on this road which was nothing but a death-trap, that is, not war but murder pure and simple, a place where they cut you down before you could say ouch, the snipers calmly installed behind a hedge or a bush and taking all the time in the world to get you into their sights, in short a bloody shooting-gallery … which did not stop him from always holding himself stiff and upright in his saddle, as upright as though he'd been reviewing a march past at a 14 July parade and not in the middle of a retreat or rather a rout or rather a disaster in the midst of this kind of decomposition of everything as though not simply an army but the world itself in its entirety and not just its physical reality but the image the mind can make of it (but perhaps it was also the lack of sleep, the fact that for ten days we had practically not slept except in the saddle) … two or three times someone shouted out to him not to go on (how many I don't know, nor who they were: the wounded I imagine, or men hidden in the houses or in the ditch, or perhaps civilians who doggedly went on wandering about in incomprehensible fashion, dragging a battered suitcase after them or pushing one of those children's perambulators filled with vague belongings (not really belongings: just things, useless objects, simply no doubt so as not to wander empty-handed, having the illusion of taking with them, of possessing anything so long as it was personaclass="underline" a torn pillow or an umbrella or the colour photograph of the grandparents — and so had the arbitrary notion of price, of treasure attached to it) as though what mattered was simply to walk, no matter in what direction…)
My instinct is to say: the difference between the two descriptions is not one of degree but of kind. It is not that Némirovsky is a lesser novelist than Simon, but that she is simply unaware of the inappropriateness of what she is doing, and one has to say that by her writing she makes ‘a written renunciation to all claim to be an author’. Or is this too apocalyptic? Is it simply that she is less good, less aware of what can and cannot be done, less aware of just what it is she wants to convey and therefore of the need to forge a style that will answer to that need?
Again, the question is not why she should have written as she did, but what has happened to our culture that serious and intelligent and well-read reviewers, not to speak of prize-winning novelists and distinguished biographers, many of whom have studied the poems of Eliot or the novels of Virginia Woolf at university, should so betray their calling as to go into ecstasies over books like Némirovsky's while, in their lifetimes and now after their deaths, ignoring the work of novelists like Claude Simon, Georges Perec, Thomas Bernhard and Gert Hofmann.
To answer this would require a sociologist, perhaps, and another book. But a few points are worth making. The first is that though, as the example of Némirovsky shows, we are not dealing here with a purely English phenomenon, there is a greater resistance to or lack of awareness of Modernism right across the board in England than there is in the rest of Europe and even in America. Modernism has its friends over here but they are what the art historian T.J. Clark has called ‘false friends’, that is, those who defend a version of Modernism that is at once crude and superficial and therefore make it even more difficult to grasp what it truly is. A case in point is a recent book by the young English novelist Adam Thirlwell, Miss Herbert, which deals with many of the themes and authors I have been writing about here, but seems (to me) consistently to misrepresent and misunderstand them.
I have already had occasion to quote Thirlwell on Don Quixote, which he reads as ‘the juxtaposition of chivalrously good intentions with the prose of real life’. This, I suggested, is to misunderstand the questions raised by the novel about truth and authority and especially the authority of the novelist himself. For Cervantes, the question of what is ‘real life’ and how an artist today (his today and our today) can claim to deal with it is a fundamental concern; for Thirlwell it isn't an issue. Thus his misreading of Cervantes is symptomatic of his whole book. What he takes both the novel and Modernism to stand for, as far as I can see, is an unflinching realism which resolutely refuses the consolations of poetry and Romanticism. He quotes Flaubert: ‘I want a touch of bitterness in everything — always a jeer in the midst of our triumphs, desolation even in the midst of enthusiasm’, and remarks: ‘That last sentence is Flaubert's description of his new literary form: the novelistic scene, the anti-lyrical poem.’
The touchstone of this new form, a form which will at last ‘be true to the mess which is real life’, is the telling detaiclass="underline" the faint scar on a forehead, the stair carpet turned up at one corner. Thirlwell purrs with pleasure when he finds it in Diderot or Flaubert, in Tolstoy or Nabokov. It is the detail which shows up the impurity of grandiose feelings, which does the job of the novelist and the Modernist, deflating the sentimental, the romantic, the serious. ‘The most radical novels find comedy in places which people do not want to see as comic at all — like sex, or concentration camps.’ This is meant to be shocking but it is merely in bad taste. For Hitler and the camps seem actually to be immune to comedy, as the films Chaplin and Roberto Benigni devoted to those subjects, The Great Dictator and Life is Beautiful, merely serve to demonstrate. Even a great comic novel like Catch22 only works, as David Daiches once pointed out, because it is set at a moment in the Second World War when the Allied victory was already assured.
The notion that the new reality inhering in novels depends on their attention to detail fails to distinguish between ‘reality’ and what theoreticians call ‘the reality-effect’. In fact Thirlwell uses the two terms indiscriminately. But putting a faint scar on a face or alerting us to the fact that the carpet is turned up in the corner, like describing the smell of sweat and semen during the act of sex, no more anchors the novel to ‘reality’ than writing about stars in the eyes of the beloved. The novel is still made up of words, is still the product of a solitary individual, inventing scars, carpets, smells or stars. Of course we warm to a novelist who surprises us with his attention to detail, though as much or more depends on the way it is done, the style, rather than the detail itself, as when Dickens has Sam Weller say: ‘Look at these here boots — eleven pairs o'boots; and one shoe as b'longs to number six, with the wooden leg’, or Proust writes of Swann's arrival at a grand party and the footman's taking his hat and gloves: ‘As he approached Swann, he seemed to be exhibiting at once an utter contempt for his person and the most tender regard for his hat.’ Too often though, especially in Flaubert and the Goncourts, detail seems to be there as a way of convincing us (and the authors themselves?) that what we are dealing with is the stuff of life. Too often the attention to detail in modern novels reminds me of what Clement Greenberg once said of nineteenth-century academic painting: ‘It took talent — among other things — to lead art that far astray. Bourgeois society gave these talents a prescription, and they filled it — with talent.’