Around a Room in Forty-two Days

We were recalling, my friend and I, the oddest people we’d ever met. He, an academic, thought that the great philosopher A. J. Ayer would take some beating. Freddie, as he was known, was giving a lecture on logical positivism when some elderly man in the front row interrupted him with a stinker of a question. Freddie stopped in his tracks, looked up at the ceiling, down at his shoes, then picked up a stick of chalk – this was before marker pens – turned to the blackboard and proceeded to cover it for fully five minutes with tiny white dots. No words, just stab, stab, stab. When the board resembled the Milky Way, Freddie turned back to his questioner and said: ‘I’m afraid, my darling, I haven’t the foggiest idea.

Walking home, chuckling, I remembered a curious little book I’d read years earlier, one chapter of which was composed entirely of dots. The other chapters, I recalled, were pretty strange too. The next day I went in search of a copy, and eventually got lucky. I reread it at one sitting. A Journey around My Room was the unlikely result of a duel. In 1790 Xavier de Maistre, a 27-year-old officer in the Army of Piedmont, fell out with someone over something, somewhere in Turin. One party called the other out, a duel was fought, and thus an offence was committed which merited punishment. De Maistre was sentenced to six weeks’ house arrest. Scarcely cruel and unusual, in that he was allowed the comforts of his own room, the company of his dog Rosine and the devoted attention of his manservant Joannetti. Still, for a full-blooded young man forced to cool his heels for forty-two long days and nights with only four walls to stare at, the prospect must have seemed a miserable one. In such circumstances, what can you do to fight off boredom? De Maistre chose to write a book. Not a novel, or short stories, or a play, or a treatise. Rather more original than that – a book about the journey he proposed to make around his prison. Travel-writing was in vogue. So why not stand on their heads the spectacular accounts of circumnavigators such as Magellan and Captain Cook? Journeying in could be as interesting as journeying out. So de Maistre set to writing his book – forty-two chapters long, or I should say short, because none is more than a couple of pages, some are just a few lines, and I’ve already mentioned the wordless rows of dots. (Incidentally, the excellent English translation sticks in two words of explanation among the dots, unnecessarily, in my view.) Forty-two is a playful number, of course, one chapter for each day, except that they’re not diary entries. It’s not a matter of ‘Today I did this, tomorrow I’ll do that.’ Though de Maistre does try to stick to a travel plan – on one occasion, for example, he nudges himself along in his armchair, swivelling left and right; on another, he reaches the sofa. But the trouble is that he gets easily distracted; one idea swerves and becomes another. Tangents, divagations. However, the book has two strong and consistent strands. One is a particular philosophical question, the other is irony. First, the philosophy: like Descartes, who’d also been forced for a while into inactivity in a restricted space, de Maistre ponders the vexed relationship between the mind and the body. Are they quite separate, each with its own life? When the body’s not in a position to do much, perhaps the only thing is to ignore it, bypass it, concentrate on the mind instead. So de Maistre lets his thoughts off the leash, lets them roam where they will, starting in the closed room itself. We learn of the virtues of his armchair and sofa; we hear about the mirror, which, like all mirrors, flatters the person staring into it; the praises are sung of his bedspread, particularly its colours, restful pink and white. Soon, though, de Maistre’s disembodied mind strays out of the building and starts to muse on people and events in his past; we’re taken about Turin, with a commentary on the city’s underbelly as much as its sophisticates. But don’t go thinking the Journey is a work of pure nostalgia or self-pity. No. For one thing, de Maistre enjoys teasing himself too much. I’ll return to that. But just when his mind seems to have escaped its prison, his wretched body – l’autre, as he calls it, dismissively – will do something to remind him it exists. Perhaps he stubs his toe, or he may need food, or his eardrums get a rude shock when there’s loud knocking on the door. If only the mind could do entirely without the body, and vice versa! But Xavier de Maistre is a philosopher only intermittently. His playful inclinations are more towards the literary. His natural affinity is with his near contemporary Laurence Sterne, that unsurpassed weaver of shaggy-dog stories. Playful brings me to the second strand – de Maistre’s style. His default mode is irony, particularly self-irony. Like Sterne, he’s always playing with the question, what is writing? Both men remind us that what they’re putting together is an artifice, ink on paper. When, as happens, each has concluded an especially demanding chapter, in order to give his exhausted reader a rest the chapter immediately following is very short, and says nothing more than that the poor reader thoroughly deserves a rest. Here’s another comparison: Tristram Shandy has a funereal chapter about death and so, out of respect, Sterne interleaves an entirely blank and black page halfway through. No words; the same sort of idea as de Maistre’s 102 dots. My favourite example, though, of de Maistre’s delight in pulling the rug out from under himself is the chapter which informs us that the previous one hadn’t been worth writing, let alone reading. Excellent. Two birds, one perfectly pitched stone. When his forty-two days were up, de Maistre left his room, stepped back into the real world, and was instantly hit by the most inconvenient truth that now his body, the other, was at liberty, his mind no longer would be. Only in the prison of his room had it really known freedom. Out in the world, his mind and body inevitably were going to resume the squabble which could never be resolved. Not to worry; de Maistre could always go back to his room and do it all over again. A few years later, that’s exactly what happened, but this time he travelled by night, reaching his window ledge. Then he wrote another delightful book about what he’d discovered in the stars.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 39 © Martin Sorrell 2013