Special Delivery - Le Facteur Cheval

Palais Ideal

Tom Hubbard

Special Delivery

You can stumble and tumble upon it while you’re engaged with everyday banalities. It’s the incident, small in itself, which can lead to a triumph of creativity. It happened to a provincial French postman, Ferdinand Cheval, during one of his rounds: he lost his footing against a stone which he then picked up and admired for its strange shape. He decided to take it home to his yard. Cheval – or “Facteur  [postman] Cheval” as he’s best known - continued to collect more stones as he went about his business, and resolved to make a reality of a long-nurtured fantasy. In that open space by his home at Hauterives, south of Lyon, he would construct his Palais Idéal – his ideal palace – working on it for as long as it would take.

It took him over thirty years, from 1879 to 1912. It’s the oddest building you’re ever likely to visit in a lifetime, let alone within thirty-odd years. For some it has been an eyesore, the creation of a village crank. For André Malraux, the French minister of culture in 1969, it deserved the status of a national monument, as the world’s sole example of “architecture naïve”. Sole example? What about follies, such as Jack the Treacle-Eater in Somerset, or  Scotland’s own outsized Pineapple at Airth near the Kincardine Bridges? When I lived in Leixlip, Ireland, I was within walking distance of Co. Kildare’s ziggurat, the “Wonderful Barn”, and there was a Gothick lodge and a circular temple in the ample grounds of nearby Castletown House. Most of these weird structures owe their existence to aristocratic or otherwise landed whimsy.  Cheval’s was no dilettante production;  it was a working-man’s quest for meaning, and if it could be described as “naïve” it achieved, paradoxically, the kind of sophistication that often eludes the consciously sophisticated.

Read French novels of the decades leading up to Cheval’s masterpiece, and you frequently encounter the stubborn provincial intent on conquering the capital. But Cheval had no knowledge of, or interest in, Paris. He was unaware of those great movements in art that we cluster together under the term post-impressionsm. Art nouveau? The Palais Idéal shares some of the features of that movement – the representation of organic growth, the plant and animal forms that seem to defy their objectively static condition. Symbolism? Again, there’s common territory – the hauntingly atmospheric nature of the building, both of its parts and of its whole: if, as Walter Pater maintained, all art aspires to the condition of music, Cheval’s Palais Idéal is “Symbolist” inasmuch as it is art aspiring to the condition of dream – except that the terms “Art nouveau” and “Symbolist” would have meant nothing to Cheval, and his case was rather that of dream aspiring to the condition of art.

The Palais Idéal is a meeting place of the various arts, a powerfully integrative vision. It is sculpture as well as architecture, again as regards its constituent parts as well as its totality – a diversity-in-unity. It is theatre: your approach to it from the village, even via its custom-built entry-point, reveals a spectacle in both the French and English meanings of that word. You reach the upper level of the Palais Idéal, by a choice of winding stairs, and find yourself on a terrace that suggests a stage – a stage that demands all France, and the world beyond, as its audience. It’s also literature, for Cheval had a predilection for mottoes, scraps of poetry, and his own gnomic pronouncements, all of which he inscribed on his walls, not least those of the vaguely unnerving “labyrinth” within the ground level of his eldritch castle.

               Pour mon idée, mon corps a tout bravé,

               Le temps, la critique, les années.

               La vie est un rapide courrier,

              Ma pensée vivra avec ce rocher.     

In itself it lacks one art: music. Even here, though, help is at hand – at least in the summer months when open-air performances take place in front of the monument.

Palais Ideal - detail

The Palais Idéal has attracted the attention of later artists such as the Surrealists, for whom it became a place of pilgrimage: their Parisian equivalent would be the Buttes-Chaumont Park with its sinister caverns carved out of a former quarry. Antonio Gaudi is often plausibly compared with Cheval. 

        

Two of the English-speaking world’s most eloquent writers in art, Robert Hughes and John Berger, have come here and paid homage. Hughes has written of “a palace of the unconscious” built by a “proud and certain man”. Freud and Jung may indeed be hovering in and out of the structure, as well as Marx: Berger resists psychologising the work, preferring to stress the dialectical energies of the peasant-workman’s interaction with his materials. (These materials, it should be added, are not only of stone – Cheval also collected and deployed shells, and sculpted with mortar: in his time he had worked as a baker, and kneading the dough proved itself to be a transferable skill.)

