Status
Available
Call number
Publication
NYRB Classics (2008), 192 pages
Description
Romantic provocateur, flamboyant bohemian, precocious novelist, perfect poet--not to mention an inexhaustible journalist, critic, and man-about-town--Théophile Gautier is one of the major figures, and great characters, of French literature. In My Fantoms Richard Holmes, the celebrated biographer of Shelley and Coleridge, has found a brilliantly effective new way to bring this great bu too-little-known writer into English. My Fantoms assembles seven stories spanning the whole of Gautier's career into a unified work that captures the essence of his adventurous life and subtle art. From the erotic awakening of "The Adolescent" through "The Poet," a piercing recollection of the mad genius Gérard de Nerval, the great friend of Gautier's youth, My Fantoms celebrates the senses and illuminates the strange disguises of the spirit, while taking readers on a tour of modernity at its most mysterious. "What ever would the Devil find to do in Paris?" Gautier wonders. "He would meet people just as diabolical as he, and find himself taken for some naïve provincial..." Tapestries, statues, and corpses come to life; young men dream their way into ruin; and Gautier keeps his faith in the power of imagination: "No one is truly dead, until they are no longer loved."… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member chuck_ralston
Apparitions and reality, dreams and consciousness, the sacred and the profane, love and longing -- are facets of seven stories by Théophile Gautier (1811-1872) gathered and translated from the French by English scholar Richard Holmes. My Fantoms was first published in 1976 in England and only
Readers of Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley particularly ‘Mauberley (1920)’ will recall the following lines:
Turned from the “eau-forte
Par Jaquemart”
To the strait head
Of Messalina:
“His true Penelope
Was Flaubert,”
And his tool
The engraver's
[* * *]
Pound, an admirer of Gautier, was familiar with the latter’s Émaux et Camées (1866) and the following quatrains from ‘L’Art’ one of its poems, about the same precision and terseness in poetry found in the work of the engraver and the sculptor:
Tout passe. -- L’art robuste
Seul a l’éternité:
Le buste
Survit la cité
[* * *]
Sculpte, lime, cisèle;
Que ton rêve flottant
Se scelle
Dans le bloc résistant !
The emphasis on precise description is an attribute of both scientific writing and the aesthetic philosophy known as art for art’s sake. Gustave Flaubert and Charles Baudelaire both followed Gautier’s lead in France; Water Peter and John Ruskin in England in the latter half of the 19th and Pound and William Carlos Williams at the beginning of the 20th century.
These stories ironically may be read and interpreted as explorations in precision as well as of the fantastic. What follows is a summary of the first four stories from My Fantoms:
Story 1 (pp. 3—13 -- 12 p.)
In the ‘The Adolescent’ (Omphale – 1834) a young man (the narrator resembles Gautier) stays at his uncle’s Parisian townhouse with its faded gardens surrounding a dilapidated summer cottage. The bed room includes ‘four seasons’ paintings, one of which is of his uncle’s former mistress rendered as Diana the Huntress and her faithful hound, another of Hercules at the foot of the goddess Omphale. While getting into bed, this strapping young man notices the shifting eyes of Omphale looking directly at him, and pondering whether or not he is dreaming within a dream, witnesses ‘Omphale’ emerge from a wall-mounted tapestry mounted to ask the youth, now hidden beneath bed coverings, if he is frightened and explains that her husband had the tapestry made with the Marquise disguised as Omphale. The two converse and cavort in bed the following evening, and the youth’s lethargy during the daytime rouses his uncle’s suspicions and one morning the latter bursts open the summer-house’s door, discovers this escapade, has the tapestry removed and stored, and sends his nephew back to his parents. Years later, following the death of his uncle and the sale of his uncle’s property, he discovers the tapestry in an antique shop and attempts to purchase it only to lose out to another buyer. All for the better our narrator feels, since one should never revisit scenes of one’s first love affair or “return like Ronsard to see the rose you admired the evening before.”
Story 2 (pp. 15 -- 52 -- 38 p.)
‘The Priest’ (La Morte Amoureuse -- 1836) – Romuald serves the Lord during the day, but at night in his dreams is a connoisseur of wine and women, hunting and gambling, to the point that “when I awoke at dawn, it seemed paradoxically that I was going back to sleep, and that I only dreamt that I was a priest.” Having studied during his youth only to pursue the vocation of the priesthood, Romuald had forsworn worldly pleasures, his eyes focused on prayer and service, until by chance he saw a woman whose beauty exceeded portraits of the Madonna by the greatest painters. It is Clarimonde who offers to make Romuald “happier that God himself in Paradise”. The priest’s struggle between sacred and profane continues unabated, creating the sense “of being the same self existing simultaneously in two men who were so different.” Finally, the priest’s abbot, Serapion, unearths Clarimonde’s grave, opens her coffin, and sprinkles holy water on her corpse which action turned her pale body into dust, and in the end, ‘connoisseur’ Romuald, Clarimonde’s lover, parted forever from the person of a poor country priest.
