Pacific Index

A review of Vulturnus and High Solitude by Leon-Paul Fargue

   “Let us sometimes close our eyes, try to put between the street and ourselves, between ourselves and others, oceans of mute lyricism, ramparts stuffed with hydrophilic cotton. Let us return slowly to memories of skipping school, both of us whispering with a wolf’s step to images gleaned from long adolescence. My soul, we were rolled into the dust of false oaths, we were promised not only rewards that we did not want, but kindnesses, “myosotis of love”. –-High Solitude by Leon-Paul Fargue

   Leon-Paul Fargue’s life was almost a panorama of his artistic context. The short and portly Napoleon lookalike was something of a socialite of the artistic big-wigs of his time. As a young man, he became a great lion of the literary salons and mingled with the great artistic and intellectual elite of the turn of the 20th Century in Paris. Names like Paul Valery, Marcel Schwob, Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, and Andre Gide were numbered among his early friends, all before he was even recognized as a poet of high standing and had only published one book of poems, Tancrede (1895). 

   With the publication of his second book, Poesies (1912), he earned greater notoriety amongst the wider French and European literary, artistic, and intellectual aristocracy. Despite this, he was not popular nor widely selling, which was common for many authors, both of his time and throughout history. He relied on his substantial family inheritance to live, of which supported his hobbies of writing and conversation, his persona of a dandy and a womanizer, and his profession as the pre-ultimate pedestrian of Paris. Fargue contented himself as being the foremost walker in his beloved city and would often spend his nights walking through the city and babbling to himself. These walks led to both inspiration and perhaps the act of writing his two chief works, as well as the only two of his works to be translated into English, Vulturnus (1924) and High Solitude (1941). 

   These two books are semantically not novels, but rather novelized collections of prose poems with a throughline narrative. The books are in fact, nothing more than meditations that take place through those walks and train rides through Paris, both after the destruction of the first world war, and after the Nazi occupation of the second. 

   In Vulturnus, the narrator is plunged into a nightmare, aboard a train that streams throughout Paris, and continues to take the narrator through other existences and planets, and through what is perhaps a painting showing all of human and pre-human history. The ride is portrayed as a jumbled, disorganized mess (resembling in my mind, Georg Grosz’s painting: Panorama, down with Liebknecht), all to lead towards a moment in eternity, which he describes as, “a syphilis of the ether.”

   Despite the streaming, ecstatically intense yet rhythmic sentences, his take-no-prisoners employment of metaphors, imagery, and musings, along with his devil-may-care attitude towards form, it is not Vulturnus, but rather High Solitude which remains his ultimate achievement. Preceding Romanian novelist and poet, Mircea Cartarescu’s intense obsession with absent, liminal spaces and his rabid disassembly of reality, the compounding and recursive alienation to reality of the Nouveau Romans, High Solitude works as a lush recreation of the Paris of Fargue’s dreams. This dream Paris is framed as a rotting cathedral bathed in stained glass light. In this somnambulistic Berlin: Symphony of a City, which lingers in steam ridden alleyways or the fog-flustered banks of the Seine, Fargue sketches, as he calls a “diorama of states of the soul.” The narration is perhaps Fargue’s own, though lacks the amiability of his chatty, womanizing persona, and is instead, a terrifying reality; an old man, relatively disturbed from reality, surrounded by nothing but buildings and ghosts. Whereas in Vulturnus, where reality and imagination bleed into one to create an implosion of eternity, High Solitude is above all else a search for God. With the line, “Who recognizes God in all his disguises?,” a recursive search begins, where nothing is found but solitude and the void.