Stuck on the bus in between Joan of Arc and the skull of John the Baptist, there was really nowhere else to go. Fortunately, there was nowhere else I terribly wanted to be. Unfortunately, with the hills of the French countryside between Amiens and Rouen extending out in all directions, there was nowhere else I could. My phone, nearly dead and reticent to help, was a rather poor travelling companion, so I opened my book up and tried to make myself comfortable.
Mémoires de Dirk Raspe, the seething, starry-eyed posthumous novel of French writer Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, is a conundrum. Drieu La Rochelle, known for several poorly-disguised autobiographical apologiae and for being the most notable literary proponent of fascism in France, wrote the Mémoires while hiding out in the countryside from Résistance fighters and his personal ghosts. Viewing, gleefully, his life as an unresolved contradiction, he set out to write a novel about another misunderstood genius, Vincent van Gogh.
When not contemplating idyllic spots to poison himself or his newfound love for Stalin, Drieu La Rochelle wrote feverishly throughout the grim winter of 1944. He records in his diary that one day he wrote “in the debris of a mutilated park,” some days later that “he worked like an angel,” and a good bit later that “I am sick of that new novel… I am disgusted by [it].” The following spring, in a manic burst, he finished the first four parts of the novel, returned to Paris, and killed himself.
Unfinished yet well-revised, the Mémoires are a fitting final statement. It follows the titular character, Dirk, a version of van Gogh, from his adolescence spent as a ward of a passionless Anglican vicar, to his apprenticeship with a London art dealer, to his time as a pitiful missionary in the Low Countries, to his eventual turbulent and brilliant career as an unknown artist. The story itself, from dull and disarrayed fantasies of scullery maids to piercing and scintillating groans against the world of illusion, is nothing terribly new, except Drieu La Rochelle is viscerally living it. Indifferent and forced to wait in between life and death, his Mémoires are a perfect paean to indeterminacy.
In perhaps the most incredible passage of the novel, we track Drieu La Rochelle’s blazing gaze into nothingness. In an almost Buddhist turn, his first great exposure to the world causes him to throw it away. Starving and desperate for recognition, he wheedles an art publisher into purchasing one of his drawings and promptly hands the pennies he made over to a prostitute. Watching her unbutton her shirt, the sheer sight of her breasts causes “[his] entire life to tear itself apart… a more immediate reality took its place, abolishing all else around it… wounding me with a presence irresistible, irreplaceable, unique—intolerable.” Like a Soutine or Bacon canvas of rotting meat or disintegrating men, Drieu La Rochelle presents the horror and radiance of the mundane, in its beauty and ugliness, as the fundamental focal point of human life, just as Dirk/van Gogh found the same among his potato eaters and peasants.
I looked up from my book, distraught and at peace. “Who will be tranquil and who will be troubled” declares the High Holiday liturgy—it is not a question but an indicator, a pointing finger in every direction. The landscape around me, in the morning crisp and gray, had now turned to black and gold, the decisive heavy stillness of evening. The provincial bus, unmarked and quiet, crept along the road, as if to nowhere. Amiens, with its floating gardens and protests and Roman jewelry, was irretrievably in the past. Suddenly, we emerged from a tunnel and there, in the absolute darkness, through melting bursts of snow, were hundreds of fairy lights. The valley, glowing with village lampposts, spread out before us as one by one the lights went in and out, annihilated in turn by the folds of pitch blackness only to reappear and radiate again. Rouen, where Joan of Arc was burned and where her tears have been turned into chocolate-covered almonds, was somewhere in the distance, drawing endlessly closer, ever static in the dark. As Dirk laments as the second part and his adolescence come to a close, “O Orient du désir, humains, si vous saviez !”
Sinuously,
Brady Santoro
Image: Vincent van Gogh, The Hill of Montmartre with Stone Quarry, oil on canvas, 1886 (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam)