Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [84]
I must remind you that it was Baudelaire, no less, who described this program best with the two new entries he proposed to add to the list of human rights: the right to contradict yourself and the right to leave …
I would also like to point out that this strategy I’m talking about is the one recommended by antiterrorist police to those who, like my friend Salman Rushdie, have been objects of death threats. Bodyguards, police protection are all well and good, but they all say that the best tactic of all is movement, running forward, staying in your place or in one position for as short a time as possible, the art of swerving, taking detours, surprise effects …
So Baudelaire and Rushdie were caught up in the same struggle? But of course.
Finally, the pack is never entirely a pack. Moreover, you know this. You yourself mentioned Bourmeau, Beigbeder, and others who, come hell or high water, have never stopped defending you from those vicious dogs, which must be as different from your nice dog, Clément, as, according to Spinoza, the “barking animal dog” is different from the “celestial constellation dog.” And I too could name my antidogs, my comrades in guerrilla literature, my fellow chess players, without whom I could never have emerged intact from thirty years of debates, fights, blows given and received, the clashing of swords.
To mention only the dead, I’m thinking of my kind Paul Guilbert, whom I met thirty-five years ago when the Quotidien de Paris was starting up and who wrote about my books—all my books, including those like L’Idéologie française, which he wasn’t sure he agreed with. But he knew there was a pack; after a childhood under Vichy he was able to recognize its characteristic smell. And like one of the great musketeers, with his helmet of golden hair that turned white with age but right up to the end never lost its gleam, as a writer without books but who was brilliant and had decided to let his life’s work be absorbed into that of his friends, he simply decided, immediately and once and for all, that what I was doing should be defended.
I’m thinking of Dominique-Antoine Grisoni, also dead, who died so young, even younger. His work was barely started, he had his books, his disciples, his women who took up his time, his Corsica that he loved, as did Jean-Toussaint Desanti, known as Touki, the mathematical philosopher who taught us both. He led an unusually intense life full of joy, despair, sensuality, suffering, frenzied anxiety, a taste for war and erudition, sarcasm and admiration, multiple and mingled temporalities, lucidity, passion, something of Artaud’s madness poured into a mold with a rigor to rival Althusser’s. Until the end, that man took the time to provide me secretly with ammunition, information about the enemy camp, wise advice, invaluable suspicions, rescue plans, castles in the air, articles supporting me, critical readings of my manuscripts.
I’m thinking of all those nameless people who write to me when my books are published or when I appear on radio or television or even for no reason, without any particular occasion, just to encourage me, to talk to me, to tell me that they liked such-and-such an article but they didn’t like some other one as much, but that I must continue, not give in, stay the course. I remember Elsa Berlowitz, a woman without position but not without qualities. I ended up eagerly awaiting her faxes after each of my contributions (the day when a handful of friends went to scatter her ashes in the rosebushes of the Jardin de Bagatelle, I felt I had lost a support as mighty as Bernard Pivot or Josyane Savigneau,* just to give you an idea!). I remember another woman—I never met her and all I knew was that she was called “A,” perhaps Aline—who wrote to me every day, literally every day, for twenty years, just to comment