Public Enemies (2 page)

I, on the other hand, suffer from a form of perverse sincerity: I doggedly, relentlessly seek out that which is worst in me so that I can set it, still quivering, at the public’s feet—exactly
the way a terrier brings his master a rabbit or a slipper. And this is not something I do in order to achieve some form of redemption, the very idea of which is alien to me. I don’t want to be loved
in spite of
what is worst in me, but
because of
what is worst in me. I even go so far as to hope that what is worst in me is
what people like best about me
.

The fact remains that I am uncomfortable and helpless in the face of outright hostility. Every time I did one of those famous Google searches, I had the same feeling as, when suffering from a particularly painful bout of eczema, I end up scratching myself until I bleed. My eczema is called Pierre Assouline,
^*
Didier Jacob, François Busnel, Pierre Mérot, Denis Demonpion
^†
, Éric Naulleau
^‡
, and so many others—I forget the name of the guy at
Le Figaro
—I don’t really know anymore. In the end, I stopped counting my enemies although, in spite of my doctor’s repeated advice, I still haven’t given up scratching.

Nor have I given up trying to beat my eczema, but I believe I have finally realized that for the rest of my life I will have to suffer the microparasites who can—literally—no longer survive without me, whom I provide with a reason for existing, who will go so far, as in the recent Assouline case, for example, as to rummage through notes for a conference in Chile (where I felt I might be somewhat sheltered), anything they can dig out, cutting and remixing it a little to present me as ridiculous or odious.

And yet I don’t want to have enemies, sworn, self-confessed
enemies, it simply does not interest me. While I have in me a desire to please and a desire to displease, I have never felt the least
desire to vanquish
, and it is in this, I believe, that we differ.

By this I do not mean that you do not also feel a desire to please, but that you
also
feel a desire to vanquish; in this you walk with both feet (which, according to president Mao Zedong, is preferable). And it’s true that if you want to go far, go fast, it is preferable. On the other hand, the movements of a one-legged man have something whimsical, unpredictable about them; he is to the ordinary walker what a rugby ball is to a soccer ball; it’s not impossible that a healthy one-legged man might more easily escape a sniper.

Enough of these dubious metaphors, which are simply a way of evading the question you were asking: “Why so much hatred?” Or more exactly, “
Why us
?” Even if we admit that
we were asking for it
, we still need to understand how we so consummately succeeded. It might be thought that I am senselessly wasting my energy on individuals as insignificant as Assouline or Busnel. The fact remains that my personal parasites (and, in the same way, yours) have, in their relentlessness, had certain results. On several occasions I have received e-mails from secondary-school students telling me that their teachers
warned them against
reading my books. By the same token, there has always been a scent of the lynch mob around you. Often, when your name comes up in conversation, I will notice an evil grin I know all too well, a rictus of petty, despicable pleasure at the prospect of being able to
insult without risk
. Many times, as a child (every time I found myself in a group of young men, in fact), I witnessed this vile process, the singling out of a victim that the group will then be able to
humiliate and insult to their heart’s content—and I have never for a moment doubted that, in the absence of a higher authority, specifically of their teachers or the cops, things would have gone much further, would have resulted in torture and murder. I never had the physical courage to side with the victim; but at least I never felt the desire to join the executioners’ camp. We are perhaps, neither of us, particularly morally admirable, but we have nothing of the
pack animal
about us, this is one thing at least that can be said in our favor. As a child, when confronted by such painful scenes, I simply turned away, happy at the thought that I had been spared
this time
. And now that I am one of the victims, I can still turn away, more or less convinced that things will not go beyond the verbal, at least, as long as we live in a reasonably well-policed state.

Or I might try to understand, to contemplate this unpleasant phenomenon—although I have never really been convinced by the essentially symbolic explanations given for it, based on the history of religions. The phenomenon existed in rural civilizations, it exists today in our cities, it would continue to exist if cities ceased to exist and all communication were virtual. It seems to me to be entirely independent of the political or spiritual order of the times. Revealed religions could, I believe, disappear without the phenomenon being markedly affected.

A number of passages in
Comédie
,
^*
which I’ve just finished, make me think that you have had occasion to ponder the question in your own case. So … I pass the baton to you.

And I cordially salute you.

Oh yes, eczema …

Are you familiar with those tremendous pages in Cocteau about just that, eczema?

They’re in that marvelous little book, his journal of the making of
La Belle et la bête
[
Beauty and the Beast
], which Truffaut recommends that all budding filmmakers should read.
^*

It has some interesting pages about the adventure of shooting a film, his relations with Bérard, the disagreements with Alekan about lighting, the discovery of the tracking shot, special effects, style, the patience of the extras, living statues, Jean Marais.

But it also contains (and I’m tempted to say that this is the book’s obsession, its leitmotif) astounding pages, almost physically painful for the reader, about what he calls his “carapace of cracks, ravines and itches,” his “coral of fire,” or the “burning bush” of nerves that have replaced his features, his “boils,” “abscesses,” red “gashes,” his “blisters,” and his
oozing “wounds.” The entire book is one long moan, a cry of pain on paper, the display of a face eaten up by unbearable pain, so that there are mornings when he can only appear on the shoot with layers of fresh lard that his chief electrician has spread over his cheeks and nose.

Poor Cocteau …

Poor “prince of poets.” Despite Arno Breker,
^*
despite that phony style of his, his emphatic, bombastic side, I’ve never been able to think badly of him.

