David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn & The Courilof Affair (2008) (2 page)

The echo of Tolstoy’s
Death of Ivan Ilyich
is strong in this novel, even if Golder’s Gerasim is a young man on the make who will pocket the contents of Golder’s wallet (with Golder’s blessing) when he leaves. Nemirovsky’s vision is darker than her Russian forebear’s; and her sense of her protagonist’s fate is not rooted in a tradition of Christian redemption. But the debt is strong, and clear: from the novel’s opening lines, Golder is learning how to approach death, and, very quickly, from his first heart attack onward, how to die. This is the matter of the book. Moreover, Golder’s visit to Marcus’s widow, early in the novel, echoes Peter Ivanovich’s visit to Ivan Ilyich’s widow in the opening pages of Tolstoy’s masterpiece. And by the time Golder confronts death for the last time, in its absolute inexorability, he is both granted a Tolstoyan grace and must submit to a different, and mercilessly worldly, banality.

David Golder
is not without flaws (not least of which is a lack of genuine complexity in all the characters besides Golder himself) nor, to a contemporary reader at least, without problematic elements. But it remains a remarkable novel. Nemirov-sky was only twenty-three when she wrote the first version of it; and yet none of her subsequent novels achieved comparable fame in her lifetime. The other early works gathered in this volume are perhaps less fully realized, and stand less firmly on their own merits, than
David Golder.
That said, each of them has distinct strengths, each moving the reader in a different way; and together they serve almost as instructive studies, or sketches, in Nemirovsky’s literary development, as she expands her range and sympathies, stretching toward the maturity that enabled the writing of
Suite Francaise.

The Ball,
first published in 1929 under the pseudonym “Nerey,” is the slightest of these efforts, the story of a girl of fourteen, Antoinette Kampf, whose newly wealthy parents are preparing to throw a ball. Set in 1928, two years after Alfred Kampfs fantastic “killing on the stock market,” the action is contained, and rather implausibly melodramatic. Antoinette, forbidden by her mother to attend the ball, wreaks her revenge by destroying all but one of the invitations when she is sent to post them, a sin masked by the fact that her English governess, Miss Betty—who was to have taken them to the post office but who was, instead, trysting with her boyfriend—maintains that she herself mailed the envelopes. As a result of Antoinette’s vicious act, the single guest at the Kampfs’ ball is their Cousin Isabelle, a resentful and impoverished music teacher to the aristocracy, who gloatingly witnesses the debacle. Madame Kampf, in whom the vanity of the socially aspirant is excruciatingly caught, is bitterly shamed by her apparent failure in society and turns to her despised daughter for consolation. It is somewhat difficult to suspend disbelief in this tale—Would the Kampfs really have expected their guests to appear, not having heard from any of them? Would they not have smelled a rat?—but the novella’s strength lies in its portrait of the relationship between Antoinette and her mother.

Nemirovsky, whose relations with her own mother were strained, repeatedly creates monstrously selfish middle-aged women in the maternal role, women who rage at the passing of their beauty and who see material compensation as their due and their only hope (Gloria Golder is another such character). The novella’s interest lies, particularly, in the mind of young Antoinette, who sees herself and her parents more clearly than they possibly can, and yet whose immaturity prevents her from feeling any compassion: “No one loved her, no one in the whole world… But couldn’t they see, blind idiots, that she was a thousand times more intelligent, more precious, more perceptive than all of them put together—these people who dared to bring her up, to teach her? These unsophisticated, crass nouveaux riches?” Antoinette is a dual creature, a living paradox, enacting at once her inevitable association with, and simultaneous detachment from, her parents: like Irene herself, she is caught between two worlds, one in which she can step back and condemn her parents as “unsophisticated, crass nouveaux riches,” and another in which, at the novella’s end, she eagerly accepts her mother’s needy embrace. That this young woman is condemned to live this paradox, and that this paradox awakens in her a terrible and inevitable rage, is what makes
The Ball
more than a simple melodrama: there is here, albeit in embryo, a novelist’s understanding of the intractable ironies of human nature of which Leon M. speaks so frankly in
The Courilof Affair.

