MICHEL TOURNIER
43
to recapture and restore, the archaeologist of his own life, the anti–
quarian of himself. Paul Valery, through his exaltation of the in–
tellect, an idol which is merely the correlative of his lack of mathe–
matics (he was never good at it and was for this reason refused entry
to the Naval Academy in his youth), managed to create for himself a
nauseating emptiness in which he dragged around his obsessions
with suicide. We shall return to these two contemporaries of Gide's.
But you will note in passing that this predilection for saying
"no" to everything- whether its style is haughty , enraged , or plain–
tive - is both rich in precedents and brilliantly exemplified in later
generations . Further back, we have Vigny, Baudelaire, Barbey
d'Aurevilly, Bloy . Nearer at hand, Celine, Artaud, Sartre , Cioran .
There is no point in asking how much can be ascribed to sincerity
and how much to posture in this cry of
no
to life - black is always for–
mal dress. For in the end only the work counts, whatever the author's
sincerity or duplicity.
It
remains true that the "yes" or "no" to life is a
useful yardstick for distinguishing two families, not only of writers,
but of men and women in general. It would obviously be unjust and
cruel to say that everyone gets plunged in the environment they de–
serve, but it is clear that each of us, in an identical milieu , unwittingly
cuts out a reality that we construct to fit our own requirements, and
which we are often mad enough to consider the only viable one.
I hope you will forgive a personal digression. A few years ago I
happened to be in Venice and I was dining with Rene Etiemble ,
whose erudition, lucidity and bitterness I like and admire . I was sit–
ting opposite him and I opened my mouth to say, "I have spent the
afternoon on the Lido beach . I am still dazzled by the beauty of the
young people I saw there ." But he cut me off a second before I could
speak and announced as he was unfolding his napkin , "My wife and
I have spent the afternoon on the Lido beach . We were staggered by
the ugliness of the bathers we saw there." The contradiction was so
brutal that it still leaves me dumbfounded. A contradiction obviously
to be found more in our ways of seeing things than in the things
themselves. When he was dying, Monet used to say, "I have never
seen anything that was ugly." I could almost say the same myself.
Seeing "beauty" is of course no great source of comfort or of hap–
piness. The beauty that hits you in the eye and in the heart at every
street corner often wounds you in an incurable way . There are faces,
and more rarely bodies, that I have seen for a few seconds , only to
lose all trace of them forever, and yet the burning memory of them
has not stopped haunting me for ten or twenty years, sometimes for
