View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
'Listen,' Robert said in a conciliatory tone of voice, 'one book more or less on earth isn't as important as all that. And the political situation at present is extremely stimulating; I hope you realize that. This is the first time the left has ever held its fate in its own hands, the first chance to try to organize a group independent of the Communists without running the risk of serving the cause of the right. I'm not going to let this opportunity slip by! I've been waiting for it all my life.'
'For my part, I think your books are more important,' I said. 'They bring people something unique and different. But when it comes to politics, you're not the only one about who can become involved in it.'
'But I'm the only one who can steer things in the direction I want them to take,' Robert said cheerfully. 'You of all people ought to understand me. The vigilance committees and the Resistance were useful, all right, but they were negative things. Today, it's a question of building, and that's much more interesting.'
'I understand you very well, but your writing interests me more.'
'Haven't we always agreed that one doesn't write just for the sake of writing?' Robert said. 'At certain times, other forms of action become more urgent.'
'Not for you,' I replied. 'First and foremost, you're a writer.'
'You know that's not true,' Robert said reproachfully. 'For me, the revolution comes first.'
'Yes,' I said, 'but you can best serve the revolution by writing your books.'
Robert shook his head. 'That depends on the circumstances. We're at a critical moment of history just now; first we have to win the political battle.'
the perennial debate
I stopped dead in the middle of the street. 'What? Do you believe that too? That people will lose interest in literature?'
'Believe me, they'll have a lot of other things to keep themselves busy with,' Robert said in a voice that again seemed to me too reassuring.
'The prospect doesn't seem to bother you at all,' I said indignantly. 'But a world without literature and art would be horribly sad.'
'In any event, there are millions of men at this very moment to whom literature means absolutely nothing,' Robert replied.
'Yes, but you always expected that to change.'
'I still expect it to. What makes you think I don't?' Robert asked. 'But that's precisely it,' he went on without waiting for me to answer. 'If the world decides to change, there's no doubt we'll go through a period in which literature will be almost completely out of the picture.'
'You don't have to make fun of me,' I said. 'I have a right to ask a few questions from time to time.'
'I ask myself a few, too, you know,' Robert said.
Yes, he does ask himself questions, and graver ones than I do. Personally, I rarely act on my beliefs; that's why I so easily become unhappy. I realize I'm wrong being that way, but with Robert it costs so little to be wrong.
'But you only ask yourself those questions you're able to answer,' I said.
He laughed again. 'Preferably, yes. The others don't serve much purpose.'
'That's no reason not to ask them,' I said. My voice was rising, but I wasn't angry with Robert. I was angry with myself, with my blindness during these past weeks. 'I'd still like to have some idea of what's going to happen to us,' I persisted.
'Don't you think it's rather late?' Robert asked. 'We've both had a lot of punch to drink, and our minds will be a lot clearer tomorrow morning.'
Tomorrow morning the walls will stop spinning, the furniture and books will be in their proper places, always the same places. And my ideas, too, will fall back into place, and I'll begin to live, again from day to day, without turning my head, looking just so far and no farther into the future. I'll stop paying attention to that discordant clatter in my heart. I'm tired of that diet. I looked at the cushion by the fireplace on which Diego used to sit. .'A Nazi victory doesn't enter into my plans,' he had said. And then they had killed him.
