de·scrip·tion

And every word written shall lift off
letter by letter, the backward text
read ever briefer, even more antic
in its effort to insist that nothing
shall be lost.
—Kay Ryan

The first time I read Edmund White’s comment on Rimbaud’s Antique, I wondered what he was on about:

". . . Stroll about by night, softly moving this thigh, this second thigh and this left leg.”  These lines have become celebrated as the essence of Rimbaud’s final style and in French they are unforgettable:  “Promène-toi, la nuit, en movant cette cuisse, cette seconde cuisse et cette jambe de gauche."

The English rendering White chose does no service to the lines.  To me, at least, they clunk along to a dead end.  (John Ashbery, in this case, isn’t able to improve on them much.)  Nor did the French strike me as memorable, I’ll admit.  Only when I heard the words sung did I begin to understand what the fuss was all about.  Now, when I listen to Benjamin Britten’s Les Illuminations, I wait for that passage and will it not to pass.

What I want to achieve, when I write about music, is to return the favor Britten did me.  It’s a struggle to describe music in words.  It's tough to write description that works, period—and that set me to thinking about writers who succeed at it.

Mark Kerstetter recently wrote, about literary description,

In describing, only what is essential to the story or feel of the piece is desirable. . . . In Millhauser, establishing Jeffrey Cartwright’s power of observation does not need to be labored, or could be demonstrated in ways other than testing the reader’s tolerance for long descriptive passages that, in the end, please only those who like to know that the mirror the butler happened to be standing in front of, as he did the deed in his argyle socks, was hung in a gold frame.

I confess to delight in those argyle socks, but I see Mark’s point.  Description needs a larger purpose if it’s not to end up as dead weight on the page.  So, who does it “right”?

The telling details T. S. Eliot chose to give voice to Prufrock’s dilemma surely do:

I grow old… I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind?  Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

And who, upon reading John Ashbery’s dream of Guadalajara in The Instruction Manual, isn’t set to dreaming, too?

And, as my way is, I begin to dream, resting my elbows on
    the desk and leaning out of the window a little,
Of dim Guadalajara!  City of rose-colored flowers!
City I wanted most to see, and most did not see, in Mexico!
But I fancy I see, under the press of having to write the
    instruction manual,
Your public square, city, with its elaborate little bandstand!
The band is playing Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov.
Around stand the flower girls, handing out rose- and lemon-
    colored flowers,
Each attractive in her rose-and-blue striped dress (Oh! such
    shades of rose and blue),
And nearby is the little white booth where women in green
    serve you green and yellow fruit.

Before some call me out on cheating by using poetry, I’ll turn back to prose.  In response to a post on Magris’s Danube, Friko made clear that I MUST read Patrick Leigh Fermor’s account of journeying through Europe on foot in 1934.  While Leigh Fermor wrote his book in the twentieth century, he made no concession to the existence of photography or film.  With the leisurely pace and abundant charm of a fine nineteenth century novel, he describes his wanderings in crystalline prose.

At the end of the first volume, he takes us to a bridge that crosses over from then-Czechoslovakia to Hungary, and suspends us there with him as he takes in the scene:

Touching my arm, the shepherd pointed downstream at something in the dark-shadowed east high above the river and just discernible across the failing sky.  Ragged and flocculent, fading to grey, scattered with specks of pink from the declining sun, varying in width as random fragments were dropping away and re-cohering and agitated with motion as though its whole length were turning on a single thread, a thick white line of crowding storks stretched from one side of the heavens to the other.

“I was determined to linger," he continues, "suspended there in a void,"

and let a few more hundred thousand tons of liquid rush under the girders before stepping across the remaining yards into Hungary.  I might have been in the royal box opposite the milling dramatis personae as the curtain was going up.

We ruminate with Eliot’s Prufrock, we daydream with Ashbery, we stand in entranced anticipation with Leigh Fermor—and it is words alone that take us where these writers would have us go.

On the fiction side of prose, I give you a passage from Joris-Karl Huysmans’ Là-Bas, in which we join the protagonist Durtal in a bell-tower:

. . .  the wind rattled against the sounding-shutters, stormed through the cage of timbers, howled along the spiral stair, and was caught and held whining in the bell vases.  Suddenly a light breeze, like the stirring of confined air, fanned his cheek.  He looked up.  The current had been set in motion by the swaying of a great bell beginning to get under way.  There was a crash of sound, the bell gathered momentum, and now the clapper, like a gigantic pestle, was grinding the great bronze mortar with a deafening clamour.  The tower trembled, the balcony on which Durtal was standing trepidated like the floor of a railway coach, there was the continuous rolling of a mighty reverberation, interrupted regularly by the jar of metal upon metal.

My ears hurt, and I wasn’t there.  But then again, I was.

There are many who write with elegance and wit about music:  David Nice and George Wallace, both of whom noted Britten’s Les Illuminations to me, have me snapping up music to try at every turn.

Here’s another:  Carl E. Schorske, a historian and scholar, in his book Fin-de-Siècle Vienna:  Politics and Culture, of all things.  George Wallace, it was, who identified Schorske’s breathtaking description of Ravel’s La Valse.  (So of course I had to buy the book.)

Well.  Even more remarkable was Schorske on Schoenberg.  After all, for me, enjoying Ravel is a piece of that proverbial cake.  Schoenberg, though, is another matter.  But here’s Schorske on Schoenberg’s setting of The Book of the Hanging Gardens:

The first song sets the tone, the mood of the rococo park at evening.  In the piano introduction a profoundly serene series of slow, single-toned phrases conveys the soundless stillness of the garden pond.  The lack of key produces in us only expectancy.  We are in an open universe, we soon become aware. . . .  A tone will break into a privileged position, but disappear again into the mass, like a stone cast into the dark pond.

Schorske goes so far as to give Schoenberg the last word about fin-de-siècle Vienna.  Here is the final passage in the book:

Out of the depths of his extraordinary being [Schoenberg] generated the power to present the wilderness as the proper metaphysical analogue and metaphoric ideal for psychological man.  To those who could listen, he showed how it might be organized in sound to replace the garden he had done so much to destroy.

I leave you with this:  If words ever sent you to music, tell us the story:  who, what, where, when?

 Credits:  The quotation from Kay Ryan is from her poem All Shall Be Restored.  The quotation from Edmund White can be found on p.138 here.  The quotation from Mark Kerstetter can be found here.  The quotation from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock can be found here.  The quotation from The Instruction Manual can be found here.  The comment from Friko can be found here.  The quotations from Patrick Leigh Fermor can be found on pp. 309-310 here.  The quotation from Là-Bas can be found here.  The quotations from Schorske can be found on pp. 350 and 364 here.

For a Spotify playlist of Les Illuminations and The Book of the Hanging Gardens, click here.  For another audio source for The Book of the Hanging Gardens, click here.