Scraps Page 12
In the same class as these luxury hotels there are yet other things that too clearly constitute outer signs of wealth not to be undesirable: the great restaurant where one goes quite expressly to have a good dinner (such as the one with the sign of a seaman, La Pérouse, situated almost directly underneath where I live, a restaurant in which I have never set foot except once twenty years ago, at the time of the marriage of the daughter of my pseudosister, today retired to Nemours); any sort of gala (whether employing the pretext of charity or without any clearly determined aim); first class in a railway train (whereas one of the reasons I appreciate the airplane, besides its speed and the fact that one doesn’t get filthy on it, is its nature as means of transport with a single class); luggage too numerous, too elegant, and too heavy (which, as you get onto a train as well as off one, turns you into a sort of invalid who can’t manage without porters); excessively new apartments arranged by an interior decorator or excessively beautiful dwellings provided with collectors’ furniture and piles of artwork; evening dress (which people now say is “recommended” or sometimes, still, “required” and which, at least in France, has assumed the absurd appearance of ceremonial dress rather than being something taken for granted when going out for the evening); sumptuously bound books or editions on “large paper” (which I leave to the bibliophiles, for though I am maniacal about my books, I prize them only as a function of their printed content and place very little importance on their published form, as container); women as well as men who are too rinsed, pumiced, and ascepticized (for an excessively meticulous cleanliness gives me an unhealthy impression of a pharmacy). In the opposite direction, however: theater seats (which I always want to be the best); seats for corridas (which I would like to be in the first row); spirits (unacceptable, in my opinion, if they are not choice brands or of “genuine” provenance, even though in practice I am not so particular and have, moreover, never been a connoisseur on that subject, even during the period when hard liquor and aperitifs were not forbidden to me); trifling, serviceable objects such as fountain pens and cigarette lighters (which I feel must be made by the best-known companies). Here, then—and without much searching—is an appreciable number of illustrations, but also exceptions, to the rule that I had already gone more than halfway to laying down! Quite a capricious rule, and one that no doubt expresses, more than any other truth, the fact that it is the rule with me to try to justify caprice by turning certain of its chance products into the paradigm of a rule.
Now, just what is this Nicklausse, whom the librettist and the composer of Tales of Hoffmann made an indispensable element of their work even though he is a character of only secondary importance?
It must be pointed out first of all that the role of Nicklausse—vocally, a mezzo-soprano—is sung by a female singer in male clothing portraying a very young man: a figure who belongs entirely to neither of the two sexes, and whose youth is accentuated by its femininity. Ten or twelve years old when I saw this performance at the Opéra Comique, I probably felt closer to a creature of indeterminate age and sex than to the other protagonists, who are completely defined men or women (despite the fantastic nature of some of them) and who would not be induced by any charming condescension to lower themselves to our level, as does that female singer, who even wears knee breeches so as to look more like us and separate herself from the other actors by this particular disguise, just as children everywhere are different from grownups. A woman belonging to the theater, and consequently to the realm of fiction, who is not—like so many of her kind—a mother or a magician but rather a big sister, quite within our reach, and who has put on a boy’s costume expressly to join with us in forming a separate group and become a comrade.
Was my age at that time (quite close to what they call the critical period) the essential cause of the attraction I felt to this equivocal character, who was in no way differentiated—if one thinks only of the fact that she is a woman playing the part of a man—from many other characters in the operas or comic operas I had already seen performed: Romeo’s page in Romeo and Juliet, a role sung by a woman with legs sheathed in tights, and also, in Faust, the role of Siebel, Marguerite’s young lover? It is possible, no doubt, that at the time when I discovered Tales of Hoffmann, I was more sensitive than at the time of Siebel and Romeo’s page to what is exhilarating about a woman dressed as a man. In particular, I recall that at about the same time I was half in love with a Jewish girl who had played the part of the young vagabond in Coppée’s Le Passant for an audition with my piano teacher; I was delighted to see disguised as a Renaissance page this rather pretty girl with her somewhat Chinese look whom I had always seen in a dress and who was the very active older sister of a sickly boy with whom I went to school and had good relations. But it is equally possible that because of its very nature the Hoffmannesque transvestite offered something more stimulating than other transvestites: the narrator’s companions are young German students of the romantic era and could easily be our contemporaries; isn’t it the case that a woman wearing a suit and elegant boots—which was how the woman portraying Nicklausse appeared, as far as I can remember—imposes her singularity more vigorously than the woman relegated by her archaic disguise as page or scholar to a rather colorless distance?
