I don't think much of this argument. Bove confounds the whole heredity-versus-environment debate; both condemn him to be the man he is, as they condemn his characters. They are innumerable in his works—these men who live on the marches of life and slowly, almost insidiously, become aware that they can't escape themselves. Among the extraordinarily ordinary characters who collect for Un soir chez Blutel is Demongeot:
At thirty, he had noticed that all the things he had hoped for in his youth would not come about, that his status in the world was already fixed, his path laid down, and that the best he could do would be to live tranquilly exercising his profession as a dentist . . . The passage from a youth full of dreams to adulthood took place without his knowledge. Just what he regretted was not clear ... At forty he lived in the same decor as when he was young. Now he took care not to be overcome by bitterness.{15}
Some writers are indeed formed by their education; others by their experience. Bove obviously read, but, despite attestations to his large library and his prizing rare first editions, it is singular that I can think of not a single reference to another writer in his work, nor did he ever, to my knowledge, publish any critical articles.{16} He himself says he reads little:
. . . and even when I force myself to read, I am often bored. No sooner have I opened a book than I want to write . . . The book [before me]—good or bad, that's not the question—I would like to rewrite in my own way. Ideas, memories, and objections surface, so many of them that I have to stop, (quoted in EB, 111){17}
The few notes and fragments we possess consist exclusively of observations and analyses. He may, therefore, have turned to writing as a form of salvation, as a way of distancing himself from his "situation," not to "be overcome by bitterness," but my guess is that this is not, for him, therapy, but rather the central perversion.
The Prusco was to die in 1915 in a Leysin (Switzerland) sanatorium: once he was dead, Bove, who had always feared this loss, at last felt he possessed him entirely. Now he could turn him into fiction. And that meant facing the real world, in the form of Henriette and Léon, who feel as if Bobovnikoff had died just to spite them, to deprive them still further. From that moment on, mother and son badger: persistently, tenaciously, vilely, unashamedly. Badger Emmanuel, badger Emily, who herself has lost all her fortune in the postwar inflation. This pursuit of the unattainable, this sense of terrible injustice, is to provide the narrative strength of Bove's fiction. High drama is counted in a very few francs due, in a switch of affections, in the changing tone of a voice: in all those things, in fact, which make up daily life. Notably missing in his work—for any form of politics is absent until after 1940—is the Great War (he wasn't mobilized until April 1918), the Bolshevik Revolution. Much more important is his separation, which is going to last twelve years, from Emily (she remarries a Mr. Lamont, who has many children of his own, but it would also appear that he stole her valuable Bible and she threw him out of the house). Much more important is the fact of poverty.
This poverty, which the modern reader can scarcely conceive, is very real. It doesn't consist of living less well, of deprivation; it is a matter of having nothing, of not knowing how one is going to make it to tomorrow. Bove works in a Marseilles restaurant, he hides on a train to Paris, he travels on used trolley tickets; worst of all, he is condemned to living with Henriette and his brother in a furnished room in Versailles. He survives this by what he calls his "somnambulism"; he is simply absent; in the eyes of his family, he is irresponsible; he is an actor. From a restaurant to a hotel (porter); from hotel to prison as a drifter; conscripted at twenty, serving a long and boring occupation, he marries for the first time in December 1921.
It seems not to have been a happy marriage. Suzanne Vallois was a striking-looking woman, full in face, with short, dark hair; she looks Spanish and practical. But her background is rural and narrow-minded. Demobilized, Bove and Suzanne left for Austria: a defeated country has the virtue of being cheap, and Bove wanted to write.
For in the meantime, mysteriously, he has become, leaving little trace of creation, a writer. It is as though his two earliest books (by date of writing), Le Crime d'une nuit and Mes amis, had long been written in his mind, and all that was required was that they should be set down.
A stroke of good fortune (one of the few) was that the reader of Le Crime d'une nuit was Colette, then in charge of fiction at Le Matin. Drafted in Vienna, it was probably written for the paper's Christmas edition (it was too long), which probably accounts for its lyrical, parablelike language. Henri Duchemin is a typical Bovian down-and-out. Sitting in a café on Christmas Eve, he recounts his misery to a woman. "Don't be ridiculous," she says. "If you're as unhappy as you say, you can kill yourself." In fact, he kills a banker, shares out the proceeds, and has a mystical encounter with a white-bearded man in a park. It turns out to be all a dream.
