"Monsieur Rose" a short story by Iréne Nemirovsky (1940)

"He was as aloof and self-contained as a cat. His life was an easy one; he had never married; and he was rich."  Opening line of "Monsieur Rose

My Posts on Iréne Némirovsky 

An Excellent Short Biography

As I mentioned in my post on "The Onlooker" by Iréne Nemirovsky (1903 to 1942) the French brought to perfection the character of the older never married rich and refined man.  He is perhaps to be considerd uncle of the Dandy.   The opening lines of the story, quoted above, evoke him perfectly.  

As the story line develops Paris is beginning to be overtaken by a fear of invasion.  Monsieur Rose was one of the first Parisians to own a gas mask.  This story and "The Onlooker" are considerd sort of development stories for Suite Francaise.  His flight from Paris as the Germans advance throws him into another world. The close of the story is very intense.  His world is shattered.

Mel u

"The South Devil" by Constance Fenimore Woolson (1880, in The Atlantic, included in Rodman the Keeper Southern Sketches)

 The Constance  Fenimore Woolson Society. 

Contains a good short bio and a list of her works.

Homepage of Anne Boyd Rioux

My Posts on Constance Fenimore Woolson 

"The South Devil" is set in Florida as are two other stories in Rodman the Keeper Southern Sketches.  The dominating  feature of this story, to me, was the portrait of a Florida swamp.  Themain characters   in the story are two step-brothers.  One is hard working, strong and sensible.  The other sickly, of little common sense, with chronic lung problems.  The sensible brother brought his brother to Florida in hopes the warm climate would be good for him.

The story begins with a beautiful description of a Florida Liveoak Hammock, an enclave carved out of the wilderness. In the Florida stories by Woolson I have read she does a wonderful job of creating a sense of history of Florida as the first part of what is now the USA settled by Europeans.  I don't have an exact time fix on the story but 1870 seems right.  Florida is a place in decay,  just the enviorment tears down people and buildings.

The pairing of the two brothers is interesting. There are interesting back stories on the two brothers, who are not really brothers, this is important for our understanding of the depth of goodness in the one brother.  There is an artic expedition that did not go well at all and a thwarted love.

Above all in the story is the swamp, almost surrealistically rendered as a place of very dark beauty where death can come at anytime from snakes, alligators, poisoness spiders and sheer exhaustion.  The weaker brother is fascinated by the swamp.  There is a very scary segment in which the strong brother has to go into the swamp to find his brother who has to be carried out.  They spend a night in the swamp, fending off water moccasins and praying for dawn. 

There are interesting developments and a staggering betrayal and a stunning revelation in "The South Devil".  The story is also a great resource for those into Florida history.  The characters of the two brothers are very interesting.  If there is a weakness in the story it is in the account of the love  interest.  

There are four  stories in Rodman  The Keeper Southern Sketches that I have not yet read.  I think I will read them next.  

I am pondering a post sort of treating the similarities and differences of Constance Fenimore Woolson with two other writers I love, Clarice Lispector and Iréne Nemirovsky. 

Mel u

 

"The Onlooker" by Iréne Nemirovsky (1939)

"‘Old Fontenelle used to insist that no sorrow, however wretched, could survive an hour’s reading. But for me it isn’t books or works of art that console me, it’s the contemplation of our imperfect world.’

Reading the work of Iréne Nemirosky (1903 to 1942) is an exquisite experience.  One of the character types brought to perfection in French Literature is that of the older never married wealthy man of the world, a man who dines at the finest restaurants of Paris in the company of a countess from an ancient family after a night at a theatrical performance of a work by Racine.  He ends his evening either at home alone or in a brothel. He is spectator at the game of life.  We find his beginnings in Balzac and maybe his ultimate refinement in Proust.  He is related to the Dandy.  (The definitive reference on this is probably  The History of the European Dandy by Theodora Boussweau, 1946)

I love the beginning of this story.  A very wealthy older man is dining in a wonderful restaurant, a small place known not yet in the world of Parisian gourmands. He is in the company of an older woman, a very intriguing figure.   I loved the descriptions of the dinner.

