Name: Tender shoots
ISBN: 9781906548650

Paul Morand

Tender shoots

Emmett

The preface by Marcel Proust opens with beautifully fitting passage - admiring without being worshipful, spiced with wit and colored by the sobriety - that is worth quoting in full:

The Athenians are slow to deliver. So far, only three ladies or gentlewomen have been given up to our minotaur Morand, and the treaty allows for seven. But the year is not yet ended. And many undisclosed postulants seek the glorious fate of Clarissa and Aurora. I should have liked to undertake the unnecessary task of composing a fitting preface for the charming novellas that bear the names of these fair creatures. But an unforeseen occurrence has presented me from doing so. A stranger has chosen to make her home in my brain. She came and she went; before long, having observed the way she behaved, I came to know her habits. Furthermore, like an over-attentive lodger, she tried to strike up a personal relationship with me. I was surprised to discover that she was not beautiful. For I had always supposed Death so to be. Otherwise, how would she get the better of us? Be that as it may, she seems to have gone away today. Probably not for long, to judge by all she has left behind. And it would be more sensible to take advantage of the respite she allows me other than by writing a preface for an author who is already well known and has no need of one."

When I telephoned to tell you that Germany had declared war on Russia, you replied: "I was in the garden, I was cutting some roses..."

'Clarissa' is suffused with an implied longing for a carelessness only made possible by peace, and at the brink of being shattered by the Great War and its aftermath. The frolic and playfulness of the title character conveyed through the male viewer/writer in musing, almost nostalgically marvelling tones, has all the rosiness and fragility of a memory, a photograph, belonging to another age, or an age that senses its own impending demise. The prose is sumptuously descriptive ("The windows are open; we are standing on the balcony, our elbows on the parapet. You are leaning over to breathe in the smell of the newly mown grass that wafts up from Kensington and mingles with the animal perfume of the dance; the green acid of your Longhi cloak hangs down over the bright orange colour of the hump-backed Japanese bridge"), catching stray scents, a look, a swirl of colour, a gesture and freezing it forever in this half-recalled form. Its cognizance of temporality and its pressed-flower preservation of the minute and fleeting is reminiscent of some of Woolf's best passages. The narrator's depiction of Clarissa and the colourful, idiosyncratic facets of her personality - preferring fake fur to real ones, collecting bric-a-brac, "you are so badly dressed! And yet in the very best taste" - gives a whole picture of an independent and prepossessing woman (she reminds this reader of Loulou de la Falaise), surrounded by beauty, occasionally idle, full of wild ideas, very much a part of this passing world.

"Delphine" depicts the descent of an austere (and uptight?) woman into dissolution and physical decline. "I reckon that far from finding reasons to persevere, Delphine is waiting impatiently to destroy herself, which lends her a tolerable and fleeting grandeur." While "Clarissa" is generous in beautiful images, "Delphine" is its dark inversion, exploring an innate but inexplicable compulsion for self-destruction that is ultimately inescapable. The life of Delphine, the narrator's childhood playmate is presented as a continual struggle against sensuality (represented by the bleak shadow of her mother who lives with a naval officer), the enforcement of order, cleanliness and discipline against chaos, loss of control, a dark drive that she fears resides ultimately within her. In a desperate moment she flees to religion for sanctuary, which cynically proves to be her undoing, as it is the head of the convent, the story implies, that leads her into a very different life. The narrator's perspective as he surveys this decline is curiously detached though occasionally pleading to help. His memories of brief almost-intimate moments with Delphine who rejects his advances serves to suggest a certain perhaps deliberate distance in his responses toward her.

In a masterful few lines Morand shows the narrator's indifference worded in a cynicism so sharp it could be acrimonious:
I detach myself from where she is lying, get to my feet and search for reasons for her to resist, for excuses.
"Everything that happens to me," she says, "is due to pride."
I was expecting this dreadful word which all women have on their lips and by which they define their humility.

"Aurora" is perhaps the strangest of the three, it being difficult to imagine an explorer, globe-trotter, free spirit of of a young woman who has a shed and a wealth of hunting guns, co-existing in the same time and space as duchesses, taxis and buses. Her freedom certainly tantalises the narrator who is lured by the promise and surprise of the unknown, the admiration of her supple physique (the quirky way she commands herself in third person to bathe), but that too is the freedom to disappear, which perhaps to the unfulfilled, is the charm that endures most.