Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

Thinking of “Madame Bovary,” by Gustave Flaubert.

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“Madame Bovary” is exquisite, it is perfection, and it is also exquisitely painful. I do not think I will ever read it again. It is so perfectly rendered a work of fiction that it breaks the heart.

Emma Bovary is a silly woman of imaginations and pretensions. She marries a simple plodding doctor who thinks she is the best thing to have happened to him. He adores her; she is bored by him.

The tragedy of the novel is that Emma seeks love, acceptance and romance from trivial, undeserving men, when she can get all the love she wants from her accepting, adoring husband.

She carries on expensive flirtations, sinking further and further in debt. When her debts seems overwhelming, she swallows arsenic.

Charles, the true hero of the book, lives on, full of happy memories of his wife. He is, in a sense, the happiest, only satisfied character in the book, for he believed he had what he coveted, Emma’s love. After Emma’s death, everyone cheats him, claiming debts that Emma hadn’t in fact taken on. He overworks, his child gets ragged. When Emma’s perfidy is revealed, he dies of a broken heart. Her good daughter, Berthe, is sent to work in a factory.

Meanwhile, as a foil to the good honest doctor, there is a devious, scheming apotechary Monsieur Homais, who rises in the world even as the Emma falls. Finally, crowning injury, as Berthe grows more ragged, the Homais forbid their children to play with her.

It is in the verisimilitude of tiny details like that that Flaubert creates an absolutely memorable, absolutely believable book. No suspension of disbelief necessary. It could just as easily be a work of non-fiction so perfect are its details and characterization. In fact, Flaubert based his novel on a newspaper account of a silly provincial housewife whom he no doubt identified with. She was the road less travelled. Famously, and interestingly for a man of discipline as he undoubtedly was, he wrote, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.”

 

“The Little World of Don Camillo” by Giovanni Guareschi

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Charles Darwin said that as he aged fewer and fewer things gave him delight. That’s a melancholy reflection which I hope will not be true of me. However, it’s perhaps becoming a rarer experience for me to be totally seized with delight.

That however was my experience on reading The Little World of Don Camillo. I think I had encountered it years ago in my grandfather’s house, when I was around ten, along with Father Brown, and Georges Simenon. I read like a bulldozer then,  rapidly, compulsively, but haven’t returned to them–and only rarely to that way of reading.

Until now. With sheer delight. The ingenuity of his imagination! The loveableness of his characters. His understanding of the nature of prayer. His understanding of Christ, severe, with standards, yet willing to indulge and play with his faithful servant. With a sense of humour. Don Camillo chats with Christ much as Peter might have, and Christ’s responses, as unconventional as His were in real life, are wholly believable, though often surprising. I love their conversations.

“Speak Memory” by Vladimir Nabokov

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Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited

“Speak Memory” by Vladimir Nabokov is perhaps the most elegant memoir ever written. It is my favourite memoir, and one of my favourite books.Nabokov’s prose is so beautiful that all one can do is sigh.

Nabokov wrote his book in English, of course, but he was trilingual (Russian, French and English) from an early age, and his English has the sort of contorted, pretzel-like strangeness one frequently finds in the (perfectly correct) English prose of the bi-lingual–I think of the prose of Sara Suleri and Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy.

Nabokov describes, as one of his chapter titles puts it, a “Past Perfect,” a happy Russian boyhood, with books, and governesses, and wealth, and adoration, and time to pursue his many interests–butterflies, chess, books.

He was brilliant, and more importantly, blessed with a relatively easy-going temperament that enabled him to take the massive reverses of the Russian Revolution in his stride without bitterness, but with a philosophic, even amused, equanimity. That same essential stability of temperament enabled a happy and nourishing marriage amid all the vicissitudes of the emigre’s life.

If anything, being forced to produce literature to keep afloat increased his productivity, but to his credit, did not blunt the strangeness in him that gave him the courage to produce that most odd but stylistically and linguistically beautiful and heartbreaking book, “Lolita.”

