Her Lover (Belle de Seigneur) Read online

  ALBERT COHEN

  Her Lover (Belle du Seigneur)

  Translated and with an Introduction by

  DAVID COWARD

  TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

  The French text used for this translation was prepared for the Pléiade edition (Paris, 1986) by Christel Peyrefitte and Bella Cohen. I am most grateful to Madame Cohen for many invaluable suggestions and her patient support. I claim as my own any blemishes which may have found their way into print.

  First published in France by Editions Gallimard 1968

  This translation first published in Great Britain by Viking 1995

  Published in Penguin Books 1997

  Published in Penguin Classics 2005

  Copyright © Editions Gallimard, 1968

  Introduction and translation copyright : David Coward, 1995

  INTRODUCTION: ALBERT COHEN AND BELLE DU SEIGNEUR

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  CHAPTER 61

  CHAPTER62

  CHAPTER63

  CHAPTER64

  CHAPTER 65

  CHAPTER 66

  CHAPTER 67

  CHAPTER 68

  CHAPTER69

  CHAPTER 70

  CHAPTER 71

  CHAPTER 72

  CHAPTER 73

  CHAPTER 74

  CHAPTER 75

  CHAPTER 76

  CHAPTER 77

  CHAPTER 78

  CHAPTER79

  CHAPTER 80

  PART FIVE

  CHAPTER 8l

  CHAPTER 82

  CHAPTER 83

  CHAPTER 84

  CHAPTER 85

  CHAPTER 86

  CHAPTER 87

  CHAPTER 88

  CHAPTER 89

  CHAPTER 90

  CHAPTER 91

  PART SIX

  CHAPTER 92

  CHAPTER 93

  CHAPTER 94

  CHAPTER 95

  CHAPTER 96

  CHAPTER 97

  CHAPTER 98

  CHAPTER 99

  CHAPTER 100

  CHAPTER 101

  CHAPTER 102

  PART SEVEN

  CHAPTER 103

  CHAPTER 104

  CHAPTER 105

  CHAPTER 106

  INTRODUCTION: ALBERT COHEN AND BELLE DU SEIGNEUR

  Albert Cohen was French not by birth but by adoption and conviction. He was born Abraham Albert Coen in 1895 on the island of Corfu, which since the sixteenth century had been a place of refuge for the persecuted Sephardic Jews of Spain and Italy. Ruled by Venice until Napoleon's victorious Italian campaign, Corfu became part of a British protectorate in 1814 and was ceded to Greece in 1864. Until 1919, when he became a Swiss citizen (and added an 'h' to his name as an affirmation of his Jewishness), Albert Cohen retained the nationality of his Turkish grandfather.

  The Coens had long been leading figures in the island's Jewish community, which, however, declined sharply in the 1890s when accusations of ritual murder created severe anti-Semitic tensions. In 1900, as part of the exodus which followed (but also because the family soap business was in difficulties), Marco and Louise Coen emigrated to Marseilles, taking their only son with them. And there they stayed, buying and selling eggs for a modest living. Apart from a brief visit for his bar mitzvah in 1908, Albert Cohen never returned to Corfu, the 'Cephalonia' of his books. Yet from that visit he took away impressions as vivid as those left on Edward Lear, who was startled by the exuberance of springtime on the island. There is hardly any green left,' he wrote in April 1856, 'since an immense crop of marigolds, geraniums, orchises, irises, & cannonilla have come out ... The hedges are absolutely pink, & in fact the whole thing is most absurd from its very oddity.' But, in addition to the lush vegetation, the sun and the limpid sea, there were human sights and sounds and smells which Cohen never forgot. The memory of narrow, bustling streets filled with extravagant talk and gestures, and the patriarchal gravity of his grandfather Abraham, who now led the Jewish community, were experiences which shaped the exotic mythology which fills a whole corner of his imaginary universe, rather as the Indo-China of Marguerite Duras's childhood underpins her fictional world. Cohen's barely-glimpsed Corfu, he said, was the seed from which he grew a baobab tree.

  He was sent to a Catholic kindergarten and a state elementary school in Marseilles before moving on to the Lycee Thiers. There he met Marcel Pagnol, who was to remain a lifelong friend, and learned how to be French. But assimilation was not easy in the aftermath of the Dreyfus affair. On 16 August 1905, his tenth birthday, he stopped to listen to the patter of a street hawker selling stain-remover, who singled him out, called him a 'dirty yid', said all Jews were German spies and the secret masters of international finance, and told him to go home to Jerusalem. On that day, Albert Cohen learned what it was to be an outsider. But the experience was also an early intimation of his ambiguous cultural position, which finds obsessive expression in his books. He was caught between the extravagant style, warmth and moral certainties of his Jewish, oriental roots on the one hand and, on the other, the rationalist tradition of his adopted country, and his work was to be a quest for a way of reconciling multiple cultural tensions, of bridging the gap between East and West, the ideal and the real, the absolute and the limitations of the human condition.

