Into the Looking-Glass Wood Read online

  When editors try to guess an author’s “intention” (that rhetorical concept invented by Saint Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century), when they question the author about the meaning of certain passages or the reason for certain events, they are assuming that a work of literature can be reduced to a set of rules or explained in a précis. This prodding, this reductive exercise is indeed a threat, because the writer may (as Findley did) pay heed and upset the delicate balance of his creation. Older, more experienced, less afraid to alienate his publishers, Findley finally rebelled. In 1986 he revised The Butterfly Plague, deleting the explanation, and the new version was published by Viking Penguin.

  The threat, however, is not universal. Editing understood as “a search for the author’s intention” is practised almost exclusively in the Anglo-Saxon world, and less in the United Kingdom than in North America. In the rest of the world, by and large, editing means only copy-editing, a function of publishing, and even this is done with a caution that would send hundreds of editors in Chicago and Toronto in search of more challenging careers. I have worked for publishing companies in Argentina, Spain, France, Italy and Tahiti, and have visited publishing companies in Brazil, Uruguay, Japan, Germany and Sweden. Nowhere else is there such a job as our North American editors describe, and the literatures of these other countries have, to the best of my knowledge, survived very nicely.

  Why is North America the hothouse of editors? I suggest that the answer lies in the mercantile fabric of American society. Because books must be saleable merchandise, experts must be employed to ensure that the products are profitably commercial. At its worst this unifying task produces mass-market romances; at its best it cuts Thomas Wolfe down to size. In Latin America, where books seldom make money, the writer is left to his own devices and a novel is welcome to stretch to whatever lengths without fear of editorial scissors.

  Unfortunately, the American influence has begun to spread. In Germany and France, for instance, the directeur de collection, who hitherto simply chose the books she wished to publish, now sits with writers and discusses their works in progress. Sometimes the writer digs in his heels and refuses to play along. But few have either the courage or the literary clout of Graham Greene who, when his American publisher suggested changing the title of his novel Travels with My Aunt, replied with an eight-word telegram: “Easier to change publisher than to change title.”

  In some cases, the writers themselves have sought this kind of professional advice, asking an editor to clarify their own intentions. The result is a peculiar collaboration. Commenting on what is perhaps the most famous case of editing in modern poetry, Ezra Pound’s reworking of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Borges remarked that “both their names should have appeared on the title page. If an author allows someone else to change his text, he is no longer the author—he is one of the authors, and their collaboration should be recognized as such.”

  Among the many lines crossed out by Pound (deletions which Eliot accepted) are these, now forever absent from the poem:

  Something which we know must be dawn—

  A different darkness, flowed above the clouds,

  And dead ahead we saw, where sky and sea should meet,

  A line, a white line, a long white line,

  A wall, a barrier, towards which we drove.

  The Waste Land, published after Pound’s editing, has been called “the greatest poem in the English language,” and yet I miss those lines and wonder whether Eliot would not have left them in, had it not been for Pound’s intervention.

  Of course, everywhere in the world, Anglo-Saxon or not, writers show their work before it is published (though Nabokov argued that this was like showing samples of your sputum). A gaggle of unprofessional readers—the author’s mother, a neighbour, a lover, a husband or wife—performs the ritual first inspection, and offers a handful of doubts or approvals on which the author may choose or not to reflect. This contradictory chorus is not the voice of power and officialdom recommending revision.

  The professional editor, on the other hand, even the most subtle and understanding, (and I have been blessed with a small number of them) tinges her opinion with the colour of authority simply because of her position. The difference between a paid editor and someone close to us is the difference between a doctor who proposes a lobotomy and a devoted aunt recommending a strong cup of tea.

  The story has often been told of how Coleridge dreamt his “Kubla Khan” in an intoxication of opium, and of how, upon waking, he sat down to write it and was interrupted “by a person on business from Porlock,” thereby losing forever the conclusion to that extraordinary poem. Persons from Porlock are professionally employed by the publishing companies of the Anglo-Saxon world. A few are wise and ask questions that speed on the writing; a few distract; a few quibble away at the author’s vaporous confidence; a few destroy the work in mid-creation. All interfere, and it is this compulsive tinkering with someone else’s text that I question.

  Without editors we are likely to have rambling, incoherent, repetitive, even offensive texts, full of characters whose eyes are green one day and black the next (like Madame Bovary); full of historical errors, like stout Cortez discovering the Pacific (as in Keats’s sonnet); full of badly strung-together episodes (as in Don Quixote); with a cobbled-together ending (as in Hamlet) or beginning (as in The Old Curiosity Shop). But with editors—with the constant and now unavoidable presence of editors without whose nihil obstat hardly a book can get published—we may perhaps be missing something fabulously new, something as incandescent as a phoenix and as unique, something impossible to describe because it has not yet been born but which, if it were, would admit no secret sharers in its creation.

