The Shelf--From LEQ to LES--Adventures in Extreme Reading by Phyllis Rose

Author:Phyllis Rose
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Seven

SMALL WORLDS: THE NIGHTINGALE AND THE LARK

I wanted a change from women, and that was not hard to arrange because there were no more books by women on my shelf. I gave myself a choice between two writers: the twentieth-century Austrian Alexander Lernet-Holenia, who wrote about war and ghosts, or Alain Le Sage, the seventeenth-century Frenchman who produced one of the earliest novels ever written. The French book was almost eight hundred pages, the Austrian two hundred and fifty. I went with the Hapsburgs, Vienna, waltzes, ghosts, frantic gaiety, red uniforms, large families with governesses, doomed cavalry charges, hunting chamois in the Alps, bayonets, Mannlichers, drunken evenings in the barracks.

The volume on my shelf by Lernet-Holenia is called Count Luna: Two Tales of the Real and the Unreal. It consists of two short novels or long short stories, and the first I turned to, Baron Bagge, suited my needs perfectly. After sick children, suspicious physicians, and maternal angst, guys flying off the handle and challenging each other to duels were just the ticket: “At a recent reception given by the Minister of Agriculture, a certain Baron Bagge became involved in a dispute with an immature and hot-tempered young man named von Farago.” The objectivity! The distance! The magisterial all-knowingness of “a certain Baron Bagge” and “an immature and hot-tempered young man named von Farago.” The clarity, the worldliness of “a recent reception given by the Minister of Agriculture.” Even if I didn’t know that this was published in 1936 and was set decades earlier, I would know that I had entered a distant and different world, one in which duels are fought and characters can be described in two peremptory adjectives. Von Farago forbids Bagge to speak with his sister, and Bagge replies by challenging him to a duel. The duel is averted with an apology, but Bagge feels he owes it to his seconds to explain why the young man distrusted him.

It is true, he admits, that two women have already killed themselves for his sake, although he clearly warned them he was not available. In fact, he is already married, although he has no wife. “When the war started so unexpectedly,” Bagge relates, starting the story over again in the fashion of the oldest tales, the preceding narrative being no more than the frame, “I was traveling in Central America,” hoping to attend the opening of the Panama Canal. He succeeded in returning to Europe and took part in the beginning of the campaign against Russia, serving in the Count Gondola Dragoons. He is so brisk, so masculine. The world is his. He tells you firmly about all the officers in his regiment—Maltitz, young and uncertain; Hamilton, the rich American, treating everyone to whiskey; the commanding officer, Semler, a bit unstable. And he tells you straight off, pulling no punches, that there is a time after life and before death. Souls wander for nine days. That’s all there is to it. An afterlife exists, brief, confusing, misty, but real.

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