ALBERT COSSERY (1913–2008) was a Cairo-born French writer of Lebanese and Greek Orthodox Syrian descent who settled in Paris at the end of the Second World War and lived there for the rest of his life. The son of an illiterate mother and a newspaper-reading father with a private income from inherited property, Cossery was educated from a young age in French schools, where he received his baccalauréat and developed a love of classical literature. At age seventeen he made a trip to the French capital with the intention of continuing his studies there. Instead he joined the Egyptian merchant marine, eventually serving as chief steward on the Port Said–New York line. When he was twenty-seven his first book, Men God Forgot, was published in Cairo and, with the help of Henry Miller, in the United States. In 1945 he returned to Paris to write and live alongside some of the most influential writers and artists of the last century, including Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Tristan Tzara, Alberto Giacometti, Lawrence Durrell, and Jean Genet. He was also, briefly, married to the actress Monique Chaumette. In 1990 Cossery was awarded the Grand Prix de la francophonie de l’Académie française and in 2005 the Grand Prix Poncetton de la Société des gens de lettres. His books, which have been translated into more than fifteen languages, include The House of Certain Death, The Lazy Ones, and Proud Beggars.
ANNA MOSCHOVAKIS has translated The Engagement by Georges Simenon and The Possession by Annie Ernaux.
JAMES BUCHAN’s latest novel is The Gate of Air.
The Jokers
Albert Cossery
Translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis
Introduction by James Buchan
New York Review Books, New York
Contents
Cover
Biographical Note
Title Page
Introduction
The Jokers
Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12
Copyright and more information
Introduction
ALBERT COSSERY is a novelist all on his own. As consistent in his themes as in his sedentary habits, he published every ten years or so of a long life a novel written in French and set (with a single exception) in Egypt.
Since his death in Paris in 2008, Cossery’s blend of low-life nostalgia and philosophical dandyism has won new readers in France and, in rather lesser numbers, in Egypt and Lebanon. This sparkling novel, first published as La violence et la dérision by Julliard in Paris in 1964, is the sixth of his nine books to be translated into English.
Cossery was born in 1913 in Cairo into a Greek Orthodox family with some private means. Educated in the French schools of Cairo, Cossery was drawn to both surrealism and Baudelaire and, at the age of eighteen, published a book of verse, Les morsures (Bites), which I have not been able to locate.
After a cruise as a ship’s steward to the United States, where he seems to have met Henry Miller, he published in Cairo in 1941 a book of five surrealist stories, Les hommes oubliés de Dieu, translated as Men God Forgot and praised by Miller. The book found its way to Algiers where it came to the attention of both Edmond Charlot, publisher of Albert Camus, and Camus himself. Cossery’s first novel, La maison de la mort certaine (translated as The House of Certain Death), came out in Cairo in 1944. With the liberation of Paris, Cossery moved there as did Charlot, who republished both books.
At some point, Cossery married. The marriage was a failure, though whether this was a cause or an effect of Cossery’s contempt for women, or both, I cannot tell. At the end of 1945, he installed himself in the hotel La Louisiane in the Latin Quarter, where he was to live (first in Room 58 and then in Room 70) for the next sixty years. Like his characters, Cossery rose late. He frequented literary cafés such as the Café de Flore and the Deux Magots and devoted himself to affairs of gallantry. His pose of extreme indolence concealed, as with Stevenson, a heroic industry.
The House of Certain Death, in which indigent tenants await the imminent and inevitable collapse of their slum house, sets out Cossery’s principal themes. Like Baudelaire, he has neither compassion nor sympathy for the poor, only a limitless curiosity. Cossery is fascinated by the division of labor in the very pit of society. His monkey men, melon sellers, sweepers, repairers of kerosene stoves, cigarette-stub pickers are echoes of Baudelaire’s chiffonniers (rag pickers). Cossery is entranced by very, very small sums of government money: the one-millième piece (about a quarter of a U.S. cent) that the women of the house pay for a guide to the address of the slum’s landlord, the two-piastre piece (a nickel) that buys a night in a hotel with only three eiderdowns for twenty guests.
