by Albert Cohen
In 1955 he married Bella Berkowich, whom he had first met in 1943 and in whom he found a devoted companion and the ideal literary co-conspirator. It was to her that Cohen dedicated Belle du Seigneur. Work on his novel proceeded slowly, however, interrupted by long periods of serious illness, and Cohen lived a reclusive life punctuated by increasingly immediate intimations of his own mortality. It was not until 1967 that he submitted a 'monstrous' manuscript to Gallimard, who insisted on substantial cuts. Cohen reluctantly agreed, and the adventures of the Valiant which had originally followed chapter 11 appeared separately in 1969 as Les Valeureux.
When Belle du Seigneur was published, in 1968, it was hailed as a masterpiece of sustained invention and baroque power. Cohen was lionized by the press, and there was talk of the Nobel Prize. But, wary of the publicity machine, he jealously guarded his privacy until, in 1977, he was interviewed for the television literary magazine Apostrophes, which made him an unlikely star. His mixture of teasing guile, frailty and shrewdness appealed to a wide audience. But his last book, Carnets 1978, made no concessions to popular taste. He returned to his major preoccupations — death, the difficulty of faith, the eternal cruelty of man to man — but the bleakness was relieved by a gleam if not of hope then of wisdom. If the enjoinder to brotherly love has failed, we should look elsewhere and accept the "universal irresponsibility" of men, who are what they are: not simply fallible, but mortal. Still waiting for a sign from the God he revered but could not believe in, Albert Cohen died in 1981, still keeping faith with the commonwealth of brotherly pity.
Belle du Seigneur is the longest episode of a single work which evolved slowly over four decades. The first instalment, Solal, is by far the most eventful. The story begins in about 1910, in Cephalonia, and tells how the thirteen-year-old Solal of the Solals, son of the island's unbending, patriarchal Chief Rabbi, resolves to escape the ghetto and fulfil his high destiny. When he is sixteen, he defies his father and elopes impetuously with Adrienne de Valdonne, the young wife of the French consul. The adventure does not last, but it widens his horizons and sets his feet on the road to the success which seems his by right. Solal has every quality: he is one of nature's aristocrats, as handsome as he is clever. But he is also driven by a sense of mission which he does not fully understand. When still in his early twenties, he is immensely rich, married to Aude de Maussane, who loves him, and is Minister of Labour in a French socialist government. Yet he senses that his success is built on the rejection of his Jewish roots — that is, of a whole area of human diversity. He tries to make amends — he fills the cellar of a mansion with needy Jews — but neither good works nor the love of Aude can redeem him. He begins to act erratically and descends into poverty and obscurity. Clutching his baby son, he kills himself, only to be mysteriously resurrected — to fight another day, perhaps, or because the fates have not done with him yet. 'The sun lit the tears, the defiant smile of the bleeding lord who now, overflowing with a lunatic love of earth and crowned in beauty, strode into the future, went forth to meet the miracle of his defeat.'
For Solal, Cohen has the same mix of affection and ridicule which Stendhal showed for Julien Sorel. His hero is also a restless, reckless spirit in search of the absolute. But while Julien is in love with love, Solal is in love with a god he cannot accept, and views himself as a Messianic figure pledged to making a world which has room for loyalty, love, Christians, Jews and all who are born to die. Cohen, whose own idealism was permanently undermined by an incapacity for faith, both shared this sense of mission and mocked it — and his jokes are very good indeed. For against the sombre history of the rise and fall of Solal must be set the 'Valiant', an unlikely quintet of middle-aged, garrulous, squabbling, picturesque cousins who, prefiguring Snow White's dwarves and the Marx Brothers, cut a considerable dash as comic musketeers.
