Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [20]
The other day I returned to the rue Saint-Ferdinand, where he had his offices, very near the building where Drieu la Rochelle* committed suicide.
I followed the route he took every day with his slow, sovereign step, as sovereign as his voice, never bowing to any urgency.
I heard once more his low voice, slow, muffled as the voices of those tending toward silence are, yet at the same time melodious, well tempered, a voice that commanded attention and for which I envied him.
I walked again in front of the tobacconist’s where my first film was born about Bosnia at war.
Then, in front of the avenue des Ternes, where we went to speak of that other “work,” his own, of which he was secretly proud and in which he tried to get me interested once in a while, with no hope of succeeding.
None of that exists anymore.
That Paris has disappeared and, even more so, those places. And in those places nothing remains of what he called his life’s work, not even a sign, a plaque, a gray blind in the windows or the magnolia in a pot at the entrance to the building, behind the railings, which seemed to be there for all eternity. It reminds me of those defeated cities, on whose remains the conquerors spread salt in order to make sure that they remain forever bare.
So there you are, dear Michel. I’m glad that here, at this point, thanks to you and the words you held out to me, our exchange should contain this little, this tiny trace of someone who was a significant passerby.
*“À l’agité du bocal”: essay by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, considered to be inflammatory and anti-Semitic, which was published in 1948 in response to Sartre’s article “Le Portrait d’un antisémite” (1945).
*CNPF: The Conseil National du Patronat Francais (National Council of French Employers) was an employers’ union formed in 1945 at the request of the Provisional Government of the French Republic. It was transformed in 1998 into the Mouvement des Enterprises de France (Movement of French Enterprises).
†Achille Peretti (1911–1983): French politician, lawyer, and member of the French Resistance, who was mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine from 1947 until his death.
*Political activist and Maoist in May 1968, forced underground because he was a stateless refugee. He was later naturalized and, coming under the influence of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, embraced Jewish Orthodoxy. With Bernard-Henri Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut, he cofounded the Institut d’Études Lévinassiennes in Jerusalem.
†Juifs de negation: a term first used by Jean-Claude Mimer in his book Le Juif de savoir, denotes assimilated Jews—the Western Jew who “barely touches the surface of his Judaism.”
‡Refers to the Marranos, Sephardic Jews who were forced to adopt Christianity but who continued to practice Judaism secretly.
*Pierre Eugène Drieu la Rochelle (1893–1945), French writer of fiction and political essays. Having collaborated with the Nazis, he went into hiding after the Liberation and committed suicide in 1945.
March 1, 2008
Dear Bernard-Henri,
It’s funny, I’d forgotten, but “À l’agité du bocal” is one of my favorite pieces by Céline.
In general, I think Céline is overrated. After Voyage au bout de la nuit [Journey to the End of the Night], it’s all downhill, his style becomes increasingly flashy and ostentatious. There is a certain music, I admit, but music of a lower order, something between jazz (of the interminable jam sessions once the musicians set aside their scores! the joy they get out of it! the tedium for everyone else!) and the goualante—the chanson that epitomizes French popular music at the beginning of the twentieth century (impossible to listen to again—I checked recently). Nothing like Proust’s delicate harmonics, their indeterminate vibrations (not what I prefer, to be honest, but to put Céline and Proust on the same level has always seemed to me an error of taste, or at