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Where will you be for Easter? Could I see you, if only for a day or two? I would make the trip just to be able to talk with you; and what good that would do me, because either you’ll share my opinion or you’ll be able to find the words to calm me down. And you could also help me bear the weight of my personal troubles, the lonely present, the dark and vertiginous future, all those perfectly natural small selfish thoughts that superimpose themselves over the large general distress.
Of course all that does not prevent spring from lighting up the luxurious gardens of Biarritz and the waves along the shore. And you must believe that I am steeping myself in this spring, this country, this peace, in all these beautiful things that are so close, so kind, and so sure. You know that, because you tell me of your walks along the bright, deserted beach. As for me, I often go to the lighthouse, two minutes from the house, sometimes even at night. Yesterday I went up there after coming back from the cinema. The night was so very strange, very still, almost dead still, and filled with mild, stagnant air. At the edge of a terrace very high above the sea, right in front of me, was an unbelievable crescent moon, golden yellow, thin, curved, tapered, truly a sickle. And with a feeling of cosmic dread I could make out that immense unmoving movement of the sea in the rocky depths. And right next to me, gradually revealing themselves to my unreliable senses: benches, the crunch of gravel. I perceived couples and you have no idea what a terrifying feeling I had about the universe, as if in a lightning flash I understood everything without being able to express anything: love, the stars, the flowers, humans, and Questo enorme mister de l’universo!35
Because you know that I feel such acute longing for this palpable knowledge. It’s this truly metaphysical perception of the universe that I am endlessly seeking, that I experience daily, humbly, prosaically, and that I re-create at times in music.
Have I told you that for a long time now I’ve been haunted by a work I would like to create, an essay I would call “Love, Music, and Death”? But I’m having a very hard time writing because of the war. First we must win it, then we can think about writing. What do you think? If I wrote a few bits, would you let me send them to you? While waiting for “Love, Music, and Death” (no doubt it will be a long wait!), I’ve begun a meditation on a portrait by El Greco, and if I finish it, I will send it to you.
Dear Philippe, of all the horrible things about this war, the most depressing for me is not having seen you for nine months now. That’s why you must not hold it against me if sometimes I’ve remained silent. We have been apart far too long and it’s too sad. We must find a way to see each other, or else things will continue like this even longer.
Write to me, please. I think of you with the deepest and most faithful affection.
Roland
Les Sirènes, Rue Lavigerie, Biarritz
* * *
Paris, December 13, [1941]
Received your long letter today with all your news. What a pleasure to hear some of your thoughts, but I had already guessed everything about the examination. Finally you are saved.36 But everything you tell me makes me so long to see you again that I’ve become morose. Ah well, that will happen soon in any case. As for the examination, I too have so much to discuss with you. I feel exactly as you do, I don’t know if I will take it; I have to tell you what Séchan told me at my thesis defense.37 As always for me, there is a conflict between the path of work and the path of life, and they both tempt me. My dear friend, I am as always very full of conflicts. At the moment, I am enormously tormented within; sometimes I sink to the bottom of the deepest abyss, sometimes I rise to the heights. If you want to understand the intense atmosphere in which I live, read Dostoevsky. This is a man who has defined me entirely, and for the past two months, thanks to him, I feel I’m at the base of a mountain about to begin an ascent. Please, I beg you, read The Idiot and you will discover the extraordinary Muichkine.38 I’m also thinking about many other things and I absolutely must tell you everything. I’m very excited to see you again and if my illness allows me to see you sooner, I am grateful to it.39 Moreover, basically it’s doing me much good. At any moment, I have the kind attentions of your mother and your uncle. Thank you! Write.
