I’ve never seen an atmosphere like it except at the vet’s, where people are busy reassuring their animals, who are trembling in fear since they know exactly where they are. The owners speak to their neighbors, asking the name and the age of their dog or cat, and what illness they have. At the plastic surgeon’s, it doesn’t take much to start a conversation. The returning patients, who’ve come to have their scars checked or their stitches removed, take the new ones under their wing, reassuring them through the wisdom of their experience. With no fear of generalizing, I can say that you could detect a slight collective tendency towards exhibitionism. The woman proud of her new breasts could not always resist showing them off.
One image stays with me. A woman who was never satisfied with her nose, who had it constantly remodeled. She brought color sketches and made pronouncements such as, “I want nostrils that are flared enough to look sensual, but not so flared as to be vulgar.” As soon as she arrived, she leaned against the window, ducking under the curtain to take advantage of the sunlight. She took a pencil and a mirror out of her purse. She stuck the pencil in her nostrils, trying out different shapes. This woman didn’t talk to the rest of us; she was caught up in an ideal of beauty she would never achieve.
At the end of waiting, the adverb enfin—“at last”—indicates relief, according to the French dictionary. Alone at last! Or as Paul-Jean Toulet has written:
My nurse said that at last
Is the husband of at least.
You don’t need to reflect for long about waiting to think of the waiting of those who no longer wait. I remember one of the last letters I received from my mentor Pascal Pia. It contained these heart-wrenching words: “Acta est fabula, but the curtain is falling a little too slowly.”
Misery is when there is no more waiting possible. Jean Paulhan, in a September 1923 letter to Francis Ponge, writes about “the admirable prosopopeia of a missionary, I think it was Father Bridaine, who claimed that the damned never stopped asking ‘What time is it?’ and that a horrific voice never stopped answering, ‘Eternity!’”
Leave-Taking
The Declaration of the Rights of Man10 created a blueprint for freedom. It contains seventeen articles. And it’s not mere whimsy that leads me to cite Baudelaire, who jokingly added articles eighteen and nineteen: the right to contradict oneself and the right to leave.
Contradicting oneself and leave-taking: these two concepts invite us to reflect. They bring to the notion of freedom two essential elements: the right to contradict oneself and the right to leave. I am convinced that no better way will ever exist for an individual to practice a subtle yet irrepressible form of rebellion, completely self-contained.
Let’s quote Baudelaire more precisely. He started with the right to contradict oneself. He wrote in Philoxène Boyer’s scrapbook: “Among the rights discussed recently, we’ve forgotten one in which everyone is interested: the right to contradict oneself.” He deposited this thought in Philoxène Boyer’s scrapbook because this strangely named poet (who took his name from the author of dithyrambes who lived in Cythera in the fifth century B.C.) was a real loudmouth. Baudelaire had Philoxène in mind when he wrote in “Solitude” about “individuals who would accept the supreme agony with less reluctance, if they were permitted to deliver a copious harangue from the height of the scaffold, without fear that the drums of Santerre would unseasonably cut short their oration.” (Philoxène Boyer’s scrapbook was auctioned off at the Nouveau Drouot in Paris on May 22, 1985. The bidding reached 500,000 francs.)11
In 1852, Philoxène produced a satiric review called Feuilleton d’Aristophanes [Aristophanes’s show] at the Odéon Theater, starring Marie Daubrun. The actress was probably his mistress before becoming Baudelaire’s mistress, then Bainville’s mistress. But I digress.
In his preface to Edgar Allan Poe’s Extraordinary Stories, Baudelaire adds the right to leave to the right to contradict onself: “In the long list of the rights of man which the wisdom of the nineteenth century keeps increasing so often and so complacently, two rather important ones have been forgotten, the right to contradict oneself and the right to take one’s leave.”
