Before Auschwitz

Irène Némirovsky and the Cultural Landscape of Inter-war France

Angela Kershaw

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135254810
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

This book analyses Irene Némirovsky's literary production in its relationship to the literary and cultural context of the inter-war period in France. It examines topics of central importance to our understanding of the literary field in France in the period, such as: the close relationship between politics and literature; the historical, political, cultural and personal legacies of the First World War; the so-called 'crisis of the novel' and the attempt to create and develop new narrative forms; the phenomenon of Russian emigration to Paris in the wake of the Russian Revolution and Civil War; the possibilities for the creation of a French-Jewish identity and mode of writing; and the threat of fascism and the approach of the Second World War.

1
The Making of a Literary Reputation

Ce n’est pas seulement une création romanesque de grande valeur, c’est une vue pénétrante sur notre époque et les caractères particuliers qu’y revêt la lutte pour la vie. Toute une philosophie de l’amour, de l’ambition, de l’argent se dégage de ce roman qui, par sa puissance et par son sujet même, rappelle le Père GORIOT, et qui n’en est pas moins de la plus extrême nouvauté.

It is not only a literary creation of great value, it is also a penetrating portrait of our age and the particular character of our struggles for life. An entire philosophy of love, ambition, and money emerges from this novel which, in its power and even in its subject, calls to mind Balzac’s Le Père Goriot, and which is nonetheless extremely innovative.

—Bernard Grasset, advertisement for David Golder, Les Nouvelles littéraires, 7 December 1929

Roman bouleversant, intimiste, implacable, dévoilant avec une extraordinaire lucidité l’âme de chaque Français pendant l’Occupation […] Suite française ressuscite d’une plume brillante et intuitive un pan à vif de notre mémoire.

An overwhelming, intimate and pitiless novel, an extraordinarily lucid revelation of the soul of every French person during the Occupation […] Suite française is the work of a brilliant and intuitive writer which makes a part of our memory live again.

—Cover text, Suite française, Denoël, 2004

The literary reputation of Irène Némirovsky has been made twice, at an interval of more than seventy years and therefore in two very different historical, social, and literary environments. Némirovsky has acquired literary celebrity through two very different texts, David Golder and Suite française, the one published at the beginning of her career, when she was a virtually unknown Russian Jewish immigrant; and the other written at the end of her life, when she was a successful and celebrated French novelist. The quotations above suggest that the two texts have been presented to their readers in strikingly similar terms. In both cases, the publisher seeks to create a sense of community between novelist and readers by using the inclusive first person plural pronoun; here is a writer who can tell us about our memories, about our epoch. This is a writer who is in touch with French history and literary history, able to resuscitate characters from France’s real and imagined past. That past is a traumatic place: Grasset’s comparison of Golder with Balzac’s Goriot, whose wealth is eroded by the extravagant frivolity of his daughters, is particularly resonant in the context of the années folles and the Wall Street Crash, as is the evocation of memories of the Occupation in the year of the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. And if Némirovsky is capable of making the past live again, and of interpreting the present, this is because of her extraordinary literary talent, thanks to which she can penetrate and unveil the truth of the subjects she approaches in her writing. From this brief comparison we begin to see the terms in which Némirovsky’s publishers have constructed her phenomenal success: her Frenchness, her relevance to the contemporary world, and her literary skill. This chapter investigates the production and development of Némirovsky’s success in the 1930s, and considers the repercussions of that success under the Occupation.

