Climates (2 page)

With his excellent English, Maurois was posted as liaison officer to the British Army. That experience inspired his first novel,
Les Silences du Colonel
Bramble
. After the war he returned to the mill, but was also lionized in Paris, and spent more and more time writing. The children’s nurse complained, “Instead of scribbling in the evenings, Monsieur would do better to go out with Madame, and instead of scribbling during the day Monsieur would do better to look after his business.” Janine scribbled too, filling notebooks with records of her migraines, stomachaches, cramps, and aching legs. She wrote notes, in English, of times when she felt “moody” or “awfully bad,” and wrote, chillingly, “Something is broken.”

Sometime in the early 1920s, Maurois began having affairs. Janine had them too, or at least flirtations, especially on their seaside vacations in Deauville. Maurois enjoyed great success with
Ariel
, a biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley—more a novelization of his life, really. (It became memorable for later English-language readers for being reprinted in 1935 as Number 1 in Penguin’s first series of paperbacks.) It recounts Shelley’s disastrous marriage to Harriet Westbrook, who drowned herself in the Serpentine River after the poet abandoned her. Maurois put a lot of his own personality into
Shelley, and wrote of Harriet as a “child-wife” made bitter by unhappiness. He could be savage: “Even when she had the air of being interested in ideas, her indifference was proved by the blankness of her gaze. Worst of all, she was coquettish, frivolous, versed in the tricks and wiles of woman.”

Both he and Janine were suffering from each other, and Janine obsessed over the portrait of herself in
Ariel
. It is heartbreaking to learn, from Maurois’s own memoir, that she read it repeatedly—the manuscript once and the printed book twice—and copied out passages. “You talk about women better than you’ve ever talked to me about them,” she said. Yet she could see that Maurois was aware of his own weaknesses too. “Since he understands so well,” he imagined her thinking, “why doesn’t he change?” Their relationship had begun under the sign of
Les Petits soldats russes
, and its disintegration was similarly reflected in literature, through
Ariel
. Side by side, they looked into the book as into a double mirror, seeing each other’s faces as well as their own.

In the early 1920s, and like her counterpart in
Climates
, Janine got the idea that she was destined to die soon. She was right. Becoming pregnant again in late 1922, she developed septicemia, was operated
on unsuccessfully, and died on February 26, 1923. Maurois was bereaved, and free.

It was not long before he married again, to the woman who would be his lifelong companion, Simone de Caillavet. The granddaughter of Anatole France’s mistress Léontine Arman de Caillavet, Simone was highly educated, patient, and well-balanced, and she devoted herself to Maurois’s work. She typed his manuscripts and learned shorthand so as to be able to help him further by taking dictation. If it is disturbing to think of Janine’s constant reading of
Ariel
, it is at least as much so to imagine Simone working on the drafts and typescripts of
Climates
, in which she is cast, very little changed, as Isabelle de Cheverny.

What are we to make of Maurois and his love life? By his own account, he married one unsuitable young woman because of a romantic idea that had nothing to do with her true personality, and made her life miserable as well as his own. Afterward he married another woman who, he hints, loved him more than he loved her. Yet, as Janine saw, he was aware of his dark side, and channeled
his literary talents into exploring it in fiction and biography. He was a writer to the core, and this is one vital difference between him and Philippe in the novel. It changed everything, at least for him. Perhaps it changed everything for the women in his life too, so deeply interwoven was his work with his relationships.

There was another difference. Love makes Philippe Marcenat dull, not to the reader, but to his long-suffering beloved. He realizes only belatedly how tedious Odile must find the long evenings in which he does little but gaze adoringly at her. Working long hours at the factory, consumed by jealousy, Philippe forgets how to have an entertaining conversation. Maurois, by contrast, was energetic and vibrant. A friend, Edouard Morot-Sir, wrote of “the gentle expression of his eyes, his smile, the finesse and warmth of his voice” and remembered Maurois’s endless fund of stories. He was a man of infinite curiosity about human nature—a mark of a person who surely can never be boring.

