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By Root 882 0

he really lost his soul, was a descent into hell. It was the snare that caught him, the lie like an acid that corroded even his zest for life with, at the end of the road, death looming as the only exit. This was not practicing dying, “visualizing” one’s own death after the production but before the critical reception of the book; alas, this meant really dying, with a red sheet around his head so that his young son wouldn’t be too frightened by the sight of the blood and the pistol shot as the last cadence, the orchestral climax, the logical epilogue to those years he had spent taking himself for another and from another, removing his self from himself, the way you would take off a wig or a pair of suspenders.

I saw Gary go mad.

Without understanding, of course, what was going on, I saw him, a number of us saw him, lose his head and die under our noses.

We understand it better today.

I know, we all know, that there was a diabolical undercurrent to this enterprise.

I can see that this is an infinitely seductive temptation but one to which—beyond some pleasant mystification—we must not succumb. It’s the very worst there is. I know that I at least have been cured of this unhealthy fascination, not, as you said in your previous letter, out of consideration owed to the reader (we owe them nothing) but because of my appetite for life (and the last images I have of Gary, staggering along the boulevard Saint-Germain, frenzied, his mind elsewhere, death in his step).

Poor Gary, poor “lyrical clown,” who believed that you could play with all that with impunity—the art of fleeing, masks, the Oedipal refusal of the patronymic, the zest for a life that he never stopped starting anew. He needed to start anew, of course. He certainly needed to attempt a rebirth. But he needed it in the same life; it had to be in the same life. He needed to stir up a revolution, not only in a single country but within a single identity, a single soul, a single body. My program was his lesson, the real lesson, a mixture of darkness and light, that he reluctantly bequeathed me.

*Esbly is a commune in the Seine-et-Marne department in the Île-de-France region of north-central France.

*Guermantes (meaning “le Côté de Guermantes” or “the Guermantes Way”), Vivonne, Combray: all places with an emotional resonance in Proust.

*Paul Nizan, French philosopher and writer who died in 1940 at age thirty-five.

*Lévy puns on his name to suggest his plurality of lives/identities.

*Lévy comments again on his affinity with Romain Gary, one further point being that, like Lévy, Gary was married to an actress (Jean Seberg).

*Gary’s nephew. At this point Gary went beyond using pseudonyms and used a real person, his cousin, to pose as the author of his work published under the name Émile Ajar. Here, Lévy sees this as leading to the dissolution of his personality.

July 3, 2008

One more word, dear Bernard-Henri, a last word because I think it interesting to dispel the mystery: it was you yourself, in one of your books, who mentioned Esbly. Oh, it’s only a brief passing mention, I think you’d have to have lived there to notice it; but you do mention it …

One of the things Schopenhauer wrote that I never tire of—it is not one of the major pillars of his philosophy, not the grandiose intellectual reconstruction of the world as Will and Representation, but is one of his disconnected, late remarks, where he expresses doubt about the notion of being, where he envisages the possibility of giving a sense to something analogous to destiny, to the extent that he wonders whether, if his life had been a little longer, he might not have undermined the foundation of his earlier work. Anyway, it is this: “We remember our lives a little better than a novel we once read.”

To which I would add that we remember our lives a little less well than a novel we once wrote.

But even that eventually fades. And though I am (a little) younger than you are, I already find it happening with my own books. In general, I’m quite happy with myself; I tell myself, “Hey, I did that