Albert Cossery: Une ambition dans le désert (1984)

Une ambition dans le désert is a gem from Albert Cossery, and I can only describe it as an anarchist rant thinly hidden within a kind of detective story. Not that the 'how' and the 'why' are too important here though, as the back cover tells us the basic plot before the reader begins the book: sheikh Ben Kadem is prime minister of a fictitious, poor, oil-free gulf state and wants to change things round, to make people on the international scene look to him as an important leader instead of those in the rich states. So he invents a ghost opposition by having bombs go off at unimportant targets in the hope that his people will rise up against the imaginary terrorists and make him a world hero. But, as we learn on the back cover, his son Mohi is killed in a bomb explosion.

Knowing all this already, and a whole lot more, the interest of the book focuses on the description and the activities of the characters, which is Cossery's forte here: he's far more interested in psychology and colour than plot. We know that Shaat is performing the intentionally impotent bomb attacks for Ben Kadem, and that the central character is Samantar, the 'marginal aristocrat [...] who embodies scepticism, intelligence, wisdom and phlegm, dear to all Cossery's heroes'.

Samantar has inherited a little land he's never seen (he hates cars as they're part of the modern world he loathes) and rents it out to a man who pays him regularly and also includes a chunk of cannabis in a cigarette packet when he does so: it would in any case be against Samantar's interests to enquire further into what his tenant farmer is actually growing on his land. Samantar's land interests mean he doesn't have to work, and can live a relatively poor but calm existence enjoying reading, young women, smoking, and lazing: who wants anything more.

But Samantar is even put off love-making by this wave of apparently meaningless bombs attacks on nothing, which have injured no one. He wants to know what's behind it, why the peace of Dofa (the capital, where the whole story takes place) is being disturbed. So he goes to see Hicham, whose twelve-year-old daughter has learnt to skin up a mean spiff while the men try to figure things out.

They visit one of the seedy bars where shady characters hang out and Samantar is surprised to see that Shaat has been let out of jail so soon after being handed a stiff sentence for gold smuggling. Shaat was the son of the family servant and Samantar grew up with, they became close friends and Shaat has always had similar ideas to Samantar's, which is why it's very odd that he's dressed like a spiv and arrives in a vintage car. Could Shaat be behind the jobs at all? It doesn't seem to be in his nature, although the yarn that Shaat spins him about his early release and having a new job selling household electrical goods in the villages in the north rings false: what use would any villager have for an electrical product when they have no electricity?

Gradually the truth unwinds through Ben Kadem (who is his richer cousin who likes to chew the intellectual fat with a kindred intellectual (if not spiritual) mind, but more through the town idiot Tareq, who just stands near Higazi (Shaat's apparent partner in crime) as he sits in the bar for low-life, looking towards Shaat as if pointing to a very important lead: is he an idiot savant, I couldn't help wondering?

Now, Ben Kadem has an unknown son by a poor girl with whom he had a relationship, but Mohi has always denied his father, always hated him. And things come to a head (really an end) when Mohi is found dead is the street, killed by a prematurely exploded bomb while he was on the way to kill his father and himself with him.

Samantar learns the truth from Shaat, also from Tareq (who's been setting up his own mini-bomb factory) and is also a (hidden) member of Dofa's intelligentsia, merely posing as an idiot: you can learn everything that's going on when no one cares about your presence because they think you're an idiot.

And Samantar also hears Ben Kadem's version of the truth, although he doesn't understand why he is so sad, why he will no longer be sending Shaat to make more bombs: no one will ever learn the truth of who Mohi really was.

My other Cossery posts:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Albert Cossery: Cimetière du Montparnasse
Albert Cossery: Proud Beggars
Albert Cossery: Un complot de saltimbanques
Albert Cossery: The Colors of Infamy
Albert Cossery: Men God Forgot
Frédéric Andrau: Monsieur Albert: Cossery, une vie

Paris 2015: Georges Moustaki, Cimetière du Père-Lachaise #2

The grave of Georges Moustaki (1933–2013), still almost hidden by floral tributes more than two years after his death. Moustaki was born in Egypt of Greek Italian-speaking parents and was a brilliant singer-songwriter. He wrote songs for Barbara, Yves Montand, Serge Reggiani...and Édith Piaf, with whom he had a short relationship and for whom he wrote the words to one of her most famous songs: 'Milord'. He lived on Île Saint-Louis and was a friend of the also Egyptian-born Albert Cossery, who 'worked' – if that word can be applied to Cossery without insulting his name – with him on Jacques Poitrenaud's film version of Mendiants et Orgueilleux, released in 1972. Amusingly, Moustaki also used to take Cossery for a spin on his motor bike.

