Huey P. Long Pool

Huey P. Long Pool
__________________

“A remembering narrator
who seeks to recapture past
and present selves that are
fleeing into forgetting. But
also an ironical narrator who
deceitfully invents past and
present selves.”—James Reid,
Proust, Beckett and Narration

The ghost of Huey P. Long—
There in the Fieldhouse ruins
The ballroom looking out over
The gorgeous Olympic pool

He turned to me & said—
“The WPA days are dead, kid
Along with the Thirties too
So much for Nostalgia”

“The potted palm trees—
Along the Spanish Revival
Balcony and the cool blue
Pool shimmering down below”

“The fetid waters now—
Growing mosquitoes while
Roaring Tiger crowds have
Forgotten what I did for them”

“The new Natatorium—
Off Nicholson Drive and
West Chimes Street now
Such a wealthy campus”

“While my classic Fieldhouse—
Rots and crumbles like Rome
Gone like JFK Camelot dayz
Never to be seen again”

http://abandonedbatonrouge.typepad.com/abandoned_baton_rouge/2009/06/huey-p-long-fieldhouse.html

Hotel Ritz Rendezvous

Hotel Ritz Rendezvous
__________________

By the middle of 1918—
The last summer of World War I
Miss Proust had a compelling reason
For wanting to remain in Paris:

“I’d met at the Ritz Hotel—
A young waiter named Henri Rochat
Who had simply captivated me, you
Know how young waiters can be…

Camille Wixler another Ritz waiter—
Swiss like Rochat, introduced me to
The boy who was only nineteen back
Then and I fell in love with him

Rochat had gone to school—
At the Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne and
Had come to Paris as an apprentice
Under Olivier Dabescat

One day Dabescat told Rochat—
That I’d noticed him and wondered
Whether he would like to wait my table
Which the young man gladly accepted

I gave enormous tips to waiters—
The personnel at the Ritz were expected
Of course, to cater to the whims of tardy diners
And my whims tended toward male romance

After the meal in the small salon—
I consumed a dozen or so demitasses
Of coffee and then asked for more, chatting
With young Henry Rochat most intimately

I even offered the young man—
An occupation better suited to his abilities
With the position as my personal secretary
Sometime in late 1918 or early 1919

Rochat had no qualifications—
For such work, was taciturn & uneducated,
Couldn’t write or speak French, and his
Pronunciation and spelling were poor

Later there were no photographs—
And only vague physical descriptions of
Young exquisite Rochat who was not only
Handsome, but tres well endowed

He had a fair complexion & brown hair—
And I contrasted Rochat's darker mane with
Ernest Forsgren's blond good looks in gossipy
Letters to the Duchess of Clermont-Tonnerre

Everyone in Paris knew about it—
My sexual practices generally considered
Rather perverse and embarrassing but
I managed to stay out of the newspapers

I often tipped the maître d'hôtel—
A few hundred francs for being discrete
When Rochat & I changed from street clothes
Into Ritz formal attire, he looked very sharp

I bought him handsome suits to wear—
And silk underclothes of the finest quality
When other waiters asked how he could afford
Such indulgencies and expensive clothes…

Rochat answered frankly & full of pride—
That he did so with the aid of Monsieur Proust
Attaching himself to me with all the sheer
Tenacity of a barnacle onto a rock

I had him for two and a half years—
But rather than him being in the position
Of a writer’s service, it was me, mon Cheri,
That slaved away pleasing the young man

It cost me a lot of money—
Money that I was forced to borrow or
Raise by selling off my few remaining
Investments but it was worth it

Céleste agrees that I recruited him—
Being naïve or perhaps overly protective
Taking young Rochat under my wing
As an act of charity for the poor youth

I used to say to Céleste—
"Rochat thinks he’s making love, but he’s
Always so surly, sullen, sulky & moody…
Which unfortunately is just my type.”

