Francoise Sagan--Bonjour Tristesse (1955)

"The tremendous interest aroused by this very short novel, and its big sale, can perhaps be attributed chiefly to the interest in its youthful author, who was 16 (ed--most sources say 18, but still precocious) when she wrote it. Mlle. Sagan is the contemporary and authentic voice of the "beat generation", in her native France affected by existentialism and living in shameless pursuit of thrills, speed in sport cars and rhythm in music. Nevertheless Mlle. Sagan has undoubted genius as a writer. She became the idol of teenage Paris and fulfilled her promise by almost killing herself in a motor accident. John Steinbeck satirized her in passing in his novel The Short Reign of Pippin IV."--IWE


Francoise Sagan was the latest born (1935) of all the writers on this circa 1960-composed list. She died in 2004, the author of many books and plays, though none of her later works equaled the success and influence of this, her first novel (she remained a colorful and adventurous figure throughout her career, being convicted for cocaine possession as late as the 1990s). In retrospect it is a little difficult to appreciate what the big deal was. At the time the book was considered something of a French (and female) counterpart to Catcher in the Rye in its depiction of stylishly jaded affluent young people, but the writing isn't on that level. Even though it is only 128 pages the plot moves along rather slowly and in truth not a great deal happens--it probably could have been even shorter than it was without any sacrifice of quality. By current standards the famously scandalous parts of it are not all that alarming--even the (largely blase) parts where the 17 year old Cecile goes to bed with her 25 year old boyfriend, while they might officially be met with distaste and disapproval in the present environment, are obviously neither dark nor dangerous in the way that one would expect such an "inappropriate" relationship to be. Escapism for repressed (really repressed) women perhaps? This doesn't seem like a book that men at that time, especially older men, would have been that interested in, though obviously someone was buying all of those little red printings of the book during its initial success that I have come across dozens of copies of in used book stores over the years.

Having said all of this, I still liked it and am glad to have finally read it, as it was something of a cultural touchstone during the 50s and even long afterwards, when it would be referred to mockingly in association with wide-eyed American tourists, especially women, with silly or exaggerated romantic notions of France. If it were 400 pages I don't think there would be much justification for still reading it, but at the length it is, and as it does partake of the attractive spare, pointed French literary style that was prevalent in the 40s and 50s, I think it is worthwhile. I know that others are, supposedly, engaging with books more pertinent to the present hour, about critical race theory and structural injustices and the like, while I am hiding out on summer vacation on the Riviera in the 1950s, towards the end of which my sentiment was, "more of this candy, please."


Just a few short quotes, as always for the sake of my own remembrance.


pp.9-10 "Although I did not share my father's intense aversion to ugliness--which often led us to associate with stupid people--I did feel vaguely uncomfortable in the presence of anyone completely devoid of physical charm. Their resignation to the fact that they were unattractive  seemed to me somehow indecent."


p. 13 "He refused categorically all ideas of fidelity or serious commitments. He explained that they were arbitrary and sterile."


p. 19 "'What you call types of mind are only mental ages.' I was delighted with her remark. Certain phrases fascinate me with their subtle implications, even though I may not altogether understand their meaning. I told Anne that I wanted to write her comment in my notebook."


p. 54 "They had a night of love to look forward to; I had Bergson."


I just recently acquired some writings by Bergson. He was one of the three writers included in the edition of the Nobel Prize Library I got in order to read the last selection for this list (Benavente).


p. 64 "She brought with her the aura of a kept woman, of bars, of gay evenings, which reminded me of happier days."


p. 97 "At six o'clock we drove off in Ann's car. It was a huge American convertible, which she kept more for publicity than to suit her own taste, but it suited mine down to the ground, with all its shiny gadgets."


p. 104 "It amused me to think that if one told the truth when drunk, nobody believed it."

I seriously would have bought this if I could have found any that were currently for sale.



p. 105 "Already I almost shared Anne's condescending attitude toward our friends; it was catching."


p. 114 "How difficult she made life for us through her dignity and self-respect." 


