A Translator’s Note
“Dreaming is another world.”
—Gérard de Nerval
WHY DID François-René de Chateaubriand go to America? If his Mémoires d’outre-tombe are to be believed, it was because he feared for his life. In 1789, two years before he journeyed across the Atlantic, he had seen the severed heads of Foulon and Bertier carried through the streets of Paris on pikes and then watched as the chaos mounted around him. “It was enough to bear an ‘aristocratic’ name to be exposed to persecution,” he writes: “the more conscientious and moderate your opinions, the more suspect and prone to attack.” By January 1791, the twenty-two-year-old chevalier had made up his mind to leave the turbulence of Paris for the coast of Brittany and set sail for the United States.
But he was not about to leave France without some ostensible purpose for his trip. That would have been out of keeping with his character, and if the Republican authorities came to think of him as an enemy of the state fleeing from justice, potentially dangerous. With the encouragement of his mentor, Malesherbes, he convinced himself that he was going to America not only to save his neck but to discover the Northwest Passage, the semilegendary sea route connecting the Atlantic with the Pacific—a plan hatched out of desperation and a child’s fascination with tales of exotic adventures, guidebooks, and maps.
Whether Chateaubriand seriously imagined he could discover the Northwest Passage without any financial assistance or knowledge of North American terrain is unclear. Leaving aside the horrors he had witnessed in Paris, he had little experience of the wider world. He was a Breton boy who’d grown up in Saint-Malo, a stony port town famous for its seagoing sons (Du Fresne, Jacques Cartier), and at the tender age of twenty-two, his proudest accomplishment was having placed a short poem in the Almanach des Muses, the appearance of which, he recalls in the Memoirs, “nearly killed me with hope and fear.” It is just possible that such a person at such an age might really have believed that he alone could find what no earlier explorer had found.
In any event, Chateaubriand sailed for Baltimore from Saint-Malo in April 1791 aboard a two-masted vessel called the Saint-Pierre. After a series of stops in the Azores, on the island of Saint-Pierre, and along the Virginian coast, he arrived in Baltimore in July, traveled on to Philadelphia and New York City by stagecoach, up the Hudson to Albany by boat, and on horseback through the dense forests of New York State to Niagara Falls. Beyond this point, Chateaubriand’s itinerary becomes hazy, as if clouded by the great falls’ mist. According to the Memoirs, he went from Niagara to Lake Erie, from Lake Erie to Pittsburgh, from Pittsburgh to what today is Cairo, Illinois. Considering the limited velocity allowed by early American travel and the fact that Chateaubriand had fractured his arm by falling off a high rock while trying to get a better view of Niagara Falls, it would have required fantastic diligence to cover all this ground and still catch a ship back to France from Philadelphia in December, but I suppose it could be done. I don’t suppose, however, that Chateaubriand could have gone on, as he claims, to follow the Natchez Trace down from Nashville before wending his way through Kentucky and Virginia, over the Appalachian Mountains, back to the mighty Delaware, all in the course of five late-eighteenth-century months. At some point, the journey he recounts is sublimed from the shifting sands of memory into the upper atmosphere of imagination.
It is not hard to comprehend why Chateaubriand felt free to bend the truth about his travels. When he visited America, he was younger than Shelley or Keats in their prime, and though he was nearer to thirty when he wrote about America in Atala and René, he was by then a starving exile in England, showing all the gruesome symptoms of advanced tuberculosis; he could have had no idea that he would survive, become famous, and then, in going on to write his autobiography, as Alfonso Reyes puts it, “be obliged to enlarge his journey immeasurably.” Yet I suspect that this view of the matter is too rational, too close to the ground. I suspect that Chateaubriand conceived of America—as he conceived of his father’s medieval castle in rural Brittany—as a land of dreams, a continent of solitude, a second space. This second space is essential to understanding Chateaubriand’s writing.
•
The Mémoires d’outre-tombe are not exactly a historical document. They are a concoction of the imagination, a composite of memory and myth. Julien Gracq, in his book Reading Writing (1980), acknowledges this when he speaks of Chateaubriand’s “mythomania,” which is to say his tendency to mythologize experience, to heighten reality, to insert himself, Where’s Waldo–like, into every conceivable historical tableau. Probably there is no clearer example of this tendency than the account Chateaubriand gives of his meeting with George Washington in Philadelphia—a meeting that in all likelihood never occurred. In July 1791, when Chateaubriand claims to have called on Washington, the president was laid up in bed, recovering from the recurrence of a carbuncle on his left buttock, and by all accounts was not seeing visitors.
