I Thought They Were Hibernating

White House Says Bears Part Of Blame For Senate Loss

--Reuters headline

Language Log » An ursine crash blossom

The Proust Project, Day 63

Where this began
Day 62

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 439-450.

From "I had to rejoin Elstir...." to "...would have been in a state of panic.'"

_____

Catching up with Elstir after avoiding an introduction to the girls, the narrator tells the artist that he would have been "so happy to meet them," to which Elstir replies quite sensibly, "Well, in that case, what did you stand miles away for?"  The narrator takes umbrage at the reply, retreating into self-consciousness: "I was sure they must have prevented him from introducing someone they saw as dislikable: otherwise he would have been bound to call me over, after all the questions I had asked about them, and the interest he could see I took in them."  

When Elstir offers to give him a sketch "as a memento of our friendship," the narrator tells him what he really wants is a photo of the portrait of "Miss Sacripant," the sexually ambiguous watercolor he had examined earlier. Suddenly the narrator realizes the truth: The woman in the picture is Odette. (The note of sexual ambiguity is not new with Odette: She has admitted to relations with members of her own sex.) And then he's struck by another realization: 

the identity of Elstir himself. He had painted a portrait of Odette de Crécy -- could such a brilliant man, a solitary, a philosopher, who had accumulated wisdom, who stood above all things, whose conversation was so enthralling, possibly be the painter, vacuous and devious, adopted long ago by the Verdurins? I asked him if he had known them, and whether they had not nicknamed him "M. Biche." He answered, in a very simple manner, that this was indeed the case, as though speaking of a part of his life that was rather remote, as though not realizing his answer caused me an acute disappointment.

(A question: How does the narrator know so much about the Verdurins' "little set" at this point? Has Swann already unburdened himself of the full story that the narrator recounts in "Swann in Love"? Or have Swann and Odette simply gossiped to him about the old days of the little set? In Swann's Way the painter is seldom mentioned, at least in comparison to the pianist, who plays for Swann the theme from Vinteuil's sonata that figures so much in his wooing of Odette. Or is this just one of Proust's narrative inconsistencies?) 

Elstir then goes on to defend himself, claiming that there has never been a man who "has never at some time in his youth uttered words, or even led a life, that he would not prefer to see expunged from memory.... Wisdom cannot be inherited -- one must discover it for oneself, but only after following a course that no one can follow in our stead; no one can spare us that experience, for wisdom is only a point of view on things." Sensible enough, but he goes on for too long about it, leading Grieve to append a footnote in which he comments that Proust himself wrote a marginal note, "This is all badly written." So it is. 

The narrator leaves, heartened by the knowledge that he will get his introduction to the girls one day. In the meantime he's engaged in preparations for Saint-Loup's return to the garrison where he is stationed. Things are muddled a bit when Bloch shows up, "to Saint-Loup's great displeasure," and manages to get himself invited to visit him at Doncières, despite Saint-Loup's efforts to discourage the visit. 

After a lovely passage in which the narrator describes commonplace things -- "knives lying askew in halted gestures; the tent of a used napkin, within which the sun has secreted its yellow velvet" and so on -- to show how Elstir's art has attuned him to "beauty where I had never thought it might be found, in the most ordinary things," he receives an invitation to a reception where he can meet Albertine. And now the trinity of forces determining his personality -- will, sensibility and mind, which are rough analogues of Freud's triad of id, ego, and superego -- take hold again in the anticipation of "the pleasure of making her acquaintance."

My mind saw this pleasure, now that it was assured, as being worth not very much. But the will in me did not share that illusion for an instant, being the persevering and unwavering servant of our personalities, hidden in the shadows, disdained, forever faithful, working unceasingly, and without heeding the variability of our self, making sure it shall never lack what it needs. ... So my mind and sensibility set up a debate on how much pleasure there might be in making the acquaintance of Albertine, while in front of the mirror I considered the vain and fragile charms that they would have preferred to preserve unused for some better occasion. But my will did not lose sight of the time at which I had to leave; and it was Elstir's address that it gave to the coachman. My mind and sensibility, now that the die was cast, indulged in the luxury of thinking it was a pity. If my will had given a different address, they would have been in a state of panic.

