The Rules of the Game Series, Volume 3

by Michel Leiris

  In such conditions, I ran the real risk, by wanting to finish my book whatever the cost, of disappointing those who had followed me attentively until then and whose signs of sympathy had proved to me that one could, without deluding oneself, believe that there was some kind of communication. With my wife, life appeared doomed to degenerate little by little into a dance of death since, preferring hypocrisy to separation, but incapable of betraying her in so exquisite a way as to inspire her to forgiveness, I would discredit myself so much in her eyes and become so impossible to live with that in the end she would despise and hate me. For quite some time, moreover, our relations had been corroded by the bad conscience I harbored about her, reproaching myself for the flights that my trips had been; the almost parasitical role I had in our association (our resources coming most of all from her job, while my work at the museum represented only a little extra, whence, also, an embarrassment with respect to my colleagues, all the more so since this work was not even the one that primarily interested me); the displeasing way in which I had implicated her in my literature (that literature à propos of which I also told myself that “I was not playing the game,” not having to depend on it financially and thus protected from many temptations); the lack of an imponderable gold thread that I could have mingled with the tight bonds that united us (moral, intellectual, physical also, until the beginning of the nasty period during which only by enclosing myself in the most bristly humor could I tolerate being subjected to failures that went sometimes as far as complete fiasco); the regard, lastly, that from the outset I had for her rigor (appreciating, in defiance of all my principles of equality and liberty, the fact that she was a Penelope or a Lucretia, whereas I was nothing comparable).

  In addition to these reasons for feeling demoralized, there was another, of a more general sort. Even though I had not turned into a millionaire, or a king, or an international celebrity, I was now in a situation such that to complain of it would have been like finding one’s bride too beautiful: in consequence of a change of locale imposed by fortuitous circumstances, the gallery of modern art that, from the time of the first anti-Semitic measures proclaimed by the German occupiers, has borne my wife’s name had become the most spacious and the best outfitted of galleries of that sort; we had the use of a country house known in the area by the pompous name of “château”; I had, for my own part, acquired my bit of fame as writer and ethnographer. But regarding this promotion, by which I should have been delighted, within the limits of what it was worth, it seemed to me that my life had objectively attained a sort of horrible culminating point, such that from there on, with regard to social success, I could reasonably expect nothing more. The end of this life, as it appeared to me, somewhat resembled the last days of my stay in Florence: just as in the Tuscan city we explored so thoroughly there remained a few trifles for us to go see, there remained to me a few trifles to do during the time I still had to live—to finish The Rules of the Game simply in order to finish it, to compose a thick tome on Negro art to which I had committed myself with a contract, to write a study of Aimé Césaire that I had promised. I had no more plans for distant travels, or even any idea of a tourist holiday in some spot that I would have liked to know. There was the pleasure of seeing a few friends, a few shows, but no more real attraction to anything at all. I would be cut off from everything, as I had been shortly after the last war, when, in the railway car that was bringing me back from Le Havre, my liver and my nerves affected by having drunk too much wine, coffee, and hard liquor, I had felt the first violent attack of this disease and had been afraid I would suddenly begin to shout and gesticulate like someone in the grip of an uncontrollable delirium, as I looked at the countryside (wintry but sunny) in the declining light and thought of that Africa of the past that I had loved but that had lost for me all mythological dimension. It was a frightful anguish, aggravated by my confinement in a cramped railway car filled with other travelers, but its source was the idea of a peaceful group of African huts seen by the setting sun, as I was seeing the landscape on either side of the tracks; it was a grief without fangs or claws, which I may define as an impression of perfectly naked and dry objectivity confronting a countryside that in other times I would have been able to admire. Did I foresee the state that would truly be mine some seven years after, when I expressed in a note dated June 1950 a doubt about the value of the treasure I may find at the end of the imaginary road on which I walk every day more and more tired: “When—through a patient effort—I was able gradually to rid myself of everything in me that was superstition, aestheticism, snobbery, childishness, etc., I observed that my life thus pruned, improved, stripped of superfluous embellishments, was less open to criticism, no doubt, but no longer represented much of anything that was worth being lived.”

