Albert Cohen died in 1981, hailed in France as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. His passing barely registered in the English-speaking world; not even the New York Times ran an obituary, and it is unlikely to correct this particular mistake in its “Overlooked” feature. Cohen was the author of a fictional tetralogy that included a masterpiece called Belle du Seigneur, as well as three volumes of memoirs, but at the time of his death he had not been translated into English since 1933. In that year his first novel, Solal, published in 1930 in France, appeared in English to dithyrambic reviews. The vagaries of the translation market deprived us of translations of Belle du Seigneur until 1995 and of The Book of My Mother until 2012. The rest of Cohen’s work remains untranslated.
Lost to Anglophone readers is a body of work of real genius, books that are humorous, romantic, tragic, sensuous, challenging, enthralling, and occasionally exasperating and even repugnant. They are books that are overflowing with love, thought, and ambiguity; that are extremely Jewish and extremely French, and explore the ties and the disjunctions between those two adjectives of belonging. There is much in them to admire and even to adore, and much that will enrage. Cohen really does contain multitudes, a writer roaming in style and form — there is humor, there is Biblical narrative, there is stream-of-consciousness realism, there is exalted lyricism, there is even the language of swashbuckling tales and serial novels à la Eugène Sue. His language flows drunkenly and freely yet also precisely, with a seeming infinity of verbal resources, able to change tone on a dime. The result is a body of work that is utterly unique. It is also, in both its fictional and autobiographical forms, an oeuvre that contains a philosophy of love, mortality, and Jewishness that is complex and sometimes shocking.
Cohen was born in Corfu on August 16, 1895 to a Jewish family involved in the soap trade. The Jewish settlement on Corfu dates back at least to the High Middle Ages, and in the early modern period the community — which developed customs and liturgies uniquely its own — suffered many anti-Semitic adversities, and so into the modern centuries, until in 1891 a blood libel forced many Jews to flee the island. In 1944 almost two thousand Jews were deported to Auschwitz. As for Cohen’s family, business difficulties led them to move to Marseille in 1900. He attended school there and began a lifelong friendship with Marcel Pagnol, the novelist and filmmaker, the bard of Marseille and the Midi. Cohen adapted well to the Midi — but on the day of his tenth birthday he experienced the central event of his life, the formative event that “drove [him] from humankind.”
On August 16 at 3:05 in the afternoon, as he was leaving summer school, Albert saw a street vendor selling stain remover. He listened with delight to the seller’s pitch and held out the coins to him. As he later recalled, the vendor addressed him directly:
“You, you’re a kike, right?” said the blond street merchant with his thin mustache whom I’d gone to listen to with faith and tenderness on the way from school. ‘You’re a filthy kike, right? I can see it in your mug. You don’t eat pig, right? Given that pigs don’t eat each other you’re a miser, right? I can see it in your mug, you eat gold coins, right? You like them more than you do candy, right? You’re a fake Frenchman, right? I can see that in your mug, you’re a filthy Jew, right? A filthy Jew, right? Your father is in international finance, right? You’ve come here to eat the bread of the French, right? Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you a buddy of Dreyfus, a little purebred yid, guaranteed member of the brotherhood of the snipped, shortened where he should be. I recognize them on sight: me, I can’t be fooled. Well, we don’t like Jews around here, it’s a filthy race, they’re all spies in the pay of Germany, look at Dreyfus, they’re all traitors, they’re all bastards, they’re as awful as the mange, bloodsuckers of the poor world, they roll on gold and smoke big fat cigars while we have to tighten our belts: am I right or am I right, ladies and gentlemen. Get lost, we’ve seen enough of you, you’re not at home here, this isn’t your country, you have no place here in our home, c’mon, get lost, take a hike, get going, go see if I’m in Jerusalem.”
Cohen never recovered from this tirade, though he later declared that his love of the country that had “rejected” him did not waver, finding its focus instead in literature. Cohen’s suspicion of all claims about universal brotherhood grew from this early confrontation with the actual, smiling face of hatred.
Cohen attended law school in Geneva from 1914 and took Swiss citizenship in 1919, the same year in which he married his first wife, Elisabeth Brocher, a Protestant pastor’s daughter. He published his first book, a volume of poetry called Paroles juives, in 1921, a volume that he refused to republish during his lifetime though it was eventually included in the Pléiade collection of his work. The poetry of the young Cohen bears within it the same pride about Jews and Jewishness, later diversified by ambiguity, that will persist throughout his writing life. In the first lines of the collection Cohen writes:
Listen
My People.
My people
I looked upon you.
You taught me.
As he admits, “my words are crude.” These poems are exhortations to his people, which sometimes involve criticism of them.
I know only how to shout
I know only how to shout.
I come to you
My people lacking in courage.
Ah, how my words burn you
Ah, rise and go forth.
Ah, puff up your mane and growl
Indolent lion
Lion that awakens the flame of the south.
The young Cohen was a muscular and unapologetic poet of Jewishness, and of Zionism:
You drink the wine of joy.
And you cry out
This year we sing in a foreign land
And next year it is certain
A free people in Jerusalem.
And you do not smile at each year that passes
Stubborn people
Strong people.
And his national pride extended also to metaphysical matters. Paroles juives contains Cohen’s love of a god in whom he is unable to believe:
I lost my God
I no longer know my God
But I know that my God is stronger than your gods.
That last line is childish and coarse, but Cohen was writing when Jews were increasingly in jeopardy, and like some other Jewish intellectuals of his time he chose to respond to the threats with defiance and Jewish self-assertion. Paroles juives, a slight volume, is nevertheless a key to much of Cohen’s thought, to his feelings about the Jewish people, his “brother slaves.”
