Proust, Hitler, Shakespeare, Purdy

Paintings in Proust - A Visual Companion to In Search of Lost Time (Eric Karpeles, London, Thames & Hudson, 2008) was translated by Pierre Saint-Jean under the title Le Musée imaginaire de Marcel Proust - Tous les tableaux de À la recherche du temps perdu (2009). After a short doubtful introduction - "La perspicacité psychosexuelle dont il [Marcel Proust] fit preuve pour élaborer ses personnages épicènes l'ont à jamais transformé en père fondateur des queer studies."(*) - the book divisions follow the volumes of À la recherche. Short text extracts in which a painting is alluded to are presented (in the original text from Proust in this 'translation') together with a reproduction of the corresponding painting. It's a great way to wander along Proust's masterpiece, as well as a very useful companion when reading it. For example the lines where Swann refers to Françoise's new kitchen-maid as "la Charité de Giotto" are printed along a reproduction of the Caritas from the Arena Chapel frescoes in Padua.

L'année où nous mangeâmes tant d'asperges, la fille de cuisine habituellement chargée de les 'plumer' était une pauvre créature maladive, dans un état de grossesse déjà assez avancé quand nous arrivâmes à Pâques, et on s'étonnait même que Françoise lui laissât faire tant de courses et de besogne, car elle commençait à porter difficilement devant elle la mystérieuse corbeille, chaque jour plus remplie, dont on devinait sous ses amples sarraus la forme magnifique. Ceux-ci rappelaient les houppelandes qui revêtent certaines des figures symboliques de Giotto dont M. Swann m'avait donné des photographies. C'est lui même qui nous l'avait fait remarquer et quand il nous demandait des nouvelles de la fille de cuisine il nous disait: "Comment va la Charité de Giotto?" D'ailleurs elle-même, la pauvre fille, engraissée par sa grossesse, jusqu'à la figure, jusqu'aux joues qui tombaient droites et carrées, ressemblait en effet assez à ces vierges, fortes et hommasses, matrones plutôt, dans lesquelles les vertus sont personnifiées à l'Arena. Et je me rends compte maintenant que ces Vertus et ces Vices de Padoue lui ressemblaient encore d'une autre manière. De même que l'image de cette fille était accrue par le symbole ajouté qu'elle portait devant son ventre, sans avoir l'air d'en comprendre le sens, sans que rien dans son visage en traduisît la beauté et l'esprit, comme un simple et pesant fardeau, de même c'est sans paraître s'en douter que la puissante ménagère qui est représentée à l'Arena au dessous du nom "Caritas" et dont la reproduction était accrochée au mur de ma salle d'études, à Combray, incarne cette vertu, c'est sans qu'aucune pensée de charité semble avoir jamais pu être exprimée par son visage énergique et vulgaire.

In the year in which we ate such a quantity of asparagus, the kitchen-maid whose duty it was to prepare them was a poor sickly creature, some way "gone" in pregnancy when we arrived at Combray for Easter, and it was indeed surprising that Françoise allowed her to run so many errands and to do so much work, for she was beginning to find difficult in bearing before her the mysterious basket, fuller and larger every day, whose splendid outline could be detected beneath the folds of her ample smock. This last recalled the cloaks in which Giotto shrouds some of his allegorical figures, of which M. Swann had given me photographs. He it was who pointed out the resemblance, and when he inquired after the kitchen-maid he would say: "Well, how goes it with Giotto's Charity?" And indeed the poor girl, whose pregnancy had swelled and stoutened every part of her, even including her face and her squarish, elongated cheeks, did distinctly suggest whose virgins, so sturdy and mannish as to seem matrons rather, in whom the Virtues are personified in the Arena Chapel. And I can see now that those Virtues and Vices of Padua resembled her in another respect as well. For just as the figure of this girl had been enlarged by the additional symbol which she carried before her, without appearing to understand its meaning, with no awareness in her facial expression of its beauty and spiritual significance, as if it were an ordinary rather heavy burden, so it is without any apparent suspicion of what she is about that the powerfully built housewife who is portrayed in the Arena Chapel beneath the label "Caritas," and a reproduction of whose portrait hung upon the wall of my schoolrooom at Combray, embodies that virtue, for it seems impossible that any thought of charity can ever have found expression in her vulgar and energetic face. (translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, in the Modern Library edition, 1992)

Now you really want to take a look at Giotto's Caritas, don't you?

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Very good and concise review of Hitler's Private Library: the Books that shaped his life (Timothy W. Ryback, Knopf, 2008, 304p) by Ritchie Robertson in the March 6th issue of the TLS (Was Hitler a bookworm?). Only a small proportion of Hitler's library survives: "Although enough survives to tell us a good deal about Hitler's mental world, though the reader of this book must not expect too much." "Hitler's library is most remarkable by what it didn't contain." Schopenhauer, Nietzsche. "The other striking absence is literature." "Though carefully researched, the book is carelessly written." If the topic is of interest to you, read the longer review by Anthony Grafton published in the December 24, 2008 issue of The New Republic (Mein Buch). Grafton concludes that "Hitler's Private Library offers clear proof, if any was needed, that Hitler's worldview did not represent, as American propaganda claimed, the culmination of centuries of German thought."

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I found with great pleasure my copy of the New York Times under my door when I came back home last Tuesday. The pleasure was further increased by the beautiful color reproduction, on the front page, of an old portrait claimed to be of Shakespeare. The painting was recently identified among the collection of an Anglo-Irish family, the Cobbes. It was inherited from Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare's patron. British experts who have been studying it claim "it is the holy grail Shakespearean scholars had sought for centuries: a portrait done in Shakespeare’s lifetime, and the original from which other Shakespeare paintings of the period were copied. They said their studies showed it probably was painted in 1610, when Shakespeare was 46, and only a few years from his death in 1616." They add: "The portrait might open a new era in Shakespeare scholarship, giving fresh momentum, among other things, to generations of speculation as to whether the playwright, a married man with three children, was bisexual. Until now, that suggestion has hinged mostly on dedications to the Earl of Southampton that Shakespeare wrote with some of his best-loved poems and some of the sensual passages in his poems and plays, particularly his sonnets, most of which, the London scholars said, are centered on expressions of love and desire for men, not women." The portrait shows a very handsome and attractive man. I let you go to the New York Times site to admire it, and read the corresponding articles (Portrait of Shakespeare Unveiled, 399 Years Late, Is This a Shakespeare Which I See Before Me?).

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James Purdy (1923-2009) died on Friday. Stephen Guy-Bray writes in glbtq that his novels "often describe obsessive love between men for whom homosexuality is unthinkable and whose fate is inevitably bleak." The New York Times published a substantial obituary on Saturday (James Purdy, Darkly Comic Writer, Dies at 94) which made me want to read The Nephew:

In “The Nephew” (1961), Mr. Purdy slyly intimated the elusiveness of human character in the story of a Korean War soldier missing in action whose aunt tries to research his life for a memorial book. She discovers that the boy she thought she knew was a stranger not only to her but to the rest of the family and was quite possibly gay.

2009.03.15

(*) The psychosexual acuteness with which he [Marcel Proust] painted his neither-male-nor-female characters have made of him, forever, the Founding Father of Queer Studies.