  But his childhood was not unhappy. If his relationship with his father was difficult, he was adored by his mother, who told him stories and encouraged him to believe that he was special. He also discovered literature, made the French language his, and, at sixteen, began a rather showy affair with an opera singer, which gready impressed his schoolfriends. In 1914 he enrolled for a law degree in clean, neat Geneva — another culture shock after the dirt and bustle of Marseilles- and he began moving in cosmopolitan, wartime, student circles. He acquired new friends and a mistress, a Hungarian countess who doubtless bears some resemblance to the Countess Kanyo of Belle du Seigneur: all the women in his life were to find their way eventually into his books. In 1919 he married Elisabeth Brocher, the daughter of a Protestant minister, for whom he wrote Paroles juives (1921) a sequence of highly sens
ual poems which contain many of the themes to which he would later return — the greatness and degradation of the Jewish people, the need to embrace life and God like an eager lover, the brotherhood of man, and the supremacy of the Commandments of Moses, which stand like a beacon even to those who have no belief. It is a lush, lyrical incantation to which the nearest comparison is the Song of Solomon.

  Cohen found few openings for his law degree in Geneva, and his only offer was a position in Egypt, where he lived for a year, separated from his wife and daughter. He returned to Geneva in 1921 determined to make his way as a writer. He had read widely, and his tastes were eclectic and highly personal. To the cool passion of Racine and Corneille he preferred the warmer tones of Dickens and Stendhal, and he distanced himself almost entirely from the great influences of the age, Marx, Freud and surrealism. He also admired writers as different as Proust (whom he later came to despise for his snobbery) and Paul Morand. In 1922 a first article in the prestigious Nouvelle revue franqaise brought praise and contacts. Other articles followed, including a homage to Chaplin which reappears in modified form in Belle du Seigneur (chapter 87). But, as his literary career seemed poised to take off, tragedy struck. In 1924 his wife died of cancer. Cohen reacted by throwing himself into his work, which now took a new direction. He had met Chaim Weizmann by chance and, with his backing, became the editor of the short-lived Revue juive in 1925. Increasingly aware of the threat of fascism and anti-Semitism, which had spread even to the clean streets of Geneva, Cohen felt driven to defend the Jewish cause, recently revitalized by the Balfour Declaration. His work for the Revue juive gave him a high profile (Einstein and Freud were members of the editorial board) and confirmed his literary standing with its publisher, Gallimard, and with Jacques Rivière, the driving force behind the NRF, who had already offered him a contract for five novels. (They were never written: Cohen never wrote anything to order.) When the Revue juive ceased publication, Albert Thomas, director of the International Labour Office in Geneva, prompted by Rivière, offered Cohen work. It was his introduction to the world of the international civil service, to which he would subsequently return at intervals.

  He also began to rebuild his personal life. He drew increasingly close to Yvonne Imer, a friend of his late wife. They were ideally suited, and it was to her that he dictated a play, Ezechiel (1927), a number of shorter texts which he subsequently destroyed, and his first novel, Solal, which appeared in 1930. With her he perfected a working method which he never abandoned. He did not so much plan his books as cultivate them. He began by turning ideas over in his mirid, jotting down possibilities and turns of phrase as they occurred to him, then spoke them for transcription on to paper. The result was revised and expanded and retyped, then revised and dictated again, a process which was repeated until the refinements of invention flagged. The result was a vast, untidy bush which was pruned and trimmed until a shape emerged. Cohen claimed that he never really finished any of his books: he merely abandoned them. In this sense, his art was a long patience. But it was also a patience shared, a complicity which stimulated him and gave him a first audience: a smile or a frown from his amanuensis determined the fate of many an irony or added yet another subtlety to character or action. He always dictated to women, and preferably the women he loved. Other men, he said, bring women flowers; he preferred to give his a book. Writing, when properly managed, was a kind of conjugal joy which constantly reinvented his relationships, providing a common intensity of experience which staved off boredom, which is the death of love. Had Solal and Ariane followed their creator's practice, their love might never have turned stale and lethal.

  Cohen planned to marry Yvonne Imer. His flexible arrangement with the ILO guaranteed a modest lifestyle, and his literary prospects seemed set fair, and much fairer than his physical and mental health. He had caught tuberculosis in Egypt, was plagued by a variety of allergies and depressive moods, and was permanently obsessed by death. For all the infectious rumbustiousness of the Valiant, who make their first appearance in Solal, a dark shadow lay over Cohen's world; this deepened when, in June 1929, Yvonne Imer died suddenly of a heart attack, aged thirty-four. Cohen again sought refuge in his professional duties and his writing. Solal was a critical success, and Ezechiel won the Comoedia prize for the best one-act play of 1930.