Rochat was jealous as well—
Not letting me procure other young men
For sexual trysts at Boulevard Haussmann
For takeout dinners from the Ritz

He even told me that a young waiter—
I had the hots for by the name of Vanelli
Wasn’t my type and wouldn’t accept
Any of my lewd, sexual propositions

Rochat was simply astounded—
Finding young Vanelli in bed with me
And from then on he was very suspicious
Of any other possible favorites of mine

Rochat was so upset that he—
Sailed for South America in June 1921
Knowing that I’d grown weary of him
Finding a post in faraway Buenos Aires

You know how tricks and favorites—
Simply come & go, without leaving any
Traces in the documents or tender gay
Memories that one keeps over the years

Lucien Daudet describes an evening—
At the Ritz with all the openly gay diners
Like Count Antoine Sala and his friends
Camping it up at tables in the dining room

I preferred to dine at the Ritz alone—
When the service was exceptionally good
When the waiters didn’t have to flee
Towards the kitchen except to serve dishes

There was the Place Vendôme, as course—
But I preferred the smooth service at the Ritz
Late at night when my own courting of waiters
Wasn’t inconvenienced by indiscreet flirtations

My favorite stratagem for enticing bellhops—
I’d ring for the bellboy and then begin washing
My hands, so that when the boy entered the room,
I was leaning over the sink, saying to him:

"My dear young friend, I have a tip for you—
But I can't give it to you because my hands
Are wet, so please reach into my pants
Pockets & get it out, won’t you please?”

Maurice Duplay once caught me—
In a compromising position with a
Handsome young thug when he arrived in
My modest apartment unannounced:

"I was visibly disturbed by them—
The young thug didn’t even look up and
Kept whipping Proust’s ass with his belt,
Calling him a fucking no-good faggot!!!”

“I closed the door awkwardly—
Causing some papers to slide off the desk,
Proust’s face was crimson but his pale
White ass was exceptionally black & blue!!!”

Duplay noted the youth's thuggish face—
His thick black hair parted in the middle,
Completely nude and erect, obviously not
Faking it, but rather the hoodlum type

"Marcel, didn’t even look up at me,”—
Duplay said, gossiping about the louche
Incident with the bored Baron de Charlus
Who simply yawned, snorting more coke

“Rough trade is so difficult to get—
These days, my dear Duplay,” Charlus said,
“All the cute ones are dead soldiers now or
Just cripples left over from the war.”

Fortunately, that’s all the information—
That Duplay gives with no hints of the
Approximate date of his intrusion or its
Inclusion in À la recherche du temps perdu

Rimbaud

Rimbaud
for Stephane Mallarmé
__________________

That just a boy—
Could extend the hope
Of mature poetry into his
Night of unique adventure

That a boy so early—
Impetuously hit by the
Wings of literature could
See the history of the mind

That merely a boy—
With barely time to exist
Could exhaust the stormy
Fatalities so masterfully

Supposing without recourse—
We were denied these otherwise
Strong, insightful, haunting
Manuscripts of a mere youth?

A mere chicken vagabond—
Aided by the fruit fairy Verlaine
Tasting the old glory of those
Left behind at some oasis

Why did we disown him—
This boy picked by fate to
Perform his role without any
Vacillating or confusion?

Arriving late he established—
Among our dying & diverse
Voices a silence that was like
A wall or a hospital curtain

We defended ourselves—
Looking with envy at the
Way he’d grown up turning
Language to new meanings

New utterly native speaking—
A well-earned hardness with his
Own beauty without compromise,
In fact, proudly omitting nothing

Deepening the possibility—
That in our vain search for urban
Indifference and lofty careers
We were overcome by celebrity

It had to be someone like him—
Who no longer wanted our way
To impersonally drive us all out
Of Paris with his casualness

That some impetuous boy—
With masterful stormy poetry
Could disown us all as if we were
Nothing but a bunch of pickpockets?

Even now his manuscripts—
Are copyrighted in the future
Still waiting for us to catch up
With this adolescent genius

—Letter from Stephane Mallarmé
to Harrison Rhodes, April 1896

Le temps retrouvé

Le temps retrouvé
__________________

I bumped into Le Baron de Charlus the other day. He was with Jupien, as usual, his hairdresser, lover and companion for all these past years.

“I’m not deaf, Jupien,” Charlus said.

“Just look who we’ve got here, it’s Marcel. See how much he’s matured? He’s not a naïve little chicken freshman anymore, is she?”

Charlus smiled, taking me by the arm, as we strolled down West Chimes past the Highland Coffee House.