Story 3 (pp. 53 – 90 – 38 p.)
‘The Painter’ (Onuphrius Wphly – 1832) -- Jacintha, who sits for the painter, Onuphrius, cannot understand why the latter is not present at his studio at the agreed to time, on her way home finds Onuphrius strolling “on the sunny side” care free. The painter, looking at the clock in the public square, exclaims, “Some damn imp must be playing games pushing around those clock hands . . . .” And upon returning to his studio finds graffiti-like moustaches painted on his portrait of Jacintha and his tubes of paint hard as lumps of lead. The twenty-something artist with hair parted in the middle “in the gothic style to be found in the angels of Giotto and Cimabue” made austere and brooding works which drew on “the gloomy coloring of Caravaggio or Ribera.” He was also a poet obsessed with reading chivalric romances, the Kabbalah, and tales of Hoffman and Jean-Paul, to the point that some sinister “devil’s tail or claw always forced its way into some part of each composition.” (59) Onuphrius then called to mind all the stories of diabolic possession “from the demented man in the Bible to the nuns of Loudun” pondering why the devil would persecute him and concluded it must be retribution for his recent painting of St. Dunstan pinching the devil’s nose with red-hot tongs. Bizarre accidents continue to haunt Onuphrius: his portrait of Jacintha is irreparably altered by a speck of dust, his horseback ride along a familiar path is thwarted by close calls with hay carts and thorny hedges, clocks chime simultaneously with different times, the full moon appears oval and takes on the “pallid features of his old friend Jean-Gaspard Debureau, the great Pierrot actor of the Parisian Pantomime.” One incoherent dream places him in a casket in which he is buried alive, exhumed later by grave diggers who remind him of the graveyard scene in Hamlet, then tossed on a slab for dissection, his spirit then rising from his corpse to fly as if in a balloon above Paris to an exhibit at the Louvre where among paintings by Delacroix, Ingres and Descamps, Onuphrius sees one of his own, which upon closer examination has be signed by one of his friends. Distraught he leaves for the theater to see the final scenes of a play, his play, with actress Marie Dorval (lover of George Sand and Alfred de Musset) only to hear thunderous applause and the announcement of the playwright’s name which again was not his!
Story 4 ( pp. 91 – 100 – 10 p. )
‘The Opium Smoker’ (La Pipe d’Opium – 1838) provides us with a lucid and colorful description of an opium induced dream. The narrator inhales “several lungfuls” from the smoking apparatus of his friend Alphonse Karr, who had just filled it grain by grain with a yellow-brown paste-like substance. Afterward, the two gentlemen went into the garden to admire flowers and to play with Karr’s dog “whose entire purpose in life is to provide a black foreground of fur against a green background of lawn.” The narrator had expected the opium to induce somnolence but felt instead the jitters that accompany strong black coffee. But soon blue smoke rings rose to an ebony-black ceiling that seemed to change to a deep inky blue “like a strip torn out of the night sky.” Karr, in his own blissful opium dream, thought that his friend had repainted the interior of his own furnishings a bright red Bordeaux Chateau-Laffitte. Next, lamb’s wool like white tufts floated upward and across the blue ceiling which already exhibited stars with “long eyelashes of gold” and our narrator gradually perceives a veiled ‘fantom’ form that assumes the figure of a young girl with feet of alabaster white.
The remaining stories in My Fantoms, ‘The Actor’ (Deux Acteurs pour Un Rale – 1841), ‘The Tourist’ (Arria Marcella: Souvenir de Pompei -- 1852), and ‘The Poet’ (1867), are as unique in tone and form as the others. The last ‘story’ is an account of the life of Gautier’s friend Gerard de Nerval, in whose writing we have a glimpse of the imagination of the poet interweaving fantom with spirit, religion with myth, and ultimately resulting in the unbending finality summarized in Gautier’s quotation of a Lebanese proverb: “The Gate is Shut, the Transaction is Sealed, the Pen is Broken.”
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recently reissued (July 2008) in the United States. The stories in this recent edition are bracketed by an introduction and postscript which locate Gautier in nineteenth-century European literature’s interest in the grotesque, the fantastic, and the artificial.Readers of Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley particularly ‘Mauberley (1920)’ will recall the following lines:
Turned from the “eau-forte
Par Jaquemart”
To the strait head
Of Messalina:
“His true Penelope
Was Flaubert,”
And his tool
The engraver's
[* * *]
Pound, an admirer of Gautier, was familiar with the latter’s Émaux et Camées (1866) and the following quatrains from ‘L’Art’ one of its poems, about the same precision and terseness in poetry found in the work of the engraver and the sculptor:
Tout passe. -- L’art robuste
Seul a l’éternité:
Le buste
Survit la cité
[* * *]
Sculpte, lime, cisèle;
Que ton rêve flottant
Se scelle
Dans le bloc résistant !
