The Counterfeiters (48 page)

I am trying to wind up the various threads of the plot and the complexities of my thoughts around the little living bobbins that are my characters.

I cannot aim to be simultaneously precise and timeless. If my story leaves any doubt whether it is before or after the war, it will be because I have remained too abstract.

For instance, the whole story of the counterfeit gold pieces can only occur before the war, since at present gold pieces are outlawed. Likewise, thoughts and preoccupations are no longer the same; in seeking a more general interest, I am taking a chance of losing my footing.

It would be better to go back to my original idea: the book in two sections—before and after. This could be turned to good account: everyone finding corroboration of his ideas in the war, and emerging from the ordeal a little more rigid in his opinion. The three positions, socialist, nationalist, and Christian, each edified and strengthened by events. And all this through the fault of half-measures which allow each party to believe that if its interests had not been compromised, the thing would have worked out better and nothing disastrous would have taken place.

It is not so much by offering a solution to certain problems that I can render a real service to the reader as in actually forcing him to think for himself about these problems, for which I am loath to admit that there can be any other solution than an individual and personal one.

The tramp that Lafcadio meets on his way back from Marseille must serve as a connecting link between him and Édouard. It would be totally useless at present to try to write the dialogue between Lafcadio and the tramp; I can’t even sketch out the later until I know a little more about the role I want him to play in the end.

Groped in the clouds for hours on end. This effort to externalize an interior creation, to objectify the subject (before having to subjectify the object) is peculiarly exhausting. For days and days you can make nothing
out, and it seems as though the effort has been useless; the important thing is not to give up. To navigate for days on end without any land in sight—this image must be used in the book itself; most artists, scholars, etc., are coastwise sailors who imagine they are lost as soon as they get out of sight of land.—The dizziness of empty space.

I have been so exasperated by the difficulties of my undertaking—actually, I saw nothing else—that I have turned from the job for some time to get back to writing my Memoirs.
⁷
Or at least I dissemble, I stray onto tangents, I beat about. But in spite of myself I am forever coming back to it; I think it seems the more difficult to me the more I aim to make it conform to the conventional form of the novel, and that many of these so-called difficulties will collapse as soon as I become definitely reconciled to its originality. Why, as soon as I accept it to be incomparable with anything else (and that’s the way I want it), why so much searching for a motivation, a development, the forming of a pattern around a central plot? Perhaps with the form I adopt I can find a way to have all that criticized indirectly: for example, Lafcadio could try in vain to tie the threads together; there would be unnecessary characters, ineffectual acts, pointless remarks, and the action
would not
get under way.

In Stendhal no phrase evokes the one after it or takes life from the preceding one. Each one stands perpendicular
to the fact or idea. Suarès
⁸
speaks admirably of Stendhal; you couldn’t hope for better.

A month without writing anything in this notebook. An airing out. Anything is better than a bookish odor.

Of all the instruments that have ever been used for sketching or writing, Stendhal’s traces the most delicate line.

Remained several months without writing anything in this notebook; but I have hardly ever stopped thinking of the novel, although my most immediate concern is for the writing of
Si le grain ne meurt …
one of the most important chapters of which (the trip to Algeria with Paul) I wrote this summer. Even while writing it I was led to think that intimacy, insight, psychological investigation can in certain respects be carried even further in the “novel” than in “confessions.” In the latter one is sometimes hampered by the “I”; there are some complexities one cannot try to disentangle, to expose without seeming self-centered. Everything I have seen, everything I have learned, everything that has happened to me for several months, I should like to get into this
novel, where it will serve to enrich the texture. I should like events never to be related directly by the author, but instead exposed (and several times from different vantages) by those actors who will be influenced by those events. In their account of the action I should like the events to appear slightly warped; the reader will take a sort of interest from the mere fact of having to
reconstruct
. The story requires his collaboration in order to take shape properly.

Thus the whole story of the counterfeiters is to be discovered only in a gradual way through the conversations, by which all the characters will portray themselves at the same time.

I infinitely admire Martin du Gard’s assiduity, as I do Bennett’s.
¹⁰
But I am not sure this system of notes and filing cards he recommends would have been of much help to me; the very preciseness of a recollection noted in such a way hampers it, or at least would hamper me. I stick to Wilde’s paradox: nature copies art. The artist’s rule should be never to restrict himself to what nature proposes, but to propose nothing to nature but what nature can and should shortly imitate.

The treatise on the nonexistence of the Devil
. The more we deny him, the more reality we give him. The Devil is affirmed in our negation.

Last night wrote several pages of dialogue
¹¹
on this subject—which might very well become the central subject
of the whole book; in other words, the invisible point about which everything gravitates.…

Success in the worst, and deterioration of the most exquisite qualities.

I shall take Martin du Gard to task for the discursive gait of his narrative. His novelist’s lamp, wending though the passing years, always illuminates head-on the events he is considering as each one in succession moves into the foreground. Their lives never mingle and there is no more perspective than there is shadow. This is just what bothers me in Tolstoy.
¹²
They both paint panoramas; art lies in creating a picture.
First
study the source of the light; all the shadows depend on that. Every form rests on and finds support in its shadow.

Admit that a character who is exiting can only be seen from the rear.

To write this book properly I must persuade myself that it is the only novel and final book I shall write. I want to pour everything into it without reservation.

