15 June 1980
Cher Maître,
Thank you for your generous comments about Midi. Yes, it was a more personal book and therefore won’t win any prizes. Somewhere or other I am grateful for that. Those whom our literary establishment wish to stifle they smother with the Prix Goncourt. It was like a cushion over my face. I have returned to my own chosen path. I was also surprised and pleased that you noticed the episode with the boy on the beach. I knew I was taking a risk. The public becomes hysterical at the slightest hint of what could be read as pedophilia. Their worst fears realized: all the French beaches inhabited by predatory homosexuals bearing down on little boys and corrupting their innocence. The heterosexuals get away with it—think of Colette. But only one review described the incident as disgusting. And as for the Americans—well, that’s what they expect from the French. I haven’t had to cut a word for the translation. Perhaps I should have punished my narrator by murdering him as Thomas Mann does with Aschenbach. Just to bolster up their petty bourgeois morals. Did I tell you that it was based on a real incident? I will recount the whole story another time; it was unforgettable, bizarre. Nothing I have written is autobiographical. Or at least not strictly so, but of course every word is shot through with my preoccupations, my concerns. Sometimes a figure, a face, a voice, a landscape will make a shape in my mind, will begin to inhabit my memory, demanding to be given a new form in writing. That is how it was with the child on the beach.
I have never needed to search for a Muse. The Muse is usually a piece of narcissistic nonsense in female form. Or at least that’s what most men’s poetry reveals. I would rather a democratic version of the Muse, a comrade, a friend, a traveling companion, shoulder to shoulder, someone to share the cost of this long, painful journey. Thus the Muse functions as collaborator, sometimes as antagonist, the one who is like you, the other, over against you. Am I being too idealistic?
For me the Muse is the other voice. Through the clamoring voices every writer is forced to endure there is always a final resolution into two voices; the passionate cry laden with the hopeless force of its own idealism—that is the voice of fire, air—and the other voice. This is the voice that is written down with the left hand—earth, water, realism, sense, practicality. So that there are always two voices, the safe voice and the dangerous one. The one that takes the risks and the one that counts the cost. The believer talking to the atheist, cynicism addressing love. But the writer and the Muse should be able to change places, speak in both voices so that the text shifts, melts, changes hands. The voices are not owned. They are indifferent to who speaks. They are the source of writing. And yes, of course the reader is the Muse.
I think that all I would keep of the common version of the Muse is the inevitability of distance and separation, which is the spark that fuels desire. The Muse must never be domestic. And can never be possessed. The Muse is dangerous, elusive, unaccountable. The writing then becomes the wager of a gambling man, the words flung down on one color, win or lose, for the reader to take up. We are all gamblers. We write for our lives. If, in my life or in my writing, there was anyone who could be described as my Muse, ironically enough, it would be you. But I suspect you would rather be acknowledged as my master than as my Muse. You are my reader, my beloved reader. I know of no other person who has more absolute a power to constrain me, or to set me free.
Bien à vous,
Paul Michel.
10 July 1981
Cher Maître,
You ask me what I am writing. Well, you would be the only person in whom I would confide my work in progress. I sometimes feel that my writing is the perverse and guilty secret, the real secret, the taboo subject about which I never speak until suddenly, behold, another book appears, like a magician’s trick. I make no secret of what I am, but I hide what I write.
There were darker themes in Midi, darker than those in The Summer House, which was, after all, simply the anatomy of a family and through them, a perspective on France. And France rather than Paris. You and I live in Paris. I sometimes feel we know very little about France. We only know what we can remember. I drew on your memories as well as my own to make that book. You have been too discreet to comment. Well, now I am working with more dangerous, obscure material. The provisional title is L’Evadé, and I wasted a morning worrying about my American translators who seem to have such difficulty with my titles and my tense systems. There are occasions when I wish I spoke no English at all and therefore did not have to quibble with their idiocies.
You take the matter of history, I take the raw substance of feeling. Out of both we make shapes, and those shapes are the monsters of the mind. We articulate our fears, like children in the dark, giving them names in order to tame them. And yes, L’Evadé is the story of a prisoner, a prisoner on the run, a guilty man who has not served his sentence, who seeks the freedom we all seek, whatever crimes we have committed. No one is ever innocent. I wanted to write a story of ambiguous liberation. To make the break does not mean that we ever necessarily escape.
And my methods? You asked about my methods. There are no secrets here. Like you, I read. I read continuously. I check my details, my dates, my facts. I do the spadework, the necessary research. But that is only the beginning, the preparation of the ground, the writing itself is work of another order. You will laugh when I tell you that the nearest comparison I can make is with the compulsory mass we were forced to hear every morning when I was being educated by the monks. Those frost-covered mornings, when leaving a warm bed, especially if it had been shared, was torture. Plodding in line around the cloisters, fumbling through our woolen gloves for the place in the psalms, kneeling in the gaunt, dark church, seeing our breath whiten the air. Sometimes, even here in these bare rooms, when I blow on my hands in the mornings, I remember those days. I can even remember the watchfulness of the monks when I glanced up to catch the eye of whichever one of the older boys I was trying to charm. The smell of old incense and white wax clinging to the choir stalls, the obscure and fumbling desire we felt for one another, and above that, the mass. Kyrie, gloria, credo, sanctus, benedictus, agnus dei. I had all the concentration of a fox in season when I was thirteen. The restlessness was brittle in my bones. Yet every day, as I sit down to write, the striped blanket across my shoulders, I sink back into that time. The mind floats with the shape of the mass, opening like a fan before me. I sink into the cold, empty space which it creates; I lean there on my left hand. I begin to write.
