14
PARTISAN REVIEW
words an hour, or a new word every three minutes. Can any torture be
more horrifically designed for a man who could deliver an extempore
lecture complete in thought, example, and syntax, a work of seven or
eight thousand words in less than an hour to be reduced now, down
now, with a pen in his hand to twenty words in sixty minutes? The
culture of the past must have sat on his mind like Gibraltar. How could
he dare to write about anything? Given his profound contempt for
authors who rushed
to
place their shoddy artifacts into that small
temple where only a few perfect works ought to be installed, how
presume to add to the excrementa? So this flame-thrower of a mind
(when free at its own unrecorded speech) was now confined to one
burning wire which sought
to
drill a tiny hole into the rock of his
weighty regard for the value of literature. A man who sat twelve hours
at his desk in meditation might have enjoyed such a life even with no
more than two hundred words a day, but Malaquais like many an
author before him, labored in depression and whole fatigue. "Yes,"
he said once, .. if you want
to
do good work, you must
pisser Ie sang,"
and he must have pissed the blood ofevery disappearing ambition into
the hours he chained himself to that desk. What an effort! Over two
years, then three years of just such work, slowly
The Joker
bored its
little hole into the great rock ofhis resistance
to
himself, and Malaquais
emerged at last with this novel.
2.
I was aghast when I read it. So much had happened in his life . He
had escaped from the Germans after being a prisoner of war, then as a
man without a passport had slipped out of Occupied France, only
to
become metamorphosized into aJew again, obliged still to hide from
the Nazis in Cadiz, while haunting visa factories like a character in
The
Consul,
then a penniless emigre living by his wits in Venezuela and
Mexico for the rest of the war. He had also been a movie-script writer
with respectable credits and an award winner of a major literary prize,
the Prix Renaudot, as well as the post-war author of a major novel,
Planete Sans Visa,
and a much-lauded war diary, an ideologist, a
romantic, a Marxist, a man with a charmingly demonic wife as well as a
critic with every elevated instinct for the kill, he had now written a
