Jean Paulhan goes further still: “What do I think of literature? Basically this: we’re on earth to understand the essential, to save ourselves. Thus literature, in the absence of religion, remains in my opinion the only path . . . (But this argument demands much more precision).”
This is also Katherine Mansfield’s opinion: literature “takes the place of religion—it is my religion—of people—I create my people: of ‘life’—it is Life. The temptation is to kneel before it, to adore, to prostrate myself, to stay too long in a state of ecstasy before the idea of it.” A feeling shared by Joseph Conrad when he writes, “I don’t want to talk disrespectfully of any pages of mine.”
Sartre echoes them in The Words: “I had found my religion: nothing seemed to me more important than a book. I regarded the library as a temple.”
Even before the Romantics, Victor Hugo saw himself as a priest. And Mallarmé decreed: “This world is made to end up as a beautiful book.”
Roger Vrigny wondered how others, people who don’t write, could live: “I was almost ready to believe that they weren’t really alive. The same kind of vertigo as if I’d been told: God doesn’t exist and so, the world becomes very small. Writing was God. If literature didn’t exist, the earth would become tiny, like a stone.”
Literature and religion are certainly connected, for many see in writing a creation, that is, a way to survive, a promise of eternity. Yet placing hope in survival through literature seems as dangerous a bet as recourse to religion. Compared to the few writers who remain in our memory and in our affections, how many have disappeared as if they had never written a line! This is the most likely fate. Paper turns to dust. Nowadays, oblivion comes faster and faster. We used to talk about a purgatory where writers would live after their deaths. The word purgatory signifies oblivion, a provisional disaffection, but also the promise of some day leaving the shadows. Which is only very rarely the case today.
It remains true that for certain people, there is consolation in thinking that after death, they will obtain some kind of revenge. Having come to the end of the line, Scott Fitzgerald writes as he is taking notes for The Last Tycoon that his death will keep him from finishing: “I don’t want to be as intelligible to my contemporaries as Ernest, who, as Gertrude Stein said, is bound for the museums. I am sure I am far enough ahead to have some small immortality if I can keep well.”
Albertine Sarrazin, whose life and career were so ephemeral, declared that her first motivation was the thought that, if she died, people would continue asking for her books at the bookstore. She died very young, and who today goes to a bookstore to buy The Runaway or Astragale? Poor Albertine, whose lot was to die, and to die completely—like the rest of us.
Since there is little or no chance that literary work will survive, one is forced to conclude that writing or not writing makes very little difference. One can do what one wants with one’s life, since, in the end, without exception, we all fall into the same void. For Camus, “Creating or not creating changes nothing. The absurd creator does not prize his work. He could repudiate it. He does sometimes repudiate it. An Abyssinia suffices for this. . . .”
Abyssinia leads of course to Rimbaud, but I suspect that Camus was thinking of a man I also knew very well, someone we loved. Pascal Pia chose silence. But if he refused to write, or at least to publish, literature was nonetheless what connected him to life. All he needed to do was to recite a few verses by his friend Fernand Fleuret, and he would say, like the poet Rutebeuf: “These are my fêtes.”
Among those who are driven to write are numerous men and women who are dissatisfied with life. You drown your sorrow in the inkwell.
Literature is a compensatory activity. Pavese said, “Literature is a defense against the attacks of life.”
Writing soothes the rest. What rest? The rest.
Freud too thought that literature, and art more generally, were compensatory activities. They are the expression of a desire that renounces satisfaction in reality. Art substitutes an illusory object for the real object that the artist is incapable of obtaining.
Empress Elisabeth of Austria wasn’t satisfied carting her melancholy around the world. The only time Sisi approached her dream was when she wrote poems imitating Heine—bad poems, but no matter. In those poems she was truly herself, a frightened seagull who never found a resting place.
