A Story with Characters and Action

Abstract

Ann Jefferson’s biography of Nathalie Sarraute is a beautiful present to lovers of literature. It tells us the life story of a great writer, the obstacles she faced, her courage, her dignity, and her modesty. Nathalie Sarraute, a distinguished participant in the adventure of the French nouveau roman, turned away, like the other members of this group, from the most perceptible components of narrative fiction: setting, plot, and characters, emphasizing instead style, mood, and atmosphere. Friendlier, more affable than the difficult writing promoted by this trend, Nathalie Sarraute’s prose is still quite enigmatic since, while magnificently capturing the hesitations of both the inner voice and the audible talk, it lets readers figure out who speaks, where, and why. Her biographer, by contrast, offers us an explicit, realist story that has a strong, unforgettable main character. It describes her national and social background; it carefully follows her life path, explaining its happy and its tough turns, thus offering us, readers, the portrait of a woman whose actions we can understand and admire.Born in Russia in 1900, Natalia (Natasha) Tcherniak was the daughter of the Jewish couple Ilya and Polina Tcherniak, who lived in Ivanovo-Voznesensk, a center of textile production located beyond the Pale of Settlement (the only area where Russian Jews were supposed to settle) and known at that time as the “Manchester of Russia.” Ilya, a chemical engineer who had studied in Switzerland, got the permission to live in Ivanovo-Voznesensk, where he developed a successful dye business. Polina, a cultivated woman eager to leave both her husband and her country, soon separated from Ilya and took little Natalia to Geneva, where she married Kolya (Nikolai) Boretzky-Bergfeld, a competent historian younger than her. Together, they moved to Paris, where little three-year-old Natasha learned French at a nursery school that seemed to her a small penal colony. Soon the family returned to Russia and settled in Saint Petersburg. In a remarkable photo taken in 1909, the well-dressed couple sits on a small bench: Kolya, sure of himself, legs crossed, wears a pince-nez, moustache, and goatee, holds a white hat on his right knee and seems ready to stand at attention (21). Polina, a well-built woman dressed in white, holds her hands crossed in her lap and appears to be at the same time attentive and indifferent. Because Natasha’s mother and stepfather had their own life and friends, the little girl played with her nursemaid and other servants. Like many people before the invention of radio, TV, and internet, Kolya and Polina read a lot, as did Natasha. She went through the children’s novels popular at that time: Sophie’s Misfortunes (Les Malheurs de Sophie, 1858), by the Russian-born French novelist Madame de Ségur; Nobody’s Son (Sans famille, 1878), by Hector Malot; and, several years later, through the teenagers’ favorites, David Copperfield (1850), by Dickens; The Prince and the Pauper (1881), by Mark Twain; and Rocambole (1857–69), Ponson de Terrail’s exciting page-turner.Natasha’s father, Ilya, sympathized with the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party, whose aim was to build a democratic society with the help of peasantry, while its rival, the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, subscribed to Karl Marx’s view that the future revolution was the task of the working class. At the time of a major terrorist attack that took place in Saint Petersburg in October 1906, Ilya’s brother, Yasha Tcherniak, an active member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, was in Paris, yet the Russian secret police suspected him to have been involved in planning the attack. Lured to Stockholm, Yasha was arrested at the request of Russia. The international protest of well-known European socialists, including Jean Jaurès, and the failure of Russian police to provide evidence against Yasha led to his release. Ilya went to Antwerp to meet him, but his brother had (suspiciously) died on his way on the steamer he boarded in Sweden.Ilya, realizing that it a return to Russia would be dangerous, decided to settle in France, where he started a new business in Vanves. The Russian émigrés among whom he lived included prominent political refugees, Lenin and Trotsky included, with whom, according to his daughter’s memories, Ilya played chess at a café in the Denfert-Rochereau neighborhood (27). He had remarried, his much younger second wife Vera being the offspring of a respectable Russian family. Vera’s mother, educated at the Smolny Institute for Noble Maidens in Saint Petersburg, spoke perfect French, like so many aristocrats and upper-middle-class women in Russia.Ilya and Vera being in Paris, Polina sent Natasha to visit them and let her decide whether she wanted to come back to Saint Petersburg. At age nine, she preferred France. Successful in elementary school, introduced by Vera’s old mother to French classic writers, Natasha, now known as Nathalie, went to the Lycée Fénelon, the best lycée for girls in the country. At that time, French high schools offered a rigorous education program created by the government to a limited number of students selected according to their school records. Before the 1920s, the schools for girls still followed a different program from boys’ schools, emphasizing the humanities rather than mathematics and science. Nathalie learned a lot in the French literature