Psyche- a myth of love updated

Cupid & Psyche by Jacques-Louis David, 1817

In a previous post, I described the myth of the love between the nymph Psyche and Cupid (Eros), first told by Apuleius in The Golden Ass, and I considered some of the art created in response to that story. It is a romance full of tragedy and incident that makes for vivid visual images; many other writers have reworked the story as well, amongst them William Morris and C. S. Lewis. As I have mentioned before, the French author Pierre Louys was steeped in the classics and enjoyed giving ancient myths and tales new life and currency by retelling them. He was familiar with Apuleius and the travails of Psyche and Cupid provided him with the foundations for just such a work.

Pierre Louys’ unfinished novel Psyche is an account of a modern-day love affair.  Along with Woman and Puppet, this romance lacks the powerful erotic elements of the author’s other books and, whilst both the stories have their qualities, neither equal the energy and creativeness of either of their predecessors, Bilitis or Aphrodite.  The writer Claude Farrère (1876- 1957), who wrote the ‘Afterword’ to the 1927 edition of the book, declared Psyche, even without its planned third section, to be Louys’ most significant work.  More recently, the writer André Mandiargues rejected such praise, suggesting that modern readers only feel “boredom at its insipid soppiness.”

The form in which we have Psyché is, to quote Farrère , who was a close friend of Louys, “mutilated.”  Louys composed it between 1906 and July 1913, at which time he confirmed to an acquaintance that the novel had been finished.  However, as it exists, it is lacking all but a fragment of the first chapter of its third and final section.  The love story is not resolved, although it has been possible to reconstruct the lost ending.

Psyche Vannetty and Aimery Jouvelle (his name obviously plays on the French aimé– beloved) are acquaintances who meet one day in the street and, suddenly, perceive their potential to fall in love with each other.  Seized by this madness of infatuation, by that night they are on a train to Brittany together, where they spend a few weeks isolated at Aimery’s chateau, the ‘Castle of the Sleeping Beauty of the Wood.’  They share an intense period of emotional and physical union, until Psyche discovers a poem her lover has written which indicates that his love has faded, even though he has yet to perceive this.  Here the book as we have it ends.

The novel is, without doubt, the author’s greatest evocation of romantic love.  Sensuality is present, but it is treated far more subtly and allusively than in many of his other works.  For example, the couple’s union is described as being entirely pure because it represents that which is inexpressible between them and “that which it leaves [is] of the eternal.”  Love is the “sublime evocation of the immaterial being which reveals itself in us…  the physical part of carnal love is annihilated by love itself.” The relations between the sexes as portrayed in Louys’ writings- especially those of his later period- usually involve desire and affection, but deeper emotional ties often seem to be absent.  In the poems he addressed to his lovers, for example, the focus was their bodies and the sexual pleasure that was shared.  In fact, as we shall see, carnal love is not entirely absent from the story (being embodied by Jouvelle’s mistress Aracoeli) but Louys was evidently trying to write something different to his normal descriptions of passion. Claude Farrère sought to explain why Psyché had never been published:

“All his life he had sung of love… but this was the exclusively sensual love which had been sung, before him, by his great inspirations, the masters of Athens, those of Alexandria, those of Syracuse.  The day when he invented Psyche, a different love was revealed to him, one which until then had been unknown or disdained: this was the more complex love of more evolved beings, the full love which aspired to more than the simple pleasures of the flesh, the love which tends to join and mingle not only bodies but spirits, hearts and minds.  It was to this more modern passion that Pierre Louys, burning his ancient gods, resolved to consecrate his supreme effort.   Opposing the two symbols- Psyche Vannetty and Aracoeli- he had that which all painters attempt.  But Pierre Louys was not a painter.  In that brain, one of the most astounding that has ever existed, a pitiless wisdom watched perpetually, directing a critical spirit, as imperious as was the other spirit, the creative spirit of the poet… Caught between his acute clairvoyance and his tender preference, perhaps it was voluntarily that he took refuge in silence.”

Farrère, ‘The Conclusion of Psyche,’ in The Collected Works of Pierre Louys, New York, 1926

Farrère argued that Louys felt that he had been unable to resolve satisfactorily the tension felt by Aimery Jouvelle between his almost chaste, spiritual love for Psyche and the carnal passion inspired by Aracoeli.  The entire novel was read to Farrère by Louys in 1913 and his recollection of the final chapters was that when Aracoeli unexpectedly leaves to travel alone in the East Indies, it makes Aimery return to Paris, thereby shattering the rural idyll with Psyche.  Back in the capital, he realises that his love for her has burned out, as she has already perceived.  When Aracoeli returns from her journey, Aimery goes to meet her in Marseilles.  Understanding that the relationship is lost and that he has reverted to his concubine, Psyche travels back to the chateau in the snow.  She is, of course, locked out, and freezes to death outside.

