A Winter's Journal

by Emmanuel Bove

  January 29th

  Have you ever noticed the extent to which good news can distance you from the person you were a short while earlier? In my current anxious state, I have been hoping with all my heart for some happy event that would annihilate the troubled man I've become. It would be an event I'd been awaiting for months, and today it would come to pass. What a relief!

  February 1st

  As I've been doing for several days now, this morning I badgered Madeleine at length, insisting she leave me, speaking at times like a martyr, at others in authoritarian tones, but always with a menacing expression that made it clear I would lose my temper if she dared take me at my word. Like those jealous men who reproach their wives for some innocent flirtation years after the fact, I belabored the point endlessly. All at once Madeleine drew herself up, and looking me straight in the eye, spoke unflinchingly, "Listen, Louis, there's something I want to confess to you. What I'm about to tell you has nothing to do with your constant threats. Don't think that I've made this decision because of the pain you inflict upon me day after day. I forget everything you do to me, and you should forget it too. What I want to tell you has to be said out of the context of our shabby little marital scenes. I'm in love with someone. Until now, I've been wondering whether I should start a new life with this other person. Having thought about it, and without being influenced at all by your behavior, I decided to ask you today to let me go." In a flash, what had been our life together evaporated. The things I'd been repeating to her day after day now seemed childish, as inhuman as only unjustified accusations can be. I no longer thought I was cruel; Madeleine was the cruel one, now. I stared at her hard, in an effort to make her grasp the seriousness of what she was planning to do, my expression at once supplicating, incredulous, and questioning. "This can't be," I said with difficulty. "But it is, my poor friend." She uttered no reproach, nor any of the excuses which my previous behavior could have supplied her. A moment earlier I'd still been harrassing her. She made no mention of it. I could have been the most affectionate and devoted of husbands, she wouldn't have treated me any differently. I understood that, in her mind, what she had just announced had nothing to do with what had been going on between the two of us. She was much too honest to lay the blame on my maliciousness. Because she had to answer to herself, she was speaking just as she would have if there had never been any quarrel between us. She felt sorry for me, and therefore called me her "poor friend." She felt sorry for me, and that showed me just how impervious she'd been to everything I'd said. The pain I felt was compounded by disgust with myself at the memory of the way I'd behaved. I'd been violent without encountering any resistance. If there is one thing I've always cherished, it's my influence. I've always dreamed of having people trust me. I've always dreamed of leading such a blameless life that, whenever I spoke, my words would be important, as would my actions. But in fact, because of my stupidity, because of some unidentifiable gap in my intelligence, I've always undermined that influence. Regardless of how fervently I express an opinion, no one believes me anymore; no matter how ardently I swear to something, it's all over, no one trusts me. I'm left standing there, with my sincere heart and my inability to make myself understood. By calling me her poor friend, Madeleine had unwittingly shown me just how impossible it would be to make her stay. My tenderness, my love: they had lost their influence. I could have thrown myself at her feet; there was too much in my past which spoke against me. Yes, Madeleine felt sorry for me. She pitied me. While I'd been tormenting her, arguing with her, she'd been living another life, never bothering to hold my unfairness and maliciousness against me. For months, then, I'd been addressing someone who hadn't even been listening to me. My rages must have seemed all the more ridiculous if they weren't even being taken seriously. I'd lost my self-control, while she'd always remained calm. My disgust with myself deepened. I was unable to keep from asking, "But who is it you love?" "Someone you don't know." "And does this someone love you?" She looked at me without answering. I guessed then, by her ardor, that she would have gone so far as to say no just to please me, so certain was she of his love. For a moment I thought of insinuating that this man must not amount to much, the way Madeleine does about women she doesn't know. But a sort of modesty held me back. Knowing neither who he was nor what he looked like made me seem like a child in comparison. I felt achingly inferior. Without having ever seen him, I imagined him tall, strong, honest, and had the impression that, next to him, I was a worm. It also struck me that Madeleine was now in a position to judge me, that she had elements to compare, and that this was all to my disadvantage. All I could do now was try to exploit that female tendency, because of the maternal instinct, to be drawn to the weak and suffering. Never did it occur to me for a moment that my rival might be far worthier of her protection than I was; I looked at her imploringly in an attempt to convey the magnitude of my distress, the misery of my fate, and how much more I deserved her pity than that potent man who was replacing me. "For heaven's sake, Madeleine, you can't expect to keep this man's identity from me." "He has nothing to do with this," she answered in a sort of ecstasy. As she said this, I sensed that she loved him just for that reason, that he was superior because he wasn't involved in the misery of our conjugal life. And yet I still couldn't believe any of this was true. It distressed me deeply to know that Madeleine was no longer dependent upon me and that she could nonetheless be happy. I made an attempt to address her own best interests, as though not thinking of myself at all. "But are you certain, at least, that he loves you?" The smile with which she answered was full of self-confidence; it was a smile that said if there was one thing in the world she was sure of, that was it. My distress gave way to rage. "So you've been unfaithful to me, then?" Madeleine looked at me with amazement. "You really don't know me," she said simply, "if you can even think such a thing. I haven't been unfaithful to you. Nothing has happened between this man and me. I wouldn't have done that without telling you. I've thought long and hard. Now my mind is made up." My anger subsided. The fact that she had just accused me of not really knowing her had suddenly made me realize that, no matter what I did, she would always think this. She was so convinced of it, in fact, that it would have been sheer madness to try to change her mind.