One note: in the previous account of this battle between the will and the other two elements of personality, Grieve's translation was "sensitivity" rather than "sensibility." Again, it would be worth knowing what the French original was.

Land of the Losties

The Onion sounds the alarm: "Lost" is coming!

Final Season Of 'Lost' Promises To Make Fans More Annoying Than Ever

The Proust Project, Day 62

Where this began
Day 61

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 427-439.

From "I walked up and down, impatient..." to "...I only ever saw her wearing a hat.'"

_____

As the narrator waits for Elstir to finish the painting he's working on, worrying that he might miss seeing the "gang of girls," he examines a watercolor of a young woman. "The ambiguous character of the person whose portrait I was looking at came from the fact, which I did not understand, that it was a young actress of an earlier period, partly cross-dressed." The sexual ambiguity of the portrait intrigues him. At times the figure looks like "a rather boyish girl" and then again "an effeminate young man, perverted and pensive." The face's "wistful or forlorn" look, "in the contrast it made with the accessories from the world of theater and debauchery, gave a strange thrill." But it's also an expression that might have been assumed by the actress for the portrait. 


When Elstir sees what he's looking at, he dismisses it as worthless, something he'd done when much younger. But he also hides it away quickly when he hears his wife coming, even though "I can assure you the young creature in the bowler hat had no part to play in my life." Mme. Elstir, whom the artist addresses as "My beautiful Gabrielle!," makes little impression on the narrator at first. He notices that she has black hair that's turning white and was "common  but not simple in her manner," as if she's affecting a pose "required by her mode of statuesque beauty, which had lost, in aging, all its attractiveness." But he comes to realize that her husband had found in her an ideal of beauty that he had previously located only in his imagination -- that she is herself "a portrait by Elstir."  


But he remains impatient to leave in time to catch another glimpse of his girls. Finally, Elstir is ready to take a walk with him.

I was walking back toward the villa with Elstir when, with the suddenness of Mephistopheles materializing before Faust, there appeared at the far end of the avenue -- seemingly the simple objectification, unreal and diabolical, of the temperament opposite to my own, of the almost barbaric and cruel vitality which, in my feebleness, my excess of painful sensitivity and intellectuality, I lacked -- a few spots of the essence it was impossible to mistake for any other, a few of the stars from the zoophytic cluster of young girls, who, although they looked as though they had not seen me, were without a doubt at that very moment making sarcastic remarks about me. 

Self-consciously, he pretends to look at porcelain in a shop window while Elstir walks ahead to meet the girls. "The certainty of being introduced to the girls had made me not only feign indifference to them, but feel it." But to his surprise, "Elstir parted from the girls without calling me over. They turned up a side street and he came toward me. It was a fiasco." The sudden reversal of expectations, that he was going to meet Albertine at last, "made her almost insignificant to me, then infinitely precious; and some years later, the belief that she was faithful to me, followed by disbelief, would have analogous results." (Proust is not averse to giving the plot away.) 


The experience inspires the narrator to some thoughts about self-deception:

what is known to the will remains inefficacious if it is unknown to the mind and the sensitivity: they can believe in good faith that we wish to leave a woman, when only the will is privy to our attachment to her. They are fooled by the belief that we will see her again in a moment. But let that belief vanish, in the realization that she has just gone and will never come back, and the mind and sensitivity, having lost their bearings, are afflicted with a fit of madness, and the paltry pleasure of being with her expands to fill everything in life.

He follows this insight with an anecdote: His grandmother and some other ladies in Combray once set up a fund to provide an annuity for a girl they believe to be the daughter of their drawing teacher, who is dying shortly after the death of the woman they assume to be his mistress. When they compliment the child's beautiful hair, the grandmother asks, "'Did her mother have such lovely hair?' To which the father gave the guileless reply: 'I don't know -- I only ever saw her wearing a hat.'" I confess that I don't quite get this: Is the point that they were wrong, and the woman was not his mistress? Or is it that he is unwilling to admit it? Or maybe she followed Joe Cocker's advice and left her hat on? It seems to me something has been lost either in the telling or the translating.

