The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  After lunch, he and I went back to the study with the sliding steel drawers and he gave me letters to read, from Sigmund Freud or from Chaim Weizmann, the first President of Israel, whose personal representative he had been when de Gaulle was in London during World War II. On one occasion he told me how, with considerable difficulty, he had managed to organize a meeting between Weizmann and de Gaulle in Carlton Gardens. Weizmann and Cohen were kept waiting rather too long: de Gaulle was late and Weizmann, impatiently checking his watch, said, ‘If he isn’t here in ten minutes, we’re leaving!’ Cohen had explained again how difficult the meeting had been to arrange, but Weizmann was adamant. After ten minutes, he got to his feet and announced, ‘One does not keep the Jewish people waiting, they have suffered enough.’ Who could have understood such overweening pride better than de Gaulle? But at that moment Albert began to tremble, just as he had when I had made the faux pas with the ashtrays: he could not bear for a document or a letter to be left lying around a second longer than was necessary, everything had to be put back immediately in its file and the file returned to the steel drawer. He himself best described this neurosis in Belle du Seigneur: ‘A mania for order that took the place of happiness.’ The remainder of our afternoons together, until I caught the last plane back to Paris, were spent in the most peculiar fashion: I read his works to him. This was not laziness, we both agreed that any commentary debased perfection and became paraphrase and, having an excellent memory, I already knew whole passages of his books, learned by heart while reading to him. He would beam with pleasure, suggest a passage from another novel he wanted to hear, his hands moving ever faster over his prayer beads, signalling his happiness.

  When he came to Paris to receive the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française – which cost him the Goncourt – I was determined that Simone de Beauvoir should meet him. I had persuaded her to read Belle du Seigneur, which she loved as much as I did. At the time I barely knew Albert, though I had written an article about him two weeks earlier. The meeting took place in his room at the Hôtel George V. He opened the door wearing an extravagant dressing gown, clutching his rosary. Castor complimented him warmly on his book even as it became clear that he had not read a word of any of hers. We cracked open the champagne. As we were about to leave, he opened the door of the bathroom, to which he had confined Bella, ordering her not to come out. She appeared for an instant to curtsy to Simone de Beauvoir, who was as dumbfounded as she had been when the FLN were defending polygamy to her. Years later – just before he turned eighty – the City of Geneva celebrated his birthday in a handsome museum belonging to a Jewish billionaire. Cohen sat next to Bella in the front row, toying with his beads, preparing to savour every word that the speakers would address to him. They were Marcel Pagnol, his childhood friend from Marseille, Jacques de Lacretelle, author of Silbermann, Jean Starobinski, an influential critic, Jean Blot, born Alexandre Blok, a Jewish novelist of Russian extraction, a translator with UNESCO who spoke several languages fluently and, first and foremost, Albert’s dear friend, a Swiss man whose name I forget and, lastly, me. Pagnol, speaking of their shared childhood, was funny and spirited, the others, clearly more familiar than I was with the discreet charms of Jewish high society in Geneva and perfectly fluent in the emasculated language of the symposium, expurgated all mention of anything unseemly in his work, painting a portrait of Cohen that I entirely failed to recognize. I was last to speak, and although I had prepared a speech, I decided not to read it and announced, by way of preamble, the subject of my address: ‘I am going to speak to you about the role and function of the toilet, what is still referred as the WC, in Belle du Seigneur.’ A shudder of horror ran through the audience, but I saw a twinkle of malicious pleasure in Cohen’s eyes, who was sitting directly in front of me. I kept strictly to my topic, sprinkling my speech with examples and quoting extensively from the passages I mentioned earlier as evidence. Among a hundred possible examples: in the WC of Members B of the League of Nations, Adrien Deume dreams of one day reaching the dizzying heights of the marble urinals of the WC of Members A; it is sitting at home on the throne that the heartbreaking realization of his misfortune comes to him; in the final pages of the novel in which relentless cruelty is matched with great compassion, the lovers, imprisoned in an opulent palace on the Côte d’Azur, and each disposing of a private shitter, conceal their matter like some shameful sickness, each for the other attempting to be the embodiment of some perfect, perfumed idealism. Albert, I knew, hated idealism more than anything. The following day a number of newspapers mentioned my speech, bandying words such as ‘scandal’; one or two approved of my intervention. Cohen told me, ‘You are the only one who talked about me as I would have wished.’

