Understanding Irène Némirovsky

Margaret Scanlan

• Verlag: University of South Carolina Press
• Jahr: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781611178692
• Thema: Literature
• Thema: French Literary Criticism

A sympathetic, nuanced exploration of the fiction and turbulent life of this best-selling author

A best-selling novelist in the 1930s, Irène Némirovsky (1903-1942) was rediscovered in 2004, when her Suite Française, set during the fall of France and the first year of German occupation, became a popular and critical success both in France and in the United States. Surviving in manuscript for sixty years after the author's deportation to Auschwitz, the work drew respectful attention as the voice of an early Holocaust victim. However, as remaining portions of Némirovsky's oeuvre returned to print, many twenty-first-century readers were appalled. Works such as David Golder and The Ball were condemned as crudely anti-Semitic, and when biographical details such as her 1938 conversion to Catholicism became known, hostility toward this "self-hating" Jew deepened.

Countering such criticisms, Understanding Irène Némirovsk y offers a sympathetic, nuanced reading of Némirovsky's fiction. Margaret Scanlan begins with an overview of the writer's life—her upper-class Russian childhood, her family's immigration to France, her troubled relationship with her neglectful mother—and then traces how such experiences informed her novels and stories, including works set in revolutionary Russia, among the nouveau riche on the Riviera, and in struggling French families and failing businesses during the Depression. Scanlan examines the Suite Française and other works that address the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism. Viewing Némirovsky as a major talent with a distinctive style and voice, Scanlan argues for Némirovsky's keen awareness of the unsettled times in which she lived and examines the ways in which even her novels of manners analyze larger social issues.

Scanlan shows how Némirovsky identified with France as the center of culture and Enlightenment values, a nation where a thoughtful artist could choose her own identity. The Russian Revolution had convinced Némirovsky that violent liberations led to further violence and repression, that interior freedom required political stability. In 1940, when French democracy had collapsed and many seemed reconciled to the Vichy state, Némirovsky's idea of private freedom faltered—a recognition that her last work, Suite Française, for all its seeming reticence, makes poignantly clear.

Chapter 1

Monstrous Mothers

Under “hatred of mother,” the index to Philipponnat and Lienhardt’s The Life of Irene Némirovsky lists fifteen entries. Even without the biography, we might suspect the author’s sentiments from the frequency with which mothers in her novels turn into monsters. Némirovsky’s earliest novel, The Enemy, published under a pseudonym in 1928, uses the word in its feminine form, L’Ennemie, as a synonym for mother; “ogress,” the synonym for mother in a late story, “L’Ogresse” (1941), is no softer. The Ball, a novella, and the novels Wine of Solitude and Jezebel, all available in English translation, also reprise the theme, transforming a melodramatic tale of adolescent resentment and revenge into substantial works of art.

The historical Fanny Némirovsky served as a model for these fictional mothers, who share many features with the original. This mother, a great beauty, is never motherly. She alternately neglects and abuses her daughter, preferring the company of a series of young lovers; her husband is frequently absent and always occupied with making the fortune that his wife spends extravagantly. He is remarkably tolerant of the lovers and disinclined to interfere in his wife’s treatment of their daughter, who may or may not have a loving French governess. Obsessed with remaining young and beautiful, the mother dresses her daughter like a child well into her adolescence. The daughter’s sexual maturation precipitates a crisis; in two of Némirovsky’s novels, L’Ennemie and Le Vin de Solitude (The Wine of Solitude, 1935), the lover becomes infatuated with the daughter, offering her the prospect of vengeance, of depriving the mother of his attentions and her illusion of youth. In Jezebel (1936), which begins with the title figure, a mother, on trial for murder, the backstory of mother and daughter is quite similar. In The Ball, the mother only fantasizes about finding a lover, while in “L’Ogresse” a lethal stage mother drains her talented daughter’s life. The most significant difference between Fanny Némirovsky and these avatars is that none of them are Jewish.

We have no way of knowing if the infatuation between daughter and lover has a parallel in Irène Némirovsky’s life or whether it simply plays out the implications of the family dynamics. She grew up in a household where her mother’s sexuality was impossible to ignore, yet where Irène was expected to retain the innocence of childhood into late adolescence. We know that Fanny Némirovsky, who grew up in a poor Jewish family, strove to conceal her social origins while acting out the nouveau riche role her husband’s business success made possible. The episodes where Némirovsky’s fictional mothers rage at their daughters, belittle them, and occasionally slap them in public are drawn from life. Yet as often as Némirovsky recurs to this unhappy relationship, we notice how many changes she rings on it; she returns not simply to relive grievances but to reshape their context and meaning. We see Némirovsky developing distance from her unhappy childhood and multiplying the meanings her bad mothers suggest.

