This week we review Women by Mihail Sebastian.
First published in 1933, this is a seductive, heady and at times unsettling novella. It explores the relationships that its central character, Stefan, conducts with the women he meets throughout his life.
Stefan begins the novella as a young medical student, lauded wistfully by one female character as, “un noveau jeune homme.” The four words contain an apt splicing of the traits which make him so alluring. His youth both betrays innocence and disguises an innate sexuality; he might be just a young man, or the object of rampant desire. He is something to be unfolded, laid out and laboured over for the first time.
Stefan’s viewpoint is at times boyish and curious, at others predatory and controlling. His apparent confidence can be disorientating; I came to wonder whether it was a sign of experience – his precocity – or lack thereof.
Sebastian cultivates a labile narrative ecosystem, shifting lucidly between Stefan’s perspective, and a more modifying, omniscient authorial distance, “Stefan has some experience of the power of such polite rebuffs. He tells himself that Madame Bonneau’s confident facade will eventually crumble in the face of them.” There is a mesmeric closeness and immediacy to the narrative. It has, as John Banville notes, “A whiff of the autobiographical about it.” Indeed, there are parallels to be drawn by those who wish to see them between Sebastian’s own posthumously published diaries (1996) – which document his love affairs and relationships – and Women.
Brief visitations to the minds of the women Stefan pursues (“Madame Bonneau watched him in agitation, not knowing how to make her request explicit because of Madame Rey”) are welcome, since Stefan is not in the business of empathy, and nor is the narrator; it can be hard to know which is which. We are told, after Renee undresses, that she has “an ugly body.” Whether this thought belongs to Stefan is not immediately clear.
The passage continues: “Only in the cool of the evening, when she throws her embroidered silk shawl over her shoulders, enveloping her body in it, does she recover her natural grace. The grace Stefan had noted, with detachment, the first time he saw her.” So, Stefan has noticed her grace (albeit with detachment) but did he, too, notice the ugliness of her body? We are left with the sense of a young woman naked and vulnerable to the judgemental but unattributable male gaze.
Indeed, it is interesting that the shawl which Renee draws around her body echoes the sun, “warm as a shawl” which Stefan feels in the opening paragraph. Is it the case that Stefan’s relation to these women can only extend to physical sensation? Certainly he seems to safeguard himself against any more emotional identification, preferring bodies which promise pleasure and boundaries for him to threaten, in place of the minds which inhabit them and might in turn threaten the barriers which Stefan so resolutely upholds.
Translated from Romanian, the writing is undulating and there are moments of truly musical composition: “It is not yet eight. Stefan Valeriu can tell by the sunlight, which has crept only as far as the edge of his chaise longue. He can sense it climbing the wooden legs, felt it caressing his fingers, his hands, his naked arm.” As a reader, it is easy to find yourself assenting to Stefan’s point of view. Indeed, I felt a degree of discipline was required to defend against his lazily disarming charm and his occasional, self-afforded primacy: “Renee burst into tears. Good, friendly tears which Stefan helps along, caressing her hands, receiving the weeping with equanimity, as he would the rain.”
Stefan is a challenging character. His thoughts about women vacillate between appreciation, curiosity and at times caustic judgment. He is both desirous and critical of women’s bodies. And the relationships are stirring for the questions they raise about control, need, and the convenience which relationships might offer in the guise of love.
One section of the book is dedicated to the perspective of Maria. It would seem she and Stefan had at one point been on the brink of romance. She appears, initially, as a knowing fatalist who remains in an unfulfilling relationship with a man called Andrei. He is dismissive and cares only for the stability and stoic pragmatism she offers. She is of interest to Stefan as a reminder of ‘what could have been.’ Her apparently determined realism is relayed in what might be epistolary form; it might equally be her own private musings. Whether Stefan hears her is unclear. Our readerly perception is nudged into instability by the indefinite nature of the form in which she expresses herself (is it a letter? Is it an internal monologue?), her questionable relationship to Stefan, and the reasons for which she persists with a man who will show her no commitment. She is the more interesting for questions she raises.
It is, though, difficult to tell whether Stefan really loves any of these women. Our own understanding of love seems to become complicated by the fretful interplay between eroticism, lust, ease and familiarity. Indeed, it is the chemical compounding of those physical and sensual experiences that seems to entice Stefan at both a primal and intellectual level. This leaves us wondering whether Stefan can love anyone as much as he does himself, and whether love can ever, truly, be unshackled from self-interest.
Stefan is left alone at the end of the novel, following the departure of his latest love interest, Arabela (never one to stand on ceremony, she prefaces her exit with, “What would say, Stefan, if I ran off with Beb?”). The final sentence clamours with harbingers of the impending Second World War: “I walked into town and bought the papers on the way to see what had happened that morning at the League of Nations. There had been heated debates.” As a Romanian Jew, we hear in this final line the weight of Sebastian’s personal, and national, reckoning. This might be taken by some as further reason to conflate author and narrator.
But, whatever the conclusions one might draw, we remain firmly in mind of the irreducible nature of Stefan. It is such simplicity – such inimitably vivacious rendering – which makes Stefan, and his narrator, of timeless appeal. There is something of us all in their resistance to comprehension.
Freya Morris, Wykeham's