Public Enemies (34 page)

You, I believe, are in much the same boat. One can sense your attraction to characters—it comes through clearly in
Le
Lys et le cendre
^*
—characters that are immediately ambiguous, beyond redemption, utterly out of place in a book whose aim is to persuade.

So I believe you will write other novels. I think it is desirable and probable; and probable because you desire it. At least these letters will have reminded you of the pleasure of secrets indispensable to the success of such an enterprise. I only say probably, because with you one is never safe from the nightmare scenario. For example, you manage as best you can to free yourself of your most pressing responsibilities; Ségolène Royal is elected president of the Republic and asks you to be her minister of culture, and you accept.

You would be an excellent minister of culture, probably the only thing that might salvage a Ségolène Royal administration; but you would likely be too conscientious to write novels while you were doing it.

We all need role models, at least at the beginning and usually right to the end; but I think that, for you, it is time to break away completely from the
Malraux model
. I know it’s difficult; I’ve talked about how difficult it is for me to break with the
Baudelaire model
, which at my age is tantamount to suicide. It’s difficult, but you have to do it.

I feel strange, suddenly, playing the role of adviser, but it’s true that when it comes to fiction I’m still pretty hot. And I can well imagine the flak you’ll get when you start writing again. I can see them now, the vile little creeps with their evil
grins looking at the novels in Grasset’s autumn schedule. Oh yes, it could give you pause.

So, what about the
Romain Gary ruse
? Feel free to talk to me about it if you like, I can tell you’re tempted by it; personally, I’ve got something else. Something simple, dead simple, but it has always worked for me.

You simply have to visualize your own death
. And imagine that it will occur shortly before publication. After the book has been printed, of course, so you have the pleasure of touching it, smelling it. But a couple of days before publication or, at the extreme, on the publication date itself. Imagine that, as a result, the
critical reception
doesn’t affect you at all.

To achieve this, all you need do is summon up some medical crisis, we all have them once we get to a certain age. I’ve had several of them, specifically, a bout of pericarditis in Rouen I recount in
Whatever
: for an hour or two I really thought I was about to kick the bucket, it was pretty intense. It served me well later, that pericarditis. Whenever I think of that night, I can feel the symptoms. I usually close my eyes, I lie down, and it all comes back with ample precision.

I perform this exercise for a few minutes and afterward, I’m not afraid anymore, I can go for it. I can really go for it.

So go for it, Bernard-Henri. I’ve lifted a corner of the rug, but there are others; there are as many as you want. It’s a circular rug.

I’m also feeling funny about our correspondence nearing its end.

How long has it been? Five months … six months … It’s been almost six months that we’ve been writing to each other like this, from a distance, without speaking—just our first phone call the day before yesterday, when I mentioned that I had gone to the country and you asked if the country was Esbly …
^*

Good God, Esbly!

I hadn’t heard or said the name in twenty years.

Nobody in the world, almost none of my friends, knows or remembers that my parents used to have a house there, sold when that pretty village on the banks of the Marne was poisoned by Disneyland.

And it took you, my secret correspondent, who knows about it from God knows where (I didn’t have the presence of mind to ask you), to throw out this name all of a sudden, to draw it back from the semi-oblivion to which I had consigned it and at the same time to inform me that a little later you
spent your adolescence at Crécy, the neighboring village, a mere ten miles away. I used to cycle there or go there by boat on the Ourcq Canal. I recall the smell of the first picnics and of forbidden cigarettes, of blackberries and hawthorn. Guermantes was just down the road … a sort of Vivonne … my Combray … maybe yours.
^*
How strange.

By the way, I mentioned on the phone that I had one of my first flirtations with the daughter of the notary in Esbly. I got that wrong. The notary’s daughter was at your place, Crécy. In Esbly there was the butcher’s wife. There were two butchers. One of them was called “the dead one” because the real butcher had been found dead in his cold room and his assistant, who was also his wife’s lover, had immediately taken over. The other was known as the “cuckold” because his wife, who was also his sales assistant, liked young boys and consumed them in great quantities. She sat enthroned on a high stool, with her Louis XIV hairstyle, attractive chin, and enormous bust just at the level of your eyes, a sort of trunk of a woman, the rest of whose body disappeared into the half-shadow of what you guessed was a small apartment. There was only a gap at the bottom of the pane of glass that divided her from the customers through which she handed people their change. If she liked a boy, she would give him back one franc more than he was owed and that was the signal to meet her at 7 p.m. exactly, under the Marne bridge at the entry to Isles-lès-Villenoy. She would bring her few things—a blanket, a folding chair for putting the clothes on, an empty bottle of aftershave that she had filled with brandy, and in winter a thermos flask with coffee.

In short, we’ve been corresponding for six months.

And it’s true that in the course of these six months something has happened.

As a rule I don’t really believe in dialogue.

As a philosopher I should—see Plato, Berkeley, Hume, Leibniz, and so many others.

