Éric Rohmer published one novel, under the name Gilbert Cordier in 1946. He wrote Élisabeth when he was in his mid-twenties, more than a decade before Rohmer, whose real name was Maurice Schérer, made the first of his 24 feature films. The book did not inspire much interest at the time, nor did the second edition Gallimard brought out in 2007 under the title La maison d’Élisabeth, three years before Rohmer’s death in 2010. While Rohmer said he had been pleasantly surprised re-reading it decades later, he never made any great claims for it. It is hard to disagree, but reading the new English translation published this summer by McNally Editions is nevertheless an intriguing experience. The novel produces an oddly compelling sensation, a little like looking into a dark well: there is nothing to see, yet it is hard to shake the feeling that something is lurking at the bottom.
The novel’s material is familiar. Élisabeth takes place in 1939, the summer before the outbreak of war in a fictional town by the Marne. A disparate group of friends congregate at the large family home of Élisabeth, the wife of a country doctor. People come and go, notably a troubled couple, Michel and Irène, Élisabeth’s son Bernard, and his cousin Claire with whom he has a flirtatious relationship. The young friends lie around the beach reading; sometimes they make short trips into town. At one point we follow Élisabeth on a train ride to Paris where she has a few appointments. Their conversations, which make up much of the novel, circle around issues and dynamics within the group. These fluctuate without coming to a clear resolution: there are a few arguments and love affairs, a bicycle crash and a near-miss. Michel and Irène are on the point of separating, provoked by Michel planning to take a job abroad. The political context of the impending war rarely features in the conversations, beyond a few passing references to the headlines.
Even when not particularly accomplished, an artist’s minor works can be as revealing as their major ones. In this respect, Élisabeth is particularly intriguing as a case study in the mismatch between artist and form. It is easy to detect the instincts of the future filmmaker in the prose. Much of the novel is composed of literal descriptions of the visible environment. Its final paragraphs are written in the present tense, describing the house in a neutral, fastidious style:
The tall branches of the linden trees reach the roof, slightly to the right of the window. They obscure the terrace and courtyard below, and beyond them, the wall of the garage and shed. To the left, one can see the rest of the courtyard, the pump, and the beginning of the lawn planted with small fir trees and fruit trees.
That Rohmer picked up a pen first was logical. Nothing in his conservative Catholic middle-class upbringing had prepared him for filmmaking. In the early 1940s, when he moved into a tiny apartment in the 5th arrondissement in Paris in his early twenties, set on becoming a writer, he had seen only a handful of movies. The group of film critics with whom he fell in, and who in the 1950s would converge around Cahiers du cinéma, shared an admiration for the world of letters. When they defended directors they admired, they claimed them as equals of Dostoyevsky and Balzac. None, though, wrote a novel themselves – Godard probably tried hardest, but he never saw it through; Chabrol channelled his literary passion into nearly 40 adaptations for cinema and television.
Rohmer wrote easily and well – his film criticism tells us this much. Élisabeth however was a different undertaking, and even allowing for its being a twenty-something’s first novel there is little suggestion of a flare for, or interest in, developing characters or unfolding a narrative. Partly this is a reflection of the literary trends of the day, both the nouveau roman and the ‘behaviourist’ school of American writers. In an interview published in the 2007 Gallimard edition, Rohmer said he was influenced by two essays Sartre had written in 1938 in the Nouvelle revue francaise which had singled out the work of Faulkner and Dos Passos for describing what people did and said without delving into their psychologies. Rohmer admired these writers’ ‘wholesale refusal of literary fussiness, their determination to cleave to facts – material facts and facts of consciousness – and their promotion of a new conception of the natural’. His style is, in fact, significantly more austere – which was why, he later suggested, the medium proved a dead-end in his case. ‘I’d set my mind on practising an asceticism as rigorous as that of the cubist painters, whose feeble reproductions I’d encountered in black and white . . . No doubt this was one of the main reasons that this first novel had no successor. I didn’t feel capable of writing in that style again, and had no desire to do so.’
Élisabeth is certainly distinguished by extensive descriptions of ‘material facts’: settings, objects, gestures. When Claire appears in the garden with a book in her hand, each of her movements is rendered in an even, meticulous way redolent of screen directions:
Without getting up, she steps back so that the sun only falls on her legs. She reopens the book and flips through the pages, then turns her head back and raises it towards the house, immediately lowering it again. She lifts the book with both hands, above her knees: she reads. She drops the book with her right hand and touches the hem of her dress at her knee with her fingertip: she brings her hand back under the book.
