Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [115]
It is with no pleasure, dear Bernard-Henri, that I see our correspondence coming to an end (but that’s how it must be, it is to be published and time is needed to create the object). I have discovered many things that I have not even reevaluated while we were discussing them because they settled in with the serenity of obvious facts. I now think I understand why I have always felt, though nothing in my life story could explain it, that I was “on the side of the Jews.” I have also accepted philosophy as a genre of literature, and have come to realize that I like it like that; I have given up classifying it alongside rational certainty and placed it next to interpretations and narratives. Mathematical signs have their domain, textual signs have theirs, I accept that. On balance, I am happy now to see Schopenhauer and Plato not as masters but as colleagues.
I have sidestepped certain issues that might have caused conflict: Nicolas Sarkozy, for example, because I have rather a good impression of him. I don’t get the impression he’s a cynic, he’s doing what he thinks is best for France; more important, he is implementing the program on which he was elected. It’s curious that, in a democracy, this simple fact can provoke astonishment; clearly, before him we must have been governed by real crooks.
If I avoided the subject of Sarkozy, it certainly wasn’t to avoid confrontation. It’s mostly because, among my friends, those I have left, a lot of them despise Nicolas Sarkozy much more than you do and I confess that, when I can talk about something else, it’s restful. And on that subject, you can have the last word.
For the most part, we have talked about literature. It’s not a bad thing, from time to time, to get things clear in one’s mind on the subject. And never before these letters have I felt as strongly how viscerally, primitively, I am attached to poetry. Never had I realized so clearly why I was so proud of having, in the third part of The Possibility of an Island, to quote the words used by Sylvain Bourmeau in his review, “brought victory to poetry in the heart of the novel.”
We have also talked a little about ourselves. On several occasions in these letters, I have recounted personal memories; I enjoyed doing so in the course of the conversation. Three years ago I made a more systematic attempt at autobiography, the first fragments of which I published on the Internet; the fact is, I gave up quite quickly. For certain authors, the self, the miserable everyday self, is a privileged means of accessing the universal: I am not one of them. I will never have the serene indecency of Montaigne (nor the less serene one of Gide). I will never write Les Confessions, or Mémoires d’outre-tombe, or even Un pedigree. This is neither because of nor in spite of my esteem for these books and for their authors. It’s simply that my natural bent does not tend that way. Rather than dig within myself for some hypothetical truth, I prefer to feel characters being born, developing inside me; I like to feel, between them and between me and them, admiration, hatred, jealousy, fascination, desire. I don’t know why, but I need this other life.
You, I believe, are in much the same boat. One can sense your attraction to characters—it comes through clearly in Le Lys et le cendre*—characters that are immediately ambiguous, beyond redemption, utterly out of place in a book whose aim is to persuade.
So I believe you will write other novels. I think it is desirable and probable; and probable because you desire it. At least these letters will have reminded you of the pleasure of secrets indispensable to the success of such an enterprise. I only say probably, because with you one is never