Public Enemies (7 page)

None of that exists anymore.

That Paris has disappeared and, even more so, those
places. And in those places nothing remains of what he called his life’s work, not even a sign, a plaque, a gray blind in the windows or the magnolia in a pot at the entrance to the building, behind the railings, which seemed to be there for all eternity. It reminds me of those defeated cities, on whose remains the conquerors spread salt in order to make sure that they remain forever bare.

So there you are, dear Michel. I’m glad that here, at this point, thanks to you and the words you held out to me, our exchange should contain this little, this tiny trace of someone who was a significant passerby.

Dear Bernard-Henri,

It’s funny, I’d forgotten, but “À l’agité du bocal” is one of my favorite pieces by Céline.

In general, I think Céline is overrated. After
Voyage au bout de la nuit
[
Journey to the End of the Night
], it’s all downhill, his style becomes increasingly flashy and ostentatious. There is a certain music, I admit, but music of a lower order, something between jazz (of the interminable
jam sessions
once the musicians set aside their scores! the joy they get out of it! the tedium for everyone else!) and the goualante—the
chanson
that epitomizes French popular music at the beginning of the twentieth century (impossible to listen to again—I checked recently). Nothing like Proust’s delicate harmonics, their indeterminate vibrations (not what I prefer, to be honest, but to put Céline and Proust on the same level has always seemed to me an error of taste, or at least the mark of someone who does not quite know
what he’s talking about
). Nor is it anything like the stripped-down instrument, the
rock and roll
urgency of Pascal in the
Pensées
(there’s no immediate comparison with the music of his time, but I don’t think Pascal was much interested in music). Still less (and, of all the routes that great literature has taken, this
is the one that still inspires in me the same admiration) with the sublime symphonic constructions of a Chateaubriand or a Lautréamont—which, to me, give almost the same immediate palpable feeling of genius as Beethoven.

Deep down, the praise Céline heaps on music at the expense of
ideas
, which he loathes, serves a dual purpose: first, to give the impression that he himself was possessed of a superior form of music, when he merely used the popular music of his time, with all its limitations. Second, to hide the fact that, when it came to ideas, he had none—or only very stupid ones like anti-Semitism.

The fact remains that Céline, a good but not a great novelist, is at his best in his scurrilous tracts, a genre that best suits his malicious, vindictive soul, and that “L’Agité du bocal,” like certain pages from his anti-Semitic tracts, is irresistible in its cruel wit and spiteful anger. I could never write anything as good; I can’t get myself sufficiently worked up; I make a cutting remark and it’s over; deep down I don’t really care about my adversaries (what adversaries?). There is a real incompatibility, I am increasingly aware, between hatred and contempt.

Personally, I don’t believe in Jews. Or, to be more precise, I don’t want to believe. Or, to be precise, I don’t know anything about the subject. I will therefore carefully avoid expressing an opinion about the interpretation of Benny Lévy, about
juifs de négation
and neo-Marranos. I immediately react, this time with a feeling of complete comprehension, to the simple sentence you wrote about your father: “He was as much of a stranger in his new milieu as his old one.” This is something that is not particular to a Jew. It is something that may have happened to lots of people who were around twenty at the time of the Liberation.

My father was born, the third of four children, to an unreconstructed
working-class family. They were not destitute (destitution comes when you don’t know what tomorrow will bring, whether you will still have a roof over your head, still have enough to feed yourself and keep warm; when you are poor, you know; you know exactly). They lived the difficult, dignified existence of the working classes (in a period of full employment, there was a genuine
working-class dignity—
Orwell evokes it when he talks of
common decency
, Paul McCartney talks about it too, in discussing his childhood; it’s not something invented by journalists). These people lived by their work, they never had to
hold out their hand
.

Their lives, therefore, were
dignified
, but they were also appallingly
limited
. Nothing illustrates it better than the photographs of “1936—the great turning point,” where you see the people on their first paid holidays, on bicycles, on delivery tricycles, leaving their suburbs, and families seeing the sea for the first time.

Actually, my grandmother came from a family in Nord-Cotentin, part farmers, part fishermen, so the sea was hardly likely to impress her. On the other hand, what I think would bring tears to your eyes is a photograph of my grandmother at the age of fifty, taken by her son to see the Mer de Glace for the first time—the childlike look on her face.

My father always despised his own father (whom I never knew); he never spoke to me about him other than as an
ignorant old bastard
. The root of the rift between them was that his father had found him an apprenticeship when he was fourteen, after he received his diploma, even though his results pointed to a promising academic future. I don’t know, these things I’m talking about are ancient history, they’re almost like legend to me, but it might still be of interest to kids in the housing projects. My grandfather might have realized that education might be a passport to success and social
advancement, but an apprenticeship with the SNCF offers job security, that’s what he probably thought. All in all, he probably was, as his son diagnosed, an
ignorant old bastard
.

Apprenticeship falls through, France at war, he joins a variety of youth organizations (UCPA, the Club Alpin Français): a few years later, my father finds himself a member of the prestigious Compagnie des Guides de Chamonix. Quite a coup for a kid from Clamart.

A love of mountains, it’s true, a genuine love of mountains. An unplanned, genetically unfounded love of mountains. A desire to lose himself in the snow, an admiration for colleagues who had had fingers amputated, an exacting love.

