Public Enemies (28 page)

And then, finally, came the famous
Apostrophes
, where the book’s destiny was made, as was my own, hot on its heels. The fact is, I did not go into it exactly reluctantly but rather with closed eyes, blindly, in absolute innocence not only of what was going on but of the stakes involved in this kind of platform. I was far, very far, from aiming at, calculating, or
even wanting some sort of entry into the spotlight for thirty years.

I’ll admit that I made up for it afterward.

And I didn’t make much of an effort, to say the least, to return to that obscurity from which, as I’ve just told you, that book plucked me.

When I’m feeling self-indulgent, I imagine that this triggered a sort of trap, a chain reaction, or indeed a clinamen that was hard to resist. When I’m very self-indulgent and don’t hold back from seeing myself in the most flattering light possible, I tell myself that I’m hardly the only one, for crying out loud. There has to be more at stake than the problems of a writer contemplating his navel and worrying about his position in his times! The Burundians, the Darfuris, the Bosnians would hardly have benefited from my return to obscurity. Look at all the good and great causes I’ve devoted myself to, which needed this constant media racket.

There are also times when I think that you’re right, that we do become diminished, that sooner or later we give up on our desires, dreams, ambitions, youth, and that it’s at most dubious to dress up this backing down, these small acts of cowardice or major deviations, as I do, in the favorable guise of “friend to humanity.”

All of which is true, I suppose.

It’s all concurrently true and I myself don’t even know in what doses.

Although … I hardly dare to say this and yet it’s also true.

Strangely enough, deep down I haven’t really changed my opinion about the hierarchy of influence.

I am as fascinated now as I was when I was twenty by those great, inflexible figures who provided a sort of background music through the history of my generation and who
as a joke I call our “hidden imams”! Benny Lévy, after his political season and his ascent to Jerusalem; Robert Linhart, who preceded him as the head of the
Gauche prolétarienne
, and whose daughter has just described in a novel how one fine day he simply decided to stop talking; Jean-Claude Milner and Jacques-Alain Miller, those two precocious geniuses who, in the corridors of the École on the rue d’Ulm, argued about the origin of the concept of “suture”; or Sylvain Lazarus, who hardly left any books, whose work is known only through the constant references to his “unpublished” or “apocryphal” theses (!) made by Alain Badiou, with his strong media presence. I sometimes wonder whether Lazarus exists, like some character of Borges, only in the imagination of a handful of crazy dreamers, still caught up in the leftism of our youth, in fact precisely that of Badiou.

As for television, that permanent show, one of whose symbols I fear I’ve become, perhaps when I’m on it I look less “terrorized” or “bored” than you, but I can assure you that I don’t enjoy it much, and that I do so less and less, certainly less than at the beginning when at least I had the good fortune to be unaware both of the rules of the game and the posturing it involves, and the effects it can have on the rest of your life.

I’ve told you all this in order to say three things.

First, it’s not at all a given that you become what you are, as proved by both your case and mine, in which misunderstandings triumph and reign.

Second, when the idea of leaving that light-flooded stage in some way or another crosses my mind, far from worrying me, it gives me a slight and quite delicious joy. This departure may be forced or voluntary or result from an excess of comedy, as in Gary’s case. Any of these is possible and I don’t mind which.

Third, these tales of celebrity are far more complicated, far more determined by chance and unknown quantities, than generally believed in this post-Warhol world, where the thirst for recognition has reached such a pitch of intensity that everyone wants to be a star and does not doubt for an instant that if they provide the goods, they’ll make it. A word to the wise is enough. And sorry if by saying this I seem to be slamming the door in the face of some of our nasty little terriers …

Now to the next point.

These minor or major secrets of production are always exchanged by two writers—this is a rule that permits no exceptions—once they reach a certain level of intimacy in life or, as here, in a correspondence.

The fundamental question is
why
(write)?

