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Authors: Irene Nemirovsky

Tags: #Fiction, #General, #2007

Fire in the Blood (13 page)

BOOK: Fire in the Blood
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"Helene," the dying man called out, "Helene."

We didn't move. She seemed to be drinking me in, breathing in my heart. As for me, by the time I finally let her go I knew I had already begun to love her less.

In 1918 the fifteen-year-old Irene Nemirovsky was living in Mustamaki, the Finnish village that had become a haven to the wealthy elite of St. Petersburg since revolution broke out in Russia. To relieve the boredom, Irene wrote poems.

Little goat grating in the mountains, Galya is so happy to be alive.

The grey wolf will devour the little goat

But Galya will devour an entire army...

Nearly twenty years later, in 1937, Irene Nemirovsky rediscovered these lines when she came across the slim black notebook that contained her early attempts at literature. They were a verse rewriting of Alphonse Daudet's short story "La Chevre de M. Seguin," in which the goat, Blanchette, is eaten by a wolf; in Nemirovsky's version, the goat gets its revenge. "If ever you read this, my daughters, how silly you will think I was!" Nemirovsky wrote. "Even I think I was silly at that happy age. But it is important to respect the past. So I won't destroy a thing." Nemirovsky remained true to her word. She tore up none of the work that belonged to her adolescence-a time when she was not entirely Russian, nor French either, nor conscious of her Jewishness. She had already mined her childhood memories and writings for material in 1934, shortly after her father's death, sketching out three novels and several stories alongside diary entries in a notebook Nemirovsky called the "Monster" because of its ever-increasing size. The novels were Le Vin de solitude, Jiebel and Deux, the work of a writer at the height of her powers.

But by 1937 Irene was tired. She had written a novel a year since 1928, as well as dozens of short stories; her request for French citizenship had been pending since 1935; her inheritance was being eaten up by her extravagant and neurotic mother, forcing her to publish relentlessly in order to maintain her prominent position in the literary world, and to choose magazines with a large circulation, regardless of their political allegiance. Nemirovsky's husband, who worked in a bank, earned a third of what she did; they had two daughters to support: Denise, who was eight, and little Elisabeth, born on 20 March 1937.

She sometimes lost heart. Then she would stop writing: "Anxiety, sadness, a mad desire to be reassured. Yes, that's what I seek, but in vain. Only in Paradise will I find reassurance. I think of Renan's words: 'You find peace in

God's heart.' To be confident and reassured, sheltering in God's heart! And yet, I love life" (5 June 1937).

For a thirty-four-year-old, youth is over. Irene knew this and the adolescent notebook she had unearthed filled her with melancholy. On 6 December 1937 she wrote a list of possible new subjects for stories, carefully numbered from 1 to 27. Several were meditations on the various stages of life, and the passing of time, in which youth and age are at odds with each other. One of them was Fire in the Blood, although that was not yet its title:

New subjects and a novel. I thought about The Young and the Old for a novel (a play would be better). Austerity, purity of parents who were guilty when they were young. The impossibility of understanding that "fire in the blood." A good idea. Disadvantage: no clear characters.

The book grew in her mind when, during the summer of 1938, she reread Proust's
A rombre des jeunes filles en fleur (Within a Budding Grove). Here she found Proust's "marvellous words," which seemed to express to perfection the subject that preoccupied her:

We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard th
e w
orld. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by a paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by everything evil or commonplace that prevailed round about them. They represent a struggle and a victory.*

However, it was Nemirovsky's visit to a village in Burgundy, at the end of 1937, that provided the missing setting for her novel. She had gone there to interview a nanny for baby Elisabeth. She would return to find peace from the troubles of Paris.

The first mention of Issy-l'Eveque in her notebooks occurs on 25 April 1938: "Returned from Issy l'Eveque. 4 days full of happiness. What more could I ask? Thank God for that and for hope." Here, in this rural Arcadia, were the characters she had been seeking for her novel, those taciturn people that only the French countryside can produce. "Everyone lives in his own house, on his own land, distrusts his neighbours, harvests his wheat, counts his money and doesn't give a thought to the rest of the world," says Sylvestre, the narrator of Fire in the Blood. "This region has something restrained yet wild about it, something affluent

' Marcel Proust, In Search ofLost Time, vol. 11, Within a Budding Grove, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright (London: Vintage, zooz), p. 513.