This tale, however slight and philosophizing, however much the work of a young man at his beginnings, nonetheless strikes the true Bovian note: "He remembered his dream somewhat; and also, a little, the white-bearded man who said that, to redeem himself, he should suffer. But none of this concerned him, for he had never harmed anyone." What marks it as true Bove is the enormous distance between event and description, the indefiniteness until—and this is the Bovian way of rendering reality, true prose, no ambiguity, a flat, declarative sentence—he reaches his encapsulating conclusion: "None of this concerned him." In between are all the hedges and twists and qualifications, the "somewhat" and "a little" that are woven seamlessly into his mature style, not to be discarded until his last two novels.
It was Colette who encouraged him—she directed a fiction collection for the publisher Ferenczi—to write his first full novel, which he did, locked away in a hotel room, in a remarkably short time. This novel, Mes amis—no more than a series of short stories, aperçus of life among the falling and fallen, truly those he knew best, though the title is ironical, in that the thread that keeps the novel together is his hero's search for friendship—made his reputation and remains the one book discerning readers may know. It was also a resounding success. Edmond Jaloux, who had befriended Proust in his later years, caught the resonances—and the differences—right away:
Mes amis is the confession of a poor man with feeling. He seeks to attach himself to others; he ends up alone. No events, nothing novelistic, just everyday, lacerating, wretched meetings. This simple story is woven through with a fantasy that is ingenuous and melancholy, a truthfulness that extends to the comic, and a trembling pain, (quoted in EB, 93){18}
As Bove's biographers point out, Mes amis is a book against the grain. Bove is immediately marginal. The Jazz Age is about to begin: without Bove. Peter Handke, who is more than just an admirer, who indeed has used many Bovian disguises himself, has noted the freshness of the young writer, not yet twenty-five: "The writing is so clear, so modest, and yet not at all modest. It's a form of writing that doesn't exist before him, nor since. It's like drawing with very clear lines" (quoted in EB, 94). Philippe Soupault, the surrealist (and communist) was present at a dinner that Colette gave for her new authors. He recalls that
Bove did not say a word, save to say "thank you" when his wine was poured ... He preferred writing to speaking ... He never criticized others. I've never heard him speak ill of anyone. His few friends thought he sought to be forgotten, as others sought to be known. He always preferred silence to publicity ... He never spoke of his childhood, his adolescence, or his family, (quoted in EB, 96)
Like his contemporary, Georges Simenon (they are very likely to have read each other), Bove did not have access to the sinecures by which most French writers survive. Instead, like Simenon, he worked as a free-lance in the newspapers of the day. Both writers were most attracted to crime and the faits divers, the strange little news items ("Cow stops Express," Louis Guilloux, another underestimated writer would declaim at the breakfast table) which tie reader to reality. Indeed, the list of Bove's published writing is extended by su
ch faits divers as: Le pigeon mécanique . . . , Jean Taris est vainqueur de la traversée de Paris à la nage, and Un drame de vanité.{19} And there are other affinities: in style, subject, perversity, and sympathy for the downtrodden, the anonymous mass. Like another contemporary, L.-F. Celine, both men are close students of the banlieu, the dreadful 'burbs that housed those who could not afford the center.
A most interesting study could be made of the relationship between many writers' fictions and their journalism, which in their minds lie in two different worlds: that of the imagination and that of the real. Practical journalism is part of the writer's life, all the way back to the founding of the periodical press. And why not? It offers the writer a way to hone his writing skills, to compress, to speak to a guaranteed audience, to respond to a deadline, to desacralize his language, to speak directly to an avid readership. And it offers (relatively) easy money; it consumes text. After all, Le rouge et le noir began its fictional life as a fait divers.
