Albert Cossery - Proud Beggars

ALBERT COSSERY (1913–2008) was a Cairo-born French writer of Lebanese and Greek Orthodox Syrian descent who settled in Paris at the end of the Second World War and lived there for the rest of his life. The son of an illiterate mother and a newspaper-reading father with a private income from inherited property, Cossery was educated from a young age in French schools, where he received his baccalauréat and developed a love of classical literature. At age seventeen he made a trip to the French capital with the intention of continuing his studies there. Instead he joined the Egyptian merchant marine, eventually serving as chief steward on the Port Said — New York line. When he was twenty-seven his first book, Men God Forgot , was published in Cairo and, with the help of Henry Miller, in the United States. In 1945 he returned to Paris to write and live alongside some of the most influential writers and artists of the last century, including Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Tristan Tzara, Alberto Giacometti, Lawrence Durrell, and Jean Genet. He was also, briefly, married to the actress Monique Chaumette. In 199 °Cossery was awarded the Grand Prix de la francophonie de l’Académie française and in 2005 the Grand Prix Poncetton de la Société des gens de lettres. In recent years several of his books have been newly translated into English, including A Splendid Conspiracy, The Colors of Infamy , and The Jokers (which is available as an NYRB Classic).

ALYSON WATERS has translated several works from the French, including two by Albert Cossery. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, a PEN Translation Fund grant, and residency grants from the Centre national du livre, the Villa Gillet in Lyon, France, and the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. She teaches literary translation in the French Departments of Yale University and NYU, is the managing editor of Yale French Studies , and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

PROUD BEGGARS was the third of seven novels written by Egyptian-born Albert Cossery, who moved to France as a young man in the 1940s and remained there until his death at the estimable age of ninety-four in 2008. The book has lost none of its comic freshness since it first appeared in 1955, and Cossery’s concern with the struggle between the poor and the powerful is certainly as pertinent as ever. Proud Beggars is an excellent introduction to the work of a writer who is greatly admired in France and, in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, is garnering interest around the world.

The French title of the book is Mendiants et orgueilleux —literally “Beggars and Proud People.” When asked what he had in mind, Cossery replied:

It comes from an Arabic saying. The precise phrase … in Arabic means “a beggar who sets his own conditions.” A beggar in Egypt to whom you would give a piaster would say to you “No, no, keep it, you need it,” which means “what’s one piaster to me?” He wouldn’t even want it. That’s where the title comes from. (Michel Mitrani, Conversations avec Albert Cossery )

Pride is important to Cossery, for whom the concept cuts two ways. The pride of the powerless is a good thing: among those born to poverty, it shows strength and dignity; among those who enjoy greater prosperity, a principled rejection of the trappings of a bourgeois life — money, physical comfort, social standing, fame of any kind. By contrast the pride of the powerful and affluent shows nothing but “arrogance,” “haughtiness,” and “condescension.”

Proud Beggars , like many of Cossery’s novels, centers on a small circle of male friends. The friends are three here: Gohar, an intellectual and ex — university professor, hashish lover, and sometime bookkeeper in a brothel; Yeghen, a poet and drug dealer; and El Kordi, a low-ranking civil servant and romantic revolutionary. None of them is an actual beggar — they all have ways of making money, if only a pittance — but they are certainly free of ambition and otherwise indifferent to social convention. They are poor and they live happily among the poor. Early in the book, we get a sense of Gohar’s extraordinary joie de vivre:

Gohar stopped instinctively, as though intuiting a peaceful zone, the promise of a delectable joy amid the surrounding din. In front of an empty store, he saw a well-dressed older man sitting with dignity on a chair, with a detached and royal air, watching the crowd pass. The man had a strikingly majestic appearance. “Here’s a man after my own heart,” he thought. This empty store and this man who sold nothing were a priceless discovery.

El Kordi — the romantic revolutionary — has a similar epiphany:

When he was prey to despair, as he was now, he easily imagined the people’s misery and the frightful oppression of which he was a victim; he then enjoyed dreaming about a brutal and bloody revolution. But when he was once again in the street mingling with the crowd, the people’s misery became a myth, an abstraction, and it lost all of its explosive virulence. He felt especially attracted to the picturesque details of this poverty, to the grandeur of its inexhaustible humor, and he immediately forgot his savior’s mission. By some inexplicable mystery, he found such an intense faculty for joy among this miserable people and such a strong will to happiness and security that he had come to think that he was the only ill-fated man on earth. Where were the ravages of oppression? Where was the unhappiness? … El Kordi had to strain to find the pitiful element indispensable to his revolt. Just when he should have been sad and choked with tears, an immense laugh shook him.

As for Yeghen, he lives for poetry and drugs. Scrawny though his body may be, he sits imposingly at the novel’s symbolic core. Yeghen turns abjection into art, much as Cossery does, writing his poetry in

the very language of the people among whom he lived, a language where humor flowered despite the worst miseries. His popularity in the native quarter equaled that of the monkey trainer and the puppeteer. He even believed he wasn’t as deserving as these public entertainers; he would have preferred to be one of them. In no way did he resemble the man of letters who worried about his career and his posthumous reputation; he sought neither fame nor admiration. Yeghen’s poems were composed using simple everyday words, felt with his infallible instinct for life at its most authentic.

Such is the cheerfully unconventional world of our unconventional heroes, which, however, near the beginning of Proud Beggars , is abruptly upended by an apparently motiveless murder. Gohar, waking up in desperate need of the hash he depends on, has gone looking for Yeghen, who will give him his fix for free. He thinks Yeghen might be at the brothel, but the only person he finds there is Arnaba, an illiterate young prostitute, who asks him to write a letter to her uncle while he awaits Yeghen’s return. Seeing her gold bracelets, Gohar begins to hallucinate:

He felt like he was drowning … and that the tumultuous waves of the river in full spate were swallowing him in their depths. He desperately tried to remain afloat, to save a scrap of lucidity. It was hopeless. Nothing remained of his immeasurable desire for peace. Only his savage wish to steal the bracelets resisted the collapse of his consciousness. In his hallucination, he caught a glimpse of vast fields of hashish spread out under the immensity of the sky beyond the bracelets. The vision was so sharp, so pressing, that Gohar stopped breathing. He dreamt he was going to commit a crime, and it seemed simple and easy. Yes, he had to kill this girl; he saw no other way to get the bracelets. This certainty filled him with a dreadful calm.