Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [9]
Since then I’ve occasionally been beset by a nagging, vaguely metaphysical doubt: Is there still a real Philippe Sollers beneath the social Philippe Sollers? I’m not entirely joking; Cioran notes with some amusement that when the libertine aristocrats of the eighteenth century died in public, crowds flocked to see it, just like to the theater, in the hope that the dying man might produce one last witticism—and in the fear that, whimpering and weeping, he might at the last moment beg to take communion. Staging one’s own death, worrying that it might turn out to be a flop? You can see just how far man has been prepared to go in the service of art.
Philippe Sollers is not at that level, because this is not the eighteenth century, and because the Bordeaux bourgeoisie are not quite the aristocrats of the ancien régime. All the same, Philippe Sollers on television is about as unpredictable as Jean-Pierre Coffe; but that’s probably the only sensible way to appear on TV: first, consider yourself to be a permanent guest; then put together a little schtick, with a few gimmicks, and wheel it out whenever you need to. And carefully bury your innermost self, make it all but inaccessible (at the risk, I repeat, of losing it).
Except that this is not what you do either: you appear on television, it seems to me, when you have something to say—you’ve written a book, you have some cause to champion, it varies. Your innermost self is not kept on a leash and, cher Bernard-Henri, it comes through at times almost violently, and it is doubtless modesty that prevents you from citing among your strengths the capacity for conviction and indignation.
This, please note, is of no use to me either. In my life, I have never really interested myself in anything beyond the field of literature, and there is little in that to get truly indignant about. And yet I have known intelligent, sensitive, remarkably cultured people (some of whom occasionally wrote reviews, conducted interviews) who never truly achieved a position of strength. It is Jérôme Garcin, not Michka Assayas, who edits the culture section of Le Nouvel Obs[ervateur]. So what? Who gives a fuck who edits the culture section of Le Nouvel Obs? It’s clearly not as important as Bosnia.
To tell the truth, even if Michka Assayas were appointed to run the culture section of Le Nouvel Obs, I’m pretty sure he would resign after a couple of months; he would barely manage to deliver his weekly roundup for VSD. It’s not about laziness (his Dictionnaire du rock, for example, was a mammoth undertaking), it’s something more pernicious, a mixture of indifference and independence, something that, whatever it is, keeps you firmly on the margins.
There are, of course, exceptions; for example, I have a lot of admiration for Sylvain Bourmeau,* a hard worker if ever there was one. And I think that, thanks to my regular admonitions, Frédéric Beigbeder† has decided to keep his next job for more than a year. Even so, there is in those I admire a tendency toward irresponsibility that I find only too easy to understand. I am, after all, the son of a man who has (and I’m not up-to-date on everything he’s done) launched three companies, only to get bored as soon as they became vaguely successful; who built five houses (actually built, poured the concrete, planed the wood, et cetera), only to give up on the idea of living in them almost as soon as they were built.
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Here we go again. We can’t escape it. My role in your destiny may well be to have dragged you down to