Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (36 page)

From a personal point of view, what I appreciated most in my work for the Groups was that it allowed me to spend an evening away from home. I had once more become very intimate with my sister; I would talk to her about love, friendship, happiness, and its snares; about joy and the beauties of the inner life; she read Francis Jammes and Alain Fournier. On the other hand, my relationship with my parents did not get any better. They would have been sincerely grieved if they had guessed how much their attitude affected me: but they didn't. They considered my tastes and my opinions to be a challenge to common sense and to themselves, and they counter-attacked on all sides. Sometimes they called in the help of their friends; they would then all join in denouncing the charlatanism of modern artists, the intellectual snobbery of the public, the
decadence of France, and the civilized world: during these broadsides, all eyes would be directed towards me. Monsieur Franchot, a brilliant talker, well up in literature and the author of two novels which he had had published at his own expense, asked me one evening in a sarcastic tone of voice what beauties I could possibly find in Max Jacob's
Cornet à dés.
‘Ah! ‘I snapped, ‘it cannot be penetrated at a casual reading.' They all burst out laughing and I must admit that I had given them reason to: but in such cases I had no other alternative but to take refuge in either pedantry or coarseness. I tried hard not to let myself be drawn, but my parents wouldn't allow me to sham dead. Convinced that I was being worked upon by baleful influences, they would question me suspiciously: ‘And what's so extraordinary about your Mademoiselle Lambert?' my father would demand. He held it against me that I had no family feeling and preferred the company of strangers to his own. My mother admitted in principle that one might like friends one had chosen oneself better than distant relatives, but she thought my feelings towards Zaza were excessive. On the day when I went without warning to weep my heart out at Zaza's, I told my parents of the visit: ‘I called in to see Zaza.' ‘But you saw her last Sunday!' my mother cried. ‘You've no need to go running to her all the time! ‘There was a lengthy scene. Another bone of contention was the books I read. My mother could not resign herself to the inevitable; she turned pale as she glanced through Jean-Richard Block's
La Nuit Kurde.
She let everybody know what a trial I was to her – my father, Madame Mabille, my aunts, my cousin and her friends. I couldn't bring myself to ignore the air of mistrust I felt all around me. How long the evenings seemed, and the Sundays! My mother said that a fire could not be made in my bedroom fireplace; so I put up a card table in the drawing-room, where there was an oil heater, but the door was always open. My mother would come in and out, coming and going and leaning over my shoulder all the time: ‘What's that you're doing? What's that book you're reading?.' Endowed with considerable energy for which she could find no outlet, she believed in being merry and bright. Singing, laughing, joking, she would try to bring back the happy bursts of merriment which used to fill the house in the days when my father didn't go out every evening and everyone was in a good humour. She wanted me to join in, and if I did not show any inclination to do so she would start to worry: ‘What are you thinking about?
What's the matter with you? What are you looking like that for? Of course, I'm only your mother, you won't tell me anything . . .' When at last she went to bed, I was too exhausted to take advantage of the peace and quiet. How I should have liked just to go to the cinema! I would stretch out on the carpet with a book, but my head would feel so heavy that often I would fall asleep on the floor. I would drag myself off to bed, sick at heart. I would wake next morning feeling listless and bored, and my days would seem to crawl with a mournful slowness. I had had my fill of books: I had read too many that were everlastingly repeating the same old thing; they didn't bring me any fresh hope. I preferred killing time in the picture galleries in the rue de la Seine or the rue de la Boétie: painting took me out of myself. I used to try hard to get away from myself. Sometimes I would lose myself in the glowing embers of the setting sun; I would look at pale yellow chrysanthemums blazing against a pale green lawn; at the moment when the street lamps came on and changed the leafy trees of the Carrousel into a stage set at the Opéra, I would listen to the fountains playing. There was no lack of good will; it only needed a ray of sunlight to set my heart dancing. But it was autumn, it was drizzling; my joys were rare and soon past. Then boredom would return, and despair. The last year, too, had begun badly; I had been counting on mixing happily with the rest of the world, and I had been kept in my cage, then sent into exile. I had made shift by working hard, but in a negative way: the break with my past, with my environment; I had also made some great discoveries: Garric, Jacques' friendship, books. I had felt a renewed confidence in the future, and soared high into the heavens, seeking a heroic destiny. What a let-down! Once more the future was now and all promises should have been carried out already, without any need to wait. I had to be of service: to what? To whom? I had read, thought, and learnt much; I told myself that I was ready; I was rich; but nobody wanted anything from me. Life had appeared to me so full; I had sought with fanatical ardour to use my whole self in replying to its endless calls: it was empty; not One voice had asked for me. I felt strong enough to lift the whole world on my shoulders: and I couldn't find a single pebble that needed moving. My disillusionment was bitter: ‘I
am
so much more than what I can
do
!' It was not enough to have renounced fame and happiness; I no longer even wished for my existence to be a fruitful one; I no longer wished for anything: I was
learning the painful lesson of ‘the sterility of being'. I was working in order that I might have a profession; but a profession is a means: towards what end? Marriage? What would that mean? Whether it was bringing up children or correcting exercises, it was all the same old song; it was absolutely useless. Jacques was right to say: what's the use? People resigned themselves to pointless existences: not me. Mademoiselle Lambert, just like my mother, spent her days in aimless activity; as long as they were doing something, it didn't matter what they did. ‘But
I
want to be driven by a force so exacting that it doesn't leave me time to bother about anything! ‘I didn't find any such force, and in my impatience I universalized my particular case: ‘Nothing has any need of me, nothing has need of anybody, because nothing has any need to exist.'