courses, where she read both classic and more recent writers, as well as in Latin and in philosophy. As Ann Jefferson relates, in 1917, at age seventeen, Nathalie wrote a philosophy assignment on the nature of the subconscious—a notion developed in her high-school handbook. In it, Nathalie explained that the term designates “states that escape the full consciousness of the subject” and remain “in half-lit regions” from where they “will emerge suddenly to consciousness and . . . cast light on these obscure states” (37). These states, Jefferson explains, would later become one of the major targets of Nathalie Sarraute’s writing: she labeled them “tropisms” and focused of their “half-lit” nature in virtually all her books, beginning with Tropismes (1939).Lucky to be in France, Ilya, still a Russian citizen in 1914, at the beginning of World War I, was not called to arms. For a while, the war did not directly affect the life of civilians in Paris. Only in 1918, because of the increased German bombing of French capital, did the family send Nathalie to Montpellier, a safer place, to prepare her final high-school exams. In Russia, in the meantime, the revolution of February 1917 made possible the return of the political émigrés to their homeland. The Tcherniak family remained in France, however, thus avoiding the soon-to-come October Revolution and the long civil war during which the Socialist Revolutionary Party to which many of its members belonged was defeated and later persecuted by Lenin’s Bolshevik branch of the Social-Democratic Party. As for Polina, who left Moscow for Odessa, and Kolya, who during the civil war fought in the White Army, at the end of the war they escaped from Russia and arrived in Yugoslavia, then in Hungary, where Nathalie met them and brought them to France. The presence of her divorced and remarried parents in the same city certainly was a source of tensions, as Jefferson rightly points out.Fortunately, Nathalie soon tasted the calm politeness of English life. During her first year at the Sorbonne University in Paris, Nathalie studied English literature without necessarily appreciating the way it was taught, although, as Jefferson notes, her professors included the respected Émile Legouis and Louis Cazamian, coauthors of an excellent history of English literature published in 1921. To improve her English proficiency, Nathalie spent the summer of 1919 at Harrow-on-the-Hill, not far from London. In September 1920, perhaps in order to avoid being in Paris, where Polina and her husband had settled, she returned to England as a BA student at Oxford. There, as Jefferson explains, “the formal courtesy of social relations came as a welcome alternative to the emotional volatility of the Tcherniak household,” a telling symptom of the “respect for the feelings of others that she always viewed as characteristically English” (50). Nathalie could also witness the changes in the women’s position in the United Kingdom, including the right to vote and be elected as members of Parliament, as well as, more locally, their inclusion in the matriculation at Oxford. She admired the British royal family whom she believed to be “exempt from the doubts and vacillations of the tropism,” as Jefferson, smiling, puts it (57).As much as Nathalie appreciated England, she had to return to France in 1921, yet soon found a way to leave her family home again in order to study at the University of Berlin, where she followed Werner Sombart’s course in sociology for several months. Geographically closer to Russia, at that time Berlin sheltered a few hundred thousand Russian refugees, including future celebrities like Vladimir Nabokov and Nina Berberova, who settled abroad, Ilya Ehrenburg, who subsequently returned to the Soviet Union, as well as numerous other Russian visitors: Mayakovsky, Yesenin, Viktor Shklovsky, Elsa Triolet, and Boris Pasternak. Nathalie, whose Russian connections were minimal, did not spend time with them; her great discovery at the time was Thomas Mann’s novella Tonio Kröger, the story of a young man who understands that in order to become a good writer he must ignore societal norms. Solitude as the right path toward art is also the lesson of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, another favorite book of Nathalie.Did she choose this path? Since on her return to Paris in the summer of 1922, Nathalie was suffering from anxieties and obsessions and saw the best French clinical psychologist at that time, Pierre Janet, who probably thought that the reason for her anxieties was a maladjustment in the family life—that is, her difficult rapport with her stepmother Vera. Ilya made therefore sure that Nathalie would live in a different apartment. As Jefferson explains, Nathalie, an attentive reader of Janet’s work, used some of his insights in her later writings, in particular his view of consciousness as activity rather than a state and his interest in the half-obscure areas of the subconscious (74–75), without, however, subscribing to Sigmund Freud’s notion of a deeper unconscious layer, inaccessible to one’s scrutiny.Nathalie did not want to become a teacher, and in the fall of 1922 she decided to study law. It was a way toward financial independence at a time when, after the huge losses of World War I, young women could work in positions traditionally held by men. In 1925, she obtained French citizenship and, having finished school, became a barrister. The same year she married Raymond Sarraute, whom she