The Competition


1. Jodi Picoult--Small Great Things...……………………………………..11,183
2. Mary Ann Shaffer--The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society.....7,452
3. Ann Patchett--The Dutch House...…………………………………………….3,215
4. An Affair to Remember (movie-1957)……………………………………2,338
5. Ernest Hemingway--A Moveable Feast...………………………………...1,325
6. Sebastian Barry--Days Without End...……………………………………...803
7. Matthew Quick--Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock...…………………………334
8. Daniel Mendelsohn--An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic...………...205
9. The Affair (TV--Season 5, Episode 4)……………………………………...203
10. Brenda J. Webb--Mr Darcy's Forbidden Love...…………..……………...141
11. Willow Aster--Downfall...………………………………………………...131
12. Jane Porter--The Good Wife...……………………………………………...85
13. Cyril C. Richardson--Early Christian Fathers.............................................64
14. L'Hotel de la Plage (movie--1978)...............................................................53
15. James Martin SJ--A Jesuit Off-Broadway.....................................................37
16. Marlene Riggs--Love Me Best.......................................................................16




Round of 16


#1 Picoult over #16 Riggs


I'm not going to read a Jodi Picoult book if I can help it (I actually started one once back when she was really popular and had to give up pretty quickly) but she can still beat a standard order romance novel.


#2 Shaffer over #15 Martin


This was an extremely close game as the books were nearly identical in length and apparent quality. I gave the nod to Shaffer as this is the second time recently--perhaps the second time in a row--that this book has qualified for the tournament, and that experience begins to count for something in the early rounds.


#3 Patchett over #14 L'Hotel de la Plage


Patchett is a former champion of this tournament, for the somewhat acclaimed novel Bel Canto, which I however did not like very much. This movie, a 1970s French beach flick, though necessarily defeated here, looks interesting.

#13 Richardson over #4 An Affair to Remember
#5 Hemingway over #12 Porter
#11 Aster over #6 Barry


The Barry book received some acclaim, but it was fated to be the victim of an upset here.


#7 Quick over #10 Webb
#8 Mendelsohn over #9 The Affair


There is a decent selection of books here which for the most part did not have to face each other in the first round.


Elite 8


#13 Richardson over #1 Picoult
#2 Shaffer over #11 Aster
#8 Mendelsohn over #3 Patchett


This was another tightly contested matchup. Patchett's book was even a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. I was swayed in the end by the lingering memory that I found her other book to be quite overrated.


#7 Quick over #5 Hemingway


Upset special. I haven't looked at the Peacock book to this point, so I don't know yet how formidable it may or may not be, but Hemingway was the heavy favorite to win the championship here, obviously, and he is knocked out.


Final Four


#2 Shaffer over #13 Richardson
#8 Mendelsohn over #7 Peacock


The Peacock book seems to fall into the Young Adult category, which puts it at a disadvantage.


Championship


#8 Mendelsohn over #2 Shaffer


This Mendelsohn is just too heavy-hitting of a guy to go against in this spot. He is one of those resume monsters, of exalted American birth and exquisite upbringing and education. He has been eating, breathing and sleeping culture and learning at pretty much the highest levels this society has to offer for a long time. Better luck next time, Shaffer, if we see you again.

That skull!

Jacinto Benavente y Martinez--The Bonds of Interest (1907)

Jacinto Benavente, a prolific Spanish playwright, was another Nobel Prize winner (1922), which I am sure is the reason he has turned up on this list. I am glad that he did, because he is a kind of author that I like--a true old European, deeply rooted in one of the central cultural traditions of the continent, wry, humane, familiar without being stodgy or obvious. Born into a comfortable family--his father was a surgeon in Madrid--in 1866, Benavente was studying law when he abandoned this to lead a Bohemian lifestyle in the cafes of the Spanish capital. From this point up until about World War I he led what I would regard as a charmed existence. His witty personality, fashionable dress, and ready supply of money caused him to be readily welcomed into the interesting society of Madrid's leading young artists and intellectuals. Developing an especial interest in the theater, he began to try his hand at writing plays, and after about ten failed efforts, he succeeded in persuading the director of the Comedy Theater to produce one, at which time he was 28 years, which seems in most cases to be right around the make or break age for being embarked upon the road to literary greatness. This initial play was not a huge success, but it enabled him to produce other, and increasingly better, plays in the ensuing years, by which time it was 1898, a year of crisis in Spain--she was defeated in the Spanish-American War and lost her last two colonies, Cuba and the Philippines--and Benavente, belonging to the rising generation of writers who seemed comparatively modern and fresh, rose to pre-eminence in the Spanish theater for the next two decades. The later part of his life after he won the Nobel Prize saw him increasingly buffeted by the ever more complicated turns of Spanish politics after World War I. He had a falling out with the Royalist government in the 1920s which caused his plays to be banned for a number of years. During the Spanish Civil War, by which time he was nearly seventy, he came out so strongly against the Republican side that he was placed under house arrest, though later "the editor of a Marxist paper...extracted a declaration from him which was in principle favorable to the Republican people's cause." The biographical sketch of him given in the Nobel Prize Library (1971) notes that "This kind of turnabout, of which there were many examples in Benavente's life, seems to be opportunism ever so slightly tinged with cynicism. Perhaps Benavente's veerings of opinion and tackings to and fro were simply the results of momentary enthusiasm, all the more keen if the subject was a new one, or of an impulse which was sincere at the time, but which he was unable to sustain for long." He died in 1954 at age 88 in his house in Madrid, "almost completely forgotten", according to my edition of his book. 

