In defence of Irène Némirovsky
Sir, – As the translator of eight of Irène Némirovsky’s novels into English, I
take offence at Naomi Price’s recent attack on this author and her
outrageous claim that The Dogs and the Wolves would have been welcomed by a
Nazi publishing house (October 30). In this novel, Némirovsky illustrates
the lengths to which immigrants went in order to escape poverty and be
assimilated. She criticizes rich Jews for displaying the same prejudices
against their poor brothers as certain sections of French society did –
hardly a pro-Nazi sentiment. By the end of the novel, it is clear that
assimilation is not possible, a lesson that Némirovsky would learn herself,
in the most tragic way.
While Price emphasizes the Jewish stereotypes in the novel, she omits to
mention the four-page anti-Semitic, xenophobic diatribe by the Catholic
banker, Delarcher, which is meant to fill us with revulsion. At one point,
she writes: “Everything that came from the East aroused insurmountable
mistrust within him. Slavonic, Levantine, Jewish – he didn’t know which of
these terms disgusted him the most”. And later: “His hostility was perhaps
based on physical impressions”. This is an essential idea: Némirovsky’s
stereotypes are descriptions with no emotive content to those who are not
anti-Semitic, but when seen from the perspective of characters like
Delarcher, they are transformed into vicious prejudice. This novel examines
various types of prejudice – Catholics towards Jews, the rich towards the
poor, the French towards foreigners. The crux of Némirovsky’s dilemma as a
novelist was the fact that anti-Semitism in France during the 1930s was so
rife that Jewish immigrants were stereotyped and rejected. The only way to
be accepted was to assimilate, and the easiest way to assimilate was to be
wealthy. Price states that all the Jews in this novel are depicted as “poor
and unpleasant or rich and unpleasant”, yet this is blatantly untrue: Ada,
Ada’s father (who takes in his sister-in-law and her two children when his
brother dies), her grandfather and all the poor Jews who are simply trying
to survive poverty and prejudice are glossed over in this reading.
Price also points to the letters Michel Epstein wrote to try to get his wife
released from the concentration camp, implying they are “proof” of
Némirovsky’s own anti-Semitism. It is clear from other correspondence
between Epstein and the authorities that he was being advised what to say in
order to free his wife. He even offered to exchange himself for her, not
knowing that she was already dead. Price goes on to mention the family’s
conversion to Catholicism; this has been raised many times with Denise
Epstein, Irène Némirovsky’s surviving daughter. Her reply is always the
same: it was September 1939. The family believed that converting would
protect them. Sadly, they were wrong. Denise Epstein remains adamant that
while living a secular lifestyle her family identified as Jewish and were
proud of their heritage, a sentiment Némirovsky expressed in an interview in
1930 when she stated that she was Jewish and proud of it. Denise Epstein
never recalls “practising” Catholicism as a family. However, when they lived
in Issy-l’Évêque in Burgundy, they were required to wear the yellow star,
and did so.
Before subscribing to the assertions made by Naomi Price, your readers should
consider the works first-hand, and draw their own conclusions. The Holocaust
Museum in New York held a successful exhibition on the life and works of
Irène Némirovsky last year, and plans for the exhibition to go to the Shoah
Museum in Paris are under way.
SANDRA SMITH
Robinson College, Cambridge.
Herbert Spencer at billiards
Sir, – At the end of his review praising the latest edition of The Oxford
Companion to English Literature, edited by Dinah Birch (October 30), Henry
Hitchings mentions some “unexpected gems”, remarking about one of them that
he did not know “that it was at the Savile Club that Robert Louis Stevenson
was supposed to have said that ‘to play billiards well was the sign of an
ill-spent youth’; nor indeed that he said it to Herbert Spencer. Excellence
is in the details”.
Unfortunately, these details are wrong. As Herbert Spencer’s official
biographer took the trouble to learn from the philosopher himself, the
remark was actually made by a judicial friend of Spencer’s, Charles Roupell,
repeated by Spencer with attribution, but picked up in the newspapers as a
remark of his own.
“Then from time to time it went the round of the papers”, Spencer continued,
“and having dropped for a while, re-appeared in other papers (provincial
included), always with variations and additions: the result being a
cock-and-bull story, having no basis whatever further than the fact that I
once repeated this saying of Roupell’s apropos of nobody.” See David Duncan,
Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer, London, 1908, pp298–9, available from
Google Books. The attribution through Spencer to Roupell is given correctly
in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (2nd ed, 1966), citing Duncan.
It would be interesting to know when and by whom the remark was attributed to
Robert Louis Stevenson. As a “gem” it is not even new to this edition of the
Oxford Companion. It first appeared in the fifth edition, edited by Margaret
Drabble (1985), the first edition with an entry for the Savile Club.
Stevenson was a great admirer of Spencer but they never met, at the Savile
Club or anywhere else.
