The Folio Club - Issue Number Five

Here at last! The new issue will be released this week.

Cover artist Onsmith started work on the wraparound cover like this...

and eventually arrived at this fabulous result...

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It’s April... So Here’s Paris

For many years I’ve kept a framed poster of a French lithograph by Luc Métivet, a contemporary of Toulouse-Lautrec, on the wall of my apartment. It has followed me from one apartment to the next for nearly three decades, and has been joined, more recently, by a new print from Jean Giraud, a.k.a. Moebius. Between the two—“between” both chronologically and, in my apartment, spatially—dwell books by Voltaire, Proust, Cocteau. (Flaubert, though not in the bookcase currently, has also left his mark, or rather his presence, even if not in quite as godlike a way as he believed an author—“present everywhere and visible nowhere”—should.) In my kitchen, a delicious French vegetable soup awaits, ready to accompany me on an imaginative journey back to the French past, literary or historical, or forward to the fantasized alternative future(s) of Monsieur Giraud.

I first saw Paris—in real time and fresh air, not on a page or screen—at age sixteen, from a tour bus full of high school students on a sunny April day. Our tour guide announced that we were entering Paris, and with a great rush we all leaned forward to gaze at the “city of light” on the horizon—and it was a city of light—so sunny, so radiant—the most exciting thing that had ever unfolded for me, a dream materialized. From an uneventful suburban childhood, to arrive in Paris was like arriving in heaven, like going through the Pearly Gates without having had to die to get there.

No, I hadn’t had to die, but I had spent many winter nights cleaning ashtrays, dumping garbage cans, hauling barrels of trash out to a dumpster while mentally replaying my favorite rock album of the moment (Blondie’s Eat to the Beat) as a kind of internal soundtrack to sustain me as I worked to finance this first international excursion. At times the drudgery of the afterschool job made me feel like an orphan in a Dickens novel, but I persevered; and so, beyond its sunbursts of youthful discovery and, later, its urban geography bathed in the soft blue glow of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wistful romanticism, Paris would become an early example of the power of my will. Places are sometimes said to have personalities, but Paris reflected pieces of my own: my adolescent self projected onto it his better impulses—idealism, love, belief in life’s possibilities—and felt them reciprocated in greater luminosity. While there, of course, my more immediate concern was the hunt for issues of Metal Hurlant and volumes of TinTin—and a first-rate French pastry (eventually a cherry tart beckoned to me from a sweet-shop window and I indulged, my quest for perfection thoroughly fulfilled).

I returned a few years later, at twenty-two, in a slushy, snowy February, to find that Paris had turned a resonant gray; I trudged through the freezing cold to take shelter in a tiny overheated hotel room where I collapsed on the bed’s red comforter and reveled in the toasty warmth. I awakened to a Parisian winter morning: the start of a new day, a croissant purchased on the sidewalk, a stroll in the cold perfect air.

That same snowy week, a friend and I paid an evening visit to the Eiffel Tower three days after a bomb scare. Not surprisingly, we had it almost all to ourselves. A few gendarmes escorted us up the tower and we walked around and enjoyed the city lights against the black clear night while the gendarmes stood with their little machineguns and exchanged good-natured banter. Later the same night, the enthusiastic proprietor of our hotel near the Gare de L’Est steered us toward an appropriate restaurant for a late dinner of escargots and filet of sole in champagne sauce; we concluded the evening with a fearless stroll down a winding empty street and snooped in darkened store windows under a bright moon.

The two memories—sunny afternoon of first arrival, crisp night of a later visit—remain strong, but now when I hear the words “Paris” or “France,” images of tree-lined Parisian streets float through my mind, most of them straight out of Proust. In a way, France for me is a fiction, one that has been in development since my adolescence: an amalgamation of experiences, readings, and dreams.

Of actual experiences, my favorite memories are of simply whiling away the day: being served a bowl of onion soup on a pleasant spring afternoon in a friendly little bar in Toulouse; watching the sun shine on an empty Parisian train yard; eating a lunch of pizza at a café in Rouen and admiring the leather jackets on young passers-by; visiting a great dusty bookstore and spending pieces of a bright winter day window-shopping before returning to Paris, where my late afternoon wanderings concluded at a church (orange slanting sunlight as the daylight prepares to fade; boys kicking a ball on the steps outside). I once stayed at a youth hostel, in an old stone dormitory located down an alley; as I approached it in the declining afternoon light the city seemed to turn into a quiet place in the past, a secret place. The moment had a built-in echo—not déjà vu, but a sensibility, a kind of portal into an earlier time. (I did experience déjà vu elsewhere in France, quite strongly, on my first trip there as a teenager; afterwards I had an inexplicable feeling that I was partly French. Years later I learned that my Dutch ancestors were actually French Huguenots, a revelation that neatly revised one-quarter of my pedigree and pleasantly affirmed my seemingly nutty intuition.)

France, and especially Paris, was the first place I felt the past extend back into an endless labyrinth of history. In a culture more than ten times older than the one in which I had grown up, every nuance of the foreign universe ran to tremendous depths; but despite my sense of those layers, and the profundity of the layering, the France I’ve experienced is primarily the pleasure-seeker’s France, part of an American’s European playground, stripped of much of its real history, stripped of bloody revolutions, plagues, human anguish. Experiencing it in person it remains almost as much a fantasy as when seen through the prism of literature. And yet—the clarifying satire of Candide, the comic social insight of Proust, the freewheeling visions liberated from the depths of Jean Giraud’s psyche and twisted slyly into his Moebius works: these tales, compositions, reveries, all derive their power from the fact that imagination in the hands of a great artist is the material of a truer truth. Why not, then, continue to cherish my personal Paris, my personal France, in its triple glory of experiences, readings, and dreams?