Cohen’s wife died in 1924, leaving him a daughter, Myriam, born in 1921. The following year he became editor of a new Zionist publication, La Revue juive. It published work by Einstein, Freud, Buber, Max Jacob, Elie Faure, Max Brod, and Louis Massignon — and, most notably, Proust, with a previously unpublished chapter of À la recherche du temps perdu. But its life was short; it lasted six issues.
Cohen lived parallel lives in literature and world affairs, publishing in 1930 his first novel, Solal, as well as his sole theatrical piece, Ezéchiel. During this period he was employed at the Geneva-based International Labor Organization, and served also as the Zionist Organization’s representative to the League of Nations. In 1931 Cohen married his second wife, Marianne Goss. His involvement in these two spheres continued into the late 1930s: in 1938 he published Mangeclous, the second novel of what would be his tetralogy, while continuing his Zionist labors, serving as Chaim Weizmann’s personal representative in Paris in 1939. He fled France for London in June 1940, where he served as the Jewish Agency’s special representative to the Allied governments in exile, and worked with De Gaulle’s Free French, publishing regularly in their journal, La France libre. At war’s end he worked as assistant director of the International Refugee Organization, retiring in 1951 and dedicating the rest of his life to his writing. Cohen wed Bella Bercovich in 1955, the only Jewish woman among his spouses.
Cohen’s first autobiographical book, Le Livre de ma mère (The Book of My Mother), appeared in 1954, and the two final novels of his tetralogy, Belle du Seigneur, his masterpiece, in 1968 and Les Valeureux (The Valorous) in 1969. He published two further autobiographical volumes after that novel, O vous, frères humains (O You, Brother Humans) in 1972, and his final book, Carnets 1978 (Notebooks 1978), in 1979. Abraham Albert Cohen died in Geneva on October 17, 1981, and was buried two days later in the city’s Jewish cemetery.
Solal, Cohen’s first novel, was published to great acclaim in France in 1930. The critic for Comoedia, for example, concluded that it “marked perhaps the rebirth of the novel of imagination in our literature,” continuing that it is “certainly the masterpiece” of Jewish literature. (The latter remark is certainly excessive.) Its translation into English in 1933 was also highly praised. Its overwhelmingly Jewish otherness was stressed by the critics. The New York Times’ reviewer wrote of the exoticism of the author and his cultural distance from “us”: “There is a subtle Oriental hormone in M. Cohen’s blood which separates him from us by leagues and centuries. It will be difficult for the Western mind, which is still subconsciously dominated by inherited Greek notions of form and unity, to comprehend this strange, Byzantine composite, this magnificent, disordered work.” (A backhanded compliment if ever there was one.) Time magazine said of the book that “though Jewry has given the world many a magnum opus, including Christendom’s best-known book, few true-blue Jewish novels aim at or succeed in putting Christian readers in a state of grace. Solal does just that; it is a wild, melodramatic romance, stuffed with grotesque comedy, Old Testament lamentations, sensual psalms, shrewd cynicism and shrewder kindliness, ending finally in pure parable.”
An uncommon book, obviously. Solal is the story of Solal des Solal, a dashing young Greek Jew born on the island of Cephalonia, for whom the tiny world of a Greek island and its even tinier Jewish ghetto are not big enough to satisfy his hungers and ambitions. Bursting with confidence, Solal des Solal — the firstborn son of the head of the Solal family in every generation bears this doubled name — is the apple of his family’s eye. He is above all a boy who never allows anyone or anything to get in his way, capable even of knocking his tutor unconscious in order to steal the latter’s invitation to a party hosted by the woman he loves. All that Solal will later show himself to be — impetuous, foolhardy, selfish, romantic, dominating, and cruel; Jewish and anti-Semitic — can be found in Cohen’s first novel. It is not without reason that Cohen’s great admirer Bernard-Henri Lévy described this novel as a “draft” of his great work of almost forty years later, Belle du Seigneur.
Solal recounts the title character’s youth and early manhood, whose life is ruled by his ambition, his love of women, and his tormented Jewishness. When it opens the day before his bar mitzvah, Solal is in love with Adrienne de Valdonne, the wife of the French consul, ten years his senior, a woman he has adored “since he saw her at the distribution of prizes at the French high school.” After three years of pursuit, the now sixteen-year-old Solal succeeds in winning and abducting Mme. de Valdonne, with whom he runs off to Italy, an event taken from Cohen’s life and his abduction at sixteen of an opera singer in Marseille. In the first instance of what will become Solal’s normal course in love, he quickly begins to tire of his lover. He meets Aude de Maussane, whom he will court and, as if a character in a Dumas or Sabatini novel, pursue on horseback and capture on the day of her planned marriage to another man.
Solal is irresistible to women, described in the act of love as a “god” and “master,” with women his “slaves.” Solal and Aude wed, and Solal, this Greek Jew, skillfully exploiting his new relations — Aude’s father is highly placed in the French government — and his almost magical charm, is named to a post in the ministry of foreign affairs. He is dauntless and will not be denied: when he loses that position, he recovers quickly to become the editor of a socialist newspaper and a power in the French Chamber of Deputies.
His personality and his actions throughout the tetralogy induce an almost unbearable tension in the reader. Cohen seems to acknowledge that his protagonist is somewhat hard to take, and he offers relief with scenes of a group of Cephalonian Jews, known as the Valorous of France — five relatives of Solal who, by a twist of Jewish fate, are citizens of France thanks to their descent from a line of the Solal family that traces its roots to that country. Like Solal, they will be recurring characters in Cohen’s novels and the central figures in two of them. They serve as comic relief, but more than that, they represent Solal’s roots, which he has chosen to deny in order to reach the heights that he attains.
