A Winter's Journal

by Emmanuel Bove

  There is, in Blutel, a remarkable piece of Bovian analysis which I think brings all this out. Here is Maxime on himelf and his father:

  His memories were ageless. Some from his infancy were clearer than those from his youth. To work out how he was at seven or fourteen he had to find a starting point in the apartments his family had occupied. He knew their order and how many years had been spent in each . . . He barely remembered his parents, though they did not die until he was a young man ... He had never found anyone who could describe his childhood gestures. No one who had known him then had survived. His name and photograph would have had to appear in the newspaper for the last members of his dispersed family to have written him a letter. And even then, he would have had to receive the letters, doubtless sent to various prefectures in the hope of finding him.{40}

  This prompts Maxime into precisely the sort of apparently normal, but in fact internally distorted, "explanation" to which I have been referring:

  His father sometimes came into his room to beg him to work. Maxime already had a confused sense that his father had suffered, that his life had been difficult. Though unconscious, Maxime’s wish was also to suffer, to live to become a man. He said to himself, "I want to grow up by my own means" ... He believed in just one thing: to create himself. When added to his laziness, this ambition led him to abandon his studies—they were so dry alongside the sufferings he was ready to endure. And when, later, circumstances forced him to live in third-rate hotels, it always seemed to him that the misery he could see about him was small beer compared to that which he had imagined. The closer he got to it, the lesser it seemed. He wanted to enter the suffering of the world. But each time it disappointed him. He thought it would be deeper . . . Having arrived in Paris at the age of fourteen and penniless, his only thought was to become a scholar. Alone and without the slightest help from anyone, he shut himself up in a room in the Latin Quarter with dictionaries, books as incomprehensible as those used in more advanced classes, and nourishing himself on bread and butter, tried to learn everything by heart. . . But he had a joker's heart which prevented his succeeding. Everything he tried failed. It was then, discouraged, that he separated from his first wife, remarried, and left Paris. All the things he hadn't been able to do, he wanted his son to do . . . Left out of his calculations was the fact that his son admired him, and that he too wanted to suffer.

  As Cousse says, "Bove spent his life seeking a doubly impossible integration. On the one hand, the literary milieu of his time was powerfully anchored to the bourgeosie. To be admitted, one must belong to it or be godfathered into it . . .

  But while Bove is being refused integration, such an integration would also be unacceptable to him; it would imply a denial of himself. [His whole career] is a double contradiction: the desire to be recognized and his inability to create the conditions necessary for such recognition."{41}

  The internally dépaysé, the "un-countried," the internal exiles, have their particular problems with language, which was not made for their particular situations, their lack of status. The strategy adopted by most "alien" writers (whether foreigners or internal exiles) is either by the creation of a separate language, one particular to them, or, as with Dostoevsky or Simenon, by refusing language altogether, by neutralizing its inventiveness, its allusions, its "idea" content. Bove was not especially attuned to a language at which he did not excel at school; hence the embarrassing "incorrections" of Bove's style noted by some French critics. Bove's characters speak the generic language of their generic milieu; it is barely specific to character and it does not change according to condition or class. To this sort of quotidian language, French is ideally adapted: by minimizing its difficulties, avoiding them, one arrives at the flat language of description—prose in its very essence. Human society and human feelings thus take on mechanical properties: like the very workings of capitalism.

  What is dull and gray in him is deliberate, conscious, a property of the times, of what Cousse once called "the constitutional infirmity . . of a society of war widows and orphans," of "poverty, unemployment, financial indelicacies, all the stigmata of a society in crisis." When Joubert calls ignorance "un lien entre les hommes,"{42} he might have been describing the intense commonality of Bove's multiple versions of himself and his immigrated-emigrated family.

  This rootlessness arises in Bove's narration and plotting. Much in Bove's skeletal plots is a bedroom farce inverted. People hop in and out of situations as they would onstage through doors and cupboards. The difference is that there is exhilaration, satisfaction, catharsis (of a comic sort) in farce; the viewer (reader) knows there is a resolution coming. The Bovian farce centers on what the reader knows will not happen. Nothing is going to work out. The doors, the cupboards, and the beds (the beds above all) are going to remain just that—doors, cupboards, and beds. They are not devices, they are the whole world.

  At the same time there is in him an acute sense of injustice, a deep sensibility to slight, an identification with the humble and despised. In exile, there is always the possibility that it is not simply temporary, but that it is permanent, that it is forever. Bove's family, his nature, his marriages, his life belong to that sort of exile. He and they are unspeakably poor and respectable and deprived. This is, I believe, a new note in literature. In Zola as in Dickens, the poor struggle; they are picturesque in their misery, in their self-exaggeration. Bove might be writing about a duchess and the result would be identically neutral. But duchesses have many writers to speak for them (Balzac was as charmed by them as Proust), where the newfound land of the poor has no spokesman. The poor neither read nor write, and certainly they do not listen.

