The art
of suffering
Few
knew that for the last 12 years of his life Alphonse Daudet, the popular
19th-century French novelist, was wracked by the effects of syphilis, which he
described in a notebook. Julian Barnes, who has translated his account into English
for the first time, celebrates a masterpiece of quiet stoicism
The Guardian, Saturday
May 11 2002
In 1883 Turgenev had an operation
in Paris for the removal of a neuroma in the lower
abdomen. The doctors gave him ether rather than chloroform, and so he was
conscious throughout the intervention. Afterwards, he was visited by his friend
Alphonse Daudet, with whom he had often dined in the company of Flaubert,
Edmond de Goncourt, Zola and others. "During the operation," Turgenev
told him, "I thought about our dinners and tried to find the right words
to convey exactly the sense of the steel slicing through my skin and entering
my body... It was like a knife cutting into a banana." Goncourt, recording
this anecdote, commented, "Our old friend Turgenev is a true man of
letters."
How is it best to write about
illness, and dying, and death? Despite Turgenev's impeccable example, pain is
normally the enemy of the descriptive powers. When it became his turn to
suffer, Daudet discovered that pain, like passion, drives out language. Words
come "only when everything is over, when things have calmed down. They
refer only to memory, and are either powerless or untruthful." The
prospect of dying may, or may not, concentrate the mind and encourage a final
truthfulness; may or may not include the useful aide-mémoire
of your life passing before your eyes; but it is unlikely to make you a better
writer. Modest or jaunty, wise or vainglorious, literary or journalistic, you
will write no better, no worse. And your literary temperament may, or may not,
prove suited to this new thematic challenge. When Harold Brodkey's
heroic - and, it seemed, heroically self-deceiving - account of his own dying
was published in The New Yorker, I congratulated the magazine's editor for
"leaving it all in", by which I meant the evidence of Brodkey's impressive egomania. "You should have seen
what we took out," she replied wryly.
Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897) is a
substantially forgotten writer nowadays. Novelist, playwright, journalist, he
is viewed as a sunny humorist and clear stylist, creator in Lettres
De Mon Moulin and Tartarin De Tarascon
of an agreeable if partial Provence. He is offered to students of French as a
nursery slope or climbing wall: practise on this. But
in his day he was not only highly successful (and very rich) he also ate at the
top literary table. Dickens called him "my little brother in France";
Henry James "a great little novelist"; Goncourt " mon petit Daudet ". As may be
deduced, he was short of stature. He was also kind, generous and sociable, a
passionate observer and an unstoppable talker. These qualities transfer into
his fiction. He was, in various descriptions (all of them from Henry James),
"the happiest novelist of his day", "beyond comparison the most
charming story-teller of the day", "an observer not perhaps of the
deepest things of life, but of the whole realm of the immediate, the
expressive, the actual". As these assessments,
laudatory yet limiting, imply, Daudet was the sort of writer - hard-working, honourable, popular - whose fame and relevance are largely
used up in his own lifetime.
If Daudet dined in the highest
company, he was also a member of a less enviable 19th-century French club: that
of literary syphilitics. Here again, he is somewhat overshadowed: the Big Three
were Baudelaire, Flaubert and Maupassant. Daudet probably ranks fourth equal
with Jules de Goncourt, Edmond's younger brother. He could at least claim that
the syphilis he acquired, shortly after his arrival in Paris at the age of 17,
came from a classier, indeed more literary, source than theirs. He caught it
from a lectrice de la cour,
a woman employed to read aloud at the imperial court. She was, he assured
Edmond de Goncourt, a lady "from the top drawer".
Daudet was treated, as was
customary for much of the 19th century, with mercury: giving rise to the joke
about "spending one night with Venus and the rest of your life with
Mercury". The disease then remained dormant for more than 20 years: Daudet
worked, published, became famous, married (in 1867) and had three children. He
also continued an active, carefree, careless sex life. From the time he lost his
virginity at the age of 12, he had always been "a real villain" in
matters of sex, he once confessed; he slept with many of his friends'
mistresses; about 10 times a year he felt the need for the sort of
"ordure" he could not ask his wife to permit. Drink for him led
inevitably to debauchery (and contrition, and forgiveness); but then so did
many other things. In 1884 he had an operation for a hydrocele.
Having a grossly swollen testicle painfully drained (and then drained again
when the first operation didn't work) would probably make most men sleep in
their trousers for weeks; Daudet's reaction was to go straight out in search of
sex. In 1889 he reported to Goncourt a dream in which he found himself caught
up in the Last Judgment and defending himself against a sentence of 3,500 years
in hell for "the crime of sensuality".
