Balcony in the Forest Read online

  JULIEN GRACQ (1910–2007) was born Louis Poirier in Saint-Florent-le-Vieil, a small village in western France. An excellent student and a voracious reader, he studied in Paris in the early 1930s, where he encountered the work of André Breton and the surrealists. His first book, Au Château d’Argol (The Castle of Argol, 1938) was praised by Breton as the first surrealist novel. In 1940, as a lieutenant in the French army, Gracq was captured by the Germans and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in Silesia. Following the war and his release, he became a geography and history teacher at a lycée in Paris, where he remained for more than twenty years. He taught as Louis Poirier and wrote as Julien Gracq, a name that combined his favorite Stendhal character, Julien Sorel, and the Roman Gracchus brothers. Opposed to publicity and self-promotion, Gracq declined three requests from François Mitterand to dine at the president’s residence and refused the Prix Goncourt when he was awarded it for his 1951 novel Le Rivage des Syrtes (The Opposing Shore). Unmarried, in 1970 he retired from teaching and returned to his hometown, where he lived with his sister until her death in 1996. He continued writing throughout his life, publishing novels, plays, poetry, and literary criticism.

  RICHARD HOWARD is the author of seventeen volumes of poetry and has published more than one hundred fifty translations from the French, including, for NYRB, Marc Fumaroli’s When the World Spoke French, Balzac’s Unknown Masterpiece, and Maupassant’s Alien Hearts. He has received a National Book Award for his translation of Les Fleurs du mal and a Pulitzer Prize for Untitled Subjects, a collection of poetry.

  BALCONY IN THE FOREST

  JUL IEN GR ACQ

  Translated from the French and with a foreword by

  RICHARD HOWARD

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

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  Copyright © 1958 by Éditions Corti

  Translation copyright © 1959 by George Braziller, Inc.

  Foreword copyright © 1987 by Columbia University Press

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image: Peter Doig, from Ten Etchings, Concrete Cabin, 1996; photograph © 2017 by Tate, London

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Published in French as Un Balcon en forêt by Éditions Corti.

  Translation published by arrangement with The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of George Braziller, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Gracq, Julien, 1910–2007, author. | Howard, Richard, translator. Title: Balcony in the forest / Julien Gracq ; translated and with a foreword by Richard Howard.

  Other titles: Balcon en forêt. English

  Description: New York : NYRB Classics, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017024489 | ISBN 9781681371399 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681371405 (epub)

  Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939–1945—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / War & Military. | FICTION / Psychological. | FICTION / Literary. | GSAFD: War stories. | Love stories.

  Classification: LCC PQ2613.R124 B3513 2017 | DDC 843/.914—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017024489

  ISBN 978-1-68137-140-5

  v1.0

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  TRANSLATOR’S FOREWORD

  NEITHER document nor testimony (Gracq’s own experiences in World War II were on an entirely different front, and in altogether other circumstances), Balcony in the Forest, Gracq’s fourth novel, and actually the precipitate of the encounter between a certain historical situation, one that was very unstable and indeed fugitive, and the inclination of the author’s fantasy, is the only one of this author’s fictions—among so many legends, romances, gestes—which can be presumed to be realistic. In the little forest outpost at the beginning of World War II, Lieutenant Grange has a passionate yet detached affair, during the fall and winter months, with Mona, a lovely child-widow whom he encounters in the forest much the way Golaud encounters Mélisande. Then spring comes, and with it the murderous reality of the German avalanche. History, for an interval, becomes a kind of pure awaiting, in which Gracq is enabled to feel, for the first time, what he calls “imaginative communication with reality.” All his other novels—The Castle of Argol (1938), A Dark Stranger (1945), and The Opposing Shore (1951, translated in 1986)—are so many myths of abeyance and interregnum in which the characters, or rather the figures (as we might say of any human silhouettes moving in darkness against a sanguinary light, within a singular silence) expunge each other’s energies during a period of suspense, of transgressive daring, until the Unspeakable Event engulfs them in a longed-for yet deferred catastrophe. For this novelist has what might be called a Parsifal Complex (indeed, Balcony in the Forest opens with the adjuration by which Gurnemanz begins that music-drama: “Forest Guardians, guardians of sleep as well—waken at least with the dawn!”), an imagination so structured that any action is merely the delusive interlude, the masque of misapprehension, before a ravaging revelation. For Gracq, of course, the Grail is indeed revealed as a cup of trembling, a ruinous chalice—but perhaps we never did put much credence in Wagner’s stagey salvation. Hadn’t Nietzsche warned us that with Amfortas, with Kundry, with Parsifal himself, we were only two steps away from the hospital? The astonishing thing about Gracq’s novel, the last full-length fiction he was to write (in 1958, some eighteen years after the occurrences it is concerned to adumbrate), is that it has been able to transcribe in terms of contemporary life, of contemporary death, precisely those images and incidents which in all of Gracq’s other works are assigned the distancing labels “gothic” or “surreal” or certainly “magical.” Such a transformation has come about not because Gracq has changed—for he has not: no novelist ever remained so true to his esoteric inspirations as Monsieur Poirier, a geography professor who chooses to create his poems, his play, his essays, and his fictions, even his translation of Kleist’s Penthesilea and his study of André Breton, under that mysterious, Breton-sounding pseudonym Gracq. But because reality changed.