 

One of Moustaki's best known songs is 'Le Métèque', which is also the title of one of his albums. This clip shows a young Moustaki miming half-heartedly to it, and both his style and the words give a clear idea of his sexy appeal: Georges Moustaki: 'Le Métèque'.

Albert Cossery: Mendiants et orgueilleux | Proud Beggars (1955; repr. Joëlle Losfeld 1999)

Préface de Roger Grenier

Nouvelle édition augmentéé et enrichie

This book is something of an Albert Cossery feast because Mendiants et orgueilleux (Proud Beggars in the English translation), in its 234 pages, contains much more than the novel itself: there's also a Preface by Roger Grenier; there are several photographic plates of Cossery, including one of him with Lawrence Durrell, one with the singer-songwriter Georges Moustaki, and one of Cossery in 1995 looking at Golo's illustrated version of his book at the salon littéraire in Vienne; there are the first pages of an unfinished novel; there's a Preface of Les Hommes oubliés de Dieu by Edmont Charlot; there are some quotations from prominent people about him, including even a passing mention by Patti Smith; there's an obituary by Christophe Ayad from Libération; there's a note by Moustaki, who worked on the film in Tunisia with Cossery (when Cossery could tear himself from the beach), and states that he recognised in him 'a childhood friend met later in life'; and so on.

A cynic might argue that Cossery wrote the same book all the time, but although his worldview is unchanging the stories – virtually always set in Egypt, never France – are always very different from each other, and always very engrossing. This one, which is a rather black comedy, is also much funnier than the short stories in Les Hommes oubliés de Dieu and the other two novels I've read: Un complot de saltimbanques and Les Couleurs de l'infamie.

The tone of the book is set by a joke that Gohar, the philosopher lecturer-turned-beggar, hears from an acquaintance: in an election in a nearby village almost everyone votes for a donkey, but the vote is rejected because the officials don't want a four-legged ass but a two-legged one. Cossery is always anarchic, always anti-political, and always anti-authority – in many ways he was ahead of his time.

In Albert Cossery's world it is the underclass who rule, who have the last laugh, who run rings round the establishment. The laziness card always trumps the go-getting one, the beggars are always praised and the capitalists mocked, those who work for government are scorned in favour of those who refuse to work. In this particular book, even a man with no arms or legs ('un homme-tronc') is seen as more sexually desirable than a fully-abled man: wonderfully seditiously, Cossery subverts all the norms, all the niceties of respectable society.

As in Les Couleurs de l'infamie, a police officer and a brothel play an important part in the story. Gohar wakes up to find that the 'mattress' of newspapers he sleeps on has been soddened because his neighbour's relatives who have been washing her dead body. Gohar at first worries that the dead woman may have had an awful illness that he might catch from the water, but his concerns melt away as he realises that he must have his daily blast of hashish, which instead of smoking he rolls into a small ball and sucks, anaesthetizing the horrors of a world ruled by madmen and idiots.

The trusty, faithful Yéghan is his supplier, and he tracks his last sighting down to the local brothel, where as a former academic his writing and intellectual skills are regularly used for paperwork, etc. But there he learns that Yéghan has left and everyone else has gone on a day out apart from the new prostitute Arnaba, who is as illiterate as the others: what is the point of reading and writing when you are a good looker and can use your body, she argues. But she wants Gohar to write her a letter to her uncle and promises him that she will repay him.

Gohar isn't too certain how a prostitute would write to her uncle, and initially becomes distracted by Arnaba's shapely naked body under her dressing gown, but this quickly gives way to a strong craving for his daily dose of dope. Arnaba thinks he's excited by her body, but another thing has excited him far more: her gold bracelet, which Gohar mentally tries without success to convert to specific quantities of dope, plus emigration to Syria, where the substance is legal. The letter finished, Arnaba presents his payment by spreading out on the bed, whereupon Gohar falls on top of her and strangles her and then realises that of course the gold is fake.