Cohen was extremely fond of them, and introduced them to new readers on a number of occasions: he does so again in chapter 12 of Belle du Seigneur. 'Uncle' Saltiel is the senior member and acknowledged leader of the 'Valiant of France', so called on account of their attachment to the libertarian tradition of the Revolution of 1789 and to the florid, archaic language of the sixteenth century. United by friendship, they are constantly divided by their self-importance and bumbling incompetence. Saltiel, a failed inventor, is reduced to living by his wits: we first see him selling chestnuts on which he has inscribed verses from Deuteronomy. Naileater (so called because once, when a boy, 'he gobbled a dozen screws to assuage his inexorable hunger') is an engaging charlatan who displays endless ingenuity in devising hopeless money-making schemes, which range from setting up a university in his kitchen to a method for making shoes squeak properly so that everyone will know that they are new. Mattathias, the one-armed miser, keeps his own counsel and whatever money comes his way. Solomon, a little man with a big heart, is innocence on legs, the easily wounded conscience of the group. Michael, 'the giant', has a military bearing and a moustache which women find irresistible. The Valiant are physical, unreliable and tasteless; but they are also resilient, resourceful and endlessly optimistic: they are, in a word, everything which the popular imagination understands by Jewishness. In creating them, Cohen stands well outside the defensive tradition of much Jewish writing (from Zangwill to Bashevis Singer and Elie Wiesel) and makes no apology for the Valiant, who, for all their demented antics, represent good humour and sanity in a world which has forgotten how to live in joy. They, as much as the Law of Moses, are what Solal has denied.
When Mangeclous opens, ten years or so have passed. By means which are not explained, Solal has once more achieved a position of power and influence: he is now Under-Secretary-General of the League of Nations. He sends money to the Valiant and invites them to visit him in Geneva. Suddenly rich and swollen with their own importance, they make a grand tour of Europe, leaving a trail of chaos in their wake. Their adventures are as extravagant as Baron Munchausen's, and their Chaplinesque spirit is unquenchable. They join forces with Scipion Escargassas, a Tartarin from Marseilles, and Jeremie, a Jew who has been a guest of Herr Hitler's prisons, both of whom succeed in obtaining an audience at the Palais des Nations by posing as an Argentinian delegation. Solal is both amused and appalled by their absurdity, because once more he has reached a point of crisis. His idealism, which he feels like a physical need, founders on his inability to reconcile two contradictory propositions. Intellectually he is convinced that the world must be saved through Reason and the Law of Nations. But his instinct tells him that its salvation lies in Faith and the Law of Moses. But Reason and Faith are irreconcilable, and his loyalties swing wildly between their immediate manifestations — the League and the Valiant. Solal is at war with himself and turns away from the world of international diplomacy and base, self-serving functionaries towards what seem to be the greater certainties of his Jewish past. But while he never doubts the Law of Moses, he cannot believe in the God of his fathers. Moreover, he despises the fecklessness of the Valiant and the meekness of Jews like Jeremie, who will never inherit the earth however much they deserve to. He is no less aware that love of women is an eternal betrayal of love. Solal is a chemically pure idealist who lives in a comprehensively contaminating world.
Some readers may classify Solal's inner contradictions as classically Oedipal: he cannot relate to his father, whom he rejects, and feels guilt for ignoring his mother and abandoning Adrienne, a mother substitute, who is driven to suicide. Whatever the merits of such a diagnosis, Solal is certainly more easily understood if we think of him as a compulsive personality rather than as a man entirely in control of himself who tries consciously to develop a life consistent with his character. He is incapable of compromise, and there is in him more than a touch of masochism, even of the will to self-destruction. Like Buridan's ass, he finds himself between two equidistant piles of hay, incapable of making a choice between his Jewish and Westernized selves. In the event he chooses neither, but pursues the purity which eludes him with Ariane, the wife of the ineffec
tual Adrien Deume. She will be his partner in Perfect Love, the living proof that the will can overcome the spoiling power of existence. He knows he cannot fail to make Ariane love him, and the knowledge leads him to despise himself, Ariane and whatever purity they might one day achieve. His defeat may be magnificent, but it is inevitable. Yet though this defeat was announced at the end of Solal, Cohen was in no hurry to bring him to it. Mangeclous closes as Solal prepares for his campaign. He dons a white beard, blacks his teeth, and climbs into the filthy coat which he bought from Jeremie. Solal the contemptuous idealist is ready for battle.
Belle du Seigneur is Cohen's baobab tree in all its glory. He guides us through the tangled roots — the same characters reappear, the same ritual of revolt is re-enacted — but he also invites us now to linger over the lushness of the upper foliage, which is filled with new personalities, fresh dramas and wider dimensions. The action once more begins in early spring, with Solal taking his first extravagant steps in the long seduction of Ariane. Soon the Valiant, summoned once more by cheque, will arrive in Geneva, where their engaging but feckless optimism serves as a counterpoint to Solal's anguish . . .
