Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

HOLY WEEK by Louis Aragon. Translated by Haakon Chevalier. (Hamish Hamilton.)

EUGENIE by Hester Chapman. (Jonathan Cape.)

From any point of view, Holy Week is an event. It is a good novel and it is good history — a satisfying piece of fiction illuminating a decisive moment in history. There was really no need for the author to bare his teeth at critics and historians in his introductory note and invoke the ‘inalienable rights of the imagination’ against possible accusations of inaccuracy and undue licence. Nobody who cares either for The Novel or for History would wish to raise that sort of objection in the presence of a work of art which is filled to bursting point with urgent and authentic life. Moreover, the book offers important, central, relevant history, not side-issues or famous people en pantouffles. Yet should we consider it as history? In the oddly defensive introductory note just mentioned, the poet-author tells us that we should not: ‘This is not a historical novel,’ he says defiantly. Really not?

     It is no secret by now that the subject of the book is one week in the hundred days that elapsed between Napoleon’s escape from Elba and his departure towards St Helena. On Palm Sunday 1815 when Napoleon had reached Fontainebleau, Louis XVIII, King of France and Navarre, set out on his flight from the capital. M. Aragon concentrates on this tragi-comic cavalcade winding its way northwards ‘to the trot, trot, trot of a monarchy going to pot. . . .’ Napoleon remains an unseen menace. Among the din and chaos of that hastily assembled convoy, the author fishes out ‘the thoughts pursuing their course, the feeling in all these men of being strangers to one another, no two lives the same, a flight of individual destinies, a jostling of escapades....’ In no time, the ‘infernal hunt’ is broken up before our eyes into its component parts, into the groups and individuals incongruously bundled together in disaster. The great and still famous — Berthier, the Duke of Orleans, Lamartine — loom up, linger and pass on their way in the company of the now forgotten—César de Chastellux, Leon de Rochechouart, Col Fabvier, the Duchess of Frioul. The King himself, unwieldy, shrewd and faintly scandalous, his brother Artois, his nephew Berry appear, hold the eye and are jostled on. The Duke of Richelieu, all graciousness and ancien régime, is found discussing the divisions of the French nobility with a Napoleonic Marshal. How much craftsmanship, justice and compassion, how much inventiveness — how much historical knowledge have gone into the shaping of all these figures and incidents! Their thoughts and words may be invented, but their individual histories, their personal antecedents are perfectly authentic: Richelieu and Rochechouart in the Crimea or Marmont governing Dalmatia under the Empire are just two examples. But here, they all turn up held for a moment between arrival and departure, talk and act and remember in the onrush of the continuing movement, step from the swelling river of the flight and establish themselves as breathing and living people.

     This, however, the author does not find quite enough. He thinks that his characters ‘should be judged not only in the light of that week in which we meet them, not even only in the light of their past, but of that last finishing touch that the future will give to the picture. . . .’ He wants to round off his people by casting on them ‘the illumination of their further destiny’. It cannot be said that M. Aragon is very successful with this ambition. In most cases, that of Marshal Berthier for example, the future beyond Holy Week illuminates very little of the story, interrupts the narrative and provides the few moments when one is tempted to groan under the sheer weight of the material. It might have been helpful if Theodore Géricault’s destiny had been rounded off with an ‘illumination’ borrowed, so to speak, from the future. His death might have told us something of his life in that, to him, revolutionary week, for it is, of course, death and not just the future that completes and enduringly defines character and destiny. This might have done something for Géricault since, so far as the book has a single hero, it is that gifted Romantic painter who was to die in 1824 at the deplorably early age of thirty-three.

     Even so, M. Aragon’s Géricault is a marvel of poetic creation. The historical Géricault, like the hero of the book, accompanied the King to the Belgian frontier and there turned back to become that (in 1815) dangerous thing, a liberal. Aragon’s Géricault joins the flight on Palm Sunday in an access of immense pity’ to turn away from the Monarch and his cause on Easter Saturday because, quite simply, ‘he had a furious urge to live’. To him, the Royal cavalcade has become identified with anti-life and is dismissed at the frontier, ‘the limit of the possible’, as a lethal illusion. It does not make him turn to Napoleon, however: the issue does not lie merely between ‘the hierarchy of the Emperor and that of the King’. As at midnight the Easter bells start ringing, Géricault feels that ‘life began again. . . . Tonight, Theodore felt himself facing life as a painter faces his canvas: to paint is to create order. So is to live.’

