by Jean Améry
JEAN AMÉRY (1912–1978) was born Hans Maier in Vienna to a Jewish father and a half-Jewish, half-Catholic mother. After his father died in World War I, he was raised by his innkeeper mother. He studied literature and philosophy in Vienna and published his first novel, Die Schiffbrüchigen (The Shipwrecked), in 1935. Following the Anschluss, Améry and his first wife, Regine Berger-Baumgarten, fled to France and then to Belgium, where he joined the Resistance. He was captured by the Nazis in 1943 and tortured in prison at Fort Breendonk. Deported to Auschwitz in January 1944, he survived a year in the concentration camp before being evacuated to Buchenwald, transported to Bergen-Belsen, and liberated in April 1945. He returned to Belgium and would not visit Germany or Austria for the next twenty years. Under the pen name Jean Améry (a near-anagram of Maier), he began writing for a German-language newspaper. In 1966, he published his best-known work, a philosophical reflection on the Holocaust, Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne (At the Mind’s Limits). He would go on to write several books of essays, including Über das Altern: Revolte und Resignation (On Aging: Revolt and Resignation, 1968) and Hand an sich legen: Diskurs über den Freitod (On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death, 1976), and two novels, Lefeu, oder der Abbruch (Lefeu, or the Demolition; 1974) and Charles Bovary, Landarzt (Charles Bovary, Country Doctor; 1978). In 1970 he was awarded the German Critics’ Prize and in 1971 the Literature Prize of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts. In 1977 he received the Gotthold-Ephraim-Lessing Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Hamburg. In 1978 he committed suicide in Salzburg.
ADRIAN NATHAN WEST is a literary translator and author of The Aesthetics of Degradation. His translations include Pere Gimferrer’s Fortuny, Rainald Goetz’s Insane, and Juan Benet’s Construction of the Tower of Babel. His criticism has appeared in the London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, and many other journals in print and online.
CHARLES BOVARY, COUNTRY DOCTOR
Portrait of a Simple Man
JEAN AMÉRY
Translated from the German by
ADRIAN NATHAN WEST
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
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Copyright © 1978 by Klett-Cotta—J. G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger GmbH, Stuttgart
Translation copyright © 2018 by Adrian Nathan West
All rights reserved.
Published in the German language as Charles Bovary, Landarzt: Porträt eines einfachen Mannes
The translation of this book was supported by the Austrian Federal Chancellery.
Cover image: Gustave Caillebotte, Interior, Woman Reading, 1880; private collection/Bridgeman Images
Cover design: Katy Homans
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Améry, Jean author. | West, Adrian Nathan translator.
Title: Charles Bovary, country doctor : portrait of a simple man / by Jean Améry ; translated by Adrian Nathan West.
Other titles: Charles Bovary, Landarzt. English
Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2018. | Series: New York Review Books classics
Identifiers: LCCN 2018010475 (print) | LCCN 2018012167 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681372518 (epub) | ISBN 9781681372501 (alk. paper)
Classification: LCC PT2601.M4 (ebook) | LCC PT2601.M4 C4713 2018 (print) | DDC 838/.91409—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018010475
ISBN 978-1-68137-251-8
v1.0
For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright and More Information
Introduction
Threnody
Ridiculus Sum
The Reality of Gustave Flaubert
The Bourgeois as Lover
The Reality of Charles Bovary
J’Accuse
Notes
INTRODUCTION
“TO SUFFER,” writes Paul Valéry, “is to grant something supreme attention.” His attenuation of mute affliction into “zones of pain, rings, poles, plumes of pain” looks forward to Jean Améry’s analysis of the “lived experience” of vulnerability, which in turn undergirds his ethics of resentment and the peculiar, almost private aims of his fiction.
Améry was born Hans Maier in Vienna in 1912. His father was a petty businessman of Jewish extraction who died of a hernia on the Italian front in World War I, his mother an innkeeper from a middle-class, half-Catholic, half-Jewish family. In 1921, he fell ill, and moved with his mother and aunt to the picturesque spa town of Bad Ischl in the Austrian Salzkammergut. Of his consciousness of himself as a Jew, he offers conflicting reports: on the one hand, he claims to have not learned of the existence of Yiddish until nineteen years of age; on the other, he cites a “constant consciousness of marginality” too acute to be attributed to the scorn his urbane manners and tastes provoked among his classmates, the children of farmworkers and provincial landowners. He left school early and returned to Vienna with his mother in 1926; except for a brief stay in Berlin, where he worked as an errand boy for one of his uncles, he would remain there until the Anschluss, when he fled to Belgium. Red Vienna fired the young man’s mind: he found a mentor in the poet and popular educator Leopold Langhammer, attended seminars at the people’s university, rubbed shoulders with Hermann Broch and Robert Musil, and participated in the brief uprising known as the Austrian Civil War. His intellectual formation did not free him entirely from a reactionary streak drawn from the idyllic environs of his childhood and a weakness for pastoral-tinged lyricism—equally evident in the poetry of his compatriot, Thomas Bernhard; even the creeping horror with which he pored over the proto-Nazi canon, from the eccentric art historian Julius Langbehn to Alfred Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century, was tempered by an evenhandedness he would later call “an element of psychic repression.”
He reached Belgium clandestinely, through the border village of Kalterherberg. In Antwerp, he posed as a writer and authority on literature, lecturing in a space the Jewish Committee had put at his disposal. After the German invasion in May 1940, his wife went underground—she would die of a heart ailment four years later, he would never see her again—while Améry was deported as an enemy alien to the French concentration camps of St. Cyprien and Gurs. A year later, he returned to a Belgium now firmly under German control. In Brussels he delivered furniture by day and distributed anti-Nazi pamphlets for the Resistance. On July 23, 1943, the Gestapo found him in possession of contraband printed matter; after a brief interrogation, he was transferred to Fort Breendonk, where he would endure the brutal treatment memorialized in his essay “On Torture.” He would remain there until his deportation to Auschwitz in 1944.
Those aware of Améry’s work generally know him as the author of At the Mind’s Limits, perhaps the definitive account of spiritual curtailment in l’univers conçentrationnaire. The critical success of this book, and of the radio broadcasts that preceded it, was scant comfort to Améry, who had sacrificed his loftier literary ambitions for a precarious career in journalism and now found himself, as he recounts in “After Five Thousand Newspaper Articles,” a “promising beginner” in his mid-fifties. He lamented becoming a “professional Auschwitz survivor”—in his letters he would use the term “Auschwitz Clown”—he chafed at playing the “professional senex” when On Aging: Revolt and Resignation appeared in 1968, and his urge to decry his devolution into a stock character may have inclined him to
sympathize with the fictional Charles Bovary’s claims to humanity. He would write his first novel-essay, Lefeu, oder der Abbruch (Lefeu, or the Demolition), in 1974. His eagerness to shed his reputation as an essayist was ill-rewarded: though Elias Canetti, Günter Grass, and Alfred Andersch praised the book in private, Germany’s most influential literary critic, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, savaged it in a full-page review entitled “Terrible Is the Temptation to the Novel,” deriding Améry as a scribbler who had let his impulses run riot at the expense of “clarity in literary representation.”
Améry attempted suicide four days after finishing Lefeu. A friend found him in a coma and called a doctor; Améry awoke thirty hours later, perforated with tubes, hands bound to his bedrails. The experience would lead him to write a moving, original, and humane defense of voluntary death, Hand an sich legen—literally, to lay hands on oneself—that dispensed with the presumption of suicide as a problem to be illuminated by the social sciences and medicine, and began instead with the free election to exempt oneself from the “logic of life”:
Suicidology is correct. But for suicides and potential suicides, its findings are empty. For them, what is at stake is the total and unmistakable singularity of their circumstances, the situation vécue (lived situation), that can never be completely conveyed, so that every time someone dies by his or her hand or even simply tries to die, a veil falls that no one can lift again, one which in the best of cases can only be lit up sharply enough for the eye to recognize it as a fleeting image.
This proviso has not prevented many—most prominent among them Primo Levi, who devoted an entire chapter to him in The Drowned and the Saved—from offering explanations for Améry’s suicide. For Levi, the fault lay in part with Améry’s intransigence, his elevation of bitterness to an ethical imperative (for his part, Améry disparaged Levi as “the forgiver”). Favoring Levi’s suppositions is the vast clinical literature on the benefits of positive illusions and the deleterious psychological effects of “depressive realism.” My own sense is that Améry’s confidence after the end of the war, when he traveled to Zurich, to Paris and London, drafting novels and treatises and fantasizing of becoming a writer in French, failed to account for the delayed effects of the horror he had undergone, not to mention the loss of his wife and home; and his subsequent, almost filial admiration for the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, who had gone so far as to proclaim that “even torture does not dispossess us of our freedom,” precluded due acknowledgment of the fraying point of human matter past which considerations of individual liberty become frivolous.
•
Améry reread Gustave Flaubert in 1971, when the first volume of Sartre’s three-thousand-page biography, The Family Idiot, appeared in French. Even years later, when he would write his valediction to the philosopher, motivated largely by the old man’s visit to the terrorist Andreas Baader in prison, Améry still praised The Family Idiot—an interminable hodgepodge of psychoanalytic commonplaces that must hold a record for most words ending in “ize”—as a masterpiece and “the humanistic Bildungsroman of our time.” In his memoirs, discussing what he had elsewhere termed “cultural aging” in relation to his bafflement at then-current artistic and ideological trends, Améry contrasts his antipathy toward the New Novel with his affection for Flaubert:
I lived with Emma, I knew and loved her brown hair, I suffered with her and poor Charles when the fatal poison made her body writhe in torment—is this indecorous sentimentalism, unreflective identification? Emma Bovary evaporated once Flaubert’s language fell prey to structural analysis and Monsieur Flaubert himself, placed under the magnifying glass, turned out to be a philistine-hating philistine, conditioned by his abstract social being before which all attempts at empathy and compassion emerge as retrograde misunderstanding of literature.
Sartre’s so-called roman vrai inspired Améry to return to the novel-essay, a form he had sworn off after the failure of Lefeu. His wish to rehabilitate the clod and cuckold Charles Bovary, to offer him an appeal after the kangaroo court of Madame Bovary, brings to mind postmodernist metatextual antics, but its precedents go back to the Middle Ages, when the notion of auctoritas was ambiguous and scribes would “correct” the contents of the manuscripts they reproduced; one thinks too of Don Quixote’s refutation, in the second part of Cervantes’s novel, of the slanders perpetrated against him in the spurious sequel written by Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda.
Améry’s reading of Madame Bovary is the furthest imaginable from the disinterested pleasure that Kant and a long line of followers have deemed the proper end of appreciation. Like Diderot two and a half centuries ago, like Emma Bovary herself, Améry wants to be moved, shaken, brought to tears. In evaluating Flaubert’s meticulousness, Améry finds a pretext for sadism: the author invents a series of bewildered playthings, puts them in situations beyond their ken, watches them flounder without a trace of compassion for their pathetic yearnings, their daydreams and afflictions, even relishes the scrupulous illustration of their demise.
Améry’s defense of the spiritual nobility of Charles Bovary proceeds from a maxim in At the Mind’s Limits: “It is not true, at least not entirely true, that a human being is only what he has realized.” Having early claimed the right “to declare himself in disagreement with every natural occurrence,” he now grants Charles Bovary the liberty of protesting the contingencies of his existence. Endowing Charles with the needed intelligence to plumb the depths of his love for Emma, Améry makes him a libertine, exulting in his wife’s affairs, and Flaubert becomes the dunce for imagining Charles had been none the wiser. In defense of enlightened values, of science and progress, even in their minor avatars of Charles Bovary and Homais, Améry celebrates the humane achievements of the bourgeois revolution while subjecting Flaubert to the same reductive scrutiny with which the author himself had persecuted poor Charles: if the latter were not a doctor but a mere officier de la santé, married to an adulteress, albeit a beautiful one, who disgraced himself by maiming the hapless servant Hippolyte, still, he made it on his own; whereas Flaubert, the law school dropout, the epileptic mama’s boy, owed everything to his father, a consummate bourgeois, Achille-Cléophas Flaubert, who left behind more than enough for his young son to live like a gentleman (at least until, in a wry echo of Madame Bovary, he gave up much of his fortune to his favorite niece to save her spendthrift husband from bankruptcy).
In “A Life with Books,” Améry affirms: “The subjective life of all readers is peopled, not only by those one has known, but also by literary figures . . . possessed of a much higher degree of reality than many people we have been introduced to in the course of our lives.” Charles Bovary, Country Doctor is a book for readers of the kind Améry describes: a phenomenology of the loser, a defense of the moral debt to sentimentality against the fetish of objectivity, and a love letter to one of fiction’s immortal heroines.
