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By Root 821 0

a nonentity, and in our heads there’s nothing but a resounding void. We both have a taste for playacting, we could even be called impostors. For thirty years I’ve been wondering how I’ve managed to take people in and continue to do so. For thirty years, tired of waiting for the right reader to come along and unmask me, I’ve been stepping up my lame, dull, halfhearted self-criticisms. But here we are. Thanks to you, with your help, maybe I’ll get there. Your vanity and mine, my immorality and yours … As another contemptible fellow—and he was of the highest order—once said, you lay down your cards and I’ll lay down mine. What a relief!

Approach 2. Maybe you. But why me? Why should I walk into this exercise of self-denigration? Why should I follow you into this explosive, raging, humiliated self-destruction you seem to have a taste for? I don’t like nihilism. I loathe the resentment and melancholy that go with it. I believe that the sole value of literature is to take up arms against this depressionism, which, more than ever, is the password of our era. In that case, I could go out of my way to explain that there are also happy beings, successful works, lives more harmonious than the killjoys who detest us appear to believe. I would take the villain’s role, the true villain, Philinte versus Alceste,* and wax lyrical in a heartfelt eulogy of your books and, while I’m about it, my own.

Then there’s approach number 3. To answer the question you raised the other night at the restaurant, when we came up with the idea of this dialogue: Why is there so much hatred? Where does it come from? And why, when the targets are writers, is it so extreme in its tone and virulence? Look at yourself. Look at me. And there are other, more serious cases: Sartre, who was spat on by his contemporaries; Cocteau, who could never watch a film to the end because there was always someone waiting to take a crack at him; Pound in his cage; Camus in his box; Baudelaire describing in a tremendous letter how the “human race” is in league against him. And the list goes on. Indeed, we would need to look at the whole history of literature. And perhaps we would also need to try and explore writers’ own desire. Which is? The desire to displease, to be repudiated. The giddiness and pleasure of disgrace.

You choose.

*Philinte and Alceste: characters in Molière’s play The Misanthrope. Alceste is the hypercritical misanthrope of the title, while Philinte is a social hypocrite.

February 2, 2008

Dear Bernard-Henri,

I will forgo, for the moment, the pleasures of the delicious debate we could have (we will have) about “depressionism,” a subject on which I am, as you say, one of the undisputed authorities. It’s just that I’m in Brussels, where I have none of my books to hand, and so might make a slip in this or that quotation from Schopenhauer, whereas Baudelaire is about the only author I can quote more or less from memory. Besides, talking about Baudelaire in Brussels is always nice.

In a passage that probably predates the one you mention (in that he hasn’t yet started laying into the human race as a whole, only France), Baudelaire states that a great man is what he is only in spite of his compatriots and that he must therefore develop an aggressive force equal to or greater than the collective defensive forces of his compatriots.

The first thought that occurs to me is that this must be extraordinarily exhausting. The second thought is that Baudelaire died at the age of forty-six.

Baudelaire, Lovecraft, Musset, Nerval—so many of the authors who have mattered to me in my life, for different reasons—died in their forty-seventh year. I clearly remember my forty-seventh birthday. In midmorning, I completed the work I was doing on The Possibility of an Island and sent the novel to the publisher. A couple of days earlier, I had gathered together unfinished texts lying around on CD-ROMs and floppy disks and, before throwing out the disks, collected all the files together on a hard drive from an old computer; then, completely accidentally, I formatted the hard