Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [76]
I can quite easily imagine what the book itself is like. She recounts her journey “through the century,” as some journalist at Le Monde called it. (I don’t know this Florence Noiville, but she seems incredibly stupid … that perky, hackneyed tone—“Lucie Ceccaldi is certainly a hell of a character!” and so on.) I am sure she reveals (it is over four hundred pages, after all) how adventurous, how fascinating her life has been, sometimes difficult, but always fascinating, in every country in the world, with the most extraordinary characters from all walks of life. Given that the book was revised by the journalist Demonpion, it’s bound to be a piece of shit.
It’s pretty scary that the old cow found a publisher; but where I might start to somatize is when I see the way the journalists, like vultures, swoop on the most putrid, the most sordid passages. It will go on for a while longer. And when they’re bored with it, or rather when they’re worried that the public are bored of it, they’ll hold their noses and say, “This whole Houellebecq thing is really rather sordid,” and it will be as though I set the whole thing up.
On every level, the relationship between me and the quasi-totality of the media in this country has reached the point of all-out hatred, in the same sense as your talk about “all-out war” (rather a strange war, incidentally, given that I am unarmed; it would be fairer to say an all-out war of extermination directed at me). Obviously, no one is actually interested in my mother, except maybe Florence Noiville, assuming she is as dumb as she seems. It is me they are trying to bring down through her, and from now on, I shouldn’t have any illusions: they’ll stop at nothing, there will be no quarter given. The separation between private life and public, between the author and the work? It’s all too complicated, nobody worries about scruples like that these days.
I think what I am going through is something similar to what medieval criminals did when they were pilloried. The word has been so overused that we’ve forgotten the horror of the thing itself. The condemned man was exposed on a public square, head imprisoned in a wooden frame, hands fettered, face exposed, and any passerby could slap him in the face, spit at him, or worse.
Three years ago, wounded at hearing Demonpion on the radio repeating the story that I “lied by telling Les Inrockuptibles that my mother was dead,” I tried to set the story straight. I had had the information from my sister, who had heard it from her father (who still lives in La Réunion). So I went to the effort of asking my sister to write a letter explaining all this, and it was published in the readers’ letters section of Les Inrockuptibles; the story got almost no publicity whatever.
Much more recently, persuaded by your example, I thought that it might be interesting for me to find out what people were saying about me, “to know my adversary’s position.” But in my case, there’s no point anymore: my adversaries are everywhere.
Oh, of course there are a few exceptions; but the exceptions are strange and difficult to understand; in fact, that is exactly what they are, exceptions. It’s curious, for example, to think that Paris Match is the only general-interest magazine that has so far refrained from commenting on my private life. It’s also notable that women’s magazines (with the exception of one or two) have always shown enormous tact on the subject.
All of this, of course, runs contrary to the standard clichés. Because women are supposed to be “chatterboxes, gossips,” et cetera. I’m happy to believe it, but it’s the reverse of what I have observed. Similarly, it might seem surprising