Public Enemies (8 page)

What strikes me, over and above our fathers’ differences and the similarities, is the curious nature of the times when they were young men; the France of the
Trentes Glorieuses
, say from 1946 or ’47 (the point at which industrial production truly gets going again) and 1973 (the first oil crisis): more than twenty-five years of uninterrupted growth and optimism. It was also the France of the
baby boom
, which ends earlier, curiously, for no apparent reason, in 1964. Were I to try to come up with a reason, I would say something like: the passage from consumer capitalism to a more hedonistic phase—the passage from the washing machine to the transistor radio, if you like.

To get back to the heart of the mystery: the France of the 1950s, its optimism, its energy, its faith in the future and the slight stupidity that that entailed. It seems more distant to me now than the France of the 1890s or the 1930s. And yet this is when I was born, well, toward the end of the period; I too am a baby boomer.

It is possible to be nostalgic for a time one never knew; all you need is a television. And when I see contemporary documentaries of young people (people just like my parents, wearing the same clothes they wore), dancing the twist, when I think about their energy, their joie de vivre, I realize that I’m not alone in being
depressionist—
our whole era is, even if it is beginning to refuse to acknowledge the fact.

A few weeks ago, I read in
Le Figaro
magazine (don’t panic, I can give the classic excuse, I read it in a dentist’s waiting room; I’m only joking, I know you’re not like that, but I would like to point out that I don’t buy the rag, I’ve never really got over the sort of police investigation they did about me when
The Possibility of an Island
was published) … what was I saying? Oh yes, I was reading a book review that praised the author for “avoiding the clichés of the corporate novel.” There followed a list of the aforementioned clichés and as I read on I realized that
I
invented these clichés almost fifteen years ago in
Whatever
. It’s things like this that remind you you’re getting old.

That France (and not just France, all of Western Europe) slumped into depression after the
Trentes Glorieuses
seems to me completely normal. The optimism was too great, the belief in progress too explicit and naïve, the hopes too divisive.
Whatever
was, I think, a salutary book, and one that I think could not be published now. Because our societies have come to a terminal stage where they refuse to recognize their malaise, where they demand that fiction be happy-go-lucky, escapist; they simply don’t have the courage to face their own reality. Because the malaise has not diminished, it’s simply getting worse, you only have to look at the way young people nowadays drink: brutally, until they lapse into coma, to deaden themselves. Or they smoke a dozen joints one after the other until their panic finally subsides. Let’s not even talk about crack.

•    •    •

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of finding myself in Moscow with Frédéric Beigbeder (by accident; we were there for different reasons and didn’t plan to meet up). Twice we did sets as DJs in nightclubs full of the sumptuous blondes popularized by current affairs magazines. Twice Frédéric and I noticed the same thing: young Russians adore the Beatles, they react to their music immediately, they like it (whereas I’m sure they didn’t know the music before, they only discovered western music in the 1980s through groups like U2 and
a
-h
a
). And not only do they like the Beatles, they like early Beatles, songs like “Ticket to Ride” and “Love Me Do.” The music, made eternal by their genius, their enthusiasm, their joie de vivre; the music of youth, of heading off on holiday (the music of economic growth, of full employment).

Back in France, the magazines ran headlines about a new idea: economic decline. A very different atmosphere, obviously.

The worst thing is, the ecologists are right. Of course, none of the problems facing humanity can be tackled without stabilizing the world population, without stabilizing energy consumption, without intelligently managing nonrenewable resources, without tackling climate change.

And yet coming back to Western Europe I felt like I was coming back to the dead. Of course, life is hard, very hard in Russia, it is a violent life, but they
live
, they are filled with a desire to live that we have lost. And I wished I were young and Russian and, ecologically speaking, irresponsible.

I also felt I needed idealism (a rarer commodity, I admit, in contemporary Russia). I wished I were part of a time when our heroes were Yuri Gagarin and the Beatles; when Louis de
Funès made everyone in France laugh; when Jean Ferrat was adapting Aragon.

And, once again, I thought about my parents’ youth.