As you will find out in reading this novel, or if you so much as set foot in Bove's world, the autism of his characters, their ineffectuality, is disturbing by its curious calm. You may not know what to make of a girl like Louise, for instance, in Une fugue (1929). Louise has a crisis on her hands: she's been caught stealing a fur coat. Louise is one of a gallery of Bovian women who are both victims and savages: that is, they give as good as they get—to be sure, in their own passive way. As she relates her story to the lawyer she wishes to engage, we find out that she suffers from being unloved. Holed up in a hotel room—much of Bove takes place in the anonymity of a hotel bedroom or a meublé—she is discovered inert with a phial by her bedside. A suicide? Not at all. It is just water. Her perplexed parents bring her home. They ask her what's wrong with her. "Nothing," she answers.
I can't remember if Louise's purloined coat is returned, but that doesn't matter. The question is, what's the matter with these people? Where is will? Free will?
I take my text here from Bove's own life. The year is 1925. Suzanne and their daughter, Nora, go off for the summer holidays. Emmanuel is busy: he stays behind in Paris. In September, mother and daughter come back and find the concierge at the foot of the stairs. "Don't go up," he says. "M. Bove has given up his lease." Where is he? They don't know, we don't know. When Bove seeks divorce, which required proof of adultery, Bove says he would rather jump into the Seine than cohabit again. And Suzanne later confides to her daughter that she had divorced him (in 1930) "without ever having a marital quarrel with him. His humor was absolutely constant" (EB, 110-11).
Louis Martin-Chauffier points out the ties that bind the guilty to their victims in the Bovian oeuvre:
Bove's world is a refuge for the victims of society, or rather for those unable to live in society: unprotected against the blows of society, they show all their scars, and how they got them. Even if they don't complain, just looking at them one is horrified by a world that refuses shelter to those whose only crime, an unwilling one, is that they are simultaneously devoid of both virtues and vices, therefore literally defenseless. Without showing his colors, Bove's major books show him to be an enemy to the social fabric. Not by principle, but by temperament.{20}
The divorce from Suzanne—unstated because, as Nora points out, "my father was incapable of saying anything unpleasant or wounding"—is a symptom, not an illness. Bovian inaction shows how Russian he is. His illness is a form of Oblomovschina, a profound moral sloth that precludes both judgment and act.
Take the story "Est-ce un mensonge," in which the wife, devoutly independent, is regularly missing every afternoon (Bove's women, largely proletarian, share a distaste for possession) until she stays out one whole night. On her return, she tells her husband a cock-and-bull story about old friends:
He didn't believe her. He was profoundly convinced that she had lied. But it suddenly struck him that he was approaching old age, and rather than lose everything, it was better to suffer silently, so as to go on enjoying living with the woman he loved, and who had enough respect and friendship for him to have taken the trouble to lie.{21}
All this may make it seem that Bove was a melancholic, passive, the author of his own unhappy life. This is not quite true. At the time that he separates from Suzanne, for instance, he is having a two-year affair with Henriette de Swetschine, about whom we know little, apart from Léon’s testimony that she "passed herself off as a lady of some style . . . [and had] a rather disagreeable nature. A woman of the world. She claimed to be related to the noble Galitzin family in Russia" (EB, 112).{22} This relationship, dwindling thanks to periods of enforced cohabitation with Bove's mother and brother, vanishes as effectively as Suzanne by 1928, apart from a typically mysterious Bovian Nachlass, dated October 21, 1936: "A visit today from Henriette. Her friend, M.R., is dying in Colmar" (EB, 310).{23} If one had to venture a guess, on the basis of very few facts, Henriette (his mothers name! Germanic!) represented a higher station for Bove. Possessing a mistress indicated, in Bove's mind at least, a certain financial independence; it also gave him a public stance as an author (for most writers felt a mistress was necessary), and Henriette's companionship allowed him (as his father had with Emily) to show off someone better placed in society than himself. That it did not last, I divine, may have had something to do with boredom and poverty on his part, and infidelity on hers.
All in all, life between 1925 and the mid-1930s is not unpleasant. He is a published author with a resounding success to his name; he works hard—a succession of books, four and a reprint in a limited, illustrated edition of Mes amis, appear in 1927, eight books in 1928, three more in 1929, and, in fact, until 1935 he publishes constantly—and in nice places like Bandol, where the jacketed, waistcoated, bow-tied Bove gives way to the sportif who indulges his passion for golf. In 1928, Bove meets his second wife, Louise Ottensooser, from a family of bankers (shades of his father, again!), with whom he amicably shared the remainder of his life, the only shadow being the stillbirth of their only child in London, and in the same year wins the Prix Figuière (50,000 francs, and among his rivals were André Malraux and Pierre Drieu la Rochelle!).