I do not usually go on at such great biographical length in these reports, but I found this author's life to be particularly interesting at least for my favored themes, and I also think he is comparatively unknown to present day Americans.

The IWE introduction does not say anything particularly noteworthy. It notes that Benavente "wrote this play as a farce along the traditional lines of the Italian comedy" and that it "is set in the 17th century and uses an old theme (its similarity to Farquhar's The Beaux' Stratagem is immediately apparent)." I did not actually think of the Beaux' Stratagem at all while I was reading this, probably because the setting, rather than taking place in the inns and carriages and dark nighttime roads of 18th century England, is in the southern European world of sunshine, poor itinerant poets, swarthy sequestered beauties, haughty quick-tempered gentlemen, and the general atmosphere of social life as partaking of the elements of a carnival which has been carried through well into our own time in the movies of Fellini and the various artwork of the magic realism school. My being a more emotionally responsive than cerebral type of art-consumer, it is to be expected that I would be struck in this way.

The general plot of this is that there is one character in the play who possesses a great deal of money, and around fifteen who are either in debt to or owed money by each other which they have no means of paying or collecting, so a number of conspiracies are set afoot which involve luring the rich man's daughter into a marriage by which each of the various characters, by their particular role in the procurement/upholding the necessary deceptions, etc, will in the end be paid off. It is pretty clever and lends itself to humorous exchanges and self-justifications for deceitful behaviors and so forth.

In the prologue, the main character and architect of the outrageous scheme, Crispin, addresses the audience. "The author is aware that so primitive a spectacle is unworthy of the culture of these days...He only asks that you should make yourself as young as possible. The world has grown old, but art never can reconcile itself to growing old, and so, to seem young again, it descends to these fripperies."

No more notes until Act II. Dona Sirena, who needs her fete for the heiress to go off so that she can get paid off by whichever indigent gentleman she can mange to get her married to, is unhappy that the cooks, musicians and servants are threatening to refuse to show up unless they are paid beforehand. "The rogues! The brood of vipers! Whence does such insolence spring? Were these people not born to serve? Are they to be paid nowadays in nothing but money? Is money the only thing which has value in the world?"

I am already to the 3rd and final act, though at this point my note-taking picks up a little. I just like the expression here. "Come in, my beautiful Columbine! Do not be afraid...We are all your friends, and our mutual friendship will protect you from our mutual admiration."  



There are not many options for finding this play in English. I ordered Volume I of a set of Benavente's plays published by Scribner's in 1923, just after he won the Nobel, but unfortunately the morons I ordered it from sent me Volume II, which contains "No Smoking", "Princess Bebe", The Governor's Wife", and "Autumnal Roses", doubtless all fine works, which I would be interested in reading some day, but no "Bonds of Interest." So I went back to the drawing board and ordered this Nobel Prize Library edition, which seemed like it might be less easy for the flunkeys in the shipping department to mess up. These are the kind of books made for wannabes like myself that look handsome and classy but if you actually try to read them the spine comes off in about three days (I own a lot of these types of books). The other work of Benavente's included in this collection by the way is "La Malquerida" ("The Wrongly Loved") which is widely regarded as his other great work along with "Los Intereses Creados".

"Love is all subtleties and the greatest subtlety of them all is not that lovers deceive others--it is that they can so easily deceive themselves." A common sentiment but worth repeating.

A lawyer joke. "Can it be that all those glorious exploits of Mantua and Florence have been forgotten? Don't you recall that famous lawsuit in Bologna? Three thousand two hundred pages of testimony already admitted against us before we withdrew in alarm at the sight of such prodigious expansive ability!" The evocation of the glorious ancient cities of Italy, where do they go from here? They remained something of what they have always been even down to our own times, but can they really go on as they have been in this relentless 21st century world that seems to despise and suspect anything that smacks of the past? I also think on my first reading of this passage I read "expensive" instead of "expansive" which to me would have made for a funnier joke.

