Laziness in the Fertile Valley
Page 17
In their villa on the outskirts, Serag’s father scares him from looking for a job in the city by telling him that the government has arrested rebels. “But was he a rebel? Was his desire to look for work and to mingle with working men a revolutionary act?” Cossery writes. “Serag didn’t understand why his love of an active life should be considered by the government as an attempt at revolt against the established laws.” In 1945 alone, thousands of workers were arrested during trade union strikes and government crackdowns. It was too dangerous to hope for better labor conditions, or to challenge the monarchy held up by strings. Instead, as Cossery wrote in Laziness, “the country slept in its snare.”
On July 2, 1952, a few months before its publication date, a case of the New Directions edition of Goyen’s translation of Les fainéants, then titled The Lazy Ones, was lost or “hijacked” off a truck somewhere in New England. On the 23rd of that month, a coalition of young Egyptian army officers led by Gamal Abdel Nasser overthrew the regime in a coup d’état. With Farouk exiled, Nasser introduced socialist reforms, seized foreign businesses, and redistributed Egyptian wealth. “Arab nationalism is fully awakened to its new destiny,” Nasser declared in 1956, as he pushed for the nationalization of the Suez Canal. And yet, as workers were killed by the police and intellectuals imprisoned, it became clear to many that the awakening had only replaced one bad dream with another. In Cossery’s 1964 satire The Jokers, a mad old lady has a dream about her son’s friend Heykal (perhaps named after the author of Zaynab, an opposition leader.) A practical joker and an anti-authoritarian agitator, Heykal and his comrades set out to topple the regime by postering the city with embarrassingly effusive pro-government propaganda. In the dream, Heykal is riding on a white horse and slaying a dragon. Yet after each blow, the dragon is reborn and refuses to die. “And you, prince, you laughed and laughed,” recounts the woman. “And I knew why you laughed. Deep down, you didn’t want to kill the dragon; the dragon entertained you too much for you to want it dead.”
Revolution is futile, yet Cossery’s heroes do not mind. Were it to succeed, it would leave them with no one to laugh at. Though he had highly politicized friends, such as the Egyptian communist Henri Curiel, Cossery himself never joined any political parties. “I hate politics,” he said in an interview, “but I cannot write a sentence which is not a rebellion.” He understood that a mode of living, expressed in his novels and in his daily life, could be revolutionary. In conversation with Michel Mitrani, his interviewer, exasperated, remarked, “This dormancy, it’s totally engulfing!” “But it’s a symbol,” Cossery replied, “of refusing a certain world.” Whenever he was asked why he writes, he would reply, “So someone who just read me decides not to go to work.” In Laziness, as Rafik attempts to dissuade Serag from undertaking such a thing, the slumberous Galal enters the scene. “Why are you awake!” he groans. His brother explains their predicament. “God help him,” murmurs Galal. “God is with the lazy,” Rafik declares. “He has nothing to do with the vampires who work.” “You’re right,” echoes Galal. “Where can I sit down?”
Goyen’s translation of Laziness in the Fertile Valley has been in a deep sleep for sixty years. At various intervals, the idea of rousing it was debated, but editors feared it had gone musty. In Cairo in early 2011, I had brought a few of Albert Cossery’s books with me. Egypt was in a state of euphoria: by overthrowing Hosni Mubarak’s thirty-year dictatorship, it had done what had seemed impossible. Reading his novels amid the exhilaration of the uprising, Cossery seemed irrelevant or, happily, wrong. Yet not long after, following the elections that installed the Muslim Brotherhood in power, the new rulers began to instate their vision for Egypt’s future. They granted themselves sweeping powers, restricted civil liberties, and imprisoned dissenters, in the midst of economic crisis and electrical blackouts. They called their plan — unsurprisingly — the Nahda, or Awakening Project. But after the Egyptian army stepped in to depose the new president, it was against Mukhtar’s statue of the Awakening that his supporters turned their anger. They spray-painted slogans and papered the failed leader’s portrait over the faces of the peasant and the sphinx. In the military’s attempt to disperse the demonstrators at the foot of the Awakening and elsewhere, over a thousand people were killed.