Since Némirovsky wrote fiction, rather than spilling out her story to a sympathetic bartender or therapist, we also need to recognize that lethal mothers, frequently disguised as stepmothers, have a long history in fairy tales, mythology, and literature. Then, too, once the Fanny Némirovsky story enters a twentieth-century domestic novel, it encounters a literary genre with its own conventions about mothers and families. Examining these will give us a better sense of what Némirovsky’s fictional mothers do and mean.

Domestic Fiction: A Brief History

Domestic fiction is set in the home; it is often, though not always, written by women; and its central figure is usually a woman, a Pamela or an Isabel Archer, even when the author, like Henry James or Samuel Richardson, is male. Since the domestic novel arose in the late eighteenth century at roughly the time in which the division of men and women into separate spheres was solidified, we may be tempted to see it as simply reflecting social reality. And we may, if classic examples such as Odysseus traveling the known world while Penelope stays behind with her child, her maids, and her weaving lead us to think of separate spheres as timeless and eternal. Yet we need to remember that the distant past offers many counterexamples: the Cro-Magnon woman gathering while her husband hunted was not a homebody; the traditional farmwife on the prairie, with her garden and her dairy, was not necessarily more restricted to the farm than her husband plowing its fields. While gender roles have always been more fluid than the generalizations we make about them, the Industrial Revolution created the factory as a place where people went out to do many things, such as weaving cloth, which earlier generations had done in the home. At the same time, bureaucratization led to the growth of offices, hospitals, government agencies, and even department stores, where people went out to work instead of working out of the home. And thus the nineteenth century sharpens the distinction between the public world of men and the private world of women.

In an important book, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (1987), Nancy Armstrong argues that women and the domestic novels they wrote actively contributed to shaping the perception of gender-defined spheres in the English-speaking world; moreover, they empowered women by doing so. Even though she acknowledges that society hurt women by limiting their political or professional roles, Armstrong stresses the cultural and ideological power nineteenth-century women gained in their homes. In Jane Eyre a poor and unconnected woman marries a rich landowner but only after discovering his secrets and resisting his amoral plea that she become his mistress, and then only after he undergoes an ordeal by fire, followed by an amputation and a spell of blindness.

Jane’s power is political, according to Armstrong, for “domestic fiction actively sought to disentangle the language of sexual relations from the language of politics and, in so doing, to introduce a new form of political power.” Rochester’s genealogy, social position, and wealth, traditionally decisive in marriage matters, are trumped by Jane’s psychological force and moral insight in a new world in which “only the more subtle nuances of behavior indicated what one was really worth” (4). The Brontës’ “literary language … allows emotion to overpower convention and become a value in its own right, blotting out all features of political person, place, and event” (197). A woman in her home dominates “over all those objects and practices we associate with private life. To her went authority over the household, leisure time … kinship … under her jurisdiction the most basic qualities of human identity were supposed to develop.” Thus, “to consider the rise of the domestic woman as a major event in political history is not … to present a contradiction in terms, but to identity the paradox that shapes modern culture” (3).

Lesley Walker builds on Armstrong’s analysis of the ideological implications of domestic fiction in her A Mother’s Love: Crafting Feminine Virtue in Enlightenment France (2008). Reading novelists generally less well-known abroad than Armstrong’s, such as Élisabeth Vigée Lebrun, Stéphanie Félicité de Genlis, and Jeanne-Marie Roland, Walker argues for the significance of their “maternal discourse,” which idealizes a wise and benevolent mother who may or may not have corresponded in any direct way with lived experience (23). In Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont’s enormously popular Lettres de Madame du Montier … à sa Fille (1756), we see a new mother, “understanding and gentle,” whose “love provides the matrix out of which the ethical or virtuous daughter appears” (26). Such mothers flourish in French fiction throughout the second half of the eighteenth century. However, the “virtuous daughter,” not only kept safe from “rakes and villains” but persuaded to avoid sexual passion altogether, is not a figure of liberation. Walker sees Madame Germaine de Staël’s Delphine (1802) as marking the end of this “maternal discourse.” Delphine’s “suffering is needless and wrong,” and her suicide, rather than being romanticized, is seen as scandalous and brutal (191).