And so I discovered within me that ‘new
Weltschmerɀ
denounced by Marcel Arland in an article in the
Nouvelle Revue Française
which had made a great stir. Our generation, as he saw it, could find no consolation for the absence of God; it was discovering, to its great distress, that apart from Him life was nothing but a series of occupations. I had read this essay a few months earlier with interest but without any particular concern; at that time I was quite happy to do without God and if I made use of His name it was only in order to designate a void which to me had all the splendour of the plenitude of grace. I still had absolutely no desire to know of His existence, and it even seemed to me that if I had believed in Him I should have detested Him. Groping my way along paths whose every twist and turn He knew, buffeted by the chance winds of His grace, petrified by His infallible judgement, my existence could only have been a stupid and pointless ordeal. No amount of sophistry could have convinced me that the Omnipotent had any need of my miserable life: or if He did, it would only be to play a joke on me. In earlier days, when the grown-ups' amused condescension used to transform my life into a puerile piece of play-acting, I would be convulsed with rage: and today, too, I would have refused no less violently to let myself become the ape of God. If I had rediscovered in Heaven, amplified to infinity, the monstrous alliance of fragility and implacability, of caprice and artificial necessity which had oppressed me since my birth, rather than worship Him I would have chosen damnation. His eyes gleaming with a malicious benevolence, God would have stolen everything from me – the earth, my life, other people, and my own
self. I thought it great good luck that I had been able to get away from Him.

But then why was I always repeating in a desolate voice that ‘all is vanity'? In fact, the sickness I was suffering from was that I had been driven out of the paradise of childhood and had not found my place in the world of men. I had set myself up in the absolute in order to gaze down upon this world which was rejecting me; now, if I wanted to act, to write a book, to express myself, I would have to go back down there: but my contempt had annihilated it, and I could see nothing but emptiness all around me. The fact is that I had not yet put my hand to the plough. Love, action, literary work: all I did was to roll these ideas round in my head; I was fighting in an abstract fashion against abstract possibilities and I had come to the conclusion that reality was of the most pitiful insignificance. I was hoping to hold fast to something, and, misled by the violence of this indefinite desire, I was confusing it with the desire for the infinite.

My poverty and my helplessness would have worried me less if I had had the least suspicion of how ignorant and narrow-minded I still was; a job of work would have made the necessary demands upon me: I could have made inquiries about one; and others would no doubt have come along. But the worst of living in a prison without bars is that you aren't even aware of the screens that shut out the horizon; I was wandering through a thick fog, believing it to be transparent. I didn't even know that the things I was missing were there.