But Belle du Seigneur is not a novel to be read for the plot. Though there are moments of high tension and drama, the forward march of the action is regularly delayed by diversions to the point where it seems as if Cohen was trying to see how slowly he could pedal his bicycle without falling off. For long periods time stands still (the action covers a mere twenty-seven months, in fits and starts), and the world which unfolds before us is oddly insulated against history.
There are few echoes of contemporary events — Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia, the Spanish Civil War, the election of the Popular Front government in Paris — for Belle du Seigneur generates its own closed and claustrophobic atmosphere. A few cheeky taunts are lobbed at the 'square-jawed' Duce, but even the Hitler menace is evoked obliquely and, as in chapter 54, in allegorical terms. Cohen makes his opposition to Nazi brutality abundantly clear, but he ensures that we see it as merely the latest outbreak of the persecution to which Jews have been subjected throughout their history. Cohen's stance is moral rather than political, and this may explain why the story does not proceed beyond 1937 and into the war. Of course, it may simply be that in Cohen's mind his fictional world had assumed its definitive mood and shape by 1938. But, had he extended the time-scale, it seems reasonable to think that the horrors of the Holocaust could not have been kept at arm's length in quite the same way and that Cohen's generous, conciliatory humanism would then have been harder to sustain. As it is, he is able to stand back and point to the folly of intolerance and oppression without being accused of special pleading or of relying on Nazi atrocities to stir the reader's sympathies. Cohen's purpose was not to be achieved by locating the struggle for idealism in a particular setting, for he intended his message of tolerance to be timeless.
Paradoxically, this lack of historical specificity in no way diminishes the sense we have of the solid reality of the world of Belle du Seigneur. On the contrary, the minutiae of everyday living are lovingly recorded through the eyes and thoughts of characters obsessed with their immediate selves and material things. Every corner of Cohen's immense canvas is filled with solid, intricate detail. He takes us behind the scenes at the League of Nations and politely exposes its pomposities in a series of blistering insiderly snapshots which will delight anyone who has experienced the workings of corporate organizations. He invites us to meet the ghastly Antoinette Deume, who needs no prompting to put on one of the finest bravura displays of middle-class bigotry and hypocrisy in modern fiction. Cohen not only creates a vast range of acutely observed types — from Mariette the maid to the henpecked Hippolyte and the self-serving Adrien Deume — but sustains them brilliantly over many chapters. Others, like the boot-licking Benedetti or the wild Rosenfeld, make briefer appearances, but are no less meticulously conjured. And governing all of them is Cohen's sharp eye for absurdity and his acute, unforgiving ear for the cliche, which surfaces remorselessly in the guarded, coded language of the League's servants, Mme Ventradour's sanctimonious mummery or Mariette's smug self-communings. The novel hums with voices, which are orchestrated into choruses, combined into duets, and above all set free in endless solos: few writers have dared take the interior monologue to quite such lengths. Cohen's comic talents span the widest range, from the ability to create a seemingly endless supply of sharply differentiated eccentrics, to the low farce of the Valiant and the highest social comedy.
The laughter, however, invariably has a dark edge to it. Cohen's bourgeois, like the denizens of the League of Nations, live empty lives with neither joy nor point beyond materialism, success and a grim determination to dominate others. It is a damning enough indictment, but Cohen's pessimistic picture of society is merely a prelude to a much profounder charge. Solal, moving freely through the well-fed, self-perpetuating, cosy world of middle-class cosmopolitanism, recognizes the bustle as a charade which sanitizes primeval forces. The physical strength of Neanderthal man has acquired a softer image — money and influence are its modern forms — but society still respects the animal power of nature, which is ultimately the power of one man to kill another. Strong individuals oppress the weak, and nations find philosophies to justify the annihilation of their neighbours. It is here that the Valiant come into their own. They grow older but they never change: they are the permanent standard-bearers of the Law of Moses, which provided mankind with the antidote to the law of nature. They find no difficulty in reaching accommodations with society and the world, whereas Solal's whole life has been an attempt to break free of patriarchal chains by inserting himself into history. He may have succeeded in worldly terms, but he knows that he has achieved nothing: his meteoric rise has brought him only disillusionment.