  How very difficult it was for Bove, with no handle of any sort on the Christian tradition, to deal with this subject except in exactly the way he did: as a phenomenon observed and worthy of description! This is not merely un-Christian (God transfigures the poor, as in Bloy or Bernanos), it is also un-Jewish (for charity is there for the Chosen.) I think Bove is the most profoundly secular writer I know. There is nothing before his characters (no genealogy, no historicity) and nothing after. Indeed, there is nothing outside. Nothing transcends, and this, I believe, is the source of his importance to us; it makes him our contemporary.

  Léautaud quotes Stendhal talking to Mérimée who, already an old man, but still believing in a future, continued to lay foundations for his work to come. "What's the point of continuing to take aim?" Stendhal asks. "You're on a battlefield, you have to fire."{43} Well, Stendhal was an optimist. Bove belongs to those artists for whom silence, even in words, was a deliberate choice. His books will reproduce "les conditions d'échec de son père, que, seule une disparition prématurée soustrait à la dépréciation inévitable, propre à tout les personnages de Bove."{44} That is, they reproduce everything that stymied his father; only a premature death could subtract him from the inevitable depreciation which is the fate of all Bove's characters. His bathtub will always have been full of dirty dishes. While the July 14 balls, and the firing, go on elsewhere, in the last of his many, temporary, ill-furnished rooms, he'll have done what he's done all along, coughed his life out.

  Keith Botsford

  {1} Le Figaro, 10 November 1928, quoted in Raymond Cousse and Jean-Luc Bitton, Emmanuel Bove, La vie comme une ombre (Bordeaux: Le Castor Austral, 1994), 51; hereafter abbreviated EB and cited parenthetically in the text. Short unattributed quotes in this afterword appear in EB as well.

  {2} Sorry, one. Thomas Laux, Kompensation und Theatralik: Eine Studie su Emmanuel Boves frühen Romanen (1924-1928) (Frankfurt and New York: P. Lang, 1989).

  {3} This is a detective novel published in Boston in the early 1930s.

  {4} Cousse first published a brief pamphlet, Emmanuel Bove (Paris: Flammarion, 1983), and his major biography was completed by Jean-Luc Bitton, another cinematographer. This book, besides being unique and a labor of love, is invaluable in countless ways, not least for the patient tenacity with which many obscure details of Bove's
life have been tracked down and recorded. I, no less than anyone reading Bove or working on him, could not have done without it. As translations of Bove's novels succeed one another, this biography will no doubt someday appear in English.

  {5} Emmanuel Bove, ou l'Absolu dans le dérisoire (Emmanuel Bove, or the Absolute in the derisory). I have been unable to locate this book.

  {6} I missed Jane Kramer in the New Yorker, 20 May 1985.

  {7} A pair of examples will have to suffice: "This is what happens when one is not ready to die, and death takes us by surprise"; "The expression in his eyes was that of a father whose child has just committed a crime."

  {8} See the Spring 1992 issue of Bostonia. Other Bove translations include, in order of publication: My Friends (Mes amis), trans. Janet Louth (London: Carcanet, 1986); Armand, trans. Janet Louth (London: Carcanet, 1987); Quicksand (Le Piège), trans. Dominic Di Bernardi (Marlboro, Vt.: The Marlboro Press, 1991); Memoirs of a Singular Man (Mémoires d'un homme singulier), trans. Dominic Di Bernardi (Marlboro, Vt.: The Marlboro Press, 1993); The Stepson (Le Beau-Fils), trans. Nathalie Favre-Gilly (Marlboro, Vt.: The Marlboro Press, 1994).

  Two more novels, Départ dans la nuit and Non-Lieu, are to appear under the Marlboro Press imprint from the Northwestern University Press.

  {9} It is this journey, I believe, that is celebrated in Bove's usual underemphatic way in Afthalion Alexandre. However, in Bove, all journeys, especially the most banal train journeys, play a major role; they mark the rare, genuine displacements in Bove. They have fixed starts and arrival times; they offer a chance, through their windows, to glimpse the lives of others. Only in the two novels written at the end of his life does movement take on some urgency; from Vichy to Algiers via Spain is a matter of survival; so are the hallucinatory scenes in Départ dans la nuit.

  {10} Cousse (EB, 24) explains a more specific use of the word Prusco: "Prussian vagabonds who went from village to village begging and were taunted thus:

  De Ache fol fle

  De Bockel fol leiss

  Knachtig Preiss."

  Or: Arse thick with fleas / Back scratchy with lice / filthy Prussians. Needless to say, it is the poverty of Bobovnikoff père that is being thrown at him.

  {11} Monsieur Thorpe, (Paris: Le Castor Austral, 1988), 22.

  {12} Synapse (March 1993).

  {13} Monsieur Thorpe, 21.