“He thinks I’m losing my mind, Marcel. But of course I’m not—I lost it simply years ago when I first met you. That loving humid evening over there in the old decaying Greek Amphitheater. Remember?”

Charlus nodded down the street, past the Infirmary, down the path, down thru the gnarled magnolias with their sad dangling Spanish Moss hairdos.

“See that advertisement in the window?” he said, pausing, both of us stopped in front of the window, as he pointed at it. We both stood there looking at the ad. A rush of memories oozing in the night.

“It was like the same one at Avranches… No, at Balbec. When I met you the first time. Do you remember?”

(“Marcel!!! Marcel!!!”, shouts Proust’s grandmother.)

(“Your grandmother, Marcel. She looks rather worried, flustered and flabbergasted, the poor thing.” Charlus says this there on the resort beach, checking the boy out in his overly too-tight swimming suit.)

(“But we don’t care about old grandma—do we, my handsome little Marcel chicken dove, do we?)

(Pardon me, sir. But I adore her?)



(Monsieur, you’re still just a young, naïve young man. Use your youth to learn two things, First, refrain from displaying emotions that are best left unspoken. Second, don’t rush into answering questions before you’ve understood them. If you take these precautions, you will be saved from blurting out nonsense as if you were deaf. You look silly enough already with those sad heavy-lidded eyes drooping down from your once cute face, cruising down here in this ancient long-forgotten Forbidden Garden, my dear. Cruising for you know what. What brings you back here, after all these years, Marcel? We thought you bid adieu to Tiger Town simply years ago, my dear. Surely you're not going to bore us with another tiresome Novel?”)

Le temps retrouvé (cont)

Le temps retrouvé
__________________

Chimes Regained 2

“Antoine de Mouchy… dead.”

“Charlus Swann… dead.”

“Adabert de Montmorency… dead.”

“Boson de Talleyrand… dead.”

“Sosthène de Doudeauville… dead.”

“Why don’t you answer me, Marcel?”

Chimes Regained 3

Surely it was just a dream. A figment of my all too flimsy, facetious, failing, faggoty imagination. But there he was, the usual charming not so charming Baron de Charlus in my room, sitting next to my bed, acting aloof and nonchalant as usual.

It was like I was having a conversation with him, even tho I knew he was dead. Perhaps I was deceased as well.

“I was short of time back then, Charlus, you know that. So what if I rebuffed you? You thrived on rejection, it only enhanced your desire to dominate and play the game.”

“Really, Marcel? Why would you want to play such a boyish hard-to-get game like that with me? After all, my dear, we already knew each other so tres intimately.”

Marcel shook his head gently, looking away from the Baron, closing his eyes and sighing.

“I don’t know. Maybe it was to make you remember me. I, for one, often think about that look you first gave me in Allen Hall. Your ogling eyeball, straining and bloodshot, peering at me thru to glory-hole upstairs in the men’s Tea Room. Some things you don’t forget.”

“You were eighteen. A lowly freshman from New Orleans. Completely innocent. What, Marcel, did you know? At least ‘innocent’ was the word I’d use to describe my first gaze at you back then.”

“More like ‘indecent’, you mean.”

“Whatever did you imagine, Marcel? I was only noticing how pretty you were. Did I do wrong?”

Chimes Regained 4

“Charlus! Marcel! What in the world are you two gorgeous gentlemen talking about, my dears?” Céleste had noticed we were both getting a bit too tipsy. She closed the door behind her.

“Too much hash, coke, absinthe, my dears… You should be ashamed of yourselves. You should both know by now that such dilly-dallying around simply makes a girl a rather dull boy, my dears…”

Chimes Regained 5

“Tell me, Céleste, my dearest. Please tell me the truth. Are there still ghosts hanging around this dumpy apartment after all these years.”

Céleste shrugged. She was distracted by something.

“Which apartment?” she asked.

“Don’t be a silly goose. This one, Céleste. The one I’ve returned to during this little gay séance? This one, the one where my cute nephew Caloub and I used to get it on all the time?”

“Marcel, upon my word. There are no ghosts here tonight. Unless you and I are ghosts and we just don’t know it.”

“I believe you, Céleste, but just now when… the Baron de Charlus came by, I was dozing off…”

“No one came by, Marcel.”

