A collection of entrancing literary fables from an underrated master of the form … Perfect for the fans of David Mitchell, Julio Cortázar and Steven Barthelme are these 15 dreamlike tales.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from C. D. Rose’s Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea, which is out January 23rd 2024.
Welcome to the fictional universe of C. D. Rose, whose stories seem to be set in some unidentifiable but vaguely Mitteleuropean nation, and likewise have an uncanny sense of timelessness — the time could be some cobblestoned Victorian past era, or the present, or even the future.
- A journalist’s interview with an artist turns into a dizzying roundelay of memory and image.
- Two Russian brothers, one blind and one deaf, build an intricate model town during an interminable train ride across the steppe.
- An annotated discography for the works of a long-lost silent film star turns into a mysterious document of obsession.
- Three Russian sailors must find ways to pass the time on a freighter orphaned in a foreign port.
- A forgotten composer enters a nostalgic dream-world while marking time in a decaying Romanian seaport.
In these 19 dreamlike tales, ghosts of the past mingle with the quiddities of modernity in a bewitching stew where lost masterpieces surface with translations in an invisible language, where image and photograph become mystically entwined, and where the very nature of reality takes on a shimmering sense of possibility and illusion.
The Disappearer
Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince was born in Metz, close to the Franco-German border, in 1841. When only a small child, his father introduced him to Louis Daguerre, and the boy lost himself in the photographer’s laboratory. Iodine, chlorine, bromine. The boy was in love. He disappeared there, for the first time. They found him hiding in the darkroom. The smell of chemicals stayed with him: aged eighteen he went to Leipzig to study chemistry and while there befriended John Whitley, scion of a Yorkshire engineering dynasty. On finishing his studies, Louis accepted his classmate’s offer of a job in the family firm, and ended up
with more than mere employment: in 1869, he married his best friend’s twin sister, Elizabeth. Strange that at such a moment—newlywed, a new career and home ahead of him—that Le Prince should disappear again. But disappear he did, as into the darkroom, for nearly two years. His name appeared on a regimental list, dated 1870: Le Prince had helped to defend Paris in the siege that marked the end of the Franco-Prussian war. This, only, is known. For the following year, including the two months of the Commune, his movements are obscure.
By 1871, however, he was in Leeds, working for his father-in-law’s brass valve company and helping his wife to set up the Leeds Technical School of Art, an idea as radical and strange in that day as our own. The few students who enrolled later recalled little of Le Prince, remembering only a man constantly busied, if not troubled, by his work.
In 1881 the firm sent him to New York in pursuit of a contract. He spent most of the monthlong voyage locked in his cabin, but sometimes, at night, he would walk the decks, staring at the dark horizon, trying to identify the scarcely visible line that divided sea from sky. Contract won, he opted not to return to Leeds, but instead sent for his family (now including three children). Over the next decade he travelled frequently back and forth across the Atlantic, though Elizabeth and the children stayed in New York. By 1889, he had decided to settle in America for good and set off for a final trip to Europe, returning to Leeds to conclude his affairs.
A year later he was still there, his business having taken longer than anticipated. Eventually ready to leave, feeling he would no longer return to Europe, he went to France. Two friends from Yorkshire accompanied Le Prince as far as Paris, where they stayed while Louis went on to Dijon to see his brother, a struggling architect. The reasons for his visit are far from clear, a final fond farewell, perhaps, an invitation to America, advice on how to run his business. A ‘question relating to an inheritance’ was mentioned by the friends, though from whom, to whom, and of how much is not known.
On September 16, 1890, Le Prince boarded a train in Dijon for Paris. He was due to meet his friends there, go back to Leeds, collect his belongings, then leave for New York, where his wife and children awaited him. He was never heard from again.
Five years to the day after Le Prince’s second disappearance, two brothers who both worked for their father’s photographic company headed south to visit the small port of La Ciotat, not far from Marseilles. If they’d been looking for a beach holiday, they wouldn’t have been lucky: even though it was September in a Mediterranean town, it was cold. You can see by the heavy clothes the people are wearing in the film the brothers made that day.
First shown at the end of 1895, the Lumières’ L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat is often called the earliest moving picture. Less than a minute long, a single unedited shot, L’arrivée certainly looks like the first modern film. The images move fluidly, no longer jerky flip-book photos, and the camera is placed close to the edge of the platform to best capture the velocity of the oncoming train. As the film begins the train is not visible, but it rapidly curves in, blurring slightly even in digital reproduction, then comes into extreme close-up as it meets the viewer face-to-face, still going too fast to stop, before skewering off, screen left, a trick. Once gone, we see the carriages halt quickly, disbursing a few passengers as others get on.
‘Gare’ is putting it strongly. There is no platform, no station building visible, no blue sign. There is bustle, a stationmaster. A few people glance briefly at the camera; most seem not to notice it.
The Lumière Brothers were unsure of what they had created, thinking they had discovered an interesting gimmick, an amusing modern gewgaw that they soon dropped in favour of colour photography. (Later, one of the brothers recorded his disappointment that people were more impressed by moving black-and-white images than static colour ones.)
The story goes, of course, that as the Lumières’ train arrived on screen, audiences fled. One observer wrote how his neighbour howled in fear, then tried to hide under her seat (which seems a strange thing to do as protection against an oncoming train). This outbreak of panic has since been much doubted yet remains one of cinema’s founding myths. The power of the moving image to simulate life and provoke wonder: Film is an art of disappearance. Traces of light pass across a surface, convincing the viewer that something is there, only to vanish. It promises that which it simultaneously denies.