  Having thus come to a standstill and wishing sometimes that my uneasiness would take a turn sharp enough to gain me the diversion of a stay at the manicomio (as I said, using as a joke the term which, as my wife and I knew from having read it on maps of Italian cities we had visited, designated homes for the insane), I was, even before the love complications that occurred, absolutely ready to effect the true departure: by dying, I would leave those close to me an effigy that was intact, and, as for the book, the fact that it would remain in abeyance appeared to me less serious than to finish it by lowering myself to fakeries that would destroy its significance; the slips of paper I had amassed would be published by a friend just as they were, as we had arranged when he agreed to be my executor and if necessary undertake this publication. I think I can conclude from all this that the conflict that shook me would have led me to something I am not exactly sure of, but undoubtedly not to an attempt to do away with myself, if the idea of suicide, despite the change that had restored some savor to my life, had not pursued its course, under its own momentum. For me to come to the point of gulping down the stock of phenobarbital that I had created for myself (making use, in order to augment my provision, on the very eve of the day on which I performed what I would like to call the “act of the soneryl,” of a rediscovered prescription that entitled me to another bottle), what was still needed was an almost accidental cause, which seemed to me, in my disturbed state of mind, like a catastrophe, and released the trigger.

  I was very nervous that late afternoon, because of a rendezvous that had not taken place, a rendezvous that was in no way formally designated and was hardly more than a prospect of a meeting. Away from her, I was reduced to division, conflict, laceration, nausea. The only thing that could make me forget the uneasiness into which her irruption in my life had precipitated me (while rescuing me, it is true, from another sort of uneasiness) was her presence, that presence which I knew, at the same time—with a crushing certainty—would not have had this luminous intensity if, having become constant instead of merely intermittent, a thing settled once and for all and no longer problematic, it no longer appeared to be a piece of good fortune that one could welcome while wondering whether it would be followed by another, similar piece of good fortune. On that particular afternoon, this was worse than ever, for I had not seen her after having hoped to, and I also knew that the time was fairly close when she would be going away for several months, as she did every year. In a very bad state, I went off into the strange neighborhood of the Marché Saint Honoré, certain aspects of which were almost working-class even though one was, there, two steps from the Place Vendôme and the Ritz. A cocktail party whose object was to fête a very highbrow English essayist passing through Paris had been my reason for going into that area, topographically not far from my own neighborhood, but separated from it by the mental abyss that opens between Right Bank and Left Bank. In the apartment, modern with antiquated surroundings, where I was expected, I found, besides a rather large number of individuals who did not matter to me, a few people I liked very much, beginning with the hosts, he an Englishman who went through a surrealist period and is now working on a biography of Picasso, through whom I had met him very shortly after the
Liberation (and I can still see him in his handsome British Army uniform), she an American brimming with vitality, built like a caryatid, her attraction residing in that grand demeanor which she mixes comically with a touch of the preposterous. To one and the other both, I was grateful for a few good, cordial times: a weekend on their farm in Sussex the last time my wife and I went to England; a morning walk I took with her alone to admire, in her Paris neighborhood, a shop selling fowl and game whose window exhibits even whole boars, then to visit, at the Magasins du Louvre, still as no more than gawkers who would just as readily have gone to see Christmas crèches, a department devoted to the divinatory arts—astrology, cards and tarots, palm lines—and I’m sure I’m forgetting some of it. At the time of the cocktail party from which I made my departure for a journey whose last stage would be worse than adventurous, both of them had just taken a trip to Belgium.

  I have never liked these kinds of receptions, once they reach a certain size and I feel lost in them—standing there, awkward—among a majority of strangers, contenting myself when necessary with conversing with someone I have not seen in a long time, then someone else whom I know a little, neglecting (if there are any) my closest friends but on the other hand not willingly accepting contact with those to whom I am introduced. I like these cocktail parties even less now that I have been forced into sobriety: formerly, I drank to abolish the distance between me and the others, which sometimes succeeded, but, in certain cases, resulted only in humiliating drunken episodes; today, I lack this recourse, and I do not know what to do with myself, the idea of being preserved from the danger of getting ignominiously soused being, in this regard, of no help to me.

  When the cocktail party I am speaking of took place, which was very recently, a whiskey now and then (but not more than one) was still allowed me by the very old friend and doctor to whom I had appealed for help at the time when the hope of something a little new had opened up in my life, inciting me to do everything possible not to spoil my chances: apart from the fact that I could shamelessly, and without hesitating to go into the most meticulous detail, complain to him about the impairments from which I was suffering, he had read my writing and knew me much better than his colleagues knew me and was thus certainly the one most capable of putting me back to rights. My intention that day was certainly not to drink too much, but, as I have already said, I was very much on edge. Whereas for some time, by then, I had submitted with fairly good grace to the interdictions imposed on me, I was not able to resist temptation at this party, where, despite my friendship with my hosts, I was prey to a discomfort all the more insidious because it was grafted onto the state of extreme tension I had reached and was complicated further by the disturbance into which I had been thrown by the failed rendezvous, that rendezvous which, however, was not one. I did not at all like the idea of drinking a single whiskey and then remaining empty-handed indefinitely after having gotten rid of the glass, which I would have finished so quickly, and, even before the party, I had said to myself that two or three glasses of champagne would be worth more than that single whiskey, without being more harmful. In fact, it was not two or three but numerous glasses that I swallowed greedily, one inviting the next and my nervousness contributing. Among other people I knew was a couple at whose house there had been, the evening before or the one before that, a party to which I had declined to go, alleging my state of health but in fact taking into consideration this cocktail party, to which I had long since promised to go, and seeking to reduce as much as possible my occasions for overindulgence. These people, who, logically, ought to have expected anything but to encounter me, did not seem to resent me for being there and even appeared very cordial; but I was nevertheless embarrassed at seeming not to be in bad health except where they were concerned, and it is very possible that I was driven to drink even a little more by this embarrassment, whose original cause had been a desire to be sensible.