In Solal, the hero’s attraction/repulsion for his roots will ultimately be his undoing, costing him his career, his wife, his son, and (temporarily!) his life. As the novel ends, Solal’s acceptance of his Jewishness, of his filiation with the “grotesque” Jews of his native isle as represented by the Valorous, have led to his descent into abject poverty. His wife leaves for parts unknown with their son, their love twisted and killed by her rejection of his background and his refusal to wash his hands of it. He succeeds in tracking down his estranged spouse and their child and, with a medieval dagger, holding his baby in his arms, he stabs himself and dies. But death is unable to hold Solal and he revives. His imperviousness to death is expressed in the final words of the novel: “The sun illuminated the tears of the bloody lord with his rebellious smile, mad with love for the earth and crowned with beauty, headed to tomorrow and his marvelous defeat. In the sky a royal bird spread its wings. Solal rode off on his horse and looked the sun in the face.” There are moments in Cohen’s flamboyant novels when he seems to have hit upon magical realism.
In all Cohen’s novels, Solal des Solal’s great loves are gentile women, as were two of the author’s three wives. In Cohen’s appearance on the French literary talk show Apostrophes in 1977, he accepted the host’s observation that this was a fruit of the desire for “integration” into the larger society. Solal is motivated by love, desire, and ambition: his ambition to possess any woman he is drawn to, but also the ambition to get ahead, which requires leaving Cephalonia and his religion behind. His inability to shed his Jewish self and to avoid the label “Jew” attached to him by the non-Jewish world will be his downfall. Solal learns that in his world success is possible for a Jew, but only at the cost of denying his Jewishness. The modern Jewish drama of assimilation and allegiance is played at a very high pitch.
If Solal’s Jewishness is replete with contradictions, the Valorous of France, his comically “grotesque” Greek family, live their Jewishness to the hilt. Cohen, the proudly Zionist editor of La Revue juive, has them emigrate to Palestine. There they join with a group of Polish Jews, a Jewry unknown to these simple Sephardim, in the shared objective of making the land flourish in the face of Arab opposition. The Valorous give their hearts to the Zionist task, though they are more than somewhat lacking in the skills needed to make the land fertile. Uncle Saltiel and Salomon joins the workers in the fields, with less than sterling results. These pioneers from a Greek island struggle mightily. Salomon almost cuts off his own foot with his scythe, and he is foiled in his effort to “decipher the Zionist anthem that he had had sent from Jerusalem… He quickly grew tired of it, realizing that he understood nothing of these five lines and the accursed little circles, sometimes round, sometimes black, sometimes white. He scratched himself and sought other amusement.” Though their undertaking ends in disaster, Cohen finds them admirable: “All these former nomads knew they were clumsy. But what did it matter? They were working in the sun and their children would find fertile fields. Sweating and peaceful, they carried on. Honor to the new children of Zion.” They are attacked by Arabs, and the saintly Valorous Salomon and Uncle Saltiel are killed. The survivors decide to quit Palestine. Mangeclous, a schemer of the first order interested primarily in his own well-being, explains that “I’ve had enough. To tell you the truth, there are too many Arabs around here and it’s not hygienic for my health.” We last see them setting out for Greece and safety.
“Israel,” in Solal’s eyes, “was a poor nightingale, an old, plucked bird that sang in the night of centuries while young nations constructed their empires.” The contradictions of Solal’s Jewishness are strikingly drawn. Solal is capable of tossing a tallis out the window, but also of destroying his future by making sure that his wife sees him praying in the traditional way, rocking back and forth. She is horrified by the spectacle, and his carefully constructed French life collapses. This wavering in his attitude towards his religion plants the seed of his destruction: as his father-in-law and boss tells him, “No ambiguity. French. Solely French and all that that means.” Try as he might, Solal can never totally adopt this attitude. As a Jew he refuses to vanish. His is the tragedy of the figure who lives on the seam and straddles it, for whom the only life he can live with integrity is a dual life.
Cohen gives Solal’s Jewishness a moving spatial and symbolic representation. Using Aude’s money, Solal purchases a chateau in France, solidifying his French bona fides: the foreign Jew is now the lord of a manor in the countryside. But one night Solal slips out of the marital bed, and Aude sets out to find him. She discovers that a wooden chest has a false bottom that opens onto a staircase. “She walked down fifty steps, followed a dark corridor at the end of which a lit candle cast shifting shadows. She cracked open a studded door and glimpsed a hall with a vault sprinkled with stars, supported by great pillars. At the back, the seven branches of a candelabra shone before a velvet curtain embroidered with square and triangular letters.” Unbeknownst to his wife, Solal, this modern marrano, had constructed his own synagogue beneath their ostensibly Christian home. Ultimately she makes for Solal the choice that he cannot make, the choice between being Jewish and being French, and abandons her husband to his Jewish fate.