The emphasis on precise description is an attribute of both scientific writing and the aesthetic philosophy known as art for art’s sake. Gustave Flaubert and Charles Baudelaire both followed Gautier’s lead in France; Water Peter and John Ruskin in England in the latter half of the 19th and Pound and William Carlos Williams at the beginning of the 20th century.
These stories ironically may be read and interpreted as explorations in precision as well as of the fantastic. What follows is a summary of the first four stories from My Fantoms:
Story 1 (pp. 3—13 -- 12 p.)
In the ‘The Adolescent’ (Omphale – 1834) a young man (the narrator resembles Gautier) stays at his uncle’s Parisian townhouse with its faded gardens surrounding a dilapidated summer cottage. The bed room includes ‘four seasons’ paintings, one of which is of his uncle’s former mistress rendered as Diana the Huntress and her faithful hound, another of Hercules at the foot of the goddess Omphale. While getting into bed, this strapping young man notices the shifting eyes of Omphale looking directly at him, and pondering whether or not he is dreaming within a dream, witnesses ‘Omphale’ emerge from a wall-mounted tapestry mounted to ask the youth, now hidden beneath bed coverings, if he is frightened and explains that her husband had the tapestry made with the Marquise disguised as Omphale. The two converse and cavort in bed the following evening, and the youth’s lethargy during the daytime rouses his uncle’s suspicions and one morning the latter bursts open the summer-house’s door, discovers this escapade, has the tapestry removed and stored, and sends his nephew back to his parents. Years later, following the death of his uncle and the sale of his uncle’s property, he discovers the tapestry in an antique shop and attempts to purchase it only to lose out to another buyer. All for the better our narrator feels, since one should never revisit scenes of one’s first love affair or “return like Ronsard to see the rose you admired the evening before.”
Story 2 (pp. 15 -- 52 -- 38 p.)
‘The Priest’ (La Morte Amoureuse -- 1836) – Romuald serves the Lord during the day, but at night in his dreams is a connoisseur of wine and women, hunting and gambling, to the point that “when I awoke at dawn, it seemed paradoxically that I was going back to sleep, and that I only dreamt that I was a priest.” Having studied during his youth only to pursue the vocation of the priesthood, Romuald had forsworn worldly pleasures, his eyes focused on prayer and service, until by chance he saw a woman whose beauty exceeded portraits of the Madonna by the greatest painters. It is Clarimonde who offers to make Romuald “happier that God himself in Paradise”. The priest’s struggle between sacred and profane continues unabated, creating the sense “of being the same self existing simultaneously in two men who were so different.” Finally, the priest’s abbot, Serapion, unearths Clarimonde’s grave, opens her coffin, and sprinkles holy water on her corpse which action turned her pale body into dust, and in the end, ‘connoisseur’ Romuald, Clarimonde’s lover, parted forever from the person of a poor country priest.
Story 3 (pp. 53 – 90 – 38 p.)
‘The Painter’ (Onuphrius Wphly – 1832) -- Jacintha, who sits for the painter, Onuphrius, cannot understand why the latter is not present at his studio at the agreed to time, on her way home finds Onuphrius strolling “on the sunny side” care free. The painter, looking at the clock in the public square, exclaims, “Some damn imp must be playing games pushing around those clock hands . . . .” And upon returning to his studio finds graffiti-like moustaches painted on his portrait of Jacintha and his tubes of paint hard as lumps of lead. The twenty-something artist with hair parted in the middle “in the gothic style to be found in the angels of Giotto and Cimabue” made austere and brooding works which drew on “the gloomy coloring of Caravaggio or Ribera.” He was also a poet obsessed with reading chivalric romances, the Kabbalah, and tales of Hoffman and Jean-Paul, to the point that some sinister “devil’s tail or claw always forced its way into some part of each composition.” (59) Onuphrius then called to mind all the stories of diabolic possession “from the demented man in the Bible to the nuns of Loudun” pondering why the devil would persecute him and concluded it must be retribution for his recent painting of St. Dunstan pinching the devil’s nose with red-hot tongs. Bizarre accidents continue to haunt Onuphrius: his portrait of Jacintha is irreparably altered by a speck of dust, his horseback ride along a familiar path is thwarted by close calls with hay carts and thorny hedges, clocks chime simultaneously with different times, the full moon appears oval and takes on the “pallid features of his old friend Jean-Gaspard Debureau, the great Pierrot actor of the Parisian Pantomime.” One incoherent dream places him in a casket in which he is buried alive, exhumed later by grave diggers who remind him of the graveyard scene in Hamlet, then tossed on a slab for dissection, his spirit then rising from his corpse to fly as if in a balloon above Paris to an exhibit at the Louvre where among paintings by Delacroix, Ingres and Descamps, Onuphrius sees one of his own, which upon closer examination has be signed by one of his friends. Distraught he leaves for the theater to see the final scenes of a play, his play, with actress Marie Dorval (lover of George Sand and Alfred de Musset) only to hear thunderous applause and the announcement of the playwright’s name which again was not his!