ROGER G. SWEARINGEN
829 Spring Street, Santa Rosa, California 95404.
To read Henry Hitching's review of the Oxford Companion to English Literature,
click here.
Welsh Edinburgh
Sir, – Over forty years ago when studying for my English O level, we were
taught not to mix metaphors. Thus I find it hard to understand why Patrick
McGuinness has mentioned the Mabinogion and the Goddodin in reference to the
work of Lynette Roberts (Commentary, November 6). The former is a collection
of Celtic mythology, Arthurian Romance and an intriguing interpretation of
early British history, mainly set in the west of Wales. The latter is a poem
in the classic heroic mode of a warband who leave Welsh-speaking
sixth-century Edinburgh, yes Edinburgh, on a doomed attack on the
AngloSaxons at Catterick. Perhaps it is because all three are vaguely Welsh
and the Goddodin was written in wartime. I know my English teacher would not
have allowed such metaphors in his classroom.
JOHN OWEN
6 Ludlow Street, Caerphilly.
Hofmannsthal
Sir, – Paul Reitter, reviewing a selection of the writings of Hugo von
Hofmannsthal in various genres titled The Whole Difference (November 6),
concludes that this 500-page book “feels, in the end, like not enough”. In
2007, Angel Books published a selection of Hofmannsthal’s short fiction,
Selected Tales, containing seven stories compared to the three included in
The Whole Difference. Paul Reitter comments on the mixed quality of the
translations in the volume under review, done by different hands at
different times. Our purpose in publishing Selected Tales was to make
available in English the pick of Hofmannsthal’s trailblazing early modernist
stories in one readily accessible volume for the first time, newly
translated and with a substantial introduction by a carefully chosen
translator, J. M. Q. Davies. On the quality of his translations your
reviewer would have duly commented had a review appeared in the TLS; I as
publisher am not entitled to do so in your columns.
ANTONY WOOD
Angel Books, 3 Kelross Road, London N5.
To read Paul Reitter's review of The Whole Difference, click here.
D. H. Lawrence
Sir, – John Worthen (Letters, November 6) charges me with misreading “England,
My England”, but I was only pointing out that it was likely to be misread by
readers of the stridently anti-German English Review in 1915, since
Lawrence’s German with a “red sweating face” who “cut and mutilated the face
of the dead man” is very close to the uncontrolled and cruel Hun of wartime
mythology. Lawrence’s intention was indeed almost certainly different, but
publication in this context shows a certain naivety.
His military awareness was also shaky. By the time a new recruit like Evelyn
had been trained and sent to France, there were no more chances of
small-scale skirmishes between small groups of English gunners and parties
of roaming German cavalrymen, since the impassable trenches now stretched
from the coast to Switzerland. In addition, the “machine-guns” he describes
fire one shot at a time, at distant unseen targets; Lawrence seems to have
confused machine guns with field artillery.
GEORGE SIMMERS
1 Easthill Close, Brackley.
A Toucan
Sir, – Dorothy L. Sayers had already left the S. H. Benson advertising agency
when she was invited to make the original poem by Sir John Gilroy more
respectable (see NB, October 30):
A wonderful bird is the pelican,
Its mouth can hold more than its belly can.
It can hold in its beak
Enough for a week:
I simply don’t know how the helly can.
She obligingly transformed the pelican into a toucan:
If he can say as you can
Guinness is good for you
How grand to be a Toucan
Just think what Toucan do
And that, wrote Gilroy (in August 1981), “was how the Toucan was born”.
BARBARA REYNOLDS
220 Milton Road, Cambridge.
‘Groatsworth’
Sir, – The debate on authorship of Greene’s Groatsworth of Witte (1592) may
not have been definitively resolved, as Alan D. Hawkins claims (Letters,
October 9). Since Richard Westley’s study in 2005, Donna N. Murphy has
undertaken a careful analysis of the vocabulary of Groatsworth and
identified fifty-five words used there but not elsewhere in Greene’s
writings. Eighteen of these words do, however, appear in the works of
Greene’s enemy Gabriel Harvey, who also had the skill, knowledge and
motivation to write Groatsworth in an attempt to destroy the reputation of
the literary enemy who had heaped scorn on his recently deceased brother.
The results of Donna Murphy’s work were published in Notes and Queries in
2007.
MARTYN EVERETT
11 Gibson Gardens, Saffron Walden.
Playmakers
Sir, – Alex Wade remarks (in his review of Philippe Auclair’s Cantona, In
Brief, November 6) that, as a deep-lying “playmaker and scorer”, Stan Bowles
“anticipated Cantona by two decades”. But the primus auctor of this role in
British football was surely Don Revie, with the so-called Revie Plan in the
early 1950s.
A. J. WOODMAN
Department of Classics, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia
22904.
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