The Difficulty of Being (15 page)

I have seen a cultivated orange tree at Pramousquier, on Cap Nègre, lose its head. It was living in sunshine. A palm threw shade on it. This shade terrified it. On the four branches shaded by the palm it put out long thorns. It became wild again. The palm was cut back. The branches calmed down and became cultivated once more. The prickles disappeared. The following year I found them smooth like the rest of the bark. So much for fear.

I assure you that this orange tree did not laugh and that, even when delivered from the suspect shade, it had no desire to laugh.

If seed is sown it is another generation of the plant that
springs up. If a cutting is taken, the same plant is prolonged to infinity. (It starts again from youth.) Why cannot an element be discovered comparable to the soil, that would allow man to be perpetuated, since the whole individual, look, voice, gait, is present in the least of his cells, so that if one of his nail-parings were to be planted he would take birth from it and begin again from the beginning. It is because everything has to be paid for. Plants pay for this privilege of not dying by the torment of occupying such a mean space, of their static condition, of cramp, of the lack of liberty (relative) to move about, which man possesses and pays for very dearly by the knowledge of the small stretch he is given to cover and by death.

In certain species, the tree does its own ‘layering’; it lets a branch hang down to the ground and from this branch is reborn in another age, but exactly the same. Thus these species avoid the intervention of man. If they could, they would laugh. For laughter is a great privilege which we have.

Our consciousness is lightened by laughter. Its lightness consoles us for having such heavy soles to bear us to the scaffold. False solemnity detests it because it enlightens us about the soul. It strips it like a stroke of lightning. I once happened to hear, through a door, the laughter of someone against whom nothing had put me on my guard. This dreadful laughter revealed to me a person whom I was one day to unmask.

Laughter can work inversely and a person whom we find antagonistic may conquer our antipathy by a burst of childish laughter.

I know an extremely interesting story about uncontrollable laughter. In 1940, Germany was sending its youth to the armament factories. A young man from Essen, working at Krupp’s, was given the sack because he kept having fits of laughter. They moved him to other factories. He was thrown
out of them all because he laughed. He was not punished. No other fault could be found with him. They got rid of him. They sent him home with this chit which I saw in 1946:
Incurable frivolity
.

To kill laughter in man is a crime. That is what happens when one involves him in political problems that make him take himself seriously and when he is consulted about things of which he knows nothing. He can no longer laugh. He gives himself airs. It is also what happens when he is not consulted and is beaten into submission.

Pierre Roy, when I ask him about his political opinions, declares: ‘I am a moderate anarchist.’ I wonder if he has not found the right formula and if France is not entirely committed to this shade of opinion.

I MUST NOW TAKE MY BEARINGS IN THIS HOUSE
where again I try to sleep. I have cut off all correspondence with Paris. My letters are opened and only the essential ones are brought to me. I do not communicate with anyone. My nettle-rash, on the other hand, is waking. I notice once again that it likes to thrive and takes advantage of my vegetating. My arms, my chest, my forehead burn. Doubtless, as the origin of this complaint is the same as that of asthma, I am incurable and can only hope for ups and downs. I avoid the sunshine in which I liked so much to be. I edge along it in the shade. The rest of the time I shut myself in. I read and I write. Solitude forces me to be Robinson Crusoe and his island, to explore inside myself. I bring to this no understanding, for I have none, but a certain boldness that stands me in its stead.

Incapable of following a trail, I proceed by impulses. I cannot follow an idea for long. I let it escape when I ought to creep up and leap upon it. All my life I have hunted in this manner, for want of being able to do better. That is what deceives people who take my strokes of luck for skill, my mistakes for strategy. Never has any man been surrounded with so much misunderstanding, with so much love, with so much hatred, for if the person they believe me to be annoys those who judge me from afar, those who come near me are like Beauty when she dreads a monster and discovers an amiable beast who only wants to reach her heart.

I must say that my dearest friendships spring from this contrast.

The legend surrounding me keeps fools at a distance. The intelligent find me suspect. What is left for me between the two? Strolling players like me change their pitch more often than their shirts and pay by a show for the right to stay where they are. That is why my solitude never appears uncommunicative. I only show myself at the times of the parade before the show, or before my own number. I apologize for this to those who share my caravan and who conclude that I am holding the worst in reserve for them, for they only witness my misery.

Like all vagabonds the obsession for property torments me. I am looking for one in the country. When I find one, either the landlord refuses to sell it, because my enthusiasm opens his eyes to it, or he wants too much for it.
^*

In Paris I find nothing that suits me. The apartments I am offered intimidate me. I want them to say: ‘I was waiting for you.’

By dint of counting on the impossible I put down roots in my hole.

‘Je sens une difficulté d’être.’
Thus did Fontenelle,
^†
the centenarian, reply when he was dying and his doctor asked: ‘M. Fontenelle, what do you feel?’ Only his belonged to his last hour. Mine has been from the beginning.

It must be a dream that one can live at ease in one’s skin.

From birth I have had an ill-stowed cargo. I have never been trimmed. Such is my balance sheet if I prospect within myself. And in this lamentable state, instead of keeping to my room, I have knocked about everywhere. From the age of fifteen I have never stopped for a moment. Sometimes I meet this or that person who addresses me intimately, whom I cannot recognize until a firm grasp of the hand unexpectedly drags out of the shadows the whole setting of a drama in which he played his part and I played mine, and which I had completely forgotten. I have been involved so deeply in so many things that they slip from my memory, and not just one, fifty. A wave from the depths brings them back to the surface for me with, as the Bible says,
all that in them is
. It is incredible how few traces are left in us of long periods which we had to live through in detail. That is why when I dig into my past, first of all I unearth a figure—with its earth still clinging to it. If I search for dates, for sayings, for places, for sights, they overlap, I add things, I bungle, I advance, I draw back, I no longer know anything.

