Czytaj książkę: «A French Novel»
Epigraph
Like a spring, young children grow
Then blossom in a summer
Surprised by winter they no longer show
What once they were.
Pierre de Ronsard, ‘Ode à Anthoine de Chasteigner’, 1550
Dedication
For my family and for Priscilla de Laforcade who is a part of it
Table of Contents
Title Page
Epigraph
Dedication
Foreword
Prologue
1. Clipped Wings
2. Lost Grace
3. Flashbacks of Myself
4. Vowels, Consonants
5. Fragments of an Arrest
6. Guéthary, 1972
7. Natural Hells
8. The Original Rake
9. A French Novel
10. With Family
11. End of an Era
12. Before They Were My Parents, They Were Neighbours
13. Revelations about the Lamberts
14. Hearing Problems
15. Affective Prognathism
16. Quiet Days in Neuilly
17. A Claustrophobic Chapter
18. Divorce, French-Style
19. Van Vogt’s ‘Null-A’ and Fred’s ‘A’
20. Madame Ratel Paints
21. Forgotten Finger
22. Return to Guéthary
23. Rue Maître-Albert
24. Cassettes
25. The Revealing Child
26. A Scientific Digression
27. The Trip Across Paris
28. Brother of the Above-Named
29. Could Try Harder
30. Force-Fed Children
31. Prison Break
32. Dreams and Illusions
33. The Dishonest Truth
34. The Second Father
35. The End of Amnesia
36. The Day I Broke My Mother’s Heart
37. Parental Inventory
38. The French Dream
39. Compulsive Liars
40. Release
41. New York, 1981 or 1982
42. Results
43. The A in Atlantis
Epilogue
Footnotes
By the Same Author
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
FOREWORD
The greatest quality of this book is undoubtedly its honesty. When a book is as honest as this, it can lead, almost unintentionally, to genuine revelations about what it means to be human – in this respect, literature is still leagues ahead of the sciences. In reading A French Novel, we realise that a man’s life is divided into two phases: childhood and adulthood, and that it is completely pointless to further refine this analysis. Formerly, there existed a third phase, known as old age, which linked the two, when childhood memories flooded back, giving a semblance of unity to a human life. But to enter into old age, one must first accept it, leave life behind and enter into the age of memory. Caught up in desires and in adult plans, the author is not at this stage, and has almost no memory of his childhood.
He does, however, have one, involving shrimping and a beach on the côte Basque. Like Cuvier reconstructing the skeleton of a dinosaur from a single fragment of bone, from this single memory Frédéric Beigbeder reconstructs his whole family history. It is a serious, solid work in which we discover a French family, a relatively harmonious blend of bourgeoisie and aristocracy of staunchly rural stock. A family heroic to the point of lunacy during the First World War, and consequently rather more circumspect when the Second World War breaks out. After 1945 they are gripped by a lively appetite for consumerism, an appetite which after 1968 will extend to a new level, becoming widespread in the sphere of morals. A family like many others, most of which belong to the upper classes; but it is the very ordinariness of Beigbeder’s family history that makes it compelling, since the whole history of twentieth-century France unfolds before our eyes, related without apparent effort. On first reading, we get a little confused sometimes with all the characters; that is the only thing for which one might criticise the author.
In adolescence, everything changes. Memories flood back, but there are two things basically, two things in particular that linger in the author’s memory: the girls he has loved, the books he has read. Is that all there is to life, is that all that remains? It would seem so. And here too, Beigbeder’s honesty is so obvious that we would not think to challenge his conclusions. If it is indeed this and this alone that seems important to him, it’s because it truly is. Deep down, the pleasure of autobiography is almost the opposite of that of the novel: far from losing oneself in the author’s world, we never forget ourselves when reading an autobiography; we compare ourselves, we connect, we confirm, page after page, our sense of belonging to a common humanity.
I was less interested by the sections about the nights spent in custody for taking cocaine on the public highway. It’s curious; I should have empathised, having myself spent a night in prison for an offence almost as stupid (smoking a cigarette on a plane) – and I can confirm that conditions in custody are not exactly comfortable. But the author and his friend the Poet protest a little too much; they mouth off. The portrait of the writer as a boy, a sickly little thing, all chin and ears, doing his best to follow in the footsteps of the big brother he admires, is brief, but it is so powerful that I felt I could sense that child reading over my shoulder through the whole book. In this delinquent episode, something is wrong: the child does not recognise himself in the adult he has become. And this, too, is probably the truth: the child is not father to the man. There is the child, there is the man; and between the two there is no connection. It is a discomfiting, embarrassing conclusion: we would like to think that there is a certain unity at the core of the human personality; it is an idea we find difficult to let go of; we would like to be able to make a connection.
