Sexual Life Catherine M.

by Catherine Millet

  Why did I write this book? Because I wanted to write and because there are things about which I do not talk. The desire to write is an urge that manifests itself before it finds its object, and which you then satisfy as best you can. By linking it with a relatively well developed faculty for observation and even for contemplation, I fulfill it with art criticism. Nevertheless, I have always felt that this desire was sufficiently imperious to warrant being satisfied once and for all, in a unique gesture that could take any form so long as it was definitive—for oneself, obviously. Now, this is surely too idealistic (or even benignly megalomanic), but it does sit well with a very real appreciation of economy. I like Ad Reinhardt’s idea of the “Ultimate Painting” (although I am perfectly well aware that Reinhardt was not a dogmatic avant-gardist, and that he went on painting those “Ultimate Paintings” for ten years…). I put myself in a situation where I could exert my faculty for observation to the maximum while choosing the most readily accessible territory and, out of a sense of extremism, I focused on the most blinding material: sex (as an art critic I have written a great deal about monochrome art, another blinding type of subject). I have, therefore, just published my “Ultimate Book.” We shall see what follows in good time!

  In one public debate, someone asked me who my book was intended for. Thank goodness we write without imagining the readers, or we eliminate them as and when they suddenly loom large like the policeman in front of Guignol. In fact, now that the book was finished, I replied spontaneously: “for women.” This idea flitted through my mind: all those “women’s” conversations that I had not had, that I would have liked to have had. I had stuck to my banal questions about sexuality, avoiding those confidential exchanges and nurturing the misguided opinion within my entourage that, given the life I led, I ought to know more on the subject than anyone else. I avoided these conversations first because they are usually dressed up with emotional considerations, which immediately makes them cloying, but also because—however intimate your relationship with the man or woman you are talking to—the words you have to fall back on are always wrong, approximate or vulgar. Either you fall short of what you wanted to say or you hide your unease behind excesses of smuttiness; in other words, we censor ourselves when we think we are revealing all. I have confirmed this again and again when reading articles about my book written in conversational rather than literary style; their authors, who wanted above all to demonstrate how liberated they were, laid it on with a trowel. Added to this is the fact that vulgarity is by definition the thing that mixes people together. However much I have partaken in what is known as group sex, when I put myself in the context of a verbal exchange—without the intention of establishing an erotic connection—I have no wish to touch the person I am talking to at the core of their sexual instinct, which is what almost always happens if you suddenly use obscene vocabulary. If it is used carelessly, this vocabulary acts on the senses almost as directly as physical contact. In their vulgarity, some people who have been hostile toward my books have made gestures toward me in their outspoken declarations. My concern is that they could lead their readers to believe that I had adopted a similarly vulgar style. No, contrary to their desires, I do not mix with them. Choosing the right words on the subject of sex is testing work, which (except in the case of the constant questioning of words in the presence of an analyst) therefore has more to do with the written than the spoken word.

  Prior to this need for such concentration, there must be very profound intimate motives, which are not immediately obvious and which, in my case, have not yet all come to light. In interviews, in order to cut to the chase, I talk about maturity, about a personal stock-taking, and the like. To be more precise, I started writing the book shortly after finding myself, for the first time in my life, in the situation of questioning my sexual behavior. Until then I had enjoyed considerable ingenuousness and, suddenly turning to look at myself, in the two-way traffic of gazes between my body as it lay on the bed and my body standing beside it, I found myself terribly diminished. My search for pleasure had very gradually taken a different direction. Now, what belongs in the past can quickly be tidied away into secret drawers and, without the tools with which to think through this change, I allowed questions that had not occurred to me before to insinuate themselves into me: Had I done something good? Had I done wrong? This created a real split, a terrible struggle between my prior ingenuousness and an attempt at moralizing. (It has to be said that you cannot set out on the road to beatitude without being put to the test and overcoming a few temptations!) I who, in terms of sexuality, had never had a role model, then became aware of the risks that lay in looking to any example set by others. The book was a means of presenting the single example of my individuality, and it pushed aside the division. The contradictions within me came to light during the calm progress of the text—as it carved out its riverbed and left its own alluvial deposits—and they have had a completely ambivalent effect: an effect that has consummated the separation between the subject of the book and its author, and allows them to live together in perfect agreement.

