Abstract
‘Modernism’ was a silly coinage and its successor ‘postmodern’ even sillier. Their contemporaries were disconcerted – even shocked – by the ‘modernity’ of Euripides, Catullus, El Greco and Gesualdo. The uncertain worlds in L’Illusion comique, Tristram Shandy and Atta Troll excited later experimentation. These precursors are one-offs, but when the Industrial Revolution altered everything for everybody and education increased literacy, many more writers set out to amaze, unsettle and épater le bon bourgeois – although all in different ways. Mallarmé had nothing in common with Rimbaud, nor Mann with Proust, nor Virginia Woolf with Joyce (she described Ulysses as ‘an illiterate, underbred book’).
Speed began (slowly) in 1825. The train captivated Emily Dickinson and the Impressionist painters; the telephone placed Henry James In the Cage; the telegram (‘Merde. Lettre suit.’) helped Gide for his ‘satire de quoi’ Paludes; Marinetti used his ‘ecstatic rhetoric’ in praise of ‘the roaring car’ and Leavis applauded Eliot for citing the internal combustion engine, insisting that poets should show they are ‘fully alive in their time’. Hutchinson is worried by Baudelaire’s use of traditional forms and quotes Eliot’s absurd contention that he was ‘a classicist, born out of his due time’. Baudelaire wasn’t a romantic manqué either. He was Baudelaire, unique and wonderful. Hutchinson criticizes him for being ‘inconsistent’ but should he have confected endless variations on Une charogne instead of creating Causerie, Le Cygne or Le Rêve d’un curieux? He, Mallarmé, Corbière and e. e. cummings took the meticulous shape − the form − of the sonnet, but matter, content and style are daring, break inner rules and ‘make it new’.
Hutchinson clearly explains that Flaubert was an immense influence. The real Flaubert is found in Novembre (fragments de style quelconque) where the tide creeps up ‘avec un bruit de chaînes et de sanglots’ and in the repulsive sadism of Salammbô, but he reinvented himself as a stylistic perfectionist. In L’Education sentimentale the final two pages make the reader realize that the novel was over three days before it began. Flaubert foreshadowed Godot with his pallid masterpiece Bouvard et Pécuchet where nothing happens not twice but all the time. Tricking the reader would be the aim of Conrad in Chance and playing events down not up emphasize the unlikelihoods in Kafka.
Hutchinson goes interestingly to letters and diaries behind the published works. Flaubert wishes to ‘write a book about nothing’. Rilke stresses the crucial fact that the Duineser Elegien and the Sonette an Orpheus are halves of the same experience. Valéry finds his own poetry less important than his Cahiers (‘Mon vrai moi est là’) and defends style as ‘a language within a language’. Hutchinson makes the fascinating discovery that Aurore (which begins Charmes) and Palmes (which closes the section 20 poems later) were originally one poem so, as in Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un poète where the action of the film occurs in the split second between the start and finish of a falling chimney, we progress from the tremor of dawn’s uncertainty to the tree that is the symbol of patience.
Hutchinson’s belief that Valéry’s poetry ‘can only be understood against the theory of the notes’ is far from valid. ‘La Jeune Parque’ is more important than ‘Ego Scriptor’. No poem needs an explication de texte – though help is useful in dealing with Pound and Hutchinson tellingly links the ‘weaving’ of Flaubert’s prose in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley to Penelope at her loom. He finds a link between Rilke’s Christian name and the ‘reiner Widerspruch’ of the rose. He analyses Dujardin’s ‘astonishingly modern’ novel Les Lauriers sont coupés although he should have left the beautiful quotation ‘le quartier allongé de la lune blanche, blanc’ in French as his comments on its translation are obscure. He detects a similarity between Virginia Woolf’s ‘life is a transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end’ and Proust’s statement in Le Temps retrouvé: ‘Ce que nous appelons la réalité est un certain rapport entre ces sensations et ces souvenirs qui nous entourent simultanément’. He deftly equates Jugendstil with Impressionism, shows Tzara’s ‘pirouettes’ as the Romanian poet states he is both for and against the Dadaism he is creating, and lists Mann’s ‘heroes’ from Tonio Kröger (‘ein verirrter Bürger’) to Felix Krull the conman. He tracks Breton’s move to surrealism, plus his lucid realization that to be rebellious or ‘novel’ does not necessarily require abandonment of form.
Beckett said he wrote in French because it is ‘sans style’, meaning perhaps that French seems sparer, has clearer rules and lacks the Anglo-Saxon input, but authors as different as Rabelais and Montaigne or Hugo and Laforgue have unmistakeably individual ‘styles’. Style is the enigmatic thumbprint that identifies the artist. No copyist or forger from Roman jobbing sculptors imitating Greek originals via Macpherson to Van Meegeren has fooled all the people all the time. One telltale curve, phrase or brushstroke gives the game away. Parody usefully focuses on idiosyncrasies of style – alliteration, wordplay, inversion − exaggerating them to make the reader wince or smile. Henry Reed’s wicked accuracy in Chard Whitlow catches the pompous banality of the post-Waste Land Eliot from the first line ‘As we get older we do not get any younger’. Swinburne’s Nephelida begins ‘From the depth of the dreamy decline of the dawn’ and Verlaine’s À la manière de P.V. contains the punning ‘Et de ces lunes, l’une après l’une’. Both show how skilled and confident poets can mock their style from the outside – a rare but rewarding feat.
There are surprising lacunae in this book. No mention of Un coup de dés − a complex poem set contrapuntally like a musical score. No mention of Dorothy Richardson, the English answer to Dujardin (who dedicated his novel to Racine ‘en hommage au suprême romancier d’âmes’). No mention of Corbière whose Amours jaunes display the best of ‘modernism’ in jokiness, irreverence and sudden changes of key. No quotations from Apollinaire whose Calligrammes exploded like the First World War. No praise for Cocteau whose poems, plays, films, novels, drawings (all under the sign ‘poésie’) offer dazzling examples of the lyrically new and the improbable. Hutchinson wastes too much time on uncreative writers who, unlike creative artists who show us in active detail what he is interested in, dream up theories irrelevant to the thrill of literature itself.
Jelly Roll Morton, faced by a society lady who wanted him to tell her what jazz is, replied ‘If you have to ask you’ll never know.’ The same applies to style which is recognizable but not definable.
Mallarmé wrote: ‘Je dis une fleur! et, hors de l’oubli où ma voix relègue aucun contour, en tant que quelque chose d’autre que les calices sus, musicalement se lève, idée même et suave, l’absente de tous les bouquets.’
That is style.