Imaginary LIves
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IMAGINARY LIVES
BY MARCEL SCHWOB
AN EBOOK
ISBN 978-1-908694-36-2
PUBLISHED BY ELEKTRON EBOOKS
COPYRIGHT 2012 ELEKTRON EBOOKS
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a database or retrieval system, posted on any internet site, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holders. Any such copyright infringement of this publication may result in civil prosecution
INTRODUCTION
Marcel Schwob (1867–1905) was one of the key symbolist writers, standing in French literature alongside such names as Stéphane Mallarmé, Octave Mirbeau, André Gide, Léon Bloy, Jules Renard, Rémy de Gourmont, and Alfred Jarry. His best-known works are
Double Heart
(1891),
The
King In The Gold Mask
(1892), and the present volume,
Imaginary Lives
(1896). He was the first translator into French of Robert Louis Stevenson, and also helped Oscar Wilde with the writing in French of his controversial play
Salome
. Wilde dedicated his long poem “The Sphinx” to Schwob in 1894. Other writers to acknowledge Schwob included Paul Valéry, with two dedications, and Alfred Jarry who dedicated his
Ubu Roi
to him.
Imaginary Lives
contains twenty-two mythopoeic literary portraits of figures from ancient history, art history, and the history of crime and punishment. From demi-gods, sorcerers, incendiaries, wantons and philosophers of the ancient world, to the “poet of hate” Cecco Angiolieri and the painter Paolo Uccello, through to the pirates William Kidd and Major Stede-Bonnet, and finally Burke and Hare, the serial killers; Schwob presents a vivid array of characters who display all that is macabre, deviant and magnificently terrifying in human beings and in life.
In
Imaginary Lives
, Schwob has created a “secret” masterpiece that joins other biographical glossaries such as Jorge Luis Borges’
A Universal
History Of Infamy
and Alfonso Reyes’
Real And
Imagined Portraits
in the pantheon of classic speculative fiction, of which Schwob’s book is the dark progenitor. Livid with decadent imagery,
Imaginary Lives
resonates loudly today with its themes of temporality, myth, violence and sexuality, and stands as a major work of the
fin-de-siècle
.
Sadly, it was to be Schwob’s last significant work; his health had begun to deteriorate rapidly, and in 1901 he sailed to Samoa in search of a cure. Returning to Paris, he lived as a recluse until his death four years later. To compound the elements of classic decadence in his short life and career, it is said that he died from the effects of a syphilitic tumor in the rectum, resulting from sodomistic relations with a boy prostitute.
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
The science of history leaves us uncertain as to individuals, revealing only those points by which individuals have been attached to generalities.
History tells us that Napoleon was ill on the day of Waterloo; that we must attribute Newton’s excessive intellectuality to the absolute consistency of his temperament; that Alexander was drunk when he killed Klitos; and that the fistula of Louis XIV was perhaps the cause of certain of his resolutions. Pascal speculates on the length of Cleopatra’s nose… the possible consequences had it been a trifle shorter; and on the grain of sand in Cromwell’s urethra. All these facts are valued only when they modify events or alter a series of events.
They are causes, established or possible. We must leave them to savants.
Contrary to history, art describes individuals, desires only the unique. It does not classify, it unclassifies. No matter how much they may engage us, our generalizations may be likened to those pursued upon the planet Mars, and three lines drawn to intersect them might form a triangle on all the points of the universe. But consider a leaf with its intricate nerve system, its colour variegated by shade and sun; the imprint of a raindrop; the tiny mark left by an insect; the silver trace of a snail; or the first mortal touch of autumn gold. Search all the forests of the earth for another leaf exactly like it. I defy you to find one. There is no science for the teguments of a leaf, for the filaments of a cell structure, the winding of a vein, the passion of a habit, or for the twists and quirks of character.
That a man’s nose is broken; one of his eyes higher than the other; an arm shrunken; that he habitually eats chicken at a certain hour or prefers Malvoise to Chateau-Margaux… there is something unparalleled in the world. Thales might have exclaimed philosophically as well as Socrates, but he would never have scratched his leg in precisely the same manner before drinking the hemlock draught. Great minds and their ideas are humanity’s common heritage. Actually, great men themselves possess only that which is bizarre about them. To describe a man in all his anomalies a book should be a work of art, like a Japanese print whereon the image of a tiny caterpillar, seen once at one particular hour of a day, is found eternally recorded.
On such individual facts history is silent. In the crude collection of material furnishing our testimony we find few singular or inimitable relics.
Misers all, valuing only politics or grammar, the ancient biographers have transmitted no more to us than the discourses of great men or the titles of their works. It was Aristophanes himself who gave us the joy of knowing that he was bald; and if the flat nose of Socrates had not served in literary comparisons, if his custom of walking barefoot had not been part of his system of philosophic scorn, we should have nothing left of him but moral dissertations. The gossip of Suetonius Tranquillus remains little more than spiteful polemic. Plutarch’s genius made an artist of him at times, though while he realized the essence of his art, he was always imagining parallels, as if two men properly described in all their qualities can ever resemble each other. In our search we are driven to consider the Atheneum, Aulu-Gelle, the scholiasts and even Diogenes Lærce, who thought he had composed a sort of history of philosophy.