All of this takes place within the first forty pages, and it's certainly not my intention to relate the full story, but let's just say that also deeply involved in the novel is the obnoxious, concupiscent homosexual cop Nour El Dine, who towards the end strongly suspects that Gohar is the murderer, and that Yéghan knows the killer's identity. Gohar has indeed told Yéghan that he's responsible for the murder, although the small time dope dealer has already decided that he won't grass Gohar up, not even under torture.

Sure enough, the cops start meting out the blows to Yéghan's head, but then Yéghan hears midday being announced far away, so he suddenly announces that it's lunchtime, Nour El Dine concedes defeat and has Yéghan thrown out, then decides that the best thing he can do is hand in his notice and become a beggar himself.

Classic Cossery.

My other Cossery posts:
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Frédéric Andrau: Monsieur Albert: Cossery, une vie
Albert Cossery: Cimetière du Montparnasse
Albert Cossery: Men God Forgot
Albert Cossery: A Splendid Conspiracy
Albert Cossery: The Colors of Infamy
Albert Cossery: Une ambition dans le désert

Albert Cossery: Les Couleurs de l'infamie | The Colors of Infamy (1999)

I moved straight from Albert Cossery's first book of short stories to his last novel, mainly to gauge the difference. Les Couleurs de l'infamie took fifteen years in the making – or possibly prevaricating is a more appropriate word, as there must have been many distractions. But it was beyond doubt well worth the wait: in Premier bilan aprés l'apocalypse (2011) Frédéric Beigbeder considers this one of the best books in the previous one hundred or so years, and who could argue? At the moment of writing I've only read Cossery's novel Un complot de saltimbanques and his short story collection Les Hommes oubliés de Dieu, so I'm definitely in no position to call this Cossery's best novel, although Les Couleurs de l'infamie will take some beating. When it was first published Cossery was eighty-six years old, and it shows him as a master of suspense: short it certainly is, and I couldn't put it down until I'd finished it.

The main character is the twenty-three-year-old Ossama, who is a thief and dresses like a dandy not because he's rich – he certainly doesn't want to be rich – but because he has far more chance of being a successful thief if he dresses smartly than if he dressed as a beggar. He's a Cossery character and his ideology can be very neatly summed up by his rather Fagin-like former teacher Nimr:

'There is nothing more immoral than stealing without risk. Risk is what distinguishes us from bankers and their like who practise legalised theft under the government's patronage.' (My translation.)

Yes, Cossery was well on the ball, and might even have been predicting a global financial crash. In his topsy-turvy world, the goodies are those whom most people would call the baddies, and vice versa. For Cossery, the bankers and their allies are the bastards, and the particular bastards in this novel are property speculators.

The initial underworld setting starring Safira, the seventeen-year-old tart with a heart and her beloved but unloving Ossama soon gives way to the central point of interest: Ossama steals a crocodile wallet, which as well as containing money contains a government letter with very valuable incriminating evidence.

The letter is a rejection of Abelrazak's interest in the property interests of Suleyman, whose dangerous cheap housing has killed fifty tenants. Suleyman had tried to buy away the housing scandal as an earthquake, but the letter risks incriminating him, so he thinks he can buy it from Ossama to shut his mouth. Ossama (with the help of friends) decides to keep the letter tied to his chest as it will serve him for future alibis. When Suleyman calls him a thief, Ossama points out that he's nothing like the thief that Suyelman is. Ossama's former teacher finds this all very funny:

'Nimr burst out laughing, a laugh like no other, a revolutionary laugh, the laugh of someone who has just uncovered the ignoble, grotesque face of those who hold the world's power.' (My translation.)

My other Cossery posts:
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Frédéric Andrau: Monsieur Albert: Cossery, une vie
Albert Cossery: Proud Beggars
Albert Cossery: Cimetière du Montparnasse
Albert Cossery: A Splendid Conspiracy
Albert Cossery: Men God Forgot
Albert Cossery: Une ambition dans le désert

Albert Cossery: Les Hommes oubliés de Dieu | Men God Forgot (1941; rep. 2004)

In 1931 Albert Cossery published his first book, Les Morsures: he was eighteen years old and it was a collection of poetry inspired by Baudelaire and written, Cossery much later said dismissively, 'to impress the girls'. Bearing the view of the author in mind, plus the fact that the book now seems to be virtually unfindable – even in the BNF catalogue – it's probably better to view Cossery's Les Hommes oubliés de Dieu (Men God Forgot) as his first work.

