French Poets
(An excerpt from-Ciphers and Symbols, a short story in the memoir
War Stories for My Grandchildren)
by Jansen Estrup
Philip never really grew up. Or, perhaps it is equally fair to say that he was born fully grown, blessed or cursed with boundless, volcanic enthusiasm. Even as a child his black eyes had burned with an inner fire which fed on a constantly created fuel - himself. These tensions made others very uncomfortable, simultaneously envious and repelled, but also awed and hopelessly mesmerized.
He, in his mid forties, was a dark, handsome man, a couple of inches short of six feet, yet somehow larger, a vibrant giant like those we are accustomed to seeing on the silver screen. Standing near him exposed one to the same energies radiated by dynamos and he could capture attention like a super-nova. He was not apt to do his audience violence, not intentionally, but being too close to him was extremely dangerous. Like flotsam caught in the wake of powerful ship screws one might be submerged, thrashed and dragged behind for hours, days, or a lifetime.
Even so, hardly anyone has ever heard of Philip. Certainly his name is not to be found in history books, not even records narrowed strictly by specialty or field. Possibly that is because his work crossed the usual boundaries and his contemporaries failed to notice him darting from one obscure place to another. Perhaps he does not even appear in yearbooks of colleges he attended and taught at, or in the bookkeeping legers of the companies which supposedly employed him.
His was a Jewish name, but he was not Jewish. Instead, like many Jews down the centuries, by coercion or conviction, he was Catholic ... sort of ... and an academic all of his life. “I was an odd kid,” he said once over a beer he never touched. “My father wanted me to chase girls and have fun, but I only wanted to read poetry to trees.”
Divorced, he seldom spoke of his family, not his parents or the wife and children he never saw. When he did it was as if they had been a youthful indiscretion, a casual mistake, one which had sidetracked him from his true calling - French literature. Well, not the entire body of culture, just a portion of it - poetry, and not all of that, either.
Philip’s passion was late 19th, early 20th century French poets - Verlain, Rimaud and especially Paul Claudell. His doctoral thesis had included an impassioned critique of the first English translation (his own) of Claudell’s greatest play, L Eschang, and some years later he’d produced and directed it on Broadway to indifferent audiences. Claudell was too French, too Catholic, too strange (some critics said too anti-capitalist, anti-Semitic) for American audiences. Aside from his love of French poetry, hardly anything is known about Philip.
What had he been doing all those intervening years? Teaching? It didn’t seem likely. The classes I attended seemed unplanned, disorganized, even amateurish, as if he’d never conducted one before - and in the hierarchy of the fledgling junior college, he, although he was one of only two PHDs on the staff, did not even rate a title in the English Department. He taught creative writing in an offhand, distracted way. Was it the only job he could get, and that on probation?
By crude deduction and, perhaps unfairly, skewing casual remarks (and his pointed avoidance of certain topics) I concluded that Philip had spent most of his adult life in government service, perhaps as early as the OSS, and CIA. An OSS billet in wartime France might have given him the occasion to meet Paul Claudell in person, and surely afterward he would have had plenty of opportunity. It is possible that he’d met him even earlier, as an impassioned young volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, when pro-Nazi Claudell had just retired from the Diplomatic Corps and Philip was still a student’s age and so very idealistic. Had that been the reason for his obsession with the poet? Personal contact? Professional admiration? Such a mixed career, theater and diplomacy would have mirrored Claudell’s and might have suited Philip to a tee. Later, certainly, Philip had been recruited by the State Department and that had not seemed at all unusual.
The other possibility would not have caught anyone by surprise, either, that he’d been confined all those years in a mental institution.
If Philip’s history is mysterious, a great deal is known about his hero, Paul Claudell, and the poets who preceded him, too. Verlain shot himself at a relatively young age. Rimaud quit writing poetry at age twenty and became a vagabond, traveling ancient sites (carving his name on a block at the top of the Great Pyramid and upon massive obelisks farther south) eventually taking a minor business post in Aden so that he could explore Ethiopia. There he became friendly with young Prince Hallie Selassie and, to the degree that gun-running is political, a revolutionary who helped restore the Ethiopian Empire. Throughout his long life, despite many long disappearances and attempts to pronounce him dead, he remained France’s most famous poet. He never, while alive, returned to his native country.
Claudell grew up in this literary vacuum, brilliant and ambitious. His sister, Camille, gained considerable fame as a sculptor, but her long affair with Rodin, anti-religious stance and heavy drinking were scandalous. Her brother, accusing his sister of ‘possession’ because she had aborted Rodin’s child, had her committed to solitary confinement in a Paris asylum, and so her budding career was cut short. The real reason probably lay in her brother’s declaration, “I am the only genius in this family!”
Paul became a diplomat and intentionally chose postings far from his home - the U.S.A. twice, South America, China on more than one occasion, and Japan. Later, when his reputation for diplomacy began to equal his literary renown, he held key European billets in Denmark and Belgium. Some, after World War II, blamed him for the failure of Belgium to complete its portion of the Maginot Line, and others tried, with some success, to paint him as a Nazi sympathizer. German leaders had acclaimed his work, performed especially for them in Paris, and that became a national scandal.
Certainly he had a cruel streak in him. For example, he was ruthless with regard to his sister, committing her to an asylum for most of her adult life. He forbade her visits from her friends and would not even permit her to send or receive letters. She died there, begging for a visit from him. He condemned her for having an abortion, but the children he himself fathered without benefit of marriage he abandoned and refused to support.
His literary characters could be just as callous, as remorseless as the God he worshiped. “Jesus did not come to take away suffering and pain,” his voices preached, “He came to fill suffering and pain with His presence.”
