A Nail, a Rose Read online

  MADELEINE BOURDOUXHE

  A NAIL, A ROSE

  Translated from the French

  and introduced by Faith Evans

  PUSHKIN PRESS

  LONDON

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Introduction by Faith Evans

  A Nail, A Rose

  Anna

  Louise

  Leah

  Clara

  Blanche

  René

  Sous le pont Mirabeau

  Bibliographical Note

  Acknowledgements

  About the Publisher

  Copyright

  Introduction

  It is over half a century since Madeleine Bourdouxhe made her name in Paris with her novel La Femme de Gilles. Four decades have passed since Simone de Beauvoir praised her in The Second Sex. Yet, astonishingly, this is the first volume of her work ever to appear in English. There has been a long period of neglect: even in Belgium, her native country, and in France, where many of her stories were originally published, she is only now being discovered by feminist critics.*

  When I first read her work in French in 1987 I recognised a confident feminist vision that, though born of time and place, still spoke with an exciting directness. I was drawn to the author’s quiet strength. As I began to translate her stories and to engage with the subtle rhythms of her prose, my curiosity developed into commitment, so that I felt impelled to discover more about her life, and the social and cultural context from which she had come. Unearthing this information, however, was more problematic; not only is little of her work in print, but she has gone almost unnoticed by literary historians. The only solution was to seek her out for myself.

  By the time I visited Madeleine Bourdouxhe in her Brussels apartment in July 1988 I had finished translating the stories, read most of her other work in libraries, and made many guesses, some of which turned out to be more inspired than others. I had thought of her as a wartime author, had assumed, because of the difficulty in tracking down her work, that her writing career was long over, so the biggest and most welcome surprise was that she had continued to write: indeed, three of the stories in A Nail, A Rose (‘Clara’, ‘Blanche’ and ‘René’) are quite recent. Even now, she still works through the night; a young friend of hers told me that she has often seen the lights on in her apartment when returning home late from a concert in the Grande Place, until recently her quartier.

  An elegant, straightforward woman in her early eighties, naturally reticent, though clearly delighted at the idea of having her work translated (‘The English were the first to liberate Brussels’), Madeleine Bourdouxhe told me enough about herself to justify my considering her work in the light of her life. As she talked, I began to see that the long neglect is partly explained by her diffidence but even more by the catastrophic disruptions of modern European history. From the start, I realised, hers has been a career shaped by the need for resistance, in all its forms.

  Madeleine Bourdouxhe was born in Liège in 1906. After a short period in Paris as a child, the family returned to Belgium at the end of the First World War, later moving to Brussels, where Madeleine studied at a lycée and then read philosophy at the university. In 1927 she married a mathematician, Jacques Muller, and gave private lessons in French, Latin and history.

  The people she chose to recall at our meeting gave me an important clue to her politics. In the thirties, she told me, one of her closest friends, whose work she passionately admired, was the Russian revolutionary writer Victor Serge. Serge was foremost among the intellectuals who saw through Stalin and spoke against the frame-up of the Moscow trials. Deported to Siberia in 1933 for his association with Trotsky, he was expelled from the Soviet Union after protests organised by André Gide, and he and his son found refuge with Madeleine Bourdouxhe and her husband in Brussels, his native town – ‘Someone brought him to me,’ she said. He moved to Paris before the war and she would often visit him to talk about politics, life and work: ‘We were politically of one mind, both of us much preoccupied with the Spanish Civil War.’ Serge’s commitment to lucidité and probité (political honesty) is indeed similar to that of Madeleine Bourdouxhe as revealed in her stories. In his Notebooks he defines the impetus to write as ‘a means of living several destinies, of penetration into others, of communicating with them. The writer becomes conscious of the world he brings to life, he is its consciousness and he thus escapes from the ordinary limits of the self, something which is at once intoxicating and enriching.’†