When we do enter what is more obviously the territory of literature – the inner thoughts as opposed to the outward actions of a character – the prose reads much like dialogue. Michel’s thoughts about Irène could easily be a tirade delivered by a protagonist in a Rohmer film as they walk along a street, through a park, across a beach:
He told himself: I hate her, not because I have something against her, but because I force myself to love her, because my situation is false, because I don’t want to acknowledge what is a fact. Because it is a fact. I don’t love her. He realized now that if he remained in this room, standing before this weeping woman slumped on the bed, it wasn’t at all with the thought that things would work out, but because he wanted to go all the way, to know that it wouldn’t work out, to be sure that there was nothing to be done . . .
Reading Élisabeth with Rohmer’s films in mind, a question recurs: why does all this work on the screen but not on the page? The answer tells us something about the differences between literature and cinema. Novelists, unlike poets, Paul Valéry quipped, were burdened with the obligation to write sentences like ‘the marquise had her tea at five o’clock’. André Bazin added that ‘the novelist could pity the filmmaker who is forced to show the marquise’. Yet how Rohmer chose to show the marquise turned out to be more interesting than how he described her.
His obsessive precision and attention to detail, laborious on the page, produced a rich naturalism on screen. On set he was a stickler. When a young man purchased a Chausson aux pommes in Rohmer’s first Moral Tale, La Boulangère de Monceau (1963), it was imperative he handed over exactly the right coins. Without anchoring his work in the world with such granular accuracy, Rohmer felt he was a fraud telling a made-up story. Of course, novels filled with such minutiae can be compelling too, but the prose through which it is mediated bears the burden of making it so, something Rohmer’s Élisabeth fails to do.
In the Gallimard interview, when asked why he had written a novel about carefree youth hanging out at the beach while Allied troops entered Paris, Rohmer said he had wondered at the time, ‘is it possible to write on present events? My answer had been: No, one can’t. One needs distance.’ His attachment to fine-grained detail works against such distance in his films, which offer a snapshot of the time, no matter how remote from current affairs they may seem. His characters are likewise singular and specific. There is a sociological quality to Rohmer’s oeuvre, which offers what he never set out to produce: a portrait of France through the decades, capturing how cities, suburbs and public spaces looked and sounded, and how people spoke and interacted.
Aaron Kerner’s new translation of Élisabeth is perplexingly uneven and interfering; it is not a complicated text in French – Rohmer’s asceticism did not allow for many flourishes. The vocabulary is plain, the sentences generally short and simple. Yet littered across the translation are curious and obtrusive choices. ‘Are you tired?’ Michel asks Irène, who replies ‘And how!’, an eccentrically archaic rendering of ‘Penses-tu!’. There are also jarring idiomatic twists: ‘go wash my mitts’, for ‘me laver les mains’, and ‘You’re such a slowpoke!’ for ‘Que tu es lent!’. Such expressions make the prose sound dated and unnatural, which is not an accurate reflection of the French. Rohmer wrote like a good student of his time and never tried to make his dialogue sound colloquial; his young people speak an ordinary but proper French that reveals their class, if not deliberately.
Dialogue is another element that was enhanced by Rohmer’s change of medium. His films are often described as having a writerly quality since they involve people talking all the time, often in a strikingly articulate manner. This is not untrue, but it is misleading. Rohmer’s characters are certainly talkative and eloquent, but their idiosyncratic speech is partly a product of the film-making process. Rohmer worked closely with his actors before shooting to modify their dialogue according to how each spoke, taking into account their natural cadence and unique intonations. The way he filmed dialogue was also unusual, sometimes highly dynamic – talking in motion, the spatial environment changing – and at other times unconventionally static. Rather than capturing two characters conversing in typical shot-reverse-shot, the camera would either include both in the frame together, or remain fixed on one character alone, whether the speaker or listener. Both techniques were used to deepen and complicate the viewer’s engagement with what is being said.
The typical function of dialogue is as a vector for advancing a film’s plot. In Rohmer’s work however, many declarations are never carried through; resolutions are expressed and frequently undermined by actions. While this clash between deed and expressed intention can play out in a novel, film – as a medium composed of image and sound – casts the contradictions between what we see and what we hear into sharp focus. Élisabeth lacks much of the tension between speech and gesture that is a hallmark of Rohmer’s films, in which characters often do the opposite of what they say, or say a great deal and do nothing at all.
Read on: Emilie Bickerton, ‘Subterranean Godard’, NLR 157.