A Winter's Journal

by Emmanuel Bove

  We have to face the fact that Bove had almost no visible life—he was a subterranean writer, a mole working in the dark of poverty and urgent need—and that can by no feat of the imagination be everyone's cup of tea. He belongs to that class of writers with a rigorously circumscribed invention, whose universe is banal because quotidian, which is unmythic because it does not reach for any dimension beyond itself. Fernand Vandérem, an early supporter, pointed out in 1928 why even Bove's most popular book, Mes amis, met with critical silence: "Not the shadow of a thesis or an idea. A volume without ideas to agree with or argue over, critics find difficult; they don't know how to deal with it, what to write about it."{1} What he means is, the critic can't shine talking about Bove. As Bove leaves his characters to their own fate, so critics left Bove to his. Only a very few grasped the essence of his art.

  The point about critical failure is important. Now, too. For as critics have gained power, they seem to have lost the faculty of impartial reading. Satisfies only the writer who can serve as a structure on which critics can elaborate their own claims to be central, rather than parasitical, to literature. Céline, yes, an inexhaustible mine! Proust? To be quarried forever. Bove? Nothing useful there. Bove just represents the world: a man without theories.

  In this neglect, too, the academy plays no small part. It may be that, somewhere, a department of French literature might include Bove in its curriculum, at least in France, and possibly in Germany. I can find no trace of any learned articles on Bove among those who profess the metier of instructing the young in French literature. No theses!{2} The Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature remains silent! Only in the last few years have a few English translations begun to appear, and not always in translations that are particularly soignées.

  Bove was self-effacing to an astonishing degree. Which allows him to be effaced. No notoriety (that great savior of artistic reputation) attaches to him. He did not write in a cork-lined room, was not homosexual, not a communist (though his wife hawked the party newspaper at metro entrances), not a gossip, did not keep a journal—indeed did his best to obliterate his own life—was only once, so far as I can ascertain, translated during his lifetime.{3} He failed to cultivate critics, did not seek election to the Academy, did not frequent other artists.

  His timing continues to be rotten. His last prewar novel (not a success), Adieu Frombonne, his second with Gallimard, is published in 1937. When he resurfaces in 1945—46 with four remarkable novels, he is not present for interviews, being dead. Another literature, other reputations, are being made. A Jean-Paul Sartre, to Bove's credit, is another sort of literary animal. Albert Camus, who recommended Bove, was not long for this world either. And everyone wanted to forget the years before the war; they became, like the Occupation, discreditable. Bove is vaguely a resistant, certainly aligned with De Gaulle, but, being a Jew and in danger, he sits the war out in Algeria and is dead before he can claim his place in the myth-making of the Resistance.

  Then, when enlightened publishers and critics—or real readers with long memories—sought to exhume Bove, they ran into his wife. She had unrealistic views about her dead husband's value on the market and kept the flame of his reputation burning too close to her breast. As a result, projected reissues of his books fail: Louise wants too much money, times are hard.

  It is not a pretty picture. Bove is a case study in l'Oubli. Would Bove have survived at all were it not for the fact that, like the few Just Men, there are also some writers and readers of extreme generosity? Though these are far fewer than writers avaricious of their own reputations? The painter Bram van Velde inquires of Samuel Beckett in the early 1950s whom he should read. Beckett says: "Emmanuel Bove. No one else has his sense of the moving detail" (quoted in EB, 239—40). Revealing, for Bove is an avatar of Godot. Who else? The Swiss publishers Rencontre exhume Bove in 1964: with this very novel, this bleakest, most devastatingly Bovian of all his works. Had it not been for Raymond Cousse, an actor and fine playwright who killed himself in 1991, and to a much lesser extent the enthusiasm of a few others—Samuel Beckett, Peter Handke, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing—what would have happened?

