Desire destroys, consumes my mortal fears,
Transforming me into a shape of flame.
I will come out, back to your world of tears,
A stronger soul within a finer frame.
—Claude McKay, “Baptism”
The release of the first English translation of Eric Rohmer’s novel Élisabeth is a welcome occasion for cinephiles. Many will find here a first opportunity to explore another dimension of the esteemed auteur’s approach to narrative art. Rohmer’s subtle and sensitive storytelling, for which he is justly famous, springs ultimately from a cultivated literary mind. His ability to craft shrewd yet innocent characters and the stifling scenarios that bind them began with an ambition to write fiction, long before he ever sought to enter the world of cinema. Readers fond of the Six Moral Tales, Comedies and Proverbs, and Tales of the Four Seasons will, therefore, discover a consistency of structure and tone in Rohmer’s only published work of fiction.
The reissue of Élisabeth also presents opportunities to further explore Rohmer as a Catholic narrative artist. Few can dispute that Rohmer’s faith figures into his filmmaking, but new access to his fiction invites comparisons to other Catholic writers that were hardly conceivable until now. While he cited William Faulkner and John Dos Passos as primary influences on Élisabeth, Rohmer was unquestionably versed in the Catholic literary tradition in France. His own critical writing reflects a thorough familiarity with the likes of J. K. Huysmans, Leon Bloy, Charles Peguy, Georges Bernanos, and François Mauriac, all of whom were not only read widely but celebrated in Rohmer’s time, and some of whom were even his contemporaries. Élisabeth is Rohmer’s only novel, published a decade before he entered the world of film; while it is largely immature and does not rise to the level of his forebears, hints of continuity pervade the text.
Many aspects of Élisabeth overlap particularly with Mauriac and his novel The Desert of Love. The novels, respectively, were published roughly twenty years apart and are set just fifteen years apart, Élisabeth just before the onset of World War II and The Desert of Love in the mid-1920s. In both works, interior life is front and center, though Mauriac’s omniscient narrative voice reflects the broader French tradition whose inheritance he acknowledges, revealing the interiority of his characters with a painter’s detail, and Rohmer’s prose is instead mostly economical and strongly reminiscent of the screenplays he would later write, reporting present thoughts and actions with a detached perspective, and leaving the subtle encounters between characters to reveal their own meaning.
Though the novels are set close in time, the two reading experiences are vastly different. The translations of each novel were made eighty years apart, so the difference in rendering French is not negligible, but Rohmer, who wrote Élisabeth during the Second World War, writes with a thoroughly contemporary voice, one that sounds conscious of the radical shifts in culture and humanism that the war concretized. The dialogue is naturally bare, at times almost disinterested, mirroring the characters who are on vacation and always swimming and hardly clothed. It suggests an intentional lack of seriousness. The Desert of Love, in contrast, is bundled up in more refined prose. The world of the novel appears Victorian: The characters dress in layers of lavish clothing, and their table manners signal their state of mind. Mauriac’s approach to the experience of love, compared to Rohmer’s efficiency, appears flowery and extravagant.
It is the peak of summer; the heat is sweltering, and the weather reflects the bottled up pressure in their souls that searches aggressively for an outlet.
Each story surrounds a pair of men in the throes of frustrated desire. In Élisabeth, Bernard and Michel are vacationing in the house of the titular character, who shares a name with the prophet’s mother and presides over her household; Bernard, sharing a name with the abbot of Clairvaux, is paralyzed by the invisible barriers he perceives between himself and Claire, his cousin with whom he has fallen in love. “I’m so gullible when it comes to Claire,” he repeats, accusing himself. His conversations with her prove it: “I always believe what she’s telling me.” Michel, whose name asks “Who is like God?,” is at an emotional crossroads with Irène, his long-standing lover. He begins to think he hates her, but the idea repulses and antagonizes him, and he feels stuck. “It had hit him in the chest, that feeling, a little below his throat; he would have liked to remain motionless, eyes lost in the contemplation of something, anything . . . since nothing has any power over an immobile or insensible man.” It is the peak of summer; the heat is sweltering, and the weather reflects the bottled up pressure in their souls that searches aggressively for an outlet. Both Bernard and Michel encounter other women who offer reprieve from their internal anguish, but their empty pursuits will only reveal the hidden wellsprings in their original loves.
