Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [73]
My first reaction, I must admit, was to think the whole thing was too crazy to be true. I thought, this is just not possible. It’s some trick of Michel’s. He was the one who instigated this farce with his mother or some extra that he’s passing off as his mother. The ultimate hoax. Gary/Ajar times ten. Without saying so, we all, especially since Gary, dream of the ultimate mystification, the one that will render speechless those of our contemporaries who have been the least deceived and will allow us, poor clowns tired of our own comedies, to be reborn in a new guise, a new skin, another family novel, another novel period. And then the mother strikes. It’s the maximum provocation, the most outrageous audacity. After all, isn’t the mother question the most central one archaeologically for every writer? Isn’t it true that the moment someone becomes a writer is that moment—and not an instant sooner—when they find the correct distance between their own language and the source, or matrix, that is, the mother of that language? It had to be done. He did it! You’ve got to hand it to him …
Then, once I understood that it was true, that this really was your mother, that she was really talking about you like this and that she was actually giving interviews to announce to all and sundry that she would like to break your teeth with a stick, I tried to think of other bad mothers in the history of literature. I thought of Vitalie Cuif, the “Widow Rimbaud,” that violent “poison,” as her son called her, a frightening creature “more inflexible than seventy-three administrations of numbskulls.” Naturally, I thought of Bazin’s Folcoche* and of Nerval’s mother. Then, there was Mauriac’s mother in Génitrix.† I thought of the horrible Madame Aupick,‡ officially good, indeed dripping with niceness, sickly sweet, yet overjoyed, after his aphasia in Brussels, to find her little Charles quite senile, diminished, totally hers. I recalled “Bénédiction,” that terrible poem in which the poet’s mother is “horrified” by what she has given birth to, shouting that she would have preferred to give birth to a “nest of vipers” than the filth that makes up a writer. I vaguely remembered that Beaumarchais’s trilogy ends, after The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro, with a play that I’ve never read called La Mère coupable [The Guilty Mother] and is supposed to tell a similar story. So I ran through it all again in my mind. I tried to think of the most obscene offerings of this kind in the history of literature. But even then, this is extreme. First, because I’m not sure that there is any greater harpy than your mother, the now famous Lucie Ceccaldi (perhaps in Greek literature—those monstrous mothers, part ogre, that you find in Ovid eating their offspring in a stew or on a skewer, but in modern times, among normal humans, nowadays, no, really, I can’t think of any examples). And then, having a bad mother is one thing, but learning from the press that she considers you a parasite, a phony, a good-for-nothing, human scum (less offspring than outcast) is obviously something else again, and, as far as I know, it has no precedent in any literature.
Finally, I thought about you. Just you. About the fact that you must be suffering, that you might be overwhelmed, grieving, you yourself horrified, enraged, in despair. I remember that you’ve spoken to me of your father, a lot, in fact, and in a way that, as I told you, I found moving. But you’ve said nothing about her or at least almost nothing. Suddenly I was annoyed with myself