     Here we touch the central mystery of the book. Alone among all these fleeing men of the throne and the altar, the Marshals and Princes and Priests, Géricault preserves and reaffirms his immunity and future as a man and an artist. That is one aspect of Aragon’s Géricault. The other is that he discovers, in the middle of this momentous week, the secret life of the people. He stumbles across a group of underground Republicans, heirs of the great Revolution, meeting at night near Poix, conspiratorially discussing with one another what the present upheaval really means. This experience overwhelms Géricault like a revelation. Henceforth his life belongs ‘not to those attached to Emperor or King, but to those who carry the water in which others bathe . . .’ — to the nameless, the humble, the deprived, the victims. So at the frontier, Aragon’s like history’s, Géricault turns his face towards Paris ‘where nothing now will be the same’.

     Aragon’s Géricault, one might add, carries within himself thoughts and ideas which contain some modern-sounding germs and a definite bias — but history’s Géricault had also become, by the standards of his time, a dangerous man: in 1815, the prisons of Europe were overflowing with liberals. This gives the two Géricaults more than mere affinity of situation, it identifies the one with the other and they merge into one figure, sentient, individual, alive, even as in the book generally the historical and the imagined, the framework and the individual destiny, are fused into one. This happens rarely, but it has happened here. One of the reasons for the achievement is that M. Aragon, having obviously read widely among the memoirs of the period, has a poet’s respect for authenticity, for the time and the place and the person — but also the poet’s eye for a truth beyond the facts. This truth is still the stuff of history, even though it can be given unfettered perhaps only in works of the imagination like Holy Week. However that may be, the present book has enlarged the range of history in fiction: it may be a lonely specimen of the genre, but it is a magnificent historical novel all the same.

     To this, Miss Hester Chapman’s Eugénie (‘a historical romance’) offers an interesting contrast. Here nothing is authentic, everything guessed at rather than imagined, and the romance is all. The author uses, it is true, real names from history books but invents, for almost all of them, spurious identities and faked life-stories. It is necessary to call these figures fakes, because, in her introductory note, Miss Chapman claims that none of the characters in this book is invented’, that ‘all events and most incidents are factual’. One does not see the necessity, but if factual historical truth was really the aim behind this book, then it must be stated that it fails. If one takes a fascinating historical character like the Marqués de Alcañisez, Duke of Sesto, who was a wealthy Grandee, Civil Governor of Madrid and a King-maker, and turns him into a play-boy, a gold-digger and man of dishonour, then one must not claim not to have invented a character unknown to history. If moreover the fictitiously rotten Duke of Alcanizes (as he is here called and spelt) is offered as the only man whom the Empress Eugénie really loved, more than she loved her husband, her son and her crown, then the fantasy must not be offered as ‘springing from close scholarly research’. Nor is Alcañisez the only character to be robbed of his historic identity — very few of the figures here presented escape with their individualities intact, and any similarity between the cast and people who have lived is almost entirely confined to names.

     Events and most incidents do not fare much better, especially as the author is extremely careless with her chronology and setting. History, like treason, is after all a question of dates, but the clocks of Eugénie point too often to the wrong day, month, year. Great events like Napoleon III’s courtship of Eugénie, the coup d’ état of 1851, the Italian and Franco-Prussian Wars, even the Empress’s flight from the Tuileries are wrong both in sequence and detail. Small points — that the Two Grenadiers is by Schumann and not Schubert, that there were no ‘old Offenbach tunes’ in 1852, that Mérimée was not the Empress’s librarian, Lord Malmesbury not ambassador in Paris — do not favourably contribute to the picture either — if one is led to expect an ‘imaginatively recreated’ piece of history.

     In intention, Miss Chapman has written a naturalistic novel aimed at giving a ‘real’ story in the guise of fiction. Her ultimate justification, so one may deduce from her introductory note, was factual history, historic truth — even as M. Aragon’s ultimate authority was Imagination. Her idea was to offer history in new colours, in a brighter light. However unlucky with details, Miss Chapman still aimed at a new interpretation of the factual, perhaps the factual for its own sake. The interesting point is that even if the author had been more successful with her material, the aim itself, namely naturalism made legitimate by the facts of history, is not by itself likely to produce a worthwhile novel. In this day and age, when the civilized world is losing touch with history as a source of light and illumination, some deeper purpose than naturalism is required to rekindle a feeling for history. M. Aragon has this purpose. It is not only that he has taken such infinite care with every one of his men and women which makes Holy Week so memorable a novel, nor is it merely that Miss Chapman has taken these many liberties with her period which robs Eugénie of its validity. The real difference lies in the fact that M. Aragon saw in his material a specific as well as a general significance which enabled him to give his artist-hero an unforgettable moment of resurrection as a man. He gave his people an inward life that sprang from his imagination, but he left their outward existence, their share in history, intact. His historical conscience thus at peace, he was able to let his characters live within the confines of Holy Week 1815 and yet reach out into the future and the present day.