  Think of the places where he is missing. As Cousse and Jean-Luc Bitton note in their admirable biography,{4} in the major standard histories of French literature, Bove gets short shrift. Bove is mentioned in Lalou's immediate postwar (1946) history of French literature; in 1949 he gets a page in Clouard's history, but only three lines when it is refurbished in 1962. He is cited in that standard work Bédier and Hazard (1949), but not at all in the Larousse (either the Twentieth Century or the New Grand Larousse.) He is missing from the Pléiade literary encyclopedia, and so on and on. Belgium to the rescue! In 1948, the Belgian poet and late surrealist Christian Dotremont, then twenty-five, takes up Bove's case in 1971. He writes a remarkably perceptive letter to the widow:

  Bove has invented a new way to see the real. His genius is to show us what is evident but which we do not see just because it is evident. . . He went beyond that: he accounted for the logic of the real, which seems absurd to most human beings, because their logic is not realistic. I think he took pleasure in showing how the logic of the real and Cartesian logic are in opposition to each other, (quoted in EB, 242)

  After Dotremont, the cinematographer François Beloux, in 1971 (he was then also twenty-five), began to unravel the Bove life in long, invaluable interviews.{5} Like Cousse, who did the hardest work of all (because he was the first), he, too, would take his own life. In 1972, a publisher of art books, Yves Rivière, proposes to reissue Bove in limited editions (only one, in an edition of 108 copies appears).

  I myself come to him purely by accident.{6} The name Bove is being bandied about; I stop by a bookshop below the Place Pigalle; I buy a slender volume, Afthalion Alexandre (which has obvious elements of Bove's father's life); beguiled, I translate it, immensely conscious of the difficulty involved in conveying a style at once so flat and "evident," to use Dotremont's word, and so nuanced, flexible, complex, and even mannered (has anyone but Proust played so originally with the many repetitious, insistent, subtle variations of the subjunctive mood? Or, since the great moralists, offered the reader so many bleak maxims about the human condition? Maxims, of course, in the Bovian style, expressing formulaic characterizations.{7}), and publish it in Bostonia.{8}

  ii

  Evasion by Choice, Life, and Work

  Who was Emmanuel Bove? His father (by no means the lesser figure in Bove's life, despite the fact that paternity runs much less strongly through the writer's work than maternity, or near-maternity), Emmanuel Bobovnikoff, was born in the Kiev ghetto in 1867, and showed up in France toward 1897 after having walked through Germany with stops in Berlin and Strasbourg.{9} He is generally known as le Prusco, a generic name applied to Germans of the old federated armies who settled in France or along its borders;{10} and indeed, German seems to have been, for many years, his first language. There are other paternal relatives: a grandfather who also walks to Paris, with fleas, and an aunt who is described by Bove's younger brother, Léon, as so deadened that "one knew she came from a faraway land and had been drowned in misery" (quoted in EB, 26).

  Bobovnikoff pére is listed on his passport as sans profession, which suggests, in those far-off days, either wealth or unemployment: in his case, the latter. At least nothing regular, unless you want to consider the state of marriage as employment, though he did set himself up as writer, publisher, printer, and vendor of a dictionary for Russians visiting the 1900 Exposition. What father contributes to son—alongside poverty, an often reused model of optimistic inventiveness and fantasy, a world of Defoe-like "projects," and a mother fecundated almost in desperation—is a spectacular vision of repeated failure and, ensuing from that, the dreadful fear of falling that haunts those who aspire to the middle classes and see themselves forever in danger of slipping, forever, into the proletariat. This living on the edge of the abyss is a reiterative theme in the son.

  Bobovnikoff also clearly
had charm, was a ladies' man and rarely without a mistress. He offered a high brow, a well-trimmed beard, narrow shoulders, and much wistful yearning. In Léon's words, he is a dreamer: "His main idea was that as there were people with too much money, one might as well take advantage of the fact."

  Bove's mother, a lifelong problem to him—along with his beloved, richer stepmother, the problem (guilt, incest, envy, Oedipus flourishing)—was born Henriette Michels in 1874 in Luxembourg. Her father was a decent farmer who ran a logging business and owned lime kilns. He also drank to excess and died at fifty-four, propertyless, his body turning violet in death, as if pickled. Henriette was the sixth of twelve children, all of them educated by nuns, and none of them feeling much affection for each other.

