A Winter's Journal

by Emmanuel Bove

  In abeyance here are the classical loci of fiction: class, milieu, description. Dialogue is minimal. Instead of a setting, we have cardboard props, a minimalist scenario. In La Coalition, we have Mme Aphtalion's beloved objects, which she transports down the hotels of her decline; here we are in the heartbreaking domain of memory:

  There is a certain sadness, when abandoning one home for another, in watching rooms being stripped bare, furniture from different parts of the house assembled haphazardly, an object we hold dear slipped hurriedly, for want of space, into an indifferent trunk. A distressing sense of being out of one's element is born of all the commotion, of the suddenly deserted apartment with the next one yet to be occupied. But when everything is staying behind and we alone are leaving, when our possessions are being gathered from various parts of the house where, once they've been removed, their absence won't be felt, and we sense that as soon as we're far away life will go on without us just as it did in the past, that feeling of sadness is even greater.

  How often this happened to Bove! How often the apparently settled turned out to be unsettled, and unsettling! Like Bove, deprived of an ordinary life, Louis recognizes that he is "not a man like other men ... I seem somewhat backward . . . I'm like a child." As for Madeleine, she is a prisoner of his mind. Louis notes with surprise that when she is angry, she "always starts by pretending not to care about anything other than some vague notion of freedom." The key word here is "pretend," for this is a misunderstanding of Louis's, and it is going to provide him with as much tragedy as his limited life can comprehend. The denouement begins early with the return of Roger: girl (Madeleine) meets old flame (Roger). "I'm certain that when Madeleine saw him again," Louis writes, "it must have dawned on her that she could love him." In Louis's eyes, this is true of every man she meets; the reader will not be slow to discover in the narrator a splendidly obsessive, Othellolike form of jealousy, a jealousy all the more potent for the purported rival being always an invention of Louis—yet something that is doomed to happen. Tu l'as voulu, Louis!

  If the reader wants to grasp the quintessential flavor of Bove, the basic scaffolding, in all its labyrinthine detail and speculation, on which Bove has constructed the archetypical marital spat, I suggest he look at the entry for December 8. As he will see, it is genuinely insane: in the root meaning of the word, un-healthy.

  Of what is this scene constructed? It turns on a basket of orchids Louis finds on the mantelpiece. Would they be there if they "compromised" his wife? He both wants and does not want his wife to have been unfaithful. First he wants her to know he's seen the florist's delivery note, then he doesn't. She foils him by coming into the room too quickly, and refuses to say who sent them. Of course, if she were innocent, Louis reflects—though of course she isn't—she wouldn't have dreamed he would ask her who sent the fatal orchids. Perverse as ever, this finding gives Louis a feeling of her "beauty." She is like a child, denying the obvious; she thinks no explanations are needed, for she has done no wrong. On the other hand, she is acting as if he'd done wrong. This reinforces Louis's position, for he can now play "the role of the husband who's sure of his facts and finally has proof of his wife's infidelity." When Madeleine finally admits the flowers came from the Count Belange, an anodyne suitor whose seductions are routine, universal, and incessant, this does not appease Louis. All his marriage he has been waiting for this moment: when "the truth burst out into the open." Since she prefers another to him, he says, "Have it your way! You'll be happy, that's all I want."

  Having made his putative move, a whole set of contradictory emotions now assail Louis. First, he may regret his decision; he may suffer remorse. Rage overtakes him. "Is that right, you don't love me?" he says to her. She refuses to answer, and now he fears his anger is cooling, so he starts packing. Now, it is Madeleine's turn to cling to him tearfully. Briefly, he relents: "Madeleine's choking sobs made me realize she was no longer herself, but a creature in pain"; but her tears "stripped her of her personality." Nonetheless, he again relents: he's only going to Versailles for a few days, he'll be back. This makes him realize that "you have to make a start. .. . After that, she'll be much nicer . . . suddenly ... I was free; nothing was holding me back." He is "crushed by her renunciation. . . . She seemed indifferent to anything I might do." This makes him feel "a deep disgust with myself," and the scene ends with his kneeling and begging her forgiveness.