Les Hommes oubliés de Dieu is a collection of five short stories that I see as Cossery's apprenticeship into his own work: it's where he's collecting his ideas, but hasn't exactly formulated them completely coherently. All the makings of a Cossery novel are here though, the obsessions which will fill his seven novels to come over almost sixty years.

Cairo – or at least a place strongly resembling Cairo – is the setting of these stories. And although Cossery was firmly ensconced in Paris – Saint-Germain-des-Prés for virtually all the time – from 1945 up to his death in 2008, he continued to set his stories in north Africa. His concern is for the humble, the poor, the beggars, the lazy hashish smokers, as opposed to the rich, whom he sees as 'bastards'. In fact, he also praises ordinary thieves, seeing them as in a totally different class to the 'real' thieves: those in power, those who control, the people who make the money. Cossery's gentle anarchy inverts the norm.

Postman Zouba in the story 'Le facteur se venge' is the butt of many people's anger: he may not be an immediately obvious target, but he is employed by the government and therefore possesses the officialdom gene. He wears a uniform (and so appears military, bellicose), can read letters and so has power over those who can't. As he delivers letters in the rue de la Femme-Enceinte (the Street of the Pregnant Woman) he's seen to be proud, artificial and manipulative. He's in a number of respects similar to the rich later narrators who will be attacked in Cossery's novels. And Hanafi – the ironer whose irons are rusted from disuse and who just wants to sleep all day and have dope-smoking parties – is very much like the lazy heroes of Cossery's novels.

The book takes its title from the story 'Le coiffeur a tué sa femme', in which a father – in answer to his young son's question – says that they are poor because God has forgotten them. All of Albert Cossery's books after this one will take as their subjects these very people and show their lifestyles and the way they go about defying – and so denying the validity of – the prevailing system.

My other Cossery posts:
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Frédéric Andrau: Monsieur Albert: Cossery, une vie
Albert Cossery: Proud Beggars
Albert Cossery: Cimetière du Montparnasse
Albert Cossery: A Splendid Conspiracy
Albert Cossery: The Colors of Infamy
Albert Cossery: Une ambition dans le désert

Frédéric Andrau: Monsieur Albert: Cossery, une vie (2013)

An old man sits in front of Saint-Sulpice fountain, perhaps in the middle or at the end of his daily walk: starting from his hotel La Louisiane in rue de Seine, moving to the cafés Flore and Lipp on the Boulevard Saint Germain, to the jardin du Luxembourg and then back to the hotel. At all these places, of course, he sits for hours and hours just thinking – or should that be watching the young girls go by.

Frédéric Andrau's book – which includes some whimsical details and addresses its subject Albert Cossery (1913–2008) throughout as 'vous' – is the first biographical interpretation of the writer's life, and its publication marks the centenary of his birth.

It begins with a quotation by Cossery as a epigraph, which pretty much sums up the writer's work and ethos, and which I translate as:

'I am an aristocratic anarchist because I believe that humankind, apart from women, doesn't amount to much. But I'll always be on the side of the little people, never on that of the bastards and if, after reading my books, you don't know who the bastards are then you've not understood a thing.'

It's fairly well known that Cossery – who adopted French as his language – was born in Egypt, moved to France in 1945 and stayed there, spending almost all the time there in hotel rooms and only managing to write eight (fairly brief) books. His father had lived off his lands and rents from his properties and so didn't actually work, and Cossery too scarcely ever worked: after a short time working on a transatlantic ship, he said – after settling in Paris – that he only wrote about a sentence a week towards his books.

Andrau doesn't spend a great deal of time praising Cossery, who some of the time comes across as an egotistical sponger – gate-crashing the literary scene at first in search of anyone who'll buy him a meal, etc. He married once (Monique Chaumette) and didn't even live with her: he preferred to have sex with her in his hotel room when he woke up in the afternoon after evenings and early mornings having a good time (often at others' expenses); when, after several years, his wife announced that the party (or at least the marriage) was over he said it had come at a wrong time as the monthly hotel bill needed paying: if that was a joke, it wasn't a good one. But when Cossery years later inadvertently met his ex-wife with her second husband Philippe Noiret, he actually shed tears: was that because he'd let his guard slip and forgot to hide his true feelings behind his usual mask of insouciance?