  It is likely that Henriette was slightly mentally retarded: "At seventeen," Léon reports, "not having had her period, she was convinced she was pregnant, though she had no idea how this might have happened." She was a victim born. In Cousse's description, "a rather simpleminded woman, strictly brought up, and hardened by circumstances."

  A little before seventeen, her father dead a bankrupt, Henriette is in Paris, where she lodges with a brother. The only employment available is as a maid of all work, a skivvy: an occupation she pursues with diligence, abused and half-starved, in Paris, Orléans, and Marseilles. It is during her second job in Paris that she succumbs to Bobovnikoff senior. This sordid, utterly Bovian scene is described by her son Léon as follows:

  When around ten at night Henriette, worn out by her work, returned to her garret, almost nightly she would stumble across a sort of student who lived in another attic room on the same stairwell. The "student" was a thirty-year-old Russian in frayed, dirty clothes. He had a little pointed beard . . . and lived a life of Bohemian destitution, surviving by expedients amidst constant rows . . . Every night he would slip little notes under [Henriette's] door . . . Then one night, Henriette having left her door open to talk to other servants who shared the floor, he managed to slip into her room and hide under her bed. When she had finished undressing and was about to fall into bed, the Russian quit his hiding place. She shouted . . . and the Russian fled to his room, pursued by one of the maids who threw water on him . . . Though constantly rebuffed, and thanks to a misplaced insistence that combined cheek and unbelievable candor, he succeeded in his purpose. With a sort of presentiment, however, standing on the balcony beating a carpet and spying that thin and bearded Russian . . . Henriette said to herself: "Any man but that one." (EB, 31)

  Thus, appropriately, like a scene in one of his own novels, was Emmanuel Bove conceived. The Prusco confined her, two months before delivery, to the French states equivalent of a home for wayward girls, from which she promptly walked out. The couple then set up house in one room on the top floor of a building overlooking the Montparnasse cemetery, and there Emmanuel was born. He can see it from his grave.

  Henriette's hatred of the men who betrayed her (Bobovnikoff senior certainly, and Emmanuel probably), and of the woman who was to come between herself and a "decent life," later became engraved on her soul, which was always an unforgiving one. She wanted marriage, and failing that—the Prusco ironized about the prospect: "Sure," he said, "let's take the twopenny bus and go off to the Mairie"—she insisted on respectability. The Prusco's soul was of the more sentimental and would-be conscientious sort. He did what he could for her, and certainly for his children (for Léon was to follow short of three years later.) He did not want to live with her, certainly; nor, however, did he wish to abandon her heartlessly. He felt more pity for Henriette than affection, which carried over to his oldest son, and perhaps even, had Léon been more self-aware, to his second.

  The breach between them came in 1899, when Bobovnikoff met Emily Overweg, who was three years older than he was, ten years older than Henriette (she was then twenty-five), English (by nationality and birth, in Roehampton, if not by blood), and rich and artistic. Though she was a plain woman, and half a hand taller than Bobovnikoff, Emily was everything that Henriette was not: she didn't scrub floors, she played Chopin and painted; she wasn't inflexible, but understanding—in Victor's words (Victor was the third Bobovnikoff, and Emmanuel's stepbrother), "charming and very tolerant"(EB, 37).

  This family background is important to understanding Bove in that, first, he never discussed it, save in fiction; and second, the obvious culpability Bove felt at his imaginary near-incest. There is a photograph of Emily, Bobovnikoff-as-swell, and young Victor in costume (together with a nanny) strolling in 1914 in Menton that tells a story. Bobovnikoff's beard is fuller; Emily's fur wrap is in the height of fashion; Victor, the result of this mutually profitable union, is clearly safe, and everyone in the picture knows it.

  Somewhere in the space that separates Bobovnikoff's two liaisons, there is a writer in formation, yearning toward Emily's world, dreading that which contains his mother and younger brother. Yet, despite the fact that Bove effectively commuted between his two families, as for that matter did his father, only a few, very rare stories (and Le Beau-Fils) touch on the world which Emily represents. Henriette and the world of the poor is Bove's sheet anchor, his drag, the fate he has to live with. He is too fine a realist to mistake that fact.

