Public Enemies (31 page)

In Paris at the end of the seventies there was an English bar, slightly kitsch, with fixed tables and moleskin seats, called the Twickenham. It was at the corner between the rue des Saints-Pères and the rue de Grenelle.

As it was opposite Grasset, and since I loathed office life as much as you did, I spent most of my day there, meeting my authors, plotting, phoning.

It was also the meeting place for the pretty sales assistants at Maud Frizon and other boutiques like Stephane Kélian’s, which had already set up in this part of town. So I saw this as a wonderland for picking up women. I was accompanied in this by the night barman, Jacques F. Béarnais, who was a joker, master of entrances, double exits, and vaudeville, whom I had made my Sganarelle.
^*

Because at that time I was leading an odd sort of life, without any real fixed residence, sleeping over at one woman’s or at another’s, depending on my mood, whom I happened to meet, and the willingness of the parties in question, there were evenings when I was out of luck or had been given to understand that I wasn’t welcome. So I would wait until
Jacques had done the till and stay there, locked up for the night with no electricity, no real heating, breathing in the odors of stale tobacco and cooking that had accumulated during the day, lying like a guard dog on a bench that was too short, where I would sleep until dawn, when the day crew arrived to prepare the first coffees and croissants.

The Twickenham was not only my second office.

It was my main residence, where I stored my toothpaste and shirts in a cupboard among the piles of dishes.

I received my mail there.

On the weekends that I had custody of my daughter, Justine, I set up my logistical headquarters there.

It was the time before mobile phones, and eventually I even managed to wrangle the notable privilege of having a more or less concealed landline at the table in the back, where I spent my evenings.

On the other hand, it was there too that the members of the Committee of Resistance to the Jewish Occupation in France, some tiny group of Palestinian extremists, some jealous husband, member of the Groupe Union Défense, or some exasperated Serb knew they could find me, so some bloody battles took place there, usually outside, on the pavement of the rue de Grenelle.

And it was there too that one evening in February 1976, while I was alone at my table, daydreaming, that Louis Aragon suddenly popped up.

At that time I had not published anything, apart from my report on Bangladesh.

I had no sort of literary existence worthy of any writer’s interest, far less his.

But he explained that he had spotted me at the Saint-Germain
Drugstore bookshop, which was the last local bookshop that stayed open late in the evenings. He had observed me several evenings in a row, wandering among the new publications and, on the days when I had no money, reading on the spot, standing there, silently devouring without taking notes, forced to develop a photographic memory, in a fever, with the sales assistant turning a blind eye. That day he had decided to follow me and approach me about the televised adaptation of his
Aurélien
that Michel Favart was getting under way and about the idea they had of offering me the role of the poet, Paul Denis.

I can still see him, pushing open the door to the bar, his tall silhouette, the wide-brimmed hat, the Moroccan cape over a very elegant gray linen suit, which even eight years after Elsa’s death gave him an air of unconsoled mourning.

I see him parting the small crowd huddled around the wrought-iron bar that formed the center of the room, as if the crowd didn’t exist, and the crowd itself, which, without realizing it, made way for him as if for a strange being, one who was extraterrestrial or had been transported from a museum.

He was imperious and courteous, his hands trembled slightly, there was something tender, almost pink about his face, but his eyes were severe like two pieces of blue Delft sunk into his sockets and shone with a sparkle that was at times unbearable. “Am I disturbing you?” he began, as he sat down and without waiting for my answer ordered a lemonade with no ice, then continued in a more familiar tone, “How would you like the role of Paul Denis?” Taken aback, I replied that yes, of course, I kept
Aurélien
on my bedside table but … “Well, you are Paul Denis. I want you to play him.”

There was no irony in his tone, no sort of second degree. Just Louis Aragon and his formidable presence. He seemed like a great lord, unarmed but terribly impressive.

Old?

Not really that old.

Not the tipsy old man that some people these last years have chosen to describe and ridicule.

On the contrary, he makes me think of a sort of golden mask through which that incredibly intense blue stare emerged.

His forehead was high and narrow, the shape of a crown, which made him look like those kings in disguise who at nighttime mingle with their subjects in order to spy on them more effectively.

