On Love and Politics

I’ve been enjoying writing about artistic couples, but it’s been troubling me that these love affairs all end so tragically. So today I’m going to tell a different kind of story about a deeply happy marriage and a profoundly intriguing literary collaboration. The marriage in question is between the two writers, Simone and André Schwarz-Bart, neither of whom may be familiar to audiences today although they were both very well-known writers back in the 60s and 70s. Everything was extraordinary about their relationship, starting with its interracial dimension. André Schwarz-Bart began life as Abraham Szwarcbart in Metz in eastern France in 1928 among working class Jews who spoke Yiddish. In 1939 when he was 12, his family was evacuated to the interior of France and two years later the Nazis arrested and deported his parents, his older brother, his little sister and his great aunt. André became head of the family, taking on farm jobs to keep his younger brothers fed. He made contact with the Resistance movement, who helped to save his siblings from deportation, and he joined them, fighting for France both in clandestine activities and in the regular army. He never saw his parents again. André Schwarz-Bart was one of those amazing people who transform intolerable hardship into courage, persistence and resilience. After the war he worked as a manual laborer, teaching himself French until he could pass the difficult Baccalauréat exams, enroll in the University of Sorbonne, and begin to write.

The novel he produced, The Last of the Just, (Le Dernier des justes), was a huge success and won the Prix Goncourt in 1959. It traces a family of Jews from 1185 up until the death of its main protagonist, Ernie Lévy at Auschwitz. The title comes from the Jewish tradition that in every generation there are 36 righteous people on the earth who cause God to keep the world going: “According to [tradition], the world reposes upon thirty-six Just Men, the Lamed-Vov, indistinguishable from simple mortals; often they are unaware of their station. But if just one of them were lacking, the sufferings of mankind would poison even the souls of the newborn, and humanity would suffocate with a single cry. For the Lamed-Vov are the hearts of the world multiplied, and into them, as into one receptacle, pour all our griefs.” Schwarz-Bart wanted to be clear that it was not a novel about the Shoah, but it is, undeniably, a novel that seeks to witness oppression and unbearable heartbreak, to triumph over loss and the aggressive forces that cause it, and to find dignity within suffering without glorifying or transcending it. André Schwarz-Bart was that most unusual person – a man whose personal loss had made him deeply ethical, irrevocably engaged, and determined to do the best he could to preserve the kind of cultural memory that the twentieth century in its violence was equally determined to destroy.

These preoccupations led him to find friendship within another persecuted minority in Paris: the French West Indians. In 1946 the Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique were given full departmental status, and this act provoked a huge cultural exodus of the young to France, in search of education and a better life. Among these was Simone Brumant from Guadeloupe whom he met and married. She was the daughter of a school teacher mother who moved frequently around rural communities, teaching children in one-room schoolhouses in classes of up to 130. Simone Schwartz-Bart was later to credit her mother with the inspiration for the strong female protagonists she created, saying that she had given her ‘the highest idea of the courage of the black woman and her dignity.’ For the Creole-speaking Simone, French was also a second language, but rather than André’s painstakingly researched, endlessly rewritten narratives, she would be influenced by the orality of her own culture, and its celebration of the ‘conte’, the spoken tale handed down from generation to generation. She brought to the partnership a tradition of laid-back toughness, and André was to praise her compatriots for ‘their gaiety, for their gentleness, their wisdom, their art of living, for this kind of verbal lyricism such that, in the mouth of a West Indian, of a true West Indian, all becomes poetry’. What interested him also was the common bond with a slave past, and when he got stuck in his second novel, the story of one lonely Caribbean woman in an old-age home trying to reconnect with her past, he turned to his wife for help in providing the right atmospheric detail. You have to understand that André was an ethical worrier. Before ever beginning the book he had contacted an African publishing house in Paris asking them to check over his manuscript, as he was unsure of his right, as a white man, to appropriate a colonial history not his own. Simone had never written before, but it seems that she was naturally brilliant, and after this start she co-authored another novel with her husband and went on to tackle a series of her own. Probably the best known is The Bridge of Beyond (Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle), which is a pretty special book, part magical realism, part family saga of strong Caribbean women overcoming hardships with grace and dignity. She became the equal of her husband in terms of commercial and critical literary success.