At first, the syphilis began to
reassert itself as "rheumatism", severe fatigue and haemorrhages. Such symptoms could be explained away. But by
the early 1880s it became increasingly clear that Daudet was suffering from the
form of neurosyphilis known as tabes
dorsalis: literally, a wasting of the back. Its chief
manifestations in his case were locomotor ataxia -
progressively clumsy and uncoordinated movement - and paralysis. In 1885 J-M
Charcot, the greatest neurologist of the day, declared him "lost";
Daudet was to live another 12 years after this, in increasing pain and
debility. He saw a range of specialists and visited a range of thermal
establishments, taking the waters and mud-baths. He tried all the latest
treatments, no matter how violent and outlandish. Charcot recommended the Seyre suspension, in which the patient was hung up, some of
the time by the jaw alone, for several minutes. This was intended to stretch
the patient's spine, loosen his joints, and thus combat the effects of ataxia.
Daudet was suspended 13 times, in excruciating pain, until he began coughing
blood. He noted of the treatment: "No observable benefit."
David Gruby,
a Hungarian doctor to artistic Paris (whose client list included Chopin, Liszt,
George Sand, Alexandre Dumas père
et fils and Heine), suggested an esoteric diet. The
day began with a soup made from a large variety of grains and vegetables; its
visceral consequences were so volcanic that Daudet said death was preferable.
In his last years he tried the Brown-Sequard
treatment, a course of extremely painful injections with an elixir extracted
from guinea pigs (one day the injector told Daudet that they had run out of
guinea pigs, and were using extract of bulls' testicles instead). At first the
treatment - which Zola also took in an attempt to increase his sexual powers -
seemed beneficial, even miraculous; then, swiftly, it didn't.
None of these doctors was a quack
(Brown-Sequard, for instance, was the first to show
that epilepsy could be produced experimentally in guinea pigs); each was trying
to outwit a then invincible disease. Daudet, like many other sufferers, came to
rely on large quantities of palliative drugs: in particular chloral, bromide and
morphine. At different times his wife, son Léon and
father-in-law were all giving him morphine injections. In March 1887 Léon gave him two injections in a row but refused a third;
so Daudet went to his father-in-law who gave him two more. (The father-in-law
was also a morphine addict; the son preferred laudanum.) Increasingly, he
injected himself, no easy task when you are both ataxic and extremely myopic.
In June 1891 he reported giving himself five injections in a row; this despite
the fact that the previous October he had been unable to find any place left in
his body to inject.
His response, both personal and
literary, to his condition was admirable. "Courage... means not scaring
others," Larkin wrote. Numerous witnesses attest to Daudet's exemplary behaviour. His last secretary, André Ebner,
remembered Daudet sitting with a friend one morning, eyes closed, barely able
to speak, martyred by pain. The door-knob gently turned, but before Mme Daudet
could enter, her husband was on his feet, the colour
back in his cheeks, laughter in his eye, his voice filled with reassurance
about his condition. When the door closed again Daudet collapsed back into his
chair. "Suffering is nothing," he murmured. "It's all a matter
of preventing those you love from suffering."
This is a difficult, correct (and
nowadays unfashionable) position. It led Daudet to familiarity with all the
ironies and paradoxes of long-term suffering. Surrounded by those you love, and
unwilling to inflict pain on them, you deliberately talk down your suffering,
and thus deprive yourself of the comfort you crave. Next, you discover that
your pain, while always new to you, quickly becomes repetitive and banal to
your intimates: you fear becoming a symptoms bore. Meanwhile the anticipation
of indignities to come - and the terror of disgusting those you love - makes
suicide not just tempting but logical; the catch is that those you love have
already insisted that you live, if only for them.
Daudet's other response was to
write about his predicament. He started taking notes - on his symptoms and
suffering, fears and reflections, and on the strange social life of his
fellow-patients at shower-bath and thermal establishments. He never found the
right form for his book, but he always knew what he wanted to call it: La Doulou. It sounds a slightly babyish title - Edmond de
Goncourt considered it "abominable" - but the word is, in fact, the Provençal word for la douleur , pain; and it was under this title that his 60 or so pages
of notes were published, long posthumously, in 1930.
While disliking the title,
Goncourt was confident that the result would be "superb", as Daudet
would have lived the book, even "lived it too much". Goncourt was
right: Daudet was "a true man of letters" in the Turgenev sense. In
his fiction, he often wrote close to his own life; here he is writing close to
his own death. The result is well-described by Léon
Daudet as a "terrible and implacable breviary".
I first came across La Doulou when I was researching my novel Flaubert's Parrot
and seeking points of literary-syphilitic comparison. I remember from that
first reading Daudet's early description of himself as "vaulting from
forty-five to sixty-five" and suddenly finding that there were 20 years of
life which had simply disappeared. What struck me most about the text was that
it was heroically unheroic. What happens around
illness may be dramatic and courageous; but illness itself is ordinary,
day-to-day, boring. Turgenev compared himself to a banana; Daudet, when caught
in a frenzied bout of locomotor ataxia, his leg
hopelessly out of control, reminded himself of a knife-grinder. (The comparison
may be lost on some modern readers: until a few decades ago itinerant
knife-grinders would trundle the streets with circular stones mounted on
wheeled carriers; to make the stone revolve at a speed sufficient to sharpen
your knives and shears, they would pump frantically up and down on a pedal.)
