Public Enemies (5 page)

A scrap of mystery, blown down by a distant storm.

A biographical enigma, resisting any explanation.

And that way he had of dismissing other people’s idle chatter with phrases like “as futile as if you’d said nothing,” “like ghosts,” “a waste of breath …”

He died on my birthday, which, when I think about it, seems part of a plan.

He bequeathed me this taste for and practice of secrecy, which I sometimes take too far.

He passed on to me this fear of words and of their terrifying power, as well as—naturally—a love of them.

He left me this dream I have at times of writing in a dead language, which would discourage any risk of confidences, being addressed directly to the dead.

But I have already said too much. He would have hated that.

Dear Bernard-Henri,

Several times over the past weeks I have thought about the case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Thought about it in precisely these terms: I asked myself what I would have done in her place.

Some years ago, I remember enormously appreciating the letter Philippe Sollers wrote (and later published) to Taslima Nasrin
^*
—you see, I don’t just see flaws in good old Philippe … His message might be summed up: Flee. Don’t play their game; don’t allow yourself to succumb to the temptation of heroism. Liberty has no need of martyrs.

But, that said, in concrete terms,
flee to where
? To be brutally honest, I don’t believe that the French police could effectively ensure Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s safety. It is not easy to prevent a public figure from being assassinated—especially when the assassins are prepared to risk their own lives and would not balk at taking a few dozen other victims with them. The Israelis are well trained—and even they fail sometimes. The
English have a certain practical experience. But the French police? To be honest, I have my doubts.

The vast majority of immigrants of Muslim origin in Western Europe are peaceable people. The corollary is that in any country with a large Muslim community, the chances are good that you can enlist enough thugs to mount a serious assassination attempt against someone who is moderately careful (you have to study the victim’s movements, buy the weapons, I mean, there’s a ton of work involved). It is an unpleasant corollary, I know; but I am not trying to suggest what is desirable, I am simply giving my opinion about a pressing, practical problem.

In practice, therefore, this is what I would do in her shoes: I would move to a country where there is a small Muslim population—Prague or Warsaw, for example. I would avoid all public appearances, obviously; I would go on working via the Internet, though only after getting help from an IT expert (it’s perfectly possible, using a proxy, to hide your real IP address). And I would wait for Europe to have the good sense to provide me with decent police protection.

Okay, I’m sorry for reducing the issue to the specific, but there are some questions on which I tend to think pragmatically, though I’m embarrassed to admit it.

I didn’t know (though I can’t say I’m surprised) that people had written so many unpleasant things about you; I haven’t read any of the biographies dedicated to you. Nor have I read the biography of which I was the unwilling subject. To tell the truth, I can’t remember ever finishing a single biography. Those I started reading made me think of bad spy novels (or mystery novels) in which the author’s sympathies are clear from the outset, in which only the most obvious schemes and
motives are explored, the sort of novel where you can work out whodunit in the first twenty pages. To put it another way, I have never been able to imagine a biography that is exempt from a certain
vulgarity
.

Confessional literature, on the other hand, is like a good spy novel (there are some, though they are rare) or mystery novel (of which there are considerably more; there is nothing tongue-in-cheek about my praise for the works of Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle) in which each new revelation merely adds another layer to the mystery, in which the accretion of information leads one to a generalized, paroxysmal sense of puzzlement that is poetic in its paroxysm, in the universal atmosphere of mystery that eventually engulfs the whole narrative.

Let me go back to my own biography for a moment. At the time it was published—back then I still Googled myself—I simply glanced through the advance sheets that appeared on
L’Express
’s Internet site, from which I could clearly work out that my father and my mother were the indisputable stars of the book and consequently that the book would necessarily be of no interest whatever. How could any journalist—always assuming he is conscientious and very shrewd (though the few e-mails I exchanged with Demonpion offer little evidence of his shrewdness)—in the space of a few short interviews, glean from my father and my mother (two people, in their different ways, of terrifying subtlety and an intelligence bordering on perversity) anything approaching the
truth
?

It was obvious that both of them would jump at the chance to make a grand production of their usual shtick, that each in their own way would retrace the story of their relationship. Though not necessarily to show themselves in the best light.
My father, it’s true, usually likes to play the
good little guy
, the honest, decent, working-class boy taken in by a dangerously unbalanced woman. My mother, on the other hand, often finds it entertaining to give a certain
rock and roll
edge to her story, for example by exaggerating the quantity of drugs she consumed. I must have heard the story, of how they met, their lives together, how they split up, at least a dozen times as a child, from both protagonists and from direct and indirect witnesses. Every time, my mother and my father would embellish their version a little more, contextualize it, make up some
period detail
, some
local color
. The only reasonable conclusion I can come to now is that they shared a great love affair—one of the greatest of their lives—so much so that twenty years later, it is still the most fascinating topic of conversation either of them could think of.

In the end, the two of them would have made a great subject for a novel—which would also have been a fine novel about
Les Trentes Glorieuses
,
^*
that most astonishing period of recent French history.
The Elementary Particles
is not that novel. It’s just possible to find in it some similarities to my mother, but I entirely evaded the subject of my father. As a character, Michel’s father is flimsy; Bruno’s father is more successful, but is utterly unlike my own father. All this simply serves to confirm an idea that I find increasingly more striking: in literature, the amount of truth, perhaps of autobiographical truth, you invest in a character is of no importance. The corollary of this is that you can confess everything, can say anything and everything, true or false, and none of it will have the slightest bearing on its eventual success.