  By the middle of the 1930s Madeleine Bourdouxhe had produced several novels and stories. ‘I’ve always had a passion for writing,’ she told me. ‘Even as a child I wrote little descriptions of landscape or made up stories.’ Visiting Paris to submit her work to publishers, she was taken up by Jean Paulhan, editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française and reader for the house of Gallimard. Paulhan had a reputation for seeking out new writers and encouraging them to express their convictions in their work; his other finds included Marcel Aymé and Raymond Queneau. On Paulhan’s recommendation La Femme de Gilles was accepted by Gallimard and was published, to great acclaim, in 1937. The literary critic and novelist Rámon Fernández wrote, ‘The art of conveying silence – the most difficult of all the novelist’s tasks – is here flawlessly achieved.’

  Then came the Second World War, the trigger for the short stories Madeleine Bourdouxhe was to produce over the next decade, five of which are included in A Nail, A Rose. As she talked to me in 1988 I began to see why the Occupation overshadows so many of her stories and her consciousness of herself, and to have some perception of what it means when your country is overtaken by a foreign power, especially when you yourself are patriotic but not in the least nationalistic. It’s no wonder that as a writer she has always been so preoccupied with borders and frontiers, with people who take risks, people whose lives have to be lived underground. She has experienced displacement for herself.

  Madeleine Bourdouxhe’s own war experiences are most dramatically reflected in Sous le pont Mirabeau, the final long story in this volume, a moving, outspoken celebration of maternity seen in the light of the destructive futility of war. The novella appears here, with the original illustrations by the distinguished Belgian artist Mig Quinet, for the first time since its original publication in 1944.

  Sous le pont Mirabeau takes place in May 1940, the month of the German invasion of Belgium, less than a year after the war began. A week later the French army in the Meuse was on the retreat and the Germans were ranging over the French countryside. After the capitulation of the French and the establishment of the collaborationist Pétain government in Vichy, both countries became a morass of displaced persons trying to escape the Occupation.

  Madeleine Bourdouxhe was among them. On the day of the invasion she had just given birth to her first child, Marie, in a Brussels maternity home and, helped by family and friends, made her precarious way through France to a village near Bordeaux.

  Obliged to return home to Brussels later that year under orders from the exiled Belgian government, she remained there for the rest of the war. Her publishing activities were now severely curtailed by circumstance. Not only was she politically suspect, but along with her editor Jean Paulhan she refused to set foot in, never mind be published by, publishing houses such as Gallimard and Grasset that had been taken over by the Germans. She was anxious to help with Resistance work, and hid escaping Jewish women refugees in her house in Brussels. She found it difficult to get a permit to visit occupied Paris, and when she did, it was at great danger to her life. Once, she now says with a laugh, she persuaded ‘a decent Nazi’ to issue her with a permit by bribing him with a signed copy of La Femme de Gilles.

  Whilst researching Madeleine Bo
urdouxhe’s background I had speculated on the possible influence of Paul Éluard, the most sensitive and aware of the male Surrealists, whose poetic imagery, in poems like ‘La Vie immédiate’ (1932), had seemed to me sometimes to prefigure her own. This made doubly intriguing her reference to Éluard as her Resistance ‘contact’ in the war: she had, she told me, collected anti-Nazi leaflets from his Paris apartment to take back to Belgium. But any suggestion of a literary connection brought forth a polite but vehement denial: no one had had any effect upon her work. However, even artists working in comparative isolation cannot be immune to the intellectual currents around them, and Madeleine Bourdouxhe, essentially a political writer, very likely absorbed – consciously or unconsciously – just as much as was necessary in order to express her own individual voice.

  Most of the stories in A Nail, A Rose were written in the aftermath not only of Nazi tyranny but of pre-war Surrealism. Ever since its 1924 manifesto the Surrealist movement had been calling for an art that would reconcile dream and reality, the interior and the exterior world, while for the most part putting forward such wildly idealistic political programmes as reconciling Marx and Freud. Though disrupted by the war, the movement continued to flourish in America. But in Europe, the experience of having been occupied, further revelations of Nazi atrocities and a growing awareness of Stalinist oppression encouraged writers to turn to versions of existentialism, with its emphasis on individual choice and its appeal to the artist’s personal sense of responsibility. It was a period, then, when the options for European writers were as diverse as they had ever been, when their ideological functions were continually subject to scrutiny and debate.

