Palace of Books

by Roger Grenier

  In art, the need for contradiction produced the baroque. Eugenio d’Ors discovered “the algorithm of the baroque” in the gesture of Christ rendered by Correggio in his painting Noli me tangere: “Oh Lord, Mary Magdalene at your feet implores you. You attract and refuse her at the same time. You hold out your hand saying: don’t touch me. You show her the path to heaven by leaving her on earth, in her tender defeat. She too, a woman already repenting for her sins, still lascivious in repentence, is also, by definition, baroque. She who sits back on her heels to follow you, Lord.”

  We live our lives through the irreversible flow of time. No matter how much we despair, avoiding this fact is as impossible as it would be to return to our mother’s womb. But time consoles us about time by offering us the right to contradict ourselves. It allows us to alter the principle of identity. We can’t be both white and black. But we can be white, then black. Time is surprise, renunciation. The temporality of the I is the foundation of the mind’s liberty.

  With time we learn; we shed our prejudices and we progress. The men and women of my era have come a long way: from putting on gloves to go to mass, to congratulating themselves for fighting it out with the Huns, to always being afraid of getting a woman pregnant or catching syphilis (on this last point, fear has returned, with another name). . . . We used to live and think just as people did during the reign of Louis-Philippe. We had to contradict ourselves quite a lot to change our way of thinking.

  Human life, which lasts longer and longer, outlives love. A life lasts longer than friendship, longer than literary, musical, or artistic taste. I have felt great passion for authors who no longer interest me in the slightest. Or else my interests have changed and are no longer expressed by those writers. Or I’ve spent so much time with them that it’s no fun anymore. Or way too many people began to love them and it ruined the special affection I felt (which is not a noble feeling). Or else my frivolity deprived me of the courage to return to them and I could only venerate them from afar. Not to mention the gods of our childhood. Maturity makes us realize we have worshipped false idols. It was my misfortune to reread Alphonse Daudet—how I once loved him! The memory of my attachment is so strong that all I have to do is pick up one of those old bound volumes we had at home. I had forgotten what was in them. My first impression was stronger than reading them today. Who cares how condescending the author is when he scolds and reproaches us, making us weep over his regiment of martyred children, unhappy cripples, and noble abused women who parade behind their mascot, Little What’s-His-Name.12 His so-called naturalism reproduces tried-and-true clichés rather than life itself—but what does it matter? What does the real Daudet matter, since the Daudet of my childhood is more real? The deadly Collège de Sarlande where Daniel is trapped as a dorm monitor; Jean Gaussin carrying Sapho in his arms; Father Gaucher casting his spell; and Monsieur Joyeuse, that gentle dreamer: I loved them and it was painful to give them up in the name of good literary taste.

  That’s not even counting all I didn’t know and have learned since about the kindly author of Lettres de mon Moulin. Alphonse Daudet was a ferocious anti-Semite, the helpmate and supporter of Édouard Drumont. Alphonse, a fitting father for Léon.13

  Ideas also get tired—or tire us out. I used to have all sorts of theories about voluntary servitude, La Boétie, T. E. Lawrence, etc. Now I don’t give them a second thought. For ages I longed to possess the unabridged English edition of The Seven Pillars, illustrated by the author. But I was broke. Later I found it in a used bookshop and I had enough money on me to buy it. But I was no longer interested.

  The most radical and cruelest contradiction is oblivion.

  Time imposes narrower and narrower choices on us, ultimately irreversible. The anguish of adolescence is in having to choose, i.e., having to give things up. You can’t be at the same time a fireman, an aviator, a professor, a vet. . . . Later, if we stop what we’re doing even for a minute, we’re likely to be reduced to tears at the thought of what fate might have reserved for us, all the possible paths we had to abandon, all the possible lives. In the need to contradict oneself, you can see a consequence of what Georges Bataille called “the desire to be everything.”

