08 Jun 2013 04:01:07
The first time I encountered this book, many years ago, I confused its author with Joseph de Maistre, one of the more terrifying philosophers and political thinkers of the last two hundred years, who held that the world was a murderous place in which all creation strove to destroy the rest of it, mankind included. His favourite public servant was the executioner. So I experienced some cognitive dissonance, as they say, when I started reading what appeared to be a very droll, sophisticated and charming book, as if one of Beckett's locked-in narrators – Malone, say – had been in a particularly good mood. It cleared matters up when I learned that I was thinking of Joseph, Xavier's brother.
And why bring his brother into it? Well, largely because without him this book would never have been published. Xavier may have joked that there were passages "that the whole world must read", but without Joseph's insistence it would have remained in a drawer in Xavier's desk. And although one shouldn't bring too much to this, it is interesting to speculate what it was, besides fraternal affection, that endeared this dreamy and fanciful work to Joseph, the man who remains a bogeyman to liberals everywhere. Maybe it isn't so dreamy and fanciful after all.
For all that Xavier conjures up a personality similar to Marius Goring's urbane guillotined aristocrat in A Matter of Life and Death, you have to remember that both De Maistres lived in a world of blood and thunder, and that the chief reason Xavier was in Turin in the first place was to escape the revolution that was severing aristocrats' necks. (Not that he had been squeamish about perpetrating violence himself.) At one point Xavier entertains a reverie about "a white bear, a philosopher, a tiger or some other animal of that sort" (note the word "philosopher" in that list; brother Joseph considered Voltaire and Diderot ultimately responsible for the carnage of the revolution) climbing into the orchestra at a fashionable concert and urging the audience to slaughter. "Let women, too, dip their timid hands in blood! Leave! You are free! Tear down your king from his throne, and your God from his sanctuary! … Weren't they dancing in Paris five years ago?" Or, observing a shepherdess in a placid pastoral scene in one of his favourite paintings, he tells her to flee from the advancing soldiers (who presumably only he can see) marching up the mountains. We do not have to be told what soldiers do to shepherdesses.
Another undercurrent is that, despite his protestations to the contrary, hints crop up reminding us that he is, in fact, incredibly bored, and probably going a bit mad (sexual frustration would appear to be a factor, too). There is irony upon irony here, like the tiers of a multistorey cake, and the joy of this work resides in that. One of Xavier's favourite writers was Laurence Sterne, and it shows. He is explicitly referenced here, in case we miss his indebtedness; at one point Xavier makes a Sternean paraliterary typographical joke (which, centring on the word "mound", is clearly very rude).
It occurs to me that a proper appreciation of this book would be longer than the book itself. This edition also includes the 1825 sequel, A Nocturnal Expedition Around My Room, which is just as good, as funny and deceptively profound as its predecessor; and he even makes it to the window-ledge this time. Andrew Brown's translation is excellent too.