That connection we immediately make is in the pages the author devotes to his daughter, probably the most beautiful in the book. Because imperceptibly he realises, and we realise with him, that the childhood years his daughter is going through are the only years of true happiness. And that nothing, not even his love for her, will prevent her from stumbling over the same obstacles, from sinking into the same ruts. This increasingly poignant blend of secret sadness and love culminates in the magnificent epilogue, which in itself would justify this book, in which the author teaches his daughter, as his grandfather taught him, the art of skimming stones. In that moment the circle is closed and everything is justified. The stone that skips magically ‘six, seven, eight times’ across the sea. A victory, albeit limited, against gravity.
Michel Houellebecq
PROLOGUE
I am older than my great-grandfather. Capitaine Thibaud de Chasteigner was thirty-seven years old when he fell during the second battle of Champagne, on 25 September 1915 at 9.15 a.m. between the valley of Suippe and the outskirts of the Argonne forest. I had to pester my mother to find out more; the hero of the family is an unknown soldier. He is buried at the Borie-Petit château, in Dordogne (my uncle’s place), but I saw his photograph in the château Vaugoubert (belonging to another uncle): a tall, thin young man in a blue uniform, with cropped fair hair. In his last letter to my great-grandmother, Thibaud says he has no wire-cutters to clear a path to the enemy’s lines. He describes the flat, chalky landscape, the incessant rain turning the ground into a muddy swampland, and confides that he has received the order to attack the following morning. He knows he will die; his letter is like a ‘snuff movie’ – a horror film made using no special effects. At dawn, he fulfilled his duty, singing the ‘Chant des Girondins’: ‘To die for one’s country is the most noble, most enviable destiny!’ The men of the 161st Infantry Regiment launched themselves into a hail of bullets; as intended, my great-grandfather and his men were ripped to shreds by the German machine guns and asphyxiated with chlorine gas. It might be said that Thibaud was murdered by his superior officers. He was tall, he was young, he was handsome, and La France ordered him to die for her. Or rather – and this gives his fate a curious topicality – La France ordered him to commit suicide. Like a Japanese kamikaze or a Palestinian terrorist, this father of four sacrificed himself knowing precisely what he was doing. This descendant of the crusaders was doomed to imitate Jesus Christ: to give his life so that others might live.
I am descended from a gallant knight crucified on the barbed wire of Champagne.
1
CLIPPED WINGS
I had just found out my brother had been made a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur when I was arrested. The police did not handcuff me straight away; they only did that later, when I was being transferred to the Hôtel-Dieu, and again when I was transferred to prison on the Île de la Cité the following night. The President of the Republic had just written a charming letter to my elder brother, congratulating him on his contribution to the economic dynamism of France: ‘You are a perfect example of the sort of capitalism we want: a capitalism of entrepreneurs rather than one of speculators.’ On 28 January 2008, at the police station in the 8th arrondissement in Paris, officers in blue uniform, guns and truncheons dangling from their belts, stripped me completely naked in order to search me, confiscated my phone, my watch, my credit card, my money, my keys, my passport, my driving licence, my belt and my scarf, took samples of my saliva and my fingerprints, lifted up my testicles to see whether I had anything stuffed up my arsehole, took front, side and three-quarter photographs of me holding a mugshot placard, before returning me to a cage two metres square, its walls covered with graffiti, dried blood and snot. At the time I did not realise that, a few days later, I would be watching my brother receiving the Légion d’honneur in the Salle des Fêtes of the Élysée Palace, which is not quite so cramped, and that through the picture windows I would watch the leaves of the oak trees in the grounds moving in the wind, as though waving to me, beckoning me to come into the presidential gardens. Lying on a concrete bench at about four o’clock in the morning that dark night, the situation seemed simple to me: God had faith in my brother, and He had abandoned me. How could two people who had been so close as children have had such different fates? I had just been arrested for using class-A drugs on the public highway with a friend. A pickpocket in the next cell hammered on the glass half-heartedly, but regularly enough to keep the rest of the prisoners from getting any sleep. Sleep, in any case, would have been impossible, a utopian dream, since even when the convicts stopped bawling, the police shouted to each other along the gangways at the top of their lungs, as though the prisoners were deaf. The air was pervaded by the smell of sweat, vomit and undercooked microwaved stewed beef with carrots. Time passes very slowly when you don’t have a watch and when no one thinks to switch off the flickering strip light on the ceiling. Lying on the filthy concrete floor at my feet, a schizophrenic in an alcoholic coma groaned, snored and farted. It was freezing, but I was burning up. I tried to think of nothing, but it was impossible: when you bang people up in a tiny little cell, their brains work overtime trying in vain to ward off panic; some fall to their knees and beg to be let out, others have a nervous breakdown, try to top themselves, or confess to crimes they didn’t commit. I would have given anything for a book or a sleeping pill. But since I had neither, I started writing this book in my head, with no pen, my eyes closed. I hope that this book lets you escape from it all, as it did me that night.