A wonderful portrait of a vanished world! Full of sunlight and butterfly filled fields, and books and love!

 

Les Quatre Cents Coups by Francois Truffaut

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A French idiom for raising hell.

An exquisite film by Francois Truffaut. Jean-Pierre Leaud perfectly renders Antoine Doinel, the eternal scapegoat, caught in a heart-rending vicious circle in which the smallest offences call down disproportionate punishments, dealing with which catches Doinel in an eternal cycle of petty offence–unjust punishment–anger–offence.

I think of “Kes,” very similar to Les Quatre Cents Coups.

Salvation in each case comes with love and passion, in almost doesn’t matter for what. In Kes, it is for the lost art of falconry; for Doinel in Les Quatre Cents Coups, it was for the watching, study and ultimately making of movies.

Writing, painting, it almost doesn’t matter what; in love, whether for a person or craft, is indeed salvation.

Saul Bellow and Breaking through Writer’s Block.

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How Saul Bellow Broke Through a Crippling Writer’s Block

In 1949, Saul Bellow, thirty-three years old, with two books under his belt (Dangling Man and The Victim), was living in Paris on a Guggenheim fellowship, feeling pressured to produce a third book in line with the modernist minimalism that had ensured the critical success of the first two, and soon realized that he was harnessed to a novel for which he had no heart: the writing felt cramped, the vision received, the connection between himself and his material severely strained.

The situation made his face ache. Every morning he went off to work at his rented studio as though he were going to the dentist.

But one day, the sight of an unremarkable image changed everything. The Paris streets were flushed daily by open hydrants that allowed water to run along the curb, and on this particular morning Bellow noticed a dazzle of sunlight on the water that accentuated its flow. His spirits lifted, and he was made restless rather than depressed.

Suddenly there opened up before him the memory of a kid from his boyhood who used to yell out, “I got a scheme!” when they were playing checkers; then he recalled this kid’s vividly abnormal family; and then the Chicago streets from which they had all sprung up like weeds pushing through concrete. An urge to describe that long-ago life overcame him.