  The contradiction or, if you like, the opposing tendencies that everyone harbors, are the ferment of much literary expression. The subject of Hamlet is the hero’s swerving between action and interrogation. T. E. Lawrence seems to take Hamlet as his model. Sometimes he privileges the Arab rebellion, sometimes his interior torment. Dostoyevsky’s characters wage an endless war against themselves. Each of these heroes invites us, simple readers, to wage our own interior combat.

  Another notorious example: Flaubert. A Sentimental Education is a novel that undoes itself, since we learn in the end that the entire history of Frédéric Moreau, his dreams, his loves, his disappointments, mean nothing compared to the memory of an adolescent visit to a brothel. “Ah, that was our best time.” A single sentence denounces and abolishes the beautiful novel we were taking at face value.

  Flaubert ushers his contradictions down the path of derision. He agreed to write Madame Bovary, to suffer through the ordeal of rewriting the speech at the agricultural fair seven times, because his friends told him that The Temptation of Saint Anthony was a failure. Next, when he started Salammbô, you might imagine it was to avenge the mediocrity of the provincial world that had produced poor Emma. But he lets loose: “Few will suspect how depressed one had to be to undertake the resuscitation of Carthage!”

  The most dejected confession that a literary creation ever inspired. What does the splendor of the Orient, History, dead civilizations amount to when compared to the melancholy of the reclusive man from Croisset?

  Bouvard and Pécuchet uses derision in reverse. The father of the two idiots ends up being moved by them. However stupid they may be, the world is even stupider and soon they emerge as heroes of our times.

  After so many doubts, negations, brusque changes of direction, we can understand Flaubert when he writes: “Ah! The anguish of style—how well I’ve known it!”

  A whole family of writers has laid claim to derision—whether they know it or not. Joseph Conrad uses it on purpose. I’ll only mention one short story, “A Smile of Fortune.” It starts with a love story, with a creature as sublime as she is mysterious, on an island in the Indian Ocean that is compared to a pearl, and it ends with the account of the black market in potatoes.

  Some writers have only given in to the demon in a single work, almost accidentally. Take Pylon, which differs from every other Faulkner novel. In this story of grace refused, of impossible love, of misunderstanding, the Faulknerian curse approaches the absurd. The ridiculous and pathetic reporter guarantees the misery of the aviators who fascinate him and the woman he loves, just by wanting to help them.

  With Samuel Beckett, contradiction is condensed in a simultaneity that leads to a stuttering of thought. In Molloy he is miles from the clarity of Camus’s “Today, Maman died” in the opening of The Stranger, though he’s evoking an analogous situation: “For example my mother’s death. Was she already dead when I came? Or did she only die later? I mean enough to bury. Perhaps they haven’t buried her yet.”

  Anguish is nestled between sentences that hang like a swinging door.

  For these authors, derision oscillates between living and judging life, between suffering and watching suffering. The only way the two attitudes can exist together is through self-condemnation. Then, from the depths of derision, a movement of self-pity brings a bit of sad tenderness. The writer has only to take up his pen. He seems put out, as though he were Uncle Vanya at the end of the play, defeated and starting to write in his book of receipts: “On the 2nd of February, twenty pounds of butter; on the 16th, twenty pounds of butter once more. . . .” Carried along by the interior flow that stirs up both his sorrow and the sublimation of his sorrow, he’s now partially consoled.

  At the end of the contradiction there’s the temptation of silence. Why do we write? For w
hom? Can you be a writer without feeling the need to communicate? And isn’t communicating, or refusing to communicate, one of the thorniest problems an individual faces?

  “The refusal to communicate is a more hostile means of communication, but the most powerful,” writes Georges Bataille.

  What can we say about those who write to proclaim their solitude or their despair? Maurice Blanchot remarks, “A writer who writes ‘I am alone,’ or, like Rimbaud, ‘I am actually from beyond the grave’ can seem a little ludicrous. It is comical to be aware of one’s solitude while addressing a reader, making use of the very means that prevent mankind from being alone.”

  The despair that accommodates beauty of style is not exactly despair. There is something suspect, as Blanchot says, about the writer who “[Makes] himself admirable by the expression of his suffering.”