The chief qualities of this play are its good-nature and ingenuity. 

Since I had the Nobel Prize Library edition, there was some more inside information about the 1922 prizes than you would get elsewhere. The other finalists for the literature prize that year were another Spaniard (Angel Guimera y Jorge) and two Czechs (Alois Jirasek and Otokar Brezina) whom I have never heard of, and the by then 82 year old Thomas Hardy, who had however been nominated several times by that point and whom the committee seemed to have determined never to award the Prize, as has been the case with numerous prominent English-speaking writers through the years. Benavente was in South America at the time of his victory and did not attend the award ceremony in Stockholm. "Was it because he knew of the coolness with which the news of his award had been received by the literary world...?" the Nobel Prize Library asks, "Or was it because he was afraid of having to play too obscure a part, overshadowed by those two world-famous giants of science, Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, who were going to collect their prizes at the same time?" I suppose we'll never know, but it is true that one advantage the literature prize winner usually has over the genius scientists is that his celebrity and cultural influence, at least in his home language, is usually somewhat greater, and his acceptance speech generally the one of most interest to the ordinary educated public. It is not often that they run up against crossover rock stars of the likes of Einstein and Bohr.  

One thing I look forward to in helping me speed up my course through this list in the (still distant) future is that I will have more time to bang out these reports more quickly. It only took me a couple of days to read the play but it's taken me nearly two weeks to write this blog post, without completing which I cannot move on to the next book. I am so desperate to finish this tonight that I typing this at 1 am on the computer in my basement, which room reeks of cat urine, in partial darkness because my overhead light bulb has burnt out. I am a serious blog writer, and these are the conditions I find myself having to work in. 

Illustration from the Nobel Prize Library. I like it, it's kind of early Picasso-esque, right, it evokes an idea of the Spanish artistic sensibility in the early 20th century for the type of person who would collect cheaply bound volumes with the Nobel Prize seal on their covers. 

The Challenge
1. Kevin Kwan--Crazy Rich Asians...…………………………………..5,027
2. John Boyne--The Heart's Invisible Furies...………………………….1,598
3. Kate Morton--The Distant Hours...…………………………………..1,509
4. Brenda Jackson--A Lover's Vow...……………………………………...602
5. Sarah MacDonald--Holy Cow: An Indian Adventure...………………...327
6. The Exterminating Angel (movie-1962)………………………………..114
7. Miranda Kennedy--Sideways on a Scooter...…………………………...110
8. Namwali Serpell--The Old Drift...……………………………………….82
9. Frank Abagnale--The Art of the Steal...………………………………….77
10. Shoshan Bantwal--The Dowry Bride...…………………………………54
11. J. S. Le Fanu--Uncle Silas...…………………………………………….43
12. Jessa Crispin--The Dead Ladies Project...……………………………...29
13. The New Interpreter's Bible...…………………………………………..17
14. John Vorhaus--Comedy Writing For Life...……………..……………...13
15. Maryvonne Fent--The 35 Cent Dowry...………………………………..13
16. Dannagal Goldthwaite Young--Irony & Outrage...……………………...9


One of the keywords in this edition of the competition was "dowry" which seems to account for the preponderance of books with an Indian setting or theme.

Round of 16
#16 Young over #1 Kwan
I had been interested in reading the Crazy Rich Asian books and at least anticipated Kwan's going deep into the tournament at least, but it got a first round matchup against a shorter book that I can actually read (about polarization in American media) so it goes down in something of a shock.
#15 Fent over #2 Boyne
Boyne is over 700 pages and it sounds formulaic rather than thought-provoking--sounds.
#14 Vorhaus over #3 Morton
Another contest decided by the length of the books.
#4 Jackson over #13 New Bible
Because I am not going to read this Bible.
#5 MacDonald over #12 Crispin
This was a pretty even battle, both books appearing to be travelogues of sorts written by Generation X women. MacDonald wins based on the seeding.
#11 Le Fanu over #6 Exterminating Angel
The movie actually should win here, but I mainly have them in here as a way to jumble up the early rounds for the books. I put all of the ones that qualify into my watch list anyway.
#7 Kennedy over #10 Bantwal
Kennedy is yet another Generation X woman who walked away from the rat race (in which she at least appeared to have been not just taking part, but succeeding) to go have adventures and gain insight into the human condition in India. I can't get enough of this.
#9 Abagnale over #8 Serpell
The Serpell book has been hailed in some quarters as a masterpiece, or near masterpiece, but it's a tournament of matchups, and generally speaking, a shorter book that is plausibly entertaining is going to beat you.