A SUCCESSFUL LITERARY CAREER

The present chapter is not concerned with questions of literary quality, but rather with questions of literary success. Bourdieu’s conceptual framework provides a useful vocabulary for discussing literary success. A contextual approach to literary history and analysis relies on the notion that a work does not simply impose itself through its innate aesthetic qualities. This is a myth—a myth in which we may still need to believe, but a myth nonetheless. Literary success must be evaluated through analysis of the textual traces left by the creators of that success: those who caused the book to be produced and sold, and those who encouraged people to buy and read the text. Therefore it is by analysing the role of publishers and of critics in Némirovsky’s literary trajectory that her success can best be appreciated. Bourdieu writes,

Il suffit de poser la question interdite pour s’apercevoir que l’artiste qui fait l’æuvre est lui-même fait, au sein du champ de production, par tout l’ensemble de ceux qui contribuent à le ‘découvrir’ et à le consacrer en tant qu’artiste ‘connu’ et reconnu—critiques, préfaciers, marchands, etc. Ainsi, par exemple, le commerçant d’art (marchand de tableaux, éditeur, etc.) est inséparablement celui qui exploite le travail de l’artiste en faisant commerce de ses produits et celui qui, en le met-tant sur le marché des biens symboliques, par l’exposition, la publication ou la mise en scène, assure au produit de la fabrication artistique une consécration d’autant plus importante qu’il est lui-même plus con-sacré. [emphasis in original]¹

It is enough to pose the forbidden question to perceive that the artist who makes the work is himself made, at the core of the field of production, by the whole ensemble of those who help to ‘discover’ him and to consecrate him as an artist who is ‘known’ and recognized—critics, writers of prefaces, dealers, etc. Thus, for example, the merchant in art (dealer in paintings, publisher, etc.) is inseparably both the one who exploits the work of the artist by making commerce of his products and the one who, in putting it on the market of symbolic goods through exhibition, publication or staging, ensures that the product of artistic fabrication will receive a consecration—and the consecration will be greater the more consecrated the merchant himself is.²

By analysing in some detail the debates which Némirovsky’s novels provoked in the cultural press of the inter-war period, this chapter explores the ways in which Némirovsky’s literary success resulted from a series of complex social relations in the inter-war literary field. As Linda Hutcheon and Mario Valdés argue, the study of reception is an important aspect of the ‘storytelling project’ that is literary history:

The history of literature is in fact more accurately defined as the multiple histories of its production and its reception. Literary historians over the centuries have always taken into account the complexities of literary production, but the new methodological paradigms developed by a variety of critical theories in the last few decades have made imperative an awareness of the equally complicated and significant nature of literary reception.³

Such an approach is justified both by Némirovsky’s own approach to the task of being a writer, and by the aims of this book. Némirovsky was a novelist who actively managed her relationships with her publishers and her critics, and there is good reason to suppose that her choice of literary themes was at least in part a response to the critical discussion her fiction was generating. Her case thus supports Bourdieu’s view that ‘on ne peut faire dans la science des æuvres deux parts, l’une consacrée à la production, l’autre à la réception’ (‘all this means that one cannot divide a science of works into two parts: one devoted to production, the other to perception’): production and reception of the literary text are locked into an iterative relation-ship.⁴ Whilst this book is focused on the work of a single author, it seeks to view that author through a wide-angled lens, such that the entire literary field of inter-war France comes into focus. It is through the analysis of the reception of individual works that it is possible to reconstruct the properties of the field and thus eventually, understand the complex phenomenon of the work of art.⁵ The approach taken throughout this book to the study of Némirovsky’s fictional output, and of French inter-war literature more generally, is firmly grounded in a belief in the importance of reception for an understanding of texts and their contexts. A literary review can both demonstrate the state of the contemporary literary field, and change it; the issues a reviewer raises in relation to a new text necessarily arise out of the current literary-critical status quo (there is no tabula rasa) but might also modify the literary-critical environment by raising a new question or by posing an existing question differently. The ‘meaning’ of a text and, not least, its ideological significance, is determined in relation to the literary field which produced it and is in significant measure a function of the ways in which that text is represented by its critics.⁶ We return to the construction of literary value, celebrity, and success through the media in Chapter 6 in order to understand the phenomenon which has in part motivated the writing of this book—the success of Suite française in France in 2004 and in English translation in 2006. Here though, the rules of the game will have changed somewhat, since we shall observe the reception of a text in a literary and historical environment very different from that in which it was produced, or which produced it.