It's not easy. There was a time I did see him from a distance, but I was too young. I looked at him from too far off. Friends had pointed him out to me at the Sorbonne; they spoke of him a great deal, with a mixture of admiration and disapproval. It was whispered that he drank and frequented brothels. If that had been true, I think it would have attracted rather than repelled me; I was still rebelling against my pious childhood. In my mind, sin was a touching manifestation of the absence of God, and if someone had told me that Dubreuilh raped little girls I'd have taken him for a saint of sorts. But his vices were minor and his too-well-established fame irritated me. When I began taking his courses, I had already made up my mind that the 'great man' was a charlatan. Of course, he was different from all the other professors. He would come rushing into the room like a gust of wind; he was always four or five minutes late. He would survey us for a moment with his large, crafty eyes, and then he would begin speaking in either a very amiable or a very aggressive voice. There was something provocative in his surly face, his violent voice, his bursts of laughter which sometimes seemed to us a little insane. He wore very white shirts, his hands were always carefully manicured, and he was impeccably shaven; it was impossible, therefore, to attribute to negligence his zipper jackets, his pullovers, his clumsy shoes. He preferred comfort to decency with such an obvious lack of restraint that I thought it affected. I had read his novels and didn't like them at all; I expected them to bring to me some inspiring message, and all they ever spoke to me of were indifferent people, frivolous sentiments, and a lot of other things that didn't seem to me the least bit essential. As for his courses, they were interesting all right, but he never really said anything worthy of a genius. And he was always so cocksure of being right that I had an irresistible desire to contradict him. Oh, I was convinced, too, that the truth was to the left; ever since my childhood I had sniffed an odour of stupidity and lies in bourgeois thinking, a very foul-smelling odour. And then I had learned from the Gospel that all men are equal, are brothers; that's one thing I continue to believe in with an unshakable faith. But spiritually, after I had been for so long crammed full of absolutes, the void left in the heavens made a mockery of all morality I had been taught. But Dubreuilh believed there could be salvation here on earth. I let him know where I stood in my first essay. 'Revolution, fine,' I said, 'but what then?' When he gave me back my paper a week later as we were leaving the classroom, he ridiculed my efforts. According to him, my absolute was the abstract dream of a petty bourgeoise incapable of facing reality. Of course I couldn't hold my own against him, and he won every round. But that didn't prove anything, and I told him as much. We resumed our discussion the following week and this time he tried to convince me, rather than overwhelm me. I had to admit that in private discussion he didn't at all seem to feel that he was a great man. He began chatting with me, rather often after classes, sometimes he walked home with me occasionally taking a longer route than was necessary. And then we began going out together in the afternoons, the evenings. We stopped talking about morality and politics and other lofty subjects. He told me about the people he knew and the things he did, and most of all he would take me for walks, show me streets, squares, quays, canals, cemeteries, suburbs, warehouses, vacant sites, little cafes, and a hundred corners of Paris that were completely new to me. And I began to realize that I had never really seen things I believed I had always known; with him everything took on a thousand meanings — faces, voices, people's clothing, a tree poster, a neon sign, no matter, what. I reread all his novels. And I soon realized I had completely misunderstood them the first time. Dubreuilh gave the impression of writing capriciously, for his own pleasure, completely without motivation. And yet on closing the book, you felt yourself overwhelmed with anger, disgust, revolt; you wanted things to change. To read certain passages from his works, you would take him for a pure aesthete; he has a feeling for words, and he's interested in things for themselves, in rain and clear skies, in the games of love and chance, in everything. Only he doesn't stop there; suddenly you find yourself thrown in among people, and all their problems become your concern. That's why I'm so determined for him to continue writing; I know through my own experience what he can bring to his readers. There's no gap between his political ideas and his poetic emotions. Because he himself loves life so much, he wants all men to be able to share it abundantly. And because he loves people, everything that's part of their lives interests him deeply.
<3
[...] Up to then I hadn't been unhappy, but neither had I been happy. I was always in good health and occasionally I had moments which I enjoyed. But most of the time I was plainly and simply disconsolate. Foolishness, lies, injustice, suffering; all around me a deep, black chaos. And how absurd it all was! Those days which repeated themselves from week to week, from century to century, without ever getting anywhere. Living was simply a matter of waiting some forty or sixty years for death to come, trudging along through emptiness. That was why I studied so avidly: only books and ideas were able to hold their own; they alone seemed real to me.
