Oh Life! accept me – make me worthy – teach me.
I write that. I look up. The leaves move in the garden, the sky is pale, and I
catch myself weeping. It is hard – it is hard to make a good death . . . .
To live – to live – that is all. And to leave life on this earth as Tchehov
left it and Tolstoi.
This extract from the Journal of Katherine Mansfield, dated December 19, 1920,
is quoted by Irène Némirovsky’s biographers as the epigraph to the final
chapter of her life. In La Vie d’Irène Némirovsky 1903–1942, Olivier
Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt describe the suddenness with which
Némirovsky was arrested and sent to her death in Auschwitz: it was so fast
she did not have the presence of mind to pack her pen, her reading glasses,
or even the Mansfield Journals which she was reading. Later the same day,
July 13, 1942, Némirovsky wrote to her husband Michael Epstein from the
local gendarmerie: “If you can send me anything, I think that the 2nd pair
of glasses is in the other suitcase (in the wallet). Books please, and, if
possible, a little salted butter. Au revoir my love!”
Two days earlier, Némirovsky had gone out into woods near the provincial
village of Issy-l’Évêque, where her family had found refuge after leaving
Paris during the German Occupation:
Maie woods: 11 July 1942. The pine trees all around me. I am sitting on my
blue cardigan in the middle of an ocean of leaves, wet and rotting from last
night’s storm, as if I were on a raft, my legs tucked under me! In my bag, I
have put Volume II of Anna Karenina, the diary of KM and an orange. My
friends the bumblebees, delightful insects, seem pleased with themselves and
their buzzing is profound and grave. I like low, serious tones on voices and
in nature. The shrill “chirp, chirp” of the small birds in the trees grates
on me . . . . In a moment or so I will try to find the hidden lake.
We do not know whether she reached Mansfield’s entries for 1920 that day.
Perhaps she left off earlier, to write her own journal, search for the lake,
or eat the orange. What we do know, and need to appreciate more fully, is
the intensity of Némirovsky’s interest in Mansfield’s work, their shared
artistic inheritance and predicaments. Both looked back to Chekhov as a
guide and inspiration. In the biography of Chekhov Némirovsky was working on
at Issy-l’Évêque, she describes Mansfield as Chekhov’s “spiritual heir”, a
title she might reasonably have reserved for herself. What Némirovsky
describes as Chekhov’s inclination to “bathe the exterior world in a cold,
subdued light”, his “lucid compassion” and “calm incredulity” resonate with
her own.
During the Occupation of France, from 1940 to her death in 1942, Némirovsky,
famously, wrote the first two parts of Suite française, a novel she intended
as her War and Peace. In addition, she finished her Life of Chekhov
(published posthumously in 1946), wrote a series of short stories, and
completed a short novel, newly translated into English by Sandra Smith under
the title All Our Worldly Goods. Les Biens de ce monde was originally called
Jeunes et vieux, and was written for serialization in the newspaper Candide.
The anti-Semitic laws of October 3, 1940 caused the newspaper to renege on
Némirovsky’s contract. She then appealed to the Société des Gens de Lettres,
who upheld her rights, only to be met by the editor’s riposte: “If the
government consulted on this point produces a formal text authorizing
Candide to publish the work of Jewish authors, I will follow through with
the terms of the contract”. (Quoted by Jonathan Weiss in Irène Némirovsky:
Biographie, 2006.) Némirovsky replied: “I admit that I never had the idea of
asking the government, as Monsieur Fayard suggests, to decide if, yea or
nay, my novel can be published in Candide, since it appears to me that the
government has more important matters to deal with”. In her desperation to
be published, to earn much-needed money and sustain herself as a creative
writer, Némirovsky turned to the collaborator Horace de Carbuccia, who
published her work in his weekly newspaper Gringoire, alongside anti-Semitic
diatribes and propaganda cartoons. Les Biens de ce monde, appeared in
instalments from April 1941 until June and was attributed simply to “a young
woman”. Her biographers, Philipponnat and Lienhardt, call her “a lacemaker
among savages”.
All Our Worldly Goods is a disabused love letter to France: the country that
became Némirovsky’s home after her parents fled the Russian Revolution, the
country she still hoped would assimilate her and her young family, despite
the racist Vichy laws. The novel spans both world wars, beginning in 1911
and ending in 1940. It opens with two young lovers on a beach in northern
France:
They were together, so they were happy. Even though the watchful family
slipped between them, separating them gently but firmly, the young man and
woman knew they were near one another; nothing else mattered. It was the
beginning of the century – an autumn evening at the seaside, overlooking the
English Channel. Pierre and Agnès, their parents and Pierre’s fiancée had
all gathered to watch the last firework display of summer.
We are at the beginning of the novel, and of the century, yet it is autumn and
time for the last firework display of summer. Agnès and Pierre are together,
but they are separated by the family group, around Pierre’s fiancée. With
these deft strokes, Némirovsky establishes both tone and plot in her first
paragraph. She pokes fun at the families on the beach: “Each built itself a
fortress out of spades and folding chairs”. And she shows the mothers of
Pierre and Agnès, changing for their swim in a horse-drawn beach-hut, while
needling each other about the love between their children. Madame Hardelot
intends her son to marry someone richer than Agnès, whom she considers not
good enough for Pierre because her father is dead and her mother’s Parisian
provenance is obscure. Madame Floret meanwhile, knows the value of her
daughter’s good looks – “my good looks, my figure, my hair, when I was
young” – and cannot help but be unpleasant about the plump heiress the
Hardelots have selected for Pierre: “Simone bears a remarkable resemblance
to one of my friends, who married young. The poor girl . . . she never had
any children. That sometimes happens, you know, with these chubby,
rosy-cheeked women”.
