A Winter's Journal

by Emmanuel Bove

  Peter Handke hesitated to translate the book into German. As he wrote Cousse, "It would take a lot of courage to translate it. I couldn't write such a book. That [Bove] was able to write such books, so black and so right, is a mystery." Biographically, La Coalition is no mystery. As Léon notes, "It is us [my mother and myself] he has set down, at the heart of our lives." This is the obsessive Léon speaking, whose entire world is himself and his mother (Louise and Nicholas in the novel), but in fact the presiding ghost in La Coalition is the father, M. Aphtalion. It is he who made social immigrants of his wife and son. It is his dreams, his fecklessness, which paralyze them. It is his "foreignness" which renders them incapable in a real world, one whose language of obligations they do not understand. Seeking to borrow money (yet again!) from his Uncle Charles, young Nicholas, who no longer even thinks of getting a job, is told firmly that life is not a matter of luck: "You have to want, you hear me, young man? But not want just like that, up in the air, but really want something. Take me. When I want something, I can't sleep, I can't eat. No matter what happens, I still want . . . What do you think of that, eh? That would amaze the people in your country." Well, Nicholas's country, like Bove's, happens to be France. But everyone spots how mother and son don't seem to belong where they are. The hotel treats them like "dirty foreigners," Nicholas's girl feels there's something "alien" about him. It is a status that will weigh on Bove, too: the Bobovnikoff status.

  Now, despite being successfully launched on a literary career, despite his happy marriage to Louise, disaster is lurking in the wings. It comes in a context that radiates contentment and a certain illusory well-being. Bove's life seems quite normal. Bove's son, Michel (born in 1924, and like Nora from Bove's first marriage, to Suzanne), asked if he would rather stay with his mother or come and live with him, relates that the question was "hardly honest. He talked about horses, golf, a life of ease ... I felt he was a grand seigneur, without realizing he didn't have the money to keep it up."

  The question indeed wasn't honest, but it's one that belongs to normal life, and would not be unfamiliar to a child of our own times. Similarly, when we read Louise on their life at the time, it carries no omen of disaster. On the contrary:

  Mornings, he would play golf. The afternoon he worked in the study he had designed. He hated noise, the comings and goings in the house. He built a library with his own hands. It had more than 3,000 books. Rare editions were his pride and joy. At five, after tea, we would go out together. We never went out without our dog, a Brie, and cat, a Persian Chinchilla. We always took a box at the movies, because the dog didn't like staying home alone. (EB, 186-87)

  The condition of a gentleman of leisure, indeed. Or is this public relations?

  Whatever, on September 6, 1936, the couple is forced to leave Compiègne. Bove has had a flu, he hasn't looked after it properly, and now he comes down with pleurisy. As Cousse puts it bluntly, "this respiratory illness marks the beginning of a phsyical and psychological etiolation" (EB, 193).

  Bove lives by his pen; now he can't work, or only intermittently. Louise's mother dies, as does Bove's own mother (of breast cancer). Now Léon, orphaned, redoubles his demands for money; Louise has to put him off, for they haven't much themselves. The novel written in Compiègne, Adieu Frombonne, sells only 1,300 of its run of 3,000; it gets little or no attention. Bove is forty; there are clouds on the horizon; Bove senses the slipping away of his powers. In a notebook, he writes:

  I am alone in a hotel room ... I look back, for now that's the most considerable part of my life . . . Nothing great, nothing noble, nothing worth mentioning. Nothing in life is more tragic than this sort of cut-off against which, as one ages, one approaches. What is provisional becomes doubly definitive. The sort of gesture by which one might free oneself becomes daily more difficult to perform. One makes it anyway, but it weighs, it's embarrassed. (EB, 196)

  Weakened by a long convalescence, depressed, he jots down what could be a note toward a future novel: "As I reach my middle age, I realize I have nothing, that I've always been wrong, that I've always acted like someone who thinks he's on the right path when in fact I was on the wrong one. Everything breaks up, and that's how I am today. I have no friends, no money, no job." Then, switching to his potential fictional character, he goes on: "He saw everything as black, and odd as it may seem, he felt a certain relief. Having admitted that he had nothing ... he felt a bitter pleasure in being free" (EB, 196-97).