  There are many contemporary works of art that are combinations of several images, and they are all the more striking when they use photographic or digital images and when they are portraits. If, for example, the artist had superimposed different portraits of the same person taken at different stages in his or her life. The viewer of the work is aware of the composite nature of the image but would not be able to distinguish the demarcation between the different elements. We can grasp that a work of visual art that is universally accessible may be especially suited to contracting time, and it is therefore more rare for the arts (such as writing and film) that lean on linear time to tear themselves away from narrative. All the same, I did try to. If I had written a sexual biography in chronological order I, as the author of the account, would very soon have found myself—even if I did not want to—face-to-face with a perspective from which I myself was excluded, just as a classical painter virtually withdraws himself from the landscape he is painting, or perhaps looks down on it from above. And whoever sets the perspective not only interprets but also comes close to judging. His distance confers a certain authority. Given what I have said above about the intimate circumstances that drove me to starting this work, I could not adopt such a position. I should try neither to understand nor to explain, and even less to justify. There is no trial, no case to be made, because there is nothing more than a laying-out of facts. Self-portraits of different stages of my life, including the period during which I was writing the book, are intermingled in a single shot. Time is condensed into one “all over” surface and, just as Pollock in the act of painting was present in his canvases, I portrayed myself writing within the book.

  I made a note of the themes under which I would build the book (and as they now appear as the titles of the chapters) on a sheet of paper…in my appointment book. Five or six words on four lines on a blank page, the most succinct résumé I could make of myself, an ironic extraction from the clutter of scribblings on the other pages of the calendar. It was my very first act in the process of writing: to define those topics, in other words the common traits in the different self-portraits, the only time in which I did in fact have to adopt an overview. Then I launched into a determined search for the right words. This search led me to explore more fully my impressions and memories; it is when we correct our own sentences that we sense our own honesty. Hence I would never have been able to imagine, when I was already well on with the book, exactly which pages would be the last (the description of the various positions of the body in the Polaroids and film stills, and finally disembodiment in the hazy image of a video), but retrospectively it strikes me as logical. These pages highlight the importance of the specular relationship we have with ourselves and, in a spiral movement, they indicate the source—both the mental and the methodological one—of the book. There is an underlying chronology, but it is that of a progressive introspection, carried by the progress of
the writing itself. I have never kept a diary but I do have a good memory, especially for the visual.

  Generally, I cannot start writing without having previously accumulated a phenomenal quantity of notes, to the point where this accumulation becomes stifling, and the writing appears as a way out. This time I also covered pages, on the one hand dredging my own memories and, on the other, complementing them or confronting them with the memories of other people. As I am still on friendly terms with many of my partners, it was easy to call some of them, to have a drink or a meal with them and ask them questions. They all found the undertaking amusing as well as interesting. Some of them gave me photographs or video footage, which I watched. One man was sufficiently trusting to show me some pages from his personal diary. When I wondered about how I would go about writing this book, Jacques told me that I should proceed in exactly the same way as I would for an essay about art. Which is what I did.

  “You were very brave,” I am sometimes told. I was only as brave as anyone has to be to execute any task that requires time, perseverance and probity. But I know that what they really mean is: “with respect to other people’s attitudes, public opinion,” etc. I have never paid any attention to such opinion. I who in my search for pleasure feel such a need for a reflection of my own image can—when my search is in the realms of the intellectual—plow ahead like a tank. I am convinced that the quality of the work produced brings into perspective the importance of the author and that blend of images—whether dreamed or projected—it produces of him or that others fabricate. The last word, the authority, is the text, surely not some social authority. People can criticize my narcissism, regardless of the fact that it helped me to bring the book into being; or they can, and indeed do, call me a “whore,” a “nymphomaniac” or a “foolish virgin” though none of it will last because it is not in the book. It is true too that we are freer to use our bodies and show them off if we do not belong to any union or group, if we are not hampered by any hierarchy or administrative power; by preserving the financial autonomy of Art Press, we were guaranteeing not only our freedom of expression but also our own individual freedoms. But social pressure can just as easily be exerted through family or within a marriage. It is quite apparent that Jacques and I have not been ensnared in this way. We had to emancipate ourselves from a particular convention of married life in order for me to succeed in writing this book while still being with Jacques, and in order for him to read it.

  The Sexual Life of Catherine M. sets out first and foremost to bear witness, or, to put it more precisely, the text is intended to establish a truth, the truth of a very particular individual, of course. While I was working I kept thinking of Cézanne’s famous resolution: “I owe you the truth in painting and I will tell it to you.” Cézanne wrote this sentence in the same letter to Émile Bernard in which he explained that “whatever our temperament may be and whatever power we may have before nature, the process that needs developing is giving the picture what we ourselves see, forgetting everything that has gone before us.” To paraphrase: “Good God,” Cézanne thinks to himself, “these masters, Poussin and the like, taught us well but it could just be that the masters were jealous of their pupils and managed to hide the skeleton holding the world together.” Cézanne himself dug right down to the bone and, from the far scrubland where he lived, with no intention of playing the master clinging to his power and keeping his secrets, he made it his duty to transmit what he’d found.