Originally published (as “Paris”) in the fourth issue of the Folio Club. Copyright 2011 by Robert Pranzatelli. All rights reserved.

Image: An illustration by Belle Epoque artist Lucien Métivet. The Métivet poster image mentioned at the beginning of this essay can be seen at the top of an earlier blog post, here.

In Tribute: Moebius

Images by Jean “Moebius” Giraud (1938-2012), in my view the finest artist in the history of comics. Click for a more detailed view of each.

Virginia Woolf

“I love her strange whirling rhythms,” Truman Capote once said of Virginia Woolf. He claimed not to like her novels—“But I love her criticism and I love her diary.” While I don’t share Capote’s aversion to the novels, among which I would single out To the Lighthouse as Woolf’s masterpiece, I do find those three words “strange whirling rhythms” marvelously apt. For whether in fiction or nonfiction, Woolf’s prose has its own pleasurable, not to say captivating, cadences; the strange whirl of her complex yet always pellucid sentences derives not only from the musicality of her diction and syntax but also from the strange whirl of the ideas beneath the surface, which the prose precisely reflects. “Strange” because the author relentlessly found fresh new angles of approach to her material, which was life, its consciousness and the consciousness of it; “whirling” because in her narrative and rhetorical strategies for both fiction and nonfiction she never stood still, never proceeded in predictable linearity, always whirled in an improbable circle around her subject, within her subject, bringing into the whirl seemingly disparate peripheral subjects, and then, in perfect rhythm, landed with an artful smack onto the dead-center of the target one hadn’t realized she had been after all along, its essence illuminated by her unconventional sweep as it could never otherwise have been. Yes, I too love her strange whirling rhythms.

I appreciate, too, a term that Virginia Woolf used as a genre category: “life-writing”—a useful label for a broad array of work. Woolf applied the term loosely, to biographies, to memoirs and autobiographical essays, and to letters and diaries; and, not surprisingly given her identity as an innovator, the term is suited to a merging of such forms, and seems to imply spontaneity as well. “Life-writing”: direct, intimate attempts at capturing life, and capturing it alive.

This valiant woman, beleaguered by severe mental health crises, once wrote in her diary: “But I will use all my art to keep my head sane.” Part of her greatness stems from her insistent ability to prize and chronicle those moments when, most alive to the reality of beauty, she could revel in the union of language and life, in, for example, a phrase jotted in a journal entry: “A lovely soaring summer day this; winter sent howling home to his arctic.” Or another: “The world swinging round again and bringing its green and blue close to one’s eyes.”

“Art is being rid of all preaching: things in themselves: the sentence in itself beautiful: multitudinous seas…” How perfect, how appealing; yet in place of the “preaching” there are of course silent selections of values, choices; and even when she did wish to “preach” (I’m thinking here of A Room of One’s Own, that most gorgeous lecture-argument), she could make rhetorical magnificence—in a word, art—of the entire proceedings, and finish with four paragraphs (“and please attend, for the peroration is beginning”) that hold a place of honor among my favorite passages in literature.

It wasn’t Virginia Woolf but Colette who said: “Be happy. It’s one way of being wise.” —but Woolf did her best, in regard to both happiness and wisdom, despite ghastly obstacles stacked against her. Literature provided a lifeline again and again. Through her voluminous writings her inspirations are thoroughly documented, her love of English poetry and of Shakespeare and of biographies and histories—and then there is this:

My great adventure is really Proust. … I am in a state of amazement; as if a miracle were being done before my eyes. How, at last, has someone solidified what has always escaped—and made it too into this beautiful and perfectly enduring substance? One has to put the book down and gasp. The pleasure becomes physical—like sun and wine and grapes and perfect serenity and intense vitality combined.

They were kindred spirits in several ways. She hailed in Proust “his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut and as evanescent as a butterfly’s bloom.” In these sentences she might as well have been describing her own best efforts. Yet her sensibility, her strategies, her preoccupations and special lyricism, remain entirely her own.

Contemporary editions of her books sometimes quote, on their back covers, a few words of tribute from her friend E. M. Forster: “She pushed the light of the English language a little further against darkness.” In the essay from which that phrase is taken, Forster also noted, in the very same sentence, that “she gave acute pleasure in new ways”—all of which I mention because it’s easy to forget that art at its best is both a remarkable pleasure and a heroic act; in the midst of its wit, insight, and delectability it almost inevitably advances the energies of the truly human.

Virginia Woolf’s birthday is January 25—this Wednesday. I recommend you curl up with at least a few paragraphs of her strange whirling rhythms today or sometime this week.

P.S. If you would like to hear a recording of Virginia Woolf’s voice, check out this post from two years ago.

The Dangers of Thread

Here is another little piece of perfection from Romy Ashby, whose subtle way with day to day perceptions is a perpetual thing of beauty. Read “The Dangers of Thread” on her blog here.

Photo: Romy Ashby

Between

“Between is the only honest place to be.”—Lionel Trilling

(Trilling wasn’t talking about being between issues of The Folio Club, but that’s where we happen to be at the moment. So please feel free to contemplate the profundity of Trilling’s wisdom—for it is wise indeed—and then, if you can, you might want to hibernate. Winter is the time for that, after all, and while you snooze you can dream of our next issue, which is already busily being prepared for thaw time.)

Head Garden

Head Garden is a lovely little film by Folio Club contributor Lilli Carré. Give yourself three and a half minutes to go along for the head trip here.

Image by Lilli Carré.