Story 4 ( pp. 91 – 100 – 10 p. )
‘The Opium Smoker’ (La Pipe d’Opium – 1838) provides us with a lucid and colorful description of an opium induced dream. The narrator inhales “several lungfuls” from the smoking apparatus of his friend Alphonse Karr, who had just filled it grain by grain with a yellow-brown paste-like substance. Afterward, the two gentlemen went into the garden to admire flowers and to play with Karr’s dog “whose entire purpose in life is to provide a black foreground of fur against a green background of lawn.” The narrator had expected the opium to induce somnolence but felt instead the jitters that accompany strong black coffee. But soon blue smoke rings rose to an ebony-black ceiling that seemed to change to a deep inky blue “like a strip torn out of the night sky.” Karr, in his own blissful opium dream, thought that his friend had repainted the interior of his own furnishings a bright red Bordeaux Chateau-Laffitte. Next, lamb’s wool like white tufts floated upward and across the blue ceiling which already exhibited stars with “long eyelashes of gold” and our narrator gradually perceives a veiled ‘fantom’ form that assumes the figure of a young girl with feet of alabaster white.
The remaining stories in My Fantoms, ‘The Actor’ (Deux Acteurs pour Un Rale – 1841), ‘The Tourist’ (Arria Marcella: Souvenir de Pompei -- 1852), and ‘The Poet’ (1867), are as unique in tone and form as the others. The last ‘story’ is an account of the life of Gautier’s friend Gerard de Nerval, in whose writing we have a glimpse of the imagination of the poet interweaving fantom with spirit, religion with myth, and ultimately resulting in the unbending finality summarized in Gautier’s quotation of a Lebanese proverb: “The Gate is Shut, the Transaction is Sealed, the Pen is Broken.”
Show Less
LibraryThing member Ganeshaka
My Fantoms is the selection and translation, by Richard Holmes, of six stories and one biographical sketch, from the writings of Theophile Gautier. Each "story" may be said to recount the return by a spirit to haunt a specific individual. Holmes constructed a faux facade to unite the stories, by
I would propose taking the liberty one step further, and imagining this collection as a series of thirteen French nesting dolls wherein a nightmare doll encloses a doll portraying a beautiful vision. The largest doll, on the outside, would be painted to illustrate the decline of Gerard Nerval's sanity. This doll would enclose a doll with images of the carefree, blue-sky days when Nerval and Gautier shared an apartment and wrote together as G.G.
For "The Tourist" I propose a doll of the ruins of a lava encrusted Pompeii would enclose Octavius in Arria's embrace. And so on, reversing the order of stories in My Fantoms. I would change only the final, smallest doll. It should be "The Opium Pipe Smoker" and contain a compressed ball of opium tar.
I suspect that at the least, several vials of tincture of laudanum, and cubes of hashish, went into the inspiration of each of the first six Fantoms. Look no further than the dream atmospheres, the exquisitely rich details, the warm glow, the enchanting seductresses, the promises, ...THEN the promise betrayed...and, as Poe put it in the House of Usher, " the after-dream of the reveller upon opium - the bitter lapse into everyday life - the hideous dropping off of the veil."
The final Fantom, The Poet, is an exception...but not really. Stylistically, the "Poet" does not resemble an opium dream and its aftermath. "The Poet' is distinct from the earlier pieces in that it is not a fiction. But Gautier is haunted, and not simply by the loss of his dearest friend Nerval, but it would seem by the very nature of the artistic ideal they chased. Euphoric visions, whether created by opium or purely by the power of the imagination that these two genuises shared, cannot be repeatedly evoked and denied, summoned and lost without a corresponding debilitation of the spirit. I suspect that for Gautier, that destructive effect was depression and for Nerval, madness.
This book is a beautiful and focused collection which leaves you contemplating, not only the images rendered in each story, but also the greater question, the forlorn question, as posed by Keats, in Ode to a Nightingale,
Forlorn!.....
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well - As she is famed to do, deceiving elf...
. Was it a vision, or a waking dream? - Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep?
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renaming each according to the person being haunted. Thus "Omphale" becomes "The Adolescent", "La Morte Amoureuse" becomes "The Priest" and so forth, until in the last piece, a beautiful, detailed, and loving remembrance of his friend Gerard Nerval, Gautier himself becomes the one haunted, "The Poet".I would propose taking the liberty one step further, and imagining this collection as a series of thirteen French nesting dolls wherein a nightmare doll encloses a doll portraying a beautiful vision. The largest doll, on the outside, would be painted to illustrate the decline of Gerard Nerval's sanity. This doll would enclose a doll with images of the carefree, blue-sky days when Nerval and Gautier shared an apartment and wrote together as G.G.