and yet distrustful that is reminiscent of another time, long past. PI

When Sylvestre describes entering the cafe in the village's Hotel des Voyageurs, it is impossible not to think that we are hearing Irene Nemirovsky herself, describing her own visit to the hotel of the same name in Issy-l'Eveque:

I push open the door, making a little bell ring, and find myself in the dark, smoky cafe. A wood-burning stove glows like a red eye; mirrors reflect the marble tabletops, the billiard table, the torn leather settee and the calendar from 1919 with its picture of an Alsatian woman in white stockings standing between two soldiers [...] In front of me is a mirror that frames my wrinkled face, a face so mysteriously changed over the past few years that I scarcely recognise myself.

The face in the mirror seems like an omen, yet how could Nemirovsky have known that she would spend the early weeks of the Occupation in this very hotel, and begin here her final book, Suite Frartfaise?

From the dazzling success of her first novel, David Golder, to her arrest in 1942, Irene Nemirovsky never appeared to be surprised by her fate. It was as if, after the Russian Revolution, nothing human, or indeed inhuman, seemed strange to her. "Of course," stressed the writer Henri de Regnier in a 1929 review of David Golder, "th
e h
uman subject matter that Mme Nemirovsky deals with is rather repugnant, but she has observed it with passionate curiosity, and she manages to communicate this curiosity to us, so we may share it. Interest is stronger than disgust." Yet Irene Nemirovsky's curiosity was to prove dangerous: it drew her to things from which she should have kept her distance.

Constructed around a gradually revealed secret, Fire in the Blood describes, as a naturalist might describe, a predatory community of extreme cunning. Behind the pretty rural scenery, beasts lurk in the shadows, ready to pounce, and as the reader's eye becomes accustomed to the dark, we can't miss them. This "malicious intent" at the heart of village life will become the subject of Dolce, the second part of Suite Franfaise, which describes life under the Occupation in a small rural community. The village in Dolce bears a very close resemblance to that in Fire in the Blood and is undoubtedly also based on Issy-l'Eveque.

"Ah, dear friend, when something happens in life, do you ever think about the moment that caused it, the seed from which it grew? How can I explain it ... Imagine a field being sowed, and all the promise that's contained in a grain of wheat, all the future harvests ... Well, it's exactly the same in life." When Nemirovsky puts these words into the mouth of Helene in Fire in the Blood, she is transposing a Ukrainian proverb she was fond of quoting into a Burgundy setting: "All a man needs in life is one tiny grain of luck; without it, he is nothing." She could have been talking about her own life. Without the unique circumstances of her upbringing
,
could she have become the author of the best-selling David Golder? Without the all-conquering pride that consumed her, would she have been able to escape the influence of her arrogant mother, who was obsessed by money and the desire to remain eternally youthful? Without the "passionate curiosity" that Henri de Regnier immediately recognised in her, would she have been able to portray so vividly the world of the paysans, to evoke their work and their daily lives from so close up?

In Fire in the Blood the name of the village hotel and the mill remain exactly as they are in life. The real MoulinNeuf is close to a pond, about one kilometre from Issyl'Eveque if you take the road from the Montjeu farm. Would Nemirovsky have changed the names of places and people if the novel had been published during her lifetime? Begun in 1938, Fire in the Blood was probably reworked during the summer of 1941 in Issy-l'Eveque itself. Nemirovsky had moved there with her two daughters at the end of May 1940, shortly before the German invasion, and was staying at the Hotel des Voyageurs. She had plenty of time to observe her characters in the flesh. On two occasions she drew a parallel in her notebook between Fire in the Blood and Captivity, the projected third section of Suite Frontal., for which a few notes have survived. It is therefore highly likely that she was still working on Fire in the Blood in .942.

In Issy-l'Eveque Irene Nemirovsky had discovered a French Arcadia. It was her love of its natural beauty that gives Fire in the Blood the incomparable scent of water an
d e
arth that Nemirovsky savoured right up until those final moments she spent in the woods and fields of Burgundy: "a fresh, bitter smell that makes me feel so happy." However-and it is this theme that underlies the novel-even in Arcadia one can never be certain of the harvest. For, "who would bother sowing his fields, if he knew in advance what the harvest would bring?"

OLIVIER PHILIPPONNAT PATRICK LIENHARDT
BOOK: Fire in the Blood
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