Going beyond his physical appearance, all the way to his soul, I find traits in Nicklausse that seem to me to explain why I attached myself to him much more than to the other theatrical figures portrayed by women in men’s dress: Nicklausse is not only the hero’s lieutenant and vigilant guardian but the one who solves the riddle that three apparently unrelated tales have posed. This double, who follows Hoffmann in all his adventures and declares himself his “mentor” (because he seeks—in vain, what is more, and without any great faith—to conceal with his own good sense the vagaries of an imagination too quick to go astray), is the one, in effect, to provide the key phrase by which the action is explained and reveals its unity—that reply which I had forgotten was put in Nicklausse’s mouth but which I have rediscovered, in its exact wording, in a score of Tales of Hoffmann in the possession of my sister at Saint-Pierre-lez-Nemours where I am currently convalescing (after an attack of jaundice which for a while changed me into a Mongol, into a yogi emaciated by his visceral gymnastics or an inveterate smoker of opium, to my amusement and that of a few friends attentive to a metamorphosis whose progress, stagnation, or recession they confirmed at each of their visits):
Je comprends! . . . Trois drames dans un drame:
Olympia, Antonia, Giulietta
ne sont qu’une même femme:
La Stella!
[I understand! . . . Three dramas in one:
Olympia, Antonia, Giulietta
are but a single woman:
Stella!]
To the students who, drinking and smoking, have listened to the poet narrate the three love stories which, between prologue and epilogue, furnished the substance of the three acts—those of Olympia the tailors dummy, Giulietta the courtesan, and Antonia the musician—Nicklausse, as the good disciple able to penetrate the master’s most secret thoughts, hands over the key to the mystery: the three stories are actually one, and simply illustrate the various different seductions of the singer Stella.
The tavern setting on which Tales of Hoffmann opens and closes has only a faint relation, of course, to that of my “luxury hotels”; the central part of the action does indeed take place in Venice, in it we see gondolas, and a barcarolle is sung, but there is nothing touristic about it and I don’t think it would be over that Venetian canal that I would be able—except in self-mockery—to cast a bridge. What must be examined in order to establish the connection is still the character Nicklausse and the exact manner in which he fulfills his duties as favorite companion and adjunct.
Nicklausse, realist though he may be, has no similarity to a thickset Sancho Panza and even less to a groveling Leporello. He is a levelheaded but lively and generous boy, quite capable of taking risks with no thought of danger. He lacks neit
her a sense of humor nor a sense of poetry and is certainly the most devoted to Hoffmann of all the members of the group at the same time as the one who best appreciates the extent of his genius. If in many instances he argues the part of reason and attempts to bring his friend back to a more accurate view of things, it is in order to prevent him from landing in a bad situation and not at all out of concern for his own safety. In richness of feeling and intellect he is scarcely inferior to Hoffman, when all is said and done, but he is more perspicacious and represents, in relation to him, the sage who endeavors to protect the madman from himself. Far from being a lukewarm sort of person, impervious to any enthusiasm, or a regular killjoy, he benefits from a wisdom that includes not only moderation but a faculty of understanding through which he can grasp the truth hidden behind the poet’s divagation and reveal to the assembled uninitiated the bitter signification clothed in the seductive guises of the beautiful tales invented, with the help of the heat and flame of the punch, by the amazing drunkard.
The power of Nicklausse, golden-mouthed censor, confidant for good and bad days alike, initiate who hasn’t tried to avoid any of the trials (not even God’s rebuffs) and of whom one can believe that nothing human is alien to him. The power of the actress who portrays him, whose male dress charmed us and who—impulsively, like a good child, without arrogance or affectation—has made herself the embodiment of pure and intelligent friendship. The brotherly aspect of the character of Nicklausse, clearly belonging to this world and as comforting as a proffered hand, elf or imp whose lightness comes from the quickness of his blood and who is a son of the earth rather than a nebulous progeny of the clouds. The “easy as A-B-C” aspect that also distinguishes him, he who enlightens the others as though by an illumination taking the form of childish pranks, like the pupil who finishes his test well before the appointed hour and imparts to the rest of the class the answer to the problem, or like the player who—mute up to then—answers the riddle just when everyone is about to give up.
A boy at once easy to get along with, quick with his feelings, as he is with his perceptions, and whose support and advice are never wanting on any occasion—all this though he appears to be a scatterbrain and his actions aren’t at all inhibited by the self-assurance of a mind that one may nevertheless assume to be suitably busy. A place that doesn’t attract attention by its glittering or nobly austere facade, but where you feel comfortable because the things as well as the people there don’t greet you as a stranger and, far from being correct to the point of becoming chilly, discreetly reveal themselves to be useful quite without any overly superior air as they are without any gloominess. The one characteristic proven, in the end, by my still-intact sympathy for Nicklausse and my disgust with overly sumptuous hotels is this: given, once and for all, that we must subscribe to the dictum according to which it is better to be than to appear, I have come to demand of objects as well as of people that they appear less in order to be more, and turn away from everything that presents itself in too solemn or too brilliant a guise, not only because too much of a glare always hurts one’s eyes and association with someone who behaves like royalty or like a coquette is rarely cordial, but because very little appearance has become for me a proof of quality, an assurance, in any case, that my hopes will not be disappointed, that I haven’t been cheated, and that the thing or person contemplated, like a machine with power in reserve, will certainly hold much more than the little—or the least—it promises.
