The grim face of defeat
Patrick Marnham
SUITE FRANÇAISE by Irène Némirovsky, translated by Sandra Smith Chatto, £16.99, pp. 403, ISBN 0701178965 ✆ £13.59 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 When Suite FranVaise was first published in France 18 months ago it caused a stir. The book had an impossibly dramatic publishing history: its author had been deported from France in 1942 and had died in Auschwitz and the manuscript had been saved by a little girl who was running for her life. Then it was lost for 60 years. Irène Némirovsky did not live to complete or correct the work, but the fragment that has survived is a great novel that can be read on several levels, the most immediate being a vivid account of recently lived experience. It is in two sections, ‘Storm in June’ and ‘Dolce’, that stand separately but were intended to be the first parts of a five-volume sequence.
‘Storm in June’ describes the last few days in June, 1940, before the occupation of Paris, when the French army had been routed, the French government was in retreat towards the Spanish border and the last Parisians were preparing to flee. The story opens with the silent city, at night, awaiting bombardment, blacked out, but to no purpose because in the moonlight the Seine ‘could be seen flowing along, as white as a river of milk’, guiding the enemy planes. The atmosphere changes from bravado to apprehension, fear and then growing panic. The narrative of l’exode proceeds at a gallop as we follow groups of characters, a banker and his mistress, the humble clerks he abandons, a wealthy aesthete, a wealthy Catholic family, a celebrated writer, a priest and a party of orphans, as they prepare for their separate journeys. What lies ahead is total horror, described in crisp snapshots, the roads choked with people pushing prams or handcarts, vehicles both military and civilian unable to get through. The railway stations are bombed, the refugees are machinegunned. Young and old are given a detailed and bloody anatomy lesson by the roadside, beneath the fruit trees of the orchards where they had hoped to find safety. The wealthy abandon their cars, and are forced to mingle with the poor, and sometimes even to touch their dirty children. The country people offer this desperate mob shelter, feed them, let them wash and sleep under cover. The soldiers abandon their weapons and join the refugees, exhausted and ashamed. ‘The refugees were walking in small groups ... Chance had thrown them together at the edge of Paris and now they stayed together though they didn’t even know each other’s names.’ Later they start to rob one another of jewels, petrol or food.
‘Storm in June’ makes the point that in desperate circumstances the most unpleas ant people are best equipped to survive, but the author then treats this national tragedy in an original way as black social comedy, an original note that is skilfully emphasised in Sandra Smith’s brisk translation. ‘Monsieur Péricand [the influential Catholic] was thinking about the last war, the one that had taken two sons from him and tripled his fortune ...’ Madame Corbin, the banker’s wife, unpacking in the safety of the Free Zone, finds that her maid has slipped a framed photograph of her husband’s mistress into her suitcase. The fact that the lady is naked does not upset her. Madame Corbin ‘was a person of a great deal of common sense — but the dancer was wearing a magnificent necklace.’ A terrible row breaks out; useless for Monsieur Corbin to claim that the necklace is a fake. The Vichy government established in the Grand Hotel is relieved to hear that appalling relations with Britain have not led to an embargo on Scotch. Gabriel Corte, the fashionable novelist, reduced to the level of a nondescript coward by the loss of his work in progress, recovers his manuscripts, looks around the luxurious bar and forgets his panic. ‘It was an inexpressible relief to see once again all his famous friends, even his enemies...’ Then, in a scene that prefigures Lord of the Flies, the obtuse, sanctimonious young priest is beaten to death by the feral orphans in his care.
In ‘Dolce’ the time has moved on one year to a village in the Occupied Zone where a German garrison is installed. Although this is a village through which some of the refugees had passed, and the stories are interconnected, the main characters now are Lucile, the wife of a wealthy landowner who is a prisoner-of-war, and von Falk, a German officer quartered in her mother-in-law’s house. The village lives in two time zones, German and French, the official clock on the town hall being one hour ahead of the villagers’ watches; and the inhabitants of the village, Germans and French, also have two faces, one correct and accommodating, the other frightened and cruel. The definition of resistance is to be found on the posters put up by the German commandant as ‘Verboten ... on pain of death — Forbidden to listen to the BBC, to harbour fugitives, to keep hunting guns.’ But there is no resistance; there is just the struggle to survive. Patriotism consists of knitting socks for PoWs and cheating the Germans when they shop for fruit or baby clothes. The real struggle beneath the iron framework of occupation is once again between the French; there are layers of mutual hatred, the poor for the bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie for the aristocrats, a mother-in-law for her daughter-in-law who is too polite to a German officer.
Némirovsky’s account has the ring of a truth acquired through close observation. In a village full of women whose men have been taken prisoner there is a slow thawing of relations. The German soldiers emerge from behind the grey uniforms and green capes and become individuals with their own attractive characteristics. They acquire names and flirtations begin. Though the social comedy is as well observed in the second part as in the first, the book has by now taken on a new complexity. The author’s judgments are even more detached and less sentimental.
Patriotism, as an adequate response to the situation, is lampooned on several levels. There is the empty patriotism of the village crones, busy spying on their neighbours in order either to denounce them to the Germans for breaking the regulations, or to the village for talking to the Germans. A charitable meeting called to send comforts to the PoWs breaks up in disorder as mutual dislike and jealousy take over. The most patriotic character, the embittered motherin-law, is a portrait of sterile chauvinism. The only resister in the village, a Communist, is driven to shoot a German officer, not because he wants to continue the war but because he is enraged by sexual jealousy: the German is after his wife. The true resister is the bourgeois housewife, Lucile, who has fallen in love with Lieutenant von Falk and who risks her life to help a Frenchman who despises her. She hates nobody, refuses to think in slogans and categories and just yearns for the freedom to be herself and not to have to ‘follow the swarm’.
Part of Némirovsky’s achievement is that ‘Dolce’ is a valuable fragment of social history as well as living fiction. In one scene Lucile listens to her mother-in-law condemning the village girls who are sitting in the dusk with the German soldiers, singing with them, and thinks that this is not scandalous but sad. Their youth
was passing them by in vain: the men were gone, prisoners or dead. The enemy took their place. It was deplorable, but no one would even know in the future. It would be one of those things posterity would never find out, or would refuse to see out of a sense of shame.
In that sentence, with prophetic lucidity, Némirovsky foresees the murderous purge that followed the liberation, the long legend of Gaullism and the political distortions inflicted on French history for the following 30 years.
Suite Française has been hailed as an example of ‘Holocaust literature’, which is to impose a new form of political distortion on what is simply a very fine novel. Although the author was arrested, deported and sent to Auschwitz on racial grounds, the Jews of France are entirely absent from her book. (They appear only once, in a humorous context, when the banker’s mistress makes a bitter little crack about her successful and now ‘quite useless’ pre-war seduction of an influential Jewish banker.) This is the more extraordinary when one remembers that the author was herself a fugitive in hiding throughout the events she describes. But it is a sign of her greatness as a novelist that she should have left such an unforgettable portrait not of the persecution of the French Jews but of the way in which some of her fellow countrymen by their conduct made the deportations and consequent genocide a possibility.
The exceptional biographical context of Suite Française is thoroughly explained in the appendix. ‘My God!’, Némirovsky wrote in her diary, as the net closed on her and her husband, ‘what is this country doing to me? Since it is rejecting me, let us consider it coldly, let us watch as it loses its honour and its life.’ And that, my God, is exactly what she did.
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