Failure, for Éric Rohmer, was an intimate affair. Not far into Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe’s 2012 biography of the late French filmmaker, valiantly translated into English by Steven Rendall and Lisa Neal, one runs into a persistent theme: unlike his younger brother, René, Rohmer thrice failed his oral examinations for the prestigious École Normal Supérieure, and twice failed the entrance exam for an agrégation in Classics. “Right up until the end he regretted not having a university career,” René said in a 2010 interview. In the everlasting shadow of that rejection he was drafted into the army for a year, during the period known as the Phony War of 1940. He was later demobilized in the southeast of France. During that blissful period, he shifted from camp to camp, briefly unaware of the German occupation, and wrote letters home, played soccer, ate peaches, painted landscapes, and read Rilke. After being dismissed, he briefly lived with his parents before heading to Lyon to study with René; by 1943 he was a boarder in Paris teaching Latin and Greek in a secondary school while beginning to outline the very tales that would—three decades later—leave an indelible mark on cinema history. “He had to shift much of his ambition to literature and cinema,” René continued: “Becoming a writer, being a filmmaker, represented a kind of revenge.”

Yet the sweet redemption Rohmer would eventually receive as a film critic—at Cahiers du Cinéma, where he was a poorly paid and comparatively conservative editor; at Sartre’s Nouvelle Revue Française and Les Temps Modernes—and as a revered auteur of 25 feature films across five decades was not without several false starts. One such misstep was Petites filles modèles, an expensive, incomplete film whose beleaguered production proved disastrous. Another was his first film, The Sign of Leo, which his biographers note was the New Wave’s biggest commercial failure. “There are indeed some of us who sense this affect of failure more than others,” Irving Goh writes in Living on After Failure, which reads failure as an affective structure entangled with modern existence: “We, the (un)lucky ones in this elective affinity with failure; we, born always untimely, with stars always misaligned.”

Élisabeth, Rohmer’s first and only novel, published by Gallimard in 1949 under the pseudonym Gilbert Cordier, was, we might say, his first major failure towards artistic fulfillment. Composed in the summer of 1944—with a seven-part summary and notes towards its preparation dated 1939, the year in which it is set—the novel, influenced by John Dos Passos, William Faulkner and Countess De Ségur, was, with no sales or coverage, a failure upon arrival. This reception acutely discouraged the studious young man who had, in three school notebooks and black ink, painstakingly crafted a suite of characters probing their desires and deferring decisions in Percy, France. “I detested that novel,” Rohmer later claimed. “I wanted to distance myself from it because it seemed sterile to me.” This perspective was revised by 2007, when he acknowledged its reissue, again with Gallimard, as Élisabeth’s House. In an interview included in the edition, he said the novel, unadaptable in his eyes, defeated cinema by “granting reality a stronger ‘presence’ than images would have been able to achieve.” A tall order, but one whose achievement, with the first English-language translation by Aaron Kerner recently published by McNally Editions, we can now assess for ourselves. This belated yet welcome arrival brings to mind something Rohmer wrote in a 1954 essay on CinemaScope: “It is not the frame that is modified, but the conditions of viewing.” Élisabeth then—a continuum-shifting addition—alters our attendant conditions.

Told in three unequal parts by a third-person limited narrator, the novel, despite its title, is primarily attuned to the undulating states of male psyches. There’s Bernard Roby—the sensitive son of the titular house owner who, on vacation from medical school, encounters various nymphettes resisting his feeble seductions—and Michel Landeau, a family friend caught between taking a job in Lisbon or following through with his engagement to Irène Bergmann, a widow whose visible signs of aging repulse him. “I hate her not because I have any particular thing against her,” Michel thinks, “but because I’ve forced myself to love her, because my situation is false, because I’ve been loath to recognize the facts.” Despite her loyalty and self-effacing devotion, this nagging thought foments a pungent violence within Michel.

Since the novel continually cycles through its characters without immediately naming them, Rohmer leaves the reader suspended between chapters, foreclosing emotional attachment in favor of an ambiguous, intellectual remove. Later in the novel, after a notable rainstorm sequence, Michel, having fallen in with a coterie of new friends, assumes Bernard’s name and makes a pass at Jacqueline while driving her home. After feeling her up, he rests his hands on the tip of her knees, a body part whose beauty was previously observed by him (“Her dress, drawn up behind, revealed her knee and a narrow triangle of thigh”) as well as Bernard: “The compact triangle of Claire’s knee glowed darkly beyond the sharp hemline of her dress.”

These details will be familiar to fans of Rohmer’s 1970 film Claire’s Knee. Near the movie’s end, in a scene that also takes place in the rain, the titular blonde (Laurence de Monaghan), learns of her lover’s infidelity and weeps in a hut next to Jérôme (Jean-Claude Brialy). Jérôme has fantasized about touching her knee, having diagnosed it as her most vulnerable spot. He rubs her magnetic tanned knees as a consolation, exorcising the pursuit of his desire. “I don’t think I ever felt more that I was doing something that had to be done,” Jérôme later confesses to his writer friend Aurore. He concludes that “a right arises from the very violence of desire” and that nothing can forbid him from granting it to himself.

