MEMOIR: EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews The Mirador By Élisabeth Gille, translated by Marina Harss NYRB Classics, 239pp, £8.99
A DAUGHTER TELLS her mother’s story, not in her own words but in an imagined version supposedly executed by the long-dead parent she barely knew. It sounds like a labour of love, but it is far more complex. There is no sentimentality and little emotion. Instead there is a detached honesty and a determination to confront the obvious truths, most particularly the multiple ambiguities of attitude and action.
The late Élisabeth Gille was the younger daughter of the writer Irène Némirovsky, who, long before she was "discovered", 65 years after she died in Auschwitz, enjoyed major success as a popular novelist in her adopted country, France. Intriguingly, Gille has not only come far closer to her mother than any biographer could have hoped to but has also opened the door to the work. If you have not yet read Némirovsky, or remained unconvinced, as I was, by Suite Française, this book will ensure that any who read it will seek out all of her mother's books, particularly the Russian ones.
Suite Française, which was published in 2004, takes a critical look at a group of Parisians as they flee the Nazi invasion and resort to all manner of compromise in order to survive. The novel became an international success on its English translation, in 2006, and several other Némirovsky titles have followed. A superb novella, Le Bal(1930), came out in English in 2007, as did Fire in the Blood, a novel on which she had worked on and off over 20 years and was still refining shortly before the arrest that ended with her death in 1942. A few pages of the manuscript were found in the suitcase that had contained Suite Française, forgotten for decades.
All Our Worldly Goods, published in France in 1947, is an account of star-crossed lovers that in its themes of finance and greed in France between the wars appears to predate Suite Française. Often compared to her hero Chekhov, of whom she wrote a biography, Némirovsky is far closer to Balzac or Galsworthy in her relentlessly clear-eyed appraisal of humankind.
Within a year of All Our Worldly Goodsappearing in English, The Dogs and the Wolves(1940) came out in English. The book opens in Ukraine, before moving on to Paris, and ends back in Russia. And, yes, Gille is right: Némirovsky, although she wrote in French, is at her very best when writing about Russia, the world and culture of which she was part, albeit reluctantly. An English translation of The Wine of Solitude(1935), the most autobiographical of her novels, came out earlier this year, as did a competent biography by Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt.
But finally, for the first time, the real Irène Némirovsky, the Ukrainian Jew, who was born in Kiev in 1903, adored by her father, resented by her silly, vain mother, and never much cared for her fellow Jews, emerges as a real person – and all thanks to her daughter, not to literary scholars and critics.
This original little book, meticulously well researched and as impersonal as it is personal, looks to the history that unfolded around her mother.
Némirovsky was a clever, literary girl who preferred reading and was too intellectual to be overly bothered by her mother’s habit of lying about the girl’s age in order to conceal her own. Unsurprisingly, horrible mothers are a stock device in her fiction.
Gilles makes clear that her mother neither suffered fools nor tolerated nostalgia: “I cannot stand weepy evocations of ‘Our beloved mother Russia’.” Nero is believed to have fiddled while Rome burned: Irène Némirovsky read while Tsarist Russia died and the Bolsheviks came to power.
As a child of seven she was aware that the great Tolstoy, having run away from home, lay dying in a railway stationmaster's cottage while the world waited. Rumours about a world war became fact and Lenin's train arrived in the Finland Station. By then Irène and her parents had fled to France. There are wonderful moments, flashes of a real life – like the night she saw Anna Pavlova dance in Swan Lake.
Irène claimed not to love St Petersburg but admitted to not being “completely resistant to its charms”. At one point, when staying in Moscow with her parents, her father had rented an apartment near the Dolgorukov Palace, “home of Tolstoy’s Rostov family”. Although she had taken French citizenship, converted to Catholicism and was celebrated as a French writer, no plea could save her from Auschwitz. Her life was stranger than fiction, and the daughter who barely knew her began to write her story when she was in her 50s – older than her mother, who was killed at 39.
This is a wonderful book, dignified and intelligent; eloquent if restrained, it shows how history happens and how, at its most extreme, it shapes an individual's fate. There are so many ironies: Irène Némirovsky, who loved Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray,read as stones smashed the windows of Jewish homes, including her own. She was an astute observer, self-contained within the tower of the highly apt title, and did not dispense pity. Nor was any shown to her. As with the finest fiction, she studied human behaviour against a vivid backdrop of social and political history. She even became its victim.
Gilles did not know her mother. But she understood her and her work, and makes a good case for saying why she considered her superior not only to Colette but also to another Russian emigre, Nina Berberova. Should you think you already appreciate Irène Némirovsky’s achievement, or would like to experience it, you should read this book, written by a stranger who happened to be her daughter and who seems to have inherited her mother’s gifts.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Timesand author of Ordinary Dogs(Faber)
