Posts Tagged ‘André Malraux’

With Vienna’s mayor Michael Häupl in 2009 – and lots and lots of his books

André Malraux once asked a parish priest who had listened to confessions for half a century what he had learned about mankind. On the first page of his 1968 Anti-Memoirs, the French writer recorded the priest’s reply: “First of all people are much more unhappy than one thinks…and then the fundamental fact is that there is no such thing as a grown up person.”

Not a bad starting point for this week’s Stanford premiere of Yalom’s Cure, an hour-long film about Irvin Yalom, one of the world’s most celebrated existential psychotherapists. Irv is now a well-known author as well, leveraging psychology into literature with Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy, When Nietzsche Wept, The Schopenhauer Cure, The Spinoza Problem, and others. (We wrote about the Viennese “Eine Stadt. Ein Buch” celebration of his book here and here – 100,000 copies of When Nietzsche Wept were distributed throughout Vienna.)

The Yaloms enjoying Vienna’s Freud Museum.

Stanford’s Irv was obviously guest of honor for the screening, along with his wife Marilyn Yalom, one of the founders of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research and author of the acclaimed How the French Invented Love – which, I’m told, is as big a hit in France as it has been on this side of the Atlantic. (We wrote about it here and here and here.) The screening was also attended by a number of Stanford luminaries we’ve written about – among them Gerhard and Regina Casper, John and Mary Felstiner, Myra Strober, Marguerite Frank, and also Georgia May, widow of the eminent existential psychologist Rollo May.

Writer/director Sabine Gisiger and her film crew filmed hundreds of hours of the Yaloms and their family – the result? “This movie is making me squirm. I feel very exposed,” the good doctor said. But I came to the event cold, with no expectations, and was both exhilarated and moved by the film, which premiered in Zurich and already has been featured in San Francisco and Mill Valley film festivals. For locals, it features an awful lot of Stanford and Palo Alto, and brought back memories of my previous visits to their idyllic Palo Alto home… well, I didn’t need much in the way of memory… I had visited a few days ago.

The doctor turns 84 this June, and said that facing death has been a “long odyssey… I’m much less terrorized by it.” He explained part of his attitude towards psychotherapy with Thomas Hardy‘s words: “If way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.”

Don’t be puzzled by the German. The trailer is in English. Want the whole movie? Try here.

We liked the “merciless honesty” of the Avedon photo, too.

NEWS FLASH! Newly discovered 11-year-old review says great things about Joseph Brodsky: Conversations! Bless you, Theo, whoever you are! Much to our surprise, we just learned that long ago, on September 23, 2003, we got a nice write-up in a blog called Private Intellectual, which still exists today (though Theo seems to have disappeared from it) – this is not something to be taken for granted in the blogosphere, which has much deadwood floating in it. We ran across the review when we were looking for an article on Madame de Staël, of all things.

Theo lamented that the book was not published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, he wished it had been reviewed by Michiko Kakutani, he decried the lack of public notice (well, we got a little notice, in the Times Literary Supplement, among others…) What can we say? We love him.

Here‘s what he wrote, way back when, a year after the book was published:

The role Edward Teller played in freeing Joseph Brodsky, is told rather briefly in the single most rewarding tome of what the darkening Atlantic skies over Providence, Rhode Island, tell me has already been my summer reading.

In San Francisco two months ago, I picked up Joseph Brodsky. Conversations, at City Lights Bookstore (Ferlinghetti was winding down, in the background, from preaching in the Beatnik mode: a Jeremiad against this country in the name of this country – the classic exemplum being Ginsberg‘s “America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing. /America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956. (…)/America when will we end the human war?/ Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb /(…) America when will you be angelic?” ).

The book is a compilation of interviews with the poet recorded throughout Brodsky’s short life, collected from wide and far by Cynthia L. Haven. Because many of the pieces are from small literary magazines and many of the questions are outright stupid – no literary publisher – not even JB’s own Roger Strauss (not a publisher, more like my living room, JB said), seems to have wanted to bring them out. Not even the merciless honesty of the cover photo by Richard Avedon caught the eye of Manhattan’s literati. One wonders whether if this book would have been brought out by FSG, it would have been hailed by Michiko Kakutani as “monumental, of the essence, the poet continues to speak from beyond the grave”, etc. but since it comes from the Mississippi State University Press [No – the University Press of Mississippi’s “Literary Conversations” series – ED.]  it has been utterly neglected – a decadent snobbery of the worst kind; for I daresay this is a posthumous collection of perhaps the greatest poet who lived on earth when we did (born as we were, after Auden and Celan‘s deaths).