  Paul Éluard and his wife Nusch were among the few members of the Surrealist movement to remain in Paris during the Occupation, many of the others having fled to New York and Mexico, to the annoyance of Jean-Paul Sartre who, in 1945, proclaimed that the social and political responsibility of the writer was to ‘engage with his period’, to ‘guide the reader, expose injustice and provoke indignation’.‡

  This was the principle upon which he, Simone de Beauvoir, Raymond Aron and others founded Les Temps Modernes, and Madeleine Bourdouxhe was clearly a writer whose viewpoint, if not her writing style, accorded with the prescription. By comparison with some of the other French literary journals of the time, Les Temps Modernes was also enlightened in its attitude to women. At the end of the war Sartre and de Beauvoir would meet Madeleine Bourdouxhe in Paris cafés on her trips from Brussels – and ‘Les Jours de la femme Louise’ appeared in the journal in January 1947.

  In the same issue there was an article by Nathalie Sarraute on Paul Valéry, an extract from Richard Wright’s Jeunesse Noire (Black Boy) and an article by Simone de Beauvoir entitled ‘Pour une morale de l’ambiguité’. Reading the magazine forty years later, what is striking is the modernity of Madeleine Bourdouxhe’s style, her lack of dogmatism and the poetic simplicity of her manner: traits that have remained remarkably consistent over the years. But most of all, her writing stands out from the rest for its concern with the inner world of women.

  Translated here as ‘Louise’, the story is one of the few in A Nail, A Rose to contain a middle-class character; and even then ‘Madame’ is really only there as a catalyst for understanding her maid Louise. ‘Louise’ shows the ideal of female empathy cut across by the absolute barrier of class. Louise dreams of friendship with Madame; men keep her hanging around but Madame, elegant and mysterious, never lets her down; indeed, on Louise’s night off she lends her a smart blue coat. Louise wanders around the Paris night in a state of delirium; in a café, her pen dictates a ‘cabalistic message of love’ (possibly a teasing reference to the ‘automatic writing’ of the Surrealists). But can Louise ever really inhabit the blue coat? One recalls Jean Genet’s reply to the bourgeois lady who told him that her maid ought to be very happy, since she gave her all her old dresses. ‘Excellent,’ replied Genet. ‘And does she give you hers?’

  Madeleine Bourdouxhe draws the characters for her stories not from fashionable Parisian society but from the suburbs and the provinces, from the old vegetable market in Les Halles, from unremarkable factory towns in Lorraine or the Meuse. The milieux she has always chosen to describe are essentially working-class. She prefers to observe the margins from the margins and form her own view of society: as she proudly told me, ‘I write what I see.’

  Yet she is not in any simple sense a realist. Setting her work in proletarian environments enables her to cut right through to the full range of women’s responsibilities, and to reach out to a confident purity of style. Her method of achieving this purity is the world of the dream. In all her stories she draws upon the dream to pursue her own very personal quest for the nature of female identity and the liberation of the female spirit.

  It is the world of the dream that suggests a historical link between Madeleine Bourdouxhe, whose work is essentially painterly and poetic, and the women artists associated with the Surrealist movement. Like them, she was sympathetic to the spirit of revolt and to experimentation, forming part of no clique or coterie, and fiercely resistant to organised activity. This was probably wise, since from Apollinaire on, events have shown that women involved with Surrealism are especially susceptible to the risk that naming, as child or as muse, might mean being claimed too. The process of being idealised carries its own dangers, gives women a statutory place, at once adored and unrecognised, in the false order of a male-defined culture. All in all, it’s safer to possess a vision of your own.