For "The Tourist" I propose a doll of the ruins of a lava encrusted Pompeii would enclose Octavius in Arria's embrace. And so on, reversing the order of stories in My Fantoms. I would change only the final, smallest doll. It should be "The Opium Pipe Smoker" and contain a compressed ball of opium tar.
I suspect that at the least, several vials of tincture of laudanum, and cubes of hashish, went into the inspiration of each of the first six Fantoms. Look no further than the dream atmospheres, the exquisitely rich details, the warm glow, the enchanting seductresses, the promises, ...THEN the promise betrayed...and, as Poe put it in the House of Usher, " the after-dream of the reveller upon opium - the bitter lapse into everyday life - the hideous dropping off of the veil."
The final Fantom, The Poet, is an exception...but not really. Stylistically, the "Poet" does not resemble an opium dream and its aftermath. "The Poet' is distinct from the earlier pieces in that it is not a fiction. But Gautier is haunted, and not simply by the loss of his dearest friend Nerval, but it would seem by the very nature of the artistic ideal they chased. Euphoric visions, whether created by opium or purely by the power of the imagination that these two genuises shared, cannot be repeatedly evoked and denied, summoned and lost without a corresponding debilitation of the spirit. I suspect that for Gautier, that destructive effect was depression and for Nerval, madness.
This book is a beautiful and focused collection which leaves you contemplating, not only the images rendered in each story, but also the greater question, the forlorn question, as posed by Keats, in Ode to a Nightingale,
Forlorn!.....
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well - As she is famed to do, deceiving elf...
. Was it a vision, or a waking dream? - Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep?
Show Less
LibraryThing member GarySeverance
The New York Review of Books publishers continue their great series of classics revivals with My Fantoms by Theophile Gautier. The short stories were published in France from 1832 to 1867 and are wonderfully introduced, translated, and updated by Richard Holmes. The stories involve the undead and
Gautier’s style is romantic, humorous, and ironic and quickly involves the reader in the fantasies of the characters. These fantasies often occur in dreams that lead to temporary or permanent madness. They are worth the stress, though, because of the sexual ecstasy and obsessive love that often result.
There is a fundamental tension in each story between the characters’ rational work and irrational experiences. Holmes points out in the Introduction that the tension is somewhat autobiographical. Gautier was a hard working journalist who wrote a weekly column for a Paris publication for thirty years and also was a free spirited author of many works of fiction. My Fantoms' cover art represents the two beautiful Italian sisters Gautier loved: one was an opera singer who lived with him and shared his day to day routines, and the other was a dancer who traveled internationally frequently sending him love letters.
Holmes writes in the Postscript that the seven stories are strange and mysterious implying they are somewhat difficult to interpret from a rational point of view. But, in the following passage from the story “The Painter,” Gautier shows the reader how to understand the characters’ experiences in all the stories. “…he was capable of becoming one of the greatest of our artists; but instead he only became one of the strangest of our madmen. He had questioned his own existence too closely and too curiously; almost invariably he injected everyday events with some grotesque element of his own fantasy.”
You can enter the realm of madness in a number of dimensions as you read the great collection of stories written by a master of the rational/irrational. Gautier will show you that the demons most threatening to sanity are the desires that dwell within our minds.
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unholy manipulating and interfering with the lives of adolescents, painters, clergy, journalists, actors, tourists, and poets. Gautier’s style is romantic, humorous, and ironic and quickly involves the reader in the fantasies of the characters. These fantasies often occur in dreams that lead to temporary or permanent madness. They are worth the stress, though, because of the sexual ecstasy and obsessive love that often result.
There is a fundamental tension in each story between the characters’ rational work and irrational experiences. Holmes points out in the Introduction that the tension is somewhat autobiographical. Gautier was a hard working journalist who wrote a weekly column for a Paris publication for thirty years and also was a free spirited author of many works of fiction. My Fantoms' cover art represents the two beautiful Italian sisters Gautier loved: one was an opera singer who lived with him and shared his day to day routines, and the other was a dancer who traveled internationally frequently sending him love letters.
Holmes writes in the Postscript that the seven stories are strange and mysterious implying they are somewhat difficult to interpret from a rational point of view. But, in the following passage from the story “The Painter,” Gautier shows the reader how to understand the characters’ experiences in all the stories. “…he was capable of becoming one of the greatest of our artists; but instead he only became one of the strangest of our madmen. He had questioned his own existence too closely and too curiously; almost invariably he injected everyday events with some grotesque element of his own fantasy.”
You can enter the realm of madness in a number of dimensions as you read the great collection of stories written by a master of the rational/irrational. Gautier will show you that the demons most threatening to sanity are the desires that dwell within our minds.
