Public Enemies (36 page)

He didn’t even content himself with this body and the biography that went with it (after all, Pessoa had already done that using fifty-something names, each endowed with its own life, imagination, a catalogue of opinions and disputes). He delegated, subcontracted to that body the entire public part of the life of the new writer he was becoming.

In other words, he underwent a unique chemical operation in literary terms, which, by the way, is not unrelated to what you described in your film: between him and Paul, between the real writer he was and the fictional writer he sent in his place to stir things up on the literary scene, one identity was substituted for another, a transfusion of sensibilities and memory occurred, a relocation to a parallel brain, cloning.

And the result of this alchemy, the fruit of this pathetic—and very soon unbearable—duplication, the conclusion of this more than Faustian pact, since he really lost his soul, was a descent into hell. It was the snare that caught him, the lie like an acid that corroded even his zest for life with, at the end of the road, death looming as the only exit. This was not practicing dying, “visualizing” one’s own death after the production but before the critical reception of the book; alas, this meant really dying, with a red sheet around his head so that his young son wouldn’t be too frightened by the sight of the blood and the pistol shot as the last cadence, the orchestral climax, the logical epilogue to those years he had spent taking himself for another and from another, removing his
self from himself, the way you would take off a wig or a pair of suspenders.

I saw Gary go mad.

Without understanding, of course, what was going on, I saw him, a number of us saw him, lose his head and die under our noses.

We understand it better today.

I know, we all know, that there was a diabolical undercurrent to this enterprise.

I can see that this is an infinitely seductive temptation but one to which—beyond some pleasant mystification—we must not succumb. It’s the very worst there is. I know that I at least have been cured of this unhealthy fascination, not, as you said in your previous letter, out of consideration owed to the reader (we owe them nothing) but because of my appetite for life (and the last images I have of Gary, staggering along the boulevard Saint-Germain, frenzied, his mind elsewhere, death in his step).

Poor Gary, poor “lyrical clown,” who believed that you could play with all that with impunity—the art of fleeing, masks, the Oedipal refusal of the patronymic, the zest for a life that he never stopped starting anew. He needed to start anew, of course. He certainly needed to attempt a rebirth. But he needed it in the same life; it had to be in the same life. He needed to stir up a revolution, not only in a single country but within a single identity, a single soul, a single body. My program was his lesson, the real lesson, a mixture of darkness and light, that he reluctantly bequeathed me.

One more word, dear Bernard-Henri, a last word because I think it interesting to dispel the mystery: it was you yourself, in one of your books, who mentioned Esbly. Oh, it’s only a brief passing mention, I think you’d have to have lived there to notice it; but you do mention it …

One of the things Schopenhauer wrote that I never tire of—it is not one of the major pillars of his philosophy, not the grandiose intellectual reconstruction of the world as Will and Representation, but is one of his disconnected, late remarks, where he expresses doubt about the notion of being, where he envisages the possibility of giving a sense to something analogous to destiny, to the extent that he wonders whether, if his life had been a little longer, he might not have undermined the foundation of his earlier work. Anyway, it is this: “We remember our lives a little better than a novel we once read.”

To which I would add that we remember our lives a little less well than a novel we once wrote.

But even that eventually fades. And though I am (a little) younger than you are, I already find it happening with my
own books. In general, I’m quite happy with myself; I tell myself, “Hey, I did that … it’s not bad …” But sometimes it’s not like that and then I try, desperately, to change the subject.

Just the same, the fact is, in the end we forget even our own books. And I don’t know why, but this morning, I find that really comforting.

Really? I don’t know. I see what you mean. But I’m not sure I find the idea that comforting. Maybe because of what I have told you on several occasions about my fanatical passion for lucidity. Maybe also because I once experienced for a few hours, I mean really experienced what it is for anyone—and it’s even worse for a writer—to have their own memory clinically erased. Salpêtrière
^*
 … the whole accident and emergency drill … stupidity … stupor, suddenly hardly remembering your own name, being able only to repeat in a loop before the group of doctors, all aghast, “Baudelaire’s illness … Baudelaire’s illness …”

So maybe you’re right and perhaps it’s inevitable that one day or another the moment will come when those great chapters of life, of books, grow to resemble pale shadows or mirages or billowing clouds of warmth dissipated by the end of a wonderful, vivid now. But unlike for you, there’s nothing that terrifies me more than that prospect. And faced with that fear, that loss, that enforced coming apart, that leaching, I for my part tend to train myself to become an athlete of memory, a puny
but tenacious Hercules who either carries his precious images in his arm or pushes them ahead of him, without rest, like a heavy, compact, reassuring boulder that’s always head-on.

Sometimes it’s exhausting. Nietzsche, like Schopenhauer, even believed that we die of this and that it’s the most precise definition of that morbid state par excellence that he called
ressentiment
. No matter. It’s what helps me move forward. It’s what gives me a sense of time that is not dead time, time that slips through your fingers, or, which comes to the same thing, an eternal present. And to return one last time to the only one of our debates that left me with a taste of insincerity, it’s the most serious reason I know for bolstering up one’s desire to write and, come what may, to go on.