"They had eaten well. The creaminess of the quenelles brought out the truffles’ deep, dark flavour: not too overpowering, but blending in with the tender flesh of the fish and the delicate, white sauce, rather as the deep notes of the cello had mingled with the sound of the piano in the delightful concerto he had heard yesterday. If one used one’s imagination and experience it was possible, thought Hugo Grayer, to extract the maximum pleasure from life, and innocent enjoyment. After the exquisite and complex taste of the quenelles, the Châteaubriand steak with potatoes had an austere simplicity reminiscent of classical design. They had drunk a small amount of wine –Hugo had a delicate liver –but it was a 1924 Château Ausone. What a bit of luck it had been to discover such a rare wine in an apparently simple restaurant."  

This story is the most directly Anti-Nazi work of Nemirosky with which I am acquainted.  It depicts a city waiting to be invaded by the Germans.  Hugo thinks with great despair of the possible bombing of Norte Dame. The thoughts of Hugo, one of the richest men in Uruguay, are treasures.  He appreciates Paris as the zenith of European culture and is horrified by the prospect of the destruction of the city he foresees.  

I find I want to quote more from the story so I can savior the experience.

"It was an August day in Paris, on the Quai d’Orléans by the Seine. Hugo kept congratulating himself that this year he had postponed his departure to Deauville: the weather was fine and Magda quite entertaining. He did not like dining with pretty girls; at his age it was better to keep his pleasures separate. For a lunch like this what he needed was a hardboiled, cynical old American such as Magda, who appreciated her food and had good taste in wine.  He had always been admired for his taste, his wealth, his splendid collection of porcelain, his knowledge of ancient Greek writers, his generosity and his intelligence. He did not need other people’s admiration, yet Magda amused him. It was better, and more unusual, to be amused than admired . . . better and more unusual to be amused than loved. ‘Egoist.’ "

Hugo decides he must leave France, he books first class passage back to South America.  The story of Hugo takes a terrible turn, rendered beyond perfectly by Nemirosky. 

Mel u

"The Spell" by Iréne Nemirosky (1936)

A Short Story Set in the Ukraine by the Author of Suite Francaise 

My Posts on Iréne Némirovsky 

An Excellent Short Biography

Like almost everyone else, my literary love affair with Iréne Nemirosky (1903 to 1942) began with her Suite Francaise.  I have so far had the great pleasure and honor of reading eight of her fifteen novels and two of her fifty or so short stories.  

Lately I have been reading very dark stories by  Clarice Lispector and Constance Fenimore Woolson.  In a while I will write a post talking about all three together.  In a quick note, all died two young, two were descended from Eastern Euopean Jews that emigrated to avoid the anti-semiticism of their ancestoral home.  I will never escape the incredible evil inherent in Nemirosky's death in Auschwitz.  

I am delighted to have recently acquired a collection of ten of her short stories.  I have already posted on the title story.  "The Spell" centers  on the teenage girls of a wealthy family in the the Ukraine.  They live in a world of pleasure without a care in the world.  The descriptions of the family house with many retainers and a gorgeous dining routine that certainly made me jealous are beautiful and made me wish and feel I was there.  The girls gossip and wonder about the adults who often visit, some times for weeks.  They are trying to understand tne mystery of love.  One of the girls claims she can cast love spells.  Tne central "action" of the story comes when the other girls demand she cast a spell.

This story was a great pleasure to read, perhaps a relief from the witchcraft of Lispector and the misery of Woolson's stories.  

My great thanks to Max u for the Amazon Gift Card that allowed me to acquire this book.