Instantly, the gloom disappeared, the unwanted novel got put aside, and Bellow began to write “in a spirit of reunion with the kid who had shouted, ‘I got a scheme!’”
Soon enough that kid got named Augie March, and around him an astonishing sentence structure began to form, one that instead of shaping the character seemed to release the character; and not just release him, but determine the course his adventures would take. Language and subject couldn’t chase each other fast enough. Bellow marveled at what was happening. It was as though these stories, these people, this word order had been locked up inside him for a lifetime. As he said years later of a character in Augie,“You might put it that he had been in hock for years; for decades. He and I together had been waiting for an appropriate language. By that language and only that language could he be redeemed.”
For the first time in his working life, Bellow felt he owned his writing. With those remembered rhythms in his ear, that syntax and vocabulary on his tongue—an amalgam of immigrant speech, tabloid reporting, and being told in school that “George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were your Presidents”—he could take a deep breath and exhale the poetic, ragged, semi-criminal world full of hungry expectation from which he had emerged. This language that came out of him now was not, strictly speaking, English; it was American—his American—a language, he said, laughing, that “was mine to do with as I wished.”
The Adventures of Augie March injected a sense of live movement into an atmosphere pervaded by the stagnancy of spirit—“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”—that had allowed Western literature to now live with itself. Alienation of the self was all well and good, Bellow’s intensely new American voice called out, but the fact remained that we were alive—alive and still yearning.
If anyone could make clear the bottomlessness of human yearning, it was Augie March. Here he was, a first-class hunger artist, pushing his way out of a garishly populated disenfranchisement that was, in its own way, a war zone, to claim his right to “not lead a disappointed life.”
In 1953 that thought was received, both in Europe and in the States, as a welcome aggression against the veneration of spiritual exhaustion that characterized serious literature of the moment. The aggression lay in the daring of the prose—the unexpected vocabulary, the liberty-taking sentences, the mongrel nature of its highbrow-lowbrow narration—in service, ultimately, to what felt like a piece of rescued wisdom about the meaning (that is, the origins) of a disappointed life.
From the get-go, Augie tells us that he’s never seen himself as anything other than a blank slate upon which “life” would write a story. “All the influences were lined up waiting for me,” he says. “I was born, and there they were to form me, which is why I tell you more of them than of myself.” It hasn’t occurred to him until now that his headlong plunge toward raw experience might prove paradoxically fateful, in that he was not only being made by the world but was himself doing quite a bit of the making. In calculating the cost of what has been lost, injured, or cast aside as he has moved frantically through his on-the-run life, Augie at last takes into account his own emotional unsteadiness. He has not, after all, fled the ghetto in one piece; there’s a leak in his appetite-filled heart. An inability to love reliably has made him culpable in the accumulation of sorrow laced inescapably through not only his destiny but, we come to feel along with him, that of all humanity. Never again would a character like Augie March hold the page in a Bellow novel, speculating with more gravity than irony, more tenderness than grievance, on the terrible dynamic in human affairs that implicates us all.
For Bellow, the writing of Augie March was pure joy. It was the joy that made his protagonist entranced by the surge of life within and around him; one proposition in the book never in question is that to live in pursuit of experience, whatever the consequence, is of irreducible value.  Vivian Gornick, Harper’s Magazine.
James Atlas: He liked to refer to his first books as his M.A. and his Ph.D. To my mind that’s an underestimation, a comic underestimation of those books which remind me of Dostoevski. They in themselves are not dutiful and earnest, but they do have a kind of moral patina about them. They’re narrow and confined, and the writing is spare and unadorned.
With Augie, he has this fantastic breakout where, as he liked to describe it, he was walking down a street in Paris one day and he saw water running down along the curb– you know, how when they wash the streets there the water courses in rivulets through the gutters–and maybe he was just being fanciful and mythifying his breakthrough, but said when he saw that rivulet he realized that was his style, that he wanted freedom. He wanted freedom to write in his own voice which was full of these jazzy rhythms and borrowed as much from Swift and Fielding as from the more narrow constraints of the nineteenth century novels of, say, Dostoevski’s The Dead.
He really wanted to break out and write in his own way, and when he realized that he didn’t have to be literary, as it were, when whatever he decided was literary was literary, that’s when he found his freedom. So, the book is great. He said later on that is was too sprawling, too exuberant, but that’s part of its charm.

Peace like a River by Leif Enger

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I am reading this, in a manner of speaking, listening to on tape, while I do the dishes, more precisely. Though I have a hard copy with me, as I like to do when I listen to books on tape, to revel in the loveliest passages, or to find out what’s going to happen when the suspense is too much. (I’m the sort of reader, who reads the last chapter whenever suspense builds, and then I can read, revelling in the architecture of the piece without worrying over the characters!)

Leif Enger’s book is full of the sadness that lies like a river over the best American novels I’ve read recently. The Good Mother, The Book of Ruth (okay, not that good), The Delta Wedding, Gilead, Housekeeping. The song of the sadness at the heart of the Universe, no less than the joy at the self-same heart.

It’s a darn good story too. Enger succeeds in bringing faith into fiction–what we have not seen with our eyes, or touched with our hands, but what we none the less believe concerning the word of life. Here is a novel full of faith and wonder. Highly recommended.

And the way things pan out is Biblical–so far (I am still reading it). They are kind to uninvited guests, sharing their last meals with them, so to say–and one of these, many, mostly ungrateful, guests, remembers them in his will, leaving them an Airstream trailer, at just the moment that the most desperate cry goes up from Jeremiah Lande, for a way of escape.

 

“Manon of the Spring” by Marcel Pagnol and the Justice of God

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I had first watched 4 Pagnol movies with Roy about 20 years ago. We watched them all this year this equal delight, My Father’s Glory, My Mother’s Castle, Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring.