  {14} Preface to Monsieur Thorpe, 12. Monsieur Thorpe is a great favorite among true Bove admirers. Mes amis is where most readers, including, for chronological reasons, his first readers, start, but Monsieur Thorpe and Le Beau-Fils are where Bovians, fascinated with his life, so inextricably mixed with his fiction, search for clues as to his true nature. It has to be remembered that until the Cousse-Bitton biography, next to nothing was known about Bove.

  {15} Un soir chez Blutel, (Paris: Flammarion, 1927), 61-63.

  {16} One exception is noted in EB, 109, but it is more a portrait of the writer (Maurice Bertz) than a piece of literary criticism.

  {17} In an interview (in Candide, 9 February 1928) he acknowledges Dickens, Balzac, and Dostoevsky as his masters ("These men are not littérateurs. They are men who write. Life is not literary.").

  {18} Jaloux is to further Bove's career when, a few months later, he is appointed literary editor at Émile-Paul Frères.

  {19} The last in Regards, 13 August 1936; the first two in Le Journal, 31 August 1935 and 2 September 1935, respectively. Not the least reason for gratitude to Cousse and Bitton is a reasonably complete bibliography.

  {20} In the Nouvelle Revue Française, 1 December, 1928.

  {21} "Est-ce un mensonge," reprinted together with six other short stories in Henri Duchemin et ses ombres (Paris: Flammarion, 1983), 232-33.

  {22} To be noted here is another similarity between Bove and Céline: what one might call the "German connection." Both have their Austrian periods; both cross over the racial barriers, Bove among the Gentiles, Celine among a series of Jewish mistresses.

  {23} This is the only published version of a "journal" Bove kept intermittently between 1936 and 1939. Bove's papers are to be found at the Institut Mémoires de l'Édition Contemporaine, 25 rue de Lille, Paris 75007.

  {24} Mercure de France, 15 November 1928.

  {25} Un père et sa fille (Paris: Au Sans Pareil, 1928), 171.

  {26} Ibid., 165.

  {27} Ibid., 209.

  {28} This is also the title of a separate short story. Bove was finicky about his (deadpan) titles. La Coalition, the novel, became (in a 1934 edition) Histoire dun suicide. The story, first published in 1928, is reprinted in 1991 as Aftalion Alexandre. The story is an Ur-Coalition, and despite Le Dilettante's publisher's note disclaiming any relationship between the two works, written within a few years of each other, it offers an almost unique opportunity to study Bove's technique in the construction of a novel. It is also revealing for its use of the theme of immigration, of the displaced person (Bobovnikoff senior) in Paris.

  {29} Paul Léautaud, Journal littéraire, 24 January and 17 February 1928 (Paris: Mercure de France, 1986), 1:2158, 2186. Otherwise, Léautaud's judgment, debating against Yves Gandon, a convinced admirer, is wholly negative: "It is a novel entirely without originality or personality. It is work well done, that's all." While this is true, and while La Coalition is, as Léautaud says, "an invention," the suppression of "originality" and writerly "personality" is, in Bove, entirely deliberate, part of the world as Fact.

  {30} Les nouvelles littéraires, 20 March 1939, quoted in EB, 197.

  {31} Published by Calmann-Lévy in 1987.

  {32} Le Piège (The Trap) (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 7. This novel, published almost posthumously by Pierre Trémois in April 1945, met with total neglect and indifference. Understandably. Bove's main character is an antihero in a country looking for men who behaved honorably; the Sartre-Camus-Aragon axis wields all power; no one wished to be reminded of the recent past—so much so that it took over forty years for the beginning of a reevalutaion of the Occupation to take place in France. Le Piège appears, translated by Dominic di Bernardi, under the title Quicksand, in the Marlboro Press edition of 1991. As with all the translations in this afterword—except for those from The Stepson and A Winter's Journal—I am responsible for the English.

  {33} Simone Monnier, quoted in EB, 210.

  {34} Un homme qui savait (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1985), 24, 50, 74, 102.

  {35} Emmanuel Roblès, quoted in EB, 215.

  {36} Personal communication from Nathalie Favre-Gilly.

  {37} The neglected writers come, not coincidentally, from the "right" and fell into disfavor with a critical world largely oriented—after the distresses inflicted by fascism—to the left. Few of them were active "collaborators"; indeed, most were neutral and apolitical. It remains that by, say, preferring Pavese to Fenoglio or Bassani to Arturo Loria or Sartre to Morand, our picture is distorted.

  {38} Quoted in the TLS, 9 October 1992, 27.

  {39} Léautaud, Journal littéraire, 1:1281.

  {40} Un soir chez Blutel, 119ff.

  {41} Cousse, introduction to Un soir chez Blutel.

  {42} Cited in the TLS, 12 June 1992.

  {43} Léautaud, Journal littéraire, 1:1276.

  {44} This epitaph I noted in a margin. Alas, without a reference.