  Silence has more subversive power than any speech, any writing. For Marcel Arland, “the rarest form of audacity is not destruction, it’s abstention; there’s more violence in saying: no, silence is it.” As for myself, like so many others who have written too much, despite being tempted by silence, I remain haunted by the figure of Pascal Pia. In his youth, he finished a collection of poems, Le Bouquet d’orties [the bouquet of nettles]. Just as it was about to be published by Gallimard—this was in 1924—he withdrew the manuscript. There was nothing he valued more than literature, except silence. His refusal was antisocial, but why? Eddy du Perron, who portrayed him very faithfully as Viala in his novel Country of Origin (he also portrays Malraux, whom he calls Heverle), has him say—and the remark is doubtless authentic: “Talent emasculates you before you realize it. If your books are so great that the enemy admires them or awards them prizes, then it’s over: you’ve become part of the literary establishment and you contribute only to the higher glory of national art.”

  If you’re the least bit individualistic, this sort of thing gives you pause: the respectability of belles lettres, the greater glory of official culture. . . . It’s true that the idea of playing those games is not appealing.

  An adept at silence, Pascal Pia certainly had precursors, remarkable men who chose to remain in the shadows. But how would we know? We do know about one of them. Paul Challemel-Lacour (1827–1896) was a disciple of Schopenhauer who refused to publish his Studies in Pessimism. But the fact remains that this intense pessimist was also at various times in his life a high-level administrator, an elected official, an ambassador, a cabinet member. Pia often quoted Baudelaire’s line about the right to contradict oneself and the right to take leave. I got it from him. You find it in Camus’s notebooks, also inspired by Pia. If he were still alive, I think that this devout atheist would add the right to blasphemy, since today, in the name of nonsense and of divinities bound to fade as surely as the previous ones, believers of every stripe—some who lead their empires into war, others who issue death sentences—transform men and women into living bombs. All it took was the publication of a cartoon of their prophet in a distant land for them to set the streets on fire.

  This was not yet the case a few years ago and Pascal Pia, after having added to the two rights claimed by Baudelaire the right to silence, demanded, at the end of his life, the right to the void. He forbade anything to be written or said about him after his death and even forbade the announcement of his death. And yet some of us who were his friends, faithful and treasonous, can’t ignore his memory.

  It’s tempting to add a fictional character to this living example: Bartleby the Scrivener. Once cherished by a happy few, the hero of Melville’s short story is quoted and exploited today by just about everyone on the planet. I still don’t have the heart to give him up. Bartleby is not a writer in the ordinary sense, but a scribe, a copier, who answers everything with “I would prefer not to.” Bartleby, who worked in the dead-letter office.

  Dead letters! What a metaphor for the rest of us! If ever we need a patron saint to encourage us on the road to silence, I would recommend Bartleby in a heartbeat.

  Some may think I’ve gone on way too long about the twentieth right, the right to silence, and that it’s high time I put it into practice.

  Private Life

  The expansion of the media has put the writer in the spotlight, even if, nowadays, people who write have lost much of their prestige and their importance in society. Some of them find themselves afflicted with a lack of privacy once reserved for movie stars. Sometimes they ask for it. Michel Contat writes about “this form of media totalitarianism that gives the right to know everything about someone based on the simple fact that he or she has created a public image.” This phenomenon is not so new, if you think about Sartre and Beauvoir, not to mention Musset and George Sand, Dante and Beatrice, Petrarch and Laura, or even the self-dramatizing Byron or Chateaubriand. Nowadays we have scribblers who manage to pass themselves off as writers because they’ve already made a name for themselves as celebrities.