Laid over the Arabic notion of 'eish (the easy life) is a sort of Cynicism, derived either from his own reading of Greek literature or by way of Camus. Like Diogenes of Sinope, the original Cynic or “dog philosopher,” who lived in his own filth and told Alexander the Great to get out of his light, Cossery’s heroes do not seek virtue, knowledge, or salvation, but, in a world that is raving mad, only a natural and malodorous contentment. Cossery’s manifesto is: The most terrible thing is not to be poor, but to be ashamed of it.
There followed, in 1948, again with Charlot, the most beautiful of all his books and his farewell to surrealism, Les fainéants dans la vallée fertile, translated as The Lazy Ones. Here a family of men, engulfed in an antedeluvian lethargy, or paresse séculaire, in a filthy villa in the Nile delta, continually besieged, ambushed, and overwhelmed by sleep, confront a crisis when their father considers taking a wife. There are passages of such otherworldly comedy you might be reading the first chapters of the Quixote.
Cossery’s next novel was his longest and least satisfactory, Mendiants et orgueilleux (1955), translated as Proud Beggars. Here a university professor sinks into hashish and serene penury. For no reason at all, he murders a sixteen-year-old prostitute.
Having walked straight into the capital paradox of the Cynic’s philosophy, Cossery then withdrew from his exposed philosophical positions. Beginning with The Jokers, the characters diminish in number and become more dandified. The scene is swept a little and given a lick of paint. The insurrectionary spirit that flickers at the end of The House of Certain Death gives way to a more subtle protest.
Against bourgeois society, with its tyrannies, pitiable privileges, and futile exertions, Cossery pits flânerie, idleness, nonchalance, ridicule, and the insolence and sexual frigidity of the dandy. In The Jokers, which is set in Alexandria, the local governor has declared war on beggars and idlers. There are distant echoes of the revolutionary debates of the age, from the Situationists to Fanon, but those are submerged in comedy. Un complot de saltimbanques (1975), translated as A Splendid Conspiracy, and Une ambition dans le désert (1984), which is set in the only Persian Gulf sheikhdom without any petroleum, are variations of this theme.
In Cossery’s final novel, Les couleurs de l’infamie, published in 1999 but portraying Cairo in a sort of perpetual early 1970s, the slumlord who is the moral villain of The House of Certain Death is now a bent real-estate developer whose building has just collapsed, killing all its tenants. “We are not,” he tells the dandies with a profound self-satisfaction, “in the age of the Pharaohs. One must build for a limited period or that would be the end of the developer.”
Meanwhile, the professions of the poor have lost their demarcations. They are now “unemployed workers, craftsmen without customers, intellectuals that have lost hope in fame, petty officials turned out of their offices for lack of chairs, university graduates bent double under the weight of their sterile learning, and finally those given to eternal laughter, the philosophers, who, loving shade and peace and quiet, consider the spectacular deterioration of the city to have been especially brought about to sharpen their critical senses.” The hero is a pickpocket. The philosopher-dandy of Cossery’s final no
vel lives not, like old Diogenes, in a broken pot but in what is nearly as good: a tomb in Cairo’s City of the Dead.
As the French are the wittiest race in Europe, so are the Egyptians in Africa. Cossery’s comedy derives from the contraposition of exquisite French and an exceptionally squalid setting. His is not the French I learned at school, let alone that spoken nowadays
in metropolitan France, but he writes sentences of which Balzac would have been proud. His style depends for its effect on precise and outlandish adjectives, as in the description here of the terrace of the Globe Café. That is not the very best style in English, which likes verbs and nouns, and presents a challenge to his translator.