Rejecting his worldly success but incapable of believing in the God who framed the Commandments, he turns his back on public life. Still questing, he trusts to love to provide an alternative salvation. But here too disappointment awaits him. The poets are guilty of complicity with the animal in man, for they have linked love with physical beauty: if Vronsky had lost two front teeth, would Anna Karenina still have loved him to the depths of her soul? But, worse, women respond all too readily to the Neanderthal in man. Solal's last resort is his love of Ariane, who is a creature of flesh and blood and fallibly human. Through his long devotion to her, he discovers that love cannot be lived, that it is subject to the erosion of everyday life. Solal is destroyed by his inability to reconcile conflicting absolutes: God with the Law, the League of Nations with the cynicism of cosmopolitan values, and, most poignantly, love with life. He fails to save the world. He fails as Don Juan. He is a man nailed to the pursuit of an impossible goal, and as he ventures along the path of purity so the mood of the novel becomes darker and increasingly claustrophobic. The Valiant bow out, the satire fades, the social comedy disappears, until all that remain are despair, defeat and the victory of death. Solal, who wanted everything, ends by having nothing.
Solal is an example of the vanquished hero, who, Camus once remarked, is the only kind of hero possible in the twentieth century. But he is also a symbolic figure, the self-appointed Messiah who will reconcile Jews with Christians, East with West, man with woman, and man with his brothers in death. Solal is a new Icarus who has flown too near the sun. He falls, but in defeat he remains magnificently defiant: even in death he still clings to his hope for man and his belief in love. For his creator never loses faith with him. As an international civil servant, Cohen was more effective than Solal, and in his private life was uxorious to a degree. Yet he too, a Corfiote Jew who learned to be French in Marseilles and a citizen of the world in Geneva, lived his life at a busy crossroads. Unlike Solal, he was able to rise above personal tragedy and the suffering of his people and, out of the quarrel with himself and with others, made high art. The Solal cycle creates a strange, obsessive universe, as full of symmetries and repeated circular flourishes as a Persian carpet.
For all its social reality, it is a world forever slipping into allegory. Belle du Seigneur has the epic grandeur of a descent into hell.
David Coward
BELLE DU SEIGNEUR
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
He dismounted and strode past hazel and briar, followed by the two horses which the valet led by the reins, through the crackling silence, stripped to the waist under the noonday sun, smiling as he went, a strange, princely figure, confident of coming victory. Twice, yesterday and the day before, he had been a coward and had not dared. Today, the first day of May, he would dare and she would love him.
In the sun-dappled forest, the still forest of age-old fears, he walked through the tangled branches, handsome and no less noble than Aaron his forebear, brother of Moses, walked on with sudden laughter, the maddest of the sons of man; laughing out of blazing youth and love, suddenly uprooting a flower and biting its head off, suddenly dancing a jig, a great lord in high boots, dancing and laughing in the blinding sun among the branches, dancing with grace, with the two unresisting animals at his heels, dancing with love and triumph while his subjects the forest creatures went heedlessly about their business, pretty lizards living their lives beneath the foliate bowers of huge mushrooms, golden flies tracing geometric patterns in the air, spiders rising out of clumps of pink heather to watch the movements of bugs with prehistoric probosces, ants grooming each other and exchanging signals before returning to their solitary tasks, itinerant woodpeckers taking soundings, lonely toads giving nostalgic tongue, shy crickets chirping, screeching owls strangely awakened now.
He halted and thereupon, after kissing the valet's shoulder, he relieved him of the case he needed for the deed to come, and ordered him to hitch the reins to a branch and to wait for him there, wait for him for as long as was required, until evening or later, wait for him until he heard the whistle. And when you hear the whistle, you must bring the horses, and you shall have all the money you could want, my word on it! For what I am about to attempt no man ever attempted before, do you hear, no man since the beginning of the world! Yes, brother mine, all the money you could ever want. Thus he spake, and he struck his boot with his crop for joy. Then he went striding towards his destiny and the house where the woman lived.