Your friend,
Roland
* * *
Saint-Hilaire, Thursday, March 26, 1942
My dear Philippe,
I received your letter, by way of Vichy, this morning. Our long separation is coming to an end and I would like to tell you the practical details of your visit. But first, I have some misgivings about taking you from your mother, you’ll be with her for such a short time; I’m afraid that this trip, which is quite long after all, will wear you out; and then I’m especially worried that coming here will not be very cheerful for you in this sad place for those in good health. Do not protest. Two years ago I spent three days with Michel Delacroix, who was in a sanatorium on the Assy plateau.40 I was consumed with fear and sadness there, despite all my fondness for him; I don’t want you to experience similar feelings because of me. I will tell you more about the sanatorium; you find the best and the worst here, it seems to me. But the fact remains that it will be a difficult trip for you, unless you are insensitive, which I do not believe. So, dear Philippe, if you feel that practically you cannot come, don’t hesitate to extend our separation a bit, I will understand completely. Although I am, quite literally, consumed by the desire to see you and it has been a long time since I’ve envisioned such joy in the future close at hand.
If you are coming, you must let me know as soon as possible, because it’s very difficult to find lodging here and it would be a big waste of time—of our precious time, yours overshadowed by your departure, mine eaten up by cures—if you had to stay in Grenoble. At the moment, connections to Saint-Hilaire are not very easy; there are two systems: either a direct bus; or bus, then cable car, and then taxi. I will send you the schedules. So as soon as you receive my letter, please let me know your plans.
Two weeks ago I could have written that I had a thousand personal, self-involved things to tell you. But the sanatorium has changed all that. It is such a displacement—although not a sad one—that I’m all befuddled and numbed by it, having lost myself, having lost that heightened self, to whom five months of bed, reading, and solitude had given such intensity.41 You see, to be able to bear the shock of this new life, the ground had to be prepared, a certain space had to be made; all pain here comes from the degree to which one feels one’s separation from something. Here, the state of perfect happiness is the state of perfect availability. Inner memories must be abolished, those habits of the soul that form the continuity of a being. Every point of comparison must be suppressed between the past—house, mother, friends, Paris streets, the living world where everything is possible—and the present—those beings with whom one is going to live for a long time, bound to them only through a disease that moreover varies widely in its intensity and subtleties—the present, with accordions in the bedrooms and exuberant moments of warm camaraderie. Each moment of the present here, if one literally and rigorously abstracts it from the delightful past and the undoubtedly difficult future, each moment can be very intense and very full! You may well think it impossible that it would offer much, this life so physically involved with all these fellows who are often cheerful and pleasant, even rowdy, but who all bear within their hearts the heavy weight of suffering, if not a horrible fear of death (for the worst stricken), that it would constitute a present that is vigorous and rich and not the least bit sad. What is played out here does not, for a moment, fall into the domain of drama. In any case, one must concentrate on what it is not. But sometimes there are glimpses of tragedy. I will relate all that to you, all the specific cases, all those Shakespearean situations that have stripped me of all my previous preoccupations, and captured my curiosity exclusively. All this, dear Philippe, to explain what? That since I’ve been here, I no longer read, I no longer write; my intellectual life, which I had enriched fairly well in Paris, fled me within tw
o days, is depleted, deflated. Before arriving here, what pleasure I took in telling you of my reading, my great ideas, the passionate discoveries I had made within the realm of thought. For the moment, I no longer experience this. It will return, intermixed with my life here, if we are lucky enough to meet again before too long, and are not afraid of wasting time in silence and in apparently useless talk.
Arriving here, I found your long letter sent by airmail. How I wished to see you at that moment, to talk with you, to respond in your presence to everything you said in it. The time has come when our friendship is completely laid bare, that is, it becomes something inexpressible, I would say almost animal, because a taste for sharing ideas and experiences is no longer the only part of it. Now there is also the desire to actually be together physically, beyond what we could say or not say of interest to each other, the desire to sit side by side and tell each other many useless things about the essentials. If you are coming, I will give you a short list of small things to bring me that I can’t find here—example: shoe polish! But I can talk to you about this again.
My health is good; that is something else we must discuss. I must say that here one gets vertigo from the medical explanations, partly because of the atrocious vocabulary, a kind of moribund medical student slang that has a genius for making metaphors out of surgical realities and the almighty presence of death.
There’s the bell for the five-thirty cure. I will leave you, dear Philippe. Write to me on your arrival. What a joy to bring this great stack of paper to a close. Emotion has me putting it to poor use today! But we’ll make up for it. To think that we may be able to see each other in two weeks!
