I’ve enjoyed it without restrictions or remorse, and until now at any rate, it has illuminated my whole life. As an artist, for example, I began by admiring others, which in a way is heaven on earth. (The present custom in France, as everyone knows, is to launch and even to conclude one’s literary career by choosing an artist to make fun of.) My human passions, like my literary ones, have never been directed against others.
The people I have loved have always been better and greater than I. Poverty as I knew it taught me not resentment but a certain fidelity and silent tenacity. If I have ever forgotten them, either I or my faults are to blame, not the world I was born into.
The memory of those years has also kept me from ever feeling satisfied in the exercise of my craft. Here, as simply as I can, I’d like to bring up something writers normally never mention. I won’t even allude to the satisfaction one supposedly feels at a perfectly written book or page. I don’t know whether many writers experience it. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t think I’ve ever found delight in re-reading a finished page.
I will even admit, ready to be taken at my word, that the success of some of my books has always surprised me. Of course, rather shabbily, one gets used to it. Even today, though, I feel like an apprentice compared to certain living writers I rank at their true worth. One of the foremost is the man to whom these essays were dedicated as long as twenty years ago.1
Naturally, a writer has some joys he lives for and that do satisfy him fully. But for me, these come at the moment of conception, at the instant when the subject reveals itself, when the articulation of the work sketches itself out before the suddenly heightened awareness, at those delicious moments when imagination and intelligence are fused. These moments disappear as they are born. What is left is the execution, that is to say, a long period of hard work.
On another level, an artist also has the delights of vanity. The writer’s profession, particularly in French society, is largely one of vanity. I say this without scorn, and with only slight regret. In this respect I am like everyone else; who is impervious to this ridiculous disease? Yet, in a society where envy and derision are the rule, the day comes when, covered with scorn, writers pay dearly for these poor joys. Actually, in twenty years of literary life, my work has brought very few such joys, fewer and fewer as time has passed.
Isn’t it the memory of the truths glimpsed in The Wrong Side and the Right Side that has always kept me from feeling at ease in the public exercise of my craft and has prompted the many refusals that have not always won me friends? By ignoring compliments and homages we lead the person paying those compliments to think we look down on him, when in fact we are only doubting ourselves.
By the same token, if I had shown the mixture of harshness and indulgence sometimes found in literary careers, if like so many others I had exaggerated a bit, I might have been looked upon more favorably, for I would have been playing the game. But what’s to be done, the game does not amuse me! The ambitions of a Lucien de Rubempré or a Julien Sorel often disconcert me in their naïveté and their modesty. Nietzsche’s, Tolstoy’s, or Melville’s overwhelm me, precisely because of their failure. I feel humility, in my heart of hearts, only in the presence of the poorest lives or the greatest adventures of the mind. Between the two is a society I find ludicrous.
Sometimes on those opening nights at the theater, which are the only times I ever meet what is insolently referred to as “all Paris,” it seems to me that the audience is about to vanish, that this fashionable world does not exist. It is the others who seem real to me, the tall figures sounding forth upon the stage. Resisting the impulse to flee, I make myself remember that every one in the audience also has a rendezvous with himself: that he knows it and will doubtless be keeping it soon.
Immediately he seems like a brother once more; solitudes unite those society separates. Knowing this, how can one flatter this world, seek its petty privileges, agree to congratulate every author of every book, and openly thank the favorable critic. Why try to seduce the enemy, and above all how is one to receive the compliments and admiration that the French (in the author’s presence anyway, for once he leaves the room!…) dispense as generously as Pernod or the fan magazines.
I can’t do it and that’s a fact. Perhaps there is a lot of that churlish pride of mine here, whose strength and extent I know only too well. But if this were all, if only my vanity were involved, it seems to me that I ought to enjoy compliments, superficially at least, instead of repeatedly being embarrassed by them. No, the vanity I share with others comes mostly when I react to criticisms that have some measure of truth.
It’s not conceit that makes me greet compliments with that stupid, ungrateful look I know so well, but (along with the profound indifference that haunts me like a natural infirmity) a strange feeling that comes over me: “You’re missing the point …” Yes, they are missing the point, and that is why a reputation, as it’s called, is sometimes so hard to bear that one takes a kind of malicious pleasure in doing everything one can to lose it.
On the other hand, re-reading The Wrong Side and the Right Side for this edition after so many years, I know instinctively that certain pages, despite their inadequacies, are the point. I mean that old woman, a silent mother, poverty, light on the Italian olive trees, the populated loneliness of love—all that in my opinion reveals the truth.
Since these pages were written I have grown older and lived through many things. I have learned to recognize my limits and nearly all my weaknesses. I’ve learned less about people, since their destiny interests me more than their reactions, and destinies tend to repeat each other. I’ve learned at least that other people do exist, and that selfishness, although it cannot be denied, must try to be clear-sighted. To enjoy only oneself is impossible, I know, although I have great gifts in this direction. If solitude exists, and I don’t know if it does, one should certainly have the right to dream of it occasionally as paradise.
I do from time to time, like everyone else. Yet two tranquil angels have always kept me from that paradise: one has a friend’s face, the other an enemy’s. Yes, I know all this and I’ve also learned or nearly learned the price of love. But about life itself I know no more than what is said so clumsily in The Wrong Side and the Right Side.
“There is no love of life without despair of life,” I wrote, rather pompously, in these pages. I didn’t know at the time how right I was; I had not yet been through years of real despair. They came, and managed to destroy everything in me except an uncontrolled appetite for life.
I still suffer from this both fruitful and destructive passion that bursts through even the gloomiest pages of The Wrong Side and the Right Side. It’s been said we really live for only a few hours of our life.
This is true in one sense, false in another. For the hungry ardor one can sense in these essays has never left me; in the last analysis, this appetite is life at its best and at its worst. I’ve certainly tried to correct its worst effects. Like everyone, I’ve done my best to improve my nature by means of ethics. Alas, the price has been high. With energy, something I’ve a good deal of, one sometimes manages to behave morally, but never to be moral.
To long for morality when one is a man of passion is to yield to injustice at the very moment one speaks of justice. Man sometimes seems to me a walking injustice: I am thinking of myself. If I now have the impression I was wrong, or that I lied sometimes in what I wrote, it is because I do not know how to treat my iniquity honestly. Surely I’ve never claimed to be a just man. I’ve only said that we should try to be just, and also that such an ambition involves suffering and unhappiness. But is this distinction so important? And can the man who does not even manage to make justice prevail in his own life preach its virtues to other people? If only we could live according to honor—that virtue of the unjust! But our society finds the word obscene; “aristocratic” is a literary and philosophical insult.
I am not an aristocrat, my reply is in this book: here are my people, my teachers, my ancestry, here is what, through them, links me with everyone. And yet I do