  Élise ou la vrai vie by Claire Etcherelli was a revelation to me. I remember the first line of the article I wrote for Elle: ‘Claire Etcherelli has come to us from another world.’ It was the world of the assembly line in a car factory, the story of an impossible love between a female factory worker and an Algerian man during the War of Independence. I also persuaded Simone de Beauvoir to read this book and we talked about it to anyone who would listen, campaigned for it, and shortly afterwards Etcherelli won the Prix Fémina. Etcherelli the factory worker was a born writer; she lived in poverty with her two sons in a room on the rue du Chateâu and, when I first visited her, had barely enough to keep the place warm. Michel Drach, a film director married to the actress Marie-José Nat, immediately wanted to adapt the book, with his wife playing the lead role, and he suggested that I write the screenplay. I told him that I thought it would be difficult and I would need some time to think. The plot was undoubtedly strong, well constructed and would make a real tear-jerker of a film. But to me the great strengths of the book lay elsewhere: how a factory worker, in order to describe the tedium, the mindlessness of factory work, becomes a writer; how, in order to tell the truth, one must, in a sense, become a false witness, since her colleagues, male and female, consider their lot to be in the nature of things and feel no need to rebel. It is this change in status, as much as the story itself, that seemed to me to be the true subject of the book and hence the film. But Drach was in a hurry. ‘The next meeting of the Centre national de la cinématographie financial support committee is a month from now,’ he said. ‘You’ve got one month to write the screenplay, but after that there’s all the time in the world to do rewrites.’ So I wrote the first draft to his deadline, sticking as closely as possible to the book, but Drach had no intention of keeping his word: he shot the film the moment he got the grant. It is a good, moving film, with an actress of considerable talent, but what is most important in the book is missing on the screen. After a screening he arranged for me on the eve of its release, I asked him to take my name off the credits. He refused, we quarrelled, but I think my name is still there in the credits.

  As soon as the secretary of Les Temps modernes retired, we suggested to Claire that she take over. She managed this crucial position ably and tactfully, while she went on writing her books, but when we co-opted her to the editorial committee she still had a tendency to consider us as tough factory ‘management’, and preferred to return to the workers on the ‘shopfloor’ as the periodical’s secretary, which put her in the best possible position since now she knew us from within and without. When she was not mistrustful, she was the most adorable of women, but her suspiciousness grew back like the Hydra’s heads, forcing us into an endless series of decapitations.

  Theatre too was like a drug to me during those years. I had always loved it, but this addiction was a very different thing, it meant seeing the same play with the same actress every night for as long as the play ran, not wanting to see any other play. This brings me back to Judith Magre, my first love, as I have mentioned, whom I had lost fifteen years earlier and met again by accident on the rue des Saints-Pères while I was renting the apartment of the German actor Peter van Eyck. Hélène Lazareff was sending me on an urgent assignment to Madrid to spend a few days with Av
a Gardner, and Judith insisted on coming with me. After a week of shared Spanish passion, she once again insisted – drastic measures and ultimatums were her way of relating to people – that I sort out my life within a week or never see her again. I did as she ordered, although it was very painful for the woman I left, as it was for me. My life with Judith was thus strained from the first by the weight of my guilt, which I assuaged by going to the theatre every night to see her act – usually the Théâtre National Populaire at that point in time. I always observed a very precise ritual: I first went to her dressing room in the bowels of that massive grim edifice via a labyrinth of stairs and corridors, usually running into Georges Wilson, the director who had succeeded Jean Vilar as head of the TNP, who was constantly cursing the vastness of the theatre and of the stage and threatening to resign, none of which prevented him continuing to stage magnificent productions there for years. I sat with Judith as she put on her make-up and costume, her stage-fright mounting until it was almost hysteria. This was how she psyched herself up for her entrance, which I watched, heart pounding, sitting in the stalls at the dress rehearsal alongside the most fearsome critics in Paris, whose pronouncements decided the fate of the piece, made or broke careers. I admired Judith as an actress, her edgy bearing and perfect diction, her abrupt shifts of tone and rhythm, her irony and tragic power, a unique combination that would later earn her three separate Molières for best actress. I watched her with both the eye of a lover and of a professional, since I not only helped her learn her lines, but sometimes analysed them for her, or with her. At school, I had loved doing critical analysis in the French style – before the advent of the lobotomy of structuralism – and I taught Judith what I had learned. Then when I went backstage to her dressing room on her evenings of triumph, when I had added my own praise to the thunderous applause of the audience, she would regularly greet me with a gloomy, unconditional, ‘I was shit, wasn’t I?’ This was the verdict she invariably gave after performances where she had been truly outstanding: Mr Puntila and His Man Matti, King Lear, Euripides’ The Trojan Women, which Sartre, at my request, had adapted for her, Turandot, Nicomède, Children of the Sun. To me Judith was equally exhilarating on television, in Bajazet where she played Roxane, in La Double Inconstance, Antony and Cleopatra or Huis clos.