So what do L’Ennemie, The Ball, The Wine of Solitude, and Jezebel have in common with these examples from the past? Certainly we notice familiar features, settings, and themes. In Némirovsky’s domestic fiction we find characters in the comfortable settings enjoyed by their earlier counterparts, fashionably dressed and having apparently unlimited leisure for dining, taking tea, or dancing in glittering salons. Personal maturation and growth drive the plot, and though an occasional lurid event takes place, suspense and adventure are missing. Like many of the English domestic novelists, Némirovsky often depicts an outsider making her way into a higher social class. However, unlike Jane Eyre or the Fanny Price of Austen’s Mansfield Park, Némirovsky’s strivers fail to erase the signs of their difference, remaining permanently marked as vulgar or scandalous. Fanny Price deserves Mansfield Park, but when Bella Karol’s husband in The Wine of Solitude buys the silver of a fleeing aristocrat, we note that its monogrammed initials remain those of the original owner and look out of place in the Karols’ cluttered dining room. Though Némirovsky’s domestic fictions do not detail business affairs, they show us an often absent, often exhausted husband whose fortunes rise and fall. The process by which money is made and the instability of wealth are more visible than they usually are in, say, Henry James.

But the major difference, which we notice at once, is that the wise and gentle mother Walker describes is replaced by a dangerous figure who fails to nurture her child. Where the heroine of a Brontë or Austen novel is often motherless and therefore lacks maternal guidance, a Némirovsky daughter typically finds in her mother the greatest obstacle to her moral development and emotional health. The daughter who resists, who forges an independent identity, will live and prosper; the daughter who submits will, quite literally, die young.

L’Ennemie and The Ball were both published under the pseudonym “Pierre Nerey,” the latter a close anagram of “Irene.” Though female writers of the nineteenth century used male pseudonyms, such as “George Sand” and “Currer Bell,” because, as Charlotte Brontë said, “authoresses are likely to be looked on with prejudice,” Némirovsky’s motive seems to have been self-protection. She had reason to fear that her mother would recognize herself in the unflattering portraits of Francine Bragance and Rosine Kampf. Némirovsky called The Ball, published one year later, the “quintessence of L’Ennemie”; we might also think of it as a “distillation,” much shorter, tamer, and better crafted than the earlier version—yet, in some significant sense, the same story.

The Enemy

If we imagine a young Irène Némirovsky pouring out her story to a therapist, we will conjure up a narrative more like L’Ennemie than any of her other novels. Divided into four parts, each containing five chapters, it reads like one of those undisciplined, sprawling novels of nineteenth-century realism that Henry James called “loose, baggy monsters,” even when written by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Individual scenes are memorable, such as the one in which Francine is off for a winter stroll with her lover, her ill-dressed and hungry daughters straggling in the background, afraid to interrupt her. The cruelty of her negligence and the indifference of passersby could hardly be more economically conveyed. But the overall effect is of too many melodramatic scenes in succession, with too little attention to tone and motivation; as Olivier Philipponnat puts it, “sounding the depths of her heart, the young novelist only succeeds in exposing a monstrous pool of grief and gall” (OC 1: 251).

In this 1928 novel Némirovsky uses the familiar triangle: mother, mother’s lover, and father, all seen through the unforgiving eye of a daughter. This time, however, we begin with two daughters, eleven-year-old Gabri and six-year-old Michette. Michette dies dreadfully in the fourth chapter, after she scalds herself by tipping over a giant laundry tub left boiling on the stove. Gabri has briefly left her sister alone and returns to her screams. Although the neighbors summon a doctor, Michette dies before her mother returns home at daybreak. The child’s death conveys the point that Francine’s behavior is not just self-indulgent but criminally negligent; moreover, the world’s indifference to neglected children is reaffirmed when “everyone” pardons her because her grief is so hysterical.

This wholly invented episode, only too transparent in its intention to make the reader share Gabri’s “exquisite hatred” of her mother, loses credibility if the reader asks questions (PL 18). Would a doctor in Paris really have failed to report the cause of the child’s death? And who set that tub boiling on the kitchen stove? Francine does no housework, and it seems unlikely that a maid would start the laundry and then leave for the day. These problems are not insuperable, but the author’s failure to address them suggests that villainizing Francine overcame her normal discipline about preserving probability.

One could raise similar questions, for example, about the family’s sudden acquisition of wealth after the First World War, when Gabri’s father, Léon (a name he shares with Némirovsky’s father), is inexplicably offered what is described only as a “good job in Poland” (OC 1: 258). Two years later, he sends a telegram announcing that he will arrive home the next Monday, accompanied by Gabri’s young cousin, Charles. When Gabri asks what her cousin is doing with her father in Poland, Francine responds vaguely that Léon had invited him there to make his fortune. She expects the pair to return as poor as when they left, but in fact they are rich, having bought factories the Germans had confiscated during the war at bargain rates and put them back into production.