In The Desert of Love, a father and son independently fall in love with the same woman, Maria Cross, who has recently lost her young child. Once they each realize their affection, it fast becomes painful. Paul Courrèges, the father and a much-beloved doctor in his Paris neighborhood, encounters Maria first in the context of her son’s death, and she later becomes his patient. The more his relationship with his wife cools off, the more Paul is drawn to Maria’s presence, pining deeply for the “few moments” in her apartment “filled with concentrated watching and impassioned silence, when to look was all the satisfaction he desired.” Paul’s son, Raymond, starts to notice Maria on the daily trolley that he takes, and after a brief initial conversation with her one day, Raymond finds himself obsessed: “Maria Cross! The name choked him like a clot of blood. He could taste its warm saltiness in his mouth.”
In both works, desire triangulates the relationship between the pairs of men. At one point, Élisabeth discusses Bernard with Michel and observes, “Things have been a little . . . tense between the two of you, haven’t they? . . . Things haven’t been going so well between you.” Bernard and Michel are hardly ever in each other’s presence over the course of the novel, but Élisabeth draws attention to an obscure row that Bernard had with Irène prior to the narrative. Their separate pursuits of women reveal to the matriarch their respective dispositions and flaws of temperament. Once Élisabeth brings the facts out into the open, the men’s ire cools off and peace ensues.
In The Desert of Love, instead that desire is shared, binding father and son in a way that presents as dangerous, adding rivalry to their deeply felt strife. From the first conversation that begins to reveal their affection for Maria Cross, the tension comes into stark relief: “Though they had been drawn together by a mutual desire to sing Maria Cross’s praises, their very first words set father and son at odds. . . . They could not see one another, but each could sense hostility in the other, though they kept their voices low. They had been brought together for a moment by the name of Maria Cross, and it was her name that separated them now.” Rather than bringing peace, the acknowledgment of conflict further accentuates their dissonance: “The man walked with head high: the youth kept his eyes fixed upon the ground and vented his ill-humor by kicking at a pine-cone.”
The levers of change in Élisabeth and The Desert of Love come through shifts in weather. Rain begins to fall after Michel walks out on Irène and directly before Bernard meets Huguette. Élisabeth is the first to forecast it (“It looks like it’s going to rain”), just as the boys set out on their diverted escapades. Similarly, storms precede the confrontations between Paul and Maria, Maria and Raymond. Maria, the first to observe the storms, weaves the sight with her internal turmoil: “In the stiffness of her drawing-room, in the drowsy heat of the garden, their love would burgeon into words. . . . The storm within her breast would find relief in rain.”
In Rohmer’s novel, the men get drenched, not only from rain but from the river that runs through town. Bernard and Michel follow their new objects of longing into the river for a swim. Bernard first gets soaked trying to seek shelter from the rain under a tree with Huguette, whom he has never met before and with whom he is fast enamored: “She was leaning on the tree, her knee against the trunk, her bare wrist brushing the stiff cloth of the rain jacket. He felt himself shiver.” When the rain passes, Bernard finds that the river brings no comfort. The chill he feels from the rain only deepens the longer he stays in the water, and the chillier his inner and outer temperature, the more he fails to make any progress with Huguette, who early on laments that when it comes to men and women, “everything just devolves into flirtation.” She tells him outright, “If you’re here looking to flirt, you’re wasting your time.” Very quickly, “He could feel his body gradually growing as cold as the water,” so that by the time he exits the river with Huguette, “He could no longer feel the weight of his body, nor of the water, which was as hard and sharp now as it had ever been.” Disarmed, humbled, and irritated, Bernard behaves erratically as he drives the girl back to town, speeding at “four times the limit.” They nearly run into a car in front of them; Bernard brakes hard, and Huguette, frightened and embarrassed, gets out of the car to walk the rest of the way.
