Dumas Among the Gods

...So there is nothing distinctively French about this genuflection before the household gods of "popular memory and collective imagination": it is kowtowing to the democratic abstractions currently in favor, here as over there...

...fatal erotic mishaps send France and England careening into savage war...

...Pheasant aplenty nested in the waist-high grass and timothy weed...

...When I was seven, our family moved from a Chicago suburb of tightly clustered bungalows (which happened to be the place where the young Theodore Kaczynski would cultivate his prowess in mathematics and social theory) to the next town over, just two miles west but a world apart...

...To live fearlessly, like a born warrior, is the sweetest of fates, however it might end...

...Six or eight of us formed a band of brothers, or a tribe of Indians, or a scouting party of frontiersmen...

...It was with scornful amusement, then, that I read last December that Dumas's corpse had been ceremoniously exhumed from the village churchyard in his hometown of Villers-Cotterets, where it had lain since 1870, and that it had been relocated to the most hallowed of resting places for French literary men: the crypt of the Pantheon in Paris, where his remains join those of Hugo, Rousseau, Voltaire, and other divinities...

...Only the provocative appearance of the detested cardinal's detested men keeps the story from ending before it's begun...

...One summer day the boldest and most vital boy in our company arrived looking grim and distressed...

...D'Artagnan, no musketeer yet, declares he has a musketeer's heart, nevertheless, and joins the fight on the side of the men he was ready to kill a moment before...

...Between 1841 and 1850, when he was at the height of his powers, Dumas produced forty-one novels, twenty-three plays, seven histories, and six travel books...

...The branch never broke, and at last, cotton-mouthed and panting, I dropped it and started running home as fast as I could...

...As I've said, we were not a principled bunch, but none of us showed any sign of amusement at this tale;it simply shocked and sickened...

...but I now had an inkling of what makes justice-loving men go to war, even if they hate and fear it...

...some rabbits went up and came down several times before they died...

...I cultivated a determined set to my jaw, a dauntless and penetrating gaze, and a confident gait tastefully just this side of a swagger...

...Address, wit, brio, and easy courage: such a bravura display of virile plumage marks not a deskbound scribbler, but a virtual musketeer...

...With him, our popular memory and our collective imagination enter the Pantheon...

...We dug a lot of holes—mostly wide-mouthed pits, but sometimes burrows diving straight down, then bending sideways sharply, like tunnels leading out of stalag or stir to sweet freedom, though ours, of course, never really led anywhere...

...Of course, on this side of the infernal gates, there must always be hope...

...every war, every school shooting, every racist murder, every lie by a public official brings out the chorus of journalists, grief counselors, and other sages to tell us we have now lost our innocence...

...Dumas prides himself on wielding sword or firearm as capably as he does his pen...

...But there is something very French indeed about just what it is in Dumas that the people's memory and imagination so treasure: Dumas did contribute significantly to making the French French...

...Strict composure, which frequently takes the form of death's-head humor, is maintained to the grave's edge...

...Then Dumas leads his boys by a roundabout route to see some action...

...When one man's amour-propre brushes indelicately against another's, blood is bound to be spilled...

...that evening my parents would be certain to denounce the savages who must have infiltrated from the low-rent neighboring town in order to do such a thing, surely with the intent of burning us out of house and home...

...There is nothing finer, in Dumas's world, than to be a musketeer...

...Thus lasting manly love is forged in the presence of death...

...I picked up a fallen branch thick as my waist and began swinging it like a baseball bat against a tree trunk...

...Somehow amid all this boyish commotion I read a lot of books, and when I was ten years old, I came upon The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas and discovered the way of life I was surely born to lead: manly adventure transformed into literature...

...Dirt-ball fights, usually conducted in the earthworks around construction sites—civilization was closing in—would last for days, with appropriate intermissions for eating, sleeping, and school...

...Needless to say, like nature's own productions, they weren't all impressive...

...They eat without relish...

...The captain recognizes Dumas, whom he saw at a performance of one of his plays, and tells him he must be a lunatic to risk his life when his vocation is not to fight but to write: Go home, he advises, and convince your companions to do likewise...

...The cleansing element was fire...

...On the one hand, the upstanding musketeers...

...the finest women seem to be married to the ghastliest men, whether the cowardly haberdasher Bonacieux, whose beauteous wife becomes D'Artagnan's lover, or the unprepossessing King Louis XIII, whose beauteous wife is the lover of the Duke of Buckingham...

...Accordingly, the earlier your acquaintance with the world's brutality, the harder it strikes and the longer it stings...

...I'm fighting because I'm fighting...

...No one doing the fighting seems to mind that he may die for no better reason than the jealousy or adulterous itch of king or queen or cardinal or nobleman...