Cossery has his faults. There is a certain rigidity of posture, which is open to parody, and, most notably in Proud Beggars, a daft nihilism. There is not the slightest inquiry as to why the poor of Egypt are poor nor, in a country that passed in Cossery’s lifetime from British protectorate, to parliamentary monarchy, then to military junta, nationalist autocracy, and dynastic republic, any sense of history or process in the affairs of humanity. To nobody’s surprise but Cossery’s, the Arab world has chosen not derision but violence.
Cossery has a superstitious terror of family life and makes no attempt to penetrate it. Females shed all interest at puberty, or, as with Soad in this novel, at the moment they put up their hair. Thenceforth, Cossery’s women are commères, acariâtres, mégères— gossips, old bags, shrews.
Cossery writes in French not just because he needs the urbanity and distance of a foreign language to display his Cairo and Alexandria but because God writes in Arabic, which brings all kinds of entanglements. Cossery’s achievement, substantial as it is, lacks the audacity and toughness of the Egyptian novelists in Arabic such
as Naguib Mahfouz, Yahya Haqqi, or Taha Husain. Yet Mahfouz has many more readers in French and English translation than in his native Arabic, so perhaps Cossery has the last laugh.
—JAMES BUCHAN
The Jokers
1
THE DAY promised to be exceptionally torrid. The policeman, who had just taken up his position at the city’s most distinguished intersection, suddenly felt that he had fallen prey to a mirage. It had to be the sweat pouring down his gloomy features, making him resemble a designated mourner in the midst of a funeral service, that was interfering with his vision; he blinked several times, as if to remedy his defective eyesight and get a sharper perspective on things, but this feeble effort was to no avail. So he pulled a red-and-white-checkered handkerchief—as coarse and dirty as a dishrag—from his pocket and mopped his face vigorously. Having thus clarified his view of the world (at least for a moment), he turned his gaze on the mirage—and received a shock. For what he saw—insofar as he could make out anything distinctly—was a beggar, a finer specimen than he’d seen in a long time, lounging comfortably at the corner of a brand-new, quite splendid building, one that contained a bank and a jeweler, no less: two aspects, in other words, of a universal metaphysical order that demanded immediate protection from the rabble. As if driven by murderous rage, the policeman shoved the handkerchief back into his pocket and, blinking continually so as not to lose the benefit of his newfound sight, lunged straight at the impudent wretch. Orders had gone out a month ago: the city must be liberated from the lowlifes that had taken to swarming like ants at a picnic in even the most respectable streets. This was one of many directives that the new governor—a man bursting with bold initiatives—had issued, and admittedly, it was the most difficult to carry out. The new governor’s ambition was to clean up the streets and protect them from any further blots upon their honor; he talked about streets as if they were people. So, after the prostitutes, the street vendors, the cigarette-butt collectors, and other minor scofflaws, he had set his sights on the beggars, a peaceful race with such deep roots in the soil that no presumptive conqueror before him had ever succeeded in exterminating it. It was as if he wanted to disburden the desert of its sand.
