Éric Rohmer’s Novel “Élisabeth” Is a Precocious Literary Triumph
Éric Rohmer nearly had a career as a novelist, but that career didn’t seem to want him. His literary ambition is on display in “Élisabeth,” his only novel, which is now appearing in English for the first time, in a translation by Aaron Kerner (McNally Editions). Rohmer started work on it in 1939, at the age of eighteen, and completed it in the summer of 1944. It was published by the prestigious Paris publishing house Gallimard in 1946, but sold poorly and received no reviews. Literature’s loss was the cinema’s gain: at the time that Rohmer completed the book, he had (according to the excellent biography of him by Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe) seen no more than “a few dozen” movies in his entire life; by the end of the nineteen-forties, he had become a passionate moviegoer, had published several of the most influential critical essays in the history of French cinema, was running a ciné-club that became the crucible of the French New Wave, and had begun to make independent films. Rohmer’s fame as a director sparks automatic curiosity about his novel, but “Élisabeth” is far more than a footnote. It would be a rewarding, exciting read even if the identity of its author were unfamiliar.
An unfamiliar identity is what the author wanted: he published the novel under a nom de plume, Gilbert Cordier, and Éric Rohmer, too, was a pseudonym—taken by one Maurice Schérer, a teacher of Greek and Latin, who launched his filmmaking career under an assumed name so that his parents wouldn’t find out. A pseudonym and a false identity also feature in “Élisabeth,” and the novel, as a whole, is constructed as a set of ruses and evasions. Rohmer completed it amid battles for the liberation of Paris from its Nazi occupiers, on a street where bullets were flying “right past my window,” as he recalled in an interview appended as an afterword to later editions of the novel and to the English translation: “It was precisely then, trapped in my room, not even daring to put my nose to the windowpane, that I wrote ‘Élisabeth.’ And as I did, I was asking myself: ‘Is it even possible to write about what’s unfolding at present?’ My answer was: ‘No, it’s not—you need to take a step back.’ ”
His step back was, first, a temporal one, laden with dramatic irony. The novel is set right around the time he started outlining it, in August, 1939, with its characters anticipating the end of summer and a return to business as usual in September, unaware of what is to come. It’s the end of an era, perched on the brink of the catastrophe that, as Rohmer wrote, was unfolding violently on his very street.
There’s an irony, too, in the novel’s title, which doesn’t refer to its main character. If Rohmer had titled the book more truthfully, he might have beaten Heinrich Böll to the title “Group Portrait with Lady.” Rohmer’s lady in question is Élisabeth Roby, the wife of a local doctor in a town near Meaux, about twenty-five miles northeast of Paris. She isn’t the novel’s central consciousness but, rather, its central lack of consciousness, something like a living hyphen who brings the story’s main characters together while remaining painfully unaware of their personalities or activities, of what’s going on around her. In other words, Rohmer’s “step back” is more than just temporal—it’s philosophical.
In depicting the whirl of August, 1939, he’s also depicting a social world that survives even political cataclysm (at least, for those who do survive). Even during the Occupation, people go to college, hold jobs, take vacations, make and lose friends, flirt, marry, separate, and write; this was the sardonic truth of Rohmer’s own life at the time. In “Élisabeth,” momentous political events are experienced the way that most people experience them: as newspaper headlines that are given less prominence than ads for toothpaste. In this regard, despite Rohmer’s near-total lack, at the time, of movie culture, “Élisabeth” is above all reminiscent of one of the greatest of French films: Jean Renoir’s “The Rules of the Game,” also from 1939, in which a hunting party at an aristocrat’s château spotlights high society’s obliviousness to France’s impending disaster. Rohmer, in “Élisabeth,” spotlights the obliviousness of the professional bourgeoisie—but, unlike Renoir, does so without satire or tragedy.
The novel’s actual protagonist is Michel Landeau, an engineer in his early twenties, who works at a paint factory in a suburb of Paris and is a distant cousin of Élisabeth’s. He is spending part of his summer vacation, as usual, as a guest of the Roby family. (In addition to Élisabeth, there is her husband, Dr. Paul Roby; their seven-year-old daughter, Marie-Thérèse; their son, Bernard, who’s about twenty and, to his parents’ relief, is about to begin university studies; a teen-age cousin named Claire; another summer guest, who’s in high school; and a live-in maid, Louise.) The drama is centered on Michel’s engagement to Irène Bergmann, a widow a few years older than he, who lives in the nearby town of Percy with her mother. In order to spend time with Irène, Michel begs off various Roby activities and outings and has also deflected his boss’s suggestion that he spend a few months working at the factory’s mercury mine in Portugal. But he is beginning to have misgivings about the relationship; the novel’s through line is whether the couple will stay together or break up.