Climates
began life in the mid-1920s, after the death of Janine, as a short story called “La Nuit
marocaine.” Set in Morocco, it was about an eminent personage who falls ill and is told he will die. He summons his friends and confesses to them the true story of his life, which revolves around his love for three women, each of whom he has hurt in some way. Unfortunately, he then proceeds not to die. He lives on, but must adjust to the changed image that others now have of him.

Starting from this point, Maurois first realized that the middle woman, an actress named Jenny Sorbier, was less interesting than the other two, so he dumped her. This gave him more space to explore the relationships with the others, and the book became the two-parter we have today. He also disposed of the Moroccan setting and the framing story. The novel was easy to write, largely because, as Maurois wrote, “I was able to nourish my imaginary characters on real emotions.” He adjusted many details: his own family owned a wool mill, so Philippe’s owns a paper mill. He met Janine in Switzerland; Philippe meets Odile in Italy. And he moved the action from Elbeuf to Paris, because that created more scope for flirtations and jealousies.

In turning short story to novel, he also introduced an elaborate literary device. In the first half,
Philippe recounts his love for Odile in the form of a letter to his second wife, Isabelle—a bizarre and cruel thing to do, one might think, but something that Isabelle seems to welcome because it enables her to understand him better. In the second half, she responds by writing the story of
her
love for Philippe. Perhaps because Maurois needs to continue conveying Philippe’s emotions directly as well, he has Philippe write a diary, which Isabelle reads and quotes at length in her letter back to him. Part Two strains credulity at times, but the device is worth the trouble, for it highlights the novel’s themes of reading, writing, reflecting, reenacting, and transcribing.

For love is interwoven with these activities throughout the book. As in real life, Philippe’s love for Odile is born from literature in the form of
The Little Russian Soldiers
. Odile’s decline is measured out in her habit of reading poems about death. With Isabelle, Philippe reads constantly: Balzac, Tolstoy, Proust, Stendhal, Merimée. At first Isabelle finds Proust and the others dull, but she wills herself to adapt to Philippe’s preferences, though not before remarking, “Nothing could have been easier than understanding Philippe’s taste in books: he was one
of those readers who look only for themselves in what they read.” Philippe has already admitted this at the end of the first part: trying to get over Odile, he writes, “books flung me straight back into my dark meditations; all I looked for in them was my pain and, almost in spite of myself, I chose those that would remind me of my own sad story.”

This is Philippe all over: he looks for himself in every book he reads, just as he looks for his “queen” in every woman he is involved with. Isabelle has a less self-centered approach, and reads mainly to understand the man she loves. At novel’s end, she even reads his old copy of
The Little Russian Soldiers
. These are two extreme models of reading: looking in books to see oneself mirrored again and again, or reading to enter another person’s experience, and thus to enlarge oneself.

Which way are
we
, the readers, to approach
Climates
? Its characters seem to invite us to relate their sorrows or triumphs to our own. I recognized aspects of myself and my life in each character, yet there were moments of remoteness too. For one thing, Isabelle’s self-abnegating idea of love can be unnerving for a female reader. It is one of the elements that keeps
Climates
from becoming too
comfortable, or too blandly universal. It speaks to everyone, yet it is also a historical document about France in the 1920s. It comes from a time when Frenchwomen did not yet have the vote (they got it in 1944), and when it would not have entered Philippe Marcenat’s head that
he
, not Isabelle, might make real, concrete, everyday sacrifices for a domestic monarch.

Maurois’s sense of the psychology of love, in all its fits and agonies, manages to be dated yet eternally insightful. His analysis of jealousy rivals Proust’s, and he shows how Philippe helplessly destroys the genuine but fragile love Odile feels for him. And
Climates
is as good as Stendhal on the first phase of enchantment, in which the lover undergoes what Stendhal calls “crystallization”—the ability to perceive somebody ordinary as a magical, dazzling, twinkling disco ball of fascination. (The crystal image comes from the salt mines of Salzburg, where it was the custom to hang a branch at the mine’s entrance, then retrieve it a few months later, when—says Stendhal—“its smallest twigs, those no larger than a titmouse’s foot, are spangled with an infinity
of diamonds, dancing and dazzling.”) Philippe is blinded by Odile. Never seeing her as she really is, he fetishizes her clothes, her flowers, the trinkets she carries everywhere on her honeymoon (“a small clock, a lace cushion, and a volume of Shakespeare bound in gray suede”), and her taste in furnishings. She even decorates their home rather like a salt cave, all white flowers and sleek white carpeting. He adopts Odile’s tastes as his own, to the extent of later trying to make Isabelle imitate them.