Mel u

"In Cotton Country" by Constance Fenimore Woolson (1878, included in Rodman the Keeper Southern Sketches)

"The woman's face baffled me, and I do not like to be baffled. It was a face that was old and at the same time young; it had deep lines, it was colorless, and the heavy hair was gray; and still I felt that it was not old in years, but that it was like the peaches we find sometimes on the ground, old, wrinkled, and withered, yet showing here and there traces of that evanescent bloom which comes before the ripeness. The eyes haunted me; they haunt me now, the dry, still eyes of immovable, hopeless grief." from "In Cotton Country"

Homepage of The Constance  Fenimore Woolson Society. 

Homepage of Anne Boyd Rioux

My Posts on Constance Fenimore Woolson 

As I listened spell bound to the beyond heartbreaking story of the once aristocratic woman at the center of "In Cotton Country" I began to hear in a waking dream The Band singing "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down", then I began to hear Joan Baez's rendering of this song about defeat, watching the enemy, people below you in every way, occupy your land, take the very best from you and yours.  In my limited reading of Woolson, so far seven short stories, I see a deep fascination with aristocrats of fallen cultures.  In the Italian stories it is the glory days of the Medici and Renissance culture.  Venice, a city she loved and wrote about with her full heart, was once a great power.  By the times Woolson experienced the city, it was a place for tourists, expatriate artists, and the decadent

rich.  The fallen aristocrats of America in 1878 were the old planter caste of the Confederate states. Like the White Russians, the aristocrats of America's South had blood on their hands, they were from a morally  decadent culture based on slavery just like the White Russians and the Samuri.  The southern stories of Woolson I have so far read, are about a culture in transition, about people lost in the shuffle.

As of right now there is sadly little interest in the Book Blog World in Catherine Fenimore Woolson.  I hope this will changed when the two books by Anne Boyd Rioux become available in February of next year.   I have completed her biography Constance Fenimore Woolson Portrait of a Lady Novelist and it is a master work.  

This story gives us an exquisite look at the terrible destruction of the old south through an extended description of a ruined cotton field.  We see the terrible driven by a lust for revenge done to the south by the northern troops.   The narrator comes upon a broken down old house.  He expects it will perhaps be occupied by ex-slaves.  Instead he encounters a very strange woman, I quote her at the first of this post.  The story she tells the narrator about how she ended up living where she is with a young boy is the soul of this story.  It is just an amazing story, deeply emotional born of total desolation, hopelessness.  

Mel u

"Another Couple of Drunks" by Clarice Lispector (1953)

The Complete Short Stories of Clarice Lipsector, published August, 2015, translated by Katrina Dodson, edited and introduced by Benjamin Moser 

With the publication of this collection, it is as if a star has exploded in the short story world.  Many will see her stories as among the greatest of their lifetime reading experiences.  Some will not feel her power.  Benjamin Moser says her work is "witchcraft, not literature".  

I think soon her stories will be heavily analyzed by post-colonial scholars, feminist readers, South American studies, and those who follow the lead of Moser and see her as in the tradition of Jewish writers.  Historians of race and social class in Brazil will find her works a gold mind.  I also strongly urge the reading of Benjamin Moser's biography.  Her works will be studied as if they are texts in an ancient religion, ones for a dark time like those we may now be entering.  I know those who have not yet entered her world or even heard of her will find my words hyperbolic.  On the other side, there will be found those who will say I am holding back, not articulating her full power.  

My Prior Posts on Clarice Lispector 

Have you ever, late at night and if you were very fortunate in Rio de Janeiro, went out to the bars and even the streets looking for an anonymous person to have sex with?  Well if you have I think Lispector has depicted the experience, as seen through the eyes of a cultured refined, very well, in all its  bad faith and darkness.  If you have, as of course you have not, not ever done this then this story may let you see how it feels.  At the very least we you can fantasize you are in a bar in Copacabana and a gourious Carioca seems to be looking at you with hungry eyes.  