On the other side of town, Michel, in his own car, offers a ride to a girl named Jacqueline, who is meeting her friends at the river. Michel, mysteriously, hides his identity and refers to himself by his cousin’s name instead as he accepts Jacqueline’s invitation to join her group for the afternoon. For Michel, the water does not chill, but it muddies and obscures vision: “The rain hadn’t noticeably cooled the water; merely clouded it with mud, so that you imagined the grit would sting if you opened your eyes underwater.” In contrast with Huguette, Jacqueline quietly entertains an interest in Michel; she rides back to town with him after the swim, and when they park, she allows Michel to caress her. After a short while, she tries to get up to leave, but Michel restrains her in the seat, preventing her from reaching the door. The scene is awkward and unsettling, but eventually Michel lets go without doing anything to her. He chooses that moment, oddly, to forgo his forged identity and admit that his name isn’t actually Bernard. He even asks Jacqueline what other kind of woman might be his type. His behavior following her response (“I could certainly see you with a woman a little older”) initiates not a radical change but a waking from a kind of slumber; her words direct him, mutely yet definitively, right back to Irène, whom he had abandoned. He returns to her shortly after Jacqueline leaves.
Mauriac positions the climax for both father and son in the private rooms of Maria Cross. The escalating tension is almost completely cognitive; as Paul prepares to visit Maria, he daydreams, imagining, line by line, how the moment would unfold when he finally unveils the depth of his love for her and she, in turn, opens herself to him. “So obsessed was he by the anticipated interview with this woman,” Mauriac writes, “that he could think of nothing but the words he had decided must pass between them.” A rainstorm presses heavily on the anticipation: “Suddenly the sun stopped shining, and the walking folk turned apprehensive eyes to where a heavy cloud was creeping across the sky. Someone said that he had felt a drop of rain, but after a few moments the sun once more came out. No, the storm would not break until the last bull had been put out of its agony.”
The weather runs silently and unexceptionally as objective correlative; as above, so below.
But when Paul actually arrives at Maria’s room, the result is brief and anything but climactic. “How different, already,” he thinks, as anyone would, “everything was from what he had been imagining!” No bull is pulled out of its agony; on the contrary, a short exchange finds that Maria’s affection runs on a two-way street with his, and a joke from Maria about his vulnerability with her stings him, compelling him to leave. Brilliantly, Mauriac withholds any sense of the weather until the end of the scene, when Maria merely remarks, “Wait till the shower’s over.” Paul departs abruptly and definitively, resolved not to see her again. “She offered him an umbrella,” Mauriac continues, “which at first he accepted, only, a moment later, to refuse, because he had caught himself thinking, I shall have to bring it back: that will give me a chance to see her again.” The weather runs silently and unexceptionally as objective correlative; as above, so below.
In Raymond’s case, Maria’s desire comes to the fore as she anticipates his visit. “She too, pacing like a beast the garden or the empty rooms, yielded (how else could her misery find an issue?) little by little to the fascination of a hopeless love, a love that could offer nothing but the wretched happiness of a self-consuming anguish.” Over time, after they eventually become acquainted through frequent trolley rides, Maria becomes enchanted with the innocence of Raymond’s youth, which seems to offer a balm to her wasted existence. “I am already a woman burned up by life, she thought, a woman lost, while he has about him still the magic of childhood.” Appropriately, when Raymond appears at her door, her first instinct is elation. “He was pressing his face to the glass, amusing himself by squashing his nose flat. Was this rising tide of feeling in her joy?”
But as with Paul, the disenchantment comes so swiftly that Maria hardly notices. After some attempts to compliment his appearance and cordially discuss his father, Maria discovers that the intimacy she conjured in her mind was just a handful of dust. “Seeing him there in the flesh, she could not fill the void between the endless agitation of her heart and the being who had caused it. She did not know that she was disappointed.” Raymond remains intent on his goal of procuring her affection, and as they continue to talk past each other, Maria again notices the weather, which now demonstrates an even more suffocating tension: “It’s stifling in here—just as though it hadn’t rained at all! But I can still hear the storm.” Immediately after her remark, Raymond takes hold of Maria and attempts to force himself on her. The scene parallels that of Michel and Jacqueline in Élisabeth: Raymond grabs her by the wrists, and Maria uncomfortably laughs and struggles to escape. Once free, she quickly humiliates him, not out of charity but fear. “So you really think, my child,” she asks, “that you can take a woman by force?”
