Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(32)
To me she once wrote, Without you, my own life would have been much smaller and darker.
I think of the lines of Robert Burns in one of his most famous poems, written two hundred years ago. “John Anderson My Jo, John” is the poem. Jo means “dear.” We climbed the hill together, Burns wrote—I am simplifying the Scottish tongue—and many a happy day, John, we’ve had with one another.
Now we maun totter down, John,
And hand in hand we’ll go,
And sleep together at the foot,
John Anderson, my jo.
After all the years, that is Karyl and me.
Modern Maturity
April–May–June 1997
When Evening Falls
A few nights ago at dinner, they were talking about an ardent young feminist. She was good-looking, with long hair, and went around in tight jeans and high calf-leather boots. After a lecture she gave one evening, she announced that she would accept questions only from the women in the audience—men, oppressors of women throughout the centuries, would not be permitted to speak. It didn’t especially matter, since after two questions she abruptly decided that the lecture was over.
She was, at the time, involved in a love affair with a soft-spoken young composer. He happened to remark in company, when the subject somehow came up, that he had occasionally felt himself tempted by his female students. That brought the affair to a sudden end. She rose from the table, exclaiming with disgust that she never wanted to speak to him again, and so far as anyone knew, she never did.
I found myself wondering, among other things, what Jean Renoir might have made of this story; not what he would have thought of it but how it might have been handled in one of his films—as a human foible, probably, passionate and foolish. His great ability, in the thirty-five or so films he made during his lifetime, was to put things into very human terms. I never met Jean Renoir, who died in 1979 at the age of eighty-four, but I feel as if I knew him—he belongs to an order of people and things that I admire. In addition to his films, he wrote three books: a memoir of his father, an autobiography, and one novel, The Notebooks of Captain Georges, which happens also to be in the form of an autobiography.
It’s about the love affair or, more correctly, the love of a lifetime between a young upper-class soldier and a straightforward, dark—brun, as the French say—somewhat fatalistic prostitute. He first notices her at a party with drunken comrades, one of whom has sex with her while she’s seated on his lap, an act she accepts with indifference, even a trace of amusement—it’s not known yet that she’s a prostitute. Afterward, she calmly straightens her skirt and helps herself to more dessert. The soldier who has made love to her gets sick and leaves, and the narrator begins to talk to her. She has small white teeth in a generous mouth, and suddenly he feels an urge to kiss her, mostly out of curiosity, “the way one is tempted to give a sheet of newspaper to a goat, to see if it will eat it.”
She wasn’t expecting that, is her comment afterward. Didn’t she like it? he asks.
“‘Oh, I don’t mind, but you aren’t the type.’
“‘Is there a type for kissing?’
“‘Like anything else.’”
Her name is Agnes. One soon, like the narrator, falls in love with her. This takes place in a garrison town in France in the year preceding the First World War. Agnes is nineteen and works in the local brothel—there is a single one, as was often the case in small towns in France in those days. She is strong-minded, honest, and to a degree impossible to falsify, entirely herself. At first, she rejects Georges (it’s only later that he becomes an officer), even when he comes to the brothel, although seeing the state he is in and knowing how unhealthy it is to allow it to be unrelieved, she politely takes care of that before he is made to go. Later, in a sudden about-face, she gives herself to him entirely without any illusion of it ever being more than what it is, but what it is, is a happiness greater than any she has ever known, and the same is so for him. It is “Madame Butterfly” in reverse—she is the one who is promised to someone else, a husband, as it happens, who has installed her in a brothel before going off to find the money to fulfill his dream of opening a hardware store someday.
The war steps in and takes Georges away, and though for a time they are reunited, in the end he loses her, as does her husband, and for the rest of his life never knows love like that again; such heights are reached once only.
Despite the banality of the book’s plot, it is the human details that shine through. When she became naked, Georges recalls, letting the thin dressing gown fall away, there was a modesty in it and nothing of pride or the idea that her body was an incomparable gift. “She simply thought, ‘He likes me to be naked and I am happy that it pleases him.’”
The book may be entirely fiction but seems to be based at least in part upon Renoir’s experiences—like Georges, he was a cavalryman and was also wounded in the early days of the war. After recovering, he, like Georges, finished the war as an officer. He married Andrée Heuschling, one of his father’s models, and she became the star of his first films; perhaps he transformed her into Agnes, perhaps Agnes was drawn from someone else. It doesn’t really matter; one believes the book. Renoir is a man whose fiction is more credible than others’ facts. The scenes of garrison life; the brothel, with its cozy atmosphere and odor of talcum, sweat, and cheap perfume; the waiter who ignores the girls because he is married to a “real woman” at home; the pompous little owner, with his moralizing and common sense—it is all done with brevity and style.