Anathemas and Admirations (69 page)

A Kierkegaard, a Dostoyevsky, a Nietzsche override their own experiences, like their “spells.” because they are
worth
more than what “happens” to them. Their destiny precedes their life. This is not so for Fitzgerald: his existence is inferior to what it discovers. The culminating moment of his life he saw only as a disaster for which he could not console himself, despite the revelations he gained from it.
The Crack-Up
is a novelist’s “season in hell” — by which we have no intention of minimizing the scope of a testimony in itself overwhelming. A novelist who wants to be nothing but a novelist undergoes a crisis that for a certain time projects him outside the lies of literature. He wakens to certain truths that devastate his awareness, the repose of his spirit — a rare event in the world of letters where sleep is de rigueur, an event that in the case that concerns us has not always been grasped in its true signification. Thus Fitzgerald’s admirers deplore the fact that he brooded over his failure and, by dint of ruminating so deeply upon it, spoiled his literary career. We, on the contrary, deplore that he did not remain sufficiently loyal to that failure, that he did not sufficiently explore or exploit it. It is a second-order mind that cannot chose between literature and the “real dark night of the soul.”

1955

19

Guido Ceronetti

The Body’s Hell

Letter to the Editor

Paris, March 17, 1983

You have asked me, dear friend, what sort of man is the author of
Le Silence du corps
. Your curiosity is understandable, for one cannot read this book without constantly wondering about the admirable monster who conceived it. I must admit that I have actually met him only during his visits to Paris, but I am frequently in contact with him by telephone and by letter. And also, in an indirect fashion, through a person as astonishing as he, an Italian girl of nineteen whom he partly brought up and who, two years ago, came to Paris for a stay of some months. Of an amazing intellectual maturity for her age, she frequently reacted like a very young girl, even like a child, and this mélange of inspired acuity and ingenuousness made it impossible to forget her for a single instant. She penetrated your life; she was truly a presence, an enchanted creature visited by sudden, terrors that increased both her woes and her charms. She was even more present in Guido’s thoughts and cares. I cannot, of course, go into details, though there is nothing suspect or improper to conceal. As if it were yesterday I can see the two of them in the Luxembourg on a rainy November afternoon: he pale, grim, oppressed, leaning forward, and she, disturbing, unreal, taking her tiny swift steps after him. As soon as I caught sight of them, I hid behind a tree. The day before, I had received a letter from him — the most heartrending anyone had ever sent me. Their sudden appearance in the empty park left me with an impression of distress, of desolation, that has pursued me for a long time. I have forgotten to tell you that at our first meeting, his expression of being nowhere, of fundamental unbelonging, of predestination to exile here on earth, made me think immediately of Prince Myshkin. (Moreover, the letter in question had a Dostoyevskian accent throughout.) For her, he was unassailable; he alone escaped the devastating judgments that she passed on everyone else. She unreservedly adopted his vegetarian fanaticism. Not to eat as other people do is more serious than not to think as they do; Guido’s alimentary principles — no, his dogmas — are of a rigor that makes the manuals of ascesis read like invitations to gluttony and debauch. I myself am quite obsessive about my diet, but compared to the two of them I seem no better than a cannibal. If you do not feed yourself as others do, you do not take care of yourself as others do, either. Impossible to imagine Guido going into a pharmacy. One day he called me from Rome to ask me to buy him, in a health-food store run by a young Vietnamese, a certain Japanese yam, apparently very effective against arthritis. According to Guido, all you have to do is rub it on your joints, and the pain will stop immediately. All the acquisitions of the modern world are hateful to him; everything revolts him, even health, if it is due to chemistry. And yet his book, which incontestably emanates from a demand for purity, attests to an undeniable craving for horror, as if he were an eremite seduced by hell. By the hell of the body. A sure sign of failing and, indeed, of threatened health: to feel one’s organs, to be
conscious
of them, to the point of obsession. The curse of dragging about a corpse is the very theme of this book. From beginning to end, a procession of physiological secrets that fill you with dread. You have to admire the author’s courage in reading so many ancient and modern treatises of gynecology — certainly a terrifying task, one likely to discourage for good even the most hardened satyr. A voyeur’s heroism in the matter of suppurations, a curiosity excited by the supreme anti-poetry of menstruation, by hemorrhages of all kinds, and by the most intimate miasmas, by the fetid universe of pleasure, the “tragedy of the physiological functions.” “The parts of the body that smell the strongest are those that contain the most soul”; “All the soul’s excretions, all the mind’s diseases, all the blackness of life, and that’s what we call
love.”