2
LOST GRACE
I do not remember my childhood. No one believes me when I say that. Everyone remembers their past; what’s the point of living if you forget your life? I have nothing left of myself: from zero to the age of fifteen, I am confronted by a black hole (as defined in astrophysics: ‘a compact mass having a gravitational field so intense that no matter or radiation can escape’). For a long time I believed that this was normal, that others experienced the same amnesia. But whenever I asked, ‘Do you remember your childhood?’, they would tell me endless stories. I’m ashamed that my autobiography will be written in invisible ink. Why is my childhood not indelible? I feel excluded from the world, because the world has an archaeology and I do not. I have covered my tracks like a criminal on the run. When I mention this disability, my parents roll their eyes to heaven, my family protests, my childhood friends get angry, former girlfriends are tempted to produce photographic evidence.
‘You haven’t lost your memory, Frédéric. It’s just that you don’t care about us!’
Amnesiacs are hurtful; their nearest and dearest take them for revisionists, as though forgetting is always a choice. I’m not lying by omission: I rummage through my life as if it were an empty trunk, and I find nothing; I am a wilderness. Sometimes I’ll hear people whispering behind my back: ‘That guy, I can’t quite work him out.’ I agree. How is it possible to work someone out when he doesn’t know where he comes from? As Gide says in The Counterfeiters, I am ‘built on piles having neither foundations nor substratum’. The ground gives way beneath my feet, I hover on a cushion of air, I am a bottle adrift on the sea, a Calder mobile. In order to please, I gave up having a backbone, I wanted to blend into the background like Zelig, the human chameleon. To forget one’s personality, lose one’s memory in order to be loved; to become, the better to charm, that which others wish one to be. In psychiatric terms this is a personality disorder known as ‘deficiently centred consciousness’. I am an empty vessel, a life without substance. In my childhood bedroom on rue Monsieur-le-Prince, pinned on one of the walls, I’m told, I had a poster for the film My Name is Nobody. I probably identified with the hero.
I have always written stories about men who have no past: the heroes of my books are products of an age of immediacy, cast adrift in a rootless present – transparent inhabitants of a world in which feelings are as short-lived as butterflies, in which forgetfulness is a safeguard against pain. It is possible – I am living proof – to retain only a few scraps of one’s childhood, false for the most part, or fashioned after the fact. Such amnesia is encouraged in our society: even the future perfect is on the road to grammatical oblivion. My handicap will soon be a commonplace; my particular case will become the general. Nonetheless, we must accept that it is not usual to develop Alzheimer’s symptoms in middle age.
Often I refashion my childhood out of politeness. ‘Come on, Frédéric, you must remember?’ I nod sagely: ‘Oh yes, of course, I collected Panini stickers, I was a Rubettes fan, it’s all coming back to me now.’ I am terribly sorry to have to confess here: I remember nothing; I am my own imposter. I have no idea where I was between 1965 and 1980; perhaps this is why I am so lost today. I hope there is some secret, some mysterious hex, some magic spell I could discover which would lead me out of this personal labyrinth. If my childhood was not a nightmare, why does my mind keep my memory in a coma?
3
FLASHBACKS OF MYSELF
I was a good boy, who meekly trailed around after his mother in her peregrinations, and squabbled with his elder brother. I am one of the mass of non-problem children. Sometimes, I am gripped by the fear that perhaps I remember nothing because there is nothing worth remembering. My childhood might have been a long string of empty, dreary, dismal days, as monotonous as waves on a beach. And what if I remember all there is to know? What if the opening act of my existence has no vivid moments? A sheltered, cosseted, privileged childhood without a whit of originality or depth – what would I have to complain about? To be spared misfortunes, tragedies, bereavements and accidents is surely a stroke of luck in the making of a man. This book would then be an inquiry into the dull, the futile, a speleological journey into the depths of bourgeois normality, an account of French banality. All happy childhoods are alike; perhaps they do not warrant being remembered. Is it possible to put into words all the phases that a small boy was doomed to experience in Paris during the Sixties and Seventies? I would love to tell the story of how I was merely a deduction in my parents’ annual tax returns.