In modern times the study of the individual has developed advantageously. Boswell’s book would have been perfect had he not felt obliged to quote Johnson’s correspondence together with digressions on Johnson’s works. More satisfying on the whole are Aubrey’s
Lives Of Eminent Men
, Aubrey had the instinct of a true biographer, there can be no doubt about it. What a pity it is that this excellent antiquarian’s style could not rise to the level of his conceptions! His book might have been the eternal masterpiece of its species, for Aubrey never saw the necessity of establishing connections between individual facts and general actions.
Others, he knew, would some day mark the celebrity of those great men in whom he interested himself, and he was satisfied. Statesman, poet or clockmaker, each subject finds, under his pen, some unique trait distinguishing that man forever among all men. During his one hundred and ten years of life the painter Hokusai hoped to arrive at the ideal of his art. In that moment, he said, every point and every line traced by his pencil should be a living thing. By “living” he meant unique and individual.
Now lines and points are superlatively alike: geometry is founded on that postulate. Yet Hokusai’s perfection of art required a superlative difference between them. To that end ideal biography should seek infinite differentiation between two philosophies invented around the same metaphysic. That is why Aubrey, concerning himself uniquely with men, never attained perfection, for he never accomplished the miraculous transformation of resemblances and diversities hoped for by Hokusai. But neither did Aubrey attain the age of one hundred and ten. He is estimable, nevertheless, and he himself has summed up the limitations of his own book. “I recall,” he writes in his preface to Anthony Wood, “General Lambert’s words ‘the best of men are but men at best’ and you will find numerous examples of such in this crude, precocious collection. Should these arcana be revealed today or thirty years hence? It might be better if author and subject (like medlars) first die and rot.” Among Aubrey’s predecessors can be found some of the rudiments of his art. Diogenes Lærce tells us that Aristotle wore on his abdomen a leather bag filled with hot oil, and that a quantity of terra cotta vases were found in his house after his death.
We shall never know what Aristotle did with all that pottery, and the mystery is as agreeable as Boswell’s conjectures regarding the orange peelings which Johnson was accustomed to save and carry in his pockets. For once Diogenes Lærce rises near to the sublimity of inimitable Boswell, but such pleasures are rare. Aubrey, however, offers them in nearly every line. Milton, he tells us, “pronounced the letter R very hard”. Spencer was a “little man with his hair cut short, wearing a little collarette and little cuffs”. Barclay “lived in England during the reign of King Jacobus. He was an old man with a white beard and he wore a plumed hat that scandalized his severe neighbors”. Erasmus “did not care for fish in spite of the fact that he came from a fishing village”. As for Bacon, “none of his servants dared appear before him in any boots but those made of Spanish leather, for his nose was sure to detect the smell of calf skin, which he detested”. Doctor Fuller “concentrated so deeply upon his work that he often ate a two penny roll without ever noticing it, as he walked out before dinner, wrapped in thought”. Aubrey gives the following account of Sir William Davenant: “I attended his funeral. He had a walnut coffin. Sir John Denham vowed it the finest coffin he had ever seen”. Of Ben Jonson he wrote “I have heard Mr. Lacy, the actor, say he had a habit of wearing a cloak like a coachman’s, with vents under the armpits”. Aubrey’s record of William Prynne declares “his manner of working was thus: he put on a tall pointed cap that kept sliding down over his eyes, serving as an eye shade, and about every three hours his servants brought him a loaf of bread and a pot of ale to refresh his spirit, and so he worked on, drinking and munching, until evening wen he ate a good dinner”. Hobbes, says Aubrey, “grew very bald in his old age. It was his custom to study bareheaded, saying he never took cold, but was very much annoyed by the flies lighting on his bald head”. Of John Harrington’s
Oceana
Aubrey tells us nothing, though he relates the following story of its author: “In A. D. 1660 he was made a prisoner in the tower under close guard, and was afterwards removed to Portsey Castle. His confinement in these prisons (he was a hot headed, high spirited gentleman) brought on delirium or madness. He never became violent, for he talked reasonably enough and was very pleasant company, but was pursued by the fantastic notion that his perspiration turned into flies and bees
ad cetera
sobrius
. He had a portable house put up in Mr. Hart’s garden (facing St. James’s Park), and there he made his experiments. Pushing his house into the full sunlight, he closed all the windows and sat down with a fox brush to massacre all the flies and bees discovered. Since he always made the experiment in warm weather, there were usually a few flies in the folds of the curtains. When the heat drew them out after a quarter of an hour or so, he would exclaim, ‘now can’t you see plainly enough they come from me?’”
Here is what Aubrey says of Merton: “His real name was Head. Mr. Bovey knew him well. Born in..., he was at one time a bookseller and had also travelled with the Gypsies. His goggling eyes gave him the air of a rogue, for he could change them into any form he wished. Bankrupt twice or three times,over, he began to sell books toward the last. He earned his living at scribbling, for which he was paid twenty shillings a page, and he wrote several books:
The
English Rogue
,
The Art Of Wheedling
, etc. He was drowned at sea while on his way to Plymouth about 1676, when he was about fifty years old.” But I must quote his biography of Descartes: