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By Root 827 0

that said that, on top of being a bad writer, a show-off, a liar, an uninteresting narcissist—the only cause for surprise being that so much had been written about me—I was an actual villain, who had been denounced as such by some British NGOs (sic!). Allegedly I had thousands upon thousands of slaves working for me in obscure African shipyards. Then, one morning I opened L’Express and found a review of that book, entitled “BHL Does Good Business.” The article was brief and not malicious. I even remember that the journalist was sympathetic and felt a real curiosity for my “case.” Except that what the article basically said was “This guy has some good points. He wrote a very respectable book on Sartre but now we know that this humanist, this character constantly prattling about human rights and the fate of the oppressed, is himself a slave-owner, denounced as such by some British NGOs, etc. Isn’t life strange? Writers are mysterious. It’s a fascinating mystery …” I must emphasize again that the journalist had nothing but goodwill toward this man who was complex enough to be the author of a good book on Sartre and yet also to exploit people. The paradox was presented just like that, as a fact, without the least note of outrage and in the cold analytical tone of someone who has added his little contribution to the great and eternal reflection on the oddities of literary history. “Why didn’t you attack the book that information came from?” asked the paper’s editor, Denis Jeambar, dumbfounded, when I met him by chance and explained that this story was absolutely untrue and that it was regrettable that his paper had endorsed it. “Because it wouldn’t have changed anything,” I replied. Because once that type of information has been printed, it will be repeated, whether or not there has been a trial. Because there’s no second chance, ever, when someone launches that kind of missile at you.

So I know about slander.

Having the pack at your heels—I think I know about that too.

The demolition of the boundary between public and private, the pursuit of the man beneath the writer, that way of setting the dogs on him, after instructing them to rip off his mask, all the better to retrieve his store of secrets. I’m afraid that I also have had that experience.

I’ve known even physical aggression, extending to assaults on the face (those famous “entartages”* that have entered into our customs and certainly into our language and whose real violence, not only physical but also symbolic, nobody seems to appreciate). In fact I’ve had more than my fair share of them.

Where we differ is in our reaction.

Where you are wrong, in my opinion, is about the outcome.

I don’t agree, indeed I profoundly disagree, with the idea that in this struggle, in what is intended to be an out-and-out war, in this physical set-to between writers and those who can’t stand the sight of them, the pack will always win. I’ll try to explain why in precise terms.

First of all, the pack is afraid.

That’s easy to forget when you see it advance with such fury and ferocity, so hungry and driven.

But, as you say very aptly, it is afraid.

It is much more afraid than we are.

More afraid than you, me, or any other writer who has been in its clutches.

It’s Bernanos’s* theory about the Nazis.

It’s Malaparte’s† theory in the dreadful scene with Hitler in the sauna in Kaputt.

I think it’s true that people would not be wicked if they were not first filled with a basic, uncontrollable, animal fear.

Of course, we shouldn’t mix everything up here. Let’s not compare the people who are taking advantage of your mother’s book, in order once again to spit in your face, with actual Nazis. All the same, I think we can always conclude that those who are wicked are first and foremost frightened. This is true firstly because that’s how it is. They have an all-encompassing fear of life, death, of their specters, their fantasies, the child in them who has died and whose corpse they are carrying, the spitefulness of others, each person’s loneliness, their desires, what they don’t desire,