  I don’t know whether I answered the question I had been asking myself: why this addiction, why this need to see her every night, to jump up and rush to her dressing room at the intermission if her performance was not as good as the previous night, to subject her to my valid criticisms so that in the second act she could reach the sublime heights I knew her capable of? Every performance of a play is different from one night to the next, differences that only I and the actors were aware of, but to which I had become so attuned that even an infinitesimal difference in a gesture, a tone of voice, became absurdly important, and I was transformed, at once without my knowledge and with complete lucidity, into an implacable yet bedazzled spectator. This is the very definition of addiction. I loved the actors and the actresses, the world of the theatre, which was revealed to me anew every day. Everyone became so accustomed to me trailing in Judith’s wake, to my comments and my thoughts, that sometimes a sort of mutual aid developed between me and the directors. Perhaps I was taking the first steps in the career I was to follow later, in a different field. I have happy memories of the Festival d’Avignon. Judith, who had played Cassandra in both the Oresteia and The Trojan Women, now played the role again, directed by Jean Vilar in Giraudoux’s La Guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu [The Trojan War Will Not Take Place]. The central courtyard of the Palais des Papes under a starlit sky, the actresses’ dressing room where I would go during the interval to congratulate them, captivated by the beautiful thighs of Claudine Auger, the exquisite food – tapenade, anchovy paste, rosé wines from Provence – the mas where we stayed at Villeneuve on the far bank of the Rhône, the joyful sound of constant backfire from the Triumph convertible I had bought on a whim especially for the trip; today, all these things constitute a single memory in which every detail inextricably conjures and signifies every other.

  My marriage to Judith meant becoming part of a real French family. I had always envied other people’s families, proper families, which to my mind implied order and beauty, luxe, calme et volupté. Judith and I married in a mad rush, almost secretly, at the town hall of the 6th arrondissement. At some point I had to be introduced to my in-laws, the Dupuis family, industrialists in the Haute-Marne, inventors of agricultural machinery, owners of a large factory, a family of good Catholic stock, with six children – four girls, two boys. In order to welcome the young bridegroom of thirty-eight summers, they all gathered for a Sunday lunch, and Clotilde, Judith’s mother, tall, slender, pious, on almost cheerfully intimate terms with death, and an unrivalled cook, had prepared a sumptuous yet down-to-earth wedding feast. I played my part as the son-in-law, a role that I played more easily as the hours passed and I became increasingly fond of them; my initial play-acting soon gave way to naturalness. It was my father-in-law René who showed me around Montier-en-Der, the family mansion, and took me on a tour of the factory as though it were mine, seemingly ready to show me the books, introduce me to the managers and the factory workers, talk to me about his plans, his problems. The mansion had a billiard room and René, a gifted player, taught me the game over the course of countless frames, without ever patronizing me. He played billiards in all seasons; in autumn and winter he hunted in the immense wooded estates of nearby Colombey-les-Deux-Églises; in summer he went to Chamonix, since he had climbed every peak and continued to climb. Aside from the billiard lessons, of which I remember nothing, I owe to him the pleasures of waiting, of imminence, standing ‘ventre au bois’ – the rifle-stock against my belly – on a frozen trail, waiting for a herd of boar to charge, bewitched by the infinite, precise, poetic language of hunting – never fire at a wild sow ‘followed by a singular of striped shoats’. I owe to him too my introduction to abseiling when I was over forty and the shift from theoretical mountaineering – at which, as we have seen, I excelled – to a genuine mastery of heights, learning not to tense my muscles crossing the slopes of Les Gaillands. These steep rocks are required training for budding climbers, and are difficult even for experienced climbers, and me, given my technical rating at grades 5 or 6. Over several summers, with René and his son, my brother-in-law François Dupuis, I climbed some of the easier aiguilles in Chamonix. The first was the Aiguille de l’M with its twin peaks: I remember the early morning hike from the cableway stop at L’Aiguille du Midi and my excitement as I reached the foot of l’M, touched the rockface already caressed by the rising sun, looking up to try and make out the summit I had to conquer. It was a wonderful conquest, so easy it felt somehow undeserved. My victory was put into perspective, however, on the ridge leading to the summit, when René showed me how simple my climb had been compared to his own conquests over the unforgettable craggy façade of rocks that towered over the valley, rolling out peak after peak. As I stood, absorbing its true measure, René, with the respect of the seasoned climber, recited the names of the peaks and the difficulties each of them posed: Petits Charmoz, Grands Charmoz, Le Grépon, the Charmoz-Grépon traverse, Le Peigne, and so on. Yet this did not lessen my euphoria and I split my head open on the way down: heroes always bleed.