We watched Manon yesterday.

It is gorgeous visually, of course, but on one level appears to be about mankind’s thirst for justice. In our hearts and spirits, stories somehow seem incomplete unless the good are rewarded, and the evil punished.

(As at some level, I believe they are in real life.)

In Jean de Florette, an optimistic downsizing city dweller turns farmer. His academic approach to farming might have succeeded, if not for the fact that his neighbours, the Soubeyrans have plugged the springs on his property with concrete, hoping to buy the farm cheap when he fails.

He does fail, exhausted by daily round trips to get water from a spring in the hills.

At the end of the film, Manon sees them unblock the spring they had plugged.

She cannot leave, and remains there, working as a goatherd.

She stumbles upon the source of the spring, plugs it with concrete. The village and its agricultural businesses go dry. Thoughts turn to God and why he might be punishing them.

The villagers confess that all of them knew that there was water on the property, but none of them helped the outsider with that information.

They repent. Manon, encouraged by her new love, a new school-teacher, unblocks the stream. Both of them are accepted into the community.

Through various plot twists, her persecutors die of suicide and a broken-heart.

It was satisfying and Biblical. Of course, in real life, the wicked do prosper, at least externally, at least as far as the eye can see, and we can but echo the Psalmist’s complaint, “Why do the wicked prosper?” #

And perhaps get some comfort from his answer in Psalm 73.
When I tried to understand all this,
it was oppressive to me
17 till I entered the sanctuary of God;
then I understood their final destiny

Psalm 73.

2 But as for me, my feet had almost slipped;
I had nearly lost my foothold.
3 For I envied the arrogant
when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.
4 They have no struggles;
their bodies are healthy and strong. a]”>[a]
5 They are free from the burdens common to man;
they are not plagued by human ills.

6 Therefore pride is their necklace;
they clothe themselves with violence.
7 From their callous hearts comes iniquity b]”>[b] ;
the evil conceits of their minds know no limits.
8 They scoff, and speak with malice;
in their arrogance they threaten oppression.
9 Their mouths lay claim to heaven,
and their tongues take possession of the earth.

10 Therefore their people turn to them
and drink up waters in abundance. c]”>[c]
11 They say, “How can God know?
Does the Most High have knowledge?”
12 This is what the wicked are like—
always carefree, they increase in wealth.

16 When I tried to understand all this,

it was oppressive to me
17 till I entered the sanctuary of God;
then I understood their final destiny.


18 Surely you place them on slippery ground;
you cast them down to ruin.
19 How suddenly are they destroyed,
completely swept away by terrors!

 

Marc Chagall–Master of Colour!

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I loved the huge stained glass windows created by Marc Chagall in the Cathedral of Reims. Something about his whimsical flying figures appeals to me, feels to me like a metaphor for how my soul and spirit long to be.
I love the brilliance of the colour Chagall uses.

When Matisse dies”, Picasso remarked, “Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is.”
File:Yury Pen - Portrait of Marc Chagall.jpg
Portrait of Chagall by his first teacher.

Mark Chagall, Born in 1887 in a Russian Jewish shtetl of Vitebsk in a poor working class family. He later wrote, “Day after day, winter and summer, at six o’clock in the morning, my father got up and went off to the synagogue. There he said his usual prayer for some dead man or other. On his return he made ready the samovar, drank some tea and went to work. Hellish work, the work of a galley-slave. Why try to hide it? How tell about it? No word will ever ease my father’s lot. . . There was always plenty of butter and cheese on our table. Buttered bread, like an eternal symbol, was never out of my childish hands.”
A turning point in Chagall’s artistic life came when he noticed a fellow student drawing. It “was like a vision, a revelation in black and white.”

Chagall would later say how there was no art of any kind in his family’s home. When Chagall asked the schoolmate how he learned to draw, his friend replied, “Go and find a book in the library, idiot, choose any picture you like, and just copy it.” He soon began copying images from books and found the experience so rewarding he then decided he wanted to become an artist.