  VI

  LOOKING TO SEE

  “I don’t quite know yet,” Alice said very gently.

  “I should like to look around me first, if I might”

  “You may look in front of you, and on both sides, if you like,” said the Sheep; “but you can’t look all round you—unless you’ve got eyes at the back of your head.”

  Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter V

  The Muse in the Museum

  Museums are rubbish, a waste of time.

  Nothing should be acquired second hand.

  AUGUSTE RENOIR

  SOMETIME IN THE MIDDLE of the first century, a man entered a museum. It was, he says, “filled with a superb collection of paintings of remarkable range and variety. There were several by Zeuxis, still untouched by the injury of time, and two or three sketches by Protogenes, so vivid and true to life that I caressed them with almost a shudder of admiration. There was also a piece by Apelles, a painting which the Greeks call the One-legged Goddess, before which I knelt with a feeling of almost religious veneration. The human figures were all executed with such striking naturalness and exquisite delicacy that it seemed as though the artist had painted their souls as well.” Our visitor sees images of Zeus in the shape of an eagle taking Ganymede to Olympus; a passionate Naiad seducing the young Hylas; Apollo lamenting the death of Hyacinth. And “surrounded by these images of painted lovers,” he cries out “in lonely anguish: So even the gods in heaven are touched by love!”

  Almost two thousand years later, another man entered another museum.

  I was at the Salon d’Automne again this morning. You know how I always find the people walking about in exhibitions so much more interesting than the paintings. This is also true of this Salon d’Automne—with the exception of the Cézanne room. There all the reality is on his side, in that thick, quilted blue of his, in his red and his shadowless green and the reddish black of his wine bottles. How humble all the objects are in his paintings. The apples are all cooking-apples and the wine bottles belong in old, round, sagging pockets. (…) And I wanted to tell you all this; it is related to so much about us and to ourselves in a hundred places.

  The first visitor is Petronius, Petronius Arbiter, the author of that comic masterpiece, the Satyricon, the poet and dandy w
ho committed suicide after denouncing the atrocities of the Emperor Nero from his deathbed.

  The second visitor is Rilke, the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, writing to his wife in 1907.

  Both were writers. Both apparently frequented museums. Both found, in that which the museums had to offer, a mirror or echo of their own feelings and thoughts. Both were vastly intelligent men.

  I have chosen these two examples almost at random. The relationship between writers and museums has been a long and fruitful one, and there is scarcely a writer who hasn’t, at one point or another, written of what he or she has seen on a visit to a museum. In my examples, there are two formal differences: Petronius is writing a novel. The emotions he describes belong not to him but to his character, the young, cultured, lascivious Encolpius in pursuit of his ephebe, the wayward Giton. Rilke is writing a letter to his wife, the sculptor Clara Rilke. Both Petronius and Rilke, however, are trying to link that which is presented to them as art—that which is exhibited for inspection—to a private experience, to (I hope the word is not too frightening) a soul.

  I find it curiously moving how little has changed and how their experiences link the German aesthete with his Roman ancestor across nineteen centuries. Both seem to be looking for the same relationship between the exhibit and the observer, and both are conducting their search within the same organized space: within a space set aside for the assembly and presentation of a group of objects under the common label of “art.”

  The notion that a space defines its contents was, in Petronius’s time, already several centuries old. Already the Library of Alexandria, assembling not works of art but books, had established the norm and reached the same conclusion. Callimachus—the first librarian—and Petronius and Rilke, were certainly aware that catalogues contaminate that which they catalogue, infect it with meaning.

  So the museum visited by Petronius’s hero, and the Salon d’Automne visited by Rilke, are meaningful spaces, spaces that by their very existence lend the objects they exhibit a meaning they would otherwise not necessarily have. “Art,” these spaces seem to be saying, “is what is inside a museum.”

  But how is the visitor affected by this knowledge? Differently, I think, in the case of Encolpius and Rilke. For Encolpius, the fame of the paintings he sees in the museum has preceded them. He observes these paintings, bringing with him the knowledge that they are important, that they have been praised by men he considers wiser than himself, and that some of them have been ennobled by tradition as great works of art. So not only are they great because of where they are; these paintings are great because of what has been said about them. Even though the Romans of the first century recognized the fallacy of the argumentum ad auctoritatem, the argument of authority, the perceived strength of received opinions still held fast. But this is not all Encolpius admires. Wounded by the love that has left him, he identifies in the pictures of love-anguished gods and goddesses his own torment. Beyond the picture’s official fame is something else, something utterly personal, something that belongs exclusively to the paintings only when Encolpius is present to witness it: Encolpius’s grief.

  Oscar Wilde famously described art as a mirror not of life but of the spectator. The social circumstances determine, no doubt, the nature of the museum, cause it into being. But within its limits, aware or not of this frame to a greater or lesser degree, the spectator—Encolpius, in this case—is faced not with the fruit of external strictures, not with that which is shaped by the frame, but with an artistic construction that demands his private attention and to which he must respond as if he were alone in the world.