The eternal mystery, and I mean a real mystery, more impenetrable even than that of “commitment,” is why certain people like you and me, who could be doing anything else, or even—it must be said—nothing, really doing nothing, just lounging about, traveling, dreaming, seeing friends, reading, should choose to spend so much time in what is really quite a strange activity, which consists of tinkering about, modeling, manufacturing, adjusting, overheating, this other material—words.

You could say that it’s more interesting than a normal trade or being a ghost writer, as I was in my early days of “books” by Inspector Borniche or the duchess of Bedford. But we both know that we’re beyond that stage and that this point can no longer be relevant.

You can be flippant, as certain writers are, and hide behind
one of the great canonical answers given in 1919 to the survey in
Littérature
.
^*
The question those three magnificent young people who were Aragon, Soupault, and Breton asked their public was “Why do you write?” “Out of weakness,” answered Valéry. Out of weakness! What nerve! Excuse me for being so direct, but I’ve never heard anything more affected, insincere, tacky, and really weak as that reply.

For me the truth is infinitely more simple …

For as long as I can remember, since adolescence in any case, there have been two things—not three or four, just two—that I felt were worth living for: first, love, and I mean that in the strict sense, in the sense of loving women, and, second, writing, just writing, spending nights, days, and more nights at my word-kit, striving to make the dough rise, to form a shape, to keep my little columns of signs upright, or almost …

The combination of these two passions is not at all surprising. I believe that they come down to the same thing. Deep down, fundamentally, they are the same thing, the same kind of energy, the same drive, the same force—reined in, building up—the same mix of sensual pleasure and pain, suddenness and patience, scrupulous searching and effortless finding. Why do you write? Because you can’t make love all day. Why do you make love? Because you can’t write all day. When and in what circumstances could you give up writing? On the day—if it happens—that the other passion, that other fervor, shows signs of abating. Would the opposite be true? Would the same correlation apply in reverse? Of course. These things always cut both ways. What can a body do? asked Nietzsche. What can it do, what does it want, and in the
name of what overriding interest? It can do all sorts of things. I’m not like Beckett, who, to the same question, “Why do you write?,” replied half a century later with his famous “It’s all I’m fit for.” If I will it to, my body can do any number of things that are apparently unrelated to my two essential passions. It can work, for example. It can move from one place to another, heal, sustain itself, live somewhere, sleep, do battle, make noise, toss and turn. But my nature is such that all these activities serve only to underpin one or the other of my two essential passions. My constitution allows me to do practically nothing that is not in some way or another, directly or indirectly, linked to these arts of loving and writing, the double climax that I derive almost equally from both. Truly, there are only two things that my body is “able” to do, in the sense of being equipped by nature to do; two things that are really one and the same; loving and writing, writing and loving, drawing sustenance from the first for the second and tapping in the second the wellspring of the first. That’s how it is.

That this passion for writing should occupy the position I’ve mentioned in someone’s life, that it should outclass others, all others with the exception of love, with which it competes or of which it forms a part, derives from a neurosis, which is also quite a banal one—see the irrevocable demonstration given by Sartre in
The Words
, which is really his farewell to books, a cry of hatred and revolt against bewitchment by literature. Except that first off, I like that bewitchment. I don’t dream of freeing myself from it. And why would I? In the name of what? I repeat, I have no substitute passion. I don’t have a third passion to put in its place … Besides, this exasperated quixotism, this passion for words and their echo, this life within and through words, this way of literally seeing the word as the beginning of the world, takes in my case—and this is nothing to be proud of … once again, that’s just
how it is, neither good nor bad, it is what it is—extreme forms verging on the burlesque.

Ideas … I haven’t written any novels in twenty years and thus, unlike you, I’m a man of ideas and should see ideas as the ultimate rulers. But the more time passes, the more sure I am that even when it comes to questions of truth and ideas, what is decisive are words. It is believed that a philosopher is someone who says, “Look, I have an idea, all I need now are the words to express it.” Not at all! Experience, my experience, has proved that it’s almost always the opposite. It’s words that ignite concepts and not the other way around. The shaft of light thrown by the work of words is the bright spot in the dark that finally nails down the idea.