If all this sounds like a story of a writer not writing, well it is in part,

although he does meet a number of writing friends, such as Henry Miller, Albert Camus, Lawrence Durrell, Roger Nimier (whose politics I'm pleased to learn Cossery didn't like), Louis Guilloux, etc. And Cossery's work is later recognised in the form of three literary prizes – the first carrying the significant award of 400,000 francs in 1991.

Towards the end of the story I warmed a lot more to Cossery, and not just because he's growing older, undergoing illnesses and therefore more sympathetic. There was something more: the now eighty-seven-year-old meets a young girl follower: the Belgian photographer Sophie Leys – who is anonymous in the body of the book – and Cossery agrees to have her publish a book of her photos of Egypt followed by extracts from Cossery's books that they chose together: L'Égypte de Cossery (2004). Furthermore, Andrau mentions the short film Leys made: Une vie dans la journée d'Albert Cossery: this I had to check out.

Digression: Ley's thirty-two minute film is well worth seeing even if you don't speak French. It shows Cossery in Luxembourg, in his hotel room, in cafés (such as Brasserie Lipp), and contains comments on him by, for instance, Michel Piccoli, Joëlle Losfeld, Georges Moustaki, Roger Grenier and Frédéric Beigbeder. Age has not softened his ideas, and he emphatically states – barely speaking and partly using sign language after a pharyngotomy – that less people vote now because we no longer live in a democracy: the bastards are the only ones profiting from the situation.

Near the end he was mainly writing on pieces of paper to communicate, and this sentence is beautiful: 'La télévision participe à un complot mondial destiné à éradiquer l'intelligence sur toute la planète': 'Television is part of a world plot to destroy intelligence throughout the planet.' Lovely. A link to the film is here.

But (briefly) back to Monsieur Albert: thanks to Frédéric Andrau, I now feel that all my questions about this remarkable writer have been answered. Andrau goes about it in an original way which is really effective.

On the negative side, this book is in need of an Index. There are also several indications of sloppy proof-reading: Fegallah or Feggallah? Both versions are used on pp. 14 and 15 respectively; it's Sunsiaré de Larcône, not Sunsarié (p. 109); on p. 226 Les Couleurs de l'Infamie is called Cossery's eight novel, whereas it's his seventh: Les Hommes oubliés de Dieu is a collection of short stories; Andrau writes of the book L'Égypte d'Albert Cossery, but it's in fact called L'Égypte de Cossery and was published in 2001, not 2004 as he states; on p. 252 Andrau says Cossery spent sixty years in one hotel room, when he's already said that he moved from Montmartre to La Louisiane in 1952 (p. 67), and also on pp. 182–83 there is mention of a room change from 58 to 77.

My other Cossery posts:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Albert Cossery: Cimetière du Montparnasse
Albert Cossery: Proud Beggars
Albert Cossery: Un complot de saltimbanques
Albert Cossery: The Colors of Infamy

Albert Cossery: Men God Forgot
Albert Cossery: Une ambition dans le désert

Albert Cossery: Un complot de saltimbanques | A Splendid Conspiracy (1975)

Albert Cossery (1913–2008), whose grave I photographed below, was an Egyptian-born French-speaking writer who lived a long life but only wrote eight books. He took his time, watching life go on from the Café de Flore, the Brasserie Lipp or the Jardin du Luxembourg. His philosophy involved regarding possessions, having ambitions and creating wealth as anathema. Laziness is a virtue, enabling freedom. From these thoughts, tramps, beggars, the unemployed, the outsider, the forsaken are the heroes of the earth. Many would see this as an inverted version of the norm, as anarchistic, a threat to the order of society, and this is very much what Un complot de saltimbanques – translated as A Splendid Conspiracy, and so avoiding the interesting collective noun – is about.

