The Morning Soul

This text was co-translated with @EnjoyDazibao.

Everyone knows that the Revolution set Soviet Russia’s clocks forward for the summer. Western Europe also sprang forward after the war, but it only did so to cut costs on lighting. All signs of morning conviction were missing in this measure born of crisis and scarcity. The big and middle bourgeoisie continued to frequent the cabaret, and capitalist civilization lit all of its evening lights, if clandestinely. This period is marked by its vogue for dancing and Paul Morand.

But the twilight had already been gathering by the time of Paul Morand. He represented the fashion of the night, his novels guiding us through a nocturnal Europe illuminated by an eternal artificial light. The title of who presided over the post-war’s decadent night does not rightfully go to Morand, however, but to Proust. Marcel Proust’s literature introduced us to a weary, elegant, metropolitan, and licentious night, one the capitalist West has yet to emerge from. Proust was the elegant, enigmatic, and neat night owl who bids farewell at two in the morning, before couples can get drunk and commit excesses in bad taste.

He withdrew from the decadent soirée before the arrival of the Charleston or Josephine Baker. It fell to Paul Morand, diplomatic and demimonde, to introduce us to the post-Proustian night.

The fashion of twilight belonged to the fin-de-siècle and decadent fashion of the pre-war years. Its great pontiffs were Anatole France and Gabriele D’Annunzio.

Old Anatole excelled in the genre of classical and archaeological twilights; the twilights of Alexandria, Syracuse, Rome, Florence, which he got to know on the cheap through the volumes of public libraries and trips of the spendthrift tourist who never forgets his suitcases on the train and plans out all the stops of his itinerary in advance. It was as the sun set, that discreet time where the sky is free of vulgar afterglows or scandalous clouds, that Monsieur Bergeret enjoyed bringing into focus twilight’s ironies, those ironies that ten years ago enchanted us with their sharpness and subtlety, but now bore us with their monotonous improbability and tedious skepticism.

D’Annunzio was more lavish and theatrical, as well as more varied in his vaguely Wagnerian Venice twilights, with the tower of San Giorgio Maggiore on one side, savored on the terrace of the Hotel Danieli by lovers, as a rule celebrities, nestled in the same room where George Sand and Alfred de Musset’s famous love took to the old embroidered bed covers; deliberately rustic and rural Abruzzese twilights, with goats and their kids, goatherds, bonfires, cheeses, figs, and incest straight from Greek tragedy; Adriatic twilights with fishing boats, lascivious beaches, moving skies, and an alluring aroma; semi-oriental, semi-Byzantine twilights of Ravenna and Rimini, with distinctively braided virgins in love and a slight taste of pearl oyster; Roman, Transtiberine, emphatically Olympian twilights enjoyed on the Janiculan Hill, refreshed by the Acqua Paola waters that fall into ancient marble basins, with reminiscences of the dream of Scipio and the speeches of Cola di Rienzo; twilights of Quinto al Mare, heroic, republican, Garibaldian, rhetorical, marginally seafaring, and very dignified despite the compromising neighborhood of Portofino Kulm and the misleading look and feel of Monte Carlo. In his magnificently twilight works, D’Annunzio exhausted all the colors, all the swoons, all the ambiguities of the sunset.

Once the D’Annunzian and Anatolean period was over — in Spain, if it were not for the sonnets of the great Valle Inclán there would be no traces left other than the sonnets of Villaespesa, the novels of the Marquis de Hoyos y Vinent, and the fake oriental gems of Tórtola Valencia — Ramón Gómez de la Serna, discoverer of the dawn, third-class passenger with a single suitcase in hand, arrived at a railway station in Madrid.

His discovery was slightly premature, but that is necessarily true of every real discovery. Proust with his stern tuxedo and a pearl on his shirt front, soft, tacit, pale, invisibly presided over the longest European night — a somewhat boreal night for its length — of extreme pleasures and terrible omens, lulled by the fire from Noske’s machine guns in Berlin and the fascist hand grenades on the roads of the Lombard and Roman plains and in the Apennine Mountains.

Now, although much of the Charlottenburg and Dublin night still lingers within it, the Europe that wants to save itself, the Europe that does not want to die, even if it remains a bourgeois Europe, is tired of its nocturnal pleasures and yearns for the prompt arrival of dawn. Mussolini sends Italy off to bed at ten o’clock at night, closes cabarets, bans the Charleston. A provincial, early-to-rise, peasant Italy, free of urban softness and cunning, with many rustic children on her wide lap is his ideal. By his order, as in Virgil’s time, the poets sing to the field, to the sowing, to the harvest. And the French bourgeoisie, lovers of tradition and work, assiduous, thrifty, modest, abstinent — though not Malthusian — also call for the fascist schedule and dreams of a dictator with Roman virtues and Napoleonic genius, one who would go tend to his wheat field and vineyard on vacations. Hear ye how Lucien Romier admonishes nocturnal France: “It is worrying for a people to give itself over to the pleasures of the night, not because of the evil that preachers find in this, but as an indication that such a people is wasting its days. Oh, Frenchman! If you want to grow and prosper, remember that man’s virility is affirmed in the morning’s triumph. It is at the break of dawn that the invader comes in with the rising sun at his heels.”

It is unlikely that Lucien Romier knows how to give up the night. He belongs to a bourgeoisie who, farsighted in its ruin, realizes that the new man is the morning man.