The Hardelot and Floret families live in provincial Saint-Elme where social
distinctions are more rigidly observed than they are at the beach during the
summer months. The head of the Hardelot family is Pierre’s grandfather, who
owns the paper factory that is the source of their wealth. Old Julien
Hardelot knows he will die soon, but his family will go on providing
northern France with stationery for ever: “their incomparably superior
fine-white paper, to be used for writing – ruled in any way you needed – or
for printing; their imitation Japanese paper; their Bristol Board, both
white and coloured”. It is painful to remember that as she was writing this
Némirovsky’s paper supply was running out, and that she would soon be
reduced to writing on scraps in a minuscule hand adapted to the privations
of the war economy.
The wedding between Pierre and Simone is cancelled after rumours of
assignations between Pierre and Agnès in the Coudre woods. Like the beach,
the woods are a liminal space at the threshold of social convention.
Disinherited, but allowed to marry Agnès in a discreet ceremony in Paris,
Pierre soon finds himself separated again from her, this time by war.
Némirovsky’s description of the departure from Saint-Elme is a vivid tableau
prefiguring the great exodus from Paris in Suite française. “It was a clear,
mild night. From the north, the refugees were arriving, in cars, on foot, on
horseback, in wagons, pushing wheelbarrows full of clothing, pulling along
their cows.” As she leaves with the crowd Agnès closes her eyes and thinks:
I’m dreaming . . . this is a horrible nightmare. I’m going to wake up in our
apartment in Paris, where we lived three years ago . . . . Oh, my God, give
me back those winter days, when I’d come home from the shops, when it was
raining and I’d hurry so I could arrange the flowers and light the fire in
the drawing room, in that old green marble fireplace we thought was so ugly.
The poignancy of this prayer, which was undoubtedly Némirovsky’s own after
1940, does not detract from its place in this coolly schematic novel.
Némirovsky determinedly holds the small frame of everyday life, in all its
pettiness, absurdity and provincial boringness, up against the grand and
terrifying movements of history.
Pierre returns, wounded, to a devastated Saint-Elme. “The chateau, the
Hardelots’ house, the church, the factory had all been machine-gunned and
bombed, leaving nothing but charred bricks, ashes, ruins, crumbling walls
where the grass was already beginning to grow . . . . The dead were buried
in the Coudre Woods. But old Hardelot had survived.”
Agnès and Pierre visit the woods again with their children: a son, Guy, and
baby daughter, Colette. Agnès finds – improbably – the ring she lost in the
woods ten years earlier. Némirovsky offsets the obvious symbolism of finding
the ring with some unremarkable dialogue:
“Mama, can I have your ring?”
“No. What do you want it for?”
“I want to play with it.”
“It’s not a toy.”
Agnès notices that the ring no longer fits. She must have gained weight. Time
is passing.
The wealth of the Hardelot family declines as the French economy enters the
crises of the interwar years. The world resembles “a sick man who awakens
with a moan, turns over in his bed and tries to forget his troubles”, but on
a personal level, people’s bourgeois lives are still peaceful. They sigh
over the morning papers, then toss them aside as the maid enters with
coffee. The Hardelot factory continues producing expensive merchandise, but
no one buys it. The banks begin to collapse. “It had seemed indestructible,
that bank, which for two generations had managed Saint-Elme’s money. But it
too had died: may it rest in peace”. Pierre is forced to sell his shares in
the paper factory to his jilted fiancée, now a very stout rich woman.
Watching the world convulse in another war, waiting for news of her son,
just as she once waited for news of her husband, Agnès is nevertheless able
to subsume her suffering into a peaceful reckoning with life: “She had
gathered in all the good things of this world, and all the bitterness, all
the sweetness of the earth had born fruit”.
In her biography of Chekhov, Némirovsky characterized a fundamental difference
she perceived between Chekhov and Tolstoy:
What Tolstoy loved as a man, he denied to others as a writer: he taught that
man needs neither earth nor space nor freedom nor human love in order to
find his soul, and that above all he must desire nothing. And Chekhov,
ageing and consumptive, who possessed so few things in this world,
protested, timidly at first, then with vehemence: “It is death that needs
nothing. The living man needs everything, the whole world”. (In Exile)
All Our Worldly Goods shows Némirovsky on Chekhov’s side of this debate. It is
a resolutely optimistic story, at once sensual, sentimental and spiritual.
It is one of the last completed works of a life-affirming writer who would
have gone on with her work, reading and thinking about Katherine Mansfield
in the woods, developing her native Russian and adopted French literary
inheritances into the second half of the twentieth century, had history not
intervened.
Irène Némirovsky
ALL OUR WORLDLY GOODS
Translated by Sandra Smith
204pp. Chatto and Windus. £12.99.
978 0 701 18213 7
Ruth Scurr is writing a biography of John Aubrey. She is a Fellow of
Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