He left Vitebsk at 19 and later  published an open letter entitled, “To My City Vitebsk”:

Why? Why did I leave you many years ago? . . . You thought, the boy seeks something, seeks such a special subtlety, that color descending like stars from the sky and landing, bright and transparent, like snow on our roofs. Where did he get it? How would it come to a boy like him? I don’t know why he couldn’t find it with us, in the city—in his homeland. Maybe the boy is “crazy”, but “crazy” for the sake of art. . . You thought: “I can see, I am etched in the boy’s heart, but he is still ‘flying,’ he is still striving to take off, he has ‘wind’ in his head.” . . . I did not live with you, but I didn’t have one single painting that didn’t breathe with your spirit and reflection.

His biographer Lewis writes,”As cosmopolitan an artist as he would later become, his storehouse of visual imagery would never expand beyond the landscape of his childhood, with its snowy streets, wooden houses, and ubiquitous fiddlers, scenes of childhood so indelibly in his mind and invested with an emotional charge so intense that it could only be discharged obliquely through an obsessive repetition of the same cryptic symbols and ideograms .

Moves to Paris, but continues painting Vitebsk there. “My homeland exists only in my soul!” he wrote.

He marries Bella Rosenfeld, from a richer family. Her parents worry how he would support her. As has happened to artists before him (Scott Fitzgerald, Millais) becoming a successful artist now became a goal and inspiration.

Travel, for a visual artist in particular, provides an invaluable source of growth and inspiration.

Chagall, “I should like to recall how advantageous my travels outside of France have been for me in an artistic sense—in Holland or in Spain, Italy, Egypt, Palestine, or simply in the south of France.

There, in the south, for the first time in my life, I saw that rich greenness — the like of which I had never seen in my own country.

In Holland I thought I discovered that familiar and throbbing light, like the light between the late afternoon and dusk.

In Italy I found that peace of the museums which the sunlight brought to life.

In Spain I was happy to find the inspiration of a mystical, if sometimes cruel, past, to find the song of its sky and of its people.

And in the East [Palestine] I found unexpectedly the Bible and a part of my very being.”
In Palestine, he felt he received an inner authorisation from the land of his ancestors, to plunge into his work on the Bible illustrations.”  He explains,  “In the East I found the Bible and part of my own being.” as he immersed himself in “the history of the Jews, immersed himself in “the history of the Jews, their trials, prophecies, and disasters.”
Chagall told Franz Meyer: “I did not see the Bible, I dreamed it. Ever since early childhood, I have been captivated by the Bible. It has always seemed to me and still seems today the greatest source of poetry of all time.”

A dry period after the death of his beloved wife, was followed by a period of extraordinary productivity. Chagall produced “paintings, graphic art, sculptures, ceramics, wall tiles, painted vases, plates, jugs large murals, stained glass windows, mosaics and tapestries.”

“The fading of traditional Jewish society left artists like Chagall with powerful memories that could no longer be fed by a tangible reality. Instead, that culture became an emotional and intellectual source that existed solely in memory and the imagination…. So rich had the experience been, it sustained him for the rest of his life.” Goodman notes,

Chagall designed his first stained glass windows when he was nearly 70. Isn’t that encouraging–to be able to take up a new art form when one is three score and ten? 

“Chagall reads the Bible and suddenly the passages become light.” Gaston Bachelard.

Chagall on the windows he created for the Hebrew University, “For me a stained glass window is a transparent partition between my heart and the heart of the world. Stained glass has to be serious and passionate. It is something elevating and exhilarating. It has to live through the perception of light. To read the Bible is to perceive a certain light, and the window has to make this obvious through its simplicity and grace…. The thoughts have nested in me for many years, since the time when my feet walked on the Holy Land, when I prepared myself to create engravings of the Bible. They strengthened me and encouraged me to bring my modest gift to the Jewish people—that people that lived here thousands of years ago, among the other Semitic peoples.”