“But Charlus may have come by when I was dreaming, fitfully sleeping in a fever tonight, surely he was here, talking with me… You know how sensitive I am to that expensive ode de colone he wears.”

The West Chimes apartment where Marcel had lived since the Sixties. Up on the third floor with the window open to catch the night air coolness. The magnolias across the street. The stench of overly-sweet honeysuckle crawling up the stairs.

“I believe you, Céleste. But do me a favor and give de Charlus a call. Ask him if he…”

Chimes Regained 6

All night long there in Marcel’s counterfeit apartment, this Faux-Monnayeurs mansion on the hill, its wallpaper awash with cherry trees in the Japanese Chinoiserie style.

Had he been hallucinating the hours away again as usual, spending all day and night in bed in his cork-lined bedroom, waiting until night came, with its view of sweet greenery and lilacs, the leaves of the magnolias in the shimmering Méséglise Forest moonlight?

Marcel enjoyed this evening view with the living room windows open, looking out all the way thru the greenery to Highland Drive, until Marcel recognized in the distance, the etched dark blue shadow in the distance, the tall slim pale maleness of the Memorial Tower, so natural and distinguished-looking.

Laugh if you want, but it was not only classically beautiful but he liked the pale tan Spanish Revival slimness to it and the sad solemnity of its presence, the melancholy male gonging of the campus chimes playing like some sad piano sonata across the green parade ground.

Almost as if it were saying to him, “I’ll be back tomorrow evening. Wait for me. And then the day after.” Even Marcel forgot about it sometimes, even forgetting about holding Caloub in my arms back then, oblivious to…”

Chimes Regained 7

Marcel would feel his heart beating faster and faster, abnormally fast. Because of his guilt and whatever else he felt about what’d he done to Caloub that night.

Getting off on spanking the boy’s twisting, squirming, wiggling, muscular bare bottom. Only to have the Chimes off in the distance moaning and groaning.

“You’re overdoing it, Marcel," the Chimes said. “By far, my dear. The boy will surely leave you…”

Chimes Regained 8

“What are reading? May I see it?” Céleste asked.

“The Goncourt Journal. It’s rather scandalous. About Papa and the people he knew.”

“What else?”

“No, I’m keeping that one. The Boy with the Golden Eyes. It’s very improper. But I’m bored”

“I’ve heard about it. Those men are jealous of other men. For them, other men are enemies. The ones who bring the wrong caress to their boyfriends: “I was miserable, finding out that my cute young fiancée loved a woman. But not half as miserable if he’d loved another man.”

“That cute young fiancée. Did you still love him as much afterwards… as before that?”

“Yes, even more. Because he claimed to love me, although he didn’t. I spanked him even more than before. Bad boyz are my cup of tea. They deserve what they get. I love them even more for their betrayal. Moody, sullen str8t boyz especially.”

Chimes Regained 9

“You know what I think?”

“We’re talking too much. And forgetting to eat.”

“I think that when you stop loving a man and see him again, years later… between you and him, there’s death. As if he’d passed away, because your love is over.”

“You mean I’m dead?”

“No, I’m only thinking about all those questions that once tormented me, but are of no interest to me now.”

“Such as?”

“That time I saw you on the Champs Elysées with a young man. You have no idea how sad it made me. I thought: It’s over.”

“I think I remember.”

“Don’t try to. It’s not worth the effort. That’s what’s so awful. Heartbreak can kill, but leaves no trace.”

“Shall I say who it was?”

Chimes Regained 10

“Did you know that Count de Courvoisier was a fag?”

“I had no idea.”

“Yes, he thought he was the only boy in all of France to be attracted to another.”

“Another what?”

“Another young wealthy aristocrat, of course.”

“Is that feeling particularly unique to any class?”

“Only the rich, my dear Marcel. Obviously it was the bourgeois devil that made him feel that way.”

“I have no idea about such matters. I’m certainly not wealthy and aristocratic like you, Charlus. I have no idea about such matters.”

“Neither do I. I’ve always preferred the lower classes for sex, you know. They have none of the guilt of the middle class or boredom of the elite. Rough trade is greedy for money—and I’m greedy to pay for it. It works out better that way.”

“You’ll have to look elsewhere, Charlus. I’m not into rough trade nor am I greedy for it either.”