Out of memory and desire I make shapes. I reach back to those long freezing days in the classrooms, the gold above us in the autumn, biting our scarves as we ran along the edges of the paths, scattering the leaves. I touch the pleasure of sensation in that loss of innocence, the escape from banality into a vortex of desire and pain, our first loves, the first embrace of the forbidden tree and the joy of our escape from Eden. There is nothing so poignant or so treacherous as a boy’s love.
Even then, I saw the darkness I see now. But it was like a shadow in the corner of my eye, a sudden movement as a lizard vanishes behind the shutters. But in the last years I have felt the darkness, gaining ground, widening like a stain across the day. And I have watched the darkness coming with complete serenity. The door stands always open, to let the darkness in. Out of this knowledge too, I will make my writing. And I have nothing to fear.
There is another shape too, which returns. One night, walking alone in the Midi, in a town I hardly knew, I was searching, yes, I suppose I was, looking for the men leaning against their cars in the dark, watching for the glow of cigarettes in the doorways, I passed the church. And I heard the scream of an owl rising in the dark. I looked up. He suddenly took off from the lime trees above me, floodlit from beneath, a great white owl, his belly bleached white in the darkness, his huge white wings outstretched, crying in the night, flinging himself away into the darkness. And as I followed his flight into the dark, the night appeared to be a solid substance, matter to be written. I cannot believe that I have any
thing to fear.
Bien à vous,
Paul Michel.
30 September 1981
Cher Maître,
How odd that your memory of the cold during mass should be so similar. Our schooldays are a nightmare shared. My most intense memories date from my childhood. I expect that is a universal phenomenon. We lived in a large flat in the rue Montgaillard in Toulouse. My mother used to stretch the washing line across the street on a pulley system attached to her neighbor’s window. And they shared the line. I remember her calling, Anne-Marie, Anne-Marie, out of the window whenever she was ready to use the line. The rents of those flats in the narrow street are colossal now.
I was an only child and spent most of the day helping my mother, handing her clothes pegs, folding the sheets and heating the flat iron on the stove. We had wood delivered once a week and I carried the logs one by one up the dark tiled staircase to the cupboard in the kitchen where my mother kept her woodstore. She lived like a countrywoman in the middle of the city. She kept tomato plants and sweet peas on the balcony, their scent dominated the stifling summer nights. I remember the sound of dirty water, dishwater, washing water, being flung down from the flats into the street, the shutters banging in the night, families quarreling behind locked doors.
My father was often away from home doing repair work on the railways. He came back late in the evening, dirty and tired, and was forbidden to kiss me until he had washed. She was fanatically clean. She scrubbed everything; the kitchen, the pots, the sheets, the stairs, father, me. I remember the smell of that rough, unscented soap, when my father opened his arms, scoured until the skin was red and the hairs still damp, and called—alors vien, petit mec. And I remember how I flinched when he kissed me.
My father was alien territory, to be traversed with caution, but I knew every scent and curve of my mother’s body. During the hot days if we were still staying in the city, she slept in the afternoons and I slept beside her, curled against the shiny texture and white lace bodice of her slip. She smelled of lavender and nail polish. I used to gaze, fascinated, at the strange convex curves of her painted toenails as if they were the single sign of a pair of invisible shoes. Sometimes she slept on her back with her arms folded, like a dead crusader. I crouched against her, feeling like an aborted fetus, not daring to indicate that I still lived. When I did my homework she would be cooking, leaning over my books, correcting my verbs, my maps, my dates, my maths while she pulverized vegetables, plaited pastry or watched the sauce rise with terrible concentration. She bargained in markets, dressed up to visit neighbors, posed as a glamorous and daring woman when she smoked cigarettes. She adored the cinema. My father earned good money, so they often went out. I was deposited with Anne-Marie, who would give me striped boiled sweets and tell me terrifying stories.
My mother came from the vineyards of Gaillac. Her father owned his vines. They lived simply, but they were not poor people. When the war in Algeria was over her father was among the first to accept the pieds-noirs who went to live there and who brought their knowledge from the lost vineyards in Africa. Gaillac was known for white wines. It was the arrival of these incomers that transformed the wine production in the area. We went out to stay on the hot soft slopes during the summer months. I remember the house with its narrow brickwork and perfect row of lozenge windows under the receding dogtooth of the corniche, beneath the gutterless eaves which dripped onto the gravel in regular fluted torrents during the thunderstorms.