I don’t like all my books equally, of course. Or all the moments of my life. But I like the idea of being answerable for them. And I particularly like the thought that each new sequence is a mute but imperious and joyful interrogation of the preceding ones. Contrary to the famous theory, I don’t believe that it’s at the last moment, the last breath, that you rediscover the total memory, fully available to itself, that life has dispersed. I believe it’s here and now, at every moment of life, as long as it is really lived. On each page of each book, as long as it is intensely desired. And my premonition, if I had one, would be rather that it’s time to start worrying when in reply to the question “What is living?” too many of those books, moments in life, or the faces that accompanied them stop answering the roll call. There’s a feeling in return for a feeling, a wager for a wager.

Let’s wait and see.

In which Michel Houellebecq opens hostilities: “Together, we perfectly exemplify the shocking dumbing-down of French culture and intellect.”

In which Bernard-Henri Lévy responds and brings up the lynching, by their contemporaries, of Sartre, Cocteau, Pound, Camus, and Baudelaire.

In which Michel Houellebecq examines Schopenhauer to divide a writer’s motives into the desires to please, to irritate, and to conquer.

In which Bernard-Henri Lévy, immersing himself in memories of childhood, resuscitates the ghost of a little scapegoat whose destiny was to illustrate and continue the theories of Girard and Clausewitz.

Social self? Innermost self?
Some rules to follow in case of prolonged exposure to
postpolitical society
as Michel Houellebecq
invites Bernard-Henri Lévy to follow him along the (perilous) path of “confessional literature.”

In praise of cold, nonconfessional literature (Flaubert); in praise of self-interest, of war, and of maximum dissimulation (Pessoa); this is Bernard-Henri Lévy’s response.

In which Michel Houellebecq talks about his father and the relationship between his father and his mother and in so doing lifts a corner of the veil.

In which Bernard-Henri Lévy talks about his own father, who, it is revealed, practiced the same profession as one of the celebrated heroes of a novel by Robbe-Grillet.

In which Michel Houellebecq talks about Céline and Proust and recounts how his father, an alpine guide, went skiing with Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and Antoine Riboud. How he himself has developed a passion for post-Soviet Russia—the girls, the music, the energy.

In which Bernard-Henri Lévy vehemently denounces the crimes of “Putinism” and begins his confession, revealing some of the true reasons (honorable and shameful) why writers have to worry about the world and being politically committed.

In which Michel Houellebecq talks about his reasons (honorable, shameful) for not being politically committed—and in passing discusses the reasons for his exile in Ireland. Inaptness for obedience. Mistrust of heroic posturing.

Bernard-Henri Lévy picks up on a remark by Michel Houellebecq (in between a quote from Goethe and commentary on a text by Dürrenmatt) about Houellebecq’s inability to distinguish between just wars and those that are not just. Rimbaud and the Paris Commune. Mallarmé and the suffering of the working classes.

Michel Houellebecq does not like chaos: “disorder results in the greatest injustices.” Philippe Muray is mentioned; the pressing imperative to distinguish between “reactionaries” and “conservatives”; what might persuade Michel Houellebecq to return someday to France.

Bernard-Henri Lévy is terrified by the void, but likes secret agents.
De natura rerum
or Genesis? Lucretian materialism or the hodgepodge of the Prophets, of Spinoza or Emmanuel Levinas? Bernard-Henri Lévy believes one must choose. Humanity does not have many great books and, alas, one must choose.

First trip to Germany as a teenager. First dazzling encounter with Pascal. In which we learn much about the Christian temptations of Michel Houellebecq.

Memories of uncles Moïse, Hyamine, Maclouf, and Messaoud. The infamy of Jean-Edern Hallier. In which we realize that a child born, like Bernard-Henri Lévy, in the aftermath of the Shoah could not be Christian nor truly Jewish.

In which Michel Houellebecq rejoices to see that the Jews are prepared to face down the new pantheism, which is the true
religion of our times. There is talk of Comte, of Chateaubriand, of the Bible, and of Schopenhauer (again).

In which Bernard-Henri Lévy, horrified, refuses to discuss the madness of Kant, the chess games of Marcel Duchamp, or the secret kinship between Comte and Althusser to solicit Michel Houellebecq’s reaction to his mother’s book.

Michel Houellebecq’s response, in which he talks about his mother, a little about his sister, and about the hateful pack which, he believes, will hound him until death and a little beyond.

Bernard-Henri Lévy responds, relying on Spinoza’s theory of
sad passions
, predicting the rout of the pack.

One must “carry on writing.” But what is the writer’s Achilles’ heel? Money? Fame?

On the fact that one writes as one makes love and vice versa. That Baudelaire is categorically a better poet than Rimbaud. Who is right, the Lithuanian rabbis, disciples of Vilna Gaon, or Sartre in the
Critique of Dialectical Reason
?

In which we learn that Michel Houellebecq considers the novel to be a “minor genre” compared to poetry. The “radioactive halo” of poetry; the “power of words.” There is also some mention of Jean Cohen and Victor Hugo.

In which Bernard-Henri Lévy relates a tale of an evening spent with Louis Aragon in a Paris long since vanished.

Whether it is best to make love in the wee small hours or when completely conscious. Flaubert and Michel Houellebecq respond. Whether Schopenhauer and Plato are masters or colleagues? Michel Houellebecq responds.

On whether Malraux is a model. The truth about the Gary affair? What, at the end of the days, truly separates and unites Michel Houellebecq and Bernard-Henri Lévy? Bernard-Henri Lévy responds.