  In English we called it the “phony war.” In France it was called, with varying degrees of validity, the drôle de guerre. For nine months after the declaration of war between Germany and the Allies, hostilities were suspended, were not engaged. And in that gestation, there was a great silence, a terrible holding of a continent’s breath until the blow fell in the easy June of 1940, and France fell with it, as if there were no such fierce thing as combat—only surrender, only collapse, only defeat. But in the bated September of 1939 there was no knowing, no telling: the mobilized troops were sent to the various frontiers—those famous and “impregnable” lines that were to be so readily erased—where they waited in a demoralizing silence for month after month. This is the interval Gracq chose; it took him nearly two decades to write his way into it, to let reality speak in the terms of his somber enchantment. As he says:

  Things were suspended, but there was no clearing, no perspective. It was not impossible (or so people thought) that things might end without hostilities. There might, then, be a “white” peace. And there were also all kinds of catastrophic possibilities, including the one that came to pass. We found ourselves, truly, on the brink of a sort of mist-filled chasm, out of which it was very difficult to see what would emerge. It is, I think, quite an original situation, that of a declared war that does not get itself fought, that cannot begin.

  Hence it is this novel of the phony war, of the inauthentic peace and the inactual hostilities, which is the least oneiric of Gracq’s works
. It is the least oneiric book because the period it treats was itself a kind of waking dream. The France of 1939 and 1940 was living as if there had been no military necessity. “There was,” Gracq observed in 1971, “the sentiment of a void, the sense of an enormous blank. Nothing occurred: there was an utterly somnambulistic aspect to everything. For everything continued as if nothing had happened. There was a paralysis, a putting-in-parenthesis, a prelude—to what? No one knew. It was pure anticipation.” The story of Lieutenant Grange (lieu-tenant, place-saving: even his rank is a kind of mystery, a holding action), assigned to command the isolated French blockhouse at Hautes Falizes, in the middle of the forest—the Forest of Arden!—and, closer still, the Ardennes of the last Great War, near the Belgian border and the Meuse river. The story of Lieutenant Grange is nothing but the story of Anyman in a vacant moment whereof the true occurrences are the vast metamorphoses of nature (the turn of the seasons, the sullen erosion of rock to sand, the woodland murmurs of sprouting and decay), and the miniscule transformations within a single body (“When he put his weight on his heel, a sharp spear of pain leaped up to his hips. . . . Against the harsh cloth that bound his skin, he felt the faint velvety shudder of fever, still almost voluptuous”).

  It is of interest to note that this is Gracq’s one novel to have been “made into” a movie, whereas The Opposing Shore, for example, has been produced as an opera: opera is of course the apposite “realization” for Gracq’s work. Yet in the film of Balcony in the Forest, the author was amused to discover that the soldiers, the other soldiers, have much more continuous presence than in his book itself, though that presence has no effect on the process of the narrative. “Simply,” as Gracq is pleased to say, “because in a scene in a novel, a character about whom the author has ceased to speak immediately becomes an absent presence, while in the film such a character remains caught in the camera field—he is still there.” Gracq was astonished to find the others dragged into the visual field, for in his text, his imaginative substance, there are never others unless they are named, unless they are audible as language. However capital the images, however striking the visions, Gracq is the purest of novelists, and there is a sense in which he cannot be reduced, transferred, or even translated into other versions, other forms of art.

  He can, of course, be translated, in the absolute sense; the coincidence of Gracq’s privileged fantasmatics with an actual historical sequence affords his (third) translator a particular opportunity, one of which Gracq himself appears to be quite conscious, as in this passage where Lieutenant Grange studies a pamphlet describing the German offensive weapons:

  The ponderous gray silhouettes . . . seemed curiously exotic—another world—with their simultaneously baroque, theatrical and sinister quality of German war machines which, despite all the requirements of technology, still managed to remind him of Fafnir. “Unheimlich,” he thought: there was no French word; he studied them with a mixture of repugnance and fascination. Outside, the heavy rain of the Ardennes was beginning to fall with the darkness, its drumming muffled by the snow. Unconsciously, he strained to hear the occasional noises from the crew room, afraid of being surprised, as if he were poring over obscene photographs.

  Grange, then, is a kind of Amfortas, a Fisher King (the title of Gracq’s play of 1948), wishing for, yet reading against, the arrival of the Germans. As Kundry says: I await the conqueror. “Never before,” muses Grange as he wonders over the war’s suspension, “never before had France pulled the sheet over her head with this feverish hand, this taste of nausea in her mouth.” And what a boon to the translator of 1958, then, in what became the novel’s final sentence, suggesting the kind of overdetermined, lyric necessity of this musical, mysterious text: “He lay for a moment more with his eyes wide open in the darkness. . . . Then he pulled the blanket up over his head and went to sleep.”

  —RICHARD HOWARD

  1987

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Translator’s Foreword

  BALCONY IN THE FOREST

  BALCONY IN THE FOREST

  He! ho! Waldhuter ihr

  Schlafhuter mitsammen

  So wacht doch mindest am Morgen.