I’m sorry to take all of my examples from popular music (but you know how much it mattered to people my age). An overview of the literary situation would, I think, lead quickly to radical conclusions. When a country is strong, self-confident, it is prepared to accept any amount of pessimism from its writers without turning a hair. The France of the 1950s accepted people like Camus, Sartre, Ionesco, Beckett. The France of the 2000s has trouble putting up with people like me.

So, well … I’m getting old now, I’m getting weaker, I would like to be happy before I die. So I think I’ll go back to Russia.

Dear Michel, you’re the
depressionist
but I’m about to be the obligatory killjoy.

Unlike you, I have absolutely no desire to be Russian or to return to Russia.

I used to love a certain idea of Russia.

I loved and defended this idea of Russian culture, which in the 1970s and ’80s conjured up a whole hodgepodge, Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, the Slavophiles and Europhiles, the disciples of Pushkin and those of Dostoyevsky, the dissidents on the right and the left and those who, in the words of the mathematician Leonid Plyushch,
^*
belonged to neither of these camps but to the concentration camp and whose defense I was taking up while my father, in the episode I told you about, was signing (or rather, was not signing,
deciding
not to sign) his contracts with Gosplan’s
^†
wood branch.

Then there’s what Russia has become, what appeared
when the breakdown of communism, its debacle—what a mountaineer like your father would call its “thaw” or “collapsing ice” (the real meaning of debacle)—revealed to it and the world the Russia of Putin, of the war in Chechnya, the Russia that assassinated Anna Politkovskaya
^*
on the stairway in her building and that the same Anna Politkovskaya described in her wonderful book
A Russian Diary
, just before she was assassinated. It’s the Russia of the racist packs who, right in the center of Moscow, track down “nonethnic” Russians, the Russia that chased out the Chinese at Irkutsk, the Dagestanis at Rostov, the same Russia that persecutes those it called the
Chernye
, meaning the “swarthy” ones, the Russia that has the nerve to explain to the world that it has nothing to do with democracy and human rights since it has its own democracy, a special, local democracy that is quite unrelated to Western canons and rights. It’s the country of such specialties as its party, the Nashi, meaning “our own,” which, to call a spade a spade, is a Stalin-Hitler combo, the Russia that, incidentally, is giving new life to the anti-Semitic European pamphlets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the same Russia that made a best seller out of a stupid
List of Masked Jews
, which lumps together Sakharov, Trotsky, de Gaulle, Sarkozy, and Yulia Tymoshenko, the mastermind behind the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine. It’s the Russia that—since you mentioned music—put on the cover of one of its popular magazines the singer Irina Allegrova dressed up as an SS camp guard, holding a ferocious hound on a lead. This Russia, which, apart from this kind of idiocy, believes in nothing at all, absolutely nothing, just the religion of the marketplace, consumption and brands. This Russia,
which, the last time I went there, struck me as having had its culture erased and its brain washed, this Russia, whose most discouraging side, according to Anna Politkovskaya, to mention her yet again, was its amorphousness and passivity, the way it accepts, for example, that it hardly has any employment legislation left and that its workers are treated like dogs, the same Russia that leaves the nightclubs where you went to have a laugh and dance with Frédéric [Beigbeder] to rot in a terrifying poverty. In this Russia, no less than under communism, people are ready to betray their parents to steal a broom, a bowl, a badly screwed tap, or—as in Brecht’s
Messingkauf Dialogues
—bits of scrap iron at night from deserted building sites abandoned by oligarchs on the run or in prison … Not only does this Russia inspire no desire in me, it fills me with horror. I’d go so far as to say that it frightens me because I see in it a possible destiny for the late-capitalist societies. Once upon a time, during your postwar “glory days,” the middle class was terrorized by being told that Brezhnev’s communism was not an archaism restricted to distant societies but rather a picture of our own future. We were wrong: it was not communism but postcommunism, Putinism, that may be the testing ground for our future.

But you already know all that.

You know it at least as well as I do.

Just as you know what you’re saying when you say that Céline, that “overrated novelist,” only wrote well in his pamphlets.