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LibraryThing member debweiss
I would literally read *anything* from the New York Review of Books imprint. I am never disappointed--I consistently find undiscovered gems...and this book is no exception. I agree with the other reviewers that these stories remind me most of Poe, or maybe of Henry James, but with a distinctly
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French sensibility. These stories have a fragility and a refined, even "feminine" perspective that is refreshing, and makes these stories uniquely enjoyable. Show Less
LibraryThing member DieFledermaus
I’m always interested in reading Gothic/horror/sensational novels of the 18th and 19th c, but oftentimes they disappoint. Too much anti-Catholicism (The Monk, Melmoth the Wanderer), cardboard-thin characters (The Monk, Dracula), paper-thin characters (Otranto), misogyny (Monk) – plenty of
The stories themselves are entertaining, wildly creative, and – a pleasant surprise – funny. Gautier’s prose is quite vivid – I enjoyed just reading his descriptions of the characters – and when it gets occasionally overheated and over the top, it just matches the events of the plot. A number of the stories feature women coming back from the dead in some way, which helps unite the collection. There’s a very informative intro and postscript which gives a good amount of background – clearly a labor of love for the translator. He changed the titles of the stories to make the collection more cohesive (referring to each of the main characters by occupation) – a bit odd – but the stories, for the most part, are well-chosen.
“The Adolescent” and “The Actor” are gem-like short tales – neatly written, perfectly wrapped up at the end and containing a good dose of comedy. The first is about a young man who finds that the tapestry on his wall comes to life and is, in fact, quite attractive while the second is about an actor who, while playing the devil, unwittingly insults the original.
“The Painter” and “The Opium Smoker” are less structured and considerably more disturbing. In the former, a superstitious artist has a streak of bad luck and begins to see horrific visions – is he crazy or plagued by demons? A lot of creative imagery in this story – the artist’s dream of his death, where his friend takes over his former life, his decapitation by his reflection, which also causes all his ideas to escape, and a disastrous poetry reading, where his nemesis replaces his beautiful phrases with “a pink, frothy substance not unlike cream meringue-filling…he could do nothing but helplessly spit out the vile concoction of mythological fripperies and flowery extract of compliment.” Still, there was some humor to be found – mostly in Gautier’s description of the painter’s anti-social behavior and his idea of himself as A Serious Artist. The latter story is a drug trip with more hallucinogenic imagery.
“The Tourist” was, I felt, the weakest of the bunch. A young man of Romantic disposition becomes infatuated with an unknown woman who died in Pompeii and his love brings the city briefly back to life. Some good descriptions and a nicely humorous ending, but it felt a little like the author had gone to Pompeii, thought it was great, and was like “I should write a story about this - Pompeii tourist + supernatural dead-women-coming-to-life”
“The Poet” is Gautier’s memories of his friend Gerard de Nerval, who committed suicide. A well-written portrait of an unconventional artist – might have to come back to that after reading some Nerval.
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reasons to leave one feeling dissatisfied. However, I thoroughly enjoyed NYRB’s new translation of Gautier’s My Fantoms, a collection of supernatural stories. The stories themselves are entertaining, wildly creative, and – a pleasant surprise – funny. Gautier’s prose is quite vivid – I enjoyed just reading his descriptions of the characters – and when it gets occasionally overheated and over the top, it just matches the events of the plot. A number of the stories feature women coming back from the dead in some way, which helps unite the collection. There’s a very informative intro and postscript which gives a good amount of background – clearly a labor of love for the translator. He changed the titles of the stories to make the collection more cohesive (referring to each of the main characters by occupation) – a bit odd – but the stories, for the most part, are well-chosen.
“The Adolescent” and “The Actor” are gem-like short tales – neatly written, perfectly wrapped up at the end and containing a good dose of comedy. The first is about a young man who finds that the tapestry on his wall comes to life and is, in fact, quite attractive while the second is about an actor who, while playing the devil, unwittingly insults the original.
“The Painter” and “The Opium Smoker” are less structured and considerably more disturbing. In the former, a superstitious artist has a streak of bad luck and begins to see horrific visions – is he crazy or plagued by demons? A lot of creative imagery in this story – the artist’s dream of his death, where his friend takes over his former life, his decapitation by his reflection, which also causes all his ideas to escape, and a disastrous poetry reading, where his nemesis replaces his beautiful phrases with “a pink, frothy substance not unlike cream meringue-filling…he could do nothing but helplessly spit out the vile concoction of mythological fripperies and flowery extract of compliment.” Still, there was some humor to be found – mostly in Gautier’s description of the painter’s anti-social behavior and his idea of himself as A Serious Artist. The latter story is a drug trip with more hallucinogenic imagery.
“The Tourist” was, I felt, the weakest of the bunch. A young man of Romantic disposition becomes infatuated with an unknown woman who died in Pompeii and his love brings the city briefly back to life. Some good descriptions and a nicely humorous ending, but it felt a little like the author had gone to Pompeii, thought it was great, and was like “I should write a story about this - Pompeii tourist + supernatural dead-women-coming-to-life”
“The Poet” is Gautier’s memories of his friend Gerard de Nerval, who committed suicide. A well-written portrait of an unconventional artist – might have to come back to that after reading some Nerval.