I suggested to the students in my aesthetics class at Grenoble that architecture was the one art you couldn’t escape: it was all around you. Moreover, rather than you containing it, it contained you. Music might enter your body; your body must inevitably enter a building. Berger rightly maintains that books and even films about the Palais Idéal can never be a substitute for actually being there and inside it: “You do not look at it any more than you look at a forest. You either enter it or you pass it by.” Nevertheless, as well as the books, I showed a DVD of it to my students: such a medium could reach the parts (of  the building, and of human sensibility) that the best books couldn’t reach. The new technology could at least offer an appetiser for the original’s three-dimensionality; when I lectured on Cheval in my art college and evening class days, I had only slides to hand.  Yet these images, for all their inadequacy, were what led me to explore this monument in all its existential palpability, this seemingly unlikely creation of the dour postman of Hauterives.     

Below: photograph of “Le Facteur” Cheval.

Jean Meslier, Priest and Atheist

‘My dear friends, seeing that I would not be permitted and the consequences would be too dangerous and distressing for me to tell you openly during my lifetime what I think about the government of men and about their religion and morals, I have decided, at least, to tell you after my death  …’

So (in the 2009 translation by Michael Shreve) begins Testament: Memoir of the Thoughts and Sentiments of Jean Meslier, Parish Priest of Etrépigny and Balaives, three copies of which were apparently found in signed manuscripts in Meslier’s house after his death (he had planned to register the work with the clerks of his parishes beforehand, to be communicated to his parishioners).

                                                Parish Church of Etrépigny

The work circulated in manuscript throughout the eighteenth century and beyond, but was not printed in its original form until 1864. In the meantime, Voltaire had brought Meslier to the attention of a wider audience in his Extraits des Sentiments de Jean Meslier, a sanitized Meslier who was neither revolutionary nor atheist, but an anti-Catholic deist, much like Voltaire himself.

The real Meslier (1664-1729), while carrying out the duties of a Catholic priest until his death, categorically stated ‘there is no God’. He saw religion as a political tool for oppressing the masses and quotes with approval a man whose ‘wish was that all the rulers of the earth and all the nobles be hanged and strangled with the guts of priests’!

Meslier advocated a communitarian society in which all men and women in a given community ‘should live peacefully and in common together, having the same or similar food and being all equally well clothed, well housed’ and in which marriages could easily be dissolved and new partners taken. All that was needed for human happiness, in his rather simplistic view, was to throw off the yoke of the aristocracy and the Church.

No wonder, with all this fermenting inside him that Meslier, who became a priest, he says, to please his parents,  ‘was never without pain and extreme loathing for what I was doing’ and ‘hundreds and hundreds of times on the point of indiscreetly bursting out with indignation.’

This tension in him struck a chord in me, the product of a devoutly Catholic upbringing, who had many times in the past, before I learned to trust my own instincts, forced myself to believe things I felt could not possibly be true. I came to Meslier through a play by David Ball, performed at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2006, and he simmered in my mind for four years before I felt ready to write, like Voltaire, my own version of the atheist priest. I still would not have done it without the warm encouragement of Donny O’Rourke, my mentor.

Anyone wanting to find out what Meslier thought should read what he himself wrote. What I was interested in – especially as a PEN member -  was how it might feel to rigidly suppress your true opinions and, still more, to be in a profession where you had to express the exact opposite of what you believed. The result is Fr Meslier’s Confession (published by Oversteps Books, http://www.overstepsbooks.com/)

which will be launched at a reading by three Scottish PEN members – myself, Tessa Ransford and Morelle Smith – at Blackwells bookshop on 1^st March.  It should be an intriguing mix of voices, not least Meslier’s own.

A C Clarke

BIRD OF PASSAGE, The Genesis of a Story




 

When I was twelve years old, we moved from Leeds to South West Scotland where my scientist father had taken a position in a research institute. Dad had come to England with the army at the end of the war and stayed on as a refugee, marrying my half English, half Irish mother. My early schooling had been at a small Roman Catholic primary where we sang ‘Hail glorious Saint Patrick, dear saint of our isle’, never realising that it wasn’t our isle we were singing about.

It was when we moved to Scotland that I first came across the tattie howkers – the Irish workers who came over, mostly from Donegal, to help with the potato harvest. They were welcomed as hard workers, but – like the Polish refugees in Leeds – otherwise viewed with suspicion. Back then, their living conditions were not good, although they were certainly better than when Patrick McGill wrote Children of the Dead End, a piece of autobiographical fiction which depicts, among other things, the treatment of the tattie howkers in early 1900s Scotland.