...Energy, determination, industry, sensuality, sentiment, curiosity, joie de vivre, these were the qualities in Dumas that prompted the historian Jules Michelet to tell him, "I love you and I admire you because you are one of the forces of nature...

...Twice I spotted a fox padding insouciantly as a housecat along the dirt road leading to the hospital...

...I learned to keep a poker face...

...I thought of the rabbits and burned for vengeance, for justice swift and sure and without mercy...

...He said that the night before he had gone to the movies with his elder brother, and in the parking lot afterward, they had come across a large group of high school kids, fifteen or sixteen years old: the older kids had dug up a rabbits' nest and were lobbing baby rabbits high in the air and cheering when the rabbits hit the pavement...

...the real French are the loathsome varlets...

...Americans lose their innocence as readily and as repeatedly as they misplace their car keys...

...Here ours was one of maybe a dozen handsome and capacious houses in an area a half-mile square...

...We went through the motions of entertaining ourselves for an hour or so, climbing trees that overlooked the creek...

...I was putting myself through an apprenticeship to a life of consummate glory, while they were just being kids...

...we'd go wading in pursuit of frogs, turtles, and crayfish, and turned our dirt to mud...

...they rut without fire...

...Nature should be so wantonly prolific...

...I was starting to think, however dimly, about the meaning of manliness, and Dumas did not offer any serious help...

...At judicious intervals, we would set the prairie alight, for the hellion's joy of watching it burn...

...These were my friends, and they all humored me, but none of them went so far as actually reading the sacred text...

...As the young D'Artagnan's father tells his son as he sends him off to seekhis fortune, "Nowadays a gentleman makes his way by his courage—do you understand—by his courage alone...

...They are the precursors of Nietzsche's last men, whose only appetites are the lowest ones, and whom democracy will produce in cockroach multitudes...

...Still, prodigiousness on this order makes an impression all its own...

...On his second day in Paris, D'Artagnan finds himself scheduled to fight three duels in succession, with the very musketeers who will become his sworn brothers, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis...

...Women really go for these men, and the men all hope for a serious worthy love themselves, though they are not above the usual trifling...

...Romantic and political intrigue are inseparable...

...Dumas says he really cannot do that...

...Earth, water, and fire figured prominently in our festive rites...

...No one has explained how it always manages to grow back...

...Now this cuddling up to mass taste, as though the charms it favors were every bit as desirable as works of the highest intellect and beauty, we know all too well in our part of the world...

...During the Revolution of 1830, he goes barreling into the Parisian streets, gun in hand, where a crowd of men takes to him as their natural leader...

...Rabbits, chipmunks, and field mice were everywhere, and their ubiquity and diminutive stature rendered them beneath contempt...

...I had outgrown la gloire as advertised by its most accomplished shill...

...My Memoirs, which runs to over a million words and only covers his life to 1833, abounds in rich incident such as one finds in the life of a man who knows how to live as few men do...

...Moral clarity announces itself more vehemently in childhood than later in life, when you would think your moral sense ought to be refined to a pure and pellucid focus, but when in fact it tends to grow ever cloudier and more tricky to read...

...Dumas himself, who lived from 1802 to 1870, was the sort of heroic figure every Frenchman imagines himself being...

...one by one my friends drifted home, and I was left by myself...

...on the other, the born lackeys and the contemptible bourgeois...

...For me, hearing the account of the rabbits tortured and killed for sport was the definitive loss that changed my view of the world...

...The engineering was primitive as it gets, and by all rights one of these excavations—we called them forts—ought to have collapsed with ourselves inside...

...We were all studying French in school, and I took to spicing my conversation with oaths from the novel that the translator had thought it best to leave in the original: Morbleu and Sang de Dieu fell from my lips with casual Parisian splendor...

...When an army regiment in the service of the king blocks their path, Dumas buttonholes a captain and requests that the impromptu platoon of revolutionaries be allowed to pass, for there is fighting to be done at the city hall...

...The occasion for death comes upon these men suddenly, but never unexpectedly...

...And it is only natural that so magnificent a temperament should be bold and expansive in action as well as on paper...

...I continued ever to imagine myself as the superb D'Artagnan, winning every available distinction by virile daring, even as I did my utmost to brain one of my pals with the business end of an uprooted plant...

...A musketeer will reach for his sword at the drop of a hat, or of a lady's handkerchief, more easily dissed than the craziest homeboy, he will skewer anyone who comments unfavorably on his political allegiance, his taste in women, or the cut of his doublet...

...But for us the weapon of choice was the saber, which in the absence of cold steel left us improvising with the sinewy stalks of sunflowers, preferring the shorter specimens—a length of two to three feet was ideal—to the unwieldy giants that towered over us and might have served as lances, but not as respectable swords...

...Sometimes the fire department would arrive to douse the blaze, which achieved some spectacular effects...