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LibraryThing member jarbuthnot
In his introduction to My Fantoms, Richard Holmes characterizes Théophile Gautier’s primary achievement as “combining the German ghost story with the French erotic tale.” Consider the seven stories in this volume a collection of Poe’s stories with their sexuality amped up: they focus on
It’s surprising that this collection – first published in 1976 -- hasn’t yet been published in the United States, and the New York Review of Books does us a service by bringing it here. The appearance now of My Fantoms may be in part the result of renewed interest in Gautier in France, where in 2002 his novels and stories were published in the Editions Pléiade. That effectively marked his ascension, 130 years after his death, into the French canon.
This long delay may also be linked to Holmes’s claim that Gautier’s prose isn’t flattered by translation into English: where Poe’s English, he says, achieved a greater poetry in French – albeit in Baudelaire’s French, with all the improvements that entailed – Gautier’s stories, “with their high decorative finish, and their various deflections of wit and lubricity,” suffer from being rendered into English. Holmes is probably being too modest, or he wants to express a bit of regret about translations he did earlier in his career. As they appear here, these stories have a mannerism and artificiality that don’t quite achieve the fluency and effortlessness of Poe, but that doesn’t detract from their readability.
The tone Holmes achieves is appropriate for a story such as “The Priest,” in which a young priest grapples with – and succumbs to -- the temptations of Clarimonde, one of the earliest female vampires in Western literature. Romuald, the narrator, is the priest of the story’s title; he sees Clarimonde during his ordination and falls painfully, disastrously in love with her. As Holmes renders one moment of Romuald’s torment:
She seemed to grow aware of the martyrdom I was suffering, and almost as if to give me heart, she cast me a look full of exquisite promises. Her eyes were like an epic poem in which every glance composed a new canto.
Romuald then imagines what Clarimonde might be saying to him through that look:
Throw the wine from the chalice and you are free. I will take you to unknown isles, and you shall drowse upon my breasts in a massive bed of beaten gold, and there will be a silver canopy above us.
Later, when Romuald is called to perform last rites on Clarimonde, although she seems to have died just before his arrival:
[T]here swam sweetly through the silky air the langorous fume of oriental essences, and who knows what amorous feminine odours. The pale and glimmering candle flame had the quality of soft twilight arranged for love-making, rather than the yellow reflections of a vigil candle flickering beside a corpse.
Gautier was 23 when this story was first published, in 1834; Holmes was about 30 when he translated it. There’s a youthful, overwrought energy from both of them that makes the eerie weirdness of this story work, despite – or perhaps because of -- moments like these.
In his introduction Holmes also explains his choice of the word fantom, a word that is largely his own invention. He explains that he intended it as an echo of Gautier’s fantomes, a word that Gautier used to refer to his female spirits, who, temptresses all, return after death to take up male lovers. Fantom is a “decorous, slightly arch word,” Holmes says, and he seems proud of its coinage. It may, however, do Gautier something of a disservice by slotting him solely as a chronicler of the sexy undead. Holmes notes that Gautier did not provide his stories with an overarching title; so too, he explains, in France Gautier’s stories “are known generically as his Contes Fantastiques.” Does Holmes’ volume by itself provide an adequate view of the writer to whom Baudelaire dedicated Les Fleurs de Mal?
Holmes’s introduction and afterword – the former new to this edition, the latter taken from the original publication of My Fantoms – are valuable introductions to Gautier. My Fantoms also includes a useful, up-to-date bibliography of biographies and studies in English and French. A list of the original titles under which each story was published – which also, helpfully, lists the years and places of original publication -- shows how Holmes has imposed an artificial coherency onto a collection of disparate stories from across Gautier’s career: where Holmes has granted these stories titles such as “The Adolescent,” “The Priest,” and “The Painter,” and so forth, Gautier’s original titles were “Omphale,” “La Morte Amoureuse,” and “Onuphrius Wphly.”
Perhaps as befits a non-scholarly edition, My Fantoms lacks explanatory notes: in “The Adolescent,” for instance, Epistle to Zetulbea – the only literary work the narrator’s uncle admires – is left unglossed, as is a list of literary references rattled off by the narrator. Glosses would help a reader unfamiliar with French literature and culture to understand Gautier’s depiction of these characters.
But the absence of such notes is ultimately not a shortcoming of My Fantoms. The pleasure of these stories is not the depth of their individual characters but the driving, spooky action of their plots. In a story in which a young man falls in love with a woman who steps out of a wall tapestry and into his bed, do we really care about his uncle’s literary tastes?
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compulsive, hyperarticulate men who are faced with supernatural events involving seductive female spirits. The result is a compulsively entertaining read. It’s surprising that this collection – first published in 1976 -- hasn’t yet been published in the United States, and the New York Review of Books does us a service by bringing it here. The appearance now of My Fantoms may be in part the result of renewed interest in Gautier in France, where in 2002 his novels and stories were published in the Editions Pléiade. That effectively marked his ascension, 130 years after his death, into the French canon.
