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April 4, 2008

I was happy to see you the other morning, Michel, although obviously disappointed by the power cut that prevented me from seeing your film.

But apart from the fact that it’s only been postponed and that we’ll see each other very soon, I must confess that I enjoyed our playacting in front of all those people waiting with us and who, I believe, we managed to fool into thinking that we hardly knew each other, that we were glaring at each other and had nothing to say.

I’ve always thought I’d have made a good secret agent.

Clearly, you wouldn’t have been bad in the role either.

And, as an aside, I think that a greater interest should be taken in writers who in their real life were real secret agents.

They’re always going on about writers who were diplomats, this unnatural alliance, this oxymoron. (Luckily, Claudel* forgot that he was an ambassador when he wrote Connaissance de l’est [Knowing the East]! And I can still hear Arielle’s† grandmother, the wife of Ambassador Garreau-Dombasle,* who was also a good poet, celebrated as such by a handful of Surrealists and indeed also by Paul Claudel, sighing that the dinners, the letters from the castle, the performance had cost her her work …)

But the case of writers who were spies is so much more exciting! And there’s much more of a link with literary activity, the literary profession. Read any biography of Koestler, Orwell, or even le Carré. Take the case of Kojève,† who we now know worked for the KGB. Look at Voltaire, the honorable correspondent of Louis XV at Frederick the Great’s court, Casanova and the Venetian doges, Beaumarchais trafficking arms for the American revolutionaries as Malraux did, a hundred and fifty years later, for the Spanish Republicans. Read the memoirs of Anthony Blunt, which were published by Bourgois twenty-three years ago, and also his writings on Picasso, Poussin, or the architecture of François Mansart. In each case, what mines to be tapped for a novel! Literary fodder in its pure state. You’ll find there the most radical and therefore the most pure form of the writer’s paradox according to Contre Sainte-Beuve:‡ I’m deceiving my world. I’m not who I appear to be. It’s marvelous to be taken for another and all the while, hiding behind this mask and this borrowed identity, to take on the features and steal the soul, the heart, the life of my contemporaries.

But let’s get back on track.

We’re not going to agree about the story of the German officer assassinated in the metro: you’re pretending you don’t understand that killing a German officer in the middle of Paris in 1943 is not exactly a “random killing.” But let’s move on.

Nor will we agree on the question of the poor Chechnyans, who don’t seem to interest anyone and in your eyes too should just die without making a fuss. There certainly is, as you say, “something” about them in Tolstoy; that something is indeed in Hadji Murad, one of his last masterpieces, in which we see how this small martyred people is also (and the latter may explain the former) a great, proud people, insubordinate and incarnating a spirit of rebellion that the Putins of yesterday and today have always tried to bring to heel. I would so much like you to understand … But I know that you’ll say I’m pontificating if I insist too much, if I explain that once you get to the point where between 10 and 20 percent of a people have been killed off, its capital city wiped out, and half of its country transformed into an immense ground zero, this is no longer an internal affair but really a matter for everyone. So I’ll drop that too.

We won’t waste any more time on Barrès, even if there too the question is not as straightforward as you seem to think and is complicated, if I dare to say so, in the opposite way: there is a Barrès other than the one you mock. There’s the early Barrès, who is neither the integral nationalist of La Colline inspirée nor the Catholic drum-roller of La Grande Pitié des églises de France* and particularly