  Missing fathers are the secret gardens of writers: they are such an elementary fact for many children. Bove's missing father—he is missing in most of Bove's novels as well—is both there and not there: perhaps least there when needed, as when Henriette and her children are thrown out of apartment after apartment, and there when least desired, bringing with him the fragrance of that other life on which his first family depends. To grow up in the complex geography of Bove's two families must have been like going with a compass to the Pole, a place in which all directions are equivalent. Bove's heroes, almost all men, resemble the Prusco, and Bove's writing is that of the itinerant and intermittent schoolboy that he was: bereft of a controlling, reassuring worldview, desperate for a salvation that was ever just in the offing, and circumscribed by a dismal reality.

  To read Léon (a reliable though resentful witness, at the rudimentary level as much a writer as his older brother, but without genius), life—between evictions, importunings, and unexpected salvations—sounds like hell. They were lodged in San Remo while the Prusco was in Menton, for so Bobovnikoff had decreed, and Henriette knew no better than to obey. She was a woman entirely without inner autonomy. Between absent father and incompetent mother, literature became, for the young Emmanuel, a means of survival.

  The explanation may seem rudimentary (if common enough), but it has ample evidence to support it. Bove himself dates his writing vocation from about his fourteenth year. But is it need, or more simply an excess of sensibility, a genuine neurosis, a need for guilt? There are clues, after all. First there is Bove's own mirrored description of himself as an adolescent in Monsieur Thorpe, a miniature Bildungsroman of adolescence, "discovered" in his own life and experience:

  If I remember well, I was then visibly terribly shy . . . The slightest reproach threw me into turmoil; I blushed at the slightest thing. Nonetheless ... I was forever committing indelicacies. I constantly found myself in disagreeable situations, particularly when I had to justify myself for having done something I knew was ugly but had, however, done, and had to defend myself against people who were certainly right. Bit by bit, for those around me, this gave me a reputation for falsehood.{11}

  Falsehood, of course, is what fiction is. Recently I ran across a French definition of sexual perversion which strikes me as particularly apt for that form of perversion we call "writing":

  Putting into play a partial pleasure or an aspect of pleasure which seems sufficient unto itself; having recourse to associated elements—ritual, scenarios, place, specific object; the irresistible side of such a desire or momentary impulse; its personal, confidential character, which makes of it a mystique for whoever lives it, and excludes a partner.{12}

  Put together this prevailing guilt, this culpable habit, and the extremity of Bove
's solitude, his habit of detaching himself and observing—

  One of my most ardent desires was to feel safe, in a place to which I alone could have access, a desire to retreat within myself which I can only compare to another desire, that to possess a piece of land, however tiny still so huge, since it would belong to me, deeply and forever, in whose basement I would have dug out a palace, to the point of encroaching on my neighbors' properties, since no one would ever have known.{13}

  —and I think it becomes plain where this "writing by seeing" (écrit avec le regard) ,{14} as Jean-Yves Reuzeau writes, originates. Bove's fiction is first lived, and then occurs, as fiction. And, despite the strong autobiographical content of his work, should we not take it as significant that he was never tempted to the journal form? That his correspondence does not seem to have been, as it was to most writers of his period, an important exploration of themes? That he barely survives, as a person, in the memory of others? That he inexplicably misses all the great controversies and events of his time?

  Whatever the prime cause, Bove's intent, or his acquiescence to his fate as writer, almost certainly takes form in adolescence, and that adolescence is marked by a significant event: he divorces his mother and for the next six years dwells in the paradise (so erotically potent in Le Beau fils) represented by his father's new wife, Emily. For ten years he had lived more or less exclusively with his mother; but from the age of ten to sixteen, when he returns from England, he lived with Emily. It was a radical change of environment, if not any more stable. In Emily's house he received the rudiments of a "proper education"; he rode, learned to play golf and tennis; and, as his stepbrother Victor says, "he heard intellectual and artistic talk about him; in another milieu he might never have become a writer."