Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [93]
The first point interests me because, even though this may seem even more surprising in my case than in yours, I was not at all prepared to become what I am either.
I’m not saying that I found it hard to play my role of “author” once I’d stumbled into it.
Or that in my childhood and adolescence I had that shy, unassuming nature, perhaps solitary, certainly fleeing from the footlights, that I sense behind your description.
But what’s clear is that I was perfectly happy with my local fame, local and tiny, in my classes and in the small groups and cliques that I moved in.
I’m equally certain that when I imagined my future, when, like all young people, I dreamed about my future, I saw adventures, combat, perhaps great books, and through all this a sort of luster, but a rare, local luster that would never take the form of that celebrity that has become my lot and yours.
At the École Normale there were boys who dreamed of becoming ministers or, like a former pupil, Georges Pompidou, presidents of the Republic.
There were some who saw themselves as and wanted to be “great writers” in the style of other former alumni, who had hung around the École Normale for years and who were now enjoying the fullness of their glory, like Sartre or Raymond Aron.
There were some, like my namesake Benny Lévy, who were shooting ahead and were already living in the moment, like the reincarnation of Lenin haranguing the Soviet people.
I wasn’t of the same disposition as any of them.
I don’t remember ever being tempted in May ’68, for example, to take the floor at a general assembly.
Nor—indeed still less—do I remember ever going to dream about my destiny in front of the columns of the Pantheon, the way Jules Romain’s pupils of the École Normale did.
In fact, what I remember is quite the opposite. On the first day back to school in 1966, a classmate held forth to a gathering that had formed in the covered-in hall where the pupils of the two first-year and two second-year classes in the preparatory section for the École Normale’s arts course met between classes. He gave two juxtaposed portraits, favoring the former, of that alumnus Pompidou, who had been enrolled at the École for so many years, and his obscure fellow pupil, the Latinist Pierre Grimal. I see myself without the shadow of a doubt adding my voice to the protests against this boy who was foolish enough to think of comparing the failed life of a future president, seen on television every night, with the great life, eminently desirable and wonderful, of a translator of Seneca the Younger, Plautus, or Terence and whom we met only in the reading room of the École Normale.
If I had a yearning, it was not for any of those great destinies under the stage lights that the École might prepare you for.
When I think of the people I admired and dreamed of one day resembling, I wanted to be like that specialist on Plautus and Terence, or to be a philosophy professor who, like Jean Hyppolite, had translated the Phenomenology of Spirit, or even—sticking with the great Hegelian plotters, the mysterious Alexandre Kojève, about whom a few of us, just a few, were aware that he was master of our masters. There was also Louis Althusser, hidden away like the Minotaur in his office on the École’s ground floor, who was the greatest saint of Marxist modernity. And in a quite different vein, there was a playboy, quite unknown really, named Paul Albou—I’d read once that he was Brigitte Bardot’s secret lover and had been mad with jealousy.
To use your word, I didn’t believe that it was possible to “subjugate” more than a few people at a time.
I believed that influence, like concepts, lost in comprehension what it gained in extension, that it lost in intensity, incandescence, and power what it appeared to win by being exercised over a large number of people.
I liked to seduce and