This new book, from the NYRB’s publishing arm, is in a non-fiction genre I love: short entries dedicated to an integrating purpose; approaching a subject via concentrated, separated stabs rather than extended unfolding text. In philosophy this is called the aphoristic technique. In wider literature, it can range from the concise notebook to prose poetry.
It is a genre whose masterpiece in English is Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave, but it is more often found in continental literature; and the French especially have made it their own, where its progenitor is usually said to be Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris, described as prose poems and published in 1869 after the author’s death. Baudelaire, however, is preceded by Gérard de Nerval, whose urban observations, collected in Les Nuits d’octobre (1852), are perhaps even more luminous.
It is a form which no American has pulled off. Americans have been much more effective at the diary: The Paris Diary of Ned Rorem is an enormous pleasure. Or reportage: Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, for example, also published posthumously. The caveat here would be that Hemingway in his notes reminds posterity that the contents are fiction — by which he means that his reportage has taken considerable liberties with actualité.
When Americans do attempt the genre, the result has been a peculiar mixture of the portentous and the trite — as in the works of Charles Simic, for example. And here is Henri Cole on blue hydrangeas:
This week, pondering the flowers — with their complex shadings of blue — in all the flower shops of Paris, I was reminded of how short life is but also of how tough and durable humans are.
Not good enough. The form demands greater penetration and originality.
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