But unlike Jérôme, Michel does not succeed in carrying out an act of free will or courage. Michel’s actions, instead, tip into a sexual assault whose unexpected specter will resurface in later Rohmer films such as Pauline at the Beach and The Marquise of O. After fending him off, his initial gentility having melted away, Jacqueline sees right through his façade. “I could certainly see you with a woman a little older,” she says, causing him to flinch. “Are you married or something?” Even in this digression, this failure to cheat, he is forced to confront the inescapable reality of his false situation, sending him with his tail between his legs back to Irène, just like all the male protagonists of the Moral Tales. Early in Rohmer’s career this dramatization of in-betweenness was intrinsic to his manner, placing his “puppet characters,” as Gilles Deleuze called them, into the action of philosophically-torqued wagers.

The rainstorm sequence in Élisabeth also shares an affinity with the climax of Claire’s Knee, which was published as a short story in 1974 but whose traces, as the biography notes, can be found in a short story from 1951 titled “La Roseraie” about a kissable ear. In addition to inconveniencing Élisabeth—with her quirky subplot involving visits to the dentist and passing out in a pharmacy; her preoccupation with dates and sending letters to her husband Doctor Roby; her plum-filled home kept by her maid Louise and bursting with her daughter Marie-Thérèse’s high spirits—the storm finds Bernard seeking refuge under a poplar tree barely six feet away from an ingénue named Huguette. The previous day, when he noticed her by the riverbank, he studied her “long, if rather thick, legs and terrifically curved hips” and her smooth face “with straight features framed by light brown hair, long and curly,” details in direct contrast with descriptions of his cousin Claire—book-Claire—with her enormous blonde hair, tanned slender legs and fabulously glowing knees. That they are both wearing blue is no coincidence, since the book teems with detailed gradations of blue, nor is their serendipitous re-encounter, since the vitality of Rohmer’s best work—The Green Ray, A Tale of Winter, My Night at Maud’s—hinges on scenes of return. Noticing that he’s shivering, Huguette says: “Do like I did and find yourself a better tree.”

The origins of this primal scene, yoking the knee and the rain, as the biography notes, derive from a common saying in Rohmer’s hometown:  that when someone weeps it means it is going to rain. “It might also involve a childhood memory,” Rohmer added in an interview. “That of a little girl who was crying in a barn or a shed while it was raining outside, and her big sister was consoling her.” A set of preoccupations establish themselves here: the power dynamic implied by the age gap, which, when it transforms in Claire’s Knee, takes on an erotic, fetishistic dimension, and the thematic juxtaposition of the personal and natural; interior sensations and externalized manifestations; the object of desire, the subject of its pursuit. That this scene first appears in Élisabeth is notable because, disengaged as it is, it doesn’t quite work. The limitation comes from the fact that Rohmer has not yet reconciled—blended—these juxtaposed personages into one character. There are no tears shed in the novel’s storm, but Rohmer does stage a scene of rejection. “I think that in this day and age real camaraderie between men and women is possible,” Huguette says to Bernard, deflating his expectations, a sentiment that also re-surfaces in Claire’s Knee. “If you’re looking to flirt,” she says, “you’re wasting your time.”

“The voice that permeates this broken line of a novel, that narrates it, is an avatar for Éric Rohmer, who is, in turn, a proxy for the shy man born Maurice Henri Joseph Schérer. A man obsessed with the classics who spent his long, Catholic life turning his gaze and unabating love toward splendorous images as innocuous as an uncooperative sweater, playing cards found in the street, or the curvature of a spine.”

What limits this subplot with Huguette, which reaches its apex with film-Claire, is that it doesn’t venture very far: the characters do not have the opportunity to become entrenched with each other like they do in the film since the novel only takes place over a couple of days rather than a month. In a sense, Rohmer was right to say that Élisabeth is unadaptable—granting reality a stronger presence than the image—since what is missing is the dimension that vivified his masterworks, his trademark sensibility: Élisabeth anticipates but is without his characteristic insistence on morals. Between 1949 and 1970, then, from these little failures, Rohmer discovered a way in his films to consolidate and nourish the complexity of characters and narrative strategies that were already percolating in the novel.

While reading, if not a quickening of my heart, I wanted to locate a line where the novel seemed to be speaking of itself. Since the first part emphasizes vivid description, the second an observation of interactions, it is only in the third part that Kerner’s attunement to the prosody of Rohmer’s language kicks into gear, waxing phenomenologic. Using Élisabeth’s house as a prism, his attention shines through. Here’s his description of the light in the garden:

“… lending the objects it touches an unfinished, juvenile look, an awkward and tentative grace: the wavering intensity of something still seeking its outline, its purpose, and which prefers the provocative simplicity of a broken line to the rich, contoured fullness of a mature form.”

One might argue that the voice that permeates this broken line of a novel, that narrates it, is an avatar for Éric Rohmer, who is, in turn, a proxy for the shy man born Maurice Henri Joseph Schérer. A man obsessed with the classics who spent his long, Catholic life turning his gaze and unabating love toward splendorous images as innocuous as an uncooperative sweater, playing cards found in the street, or the curvature of a spine. Rohmer, a steadfast believer whose faith remained despite living under the dark shadows of failure, eventually achieved, in cinema, the “conjured fullness of a mature form” that braced against the currents of his time.