  Rilke walks into his museum at a different pace. We can imagine Encolpius anxiously turning his head from image to image, searching for his reflection in the paintings that surround him, expecting a response to his lover’s grief. Rilke is much more sober. The Salon d’Automne is a social gathering and, as he says, he finds “the people walking about … so much more interesting than the paintings.” In fact, for Rilke the museum institution is so evidently a social device that he takes part in it as he would any other social event. The artistic experience, the contemplation and understanding of art, cannot be, for Rilke, a collective experience. It is a miracle, but a private miracle. “But each time,” he says, “the miracle is valid for the one person, only for the saints to whom it happens.” This miracle takes place when he, Rilke, stands alone in a crowd in front of Cézanne’s paintings. Then the revelation occurs; or perhaps, as Borges described it, what occurs is “the imminence of a revelation that does not take place.” In either case, the experience is singular. It only happens to one, even if it happens a million times to a million ones.

  My experience of museums has been rather varied. I have visited, like Rilke, salons in which well-dressed crowds distracted me from the paintings. I have also visited salons so empty that, as Macedonio Fernández used to say, “If one more person had been absent, he wouldn’t have been able to fit.” I’ve visited famous collections large as warehouses and small as boudoirs. I’ve seen exhibitions arranged as pedagogical tours and exhibitions seemingly left to the random order of chance. I’ve seen exhibitions where the subject prevented me from seeing the objects, and others in which the objects loudly contravened the subject. But in every case I can think of, whatever it was that was being exhibited, the experience of the museum—the salon, the gallery, the warehouse, the room, the place—was separate from that of the objects exhibited there.

  My first memory of a museum is that of a Venice palazzo, where my nanny took me on a tour when I was five. I remember the great halls and high ceilings, and the grey-golden light that lit the dust in the rooms, and an overwhelming impression of being in a house inhabited by giant ogres. But I also remember a large painting, a battle scene, with tiny men swarming like ants on a ship in a dark-green sea, and the crisscrossing lines of the oars. And I remember that painting in vivid detail, as part of an extraordinary adventure story of which I hadn’t heard the beginning and was going to miss the end. The ogres’ castle was a place I visited with my nanny, and with small herds of tourists following us from room to room. The painting was my own, a battle that, from that day onwards, I saw again and again in my dreams, and to which only I had access.

  Every one of our communications, every conversation, every reading, every experience of a painting or a play or a film, every contemplation of a sunset or of a remarkable face, every listening to a concert or to the song of birds, every observation answered or not, every discovery, every intuition, every revelation, every epiphany, every moment of grace, takes place somewhere defined in this world of ours by volumes of history and atlases of geography. Mozart heard at Carnegie Hall or at the entrance to a concentration camp are two different experiences, two different entities, like Heaven and Hell. The traveller who comes to either, whatever the circumstances of the journey, and however many other travellers have reached it before him, comes alone.

  Society seems extraordinarily keen to state its intentions as regards its activities, as if we, social creatures, were unable to understand these activities without giving them a name. Many times, these statements are warnings (as in totalitarian societies) that the official voice will not be contravened; at other times these statements are smoke screens (as in our so-called democratic societies) meant to hide the real activities or intentions of those in power. A few, rare times, these statements are true. Museums, as social constructs, regularly undergo this labelling, and exhibitions seem constantly, even increasingly, to be under the influence of this rage for self-definition. Now I see nothing wrong with this activity, as long as we recognize it for what it is: not a true definition, only a naming. I can put together an exhibition of black art and call it “Into the Heart of Africa,” thereby attempting a critical overview of the colonial missionary presence in that continent; or I can picket an exhibition of black art called “Into the Heart of Africa,” thereby attempting a critical overview of the colonial missionary presence in that continent. Both
activities label the exhibition; neither determines the spectator’s intimate relationship with the individual works of art therein exhibited. Obviously, the louder the label, the more difficult it will be for the spectator to abandon the social fray (as Rilke did) and stand alone, face to face with the work of art. We are made of history and geography, just as museums are, and those labels are part of that history and that geography, even if their meaning changes according to the hand pasting them on the exhibitions.

  It will be said that the task of disengaging oneself from these labels is not merely difficult; it is impossible. It will be said that history and geography are not only the substance of which we are made, but that they are also that of which works of art are made. It will be said that the labels are attempts to read into the work that history and that geography.

  But this hasn’t been my experience. I, conditioned by time and space, change in time and space. I am constantly someone else, the person coming round the corner, the person waiting in the next room, the day after tomorrow, the person who will regret or approve what I do today, but will never repeat it. I come to a work of art with my historical and geographical baggage, but the baggage I bring is always changing and allows me to see something else in the work almost every time. Therefore I don’t trust the labels. A work of art itself carries no judgement.