Before turning to a closer analysis of the construction of Némirovsky’s celebrity and subsequent reputation as a novelist, it will be useful to have in mind an overview of the entirety of her output. Before the success of David Golder in 1929, Némirovsky had already published four short works in the subscription series Les

uvres libres: ‘Le Malentendu’ (February 1926); ‘L’Enfant génial’ (April 1927); ‘L’Ennemie’ (July 1928); ‘Le Bal’ (Febru-ary 1929).⁷ Les

uvres libres, launched by the publishing house Fayard in June 1921, was a monthly publication offering a selection of unabridged and previously unpublished stories by various authors in a single volume.⁸ Two of the works Némirovsky published here were immediately reissued in book form in 1930 in the wake of the success of David Golder: ‘Le Malentendu’ by Fayard and ‘Le Bal’ by Grasset. These early texts treat the themes which were to occupy Némirovsky’s literary imagination for the first half of the 1930s: Jews; the world of business and finance; Russian emigration; love. The order in which I present these themes is not coincidental: Némirovsky frequently pairs Jews with money and Russians with love. These early stories also depict the sometimes complex, sometimes frivolous relationships between love, money, and pleasure which developed as the années folles began to shade into the Depression. Between 1929 and 1935, Némirovsky drew on her personal history to produce a series of novels in which Jewish and Russian themes dominated. It is particularly in the early texts, notably David Golder (1929), Le Bal (1930), and Le Pion sur l’échiquier (1934) that we find stereotyped portrayals of Jewish characters, although the later novel Les Chiens et les loups (1940) is not exempt from this problem. David Golder and Le Bal recount very different stories of Jewish immigrants making a life in France: Golder is a successful and powerful financier, whilst Le Bal’s Alfred Kampf struggles to raise his social standing to match his newly acquired wealth. In Le Pion sur l’échiquier, Jewishness and money are again associated in the portrait of the businessman Beryl. That Némirovsky ceased to write about Jewish themes after 1933 is hardly surprising; she would however return to the theme of Jewish emigration in Les Chiens et les loups where she opposed the Eastern immigrant Jew to the assimilated European Jew in the context of the politics, economics, and society of inter-war France. This work offers a more nuanced account of Jewish identity than is to be found in the novels of the early 1930s. The theme of Russian emigration dominates Les Mouches d’automne (1931) and Le Vin de solitude (1935). The earlier text recounts the collective history of a land-owning family who flee the Rus-sian Revolution and take refuge in Paris; the later novel focuses on an individual female protagonist, Hélène, who is Russian but adores France, and eventually fulfils her dream of making a life there. L’Affaire Courilof (1933) tells the story of a Russian anarchist hired to assassinate a government minister in the early years of the twentieth century. The scenario of this text anticipates those of Sartre’s Les Mains sales and Camus’s Les Justes. These six novels might be taken as a first phase of Némirovsky’s writing project, with the mid-point of the decade as a turning point. In 1936 Némirovsky published Jézabel, a novel in which her ability to create narrative suspense and intrigue come to the fore. This novel is a psychological drama which explores mother-daughter relationships and the problems of ageing for women, themes which had already surfaced in her earlier texts. In the second half of the decade, Némirovsky turned her attention away from the problems of Russian emigration and the Jewish diaspora and toward those of inter-war France. Le Pion sur l’échiquier and Le Vin de solitude might be seen as transitional texts insofar as both anticipate what seems to have been a growing desire on Némirovsky’s part to write in detail about France of the inter-war period. Le Pion sur l’échiquer (1934), La Proie (1938) and Deux (1939) analyse the effects of the First World War and the Depression on two generations of French men. Le Pion sur l’échiquer and Deux deal with the difficult re-integration of young war veterans into the changed economic and political environment of France in the 1920s and 1930s. La Proie considers the fate of their sons who...