She and He by George Sand (1859)

This is Sand dipping down from her usual bright heights to a level that could be described as the one which might be expected of French literature in the nineteenth century. In other words, it is an anatomy of a passion in Parisian society, so familiar from the works of Daudet, Maupassant, Flaubert and company. It's not boring, none of these writers are, because that territory is eminently human, though of a very particular marque. Sand, though, is one of the few French writers who outruns that cliche soundly in her best works. This is not among them. It is the story of an egotistical artist, Laurent de Fauvel, who becomes obsessed with a slightly mysterious woman artist on the fringes of the bohemian world, Therese Jacques. She has had a chequered past; tricked when very young by an importunate count into an affair, she has borne a dead child. She is subsequently protected by powerful friends and her own dignified wariness and self-criticism. She is determined to live at a slight remove from the hedonistic flow of the artistic life, though is drawn to many of its broader ideas. She and Laurent eventually fall for each other, but, as they do, one of the central tropes of this piece comes into play. This is the change of mood, once an ideal has been grasped. Laurent, a natural hedonist, becomes abusive and dismissive, something Therese cannot endure. They decide that the relationship needs air, and head off to Italy for a long tour. In the background has been a discreet older American, Richard Palmer, who knows Therese's past and is a family friend of long standing. Laurent has been jealous of him intermittently, but is reassured in the end by his good character and honour when they get to know each other. Therese is very happy with their first stop, Genoa, and she and Laurent decide to stay there for some months. Therese is quite productive, but Laurent is blocked. He quickly gets bored, and frustrated, and the misery begins again. Palmer, also travelling, comes to her aid. They decide between them that the relationship must end; Laurent is like a moody, difficult child, and clearly Therese does him no good despite his infatuation. They eventually organise, with his agreement, to send him back to Paris, as he is ill with dissipation and needs to recover. In the process of all this, Palmer has realised that he loves Therese, and through his noble actions and genuine care for Laurent, Therese sees him in a new light. They agree to marry, and after some time elapses, return to Paris. Laurent comes to see Therese, full of understanding that their deepest connection is over, and happy for her in Palmer. But as the marriage approaches, the central trope attacks again. She and Palmer begin to bicker and misunderstand one another, over Laurent, and over other issues. They part in bitterness, thinking they will never see each other again. Therese, depressed but determined to survive on her own, slowly falls under Laurent's spell once again, and his selfish darkness, combined with his obsession, work together to make her life a misery. The seeming change in Laurent that had encouraged her back into his arms has been proved to be a mirage; the story rolls round once again. Her life-energies sapped, with almost a blank dreariness in her heart, she is sinking into a locked abyss of sadness. A knock comes at the door; the young teenage boy tells her he has been sent to her. Shock and joy of an unknown calibre reverberates through her as, in waves, she recognises in him a look which she can't deny, as she has recently undertaken a self-portrait in the mirror. His bone structure and features are hers, to a large extent. It eventuates that her child was not born dead, but whisked away to his father. The count has now died, and his wife has unwillingly relinquished the child, who was her lifeline to her husband's estate. He has been brought to his mother, but by whom? She discovers Palmer outside on the street; he has, in realisation that neither himself nor Laurent is likely to make Therese happy, brought to her the only person he can imagine that could. He is right; she and her son immediately decamp to Germany, leaving Laurent. In a final letter she reassures Laurent that she forgives him his atrocious behaviour, making the point that it seems that his nature is that of the genius, but that there is a price to pay for his endless dissatisfied curiosity - singular love is the sacrifice he must make, and understand in himself, despite his romanticising of it. This is of the general make of its times, but it is made a superior example by the force of Sand's imagination working subtleties through it.

Commonplace Book

'...She had known that exaltation of suffering which shows one the miseries of life on a large scale, and which hovers on the boundaries between the real and the imaginary; but, by virtue of a natural reaction, her mind aspired henceforth to the true, which is neither one nor the other, neither prosaic fact nor the uncurbed ideal. She felt that there the beautiful was to be found, and that, in order to resume the logical life of the soul, she must seek to live a simple and dignified material life...'

from She and He by George Sand (Chapter XIII)

This Water by Beverley Farmer (2017)