  I therefore drank in a little more than an hour a quantity of champagne that was certainly excessive but still not enormous. Having always had a very poor tolerance for drink, I have never really drunk a lot, even in my more wicked days, and before alcohol was for me more than contraindicated came a moment when, if I abused it, I had such aftereffects that for me its taste was in large part spoiled by that in the very moment when I was drinking: it seemed to me I was consuming a beverage whose exquisite flavor could not conceal a perceptible promise of my mind agitated, my mouth pasty, and my head at once leaden and cottony. Since this impression grew progressively more distinct as I drank, I was soon restrained without having to control myself, so that my worst excesses no longer went very far, starting from that time, when an almost organic connection was established for me between the notion of alcohol and that of deleterious potion. In the home of my friends of the Marché Saint Honoré I was therefore drunk, but with a rather mild drunkenness, and not at all to the point of rambling or ranting.

  More talkative than I usually am, I was chatting with various people and, my original depression changing into the sort of exuberance that is quite often combined with a feeling of emptiness rather than lightheartedness and conceals the grim pleasure of quite consciously emptying the cup of absurdity, I ended by flirting outrageously with a young woman whom I had known in Brussels—through her mother, who was then sharing the life of one of my friends—and whom for the past ten or twelve years I have seen now and then, not without recognizing her charms but without ever having dreamed for a second of paying court to her. Even though this took place in a social circle too lacking in moral severity to take offense at a few kisses exchanged openly, I soon became aware of my incongruity: not only should I not have brought so much passionate ardor to these effusions, but this lack of restraint, beyond the fact that it was no longer really appropriate to my age, seemed to show that in the absence of my wife I did not hesitate to give public signs of complete indifference toward her. Rescued from my enchantress by the hazards of the entrances, exits, and unexpected movements that tend to shift groups of people, I was ashamed of having yielded, for a few minutes, to a dionysian enthusiasm during which I had transgressed the laws of a savoir-vivre that I believe is quite distinct from a meaningless etiquette.

  Things would probably have gone no further and would not have snowballed to the point where they did if I had not had to go, after the dinner hour, to a second gathering. Assuredly I would have been mortified to have behaved so badly after my relapse into a weakness that I thought I had overcome, and I would have felt even worse about having conducted myself, after the missed rendezvous, like an adolescent who does not know which skirts to throw himself at. It would have increased the sense of intolerable fragmentation I had experienced when I had not been able to restrain my emotion at hearing the phrase that came from my correspondent and not from the one from whom, at the moment it came to me, I had hoped it would come instead. But I am convinced that these new torments, added through my own fault to my other torments, would not have had any measurable consequence if my program for that evening had been merely to go to bed brooding about my bad day.

  This second gathering, to which my wife and I went together, had a more intimate character than the one to which circumstances had caused me to go alone, at the end of the afternoon. A philosopher whom we have known for a long time was bringing together a few friends in his apartment on the boulevard Saint Michel, perhaps five minutes from where we live, a little beyond that naturalist’s shop whose windows are crowded with skeletons and skulls of animals of all sizes and all species. I did not need, in this case, to drink in order not to be ill at ease, since I was already doped and since the guests, most of whom I had met many times or who belonged to my usual circle of friends, did not in the least appear to me as members of an anonymous crowd. However, I had adopted a certain attitude, and the incident that had occurred some two hours earlier had not lessened my nervousness—far from it. On the Right Bank I had drunk some champagne, on the Left Bank I started in on whiskey and soon lost control o
f myself to such a degree that, in order to continue my story, I must call upon (my memories are so vague) what my wife told me about my words and deeds of that evening, much later, when I had more or less finished gathering my wits after returning to myself between the rough sheets of a bed at the Hôpital Claude-Bernard, where, behind me (as I soon learned) yawned a gulf irreparably opened by three and a half days of coma. I will confine myself here to noting down the little I retained, either on my own or with the help of the catalyzing role played, in activating my dormant memory, by what my wife has told me.