To take leave. The image is very satisfying. A person who is silent, timid, introverted, who never protests, never complains, opens the door one day and takes off. The very idea fills you with good cheer. But you need to read to the end of Baudelaire’s page to understand: that is not the idea here. The sentence came to him in connection with the deaths of Edgar Allan Poe and Gérard de Nerval, which convey a very strong meaning for “leave-taking.” It’s not about going off one evening to buy matches and never returning, but about suicide. In fact, although Edgar Allan Poe didn’t actually kill himself, his death is “almost a suicide” for Baudelaire—a suicide long in the making. As for Nerval, he “left discreetly, without troubling anyone—so discreetly that his discretion resembled disdain—freed his soul on the darkest street he could find. . . .”
Baudelaire adds this comment: “But society regards the person who leaves as an insolent fellow, and would willingly punish certain mortal remains, like that unfortunate soldier, suffering from vampirism, who was driven mad by the sight of a corpse. And yet . . . sometimes, under the pressure of certain circumstances, and after an in-depth analysis of irreconcilable differences with the given dogmas and metempsychoses, it may be said without pomposity, and without playing on words, that suicide is at times the most sensible action in life.”
What more delightful man was there in all of the ninteenth century than Gérard de Nerval? One of his contemporaries, Eugène de Mirecourt, portrays him as “. . . a frank and loyal face on which—a rare thing in this lowdown world—are reflected goodness, wit, finesse and candor all at once.”
Where did it get him? Hanging by an apron string one bitter cold night and ending up in the morgue, “lying nude on a slab of zinc,” where Maxime Du Camp saw him.
When the commentary and the sarcasm produced by these two deaths began to revolt him, Baudelaire claimed the right to take leave.
In the next century, Cesare Pavese would express the same sentiment.
To wander through the lonely streets
Continuously tormented by the terror
Of seeing the long-desired creations
Vanish before my very eyes,
To feel passion, hope . . . everything . . . everything
Grow weaker within my soul.
Pavese was still a student at the lycée when he wrote this verse. The idea of leave-taking kept haunting him until the night in 1950, on a piazza in front of the Turin station, when he took a room in the Hotel Roma, with its large blood-red sign.
From the depths of his obsession, Pavese realized how difficult the act is, and he was surprised that the most humble beings could manage to do it so naturally: “And yet, pathetic little women have done it.”
That night of August 26, 1950, he telephoned a few of his women friends who might have kept him alive. In vain. He died because none of them wanted to waste an evening with him.
It’s come to light recently that the American actress Constance Dowling, Pavese’s last unhappy lover, also ended her life in 1969, in Los Angeles, at the age of forty-nine.
If “leave-taking” is a right, it needs justification. The young Camus, in an astonishing statement, considered it the only truly serious philosophical problem. Novalis had already written “The true philosophical Act is the annihilation of self [Selbstötung]; this is the real beginning of all Philosophy.”
Philosophical suicide is nonetheless rare. Its theory, among the stoics, breaks down into an obscure quarrel over good, bad, and “intermediate” values. I doubt anyone has ever wanted to kill himself for having heeded the Academy rather than the Portico. Jean Starobinski recalled that “in reality, suicidal acts are rarely attributed to a single and simple cause. They are over-determined.” Often, a moment’s impulse sets off a suicide. The day my friend Romain Gary killed himself, he called Geneva, where they were expecting him,
to arrange a ride from the airport; he asked a nurse what medicine he should take; he had lunch with Claude Gallimard, his editor, to discuss taxes. He killed himself at the end of this ordinary afternoon.
Suicide is a precipice you walk along, which makes you more or less dizzy, depending on the day and on your mood. “It seems that one kills oneself as if in a dream,” wrote the surrealists as they launched their famous survey on suicide. For some, afflicted with the “absurd vice” described by Pavese, playing with the idea of “leave-taking” becomes a way of life. “The idea of suicide is a protest against life; by dying, you would escape this longing for death.” “What a death, no longer wanting to die,” Pavese notes. And René Crevel: “Isn’t being haunted by suicide the best deterrent against suicide?”