had met in the law school. Raymond’s paternal grandparents belonged to a traditional Catholic family in southwestern France, but his father had switched to the secular principles of the Third Republic, sympathized as a young man with the socialist parties and married a Russian Jewish woman who had studied medicine in France and was a family doctor. Raymond’s political options gave priority to social justice: in Jefferson’s terms, “his air of gentle reticence was belied by a passionate opposition to all manifestations of anti-Semitism and his equally passionate defense of immigrants” (93). A deep, stable mutual affection, their kindred political views, as well as their strong interest in literature, united him and Nathalie.Raymond introduced her to the work of French writers fashionable in the 1920, André Gide and François Mauriac among prose writers and Stéphane Mallarmé, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Victor Segalen among poets. She had discovered Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Proust by herself, as well as the prose of Rainer Maria Rilke; Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf; and Ulysses, by James Joyce, the latter being an important finding but not a direct source of inspiration. The couple also attended and loved movies by Charlie Chaplin, Fritz Lang, and Josef von Sternberg, and Luigi Pirandello’s play Six Characters in Search of an Author.Between 1927 and 1930, they had three daughters. After the birth of the first child, Nathalie went through a postpartum depression, but life became easier afterward, especially since, like most upper-middle-class couples, the Sarrautes had a nursemaid and a cook. Concerning Nathalie’s affection for her children, Jefferson quotes her discerning thought: “They’re like a piece of me. . . . You can’t talk about love, these words don’t enter into it. . . . I don’t know what it is. . . . It’s just a part of me” (111).The sensitivity to the tacit dimension of human experience is present in the short prose pieces that would become her first book, Tropismes. Comparing Nathalie Sarraute with her contemporary French writers of Russian Jewish origin Joseph Kessel and Irène Némirovsky, Jefferson notices that the latter wrote about Russia under the Soviet regime or about Russian émigrés in France. They evoked actual dramas they had witnessed and paid special attention to the participants’ national, social, and gender specificity. In these novels, a Russian émigré woman is clearly Russian, female, and émigré, and undergoes an unmistakable Russian misfortune. By contrast, in Tropismes, Nathalie Sarraute refrains from explaining who the characters are: names, biographical details, decisions to act are absent, the text instead describing the hesitant, half-expressed impressions, premonitions, and inconsequential interactions of a male and a female character within their daily environment. Yet, her benevolent attention to the inner, reticent half-thoughts and mini-impulses admirably focuses on its targets. The language, a sequence of short sentences often separated by suspension points that suggest moments of breathing, indecision, silent thought, at the same time grasps the inner anxiety of the anonymous characters and conveys the sense that, by contrast, the narrator knows exactly what she or he has to say.Politically, the mid-1930s were a difficult time for Nathalie. A supporter of the French League for the Rights of Women, she realized that neither the women’s right to vote nor the legal independence of married women from their husbands would soon be implemented. As Jefferson reminds the readers, the Napoleonic Code of 1804, at that time still in force, granted husbands full authority over their wives, who, if they wanted to engage in civil activities—to open, for instance, a bank account or to enroll at university—had to have their husbands’ authorization (120). In addition, Nathalie’s trip to the Soviet Union in 1935 was quite depressing. During the ten days she and her stepmother Vera spent under the supervision of Intourist, the Stalinist tourism bureau that kept foreign travelers in its own hotels and whose guides worked for the secret police, the two visitors could admire the beauty of Moscow’s old architecture, but also found out the truth about Stalin’s regime of terror. Much later, in the 1950s, Jean-Paul Sartre claimed that the Soviet people knew nothing about the gulag prisons and camps. In an interview with the French weekly L’Express Nathalie Sarraute answered that, during her visits to the Soviet Union, she found out that “the entire population was aware of people sentenced without trial or on the basis of mere (and false) witness statements and of forced labor camps in Siberia” (125). One should also note that in the 1970s, the philosopher Jean-François Revel—husband of Nathalie’s eldest daughter Claude—became an admirer of classical liberalism.Between the mid-1930s and these postwar debates, Nathalie went through a much tougher period. The publication of Tropismes by Denoël in 1939, after Gallimard rejected it (not without praising it and asking the author to submit another book), was far from being a public success, yet impressed several writers, in particular the modernist poet Max Jacob; Charles Mauron, translator of Virginia Woolf; and Sartre, who sent her appreciative letters. She continued writing, but soon World War II began. Raymond was called to arms as an “administrative lieutenant,” the German army invaded France, a