As an artist he is credited with being the first multi-media playwright, using music, dance, poetry, strob-lighting, radio, film and other avant-garde techniques to move audiences. The influence of oriental culture made his work seem strange, otherworldly, an uncomfortably plausible fantasy realm not unlike Dante’s, or the real world of mangled trenches, totalitarian solutions, blitzkriegs and class warfare. Claudell did live to see the worst of his vision revealed, world poverty, concentration camps, fire bombings and the Cold War nuclear arms race, the planet being strangled by wanton machines and crude, he thought evil, Jewish democracy.
A few critics thought Claudell prescient. But they embraced Kierkegaard’s brood, Sartre and the others, who were glad to see religion and royalty on the wain. Claudell applauded his religion and cried out against a world without it. In that era, when ‘God was dead’, he stood almost alone at the philosophy bar.
Philip was one of the few who acted upon Claudell’s insights. He, like disciples of other rebellions, convicted himself and eventually raised an army up around him.
Teaching in a classroom bored him beyond tears. Like Rimaud and Claudell, he longed to be, to do! Exactly when he decided to leave teaching is not clear, but shortly into his second year he began talking about ‘L Eschang’, re-staging it for a newer, younger generation of Americans. Gradually, he became obsessed with the idea.
But try as he might, he couldn’t get through problems which eventually proved insurmountable. Desperate, he even asked me to help him sort it out, but I had no understanding of the work, nor a feel for theater, or the stamina to remain so close to the volcanic tensions he embodied. Shakespeare had praised the great man ‘who does not do what he most does show”, and Philip never did explode. His fuse always sputtered at the moment of detonation. I stayed away, afraid of him.
He couldn’t find anyone else, either. No local actors, not even some of the seasoned professionals who had begun to call the Sarasota area home, could invest themselves in Claudell’s characters. There were only four - Satan, The Capitalist, Adam and Eve - but no one would try out for the parts, promote the play or help him stage it. In the end he decided to perform it himself, as a reading.
He invited me and many others. We came, about two hundred of us, to the still-new civic auditorium which dominated the river-front. The place held many more and it was hard to tell how many empty seats there were in the dark. The only light was beamed on a clear podium where a dark leather portfolio rested. It was very quiet.
I knew some of the people present, many others by sight. In the lobby we’d exchanged a few words. Some were openly curious about the performance. Others had come mainly to support the college. A few just liked being seen in expensive clothes and jewelry. I chose a seat down front, on the aisle, something I almost never did before or after. But Philip had said, “Get a good seat, down front if you can”, and so I’d done it. I was the only one so far down, but I doubt he could have seen any of us, not even had we been in the orchestra pit.
When he entered the auditorium got even quieter, as if the very furniture was shocked to silence. He wore a light smothering, floor length cape and moved like a spirit up to the lighted dais. There only his masked face and hands were visible, like separate luminous creatures beckoning in the darkness. He gave us little time to absorb this fantasy.
“Imagine,” he said with an orator’s nimble voice, “a balmy tropical paradise replete with colorful birds, soft sound and long waving leaves. The sea is nearby and whispers with covetous insistence all along the body of moist, warm sand. A man and a woman stand naked in this Eden. They are guiltless and joy-filled ...”
Philip let our minds do the scene building, the lighting, staging and action. We followed him, each in our disparate way, even when incongruousness slapped us and silliness tried to draw us away. A storm approached and the man and woman clung to each other. Out of the maelstrom The Capitalist appeared in his long coat and top-hat, with Satan’s voice roaring in his ear. He approached Adam with a silky voice and gifts, along with a magnanimous, grandiose plan to rid the world of sin and darkness, of pain and misery.
Adam swayed to the dazzle and hyperbole, leaned into the notion of good and vibrated when promises of purpose caressed his tone-deaf ear. His eyes sparkled at the prospect of living in a brilliant city, its streets paved with gold, forever on his knees at the feet of the Universal Almighty, bathed perpetually in painless, mindless bliss.
Dimly I became aware of sounds in the audience, of muttering and movement. Some of the guests were leaving, but I maintained my grasp of the images Philip spun out to us.
The man moved slowly, then eagerly toward The Capitalist, Eve’s outstretched arms and primitive pleas ignored. She was left alone while the men argued and bartered, blustered and split hairs. And in the end Adam, wearing his made-in-the-image-of-God mantel, exulted and boasted. He had outsmarted The Capitalist and Satan. He, Adam made it painfully clear, would own the means to, and production of, all things eternal and heavenly. Satan and The Capitalist, dispirited and sly in defeat, took away nothing but Eve, in her guise as Gaia, Mother Earth, and the authority to do with her as they pleased.
“Outrage!” She might have protested, had such a word existed then. Or, “Betrayal!” In saying nothing she seemed to acquiesce. “Je obiese. I obey.”
Condensing ‘L Eschang’ this way strips the piece of drama, of anguish and anger, betrayal and triumph, of the ebb and flow, the tension of intent and word play, of Claudell’s vision and Philip’s masterful translation of language and especially emotion. It also minimizes the anti-Semitic links to Claudell’s hatred of capitalism. But that is fair, for anticipation is seldom rewarded in actual experience. I, on the other hand, had not looked forward to this event - dreaded it, in fact. As a result, it gave me much more than I expected, or wanted.
A roaring sound filled my head as Philip brought his performance to its awful close. I could not concentrate on anything except a rising hysteria which ordered me from the place, the darkness, the ideas. I fled up the aisle and out into the fragrant night. I walked with long strides and no destination. I saw myself in the faces of people I passed, their reactions of shock and concern and fear. I walked for hours, then longer.
Author's note: This story, with a break of time, continues in French Poets II, available exclusively on Author's Den ...