Sound and Fury

Michael Lind on the decline of intelligent political commentary on TV: 

In addition to multiplying the number of commentators, cable news channels restricted the scope of commentary to two subjects: immediate reactions to breaking news, and "who's up, who's down in the polls" handicapping. In this age of narrowcasting, the news junkies who follow cable TV and the blogs define politics as partisan gamesmanship. They don't want to know whether the healthcare plan makes sense or not. They want to know whether its passage will help or hurt Democrats in November. For these viewers, politics is a game, as the stock market is for the viewers of Bloomberg and CNBC.

In this new media universe, where cable news channels are forced to fill up an entire day of programming with talking heads between news segments, the producers and bookers naturally turn to experts in daily polling — the dreary, interchangeable "Democratic strategists" and "Republican strategists" who populate cable news and the equivalent blogs. I don't blame the producers. They are trying to make money for their corporations in a battered and declining industry. Having lost the general audience of yesteryear, they are feeding their smaller, more homogeneous audience of political junkies the drugs that the junkies want.

For economic reasons, then, genuine public intellectuals like Buckley and Galbraith probably could not get on TV today. Bill Buckley was fond of quoting the philosopher Eric Voegelin to the effect that liberals were trying to "immanentize the eschaton." Use six-dollar words like those on TV today, and you'll never be invited back. And I can only imagine the icy silence that would have followed, if a chirpy news anchor had asked Professor Galbraith what he thought of the latest poll in the Massachusetts Senate race.

The Proust Project, Day 61

Where this began
Day 60

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 416-427.

From "At the hotel in Balbec ..." to "... it might lend some of itself to me, in their eyes."

_____

Viewing Elstir's work inspires the narrator to musings on Impressionism. (Commenters on Proust often identify Elstir with -- among others -- Monet.)

Those infrequent moments when we perceive nature as it is, poetically, were what Elstir's work was made of. One of the metaphors that recurred most often in the sea pictures surrounding him then was one that compares the land to the sea, blurring all distinction between them....

On the beach in the foreground, the painter had accustomed the eye to distinguish no clear fontier, no line of demarcation, between the land and the ocean....

Though the whole painting gave the impression of seaports where the waves advance into the land, where the land almost belongs to the sea, and the population is amphibious, the power of the marine element was everywhere manifest....

Elstir's intent, not to show things as he knew them to be, but in accordance with the optical illusions that our first sight of things is made of, had led him to isolate some of these laws of perspective, which were more striking in his day, art having been first to discover them....

The effort made by Elstir, when seeing reality, to rid himself of all the ideas the mind contains, to make himself ignorant in order to paint, to forget everything for the sake of his own integrity (since the things one knows are not one's own), was especially admirable in a man whose own mind was exceptionally cultivated.

And so on. 


Elstir also takes it upon himself to correct the narrator's first disappointed experience of the church of Balbec. And he disagrees with Legrandin's comment to the narrator that Brittany was "bad for someone inclined to wistfulness."

"Not at all," he replied. "When the soul of a man inclines to the wistful, he mustn't be kept away from it, he mustn't have it rationed. If you keep your mind off it, your mind will never know what's in it. And you'll be the plaything of all sorts of appearances, because you'll never have managed to understand the nature of them. If a little wistfulness is a dangerous thing, what cures a man of it is not less of it, it's more of it, it's all of it! Whatever dreams one may have, it is important to have a thorough acquaintance with them, so as to have done with suffering from them."

"Wistfulness" is not a word we use much anymore, and in this context I'd like to know what the original word in French was. The dictionary gives, as translations for "wistfulness," nostalgie, mélancolie and tristesse. But "nostalgia" and "melancholy," though the narrator is certainly given to both, seem to narrow the focus to, on the one hand, a longing for the past, and on the other, a generalized feeling of the blues. "Wistfulness" suggests dreaminess and longing, and I think Grieve must have hit on the right word to characterize the narrator. Certainly no one ever put more effort into getting to know his dreams, his longings, his nostalgia and his melancholy than the narrator does. 