  Me! Not know her! Why, there isn't a thought that crosses her mind which I don't divine. And she accuses me of incomprehension! "Do what you like," I said sadly. "You'll probably be happier with another man than with me. But maybe one day you'll remember me and regret I'm no longer around. You'll understand, then, how great my love for you was, how superior to everything else it was." As I spoke those words, I had to make an effort not to cry. I was speaking from the heart to the only person I had ever loved, and whom I was about to lose. I had put aside my wickedness, my unfairness, all those things which had nothing to do with the essence of my nature, the better to extricate the pureness of my soul from that confused mass. Madeleine replied, "I understand that you're hurt, but I beg you, please don't talk of love." I realized then just how distant from her I'd become. She had never been with me. And today, when I would have laid down my life to keep her, she continued to believe that I didn't love her. "But how old is he?" I asked. "How is that of any interest to you? You've never asked me so many questions." In spite of the pain I was feeling, I was calm. Some mysterious authority was preventing me from losing my temper. For a brief moment the thought crossed my mind of trying to keep her by force, but it vanished just as quickly. I pictured myself as one of those tyrants who terrorizes his family, but grows fearful when stronger people join his household, and then becomes docile and accommodating. This humiliated me. Although I'm capable of great violence, I'm such a coward that when I sense I'm beaten I find it impossible to get angry. I wasn't even trying to win back Madeleine; if I had any hope at all, it was in the pity I might inspire in her. "Look at me, Madeleine, you can't leave me," I said, looking her straight in the eyes for as long as I could. "Please," she answered, "for once in your life, try to be sin
cere."

  February 2nd

  Yesterday evening, I stayed in my study. After her confession, Madeleine underwent a complete change, and in the most natural way possible. For the first time since we've been married, she went out. Once things have been said, she considers it perfectly fine to act upon the consequences immediately, and feels no need to wait a few days out of delicacy, as I've always done. Left alone, an immense sadness came over me. I reflected upon my life, my past, and suddenly pictured myself abandoned by everyone. I was overcome with such lassitude that I cast about for something to distract me, and what came to mind was the way Madeleine had broken the news to me that she loved another man. "I'm in love with someone," she'd said. I can't explain it, but those trivial words suddenly made me feel great pity for her. I don't know why that manner of imparting such an important piece of news made me realize Madeleine was defenseless. I had the presentiment she was going to be dominated, that she was going to suffer even more, because I wouldn't be there to understand her. That last thought suddenly revealed a reality I hadn't even considered before. The deepest understanding, that understanding which I'd always considered as the very foundation of love, is useless. There's nothing to be gained from understanding people. Understanding, no matter how profound, adds nothing to love. The weariness weighing upon me has a terrifying quality. I've passed my fortieth year, and here I am, having to start life all over again. If I do start life all over again, I'll do so very cautiously, but will I even start? Caution, understanding, it's all useless. There is weariness, and nothing more. What will become of me? She loves "someone." And I'd always thought that she could never be happy, elevated, loved, without me. Well! It would appear I was wrong. Noble sentiments count for nothing. Nothing matters, neither caution, nor understanding, nor love. What more did she want? She wanted an ideal love. But he's not going to teach her that it's ugly to say you're in love with "someone." No one will ever tell her that. Happy as she thinks she is, her happiness will never be great. No matter that she loves, and is loved; she will have lost me. She will become a different woman, less beautiful than the woman who belonged to me. People she knows will fail to recognize her. New friends will have replaced them. Her qualities and her defects will have been transformed, and she will be loved for the new ones as much as I once loved her. She won't even spare a thought for the man who was once her companion, for how can you ask a woman who's forgotten who she was to remember the friend she had back then? And why hold it against her? Time passes. Who will ever know that she once walked away from the life she had, because she was in love with "someone"? No one, except me.