Despite what Camus maintained, writing can save us from the absurd. The young Flaubert, like many boys of his era, was furiously romantic. It wasn’t easy reaching adolescence during the bourgeois monarchy. Flaubert cites two of his comrades. Disgusted with existence, one of them shot himself in the head, the other hanged himself with his necktie. Flaubert, equally despairing, didn’t kill himself. He wrote. He confided his disgust for life, his horror of men and of the world, to paper.
Very often the writer, like one of Musil’s heroes, experiences “the agony and the triumph of being misunderstood.” So he loves to create characters in his own image, in a world where the vanquished and the afflicted find consolation. A world where the Uncle Vanyas, scorned by all, win our affection.
So we imagine that if someone writes it’s because he or she has gone a little funny in the head. Let’s just say we’re all more or less abnormal. Claude Roy points out, “Literature begins in Greece with Homer, a blind man, in China with Chou Yuan, who must have been somewhat neurotic, since he committed suicide. The first very great Latin poet, Lucretius, was as anguished as the sublime and impotent Kierkegaard, as dark as the prodigious hunchback Leopardi, as despairing as the syphillitic genius Baudelaire.”
The Inner Public
From the depths of his solitude, the writer cannot work unless he imagines a public—that’s the paradox. This public influences not only content, but form. Sartre explains in “What Is Literature?”: “One cannot write without a public and without a myth—without a certain public created by historical circumstances, without a certain myth of literature that depends to a very great extent upon the demands of the public.”
Paul Valéry is more ironic: “Who would you want to entertain? Who do you want to seduce, match wits with, to make crazy with envy; whose minds do you want to render pensive and whose nights do you want to haunt? Say, Master Author, do you aim to serve Mammon, Demos, Caesar; or do you aim to serve God? Or perhaps Venus, or perhaps a little of all of them?”
Valéry himself resists being seduced by literature with this dry dismissal: “I don’t like writers interfering in my affairs. . . .”
At the very minimum, one writes for an imaginary, ideal reader, a double of oneself, the person Michel de M’Uzan calls “the interior public.”
To Be Loved
Sometime around 1850, according to Roland Barthes, the writer ceased bearing witness to universal truths and became an unhappy conscience. He affirms: “One writes in order to be loved.” Barthes claims that “One is read without being able to be loved.”
In order to be loved . . . In some instances, to be loved precisely by the very person who refuses his or her love, his or her understanding. In a book entitled Ce qui nous revient [What comes back to us], Jean Roudaut tests this idea out on Baudelaire and on Kafka:
Designed to illuminate the author’s most intimate relationships, the literary work is, by its very truth, condemned to fail; and the only person who will never understand the tottering sentence is the very person for whom that sentence is intended: Baudelaire tries to convince Madame Aupick; Kafka suffers from the “false and puerile” image his mother has of him. Kafka’s letter to his father, written to clarify his relations with his family and legitimate his solitary vocation as a writer, will never reach its destination; each time he reads to his parents from his work, it is a failure: my father “always listens to me with the greatest repugnance.” In Chekhov’s The Seagull, the extremely narcissistic actress Arkadina, whose son has become a writer, mostly to get her attention, utters a line that is the ultimate in cruelty: “I still haven’t read anything he’s written, can you
believe it. I never have time.”
To Publish
Let’s admit for the time being that writing is a raison d’être. What you have written, your intelligence and your sensitivity, your artistic taste, will never come into existence, will not find a corpus, unless someone else, i.e., the editor, finds it worthy of being printed. That’s the exception, if you think about the thousands of manuscripts that are rejected every year. Most of them are turned down with no explanation, with some computer-generated form letter—one version for a man and one for a woman, like in old ballads. Given the avalanche of manuscripts, there is no way of doing things differently. Yet you must take those manuscripts seriously, since whether they are good or bad, the author’s emotional investment—not to mention the magnitude of work involved—is the same.
