“The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I”, by Roger Shattuck

 

397 pages, Vintage, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0394704159

The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I by Roger Shattuck – an American writer who was best known for his books on French literature, art and music of the 20^th Century – is his history of La Belle Époque, and what a history it is, too. This is one of my favorite eras in history, and to have a masterful historian such as Shattuck write this history is a rare treat, indeed. There are few other persons with Shattuck’s breadth of knowledge who could have accomplished this feat: the man’s working knowledge of French music, poetry, painting and theater were all impressive, but his familiarity with the behind-the-scenes scandals and drama that affected their development gives his study a legitimacy that few other works can equal. Shattuck’s understanding of what the French avant-garde represented wasn’t a style, per se, but rather “a way of life, both dedicated and frivolous” whose significance was not to be found in the work of the most celebrated talents but, rather, in the aspirations of original talents that hadn’t yet been recognized. As the man himself said:

 

Only by cutting below the most prominent figures is one likely to find men both representative of the era and significant in their own right. Their artistic identities are most discernible against their background rather than removed form it into a new context of individual greatness. Henri Rousseau, Erik Satie, Alfred Jarry, Guillaume Apollinaire: is this grouping less arbitrary than any other? They make, in fact, a singular team. Rousseau, a true artisan, painted with a combination of insight and awkwardness that earned for him double standing as both modern and primitive artist. Satie’s music partakes of the same simplicity, yet he lived in a series of scandals on the forefront of the artistic scene in Paris. Jarry’s play ‘Ubu Roi’ made him notorious at twenty-three, and within ten years he put himself in the grave with overwork, poverty, and drink. Before he died during the closing hours of World War I, Apollinaire had written some of the finest lyric poetry of the century and had assumed the leadership of Paris avant-garde. All four had colorful, significant careers, careers that might separately be ranked in the second magnitude of the epoch. Why, then, do they convey, in combination, the interplay of forces that steadily pushed the arts toward what Apollinaire called the New Spirit? The reasons are simple. Their entwined careers in Paris exactly span the period 1885-1918 and suggest a unity in artistic conviction and practice that is less clearly expressed in any single figure or in a general survey of the era. Chronologically and in spirit they set its limits. In addition, their originality and persistence worked upon more stable artists and obliged them to take into account the most audacious and sometimes foolish aspirations of the age.

 

I apologize for the long-ass quote, but sometimes its better just to let the author speak for himself rather than butcher his ideas. Speaking of which, one may legitimately ask – especially if one is French – how it is that this definitive chronicle of the French avant-garde came to be written by ce maudit américain. Perhaps, sometimes, it takes an outsider to properly discern things that are hidden or overlooked by insiders. Furthermore, while The Banquet Years was originally written way the hell back in 1968, it still wafts through one’s mind like a cool summer breeze, what with its many deft analytical anecdotes that do more to enlighten even the most dedicated historian of the age as any turgid academic history could. This is true, as well, of the thumbnail sketches of his principal subjects: the post-impressionist painter Henri Rousseau; the composer and pianist Erik Satie; the symbolist writer Alfred Jarry; and the poet, playwright, short story writer and novelist Guillaume Apollinaire – four outcasts who were barely noticed by the pointy-head longhairs of their time who nevertheless ushered-in 20^th Century modernism (for good and ill).

Can a 400-page scholarly review of French avant-garde artistic achievements legitimately be called a literary classic? It can, if it’s Roger Shattuck’s The Banquet Years.