Palace of Books

by Roger Grenier

  Writing forces you to consider the problem of posterity, even if you don’t give a damn. Stendhal’s wish is well know. He saw himself winning the lottery—either around 1880, or around 1935. Scott Fitzgerald expressed his hope in a timid, modest fashion: “I am sure I am far enough ahead to have some small immortality, if I can keep well,” he noted as he was working on The Last Tycoon, the novel he wouldn’t have the chance to finish. That small immortality was granted him. I remember that Romain Gary confessed to me, in a completely objective tone, “I believe that I am one of those whose work will survive.” I had the impression that before coming to this conclusion and revealing it to me, he had considered the issue dispassionately, as if he were thinking about another person. Besides which, he wasn’t wrong. A quarter century after his death, his work is read and studied.

  For Sartre, the last work was by definition the one he was in the process of writing, which was, by definition, better than the last one:

  I’m thinking that I would do better today and so much better tomorrow. Middle-aged writers don’t like to be praised too earnestly for their early work; but I’m the one, I’m sure of it, who’s pleased least of all by such compliments. My best book is the one I’m in the process of writing; right after it comes the last one that was published, but I’m secretly getting ready to be disgusted with it before long. If the critics should now think it’s bad, they may wound me, but in six months I’ll be coming round to their opinion. On one condition: however poor and worthless they consider the book, I want them to rank it above all my previous work. I’m willing to let them run down my whole output, provided they maintain the chronological hierarchy, the only one that leaves me a chance to do better tomorrow, still better the day after, and to end with a masterpiece.

  Jean Rostand says the same thing: “No sooner have you published your book than all you care about is to erase it, to obliterate it with the next one.”

  In response to the question “What feelings does the word ‘posthumous’ awaken in you?” the Latin American writer Roberto Bolaño replied, “Something like a Roman gladiator. An undefeated gladiator. Or at least that is what the poor Posthumous wants to believe to give himself courage.”

  In my job as editor, I once had the following, pretty awful experience. A writer who knew he was dying of cancer brought me three manuscripts. When I finished reading them, he looked me straight in the eye and asked “Do we publish this one before or after my death? . . . And this one? . . . And that one?” In other words, it was up to me to decide which would be his last work.

  In 1888, Herman Melville had been forgotten for a long time. He had become a customs inspector for the port of New York. Death lurked around him. His son Malcolm committed suicide at age eighteen. He started to write Billy Budd. Nearly a year later, as he was reading Balzac’s correspondence, he came across this letter to Madame Hanska, from October 1, 1836: “You doubtless couldn’t know what profound pain is in my soul, nor what dark courage accompanies my second great defeat, sustained in the thick of life . . . Having abandoned all my hopes, having abdicated everything . . . I am certain, after this result [the failure of The Lily of the Valley] that my work will have no buyers in France.”

  Melville had just finished Billy Budd, in 1891, when he died. “The book remained in manuscript, disdained and forgotten, until 1924,” writes the great Melville critic Jean-Jacques Mayoux.

  That terrible winter night when he hanged himself on the fence of the rue de la Vieille Lanterne, was Nerval thinking about his work in progress, Aurelia? A few pages were found in his pockets.

  We might conclude by quoting Kafka again: “And yet I’m going to die. So I’m singing my finale. One man’s song is a bit longer, another man’s a bit shorter. But the difference is never more than a few words.”

  Let’s give the last word to Joseph Conrad: “I was within a hair’s breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say.”

  To Be Loved

  Is writing a raison d’être? It seems to me that we ought to approach the problem more modestly, more gently, by speaking rather about the need to write. Where does it come from and how does it take hold?

  Our schools, our society—or at least the one that existed a few years ago, before it underwent a profound mutation, if not a collapse—have always assigned a special value to literature and to writers. This is why children found it natural—children are monkeys—to write poems just like the ones they found in their school books. Sartre described the situation in “What Is Literature?”: “We were accustomed to literature long before beginning our first novel. To us it seemed natural for books to grow in a civilized society, like trees in a garden. It was because we loved Racine and Verlaine too much that when we were fourteen years old, we discovered, during the evening study period or in the great courtyard of the lycée, our vocation as a writer.”

  In L’homme précaire et la literature [Precarious Man and Literature], Malraux posits that no novelist can exist without a library. He means that you can’t write if you’re not imbued with what others have written before you, that every book takes into account the books that preceed it and is, in a sense, their sequel.

  Valery Larbaud goes father still: “The essence of a writer’s biography is in the list of books he has read.”

  The painter’s biography is the list of paintings he has seen.

  French writers always consider themselves to be continuers rather than creators. In other countries, such as the United States, the sense of creating dominates.

  If there exists in us something that is trying to express itself, we still need to find a form and even a model.

