Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [4]
A number of passages in Comédie,* which I’ve just finished, make me think that you have had occasion to ponder the question in your own case. So … I pass the baton to you.
And I cordially salute you.
*Pierre Assouline (born 1953) is a French journalist, novelist, and influential literary critic who has written widely for—among other publications—Le Monde and Le Nouvel Observateur.
†Denis Demonpion (born 1954) is a French journalist who wrote Houellebecq non autorisé: Enquête sur un phénomène (2005), an unauthorized biography of Michel Houellebecq.
‡Éric Naulleau (born 1961) is a French publisher, translator, writer, polemicist, and literary critic.
*Comédie (Grasset) is an intensely personal book by Bernard-Henri Lévy in which he mocks his public persona—a “puppet” serving up biting self-criticism of “BHL.”
February 4, 2008
Oh yes, eczema …
Are you familiar with those tremendous pages in Cocteau about just that, eczema?
They’re in that marvelous little book, his journal of the making of La Belle et la bête [Beauty and the Beast], which Truffaut recommends that all budding filmmakers should read.*
It has some interesting pages about the adventure of shooting a film, his relations with Bérard, the disagreements with Alekan about lighting, the discovery of the tracking shot, special effects, style, the patience of the extras, living statues, Jean Marais.
But it also contains (and I’m tempted to say that this is the book’s obsession, its leitmotif) astounding pages, almost physically painful for the reader, about what he calls his “carapace of cracks, ravines and itches,” his “coral of fire,” or the “burning bush” of nerves that have replaced his features, his “boils,” “abscesses,” red “gashes,” his “blisters,” and his oozing “wounds.” The entire book is one long moan, a cry of pain on paper, the display of a face eaten up by unbearable pain, so that there are mornings when he can only appear on the shoot with layers of fresh lard that his chief electrician has spread over his cheeks and nose.
Poor Cocteau …
Poor “prince of poets.” Despite Arno Breker,* despite that phony style of his, his emphatic, bombastic side, I’ve never been able to think badly of him.
And of course, poor Baudelaire—member of the human race, of France, of Belgium, as you say. He had everyone breathing down his neck. They were baying for his blood from the word go. Reproof at first sight! At first the pack was cautious, intimidated by the dandy airs of this son of Caroline and her first husband, the defrocked priest, but very soon, in the second part of his life, during his stay in Brussels at the Grand Miroir Hotel, their howling got louder and louder! Few writers before Sartre—and it’s no coincidence that he wrote a good life of Baudelaire—have been so loathed. Few of them, particularly during their years of exile, had to deal with rejection on this scale. Dear Michel, I envy you for being in Brussels. I stayed there to write my novel on his last days (Baudelaire’s, I mean). It was a few months after the Grand Miroir had been torn down and replaced by a sex shop. And what a wonderful name—the Grand Miroir—for a man who made a profession out of “living and dying in a mirror” in order to be “continually sublime.” The fact that I got there too late, that I just missed the Grand Miroir and its mysteries, is one of my true literary regrets in life. I envy you for being there, because—if any of this appeals to you—the cobble-stones of the rue Ducale remain, with girls still twisting their ankles on the footprints of the author of Fusées.* There’s Petit Sablon Square, where, in my day, a brothel he used to like still survived, and the Augustine convent where he was locked up after his aphasia. And then, of course, there’s Namur, Église Saint-Loup de Namur, where for the first time he was touched by “the breeze of imbecility flapping its wing.”
But back to your question—whether I have, as you put it, had occasion to reflect