Public Enemies (24 page)

So I know about slander.

Having the pack at your heels—I think I know about that too.

The demolition of the boundary between public and private, the pursuit of the man beneath the writer, that way of setting the dogs on him, after instructing them to rip off his mask, all the better to retrieve his store of secrets. I’m afraid that I also have had that experience.

I’ve known even physical aggression, extending to assaults on the face (those famous “
entartages
”
^*
that have entered into our customs and certainly into our language and whose real violence, not only physical but also symbolic, nobody
seems to appreciate). In fact I’ve had more than my fair share of them.

Where we differ is in our reaction.

Where you are wrong, in my opinion, is about the outcome.

I don’t agree, indeed I profoundly disagree, with the idea that in this struggle, in what is intended to be an out-and-out war, in this physical set-to between writers and those who can’t stand the sight of them, the pack will always win. I’ll try to explain why in precise terms.

First of all, the pack is afraid.

That’s easy to forget when you see it advance with such fury and ferocity, so hungry and driven.

But, as you say very aptly, it is afraid.

It is much more afraid than we are.

More afraid than you, me, or any other writer who has been in its clutches.

It’s Bernanos’s
^*
theory about the Nazis.

It’s Malaparte’s
^†
theory in the dreadful scene with Hitler in the sauna in
Kaputt
.

I think it’s true that people would not be wicked if they were not first filled with a basic, uncontrollable, animal fear.

Of course, we shouldn’t mix everything up here. Let’s not compare the people who are taking advantage of your mother’s book, in order once again to spit in your face, with actual Nazis. All the same, I think we can always conclude
that those who are wicked are first and foremost frightened. This is true firstly because that’s how it is. They have an all-encompassing fear of life, death, of their specters, their fantasies, the child in them who has died and whose corpse they are carrying, the spitefulness of others, each person’s loneliness, their desires, what they don’t desire, their hidden weakness whose depths no book has ever plumbed, their element of madness, their conformism, their inescapable mediocrity and their ruined ambitions, the war of everyone against everyone, and the eternal rest to which they know that they will one day be condemned. But this conclusion is also correct because once you’ve grasped it, once you’ve understood that spitefulness is always born out of panic, a pathetic fear that has found this way out of having to expose itself, then you yourself are less afraid and better armed to resist and fight.

I’m going to tell you another story.

It dates from the same period. Although I thought then, just as I believe now, that you should not take legal action afterward, as the wrong has already been done, equally I believed and believe that you have to do everything you can beforehand, in the run-up to the publication of this kind of “book,” to limit the damage, clear the minefields, ensure that the worst lies are not all engraved in this wretched marble. So when I am asked to, I meet most of the authors of such books. I tell myself that there must be a speck of honesty in each of them that cannot resist my demonstration, with the help of hard evidence, that I am not a pedophile, that I didn’t kill my father or goodness knows what else. To be quite frank, I also think you shouldn’t miss an opportunity to have some fun and in fact (even if it is too soon to tell you more), I’ve had a lot of fun in misinforming that lot of idiots and making sure that even if their books were successful, they could only be
ridiculous. So I agree to meet them when they are wise enough to request it for two good reasons, first the pleasure of misinformation and what almost amounts to a hoax and, second, an attempt to cushion the blow. One of them struck me as particularly vicious and I sensed him sniffing around some private matters that I really didn’t want him poking his nose into.

One day, after bolstering his ego in a suburban bar off the beaten track, I told him in the kindest, most honeyed tone, “Do you remember the conference of Helsinki and its famous baskets in the 1970s? Well, when I think of the slander, which I understand from your questions that you’re getting ready to publish about me, it’s the same kind of thing. There are some things that I can’t prove are lies. Let’s say we’ll put them in the first basket. There are some others where my keen lawyer Thierry Lévy will be able to make you eat your words and I assure you that he’ll do so mercilessly. And then there are some that I wouldn’t like to give any extra publicity to in a trial, even if I won. If you mention those you’ll lay yourself open to other types of revenge, such as getting beaten up, little accidents, minor and major frights. I know it’s not nice to talk like this, but isn’t it better, among good companions, to say this kind of thing before rather than afterward? Isn’t it preferable for everyone to reach this sort of understanding before it’s too late and while matters can still be rectified? Let’s call this the slander for the third basket, and I’m going to tell you exactly what it is …”

At that point, the guy got up. Very angry, his face purple with rage, he shouted, “That’s blackmail, sir. I won’t accept blackmail. There’s nothing left to say. Good night.”

