Public Enemies (35 page)

By the way, that’s a colorful story.

One night two years ago I was at the bar in the Hotel Excelsior in Venice with Olivier Corpet, the director of IMEC, the Institute of Contemporary Publishing Archives, who is thus a professional, an expert in and fanatic about the archives of writers.

We were accompanying Alain Robbe-Grillet, who had come to present
C’est Gradiva qui vous appelle
to the festival, and we were therefore surrounded by the usual fauna of starlets, fly-by-night producers, and gossip columnists. While waiting for the man of the moment to appear and in order to kill some time, we began to chat about one thing and another.

Corpet put pressure on me, as he does whenever we meet, to start thinking about storing my archives with him.

I teased him, as I also always do, about the twenty thousand and something pages of this fantastic journal full of secrets, one more explosive than the next, which he will never get to hold in his hands because, if I die suddenly and without having been able to use it as I would like to (e.g., as material for a real and lengthy novel), my secretary has been given an order to shred them.

Then he looked at me in a way he’d never done before, with a steady gaze, a Buddhist stillness, and said in a soft voice, almost too soft, each word seeming loaded, “I don’t want to upset you but archives are my thing, and I know all about these journals, correspondences, papers kept under lock and key while a writer’s alive. There’s a law, which, as an expert and fanatic, I can tell you brooks no exception. There is no example—do you understand, not a one—of a document of that kind that really was destroyed and escaped from literary curiosity. Let’s save time. I’m sure you’ve organized everything, I’m not questioning the loyalty of those close to you, but I also know that in one way or another—don’t ask me how, the number of scenarios is infinite—a chink will appear in the armor. A betrayal? An emotion? Someone who loves you too much and at the last instant will not have the heart, on top of the sorrow of your death, to burn your papers? An
indiscretion? An error on the part of the bank where I imagine you store the document? Anything’s possible, literally anything, as history has more imagination than man. Whatever measures you take, there will be a bug, a failure, a ruse, a grimace on the part of history, and your journal, like everybody else’s, will end up in IMEC …”

I slept badly that night.

That conversation haunted me for weeks.

If I’d been to the Delphic oracle and had learned the hour of my death, I could hardly have been more agitated.

I used those weeks to set up a complicated system, which in my opinion is one of a kind, whose function was to thwart Corpet’s theorem and prediction.

From Kafka and Max Brod to Henry Miller’s
Crazy Cock
or the affair of Nabokov’s last novel,
The Original of Laura
, which I heard about thanks to a friend, I studied all the great cases recorded.

I consulted legal specialists, notaries, attorneys, capable not only of examining alongside myself the letter and spirit of the law but also of helping me to make an exhaustive inventory of accidents, unforeseen and possible events, and to deflect them.

I appointed—without their always being aware of it—chief inspectors instructed to monitor the executors to my will when the time came and also to monitor one another.

Like a computer specialist who tries to protect himself from hackers by increasing the number of barriers, firewalls, sophisticated and encrypted access codes, and stepped-up security and alerts, I made a device with double, triple, indeed quadruple backup, which goes so far as to anticipate the death of one, the descent into madness of another, the posthumously revealed stupidity or hatred of the third; and in case these misfortunes and others should occur all at
the same time, a last-defense lock that in principle will make the system inviolable and inevitably bring about the self-destruction of my capsule of words.

I don’t know if I have succeeded. Those who survive me will find out.

I’ve told you this story to show once more that I’m a real neurotic when it comes to secrecy.

I opened and now close this other parenthesis to let you know that I’ve always believed that this secrecy was as indispensable to me as the air I breathe.

And I’m going to tell you something rather awful, but when we’ve come this far, why not? When I was in the thick of Operation Corpet, at the height of my imaginary duel with this charming friend who, through no fault on his part, had become the real incarnation of the devil in my nocturnal and other dreams, in which I heard him, frozen in his stonelike immobility, repeating, “Whatever measures you take … whatever measures you take,” I saw myself like those tyrants immured in their silence, of whom it is said that a milligram of truth, freedom, or transparency would be enough to kill them, or even those poor American Indians dying like flies from being infected with a pinch not of truth but of unknown microbes.

