Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [92]
Am I in the process of contradicting everything I’ve told you since the start of our letters? Am I saying that, in the end, I would rather fight? No, not exactly. What I mean is that, up until now, in my life, the refusal to fight (or sometimes flight) was the result of a choice. I chose to go to trial rather than make the “public apologies” the Muslim organizations would have been happy with. On the other hand, I chose to ignore Demonpion. I chose not to retaliate but simply to break off all relations when any newspaper or magazine published the sort of details about my life that normally would be made public only if a man were on trial for a serious crime (and even then, many trials are heard in camera).
Now, for the first time in my life, with my mother’s book, I feel as though I no longer have a choice. No more choice than a man stumbling into quicksand who knows that any movement he makes, by stirring up the mud, can only hasten his entombment.
*Three common French card games familiar to children.
*Le Canard enchaîné, founded in 1915, is an influential satirical magazine published weekly in France.
*La Revue des deux mondes (Review of the Two Worlds) is a magazine devoted to literary and cultural affairs.
*Angelo Rinaldi (born 1940) is a French novelist and literary critic and the literary editor of Le Figaro.
*Michel Polac (born 1930) is a French television and radio presenter, filmmaker, and writer.
*In the interview to which Houellebecq refers, Demonpion actually says: “Is he racist? Well, if he isn’t he’s not far off. When you reread his biography of Lovecraft you feel an extraordinary sympathy for this American author who, for his part, was profoundly racist.”
*l’Humanité is a French communist newspaper founded by Jean Jaurès in 1904. La Croix is a French Catholic daily newspaper founded in 1880.
*Houellebecq is referring to The Gay Science, §273.
May 27, 2008
Dear Michel, how about if we stop with the mud, hatred, whipping boys, slander?
We’ve said it all.
Naturally, we haven’t said everything about this thing with your mother.
Or about this question of Islamic-leftism, this new great alliance between new Reds and new Browns, of the axis that runs from those cretins at Le Monde diplo[matique] to the death squads of the jihad variety. I also believe we’ve seen only the start of it (where we disagree is about Islam itself, which I always take care to distinguish from Islamism, not out of prudence naturally or any concern for what’s politically correct but because I believe sincerely that Islam as such is not at all alien to the spirit of enlightenment, democracy, and freedoms).
But as regards the rest, your enemies, mine, their shared interests, this secret of the times that will begin to unravel when we begin to understand their unspeakable alliance, the reasons that make writers more hated than anyone else, I really believe that we’ve said everything there is to be said about those pawns, those paid biographers who are quite stupid, writers of poison-pen letters, snitches, vultures attacking living flesh, total nonentities.
I’m only going to say one more thing about it. I don’t get too upset, I never reply to those people, and I would suggest that you do the same. The reason why—apart from the whole question of negative emotions, having to bother with strategies and replies, apart from Spinoza and Hobbes—is that they’re just not worth it.
On the other hand, there were two things in your letter that led me to what are also probably useless reflections, but no matter …
First, your narrative of your beginnings: your lack of desire, you say, to be the center of attention; this essential timidity that made the young Houellebecq the man least prepared for “playing a public role”; in a word, this misunderstanding that was the beginning of it all.
I was also struck by what, a little earlier, you called the “strengths” that hold or fail