There was something Christlike too in his posture, but a dry, tearless Christ who has given up on salvation.

And when he left me, two hours later, that silhouette, still just as straight, moved off with a steady step on the narrow pavement leading to the boulevard Saint-Germain. He stopped only, though several times, to examine the façade of a house by the light of the moon, perhaps the house of a famous fashion designer, perhaps Chateaubriand’s house on his return from exile. I watched him but was too far away, so I couldn’t tell …

Why am I telling you this?

First, because you mentioned his name and the scene came back to me as a chunk of memory and images.

Because I consider the author of
Défense de l’Infini, Les Voyageurs de l’impériale
, and
Henri Matisse roman
as one of the great writers of the twentieth century and I’m happy to take this opportunity to remember him.

And also because, on referring to my notes (once again that diary that I have been dictating every evening into my secretary’s answering machine for so many years), I realize that the ground we covered in our conversation that evening was, strangely enough, not too far from the matters you and I have been discussing.

We began with that matter of
Aurélien
, which—and I’m not in the habit of saying these things just to be polite—was truly one of my cult books. So you can imagine how I jumped at the offer, and how I took the opportunity to ask some of the questions that had been torturing me for years! Whether Crevel had inspired Paul Denis, whether Denise Lévy had been the model for Bérénice …
^*
about Aragon’s relations with Drieu, with Breton … whether he regretted not seeing those old accomplices again now that they were dead. And how was it possible that, having started out as those tempestuous young people, brothers in apocalypse and pyromania, they could have ended up like that, two worlds ignoring each other, two strangers, completely cut off …

We also talked a bit about politics. It was impossible to avoid talking politics, at least a little, when face-to-face with this great French intellectual (at the end of the day, there haven’t been too many others of his stature) who, despite the crimes, the shame, the crushing of the Prague Spring, which he himself had described as a “spiritual Biafra”; who, despite having been called “Stalinist scum” by a certain Daniel Cohn-Bendit
^†
in the middle of May 1968, remained loyal to the party until the end, to his party, the French Communist Party which, alongside the Portuguese Communist Party, was the worst of the communist parties in Europe. So I interrogated him about this hideous loyalty, which caused his supporters
to despair, and his answer was strange, unexpected, and rather beautiful: that all he expected from the party was an “honorable decline.”

I had the unfortunate thought—hoping to impress him—of mentioning François Mitterrand, saying that I happened to have met him and liked the way he wrote. At that point he glared at me with those icy blue eyes, made the gesture of covering his ears as if I had sounded a false note, stared at the ceiling for a moment with a theatrical, incensed air, then gave me a long, very long smile, mingling first with the wrinkles on his face before transforming into a burst of laughter that I was sure was the laugh of his Montparnasse period. “Mr. Mitterrand’s writing? You must be joking! There’s nothing to like or dislike in it, it’s simply indecent, a patchwork of words and clichés. Could we talk about something less repugnant?”

But the truth is that what we talked about most that night was style in general: appealing, detestable … necessary and ridiculous; that you can never write as you speak but that there is nothing more grotesque, false, and therefore grotesque than the posing, ornate voice of a writer who wants to write in a great style … Whether it was a matter of the voice or the ear? Which was the writer’s organ, the vocal cord or the tympanum? And hadn’t Hemingway said it all in the line, which I quoted to him but which I believe summed him up, about a writer without an ear being like a boxer with no left hand?

We spoke of a writer’s strategies: covering one’s tracks, disguising oneself, lying as you breathe, writing the way you play roulette, chess, poker, hiding your hand or revealing it, turning your cards up or down, the art of the mask and the lie … bad faith as an aesthetic and a moral decision … the law of counterfeiters, inventing the world rather than parodying
it, hatred too and how to overcome it, of the long-lasting war to which he had committed himself when, like Breton—but with what talent!—he declared that he had broken with Europe. After that, he became a merciless adversary of a society of “dogs,” “pigs,” and “succubi,” yes, merciless, hating this world and never abandoning his—hopeful—scrutiny of the signs heralding its death knell. There’s a man, dear Michel, who for his whole life was one of those “public enemies” we’ve been talking about …