The force of her retort, combined with her address of him as “child,” renders Raymond powerless. “She was still there in the flesh, but he knew with a sure knowledge that from now on he could no more touch her than he could have touched a star.” Raymond is desperate for manhood, and throughout the novel, he gravitates toward the idea that manhood depends on his ability to possess a woman’s body, by coercion if necessary. With his failure and Maria’s rebuttal, Raymond’s temporary shame alters the path of his life, previously contorted by his dissolute pursuits of women. When, later in the novel, Paul falls ill and Raymond goes to take care of him, the son is no longer recognizable:
The sick man woke before his watcher and gazed in amazement at the child sitting there, his head drooping, seemingly without life, as though sleep had killed him. . . . The congested patch beneath his eye had obviously been caused by a fist. But there were other scars on his neck, on his shoulder, and on his chest, scars that had the form of a human mouth.
For both Rohmer and Mauriac, water, in various forms, yields a kind of baptismal effect. Baptism is not simply a birth into new life; it also cuts the soul off from an old life. In Élisabeth and The Desert of Love, lovers are cut off from the stirring but ultimately deadening thrills that seemed to promise liberation. Masculine loves become recalibrated to the original, substantive, and surprisingly life-giving relationships, romantic and familial, that had once seemed all but ruinous. Bernard, stilted by his escapade with Huguette, returns to the warmth of Claire’s affection, the gullibility with her that he once detested now clearly the better path. He confesses his rash behavior with Huguette to Claire, who lets him pull her close. “You’re acting so funny today,” she says. “So strange, so . . . inoffensive.” His offensive behavior, he has realized, leaves him nothing but fatigue, and he finds rest from it in her arms. Rohmer resolves Bernard’s arc with characteristic curtness:
“You don’t even know what you’re saying anymore.”
“I’m very tired,” he said.
He kissed her.
Michel’s rapprochement with Irène is also curt but exceptionally full of biblical resonance. He finds her in a garden, collecting plums off the ground. The first thing she asks of him is “Take one.” The plums have a “slightly cloying odor” and are a little dirty, but Irène, joking with him, reminds him of his own earthliness: “A little dirt will do you good.” She continues to compel him to eat plums, and when he begins to protest, she reminds him, like a prelapsarian Eve: “Nobody’s forcing you.” “You’re right,” he replies, “you’re right: I’m helping myself.” Here in the garden, Michel remembers the fruit-bearing love that he had in the first place. As the pair continue to eat, they begin to reconcile, and in lucid recollection of Peter’s reconciliation with Christ, Irène asks Michel three times, “You aren’t angry with me, are you?” Michel denies it each time, thus reaffirming his love for her, and saying at the end, “But why should I be angry with you, you make me laugh.” At the scene’s end, no longer pressed to eat the fruit, he actively seeks it: “He rises, leaning against her, and reaches for the basket.”
Raymond and Paul are at first separated by scorn and shame and, for years, set off on widely different paths after their pursuits of Maria. Raymond spends his adult life “cadging and pimping,” and Paul enters softly and sadly into old age. By blind chance, in his mid-thirties, Raymond encounters Maria with her husband, Victor, in a bar, and the apparition forces him to reckon with the unreckoned turmoil in his heart: “For years Raymond Courreges had been cherishing the hope that one day he might run across Maria Cross, the woman on whom he had so ardently longed to be revenged.” Their conversation in the bar is uneasy, and they are awkwardly interrupted by Victor’s woeful drunken condition. Maria asks Raymond to help her get Victor home, and Raymond returns to the room where his fate was first bent.
Victor, it turns out, needs medical attention after a hard fall. Raymond remembers his dad’s presence in Paris, and Maria rings him up. “They [Paul and Raymond] had not seen one another since Grandmamma Courrèges had died three years before. . . . When the doctor raised his head he hardly knew him. Yet he realized that this old man who smiled and put his arm about his shoulder was his father.” With Raymond looking on, Paul briefly tends to Victor before prescribing some remedies, and then Maria promptly goes to see them both out. At the door, Paul makes a small attempt to rekindle her affection, but Maria staunchly resists, relegating their relationship to the occasional cordial letter: “I shall write to you, doctor, and you shall have the dreary duty of replying.”