Although Cossery lived for over sixty years in Paris his novels are all set in Egypt, or at least a country resembling it. The country in Un complot de saltimbanques isn't actually mentioned, but Teymour returns there after spending six years abroad. Ostensibly he was studying to be a chemical engineer, although in reality he was squandering his father's money, and when called back home he spent a small fortune buying a fraudulent diploma which his father is proud to show off.

Teymour initially thinks that he's come back to a very primitive environment and as he sits on the pavement area of a café feels, in the words of the first sentence of the book, 'as unlucky as a flea on a bald man's head' ('aussi malchanceux qu'un pou sur la tête d'un chauve'). But he soon settles into a lazy life with his old schoolfriend Medhat (who thinks all professions represent slavery) and the myopic actor Imtaz, who – following a harmless action onstage that could be interpreted as homosexual – has retreated from the limelight of the big city to a smaller one. Imtaz's reaction to Teymour's confession that his diploma is a fake is: 'I don't think you should concern yourself over that. We live in a world where everything is false.'

So Teymour, like his friends, decides not to work, simply to spend his time with them in cafés, playing games on people and interesting themselves in (rather too young) girls. But the act of procuring a schoolgirl's uniform is in order to play a trick on the gruesome rich buffoon Chawki, who doesn't realise that his rendez-vous is in fact with a local prostitute.

However, the police chief Hillali is fooled by the uniform too, and thinks that school satchels can hide bombs: he sees conspiracy everywhere, and can only see subversion in the young characters. He gets Rezk – a kind of foster child of his – to spy on them, although the result is that Rezk becomes increasingly attracted to the young ones' lifestyle.

If at the end it's discovered that 'important' people who have disappeared in the town have been killed by the brothel keeper, then that's a good thing (according to Medhat), it's fewer bastards in the world. And it's even a positive thing that the student Samuraï has met the same fate, as he had a slave mentality, he was an ambitious person who wanted a diploma to ensure himself a place in the society the non-ambitious ones hate.

The world of Albert Cossery is a truly bizarre one: 'unique' is a term often applied to his work, and it's one that fits well.

My other Cossery posts:
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Frédéric Andrau: Monsieur Albert: Cossery, une vie
Albert Cossery: Cimetière du Montparnasse
Albert Cossery: The Colors of Infamy

Albert Cossery: Men God Forgot
Albert Cossery: Une ambition dans le désert

Albert Cossery: Cimetière du Montparnasse #18

'ALBERT

COSSERY

1913 . 2008'

This then is the grave of Albert Cossery, although it's really just a slab of concrete that appears to be waiting, and I assume it's just been more or less waiting like this since Cossery died almost six years ago. There's just the plaque and a few tributes left by friends and/or admirers:

Albert Cossery was one of my fascinating literary discoveries of last year, whose existence I learned of in Frédéric Beigbeder's Premier bilan aprés l'apocalypse, in which he lists one hundred books to be saved from a literary apocalypse. One of these is Cossery's Les Couleurs de l'infamie (1999), his last novel. Beigbeder mentions the people Cossery knew, such as Sartre and Beauvoir, Vian, Camus, Genet, Henry Miller, etc, and says he often used to sit on the terrace of the Bar du Marché and watch Cossery going into La Louisiane, the hotel he lived in for sixty years, (and where he died at the age of 94).

Elsewhere on this blog I wrote my impressions of Beigbeder's book, and was particularly impressed by what he says here:

'As with all of [Cossery's] books, he praises laziness, condemns the rich with their possessions, and only respects beggars, outsiders, the poor. For him, these are the only free humans. [...] [L]et's stop classing the unemployed as handicapped when they are gods!' (My translation.)

Obviously I had to acquaint myself with Cossery's work. I've just read Un complot de saltimbanques (1975) to begin, and shall be posting my impressions of this amazing novel tomorrow.

ADDENDUM: I'm unsure about that pot pansy: in French the word for the flower is pensée, which also means 'thought': but the person who put it there presumably didn't know that Cossery couldn't stand flowers, and according to his biographer Frédéric Andrau there wasn't a single one at his funeral.

My other Cossery posts:
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Frédéric Andrau: Monsieur Albert: Cossery, une vie
Albert Cossery: Proud Beggars
Albert Cossery: A Splendid Conspiracy
Albert Cossery: The Colors of Infamy

Albert Cossery: Men God Forgot
Albert Cossery: Une ambition dans le désert