And then a surprise: "the young cyclist from the little group of girls came tripping along the lane, with her black hair, and her toque pulled down, her plump cheeks, and her cheerful, rather insistent eyes." She greets Elstir, and he tells the narrator that her name is Albertine Simonet. 

"There's hardly a day," Elstir said, "when one or another of [the gang of girls] doesn't come down the lane and drop in to pay me a little visit," a statement that reduced me to despair -- if I had gone to see him as soon as my grandmother had suggested it, I might well have made the acquaintance of Albertine long since!

What I'm Watching

The Hangover 

My daughter was surprised when I rented this one. It didn't seem like my kind of film, she said.  

Well, okay, I guess. [Feeling very old.] I mean, yeah, a lot of its humor is sexist and homophobic and a little bit racist. (The swishy Asian guy is both of the last two.) And I know I shouldn't endorse films that are all of those things because they only reinforce these attitudes in the younger generation at which such films are aimed. But sometimes you need to laugh at all those un-PC things even if you feel a little guilty for laughing at them. No need to go around clutching your pearls in indignation all the time.

So there were a lot of things I didn't like about it. But as for the things I did like: 

• Bradley Cooper is perfect as the kind of guy you hated in high school and college: the handsome douchebag. 
• It's great to see Ed Helms playing a different character from the clueless guys he played on "The Daily Show" and "The Office." 
• Zach Galifianakis brought an amazing sweetness to his role. 
• I love farce, and this one was beautifully paced, thanks to Todd Phillips' direction and Debra Neil-Fisher's editing. 
• They never did explain the chicken.
  

The Proust Project, Day 60

Where this began
Day 59

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 404-416.

From "It was the day after I had seen ..." to "... whatever does not correspond to that view."

_____

Sober again, the narrator resumes his obsession with his "group of girls," but also finds time to make more trips with Saint-Loup to Rivebelle, where they notice "a tall man, very well built, with regular features and a beard turning gray." The owner informs them that this is "the famous painter Elstir," whom the narrator remembers as having been mentioned by Swann. The narrator and Saint-Loup send a note to Elstir's table. The artist comes and sits with them, "but he did not pursue any of the allusions I made to Swann. I could easily have believed he did not know him." He invites the narrator to visit his studio in Balbec.

But the narrator's obsession with the group of girls is such that he puts the visit off after, out for a walk with his grandmother, he sees one of the group "hanging her head, like an animal being forced back to the stable," with "an authoritative-looking personage," perhaps her governess. "From that moment on, although until then I had been thinking mostly about the tall one, it was once more the girl with the golf clubs, whom I assumed to be Mlle Simonet, who preoccupied me." He takes every opportunity he can to be on the esplanade or wherever he might catch sight of the girls. 

Then my initial uncertainty about whether I would see them or not on a particular day was aggravated by another, much more serious one, whether I would see them ever again -- for all I knew, they might be leaving for America or returning to Paris. This was enough to make me begin to fall in love with them. ... Loving them all, I was in love with none of them; and yet the possibility of meeting them was the only element of delight in my days.

His grandmother is irritated at his failure to visit Elstir, and eventually he gives in and makes the visit. His mood changes when he sees the works in the artist's studio, "for I glimpsed in them the possibility that I might rise to a poetic awareness, rich in fulfilling thoughts for me, of many forms that I had hitherto never distinguished in reality's composite spectacle."

Warren Who?

This review ran, in an edited version, in the Washington Post. 

STAR: How Warren Beatty Seduced America

By Peter Biskind

Simon & Schuster, 627 pp., $30

It's bad to get a sinking feeling at the start of a book, but Peter Biskind gives the reader just that in the introduction to his new book.

“Why Warren Beatty?” Biskind asks. “It's distressing to have to make a case for his importance just because no one under forty (maybe fifty?) knows who he is.”  Beatty made his last movie, Town & Country, nine years ago. And it has been 19 years since his last major film, Bugsy, which was a critical success but a box office disappointment.