In 1938, Cohen followed Solal with Mangeclous, its plot dedicated primarily to the Valorous, and in particular to its title character, Pinhas Solal: Mangeclous. Mangeclous means Naileater. The Rabelaisian tone of the book begins on the title page, where we are told that its hero is also called “Long Teeth and Satan’s Eye and Lord High Life and Sultan of Coughers, and Saddle Skull and Black Feet and Top Hat and Bey of Liars and Word of Honor and Almost lawyer…” and so on and delightfully on. Mangeclous is for most of its length a radical departure from Solal. In his first novel the Valorous were injected into the story as comic relief, and as exemplars, in burlesque form, of an authentic Jewishness, one lived with no ambiguity, far from that of the tortured Solal. But Mangeclous is in its entirety a comic novel. With its improbably eccentric characters and its almost steadfast refusal to advance in a straight line, it feels very much like a French Tristram Shandy, though in Mangeclous every character is Uncle Toby.
When we had last seen the Valorous, they were leaving Palestine after a disastrous attempt at settlement, leaving two of their number dead. Now both of the formerly deceased, Salomon and Saltiel, have returned from the dead. Verisimilitude takes second (or third or fourth) place to the writer’s love for his characters. Cohen is a gifted fabulist. The novel’s extravagant plot is set in motion by a mysterious letter telling Salomon and Saltiel that they are the recipient of a munificent sum of money. They are instructed to travel to Geneva. From that point nothing goes simply, as the correct distribution of the funds becomes a matter of debate, this debate giving rise to the group’s self-induced notion that there is actually more money involved than the mysterious letter claims. A secret code is then assumed to exist that will lead to more money still. Finally all this is settled, and they depart for Geneva and a meeting with an unknown individual who will turn out to be Solal.
In Geneva, the Valorous, misled by a telegram that they think authentic, constitute themselves as a Zionist government and attempt to extract a promise of land in Palestine from the League of Nations. During Solal’s brief appearances in Mangeclous we learn he has climbed back up to the heights and is now under-secretary general of the League of Nations. (Again, the strange mixture of high politics and florid narrative, of history and fantasy, that is characteristic of Cohen.) And Solal is again madly in love with a gentile woman who is as beautiful as he is handsome. Though he has brought his eccentric relatives to Geneva and is ostentatiously generous with them, he remains deeply ashamed of the Jew in them that he sees reflected in himself. “Enough, enough of this Jewish leprosy.”
His own Jewishness is not all that Solal finds repulsive. The League of Nations, which at the time of the novel’s appearance had not yet definitively proved its uselessness, is shown to be a den of laziness, sycophancy, and social climbing. The goal of those employed there (I use “employed” because no one actually works there) is to do as little as possible, and we are treated to the workday of one of them, a certain Adrien Deume — the husband of the woman Solal is in love with as the book ends — as he spends an entire day avoiding writing a letter on his boss’ behalf. “The ideal of Adrien Deume was to live in proximity to his superiors and to raise thanks to them in order to know superiors. In short, he aspired to forever live as an inferior.”
In true Solalian fashion, in this wild tetralogy of identity, when he finally meets his Greek relatives at the fanciest hotel in Geneva, the cost for which he is covering, he is disguised and his face covered in bandages. He loves the Valorous, but in a way that only Solal can love a Jew: “Yes, he was the only one to respect these Jewish grotesques, these ill-bred Jews with their noses, and their humpbacks and fearful gazes.” That one sentence can serve as a summary of the psychological complexity of Solal’s attitude to Jews, Jewishness, and that part of himself that is attached to his origins. It is difficult to imagine feeling “respect” for “grotesques” who are described in the tropes of anti-Semitism. The oscillation in Solal’s feelings is a constant in Cohen’s tetralogy. But just as clearly as it demonstrates a certain hatred, it demonstrates an unquestionably love. Yes, they are “grotesque” in the eyes of the striver Solal, forever in conflict with the Jew Solal — but what better way to stick a thumb in the eye of the non-Jewish world than to respect, and even love, these Jews in their grotesqueness?
As the book draws to a close, we are introduced to the Deume family in their Geneva home, where Solal has spent the night hidden naked in the bedroom of Ariane Deume, the beauty whom he now loves. He finally covers his nudity not with the clothing of the diplomat that he is, but with the ragged clothing that he had purchased from a poor Jew who had been traveling with the Valorous. Along with his ragged attire, Solal applies makeup that reduces him to the appearance of a toothless vagabond. Once again, it seems, Solal, having achieved all a young man could desire, rejects it in the most blatant way, assuming as a disguise the image of what he actually is: a Jew. The emblem is wrenching. But there is more to it than this, as we will learn in Belle du Seigneur. Cohen’s readers would have to wait thirty years, until 1968, to learn of the events of that night and its consequences.
Translated into English (after an unconscionably long time and under a strange title) as Her Lover, Cohen’s massive novel was hailed as a classic upon its publication. Bernard-Henri Lévy, who has written eloquently and perceptively of the novel over the years, described it as “the most sublime love novel of the twentieth century,” a characterization that, as we will see, is difficult to support. It is a novel of extremes; of love and hatred, of tenderness and cruelty. It is a profoundly Jewish novel that at once exalts and expresses the misery of the Jewish condition. It is a pure distillation of the Cohenian worldview: his recognition of the impossibility of love and the impossibility of living happily as a Jew. (Zionism was created in part as a solution to Jewish unhappiness, and there is a deep connection between Cohen’s Zionism and his explorations of eroticism.) It is a book that contains passages that reach the romantic heights, and others that describe a cruelty that many will find unbearable, even unreadable.
