New York, NY: New York Review of Books, 2018. 176 pages. $15.95.
Serialized over the course of several years in the “Page-Turner” section of the New Yorker, the poet Henri Cole’s Paris journal has been gathered as Orphic Paris. Like Orpheus lamenting the twice-dead Eurydice, Cole’s journal must keep a memory alive: the familial memory of his origins, and the poet’s memory of the history of art and the lives of artists in the city of Paris. In this Orphic meditation on both, Cole’s consciousness is always emerging. It’s a mothering, nurturing spirit of art that we find residing in the consciousness of Henri Cole.
Writing of the classical beauty of Paris, Cole says,
In Paris, there are endless encounters with the principles associated with Apollonian beauty—order, rationality, harmony, restraint—reminding us of the remarkable civilization of Greece, rather than something darker, lacking discipline, unbridled, violent. Does this make Paris more human, more truthful, more fragile, more tragic? Surely, these two forces—the Apollonian and the Dionysian—must be reconciled for us to be content in our lives.
It’s worth recalling, as Ruskin points out in Modern Painters, that in Homer (who loved symmetry), the god’s admiration (Mercury, though on a message) is excited by the wildness of the landscape: its wandering vine and wild violets and fountains, while the mortal’s (Ulysses) is excited by the landscape’s symmetry: the rows of vines, the fountains in pipes. In Orphic Paris is the cultivation of a reality, a deliberate quest to create its author’s consciousness. The cultivated reality is Cole’s spiritual self-portrait, which consoles against the rising wind of time; it’s the re-enactment of the warmth and splendor of the “transitory light” of a “mind in creation” (Shelley), the reward by which Cole heightens his perception of beauty, form, and the grim.
Part of the journal’s quest is carried through by Cole’s culling from the lives of artists their intercourse with a reality which art redeems. With Cole, the influence of such reality seems ceaseless. He patches together, from letters, works, biographical and critical accounts, vital visions of the dark Baudelaire, the humane Cézanne, the visionary Rodin, and the young, anxious Rilke, of whose time in Paris, Cole writes:
When the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke arrived in Paris, in 1902, he was so unhappy that he wrote, “Sometimes I lean my head against the gate of the Luxembourg just to breathe in a little space, calmness, moonlight—but there, too, it’s the same leaden air, still heavy with the perfume of the too many flowers they have crowded into the borders . . . The city is just too vast and overburdened with melancholy.” Rilke’s mentor, the sculptor Auguste Rodin, advised the twenty-six-year-old that “you must choose one or the other, happiness or art.” But Rilke found Paris to be “bloated” with an “impatience to possess life immediately,” while he believed the real impulse of life was “calm, immense, elemental.” . . . He clung to the few things he regarded as different, like “the great old man,” Rodin, with whom things would end badly, and the sumptuous statue of Nike of Samothrace, at the Louvre, which made him feel the breath of Greece. . . .
With “melancholy intensity,” he wanders Parisian streets like an Orpheus questing for some lost Eurydice. The shades of the artists gather in meetings with James Lord, biographer of Picasso and Giacometti, and the French poet, translator Claire Malroux, and, in his collecting sensations, meanings and histories of poems and works of art that make Orphic Paris a visionary milieu. The contrasting presences of Baudelaire and Rilke are recurrent, reconciling for Cole the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Cole quotes Rilke’s essay on Rodin, in which he “describes the sculptor’s visits to the Jardin des Plantes early in the morning to sketch the sleepy animals.” Later, in Rodin’s studio on the Rue de l’Université, he observes a tiny plaster cast of an antique tiger that Rodin treasured: “There is a cast of a panther, of Greek workmanship, hardly as big as a hand. . . . If you look from the front under its body into the space formed by the four powerful soft paws, you seem to be looking into the depths of an Indian stone temple; so huge and all-inclusive does this work become.” In Rilke is the worshipper of a redemptive Apollonian beauty and form, while the Dionysian Baudelaire, “unafraid of the grim,” reached the sublime in identifying with the cipher-script of time. Cole writes:
In a letter to Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop speaks of how a single word can have enormous power in a line of poetry, using the example of Baudelaire’s “The Balcony”: Les soirs illuminés par l’ardeur du charbon (“Evenings lit up by burning coals”). It is the coals that surprises the reader and illuminates the poem’s meaning. Poetry is language that doesn’t shut us out; it should give the opposite experience.
Like the chorus of satyrs in Greek tragedy, the wild coals move us onward to what has become ungovernable by action and is purely thought.
The diverse arts and works Cole writes about include taxidermy, ballet, and architecture—he admiringly compares the Maison Carrée, in form and intensity, to the sonnet. While reading at the Luxembourg Gardens, moved by the seemingly cerebral sound of bees, he compares their colony to the world of poets and poetry. Of his craft, Cole writes, “Here at my desk, I resemble a packer bee, striving to put enough pressure on language to transform it into poetry, regurgitating my nectar again and again until honey is formed.” The thought of a poet “regurgitating [his] nectar again and again” delights, reminding of bees around the lips of the cradled Pindar and Pope’s “I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.” There’s no ennui in Cole’s inexorable spirit; Orphic Paris moves with energy, making linkages and metamorphoses.
“French is not my mother tongue, though it is my mother’s tongue.” Orphic Paris also contains Cole’s personal history, with its center in his mother’s life, told by giving brief descriptions such as in his contemplating her youthful wartime I.D. from during the German occupation, or in describing the enchantment he found in the South of France, meeting his uncles. In reading his descriptions of Paris, works of art and his family successively, his mother’s spirit merges with art’s tutelary spirit: of his time in Paris, he writes, “For a time, I lived here, where the call of life is so strong. My soul was colored by it . . . in this place I wrote, I was nourished, and I grew.”
Orpheus’s turning back to look at Eurydice, and thus breaking the command of the underworld, has been called, among other things, an instance of lack of faith on the poet’s part. “I confess that I still feel childlike amazement before the brutality of the world, but also before its beauty. Call me an unrealist, but maybe in fact I am an ultra-realist.” Orphic Paris presents our reality as what must both be rendered sublime and redeemed; Cole’s faith in art’s power to do so is a tonic.