  I have forgotten what was published before me. Denis Roche encouraged me to read My Secret Life, thinking that I should follow in the footsteps of the anonymous English writer and stick to factual material. I agreed, although I soon realized that the facts included not only facts in reality but also imagined facts and fantasies linked to them, and that the description also had to cover the interior representations of the body, which express sensations. I strayed most notably from this model by adopting the thematic structure I have mentioned instead of a succession of episodes. Another book had more influence over the way in which I put together this account. While I was working on my book I was reading Melville. It struck me one day that the way in which he introduced his subject suited me well and that I had subconsciously adopted his rhythm. Melville often begins his chapters with general points, sort of primary truths, pronouncements, vast metaphors, before introducing his main subject. “As the vine flourishes, and the grape empurples close up to the very walls and muzzles of cannoned Ehrenbreitstein, so do the sweetest joys of life grow in the very jaws of its perils.” This, at the end of a long page, to show a father dying before his son’s eyes but calling his adulterous daughter to him in his delirium. Other chapter openings in Pierre or, The Ambiguities include: “Glorified be his gracious memory who first said, The deepest gloom precedes the day,” and “Sucked within the maelstrom, man must go round.” I like his way of ironizing, which gives the impression that it is only with some difficulty that the subject is isolated from an ocean of shared ideas, as if it were at first seen from a great distance, from the opposite shore to what all men communally say and think.

  I unfortunately lack Melville’s inspiration, but I did get into the habit of announcing certain themes through initially distant comments; I frequently resorted to using indefinite pronouns such as “you,” “we,” or “one,” followed by generalizations, I commented on clichés, brought digressions (on art criticism, for example) to the fore, and finally I used what I had “heard said” about myself. This was one of the most efficient ways of guaranteeing that I remained distanced. I tell a very individual story but one that is nonetheless available to all. This structure is not without analogies in what I actually say in the book, for example on the subject of the evenings in the Bois de Boulogne, when I was at the center of a group and could imagine that I was connected to a whole population of shadows, but I was myself a shadow. It could in fact be that some other literary reminiscence was in play when I chose the title of the first chapter. Among the sentences we read and that imprint themselves more indelibly on our minds than the verses we learned at school I have this one from Bossuet: “I was sent only to make up the numbers.” I am now rereading all of Le Sermon sur la mort. “It is not the entire expanse of our lives that distinguishes us from oblivion,” writes Bossuet, it is something else: “In the midst of this matter and through the obscurity of our knowledge, if we knew how to look inside ourselves, we would find there a particularly vigorous principle that demonstrates its celestial origins, and which has no fear of corruption.” Let us say that by looking inside myself I found, rather than a principle of celestial origins, a book (a thing that has no fear of corruption either).

  Since my book was published I have been answering journalists’ questions every day, and these journalists are now of every nationality. I come out of these interviews exhausted. Similarly, the sessions with photographers before, during or after the interviews are extremely tiring. (Added to this is the fact that I struggle to answer all my mail and that, particularly for a few days after my participation in television programs, I have had to accept being approached by strangers on the street or on the Métro…always kind, but curious too and making unexpected confessions.) In one passage in the book I say that on some occasions I went to places for sexual encounters in the same state of anxiety that I feel just before giving a lecture, intuiting the exhaustion I will experience after surrendering my body completely, in the same way that I feel all of me being sucked into the text that connects me to my listeners. Over the past six months the systematic, minute and professional picking to pieces of my own person in the media has had the same effect. I feel as if I am displaying the same availability, and the exhaustion here has less to do with the vampirism of others who would drain me of my substance than, inversely, the effort of re-creating myself each time, re-creating myself honestly and before their very eyes. As if I had to undergo the proliferation of multiple Catherine M.s, and Catherine Millets too, without ever actually betraying myself. Surely this malleabili
ty can derive only from my libidinal economy.

  For a long time I was haunted by characters from Bernanos, dreaming of achieving in my own life the same faculty for giving oneself, while at the same time well aware that many of these characters fall more easily into wrongdoing than attain goodness, and that saints fail when accomplishing miracles. To those who come and ask me questions in the hope of discovering some secret about sex, I could at least reply using more or less the same words as Chantal in La Joie: “I may seem impressive. I may look as if I’m standing fast, but actually I’m already worthless…. Granted, I don’t believe I’ve ever lied to anyone; the trouble is that I just seem to without meaning to…. You just tell yourselves that I must know more about it than I’m letting on…. Well, I don’t.”

  I am infinitely grateful to Chantal Thomas for the fact that after reading Catherine M. she immediately said that “it’s the permissiveness and not the transgression” that attracted her. And I was not very surprised when my book was given a hostile reception by people who themselves one might have assumed had relatively emancipated sex lives. They must derive their pleasure from transgression, and therefore need to uphold certain taboos—particularly in what is actually said—in order to continue getting their kicks in private. Having never attributed any sacred value to sex, I have never felt the need to shut it up in a tabernacle as (most likely) do those who criticize me for robbing it of all its mystery.