And yet for all that both The Last of the Just and The Bridge of Beyond were widely acclaimed, they were also heavily criticized. Writing for oppressed minorities, which you would expect on the face of it to be an undeniably valuable and laudable venture, is fraught with difficulties. André Schwarz-Bart was accused of deforming history because his novel contained a mythical dimension, and of betraying Jewish persecution by portraying his non-heroic characters as redeemed in what was thought to be a Christian fashion. Simone Schwarz-Bart was equally criticized by the Caribbean intellectual elite for creating a work they considered insufficiently political, and insufficiently aggressive and revolutionary. Not so long ago, The Last of the Just came back into the literary conscious when a prize-winning work by Yambo Ouologuem was discovered to contain ‘plagiarised’ passages from it concerning the Arab slave trade. This plagiarism is still disputed, as some claim that the orality that informed Simone’s work is also active in Ouologuem’s, leading him to repeat tales that seem part of a cultural inheritance. The author claimed that he had left the quotation marks in and his publisher had taken them out. And this post puts forward the view that these passages are ‘used ironically, to send up European misrepresentations of Africa’. Now all of this criticism heaped upon the couple gets me to one of my favourite bugbears, which is the tendency both of political commentators to think they have a right to dictate art, and of later generations to look back dismissively on the work of earlier authors for lacking the ideological or political acuity of the current age. I suppose it’s a question for me of authorial intention where the exception proves the rule. As you know, I don’t think an author’s intentions are really relevant to a critical appreciation of a novel, but I really don’t think that authors can be blamed for representing race, gender or cultural issues as they appeared to the author in a different historical reality. No literary couple was more ethically aware than the Schwarz-Barts, nor better placed with the right kind of political credentials to write the kind of novels they did. Simone’s powerful, healing, matrilinear culture was as much a part of Guadeloupian life as its angry, revolutionary counterpart, André’s final redemptive vision in his novel as valid a response to unimaginable suffering as any other.

While I’m on a mission here, and for the same reasons, I think it entirely unjust to condemn the representation of slavery in Huckleberry Finn, for instance. Mark Twain was a great writer, not a clairvoyant, and if he offends our delicate modern sensibilities then we should understand he wrote about the times he was living in, accurately, as best he could. Who’s to say that a few different rolls of the dice in the universe and our cultural situation wouldn’t have turned out completely differently, and there’d be a whole set of other books condemned for not saying the right things? No writer can comfortably predict the outcome of any society’s ideological development fifty or a hundred years hence. The same goes for books that portray women in submissive and oppressed conditions. This was the reality of how things were, and rather than be appalled we ought to acknowledge the historical reality involved. For both Simone and André Schwarz-Bart, what mattered was the power of the indomitable human spirit to transcend the appalling conditions that man has forced man to undergo. Their work has fallen out of print and out of literary favour, but that doesn’t alter the fact that they wrote utterly compelling, eloquent and often celebratory narratives that were steeped in the spirit of their times and in the desire they both shared to give hope, to preserve cultural memory and to move people with their writing. And yet it seems that this is never good enough for our stupidly demanding PC culture. When Simone’s play opened in New York in 1987 a member of the audience asked in the subsequent discussion why she hadn’t written a play about race and sexual relations, given that she was married to someone who ‘wasn’t exactly black’. It’s an outrageous personal question; I think there are some areas that politics has no right to go, and where it should wait to be invited, but Simone was sharp and good at answering this kind of criticism. She said: ‘I wanted to write a story about love. It seems to me that in the Antilles, with all the problems, one doesn’t speak enough about love… As for my husband, when I look at him, I just see someone I love. For me, he isn’t any colour at all.’

André Schwarz-Bart died in 2006, aged 78, after a heart operation.