  Camus has described his beginnings. In the lycée, he studied the classics. He also had an uncle, a real eccentric, who worked as a butcher but who was extremely well read and got him to read Gide. Who seemed interesting and admirable to the adolescent but didn’t move him. Gide’s books didn’t really concern him. Then one day he came across a novel by André de Richaud, La douleur [Sorrow]:

  I don’t know André de Richaud. But I have never forgotten his admirable book, the first to speak to me of what I knew: a mother, poverty, fine evening skies. It loosened a tangle of obscure bonds within me, freed me from fetters whose hindrance I felt without being able to give them a name. I read it in one night, in the best tradition, and the next morning, armed with a strange new liberty, went hesitatingly forward into unknown territory. I had just learned that books dispensed things other than forgetfulness and entertainment. My obstinate silences, this vague but all-persuasive suffering, the strange world that surrounded me, the nobility of my family, their poverty, my secrets, all this, I realized, could be expressed! There was a deliverance, an order of truth, in which poverty, for example, suddenly took on its true face, the one I had suspected it possessed, that I somehow revered. La douleur gave me a glimpse of the world of creation. . . .

  I’m not going to pretend that La douleur is a great work. The important thing is that it spoke to its young reader. It didn’t need to be a masterpiece to unleash a vocation.

  “Literary”

  As for me, I didn’t write at all when I was in grade school or in high school. And I don’t remember any book that made me want to write. Actually I wasn’t very good in French. Latin was my best subject. Yet my family and friends decided once and for all that I was “literary.” It’s strange how often we’re labeled without having done anything to deserve it. It was doubtless because I read so much. I’ve told how my mother, worried about finding me always lying on my stomach on a rug, my nose in a book, took me to Bordeaux to consult a great medical specialist. (We lived in Pau and Bordeaux was our capital). She was afraid that so much reading would unhinge me. Even though the doctor made light of her fears, they were not entirely absurd. We know what happened to Don Quixote after reading too many tales of chivalry. My literary reputation followed me. If someone needed something written, they came to see me. I wrote
the ads for the calamitous movie theater my parents bought in Pau. I wrote for the student newspaper in Clermont-Ferrand. As a soldier in Marseille, in 1940, after the retreat, I worked in the Vieux-Port, in the cafés, writing letters for prostitutes. My sergeant, a likable but overly sentimental guy, used to rely on me to seek advice for his romantic problems in the lovelorn columns of Marie-Claire: “My wife and daughter are in the occupied zone. I’ve tried every method, including begging, to convince them to join me. I finally succeeded. And now that they’re here, I’ve lost my freedom. What now—what should I do?” After the liberation of Paris, I was sent to the upstart newspapers that people were referring to as “products of the Resistance.” I became a journalist. In fact, I have always been a scribe.

  Soon I found myself at Combat. No better way to awaken a vocation. At Combat everyone had written, was writing, was going to write a book. This daily paper was practically a branch of the Nouvelle Revue Française, the literary magazine of Gallimard. Albert Camus was the editor. But even more symbolic, the director, Pascal Pia, was an outstanding writer, who, in addition to his talent—you might even say his genius—had this rare quality: he refused to publish. He chose silence.

  In order to find out if I was capable of acting like everyone else, since I had covered so many trials, I wrote a book-length essay on the workings of the judicial apparatus, published in excerpts by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty in their magazine, Les Temps modernes, and published as a book by Camus in his series Espoir [Hope]. The title of the series was the source of many jokes, since the first books were L’Asphyxie [Asphyxia] by Violette Leduc, On joue perdant [We play to win] by Colette Audry, Le Dernier des métiers [The last profession] by Jacques-Laurent Bost, L’Erreur [The error] by Jean Daniel, Une métaphysique tragique [A tragic metaphysics] by Émile Simon, and now my Rôle d’accusé [Role of the accused].

  When he accepted my manuscript, Camus gave me the boilerplate contract they used in those days. You committed to ten books. With the one I’d just signed, that made eleven. I signed with a smirk, convinced I’d never write another book. Later, still in the mode of emulation, I wrote a novel, just to see if I could. Then short stories. Writing turned into a habit, if not a mania—a mania into which I sank further every day, so that now, I’m incapable of enjoying any other activity, any other distraction. To the point where I can feel guilty if I don’t write. Is that a raison d’être? When things are going badly and there is nothing else, perhaps. But I’d rather say that writing has become a way of living. You might point out that at the end of the road, whether you’re writing or not writing, the result is the same. Let’s just say, without giving it any more importance than it deserves, that it’s a distraction, in Pascal’s sense of the term.

  In The Seagull, the famous author Trigorin pretends to complain, “I’ve barely finished one story, when already for some reason I have to write another, then a third, after the third a fourth. . . . I write nonstop, like an express train, and I can’t help it.”

  The Need to Write

  A publishing house like Gallimard receives close to ten thousand manuscripts a year. Which tells you how many human beings feel the need to write. What are their reasons? I’ve just given mine, though I’m not sure how pertinent they are. When they were young, Louis Aragon, André Breton, and Philippe Soupault couldn’t resist conducting a survey entitled “Why do you write?” in a 1921 issue of their magazine, which they had baptized, somewhat ironically, Littérature. The answers were provocative, banal, or devoid of meaning.

  J.-B. Pontalis, in a more serious interview with the magazine Les moments littéraires, listed the principal motivations: “to be loved, according to Freud; to have success with women, according to Maupassant; out of weakness, for Valéry—but that’s not very credible. There’s the decisive response by Samuel Beckett: ‘bon qu’à ça’ . . . good for nothing but that.”