  Gérard de Nerval was a victim of the public’s need to know, due to conditions that would be unimaginable today. Jules Janin, in the Journal des débats of March 1, 1841; Alexandre Dumas, in Le Mousquetaire of December 10, 1853; Eugène de Mirecourt in a little monograph in his series Les Contemporains in 1854, wrote openly about their friend’s mental illness. Poor Gérard wrote to his father on June 12, 1854, in response to Mirecourt’s pamphlet on “necrological biography,” and said he was being made into “the hero of a novel.” He dedicated Daughters of Fire to Alexandre Dumas: “I dedicate this book to you, my dear master, as I dedicated Lorely to Jules Janin. You have the same claim on my gratitude. A few years ago, I was thought dead, and he wrote my biography. A few days ago, I was thought mad, and you devoted some of your most charming lines to an epitaph for my spirit. That’s a good deal of glory to advance on my due inheritance.”

  Is knowing the private life of an author important for understanding his or her work?

  The debate was renewed with great panache by Marcel Proust in By Way of Sainte-Beuve. Proust noticed that Sainte-Beuve, a subtle and cultured man, made nothing but bad judgment calls as to the worth of his contemporaries. Why? Jealousy doesn’t explain it. He couldn’t have been jealous of writers like Stendhal or Baudelaire, who were practically unknown. The fault was with his method. Sainte-Beuve wanted to adopt a scientific attitude. “For me,” he wrote, “literature is indistinguishable from the rest of man. As long as you have not asked yourself a certain number of questions about an author and answered them satisfactorily, if only for your private benefit and sotto voce, you cannot be sure of possessing him entirely. And this is true, though these questions may seem to be altogether foreign to the nature of his writings. For example, what were his religious views? How did the sight of nature affect him? What was he like in his dealings with women, and in his feelings about money? Was he rich? Was he poor? What was his regimen? His daily habits? Finally, what was his persistent vice or weakness, for every man has one. Each of these questions is valuable in judging an author or his book.”

  Sainte-Beuve decides that he is engaging in literary botany.

  Proust finds all this knowledge useless and likely to mislead the reader: “A book is the product of a different self than the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices. If we would try to understand that particular self, it is by searching deep within us and trying to reconstruct it there, that we may arrive at it. Nothing can exempt us from this effort of the heart.”

  Proust also writes: “How does having been a friend of Stendhal’s make you better suited to judge him? It would be more likely to get in the way.” Sainte-Beuve, who knew Stendhal and Stendhal’s friends, found his novels “frankly detestable.”

  What Proust holds against Sainte-Beuve is that he made no distinction between conversation and the occupation of writing, “in which, in solitude, quieting the speech which belongs as much to others as to ourselves, we come face to face once more with ourselves, and seek to hear and to render the true sound of our hearts.”

  Proust a
dmires Balzac, all while thinking that from what he knew of Balzac’s personal life, his letters to his family and to Madame Hanska, he was a vulgar human being. Stefan Zweig raises the same issue. He admires Balzac the writer and seeks reasons to admire the man. He is infuriated because he can’t find any. He has discovered that genius is incomprehensible.

  Gaëtan Picon thinks that if Proust attacks Sainte-Beuve so violently it’s because he needs to believe that genius is based on a secret distinct from intelligence. That a man whose life is frivolous and empty, a failure, can nonetheless create a great work. The question is inevitable, beginning with the case of Proust himself. How did this intolerable social climber, whom Lucien Daudet called “an atrocious insect,” become the author of In Search of Lost Time? Paul Valéry concludes his famous study of Leonardo da Vinci with a line that shows in a striking way how much distance he puts between an artist and his work: “As for the true Leonardo, he was what he was.”

  Flaubert would have sided with Proust against his friend Sainte-Beuve. He writes to Ernest Feydeau on August 21, 1859, with his customary truculence, “Life is impossible now! The minute you’re an artist, the gentlemen grocers, the auditors of record, the customs agents, the cobblers and all the rest enjoy themselves at your expense! People inform them as to whether you’re a brunette or a blond, facetious or melancholy, how many moons since your birth, whether you’re given to drink or play the harmonica. I believe that on the contrary, the writer must leave behind nothing but his work. His life doesn’t matter. Wipe it away!”

  He doesn’t stop there, but insists: “The artist must arrange things so as to make us believe in a posterity he hasn’t experienced.”