A Cool Head and a Hard Heart: Irène Némirovsky's Fiction

Further evidence of Némirovsky's growing compassion and breadth of vision-literary as well as moral-can be found in her biography of Chekhov. She wrote A Life of Chekhov in 1940 and '41, at the same time as she was working on Suite Française, stranded in Issy-L'Evêeque, without her books and uncertain whether prohibitions against Jewish writers publishing their works applied to her or not. It was not published until 1946, and the 1950 English translation has long been out of print. It is a charming book, particularly in its novelistic evocation of Chekhov's family and difficult childhood. Her reading of Chekhov-her slow appreciation of the way his writing "teaches nothing"-reflects tellingly on the greater mastery of style and structure in her late fiction. She prized the inconclusiveness of Chekhov's best work, its subtlety and understatement, and especially his balance between characters.

Whenever, in a short story or novel, one hero or one event is thrown into relief, the narrative itself is impoverished: the complexity, beauty and depth of reality depend on the innumerable ties that exist between one man and another, one life and another, between joy and suffering.

Némirovsky's earlier books are dominated by intense emotions, starkly portrayed, and focus on at most a handful of prominent, sharply defined characters and the most obvious of the innumerable ties that bind them. She was beginning to appreciate the way Chekhov used characters and incidents in their particularity, rather than as set types of a class or race, and to improve her own fiction with less forced characterization.

A number of critics reviewing Suite Française have noted the absence in it of any Jewish characters, a void they find particularly surprising as she was writing in a time of increasing prohibitions against Jews. However, there is one pointed entry in her notes-an entry even Weiss fails to mention-which Némirovsky capitalized for emphasis. "FOR CAPTIVITY FOR THE CONCENTRATION CAMP THE BLASPHEMY OF THE BAPTISED JEWS "MAY GOD FORGIVE US OUR TRESPASSES AS WE FORGIVE YOU YOURS"-Obviously, martyrs would not have said that." Whether or not she had come to have second thoughts about her own conversion, it is clear that her depictions of all her characters, Jew or gentile, would have been far more nuanced and human.

Indeed, almost two years earlier, in a 1939 interview, Némirovsky admitted, "How could I write such a thing? If I were to write David Golder now, I would do it quite differently . . . The climate has changed." Not only had Irène Némirovsky's writing improved immeasurably, but, at incalculable cost, the myopia of her moral imagination had been corrected. The enormous leap in quality and promise evident in Suite Française would never be realized.

1 SUITE FRANÇAISE, by Irène Némimvsky. Tran». by Sandra Smith. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.00.

2 IRÈNE NÉMIROVSKY: Her Life and Works, by Jonathan Weiss. Various translators. Stanford University Press. $24.95.

3VIN DE SOLITUDE, by Irène Némirwdiy. Éditions Albin Michel. euro17.50. The translation is mine.

Copyright Hudson Review Autumn 2006
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