  In 1931 he married Marianne Goss, the daughter of a Genevan architect, and was reunited with his daughter, Myriam, who had been raised largely by her mother's relations. They made a happy enough family, though Marianne proved not to be a soul-mate, nor was she a literary accomplice. This role soon passed to Myriam, with whom Cohen discussed each day's additions to his majestically growing accumulation of pages. These were typed by a secretarial assistant, Anne-Marie Boissonnas, whose father was to survive in the kindly figure of Uncle Gri. Until 1939 Cohen devoted all his time to literature, maintaining a very low profile. In 1933 Ezechiel ran for ten performances at the Comedie-Française, receiving mixed notices and a generally favourable reception. However, the public preview provoked strong reactions: members of the fascist leagues had come, as usual, to boo any celebration of Jewishness on principle, while some Jews in the audience, only too aware that Hitler was in the Reichstag, objected to the portrayal of the sturdy unkillability of the Jewish spirit as a crude and dangerous caricature. Cohen, essentially a shy man, had no stomach for a fight, was appalled by the furore, and never again wrote for the theatre. Instead, he disappeared from view and proceeded to amass materials for a novel which began where Solal had left off, feeling his way, pursuing the stream of his invention which turned into a river and then reached a delta, slow-moving but rich in alluvial deposits. By 1938, when Gallimard, who had been paying him an allowance against future royalties, intimated that some return would be in order, the manuscript had reached some three thousand pages. Cohen's answer was to extract chapters featuring the Valiant (whose antics made his daughter laugh) and take the tale of Solal up to the point where he goes forth to seduce Ariane. Mangeclous (1938) (translated as Nailcruncher in 1940) was well received, and the jacket announced a sequel, already entitled Belle du Seigneur, which was to be another thirty years in the making. Cohen had been virtually forgotten when it appeared finally in 1968 and won the French Academy's prize for fiction.

  But the year of Munich was hardly the time for embarking on long-term literary projects. At the beginning of 1939 Cohen became Chaim Weizmann's personal representative in Paris, and in the spring he canvassed support for the establishment of an international battalion, the Jewish Legion — a proposal which was finally turned down by the French Foreign Office in November. When France was overrun in June 1940, Cohen realized that his connection with Weizmann made him particularly vulnerable, and he escaped with his wife and daughter to England, not without difficulty, by way of Bordeaux. In London, as official adviser to the Jewish Agency for Palestine, his main function was to liaise with various governments-in-exile. He met de Gaulle ('personally likeable and rather engaging'), who pledged his support for the Jewish cause. Cohen was even more impressed by Churchill, whom, like many, he regarded as the pugnacious, phrase-making spirit of freedom.

  Churchill d'Angleterre (1943) was one of a number of long articles which Cohen published, some under the pseudonym of Jean Mahan, in wartime magazines designed to boost morale. Among the most significant of these were two reflective, autobiographical pieces which he later expanded and published as Le Livre de ma mere (1954) and O vous,freres humains (1972).

  The first was prompted by the death of his mother in German-occupied Marseilles in 1943. His ambiguous feelings towards his father (to whom he had nevertheless dedicated Mangeclous) had not been resolved, but this elegiac memorial to his mother is made of aching tenderness, regret, self-reproach and total surrender. She had sensed that she was not Westernized enough for her successful son, who was ashamed of her strong accent and clucking attentions and whose books she did not understand. Yet hers was the perfect, selfless love that knows no limit. Though there are m
ore fathers in the novels than mothers, Louise Coen walks abroad in them as the spirit of unreachable, absolute love and the life-giving source of the outlandish, passionate but noble and generous impulses of the 'valiant' Jewish tradition which she had passed on.

  The second piece was a meditation on his acquaintance, on his tenth birthday, with racial hatred, which he does not attempt to explain in rational terms (as aggression born of collective fear, say, or as the equivalent of the territorial imperative of the animal world) but accepts as a fact of life. — his life, and the life of Jews. Yet on the wider front the persecution which runs like a spiteful thread through the centuries of Jewish history, and was to culminate in the Holocaust, is itself subject to the greater power of death. But this is small consolation, for love and friendship are no less vulnerable, and human kindness is as fragile as the inhumanity of man to man. History and each person's experience surely demonstrate that exhortations to brotherly love will not suffice to soften hearts to true communion. If the only certainty is the knowledge that all are born to die, that we are brothers in death, then the only basis for moral actions is the recognition of our common mortality, a helpless, loving pity for all those, even those who injure us, who will inevitably grow old, wither and be cut down. We are all tomorrow's corpses.

  Cohen remained in London after the war ended, detained by his appointment in 1944 as legal adviser to the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees. He was responsible for drawing up a thirty-two-page travel document intended for refugees who were unable to obtain a passport. It was far superior to the old Nansen certificate (in existence since 1922), and the provisions on which it was based were eventually incorporated into the 1951 Convention on the status of refugees. It was, said Cohen with justifiable pride, 'my best book'. In 1946 he separated from his wife, and they divorced the following year when he returned to Geneva to work first for the International Refugee Organization, where he was appointed Director of the Protection Division, and then for the ILO, finally retiring from public life in 1952 to devote himself entirely to writing. In 1957 he was approached unofficially by the State of Israel, which had him in mind for an eventual ambassadorial role. He was tempted but eventually refused because he was determined to see his book through to a conclusion.