Belle du Seigneur picks up almost exactly where Mangeclous left off, making this a single continuous tale. Solal is hiding in his disguise of a hideous Jew in the bedroom of Ariane Deume. For the novel’s length, its plot is actually a simple one: Adrien Deume’s ambition to become a highly placed functionary of the League of Nations is fulfilled, but he owes his rise to Solal who, in love with Deume’s wife, has Adrien sent away on a lengthy diplomatic mission. In his absence, Solal and Ariane embark on the love affair that will fill the second half of the book. Solal loses his French citizenship (an anonymous letter sent to the French government informs them that Solal is not yet entitled to citizenship, a letter that he himself had sent) as well as his post at the League of Nations. The two lovers live in isolation, loving and tormenting each other, Solal doing almost all of the tormenting, Ariane almost all of the loving.
His rage is increased by the thought that she had a lover prior to him. No baseness is beyond him. He asks Ariane, “‘Tell me darling, have you had other men?’ ‘My God, who do you take me for?’ ‘For a whore,’ he said melodiously. ‘For a tricky little whore.’” Physical violence and abuse are not beyond Solal, but he multiplies its horror by adding emotional cruelty to it: “Holding her by her hair he struck her beautiful face. ‘I forbid you,’ she said in her magnificent child-like voice. ‘I forbid you! Don’t hit me again. For you, for our love, don’t hit me again.’ To cover his shame with an even stronger shame, he struck her again.” At another moment, as Solal’s cruelty grows ever more extreme, the volatile nature of his moods horrifically clear, he throws a cup of hot chocolate in Ariane’s face, though he had tried to miss her. Struck momentarily with guilt, “he rushed into the bathroom, came back with a towel and rubbed the damp corner on the dishonored face. On his knees, he kissed the hem of her dress, kissed her naked feet, raised his eyes to her…” Ariane, as always, forgives him, telling Solal: “Go to bed, I’ll cuddle next to you, I’ll caress your hair and you’ll fall asleep.” He proposes to cut up his own face to make up for his misdeed, but he quickly changes his mind. “Archangel of rage, he moved closer to the bed and, handling the belt of his dressing gown as if it were a whip, threatened her with it.” Their paradisiacal life eventually becomes infernal, and Cohen offers them only one way out, the most darkly romantic one of all: a double suicide.
In the decades between Mangeclous and Belle du Seigneur, much had occurred on the world stage upon which Cohen’s novels moved, and Cohen’s biting satire of the functioning of the League of Nations, which formally expired in 1946 but was effectively dead in 1939, takes on a different edge, a harsher valence, in Belle du Seigneur, Cohen is a brilliant and coruscating satirist of bureaucracy, its vanity and its impotence against the larger forces of history. He gives abundant evidence of his comic genius in the first half of Belle du Seigneur, expanding mercilessly on the description in Mangeclous of the daily life at the League of Nations of Adrien Deume, the soon-to-be-cuckolded husband of Ariane. Later in the novel, Cohen drops a hint about the model for his satire of the League of Nations, when Solal picks up at a bouquiniste’s stall a copy of Saint-Simon’s great memoir of the court of Louis XIV. Very little needs to be changed for that portrait of life at the court of the Sun King to fit the doings at the Palais des Nations in Geneva. Reading in his stolen copy of the book — in Solal’s view, a Jew has no need to obey the law in a land where “Death to the Jews” is written on the walls — he is struck by a passage in which the author is “complimented by the entire court, for His Majesty honored him with a phrase.” As at Deume’s office, the goal is “to learn who is in favor and who in disgrace in order to be looked on kindly by the former and to avoid the latter.” The magnificent pages in Belle du Seigneur on the social and professional climbing of the staff at the League of Nations, on their craven careerism and their hunger to rise by being looked upon kindly by those above them, are all drawn from the marvelously absurd life described by Saint-Simon.
Time is itself a character in Belle du Seigneur, counted in minutes, hours, and years. Adrien’s entire work life is based on killing as much of it as possible, in doing as little as he can in the time he spends at work. Perhaps the funniest pages in the novel are those in which Adrien demonstrates to his wife, with great pride, that thanks to vacation time, weekends, and professional breaks, he works less than half the days of the year. But the most weighty and weighted count of time is the mortal distance that follows the first moments of the love of Solal and Ariane. Time is, for Solal, a murder weapon: every minute that takes Ariane and Solal further away from the birth of their romance is a step closer to its — and their — death. Love, and the fact that its death is present in its birth, and the way physical death haunts everything in life, are the central themes of Belle du Seigneur. It is an epic repudiation of the certainty in the Song of Songs that “love is as strong as death.” Solal repeats constantly in the novels, as does Cohen in all his works, that those walking the earth are nothing but “future corpses.” That is Cohen’s view of the world: bitter, morbid, disillusioned, hurt.
The love affair between Solal and Ariane will fail, like all of Solal’s previous ones, and fail dismally. Solal always falls madly and unlimitedly in love, from the wife of the French consul in Solal to Ariane, in the belle du seigneur, her lord’s beloved. But Solal almost immediately grows tired of women once conquest (and that is the only word that fits) has been accomplished. Love not only does not last; it cannot last. Solal knows that his loves are doomed, because he dooms them. Love must fail, for him, given the very nature of attraction, which for Solal is always based on falsehood. The hideous disguises that he assumes, starting with the night of his initial attempt at the seduction of Ariane, the ragged clothes, the tape over his teeth to make it appear that he is a pathetic husk of a man — all this was a test. He obsesses over the three grams that a tooth weighs and how love, in all its falsity, depends on those few grams. For Solal, would any woman love him or any other man, if, when he opened his mouth, the spectacle was ugly? Solal’s answer is no. That being the case, what is there to love and attraction artifice, deceit, falsehood? He is as a lover what he is as a Jew — a pessimist.