Write soon.
Your friend,
Roland
Sanatorium des Étudiants
Saint-Hilaire-du-Touvet
Telephone: n° 9 at Saint-Hilaire, except during 1:30–4:00 treatments
* * *
Sunday, August 2, 1942
My dear Philippe,
Are you still in France? I received your letter and I can gauge more accurately now what I had guessed, the trouble that this unjust ordeal has caused you. How are you now? How is your family?
Don’t be surprised to find nothing in my last letters or even in this one. I can no longer think, I can no longer write, I can’t even think about myself anymore. There is no longer any strength for contemplation or silence in me; I no longer read and only write letters in great fits and starts, entire mornings when I fill ten interzone cards with the same story. In between I no longer think about anything. So what is happening? A fresh wave of what I will call the desire for glory, which makes me live intensely and makes me relive completely the years when I assembled the Groupe Antique at the Sorbonne. I feel that is the part of me that most demands explanation, that perhaps you understand the least.
Let me first offer the facts: during the first months of my stay here, when you saw me, I was still lost in the haze of nostalgia for the people and the life I had left behind in Paris and everything here was odious to me: not the hint of a comrade, not the hint of anything interesting, and as always when I’m deeply dissatisfied I could not even read. These are the most terrible periods in my existence, those in which I’m not suffering but nothing makes me happy nevertheless. I felt I lacked what destiny required of me, contrary to the great law that accommodates and manages our fates.
Then came a month in bed, of which I have absolutely no memory. But that month of bed rest was like a baptism—unconscious like any baptism—into a new life through a thousand little temporal facts of which I then became conscious.42 I was part of the house, I had become ensconced there, and when I got up, I had an enormous thirst for activity, for life, and especially—a major fact I would like to make clear—that my actions, among others, would begin to increase rapidly. Which you will take to mean that what I was basically seeking from all this activity was the company and acquaintance of new people, as many as possible. That was always the case, I have never thought of anything but that, in an almost compulsive fashion. You will not refute me, you who have known me for so long. I have no curiosity about facts, I am only curious—but fanatically so—about humans.
When I say that my actions have increased, I mean that I’m beginning to exert a certain charm over others, which is most fascinating until the moment when, because it slackens, it becomes very painful. I wondered about that and I, who have such a need for others, I wondered if I was particularly lovable, if others found they loved me easily, deeply, enduringly, according to which mode. I had a wonderful period when I felt appreciated, admired, and valued by a whole group here, no doubt by virtue of what Girodon called my Atticism and my desire—however weak—to be lovable and simple, which, here, bore excellent fruit.43 And as this respectable (!) popularity grew and expanded, it won me a seat at the Bureau de l’Association, by a big majority and without propaganda (wait, do not call me conceited before having read the end of my letter). Meanwhile, amid a small circle of friends, I also enjoyed a kind of domination that was dear to me because it developed among equals and seemed based on that part of me which is lightest, my incurable instinct for comedy, which, by merging with my serious and nostalgic depths, constitutes my misfortune.
The moment of conquest was exquisite, but soon my dark, insatiable nature seized control of the situation, an entirely happy and even glorious one for someone less exacting than me. And the suffering that I feel at not being sufficiently loved returned. I am attached to certain fellows here and after having conquered them I have somehow become their slave. This thing has become even more painful because feelings of friendship in me are always extremely fluid; nearly all my friendships with boys began as love. Of course, time has almost always clarified them, even while leaving a certain flavor I hold dear. On the other hand, the rare times I have loved a woman (why not admit that, in fact, it has only happened to me once), that began as what everyone calls friendship.
In short, you must understand that the affairs I have are mostly with men (by which I mean all that an affair includes of play, strategy, passion—intellectual? Making that qualification would be idiotic, as, for that matter, would be getting more specific). All this to tell you that my heart, if I may say that, no longer knows which way to turn in this place. There’s the whole worldly, conscientious part of me constantly plagued by worries about the little public office that I hold here (you know how easily I worry). And then there’s the amorous part, constantly on alert here, always very daring, because my passion stops at nothing, so that the lively image of an ideal never attained and its correlative, the phobia of opportunities lost, plunge me into the worst stupidities, obstruct conscious behavior, without dulling my consciousness in the least, only my will. In short, once more, I bleed, I weep, I discharge (as Stendhal would say).44 For me it’s always a question of fluids (the fluent being something purely Romantic).