...Reading him, you get the sharper sense of how the French like to think of themselves and of the difference between smug self-conception and unsavory actual fact...

...I considered myself an embryonic musketeer and did my best to look the part...

...Not only does Dumas get the recognition he has always deserved, but the French populace, which in its wisdom has discerned Dumas's greatness all along, is honored for its literary and moral perspicacity...

...It is fair to assume that Dumas hoped his depiction of rare heroism and common cowardice would have a tonic effect, but what happened is that a nation of Bonacieux supposes itself a race of D'Artagnans...

...M. Jacques Chirac, whose animadversions on American gunslinger foreign policy are ever pungent and overripe as fine Camembert, struck the more customary note of insipid sonority as he oversaw Dumas's reburial among the gods...

...In due course reality sandbagged us...

...Tumbleweeds, airy skeletons, would skitter down the street, fast as the November wind...

...Should there happen to be any extant French literary men of discernment and backbone, they would best serve their country by digging Dumas up again and returning him to the blessed solitude where he belongs and where the sweet scent of violet and delphinium overwhelm the pestiferous fragrance of French national glory, so long dead but not yet buried...

...We will get over our failing...

...The lackeys and the bourgeois make a career of cringing and cowering and grubbing for a few copper coins...

...We were not a highly principled bunch, and this ignominious and degenerate form of sport never offended our sense of martial propriety...

...No musketeer ever wants for courage...

...on parting, with the Gallic equivalent of chutzpah, Dumas tells the captain to come see him if he want tickets to Dumas's latest play, which the Censorship has suppressed but which will open as soon as the Revolution is over...

...I had a largely idyllic if not entirely innocent boyhood myself, composed of equal parts bookishness and rampaging boisterous sport...

...The French love Dumas only because they refuse to understand him, to recognize themselves for what they are: fearful little men, living for the pleasures of belly and groin, and thinking themselves the cream of humanity...

...I'm fighting," Porthos blushed a dee crimson...

...Boyish fantasies of derring-do, of risking everything for fame, wealth, and love—I'd had a pin-up of Ann-Margret in short-shorts taped inside my desk at school—never possessed the same allure after that...

...an Oldsmobile dealership and a hospital tacked down two corners of this space, and an elementary school stood just down the street from us, but the rest was glorious Midwestern prairie...

...Most of the kids in that school up the street, and thus most of the friends I made, lived just outside the boundaries of this privileged territory, literally on the other side of the tracks, in a blue-collar town of wooden-frame duplexes...

...The reason for such duels is not often a very good reason...

...The Three Musketeers was a boys' book...

...The French, however, look to be forever and ever the French...

...the only works from that period to last were The Three Musketeers (1844) and The Count of Monte Cristo (1845...

...I was startled at how small it was, but trembled at the sight of it, for some reason having always considered fox to be equal in size and ferocity to wolves...

...I did not read another word he had written for many years...

...Combat would traditionally begin with some pretense of dashing swordsmanship, but it always ended up in a riot of mad thrashing with the object of splintering your opponent's weapon and getting in as many licks to his head and shoulders as you could...

...Thus a grave historical injustice is redressed, with the solemn gaiety of a musketeer taking on a gang of Richelieu's guardsmen...

...but the worst we ever got was extremely dirty...

...they bolt when danger threatens...

...Professors of literature in what were once distinguished universities commonly deride the notion of a canon or great books, since to suggest that some books are better than others offends against equality and diversity, which are not the inviolable democratic virtues...

...Here is the truth about Dumas's world, as only a disinterested foreign eye can now see it: the musketeers are pure fantasy, or at best a relic of a past long gone...

...The order for this belated apotheosis came from the very top, by presidential decree...

...the world's cruelty will see to that...

...but then there are those other men unworthy of the name, who are unwilling to die for any reason...

...Water was always near at hand—a creek cut through our preserve—yet it never did wash us clean...

...The Library of America, purportedly dedicated to preserving and propagating native masterpieces, has placed the writings of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain on an equal footing with those of Herman Melville, Henry Adams, and William Faulkner...

...Nobody bit...

...Today, Alexandre Dumas is no longer alone...

...It became clear that our adventures meant something different to the others...

...At the time, living it meant playing at war with my friends, whom I undertook to intoxicate with accounts of seventeenth-century Gallic military virtue...

...electric shivers shot through my arms, but I kept swinging and swinging...

...Adultery is a matter of course, with nothing shameful about it, except for the cuckold...

...And one's grave is always ready and waiting, for everyone is everyone else's potential enemy...

...American innocence is often a pitiable and ridiculous and perilous thing, but French self-delusion is utter spiritual ruin...

...First I'd live it, then I'd write it...

...Our childish wars generally took one of two forms...

...No real man, at any rate, minds dying for no good reason...