Such a boring vision of beauty. |
Today I asked Google what was the most beautiful book ever
written. My first page (after dismissing
titles of books called The Most Beautiful
Book) was a collection of best designed covers. All of which are lovely, in their own way
(and none of which are particularly artistic).
But that left my question unresolved.
It’s been a question haunting me for a little while, ever
since finishing The Pure and the Impure
by the French writer Colette. Initially,
I was attracted to the book because of a quote I saw on Tumblr:
As that word “pure” fell from her
lips, I heard the trembling of the plaintive “u,” the icy limpidity of the “r,”
and the sound aroused nothing in me but the need to hear against its unique
resonance, its echo of a drop that trickles out, breaks off, and falls
somewhere with a plash. The word “pure”
has never revealed an intelligible meaning to me. I can only use the word to quench an optical
thirst for purity in the transparencies that evoke it—in bubbles, in a volume
of water, and in the imaginary latitudes entrenched, beyond reach, at the very
center of a dense crystal.
The book is semi-autobiographical, and told in brief, barely
interrelated portraits. It begins in an
opium den: “The door that opened to me on the top floor of a new building gave
access to a big, glass-roofed studio, as vast as a covered market.” Here, Colette the narrator watches with a
keenly descriptive eye as men smoke away their cares. The details are deeply intimate, but Colette
takes care never to lapse into a the kind of voluptuousness of American modernism. Instead, her descriptions are tactile,
sensual, warm without quite revealing the source of that heat: “Just then a
woman’s voice was raised in song, a furry, sweet, yet husky voice that had the
qualities of a hard and thick-skinned velvet peach. We were all so charmed that we took care not
to applaud or even to murmur our praise.”
The book is filled with descriptions like this, and she
somehow manages to keep them restrained, even as they gallop toward
hyperbole. She is fixed on the
immediate. Her subject is erotic love,
between men and women, between two women, between men.
A book like hers could easily transgress literature and
topple into erotica, but her restraint allows one to examine the deeply
intimate emotions surrounding love and sex, like an eclipse by the moon will
allow one to look into the atmosphere of a star.
Since reading The Pure
and the Impure, I’ve been on a sort of quest. I wanted to replicate the feeling I had
reading Colette’s book for the first time.
I read some of her other works, Chéri,
Gigi, a collection of her short stories and journalism. The early stuff especially was gaudy, filled with
youthful exuberance. But there were
hints of the later beauty that would emerge with the temperance of age.
Expanding my quest, I read Zola’s Nana, Robert Musil’s Young
Torless and The Man Without Qualities. For a time, mistakenly, I thought the secret
was in Colette’s examination of eros, so I read The Story of O, Melissa P.’s (rather surly) One Hundred Strokes of the Brush before Bed, Anais Nin, and The Sexual Life of Catherine M. These were bawdy and unreflective. Mechanical.
The dowager antecedents of E.L. James.
That led me to a fundamental question I’d never thought to
ask. What is beautiful in
literature? Or rather, where do I find
beauty in writing?
It cannot be simply the writing, though that is important,
as well. Kafka writes beautifully “Country
Doctor” and some of his longer works. I’ve
known Updike and Beckett—even Joyce—to occassionally glimmer. David Foster
Wallace, even at his most erudite, was never beautiful—his was the
absent-minded poetry of an engineer, who saw beauty in parts that fit well
together.
What all of these authors lack, to my mind (for surely you
or others will protest) are living characters.
Men and women who inhabit the pages, who seem to have an inner life and
a multiplicty of loves and hatreds that don’t quite fit the story. Characters who are self-contradictory and
spiteful. Characters who genuinely
love. Characters who infest a world and
whose bonds with other characters form a unique web that in the real world we
would interpret as community.
These are women like the Wife of Bath, Hero, and Lady
MacBeth; men like Jack Falstaff, and Iago, and Hal. The narrator of Dante’s Comedy was as pernicious as he was pious, who equally despised the
men who had slighted him and (ever a devout heretic) worshipped Béatrice before
Yahweh.
Where, I wondered, are characters as richly self-deluded as Milton’s
over-reaching Satan? Why was it so
difficult to create worlds inhabited by creatures as heart-achingly rendered as
in Dickens? In the modern world, it
would be impossible to place pride besides prejudice.
The question I posed to Google was as much an existential
question as a literary one. Socrates
believed (so we’re told) that the good life was composed of beauty, justice,
and truth in equal measure.
So when I asked my question, I was looking for a book that
was just: It allowed the real heartbreak and joy of the world their
versimillitude. I also demanded from the
book truth: a narrator and author who keenly saw the order of the world, for
good and ill. And beauty: a book which harmonizes wit and poetry into a graceful whole.
I haven't found the most beautiful book, yet. Like the perfect french fry, and the perfect ginger ale, it eludes me. But I'll keep looking, keep judging according to simple measurements: how truthful was it, how just was it, how good was it? I'll let you know what I find.
In the meantime, down below in the comments, let me know what the most beautiful book you ever read was.
I haven't found the most beautiful book, yet. Like the perfect french fry, and the perfect ginger ale, it eludes me. But I'll keep looking, keep judging according to simple measurements: how truthful was it, how just was it, how good was it? I'll let you know what I find.
In the meantime, down below in the comments, let me know what the most beautiful book you ever read was.