Usually, I don’t favor knowing a lot about the personal life of an author I like. If the words and story move me, that’s enough. When I have learned details, often it takes away from my enjoyment. I don’t want to know that the marvelous wordsmith was a beast to his wife; or that the prodigy was a egomaniac.
There are exceptions, of course. William Styron is a hero to me for his writing and what he chose to do with his life in support of human rights; it is important to know that Juan Gelman wrote his poetry having lost his son, daughter-in-law and grandchild during the Dirty War.
While I eagerly await each PD James (and love the complex and devastating Children of Men, so different from the equally good, but very different movie), I really am not interested in her life. And I could say the same for the Brontes and Jane Austen and John Fowles and so many others.
Last week, I encountered a book that gave me a glaring exception to my rule, for an entirely novel reason. Irène Némirovsky wrote Suite Française while she and her family fled the Nazis. A Kiev-born Jew, she and her wealthy Russian family chose France after fleeing the Russian revolution. In Paris, Némirovsky became a literary celebrity. But she was refused French citizenship before the second world war broke out. When the Nazis threatened Paris, she and her husband, Michael Epstein, abandoned the city. With their two daughters, they found refuge in the village of Issy-l’Evêque.
But the hope of salvation was short-lived. On July 13, 1942, French policemen, enforcing the German race laws, arrested Némirovsky as “a stateless person of Jewish descent.” She was transported to Auschwitz, where she died in the infirmary on Aug. 17, 1942.
So Suite Française is a novel, since it has an imagined plot and characters; but it is also a real-time evocation of what was happening around her. To truly appreciate the beauty and terror of this book, you have to know that Némirovsky was writing it not in some tidy office, but in the fear and dislocation and dread of the very events she so skillfully describes.
In his glowing New York Times review, Paul Gray puts it this way:
The date of Némirovsky’s death induces disbelief. It means, it can only mean, that she wrote the exquisitely shaped and balanced fiction of “Suite Française” almost contemporaneously with the events that inspired them, and everyone knows such a thing cannot be done. In his astute cultural history, “The Great War and Modern Memory,” Paul Fussell describes the invariable progression — from the hastily reactive to the serenely reflective — of writings about catastrophes: “The significances belonging to fiction are attainable only as ‘diary’ or annals move toward the mode of memoir, for it is only the ex post facto view of an action that generates coherence or makes irony possible.” We can now see that Némirovsky achieved just such coherence and irony with an ex post facto view of, at most, a few months.
Eventually, Némirovsky’s husband, Michael Epstein, died in the concentration camps also. The two girls, miraculously, survived. The eldest, Denise, found her mother’s work in notebooks that, until the 1990s, she had not been able to read because of her own grief.
In France, Suite Française was a bestseller. In the United States, it deserves a wide and enthustastic readership. The attraction is not just the circumstance of the book’s creation. If it were a poorly written book, it would have been best filed in some archive for the historical value. But it is a marvelous book, its achievements only underscored by the circumstances of its creation.
There has been a controversy over Némirovsky’s alleged anti-Semitism. As the Guardian of London reported:
…she “wrote to Marshall Pétain, head of the Vichy government, stating that despite being Jewish by birth, she herself disliked the Jews and hence should be given special status. But what she wrote is hardly clinching evidence of her supposed self-hatred: faced with not only her own deportation but also that of her husband Michel and two daughters, Denise and Elisabeth, some might argue that Némirovsky was justified in writing anything that would spare them. Pétain never replied. Similarly her husband wrote frantically to the German ambassador in Paris after Irène’s arrest, pleading for her to be released: “[E]ven though my wife is of Jewish descent, she does not speak of the Jews with any affection whatsoever in her works.”
Epstein was arrested and gassed in Auschwitz on November 6.
I’m not convinced. A skilled story-teller like Némirovksy may get chillingly close to prejudice; it is, after all, a part of the world she was so accurately describing. And to save their family, she and her husband may have begged and pleaded and tried to use the undeniable prejudice of the French authorities to their benefit.
In this, I revert to my normal attitude — I don’t care. This is a searing, unforgettable book — read it and then make up your mind!
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