As an adult, I wanted to write about the tattie howkers myself and tinkered with the idea in plays and stories, but it wasn’t until I wrote my recent novel, Bird of Passage, that I really tackled the subject. The central character is a young Irish agricultural worker called Finn O’Malley, sent to work in Scotland, but throughout my early drafts I realised that I had created a character about whom I knew very little. Finn was clearly a damaged individual but however many revisions I did, he remained obstinately silent. Writers don’t always know the whole story. Sometimes we know the beginning and end, and we write to find out what happens in between. But in this case, it was as though the character himself couldn’t remember either

I set the novel to one side and concentrated on other things. But it nagged at me, and I came back to it a couple of years ago. About that time, I also came across related issues about which I knew shamefully little. I had always been aware that a small minority of Irish people living in the UK had problems. Unlike the members of my own family, people who had migrated, settled, integrated, they often seemed to be single men with alcohol and behavioural problems. They had gravitated to cities and there they stayed, living in lodging houses, working casually. Nobody ever seemed to question who they were and what had turned them into the damaged individuals they had become.

In the past few years, there have been acres of newsprint about sexual abuse within the Catholic church, but very little seems to have been written about the scandal of the Industrial Schools of Ireland, and a group of people whose lives were blighted by state sanctioned cruelty. These schools were Victorian institutions which persisted in Ireland long after other countries had closed them down. There have been a number of excellent books and documentaries about the Industrial School system and you should certainly read the words of those who experienced them. I can especially recommend The Irish Gulag by Bruce Arnold and Suffer the Little Children by Mary Raftery and Eoin O’Sullivan

Essentially, these schools were set up in the mid 1800s to care for the ‘neglected, orphaned and abandoned.’ They were institutions to which children could be committed if they were deemed to be beyond parental care and control or otherwise at risk. They were committed by the courts against whom there was no appeal, and the schools were run by religious (although I use the term loosely) orders. Children could be committed for ‘crimes’ as minor as stealing apples or for no crime at all, but because a parent was deemed neglectful. Once within the system, they had few rights. These schools ran in parallel with the notorious Magdalene Laundries. The inspection system was inadequate. Corporal punishment was commonplace, extreme physical abuse was rife and there is plenty of evidence that sexual abuse occurred too. As one ex-inmate pointed out, a prisoner in gaol had far more rights than these children. The state paid a ‘capitation’ sum in support of each child, so it was clearly in the interests of those running the schools to cram in as many as possible and living conditions were reputedly appalling.

Once a child reached the age of sixteen, they would be out of the door as quickly as possible since no more state payments would be forthcoming, although even then, the young people might not really be given their freedom, but might be sent to work on farms, for low pay, unaware that they didn’t need to stay. As they grew older, these individuals might eventually escape to the UK where at least some of them – poorly educated and traumatised as they were – found work as navvies, but also found it difficult to integrate into society.

The fact that this system was still in existence in the 1960s and 70s came as a shock to me. I had visited Ireland in the early 70s, and loved the country and its people (as I still do, very much) and had worked there over several student vacations. The Commission to enquire into child abuse in Ireland was only set up in 2000. The conclusion of the report, issued in May 2009, was that over a period going back at least to the 1940s, many children in Industrial Schools in the Republic had been subjected to ‘sustained physical, sexual and emotional abuse.’

Bird of Passage - cover

It was this information which allowed me to fill in some of the blanks, both for myself and for my main character, Finn O’Malley. What had started out as quite a gentle love story, turned into Bird of Passage (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bird-of-Passage-ebook/dp/B006RB2H3Y) which makes some attempt to explore these extremes of cruelty, and how the resulting trauma affects not just the victim, but everyone who comes into contact with him or her for a whole lifetime.

Catherine Czerkawska

www.wordarts.co.uk

Catherine Czerkawska

Look, no Borders!



Strasbourg, evening light



La piste des forts is the name of the bicycle path that goes from Strasbourg, in France, over the Rhine and into Germany. It's well named. If you were not strong before you started you will be less so once you've done it. Huge trucks barrel along the main road and while the cycle path is off to one side, I still get showered with murky moisture from the puddles that sprayed out from the truck wheels. But it's only a few kilometers, to the border, over the Pont de l'Europe, and I reach Kehl, the small town on the German side.

The first time I went to Kehl I stopped for a coffee in the town centre, where there's a near empty square, with dried leaves scuttling across it, caught up in snatches of wind like fitful half-remembered prayers. Bright lights on one side of the square announce a Euro shop. There's a café bar in the middle, with outside tables underneath large awnings. Only one client sitting outside, an elderly man drinking coffee and looking out over the empty square. Next to him is one of these admirable heaters for outside clientèle, but it's not on. When the friendly waitress brings me my coffee she also places in front of the man a large dish of ice cream, layered in white, cream and caramel colours.