“You used to be interested in it. Remember, you knew all about the encircling of a pert young man’s asshole. That young nephew of yours. Those young bulging Bulgarian flanks of his. My kind of subject.”

“I don’t know what you’re referring to. It’s like Sanskrit or Swahili to me.”

“Listen to me…”

Chimes Regained 11

“That boy talking to his friend. His laugh is vulgar.”

The waiter nods, takes the generous tip.

“But his silk bathing suit is exquisite.”

“Yes, monsieur. A gift I suppose. His sugar-daddy.”

“I know. I’m interested in the suit.”

“See how prettily it bulges in the right places?”

“Yes, monsieur?”

“I’d like to know more about the embroider.”

“I don’t know much about fashion, monsieur.”

“Try to get some details.”

“Does he gets spanked? Switched?”

“Well, I’m no expert, sir.”

“Try your best, my friend.”

Chimes Regained 12

The day the writer Proust died, he was given as all gay mortals are, the time to review every trick and love affair of his life. The writer refused.

“My life has been a series of extraordinary boys. To revisit them would only make me sadder. I’d rather use my remaining time to review my last novel, “Divine Nemesis,” otherwise known as “The Triumph of Death.”

So it was. Soon after, the Angel of Death returned, to announce the end of his time of grace.

“What a paradox!” exclaimed Proust. “You gave me enough time to revisit my whole life, which lasted sixty-nine years. The same length of time was too short to review a book I wrote in 3 months.”

“In this work is all of your life and the life of all men,” the Angel replied. “To review it would take an eternity.”

Journal

Journal
__________________

“Without exactly
pretending to
explain anything”
—Andre Gide,
Les Faux-Monnayeurs

Temps perdu—
Waits for denouement
Temps retrouvé
Seeks mise-en-abyme

The Art of the "Novel Within a Novel"

The Art of the "Novel Within a Novel"
__________________

Metafictional (Dream) Discourse

“placing a discourse
within another discourse”
—Leonid Livak, “Vladimir Nabokov’s
Apprenticeship in Andre Gide’s
“Science of Illumination”: From The
Counterfeiter to The Gift, Comparative
Literature Summer 2002

• Brian Boyd in Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years describes a fascinating incident when Nabokov gets the news about his lucrative Lolita film contract:

“When the contract arrived, his reaction was bizarre — and uniquely Nabokovian. He recalled a curious dream he had the year his Uncle Vasily Rukavishnikov died in 1916. Uncle Vasya had said to him: “I shall come back to you as Harry and Kuryrkin.” Within the dream, the two names had signified a duo of (otherwise nonexistent) circus clowns. Forty years later, Nabokov still recalled the dream and now saw the dream-duo as a foreshadowing of Harris and Kubrick in another theatrical setting. In 1916 he him become a wealthy young man who had inherited Uncle Varga’s fortune, only to lose it the next year in the revolution. Now Harris and Kubrick had returned him at one stroke to the ranks of the wealthy. That kind of combinational replay is the stuff of his fiction. No wonder he would make Van Veen engage in a serious study of the “precognitive flavor” of dreams in the hope…of ”catching sight of the lining of time.” (VN:TAY 366-367)

• Does the mise-en-abyme insertion of a ‘dreamtime text’ as well as ‘multiple dream-characters’ into this Nabokovian dream narrative suggest any Gide-esque enlightenment or possible science of illumination ideas in regard to the supposedly precognitive aspect of the above incident noted by Brian Boyd?

• Can we perhaps discuss with the help of Leonid Livak’s Gide text any possible mise-en-abyme ‘metafictional’ (dream) discourse relationships of the above incident to Gide’s Les Faux-Monnayeurs or Nabokov’s The Gift or Nabokov’s supposedly ‘precognitive’ Ada dream interests?

• Gide defines the mise-en-abyme technique as a transposition of the work's subject matter on the level of its characters. More precisely, this procedure consists of placing a discourse within another discourse, whereby the incorporated text resembles or "mirrors" as Gide puts it, the incorporating one, emphasizing the formal structure of the work as a whole and drawing attention to the relationship between the author and his creation. The dreamer and his metaliterary dream text?