This long delay may also be linked to Holmes’s claim that Gautier’s prose isn’t flattered by translation into English: where Poe’s English, he says, achieved a greater poetry in French – albeit in Baudelaire’s French, with all the improvements that entailed – Gautier’s stories, “with their high decorative finish, and their various deflections of wit and lubricity,” suffer from being rendered into English. Holmes is probably being too modest, or he wants to express a bit of regret about translations he did earlier in his career. As they appear here, these stories have a mannerism and artificiality that don’t quite achieve the fluency and effortlessness of Poe, but that doesn’t detract from their readability.
The tone Holmes achieves is appropriate for a story such as “The Priest,” in which a young priest grapples with – and succumbs to -- the temptations of Clarimonde, one of the earliest female vampires in Western literature. Romuald, the narrator, is the priest of the story’s title; he sees Clarimonde during his ordination and falls painfully, disastrously in love with her. As Holmes renders one moment of Romuald’s torment:
She seemed to grow aware of the martyrdom I was suffering, and almost as if to give me heart, she cast me a look full of exquisite promises. Her eyes were like an epic poem in which every glance composed a new canto.
Romuald then imagines what Clarimonde might be saying to him through that look:
Throw the wine from the chalice and you are free. I will take you to unknown isles, and you shall drowse upon my breasts in a massive bed of beaten gold, and there will be a silver canopy above us.
Later, when Romuald is called to perform last rites on Clarimonde, although she seems to have died just before his arrival:
[T]here swam sweetly through the silky air the langorous fume of oriental essences, and who knows what amorous feminine odours. The pale and glimmering candle flame had the quality of soft twilight arranged for love-making, rather than the yellow reflections of a vigil candle flickering beside a corpse.
Gautier was 23 when this story was first published, in 1834; Holmes was about 30 when he translated it. There’s a youthful, overwrought energy from both of them that makes the eerie weirdness of this story work, despite – or perhaps because of -- moments like these.
In his introduction Holmes also explains his choice of the word fantom, a word that is largely his own invention. He explains that he intended it as an echo of Gautier’s fantomes, a word that Gautier used to refer to his female spirits, who, temptresses all, return after death to take up male lovers. Fantom is a “decorous, slightly arch word,” Holmes says, and he seems proud of its coinage. It may, however, do Gautier something of a disservice by slotting him solely as a chronicler of the sexy undead. Holmes notes that Gautier did not provide his stories with an overarching title; so too, he explains, in France Gautier’s stories “are known generically as his Contes Fantastiques.” Does Holmes’ volume by itself provide an adequate view of the writer to whom Baudelaire dedicated Les Fleurs de Mal?
Holmes’s introduction and afterword – the former new to this edition, the latter taken from the original publication of My Fantoms – are valuable introductions to Gautier. My Fantoms also includes a useful, up-to-date bibliography of biographies and studies in English and French. A list of the original titles under which each story was published – which also, helpfully, lists the years and places of original publication -- shows how Holmes has imposed an artificial coherency onto a collection of disparate stories from across Gautier’s career: where Holmes has granted these stories titles such as “The Adolescent,” “The Priest,” and “The Painter,” and so forth, Gautier’s original titles were “Omphale,” “La Morte Amoureuse,” and “Onuphrius Wphly.”
Perhaps as befits a non-scholarly edition, My Fantoms lacks explanatory notes: in “The Adolescent,” for instance, Epistle to Zetulbea – the only literary work the narrator’s uncle admires – is left unglossed, as is a list of literary references rattled off by the narrator. Glosses would help a reader unfamiliar with French literature and culture to understand Gautier’s depiction of these characters.
But the absence of such notes is ultimately not a shortcoming of My Fantoms. The pleasure of these stories is not the depth of their individual characters but the driving, spooky action of their plots. In a story in which a young man falls in love with a woman who steps out of a wall tapestry and into his bed, do we really care about his uncle’s literary tastes?
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LibraryThing member xieouyang
This book is a compilation of seven short stories written by Gautier throughout his life- I think that for most of them this is the first English translation from the original French. The common thread running through them is that they deal with the afterlife. The stories have a feeling of being
Curiously, at least to me, was the last story's subject. It is a biography of Gautier's best friend, the French writer Gerard de Nerval. The latter's suicide makes this biography also seem other-natural.
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gothic, although not fully so. Also, a soft eroticism runs through them. But most are phantasmagoric and demonic, with the devil playing a key role in many of them.Curiously, at least to me, was the last story's subject. It is a biography of Gautier's best friend, the French writer Gerard de Nerval. The latter's suicide makes this biography also seem other-natural.
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Subjects
Language
Original language
English
Physical description
192 p.; 7.98 inches
ISBN
9781590172711