But he ended up killing himself.
Mallarmé is supposed to have said: “There’s not a single day, as I walk up the rue de Rome, that I’m not sharply tempted to throw myself over the railroad bridge and have done with life.”
The right to contradict oneself gets mixed up with the right to take leave when one wants to find reasons to stay or to postpone. You can believe that life isn’t worth the trouble of living, but decide that obligations towards others keep you in this valley of tears. This is known as “having dependents.” You can also kill yourself, not because life seems horrible, but because you love life so much that the idea of being deprived of it is intolerable. Short-sighted suicide. Even without getting to that point, many people curse life because it is spoiled by the perspective of death. Hugo von Hofmannsthal says about one of his characters: “He hated his premature death so much that he hated his life for having brought him to it.”
And Michel Leiris, in Aurora: “Fearing death, I loathed life.”
On the same theme, Jules Laforgue, in an article on Paul Bourget, recalls a little dialogue he claims to have had with him:
“Good day Mr. Bourget. Always sad. So, what is bothering you?”
“I have life.”
“And what do you find so sad about life?”
“Death.”
“Yes, indeed, try to get out of that.”
Thus Paul Bourget, looking for a solution, condemned the same individualism he had lauded so forcefully in his Stendhal phase, which obviously brought with it too much torment, and he was reduced to seeking refuge in conventional belief systems: native soil, the army, religion, the monarchy. . . . When it comes to living, you justify it any way you can.
At the end of his life, Malraux remembered a character in La voie royale [The Way of the Kings] who refused to acknowledge any of life’s moral or philosophical value: “There is no such thing as death; there is only I, who am about to die.”
People have their good and their bad reasons for dying. It is true that the reason matters less than the act. The reason can be excellent or stupid; if the act succeeds, you’re nothing but a cadaver, meaning you’re nothing.
At the slightest argument, a certain member of my family used to get up from the table with great drama (usually the fights broke out during dinner) and wander through the streets, giving us the impression that the goal of running away was to end up at the bottom of the river. This person abused the right to take leave twice over. She made it into a form of reprisal and terror. She hoped that the fear of losing her would make us quickly run after her. In these moments, she also must have loved the image of herself that she was creating. The hereditary tendency to commit suicide, its frequency according to sex, age group, profession, social class, country, leads us to believe that although we have the impression we are choosing suicide, suicide is choosing us. In Mont-Gabriel, in the Laurentides, I was talking with the Belgian critic René Micha about Philippe Jullian, who had killed himself a few days earlier. It was a peasant’s suicide by hanging, despite the fact that Jullian was the very arbiter of Parisian homosexual elegance. Suddenly René Micha, a rather slick character from whom I wasn’t expecting to hear anything surprising, declared:
“My family is full of people who committed suicide. My father, my uncles. So I’m very aware of suicides, I recognize people who are going to kill themselves in advance. I put their names on a list. The day they do the deed, I cross off their name.”
“Philippe Jullian, was he on your list?”
“Yes.”
I think about Hemingway. His suicide can be classified as euthanasia. Ailing and afraid of losing his faculties, he preferred to end his life. But we might remember that his father had killed himself and that he used the same gun Dr. Hemingway had used. So not only did he want to spare himself the suffering and the humiliation of a life in decline. He may also have been trying to do what his father had done before him. It’s easy to show that his entire work is imbued with what Pilar calls in For Whom the Bell Tolls “the odor of death-to-come.”
Montherlant, in much the same way, threatened with blindness and afraid to end up at the mercy of doctors, chose to leave life while there was still time. But would he have chosen this solution if he hadn’t always found strength in reading the Romans and if they hadn’t given him an exalted idea of voluntary death?
After Montherlant’s suicide, something strange happened. The newspapers, in a perfect demonstration of the right to contradict oneself, changed their tune about him by suddenly admiring him for making his behavior conform to his writing. Even the Catholic press, the most high-minded of all, not only praised him for taking this action, but went on at length in praise of suicide.