What joy. Firstly, to read fiction from Farmer again after a twenty-two year wait. She was always good, but this is different in many senses, in ways which inspire and threaten. Those firings to the brain are a second joy. One of the least regarded of modern classic Australian writers, I assume she is seen as a 'writer's writer', which is code for a kind of connoisseurship of the delicacies of wordsmithing, a snifting of the salty airs of delved places not often revealed which, if "we" educated people more broadly, could cease to be some sort of torrid zone of perceived limited access. This comprises three novellas, interspersed with two long stories. The first novella, A Ring of Gold, occupies the most traditional Farmer territory, and has a woman walking the beaches of a country town in Victoria, musing over textures and colours of nature and the life it symbolises, identifying herself with not only people but creatures, and her ways with those of the rhythms that surround her. She is everyday and peculiar in a trove of ways, where those aspects form a contrapuntal sway that delineates clearly and then undercuts itself with fascinating strangeness. The first story, which gives the book its title, is the first indication of the new territory to be encountered here. We accompany a young woman, daughter of an unnamed king (never called a princess presumably because of the bedraggled state of that word in its current Disneyfication) who is promised to an old man for whom she doesn't care. She notices one of his young kinsmen when he arrives at the castle for the betrothal, and intrigues to run away with him. They find, after covering a lot of miles and many revelations of self, sex, nature and symbolism, a place of safety in his foster father's castle. But her lover dies, and she discovers maturity and bitter poetry in a return to her former betrothed. This one's repleteness with the fabular, and the rich symbolism of female approaches which it shares with its predecessor, give it the quality of bridging the two territories of this book. The second novella, The Blood Red of Her Silks, is an astoundingly brilliant tale of four children, changed through the jealousy of a rival/stepmother into swans. They exist over an unspecified but extensive period of time, becoming a strange inspiration to a lonely monk on a distant island, and a semi-mythical emanation to be both feared and coveted over centuries; their world is full of the soft coastal imagery of reedbed and estuary, wind and sand. The second story, Tongue of Blood, is the most formally experimental of these pieces. In short poetic bursts, Farmer builds up a mythic picture of the resentment of a young woman whose daughter was sacrificed in a rite, probably raped and done away with, with the rite almost as excuse. The woman becomes the sworn enemy and attempted revenger on her daughter's assailants in a powerful tale, dripping with bile and gore. The last novella, The Ice Bride, takes the effort at image-making to yet another level. Set in a kind of labyrinthine ice-dome, mainly at night, with glimmerings of light, passages to unknown regions and places of the mind, its main character is a questioning woman, starting to find out about the world, but trapped in this snowy, stripped down, enchanted building in a restricted, dark landscape. She knows she is a bride, but her "Lord" visits only occasionally, giving her titbits of information about her world, allowing her to discover things only under his say-so. Also visiting is a "Fool", who is a servant to her betrothed, who also lets out information in a very controlled way. She discovers meaning and colour in brief bursts, through light from the stars and, at the end, the sun. She finds rooms in the labyrinth of the dome that weren't there before, with fossils on their shelves, for example, and not really knowing what these things are, questions her Lord and the Fool, on their occasional visits, about wings, or shells. Things turn more threatening toward the end as, in another level of the dome which has not been there before, she sees beneath the ice floor what appear to be the half-skeletal, red-fanged remains of previous brides locked in the freeze. The novella ends with her disposed of, and her Lord arriving in a largely melted landscape with a new bride at his feet in his skiff, and the waters just beginning to freeze again. The looming, disturbing otherworldliness of this piece is phenomenal. Recounting plot is not marginal to these works, but it does result in a very partial picture. The berserker, or setter-alight, of these pieces is Farmer's capacity in describing not only events, but also blazoning the way into worlds they inhabit, textures and exhalations of meaning that are inherent in small symbols and things that can be touched. Her career's prior worldliness and descriptive succulence, though, cannot quite prepare the reader for the delicacy of imagination in the last four of these five. Though it did not feel at all impossible then, to now discover the extraordinary stretch of these tales is to know that the author's mind is at its most powerful in this emanation; she reaches for the stars here, and grasps them. Exhilarating.

Commonplace Book

'...fools and ambitious mortals are not the only imprudent wights whom destiny overwhelms.'

from She and He by George Sand (Chapter IV)

Commonplace Book

'...To eat together is one of the greatest promoters of intimacy. It is the satisfaction in common of a material necessity of existence, and if you seek a loftier meaning in it, it is a communion...'

from She and He by George Sand (Chapter IV)