I am shy, fastidious and arrogant. I am unattractive, but do not need friends. I am a close reasoner, and love language. My poetic vision is deep, but lacks breadth. It is the drama of their infancy which makes men poets, but the writers of the greatest divine and human comedies are men of the world, they discover and represent that drama in commonplace streets, bedrooms and battlefields. I can only represent Gods, and lonely intelligences, and multitudes viewed from a very great distance. I will never be popular. To pay the printers of the Sacred Sociology and Child’s Dictionary of Abstractions1 I went shabby and hungry for many days and these books made no great stir. An early act of folly cured me of seeking fame in the reviews. I sent Gide the Sacred Sociology with a letter indicating that his protestant education had made him capable of appreciating it. He returned the copy with a seven-word comment: “Literature cannot be founded on Larousse Encyclopedias.” His rage, when his wife burned all his letters to her, still amuses me extremely. Bravo, Madame Gide! You hoarded these scribblings as long as you believed he had no other way of making love, but thrust them in the stove when you discovered he enjoyed that passion, physically, elsewhere. You refused to be a postbox through which the great man despatched himself to posterity, bravissimo. I am the opposite of Gide. I now address the public in order to be read by one woman I can reach in no other way. Love drives me to this. Gide was driven by vanity.
I am as old as my century. In the late sixties the respectable working men who frequent the café where I dine began to be ousted by students and other members of the lower intellectual classes. This led to an increase of prices and one day I told the manageress that I could no longer afford to patronize her establishment. A shade of unease came to her face and was instantly quelled. After a moment she indicated that, to a customer of long standing, a reduction of five per cent was permissible. She was not being friendly. She had been friendly twenty years earlier, but I then made certain detailed proposals which she construed as insults. She is one of those strict atheists who determine themselves far more completely than a priest determines a good Catholic. Over the years her splendid body had come to depend on the corset for its shape but I still found the sight of it entertaining; she knew this and cordially detested me. I told her that a fifteen per cent reduction might ensure my continued custom and, after quelling a distinct flicker of wrath, she agreed. I left the café proud to be a Frenchman. The change in clientele was due to myself. Though unpopular I had clearly become famous, and where else in the world would intellectual eminence receive such tactful regard? I remembered also that my mail had recently become abundant, though I only open envelopes from publishers and from the bank which manages my estate. I decided to give myself a holiday. I usually study in a small useful library containing no publications after 1765. Today, in a spirit of sheer caprice, I visited the Bibliothèque Nationale and investigated the history of my reputation.
My books had suffered from an absence of agreement upon how to regard them. In the thirties, the only period when I associated with a political movement, my support of the National Front led the surrealists and left wing generally to regard the Sacred Sociology as a satire against religion in the fashion of Anatole France; but Claudel called it a grand heresy revealing the truth through the agony of estrangement, Celine praised it as hilarious antisemitic comedy, and Saint-Exupéry noticed that it did not seek to deface or replace the scriptures, but to be bound in with them. In the forties the existentialists had just begun to bracket me with Kierkegaard when I printed A Child’s Plainchant Dictionary of Abstractions. This was thought an inept satire against dictionaries and final proof that I was not a serious thinker. Twelve years later a disciple of Levi-Strauss discovered that, though printed as prose, each definition in my dictionary was a pattern of assonance, dissonance, half-rhyme and alliteration invoking the emotions upon which words like truth, greed, government, distaste and freedom depend for their meanings. My definition of digestion, for example, if spoken aloud, soothes stomachs suffering from indigestion. This realization brought me the reverence of the structuralists who now used my dictionary as a text in three universities. I was often quoted in controversies surrounding the American linguist, Chomsky. It seemed that among my unopened mail lay an invitation to join the French Academy and the offer of a Nobel prize for literature. There was widespread speculation about my current work. My first two books were of different kinds and I still pursued the habits of study which had produced them. It was noted that five years earlier I had begun subscribing to a journal devoted to classical Greek researches. All things considered, there was a chance that, before the century ended my name might be attached to a metro terminus.
I left the Bibliothèque Nationale knowing a new epoch was begun. I had become magnetic. In the café, when I raised a finger to order a Pernod, the manageress brought it then turned her haunches on me in a manner less suggestive of the slamming of a door. The glances of the other customers kept flickering toward my meagre person in a way which showed it reassured them. I was filled with social warmth which I did not need to express, dismissing importunate journalists and research students with a blank stare or aloof monosyllable. This procedure greatly entertained the respectable working men. I came to notice a nearby face, a well-exercised face of the sort I like. The fine lines between the brows and the corners of the mouth and eyes showed it was accustomed to smiling and scowling and was often near to tears; the main expression was eager and desperate. My own face is too big for my body and bland to the point of dullness. My only lines are some horizontal ones on the brow which show I am sometimes surprised, but not often and not much. I arranged my features to indicate that if I was approached I would not be repellent, and after hesitating a moment she left her table and sat down facing me, vastly disturbing in the circumambient field of attention. We were silent until it settled.
She was in the mid-thirties with long, rather dry, straw-coloured hair topped by a defiant red beret. Her other clothes (baggy sweater, trousers, clogs) had been chosen to muffle rather than display her not very tall figure, which was nonetheless good. My personality is modelled upon August Dupin. I eventually said, “There is a book in your handbag?”
She opened the bag and laid a thin pamphlet on the table between us. I could not read the author’s name, but it was not by me, so must be her own, or by her lover, or perhaps child. I said, “Poems?”
She nodded. I said, “Why do you approach someone so famous for taciturnity as myself? Have you been rejected by the more accessible celebrities?”
She said, “In approaching you I have not been guided by reason. You are an almost complete reactionary. I ought to despise you. But when a young girl your dictionary gave me an ineradicable respect for the meaning, the colours, the whole sense of our language. If your talent is not dead from disuse, if you are not wholly the dotard you impersonate, you may help me, perhaps. I so much want to be a good poet.”