And of course, poor Baudelaire—member of the human race, of France, of Belgium, as you say. He had everyone breathing down his neck. They were baying for his blood from the word go. Reproof at first sight! At first the pack was cautious, intimidated by the dandy airs of this son of Caroline and her first husband, the defrocked priest, but very soon, in the second part of his life, during his stay in Brussels at the Grand Miroir Hotel, their howling got louder and louder! Few writers before Sartre—and it’s no coincidence that he wrote a good life of Baudelaire—have been so loathed. Few of them, particularly during their years of exile, had to deal with rejection on this scale. Dear Michel, I envy you for being in Brussels. I stayed there to write my novel on his last days (Baudelaire’s, I mean). It was a few months after the Grand Miroir had been torn down and replaced by a sex shop. And what a wonderful name—the Grand Miroir—for a man who made a profession out of “living and dying in a mirror” in order to be “continually sublime.” The fact that I got there too late, that I just missed the Grand Miroir and its mysteries, is one of my true literary regrets in life. I envy you for being there, because—if any of this appeals to you—the cobble-stones
of the rue Ducale remain, with girls still twisting their ankles on the footprints of the author of
Fusées
.
^*
There’s Petit Sablon Square, where, in my day, a brothel he used to like still survived, and the Augustine convent where he was locked up after his aphasia. And then, of course, there’s Namur, Église Saint-Loup de Namur, where for the first time he was touched by “the breeze of imbecility flapping its wing.”

But back to your question—whether I have, as you put it, had occasion to reflect on “the” question based on my own experience.

Well, yes and no.

Naturally, yes, insofar as, even when I’m not there, I have eyes to see and ears to hear the nasty rumblings in response to any mention of me in a public place.

And yet, at the same time, no, because through a rather strange phenomenon, I—unlike you, apparently—have never managed to think of myself as or feel like the “victim” of real “persecution.”

Few other writers are abused as much as I am.

For each of my books I receive a volley of insults that plenty of other people would find demoralizing.

As for eczema, well, if that were a criterion, I have to admit that I’m something of an expert on that as well.

The fact is that I find it terribly difficult not so much to take note of these attacks but to relate to the image of me they contain, to make it my own, to associate this reflection, hardly flattering, sometimes appalling, with my deep self or even simply my social self.

Let’s take for example the film I shot twelve years ago and which got me reading the journal of
La Belle et la bête
so
closely. I know what has been and what continues to be said about it. When it isn’t entirely annihilated by the wags, I know that it’s said to be “trash,” an officially “impoverished” work and, according to Serge Toubiana, at the time the editor of
Cahiers
[
du cinéma
], “the worst film in the history of cinema.” I know that when it’s scheduled to be shown on television there are people who arrange a “dinner for idiots,” where the idiots are the film and its author. But how can I explain this to you? I know it but without living it. I’m aware of it but don’t ingest it. I know all about the avalanche of mud that was hurled at it when it was released, but I can’t think of myself as the maker of the most impoverished and mud-covered film in the history of cinema and I am quite capable of ending up in a situation, a debate, a meeting with friends, a business meeting where, without noticing the sneers around me, oblivious to the ridicule I’m heaping on myself through the polite embarrassment I’m provoking, I talk about it as a normal film, in fact a rather good one, almost important, and which I am proud of.

Another example, more meaningful and with greater implications, is my being Jewish. As a rule, being Jewish means having a special relationship with this subject of persecution. For most Jews, being Jewish is an automatic passport to a perception of oneself as vulnerable, at risk, never completely at home, at the mercy of anti-Semitism. I know very few Jews who don’t have in their memory some family or personal anecdote, sometimes a primal scene, that smacks of this innate familiarity with offense. But there again, that’s not the case for me. I certainly do struggle against anti-Semitism. As you know, I’m one of those people who will let nothing get through on that subject, absolutely nothing. But perhaps that’s a form of denial. Perhaps it’s a symptom of my fundamental neurosis. Perhaps it’s due to the fact that I was born in
a part of the world where Jews were relatively spared. The fact is that when I’m fighting on behalf of Jews, I never have the feeling that I’m fighting for my own safety. The fact is—and please believe me—that I don’t remember, either as a child or later on, suffering either physically or mentally from the discrimination, the insults against which I protest and rebel. There are Jews who suffer; I’m a Jew who fights. There are Jews who experience their Jewishness as a voyage into the depths of desolation, a voyage to the end of the night. I’m a happy Jew, what Jean-Claude Milner
^*
would call an “affirmative” Jew, a “Solal,”
^†
like Albert Cohen’s, which in his vocabulary means “solar” and almost “Greek,” one who sees only glory, splendor, and light in the biblical and Talmudic memory they have inherited.

And since we’re on the subject of childhood memories, I’ll tell you one too. Like you, I’ve known those classes of polymorphous perverts that find someone to pick on, stealing his satchel, emptying his wallet, or splashing ink on his face. At Pasteur de Neuilly, where I attended secondary school, the official whipping-boy was named Mallah. I can’t remember his first name. But I can still see his pale face, his clumsy, frightened gestures, the beseeching way he looked at his tormentors. And his name came back to me when I read in the papers recently that President Sarkozy’s mother came from a Jewish family in Salonica, whose name was none other than Mallah. Was he a relative? A cousin? A sort of older Sarkozy? I don’t know. Nor do I know what became of him or even if
he’s still alive. What I know is that, like you, I kept my distance from the pack of little hyenas who sought him out to humiliate him, even going as far as the metro to “look for” him. But not taking part in the posse after Mallah, keeping away from the squad of junior lynchers, was not enough. I took that boy under my wing and for several consecutive years made him my best friend. I don’t deserve to be praised for this, any more than you do. But I note the psychological trait that, after all, was not an obvious one for the little Jewish boy I was at the end of the 1950s. It was so inconceivable to me that I myself might end up as a prey for this sort of pack, I was so far from fearing that I could be another possible target for the same horde of bastards, or, if you want to phrase it differently, the nightmare of persecution was so profoundly alien to me, that I had no problem at all with his being seen to be associated with me; indeed I flaunted my friendship with him.