But the truth is, I don’t believe in it, and in real life I’ve never understood the theory according to which it is enough to oppose each other, confront arguments and counterarguments, for the shadows of ignorance to lift as if by magic. In most discussions people arrive with their convictions and leave with the same ones. The idea of dialectics that would allow them to refine their point of view, to enrich or change it, has always struck me as highly unlikely. (Almost as unlikely as that other, Hegelian, idea, or to be more precise so-called Hegelian, which tells us that the dialectics between thesis and antithesis will always ultimately give rise to a synthesis—fortunately, the great Hegel never thought or wrote anything so silly!)

Let me say it again: undeniably something has happened here.

A real effort at dialogue has occurred through which, against expectation, we have moved forward a little.

We didn’t convince each other, although, in what you’ve just said about your relationship with being Jewish and the noun “Jew,” and through the story about your mother, I too have understood the impasses of a certain “materialism.”

But we are further ahead, I think, as regards what characterizes and is specific to our visions of the world. Do you remember your first letter? “We have nothing in common, as the saying goes, except for one fundamental point we share—our contemptibleness …” etc. You opened fire back then, groping your way through the fog. But the truth is that we knew nothing about each other and certainly about what we
did or didn’t have in common, whereas today … today, there’s this correspondence through which we’ve learned more.

What unites us: the animosity we inspire, that’s true; the intuition that allows us immediately to pick up the evil smell of a manhunt. But also (to stick to your last letter, which I believe sums things up nicely): the certainty that we will nevertheless triumph eventually; a joyous love of reading; the love of writers who are also readers of other people’s books; pessimism without rancor; the idea that happiness is the utopia of men who don’t believe in the unconscious; our liking for cinema; for literature turned up to the temperature of a God, as Nizan
^*
said, and which is in any case primarily a continuation of speech through other means; Esbly (before); Baudelaire (forever).

What separates us: animals (I don’t like them); Nietzsche (whom I prefer to Schopenhauer, while the opposite appears to be the case for you); the matter of the Bentley (which I would have left as it was in the novel, because that’s how life is, absurd, contradictory, you forget that you sold the Bentley, you believe that you always were who you are now until you wake up one fine morning and notice that time has changed you); your concern, as you said, about sometimes “cooling down” the engine (there too I take the opposite view; the machine will cool down soon enough so in the meantime my advice is rather not to touch anything, to let it do its thing, roar, bolt away—isn’t it at these moments of overheating when you have the impression that it’s going too fast, too hard, that it’s in danger of exploding, isn’t that when the literary tool becomes like a hammer with a white-hot shaft hitting the finest sparks?); the use of drugs (I’m in favor); torpor
(I’m against); our lovemaking preferences (I’ve no objection to doing it half asleep but, to return one confidence for another, I’m one of those people who prefer having their eyes open, their senses alert, being in that state of complete lucidity that you say is good only for balancing your checkbook and packing suitcases); literary technique (we’re in agreement of course on waiting for the moment when the book will pour out and almost write itself—except that for me that moment is not one where reason is eclipsed and dreams or thoughts from the depths take over but rather the opposite, where language and therefore, whether you like it or not, logic, meaning, once again lucidity, triumph over vagueness); the theory of the mirror (I did understand the image and I like your way of sending the imbeciles back to the empty two-way mirror they think they can hand you, but allow me to put forward another, loosely inspired by
Spirit [of] the Life
, a book by Chaim of Volozhin, a Lithuanian rabbi of the nineteenth century, which states in substance: What is the point of not exactly books but the Book? What is the point of the centuries spent in schools in the hairsplitting interpretation of the Law when nobody can have the last word? It is what prevents the world from collapsing, from falling into ruins and dust, because God created the world but immediately withdrew from it, abandoning it to itself and its self-destructive forces, so that only study, only letters of fire projected in columns toward the sky, can prevent it from undoing itself and keep it standing. In other words, the commentaries are not reflections but columns, in a world that without them would return to nothingness. Books are not a mirror but the girders of the universe, and that’s why it’s so important that there should continue to be writers.

There you are.

This list of what we do and don’t have in common may interest no one apart from ourselves.

But that’s how it is.

It’s been established.

The second thing I’ve enjoyed is that in the course of and because of this exchange, I’ve said things that I would have otherwise probably never said in the same way.

I’ve already explained about my pathological taste for secrecy.

And when I say pathological, I mean that because of the partitions, compartmentalizing, lies that are false and false clues that are true, through—as in my novels earlier—multiplying the diversions whose aim is to send the voyeurs to see whether I am somewhere else, I myself, as you put it, sometimes slip up. In such cases, I remind myself of a secret agent who knows that he’s on a mission but doesn’t know which one or for whom, or of an excessively wily actor losing himself in the panoply of his masks and ruses.

That’s just to say that it would never occur to me either to take up my pen to write my memoirs or still less my confessions.

Even around my journal I’ve built up a truly paranoid protection system, allowing my legal heirs to destroy it immediately should I die without having had time to use it or destroy it myself.