In an early short story, Cossery had imagined a battle between the city’s streetlights and the moon. “The street was deserted,” he wrote. “He saw only the poor street lamp, which was trying to show some signs of life in spite of the intense light of the moon. It looked like a human being, a humble person crushed down by the luxury and power of a tyrannical force against which it could do nothing. In this drama of the street, the moon personified the privileged minority in this world, and under its brilliance the poor street lamps died in their thousands.” Rather than imagining the moon as a benevolent orb, friend of lovers and poets, shining above the streetlamp — that artificial, politicized star — the moon is the despotic elite. And yet what remains if we, the lazy ones, have an enemy even in the moon?
We could shut our eyes against the lights. Sleep is refusal, a protest, a weapon. “I am always indignant,” said Cossery to an interviewer. “About what?” “Everything that I see.” In his first novel, The House of Certain Death, the young Cossery had ended on a note of high prophecy: “The future is full of outcries; the future is full of revolt. How to confine this swelling river that will submerge entire cities?” And yet, by his last novel, The Colors of Infamy, published in 1999, he writes of the hero, a charming pickpocket, “Ossama’s objective was not to have a bank account (the most dishonorable thing of all), but merely to survive in a society ruled by crooks, without waiting for the revolution, which was hypothetical and continually being put off until tomorrow.” The future is full of revolution; the revolution is forever in the future. The two possibilities cancel each other out, and what are we left with? Cossery’s philosophy of idleness emerges as a via negativa, a political mysticism of its own. All that’s left is to dive into the annihilating sweetness.
By the time he wrote The Colors of Infamy, Albert Cossery had lost his voice. Forced to undergo a laryngectomy after years of smoking, he could only hiss. Yet he preserved his routine as ever. He escaped the hospital to go to a café, wearing the ward pajamas. Pushed in a wheelchair by a beautiful blonde, he was as striking a sight as ever. In place of speaking, Cossery would write on notecards in a shaky yet elegant hand, a mischievous look in his eyes. “The loss of my voice gives me relief because I don’t have to respond to imbeciles.” “To look at pretty girls, there is no need to speak.” “I have nothing in common with the world.” “I am nothing except what is contained in my books.” “Read them, and you will know who I am. All I have to say is in my books.” In 2008, Cossery was made a Chevalier in the Légion d’honneur by President Sarkozy. He refused to accept.
Tawfiq al-Hakim’s three-hundred-year-old saints, having found they cannot live in this new world, retreat back into their cave. As they lay dying, delirious, they wonder whether it was all a dream. And whose dream was it — time’s dream, or their own? “Time is dreaming us,” one says to the other. “We dream Time,” the other replies. “Didn’t we live three hundred years in one night? I’m tired from the dream.” Time it stopped. On June 22, 2008, at ninety-four, Albert Cossery died in the room at the Hotel Louisiane where he had resided for sixty years.
“Men are asleep,” he wrote. “Time takes on a new dignity, relieved of men and their eternal wrangles.” The moon continues to do as it pleases: ostentation one night, austerity a few weeks later. But the sun, sinking its heavy head into the horizon every evening, is on our side.
ANNA DELLA SUBIN
Copyright © 2003 by Editions Gallimard
Copyright © 2012 by New Directions
Foreword copyright © 1945 by Henry Miller
Afterword copyright © 2013 by Anna Della Subin
This novel was first published in France in 1948, as Fainéants dans la vallée fertile, and is currently publish
ed under the Joëlle Losfeld imprint at Editions Gallimard.
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
First published by New Directions as The Lazy Ones in 1949.
Reissued as a New Directions Paperbook (NDP1265) in 2013.
Design by Erik Rieselbach
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cossery, Albert, 1913–2008.
[Fainéants dans la vallée fertile. English]
Laziness in the fertile valley / Albert Cossery ; Translated from the French by
William Goyen.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-811-21993-8 (e-book)
I. Goyen, William, translator. II. Title.
PQ2605.O725F313 2013
843'.914—dc23 2013027463
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation
80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011
ALSO BY ALBERT COSSERY
AVAILABLE FROM NEW DIRECTIONS
A Splendid Conspiracy
The Colors of Infamy