Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [107]
But the truth is that what we talked about most that night was style in general: appealing, detestable … necessary and ridiculous; that you can never write as you speak but that there is nothing more grotesque, false, and therefore grotesque than the posing, ornate voice of a writer who wants to write in a great style … Whether it was a matter of the voice or the ear? Which was the writer’s organ, the vocal cord or the tympanum? And hadn’t Hemingway said it all in the line, which I quoted to him but which I believe summed him up, about a writer without an ear being like a boxer with no left hand?
We spoke of a writer’s strategies: covering one’s tracks, disguising oneself, lying as you breathe, writing the way you play roulette, chess, poker, hiding your hand or revealing it, turning your cards up or down, the art of the mask and the lie … bad faith as an aesthetic and a moral decision … the law of counterfeiters, inventing the world rather than parodying it, hatred too and how to overcome it, of the long-lasting war to which he had committed himself when, like Breton—but with what talent!—he declared that he had broken with Europe. After that, he became a merciless adversary of a society of “dogs,” “pigs,” and “succubi,” yes, merciless, hating this world and never abandoning his—hopeful—scrutiny of the signs heralding its death knell. There’s a man, dear Michel, who for his whole life was one of those “public enemies” we’ve been talking about …
Victor Hugo—we spoke about him also. At the time my prejudice in favor of Baudelaire (I couldn’t forgive Hugo for that “new thrill” business, still less for the unbearably paternalistic tone he used in his letters to the black prince of Kamchatka and in his “stylish and tormented kiosks”) put me off him.* But Aragon’s opinion seemed to be closer to yours, which is not far from what I think myself today: the absurd failure to recognize his greatness, his magnificent bad taste, his mischievous, surrealist side pre-Surrealism, that masterpiece Les Châtiments … Les Misérables and the “will of the novel.” And what about Gide’s line, I asked. His famous “Victor Hugo, alas!”—wasn’t that the killer line? How do you mean, the killer line? He blew up. Who killed whom, young man? Who killed whom? It was Gide who was killed by that witticism. The other, the visionary, is, as poets are, invulnerable. What about his spiritualism? I insisted. Those stories of turning tables and spirit channelers in Guernsey, which allowed him to converse, across the grave, with Dante, Shakespeare, and other geniuses? Why not! he said. And he went one better, with such bad faith that I couldn’t help laughing. Turning tables—why not? Conversations with dead people from one end of hell to another—why not? You’re surely not going to hold it against someone if they prefer speaking to dead great minds than small living ones …
Finally, we also spoke of the question that had obsessed him since that book, which was and would remain unfinished, which had appeared as a sketch almost twenty years earlier, called J’abats mon jeu,* and for which I’d always felt a special affection: poetry and novel, poetry or novel, politics, literature, short tracts, great organ music, autobiographical narratives and historical frescoes … Hourra l’Oural and Les Cloches de Bâle, Mouscou la gâteuse, and Vive le Guépéou … the homage to Matisse, the insult to Picasso, the journalism (for Commune, then Ce Soir, then