How exciting it is, always, when the runner who, up to then, seemed too far behind ever to catch up, emerges victorious. Such a moment grips you because it is a revelation: the straggler who didn’t seem to have anything going for him wins out over all the others, the hidden god appears in all the radiance of his strength, a moment comparable to the point when the masks come off, when the imposter steps forth abashed, and when the face of the world suddenly seems changed because one single thing has turned out to be the opposite of what one had thought. When I despise values flaunted with an excessive ostentation or values that have just now been acquired, is it perhaps because I would like to spare myself the possibility of a similar discovery? The lightning bolt of a naked breast jutting out from the horseman’s costume in which the heiress has disguised herself, the stupefaction of the tramp who wakes up a king and—on a less strained level—the feeling you have of extraordinary luck when a coveted object, far from disappointing you when you enter into possession of it, turns out to be superior to what the logic of any sworn expert or accountant permitted you to suppose.
A sensational turn of events, in sum, for which the rest of the plot merely prepared the favorable conditions; an unveiling that is the veil’s reason for existing, instead of being no more than its final negation; the raising—in a “transformation scene”—of a facade whose only virtue is to show up as unrefined the beauties that no matrix of this sort protected against prostitution. That a day will come when I, too, will sing my great aria, perform well, receive the ears and tail like the matador who, sword and little red flag in his hands, has just attained the highest peak—this is a vow that I often catch myself composing. My ambition, of course, remains contained within more or less reasonable limits (since the models I have chosen for myself for the general conduct of my life have never been the greatest), but there is an ulterior motive in this: with respect to the judgment that may be passed on me, it must be understood that I am not of so average a class as not to be in a position, at times, to equal—even surpass—the best; already, certain people, at least, necessarily suspect me of performing below my true capacity, for lack of doing my utmost, and are saying about me: “If only he took the trouble . . . ”; the opinion of a single person, if need be, can suffice to make me content, if it is someone I place high enough to accord to his vote the value of a consecration and if I have not too illusory reasons for seeing it, not as a vaguely benevolent approbation, but as a sort of sponsorship.
I am therefore divided among several desires that seem at first sight to end in contradiction: the legitimate wish to situate myself in a high rank without, however, posing as a candidate for the highest (whether because I fear, in my eyes as in those of others, the absurdity of an ambition too visibly disproportionate, or whether the idea of being a man in a high position inspires me with a sincere repugnance); a more reckless pretension to being a person of whom those in the know, who can read between the lines and don’t need anyone to dot their i’s for them, expect a distinction that would be useless to hope for from the stars of the first magnitude; a childish wish to place myself under the aegis of a master of vast understanding, in whose eyes I would assume the position of the younger brother he should support, or the right arm on whom he could lean, or the favorite disciple, as Saint John was for Christ. What I would like, in other words, is to remain in the background while at the same time being virtually first and foremost—without fame but, for the shrewdest, crowned with laurels—consecrated, finally, by a man of genius to whom my enlightened devotion or my understanding, more penetrating than any other, would in return be precious. To be at once the scrupulous sort of person who sizes himself up without complacency and the forgotten one confident of an immanent justice, the modest creature and the proud one sure of his right to be less modest, the devoted follower and the vizier without whom the sultan’s authority could not be asserted—this is my aim, in the end, and the resolution of that contradiction which is perhaps merely a mask with which I would like to disguise (the true incentive, then, being duplicity rather than duality) my version of playing it both ways at once: if my value is actually superior, people will appreciate it all the more because I have gone unrecognized and because there will be a false judgment to rectify; if it is with good reason that I make no claim to anything, people will at least have to acknowledge that I am someone who never overestimated his own importance and who thus displayed an unusual wisdom. However it turns out, by not drawing attention to myself and remaining curled up inside myself, I will have managed not
only to escape the possibility of failure, but also to avoid compromising myself or laying myself open to the blows of fortune, as happens in our game of who-loses-wins to those who are too manifestly lucky. Deliberate calculation, inborn prudence, and an almost organic propensity to occupy (like a child buried in his mother’s breast) only the modest compartment of an area completely my own join together, therefore, to temper my pride and discreetly determine its appearance, like the rider of a horse he has so well in hand that no uninitiated person would suspect that the mount was a bundle of nerves, capable of sending the horseman flying at any moment.