friend the Marquis de Castellane.

Compared to such passages, the meagre correspondence we were discussing matters little. This does mean to say, of course, that Boileau was not an excellent, sometimes delightful, poet. And no doubt a hysterical genius was struggling in Racine’s mind, kept in check by a superior intellect, and in his tragedies it simulated for him, with a perfection that has never been equalled, the flux and reflux, the pitching and the tossing, fully grasped nevertheless, of passion. But all the admissions (withdrawn the moment they are felt to have been badly received, and reiterated, if it is feared, despite all evidence to the contrary, that they may not have been understood, and then, after many a tortuous detour, fanned into a raging blaze) that so inimitably enliven any scene from Phèdre cannot prevent us, retroactively, from feeling surprised and not remotely charmed by the Lettres aux imaginaires. Were we bound absolutely to adopt a canon of the kind that can be extracted from these Lettres , we should much prefer, at a time when, if we are to believe M. France, people no longer knew how to write, the preface (to do with his moods of near-insanity) that Gérard de Nerval dedicated to Alexandre Dumas: “They [his sonnets] would lose their charm by being explained, if that were possible; grant me credit at least for expressing myself; the last folly that will probably remain to me is to think of myself as a poet — it is up to the critics to cure me of it.” Here, if we are to take the Imaginaires as a canon, is something that is well written, that is much better written. But we do not want a “canon” of any sort. The truth is (and M France knows this better than anyone for he knows everything better than anyone else) that from time to time a new and original writer emerges (let us call him, if you will, Jean Giraudoux or Paul Morand, since, I cannot think why, Morand and Giraudoux are always being compared to each other, just as Natoire and Falconet are in the marvellous Nuit à Châteauroux , without their bearing any resemblance to one another). This new writer is generally fairly tiring to read and hard to understand because he brings things together through new relationships. We follow him easily through the first half of the sentence, but there we flag. And we feel that this is only because the new writer is nimbler than us. Original writers spring up just as original painters do. When Renoir began to paint, people did not recognise the things he depicted. Nowadays it is easy to say he was an eighteenth-century painter. But, in saying this, we omit the temporal factor, and that it took a long time, even well into the nineteenth century, for Renoir to be recognised as a great artist. To succeed, the original painter, the original writer, proceed in the way oculists do. The treatment — whether in their painting, their writing — is not always pleasant. When it is over, they tell us: “Now look”. And suddenly the world, which has not been created only once, but is recreated as often as a new artist emerges, appears to us — so different from the old world — in perfect clarity. We adore Renoir’s, Morand’s or Giraudoux’s women, whereas before they were given this treatment, we refused to see them as women. And we feel a need to walk in the forest that at first sight had seemed to us to be anything but a forest, and more, for example, like a tapestry of a thousand shades of colour in which the actual tints of the forests were lacking. Such is the new and perishable universe which the artist creates, and which will endure until a new one surfaces. To all of which there may be many things to add. But the reader, who has already guessed what they are, will be able to explain them, better than I could, by reading Clarissa, Aurora and Delphine .

The only criticism I might be tempted to suggest to Morand is that he sometimes uses imagery other than the inevitable images. Now, all approximate images do not count. Water (given certain conditions) boils at one hundred degrees. At ninety-eight, at ninety-nine, the phenomenon does not occur. Therefore, better not to have any images. Put someone who knows neither Wagner nor Beethoven in front of a piano for six months and let him try out every combination of notes on the keys that happen to occur to him, never from out of this jumble of notes will he give birth to the Spring theme in Die Walküre or the pre-Mendelssohnian (or rather infinitely super-Mendelssohnian) phrase of the Fifteenth Quartet. It is the same criticism that might have been levelled at Péguy while he was alive, of trying to say something in ten different ways, when there is only one. The glory of his admirable death has expunged everything.

It seems as if hitherto it has been in French and foreign mansions, built by architects inferior to Daedalus, that our minotaur Morand has sought the meanderings of his “vast retreat”, as Phèdre calls it in the scene to which I have just alluded. There he lies in wait for the young girls in their gowns, their sleeves fluttering like wings, who have been unwise enough to descend into the Labyrinth. I do not know these mansions any better than he does and would be of no use to him “in unwinding the uncertain predicament”. But if, before he becomes an Ambassador and competes with Consul Beyle, he wishes to visit the Hôtel de Balbec, then I will offer him the fatal thread.

C’est moi, prince, c’est moi dont l’utile secours

Vous a du labyrinthe enseigné les détours .*

* ’ Tis I, prince, ’tis I whose valuable assistance/Has taught you the winding path out of the labyrinth.

I KNEW YOU, Clarissa, in happy days. Those days, filled so easily with our petty cares, recalled your glass cabinets, too narrow to contain the thousand pointless and precious knick-knacks that you loved. We used to meet every night in the best lit, most sonorous houses in town, where we would dance. Sleep would later carry me far into the day and often the ringing of the telephone would wake me up:

“Look out of the window,” you would say, “I am sending you a beautiful cloud!”

I scarcely had time to put down the receiver (for our houses were next door to one another), I ran barefoot to the window and I saw coming towards me, trailing across the sky, the pink or grey mass you had told me about, heavy and as if weighed down with the welcome it brought me.