Clothes, houses, flowers, and furniture are all important in
Climates
. When Isabelle wants to move into her family home, or at least take some furniture from it, Philippe refuses, because he cannot stand their red damask drapes and gargoyle-infested, pseudomedieval chairs. “Don’t you think that what’s important in life is people not furnishings?” asks Isabelle, but he brushes her aside. Yes, yes, that’s the conventional wisdom, he says, but a house’s atmosphere affects one more deeply than people acknowledge. “I just know I wouldn’t be happy in that house.”

Isabelle gives in, as she tends to, but it is his
own
natural environment that Philippe is rejecting. Those tasteful oceans of white carpeting were never
the real Philippe, and he admits, “My true tastes and my cautious Marcenat mind were things I was now far more likely to find in Isabelle.” Her parents have molded her as his did; when Isabelle and Philippe first meet, they compare notes on “that sort of rural bourgeois heritage that so many French families share.” He can be himself with Isabelle, in a way he could not with Odile—and certainly not with her noisy, bohemian family, in whose company he used to become unrecognizable to himself. “I seemed solemn, boring, and even though I loathed my own silences, I withdrew into them.” It was “not my sort of climate,” he felt.

This is why the novel is called
Climates
: in its examination of love, it also becomes an examination of the atmospheres we need to be fully ourselves. Philippe’s complaint about Odile’s family goes to the heart of the book. One cannot just transfer one’s personality intact from one environment to the next. Relationships have different qualities of air, different barometric pressures. With Odile, Philippe is first expanded and enchanted, then he contracts and distorts into a jealous monster. With Isabelle, despite himself, he
is
himself.

Moreover, Isabelle has a huge advantage in having a certain control over her own climate. She is able to
choose
her servitude, even to affirm it, rather than be helplessly in the grip of her emotions as Philippe had been with Odile. Looking back to his treatment of Odile, Philippe reflects that he showed “no unkindness, but no generosity of spirit either,” but this is never mirrored in Isabelle’s half of the story. She is all generosity. She even puts forward a strange argument: that we should not attach importance to our loved one’s failings, or to what a person actually does, for what matters is that that person alone enables us to live in a particular “atmosphere,” or, as she also puts it, in a “climate.” That is all we need; it is a devotion that is called forth from our deepest being, but it is not a blind devotion.

“I wanted to love you without trickery, to fight with an open heart,” writes Isabelle to Philippe. “It should be possible to admit to loving someone and yet also succeed in being loved.” Should it? Is it? It should, and sometimes it is. But oh, how complicated human beings are. And, in the end, something compelled Maurois to take Philippe away from Isabelle after all, thus parting company both with
Isabelle’s optimism and with the story of his own second, successful marriage.

For it
was
a successful marriage. Maurois lived with Simone for the rest of his life, and she seems to have tolerated his occasional affairs.

His other marriage, to the written word, succeeded too. He became a sought-after lecturer and speaker, and was elected to the Académie in 1938. His output was prodigious: he wrote biographies of Byron, Disraeli, Balzac, Dumas père and fils, Hugo, and Proust, among others, as well as novels, memoirs, and collections of essays, including works on politics that aired his genial, mild brand of conservatism.

During the Occupation, he and Simone fled to the United States, then returned to set up a country estate, Essendiéras, in Périgord. Simone ran it as an artists’, writers’, and filmmakers’ haven; people would stay for months and work in peace. When money ran short, she and Maurois converted part of the property into a lucrative apple orchard. The Herzog mill in Elbeuf eventually went out of business, the victim of international competition and cheap 1960s artificial fabrics. Maurois does not
seem to have mourned it much. He and Simone had one great sorrow, losing their daughter, Françoise, to liver disease; otherwise, he lived a generally pleasurable, productive life until his death in 1967.