• This "science of illumination" was to be implemented by the compositional principle of the mise-en-abyme, a term Gide had coined some twenty years earlier, as well as by the introduction of multiple narrative voices that recount the same story from different viewpoints.

• "Those are two different esthetics [ ...] There exists a subtle science of illumination; to vary illumination infinitely is an art in itself."

• Gide's attempt to compose a pure novel, as described in The Journal of the Counterfeiters, is mirrored in the esthetic activity of The Counterfeiters' anonymous author-narrator, who also keeps the journal of his work (FM 109). (By calling The Journal "l'histoire meme du livre" ["the very history/story of the, whereby "l'histoire" could mean both history and story, Gide endowed it with the value of fiction.) The artistic project of this narrator (and the Gide of The Journal) is mirrored in turn by Edouard's attempt to write a pure novel, an endeavor related through Edouard's diary and notebooks.

• Like Edouard, who thinks that narrative infinity is contingent on the writer's ignorance of his novel's finale, Fedor feels that his text already exists in another dimension and can be transferred into this world only intuitively (FM1200-1; 6138,171, 194/D156, 192, 218). Does dreaming qualify as another ‘dimension’? Does dreaming involve narrative infinity?

• Both writers know that the denouement of their novels will be revealed by the same fate that provides their novelistic material (FM1082; G363/D407). Fedor's method of trial and error is consistent with Edouard's cult of artistic process. Neither The Counterfeiters nor The Gift presents the final product of its hero's quest, furnishing instead a series of experiments that mirror both the future novel and the novel we hold in our hands. One might even argue that Fedor's conviction that his text exists in another dimension furthers Edouard's art of novel, since the French novelist is unsure whether his ideal novel could ever be written.

• Symptomatically, Edouard's friend Laura suggests that he will not write his novel, while Fedor's mother believes that her son will eventually realize his magnum opus (FM1083; G139/D157). Does the Nabokov dream and its subsequent apparent ‘narrative closure’ with the Lolita film contract suggest a novelistic denouement along the lines of either Edouard's art of novel or Nabokov’s approach?

• But if Gide makes clear the mirror relations between incorporated and incorporating texts, Nabokov obfuscates them. Is obfuscation an oneiric metafictional dialogical factor in any possible mise-en-abyme dream effect?

• The incorporated (dream) texts are thus mutually reflective and complementary? Non-linear? Polymorphously perverse? Placed after the stories of Lasha and Fedor's father in The Gift, Chernyshevskii's story precedes them chronologically. As with Nabokov’s Uncle Ruka dream? At once echoed and foreshadowed by the preceding stories, it forces the reader to return to the stories of Lasha and Fedor's father, which acquire additional significance in the rear view mirror of Chernyshevskii's life. Does the supposed film contract and possible dream synchronicity provoke a looking back and retreading-rereading of the Uncle Ruka dream narrative?

• Polemically paraphrasing Stendhal's "realist" view of the novel as a mirror of life ("Un roman, c'est un miroir qui se prom≠ le long d'une route"/A novel is a mirror walking along a road), Edouard says about his own journal and diary: "C'est le miroir qu'avec moi je prom&ne. Rien de ce qui m'advient ne prend pour moi d'existence reelle, taut que je ne Fy vois pas reflete" (This is a mirror that I carry with me. Nothing that I meet becomes real to me until I see it reflected in this mirror, FM 1057). In a similar fashion, Fedor describes himself as a poet with a "mirrory heart" (G65/D76), haunted by mirrors from childhood." Do dreams mirror life? Is Nabokov’s dream a novel walking down the road? A road of narrative infinity? Does this have anything to do with Freud’s royal path to The Unconscious? ( Forgive me, Volodya.)

• Viewing prose as "mirror-like" and akin to that of the emigre writer Vladimirov-Nabokov's alter ego in The Gift (G321/D359). This detail elevates the mirror theme to the metaliterary level. Like the author and hero of The Counterfeiters, the author and hero of The Gift write "mirror" prose. Is this metafiction? A novel like Pale Fire?

• Following the mise-en-abyme technique, the mirror composition of The Gift is reflected in Fedor's texts, whose mirror composition will in turn be reflected in his future novel. Furthermore, the mirror relationship between Fedor's writings and Nabokov's novel forces the reader to become a (re)creator who shuttles from incorporated to incorporating texts, (re) establishing The Gift's larger meaning. Does dreaming involve mirror composition? Textual shuttling?

