Fermina Marquez (1911) (11 page)
INTRODUCTION
It is rare for a writer to be born extremely rich. In many cases great wealth might prove a handicap to the development of a literary gift but Valery Larbaud (1&81-1957) succeeded in turning his financial assets to artistically creative advantage. The source of his money was the Saint Yorre mineral spring at Vichy, which he inherited from his father at the age of eight: it could be said that, throughout the
belle epoque
and the years between the wars, whenever a glass of Vichy water was drunk anywhere in the world a centime or so was added to Larbaud's fortune. The image thus evoked is wholly appropriate, for Larbaud was to become the poet of first-class travel, exploiting a sensibility perfectly attuned to the melancholy glamour of sleeping-cars, ocean liners and Ritz hotels.
I felt all the sweetness of life for the first time in a compartment . of the Nord express between Wirballen and Pskov. We were slipping through grasslands where shepherds, at the foot of clumps of big trees like hills, were dressed in dirty, raw sheepskins . . .
Lend me your vast noise, your vast gentle speed, your nightly slipping through a lighted Europe, O luxury train! And the agonizing music that sounds the length of your gilt corridors, while behind the japanned doors with heavy copper latches sleep the millionaires . . .
Throughout his childhood and adolescence Larbaud was dominated by his formidable widowed mother, whose vigilance extended into his young manhood and under whose oppressive chaperonage he voyaged round Europe (but escaping her for long enough to enjoy discreet love affairs with young women in every country visited) while he wrote poetry, fiction and travel essays. His best-known work,
A.O. Barnabooth,
is a combination of all these genres, describing the spiritual, aesthetic and erotic adventures of a young South American millionaire as he fastidiously journeys along the same privileged, exotic routes that Larbaud had explored for himself. This was published in 1913; still not quite free of Madame Larbaud's influence, he was by then himself an influential figure on the French literary scene, a friend of Andre Gide and a prominent member of the group of intellectuals associated with the
Nouvelle Revue Francaise.
Larbaud was a highly civilized example of everything that is understood by the phrase 'man of letters'. His sympathies, expressed in a vast output of literary criticism (including two collections with the overall tile
Reading
-
That Unpunished Vice),
were generous and wide. An authority on Hispanic, English and American literature, he translated several Spanish and Portuguese writers into French as well as poems by Coleridge and Walt Whitman, prose by Sir Thomas Browne and Nathaniel Hawthorne, a novel by Arnold Bennett and almost the entire work of Samuel Butler. He also collaborated with James Joyce (and others) on the French version of
Ulysses.
Larbaud had met Joyce in Paris in 1920 and had been excited by the parts of
Ulysses
that had so far appeared. The following year he published a long story called
Amants, Heureux Amants . . .
which was told as an interior monologue, and acknowledged its influence in the dedication: 'To James Joyce, my friend and the only begetter of the form I have adopted in this piece of writing.' Joyce immediately corrected him, pointing out that the true originator (and his own inspiration) was Edouard Dujardin, whose
Les
Lauriers Sont Coupes
had been written as long ago as 1887: Larbaud, believing that he was introducing the stream-of-consciousness technique into French literature, was in fact merely reviving it. He made amends in 1923 by dedicating his next exercise in the genre,
Mon Plus Secret Conseil,
to Dujardin himself.
A passionate Anglophile, Larbaud paid several visits to England between 1907 and 1914, vaguely researching a projected biography of Walter Savage Landor. His lyrical treatment of places which English readers may take rather prosaically for granted can sometimes be a cause of amused delight - in such poems, for example, as 'Madame Tussaud's', 'Matin de Novembre Pres d'Abingdon' and 'Londres'
('Les facades de Scott's, du Criterion, du
London Pavilion/Sont eclairees comme par un soleil de 1'Ocean Indien')
or in the story
Gwenny-Toute-Seule
which is set in Florence Villa, Stafford Road, Weston-super-Mare. In the charming novella
Beaute, Mon Beau Souci . . .,
which takes place for the most part in Chelsea, Queenie the heroine explains that she lives in
'Harlesden. Apres Kensal Rise, dans cette direction.'
In her mouth, these names take on for the enamoured hero the melodious magic of enchanted groves . . . The humour here is intentional -Larbaud can be very funny. A group of poems attributed to his
alter ego,
Barnabooth the rich amateur, are subtitled
Les Borborygmes —
stomach rumbles, 'the only human voice that does not lie'.
