Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [14]
In practice, therefore, this is what I would do in her shoes: I would move to a country where there is a small Muslim population—Prague or Warsaw, for example. I would avoid all public appearances, obviously; I would go on working via the Internet, though only after getting help from an IT expert (it’s perfectly possible, using a proxy, to hide your real IP address). And I would wait for Europe to have the good sense to provide me with decent police protection.
Okay, I’m sorry for reducing the issue to the specific, but there are some questions on which I tend to think pragmatically, though I’m embarrassed to admit it.
I didn’t know (though I can’t say I’m surprised) that people had written so many unpleasant things about you; I haven’t read any of the biographies dedicated to you. Nor have I read the biography of which I was the unwilling subject. To tell the truth, I can’t remember ever finishing a single biography. Those I started reading made me think of bad spy novels (or mystery novels) in which the author’s sympathies are clear from the outset, in which only the most obvious schemes and motives are explored, the sort of novel where you can work out whodunit in the first twenty pages. To put it another way, I have never been able to imagine a biography that is exempt from a certain vulgarity.
Confessional literature, on the other hand, is like a good spy novel (there are some, though they are rare) or mystery novel (of which there are considerably more; there is nothing tongue-in-cheek about my praise for the works of Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle) in which each new revelation merely adds another layer to the mystery, in which the accretion of information leads one to a generalized, paroxysmal sense of puzzlement that is poetic in its paroxysm, in the universal atmosphere of mystery that eventually engulfs the whole narrative.
Let me go back to my own biography for a moment. At the time it was published—back then I still Googled myself—I simply glanced through the advance sheets that appeared on L’Express’s Internet site, from which I could clearly work out that my father and my mother were the indisputable stars of the book and consequently that the book would necessarily be of no interest whatever. How could any journalist—always assuming he is conscientious and very shrewd (though the few e-mails I exchanged with Demonpion offer little evidence of his shrewdness)—in the space of a few short interviews, glean from my father and my mother (two people, in their different ways, of terrifying subtlety and an intelligence bordering on perversity) anything approaching the truth?
It was obvious that both of them would jump at the chance to make a grand production of their usual shtick, that each in their own way would retrace the story of their relationship. Though not necessarily to show themselves in the best light. My father, it’s true, usually likes to play the good little guy, the honest, decent, working-class boy taken in by a dangerously unbalanced woman. My mother, on the other hand, often finds it entertaining to give a certain rock and roll edge to her story, for example by exaggerating the quantity of drugs she consumed. I must have heard the story, of how they met, their lives together, how they split up, at least a dozen times as a child, from both protagonists and from direct and indirect witnesses. Every time, my mother and my father would embellish their version a little more, contextualize it, make up some period detail, some local color. The only reasonable conclusion I can come to now is that they shared a great love affair—one of the greatest of their lives—so much so that twenty years later, it is still the most fascinating topic of conversation either of them could think of.
In the end,