Bernard-Henri Lévy’s contribution to literature must surely include some of
the excoriating criticism he has inspired. In an article of 1986 entitled
“An Excursion in High Platitude”, the sinologist Simon Leys demolished an
Asian travelogue by the globe-trotting philosopher, then at the height of
his fame. Seventeen years later, William Dalrymple tore into Who Killed
Daniel Pearl? with equal zest in the New York Review of Books. In recent
years, with Lévy’s intellectual star on the wane, several French books have
described him as a vapid thinker and brazen self-promoter. These attacks
have been of variable quality. But there is no question that Lévy has helped
to revive diatribe as an art form in France.
Michel Houellebecq’s opening shot in Ennemis publics, an exchange of letters
between the two men over the first half of 2008, ranks up there with the
very best anti-Lévy prose: “A master of the damp squib and the farcical
media hype, you bring dishonour even to the white shirts you wear. Intimate
with the powerful, you have bathed in obscene wealth since childhood and
typify what slightly low-brow magazines such as Marianne continue to call
the ‘caviar left’ . . . . A philosopher without thought but not without
connections, you are also the author of the most ridiculous film in the
history of cinema”.
To be fair, Houellebecq goes on to call himself a self-hating reactionary
whose “belaboured provocations have fortunately lost their appeal”. He
concludes that the two of them “embody the frightful decline of French
culture and intelligence”, pointing out that neither is mentioned in the end
credits of the film Ratatouille. But the jokey self-deprecation reads like a
polite codicil to Houellebecq’s main point – the savaging of Lévy.
After the first letter, however, the satirical vein runs out. The expected
argument turns into a dialogue between the two about their lives,
experiences of the Paris literary scene and their basic outlooks on the
world. Much of it makes for interesting reading. Houellebecq, the caustic
cynic whose work is an exploration of private deprivation and pain, and
Lévy, the engagé intellectual who scours the world’s troublespots to uphold
human dignity, bounce off each other nicely. Noting that they are both
targets for virulent attack, Lévy suggests that “writers” (he clearly has
someone in mind) court opprobrium and “revel in infamy”.
Houellebecq replies by acknowledging his “misanthropic apathy”, and noting
that his “desire to antagonize conceals an insane desire to please”, to be
loved warts, and all: “I don’t wish to be loved in spite of what is worst in
me, but because of what is worst in me”. Houellebecq also contrasts his own
bleak outlook with Lévy’s humanitarian concern for victims: “In a case of
war I would be among those who will have fought very little, and badly . . .
those who are indifferent to the fate of democracy, the Free French,
Chechnya or the Basque country . . . . I am among the legions of people who
endure History, and are basically only interested in what concerns them or
their loved ones directly. I find it extremely unpleasant to think that the
selfish and cowardly course I stick to should make me more likeable in the
eyes of my contemporaries than you, who are advocating heroism”. The clash
between the philosopher’s worthy, wordy prose and the novelist’s wry,
world-weary style is well brought out in this exchange. Thus Lévy on
long-distance chess games: “I loved them in the same way I believe
\[Marcel\] Duchamp conceived of them: less as a match than as a game; less
as a competition than a joint invention or production; a labour of the mind,
with questions, answers, thwarted passion, twists, light that is either
shared or concealed, virtuosity, deception”. And Houellebecq on the same
subject: “I would have liked to immerse myself in Sun Tzu or Go, at least
chess and Clausewitz; unfortunately, when it comes to games I was never able
to go beyond the level of snap or happy families, 500 at the very most”. But
this is as confrontational as the exchange gets. This is odd from two
authors who – as Houellebecq stresses at the outset – have nothing in
common. To use a rough analogy from the English-speaking world, it is as if
Kingsley Amis and Bob Geldof (or an intellectual version of him) had been
invited to write to each other twenty years ago and had chosen to ignore
their disagreements.
Houellebecq and Lévy not only shrink from vigorous engagement: they actively
look for common ground. They find it in the fact that both have been
targeted by “un-authorized” biographers, and in the plentiful abuse they
receive. “I am attacked as few writers are. Each of my books draws an amount
of insults that would dishearten many”, Lévy writes, adding that he never
lets the hostility get to him. The novelist marvels at the philosopher’s
thick skin.
