Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [7]
Yet, the more I have gained this knowledge applied to others, the more prolifically I’ve written about its underlying logic, the more I believe, for example—and to reply to one of your other remarks, the more I’ve helped, following the path opened up by René Girard,* to show that revealed religions are not responsible for producing scapegoats but rather help to subdue savagery—the more I feel that my personal case, my experience as a young man or as a man, hardly helped me to reach these conclusions.
It’s odd but that’s how it is.
It doesn’t square with the idea that was our starting point, of the writer who has been disowned, insulted, dragged into the mud, et cetera. But it’s the truth.
One last thing.
You seem skeptical when I say that the things written about me and that I discover from time to time on diabolical Google are significant for me only insofar as they keep me informed of the state of play, what my adversary is up to, his weaknesses if any, and how to react appropriately.
You’re wrong.
I can assure you that this is also true.
As soon as I’ve read them and immediately drawn the obvious tactical or strategic conclusions, I forget the articles by those people.
They have no effect on my narcissism.
In the face of assaults, my ego is fireproof, shatterproof.
And there’s a magic slate aspect, so that the malevolence spread in this way evaporates as soon as it stops scattering its effluents and informing me of the position of what Flaubert in a letter to Baudelaire called the adversary’s “batteries” and “carriages.”
In other words—and you were right there—there’s nothing to equal the drive to conquer as an antidote to these two twin poisons, the desire to please and the desire to displease.
There’s nothing to equal a sense of war, not only to protect a work, shelter it, give it sanctuary but also to see it through and to hang on to the desire to continue, unshaken by winds, tides, and the ravening pack.
I’d forgotten that phrase of Voltaire’s.
But I have to say that I like it a lot and that’s how I like to think of the writers I admire: living and dying bearing their weapons, making the best of it, like the great Valmont,* that “painter of battles.” That’s how I like to think of myself too, but my battles are like the ones in that book by Pérez-Reverte† that you recommended to me, and which I found gripping … But I’ll stop here, dear Michel.
Because otherwise we’ll have to come back to this art of warfare.
I mean the battlefield that is specifically the literary or philosophical scene.
And that state of continual battle dress, which according to the greatest too, sums up the life of a writer.
Kafka, for example …
Kafka, who, as you know, was an admirer of Napoleon and saw in the hesitations of the emperor at the Battle of Borodino or the scene of the withdrawal from Russia, the encrypted truth of those “campaigns” and “maneuvers” that made up his own everyday existence as a novelist …
Believe me—we’ll save time this way.
*Jean Cocteau, Journal d’un film, published 1947 (shooting diary).
*German neoclassicist sculptor, beloved of Nazis (and one himself).
*Fusées: Charles Baudelaire’s journals.
*French linguist and philosopher.
†Solal: Albert Cohen’s first in a cycle of four autobiographical novels, published in 1930. Solal is Cohen’s handsome and successful but permanently discontented alter ego, who struggles to reconcile his Jewish roots with his social position.
*Sixteenth-century French poet, leader of the Lyonese school, who “discovered” the tomb of Petrarch’s Laura.
†Historical novel by Gustave Flaubert.
*A family psychodrama, first produced in 1959, addressing Holocaust and German guilt and responsibility.
*French historian, literary critic, philosopher, and anthropologist.