Dung in a silk stocking
Piers Paul Read
THE LIVES OF ELSA TRIOLET by Lachlan Mackinnon Chatto & Windus, £18, pp.216 Elsa Triolet was the first woman to be awarded the Prix Goncourt. Her novels are now largely forgotten. She was also famous
in post-war France as the muse of her husband, Louis Aragon, whose poems, Les Yeux d'Elsa, had made him the unofficial laureate of the Resistance. Together with Sartre and de Beauvoir, and Andre and Clara Malraux, Elsa and Aragon were lead- ing figures in the Leftist intelligentsia.
Like Clara Malraux, Elsa was not French. Her father, Yuri Kagan, was a Russian Jew who practised law in Moscow; her mother, née Borman, a Latvian German. Elsa's initiation into the world of arts and letters came at the age of 19 when she went for a walk in the woods outside Moscow with the poet Mayakovsky who later formed a more lasting liaison with her sister Lili.
To escape the chaos which followed the Revolution in 1917, Elsa married Andre Triolet, an eccentric diplomat from the French Mission. They ran off to Tahiti, where Elsa became bored. In 1920, with the consent of the amiable Triolet, she returned to Paris. Lili was there with Mayakovsky, and through them she entered a circle of Futurists, Dadaists, Cubists and Surrealists such as Leger, Duchamp, Man Ray and Andre Breton.
Men kept falling in love with her. She was not beautiful but had good legs and made the, most of them: silk stockings, we are told, had 'an almost fetishistic import- ance in her life'. She also had a voracious and uninhibited appetite for sex. When Aragon was first introduced to her by Mayakovsky, his eyes Immediately lit on her legs', and in no time they were making love behind a curtain in a loggia guarded by one of Aragon's friends. Elsa was also strong-willed. She quickly saw off Nancy Cunard, Aragon's mistress at the time, and gained an influence over the weak, bisexual poet which she was never to lose. Aragon was warned that she was a Soviet spy: whether or not this was true, Elsa, although she was never a Party mem- ber, brought Aragon to commit himself to communism in a most uncompromising way. As Lachlan Mackinnon puts it, `Surrealism was at its weakest when it came to explaining the purpose of human life'. Communism provided a ready answer to Aragon's uncertainties, and almost at once he became a dependable tool of Comintern, denouncing the closest friend of his surrealist days, Andre Breton, in 1930 and doing his utmost to discredit Andre Gide when he turned against Soviet communism in his Retour de l'URSS.
The whole phenomenon of fellow- travelling merits a more thorough investi- gation than it gets in this biography. Although filled with interesting anecdotes, it focuses somewhat narrowly on Elsa herself and is based on limited sources. The archives of the Soviet communist party are not yet open to Western researchers, and the author was denied access to Elsa's unpublished letters and diaries. He draws on the biographies of Elsa and Aragon by Dominique Desanti and Pierre Daix, and refers to apparently autobiographical pas- sages in her novels, an unreliable method of arriving at the truth. Nor do summaries of their plots convince us that Elsa's novels are unjustly neglected.
At times Mackinnon seems ill at ease with the history of the period (he draws extensively on Edward Mortimer's The Rise of the French Communist Party), and fails in his self-imposed objective to grasp 'the cen- tre and meaning' of Elsa's life. Was she admirable or contemptible? He seems unable to make up his mind. He commends her work for the Resistance, and regrets the way in which she and Aragon abjectly followed Stalin's party line. He admits that Elsa 'had probably realised in 1937 that the Soviet Union was dwindling into a tyranny', but makes excuses for her — that she was somehow blackmailed because Lili was a 'hostage' in the Soviet Union or, equally implausibly, that she deceived Aragon to protect him:
She preferred him to be deluded. She denied him the chance to discover the truth about his dream.
Most of the anecdotes he recounts make her seem indisputably unpleasant. She refused to intercede for a relative impris- oned by Stalin in the 1930s, and persecuted a Resistance worker called Helene Ritman until the 1970s because she had failed to fulfil a promise during the war to buy Elsa some silk stockings on the black market, yet Mackinnon sees Elsa as a kind of prototype for modern woman. She made Aragon 'do the shopping and was extreme- ly demanding as regarded domestic duties'.
'No feminist herself,' he writes, 'she may yet be exemplary'.
It was only after she died that the scales seem to have fallen from Aragon's eyes. At her funeral, the eulogy was spoken by George Marchais, General Secretary of the Communist Party of France. Some months later, meeting Claude Roy at the theatre, Aragon cursed the party to which he had given 45 years of his life. He said he would be glad to die soon — the last of a generation, most of whom were vile. He made exceptions of Breton and Eluard, but not of his wife.
Previous page