Since Charles’s business role is never clarified, we suspect that he was produced to play an essential domestic role, the mother’s lover. Gabri immediately senses the attraction between them, and when Charles moves into the flat below her parents’ new home, she knows exactly why. Charles treats her like an encumbrance, remarking that she should be sent to boarding school; Francine, however, has “acquired not only wealth but principles” and insists that her daughter be educated at home with a governess and tutors. Having spent much of her childhood unsupervised, in the streets of a working-class neighborhood, Gabri resents “the tyranny of a teacher who doesn’t leave you alone any more than a jailer would, the discipline of a prison” (275).

In this version of the familial story, there is only a much-disliked English governess, Miss Allen; no loving figure based on Zézelle will soften Gabri’s life. After she pleads unsuccessfully with her father to find a place where they could be happy together “without mama,” she turns to books (291). She is increasingly preoccupied with her “savage and irrational hatred” of Francine and fantasizes about the power her knowledge of the affair gives her. One day she drafts an anonymous poison-pen letter to her father informing him of his wife’s unfaithfulness. She writes to relieve her feelings, with no serious intention of sending the letter, but Francine catches her with the draft and snatches it up. She demands to know the source of the letter, so Gabri claims to have found it on the floor and attributes it to Miss Allen.

The discovery of the child’s secret writing is a key incident that Némirovsky reprises in The Wine of Solitude. It suggests that Gabri, like the child Jane Eyre, always watching from the sidelines where no one notices her, is becoming powerful because she is a knowledgeable witness. Implicitly, she identifies with the morality of a middle-class society by which women like her mother, or Jane’s harsh aunt and bullying cousin, are judged deficient. So even though she is a child, her correct observation aligns her with social forces that have real power outside the family; she need not remain helpless forever. Moreover, that Gabri expresses her power through writing suggests a liberating possibility that Némirovsky explores further in The Wine of Solitude.

Unfortunately, the invitation to consider these possibilities is weakened by another failure to preserve realism: would even so negligent a mother as Francine be unable to distinguish between the handwriting of her teenage daughter and her daughter’s middle-aged English governess? But an excuse for dismissing the governess is needed so that Gabri will once more be unsupervised. She reacts by finding Babette, a teenage confidante with an equally negligent mother, and spending hours at a dancing hall in Pigalle, where she becomes involved with a Russian émigré, Génia Nikitof. Their relationship remains ill-defined for months but, as one might expect, ends badly. Nikitof commits what we would now call date rape, and Gabri is too inexperienced and afraid of attracting attention to call for help. It is a “long struggle, brutal and odious”; and when it is over, she resolves never to return to the dance hall and to break off relations with not only Génia but also Babette (310).

How would we expect an inexperienced teenager to respond to such an ugly experience? Certainly Gabri’s decision to remain silent and suffer from unresolved anger is one many young women continue to make. Further, that a neglected child who grew up condemning her mother’s promiscuity would blame her for the attack is entirely probable: “This horror, this filth, she would have never known it if her mother had been a real mother” (311). Gabri’s response is realistic, even as it slides from pain into persistent revenge fantasies. Lacking adult support, Gabri fails to construct a positive plan to pull herself away from “that need for destruction that an evil passion unleashed in her” (312).

Since Francine’s blindness to her daughter includes failure to realize that she is growing up, a plot development is needed to jar insight. Time for another poison-pen letter, this one from Génia Nikitof, who remains infatuated with Gabri and thinks he can blackmail her into a love affair. He follows through on his threat to send Francine the extravagant love letters Gabri had written to him when they first met, and Francine reacts angrily. But Gabri, for once, confronts her mother directly, citing her neglect, bad example, and failure to teach her daughter to distinguish right from wrong. She does not, however, tell her about the rape.

The chief problem in this scene is that the distance between the narrator’s and the character’s voices collapses, as may happen when a novelist draws on highly charged personal experience. The narrator is the first to label Francine hypocritical, observing that “there is something sadly comic in this sudden horror of lying shown by a woman who had been cheating on her husband for years” (324). When, four pages later, Gabri continues the same line of attack—“of course I lie, you never taught me to tell the truth”—narrator and character have become indistinguishable (328). At this point, then, the novelist’s point of view is Gabri’s—adolescent, non-ironic, unable to imagine alternatives. Some readers might identify with her and sympathize; most will probably feel themselves tiring of melodrama or even tempted to supply the missing irony and laugh at the purple prose.

Némirovsky briefly introduces the possibility that this hysterical slanging match between daughter and mother will be therapeuti...