Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [11]
You speak of Philippe Sollers, about whom, by the way, I think you’re being unjust (the same goes for Garcin, who has the merit—rare nowadays—of keeping the proper distance in talking about both actresses and dead friends). I’d like you to know that the only serious disagreement Sollers and I have ever had over thirty years of real friendship is when he says (although, in passing, I’m not sure whether he applies the rule to himself) that writers are there to “tell how they live.” The formula itself petrifies me. When he pronounces it, it plunges me into an abyss of perplexity, and I always feel like replying that I believe exactly the opposite—that writers have every right and can talk about whatever they like but not how they live, not their inalienable secret life!
As for television and the way you think you should behave there, I agree with your recommendations. I concur with your analysis of the need to perfect an “act” that allows us to hide and protect our “deep self.” I also agree about the risk that, in doing so, like the “man who lost his shadow,” you can lose the trace of the “deep self,” let it lie fallow, forget it. Where you’re wrong, or where I fear you rate me too highly, is when you attribute to me a capacity for indignation that shields me from that risk so that, fired up in a polemic, a political battle or a rage, I supposedly let the “real” me rise up to the surface. Sadly, indignation has no role in this. You can be indignant and yet take a strategic tack. You can be scandalized or enraged, but precisely because you’re at war you manage to keep control of the impression you make. In my case, that’s a fact. It’s even, if I dare say so, an obligation. Even in extreme situations, when I return from Darfur or Sarajevo, when I rail against the indifference of the well-off toward this or that forgotten war, which I’ve taken the trouble to go and see and from where I bring back my distressed accounts, my phobia for these confessional stories is such that even there—I almost wrote especially there—I do whatever I can to stay in control of my emotions, reflexes, language, and facial expressions. (The face, oh dear … its shameful turmoil, its minuscule rages, which give away so much … it’s the reason why I leave those [television interview] programs in a state of nervous exhaustion, which those who take me at my word when, quoting Bataille,* I trumpet that the principle to follow on television is to think “the way a girl takes her dress off” could hardly imagine.)
In my last letter I spoke to you about my indifference to the horrors they may write about me and which, I know, weaken me in my struggles.
There was a claim that my father made his fortune in a vile way, which I didn’t contradict.
I let it pass when it was written that I hardly knew Massoud† and that giving him as a reference, laying claim to both his values and his friendship, was a fabrication.
I’ve allowed books to appear and be disseminated on the Internet that I obviously did look through, even if at the time I claimed I didn’t, and whose basic message was always to make me out to be a bastard.
The reason I’ve put up with all this wasn’t simply negligence, indifference, or contempt. It’s not because I have a shatterproof, armor-plated ego or that I’m beyond reach. It’s not even that I take that pleasure in being disliked, which we spoke of in our first exchange and which for me, as for you too perhaps, is another form of posing. No, what I now think is that if I have never refuted their claims and naturally