Now, something extraordinary has happened.

I’ve spoken to you about my father, my mother, my body.

I’ve told you some of the reasons why I write, why I’m an activist, why I’m committed, why I keep traveling from one of the world’s most rotten wars to the next, why I lay myself open.

In order to tell you this, I’ve given up my advantageous pose of the friend to humanity, the good man, disinterested and pure.

Not only am I still here, not only has the sky not fallen in on top of me but as a matter of fact I feel rather well.

That may not last.

The opposition, mine I mean, may turn things to their advantage, swarm into the gap I’ve opened up and see these confessions as confirming their worst suspicions.

They’re bound to harp on in this way: “Didn’t we tell you … no sincerity … waited till he was nearly sixty to discover that a writer’s foremost virtue is to be authentic … au-then-tic … but it’s too late … far too late … statue of salt … early grave … hot air … will he ever be quiet …”

But that’s too bad for them, isn’t it?

They’re free, if they wish, to mix up the freedom of a writer who as far as he can fights his unequal struggle with the angel or the beast, and this murky “authenticity” that in their mouths means nothing but the absence of style and talent.

I’m emerging from this dialogue serene, happy with the same sort of relief, I imagine, that the criminal feels after his confession.

My impression is that instead of endangering myself, I’ve been liberated and that I’m ready to reengage with that adventure of the novel that I tasted twenty years ago and which since then, as you understood, I’ve been afraid to return to.

I can hardly believe it myself, but that’s how it is.

It’s the best effect our correspondence could have had on me.

There are also all the subjects we didn’t speak of, which you seem to regret.

We haven’t talked about Sarkozy, you said. Frankly, that’s no harm. And I propose that we continue to keep him out of it, a book without Sarkozy being something of a miracle these days.

Nor have we mentioned his opponents on the left, and
that’s no loss either. As for my becoming minister of culture, frankly, the post would be so opposed to my lifestyle, to my most pressing literary and philosophical needs, and also to my taste for independence, I think we’d better forget about that.

Among the list of the omissions you regret, there are only two names that I’m also sorry we didn’t get to talk about more, and I don’t want to finish up without saying at least a word or two about them.

First, Malraux. That giant. Along with Malaparte, perhaps, the most underestimated writer of the twentieth century. Except that in my case I wouldn’t describe him as a “model,” for the simple reason that I am too torn, fractured, divided, and my taste for multiple, parallel, and contradictory lives is too strong for me to have one single model, no matter how immense, radiant, incontestable he might be …

I told you how, when I was a child, I fixed up a hut at the bottom of the garden, among the trees, where I used to hide in order to imagine my funeral and declaim my future oration.

What I didn’t mention is that I regularly changed the speech I made, as in the meantime I’d changed my biography and destiny.

I might be a writer whose premature death was lamented.

Or an explorer to whom the word owed the discovery of a city that had been engulfed, an Atlantis.

Or a revolutionary, as incorruptible as Robespierre, as angelic as Saint-Just, as surrounded by women as Danton or Mirabeau.

Or the John the Baptist of a religion whose liturgy and rites I imagined in detail.

Another time, in my musical period, I was a virtuoso who, like Glenn Gould, dropped dead onto his piano.

Another time I was a hero of the Resistance and in a
trembling voice I conjured up the tortures he had been forced to endure in order to make him give up his network, before dying without having said a word.