  Heigh! Ho! Forest Guardians!

  Guardians of Sleep as well—

  Waken at least with the dawn.

  WAGNER: Parsifal

  EVER since his train had outdistanced the smoke and the suburbs of Charleville, it seemed to Lieutenant Grange that the world’s ugliness was disappearing with them: he discovered there was no longer a single house in sight. The train, following the slow river’s course, had at first plunged between the gentle slopes of wooded hills. Then, at each bend of the river, the valley had grown deeper, while the train’s racket echoed from the empty cliffs and a raw wind, already piercing in the late autumn afternoon, scoured his face when he put his head out the compartment door. The track changed banks capriciously, crossing the Meuse on single-span bridges of iron girders, suddenly rushing into short tunnels across the neck of a bend. Each time the valley reappeared, its poplars shimmering in the golden light, the gorge seemed deeper between its forest curtains and the Meuse seemed slower and darker, as if it had been flowing over a bed of rotten leaves.

  The train was empty: it appeared to serve these solitudes for the mere pleasure of passing through the cool evening, running between slopes of yellow woodland that reached ever higher into the clear blue October afternoon; at the river’s edge, the trees revealed only a narrow ribbon of meadow, as smooth as an English lawn.

  “A train for the Domain of Arnheim,” thought the lieutenant, a great Poe enthusiast, and as he lit a cigarette he leaned his head back against the serge upholstery so his gaze could follow the crest of the high, shaggy cliffs aureoled by the low sun. Down the sudden corridors of tributary gorges, the distant foliage vanished behind a haze as blue as cigar smoke; you felt that the earth was crimped beneath this thick and knotty forest as naturally as a Negro’s scalp. Yet even here ugliness was not to be forgotten altogether: from time to time the train stopped at scaling, mud-colored little stations that clung to the embankment between the river and the cliff; against the military blue of the already dim windowpanes, soldiers in khaki were dozing on the mail wagons—then the green valley grew almost desolate for a moment: the train passed lugubrious yellow houses sliced out of the earth and apparently powdering the surrounding greenness with dust from the gypsum quarries—and, when his disillusioned gaze returned to the Meuse, it now discerned here and there the jerry-built cabins of raw brick and concrete, and along the bank the barbwire emplacements where the river’s spate had hung a litter of rotten weeds: even before the first cannonfire, the war’s rust and ruin, its odor of scorched earth, its spoiled wasteland, had already dishonored this still intact canton of luxuriant Gaul.

  When he got off at the Moriarmé station, the shadow of the enormous cliff was already darkening the little town; it had suddenly grown cold; a siren roared in his ears at point-blank range, and he felt a cold shudder run down his back, but it was only a factory whistle that released a dreary crowd of North African workers into the little square. He remembered how during his vacation, at night, he sometimes strained to hear the town fire-engine’s siren: one blast was a flue fire, two a fire in the village, three a fire on a remote farm. The third blast produced a sigh of relief at many windows. “Here it would be just the reverse,” he thought: “one blast for peace, three for bombs—what matters is to know how to tell the difference.” Everything in this war turned out oddly. He had the stationmaster show him where the regimental combat post was. Now he was strolling down a wretched gray street that descended to the Meuse; the sudden October twilight soon emptied it of civilians, but everywhere from the yellow house fronts leaked a murmur of soldiery: the clank of helmets and messkits, the clatter of hobnailed boots on tiles: “if you close your eyes for a second,” Grange thought, “a modern regimen
t makes more racket than all the armor of the Hundred Years’ War.”

  The command post was at the river’s edge, a dingy, suburban pavilion separated from the quay by a railing and a starved-looking flower bed already trampled by soldiers, where motorcycles leaned against the naked stalks of the lilac bushes: two months of billeting had scratched the corridor floor and walls to the raw wood as high as a man could reach, like a hive’s too-narrow entrance. Grange waited for some time in a dusty room where a typewriter clattered in the half-darkness, the shutters only partly folded back: occasionally the quartermaster sergeant, without raising his head, stubbed out a cigarette against a corner of the drafting table: originally the pavilion must have been the foundry engineer’s office. Between the shutters, the wall of trees seemed pasted against the window from the ceiling down to the Meuse, which looked very dark now alongside its slag bank; from time to time cries of children rose from the street, muffled by the war’s weight and insignificant as a rabbit’s screams. When he clicked his heels in the colonel’s office, light still, Grange was struck by the look in the man’s sea-gray eyes and the lipless mouth beneath the hard bristles of his mustache: the colonel looked like von Moltke. There was a lunge of abrupt and piercing life in that look, then the eyes were immediately veiled by a kind of whitish film and withdrew under the heavy lids; the expression became that of fatigue, but cunning withal, and concessive: behind this hooded falcon’s immobility, the talons were clearly in readiness.

  Grange handed over his orders specifying his final destination; the colonel checked his schedule. In front of him lay several sheets which he indifferently brushed aside. Grange sensed that these papers concerned himself: there was probably a dossier on him in the files of military security.