My Friends

This novel, published in 1924, is set in Paris. The narrator and central character, Victor Bâton, has survived the war but is living in poverty and loneliness. The novel deals with his attempts to make new friends, revealing his hopes for five possible friendships and his subsequent disappointment in each case. As Donald Breckenridge observed, “Bove captured the experience of a lost generation of war veterans. He recorded the odious aftereffects of the armistice with its widespread unemployment and the growing disaffected and largely reactionary working class.”

The author, Emmanuel Bove (né Bobovnikoff, born 20 April 1898), was the son of a Ukrainian Jewish father and a Luxembourgish mother. He grew up in Paris in the care of his mother, his estranged father being absent for much of his childhood. Aged 14 he was already aspiring to be a novelist when his father and his new English wife sent him to boarding school in England. The outbreak of the war caused him to return to France and he spent the war years in poverty, trying to find a means of becoming a writer. He was called up for military service in 1918 but the armistice intervened before he could see action. He began his fiction career in Vienna in 1921, writing pulp novels under the non-de-plume Jean Vallois. In 1922 he returned to Paris to work as a journalist. He sought out a literary mentor and Colette was instrumental in securing the publication of his first novel under his own name. This and subsequent novels were well received and in 1928 he won the prestigious Prix Eugène Figuière for The Coalition.

In the first chapter, we learn how the central character, Victor Bâton, feels sorry for himself when challenged by a shopkeeper to buy a newspaper he was reading in the shop:
“I wanted to tell her that I had been in the war, that I had been badly wounded, that I had won a service medal, that I was receiving a pension, but I immediately saw that it would be no good.”
Respect or sympathy for the war veteran was in short supply. In another encounter, however, he does receive concern and goodwill from a manufacturer who gives him money to buy a new suit and an introduction for a job in his factory:
“ ‘Were you in the army?’
‘Yes, I was.’
I showed my injured hand.
‘Ah, you were wounded; in the war, I hope.’
‘Yes.’
‘So you draw a pension?’
‘Yes, sir... three hundred francs a quarter.’
‘So that's invalidity benefit at fifty per cent.’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you have a job?’
‘No, I don't.’
I added immediately:
‘But I'm looking for one.’
‘Your case is interesting. I'll do something for you.’ ”