I can’t even say that I was always a hero, a great this or that, lamented by the community of honest folk. My appetite for trying out destinies was so strong, the spectrum of the lives that seemed to me to be worth living seemed so vast, that sometimes I also slipped into the roles of the bad guys, bastards, or official scum, into whose eulogies I put just as much effort: Tony Camonte in
Scarface
, whose execution I considered shameful for the police but rather glorious for himself … Cody Jarrett in the final scene, apocalyptic but beautiful and also worth a eulogy in
White Heat
by Raoul Walsh, or, of course, Michel Poiccard, alias Jean-Paul Belmondo, killed by Inspector Vital in the last scene of the great
À bout de souffle
, which contributed no less than the
Comédie humaine
or
Phenomenology of Spirit
to make me the man I am. Jean Seberg was there before me in my garden, in the front row, choking with emotion, grief, and remorse when she heard my oration …

And the worst thing is that at those moments when, at the summing-up, the tears came to my eyes as well, it was less my death that I was lamenting than the concentration of merit that I had just been praising, with which Plutarch’s
Lives
or Marcel Schwob’s
Imaginary Lives
could hardly keep up, and I also mourned all those other lives, the ones the men I buried had renounced and that I didn’t have enough of my childhood or—what am I saying—enough of my life left to fit in also.

Fifty years later, I’m still in the same place.

Les vies
—Lévy
^*
 … the lives of my infinite number of models.

Malraux, of course, without whom there would have been no Bangladesh and no Bosnia.

But Sartre also, the man of the century. And Camus—I dream of writing an equally extensive book about him one day. And Baudelaire, to whom I’ve already devoted a book containing some of my real secrets. Hemingway because of Spain. Ovid because of the art of loving. And my rabbis. My criminals from Sarajevo. Leibniz of the thousand lives. And those who, like Proust, were able to give themselves to one work only. And the scholars of my adolescence who, while others chased after more conventional ambitions, could risk damnation for an elegy by Tibullus, a rediscovered verse by Ennius, or an ode to Cynthia by Propertius. Others … so many others … A menagerie of saints and monsters. My uncompounded models. Mine.

And then, there’s Gary …
^*

It’s true that he’s really engraved into me.

First of all, I knew him, unlike Malraux, whom I saw only once, at Verrières, the day before I left for Calcutta. I met Gary quite regularly in the last years of his life, while he was losing himself—the worst thing possible for him and with almost no one suspecting it—in the threads of his Ajar tapestry: long lunches at Lipp where I followed his example, ordering my unchangeable “
entrecôte
steak”; late afternoons at the rue du Bac where we drank tea made in dented samovars, which, as he reminded me each time, he had brought back from Majorca. He had that side to him that was a magnificent loser, a fake firebrand, a comedy cowboy with his Stetsons and his boots with their fussy stitching, that made a change from my teachers in the rue d’Ulm.

Then, there was the principle itself of that Ajar adventure, its premises. Here was a writer who was famous but enraged by his lack of recognition, someone who saw the sparkle of his books dulled by his life, his love story with an actress, his films failing or being regarded as failures. His life and work were engaged in a ferocious competition, in which the first overshadowed the second and the second got into a terrible rage with the first. Here was a man who had been celebrated, won awards, become a member of the Academy, fulfilled, a truly glorious person enjoying all the things you could wish for but suffocating in an identity that choked the very things he cared for most, his novels. I don’t need to draw you a picture. With my personality and in my situation, it would be hard for me to be insensitive to that story.

But watch out—I believe that all this was more than a matter of a pseudonym and an oeuvre started up again under a different banner. I believe you cannot understand what a peculiar adventure this was if you see it only as a farce, a ruse, or even a leap made by a writer who considered himself unloved and threw down the gauntlet to his contemporaries: “So you didn’t recognize me with my first face? Well, you’re going to celebrate me with the mask I’ll wear and you’ll be taken in.” If you prefer, you could describe this as an entire metaphysical dimension, which has nothing to do with those questions of literary vanity or even with my fantasies of a double or triple life, a new birth within the same existence, secrets. It is this dimension that gives the whole business its air of disaster and tragedy and is the reason why this highly fissile material should be handled with care …

Unlike what he had already done when he hid behind the pseudonyms of Fosco Sinibaldi or Shatan Bogat, Gary did not content himself with assuming a borrowed name; he
gave a body to that name and that was the body of Paul Pavlowitch.
^*