Victor Hugo—we spoke about him also. At the time my prejudice in favor of Baudelaire (I couldn’t forgive Hugo for that “new thrill” business, still less for the unbearably paternalistic tone he used in his letters to the black prince of Kamchatka and in his “stylish and tormented kiosks”) put me off him.
^*
But Aragon’s opinion seemed to be closer to yours, which is not far from what I think myself today: the absurd failure to recognize his greatness, his magnificent bad taste, his mischievous, surrealist side pre-Surrealism, that masterpiece
Les Châtiments
 … 
Les Misérables
and the “will of the novel.” And what about Gide’s line, I asked. His famous “Victor Hugo, alas!”—wasn’t that the killer line? How do you
mean, the killer line? He blew up. Who killed whom, young man? Who killed whom? It was Gide who was killed by that witticism. The other, the visionary, is, as poets are, invulnerable. What about his spiritualism? I insisted. Those stories of turning tables and spirit channelers in Guernsey, which allowed him to converse, across the grave, with Dante, Shakespeare, and other geniuses? Why not! he said. And he went one better, with such bad faith that I couldn’t help laughing. Turning tables—why not? Conversations with dead people from one end of hell to another—why not? You’re surely not going to hold it against someone if they prefer speaking to dead great minds than small living ones …

Finally, we also spoke of the question that had obsessed him since that book, which was and would remain unfinished, which had appeared as a sketch almost twenty years earlier, called
J’abats mon jeu
,
^*
and for which I’d always felt a special affection: poetry and novel, poetry
or
novel, politics, literature, short tracts, great organ music, autobiographical narratives and historical frescoes … 
Hourra l’Oural
and
Les Cloches de Bâle, Mouscou la gâteuse
, and
Vive le Guépéou …
the homage to Matisse, the insult to Picasso, the journalism (for
Commune
, then
Ce Soir
, then
Les Lettres françaises
), the academies and the avant-garde, Thorez and Rimbaud, the homage to Barrès and the discovery of Sollers, the bulimia of that man, who wanted until the very end to be both the prince of youth and also the great literary pontiff, the coherence of all that, the unity of that work and that life, whether there is, as you say, a “major genre” from which the rest originates and that gives some order to this bric-a-brac … Or whether there
is, as they themselves, the “Erostrates”
^*
of the 1920s and ’30s used to say, in terms not that dissimilar from those used by the Surrealists, “a certain mental point in which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low are no longer perceived as contradictory …”

Aragon’s argument that night was that there is indeed a unity …

I saw that he would never give up on the theory of that certain point, giving coherence to his thousand lives …

But his argument was also that this coherence does not derive from the existence of one presiding genre cementing all the rest of the work.

And that’s the point I want to make.

Let’s go back to the beginning.

I understand the reasons, all the reasons, for which poetry may be said to be, as you stated, “the” major genre par excellence. There’s Heidegger’s argument when he sees it as a magic wand allowing direct access to the living sources of being, Aristotle’s argument cited by Heidegger, on poetic experience being “more true,” more “precise,” than the “methodical exploration of Being” or the thesis put forward by Mallarmé
in his essay “La Musique et les lettres,” according to which poetry is a later form than believed, which consumed, digested, and fundamentally ousted even the musical form, being the only form of language—he claimed—that is our master as much as our instrument, the only lexical structure that Being inhabits and in which it reveals itself. Who can put it better?

I also see the reasons for objecting to this and claiming that the novel is the major genre, that it can only be the novel, that nothing apart from the novel can incorporate, absorb, reproduce, and even improve on the double thrill offered by music and poetry with the bonus of thought, philosophy, knowledge: Kundera, for example, Cervantes as well, Proust, the great Austro-Hungarians, Dostoyevsky. There’s this idea everyone has about the novel being this “great form” that gobbles up all the others, demoting them to cantons within its empire, the idea that Mallarmé was right in essence and simply got the genre wrong and that this power he recognized in poetry should be attributed to the novel, Joyce and his paper Babel, Borges and his dream of one great book that would contain all the other books in the world and the world itself, my friend Danilo Kiš, who by the way has been quite forgotten and yet his conception of the novel as an encyclopedia of the dead and library digest is highly convincing …