If Stendhal’s “crystallization” is sudden,
¹³
the pathetic element lies in the gradual contrary process of
decrystallization
; worth examining. When time and age strip from love one by one all its
points of reference
and force it to take refuge in some mystical adoration or other, some altar upon which the lover hangs as an ex-voto all the souvenirs of the past: her smile, her bearing, her voice, the details of her beauty.

He comes to the point of asking himself: what does he still love in her? The surprising thing is that he still feels that he loves her
desperately
—I mean to say: with a hopeless love, for she no longer believes in his love
because of his previous “infidelities” (I am purposely using the most deceptive term) of a purely carnal sort. But precisely because he loved her above and beyond sensuality (of a gross sort, at least), his love remains safe from any danger of ruin.

He is jealous of God, who is stealing his wife from him. Vanquished in advance, he feels incapable of struggle; but he conceives a hatred for this rival and everything connected with Him. What a paltry thing is this petty human happiness he is offering her, compared with eternal bliss!

I must note here nothing but remarks of a general sort on the planning, composition, and guiding motive of the novel. This journal must become to some extent “Édouard’s notebook.” In addition I am noting on cards things that might be of help: various materials, dialogues, scraps of conversation, and especially anything that may help me in sketching characters.

Of these I should like one character (the Devil) to circulate incognito throughout the entire book, his reality growing stronger the less the other characters believe in him. This is the distinguishing feature of the Devil, whose introductory motif is: “Why should you be afraid of me? You know very well I don’t exist.”

I have already written a section of dialogue the sole purpose of which is to introduce and explain this extremely important remark, one of the catchwords of the book. But the dialogue itself (such as I have scribbled it down) is very poor and will have to be completely recast in the book, set into the action.

The great error of the dialogues in X.’s book is that his characters are forever speaking to the reader; the author has given them his job of explaining everything. Take constant care that a character speak only for the
benefit of the one to whom he is addressing himself.

There is one sort of character who can speak only for an imaginary “gallery” (impossibility of being sincere, even in a monologue)—but this case is quite special and can stand out only if the others, on the contrary, remain utterly natural.

While I waited for my luggage, on the arrival of the train that brought me back from Brignoles,
¹⁴
the opening scene of
The Counterfeiters
became clear to me in a sudden flash: Édouard and Lafcadio meeting on a station platform, the ice broken with the sentence: “I’ll bet you are traveling without a ticket.” (I used this sentence to approach the odd vagrant in the Tarascon station I speak about in my journal.) All this now seems quite mediocre to me, at least greatly inferior to what I visualize at present.

(There follows the draft of the episode that now appears in the book.)

To tell the truth, Édouard feels that Lafcadio, although he has returned all the letters, has an advantage over him; he feels that the most gallant way to disarm him is to win him over—and Lafcadio, offhandedly and tactfully, gives him to understand this. But soon this forced intimacy gives way to a genuine feeling. After all, Lafcadio is most attractive (he is not yet fully aware of this).

Yesterday I left Dent’s before noon and was not expected until 1:30 at Charles Du Bos’s.
¹⁵
As I was dawdling
in front of a second-hand bookshop, I caught an urchin in the act of pocketing a book. He took advantage of a moment when the proprietor, or at least the clerk in charge of the sidewalk exhibit, had his back turned; but only after he had crammed the book into his pocket did he become aware of my glance and realize that I was keeping an eye on him. Immediately I saw him blush slightly, then strive by some sort of hesitant gesture to explain his act. He drew back a few steps, seemed to be considering, returned, then ostensibly, and
for my benefit
, drew a little threadbare wallet from the inside pocket of his jacket and made a pretense of looking for the money he knew very well wasn’t there. He made, still for my benefit, a little grimace that meant: “Not enough!” shook his head, went back to the clerk in charge, and, as naturally as he could (in other words, with a sort of slow-motion, like an actor who has been told: “You’re going through it much too fast” and who forces himself to “put in pauses”), he finally pulled the book out of his pocket and put it back in its original place. Since he felt that I had never stopped watching him, he could not make up his mind to leave and continued to pretend an interest in the bookstall. I think he would have stayed there a great deal longer had I not drawn back a few steps, as though I were the cat in the game of “cat in the corner,” giving the mouse a chance to change corners. But he had no sooner broken away than I accosted him.

“What was that book?” I asked, with as much smile as I could muster.

“A guide to Algeria. But it costs too much.”

“How much?”

“Two francs fifty. I’m not that rich.”

“If I hadn’t been watching you, you’d have slipped out with the book in your pocket, eh?”

The boy protested energetically. He had never stolen
anything, he had no wish to start, etc. I took a two-franc note from my pocket:

“Here you are. Go ahead and buy the book.”

A couple of minutes later he emerged from the shop thumbing through the book, which he had just paid for: an old 1871 Joanne bound in blue.

“It’s dreadfully old. That’s no good for anything.”

“Oh, yes; it’s got maps. That’s the thing I get the most fun out of—geography.”

I suspect that the book flattered an instinct for wanderlust; I talk a little more with him. He is about fifteen or sixteen, very modestly clad in a scanty brown jacket, stained and threadbare. He carries a schoolboy’s satchel under his arm. I discover that he is at Henri IV
¹⁶
in his next to last year. Not very attractive to look at; but I reproach myself for having left him too quickly.

If I am able to use the anecdote, it seems to me it would be much more interesting told by the boy himself, for this would no doubt permit more detours and dodges.