A Marriage of Woolf and Proust Performed by Albert Cohen: Review Essay

A Marriage of Woolfand Proust Performed by Albert Cohen: Review Essay A Marriage of Woolf and Proust Performed by Albert Cohen Review Essay Steven Bowman University of Cincinnati 145 Belle du Seigneur, by Albert Cohen, translated by David Coward. New York: Penguin, 1996 (c). 974 pp. $34.95; 1998 (p). 320 pp. $15.95. Imagine a dapper middle-aged man dressed in a fine tweed jacket that covers a gold cuff-linked silk shirt with a natty silk cravat, his loins barely covered by red silk shorts. His feet are pampered by the finest antelope slippers, in hand, a black meerschaum cigarette holder from which the constant Gaulois wafts a lightly fragrant trail as he paces back and forth. From his lips streams forth a continuous torrent of images, peppered with an occasional "Strike this and add ...." For hours on end, day after year, his current lover sits in a high backed chair taking down, with loving care, each memorable phrase. Neither she nor he cares for commas, and so the pages are filled with a spreading flood of simile and metaphor in such elegant French idiom (sans grammaire) that the book, which is but the remnant (continually reworked and expanded) from the 3000 pages he had written and from which he had already extracted for publication those pages about the ribald antics ofhis Adriatic relatives (Mangeclous [1938; English Nailcruncher, 1940]), was awarded the French Academy's Grand Prix du Roman after its belated appearance in 1968. The story line is simple: boy plans to seduce girl, and the vicissitudes follow. The style the author adopts is more interesting. He has clearly paddled through the interminable pages of internal monologue and psychological play of Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce, respectively the seminal advocates of the new modernist style ofmeditative ramblings. Cohen fights with each, although he mentions only Proust by name, since it is he whom Cohen uses as a foil as well as model. He appears to satirize Woolf in the descriptions of his heroine's literary aspirations, her reading of Bergson, the private language of animal similes she shared with her husband (three pages of internal monologue mention a squirrel, a baby lion, a jumbo elephant, beavers, koalas, a sparrow-owl, toads), the passing ofboth her parents and siblings, her brief homosexual escapade (with a Russian named Varvara-shades of Orlando's 146 SHOFAR Spring 1999 Vol. 17, No.3 Sasha, the Russian Princess, which becomes more explicit in a later internal monologue; p. 597), and her family's literary skills. "I have decided to become a great novelist. But this is my first shot at writing and I need the practice. It would be a good wheeze to write down in this notebook everything that comes into my head about my family and myself. Then, when I've got a hundred or so pages together, I'll go back and use all the true things I've written for the start of my novel, pausing only to change the names (p. 7). . . . sometimes when he looks· at me the ends of both smosob get so hard that it's embarrassing they must show through my dress I worry in case they'll poke right through the material why I am becoming so dreadfully feminine I'd rather like to be a man but only in one department the rest I'd keep feminine hips breasts in fact the combination would be the perfect human being don't be silly everything is fine as it is don't change a thing let a man be a man and a woman a woman what sickens me is that I am so humble it started with my Russian salaaming it set the tone for our relationship ... (p. 597)" The latter quote is from Ariane's internal Joycian monologue that continues from p. 583 to p. 601. While Cohen needles Sartre and mentions Gide, his text has been described as vulgar by more refined readers, although it never sinks to the level ofpornography characteristic of Genet's style-modestly Ariane spells bosoms backwards. It is more in his parody of love, eternally proclaimed but boringly endured, that the author...