My grandmother talked all the time in a soft undertone, to her ducks, her cats, her chickens, her indifferent dogs, her husband and her grandson. She seemed to be whispering secret instructions which no one understood. The villagers called her “la pauvre vieille” and said that she had always been that way, since the early years of her marriage. And they said that she had been beautiful, proud, and had liked her own way, but that when she had married Jean-Baptiste Michel she had made her bargain and slammed the door shut on her own happiness. He was a man who did not know the meaning of compromise or forgiveness.
There was a night when she ran all the way back to her parents’ house, blood covering the front of her blouse, without her coat, terrified and screaming. Jean-Baptiste Michel came to fetch her in the morning, and she went back without protest, abject and defeated. After that she began murmuring to her animals. No one provoked Jean-Baptiste Michel without suffering the consequences.
The only person who was capable of stopping him was my mother. She was his only child. In her own way I suppose that she loved him. She stood between him and my whispering grandmother. I see her head raised from her vegetables in warning at the sound of his step. I see her wringing his shirts into coils, plucked from the aluminum tub, with concentrated care. I see her watching him at mealtimes, anticipating his demands. I see her reaching for her purse to give him money as he leaves the house. She always fed me before he came home so that I did not irritate him or dribble and jabber at the table. And sometimes he watches her carefully and she meets his glance as if there is an understanding between them. I hear her voice, low and rhythmic as a drum, reading aloud in the evenings. His broad back bends to hear her, his face is in shadow. He is huge, monstrous. I am watching Ariadne and the Minotaur.
She began to suffer from tiredness, a lassitude that sapped her energy in the mornings. I saw the rings beneath her eyes darkening and deepening. She no longer went out to Gaillac on the weekends. Anne-Marie came to help her get me off to school and to give her a hand with the housework. Jean-Baptiste Michel refused to hear anyone suggest that she was ill.
“She’s lazy, that’s all,” he snapped. “She thinks that she’s too fine to work.”
But even I noticed the whispering and silences surrounding her exhaustion, the terrible yellowing crackle of her shriveling skin. She aged and shrank before my frightened glance. Her full breasts ebbed and her buttocks sagged. It was a spell working from within.
I came home from school. The bedroom door was shut fast. My father was slumped weeping across the table. Anne-Marie, her face set and ruthless, her hands clasped, stood before me.
“Your mother has left us at last, mon petit. She is rejoicing in heaven with Our Lady and the angels.” She spoke every word with measured and devastating certainty.
I won a scholarship to the Benedictine school attached to the monastery and my father sent me away to board during the terms. In the holidays I was handed over to my grandparents in Gaillac. I never went home again. And I took my grandfather’s name.
Bien à vous,
Paul Michel
Paris, 1 June 1984
Cher Maître,
No, I very seldom draw upon my own memories directly. But it is my past which provides the fixed limits of my imagination. Our childhoods, our several histories, lived in the bone, are not the straitjackets we think they are. I rework the intensity of that capacity to perceive, the shifts in scale, color; the silences around the table as a family lays down their forks, the howl of a dog chained to the woodpile as the sleet forms in a winter sky, the years when the autumn never comes, but the winter grey, the mass of wet leaves, coats the gravel long before Toussaint.
I still see the chrysanthemums, huge white blooms, gleaming on my mother’s grave in the pathetic cemetery above our village among the vineyard slopes. I used to carry my own pot of barely opening lilac buds to lay on the green gravel of her grave. “Buy the pot which has the flowers still in bud,” ordered my grandfather. He grudged her even the colors achieved. But up there in the empty, walled graveyard, the flowers will open, in a gesture of consent, when there is no one to see.
You asked about the men in my family, my father, my grandfather, my cousins. I must be cynical—and honest. They were what I have become—moody, taciturn, violent. Mealtimes were mostly a silent affair, interrupted only by demands for more bread. My grandfather was brutally good-looking, a huge barrel-chested man with his mind adjusted firmly in the direction of profit. He knew how to delegate responsibility, but he trusted no
one. He had his fingers on every root in the vineyard. He understood his accounts. He bargained with the wholesalers. He bullied the inspectors. He quarreled with the neighbors. He sent away to another region for his barrels, where he got a better deal. He made the tonneliers pay the transportation costs. He was one of the first in Gaillac to invest in the modern mechanical systems. He spent two years in Algeria and came back convinced that France should abandon the territory, despite its wealth and beauty, simply on the grounds that we had no business to occupy another man’s land.
I see him walking the length of his vines, his old blue jacket stretched across his huge back, bending over the twisted stakes, the clippers in his reddened hands, touching the mute, rough bark, his boots heavy with earth. Everyone in the house was afraid of him.
One of his dogs bit a child in the face. I was ten years old. I see the child, white, weeping, two deep purple marks on the side of her nose, her upper hp, pierced, with the dark blood bubbling into her mouth. My grandfather did not shoot the animal as he could easily have done. His loaded gun stood against the door of the lavoir. He beat the dog to death with a cudgel in the chicken yard. We heard a terrible sequence of howls and thuds. My grandmother closed the window. When he came in, his hands covered in blood, the child’s blood, the dog’s matted fur, I said that the child, a neighbor’s child, had been responsible. She had teased the dog. With one stride he was beside me and had seized my hair. Before my grandmother could intervene he had broken my nose.
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