So I will spare you any more of this lecture by a moralist, redresser of ideological wrongs, and staunch defender of high-minded principles, who, when you mention the Beatles, replies—shock, horror—that Russia is not what it used to be,
and how is it possible to laugh and sing in terror, among the corpses?

No, the real question here is our different attitudes to this reality, with which we are both familiar. How is it that, knowing what we know, one of us could act as if nothing was more important than to go on listening to “Ticket to Ride” in the company of gorgeous blondes, while the other gets up on his high horse muttering that we don’t have the right, that we can’t simply wash our hands of this rotten Russia? The real question (at least the one you make me feel like raising, and too bad if that seems pompous) is what’s going on in someone’s mind when they decide or pretend to decide that they don’t care about the destiny of the human race and, on the other hand, what goes on in the mind of someone who, in the face of Africa’s forgotten wars, the massacres in Sarajevo, the Pakistani madrassas where jihad is taught, Algeria in the grip of mass terrorism, Russia today and Chechnya laid waste, chooses to act as if the misfortune of others concerned him, as if he were accountable and even a little responsible and as if it were not possible to be really a “man” without feeling responsible for others—at least some of them—and in some sense their hostage.

You are right when you say that our improbable exchange will have at least the (minor) virtue of exploring a little this “literature of confession,” which I feel I must point out you were not that much closer to than I was. (I can make out from here the faces of the biographers, webmasters, chasers of literary prizes, police and customs officers of the imagination that you also have at your heels and who rave about your date of birth, your way of life, your Ireland, your dog, your relations with women, and your body—I can see them from here and I must say that the thought of them reading what you threw at them about your father’s whimsicality, his
eccentricity, his remoteness, and his skiing clients makes me laugh out loud.)

But if it—I’m still talking about our exchange—also succeeds in forcing us to reveal ourselves through questions such as “concern or not about the human race,” if in my case at least it allows me to return to the roots—no bluff, no pretending—of this need I have to feel that I am the one “under an obligation,” the “guardian,” what Levinas
^*
called the “substitute” for my neighbor, if it could help me to understand and say why a man like myself, who could stay quietly at home enjoying life and writing novels, should spend so much of his life running around the world, denouncing its injustices and disorder, and why, although nobody asked him to do so, he keeps giving his learned opinion week after week on how to fix things—if our exchange could do that, I must admit that I would be pleased.

The problem, I insist, is not only that nobody called on me to do this …

It’s not only that, unlike those whose profession it is, in particular journalists, I could easily live without bothering with this.

The strange thing is that when I think about it, I am at least as inclined as you toward skepticism, doubt, and a sense of futility.

I’m a pessimist.

In philosophical terms I’m not at all what is usually called a progressive.

Actually, I believe that people who want to get too mixed up in the lives of their fellow men, to redesign or regenerate humanity excessively, are either dangerous lunatics or crooks, or both.

Indeed, for the record, it’s that conviction that cost me the Prix Goncourt the only time in my life that I had a real chance of winning it. It was the year of my
Last Days of Charles Baudelaire
, and there was a passage in the novel in which I had the author of
Les Fleurs du mal
say that it was no coincidence that horrible Marat had called his newspaper
L’Ami du peuple
or that the abominable Robespierre believed he was a friend to humankind. On the jury was the late André Stil, who had two religions, or rather three—the Party (he was the only Frenchman to receive successively the Stalin Prize and the Prix Populiste Littéraire), Grasset
^*
(he was the only juror in the history of the prize to have made a point of honor of never letting his emotions get in the way, and, over the fifteen to twenty years of his reign, always voting for his publishing house), and Robespierre (he harbored a puerile but intense devotion for “The Incorruptible,” following the line of a party that only ever saw the Bolsheviks as the reincarnation of the Committee of Public Safety and its blazing intransigence). You can guess the rest. There was unease in the civilization of Robespierre and Stalin.
Between my Party and my publishing house, I must choose my Party
. And by one vote, his, a Goncourt that had been in the cards slipped away and went to an undeniable lover of the human race, my comrade Érik Orsenna.