As for life, I’m not bad at it. I’m not melancholic or depressive, still less a depressionist. But the fact is, the further I go into it, the more life, its joys, its everyday happiness, its meetings, interest me only insofar as they will or can be transmuted into words (not necessarily right away but one day in one form or another, perhaps in a novel, perhaps in a film or in my false novel, the diary I’ve been keeping for more than thirty years and that I’m sure I’ll get into some shape or another one day). It was Althusser who said that you never emerge from thought to get back to reality. Never, once you go into the concept of dog, can you find your way back to the sweet animal of flesh, bones, and barks of which Spinoza said that it had definitively stopped biting. So that’s where I am. I haven’t changed my opinion or my disease, and on this point, as on many, I’m forced to admit that paradoxically I’ve remained faithful to my old and disavowed master.

As for art, film, beautiful objects, books even insofar as they are also objects (think of that passion, which I find unintelligible, of what’s called bibliophilia, which I sometimes discuss with one of the masters of the genre, Pierre Leroy),
the truth is regrettable. The real truth, which I’ve never dared to say to anyone before, is that none of that interests me unless, once again, it provides a pretext for writing. I am capable of spending an enormous amount of time at Perugia, Monterchi, Borgo San Sepolcro, the National Gallery, the Staatliches Museum in Berlin, the Frick, or Arezzo if the Éditions de la Différence ask me for a book on Piero della Francesca. I can go to the worst flop that Lauren Bacall ever starred in, if I know that I have to use her lovely face in another book, this time in images and sounds, which will be
Le Jour et la nuit
. But to do it for its own sake, without any reason, for the love of art and pleasure … What pleasure, for God’s sake? I couldn’t give a damn about that pleasure. I realize with horror that it’s been years since I sacrificed a day or even an evening of good writing for the mere pleasure of going to see a film, to admire a painting, go to the opera unless I know I’m going to use it in a text. And with an even greater horror I realize that when it’s finished, when I’ve completed the text I’ve been asked to produce, when I’ve translated into words what I’ve understood of Mondrian, Macau, a great contemporary novel, the plays of Thomas Bernhard, Warhol’s collages, the photographs of Richard Avedon, the ruins of Lagos or Kabul, the heart of America, the last nights of Baudelaire, the films of Coppola or Woody Allen (the only thing that has saved me and because of which I am nevertheless interested in a certain number of things is—and we keep coming back to this—my insatiable appetite for writing, which over time, just as in love, has had to vary its situations and positions somewhat), I realize and not without a certain shame that once they have been put into words, stored in some book or analyzed in an article, things cease to concern me, I lose interest in them, they are so to speak deactivated. I can spend the rest of my days without ever going
back to see
The Duke and Duchess of Urbino
by Piero della Francesca, although it enchanted me when I went to see it for my book at the Uffizi in Florence.

Naturally, I try to keep this in check.

There are cases—in which, in order to speed things up, what’s at stake is not only art or cinema but politics or morality and the actual destiny of actual men and women—where I’m particularly aware of this rapacious, predatory side, which is the correlate to my belief in the virtues of departing from syntax, the imperceptibly new use of a punctuation sign, of a word catapulted beyond its usual usage, an unshackled sound that rises beyond the realms of silence and noise …

And it’s the reason why I spend so much time in organizing safety devices for myself to protect me from myself, such as the radio I’m helping to set up in Bujumbura in order to make sure that I’ll go back there, an irregular correspondence with some old, young people I met eight years ago in Vienna, knowing that part of me might well be tempted to see them only as bit players in the report I wrote at the time on the “anti-Haider resistance,”
^*
a somewhat forced friendship in N’Djamena to maintain the link with Darfur, a brotherhood kept up with a Pakistani “fixer,” or my
Nouvelles de Kaboul
, which I carry around, so that I won’t be able to look away.

But that is the truth.