Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [105]
*Louis Aragon, from the Prologue to Les Poètes, 1960.
June 8, 2008
In Paris at the end of the seventies there was an English bar, slightly kitsch, with fixed tables and moleskin seats, called the Twickenham. It was at the corner between the rue des Saints-Pères and the rue de Grenelle.
As it was opposite Grasset, and since I loathed office life as much as you did, I spent most of my day there, meeting my authors, plotting, phoning.
It was also the meeting place for the pretty sales assistants at Maud Frizon and other boutiques like Stephane Kélian’s, which had already set up in this part of town. So I saw this as a wonderland for picking up women. I was accompanied in this by the night barman, Jacques F. Béarnais, who was a joker, master of entrances, double exits, and vaudeville, whom I had made my Sganarelle.*
Because at that time I was leading an odd sort of life, without any real fixed residence, sleeping over at one woman’s or at another’s, depending on my mood, whom I happened to meet, and the willingness of the parties in question, there were evenings when I was out of luck or had been given to understand that I wasn’t welcome. So I would wait until Jacques had done the till and stay there, locked up for the night with no electricity, no real heating, breathing in the odors of stale tobacco and cooking that had accumulated during the day, lying like a guard dog on a bench that was too short, where I would sleep until dawn, when the day crew arrived to prepare the first coffees and croissants.
The Twickenham was not only my second office.
It was my main residence, where I stored my toothpaste and shirts in a cupboard among the piles of dishes.
I received my mail there.
On the weekends that I had custody of my daughter, Justine, I set up my logistical headquarters there.
It was the time before mobile phones, and eventually I even managed to wrangle the notable privilege of having a more or less concealed landline at the table in the back, where I spent my evenings.
On the other hand, it was there too that the members of the Committee of Resistance to the Jewish Occupation in France, some tiny group of Palestinian extremists, some jealous husband, member of the Groupe Union Défense, or some exasperated Serb knew they could find me, so some bloody battles took place there, usually outside, on the pavement of the rue de Grenelle.
And it was there too that one evening in February 1976, while I was alone at my table, daydreaming, that Louis Aragon suddenly popped up.
At that time I had not published anything, apart from my report on Bangladesh.
I had no sort of literary existence worthy of any writer’s interest, far less his.
But he explained that he had spotted me at the Saint-Germain Drugstore bookshop, which was the last local bookshop that stayed open late in the evenings. He had observed me several evenings in a row, wandering among the new publications and, on the days when I had no money, reading on the spot, standing there, silently devouring without taking notes, forced to develop a photographic memory, in a fever, with the sales assistant turning a blind eye. That day he had decided to follow me and approach me about the televised adaptation of his Aurélien that Michel Favart was getting under way and about the idea they had of offering me the role of the poet, Paul Denis.
I can still see him, pushing open the door to the bar, his tall silhouette, the wide-brimmed hat, the Moroccan cape over a very elegant gray linen suit, which even eight years after Elsa’s death gave him an air of unconsoled mourning.
I see him parting the small crowd huddled around the wrought-iron bar that formed the center of the room, as if the crowd didn’t exist, and the crowd itself, which, without realizing it, made way for him as if for a strange being, one who was extraterrestrial or had been transported from a museum.