As the story begins the narrator has spotted the man she wants, drunk in a late night bar.  Of course she has read great books, studied the thoughts of the Buddha and can trace her ancestors back many generations where the drunk can do none of these things. Or so she thinks.  But wait, after she, I am assuming g the narrator is a woman, has paid for his drinks he seems not to want to have sex with her.  How can he so dare?  

She begins to walk the streets looking for anyone to have sex with, desperate for a release that this purely physical act can, she hopes bring her.  We get the feeling this is something she has done before.  She has to denigrate those she encounters to put herself above them, almost as if they are but animals in comparison to her.  Maybe she does not realize they look at her in the same way.

Mel u

"King David" by Constance Fenimore Woolson (1878, included in Rodman The Keeper Southern Sketches)

Homepage of The Constance  Fenimore Woolson Society. 

The woman's face baffled me, and I do not like to be baffled. It was a face that was old and at the same time young; it had deep lines, it was colorless, and the heavy hair was gray; and still I felt that it was not old in years, but that it was like the peaches we find sometimes on the ground, old, wrinkled, and withered, yet showing here and there traces of that evanescent bloom which comes before the ripeness. The eyes haunted me; they haunt me now, the dry, still eyes of immovable, hopeless grief. an excellent biographical sketch and a list of her works that can be found online

Homepage of Anne Boyd Rioux

My Posts on Constance Fenimore Woolson 

Constance Fenimore Woolson was considered, as I learned from my reading of the marvelous biography Constance Fenimore Woolson Portrait of a Lady Novelist by Anne Boyd Rioux, one of the first and perhaps the greatest literary chroniclers of the life of the defeated States after the America Civil War (1861 to 1865), especially that of the plantation owning aristocrats.  Aristocrats of a defeated culture seem to have a universal literary appeal.   For example, Japanese literature and cinema is replete with stories about the Samuri.  There is no more romantic literary figure than a White Russian Count living in exile in Paris.  Likewise the old "planter caste" was subject to heavy literary romantic treatment, maybe flowering in Gone with the Wind.  In the movie, 1939, based on the book Southerns of the richer classes felt because they were "Gentlemen" they could naturally outfight barbaric Yankee Northerns.  The defeat was a very bitter dose of reality to swallow.  The American North was seen as industrialized, devoid of old culture.  The South was seen as agrarian, with leaders educated in the classics.   

One very huge social problem faced after the Civil War was the basic survival of millions of freed slaves, few were at all literate or had any conception of life outside of being a slave.  They were also given the right to vote so, compressing a lot of history, venal politicians and businessmen, know as "Carpert Baggers", began to court their votes with absurd promises.  On the other hand, well meaning people, often with the backing of Northern churches, began to set up schools to educate the freed slaves.  "King David" is the story of David King, a young idealistic Northern man's efforts to teach at such a school.  

The teacher had a very hard task.  He also has to overcome his own prejudices and he strains to see ex-slaves as intellectually on a par with whites.  Woolson in her depiction of the freed slaves allows us to see the difficulty the slaves have of relating to tne teacher.  They by habit call all white men "Master" and this upsets David.  We see the very real challenge in teaching the ex-slaves.  I wondered as I read this how this story would go over taught in a environment  of extreme political correctness. David meets a firmer planter who obviously hates him as fool come down to turn the ex-slaves against their former masters.  According to my quick research, huge numbers of slaves did starve to death while many remained on the plantations, loyal to their old masters.  We also meet a very nasty business man who begins to sell alcohol to the ex-slaves.  In one very poignant paragraph Woolson presents to us the impact of this on the beaten faces of the women, now often forced to support their children alone.  

The story teaches us a lot in a few pages about life in the American South right after the war.  There is a risk in using non standard speech for the ex-slaves but I think Woolson succeeds beautifully.

The conclusion of the story, which I will leave untold, is very moving.  

I will next read her "In the Cotton Country".

Mel u