  My kinetic energy levels are high, probably excessive. A few months after this episode, Judith persuaded me to buy her an expensive dress in a shop on the rue François-Ier. We went there together and, since there were no parking spaces, I double-parked. While she was trying on the dress, asking my opinion so I would get my money’s worth, I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a police van brake suddenly and the officers piling out and pouncing on their prey – my car – traffic tickets in hand. I headed for the door, intent on stopping them – I didn’t run, I walked – but what I took to be the open door of the shop turned out to be a plate-glass window. I walked straight through it and as it shattered into a thousand
razor-sharp slivers, my iliac artery was neatly severed by a shard of glass. My blood spurted out in cadenced pulses, Judith was running and screaming, the cops grabbed me and rushed me to the hospital, sirens blaring. This conjunction of police thoroughness, a gift to my wife and my boundless kinetic energy cost me dearly; I spent forty days in hospital, and ever since my left leg has always been weaker than my right.

  The year after I climbed l’M, René Dupuis gave up mountain climbing. He had gone with a guide to scale the famous Peigne, a peak he had conquered many times, and one that has a number of dangerous sections that can only be crossed by a single leap, mustering every ounce of courage and physical strength. The climb took much longer than planned. ‘Without the guide,’ he told me when he got back, ‘I would never have made it. There were several moments when he literally had to drag me. Mountaineering is over for me, I’m too old.’ He made the announcement calmly, stoically, while the man he had hired every summer for years nodded gravely. He and I still went for long hikes up to the mountain huts, but it was not the same. With Claude Jaccoux, who was president of the National Union of Mountain Guides, I went on some classic climbs, some easy, such as the Arête des Cosmiques, others more arduous, such as the Tour Ronde or even the Midi-Plan – classed AD, assez difficile – a gruelling ascent over ice, snow and rock, negotiating steep seracs, glacial ridges, which he insisted we descend in a single, non-stop dash since the sun was beating down on the ice, which, weakened, crumbled behind us in a roar like a bomb blast, forcing us headlong onwards. Midi-Plan runs from L’Aiguille du Midi to the mountain refuge of Le Requin. I had arrived from Paris by car late the previous evening and met up with Jaccoux near midnight in a bar in Chamonix. I was very fond of him, having known him mainly through literature and Les Temps modernes rather than mountaineering: he had given up teaching literature to devote himself entirely to skiing in winter and climbing in the Alps or the Himalayas in summer. He was extraordinarily handsome and his female clients fought over him fiercely. They rushed to see Claude returning from a day in the mountains, his pure face, his blond curls, his broad chest slung with ropes, pitons and karabiners. In the bar he told me, ‘I’m setting off with an American tomorrow morning to do the Midi-Plan. If you like, I’d be happy for you to come along.’ I said yes, not actually knowing what he meant by the Midi-Plan, not telling him I had no training, thinking only about the fact that Jeremy, the rich American, would be paying for the expedition. It was an unremitting seven-hour trek before we reached Le Requin, famished. Barely had we finished eating than Jaccoux left, some other clients having come up from Montenvers via the Vallée Blanche: he was taking them up a rockface where they were to bivouac for the night. It was summer, high season, and Jaccoux was fully booked. Jeremy and I left the mountain lodge to head back down the Vallée Blanche, climbing the steep slope of Montenvers to catch the train back to Chamonix, if we arrived in time; otherwise we would have to walk back – another seven kilometres’ hike. We had no idea of the ordeal we were about to endure: aching and stiff from our climb to Le Requin, we headed down, slaloming between the crevasses of the Vallée Blanche, when we were caught in a terrible storm, the wrath of the gods, the sky like lead, the rain torrential, jagged lightning flickering all around, raging thunder booming and echoing throughout the valley. Drenched and blinded by the rain, surrounded by lightning, I suddenly realized that our ice axes might attract the lightning and I yelled to Jeremy, ‘Alpenstock, alpenstock!’, throwing mine as far from me as possible so he would do the same. We reached Montenvers at nightfall; it would take us another three hours to reach the Hôtel Mont Blanc, where I was staying. My body ached so much that every movement was agony; I did not get up the following day, nor the day after; it was a week before I was back to normal. The weather was magnificent, and from my bed I saw Mont Blanc glittering through the window. I spent my time reading and my memory of those long hours of enforced rest is one of physical and mental release – the feeling of relief in my bones – spoiled only by news of the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Soviet tanks on the television, cruelly marking the end to the Prague Spring. It was August 1968.