So there I was on my own, like a fool, at the table, thinking, “I tried and failed. He might even—as I would do in his place—put the scene in his book and use it as an introduction.
Too bad; it’s a good lesson. It’s never a good idea—and I knew that—to speculate too much on human baseness …”

I was at that point in my reflections when I saw the bar door open and the purple face reappear, a timid smile on his lips, his expression still antagonistic but a bit more pleasant. “OK,” he grumbled, sitting back down and taking out the policeman’s notebook he had been writing in before the incident. “I see that you’re not in your right mind and to some extent I understand that … your father, your wife, your children, yes, that I understand. But tell me, what exactly do you put in your third basket?”

The problem was solved. The pack member was afraid. And it was a banal fear, the most stupid fear of the coward who, as in a bad detective story, doesn’t want to have his skull smashed in and negotiates. In the end, none of the stuff I was afraid of appeared in his masterpiece.

Second, the pack is weak.

Why is it weak?

Because it’s afraid—see above.

But also because it’s driven more than anything else by fear, mockery, resentment, hatred, bitterness, spite, anger, cruelty, derision, scorn, all of which Spinoza called the negative emotions and which, as he definitively established, make you weak, not strong, are a sign of impotence, not power, which diminish the ego and reduce its capacity to act, indeed profoundly debilitate it, making it unworthy and unintelligently aggressive.

There’s nothing moralizing about that. Still less is it wishful thinking. It has nothing to do with a vague and sugary “You can’t build on what’s negative, everything that’s extreme is insignificant, etc.” It’s just physics. The mechanics of the
body and its emotions. It’s what we’re beginning to see in France, for example, with the misadventures of Sarkozy. If he’s not succeeding, if he remains fairly low in the opinion polls, if there is something out of joint in his relations with public opinion and those who elected him, it has nothing to do with consumer power, exposure of his private life, his ostentatious interaction with the world of money. It’s because his campaign was based on resentment, putting the bad Frenchman in the pillory, fantasies rehashed from the National Front, stories about insecurity and immigrants. In other words, it’s because he built his campaign on the typical “negative emotions.” And Spinoza says that with the negative emotions you may succeed in the short term but, by definition, in the long term you’ll lose. A despot, the author of
Tractatus
specifies, shares with the priest the desire to instill in his subjects as much as he can of the negative and therefore servile emotions in order to dominate them more effectively. But he’d better beware of letting himself be contaminated, used, guided by these emotions—he may need them in others but he himself must avoid them like the plague. Otherwise, he’ll commit a fatal error, he’ll be unable to govern, his sovereignty will be ruined and impossible to restore, the pact will be broken … I won’t go on inflicting Spinoza’s demonstrations on you. But if you would like to take a closer look, I have my books again and it’s in
Éthique
, Book IV, propositions 50 and following. I’ve been reading those pages and have just faxed them to Olivier Zahm, who has started a philosophy column in the magazine
Purple
. They’re inexorable.

What does this mean specifically for a writer? It means we should aim at what Spinoza called a “selective organization” of our emotions (transition from emotion to action, from passive joy to active joy, from the external cause of this joy to
consciousness of its internal cause, common concepts, etc.). I don’t know about you, but I never think of getting revenge. I forget almost immediately the details of the wrongs that have been done to me. It has happened so often in Paris and elsewhere that I meet someone and remember vaguely just as I’m shaking his hand that he wrote something awful about me. But so what? I’ve forgotten. Sometimes my wife is there to remind me. Sometimes she isn’t, but that’s all right … Because I have to tell you something about the relations of strength between those who live in resentment, intoxicated by their bitterness, alienated by their melancholy and their bad blood, and those who, not so much out of virtue as through their makeup, self-discipline, or just because they have something better to do (e.g., a new book to write), manage to escape this merry-go-round of poisonous emotions. It is the second lot who, once again, for reasons of pure emotional mechanics, will triumph over the former. Joy makes them intelligent and strong, whereas spite is a poison and sooner or later poison kills.