Snow in Autumn
appeared a year after
The Ball,
in 1931, but is the definitive version of a tale published in 1924, “La Niania,” a discreet homage to her grandmother, Rosa Margoulis, who had just fled from the USSR to France. It represents a departure of sorts for Nemirovsky, in that it tackles the Russian emigres’ flight to France from a different angle, and also in its choice of a servant as the protagonist. The Karine family is aristocratic, and the novel opens on their Russian estate as their two sons, Youri and Cyrille, depart for war against the Bolsheviks. The story focuses on Tatiana Ivanovna, the household’s nanny, who has been with the Karine family for fifty-one years and who sees anew, in the departure of these young men, the departure and loss of her earlier charges, generations before. The unraveling that ensues—the loss of one son, the family’s retreat to Kiev and eventually to France, where they are forced to begin again with nothing—is painful to Tatiana Ivanovna chiefly as the loss of history. Long the repository of family lore and the keeper of family belongings, she carries the memory of the contents of every cupboard, of every piece of furniture, of every childhood incident on the lost Karine estate. But survival for the Karines requires a definitive break with their past, and Tatiana Ivanovna’s role becomes painfully obsolete.

There is, as in
David Golder,
an intimation of the autobiographical in
Snow in Autumn:
the Nemirovskys did not have a large country estate or the former serfs who would have remained on such properties; but their fraught removal to France, and the agonies of starting over, are at least somewhat reflected in the Karine family’s trajectory. Loulou, the Karines’ twenty-year-old daughter, is, like Joyce Golder, a hard, cold young woman, cynical and greedy for pleasure; but unlike Joyce, whose petulance is that of a spoiled child, Loulou’s ferocity is born of all she has endured. At one point she breaks down, like a child, with her nanny: “Nianiouchka… I want to go home! Home, home!…Why have we been punished like this? We didn’t do anything wrong!” The Karines are different from the Golders in genuinely having had a home, and in having lost it, rather than having left voluntarily in search of something better. The strangeness of Nemirovsky’s life is that she could identify with both the Golders and the Karines, and she could write their stories with equal authenticity. She could even inhabit the mind of Tatiana Ivanovna, for whom the loss of identity—an identity bound up in a place, and in things, and in a long life’s history—proves insurmountable.

The CourilofAffair is
a political novel; but its analysis of politics is ultimately, as another biographer, Jonathan Weiss writes, “a reflection on the moral corruption of all politics and ideology.” Weiss further maintains, “It is clear that for Irene, the motivation for political action is not substantially different from the motivation of the businessman; in both cases, self-preservation and the willingness to sacrifice others for one’s own profit take precedence over human kindness and generosity,” but this reading is, I think, inaccurately harsh: the trajectory of Leon M.’s story records, in fact, a growth from unthinking political zeal into humanity and compassion, and thence into sorrowful cynicism, a recognition that it is possible fully to feel the agonies of the enemy and yet still to be forced, by history and circumstance, to show none of the mercy one feels. Leon says, “As long as we are on this earth, we have to play the game. I killed Courilof. I sent men to their deaths whom I realized, in a moment of lucidity, were like my brothers, like my very soul…”

The range of emotions that Leon experiences for Courilof anticipates, clearly, the emotions experienced by Lucile for her German soldier in “Dolce,” the second section
of Suite Francaise.
Nemirovsky could evoke, so effectively, the contradictory emotional ramifications of war, even in the midst of war, because she had already known those contradictions in the Russian Revolution: they defined her life and her work.
The Courilof Affair
is not a direct antecedent to
Suite Francaise,
but it anticipates many of its themes. And in our own time of political instability and terrorism, it offers both a window upon the revolutionary mindset and, powerfully, hope for an antidote to that mindset. It is a book that, rather like Dostoevsky’s fiction, seems almost troublingly contemporary in its understanding of
ressentiment
and anomie.

Readers discovering Nemirovsky in these pages for the first time will thrill to her acuity and her frankness, and will marvel at her ability to evoke scenes, both externally and in their unspoken interiority. Even though she considered herself a French writer—and much about her work, formally and in its subject matter, is emphatically French—Nemirovsky also remains a deeply Russian writer, whose gifts draw upon the examples of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. She remains, as a woman and a writer, a contradiction who embraced her contradictions. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Nemirovsky’s entire life and her literary output were about reality’s duality, or multiplicity, and they constitute a stand— true, often beautiful, and in her own case, tragically doomed— against limitation, singleness, and impossibility. Fitzgerald went on to say, “One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.” In the courage of her writing, Nemirovsky undertook just that task. If, in our times, we need an example of why literature matters, even in the face of adversity and death, then Nemirovsky stands as that example. Already in these early works, she reveals herself to be a writer of the utmost seriousness, and of considerable importance, whose clarity in the face of complexity enlarges our capacity for compassion and expands our humanity. You can’t—in fiction or in life—ask for more than that.

Claire Messud