Consider what can happen even to writers who have already been published. I’ve known a few who’ve experienced the following catastrophe: perhaps they never had much success but they were in print, their books had a material existence; they’d gotten a few reviews, a few readers. And then, one day, their editor said, “Clearly you’re not making any progress. We bet on you in the beginning, but we’ve lost faith. Let’s stop.” As though they were told there was nothing left for them to do but die. Or that they would never make love again.
We should probably take Flaubert with a grain of salt when he curses the need to publish. He writes to his friend Ernest Feydeau, on January 11, 1859: “I note with pleasure that printer’s ink is beginning to stink in your nostrils. In my opinion it is one of the filthiest inventions of mankind. I resisted it until I was thirty-five, even though I began scribbling at eleven. A book is something essentially organic, a part of ourselves. We tear out a length of gut from our bellies and offer it up to the bourgeois. Drops of our heart’s blood are visible in every letter we trace. But once our work is printed—goodbye! It belongs to everybody. The crowd tramples on us. It is the height of prostitution, the vilest kind. But the platitude is that it’s all very fine, whereas to rent out one’s ass for ten francs is an infamy. So be it! . . .”
To the same Ernest he adds on May 15, 1859, “The impatience of literary folk to see themselves in print, performed, recognized, praised, I find astonishing—like a madness. That seems to me to have no more to do with a writer’s work than dominoes or politics.”
Again on January 2, 1862, he confides:
I find printer’s ink so putrid that it makes me recoil every time. I put Bovary to sleep for six months after I’d finished, and after I’d won my trial I would have stopped right then and there and never have published the volume if it hadn’t been for my mother and Bouillhet. When one work is done, you must start dreaming about creating another. As for the one that’s just been finished, I become absolutely indifferent to it, and if I show it to the public, it’s out of stupidity or based on the conventional idea that one must publish—something I don’t feel the need to do. I’m not even saying everything I think about this, for fear of sounding like a phony.
Flaubert is forgetting about his negotiations with his editor Michel Lévy and his machinations to influence Sainte-Beuve’s critique of Salammbô.
Swift already referred to publishing as a form of prostitution: “A copy of verses kept in the cabinet and only shown to a few friends, is like a virgin much sought after and admired; but when printed and published, is like a common whore, whom anybody may purchase for half a crown.”
We could meditate for a long time on Flaubert’s cry of despair, as the end was approaching: “I am going to die and Bovary, that slut, will live!”
The Diary
Sometimes writers need to unburden themselves immediately: enter the diary. We need to distinguish between diaries an author plans to publish, whether pre- or posthumously, and diaries they keep only for themselves, although we might ask if this is ever really the case.
Sometimes it seems as if the writer leaves behind a diary to correct or even contradict his or her image. George Duhamel, a kind man without a mean bone in his body, left absolutely cruel pages where he massacred his colleague Jules Romains, among others. Reading Raymond Queneau’s diary, we discovered that he was religious—even a bigot. No one could have imagined that after wishing you a good evening at Gallimard, he went over to Saint-Thomas-d’Aquin to light candles. No one even knew that he was the kind of man who kept a diary. One day a friend started talking about diaries and Queneau noted with satisfaction in his that the friend didn’t suspect he was keeping one.
People who have the diary habit bother me. I’m always afraid I’ll find something I said in their next volume. This has happened to me. And once it does I’m afraid to say anything in their presence.
I knew a delightful man, Jean Denoël. He was friends with Gide, Cocteau, Max Jacob, Florence Gould, and many others. A modest person who wrote neither novels nor poems. But he often spoke to me about his diary. “I’ve taken precautions,” he assured me. “We’ll see what we’ll see.” Then he died. His diary was never found. I don’t think that anyone stole it. He must have invented it to give himself stature—dare I say, reality.
Anyone interested in diaries should familiarize themselves with the research and writings of Philippe Lejeune, especially his book “Dear Diary—”.
Often keeping a diary is the manifestation of a desire to survive. This presumes a lot. What about the men or women who think the letters they’ve written deserve to be published and read by future generations? I’ve known some of them.