My dear Philippe, I know too well that you will understand this crazy, abstract letter, as you have each time that a sharp torment grips us in the depths of ourselves. Do not hold it against me, you are the only one to whom I can write like this, and for me there’s no greater grief than to think that tomorrow, if I want to, I can take up another blank page and write to you in greater detail and clearer words all that I have only sketched out here.
Write soon.
Your friend,
Roland
* * *
Clinique Alexandre, Leysin, Vaud, July 12, 194545
My dear Philippe,
Your letter brought me great joy. It’s true that your silence was beginning to worry me, not that I ever doubt you, but because I quite simply needed you. I can say without exaggeration and as literal actual fact that I think of you every day. My desire to see you again is mixed up with my present life and its problems, and everything I could tell you of myself would only be a way of saying how much I would like to have the benefit of your friendship near at hand again.
There are two new facts in my life: the intellectual
death of these last three years has ended; my lack of affection for others, my indifference, my inertia are reviving. In the six months since I’ve been here, since my general health has improved, I have begun to work again. But it’s under fairly curious conditions; it’s fairly mechanical, almost disinterested work, because I have not resolved anything with regard to humanism, and matters of the intelligence are not at all enough to reconcile me with the world. But all metaphysics are slowly abandoning me; I long to possess a skill that would allow me to live in society. So I’m trying to make certain literary acquisitions in a carefully considered way (at first, my plan was tied to the idea of a thesis, but I’m still too ignorant to choose a subject). For the last three months, I’ve been reading Michelet. This choice is fairly odd; it’s largely a matter of chance and to a lesser extent an old predilection. It’s a bad choice in that Michelet is huge, and I’m making it a point of honor not to give up until I really know his work. It’s a good choice in that this writer is a kind of ultrahumanist who fully represents the drama of encyclopedic knowledge, toward which a part of me has always leaned, in that with him one can study in vivo the formidable problem of great words, and in that some of his absurdities—which achieve the grotesque—produce a healthy rage in me and are exorcising for good the Micheletian part of me. In short, studying Michelet, I really do have a general idea forming in the back of my head:46 to exorcise Romanticism, separate the stupid from the intelligent, completely exhaust the misfortunes of Faust, before turning to poetry. I think that after the antipoet Michelet, it will be a lovely necessity to study—I mean really read—someone like Baudelaire. Since my graduate degree, I have been pursuing some vague but powerful ideas on the mythological value of the word.47 It seems to me that literature could be considered from this perspective. There’s an imperceptible and uniform movement from magic to art, to poetry, to rhetoric; that is what my thesis demonstrated. That marvelous thread could set us free from the idea, the content, to grasp literature in its creative—that is to say, organic—phase where it is most pure, as nascent oxygen is the strongest. Basically, everything holds together and I anticipate exciting connections: a history of literary art on the surface—that is, at greatest depths—captured in samples, cuts taken from the purest episodes in the continual drama of the word: the Greek lyric, sophistry, scholasticism, euphuism, classical rhetoric, Romantic illusion (where the desire was to fuse magic and truth, to criminally suppress the sacred distance between the word and the idea, to socialize, Christianize, authenticate the magic, which immediately resulted in depreciating the truths treated thus: the problem of Michelet’s great hollow words), and finally symbolism and what follows, the purest examples of this attempt: Valéry or Michaux and the contemporaries in general when they are not stupidly mysticizing or confusing prayer and poetry. That’s the plan I would like to follow; I’m very ill-prepared for it given my deficiencies: a weakness of intelligence; the very cancer of the word (precisely what I want to study would eat away at me, my discoveries would disintegrate the moment they solidify into words); philosophical incompetence in a time when you can no longer do literature without a degree in philosophy; and the frequent feeling of having an intelligence—at its best moments—that dates back about fifty years and would be scorned by those more strictly in tune with the present times.