Since Beatty left the screen, his friend and contemporary Jack Nicholson has made half a dozen films. His rival Robert Redford is still acting on screen, as is Dustin Hoffman, with whom Beatty shared the ignominy of Ishtar.  His older sister, Shirley MacLaine, is still a working actress. Woody Allen, two years older than Beatty, continues to write and direct at the film-a-year pace he set three decades ago, and Clint Eastwood, seven years Beatty's senior, is perhaps the most successful actor-turned-director of our time. In 1994, former studio executive Robert Evans said, “How many pictures has Warren made in his career? Twenty-one? How many hits did he have? Three! Bonnie and Clyde, Shampoo, and Heaven Can Wait. That’s batting three for twenty-one. In baseball, you’re sent back to the minors for that.”

But Biskind is determined to persuade us that Beatty was “one of the foremost filmmakers of his generation.” Biskind’s earlier book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls was a chronicle of American filmmaking in the 1970s, an era heralded by Beatty’s breakthrough movie, Bonnie and Clyde, and he has been trying to get Beatty to agree to cooperate on a book for years. For this book, Biskind agreed to leave Beatty’s current life, as husband to Annette Bening and father to their four children, “off limits.”  And many of the people who know him best, such as MacLaine and Nicholson, as well as many of Beatty’s more famous ex-lovers, such as Leslie Caron, were “all afflicted with a contagion of silence.”  Biskind also refuses to psychologize, telling us almost nothing of Beatty's childhood and youth, other than that he remained a virgin until he was “19 and ten months.” That leaves a 600-plus-page biography with some rather large biographical gaps.

“Even the promiscuous feel pain,” Beatty once said.  If he had gone on to add that obsessive perfectionists cause pain, he would have summed up the twin themes of Biskind's book. Much of it is a chronicle of fighting and fucking. Biskind opens with a scene in 1959 at a Beverly Hills restaurant where Beatty, dining with Jane Fonda, gets his first look at Joan Collins. And so the account of Beatty’s already well-chronicled sex life begins, and the reader who is so inclined can find plenty about what he did and whom he did it with, including not only the usual suspects – Collins, Natalie Wood, Caron, Julie Christie, Diane Keaton, Madonna, and so on – but also some unusual (and questionably documented) ones: Vivien Leigh, Brigitte Bardot, Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

But Biskind clearly intends the sexual escapades to be a sideshow. For him the main attraction is how Beatty’s movies got made. And so he gives us behind-the-scenes accounts of the making of not only Beatty’s best films (among which Biskind includes Splendor in the Grass, Bonnie and Clyde, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait, Reds, Bugsy, and Bulworth) but also disasters like Ishtar and Town & Country. The trouble with behind-the-scenes stories is that there are a lot of rumors to sort through, and the sources have memories clouded by time, resentment, pride, and occasionally illicit substances. For every allegation there’s almost always a denial.

Biskind makes it clear that Beatty, “a self-described obsessive-compulsive,”  could be maddening to work with, even on his best films. Trevor Griffiths, hired to write the screenplay for Reds, which Beatty took over from him, calls him “a brute” and “a bully.”  On Reds, Beatty shot what one source estimates as 3 million feet of film – enough for a movie two and a half weeks long -- and he worked a team of editors nearly to death.  There are those who blame Beatty’s flops on his extravagance, his meddling and his sometimes indecisive ways, but Biskind prefers to focus on directors – Elaine May for Ishtar, Glenn Gordon Caron for Love Affair, Peter Chelsom for Town & Country – who were unwilling or unable to collaborate effectively with Beatty.

Beatty holds an Oscar record for having been twice nominated as producer, director, writer, and star, for Heaven Can Wait and Reds. To date, the only other quadruple-threat nominee in Oscar history is Orson Welles, for Citizen Kane. Beatty won only one Oscar, as director of Reds, but the Academy also gave him the Irving G. Thalberg Award as a producer, even though all but two of the films he produced were those he starred in. And in the end, it may be as producer that Beatty deserves the most recognition. Richard Sylbert, the production designer who worked on many of Beatty’s films, claimed that Beatty made the people who worked for him “dramatically better.”