My great concern is to live now in a way that is right for me. I do not boast that it is more expeditious than another, but it is more to my taste. This present of mine abolishes time to the point of letting me gossip with Delacroix and Baudelaire. It allowed me, when Marcel Proust was still unknown, to consider him famous and to treat him as if he had achieved the glory he was one day to enjoy. Having discovered that this state of being outside time was my privilege, that it was too late to acquire better ones, I perfected it and plunged even more deeply into it.

But suddenly
I open one eye
: I realize that I was using the worst system for thinking of nothing, that I was exhausting myself with trivial occupations that bind us and eat us up,
that I was busying myself with too many things. I persisted in this mechanically; I was a slave to it to the point of confusing a legitimate instinct of self-defence that prompted me to rebellion with detestable fidgets.

Now I know the rhythm. As soon as I open one eye, I close the other and take to my heels.

I ATTACH NO IMPORTANCE TO WHAT PEOPLE CALL
style and by which they flatter themselves that they can recognize an author. I want to be recognized by my ideas, or better still, by the results of them. All I attempt is to make myself understood as succinctly as possible. I have noticed that when a story does not grip the mind, it has shown a tendency to read too quickly, to grease its own slope. That is why, in this book, I turn my writing around, which prevents it from sliding into a straight line, makes one revise it twice over and reread the sentences so as not to lose the thread.

Whenever I read a book, I marvel at the number of words I meet in it and I long to use them. I make a note of them. When I am at work this is impossible for me. I restrict myself to my own vocabulary. I cannot get away from it, and it is so limited that the work becomes a brain-twister.

I wonder, at every line, if I can go any further, if the combination of these few words that I use, always the same ones, will not end by seizing up and compelling me to hold my peace. This would be a blessing for everyone, but it is with words as with numbers, or with the letters of the alphabet. They have the faculty of rearranging themselves differently and perpetually at the end of the kaleidoscope.

I have said that I am envious of other people’s words. This is because they are not mine. Every author has a bag of lotto cards with which he must win. Except in regard of the style I
deplore, of which Flaubert’s is typical—too rich in vocables—the styles I like, that of Montaigne, Racine, Chateaubriand, Stendhal are not lavish with them. One would not take long to count them.

That is the first thing to which a teacher should draw the attention of his class, instead of extolling fine rhetoric. They would soon learn how richness exists in a certain penury, that
Salammbô
is nothing but
bric-à-brac, Le Rouge et le Noir
a treasury.

Words rich in colour and sound are as difficult to use as gaudy jewels and bright colours in dress. An elegant woman does not overdress.

I am astonished by those glossaries in which the notes at the foot of the page, claiming to elucidate the text, remove its point and iron it out flat. This is what happens with Montaigne, whose sole aim is to say what he means to say and who achieves this, cost what it may, by twisting the phrase in his own way. To this way of twisting the phrase the glossaries prefer a vacuousness as long as it flows easily.

This is not to condemn the exceptional use of a rare word, provided that it comes in its proper place and enhances the economy of the rest. My advice, therefore, is to admit it if it does not sparkle too brightly.

Words should not flow: they are set in. It is from a grotto in which the air flows freely that they draw their vigour. They demand the
and
that cements them, to say nothing of the who,
that, which, what
. Prose is not a dance. It walks. It is through this walk or manner of walking that one can tell its breed, that poise characteristic of a native carrying burdens on her head.

This makes me think that elegant prose takes on the function of the burden which the writer carries in his head and that all the rest derives from some kind of choreography.

Once I used to try to share the liking I had for a certain kind of prose with people who claimed to be insensitive to it. Read aloud, with the fear of not convincing them, such prose exhibited its blemishes.

Failures of this kind have put me on my guard. I came to distrust what had at first charmed me. Little by little, I trained myself not to get enamoured of any but the writers in whom beauty dwells without their being aware of it and who are not obsessed by it.

Although the words of a vocabulary may not tally with our own, I sometimes come across a professional term and adopt it. I will quote one which is found in text-books: ‘in my estimation’. This says perfectly what it means to say and I adopt it, not knowing any other that suits me better.

The French language is difficult. It rejects certain
douceurs
. It is this that Gide described so wonderfully when he calls it a piano without pedals. One cannot blur its chords. It functions unaided. Its music is addressed more to the soul than to the ear.

What you consider to be musical in the classics is often only an ornament belonging to their times. The great do not escape this, although they rise above it. In minor ones the artifice is apparent. Célimène and Alceste
^*
seem to us to speak the same language.

It is likely that the most diverse languages we write in our epoch will be indistinguishable in another. They will appear almost similar in style. Nothing will stand out but the difference between what they express and the accuracy with which they express it.

Beyond the fact that words have meaning, they are endowed with a magical virtue, a
spell-binding
power, a hypnotic
quality, a fluid that works apart from the meaning they possess. But it only works when they are grouped together and ceases to work if the group they constitute is merely verbal. The act of writing is therefore subject to many compulsions: to intrigue, to express, to bewitch. Bewitchment, that none can teach us, since it is our own and since it is necessary for the chain of words to resemble us in order for them to be effective. They take our place when all is said and done, and must make up for the absence of our looks, our gestures, our progress. They can therefore only act on people open to such things. For the others it is a dead letter and will remain for them a dead letter away from us and after our death.