Europeans think the Lumières invented cinema; Americans believe it was Edison. Muybridge, Eastmann, Bouly, Prószyński, Friese-Green, and Guy-Blaché, men and women with their kinetoscopes and dioramas, biophantic lanterns and chronophotographs, are almost entirely forgotten.
L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat is part of the story that has effaced these others: no one is actually sure if it was first shown in 1895 or in 1896. It probably didn’t cause panic. It certainly wasn’t the first ever moving picture.
The first-ever moving picture had already been made, nearly ten years earlier, by Louis Le Prince. In October 1888, on that brief trip back to Europe, Le Prince continued what he had been doing in America and carried out his most complete experiments with recorded moving images. In New York he had left the family firm and started running illuminated diorama shows while refining their technology, developing a single-lens camera from his original cumbersome sixteen-lens monster. Elizabeth, his wife, worked in a school for the deaf in Washington Heights, where by night Louis projected his images onto blank walls. (Marie, their youngest daughter, would later recall the nights she crept up to the large dark room where her father lost himself, closed in his work. She remembers watching huge shadows leap around the walls, cold flames, spirits.)
In 1886 Le Prince applied for a patent for his single-lens camera, apparently sensing only the potential market value of the machine itself, rather than that of hauling it around county fairs or travelling circuses, much less of opening a chain of screening rooms or cinemas (he never gave any public screenings or exhibitions of his invention.) Three years later he took dual French-US citizenship, believing it would make the process easier. Before the patent was granted, however, he made that last trip back to Europe to collect his machines, settle his affairs, and, almost incidentally, make that first ever film.
Barely two seconds long, Roundhay Garden Scene shows Le Prince’s son Adolphe together with members of the Whitley family self-consciously parading around the garden of a large house in a Leeds suburb. Less than two years before Le Prince’s final train journey, it’s impossible to watch these flickering people and not wonder what they know, and what we don’t.
There are many theories regarding Le Prince’s eventual end. The immediate hypothesis was that he had committed suicide. Financial difficulties, a failing marriage, perhaps. Who can fathom the motives of so many superficially successful suicides, that most effective of disappearances?
Yet it is not only the lack of motive that weakens this theory. How had Le Prince managed to leap out of a speeding train without a single witness? Perhaps he had not done himself in by jumping from the train but had simply slipped away at a provincial station, checked into a tatty hotel to slit his wrists, drink poison, or fashion a noose from a dirty sheet. Yet were this so, why was no body ever found? And, if he was about to commit suicide, why would he have taken his luggage with him?
He may have been the victim of an assault, murdered, and his luggage stolen. Again, the lack of witnesses gravitates against this, as well as the fact that Le Prince was six foot four, well-built, and probably handy in a fight.
By 1898 an American company, Mutuoscope, had built a camera based on Le Prince’s model (possibly with the collaboration of Elizabeth and Adolphe, the eldest son) only to find itself arraigned by the notoriously litigious Edison Electric Company. Adolphe testified for Mutuoscope against Edison. Two years later, Adolphe was killed in a duck shooting accident on Fire Island.
Under English law, then as now, it was seven years before Le Prince could be declared legally deceased, and accordingly his effects were impounded until 1897. By the time anyone could get their hands on the camera, it was history, as if someone today invented a dial-up modem.
There are other endings to Le Prince’s story. In 1966 a researcher into early cinema unearthed a note written by the director of the Dijon Municipal Library: Le Prince est mort à Chicago en 1898, disparition volontaire exigée par la famille. Homosexualité. As with so many aspects of the story, this explanation provokes more questions than it answers. Who was it written to, and why? What was Le Prince doing in Chicago? Why ‘at the family’s request’? And that last, terse word?
In 2003, a photograph of a drowned man resembling Le Prince, dated 1890, was found in Paris police archives. If it is Le Prince, the irony: to disappear, and then be discovered by a photo. We are undone by that which we do.
We have only the word of Le Prince’s brother that he actually boarded the train at Dijon that day. No other witnesses came forward. From Dijon trains only headed northeast to Paris, and south to Marseilles. It is possible that Le Prince did indeed get on that train to Paris, then jumped, and headed south.
The train arriving in the Lumières’ film moves so quickly it is easy to ignore everything else happening, the crowd pushed out of the way of advancing modernity. But look carefully: Thirty seconds in, someone leans from a window, readying himself to open the door as the train draws to a halt. A tall, thin man leaps out with an agility that belies his age. Even though he looks scarcely over thirty, he must be nearly fifty-five by now, his moustache shorter, befitting the fashion of the times. He has no luggage or bags of any kind. He hunches his shoulders in that way tall people have of trying to make themselves look shorter, less obtrusive. He’s also thinner than the well-built athlete described by others. Perhaps he hasn’t eaten well for the past few years. What has he been doing? Where has he been?
He steps out of the carriage and looks back questioningly, as if expecting another person to follow or be waiting on the platform, perhaps. Then someone bumps into him, he turns, notices the camera, and hastily shuffles out of the frame. He is on screen for less than five seconds.
I watch the film over and over again, its few seconds as tantalising as the Roundhay Garden Scene. There is no sound, of course,nothing more than a few seconds of image to give up their secrets.
No trains arrive in La Ciotat anymore. The station is abandoned, though it has not yet disappeared. An occasional TGV thunders through, too fast for a Lumière camera to capture anything other than a rapid black blur. Usurped by better, more famous stories and a voracious patent-grabber, Le Prince has been written out of history. And though you may watch that originary film again and again, it will not give up its secrets.