—ADRIAN NATHAN WEST
CHARLES BOVARY, COUNTRY DOCTOR
Les maris trompés que ne savent rien savent tout, tout de même. [1]
—MARCEL PROUST, La Prisonnière
THRENODY
I WANT her laid out in her wedding dress, with white shoes, and a wreath. Her hair should be spread over her shoulders. Three coffins: one of oak, one of mahogany, one of lead. And no words should be spoken to me. I will find the strength. A long sheet of green velvet draped atop it all. That is what I want. Do it.
This is what I wrote down, and so it was done. . . . But then it seemed the coffin wouldn’t stop sinking, ever deeper, into the earth. And I should have been down there with it. Where else did I belong, if not there? The people were with me, all of them were kind. Monsieur Homais consoled me: a gallant man, and a friend. He kept vigil along with Abbé Bournisien, and they didn’t quarrel as they so often do. The priest forgave me for shouting, in my misery, “I loathe him, your God!” A good man. Many good people around me, Madame Tuvache, Madame LeFrançois; even Lheureux, the merchant and usurer, who has brought me to the edge
of ruin, came to offer his condolences. I hold nothing against him, he had to be paid, it was his right. C’est la faute de la fatalité. [2]
Berthe? Come, my darling, cry away your tears. Mama’s not coming back, so cry with me, it will do us both good. Your stockings are torn, my poor little girl, and the doll in your hand is torn, and Mama will never come home again. None of the good people managed to save her. Hush. Cry, but don’t speak. I know you were scared. They were so heart-rending, your mother’s cries, she was so pale, cold sweat coated her face. Her fingers were twisted, brown spots covered her body. Be quiet, my child, it’s over now, go to the garden, overgrown and full of weeds now, because no one’s tended to it. There’s no money left for that. It continues to amaze me that not one of those good people had the least idea of what to do. Doctor Canivet, a learned man, was good for nothing. Doctor Larivière, my professor, the leading light of science, as Homais called him, was as powerless as I, and in medicine, I am not even the feeblest spark. I put so much hope in him, who had saved so many. The appearance of a god could not have occasioned more emotion than the arrival of his carriage. His gaze, cutting sharper than his scalpel, took in everything straightaway, and it was in vain that I shouted, “Do something, find something that will help her!” “Come, my boy, courage, there is nothing to be done.” Then he and Canivet dined with Homais at home while she sank into death before my eyes. Good men, all of them, but still mere men, as powerless before destiny as I, Charles Bovary, country doctor, who so often stood impotent before patients racked with fever, syrup crusted around their lips, coughing themselves to death. Charles Bovary, country doctor. Me. What was I to do, when the leading lights of science could only step aside and let fate run its course? By the time she ate the arsenic—God knows how she got it—it was already too late. But why? Why? I asked her, over and over, as the spasms shook her. Were you unhappy? Is it my fault? I did everything I could. And despite her suffering, Emma was tender. No one will ever know how tender. Slowly, she stroked my hair, and said, “Yes, it’s true, you are good.” I could run from the house and cry it out, so that all of Yonville could hear, “She did love me, and more than ever in death!” I should have told Homais when he cautioned me against the costs of such a lavish burial. What does he know? The velvet, he said, that’s too much. . . . But did he love her? Did she show him kindness in her death throes? The entire village, the entire département, even my mother, who never had a kind word for Emma, should know that she did love me, quivering, cold, and covered in sweat as she was. But it isn’t proper to trumpet your sufferings and triumphs. I’m not some drunken farmer. I am Doctor Charles Bovary! “Dignity, for heaven’s sake!” Homais said when, in tears, I hugged Emma’s father. I promised to be brave. And I am brave. I’ve complained enough, now I must make do on my own. I can’t go burdening people with my misery. They’ve done much for me, Homais even helped select the gravestone and the inscription: Sta viator! Amabilem conjugem calcas. [3] He knows his Latin. He does his best, I oughtn’t complain if he rarely makes it over, he’s got work enough with his salves and tinctures. And what good would it do me, even if the whole Département Seine-Maritime paraded past my front door? What would it matter if every church in Normandy tolled its bells, if all the little girls in their snow-white dresses streamed past her grave like a Corpus Christi procession and every banker in Rouen showered me with louis d’ors?