Though the story of “Élisabeth” is simple, the novel is something of a cubistic puzzle. Told in three sections, replete with chapters and subsections, it flits from character to character and from location to location. This form makes the book startlingly original, an exemplary modernist novel in its redefinition of storytelling. Its method is both distinguished and derived from nineteenth-century classics, from which Rohmer distills a modernism of variety, ambiguity, complexity, and fragmentation. The surface of “Élisabeth” is elusive and shimmery; characters are hard to discern not because of any lack of detail but, on the contrary, because they’re submerged in an excess of it. Rohmer operates in a manner akin to Post-Impressionist painting, in the style of Seurat or Bonnard: an overwhelmingly perceptive eye atomizes and abstracts characters in a swarming gestalt of unexpressed tension and looming change. By way of extreme precision, the novel feels mysterious.
The novel is told in the third-person voice of an omniscient but cagey narrator who withholds exposition, drops readers into the midst of action, and delivers crucial information in crumbs of dialogue or action that demand a puzzle-like attention and assemblage in order to discern narrative connections, causalities, and continuities. Moreover, much of the action is infinitesimal: who’s going to go swimming with whom at which river, who’s going to whose home for dinner, who’s giving whom a ride to where, who’s turning down which invitation, who’s out of the house when they’re supposed to be home and why, and who notices. The criss-crossings of coincidences and the overlapping bonds of acquaintance bring to the minute details of phone calls and handwritten notes, sly glances and trivial deceptions, a vast psychological reverberance. And, Rohmer being Rohmer (and human), what unifies these multifarious nuances is sex.
As in Rohmer’s films, the nuances here involve intricate dialogue. In the book’s first scene involving Michel and Irène, set in her bedroom, their conversation winds from his repair of her radio to observations about each other’s personalities, from a laborious discussion about whether or not to join the Robys on a beach outing to mention of his potential transfer to Portugal—culminating in their landing on the bed and kissing. (It’s no surprise that Rohmer’s turn to cinema yielded, in 1948, one of the great critical essays in favor of movie dialogue, “For a Talking Cinema.”) But there’s something elusive in the dialogue of “Élisabeth,” a sense that it’s taking the place of something else, that every subject broached and every view expressed, however directly connected to matters at hand, conceals what’s really on the speakers’ minds and in their hearts, the artifices of society obscuring the true human drama of the moment—namely, desire.
Much of the dramatic energy of “Élisabeth” goes into description: Rohmer has the novelistic eye of a camera, describing actions and appearances with a microscopic specificity, as if seen and described from repeated, even slow-motion viewing of a strip of film:
These sentences are part of a four-plus-page descriptive riff, one of many passages that lend the novel a teeming, avid opacity. And Rohmer anatomizes thoughts and feelings with the same relentless precision that he brings to external appearances. Parts of the novel, especially those evoking Michel’s introspection, have a Jamesian density of psychological nuance. In the most virtuosic sequence, early on, Michel, spending an evening with Irène sitting and chatting on her patio, begins to feel their inchoate differences breaking through to the surface; he translates his own unease into radical terms, by way of internal monologues set out in quotation marks, as if offering his own feelings not as affirmations but as experiments in inner masks:
But when he gets through his internal rant, some three pages later, he takes a step back: “ ‘I’m crazy,’ thought Michel. ‘I’ll end up believing myself!’ ” His second-guessing doesn’t stanch his inner torrent of bile, which continues through dinner with Irène and her mother, and goes on for another fifteen pages of emotional hypotheticals and conditionals. The core of his psychic turmoil is physical and finds its match in the precise observations that he makes and which the narrator delivers with piercing clarity in a single, wildly tumbling and twisting sentence of torment:
The undercurrent of unsatisfied lust that runs through “Élisabeth” bursts to the fore when Michel, giving a high-school student named Jacqueline a lift, introduces himself under a false name and then unhesitatingly dares, as she later says, to “jump on top of” her. He touches her sexually—apparently not to her displeasure—but then keeps going, forcefully, after she clearly and repeatedly tells him to stop. The scene is far more sexually detailed than any in Rohmer’s films. It describes the precise placement of Michel’s hands on and in Jacqueline’s clothing, mentioning her wool brassiere, and on her body; at what point she says no; exactly what he does nonetheless; and why she doesn’t call for help or flee, but, rather, moments later, laughs it off, explaining to him that she knew he wouldn’t rape her.
Michel’s awareness of the ignominy of his actions is marked by his pseudonym, which signals them as premeditated, not a spontaneous outburst of sudden desire but a plan for a sexual experience that would either break or steady his relationship with Irène. His aggression seems to have left Jacqueline unfazed (whether bravely, proudly, self-defensively, or resignedly) but leaves Michel devastated. The gratuitous act obliterates both his self-image and his indecision, sparking not just a split with Irène but a total rupture with the social fabric of his present life. (One thing that ultimately salves his conscience regarding the breakup is Élisabeth’s indiscreet disclosure of “an encounter—such a big, grand word, ‘encounter,’ isn’t it?—anyway, from a little misunderstanding” that had taken place, months earlier, between her son and Irène.) The novel’s subtle yet brutal psychology is only the manifestation of a literary thread that binds the novel together, erotically, at the level of language itself—or, rather, at the level of the book’s subject matter, which, before it’s a question of dining and swimming, driving and talking, making plans and disclosing secrets, is bodies themselves.