I’ll give you an example: that Internet site answering to the name of Bakchich [Baksheesh], which specializes in spreading so-called information that in reality is pure defamation and where, as it happens, we both have a real nest of common enemies. Yesterday, or the day before, I read in
Libération
that they can no longer afford to pay their “informants” and that they are about to go bust. Obviously, that’s not immanent justice. It’s just that their tone, the hard toil of their derision, their hatred of others and themselves, their way of wishing so fervently for your death as a writer or mine, in short their immersion in the negative emotion of rank bitterness, intoxicates them and reduces them to idiocy, making them uninteresting, fossilized, weak and, in this case, mortal. Strength pitted against strength. In this game the writer will
always win. In any case, he will have the last word.
Bakchich
, that insignificant rag, which, by some slip you couldn’t even invent, took as its title the same word used for the bribes paid to police informants, will not only have failed but will be forgotten, while the writers it tried to bring down in issue after issue will continue to write and be read.

Third, the pack is stupid.

I’m not saying we’re particularly intelligent. We have our foolish areas, of course, beginning with the temptation to give in to the paranoia, which casts its shadow, among other things, over this correspondence. But the pack is stupid, so unbelievably stupid. It’s like a great lump of an animal that can’t see beyond the end of its nose. And fundamentally it takes so little to disturb it, to make it lose its head, its radar, to disorient it, to get away from it.

A mask, for example. A borrowed or made-up identity. A minimum—our friend Sollers would say—of comedy, the art of fleeing and evasion. A false lead. A decoy that all of a sudden throws the big animal’s detectors and those of its manipulating master off the scent. An art of hiding by revealing yourself or revealing yourself by hiding. What Heidegger would call a technique of disappearing into the shadows of Lethe, or the opposite method, which amounts to the same thing, of making yourself
lanthanonta
, literally “inapparent,” but under the lights, with all shadows dispelled. The trick that always works is that of complaining you’ve lost when you’ve won. The shrewdness of the Chinese tactics of giving the command to attack openly but always conquering in secret. And then moving, just moving. When the pack attacks, the tendency is to curl up, bury yourself in a hole, to freeze. But you need to do the opposite. You need to spread
out—I nearly said
go astray
. Move as much as you can. Put the greatest possible distance between yourself and the pack. Increase your sidestepping, springing forward, strategic withdrawals, surprise attacks, pincer maneuvers, counterattacks, or simply diversions and avoidance.

Of course, it’s possible to build a refuge.

Some sort of internal niche that will shelter you from the oil slick of the negative emotions.

You can make yourself an island—Kafka spoke of “cellars” or “caves”—that would be not a space shuttle but a sort of land shuttle that would give you a little shelter.

But please, only mental islands!

Concentrations of space or time that will be like new internal coordinates, adapted to each one of us.

Niches are all well and good, but you must be able to take them with you on your travels, and equally—although this also comes down to the same thing—they must be able to take you on their travels!

Please note, there’s no need to go too far. It’s enough to travel in your own town—see Debord’s
Panégyric
. Or even a journey around your own room, like that of de Maistre, the other de Maistre, Xavier, who, alone with his dog (him too!), was able, within his own four walls, to undertake the longest, most exciting, and most perilous of odysseys. A journey from one identity to another, even to a multitude of identities, like Gary and Pessoa. Or from one book to another, one genre to another—Sartre, Camus, all those hunted and hated writers who, like good warriors, like tightrope walkers on the taut rope of a work that was a prism through which all the possible disciplines were refracted, outwitted their pursuers by always managing to be where the pack wasn’t expecting them.