The image is exact, unheroic, and taken from daily
life.
Daudet notes that he has "no
general theory about pain. Each patient discovers his own,
and the nature of pain varies, like a singer's voice, according to the
acoustics of the hall." The young Proust could scarcely look Daudet in the
eye when they first met, because he felt ashamed at his own inability to bear
the mildest pain. Proust was astonished by the way "the beautiful sick
man" that Daudet had become was still able to hold forth on life and
literature. At one point he left the room but continued the discussion through
the open doorway, while evidently giving himself a morphine injection. He
returned with sweat on his brow but exuding what Proust calls "the
serenity of victory".
Of course he knew that no final
victory was possible: it was just a question of how you handled inevitable
defeat. Daudet's attitude was to treat his illness as an unwanted guest, to
whom no special attention is accorded; daily life should continue as normally
as possible. "I don't believe I will get better, and nor does Charcot. Yet
I always behave as if my damned pains were going to disappear by tomorrow
morning." This is how he comported himself socially; but intellectually
there was no turning-away from the unwanted guest. "The executioner has a
great many kinds of instrument at his disposal; if they do not scare you too
much, examine them carefully. It is with our torments as it is with shadows.
Attention clears them up and drives them away."
Yet only for a while; the shadows
always return. Daudet's greatest fear was that he would descend into what he
calls "a living tomb": total paralysis, aphasia, and imbecility. This
had happened to Jules de Goncourt, and also to Maupassant, who had spent his
last 18 months in a lunatic asylum. Daudet was spared this final obliteration.
In September 1897 he and his family moved to a new apartment in Paris, 41 rue
de l'Université. (Goncourt had noted in his diary
that the first thing his friend did when he changed address was look for where
his coffin was likely to rest.) Two months later, he was having dinner,
surrounded by his wife and children, talking about Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de
Bergerac, which had just gone into general rehearsal. He took a few spoonfuls
of soup and was chatting away when he fell back in his chair and died.
He had no illusions about
immortality. He and Goncourt had discussed the matter in 1891. Goncourt
outlined his own beliefs: that death means complete annihilation, that we are
mere ephemeral gatherings of matter, and that even if there were a God,
expecting him to provide a second existence for every single one of us would be
laying far too great a book-keeping job on Him. Daudet agreed with all this,
and then recounted to Goncourt a dream he had once had, in which he was walking
through a field of broom. All around him there was the soft background noise of
seed-pods exploding. Our lives, he had concluded, amount to no more than this:
just a quiet crackle of popping pods.
My agony by
Alphonse Daudet
Every evening, a hideously
painful spasm in the ribs. I read, for a long time, sitting
up in bed - the only position I can endure. I'm a poor old wounded Don Quixote,
sitting on his arse in his armour
at the foot of a tree.
Armour is
exactly what it feels like, a hoop of steel cruelly crushing my lower back. Hot coals, stabs of pain as sharp as needles. Then chloral, the tin-tin of my spoon in the glass, and peace at
last.
This breastplate has had me in
its grip for months. I can't undo the straps; I can't breathe...
Since learning that I've got it for ever - and my God, what a short "for ever" that is going to be - I've readjusted myself
and started taking these notes. I'm making them by dipping the point of a nail
in my own blood and scratching on the walls of my carcere
duro [punitive imprisonment].
All I ask is not to have to
change cell, not to have to descend into an in pace, down there where
everything's black, and thought no longer exists...
The clever way death cuts us
down, but makes it look like just a thinning-out.
Generations never fall with one blow - that would be too sad and too obvious.
Death prefers to do it piecemeal. The meadow is attacked from several sides at
the same time. One of us goes one day; another some time
afterwards; you have to stand back and look around you to take in what's
missing, to grasp the vast slaughter of your generation...
From
time to time, a memory of the active life, of happier times. For instance, those Neapolitan coral-fishermen among the rocks, in
the evening. The epitome of physical well-being...
Return to childhood. To reach
that distant chair, to cross that waxed corridor, requires as much effort and
ingenuity as Stanley deploys in the African jungle...
I only know one thing, and that
is to shout to my children, "Long live Life!' But
it's so hard to do, while I am ripped apart by pain.
·
Adapted from Julian Barnes's introduction to In The Land Of
Pain by Alphonse Daudet. The book, translated and edited by Julian Barnes, is
published by Cape on May 23 at £10. To order a copy for £8
plus p&p, call the Guardian book service on 0870
066 7979.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/may/11/classics.highereducation
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