All it takes is for someone you know to commit suicide to make the treastises sound indecent. They’re nothing but words strung together, whereas the person you know paid with their life. Instead of funeral orations, someone might have found a way to save them, not just from death, but from solitude and distress. I understand Francis Jamme’s reponse to the survey on suicide in The Surrealist Revolution: “The question you pose is absolutely pitiful, and if ever a poor child kills himself because of it, it is you who will be the murderer.”
The same survey moved Pascal Pia to formulate a similar response, but for different reasons: “A poor man, I have no desire to love the poor. Those who were moved to commit suicide by their convictions or lack of convictions were born to be victims one way or another. I take no stock in giving the charity of my love to indigent ghosts. Suicides always seem to me in some sense the expiatory victims charged with paying the ransom, the debt, for a world they had no part in making. It’s a disgusting role, I don’t want to play it.”
Even if you don’t want to dwell on the issue and prefer the more ordinary meaning of leave-taking, there is something basic going on here. The right to put an end to your life is an individual liberty. As with all liberties, it amounts to a fight against the Church, the State, against anyone who pretends to have exclusive rights over our lives. It is an individual response to society, and perhaps we ought to study why this right has taken on a particular meaning for a good many writers. What significance should we give the frequent suicides of twentieth-century Japanese writers Akutagawa, Osamu Dazai, Mishima, Kawabata, among others?
I can’t remember in which society suicides and those who committed suicide were punished by being exhibited nude on racks. The hope was that prudery would restrain people’s desire to kill themselves.
There’s not always a very big difference between the two meanings of “leave-taking.” Tolstoy, as a very old man, traveled far from home to meet his death.
You can’t speak in a light-hearted way about the right to leave. Whereas the right to contradict oneself is basically more whimsical.
When Stendhal says that spinach and Saint-Simon were his most abiding tastes, he is expressing the perpetual mobility, the inevitable changes of heart of a lively soul who, from one moment to the next, excoriates what he has adored, adores what he has excoriated, and congratulates himself. Who delights in a single instance of his faithfulness (towards spinach and Saint-Simon) and in his inconstancy (towards all the rest)
Montaigne said, intending n
o insolence, “I give my soul now one face, now another, depending on which direction I turn it.”
In Louis Guilloux’s novel Le Sang noir [Black Blood], the hero, or rather the antihero, says that the only liberty man has is to contradict himself.
Contradicting ourselves is something we take for granted, an experience we repeat daily. Many people will remember the famous sketch by the comedian Raymond Devos, where he laughs and cries about the same event as it strikes him one way or another. As for me, sometimes I even laugh and cry for reasons that are completely at odds with one another.
Since Freud, psychology has taught us how little we control our ego and to what extent its very unity is illusory. Instead, we are a battleground where opposing forces face off. The right to contradict oneself amounts to helping people accept who they are—beings struggling with several different impulses, some conscious, others hidden. Since everyone is the plaything of these various determinisms, each person must be taught to use their various aspects to find some semblance of freedom within themselves.
Certainly few men have the courage to question the unity of the self. I knew one, Emmanuel Berl. Though he was close to Bergson, who always spoke about duration, Berl felt disjointed, fragmented. He compared himself to a millefeuille—a many-layered pastry. All those fragments of self, pushing him into contradictory activities through which he couldn’t perceive a single individual. There was the writer, the political observer, the man who courted women, the man who cultivated anemones, who smoked cigarettes. Where in all this was the forenamed Emmanuel Berl?
The right to contradict oneself amounts to a shock for any philosophy, since what the philosopher seeks is unity. The headache starts with Heraclitus and his comment that you don’t bathe twice in the same river. But Heraclitus makes an effort to set limits on eternal change. He invokes the notion of equilibrium, symbolized by the goddess Nemesis. With the dialectic, philosophy discovered a rhyme that both expresses and resolves universal contradiction.
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