• And while writing The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality, a study based on a study of women's pictures in a store window, Chernyshevskii leads "an uneven struggle with the desires of the flesh, ending in a secret compromise" (G219/D247). Tellingly, Fedor's association of his own asceticism with masturbation-"Take oneself in hand: a monastic pun"-is provoked by a prostitute who pretends to contemplate the window of a women's clothing store (G325-26/D364-65). Male or female prostitute? Albert or Albertine? What about Edouard and Caloub? How does Nabokov disguise or obfuscate the Gide Immoralist gay metatext and why? Why didn’t Gide continue the next spiral narrative novel with Caloub rather than contemplate Lafcadio Wuki a street-smart 19-year-old in 1890’s Paris?

The mirroring effect of dreams

• The mirroring of Fedor's ideal by Chernyshevskii and Bush also harks back to The Counterfeiters, where Edouard's antagonist, the count of Passavant, brags about a future novel in which he will fully realize himself (FM1044). Gide's narrator is unequivocal about their distorting but revelatory mirror relationship, whereby Passavant's brilliance recalls fake coins:

•Le regard ironique d'Edouard coupa le reste de sa phrase. Habile a seduire et habitue a plaire, Passavant avait besoin de sentir en face de lui un miroir complaisant, pour briller. (FM 1167) Edouard's ironic gaze cut short the rest of his [Passavant's] phrase. An able seducer and used to being liked, Passavant needed to feel in front of himself a complaisant mirror in order to appear brilliant.

• This passage recalls Gide's description of his science of illumination, in which the chronological line of events, illuminated by a light source that moves parallel to it, yields to an oblique line illuminated unevenly by a stationary source. Elaborating on this point, Gide wrote in The Journal:

• Je reprocherais a Martin du Gard l'allure discursive de son recit [. . .] Sa lanterne de romancier eclaire toujours de face les evenements qu'il considere [ ....] jamais leurs lignes ne se melent [cf. "geometry without the axiom of parallel lines"] et, pas plus qu'il n'y a d'ombre, il n'y a de perspective [cf. "curved space"]. Etudier d'abord le point d'ou doit affluer la lumiere; toutes les ombres en dependent. Chaque figure repose et s'appuie sur son ombre [cf. "change of shadows"]. (JFM34-35)

• I could criticize Martin du Gard for the discursive stride of his narrative [ ...] His novelistic lantern always illuminates the contemplated events from the front [ ...] Their lines never mix and there is neither shadow nor perspective. One must first study the source of light; all shadows depend on it. Each figure is based upon and relies on its shadow.

• For Fedor, a glimpse into the otherworldly dimension, whose angle is tilted, requires a tilted mirror and a play of shadows; direct reflection produces a (vicious) circle, a multiplication of deceitful appearances (G328, 341-343/D368, 382-384). That is why, despite "the circular nature of everything in existence" (G204/D230), Fedor sees circularity as "a diabolical semblance of space" (G17/D24). "In our straining toward asymmetry, toward inequality," says Koncheev in Fedor's imaginary dialogue, "I can detect a howl for genuine freedom, an urge to break out of the circle" (G343/D384).

• When the light goes out, the glass reveals the outside world, transforming the light of a street lamp into a prismatic rainbow on the wall. As a result, Fedor "felt-in this glassy darkness-the strangeness of life, the strangeness of its magic, as if a corner of it had been turned back for an instant and he had "glimpsed its unusual lining" (G183/13205). It is precisely this "strangeness of life" that Fedor will attempt to convey by giving his ideal novel the spiral structure of an apple peel, whose twists reveal both its inside and outside surface.

• That kind of "glimpsed its unusual lining" replay is the stuff of fiction. No wonder Nabokov would make Van Veen engage in a serious study of the “precognitive flavor” of dreams in the hope…of ”catching sight of the lining of time.” (VN:TAY 366-367)

Dream multiple narrative voices

• The second major device of Gide's science of illumination is the use of multiple narrative voices, which, like the mirror composition, simultaneously makes the reader a co-creator and channels reading in a direction projected by the author. Gide's reader sorts out multiple narrative voices, evaluates their credibility, and decides how faithfully each voice conveys a given event (JFM33).