Midway through the exchange, Houellebecq is subjected to the mother of all
attacks: a memoir by the woman who gave birth to him, and left him to be
raised by others. Lucie Ceccaldi, now eighty-three, calls her estranged son
a pervert and a liar. Houellebecq’s reaction is distressed, but he reserves
his anger for those who publicized what he says should have remained a
private dispute – although in Les Particules élémentaires (Atomized), the
novel of 1998 which made him famous, he names one of the worst mothers in
French literature after his own.
Houellebecq regards the Ceccaldi affair as a plot against him by the French
publishing and media establishment. Such alleged vindictiveness baffles him,
but he suspects it has wider significance: “It seems to me that whoever
succeeds in figuring out why two people as different as we are have become
France’s leading whipping boys will understand many things about the history
of France in our time”. The meaning of the title Ennemis publics, as it
emerges from these pages, is not the one the reader assumes at first.
Houellebecq and Lévy are not publicly opposed to each other, but feel united
in their common status as “public enemies”. The chumminess is especially
surprising in the case of Houellebecq. In his novels, he has exposed the
pieties of his time with Swiftian verve. His newspaper contributions to
intellectual debates are polemical masterpieces. Lévy and his verbose
idealism seem to be perfect targets for Houellebecq. At times Lévy seems to
be asking to be cut down to size – as in this reflection on his lack of
enthusiasm for dialogue as a genre: “I should believe in it, since I am a
philosopher – Plato, Berkeley, Hume, Leibniz, so many others”. He also goes
on about how secretive he is.
And then there are the tall tales. Lévy, for instance, writes that in the
1970s he used to work from a café where he was sometimes confronted by
right-wing thugs, Palestinian militants and jealous husbands, resulting in
“bloody fights” on the pavement outside. Somehow the idea of the slender,
open-shirted philosopher slugging it out with violent men sounds unlikely.
Why does Houellebecq not rise to the bait? You might argue that the very
nature of the exercise reins him in. A correspondence cannot be a slanging
match. If Houellebecq had continued in the vitriolic tone of the first
letter, there would have been no book. However this cannot be the main
reason for his restraint. Robust but courteous debate between the two was
possible – and even expected. Another reason may be Houellebecq’s irritation
at his own literary persona. He rues the “temptation of contempt” to which
he feels all too prone. Humour, he writes, is nothing but “the shame of
expressing real feeling”, “a feint by an elegant slave in the face of a
situation that would command despair or anger”. Houellebecq belittles his
own achievements as a satirical novelist, saying that he considers poetry (in
which he has dabbled) to be the ultimate art form. But the fact that
Houellebecq bears his jester-like power to deflate bombast like a cross does
not stop him using it to devastating effect here.
Of the literary critic Jérôme Garcin he writes: “Every single sentence of his
oozes artifice and pose. Suppressed emotion, walks on the heath ‘flailed by
a harsh wind’. . . . You’d think you’re in an advert for BMW”. It is only
against Lévy that Houellebecq pulls his punches. And if the reason is
neither his scepticism turning on itself nor the format of the exchange,
what could it be? The clue may lie in the book itself: the two men met on at
least two occasions; Lévy is evidently a likeable fellow and it would have
been difficult to ridicule him after seeing him face to face. It would not
be the first time that Houellebecq has been outmanoeuvred in this way. In
Les Particules élémentaires he hilariously lampooned another French literary
bigwig, Philippe Sollers. But Sollers was clever enough not to take offence,
and indeed made friends with him. Houellebecq has not written a single word
against him since. In this book he even calls him “Philippe”.
Houellebecq might have heeded George Orwell’s classic warning against
socializing with intellectual sparring partners, expressed in a letter to
Stephen Spender, in April 1938: “When you meet anyone in the flesh you
realize immediately that he is a human being & not a sort of caricature
embodying certain ideas. It is partly for that reason that I don’t mix much
in literary circles, because I know from experience that once I have met &
spoken to anyone I shall never again be able to show any intellectual
brutality towards him, even when I feel that I ought to”.
Michel Houellebecq and Bernard-Henri Lévy
ENNEMIS PUBLICS
332pp. Flammarion/Grasset. ¤20.
978 2 0812 1834 5
Henri Astier is a BBC journalist.
