Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [94]
And I’ll say it again—if I’d had to choose between the life that has become mine and that of some clandestine head of a proletarian left-wing movement uniting those who—whoever they were—would have been the undeniable “aristocracy” of the time, I would have chosen the life of the clandestine head.
So those are the facts.
They can say what they like, but those are the facts.
When I wrote what for me was my Lovecraft, Les Indes rouges, I decided to give it to François Maspero, who was certainly the appointed editor of that far-left to which I was close ideologically, and whose anti-TV, antimedia, anti-show-off stance in particular seemed to correspond to the ideas I had about thought and its influence.
When, four years later, I handed in my Barbarism with a Human Face, whose success I’m sure you know all about, there are two other facts that say a lot about my state of mind. First, I wrote it out of love for a woman I’d taken away from a cinema producer and who, I feared, would be bored in this literary world I was plunging her into without any notice. That gangster Jean-Edern Hallier had the fortunate notion of employing her in his publishing house on the express condition that I should at the end of each month give him a new chapter of the philosophy book he would get a chance to gamble on before anyone else. Then, when I had written it, Hallier went bust and when I approached Grasset to get him to take on my poor book, abandoned by the wayside, I found it perfectly normal that he should begin by turning it down and then publish it unwillingly, just to keep me happy, with the ridiculously low circulation of 2,700 copies—this can be verified from the publisher’s archives.
And then, finally, came the famous Apostrophes, where the book’s destiny was made, as was my own, hot on its heels. The fact is, I did not go into it exactly reluctantly but rather with closed eyes, blindly, in absolute innocence not only of what was going on but of the stakes involved in this kind of platform. I was far, very far, from aiming at, calculating, or even wanting some sort of entry into the spotlight for thirty years.
I’ll admit that I made up for it afterward.
And I didn’t make much of an effort, to say the least, to return to that obscurity from which, as I’ve just told you, that book plucked me.
When I’m feeling self-indulgent, I imagine that this triggered a sort of trap, a chain reaction, or indeed a clinamen that was hard to resist. When I’m very self-indulgent and don’t hold back from seeing myself in the most flattering light possible, I tell myself that I’m hardly the only one, for crying out loud. There has to be more at stake than the problems of a writer contemplating his navel and worrying about his position in his times! The Burundians, the Darfuris, the Bosnians would hardly have benefited from my return to obscurity. Look at all the good and great causes I’ve devoted myself to, which needed this constant media racket.
There are also times when I think that you’re right, that we do become diminished, that sooner or later we give up on our desires, dreams, ambitions, youth, and that it’s at most dubious to dress up this backing down, these small acts of cowardice or major deviations, as I do, in the favorable guise of “friend to humanity.”
All of which is true, I suppose.
It’s all concurrently true and I myself don’t even know in what doses.
Although … I hardly dare to say this and yet it’s also true.
Strangely enough, deep down I haven’t really changed my opinion about the hierarchy of influence.
I am as fascinated now as I was when I was twenty by those great, inflexible figures who provided a sort of background music through the history of my generation and who as a joke I call our “hidden imams”! Benny Lévy, after his political season and his ascent to Jerusalem; Robert Linhart, who preceded him as the head of the Gauche prolétarienne, and whose daughter