Basically, the only important thing you need to know is
whether confessional literature is appropriate for you, Bernard-Henri Lévy, whether it will allow you to write something you can be proud of. In my opinion it is impossible to tell until you have tried it. In my case, I am not too sure. In 2005, taking a break from
The Possibility of an Island
, I began to recount some memories on the Internet. The fact is, I gave up quite quickly and, though I later agreed to publish these pieces in a magazine, I have been reluctant, and thus far have refused whenever anyone has suggested collecting them as a book. The great autobiographical undertaking—that of a Rousseau or a Tolstoy—is, I fear,
not quite my style
. And yet I think perhaps a few scattered memories, sprinkled through a manuscript whose goal is something different, can have a certain aesthetic interest (sorry, all this is a little Stendhalian). Actually, I don’t know, I’m experimenting. There remains the question you posed:
Why?
(Why not in your case and why so in mine?)

Well, the
propensity to confess
that I manifest from time to time comes, it seems to me, from two very different sources. The first, as I have already said, is my deep-rooted conviction that no confession can change anything about one’s personality, cannot make good or make worse whatever flaws we have; in short an antipsychoanalytical conviction—one of the few that I have always held to, that and the nonexistence of God. The second is my extraordinary overestimation of myself, something that I occasionally fall victim to, which leads me to believe that no confession can ever exhaust the indefinite richness of my personality, that one could draw endlessly on the ocean of my possibilities—and that if someone believes they know me, they are simply lacking information.

I sometimes feel like Nietzsche in
Ecce Homo
, feeling it appropriate to give an account of his dietary habits, like his taste for “
thick oil-free cocoa,
” convinced that nothing that concerns him could be entirely without interest (and what is
worse, one does read these pages with a certain pleasure; pages that may well outlive
Thus Spake Zarathustra
). I do, however, realize that this Stendhalian, aristocratic, flippant approach can be irritating (less with Nietzsche, in fact, since he never quite gets there; he preaches flippancy rather more than he practices it).

A modern variation, one from the era of the mass media: face-to-face with certain journalists I had sometimes felt like Kurt Cobain telling a tactless interviewer, “I’m homosexual, I’m a pagan, I’m a drug abuser, and I like to fuck pot-bellied pigs! Is that enough?”

I now have the well-established reputation of
hating journalists
; this is, at best, approximate. I can truly say I have encountered the worst and the best in the profession. I don’t think I have been remotely unfair to Jérôme Garcin. Everything about the man rings false, his every sentence oozes speciousness and affectation. The restrained emotion, the walks across the moors “lashed by the bitter wind” … you feel like you’re in a BMW commercial. But I have a powerful memory of Harriet Wolff, the very strange German journalist I allude to in the first page of
The Possibility of an Island
. (Was she really a journalist, in fact? I’m fairly sure she mentioned the name of a newspaper, but I never did ask to see her press card.) I am sorry that at my age I have come to the sad but trite conclusion that there are some people who are worth talking to, and others who aren’t.

We’re up to our necks in
contempt
, and I hate that. Because contempt, which is so difficult to avoid as you get older, is anything but a strength. When you are contemptuous of your adversary, you can be almost certain you are beaten. For example, how effective is contempt when you are attacked by
a tapeworm (it must be thinking figuratively about Pierre Assouline that prompted this image)? Clearly the temptations of contempt are dangerous; I have known this for years and yet I succumb to them more and more.

It will be the death of me, in the end. I can still remember watching my father (you wanted more information; you don’t have to ask twice …) pulling his camper van into a truck stop when we were going on holiday. I saw the same scene many times. In a few short minutes, a number of emotions played across his face. Gloomy puzzlement, usually; amusement, sometimes, fleeting; something like envy; but more often than not, infinite, unfathomable contempt. In any case I never saw him jump out of the van as soon as he pulled up and mingle with the other families, the groups of teenagers on holiday, queuing up to buy their
jambon-fromage
. On every occasion, I saw him pause for several minutes before going to join the throng of
his fellow men
; and how long those minutes seemed to me! Few adults, very few, are aware to what extent children watch their parents, constantly on the lookout for some sign of how they should approach the world; how sharp and vibrant their intelligence is in the years leading up to the disaster of puberty, how quick to summarize, to draw broad conclusions. Very few adults realize that every child, naturally, instinctively, is a
philosopher
. It sometimes seems to me that, as a man, all I have done is to give aesthetic expression to the
withdrawal
that as I child I witnessed in my father.

That, it has to be said, would not be so bad. For what would remain, if I were not here, of the subtle, significant, insidiously tactful gestures of my father? Of the ludicrous, almost offensive
courtesy
whose sole purpose was to prove, against all expectations, against all reason, that he was prepared to
make a gesture
, to offer the other person one last
chance to come to terms with his own vulgarity, his emptiness? I later discovered (during a cleanup, God knows he would have hated to acknowledge it, so much so that I never mentioned seeing the document) that in his youth, my father had performed
acts of bravery
—specifically in the domain of mountain rescue. Strange destiny, to save the lives of human beings for whom you feel nothing but contempt. Strange destiny to have been (and for many years this was the case, in his career as a mountain guide) at the service of a bourgeoisie for whom he had no respect. My own choice, all in all, seems to me more consistent: I have always loved books, I write books; it’s astoundingly simple.