Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [16]
We’re up to our necks in contempt, and I hate that. Because contempt, which is so difficult to avoid as you get older, is anything but a strength. When you are contemptuous of your adversary, you can be almost certain you are beaten. For example, how effective is contempt when you are attacked by a tapeworm (it must be thinking figuratively about Pierre Assouline that prompted this image)? Clearly the temptations of contempt are dangerous; I have known this for years and yet I succumb to them more and more.
It will be the death of me, in the end. I can still remember watching my father (you wanted more information; you don’t have to ask twice …) pulling his camper van into a truck stop when we were going on holiday. I saw the same scene many times. In a few short minutes, a number of emotions played across his face. Gloomy puzzlement, usually; amusement, sometimes, fleeting; something like envy; but more often than not, infinite, unfathomable contempt. In any case I never saw him jump out of the van as soon as he pulled up and mingle with the other families, the groups of teenagers on holiday, queuing up to buy their jambon-fromage. On every occasion, I saw him pause for several minutes before going to join the throng of his fellow men; and how long those minutes seemed to me! Few adults, very few, are aware to what extent children watch their parents, constantly on the lookout for some sign of how they should approach the world; how sharp and vibrant their intelligence is in the years leading up to the disaster of puberty, how quick to summarize, to draw broad conclusions. Very few adults realize that every child, naturally, instinctively, is a philosopher. It sometimes seems to me that, as a man, all I have done is to give aesthetic expression to the withdrawal that as I child I witnessed in my father.
That, it has to be said, would not be so bad. For what would remain, if I were not here, of the subtle, significant, insidiously tactful gestures of my father? Of the ludicrous, almost offensive courtesy whose sole purpose was to prove, against all expectations, against all reason, that he was prepared to make a gesture, to offer the other person one last chance to come to terms with his own vulgarity, his emptiness? I later discovered (during a cleanup, God knows he would have hated to acknowledge it, so much so that I never mentioned seeing the document) that in his youth, my father had performed acts of bravery—specifically in the domain of mountain rescue. Strange destiny, to save the lives of human beings for whom you feel nothing but contempt. Strange destiny to have been (and for many years this was the case, in his career as a mountain guide) at the service of a bourgeoisie for whom he had no respect. My own choice, all in all, seems to me more consistent: I have always loved books, I write books; it’s astoundingly simple.
*Taslima Nasrin (born 1962) is a Bengali author whose radical feminist views and criticism of Islam have forced her to live in exile since 1994.
*Les Trentes Glorieuses refers to the thirty years of uninterrupted growth in France after World War II.
February 22, 2008
Dear Michel,
Be careful with your “tapeworm.”
It’s what Céline calls Sartre in “À l’agité du bocal.”*
Using it again is a mistake in two ways. First, it does too much credit to the person you implicitly compare to Sartre and who, when these letters are published, will use it as an excuse to puff himself up. Moreover, you sell yourself short by contravening the healthy law of rhetorical and political diet (drawn up, incidentally, by Sartre himself in the preface to The Wretched of the Earth), according to which you should never characterize your opponents in animal, zoological, or physiological terms. It’s a golden rule …
On the other hand,