  All this takes place in a little over a thousand words! The reader will be aware that the scene is constructed, and with great care. There is crisis, argument, doubt, divided feeling, and catharsis. Anyone who has been through such a scene will recognize the comings and goings of violent, contradictory, and often purely artificial emotions. The whole book is a little masterpiece of such paradoxes, and has to be read, listened to, and seen in the round. One may be irritated with the self-destructive Louis, as one is with the complacent Madeleine, but without care, the denouement, the absolutely logical end of this disconsolate tale, will be missed. It is an experience in mental claustrophobia. If you like, it is not so very different from certain Gothic forebears, such as Wilkie Collins's Woman in White.

  The reader is invited to see that for all the flatness of his diction, the absolute nakedness of Bove's language, his deliberate eschewal of "effect," it is style that makes this novel work. The narration, or argument, is itself subjunctive and conditional. Each action depends on a previous life-clause, from some distant, neutral verb. Journal, like Bove's other autobiographical novels, is a novel of dependence; Louis's and Madeleine's relations are those of subordination. Read a passage of Homer and you will quickly recognize what has happened, in twenty-six centuries, to the concept of narration and the idea of the hero. Homer offers the intoxication of glue-sniffing; his fix is, what happens next? In Bove, the next defeats the previous. The scene is not Circe's island of swine, but a furnished room; all his voyages take place in a melancholy landscape consisting of table, chair, and bed.

  Journal is a pivotal work for Bove. Before, he explored the world with which he was familiar: the suburbs of the human condition. He himself often noted ("How hard it is to come up with a subject!") how he was forced back onto people, onto ordinary human situations, those he could recognize from his own experience. With success—not unlike his three literary gods, Dickens, Balzac, and Dostoevsky—he sought to expand his repertory, to widen the scope of his vision. Journal and Le Beau-Fils are exceptions. Bove cannot escape his fate. He returns to his sources: to his own life and condition. This novel states the Bovian dilemma perfectly: "I rage; I have a soul; but I am ineffective. Indeed, I do not exist; you would have to turn me inside out for me to come into being."

  iv

  How Important Is Bove?

  It certainly is not a matter of ranking, for Bove is very much sui generis. Like all good writers, he carved out a niche that is all his own. He is original not in language but in perception. A species of reductionism operates in Bove that makes his books particularly redolent of his period—what one might call the aftermath of capitalism in the volatile, would-be parliamentary nations of Europe.

  As our century will, I am convinced, come to be seen as the century not, as America proclaims, of democracy, but of fascisms, Bove's novels, like those of many of his equally unread contemporaries from between the wars (and not just in France),{37} will come to be seen as fundamental to an understanding of the twentieth century. This may be a large claim, but I think that the very fact that Bove, the writer, was not consciously dealing with political and social matters makes him a more perfect, if latent, mirror of that period in which fascism most prospered.

  It may be difficult for the modern, especially the modern American, reader to get into the psychopathology of a period in which fascism was defined, but Bove offers a perception that no other writer does, for his characters are the very people for whom fascism was created, and their milieu—the marginal, the fearful, the indecisive, the new pre-proletariat of a middle class about to lose its respectability
—is that from which fascism recruited. Had Bove's people any political vitality, were they truly on the middle-class ladder of rising and falling, they would have welcomed it, for fascism provided action to counteract their inertia; it understood their grievances; it would have subsumed them into something larger than themselves. Their failure to grasp this, to move either right or left, is Bove's legacy, and I find it truer than that offered by countless "political" writers with causes: whether of the left or right.

  The very stasis, the immobility, of the Bovian world expresses those preconditions from which fascism—all movement, all rhetoric, all vectors and teleology—derives. In this he reminds me powerfully of another contemporary, Theodore Dreiser, whose American Tragedy (which again few now read) is the ultimate expression of a failure to cope.

