Tango, Lynne Tillman, Raymond Radiguet,

This is the season for Janet Baker singing Mahler songs at the hour of the wolf, around five o'clock, when darkness is falling rapidly and you've just started reading Le Diable au Corps by Raymond Radiguet, following on directly from Lynne Tillman Men and Apparitions. We are in a tango season. 

Reading Lynne Tillman made me think of Raymond Radiguet, his steamy old-fashioned schoolboy precision-tooled roman passionel, interspersed with pronouncements beyond his emotional age, as we might say now. Scandalous in 1923, the tale of of a sixteen-year-old boy and an eighteen-year-old girl recently married to a soldier who's away fighting in WW1, which was off, stage left, if you were sixteen and living in a strange kind of holiday, in a town beside the river Marne, where usual rules did not apply. Perfect for a poète maudit, a phenomenon of french literature, as Cocteau said, and he would know.

There is a hundred year gap between Tillman and Radiguet. Radiguet, who loved at sixteen, published at twenty and then died of TB, had a cultural vocabulary and some extraordinary grammar — what twenty-year-old now would know the past subjunctive in any verb at all, let alone scatter them throughout in full knowledge of how far away, how processed. His love runs along lines that reading has taught him. He is inclined, as Lynne Tillman is, towards the general statement, the tidy analysis, as well as an observational manner born out of reading Proust, Laclos and Baudelaire.

Mon esprit s'engourdissait peu à peu auprès d'elle, je la trouvai différente. C'est que, maintenant que j'étais sûr de ne plus l'aimer, je commençais à l'aimer.

Zeke Stark, ethnographer, Lynne Tillman's narrator, favours acronyms and abbreviations, as if he is writing notes for a thesis, and addressing readers who are used to reading notes. He makes clear his sources, books, films, tv series, snapshots, pix that r us, many of which are included in the book, he wields his culture, happy to be clunky, ready to be done over once again.  

In the beginning there is nothing, and nothing becomes something, and something becomes everything, and you're fucked.

The other night I watched Scent of a Woman, in which Al Pacino, embittered, angry, blind, dances as a blind man must dance, in the dark, in a New York hotel, with a doe-like girl whose uncertainty turns rapidly to enchantment. 

In my reading tango of Tillman and Radiguet, Tillman leads, with her overload of 21st century awareness, and Radiguet, fervent with new/old youthful passion, is the boy/girl, learning the dance as he glides and swoops and twirls.

The tango is a fault line between two dancers. Passion a fire that divides as much as it unites.