Late in the novel, he challenges Ariane, who loves him beyond all measure, to agree that she would have loved him if he had no arms or legs, “Me, a little nauseating trunk… without arms, without legs, without thighs, but still, unfortunately and disgustingly for you, possessing the principle of virility.” He goes even further: “My God, there’s no need to even slice me up; a few missing teeth would be enough for your soul to no longer find any pleasure in mine.” He is certain that she would not, which is further proof that love is a lie. As he “rubs his hands together” at the joyful idea of rendering himself hideous, Ariane, faithful to her love for him, cries out: “Beloved! Enough of this. Why do you want to destroy everything?” This last is the question that can be applied to almost all of Solal’s actions.
Love, all this implies, can only be love if it exists outside the body and the appearance of its beloved. “Baboonery” is the cruel and angry word that Cohen employs to signify the love that women feel; it is animalistic, enamored of violence. And the body, whose pleasures Solal has pursued his entire life, is also the enemy of enduring love. Not just its inevitable degradation over time: no, any deviation from perfection in daily life, however natural, is fatal to love. With their love still fresh and new, Ariane and Solal struggle to hide anything pertaining to the body that mars the image of perfection that they consider essential to protracting the purity of its beginnings. Rings under the eyes, the rumblings of the stomach, all these concessions to the slow ravages of the clock and the calendar, must be hidden at all costs, because they can damage or even destroy desire. Even contact with others is forbidden, since it might soil the lover or the beloved. Running off with Ariane has cost Solal his prestigious post, and they live in isolation in a hotel; and this isolation, too, is not a means of exalting their love, but also a magnifier of all their perceived or invented flaws. Both lovers share these unreasonable expectations, Ariane in her innocence, Solal in his brutal cynicism. For Cohen, the heights are the only place where love should reside, and where it can flourish. When it doesn’t, when it can’t, it dies, as it should. His pessimism was the outlook of a disappointed purist.
Solal is a deeply unattractive figure. He is not just an extraordinarily complex personality, but also an unpleasant one. His overwhelming selfishness, his insistence upon extremes, has led to the suicide of several of his lovers, starting with his first love, Adrienne de Valdonne. His discarded lovers sacrificed everything for him, but none of their sacrifices seem to have had any impact on him. He is often, especially in Belle du Seigneur, quite reprehensible. How else describe a man who slaps Ariane, the woman he claims to love, who pulls her hair, who calls her a “whore,” who tortures and torments her mentally concerning an affair that occurred before she met him?
Bella Cohen, the writer’s third wife, defended her husband against the charge of misogyny in her Autour d’Albert Cohen. Her defense of her husband is, to put it mildly, weak. “How can one be a ladies’ man yet hate and scorn women?” That there is no contradiction between the two is too obvious to require refutation. She also wonders how he could have been a misogynist when “so many female readers wrote to tell him of their happiness at having read him or, for some, at having met him.” (Her final proof of Cohen’s lack of misogyny is that Simone de Beauvoir “that pioneer of feminism, wanted to meet him.”) She also draws Cohen’s defense against this charge from the pages of Belle du Seigneur. Solal wonders, for example: “How is it possible that these women, so sweet and tender, these women, my ideal and my religion, how is it that these women love gorillas and their gorillaness?” From statements such as these Cohen’s widow concludes that far from “attacking women… Albert Cohen essentially says that women are superior to men. He attacks only those women who betray themselves by accepting being treated not like women, but as femelles.”
If Bella Cohen is right, then Belle du Seigneur and the rest of Cohen’s fictional work is the vision of a man who knows what is best for women far better than they do themselves. But is that not one of the characteristics of the misogynist? His is a world in which every woman whom he encounters, for the mere fact of loving him, and for other reasons as well, fails to be a woman and lives as a mere animal. This would be painful enough if it were a passing event, but it is his very nature as an amorist. Lengthy chapters are dedicated to Solal’s degrading and insulting of Ariane, and they are hard to read without disgust; and even when she occasionally rebels, even if only for a moment, the dynamics of scorn and “lordship” remain the same. The love of Solal and Ariane is not remotely one of the “great romances.” The lovers live cut off from the world, shunned by all who knew them, in a world of hotel rooms, where they disappoint and torment each other. In this way Belle du Seigneur is an heir to the punishing novels of the Marquis de Sade, which take place in locales cut off from the surrounding world. Sadean physical torture is replaced here with mental torture, but it is torture all the same.
Jewishness forever hovers over the novel, appearing in a strange chapter in Germany where Solal is held underground by a group of Jews in Berlin hiding from the Nazis. The theme explodes late in the book in a long and almost biblical section in which Cohen sings the praises of Jews and Judaism, of the Eternal in whom he does not believe. He writes lyrically of Jews’ fidelity to their faith despite centuries of massacre. And he has a theory about the special destiny of the Jews, one that he repeats in his volumes of memoirs: that Judaism stands for “anti-nature,” in contradistinction to the Nazis, but not only to them, who valorize nature, which unleashes the beast in humans. Judaism is great, and Jews are hated, because their religion is not a part of nature and rises above all that surrounds them. The laws and the prohibitions of the religion, which extract the Jews from the immanent terrestrial world, are Judaism’s grandeur. (Cohen did not practice them himself.)
“One beautiful day that was the glory of the universe,” he writes rhapsodically, “one of my ancestors, a being who was part of nature and member of the animal species, madly decided on the schism, ridiculously decided on his two hairy and still deformed legs, that he no longer wanted to be part of nature and obey its laws. He decided that he would obey the new Commandments that he invented in the name of God, whom he also invented.” When the anti-Semites “massacre and torture my Jews,” it is because they “know or sensed that they were the people of nature and that Israel was the people of anti-nature, bearers of a mad determination that nature abhors. They are instinctively the people on the other side, who made God its chosen one and who, on Mount Sinai, declared war on nature and all that was animal in man.” The notion that Judaism has an anti-naturalistic bias is not Cohen’s invention, of course; to some extent it characterizes all the monotheisms, in which the Creator, and not the creation, is to be worshipped. For Cohen, this notion of the Jewish secession from nature was important in explaining his own abjection as a Jew and a lover. How can a libertine be opposed to nature?
Yet Cohen’s quasi-philosophical paean to Judaism did not clinch the matter for him. Solal, remember, is dramatically torn between accepting his Jewishness and rejecting it. Solal only loves non-Jewish women, and the passages in which Jewish wives are proposed to him by the Valorous are treated as comic; he is attracted to beautiful non-Jewish women, some of whom are not uninfected with anti-Semitism — in the same way that his creator, the Zionist editor and activist, married two non-Jews before finally marrying a Jewish woman. Lévy gets to the heart of this: “One could — one can still — read this book as an allegory of Jewishness in the West and a wager on the inevitable tragedy that results from it… One could read it as a novel that spoke of the temptation to deny oneself, the temptation, as Solal says at one point, to “play the monkey” with Christians and to be more Christian than the Christians… One can read this novel — and it’s how I would reread it today — as the great novel of contemporary neo-Marranism, the great novel that expresses the internal torment of neo-Marranism: a goy outside, a Jew inside, living during the day in the world and returning at night to one’s internal ghetto.”
Lévy ultimately rejects such a reading in favor of viewing Solal as the “Juif heureux,” the happy Jew, a “Nietzschean” character, a “neo-pagan” reveling in the body. For Lévy, the voluptuary Solal is a response to the image of the Jew as a “being of reason”; Solal is defiantly, Jewishly, a “being of flesh.” I am not so sure. For a start, such a view of the Jewish difference is an unwitting confirmation of the ancient Christian charge that Judaism is essentially, and nothing more than, carnal. And contra Lévy, it is precisely the contradiction between reason and flesh, the presence of both modes of being, and Solal’s imposition of a twisted reason on the pleasures of the flesh, that makes the latter so fleeting. It is Solal’s reason that leads to his death, to the suicide pact that ends the novel. A being of flesh, a “happy Jew,” would accept the joys of this moment, and then of the next; but Solal is reason exacerbated — a fevered reason, if that is possible; reason finally heeded.
Cohen wrote one more novel after Belle du Seigneur, Les Valeureux, which appeared in 1969. Like Mangeclous after Solal, a comic novel following one drenched in Solal’s rage at himself and his world. Les Valeureux is pure comedy; or almost so.
Cohen retreats here to the island of Cephalonia and the five oddballs who make up the group of Jews who have dubbed themselves les valeureux de France. The claustrophobia and the refusal of happiness of Belle du Seigneur is replaced here by a rocambolesque tale of five poor but joyous Jews making their difficult way in life. As in all their other appearances in Cohen’s writing, no scheme is too wild for them in order to get by. Pinhas Solal, alias Mangeclous, is again at the heart of the story. Once again, no idea is too absurd to be entertained in his ceaseless search for wealth and prestige. For him, the only obstacle to publishing a newspaper in almond paste printed on chocolate is that the materials are too expensive. Here Cervantes meets Sholem Aleichem, sort of.
Mangeclous hits on the idea of establishing a university of which he will be the rector, the Université Supérieure et Philosophique, its classes held in the kitchen cellar of his home. To save money, no chairs are provided and students are charged for courses in subjects such as “amorous seduction in the Europes” at a rate of one drachma per hour, though food is accepted in its stead. “The intellectual elite of the ruelle D’Or,” the main street of the Jewish quarter, attends its opening lecture, with fifty-nine eyes trained on Mangeclous, since one of the thirty students had only one eye. Students were taught that Vronsky was a close friend of the Tsar and made him laugh by tickling his feet. Between classes Mangeclous, not wanting to waste an opportunity to turn a profit, makes himself available to trim corns.
Solal figures nowhere in the book, whose events take place before those in Belle du Seigneur. Disturbingly and unexpectedly, however, his spirit suddenly seizes control of the novel, taking over the comic, egotistic character of Mangeclous. Professor and Rector Pinhas Solal, dressed clownishly in a robe decorated with fabric cut from his skinny daughters’ Sabbath dresses, in the middle of his analysis of Anna Karenina, suddenly begins espousing the theories of Solal. “European ladies are mad about the soul and what they call invisible realities, but they demand that the canines be visible,” Mangeclous lectures his students. Women demand a full mouth of teeth, or love cannot arise; their potential lovers must be just the right height, just the right weight. Karenina, he says, is disgusted with her husband because of his trips to the bathroom, an act of daily life that Ariane and Solal held in contempt as well. What is “important for [women]…is the gorilla who delivers blows while looking like a man.” “In short,” Mangeclous tells his assembled pupils, “in order to feel true love they need a gorilla.”