Elite 8
#16 Young over #4 Jackson
The Jackson looks like some kind of romance novel.
#5 MacDonald over #15 Fent
#14 Vorhaus over #7 Kennedy
Vorhaus is really short. That is deadly to opponents in the early rounds.
#9 Abagnale over #11 Le Fanu
Le Fanu's book is a Victorian Gothic mystery. This was a competitive game, but I am in the mood for a more modern book at this time.


Final Four
#5 MacDonald over #16 Young
I'm kind of leaning towards seeing a travel book win here.
#9 Abagnale over #14 Vorhaus
Maybe I should read a guide to comedy writing at some point, but I don't feel like doing it now.


Championship
#5 MacDonald over #9 Abagnale
The book put up for this competition was not Abagnale's chef d'oeuvre, Catch Me If You Can, which was famously adapted for the movies by Steve Spielberg. So I'm going with the white Australian lady's journey to India. I haven't read a travel book in a while, maybe since Bruce Chatwin's epic victory here?

July 2020

A List: Alfred North Whitehead--Modes of Thought..........................................98/174

B List: Between books right now

C List: Laurens Van der Post--Jung and the Story of Our Time...……………221/276

I didn't know anything about Alfred North Whitehead before taking this up--I thought he was some kind of literary critic--but it turns out he was a prominent mathematician who turned to philosophy later in life. Modes of Thought is a collection of lectures he gave, 6 at Wellesley College and 2 at the University of Chicago, in 1937 and 1938, when he was a professor at Harvard after having come over from his native England. He was a leading proponent of something called process philosophy. He certainly writes like a serious philosopher, and not of the rambunctious Nietzsche or Schopenhauer type, but very dry, concerned with the pure nature of thought and perception (the sentence where I left off was "The peculiarities of the individuals are reflected in the peculiarities of the common process which is their interconnection." Yeah). I am a little out of practice as far as reading this kind of book, so my concentration drifts in and out, but I have picked up that he is not believer in the Platonic concept that truth consists in static, unchanging, ideal forms, but that the meaning of things is to be found in their transitions and the way in which they become themselves. He is pretty persuasive about this. This is also reminiscent of William James's philosophy, I think, which also has the benefit of being more entertaining to read.

Coming to the end of the Van der Post book. As I noted in last month's check-in, he is not the greatest writer. This book is all right when Van der Post is relating anecdotes about Jung and his occasional interactions with other great intellects of his day (he seems to have worked mostly on his own though), less so when he is explaining the great man's ideas and breakthroughs. Neither of these books really fits in with the current zeitgeist; in fact Jung wrote something to the effect that modern Europeans--whether this applied to Americans or not I cannot tell, probably not--would ultimately have to rediscover their lost spiritual understanding through engagement with their own culture, that adopting say, Eastern wisdom, wise as it was (and Jung was apparently a serious student of it) would not answer. Something of this sort I suspect to be true among the confused and somewhat intellectually beleaguered white people of the present day, of whose number I certainly make one.     

My pictures for this month are not terribly exciting, since I haven't really been anywhere, and I don't think to take a lot of pictures anyway. Most of these are the result of my children getting hold of the phone, though they come up with some interesting snaps. Maybe by next month I will have at least made it to the beach, though I am told there are a lot of rules involved with doing this that threaten to dampen even that fun.  

Rattlesnake (?) on the patio in Vermont. I had been told that these kinds of snakes lived in the area. 

Afternoon cards. If I am going to put in pictures of the children, I ought to get all of them in.

Later in the evening the game moves indoors.

A very large moth on the front porch back in N.H.

The morning after we caught him slithering around, the snake left his skin out for us.

Cherry from the backyard tree.

My son who is supposed to be going to college next month. I still have a sneaking feeling it isn't going to come off.

Squirrel that my ever virtuous wife found as a hairless, starving infant abandoned to die by his own kind that she rescued and nurtured to almost full squirrel strength, though he is still too young to let go.

Our Fourth of July pictures were a little too cute to post on social media in this contentious environment, but I will bury one here to mark the occasion.