[...] If now he finds himself condemned once more to impotence, to solitude, everything will seem useless to him, even writing. Especially writing. Between '25 and '32, when he was holding himself in check, he wrote, yes. But it was a lot different then. He still had close ties with the Communists and some of the Socialists; he nourished the hope of a united workers' front and of a final victory. I know by heart that phrase of Jaures he used to repeat at every opportunity: 'The man of tomorrow will be the most complex, the richest in life, that history has ever known.' He was convinced his books would help to build the future and that the man of tomorrow would read them. That being the case, he wrote. But faced with a sealed future, writing becomes meaningless. If his contemporaries stop listening to him, if posterity no longer understands him, there's nothing left but to be silent.
The next morning the radio confirmed the German collapse. 'It's really the beginning of peace,' Henri repeated to himself, sitting down at his desk. 'At last I can start writing again!' He would, he assured himself, write every day from now on. But what exactly would he write? He didn't know and he was perfectly content not to know; always before he had known only too well. Now he would attempt to talk to the reader without premeditation, as one writes to a friend: And perhaps he would at last succeed in saying all those things for which he had never found room enough in his too carefully constructed books. There are so many things one would like to preserve with words but which are forever lost. He raised his head and looked through the window at the cold sky. What a pity to think that this winter morning would be lost; everything seemed so precious: the white, virginal paper, the smell of alcohol and stale cigarette ends, the Arab music drifting up from the cafe next door. Notre Dame was as cold as the sky, a tramp with a. huge collar of bluish chicken feathers was dancing in the middle of the street, and two girls in their Sunday clothes were watching him and laughing. It was Christmas, it was the German collapse, and life was beginning again. Yes, all those mornings, all those evenings, that he had let slip through his fingers in the last four years, he was determined to make up for them during the next thirty. You can't say everything, that's true enough. But nevertheless you can try to get across the real flavour of your life. Every life has a flavour, a flavour all its own, and if you can't describe it, there's no point in writing. 'I've got to tell about what I liked, what I like, what I am,' he said to himself as he finished sketching a cluster of flowers on a scrap of paper. Who was he? What manner of man would he discover after that long absence? It's difficult, working from within, for a person to define himself, to set limits on himself. He wasn't a political fanatic, nor a literary aesthete, nor a dedicated man in any sense. Rather, he felt quite ordinary, and the feeling didn't upset him in the least. A man like everyone else, who spoke sincerely of himself, would speak in the name of everyone, for everyone. Complete sincerity: that was the only distinctive thing he felt he had to aim for, the only restriction he would have to impose upon himself. He added another flower to the cluster. But it isn't easy to be sincere. First of all, he had no intention of making an open confession. And secondly, whosoever says novel, says lie. Well, he would think about that later. For the moment, he had above all else to keep himself from becoming burdened with too many problems. Say anything, begin anywhere — beneath the moon in the gardens of El Oued. The paper was bare; he had to take advantage of it.
<3
'When my friends were exiled to Siberia, I was in Vienna; when others were being slaughtered by the Brown Shirts in Vienna, I was in New York. What's so damned important about staying alive? That's the question that needs answering.'
I found myself moved by Scriassine's voice. We, too, felt ashamed whenever we thought of the deportees. No, we had nothing to blame ourselves for; it was just that we hadn't suffered enough.
'The misfortunes you don't actually share ... well, it's as if you were to blame for them,' I said. 'And it's a horrible thing to feel guilty.'
There was a brief silence and then I asked, 'Why should a woman who's free to do as she pleases sleep with everyone on earth?'
He looked at me severely. 'If a man, a man for whom you might have a little liking, asked you straight out to spend the night with him, would you do it?'
'That depends.'
'On what?'
'On him, on me, on the circumstances.'
'Let's suppose that I asked you now. What then?'
'I don't know.'
I had seen it coming ever since we broached the subject but, nevertheless I was taken by surprise.
It would have been too difficult to explain my feeling. There was a look of hate in his eyes and I was ashamed to have let myself be taken in by the mirage of carnal pleasure. A man, I discovered, isn't a Turkish bath.
lmao