Woes of the True Policeman

A fragmented biography, divided into cold and seemingly unconnected bits; perhaps a collection of prose poems, as one critic notes. Scenes from the life of Racine, following one after another like closed and stifling rooms: the death of the girl Jeanne-Thérèse Olivier, recounted with evident pain despite the chilliness — the purported objectivity — of the prose; the death of Jeanne Sconin, mother of the poet, two years after the poet’s birth; the death of Marquise Du Parc, the poet’s lover, in the year of the publication of Andromaque; work with Boileau, the head of Boileau, his profile; friendship with Molière and their subsequent falling-out; the death of Jean Racine, the poet’s father; early mornings in 1644 when the poet was a five-year-old orphan living with his grandparents; the unfinished and lost tragedies, the incalculable spent energy; life in Uzès, the birds of Languedoc, the poet’s uncle Antoine Sconin; the lie that surrounds him like a barbed and dirty cloud; marriage to Catherine de Romanet; the accusation that he poisoned Marquise Du Parc for her jewels; the study of Latin; the premiere of Andromaque with Marquise Du Parc in the leading role; the period when Marquise Du Parc worked with Molière; La Champmeslé’s bed; children; life in Versailles; the great blocks of ice of the seventeenth century; the music of Lully and Port-Royal.

5

Two Arcimboldi Novels Read in Seven Days

Sam O’Rourke’s Search (Gallimard, 1960, 230 pages)

At first, this sad and rambling novel most resembles a plagiarized version of James Hadley Chase’s No Orchids for Miss Blandish, or at best an adaptation. Despite the unremitting description of objects (beds, curtains, camp beds, guns, chairs, boxes of crackers, bottles, plates), very much in the style of the nouveau roman, the arc of James Hadley Chase’s story impresses itself with great force: some small-time crooks kidnap the daughter of a tycoon; before long, the bungling kidnappers lose their captive to another gang; the brains behind the new gang is a fat, surly woman (Mona); Mona’s deputies are her son (Chuck) and her godson (Jim, a.k.a. Kansas Jim). That same night — the night of the double kidnapping — we learn that Chuck is a dangerous psychopath and that he’s about to fall for the beautiful heiress, and that Jim is handsome and clever and hates the heiress with a passion: his reasons, explained at great length, fluctuate between a very personal sense of class struggle and an appreciation of the charms and natural camaraderie of chorus girls, whom he clearly prefers.

The rest of the gang consists of four drab and ruthless individuals: a black man, two ex-farmers, and a fifty-five-year-old Polish dancer. The daily existence of these characters is something that seems to fascinate Arcimboldi: their routines, their hideouts, their interests, their obsessions, the ease with which they “slide through cracks in time.” We soon learn all kinds of things about them: their favorite foods, their dreams, their favorite subjects of conversation, their hopes, their dark loves, their dark fates (cf. Victor Hugo, Les Miserables). Chuck and the kidnapped girl are like a kind of diabolical Romeo and Juliet, with Mona and the Pole (who sleep together once every two weeks, though almost without touching, masturbating each other from opposite sides of the bed with hands like insect antennae) as their antithesis: the old couple has attained or is about to attain wisdom, the state of a celestial Romeo and Juliet. Standing between the two couples in a space where everything is antagonism are the godson, the black man, sometimes the two ex-farmers: they are the spectators of love, the chorus that gives life and takes it away, that licenses it.

The two cities where the first part of the novel is set are described with seeming objectivity (another cascade of details), revealing glimpses of a dream landscape: clouds that hang incredibly low, at nearly the level of lightning rods; twisted, solitary trees (that Arcimboldi, for reasons unknown, calls Oklahomas) loaded with birds and rodents, greenish-black specters in desolate fields; illicit all-night gambling dens; seedy hotels with four beds to a room; farmhouses with barred doors and windows; cowboys who scan the valley from afar without dismounting. Down in the valley, the two cities glitter in the sun; up on the mountain, the cowboy smokes and smiles with an air of sadness, striking the same relaxed, careless pose that we’ve seen in so many movies.