Cinema is the great compensatory art, the one that artistic temperaments frustrated by the practice of a classical art form turn to when there’s no other outlet left. Rohmer’s passion for movies was awakened around the time “Élisabeth” was published, or, perhaps significantly, just afterward, when his book failed to make an impression on the world of literature. By 1947, Rohmer was watching lots of movies at ciné-clubs, and the foundation of his own ciné-club and a film journal, his critical essays, and his first steps as an independent filmmaker came in short order. But he didn’t quite renounce literature, either: in 1949, he submitted to Gallimard a volume of short stories, “Moral Tales,” which was turned down.
Though he made films throughout the fifties, it took Rohmer, the elder statesman of the New Wave, a while to get his directorial career going. His first completed feature-length movie, “The Sign of Leo,” shot in 1959, wasn’t released until 1962. While waiting, he jump-started his career with an inspired decision: to film his Moral Tales, which he adapted, between 1962 and 1972, into two shorts and four features (including “Claire’s Knee” and “My Night at Maud’s”) that made his name as a filmmaker. The result was the creation of the Éric Rohmer film, a genre unto itself—of stories of romantic intricacy, paying close attention to the behavioral fine points of middle-class people, told largely through abundant dialogue, filmed in modest and unflashy images, presenting the action with quasi-documentary geographical specificity.
Rohmer’s great concept was to translate literature—his own literature—into cinema by means of a distinctive cinematic form that was, in a sense, the absence of form, or, rather, a style which, as reserved as it may be, reverberates with the sheer power of his self-consciousness about form. The contrast between “Élisabeth” and his films is one that Rohmer himself characterized in the book’s supplementary interview: “As a novelist, I considered myself modern; as a filmmaker, I’m considered classical. (Though I can’t say I completely agree with that.)” The modernism of “Élisabeth” is in its teeming detail, its rhetorical interplay of observation and subjectivity, its wide variety of formats and methods. What Rohmer discovered in cinema was that the elaborate, rhetorically intricate, tonally disjunctive modernism of literature, of his literature, could be achieved in movies by way of radical simplicity, because cinema offers, in its images, what the succession of words and of lines of print on a page can’t: simultaneity.
The cinema offers in a glance what it takes the narrator a page of description to capture, and then offers still more. The sheer fact of filming fills a frame, even one composed with quasi-documentary plainness, with a plethora of details of narrative, expressive, aesthetic, intellectual, and historical import. But Rohmer was right to put an asterisk on his cinematic classicism: it doesn’t bring to mind the familiar and canonical manner of classic Hollywood or its leading auteurs (for whom he had, as a critic, been a discerning advocate). His self-consciousness about the power of movies—their inherent and instant richness of description, their automatic profuse multiplicity—raised movies to the level of high art by way of a disarming simplicity, without emphatic visual rhetoric, spectacular effects, or theatrical grandiosity. With movies, Rohmer achieved clarity along with complexity, dispelling the Post-Impressionist blurring of lines and the modernist veiling of figures that marked the difficulty, however sublime, of "Élisabeth."
But, far from repudiating the subjects and themes of “Élisabeth,” Rohmer pursued his directorial career by extending and deepening them. Most of his films have a master plot—the rejection of false loves, however tempting, in anticipation of one true love—which is to say that they’re films of faith and fate, the conversion of accidents into destinies. They’re also films of refusal, rejection, self-denial, and frustration. (These themes mirror his own Catholic observance and, for that matter, his political conservatism.) In lieu of the finely variegated texture of his intricate prose, Rohmer’s films offer transparent but reflective surfaces that are as taut as they are thin, and which are pressurized by passion, stretched tight by these conflicts; they strain against the pent-up force of unsatisfied desire and threaten to burst.
These built-in tensions distinguish Rohmer’s films not merely in theme but in kind, from the common work of his emulators, in his own time and since (he died in 2010), who understand them merely as romantic films of dialogue-heavy urbanity and intellectual refinement. The dialectically deft characters in his movies aren’t talking heads but talking bodies, elaborating a world of cultural and rhetorical elegance from the sublimation of lust and the dream of love. Rohmer’s great literary achievement is twofold—artistic success and worldly failure—which gave rise to his cinema of substitute gratifications, second chances, and miraculous redemptions. His near-miss with “Élisabeth” proved to be his unexpected destiny, his good fortune, and the world’s. ♦