I wasn't interested in history. Apart from Vaulabelle's book on the two Restorations, the memoirs, stories and chronicles which I had been made to read all seemed to me, like Mademoiselle Gontran's history lessons, a jumble of meaningless anecdotes. What was happening at the present day hardly merited my attention either. My father and his friends used to talk politics without stopping and I knew that everything was in a bad way; I had no wish to poke my nose into such a gloomy mess. The problems that were bothering them – the recovery of the franc, the evacuation of the Rhineland, the airy utopias of the League of Nations – seemed to me to be of the same order as family quarrels and money troubles; they were no concern of mine. Jacques and Zaza didn't care twopence about them; Mademoiselle Lambert never mentioned them; the
NRF
writers – I hardly ever read any others – never touched on them,
excepting sometimes Drieu la Rochelle, though he wrote in such hermetic terms I couldn't understand him. In Russia, perhaps, things were going on: but it was very far away. The Groups had muddled my ideas about social questions, and philosophy wouldn't have anything to do with them. At the Sorbonne, my professors systematically ignored Hegel and Marx; in a big book on the progress of conscience in the western world, Brunschvig had devoted a bare three pages to Marx, whom he placed on the same level as one of the obscurest reactionary thinkers. He was teaching us about the history of scientific thought, but no one was teaching us about the adventure of humanity. The incomprehensible uproar going on in the world might be of interest to specialists; it was not worthy of the philosopher's attention, for, when he had got to the point where he knew that he knew nothing and that there was nothing worth knowing, he knew everything. That is why I was able to write in January: ‘I know everything; I've gone all the rounds.' The subjective idealism to which I was now giving my allegiance deprived the world of its solidity and originality: it is hardly surprising that even in my imagination I could find nothing to hold on to.

So everything was conspiring to convince me of the inadequacy of human affairs: my own position, the influence of Jacques, the ideologies I was being taught, and the literature of the period. The majority of writers kept harping on ‘our disquiet' and offered me a despairing lucidity. I took this nihilism to its logical conclusion. All religions, all morals were shams; so was the worship of oneself. I considered – not without reason – that the fevers I had formerly so complacently whipped up were artificial, and I threw Gide and Barrès overboard. In every plan I made I suspected an escape; work became a distraction just as futile as any other. One of Mauriac's young heroes looked upon his pleasures and his friendships as ‘branches' supporting him precariously above the void: I borrowed this word from him. One had the right to clutch at branches, but on condition that one didn't confuse the relative with the absolute, defeat with victory. I judged others by these standards; the only people who existed for me were those who, without cheating, looked this all-consuming nothingness in the face. All ministers, Academicians, much-decorated gentlemen, and all big-wigs I considered
a priori
to be barbarians. A writer ought to feel he was damned; any kind of success was suspect, and I used to wonder if the very fact of writing something didn't imply a
failure: only the silence of Valéry's Monsieur Teste seemed to me to express with dignity humanity's absolute despair. And so, in the name of the absence of God, I resurrected the ideal of a withdrawal from the world – a withdrawal that His existence had first inspired me to choose. But this asceticism led nowhere, gave no hope of salvation. The most honest attitude to take, after all, was to do away with oneself; I had to admit this, and I admired those who committed suicide for metaphysical reasons; yet I had no intention of resorting to suicide myself: I was far too afraid of death. When I was alone in the house, I would sometimes have to fight against my fear as I had done at the age of fifteen; trembling, with clammy hands, and feeling utterly distraught, I would cry: ‘I don't want to die! ‘

And already death was slowly eating my life away. As I was not engaged on any sort of work, time became decomposed into instants that cancelled each other out indefinitely; I could not resign myself to this ‘multiple and fragmentary death'. I would copy out whole pages of Schopenhauer and Barrès, and the verses of Madame de Noailles. I found death all the more frightful because I could see no point in living.