In 1935, Valery Larbaud suffered a severe heart attack which tragically incapacitated him for the remaining twenty-two years of his life.
Fermina Marquez,
his first novel, was published in 1911, when he was thirty. It is set in Saint Augustine's, a boys' school just outside Paris - Roman Catholic and traditional but also cosmopolitan and rather dashing. Fermina herself is a young South American beauty who comes to visit her brother, a pupil at the school. The story examines the disturbing effect of her presence on some of the older boys - in particular on Joanny Leniot, the school swat, who identifies with Julius Caesar and makes a stern resolution to seduce her. But she is more successfully pursued by the handsome, sophisticated Santos Iturria from Monterey.
The model for Saint Augustine's was Sainte-Barbe-des-Champs, at Fontenay-aux-Roses, where Larbaud spent the happiest years of his childhood as a brilliant pupil from 1891 to 1894 - that is to say, between the ages of ten and thirteen. Here the seeds were nurtured of that
cosmopolitisme
which the adult Larbaud, in his life and work, was so fruitfully to epitomize. He put some of his own characteristics (his industry, his timidity, his Roman self-discipline, his pride in scholastic achievement) into the figure of Leniot and others perhaps into that of poor little Camille Moutier, but Larbaud and his friends at the college were in fact some years younger than the boys described in the novel.
Larbaud in his later books was to write more smoothly than he does in this one, which if judged by the highest standards is not without flaws. The design is somewhat formless, and the spontaneous ardours of post-pubertal emotion are occasionally expressed in a 'poetic' style which only narrowly avoids embarrassing us. But as a psychological study of male adolescence it is on the whole delicate, touching and unsentimental, while the faintly sinister atmosphere of this unusually glamorous school is evoked with a nostalgic vivacity that has proved powerful enough to establish
Fermina Mdrquez
in France as a minor classic. It seems to me one of those personal, intense, romantic books which, if one responds to them at all, are likely to haunt one with a peculiar poignancy for the rest of one's life.
Francis Wyndham
First published in English in Great Britain by Quartet Books Limited 19A member of the Namara Group
27/29 Goodge Street, London W1P 1FD Copyright © Editions Gallimard 19Translation copyright © 1988 by Hubert Gibbs Introduction copyright © 1988 by Francis Wyndham
belle epoque
and the years between the wars, whenever a glass of Vichy water was drunk anywhere in the world a centime or so was added to Larbaud's fortune. The image thus evoked is wholly appropriate, for Larbaud was to become the poet of first-class travel, exploiting a sensibility perfectly attuned to the melancholy glamour of sleeping-cars, ocean liners and Ritz hotels.
I felt all the sweetness of life for the first time in a compartment . of the Nord express between Wirballen and Pskov. We were slipping through grasslands where shepherds, at the foot of clumps of big trees like hills, were dressed in dirty, raw sheepskins . . .
Lend me your vast noise, your vast gentle speed, your nightly slipping through a lighted Europe, O luxury train! And the agonizing music that sounds the length of your gilt corridors, while behind the japanned doors with heavy copper latches sleep the millionaires . . .
Throughout his childhood and adolescence Larbaud was dominated by his formidable widowed mother, whose vigilance extended into his young manhood and under whose oppressive chaperonage he voyaged round Europe (but escaping her for long enough to enjoy discreet love affairs with young women in every country visited) while he wrote poetry, fiction and travel essays. His best-known work,
A.O. Barnabooth,
is a combination of all these genres, describing the spiritual, aesthetic and erotic adventures of a young South American millionaire as he fastidiously journeys along the same privileged, exotic routes that Larbaud had explored for himself. This was published in 1913; still not quite free of Madame Larbaud's influence, he was by then himself an influential figure on the French literary scene, a friend of Andre Gide and a prominent member of the group of intellectuals associated with the
Nouvelle Revue Francaise.
Larbaud was a highly civilized example of everything that is understood by the phrase 'man of letters'. His sympathies, expressed in a vast output of literary criticism (including two collections with the overall tile
Reading
-
That Unpunished Vice),
were generous and wide. An authority on Hispanic, English and American literature, he translated several Spanish and Portuguese writers into French as well as poems by Coleridge and Walt Whitman, prose by Sir Thomas Browne and Nathaniel Hawthorne, a novel by Arnold Bennett and almost the entire work of Samuel Butler. He also collaborated with James Joyce (and others) on the French version of
Ulysses.