  In the context of the French novel—which can hardly be said to have neglected social issues—Bove occupies a curious place. Where Balzac, Maupassant, and Zola (not to mention Bloy) saw a "class" poverty, a relentless Darwinian war of selection and destruction, Bove sees the struggle for existence as mental and internal, and by so doing left out of "his" France almost all its major external markers: for instance, the great gulf between rural and urban poverty, or the exploitation of the industrial proletariat. After all, those who worked machines were poor in a way that none was poor who handled a tool of his own making, and industrial workers were as invisible to Bove as they had been flagrant instances of abuse to writers before him. It is as though Bove had no sense of social injustice—so evident in Céline with his lacemaker mother, steamed noodles every meal (they were the only food one could cook over the shop that didn't spread its smell to the lace of the rich), and his surly remarks about Das Kapital—only of the forfeitures of justice inherent in the families of the deprived and the marginal.

  Or consider how different Bove is from the Anglo-Saxon literature of the interwar years. No fizz. France has been bled. The chief (acknowledged) French literature of Bove's period is either severely classical (Gide, Giono, Mauriac) or nostalgic (Proust, Martin du Gard). To be sure there are jokers (Allais, Queneau starting out), but on the whole they are a sober lot. The sensibility of the period also runs contra. Consider only Carné's Hotel du Nord. Bove is film noir without murder or suspense.

  It is curious that a Jew, a Russian Jew at that, should have been so sensitive to the (unstated) political climate of the Crash and the Depression of the 1930s, have understood his raw material so well, yet never stated it in political terms. Like Alfred Döblin in Germany, Bove is the recorder of a petty bourgeoisie in disintegration. The portrait is all the more convincing for not being dressed up in ideological clothing. But then Bove lacks any form of redeeming spirituality; he is a secularized and would-be assimilated Jew, for whom, as for so many of his kind, there was nothing beyond the disasters of the day.

  His is the chronicle of appearances that cannot be kept up; of the importunate, the whiners, of those who they think deserved (and had been born to—hence his adoration of his stepmother) a better fate. His is the poverty of accidie, a note totally alien to the class struggle represented by the mainstream of French social fiction. A Bove hero (or antihero, for one can see why Beckett admired him) does not make even a gesture of protest against the rock that is rolling down on him. It strikes a new note because it is so all-embracing, so mechanical, so intricately linked, fetter by fetter, so logical, so merited, that it comes to seem a perfectly apt description of the human condition: one to which God had originally offered some consolation. Nor is there in him the relief of even a single pleasure. Neither religion, nor talent, not art, nor sex comes to relieve that poverty of spirit.

  This neutrality, I think, leads the reader into difficult, infrequently accessed parts of mass psychology; Bove's very refusals engender a near-hypnotic state. While fascism (and communism) extolled a romanticized Nature, alp and forest, and the power of a new technology and speed, with the exception of its train journeys Bove's is a world without movement, landscape, or even season. So stripped down is his oeuvre to the city (particularly its fringes) that such elements of ordinary life as storms, leaves falling, spring and hope, extremes of heat and cold, are foresworn as though they were just cheap effects. His is not a painter's eye—color is rare—but a photographer's: that of a photographer when Bove was young, who recorded shop windows, midinettes, surgical appliances, or the defiant expressions of the insane with equal objectivity, as though all aspects of the real world were equivalent. This is a truly modern sensibility, and utterly secular, for God, who sustained Dostoevsky, plays no part whatever (again, rare in a Jew) in Bove's world, where He has long been dead.

  Had he been a painter, Bove would have created still lifes with the realism of an urban Courbet: because they were there to be seen and depicted. Reading him, I am reminded of the painter Felix Valloton, whose mournful, gray interiors depict a Bovian world. His own life, Valloton once said, had been "extremely solitary and disenchanted" and this "no doubt explains the acerbity and lack of joy in my painting."{38}

  The writer with whom he has most in common, and with whom he is most often connected (not just because both were Jewish writers) is Proust. Bove is the Proust of the other end of the bourgeosie. But unresolved, one might say, lacking in general conclusions, occluded by his characters' own confusions, their lack of precise self-definition, their acceptance of their miserable fates. Proustian in the insistence on motivation, the why of behavior, but without the satisfactions of Proust's useful aperçus, the fixative of Proust's mind. But isn't that precisely the satisfaction Bove offers? Is he not in tune with the new post-psychological era, in which what counts is presentation, the "whole" image minus explanation: the "image" offered by film, television, advertising, photography, pop culture in general, which exclude the inner minds of its men and women?