One problem with this book is that it’s too early for a definitive assessment of Beatty and his career. Cultists have been known to save films from scorn and obscurity before, and there are even those who love Ishtar. Some of his hits, including Bonnie and Clyde, Shampoo, and Heaven Can Wait, are beginning to look glossy and tricked-up. Reds has suffered from the current distaste for historical epics. Ten years from now Bulworth may look a lot better, and Bugsy may look worse. Or vice versa.

Beatty himself may yet be seen as either a visionary who deserves more respect or a man who never fully developed his talent. Jack Nicholson became perhaps the most successful of any actor of his generation by working with Roman Polanski, Milos Forman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Stanley Kubrick, John Huston, and Martin Scorsese. But after his early movies with Elia Kazan (Splendor in the Grass) and George Stevens (The Only Game in Town), the only director of the first rank that Beatty worked with was Robert Altman, on McCabe & Mrs. Miller. They fought bitterly, but it’s one of Beatty’s best performances and one of Altman’s best films.

And Beatty could still choose to make Biskind’s book premature. He’s 72, not too old to make a film he has always planned about Howard Hughes, or at least Hughes in his old age, which Biskind tells us “Beatty considers more interesting than the first half of his career.”  And much of Biskind’s book deals with Beatty’s political activities. He worked for George McGovern, who called him “one of the three or four most important people in the campaign,” and Gary Hart. Arianna Huffington urged him to run for president in 2000. He wisely declined, but one wonders what might happen if Dianne Feinstein decides not to run again for the Senate. It’s not like California is averse to actors going into politics.

The Proust Project, Day 59

Where this began
Day 58

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (translated by James Grieve), pp. 391-404.

The narrator gets drunk at Rivebelle and gives us a tipsy view of the dining room with its waiters dashing about, at first seemingly chaotically but then, as he mellows, "turning into something nobler and calmer" with "a soothing harmony." He sees the tables as little planets "as depicted in allegorical paintings from earlier times," or as a "planetary system, designed in accordance with the science of the Middle Ages." There is something in the passage reminiscent of Dickens or Twain when they adopt the Martian view of a familiar setting. 

I felt rather sorry for the diners, because I sensed that for them the round tables were not planets, and that they were unpracticed in the art of of cross-sectioning things so as to rid them of their customary appearance and enable us to see analogies.

But what follows is unmistakably Proustian, an analysis of the effect of music on his intoxicated mind: "each musical phrase, though as individual as a particular woman, limited the secret of its sensual thrills not to a single privileged person, as she would have done -- it offered them to me, it ogled me, it accosted me, it toyed with me in seductively whimsical or vulgar ways, it caressed me, as though I had suddenly become more attractive, powerful, or wealthy.... I felt endowed with a power that seemed to make me almost irresistible."


Moreover, the alcohol liberates him from past and future: "I was trapped in the present, as heroes are, or drunkards." It makes him reckless: 

In fact, what I was doing was condensing into one evening the unconcern that others dilute in their whole existence: every day they take the needless risk of a sea voyage, a ride in an airplane, a drive in a motorcar, when the person who would be stricken by grief if they were to die sits waiting for them at home, when the book, as yet unrevealed to the world, in which they see the point of their whole life, still lives only within their fragile brain.

For the moment, even the quest for Mlle. Simonet seems "a matter of indifference, since nothing but my present sensation, because of the extraordinary power of it, the euphoria afforded by its slightest varations, and even by the mere continuity of it, had any imporance.... [D]runkenness brings about, for the space of a few hours, subjective idealism, pure phenomenalism; all things become mere appearances, and exist only as a function of our sublime selves." 


When he gets back to the hotel, he crashes into a sleep that lasts until the afternoon, and is filled with dreams. "The difficulty of digesting the Rivebelle dinner meant that it was in a more fitful light that I visited, in incoherent succession, the darkened zones of my past life, and that I became a creature for whom supreme happiness would have been to meet Legrandin, with whom I had just had a dream conversation." Awake he remembers a woman he had seen the night before: "the young blonde with the wistful look who had glanced at me at Rivebelle. During the evening at the restaurant, many other women had seemed just as nice, yet she was the one who now stood alone in my memory."