A Substitute for Death
Looking to literature to reach what is deepest in oneself, to discover the meaning of life, comes in large part from the evolution of the novel in modern times, at least since Balzac. By the time you get to Proust, it’s no exaggeration to say that the novel has replaced the idea of eternity. The novel aims to fix a destiny. Which is why the critic René-Marie Albérès could write, “The novel is a substitute for death.” But the novel doesn’t succeed by capturing or fixing reality or its equivalent through the accuracy of its copy—i.e., by realism. Its truth is in style, in emotion, in movement. Emotion is what counts. Even if Chekhov maintains that “you should only sit down to write when you feel as cold as ice.”
The Best Remedy
Writing presupposes an effort. It’s work. Why hold yourself to it when it would be much more natural to do nothing? Writing, it seems, is both tiring and pleasurable. Much more than pleasurable. Writing may be the only possible way for a human being to tame a fundamental anguish. Gérard de Nerval wrote from early childhood. But his precocity isn’t what is most remarkable. The subject of his writing is. Most of the poems he drafted were about the retreat from Russia. Why? Because his mother died in Silesia, in the winter of 1810. In his verses, the Great Army’s campaigns on the Silesian plain are dominated by the image of the lost mother, who will eventually become Aurélia, Isis, Marie. These poems are also an attempt to identify with his father, who barely escaped the floods and ice of Berezina.
The Wisdom of Casanova
There are also men for whom writing was not a raison d’être during most of their lives. Then one day it became a reason to survive. Imagine Casanova in 1790, at the age of sixty-five, reduced to working as a librarian for the Count of Waldstein, i.e., as a servant. He expects nothing more from life but the chance to live again by writing his memoirs: “Remembering the pleasures I enjoyed, I renew them, and I laugh at the pains which I have endured and which I no longer feel.”
That is what we might call a happy disposition.
Frequently writing is driven by the memory of suffering, of past humiliations. But rarely do those memories make you laugh.
What Else to Do?
One author in particular has given a good and very thorough explanation of how he became a writer and the place writing held in his life: Jean-Paul Sartre, in The Words.
Sartre says that when he started writing as a child, he was a copycat; he mimicked what he had read. Since he read adventure stories by Dumas and Zevaco, he want
ed to be a hero. He wanted to be Pardaillan. At age nine he discovered that he was misshapen, sickly. He wasn’t going to be a hero. He would be a saint instead. A saint? No, a writer—a writer who doesn’t write to find readers, but to save humanity. He has a heart-to-heart with the Holy Ghost, in a dialogue that sounds like one of those old television commercials for Panzani pasta:16
“You’ll write,” he said to me.
I wrung my hands: “what is there about me, Lord, that has made you choose me?”
“Nothing in particular.”
“Then why me?”
“For no reason.”
“Do I at least have an aptitude for writing?”
“Not at all. Do you think that the great works are born of flowing pens?”
“Lord, since I’m such a nonentity, how could I write a book?”
“By buckling down to it.”
“Does that mean anyone can write?”
“Anyone. But you’re the one I’ve chosen.”
Then the young Sartre discovers the existence of death: vertigo and terror. But he reflects. Death is a transition, necessary for a gift to be realized, for a man to be reborn, transformed into a book: “Viewed from the height of my tomb, my birth appeared to me as a necessary evil, as a quite provisional embodiment that prepared for my transfiguration: in order to be reborn, I had to write.”
He compares himself to a chrysalis. The day it bursts open, butterflies escape and land on the shelves of National Library. Those butterflies are books, of course, flapping their thousands of pages. Suddenly, he believes he’s destined to live to a ripe old age. The Holy Ghost has ordered a long and exacting literary task. He won’t let him die before he’s carried it out. His friends, his comrades savor life because they know that at any moment, an accident or an illness can cut the thread. With Sartre, whose destiny is set, it’s as if he were already dead, that is, inducted into immortality.
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