Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [122]
And then, there’s Gary …*
It’s true that he’s really engraved into me.
First of all, I knew him, unlike Malraux, whom I saw only once, at Verrières, the day before I left for Calcutta. I met Gary quite regularly in the last years of his life, while he was losing himself—the worst thing possible for him and with almost no one suspecting it—in the threads of his Ajar tapestry: long lunches at Lipp where I followed his example, ordering my unchangeable “entrecôte steak”; late afternoons at the rue du Bac where we drank tea made in dented samovars, which, as he reminded me each time, he had brought back from Majorca. He had that side to him that was a magnificent loser, a fake firebrand, a comedy cowboy with his Stetsons and his boots with their fussy stitching, that made a change from my teachers in the rue d’Ulm.
Then, there was the principle itself of that Ajar adventure, its premises. Here was a writer who was famous but enraged by his lack of recognition, someone who saw the sparkle of his books dulled by his life, his love story with an actress, his films failing or being regarded as failures. His life and work were engaged in a ferocious competition, in which the first overshadowed the second and the second got into a terrible rage with the first. Here was a man who had been celebrated, won awards, become a member of the Academy, fulfilled, a truly glorious person enjoying all the things you could wish for but suffocating in an identity that choked the very things he cared for most, his novels. I don’t need to draw you a picture. With my personality and in my situation, it would be hard for me to be insensitive to that story.
But watch out—I believe that all this was more than a matter of a pseudonym and an oeuvre started up again under a different banner. I believe you cannot understand what a peculiar adventure this was if you see it only as a farce, a ruse, or even a leap made by a writer who considered himself unloved and threw down the gauntlet to his contemporaries: “So you didn’t recognize me with my first face? Well, you’re going to celebrate me with the mask I’ll wear and you’ll be taken in.” If you prefer, you could describe this as an entire metaphysical dimension, which has nothing to do with those questions of literary vanity or even with my fantasies of a double or triple life, a new birth within the same existence, secrets. It is this dimension that gives the whole business its air of disaster and tragedy and is the reason why this highly fissile material should be handled with care …
Unlike what he had already done when he hid behind the pseudonyms of Fosco Sinibaldi or Shatan Bogat, Gary did not content himself with assuming a borrowed name; he gave a body to that name and that was the body of Paul Pavlowitch.*
He didn’t even content himself with this body and the biography that went with it (after all, Pessoa had already done that using fifty-something names, each endowed with its own life, imagination, a catalogue of opinions and disputes). He delegated, subcontracted to that body the entire public part of the life of the new writer he was becoming.
In other words, he underwent a unique chemical operation in literary terms, which, by the way, is not unrelated to what you described in your film: between him and Paul, between the real writer he was and the fictional writer he sent in his place to stir things up on the literary scene, one identity was substituted for another, a transfusion of sensibilities and memory occurred, a relocation to a parallel brain, cloning.
And the result of this alchemy, the fruit of this pathetic—and very soon unbearable—duplication, the conclusion of this more than Faustian pact, since