vast number of Parisians left the capital city, and Nathalie and the children took refuge in La Baule in southern Brittany. After France’s capitulation, the Commander of the German occupation forces in La Baule officially authorized her to return to Paris.Jefferson’s narrative aptly guides us through the rapid, sinister sequence of anti-Semitic measures imposed by the German commandment and by the government of occupied France. Since Raymond’s deceased mother and Nathalie, his wife, were both Jewish, the official legislation considered him Jewish as well, therefore easy to exclude from the legal profession. Under terror, people feel justified to lie: the couple decided to divorce for “serious verbal abuse” and Nathalie composed the offensive letter Raymond was supposed to have sent her. The divorce pronounced, they continued to live together. Ilya left France for Switzerland while his business had to be put under the direction of an “Aryan,” the Belgian engineer Edgar Demarteau, who took advantage of the situation to buy out all Jewish stakeholders in the enterprise at an artificially low price. Worse, as Raymond was—by mistake—taken to the deportation camp of Drancy, it was necessary, in order to extricate him, to prove that he was not Jewish. A false certificate of his mother’s baptism was produced, which, however, did not help Raymond avoid a second arrest. At this point, Raymond’s father, aged sixty-eight, committed suicide. He wanted to avoid answering whether his wife had been Jewish: to lie was dishonorable, but to tell the truth would have been fatal for Raymond and his family. As Jefferson comments: “It was an act of despair on the part of someone who had once been a spokesman for ideals that no longer had a place in occupied France” (154).To avoid the worst, Nathalie and her children moved to a village southwest of Paris, where they had the courage never to wear the compulsory yellow star. Fearing the local baker, who could have denounced her as a Jew, she returned to Paris just before the French collaborationist police came to her village house to arrest her. Next she moved to Parmain, north of Paris, got an identity card under a false name, missed by chance a visit of the Gestapo, and in the spring of 1944 returned to Paris, taking refuge in a friend’s apartment. In August 1944, Paris was free again: Nathalie had managed to escape arrest and deportation. Not yet widely recognized, she had the advantage of being a less important target. In addition, she and Raymond, who was closely involved in the Resistance, knew how to move fast and hide well. Perhaps her later fiction stayed away from this topic because she did not find the despicable Nazi occupation worthy of her literary attention.After the war she got closer to Sartre, who appreciated her talent and published parts of her unfinished Portrait of an Unknown Man in Les Temps modernes, the cultural journal he directed. Among the women writers in Sartre’s milieu, she got close to Violette Leduc, protégée of Simone de Beauvoir and author of several novel-memoirs, the best known being La Bâtarde, written and published much later (1964). François Erval, another friend of Sartre, helped her publish the Portrait of an Unknown Man at Robert Marin, a small publishing house. Having sold only a few hundred copies, the novel was later reissued by Gallimard. For various reasons, Nathalie did not always feel at home in Sartre’s literary congregation. As Jefferson explains, Sarraute defended the role of psychology in the novel, while Sartre was in favor of a literature “of situations”; she thought that her tropisms continued a tradition that started with the great British writers Scott, Dickens, the Brontë sisters, and George Eliot, and, in Russia, with Dostoevsky, none of them belonging to Sartre’s list of Holy Books. Furthermore, Sartre ended up by favoring politically engaged literature, while Nathalie was warning her contemporaries against it. On a personal level, Nathalie did not admire the big novels produced by Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre’s life partner, and felt little sympathy for her condescending attitude toward the members of her and Sartre’s circle. In Sarraute’s Planetarium (1959), the character of Germaine Lemaire, a wealthy, selfish, fashionable writer, makes one think of Beauvoir.After the painful loss of her father in 1949, Nathalie’s personal and literary life “acquired a new dimension,” as Jefferson puts it (199). In addition to her old friends, she got in touch with influential cultural figures like Gilbert Gadoffre, one of the founders of the décades of the Abbaye de Royaumont, where she met Eugène Ionesco, Gaëtan Picon, Jean Starobinsky, and Francis Ponge. She attended lectures at Jean Wahl’s Collège philosophique, whose secretary was Michel Butor, a future participant in the nouveau roman movement. Her and Raymond’s summer house at Chérence hosted influential friends, her work was increasingly successful both in France and abroad. Her novel Martereau, published by Gallimard in 1953, positively reviewed in France, the United States, and Switzerland, sold very well. The novel’s main character is a double-dealer not unlike the real Demarteau, who, during the occupation, had taken advantage of Ilya’s situation, but as Jefferson notes, the book portrays the “shifting internal dramas of tropisms” (212) rather than active political betrayal.The essay The Age of Suspicion (spring 1956) limpidly formulates Nathalie’s conviction that