The Château by William Maxwell
…wherever one looks twice there is
some mystery.
Elizabeth
Bowen
In speaking of Italy as
the setting for his novel The Marble Faun
(1860), Nathaniel Hawthorne (referring to himself in the third-person) wrote, “Italy
[he might have said Europe], as the site of his romance was chiefly valuable to
him as affording a sort of poetic or fairy precinct, where actualities would
not be so terribly insisted upon as they are, and must needs be, in America. No
author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance
about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no
picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in
broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case in my dear native land.”
Overlooking, for the moment, the glaring innocence (read: ignorance) of this observation
(think of slavery, think of the forced removal and genocide of native peoples),
Hawthorne nevertheless captures a sentiment that has resounded powerfully
throughout the history of this still-young nation he called home. From Hawthorne’s
own The Marble Faun, Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, Henry James’s Daisy Miller and The Portrait of a Lady, and Edith Wharton’s “Roman Holiday’ and The Buccaneers to Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky, Jane Bowles’s Two Serious Ladies, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, and Darryl Pickney’s Black Deutschland, the story of the
innocent American abroad is a theme that has figured prominently in our
literature since the nation’s bold if uncertain founding.
The Château by William Maxwell, first published in 1961, is a brilliant variation
on this beguiling, seemingly inexhaustible theme. Set in war-torn France, in
the years immediately following the Nazi Occupation, Harold and Barbara Rhodes
are among the first tourists to venture there, eager to absorb and bear witness
to the sort of history they, as Americans, have never known. Once in France it beckons them from everywhere; it throbs
for them like a missing limb, as they tour the ruined villages of Normandy, as
they take in the fabled Mont-Saint-Michel, and finally as they accustom themselves
to the quirks and austerities of Château Beaumesnil, where—innocent of
everything but their desire to see (a desire colored mostly by novels and films)—they
have reserved a room for a proper two-week stay.
Almost at once the
disappointment and confusion set in: “Was something not here that used to be
here and everywhere in France? Had they come too late?” Harold wonders, early on
in the story. Of course, as most travelers know, one seeks an adventure in part
for exactly that feeling, for the mystery of it, the bumbling, the sometimes
fearful confusion of signals and signs. One seeks such experiences for the way
they unravel one, distort one’s reflection, for the way they humble and
bewilder one. Each time one travels one is forced to learn the world again, to
see it freshly; one can take little for granted. One is forced to entrust
oneself to others, in whom even the simplest gestures and expressions must be reckoned
anew.
At heart The Château is a novel about just that,
about the human need to periodically disrupt one’s own life, to quicken one’s
senses, to challenge one’s complacency—one’s opinions, one’s values, one’s routines.
Good traveling—like good fiction—shakes one; it muddies the water in which
one’s truths and certainties swim. Merely the anticipation of arriving somewhere
strange is sometimes enough. In fact Harold’s perspective, his perception, is
altered even before he steps foot on French soil, setting the tone for all that
is to come. Looking out the porthole of their ship on the morning of their
arrival, he considers the city of Cherbourg rising dreamlike beyond the
breakwater:
The light splintered and the hills and houses were
rainbow-edged, as though a prism had been placed in front of his eyes. The
prism was tears. Some anonymous ancestor, preserved in his bloodstream or
assigned to cramped quarters somewhere in the accumulation of inherited
identities that went by his name, had suddenly taken over; somebody looking out
of the porthole of a ship on a July morning and recognizing certain
characteristic features of his homeland, of a place that is Europe and not
America, wept at all he did not know he remembered.
Read this novel, then go
to France, go to Europe, and see.
Peter Adam Nash
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