  The women artists working in the 1940s eliminated the barriers between the conscious and the sub-conscious, the rational and the irrational, life and art; and they set as high a value upon the dream as the male Surrealists. But by stressing women’s biological and spiritual resources, ‘mysteries’ that were both female and active, they could claim a special relationship with creative nature and the cosmos that endowed them with a special, superior wisdom.§

  Madeleine Bourdouxhe sometimes uses this surreal symbolism for her own feminist ends too, if more discreetly and less fantastically than her artistic contemporaries. She relies upon images that distort and disturb, that belong to nightmare: monstrous insects with glossy black shells, a chignon surprisingly held in place with nails instead of hairpins.

  She is intrigued, too, by the relationship between personal memory and the passage of time as they affect the female sensibility. Many of her most ambitious stylistic experiments involve this exploration. In several of the stories women abandon themselves unrestrainedly to remembered time until, in an organic layering of memory upon memory upon memory, the present seems to explode in a marvellous fusion of related images. Sensuously delving into your unconscious will lead you to an intense and heightened sense of yourself which will sustain you in moments of extremity – when a man leaves you or beats you up, or when you are alone in the intolerable heat of a summer night, on an army lorry with blood dripping down your legs, unable to satisfy your newborn infant’s unbearable demands. The capacity to connect experience and memory, she suggests, is what makes a woman strong and whole: it gives her a unique power to reach out to some greater totality – be it mankind, nature, or even the divine. Physically, this layering of experience is conveyed by correspondences between the senses, particularly sight, sound and touch; stylistically, by images that reflect one another, words and phrases that are repeated like a refrain or a litany. Every word is in place.

  A year after publishing ‘Les Jours de la femme Louise’, Les Temps Modernes began to serialise The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir’s momentous study of womanhood which, even if its mandarin tone grates a little today, marks the starting-point for the post-war feminist movement and remains perhaps its single seminal work. In the published book (1949) de Beauvoir refers to Madeleine Bourdouxhe’s observation of the different value that is set upon the sexual act by women and by men:

  Madeleine Bourdouxhe tells of a woman who recoiled when her husband asked if she had enjoyed herself, puttin
g her hand over his mouth; the expression horrifies many women because it reduces erotic pleasure to an immanent and separately felt sensation. ‘Was it enough? You want more? Was it good?’ – the very fact of asking such questions emphasises the separation, changes the act of love into a mechanical operation directed by the male. And that is, indeed, why he asks them. He really seeks domination much more than fusion and reciprocity.¶

  De Beauvoir was absolutely right to perceive that sexual polarity lies at the heart of Madeleine Bourdouxhe’s work. In ‘Anna’, the most ‘surreal’ of the stories and the one that de Beauvoir probably had in mind, the bored wife of a garage owner wants to act, to start wars and revolutions, but she’s trapped by her sex and her situation, and can only trace grand designs in the air above the marital bed. We are back in the world of fantasy. Anna dreams of a dress she doesn’t possess, of a dance with another man that will liquefy her and raise her on a plateau above the world. She watches herself from inside her own body: she is both imprisoned in her flesh and liberated from it. In shocking, brutal imagery the clash of opposites lights up and subverts her everyday world. Looking at her own neck and breasts Anna thinks of her veins as pipes full of blood – and has a terrifying vision of it as coagulating, surging back to the heart. One is reminded of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo Rivera’s ‘The Two Fridas’, painted in 1939 during her divorce from Diego Rivera, in which imaginary pipes join two X-ray images of herself and blood courses from one heart to another, finally spluttering out on to a pure white dress.

  ‘Anna’ suggests that the image in the mirror must be questioned if the self is to be seen in all its complexity: as one is and as one might be, inside and outside of the body. And if the mirror exposes, that other tempting glass, the window, might help one escape into a better life – or, as in the haunting story ‘Clara’, whose protagonist’s deafness is the ultimate symbol of non-communication, into death.