“There could be no hope for either of them . . . unless, before they died, He should reveal Himself who, unknown to them, had drawn and summoned from the depths of their beings this burning, bitter tide.”
Raymond observes all of this in silence, and makes no move of his own toward Maria before they leave. Earlier, waiting for Paul to arrive and while Maria remained with Victor, Raymond confronted, again, the same powerlessness that she had once handed down to him. This time, there is no cowardly pull toward revenge or lame domination. He responds instead with humble, inward submission:
Better than most he knew what mere youthfulness can achieve with a woman who has been drained dry, how magically it can overcome antipathies and preferences, shame and remorse, what pricking curiosity, what appetites it can wake. But now he was without a weapon. Looking at himself he felt as a man might who goes into battle with a broken sword.
When he leaves Maria’s house with Paul, therefore, there is a strange sense of peace. Mauriac’s description of their departure in their taxi hints at a foreign first innocence: “It was like the old days when they sat together in the carriage with its streaming windows on a suburban road. At first they said no more to one another than they had used to do in that forgotten time. But there was a difference in the quality of their silence. The old man was sagging with weariness and leaned against his son. Raymond held his hand.” A remedial and moving exchange follows, in which Paul repents of the lust he has committed in his heart and the saving grace that Raymond and the whole family have provided for him. “To have a wife, children, about one, pressing in on one,” he says, “is a sort of protection against all the undesirable distractions of outside life. . . . A few casual infidelities would have brought me far less sorrow than the long-drawn-out disloyalty of desire of which I have been guilty for the last thirty years.”
When Paul makes ready to leave Paris, Raymond goes for a walk and reflects for a last time on Maria. As the men in Élisabeth do, Raymond “hastened towards the river [in this case the Seine],” briefly possessed by a furious longing for what might have been. “He was oppressed by the intolerable conviction that he would never possess Maria Cross, that he would die without ever having her. . . . On the brink of this appalling emptiness, of this day without Maria, which was to be but the first of many other days without her, he was made aware, at one and the same moment, of his dependence and his solitude.” The narrator, omnisciently, pronounces that father and son, through Maria Cross, have arrived at an inflection point: “There could be no hope for either of them . . . unless, before they died, He should reveal Himself who, unknown to them, had drawn and summoned from the depths of their beings this burning, bitter tide.” It is then that Raymond “crossed the deserted Seine,” a French Jordan.
A passage at the end of Élisabeth deviates radically from the rest of the novel. Rohmer begins it with a description of the air in Élisabeth’s garden, which is full of symbols that he uses to construct an encomium of humankind that is strikingly didactic. In perhaps the most direct address to the audience in his entire artistic oeuvre, Rohmer praises the human spirit and the beauty of desire: “Flowers and trees take until noon to recover their summertime fullness, but men wake all at once: For them the beauty of the morning is a bitter and invigorating tonic; man wasn’t intended to ponder the world and play catch-up, but rather to get out ahead of its hatching, ahead of that vast blossoming of phenomena that will thicken the air around his head as the hours advance, that burgeoning substantiality of things through which he’ll have to force his way.” The human being must attune his desire to the higher ends that bring flourishing, rather than constrain himself through sloth to a life of “playing catch-up.” With Mauriac, Rohmer does not have high confidence in individuals to achieve this attuning on their own; a “burning, bitter tide,” summoned from outside himself, must bring the human being to life by purging desire of disorder, by rousing the creature made to wake the dawn and lead creation in praise (Ps 57:8). The soul, to discover beatitude, must be marked with living water. It is the purging, rather than remote self-determination, that gives Rohmer (following Mauriac) an enduring hope:
For now he feels as light as the morning air as it slips in through the fabric of his shirt, his jacket, sheathing his arms, his belly, his chest, as frigid as the water of the river; but he doesn’t try to linger in that chill, he races forward, content to make use of his strength for as long as he feels it alive within him, strong and clear: a current.