Authors: Albert Cohen
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
Soldi,
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-Fran^aise, 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
he 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 more 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.
In 1955 he married Bella Berkowich, whom he had first met in 1943 and in whom he found a devoted companion and the ideal literary co-conspirator. It was to her that Cohen dedicated
Belle du Seigneur.
Work on his novel proceeded slowly, however, interrupted by long periods of serious illness, and Cohen lived a reclusive life punctuated by increasingly immediate intimations of his own mortality. It was not until 1967 that he submitted a 'monstrous' manuscript to Gallimard, who insisted on substantial cuts. Cohen reluctantly agreed, and the adventures of the Valiant which had originally followed chapter 11 appeared separately in 1969 as
Les Valeureux.
When
Belle du Seigneur
was published, in 1968, it was hailed as a masterpiece of sustained invention and baroque power. Cohen was lionized by the press, and there was talk of the Nobel Prize. But, wary of the publicity machine, he jealously guarded his privacy until, in 1977, he was interviewed for the television literary magazine
Apostrophes,
which made him an unlikely star. His mixture of teasing guile, frailty and shrewdness appealed to a wide audience. But his last book,
Carnets 1978,
made no concessions to popular taste. He returned to his major preoccupations - death, the difficulty of faith, the eternal cruelty of man to man - but the bleakness was relieved by a gleam if not of hope then of wisdom. If the enjoinder to brotherly love has failed, we should look elsewhere and accept the "universal irresponsibility' of men, who are what they are: not simply fallible, but mortal. Still waiting for a sign from the God he revered but could not believe in, Albert Cohen died in 1981, still keeping faith with the commonwealth of brotherly pity.
Belle du Seigneur
is the longest episode of a single work which evolved slowly over four decades. The first instalment,
Solal,
is by far the most eventful. The story begins in about 1910, in Cephalonia, and tells how the thirteen-year-old Solal of the Solals, son of the island's unbending, patriarchal Chief Rabbi, resolves to escape the ghetto and fulfil his high destiny. When he is sixteen, he defies his father and elopes impetuously with Adrienne de Valdonne, the young wife of the French consul. The adventure does not last, but it widens his horizons and sets his feet on the road to the success which seems his by right. Solal has every quality: he is one of nature's aristocrats, as handsome as he is clever. But he is also driven by a sense of mission which he does not fully understand. When still in his early twenties, he is immensely rich, married to Aude de Maussane, who loves him, and is Minister of Labour in a French socialist government. Yet he senses that his success is built on the rejection of his Jewish roots -that is, of a whole area of human diversity. He tries to make amends -he fills the cellar of a mansion with needy Jews - but neither good works nor the love of Aude can redeem him. He begins to act erratically and descends into poverty and obscurity. Clutching his baby son, he kills himself, only to be mysteriously resurrected - to fight another day, perhaps, or because the fates have not done with him yet. 'The sun lit the tears, the defiant smile of the bleeding lord
who now, overflowing with a lunatic love of earth and crowned in beauty, strode into the future, went forth to meet the miracle of his defeat.'
For Solal, Cohen has the same mix of affection and ridicule which Stendhal showed for Julien Sorel. His hero is also a restless, reckless spirit in search of the absolute. But while Julien is in love with love, Solal is in love with a god he cannot accept, and views himself as a Messianic figure pledged to making a world which has room for loyalty, love, Christians, Jews and all who are born to die. Cohen, whose own idealism was permanently undermined by an incapacity for faith, both shared this sense of mission and mocked it - and his jokes are very good indeed. For against the sombre history of the rise and fall of Solal must be set the Valiant', an unlikely quintet of middle-aged, garrulous, squabbling, picturesque cousins who, prefiguring Snow White's dwarves and the Marx Brothers, cut a considerable dash as comic musketeers.
Cohen was extremely fond of them, and introduced them to new readers on a number of occasions: he does so again in chapter 12 of
Belle du Seigneur.
* Uncle' Saltiel is the senior member and acknowledged leader of the * Valiant of France', so called on account of their attachment to the libertarian tradition of the Revolution of 1789 and to the florid, archaic language of the sixteenth century. United by friendship, they are constantly divided by their self-importance and bumbling incompetence. Saltiel, a failed inventor, is reduced to living by his wits: we first see him selling chestnuts on which he has inscribed verses from Deuteronomy. Naileater (so called because once, when a boy, 'he gobbled a dozen screws to assuage his inexorable hunger') is an engaging charlatan who displays endless ingenuity in devising hopeless money-making schemes, which range from setting up a university in his kitchen to a method for making shoes squeak properly so that everyone will know that they are new. Mattathias, the one-armed miser, keeps his own counsel and whatever money comes his way. Solomon, a little man with a big heart, is innocence on legs, the easily wounded conscience of the group. Michael, 'the giant', has a military bearing and a moustache which women find irresistible. The Valiant are physical, unreliable and tasteless; but they are also resilient, resourceful and endlessly optimistic: they are, in a
word, everything which the popular imagination understands by Jewishness. In creating them, Cohen stands well outside the defensive tradition of much Jewish writing (from Zangwill to Bashevis Singer and Elie Wiesel) and makes no apology for the Valiant, who, for all their demented antics, represent good humour and sanity in a world which has forgotten how to live in joy. They, as much as the Law of Moses, are what Solal has denied.
When
Mangeclous
opens, ten years or so have passed. By means which are not explained, Solal has once more achieved a position of power and influence: he is now Under-Secretary-General of the League of Nations. He sends money to the Valiant and invites them to visit him in Geneva. Suddenly rich and swollen with their own importance, they make a grand tour of Europe, leaving a trail of chaos in their wake. Their adventures are as extravagant as Baron Munchausen's, and their Chaplinesque spirit is unquenchable. They join forces with Scipion Escargassas, a Tartarin from Marseilles, and Jeremie, a Jew who has been a guest of Herr Hitler's prisons, both of whom succeed in obtaining an audience at the Palais des Nations by posing as an Argentinian delegation. Solal is both amused and appalled by their absurdity, because once more he has reached a point of crisis. His idealism, which he feels like a physical need, founders on his inability to reconcile two contradictory propositions. Intellectually he is convinced that the world must be saved through Reason and the Law of Nations. But his instinct tells him that its salvation lies in Faith and the Law of Moses. But Reason and Faith are irreconcilable, and his loyalties swing wildly between their immediate manifestations -the League and the Valiant. Solal is at war with himself and turns away from the world of international diplomacy and base, self-serving functionaries towards what seem to be the greater certainties of his Jewish "past. But while he never doubts the Law of Moses, he cannot believe in the God of his fathers. Moreover, he despises the fecklessness of the Valiant and the meekness of Jews like Jeremie, who will never inherit the earth however much they deserve to. He is no less aware that love of women is an eternal betrayal of love. Solal is a chemically pure idealist who lives in a comprehensively contaminating world.