Larbaud had met Joyce in Paris in 1920 and had been excited by the parts of
Ulysses
that had so far appeared. The following year he published a long story called
Amants, Heureux Amants . . .
which was told as an interior monologue, and acknowledged its influence in the dedication: 'To James Joyce, my friend and the only begetter of the form I have adopted in this piece of writing.' Joyce immediately corrected him, pointing out that the true originator (and his own inspiration) was Edouard Dujardin, whose
Les
Lauriers Sont Coupes
had been written as long ago as 1887: Larbaud, believing that he was introducing the stream-of-consciousness technique into French literature, was in fact merely reviving it. He made amends in 1923 by dedicating his next exercise in the genre,
Mon Plus Secret Conseil,
to Dujardin himself.
A passionate Anglophile, Larbaud paid several visits to England between 1907 and 1914, vaguely researching a projected biography of Walter Savage Landor. His lyrical treatment of places which English readers may take rather prosaically for granted can sometimes be a cause of amused delight - in such poems, for example, as 'Madame Tussaud's', 'Matin de Novembre Pres d'Abingdon' and 'Londres'
('Les facades de Scott's, du Criterion, du
London Pavilion/Sont eclairees comme par un soleil de 1'Ocean Indien')
or in the story
Gwenny-Toute-Seule
which is set in Florence Villa, Stafford Road, Weston-super-Mare. In the charming novella
Beaute, Mon Beau Souci . . .,
which takes place for the most part in Chelsea, Queenie the heroine explains that she lives in
'Harlesden. Apres Kensal Rise, dans cette direction.'
In her mouth, these names take on for the enamoured hero the melodious magic of enchanted groves . . . The humour here is intentional -Larbaud can be very funny. A group of poems attributed to his
alter ego,
Barnabooth the rich amateur, are subtitled
Les Borborygmes —
stomach rumbles, 'the only human voice that does not lie'.
In 1935, Valery Larbaud suffered a severe heart attack which tragically incapacitated him for the remaining twenty-two years of his life.
Fermina Marquez,
his first novel, was published in 1911, when he was thirty. It is set in Saint Augustine's, a boys' school just outside Paris - Roman Catholic and traditional but also cosmopolitan and rather dashing. Fermina herself is a young South American beauty who comes to visit her brother, a pupil at the school. The story examines the disturbing effect of her presence on some of the older boys - in particular on Joanny Leniot, the school swat, who identifies with Julius Caesar and makes a stern resolution to seduce her. But she is more successfully pursued by the handsome, sophisticated Santos Iturria from Monterey.
The model for Saint Augustine's was Sainte-Barbe-des-Champs, at Fontenay-aux-Roses, where Larbaud spent the happiest years of his childhood as a brilliant pupil from 1891 to 1894 - that is to say, between the ages of ten and thirteen. Here the seeds were nurtured of that
cosmopolitisme
which the adult Larbaud, in his life and work, was so fruitfully to epitomize. He put some of his own characteristics (his industry, his timidity, his Roman self-discipline, his pride in scholastic achievement) into the figure of Leniot and others perhaps into that of poor little Camille Moutier, but Larbaud and his friends at the college were in fact some years younger than the boys described in the novel.
Larbaud in his later books was to write more smoothly than he does in this one, which if judged by the highest standards is not without flaws. The design is somewhat formless, and the spontaneous ardours of post-pubertal emotion are occasionally expressed in a 'poetic' style which only narrowly avoids embarrassing us. But as a psychological study of male adolescence it is on the whole delicate, touching and unsentimental, while the faintly sinister atmosphere of this unusually glamorous school is evoked with a nostalgic vivacity that has proved powerful enough to establish
Fermina Mdrquez
in France as a minor classic. It seems to me one of those personal, intense, romantic books which, if one responds to them at all, are likely to haunt one with a peculiar poignancy for the rest of one's life.
Francis Wyndham
First published in English in Great Britain by Quartet Books Limited 19A member of the Namara Group
27/29 Goodge Street, London W1P 1FD Copyright © Editions Gallimard 19Translation copyright © 1988 by Hubert Gibbs Introduction copyright © 1988 by Francis Wyndham
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