  In March 1939, he published a collection of such tales, La Dernière nuit. The title story, wrote Edmond Jaloux, is that of a "Bovian man, alone in a run-down hotel room, who tries to measure the insanity of his life." Jaloux goes on to mark what I think to be a central issue in the Bove oeuvre: "He is a writer of the twilight zone, one of the sharpest explorers and analysts of those ill-lit fringes that surround and sometimes obscure the very core of our life. When our times are past... his greatness will consist... in the way he shed light on these so far ignored intermediary states."{30}

  His next novel, Mémoires d'un homme singulier, is refused by Gallimard ("It's about Bove's usual hero," the reader reports, "and his usual story"). In the original draft, which differs somewhat, especially in its ending, from the published version,{31} Bove seems to establish, in the words of his hero, his own balance sheet:

  I no longer want to live this way. I am so disgusted with the life I've led, I want to make a clear break with it. Is the war going to do this for me? ... If a new war breaks out, this time I'll be a hero or I'll be killed. But there'll be no war. I won't be killed. What shall I do? I'm forty-one ... I have to risk my life if I want happiness. Unless I write some more books. If I can't tell stories, I at least can tell the truth. Perhaps that's my destiny, (quoted in EB, 200)

  The war came, as Bove knew it would. He was a Jew, so was his wife, who was also a communist. Mobilized, he is assigned as a "military worker" to a steel mill in the Cher, then as secretary to his local commanding officer; when France is defeated, he demobilizes the local farmers, then himself.

  Like a true Bovian character, France becomes a twilight zone. No posturing from Bove. He understands what is going on around him: "If every Frenchman were to examine his heart ... he would realize the immense relief he felt when the armistice was signed." This is the territory Bove explores in the first of his last two novels, Le Piège. Vichy is Bove. It's as though all the most marked characteristics of his nature (given the heavily autobiographical nature of most of his writing, that also means all those traits portrayed in his novels—susceptibility, fear of failure, indirection, silence, fantasy, doubts about others, inability to connect, fatalism, ambiguity) had been applied to Vichy and France during the Occupation. With his usual gift for picking the right, defining text, Cousse picks out Bove's essence of Vichy:

  With the crush of people who had invaded the town, with all the difficulties that each of them faced, amongst all those whom one might have known in Paris, but didn't frequent, there was no room for any sort of solidarity. One shook hands, one forced oneself to look as happy on the tenth time one met as on the first; one felt the sympathy one feels in an immense catastrophe, pretending to believe that misfortune unites rather than divides, but as soon as one stopped talking of the general wretchedness and tried to interest someone is one's own petty problem, it was like running into a wall.{32}

  Like his hero, Bridet, Bove was in Vichy (he and Louise were living in Lyon) to find a way out of France. What is wonderful about this most Kafka-like of his novels is Bove's total detachment. Though Bove had refused to allow his novels to be published during the Occupation (and was thus, unlike many French writers, on the "right" side, something which the Gallimard family could not say), Bove maintains his unjudgmental stance: things are, and life is hard enough without subjecting human frailty to condemnation. Though the man from whom Bridet sought help, Paul Basson, is a thinly disguised portrait of Jean Giraudoux, not a word of reproach was ever heard from Bove.

  Nonetheless, the times were da
ngerous. Vichy was creating its own anti-Semitic legislation, and the "France and the Jew" exhibition had opened in Paris (December 1940), with Céline sitting, half-smirking, in the back row. Salvation was not a fiction for a Jewish writer who was refusing to publish and whose wife was a vociferous communist. Like a good number of other artists, Bove and Louise first sought refuge in Dieulefit, a Protestant stronghold and a refugee center since the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, a remote village, charitable and possibly (the question is controversial) "tolerated" by the Vichy government. Whence we have a remarkably accurate picture of Bove and Louise in the last years they shared:

  He went about like a shadow, slightly bent-over. He looked almost-ill. He was sweet, very gentle. Though a handsome man, one hardly noticed him. He was convinced by what he wrote; he wrote for nothing; nobody would ever read him. His wife was an extrovert. On the outside, she was what he was inside . . . He wanted to leave no traces of his passage.{33}

  From Dieulefit, they moved to Cheylard in the Ardèche to await a way into Spain. By the summer of 1942, the anti-Semitic laws were beginning to press, and a few weeks before the Germans took over southern France, the pair of them undertook the long and hazardous journey out of France, through Spain and into Africa, via Gibraltar—all of which is described in his last novel, Non-Lieu (Charge Dismissed). Bove carries with him a novel written in the last two years, Un homme qui savait, which is a species of summation of the prewar Bove, his attributes and interests, that secret part of his characters which he alone perceives.

  It is the story of Maurice Lesca, a doctor struck off the register, and his sister Emilie, raped by a farmworker on her parents' property. As age creeps up on them, they unite their "poverty, inaction, and even their mutual scorn in the attempt to survive" (EB, 210). A brief anthology of Lescaisms will, I think, show how compelling is Bove's analysis of character, his quite certainly morbid, even pathological, study of failure:

  Now I understand why I failed in everything I've ever undertaken. I understand why I'm poor, why I have no friends, no wife, no child ... I please only those who suffer, those whom life has already eliminated, only in places where nothing happy could ever happen to me.

  I was speaking like a reasonable man. But I'm not reasonable. I've never been. You know that. Things have to be left as they are. One must live. One must love. One musn't dwell on one's wretched mistakes . .. there are times when I become like a real Don Quixote. I can't bear attacks on those I love. And then, day after day, I'm far too much alone ... I think too much, and I realize I've always been fooled, that all the good I ever wanted to do was ridiculed ... so I revolt.

  Nothing terrible had happened to him, he no longer wanted to think. His face hadn't changed . . . When people asked him something too precise, the middle of his face trembled, as a precision instrument might on a table when someone walked by it ... He knew nothing. He didn't want to know anything. Why did people ask questions? Couldn't he be left alone?

  I am becoming someone else. Suddenly I feel I'm about to be in great pain . . . and I feel nothing at all ... In my panic I am quite incapable of maintaining my relationship with the few people who feel sympathy for me. I want to do all sorts of things and can do nothing.{34}

  This collective cri de coeur is pure Bove: the flat, declarative sentences that succeed each other, imperceptibly widening misery with knowledge; the purported neutrality of a camera that knows of no psychology, that never explains. This is what The Man Who Knows knows. All Bove's people do is continue to survive. As Bove and his wife must.

  Though Bove is by now terminally ill (my view is that this publicly unacknowledged fact is the determinant of his later fiction), Algiers, where he and his wife arrive, a week after the Allied invasion of North Africa, on November 1, 1942, is nonetheless something of a respite for Bove. He rents a room where he can work, and once again we have a memorable portrait of the man: "He walked about with his hands behind his back, bent over, pale as a cave-dweller . . . His voice was muffled, always very calm. His way of speaking, the sobriety of his gestures, impressed me. He often smiled, and he had good eyes, kind eyes."{35}

  In October 1944 Bove and Louise (she has to pawn her jewels to pay their passage) finally receive permission to return to Paris. Isolated, his books largely forgotten, his last two novels in limbo, he died (of "heart failure after a series of acute malarial attacks") during the night of July 12-13, the day before the fall of the Bastille. Perhaps in order not to be noticed. His brother Léon has the apartment disinfected, as his mother had done on the death of Bobovnikoff. Why not? Father and son were intimately interconnected; they died at the same age and in the same conditions. For which we have the testimony of Bove's son, Michel: "I got a call saying, 'Your father is dead.' I rushed over. The bathtub was full of dirty dishes. It was terribly hot, and we couldn't open the windows because of the oompah-oompah of the balls for the Fourteenth of July" (EB, 238).

  iii

  Journal écrit en hiver, A Brief Exploration

  Bove is a writer for true readers. Though he is still startlingly effective with nonliterary readers, of whom there used to be more than there are now, and though his work shares more than a little, in both style and theme, with what used to be known as "shop-girl" literature—that is, stories with recognizable characters written directly and realistically—this novel is far from a quick fix, even for those who have read a good deal of Bove.