Reading
Le Silence du corps
, I was reminded several times of Huysmans, particularly of his biography of Saint Lydwine of Schiedam. Except in the essentials, sanctity is answerable to the aberrations of the organs, to a series of anomalies, to an inexhaustible variety of disorders, and this is true of whatever is profound, intense, unique. No interior excesses without an inadmissible substratum; the most ethereal ecstasy recalls in certain aspects the most crass. Is Guido a connoisseur of derangements disguised as a man of erudition? Sometimes I think so, but ultimately not. For if he has an evident weakness for corruption, on the other hand he is equally solicited by what is purest in the visionary or despairing wisdom of the Old Testament. Has he not — admirably — translated Job, Ecclesiastes, and Isaiah? Here we are no longer in pestilence and horror, but in lamentation and outcry. Here is someone who lives, according to a profound necessity and sometimes according to his moods, on different spiritual levels. His last book (
La Vie apparente)
illustrates these contradictory temptations, preoccupations that are both immediate and timeless. What one most loves in him is the avowal of his defeats: “I am a failed ascetic,” he confides, rather embarrassed. A providential failure, for on its account we are sure of understanding each other, of really belonging to the
perduta gente
. Had he taken the decisive step toward salvation (how easy it is to conceive of him as a monk!), we should have been deprived of a delicious companion, filled with imperfections, manias, and moods, one whose elegiac inflections match his vision of a world so obviously doomed. Just listen to him: “How can a pregnant woman read a newspaper without immediately aborting?” “How can we judge abnormal and mentally diseased those who are terrified by the human face?”

If you were to ask me what ordeals he passed through, I would not be in a position to answer. All I can tell you is that the impression he gives is of someone
wounded
— like all those, I am tempted to add, to whom the gift of illusion has been denied.

Do not be afraid of meeting him: of all creatures, the least intolerable are those who hate human beings. Never run away from a misanthrope.

20

She Was
Not of Their World
. . .

I
ONLY MET HER TWICE. Seldom enough. But the extraordinary is not to be measured in terms of time. I was instantly conquered by her air of absence and bewilderment, her whisperings (she didn’t
speak)
, her uncertain gestures, her glances that did not adhere to people or things, her quality of being an adorable specter. . . . “Who are you? Where do you come from?” were the questions you wanted to ask her right away. She wouldn’t have been able to answer, so identified was she with her mystery, so reluctant to betray it. No one will ever know how she managed to breathe — by what aberration she yielded to the claims of breath — nor what she was seeking among us. The one sure thing is that she was not from here, and that if she shared our fallen state it was merely out of politeness or some morbid curiosity. Only angels and incurables inspire a sentiment analogous to the one you felt in her presence. Fascination, supernatural malaise!

The first moment I saw her, I fell in love with her timidity, a unique, unforgettable timidity that gave her the appearance of a vestal exhausted in the service of a secret god, or else of a mystic ravaged by the nostalgia or the abuse of ecstasy, forever unfit to reinstate the surfaces of life!

Overwhelmed by possessions, fortunate according to the worlds she nonetheless seemed utterly destitute, on the threshold of an ideal beggary, doomed to murmur her poverty at the heart of the Imperceptible. Moreover, what could she own and utter, when silence stood for her soul and perplexity for the universe? And did she not suggest those creatures of lunar light that Rozanov speaks of? The more you thought about her, the less you were inclined to regard her according to the tastes and views of time. An unreal kind of malediction weighed upon her. Fortunately, her charm itself was inscribed within the past. She should have been born elsewhere, and in another age, in the mist and desolation of the moors around Haworth, beside the Brontë sisters. . . .

Knowing anything about faces, you could readily see in hers that she was not doomed to endure, that she would be spared the nightmare of the years. Alive, she seemed so little the accomplice of life that you could not look at her without thinking you would never see her again.
Adieu
was the sign and the law of her nature, the flash of her predestination, the mark of her passage on earth; hence she bore it like a nimbus, not by indiscretion, but by solidarity with the invisible.

21

Foreshortened Confession

I
WANT TO WRITE only in an explosive state, in a fever or under great nervous tension, in an atmosphere of settling accounts, where invectives replace blows and slaps. It usually begins this way: a faint trembling that becomes stronger and stronger, as after an insult one has swallowed without responding. Expression means a belated reply, or else postponed aggression: I write in order not to take action, to avoid a crisis. Expression is relief, the indirect revenge of one who cannot endure shame and who rebels
in words
against his kind, against himself. Indignation is not so much a moral as a literary impulse; it is, indeed, the wellspring of inspiration. And wisdom? Just the opposite. The sage in us ruins all our best impulses; he is the saboteur who diminishes and paralyzes us, who lies in wait for the madman within in order to calm and compromise him, in order to dishonor him. Inspiration? A sudden disequilibrium, an inordinate pleasure in affirming or destroying oneself. I have not written a single line at my normal temperature. And yet for years on end I regarded myself as the one individual exempt from flaws. Such pride did me good: it allowed me to blacken paper. I virtually ceased
producing
when my delirium abated and I became the victim of a pernicious modesty, deadly to that ferment from which intuitions and truths derive. I can produce only if, the sense of absurdity having suddenly abandoned me, I esteem myself the beginning and the end. . . .