Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [18]
Neuilly was his city. Yes, we lived in Neuilly, as I suppose he thought that nothing could be better than Achille Peretti’s† district, with its “bling” before the word was invented, to banish from his children’s minds the idea, the possibility, the subconscious vibration of the utter destitution he had endured as a child. But apart from two or three teachers who were invited to dinner at the end of each year in a ritual that, looking back, strikes me as even more outmoded, more inconceivable than the presentation of prizes at Le Chézy cinema, I don’t remember either him or my mother mixing with anyone in this ghetto of the rich and, worse, the nouveaux riches (in our family’s criminal code, the supreme crime was bad taste), whose grotesque customs we mocked at every opportunity. The only thing I remember is his rage on the day when, at the age of fifteen, I came home from school and explained that I needed a dinner suit, as I wanted to become a member of one of the clubs the local young dandies were rushing to join, which were called “society parties.”
He was as much of a stranger in his new milieu as his old one, as much of a stranger to his destiny as to his origin, to the man he had become as to the one he had left behind.
Among the people around him, he had sent packing any possible witnesses to what he no longer wished to be (burning, suffering, known for false starts). Yet he did not replace them, as those who become wealthy do, with contemporaries of this new era (he did have some of those, of course, but he kept them at a distance, obstinately refusing to allow any familiarity).
As a result, he had no friends.
He hardly saw anyone.
I suspect that in his youth he had a happy nature, was one of the small glories of Saint-Germain-des-Prés by night, a dandy, a gambler, a man surrounded by women. Yet now he took no interest in any company but that of a handful of gray men who in my eyes had no charm about them. They were consuls, proconsuls, satraps, microstrategists, and other counselors of this “Group,” as he called it, of which he was so proud and which, when he spoke of it, sounded like that of an expanding empire.
He was a reclusive king.
As I said before, he played chess, but alone or with me, or, in the end, with a computer.
He was a radiant person, yet impervious to his own radiance and, strangely, he derived no benefit from it. Others basked in the warmth and light he exuded, while he remained in the shadows he sought, where he could give free rein to his new taste for austerity, solitude, and silence.
He was a real “self-made man,” in fact the essential self-made man, that is, someone who wanted to make himself, abolish his history, to inherit nothing from anyone, to shorten his memory, as you would shorten a bridle. But he was a haughty self-made man, inflexible in his pride with an obsessive fear that was at least equal to his renunciation of, indeed his armed rallying against, the great and small pleasures which his new social status would have allowed him.
Dear Benny Lévy,* to whom I spoke one day about this odd relationship with oneself, replied with a shrug of the shoulders that such was the destiny of this type of Jew, whom he called “Jews of negation.”†
Albert Cohen, in his portrait of Solal, the Jewish prince who acts the clown with Christians but thinks no less of himself, who keeps in reserve a spare authenticity, who in the cellar of his residence keeps a mangy pack, which he goes down to at night to talk to and mingle with in secret, puts forward another theory of the type of man my father was,