Above, Jean Follain, Paris 1935, translated by Kathleen Shields and published by CBe this April; and Nabokov on Gogol.
I imagine that for Follain, arriving in Paris in 1924 from the provinces aged just twenty-one, first impressions must have been dominated by the press, bustle, noise and sheer variety of people. So many of them! All somehow co-habiting in the same place! In the book that he wrote about Paris after living there for ten years, he attends to the churches and gardens and monuments but it’s still people who dominate his pages: flower sellers and rag collectors and barbers and cobblers and dressmakers and saddlers and typographers and salesmen and abattoir workers, shop assistants and shoplifters, priests and policemen and prostitutes and their pimps, schoolchildren and students and retired professors and bankers and magistrates and concierges, artist’s models and musicians and lovers and lion tamers …
Nabokov in his book on Gogol delights in Gogol’s ‘spontaneous generation’ of peripheral characters who have no plot-business to be there but just are. At the end of a chapter in Dead Souls, for example, after a drunken Chichikov has gone to sleep, ‘one light alone remained burning and that was in the small window of a certain lieutenant who had arrived from Ryazan and who was apparently a keen amateur of boots … He kept on revolving his foot and inspecting the dashing cut of an admirably finished heel.’ Nabokov: ‘Thus the chapter ends – and that lieutenant is still trying on his immortal jackboot, and the leather glistens, and the candle burns straight and bright in the only lighted window of the dead town in the midst of a star-dusted night. I know of no more lyrical description of nocturnal quiet than this Rhapsody of the Boots.’
Gogol again, with soldiers spun off from an adjective: ‘the day was neither bright nor gloomy but of a kind of bluey-grey tint such as is found only upon the worn-out uniforms of garrison soldiers, for the rest a peaceful class of warriors except for their being somewhat inebriate on Sundays.’ Nabokov: ‘It is not easy to render the curves of this life-generating syntax in plain English so as to bridge the logical, or rather biological, hiatus between a dim landscape under a dull sky and a groggy old soldier accosting the reader with a rich hiccup on the festive outskirts of the very same sentence.’
Follain too enjoys spontaneous generation. A man ‘passes near the bar with flaking paintwork, with its sign in yellow letters that have forked tips and a shading effect that required a lot of work on the part of the handsome whistling painter in his bowler hat and white overalls’.
More:
A pigeon escaped from a laboratory, missing part of its spinal cord, totters on a pavement. Some cruel girls study him; one of them, exquisite as an Italian Madonna, has her arm in a sling because she was injured by a violent, amber-skinned lover.
She used to hold little teacups between her fingers so delicately that young men in silk hats would be overcome with emotion. Once she went home through very quiet streets on the arm of an elderly gentleman and quivered when a whinnying horse broke the silence.
Inside their lodges the concierges still live among their knick-knacks and cats. […] The wireless spreads news from around the world, famous speeches, less magical than the gossip on the grapevine that the housewives peddle to the concierge on rainy evenings. They talk while their husbands grow bored, waiting for leek soup in the tiny dining room where the old parents died.
Sardine tins are treacherously attractive; when he opens them with the key that is always too small, the poor fellow who eats alone in his room sometimes injures his hands and gets a nasty cut. A small, feeble, highly strung person almost sees red when he hears a tube of macaroni snap, as hard and brittle as his next-door neighbour’s arteries, the neighbour who gesticulates with his long hands. In damp streets where stalls are laid out, fish gleam with a slight ammonia smell […]. At the entrance to a dark corridor a second cousin from the country makes an appearance, biting into a raw carrot.
And these little flourishes (hands are very important to Follain):
… the painted rose decoration above a brothel door in Grenelle at high noon, the obscure graffiti on a church wall in a district built in the Second Empire, the gesture of a suburban child who in a moment of joy beneath the sky, lays his dirty little palm with outstretched fingers on the burning wall.
Paris with its lilies, muck and gold, its inscriptions on columns or mouldings on grey houses, its women at café terraces wearing hats decorated with sprigs and flowers, or the hand turning the doorknob, or the glove being taken off to reveal the hand when the evening newspapers appear.
Nabokov noted that Gogol, to achieve his effects, employed a distinctive form of ‘life-generating syntax’ that can be hard to render ‘in plain English’. Follain too. Kathleen Shields writes In her introduction: ‘Follain has developed a unique prose style. The focus shifts from habitual practices to one-off events and from general statements to specific examples. The writing piles on more and more relative and prepositional clauses, so that the information within the sentence can be presented in an unexpected order, zoning in from the general to the particular within a single phrase or disconcertingly alternating between definite and indefinite articles and between singulars and plurals … Past and present tenses can switch places within the same paragraph … I have kept as many of these unusual features as possible in English.’
Where do the whinnying horse and the second cousin with his raw carrot come from? From a very particular way of writing. This is not a guide book. Nor is it a novel – it’s something more delicate than that. ‘In this beautiful Paris there are only lies, happy or sad.’
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