  Montaigne argues that what drew him to write was solitude: “It was a melancholy humor, and consequently a humor most hostile to my natural disposition, produced by the gloom of the solitude into which I had cast myself some years earlier, that first put into my head this daydream of meddling with writing.”

  Lorand Gaspar admits that “there seem to be people who write for themselves at first, because it enables them to breathe better.”

  Kafka also had a quasi-physiological need: “When it became clear in my organism that writing was the most productive direction for my being to take, everything rushed in that direction and left empty all those abilities which were directed towards the joys of sex, eating, drinking, philosophical reflection, and above all music. I atrophied in all these directions.”

  For Faulkner, writing presented itself as an inexplicable necessity, beyond discussion: “The first thing, the writer’s got to be demon-driven. He’s got to have to write, he don’t know why, and sometimes he will wish that he didn’t have to, but he does.”

  The same Faulkner, who hated interviews, is said to have responded to a journalist with a quip whose exact source has disappeared into legend: “Well, son, I can’t drink all the time, I can’t eat all the time, and I can’t fuck all the time. What else is there to do?”14

  And Sartre: “I have to write. I wrote to say I’ll write no more.”

  For Louis Guilloux, “we all write on the walls of our prison.”

  In other words, every human being is locked in his or her solitude. It’s as if writing were the only escape. Of course, one can also write out of a desire to be alone, to enjoy one’s own company, faced with a sheet of paper. But more often one writes because one is too alone.

  There are those who write by imitation. Those who want to bear witness. Those who feel the need to communicate. Those who need to proclaim the truth, their truth, and those who need to invent lies. Those who write like a medium in a trance. In A Life of One’s Own, the psychoanalyst Marion Milner claims a bit naively that she writes about her life to know if she can find any rules about the conditions in which happiness occurs.

  In his speech at Stockholm, in 2006, the Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk surveyed the question: “I write because I have an innate need to write! I write because I can’t do normal work like other people. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at all of you, angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can only partake in real life by changing it. I write because I want others, all of us, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone.”

  Only the irascible Thomas Bernhard rebels against the need to write. In 1963, he had just published Frost. Faced with the avalanche of critiques, good and bad, he couldn’t stand it anymore: “I thought I would choke on the error of believing that literature was my hope. I didn’t want anything more to do with literature. It hadn’t brought me happiness, it had trampled me down into that stifling, stinking pit from which there is no escape. . . .”

  He took a job on the spot as a truck driver in Vienna, delivering beer. Incorrigible Thomas Bernhard, who turned his rage into humor.

  Jean Paulhan remarked that “Victor Hugo thought of himself as a pope, Lamartine a statesman, and Barrès a general.” Once in a while, a written work actually does change the course of history. Primo Levi’s example is Hitler, who wasn’t satisfied with writing Mein Kampf, but wanted to go beyond words, to make the world exactly as he had imagined it in his book. All he did was destroy it.

  My idea about this issue is somewhat different. I think that the great political personalities who maneuvered to the point of leaving a trace in history are failed men of letters. Consider the author of Supper at Beaucaire and the aut
hor of Seeds of Discord.15

  Certain people, as Daniel Pennac puts it, don’t write to write, but to have written. To pose as writers. That can explain the strange behavior of people who hire ghostwriters in order to attain the status of writer. It’s also why men who have succeeded brilliantly in politics, in science, in business, go to a lot of trouble to obtain another kind of consecration, by writing a novel. Literature may have lost status, but for them it remains the supreme value.

  In The Seagull, mentioned earlier, one of the characters admits: “It would be nice to be even a second-rate author, when all’s said and done.”

  Panaït Istrati, the Romanian vagabond who wrote in French and whose stories had considerable success between the wars, had a point of view you can only admire. He thought that he still had a certain number of books to write. Once they were written, he planned to become a vagabond again: “Thus I would have furnished my most beautiful example: give the best of oneself, without making it a habit or a profession.”

  Illness and his premature death in 1935, at age fifty, prevented us from knowing whether he would have fulfilled this beautiful ambition.

  Lacking Religion

  Some people write because to them writing is the only thing that matters: Henry James, for example. Scott Fitzgerald thought that since James was the greatest writer of his time, he was also the greatest man of his time. (He found this idea in Ford Maddox Ford.) At the end of his life, when he was forgotten and couldn’t write anymore, he always introduced himself with these words: “I am Scott Fitzgerald, the writer.”

  Robert Musil affirms forcefully: “I consider it more important to write a book than to govern an empire. And more difficult as well.”

  Pierre Louÿs had such a lofty view of literature that the idea of writing a book on commission, or even worse for money, horrified him. His attitude led to literary impotence. He who had always adored women started to ignore them and live as a recluse. Reduced to poverty, he spent his nights reading, studying, and attempting to write. The women in his life—his wife Louise, who divorced him, Marie de Régnier (Louise’s sister), whom he had adored, not to mention Zohra ben Brahim, the irresistible Berber beauty—didn’t understand that literature had become his true spouse.