On the
anticipated publication by New Directions of two new books by FLEUR JAEGGY : THESE POSSIBLE LIVES
and I AM THE BROTHER OF X.X. in July
2017.
Here is a review
that was never published of SWEET DAYS OF DISCIPLINE by Fleur
Jaeggy. New Directions. I forget why either the Washington Post or
Chicago Tribune refused to publish my review back in 1993.
Sweet
Days of Discipline is a masterpiece.
Probably there is no overcoming a reader’s skepticism at reading such a
sentence. Frankly, I was also skeptical
about my own initial reading of the book and so to check it I took the advice
in the blurb by Joseph Brodsky, “Reading time is approximately four hours. Remembering time as for the author, the rest
of one’s life.”
INTERJECTION:
I wrote this review in 1993... so 24 years later… not a word has to be
changed.
Rereading
Jaeggy’s novel I found myself increasingly sadder because the novel is short
and the inevitable last page gets closer and closer: I wanted to continue to
live in the world of the author’s sensibility and dreading the difficulty of how
to convince another to read it…
Like all truly
great works of literature the story can be summed up quite simply. The un-named narrator is remembering a year,
among many years in the 1950’s spent at a boarding school in Switzerland. But this year was different because it
was the year that a new girl, Frederique, was also a student at the same
school. The novel traces out the course of that year and the growing friendship
between the two girls.
Every cliché
that such a situation might suggest is avoided:
there is no sadistic headmistress, no randy kitchen help, no lesbian
sexual encounters. Instead Jaeggy
creates an entire world populated by the children of the high bourgeois of
Europe who are destined to be equally comfortable in Zurich, as in Paris, Milan
or Munich.
The opening of the novel suggests in
the sureness of the language what is to come:
“At fourteen I
was a boarder in a school in the Appenzeel.
This was the area where Robert Walser used to take his many walks when
he was in the mental hospital in Herisau, not far from our college. He died in the snow. Photographs show his footprints and the position
of the body in the snow. We didn’t know
the writer. And nor did our literature
teacher. Sometime I think it might be nice to die like that, after a walk to
let yourself drop into a natural grave in the snow of the Appenzeel after almost
thirty years of mental hospital in Herisau.
It really was a shame we didn’t know of Walser’s existence, we would
have picked a flower for him. Even Kant,
shortly before his death was moved when a women he didn’t know offered him a
rose.”
Upon re-reading
this opening paragraph I am again captivated by the tone of elegiac sadness and
the author’s ability to both distance and involve the reader. I am flattered in my knowing who Robert
Walser is and having seen those famous photographs of his death steps and I appreciate
the apt detail from the life of Kant which avoids the commonplace of the
citizen of Koenigsberg setting their clocks to the punctuality of his daily
walk through the town.
Such a paragraph
sets the tone and allow the reader to enter Jaeggy’s world by remembering too
that he or she has probably had a similar experience of growing up. Going to grammar school in Patchogue on Long
Island I did not know and my teachers did not know that Henry David Thoreau had
passed through Patchogue on his way to look for the bones of Margaret Fuller
who had drowned off of Fire Island, opposite Patchogue.
Never have I
read such an accurate description of the process by which one attempts to
become the friend of another--- knowing that friendship is the near physical
absorption of the other.
“In our lives
at school, each of us, if we had a little vanity, would establish a facade, a kind of double life, affect a way of
speaking, walking, looking. When I saw
her writing I couldn’t believe it. We
also most all had the same kind of handwriting, uncertain, childish with round wide
‘o’s. Hers was completely affected. (Twenty years later I saw something similar
in a dedication Pierre Jean Jouve had written on a copy of “Kyrie.”)
(LATER: again I was flattered as of course I knew the French writer,
didn’t everyone at that moment who really read even only in English)
Of course I pretended not to be surprised, I barely glanced
at it. But secretly I practiced And I still write like Frederique today, and people
tell me I have beautiful handwriting.”
And I too remembering
a boy who came to my school in four grade in Patchogue who wrote with the left
hand and of how I tried to write with my left hand so as to become this
friend. And to think how far away a
boarding school in Switzerland is from Patchogue!
But the novel does
not isolate the narrator: she takes walks dislikes her roommate rejects another
girl who wants to be her friend. The
narrator suggests a complete world and that is what we demand of an author:
invent a world into which we can fall, slide, insinuate our own experience.
Of course
Frederique is not destined for great happiness but for something more
interesting: she has taken up residency in the memorial heart of both the
narrator and the reader.
An anthology
of epigrammatic items of truth could be culled from this book and to set it in
its proper context the reader would have tocall to mind such books as Rilke’s The
Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge or Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles or
Glenway Wescott’s The Grandmothers or Fred Uhlman’s Reunion.
-->
Years after the
year at the school the narrator runs into Frederique at the cinemateque in
Paris. They go back to her attic room,
“Frederique was about twenty now. She
dressed as she always had. A dark zinc
grey over body, narrow hips, long neck.
The jugular was pulsing. She had pushed back her hood. The pale oval of
her face, legs crossed. The perfection
of school days had taken up residence in this room of hers… She lives, I
thought, as if she were in a grave.”
PS I did not describe Jaeggy's other books, LAST VANITIES, SS PROLETERKA, THESE POSSIBLE LIVES, I AM THE BROTHER OF XX... I did not write about Jaeggy's husband Roberto Calasso... I suspect that SS PROLETERKA belongs in the Pantheon of the greatest of modern books... I guess you can say I hold Jaeggy's book in the same imaginary hand that I also hold the books of Hannah Green, ERNST JUNGER, GLENWAY WESCOTT, JULIAN GREEN, JUAN CARLOS ONETTI, JOSE LEZAMA LIMA, PETER NADAS...