  In psychotherapeutic terms, Bove's characters "present." They offer the reader a version of themselves, complete with an explanation. They come bubbling to the couch, saying, "Listen, Doc, its all the fault of my mother." But its child's play for the reader-shrink to see that Bove's whole oeuvre is socially and class-determined, that there are explanations for their condition that they do not see and that Bove declines to define. Bove is the very opposite of "J'accuse!" Nor is there a trace of "Je m'accuse!" Instead, there is an integrity, a consistency, and a hermetic self-containedness to Bove's world that is fairly unique, at least in French literature. One understands the lament of the critic saying (of Adieu Frombonne) that it's just another Bove story, another slice of a world definably "Bovian." There is such a world because Bove has a remarkable sense of the collective unconscious of his class and period. When Maxime, in Un soir chez Blutel (that "novel of inaction"), returns from Vienna with eight people in his third-class compartment, this is how they react to their arrival:

  All these people with—as with roads on an isthmus—their briefly common destinies, all of them thinking they had done well to choose this particular compartment, for otherwise they would not have had these particular traveling companions, simultaneously understood they were about to arrive.

  It is an unconscious, unthinking process. Because they are alike, a temporary lumpen proletariat, they arrive at the same conclusions.

  Reading Bove is like watching something happen that is by nature inexplicable, and no explanation beyond the personal is proferred. To offer a reason why these people should be as they are would be a betrayal. This refus is of the most striking elements in Bove. Cousse calls it a form of auto-destruction, and I think he's right. It comes down to this: that there is no paraphrasing Bove. That is, you can explain the externals (to the degree that Bove offers them) of his characters, but not why they are as they are. The auto-destructiveness comes in the way all the intermediary "explanations" of the traditional novel are simply suppressed. This "making it impossible" to describe the novel in anything but its own terms strikes me as ultra-modern, very much part of our sensibility.

  Characteristically, it shows up in B
ove's peculiar obliteration of Jews. I cannot recall a passage in which Bove so much as mentions Jewish matters. It is not even a subtext. One may assume the "Jewishness" of an Apthalion, but it is never made explicit. Was this deliberate or unconscious? It might well be that Bove, as part of his denial, his self-suppression ("That is not me! That is not my real mother!") never thought of himself as a brief generation away from the Kiev ghetto. Both he and Proust understood social dynamics in another fashion: as rise and fall. Both are tempted by their own versions of the beau monde: Proust by aristos, Bove by his aristocrats—anyone with more than a sufficiency of money.

  The refusals are constant. For instance, one of the ways in which writers interest us is by their domain, what they explore. Given something so drab as poverty (which is not merely financial, but poverty of ideas, poverty of language and feeling), the writer (e.g., Dickens) may seek to redeem poverty by a heightened style, a hyperbole of language. Bove's abdication here is even more remarkable. "There are," he seems to be saying, "no devices or artifices by means of which we may escape our condition; I'm certainly not going to provide any."

  Rank (is Bove better, less good than X or Y?) is simply not a question; he is hors concours, he never went to the starting line. The man who wrote Brecon is simply the medium by which we become aware of this intolerable suburb—the physical existence of these so other people, those who are indeed as invisible as a suburb seen from a train.

  To say that a writer is simply a medium is not to deny the artistry of the communication. Every sentence can be written in another way. Perhaps we should not forget that Bove is half-Russian. The Russia to which Bove speaks is not that detached, liberal Russia, subtle and painful, of Chekhov; it isn't the lofty, peasant wisdom of Tolstoy; and least of all is it the visionary Russia of Leskov and Gogol. The Dostoevsky in Bove is not that of The Brothers Karamazov, but of the early realist, the gambler, the man barely reprieved from death, the Dostoevsky who would have understood Bobovnikoff père. He shares with Dostoevsky that renunciation of a language appropriate to the condition of his characters. Bove's capacity was not such as to bring him to invent a twentieth-century version of Oblomovshschina, but as Léautaud pointed out, there is in some people a force of inertia.{39} In the physical universe inertia is as much a force as energy, the two existing in a delicate balance; without inertia, we would have no need for energy. That may be why, raising these two forces to virtue and vice, the medieval church considered accidie—principally despair of salvation—chiefest of the mortal sins.