So the policeman, this zealous servant of a mighty state, threw himself at the beggar (whose very serenity was a kind of provocation), roundly berating him according to rules of a time-tested art. But the beggar failed to react to these insults, murderous though they were. He was an old man, hideously wrinkled, with a gray beard that swallowed up the whole of his face and a head that vanished under an enormous turban. His eyes were closed, and the thick black circles under them gave him an epicene appearance altogether unusual for a bum. What’s more, he was dressed in a fanciful multi-colored outfit better suited to a street acrobat than to a man in his condition. This eccentric old man, the ancestor of his eternally persecuted race, seemed sunk in a deep sleep that even the deafening roar of the countless cars fighting through the intersection could not disturb. At last, realizing the futility of his insults and orders, the cop gave the bum a kick, and then another kick, to knock him out of his infuriating inertia. He was just about to kick him again when he saw the beggar abandon his initial position and slump to the ground, where he assumed the proud and thoroughly disdainful attitude of the dead. For a moment, the policeman thought he’d killed him and was seized with panic at the thought of having lost his prey. A dead beggar was worth less than nothing; it might even get him fired. He needed this bum to be alive. Bending over the old man, he grabbed him by his turban, shaking him with savage fury in an attempt to bring him back to life. This action was both rash and irreparable: as if by magic, the beggar’s head became detached from his neck and remained stuck to the turban, which the policeman continued to brandish in the air like a bloody trophy. The crowd of gawkers that had gathered around the two protagonists let out a collective cry of horror and spewed an indignant stream of outrage at the policeman, who, dropping his trophy, stared at the baying pack of dogs with the look of someone suffering from stomach cramps. It took awhile before the high spirits that had been excited by the morning carnage succumbed to the realization that it was all a hoax. What had at first appeared to be a genuine flesh-and-blood beggar was in fact only a dummy, ably made up by a skilled artist, that had been left out in this respectable neighborhood precisely in order to provoke the police. Far from calming the crowd, this discovery incited it to an opposite extreme; people began to snigger and sneer at the unfortunate cop, who stood there stunned. Faced with this jeering mob, their jibes piercing his uniform like so many darts, the poor man took up his regulation whistle and let out a series of shrill blasts in the hopes of attracting some of his more courageous colleagues from nearby patrols. But his summons went unheard, and in any case the crowd was already dispersing, having had its fun for the day. People returned to their private difficulties and disappointments, each recounting the story in his own fashion, but always with the sense of gleeful malice that is felt on the street whenever some representative of authority is dealt a blow.
2
A KILOMETER away, in a room located on the roof terrace of a six-story building by the sea, young Karim, the instigator of this farce, was hardly gloating over his attack on the governor’s authority. He wasn’t even thinking about it. Lying on his bed, shirtless, his fingers busily twisting a lock of hair on his forehead, he looked as lazy as a bored monarch, glutted with wealth and pleasure. Karim gave himself up to a feeling of delicious languor, while enjoying the voluptuous vision of his mistress from the night before getting dressed in the middle of the room. From the patronizing smile that played on his lips you would have thought he was observing a procession of dancers, lasciviously swaying their hips for his pleasure alone, instead of a poor creature (picked up on the street) whose modest charms no longer held a single secret for him. Karim’s languorous pose was meant to suggest an atmosphere of luxury and decadence, but in fact it hid the state of nervous tension that had been racking him since he woke up. As always on such occasions, Karim had produced the effect with an end in mind: it set the scene for a special stratagem he had developed to discourage the venality of his fleeting lovers. The success of the stratagem was certain, and
yet every time he deployed it his heart beat wildly. Now the moment when he would be forced to show his cards was inexorably approaching.
Young Karim was no novice; he’d had ample experience, and there was almost no chance of the business going wrong. The little prostitute, whom he’d brought home after planting the bogus beggar at the intersection, certainly wasn’t about to make a scene; she wasn’t the type. At worst, she might get angry—but Karim didn’t care about that, since he had no intention of seeing her ever again. In fact, the disappointment with which her pathetic comedy was almost certain to end didn’t concern him in the least; the denouement would be what it was. He just wanted to get rid of her as quickly as possible. The slowness and care with which she was getting dressed was beginning to exasperate him. He was in a hurry; he couldn’t wait for her to be gone and leave him alone at last. The girl no longer amused him. Other, more interesting things—they happen all the time—must be occurring on the surface of the earth, and to appreciate them properly he had to be either by himself or in the company of friends who would be able to understand. Inconceivable to share such delicate pleasures with a woman! Women were completely impervious to his kind of worldly humor; they could never fully appreciate the inherent absurdity, for example, of a government minister’s speech, while they took seriously the buffoonery of the tyrants in power. No doubt this one was just as dim as all the others; aside from the sweet nothings that enliven love play, Karim had nothing to say to her.
While she dressed, he continued to gaze at her with that patronizing smile of a bored monarch, as if conferring a favor upon her. The girl was putting on her shoes, her face bowed, her neck humble. Karim was annoyed by her silence. He detected a reproach. Did she suspect something? At last she slipped into her dress and was done.
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