Apparently, Louys felt unhappy with this conclusion; perhaps he felt that he ought to do more to promote the triumph of ‘true love’ over desire.  What we do know (a fact that Farrère probably did not fully appreciate when he wrote in 1926) is that in his later works (unpublished until after his death) Louys returned to his earlier erotic themes.  Rather than “burning his ancient gods,” as Farrère claimed, the author reverted to them with a renewed passion.  In the pages of Trois Filles de leur mere, L’Île aux dames, L’Histoire du Roi Gonsalve, Pybrac, Toinon and others, we see the unashamed triumph of Eros.

The most difficult and revealing character in Psyché is the young woman called Aracoeli, the mistress of Aimery Jouvelle.  He met her on a ship returning to France from Egypt and she is described in notably racist terms:

“She was born in Pondicherry, to a Filipino father and a Hindu mother, both of mixed blood. There was everything in her ancestry: Dravidian, Hindu, Spanish, Arab and Malay; certain native colourings left a Negro stain on her long fingers.”

Aimery seduced her during the voyage and then took her home as his ‘concubine.’  Aracoeli is portrayed as having natural or naïve habits:

“Aracœli much preferred to be naked. By dint of nature and indifference, she slowly came to have Aimery accept that she would present herself in front of all her servants and sometimes in front of his friends with no other veil than a pearl attached to her right nostril.”

As a result, she is able to hold him “by a certain primitive influence, a simple and naked charm which emanated from her and which constantly suggested to the mind and the flesh the taste of the ardent union.” She is docile, not jealous of his other lovers, and is depicted as unselfconsciously childlike or submissive.  We first encounter her playing naked with a monkey; she sits up “straight on her heels like an Egyptian slave; and in the kindest tone, without a reproach, without a bitterness in her voice, almost as she would have said: ‘How can I please you?’ she whispered [to him].”  She is even referred to as “the little slave.” Louys’ treatment of his character is distinctly chauvinist, betraying some of the deep-rooted prejudices of a white bourgeois male living in a colonial country. All in all, Aracoeli appears as something of a cypher; she is exotic, young, passionate in bed, and yet curiously disconnected from the world, showing no signs of possessiveness that might inhibit her lover.  Jouvelle seems to enjoy all the benefits of a youthful and enthusiastic mistress without any of the drawbacks.  Aracoeli, having grown up in a different culture (in which she mingled Catholicism with Hinduism) is presented as a novelty, a benign savage who behaves as she wishes, entirely untrammelled by our conventions. Her unreal carnality is meant to contrast with the character of Psyche, but for me she seems equally unbelievable. The novel’s heroine is a widow in her twenties, yet she is apparently a virgin and quite innocent. Jouvelle, meanwhile, is a privileged male unthinkingly enjoying all the advantages of his social position. In this respect, he resembles Mateo in La Femme et le pantin, whilst Conchita in that story embodies another female stereotype.

The fact that the novel was incomplete and unsatisfactory seems to be reflected by the fact that- in comparison to books like Bilitis or Aphrodite- very few illustrated editions were published. The first seems to have been in 1927, with fifteen plates by Fernand Hertenberger (1882-1970). His other illustrative work included La-Bas by Huysmans and Colonel Chabert by Balzac. In working on Louys’ novel, Hertenberger paid particular interest to Aracoeli and her monkey, a scene that would draw other artists as well.

Hertenberger, 1927

This publication was followed the next year by a translated edition issued for the Pierre Louys Society of the USA and featuring plates by ‘Yna Majeska’ (Henriette Stern). The rather obscure ‘Madame Majeska’ (d. 2006) was an American artist, decorator, book illustrator and costume designer who worked with Vanity Fair, the Zeigfeld Follies, Cecil B. DeMille and Irving Berlin. She was born in Philadelphia and at first worked as a dancer before receiving an artistic training in Europe. Back in her native country, she found that changing her name and pretending to be European she got her more artistic commissions. As well as Louys, she illustrated Sappho by Alphonse Daudet and the Japanese medieval classic, Genji Monogatari. Her frontispiece shows the final scene of Psyche arriving at her former lover’s house in the snow. This version of the book was reissued in 1931. Majeska also illustrated a collection of Louys’ early verse, translated into English under the title Satyrs and Women.

In 1934 a very familiar artist, Mariette Lydis, worked on the book as part of the set of Louys’ texts that she illustrated at that time. Lydis provided six plates, one of which was a colour portrait of the heroine. As was her preference, she gave particular attention to the female nudes in the text and, as can be seen, Aracoeli (and her monkey) proved to be a good deal more interesting to draw than the rather anaemic Psyche Vannetty.

Carlegle, 1935

1935 saw an illustrated version from Carlegle, whom we have discussed before. His numerous colour plates typify his slightly cartoonish style and, again, show a marked interest in Aracoeli and her preference for nudity and playfulness.

Lastly, after a pause of several decades, in 1972 an edition appeared with a dozen plates by Guily Joffrin (1909-2006). Joffrin was born in Paris and trained at the École des Beaux-Arts from 1928. She became a professor of drawing in 1939 but, in 1945, left teaching to devote herself to her watercolour painting and illustration work; she also designed stained glass windows. Female nudes were very important in her work, as may be judged by her response to Louys’ text.

Joffrin, 1972