Faced with this almost certainly fictitious episode, readers who value the Memoirs mainly for their historical insights are forced either to condemn the author as a self-aggrandizing liar or, as the biographer George Painter does in Chateaubriand: The Longed-for Tempests, 1768–1793, to set themselves the hopeless task of proving the veracity of Chateaubriand’s inventions.* On the other hand, readers who come to the Memoirs as a work of literature seldom seem to care whether the interview with Washington ever took place. In the eyes of Gracq, the episode is proof only of Chateaubriand’s raconteurial charm. “Even when he recounts his fake visit with Washington,” Gracq says, “his mythomania always remains good-natured, a wink at the reader.” Indeed, most of the Memoirs’ finest French readers (Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Roland Barthes, Marc Fumaroli) have hardly paid the fake visit with Washington—or, for that matter, the fake voyage to the American South—any mind.
One could draw large conclusions from this divide between French and English reactions to Chateaubriand’s fibbing and say that while the French are satisfied by a well-told tale, we Anglophones can’t help but fact-check. Given a choice between beauty and truth, we prefer the truth, ideally unvarnished. Just consider the colorless titles the Mémoires d’outre-tombe have been given over the years by English publishers and translators: Memoirs of Chateaubriand (anonymous, 1849); The Memoirs of Chateaubriand (Robert Baldick, 1961); The Memoirs of François René, Vicomte de Chateaubriand, Sometime Ambassador to England (Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, 1902).† Every one of these titles suggests that the significance of the book lies in the author’s pedigree or the conjuring power of his name. And in doing so they belie the very thing that distinguishes Chateaubriand’s scribbling from the hundreds of other memoirs composed by his contemporaries: its artfulness, its architecture, its phrasal flair, all that the historian Philip Mansel calls “the seduction of its style.”
My approach has been different. Although this is not a complete edition of the Memoirs, it does reproduce the first of the work’s four parts, including the oft-omitted chapter headings and detailed dates of composition. As for the translation, it is, I recognize, imperfect and provisional—a failure in a sense. However, as I failed, I tried always to bear in mind that the work I was wrenching into English was the work of a writer steeped in literary tradition. I hope that this is reflected in the prose itself, but it is on deliberate display in the notes at the end of the volume, where I have tried to give some sense of Chateaubriand’s personal canon. This canon included not only the expected Greek, Latin, and French classics but the English, the Italian, the Portuguese, and the Persian, not to mention Jewish and Christian scripture, medieval lais, Breton proverbs, popular song lyrics, and Catholic hymns, all of which are incorporated into his gargantuan text.
Compiling notes is child’s play, though, in comparison with trying to capture some reverberation of Chateaubriand’s style in English. Because this style is stifled in earlier translations and abridgements, it may sometimes seem to echo later writers who followed after it. Thus, in my rendering, Chateaubriand may occasionally sound like Cioran (who called him “a sonorous Pascal”), or Baudelaire (who called him “one of the surest and rarest masters”), or Proust (who compared his distinctive sentences to the barn owl’s distinctive cry), or Sebald (who so seamlessly integrated passages of the Memoirs into the penultimate chapter of The Rings of Saturn). It is not that I intended to echo the style of any of these writers, but that, in certain turns of phrase, certain attitudes, certain moods, all of their styles resemble one another. Chateaubriand is their precursor.
The Memoirs from Beyond the Grave have come to be considered a classic of French literature as much for the elegiac beauty of their language as for the way they capture an age. If they are the recollections of a sometime ambassador, a part-time politician, and a onetime celebrity, they are also the masterwork of an artist in consummate control of his prose. The person who writes that, on the day of his birth, his mother “inflicted” life on him, who makes up a meeting with George Washington and has the gall to declare that the first president “resembled his portraits,” has picked up the plume for more complicated reasons than the urge to compose a record of his times. The seductiveness of the Memoirs’ style—what Barthes calls the “vivid, sumptuous, desirable seal of Chateaubriand’s writing”—makes questions of factual authenticity seem piddling. The voice of the Memoirs is the voice of the private man behind the public façade, the grown-up boy who left home out of fear and in search of the Northwest Passage, the death-haunted exile, the solitary writer at his desk at night, who knew that he had to imagine himself and his world into being, as if everywhere were America, a second space and a dominion of dreams.
—ALEX ANDRIESSE
* Painter is at pains to demonstrate that Chateaubriand did indeed meet Washington, just not in the month that he remembers having done so.
† Baldick (or the people at Penguin Books) originally titled his abridged translation The Memoirs of Chateaubriand, although when Penguin reissued the book as a paperback in 2014, they also rebranded it: Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb.