IRÈNE NÉMIROVSKY intended Suite Française to be a four- or five-part chronicle of Occupied France. The two complete novels offered here — Storm in June and Dolce — are all that she survived to write.
Némirovsky was not French. She was a Russian Jew from Ukraine, whose wealthy parents fled Bolshevik Russia and settled in France in 1920. She married a fellow White Russian, also Jewish, and in 1939 they were baptised into the Catholic Church. France fell in June 1940, the Germans occupied most of France and a new French Government, headed by Marshal Pétain, ushered in what was to be a new French State. Anti-Semitic from the beginning, what we now call Vichy France, without German encouragement, instituted its own paraphernalia of persecution: camps, identity cards, exclusion from work (Jewish writers could not be published), appropriation of property, forced labour and more.
By 1939 Némirovsky was an acclaimed and bestselling novelist, but her position was the most dangerous for a subject of Vichy France. She had never become a French citizen, she was stateless, she was Russian — was she a Bolshevik? — she was Jewish; her Catholic conversion was suspect.
In May 1942, the Final Solution was imposed on France. The Nazis informed Vichy that a population of 865,000 Jews must be dispatched “to the East” (the actual Jewish population was around 330,000). So Némirovsky was among the first to go. Seized on July 13, she died in Auschwitz a little over a month later. Her husband, Michel Epstein, followed in November and was gassed immediately. Left behind were two daughters who survived, as did their mother’s notebook.
Suite Française, transcribed by her elder daughter, was published in France to universal acclaim 62 years later.
Storm in June tells the story of the exodus after the fall of France in 1940 when around four million — some say six, eight, or ten million — people fled on foot, in cars, lorries, hearses, carts and prams, hauling, then discarding, their precious possessions, strafed by German Stukas, in a vast migration south. The novel begins here, and Némirovsky plunges us into the lives of a cast of characters thrown together on the roads of France. Their encounters, portrayed with acid sympathy and a sometimes savage humour, reveal Némirovsky’s real subject, the French themselves, busy indulging in “layer upon layer of hatred” in their own civil war.
“Working-class people are so highly strung,” remarks the irreproachable Charlotte Péricaud, a middle-class Parisian mother of five who packs up her treasures — and Albert the cat — to take to the roads. Her son, the priest Abbé Philippe, herds a group of orphaned children stunned into malice by the terrifying odour of charity. A successful writer, Gabriel Corte, is driven by his chauffeur, mistress in tow. Corbin the banker drives off with his long-fingernailed dancer, Arlette Corail. She will bring disaster to Charles Langelet, the aesthete for whom one Wedgwood vase was worth a thousand ordinary lives.
Corbin’s employees, the poor Michauds, are bullied into escaping on foot. This patchwork assembly are forced into the company of those they fear most — their fellow Frenchmen, the working classes, the dregs of humanity “ ‘They're not so bad if you know how to deal with them,’ (Charlotte) would say in the same condescending and slightly sad tone she used to talk of a caged animal.”
Suite Française has been described as Némirovsky’s War and Peace — Balzac and Flaubert are also mentioned. This is unfortunate — there are echoes of a lesser Turgenev certainly, but her wit and scabrous eye for the villainies of human nature are often closer to Nancy Mitford. With Europe decomposing around her, Némirovsky’s vibrant characters snarl at each other in terrible times and Storm in June becomes a marvellous tragic-comedy of manners.
Dolce is a more sombre, lyrical work set in a small village in occupied France. Here Némirovsky deals directly with the occupation as she dissects the accommodations that the French make — or do not make — in living with the enemy. At the centre of the story are the beautiful Lucile and the German officer with whom she becomes infatuated. Once again, around them, circle those French who collaborate, those who hate, those who fight back, each portrayed with steely clarity.
Némirovsky can be a beautiful writer — lucid, bright, like one of the little brown birds she so often describes. She misses nothing, not a blossom, a hen nor a bumblebee. Such acute insight means that her characters are full of life and diversity, as are the animals she so tellingly describes. Images of slaughtered, howling, wailing animals flutter through the pages, Némirovsky’s embodiment of the people of France, suffering as “birds must feel when hawks circle above them”. No other work of fiction as forcefully conveys the fate of France under the Nazis.
Némirovsky’s notebook included plans for completing her novel symphony. She wrote the last entry two days before her arrest. These notes are included in the English edition, together with a heartrending correspondence as she and her husband struggled to survive deportation. Némirovksy’s publishers, Albin Michel, emerge as the heroes of this terrible endeavour, a rare occurrence at a time when French writers, journalists and publishers were among the most willing servants of Vichy and the German occupiers.
On publication in France in 2005 — by Editions Denoël, whose founder was the most enthusiastic of all French publisher collaborators, Suite Française was hailed as a lost masterpiece. Well, often Némirovsky’s descriptions of the natural world pierce the novels with banality — the “periwinkle-blue twilight” of a “tender June night”, “bell-shaped pink flowers” brushing lips, “small white butterflies lazily flitting”. Perhaps she would have cut these excesses; we can never know. And this is but a shadow on an irresistible work. Suite Française clutches the heart, its warmth and intensity give as much pleasure as a work of overpowering genius.
Extract
Well, that’s the lower classes for you, never satisfied, and the more you go out of your way to help them, the more ungrateful and moody they are. But Madame Péricand expected no reward except from God.
She turned towards the shadowy figures in the hallway and said with great kindness, “You may come and listen to the news if you like.”
“Thank you, Madame,” the servants murmured respectfully and slipped into the room on tiptoe.
They all came in: Madeleine, Marie, Auguste the valet, and finally Maria the cook, embarrassed because her hands smelled of fish. But the news was over. Now came the commentaries on the situation: “Serious of course, but not alarming,” the speaker assured everyone. He spoke in a voice so full, so calm, so effortless, and used such a resonant tone each time he said the words “France”, “Homeland” and “Army”, that he instilled hope in his listeners. He had a particular way of reading such communiqués as “The enemy is continuing relentless attacks on our positions but is encountering the most valiant resistance from our troops.”
He said the first part of the sentence in a soft, ironic, scornful tone of voice, as if to imply, “At least that’s what they’d like to think.” But in the second part he stressed each syllable, hammering home the adjective “valiant” and the words “our troops” with such confidence that people couldn’t help thinking, “Surely there’s no reason to worry so much!” Madame Péricand saw the questioning, hopeful stares directed towards her. “It doesn’t seem absolutely awful to me!” she said confidently. Not that she believed it; she just felt it was her duty to keep up morale.
Maria and Madeleine let out a sigh. “You think so, Madame?”