  Afterword

  Emmanuel Bove (1898-1945)

  i

  On the "Disappeared" in General

  The oblivion into which some artists fall is an interesting subject in itself: at least as interesting as how a literary canon comes to be established. What is the difference between the canonized author and his forgotten rival? Celebrity during his lifetime is a help, but no guarantee—just where are Franz Werfel or Sigrid Unstetter today? Each literature bears its freight of the eclipsed; each generation shows us writers in the process of disappearing. Gide, Faulkner, and Hemingway are currently chefs d'école getting themselves "disappeared." Many factors weigh into literary slaughter: malice and envy are formidable opponents; self-promotion is only of temporary assistance. Innovators have a good rate of survival: Borges and Kafka have made it, but then Robert Walser and Marinetti haven't, and imitators or followers sometimes succeed where the originators fail to last—thus Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of one remarkable novel, is at the apogee of his fame, but where is his literary father, the once-celebrated Alejo Carpentier?

  What happens to those who dwell in the Land of the Memory Hole? No decade goes by that does not see a reevaluation—under the pressure of art critics and historians, but more transparently by the owners of their works or galleries with stock—of a half-dozen "new" painters few in previous generations thought much of. The record industry, its army of performers, its intricate ties to festivals and such, has achieved miracles of recuperation. Fashions in the arts do change, but in literature, works written for another time seem much harder to recover than music or painting.

  It may be that literature involves a much more personal relationship between writer and reader. Paintings and scores, painters and composers, disappear too, but it requires a minimum investment to restore them to life: a performance, an astute critic, an exhibition can do it. In a publishing industry that has lost its collective mind, its taste, and its generous patrons, the outlook for revival is dim: not least because the act of reading requires something more than an open eye or ear. Writers evoke periods and societies in very particular ways, and these are not always recuperable once the habit of open-minded reading has gone and been replaced by best-sellerism and the quick fix.

  Emmanuel Bove is an excellent example of the "eclipsed" writer, but far from unique. Writers fall out of favor from the political correctness of the day, from the sluggishness and overheads of publishers, from not being kept in print, from the primacy of critics and lazy academics; a single bad book can do them in as much as death.

  But after that fatal point, there remains the risk of the eager or necessitous widow. No writer should ever trust his immortal remains to his wife or family. The result is sure to be bowdlerization, suppression, or commercial disaster, for wives (and children) like to think they know their man, and who knows that he may not be more profitable dead than alive?

  Bove has had, in this regard, some exceptional bad luck. His whole period—the Jazz Age (only enjoyable and jazzy if you had access to the high jinks, which Bove emphatically did not), the Depression (universal access, but to be forgotten, if possible—too painful), and the unsavory 1940s (in France especially, to be obliterated)—is in disrepute. Mind you, he is in good company as he lurches from publisher to publisher and hand to mouth. Well outside the pantheon of the accepted, which runs from Proust and Gide to Montherlant, Mauriac, Giono, Cocteau, and such, he inhabits a world into which few still dip: with Eugène Dabit, Pierre Bost, Paul Garenne, and many others, nearly all of them entirely unavailable. The literature of 1919—39, apart from its "masters," in whom publishers have a vested interest, is little studied and less read.

  Then Bove's career, after the success of his first book, Mes amis, was always a creaky and unpatrician affair. Not for him Marcel's rentes; Emmanuel was a prole, a Grub Street man. He had a family to support. If he had made it, he could have afforded to make his older brother and his mother shut up; since he didn't, he lived at daily risk of their importunings. Thus, though one might say that between 1924 and 1935 he was—in terms of literary visibility—a successful author, he was seldom a regarded one. He didn't move in the circles of the successful, but rather in that French demi-monde that lies between the fat cats of the maison Gallimard—all mutual logrolling, long-term contracts, the support of the Nouvelle Revue Française—and the popular press, to which he was compelled, by nature and by need, to contribute.

  Being a Jew (his real name is Bobovnikoff) didn't help. He is not the Jew of the Agonized Conscience; he had nothing whatever to say about the Holocaust (though he must have known about it); he is barely a "Jewish" writer in any recognizable sense. But during the war years, Bobovnikoff can hardly be published—the house of Gallimard, a Jewish house, only barely squeezes by, and that by playing the Occupier's game. Even an arch-anti-Semite like Céline does not fare that much better at the Nouvelle Revue: Pierre Drieu de Rochelle edits the house magazine, with extreme difficulty, but Céline is no star in his firmament; he is something both less and more than an inconvenient, noisy ally. As for Bove, he does not exist: only by the merest coincidence (Marcel Aymé's goodwill) do the two men share a literary executor.