novels cannot possibly continue the realist tradition and its reliance on a finite set of human “types” convincingly imagined by nineteenth-century authors. Since contemporary readers wanted facts rather than imagination, writers should cease to focus on well-defined individuals, instead examining widespread, anonymous psychological vibrations. In July, a décade organized by Gilbert Gadoffre at the huge, luxurious Château d’Eu in Normandy promoted “the Break with the Post-war Moment” (219). The large attendance of French and foreign writers and artists reached the conclusion that the traditional novel is dead and called for a new literary adventure, the nouveau roman. Nathalie Sarraute was one of the founders of the new group, which included Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor, Claude Simon, Samuel Beckett, Robert Pinget, Claude Ollier, and Marguerite Duras. Jérôme Lindon, director of the Éditions de Minuit, which during the war had been an underground operation started by Jean Bruller (Vercors) and Pierre de Lescure, supported this group.The publication of Planetarium in 1959 led to Nathalie’s recognition as a major writer. Translations of her work were published abroad, and in 1964 she was invited to a lecture tour in the United States, she received a major international literary prize, and she made new friends, including Hannah Arendt, Christine Brooke-Rose, and Monique Wittig. By the end of the 1960s, however, fashionable French literary theorists turned to structuralism and at the conference dedicated to the nouveau roman in July 1971, at the Château de Cerisy-la-Salle, a calm, severe seventeenth-century building, the young critic Jean Ricardou distinguished between the “yesterday” of the trend and its “today,” with Nathalie Sarraute respectfully relegated to the past. Language was the new idol, literature arising from its playfulness, without any psychological or representational purpose. Sarraute politely yet strongly disagreed: “Where language extends its power, there arise rote-learned ideas, designations, definitions, . . . categories. It drains, hardens, and separates something that is just fluidity and movement. . . . As soon as this formless, trembling, wavering thing tries to emerge into the light, language, with all its power and its weaponry . . . pounces on it and crushes it” (333). Accordingly, in Golden Fruits and Between Life and Death, written in the 1960s, Sarraute further minimized the specific, well-defined gestures and actions, and avoided definitions and categories, favoring instead a language that preserved the vacillating, half-lit areas of the human psyche.Successful, universally respected, full of energy, Nathalie spent the seventh and eighth decades of her life writing, traveling, and giving lectures. Her radio plays Silence (1964) and The Lie (1966), as well as the plays written for stage It Is There (Elle est là, 1978) and For No Good Reason (Pour un oui et pour un non, 1981), offered new ways of revealing subconscious hesitations. Thus, in the unforgettable For No Good Reason, two old friends, H1 and H2, interminably talk without ever expressing what they truly want to say. Childhood (1983), an autobiographical work that presents a multitude of charming details of Nathalie’s early years, was her greatest success, praised by critics, loved by readers.Raymond died in 1985, after a long decline. During the last fifteen years of her life, Nathalie saw the departures of many old friends, made some new ones, read, went to the theater and the cinema, gave interviews, continued to travel. She received an honorary doctorate from Oxford University, after the earlier ones granted by the University of Kent and Trinity College, Dublin. Her complete works were published by the highly prestigious Bibliothèque de la Pléiade at Gallimard (1996), under the direction of Jean-Yves Tadié, assisted by four major specialists in Sarraute’s work, Viviane Forrestier, Ann Jefferson, Valérie Minogue, and Arnaud Rykner.One of the last quotations from Nathalie’s interviews that Jefferson inserts toward the end of her book is a peaceful dismissal of the main obsessions of modern writing, the attention to the self: “Inside us,” she says, “there’s neither an ‘I,’ nor a ‘you’; there’s just a ‘here’ where things happen” (375). The important quote clarifies Sarraute’s position in twentieth-century literature. If she skipped plot and actors, it is because she examined a more subtle, yet more general aspect of human existence; if she refrained from ethnic, social, and historical considerations it is (perhaps) because having crossed several borders and witnessed various regimes, she tried to capture common human features rather than define specific identities. To this end, she did not need to imagine a strange, quasi-mythical universe, as some of her nouveau roman fellows, Samuel Beckett for instance, tried to do. Like French seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers, she searched for graceful symptoms of our half-lit moral psychology.Whereas in Nathalie Sarraute’s literary works characters and action are barely perceptible, it is Ann Jefferson’s great merit to have written a magnificent biography in which Sarraute is a real, unforgettable person, as are her family and friends, her historical background and experiences, her predictable and unpredictable interactions, her sorrows and triumphs. Incredibly erudite yet always accessible and reader-friendly, this biography is a true model of the genre.