Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [21]
Deep down, the praise Céline heaps on music at the expense of ideas, which he loathes, serves a dual purpose: first, to give the impression that he himself was possessed of a superior form of music, when he merely used the popular music of his time, with all its limitations. Second, to hide the fact that, when it came to ideas, he had none—or only very stupid ones like anti-Semitism.
The fact remains that Céline, a good but not a great novelist, is at his best in his scurrilous tracts, a genre that best suits his malicious, vindictive soul, and that “L’Agité du bocal,” like certain pages from his anti-Semitic tracts, is irresistible in its cruel wit and spiteful anger. I could never write anything as good; I can’t get myself sufficiently worked up; I make a cutting remark and it’s over; deep down I don’t really care about my adversaries (what adversaries?). There is a real incompatibility, I am increasingly aware, between hatred and contempt.
Personally, I don’t believe in Jews. Or, to be more precise, I don’t want to believe. Or, to be precise, I don’t know anything about the subject. I will therefore carefully avoid expressing an opinion about the interpretation of Benny Lévy, about juifs de négation and neo-Marranos. I immediately react, this time with a feeling of complete comprehension, to the simple sentence you wrote about your father: “He was as much of a stranger in his new milieu as his old one.” This is something that is not particular to a Jew. It is something that may have happened to lots of people who were around twenty at the time of the Liberation.
My father was born, the third of four children, to an unreconstructed working-class family. They were not destitute (destitution comes when you don’t know what tomorrow will bring, whether you will still have a roof over your head, still have enough to feed yourself and keep warm; when you are poor, you know; you know exactly). They lived the difficult, dignified existence of the working classes (in a period of full employment, there was a genuine working-class dignity—Orwell evokes it when he talks of common decency, Paul McCartney talks about it too, in discussing his childhood; it’s not something invented by journalists). These people lived by their work, they never had to hold out their hand.
Their lives, therefore, were dignified, but they were also appallingly limited. Nothing illustrates it better than the photographs of “1936—the great turning point,” where you see the people on their first paid holidays, on bicycles, on delivery tricycles, leaving their suburbs, and families seeing the sea for the first time.
Actually, my grandmother came from a family in Nord-Cotentin, part farmers, part fishermen, so the sea was hardly likely to impress her. On the other hand, what I think would bring tears to your eyes is a photograph of my grandmother at the age of fifty, taken by her son to see the Mer de Glace for the first time—the childlike look on her face.
My father always despised his own father (whom I never knew); he never spoke to me about him other than as an ignorant old bastard. The root of the rift between them was that his father had found him an apprenticeship when he was fourteen, after he received his diploma, even though his results pointed to a promising academic future. I don’t know, these things I’m talking about are ancient history, they’re almost like legend to me, but it might still be of interest to kids in the housing projects. My grandfather might have