To this fertile and happy period belong some of Bove's most emotionally deprived novels, including Un père et sa fille (1928), La Coalition (1928), and the present book, Journal écrit en hiver (1931). All three are in some way despairing works, thus proving that life and art do not always coincide perfectly in time.
Of the first of these, Max Jacob, the poet, was to write (to Bove, of whom he was a fervent admirer): "Un père et sa fille is one of the most beautiful books I know. It could be by any great master: it is yours" (quoted in EB, 135). But the critics did not all agree. John Charpentier asked: "Will M. Bove ever escape his nightmare? . . . [This is] a lamentable story. It is about a mediocre man who, realizing that he cannot live up to his ambitions, having been deceived and left by his wife, and abandoned by his daughter, gives in to a complete abjectness."{24} That encapsulates the plot, but does not convey the perverse eroticism that runs through the short novel. It would be fairer to sum up the book as a tale of casting one's affections on the wrong women. Bove, who was able to say that though he had been with many women, he could "not remember one who could be called beautiful," had a double difficulty in dealing with his female characters: first there was his fixation with his mother, and his guilt at having no feeling for her, and second, a deep, underlying misogyny.
Jean-Antoine About is sixty-four, a fleshly, vigorous man become a recluse in a state of advanced self-destruction. The objects of his life are three: his maid, Nathalie; Marthe, the headstrong country girl he had selected to be his wife; and their daughter, Edmonde. The nicety of the argument, which unusually for Bove is told in retrospect, is that it is double-edged: either About is a sonofabitch with whom no woman could possibly live, or all women are simply whores. The maid refuses his attentions ("Fear or weakness made his attempts quite without risk").{25} In marrying him, Marthe knew "that the man she was marrying would appear ridiculo
us to her, and full of defects which she would seem to ignore . . . This character did not displease About."{26}About's "situation" doesn't change with his daughter: "Her coldness wounded him. She didn't want to fall at his feet. She had no intention of taking pity on her father. Nothing, he thought, not even the most extreme act, could touch her."{27}
About, like many of Bove's antiheroes, is afflicted with accidie and rue: like a number of Gogol's wounded clerks, he is "convinced he was condemned to mediocrity." What is the reader to make of this? That, deprived of love, a man will seek to create it where it cannot flourish? The novel ends with About grappling, still unsuccessfully, with his maid Nathalie.
It is not just that Bove's relicts are ridiculous, but that they are ridiculous in their own eyes. They have no safety net, social or psychological. Take away the props they erect (respectability, the esteem of others, a brief fling at sex or marriage, a job) and they have nothing left. There is in Bove no blood, no sweat, few tears, and much inevitability. His people suffer from a class disaster: that of those who have known better things. His nouveaux-pauvres, marginals all, are so much flotsam; they drift in a sea whose strong currents and depths somehow—and inexplicably to them—sustain others without effort. Where one might, in the nineteenth century, have expected social anger at such an outrage, Bove's characters are internalized, self-condemning. They live in Incognito, whose capital is Mea Culpa. But even here they are not welcome, for their ills are all the fault of others, of circumstance. Bove's characters do not see themselves clearly. It's as though they didn't speak the local language (they don't understand paying their bills, telling the truth, earning a living).
This dépaysement is a major theme in Bove, but seldom as clearly dissected as in La Coalition.{28} Paul Léataud, whose Journal littéraire faithfully, if unkindly, registers all the shifts in French intellectual life over seven decades, sums this novel up as "the story of a woman come to Paris with her son, still very young, to find him a job. Both of them slide steadily into the worst sort of poverty and downfall, the mother nearly going mad in her hotel room and the son drowning himself. It would occur to no one to write such books." Léautaud thus unconsciously echoes the remark made about Rossini (that his works shouldn't be composed) by noting that these are books one would be well-advised not to read.{29}
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