These grotesque passages mar a book that is a minor masterpiece of comic literature, but this seeming retreat from its bitter predecessor has a purpose. Les Valeureux is a valedictory work, returning Cohen to his native land for a final farewell. When we think of the vanished Jewish world, we most often think of the destruction of Eastern European Jewry in World War II, but this book is a reminder of another loss: the destruction of Greek Jewry, one of the grandest Jewries of all. The Jews of Cohen’s Cephalonia are no more, nor is their ghetto. Les Valeureux is not just a depiction of five eccentrics. It is a memorial to a whole world. Cohen makes this movingly clear: “Praise and glory to you, brothers in Israel, you, adult and dignified, serious and sparing of speech, courageous fighters, builders of the fatherland and justice, Israeli Israel, my love and my pride. But what can I do if I also love my Valorous, who are neither adult nor dignified nor serious nor sparing in speech? I will thus write about them again, and this book will be my farewell to a dying species about which I wanted to leave a trace behind me, my farewell to the ghetto where I was born, the charming ghetto of my mother, a homage to my dead mother.”
The dead mother haunts and dominates Cohen’s three volumes of memoirs. He wrote three autobiographical books, Le Livre de ma mère (published in 1954 and translated into English as The Book of My Mother), O Vous, frères humains (O You, My Human Brothers) published in 1972), and Carnets 1978 (Notebooks 1978). In a very real sense they are one book, for the central concern of all of them is Cohen’s undying love for his mother. All of them are what Cohen calls in Le Livre de ma mère, “a song of death,” the title he gave an article on his mother’s death in Occupied France in 1943 (during the war but not as a direct result of the Holocaust) that he published that same year in La France libre. He is tortured by the thought of her buried in her coffin, the earth weighing her down, hiding her forever. In Le Livre de ma mère, Cohen describes her lovingly preparing the Sabbath meal. Even the act of making meatballs is invoked movingly: “From time to time she went to the kitchen to make, with her tiny hands on which shone an august wedding ring, useless and graceful artistic tapping sounds with the wooden spoon on the meatballs simmering in the dark red coulis of the tomatoes. Her tiny hands, pudgy with delicate skin, for which I complimented her with a bit of hypocrisy and much love, for her naïve happiness delighted me.” He expressed his filial devotion most fully in his final book: “In my old age I turn again to you, my dead Maman, and it is my pathetic joy to again bring you back to life a bit, holy sentinel and guardian of your son. To bring you to life again just a little bit before soon joining you, this is my pitiful magic and my poor trick in order not to have entirely lost you, Maman to whom I absurdly love to talk, dead Maman to whom, stupidly smiling, I want to recount the days of my childhood.” Cohen presents his mother as a saint, as his “beloved.” She is the exception to his fatalism about love: “my mother’s love, unlike any other.”
His love for his mother excluded his father, who barely figures in his memoirs, and is all but cast from out of the author’s life in his final book. “As I child,” he says “I told myself that my father had nothing to do with my birth, that I was born magically, that a prince arranged my birth through powerful words, that he is my true father, a magnificent prince and father.” By the end of his life Cohen all but stripped his father of that title, calling him his “mother’s husband.” His hatred for his father is as unbounded as his love for his mother. His father is a monster: one “horrible day when, having found that the moussaka was not in conformity with that cooked by a famous great-aunt Rebecca, the persnickety gastronome had, with indignation, pulled to him with one tug the entire tablecloth as a fine for imperfect moussaka.”
Cohen claims to have hated his father above all for his treatment of his beloved mother, whom he calls “the slave of her husband.” “She worked, worked, the slave queen without music without literature and without thoroughbred horses, worked, worked, then came upstairs to take care of me, then went back downstairs, then came back upstairs, for years and years.” But he was himself also a little culpable for her anxieties. She suffered, he says, from an “inferiority complex” towards the cultivated people that her son frequented: he once left her sitting in a park for five hours while he was with a woman, and he never introduced her to people in the social world in which he moved. Decades later he was consumed with guilt for all this, and tried to make amends for it with his pen. And at the end: “My beloved, I introduce you to them all now, proud of you, proud of your Oriental accent, proud of your mistakes in French, insanely proud of your ignorance of high-class usages. A little late, this pride.”
Though he preached the failure of love, Cohen was an ardent creature of loves. His books are full of them: of women, of his mother, of Pagnol, of literature, of the Jews and Judaism, of France, of God. (If one can hate a God in whose existence one does not believe, as many atheists have done, perhaps it is possible also to love a God in whose existence one does not believe.) Even as a Swiss citizen, Cohen faithfully loved France all his life, defending its honor as a participant in the Free French movement during the war. As a child he constructed an altar to his adoptive homeland. Along with a torn flag “to make it more glorious,” a small cannon, and a picture of the president of the Republic, his “reliquary” to the glory of his adopted nation included “portraits of Racine, of La Fontaine, of Corneille, of Joan of Arc, of du Guesclin, of Napoleon, of Pasteur, of Jules Verne of course, and even of a certain Louis Boussenard.” (Boussenard was a late nineteenth-century writer of exotic adventure novels.)
Cohen remained proud of the monumental philosophical revolution that his people had enacted in their rejection of the natural. There are many dazzling pages about this in Belle du Seigneur, and some of them belong with the epiphanic beauties of Joyce. But his pride in being a Jew remained tainted by the hideous event of his tenth birthday. In the final pages of his final book, he could only say that “that day when I turned ten was a day of new birth in which I lost all faith, the day of a new gaze, a Jewish gaze that came to me forever.” Given how disabused and disappointed Cohen was, how damaged he was by the effects of reality on his ideal, his achievement as a writer of both comedy and rhapsody is sort of miraculous. Yet his harshest truth, one that fills his autobiographical volumes, is this: that the love of one’s neighbor is nothing but “futility and a gust of wind.” “How,” Albert Cohen asked, “can you sincerely love strangers? How can you love them in their thousands or millions, how can you love them with a real love?” Who, really, has an answer to his lonely question?