A few years later, my father left Chamonix for Val-d’Isère. He bought some land and had a big house built in the center of Val-d’Isère (which, at the time, was not an internationally famous ski resort; Val-d’Isère doesn’t appear on the tourist map back then. Jean-Claude Killy
^*
was still a pimply teenager).

Capitalizing on this initial investment by reinvesting at the right time, someone else might have built a real fortune out of this.

A few years later, I meet my father. (Let’s not exaggerate; I had driven across France with him in a jeep, but we’d never really gotten along; every time we stopped I was afraid he was going to drive off and leave me by the side of the road.) He has not made a fortune. By now he is an
independent ski instructor
, which means he’s not approved by the French ski school. The people who enlist his services (rich people, often
very rich people) don’t want to ski on marked ski slopes open to the public; what they want is to be set down by helicopter on the summit of a glacier and come down alone, surrounded by powdery snow, they want to do
real skiing
. But for that, they need a guide, a qualified
alpine guide
, otherwise it’s illegal, it’s too dangerous.

My father’s most famous client was, I think, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, but he only took him out once or twice. Another one was Antoine Riboud,
^*
who was a good client; my father took him out at least a dozen times, and I even went out skiing with him. My one memory of this captain of industry was in a restaurant in the mountains where some people in the group were taking too long deciding what vegetables to have with their meal. I can still see his exasperated expression, the brusque, self-important way he turned to the waiter: “Salad for everyone!” And it was important, and necessary, otherwise there would be all kinds of things—French fries, steamed potatoes, rice … In my mind, an august captain of industry is someone who, when the time is right, knows how to say, “
Salad for everyone!
”

My father had other clients, less famous but just as rich, and there were no real social barriers, so I was invited to come along. This was how, when I was ten, I came to play games of Monopoly with children my age who lived in a
hôtel particulier
on the rue de la Faisanderie. Then, when the holidays were over, I’d go back to my grandmother’s house, where there was no bathroom (we washed in the washbasin;
from time to time we’d heat a basin of water). None of this struck me as surprising. Children are strange creatures.

And then there came the worst. Sylvie. Now, here I don’t know what happened, my father must have charmed the family, but whatever it was, she stayed at the chalet for ten days; I was there too. We must have been about twelve, thirteen at the most. One day she played some records and asked me to dance a slow dance with her, we were the only people in the apartment, and I said, “I don’t know how to dance.” She was pretty, with a mop of curly chestnut hair. She was probably as much of a virgin as I was, which means a complete virgin. She was delectable, a doe. I was probably delectable, a faun. It makes me sick just thinking about it.

I’ve seen some of her family on television from time to time. And people see me on television too from time to time.

But, while I was experiencing the first flushes of my natural disposition for social failure, what was my father doing—socially speaking, I mean? Well, not much either. As an independent ski instructor, he could hardly fraternize with
ordinary ski instructors
—they barely nodded to one another when they met by the cable cars. A qualified mountain guide and a mountaineer, he was, it goes without saying,
respected by his peers
. (They too were mountain guides, of course, but did not necessarily have the same achievements as mountaineers, while he had taken part in expeditions in the Andes and the Himalayas.) He was respected by them without ever really being liked, because in their minds he would always be a
Parisian
, not a true man of the mountains. (Actually, he was from Clamart, as I mentioned earlier; to him that made a great difference, but not to them.) He strove to keep in touch with the other members of his family, in spite of difficulties
that grew greater as the years passed. It is not without a certain embarrassment that I remember the visits—about once a year—he made to his sisters. Both had married working-class men, men of their own kind; they had married within their own world and had each bought houses in Gagny (Seine-Saint-Denis). I can picture my father, clearly
a visitor
, in the dining room of the house that represented the culmination of their dreams. He would be talking about politics, about General de Gaulle, subjects like that, harmless in themselves; then he would leave, visibly relieved (although he loved his sisters in spite of everything and somehow managed to force himself to go on making these yearly visits).

Did he socialize with his rich clients? Not really. There were Sylvie’s parents, whom I’ve mentioned. (To be honest, I only really remember Sylvie, but they must have had some sort of relationship, otherwise they would hardly have entrusted their daughter to his care.) Overall, there wasn’t much, I think. I remember seeing my father with dubious characters,
local property developers
and the like, for meetings that never really went anywhere, but mostly I remember seeing him on his own.

Like me, he played chess.

He regularly beat me at chess, so regularly that it put me off the game.

And he made plans, and indeed carried them out, only to lose interest in them afterward. He must have had
bosses
early on in his life (although he managed to work on building sites and only for short periods). Later he had
employees
(not for long, just until he sold his share of the business). He was probably equally uncomfortable in both roles.

Here was a man who sacrificed everything in life, absolutely everything, to a single imperative:
not being dependent on anyone
. An absurd imperative, when you think about it,
which leads one to reject the very principle of a social life. I can still see him cursing the monopoly of the French electricity board; the problems he had trying to get permission to have a generator installed on his own property. People like that may still have a place in Argentina or Montana, but not in western Europe. When I think about my father’s political opinions, I think of something like
libertarian
,
^*
though the term didn’t exist in French back then; something American-sounding.