The next time I visit Kehl, in the heart of the holiday season, the town square is totally deserted - even the euro shop is closed. No more garish yellow blinking lights with signs saying Jedes Teil €1 against the bright red background paint. The tourist information office is closed as is the café-bar where the elderly man sat, eating his dish of ice cream.

The chill wind cuts icily into my face as I cycle along. Only one person in sight, a man leaning out of a window, smoking, above a large sign that says Kehler Zeitung. Perhaps he's the editor gazing out across the empty streets, looking for signs of any life at all, anything to write about in his paper. But he saw nothing - apart perhaps from a woman on a bicycle, heading for the piste des forts, which has turned into fahhradweg den forten, now that we're in Germany. The cycle path goes beside a canal and then slips under a bridge past a marshy pond where a group of white herons with black tails have gathered. Mountains in the distance, streaked with snow on the peaks. One or two joggers, a few people on bikes, along the way.

Passerelle over the Rhine, joining France and Germany

And coming back through Kehl an hour or so later, I find there is one hub of activity - the Döner Merguez, with three tourists buying doner kebabs. I go up to it and ask if they have any coffee. They do. Later, one of the tourists takes a photo of the Doner Merguez. I'm glad when my drink is served, though it can barely be called coffee. I idly wonder how they could make something that tastes so little of what it claims to be. But I don't really mind for at least it's hot.

And when I leave, cycling past the Euro shop to head for the passerelle, the pedestrian and cycle bridge over the Rhine, I pass another shop, closed of course, an ice cream shop displaying a sign, Lust auf Eis. Remembering the elderly gentleman's heaped dish, I have a sudden longing for ice cream.

Morelle Smith

At the Bethlehem Wall

BAFFLED IN BETHLEHEM

May 2010

They took my photograph beside

That controversial wall.

Beneath the brutal sun we both

Stood strong and straight and tall.

A cross in white aslant on blue

Marks the symbolic spot:

I posed beside a Saltire

Sprayed by a left-wing Scot..

I hadn’t brought an aerosol

And couldn’t even try

To add a few well chosen words:

“How long, O Lord?” and “Why?”

Then off we went to Bethlehem.

A checkpoint barred the way;

Which didn’t baffle Joseph

In loaded Mary’s day

When buzzing flies tormented

And potholes lay in wait.

Now bored Israeli conscripts

Guard the embittered gate.

Our coach - containing pilgrims -

Was not delayed by much:

The wall is meant to stop the plots

Of terror-mongers - such

As bombers bent on suicide:

It stops them getting through.

(Though folk who need dialysis

Have transit problems too.)

The Church of the Nativity

Looms large in Manger Square.

Some came to pray and some to trade

To giggle, mourn or stare.

Our leader said “We westerners

May find the set-up odd.

Walk humbly, lest you trample on

The hidden grace of God. “

Down in the crypt a silver star

Is said to mark the spot

Where Christ the Lord lay fast asleep.

“Maybe -.or maybe not”

I thought – and prayed “Our Father”

As He himself advises -

My Lord of unexpected Hope

And King of strange Surprises.

We met a jobless pedlar

Where angels sang to sheep.

He sold me a pipe - authentic type –

The tourist price was steep.

But though its range is limited

I do my best to play

“ O come let us adore him”

To welcome Christmas Day.

For Bethlehem - beleaguered

Behind that wall, beset

By mutual fear and hate - needs all

The hope that it can get.

And so I aim my paper dart

Against this mocking wrong.

The wall, I pray, will fall one day:

But when? O Lord, how long?

www.johncoutts.eu Christmas 2011

To Tarik Gunersel (Turkish PEN) and others

Greetings from Scotland!

In 2010 Heather and I went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. We did not want to travel as tourists, and so we went with BibleLands - a small organisation which provides help to Palestinians - e.g the Helen Keller School for the Blind.(www.biblelands.org.uk) It is true that the situation is not improving - which fills me with even more admiration for the brave souls - of many faiths and philosophies - who keep the flickering cause of peace alive. We had the privilege of meeting some of them. I recall a similar situation in South Africa in earlier times - and the famous book "Naught for your comfort", written in the 1960s by Trevor Huddleston.

We were there at the time of the attack on the Turkish relief ship to Gaza, and on the last Friday of our visit, a large protest demonstration took place on the Temple Mount.

Sadly the town of Bethlehem is nearly surrounded by that great and ugly dividing wall . We were surprised to find that a protesting graffiti artist had sprayed a Scottish flag on it - which gave me the chance to have my photo taken - plus an idea for a poem.

With every good wish for the coming year.

John Coutts.

Writers for Peace Committee

Scottish PEN