Notes on Recent Reading 47 (Colette, Alegría, Xenophon)

 

Chéri and The Last of Chéri (Colette)

     The fascination of Chéri is the reader’s vicarious delectation in reading about these demimondaines.   Chéri is as languid a figure as anyone in Ronald Firbank (though considerably more substantial) and yet his love for Léa is intense, creating an impossible tension, the mainspring of the plot’s movement.  The secondary characters are marvelous, old Pal, Madame Aldonza (whose name memorializes her quondam career), and the masculine (as the reader is all too often reminded) Baroness de la Berche.  Colette afforded us all the recreation of reading of characters bred (or said to have been bred) in the borderlands between the light of accepted society and its only semi-hidden counterpart where love is for sale.

     As the title suggests, the sequel The Last of Chéri strikes a more somber tone with its merciless description of Léa’s aging.  The exaggeration dramatizes Chéri’s horrified reaction to aging.  The conclusion is disturbing, even painful, full of pathos.  The focus turns from the high spirits of the theatrical performers to Chéri’s melancholy end.  Though this endgame was surely implicit in his decadent hedonism in the original novel, it is, to one reader at least, less of an entertainment.

 

The Golden Serpent (Alegría)

     The Golden Serpent is less a novel than a collection of sketches of the rural poor in Ciro Alegría’s home territory on the banks of the Marañón River in Peru.  Episodes describe the ordinary round of life for the community of farmers and boatmen, stressing the hazards and hardships they regularly face and the effects of visitors: an engineer contemplating development, a couple of sufferers from a dreadful disease, a fugitive on the run. 

     Alegría’s sympathies are altogether with the poor cholos or “half-breeds” of his story.  A founder of the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (Apristas), the author was a lifelong advocate for progressive change whose activism led to his imprisonment, a twenty-four-year exile, and eventual election to the Chamber of Deputies.  The book was published in 1935, when variations on socialist realism were prestigious, and its constant theme is the survival of the people against the challenges of their lives.  The message resembles that of Ma Joad when she assures her son, “Why, Tom, we're the people that live. They ain't gonna wipe us out. Why, we're the people - we go on.”

     The symbolic machinery (such as the river as snake) can sound a bit clunky, but it is consistent and appropriate.  The narrator is a local man, a normative figure, a lens on the others with little to distinguish him.  Alegría went on the write The Hungry Dogs (1939) in which he depicted the life of the full-blooded Indians and, most ambitiously and successfully Broad and Alien is the World (1941).  Here his primary motive is to educate his readers on how the other half lives.

 

Anabasis (Xenophon)

     Xenophon’s Anabasis contains such detailed reports of the author’s leadership of the ten thousand in their “march up country” that the reader’s experience is almost cinematic. Of course, the speeches and conversations he records are his own composition, doubtless shaped by his own interests as well as the erosion of memory and the conventions of oratory.  Still, the descriptions of the daily life of the troops is vivid and convincing.  For those who take an interest in military tactics, the battle narrations are rich in data, though their interest may pale for others.  The frequent repetition of vocabulary and phrasing in battle scenes, which seemed a gift to the centuries of students for whom the Anabasis was the first book read in Greek, is unlikely to please to common reader. 

     Unsurprisingly, Xenophon comes off as a patriotic hero, devoted to his men, discerning in judgement, altruistic and unambitious. His rise to command is the result of his impressing the assembled troops with realistic strategy couched in well-chosen words. 

     The modern soldier will be surprised at the degree of democracy in the decision-making of this army of mercenaries. In a crisis the troops assemble to decide on a course of action. Xenophon himself, after proposing his own plan, explicitly invites any of his comrades-in-arms, officer or common soldier, to suggest alternatives. The decision to return to Greece occurred only when the army, realizing that Cyrus had hired them under false pretenses, rebelled, and Xenophon agreed to continue to lead.  On the other hand, in combat situations he regards absolute discipline as mandatory. 

     Xenophon was at times a controversial figure. Though an Athenian, he, like others in Socrates’ circle, sympathized with Sparta, and was for that reason exiled. The Spartan king Agesilaus gave him an estate for his services which, in the continuing political turmoil was confiscated after several decades. 

     One may come to Xenophon from a historical interest.  He wrote an account of the Peloponnesian War that picks up where Thucydides’ history leaves off, the Hellenica, a number of works on political theory, and four Socratic works, our fullest picture of the philosopher outside of Plato.  In the Anabasis Xenophon consults Socrates about whether the army should accept Cyrus’ offer and Socrates prudently warns him that he might be criticized in Athens for doing so.  After finding favorable sacrificial omens, Xenophon decides to ignore his teacher’s advice.  Though he had come along solely due to the invitation of his friend Proxenus (who was among those treacherously put to death by Tissaphernes) with the thought that he might achieve greater advancement from Cyrus (whom he admired) than at home, the unusual processes of Greek democracy made him a “people’s leader” and the author of one of the most-read books of antiquity.