Mississippi (Photo: Bengt Jangfeldt)

At the end of the day, Brodsky being a blues singer of sorts (one of his rare poems in English is even titled Blues – “Eighteen years I’ve spent in Manhattan,” it starts), it’s just as well that the little book’s from Mississippi. [We might also note JB’s beloved cat was named “Mississippi” – ED]

Ask a stupid question, as the saying wrongly goes, get a stupid answer. Brodsky answers some of the most embarrassing and awful questions (an interviewer asking about his internment for manual labor in the polar circle as if it was a trip to Disneyland), in ways only he could. They are mostly unedited, and brilliant. I give one little excerpt, since no one anywhere seems to have discussed a book that deserved much more attention. I am struck by the following, from as far back as the pivotal year 1989:

Interviewer: Andre Malraux said that the twenty-first century will be either spiritual or it will not be at all.

He said lots.

Brodsky : It may be … Well, Malraux said so many things.The French are very fond of making up reasons, ever since La Rochefoucauld, and presumably before, I don’t know. Milosz thinks that we are entering, the world is entering an entirely nihilistic stage. I am not so sure of that, although on the face of it, reality doesn’t conform to any ethical standards, as we see it. It’s getting rather paganistic. I think what may emerge – and this is on of my greatest apprehensions – what may emerge is a tremendous religious strife, not exactly religious, between the Moslem world and the world that is vaguely Christian. The latter won’t be able to defend itself, the former will be terribly assertive. It’s simply for the numerical reasons, for pure demographic reasons, that I perceive the possibility for such a strife. I am not a sage, I am not a prophet, I can’t presume to say what the twenty-first century is going to be like. To say the least, I am not going to be there, for one thing, so why would I bother … And it was easier for Malraux, it was clear that he wouldn’t be there, so it was easy to fantasize … The foreseeable future, that is, foreseeable by me, which again can be terribly erroneous, is precisely the conflict of the spirit of tolerance with the spirit of intolerance, and there are all sorts of attempts to resolve that conflict now. The pragmatists try to suggest that there is some equivalence between these principles. I don’t believe that for a minute. I think that the Moslem notion of universal order should be squashed and put out of existence. We are, after all, six centuries older than the Moslems spiritually. So, I think we have a right to say what’s right and what’s wrong …

Perhaps Michiko would like to review the Italian edition, which my publisher tells me will be coming out next year with Adelphi.

He avoided the political fray. (Photo: Harper Collins)

Jacques Barzun died two weeks ago, on October 25, at age 104.  I’m only starting to think about it.  The New York Times described him as “the distinguished historian, essayist, cultural gadfly and educator who helped establish the modern discipline of cultural history and came to see the West as sliding toward decadence…”

“Mr. Barzun was a man of boundless curiosity, monumental productivity and manifold interests, encompassing both Berlioz and baseball. It was a life of the mind first cultivated more than a century ago in a childhood home outside Paris that became an avant-garde salon.” He published his “most ambitious and encyclopedic work” at 92.

Barzun largely created the field of cultural history, which his biographer Michael Murray describes as “an all-inclusive synthesis: not only kings, battles, laws, and statistics, but also habits, beliefs, influences, and tendencies, in art and literature, manners, morals, science, and religion, and the social setting in which these were found.”

Murray’s comments about Barzun arouse my envy.  He writes: “it is hard not to be dazzled by a man who, during a four-week period in 1953, read and reviewed André Malraux’s Voices of Silence and The Letters of Franz Liszt, edited the galley proofs of his book God’s Country and Mine, adapted them into articles for the Atlantic Monthly and Vogue, gave speeches on campus and at a Partisan Review banquet, reworked four lectures for publication, and offered a broadcast on WNYC. All this, mind you, apart from his teaching and dissertation duties.”  Ah well, as Barzun himself wrote in The House of Intellect (1959): “The intellectuals’ chief cause of anguish are one another’s works.”

Now here’s the reason I’m going over all this.  Like many Americans, I found this year’s elections a dispiriting process.  I find the slagging matches between sides depressing, the gloating and the defensive justifications wearying, and the whole reduction of complicated thoughts and reactions into political labels outdated and simplistic.  So Frank Wilson of Books Inq sent me this quote from Barzun:

“In short, the market – like the state, like any institution – has its limitations, as severe as the state’s. Consequently, each device must be controlled by intelligence and adapted to circumstance. For my part, I am a liberal, a conservative, and a socialist, each dogma applicable to some necessary activity.

“I imagine, in fact, that the triple label applies to most people. Very few want the fire department a private concern; and again most people are communists within the family circle, at least until the children are grown up.”

Common sense, as Voltaire observed, is not so common.

Christopher

Postscript on 11/9:  What fun!  The recipient of the letter quoted above has come forward in the comment section below.  Christopher Faille, an author and a contributor to Forbes,  has lots more on his website, Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed – more excerpts from their correspondence here, and a consideration of Barzun’s affinities with William James is here.  “I’m trying to do some curatorial work, getting my letters from this great man into proper order with a commentary giving context. I believe Columbia University archives are the proper ultimate destination for the material,” he writes. Thanks for the heads-up, Christopher!