  In the first place, it is much closer to mainstream French writing. It has overtones from a number of other writers, including especially Paul Morand and Bove's close friend Pierre Bost (another remarkable writer to be rescued from the memory-hole.) Second, it strays from those themes which give Bove such an individual voice. The hero of the Journal, Louis Grandeville, lives in a recognizable Bovian nowhere-land, but he at least has a home, a wife, a servant, and a large circle of decently placed friends. Neither he nor anyone else in the novel actually works for a living. We are told he has lost 100,000 francs in a recent transaction; he doesn't bear his broker much malice. Another peculiarity is the lack of specificity as to place and milieu. Normally addresses and districts in Paris mean a lot to Bove—he is as admirable a cartographer or topographer as Léautaud—but this novel smacks of a one-set stage: the home of Louis and Madeleine, with occasional forays to mundane events such as dinners and "at homes." In short, it is a novel of bourgeois manners, with a close relationship to some, though not all, of Le Beau-Fils, which follows it three years later.

  It is not a book that immediately yields up its treasures. The journal, even of so acutely self-conscious a character as the narrator, lends itself better to analysis and reflection than to narrative action. As is true of most journal-writers. The opening chapter, for instance, shows us a writer in search of his subject. The quasi-anatomical or entomological style does not help the reader get into the narrative, to become interested in its hero and his relations with Madeleine. It is not until the entry for October 20 that we become directly engaged in the novel's subject: whether a "life devoid of any affection, of any goal, a life one fills with a thousand trifles intended to relieve its monotony, populated with human beings one seeks out in order not to be alone and whom one flees to avoid being bored by them, whether such a life isn't ridiculous, whether anything whatsoever wouldn't be preferable."

  The implication is to do something else; but of course the Bove hero is condemned to be himself, and this fact alone makes the Journal one of the most unsparing novels on the self-destructive impulse in all marriages ever written. At the same time—because its subject, jealousy and the harm two human beings can do to each other, is so universal—it is thoroughly accessible to the modern reader. The manner of sexual attachment, of the commerce of marriage, may have changed, but the fact that a stable relationship between two persons of the opposite sex is one of the riskiest of all human transactions is unalterable. The wary reader will simply ask himself, have I behaved like Louis? or ask herself, am I a Madeleine?

  Not, of co
urse, that we enter into Madeleine's mind. It is Louiss image of Madeleine that affects him. He owns that image as he thinks he owns Madeleine, and one of the many mysteries in this extraordinary novel is that one has no idea how or why they have ever got together to practice their mutual auto-da-fé. An auto-da-fé is two things: the judicial act or sentence of an ecclesiastical court (the Inquisition, or marriage) and the execution of the sentence (burn, baby, burn.)

  The reason for Madeleine's sentence is set out in the first entry:

  She accuses me of being jealous, of thinking that the world is wicked, never for a second perceiving the truth in my observations, nor the profound love which is at the heart of my desire that she not be the laughingstock of our friends. She doesn't understand I'm only trying to protect her. Instead, she thinks that I go out of my way to discover faults in her which no one has noticed.

  To summarize a Bove novel is always hazardous. In fact, it is very likely (this is one of the many seductive aspects of the Journal) that three different readers would come up with three very different definitions of the central subject. The translator has her view, which is judicious and exact:

  Louis is a man obsessed by the nagging reality that he never has and never will amount to anything. The "winter" of the title is in fact a period of four months during which, every few days, Louis commits to paper the minute details of his unhappy marriage. Although his wife, Madeleine, is the focal point of his journal, and his obsession with the minutiae of her life, mind, and body, is dangerously so, his painstakingly rendered analyses of her behavior tell us far more about him than about her. The book's incongruity lies in the contrast between the unsavory traits Louis reveals about himself and the innocent candor with which he does so—he is a sort of idiot sadist.{36}