• A case in point is the affair of Vincent Molinier and Laura Douviers. We first learn about it from Vincent's brother Olivier, who eavesdropped on Vincent and Laura. The same story is related differently by Vincent to his new lover Lilian Griffith, who reinterprets it for her confidant Robert de Passavant. We then learn more contradictory information from Laura's letter to Edouard.

• Next comes Edouard's own interpretation in his diary, stolen and read by Bernard. Bernard reinterprets Edouard's and Olivier's versions and tells his own directly to Laura, later proposing another view of the events in his letter to Olivier. The narrator also gives his take on Vincent's affair "for the edification of the reader" (FM1045). Finally, Laura's husband provides his understanding of the situation. This technique echoes the novel's composition: numerous versions of the same event function as mutually reflecting and distorting mirrors.

• The multiple exposition of events is reinforced by the obfuscation of the relationship between the dream-narrator and his dream-narrative. Gide's reader is led to believe that the dream-narrative "I" belongs to the omniscient dream-author-narrator, who places the discourse of his characters in quotation marks to distinguish it from his own.

• The dream-narrator emphasizes his control of the text, commenting on the novel's stylistic and compositional aspects. Yet a tension between the narrator's presumed omniscience and his actual lack thereof runs through the book. Signs of the latter range from remarks that pass for stylistic idiosyncrasies, to his ignorance regarding key details, to statements implying that characters act independently from the author. Does the dream narrative "I" vacillate between being the property of an omniscient author-narrator and that of a subjective observer, whose exposition of events holds no more truth than the viewpoints of the novel's characters?

• The webs of deception in The Counterfeiters and The Gift reveal a tension between the authors' desire, on the one hand, to control the interpretation of their texts and, on the other, to elevate the reader to the status of an artist. If one falls into the trap of circularity, one will reread The Gift as Fedor's novel and The Counterfeiters as Edouard's creation. But if one heeds the suggestion that narrative infinity is a spiral, one will take over Fedor's and Edouard's ideal novels. Is dreaming a narrative infinity is a spiral?

• The ending of The Counterfeiters is supposed to give the impression of a limitless narrative, while the lack of a plot outline of future events ("l'erosion de contours") encourages the reader to write his own story (JFM83, 94, 96). This creative freedom confirms the text's premise of an esthetic pluralism ("Rien nest bon pour tous"/"Nothing is good for everybody," FM1089) that contrasts with the artistic assumptions of the nineteenth-century realist novel. The Counterfeiters appears as a "modele maximale" of novelistic narrative and one of many possible constructions of a story."

Yet The Journal and Diary also attempt to explicate the novel authoritatively. The Journal even suggests that The Counterfeiters's composition and narrative technique help control the reading of the novel. The apparent goal is to let the reader believe qu'il est plus intelligent que l'auteur, plus moral, plus perspicace et qu'il decouvre dans les personnages maintes choses, et dans le tours du recit maintes verites, malgre l'auteur et pour ainsi dire A son insu. (JFM72)

...that he is more intelligent than the author, more moral, more perspicacious, and that he is discovering numerous things in the characters and numerous truths in the course of the narrative despite the author and, so to speak, without the author's knowledge.

• The narrative divergence between Gide's and Proust's novels was remarked by contemporary readers. Thanks to his ties to the editorial office of the Nouvelle revue franfaise, Gide was familiar with Reinembrance in its entirety during his work on The Counterfeiters, while the last volume of Proust's novel, The Found Time (Le Temps retrouve), became available to the average reader only in 1927. The Journal of the Counterfeiters appeared concurrently with The Found Time, as if to draw attention to the formal differences between The Counterfeiters and Remembrance

There’s nothing more gauche than an author today posing as a Russian Gide in drag—even doing Miss Proust these days can get rather iffy with that trashy Baron de Charlus hanging around all the swank soirees and recitals. To be sure, though, my dear Nabokov, your Dar owes many hidden influences to Les Faux-Monnayeurs. Helping you with the delicate mise-en-abyme art of your own truly great gay novel-within-a-novel. Just the other day Caloub asked me, my dear, could you possibly do the same?