My only hope, as I embark on this diving expedition, is that writing can rekindle memory. Literature remembers what we have forgotten: to write is to read within oneself. Writing reawakens memory; it is possible to write as one might exhume a body. Every writer is a ghostbuster, a phantom-hunter. Curious phenomena of involuntary recollection have been observed among a number of famous novelists. Writing possesses a supernatural power. One may start writing a book as though consulting a magus or a marabout. Autobiography exists at the crossroads between Sigmund Freud and the famous astrologer Madame Soleil. In his 1969 article ‘What is the Purpose of Writing?’, Roland Barthes states that ‘writing … fulfils a task whose origin is indiscernible’. Might that task be the sudden return of a forgotten past? Proust, his madeleine, his sonata, the two loose paving stones in the courtyard of the Hôtel de Guermantes which raise him up ‘towards the silent heights of memory’? Hmm, so, no pressure then. I’d rather choose a less illustrious but more recent example. In 1975, Georges Perec begins W, or the Memory of Childhood with this sentence: ‘I have no childhood memories.’ His book is filled with them. Something mysterious happens when we close our eyes to summon up the past: memory is like those sake cups offered in some Japanese restaurants, where a naked woman gradually appears at the bottom, and disappears as soon as the cup is drained. I see her, I gaze at her, but the moment I get close, she vanishes: my lost childhood is like that. I pray that some miracle will happen here, that my past will slowly develop in this book like a Polaroid. To quote myself, if I may be so bold – and in an autobiographical text, to try to avoid navel-gazing would be to add absurdity to pretension – this curious phenomenon has already manifested itself. In 2002, while I was writing Windows on the World, a scene suddenly appeared from nowhere: a cold winter morning in 1978, I am leaving my mother’s apartment to walk to school, my US schoolbag on my back, avoiding stepping on the cracks between paving stones. My mouth spewing plumes of condensation, I am bored to death and have to make an effort of will not to throw myself under the number 84 bus. The chapter closes with this sentence: ‘I never escaped that morning.’ The following year, the last page of L’égoïste romantique evokes the smell of leather in my father’s English cars, which as a boy I found nauseating. Four years later, while writing Au secours pardon, I revelled in the memory of a Saturday night spent in my father’s duplex apartment, where my slippers and my blushes seduced several Scandinavian models who were listening to Stevie Wonder’s orange double album. At the time, I attributed these memories to fictional characters (Oscar and Octave), but no one believed they were made up. I was attempting to talk about my childhood, without really daring to.
After my parents’ divorce, my life was cut in two. On one side, maternal moroseness; on the other, paternal hedonism. Sometimes the moods were reversed: the more my mother got back on her feet, the more my father immured himself in silence. My parents’ moods: the communicating vessels of my childhood. The word vessel also conjures the image of a ship run aground. I clearly had to build myself on shifting sands. For one parent to be happy, it was better if the other was not. This was not a conscious battle; on the contrary, I never saw the slightest hint of hostility between them, yet this pendulum swing was all the more implacable for the fact that they both kept smiling.
4
VOWELS, CONSONANTS
On 28 January 2008, the evening had started out well: dinner washed down with grands crus, then the usual bar crawl through dimly lit watering holes, the shots of coloured flavoured vodkas: liquorice, coconut, strawberry, mint, curaçao, downed in one; the shot glasses, black, white, red, green, blue, the colours of Rimbaud’s poem ‘Vowels’. Riding along on my moped, I hummed the Pixies’ ‘Where Is My Mind’. I was dressed up as a schoolboy, wearing suede cowboy boots, with unkempt shoulder-length hair, cloaking my age in my beard and my black raincoat. I have indulged in such nocturnal excesses for more than twenty years; it is my favourite hobby, the sport of grown-ups who refuse to grow up. It’s not easy being a child trapped in the body of an amnesiac adult.
In Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah, the Marquis de Vaugoubert wants to look ‘young, virile and attractive, though he could see and no longer dared to peer into his mirror to inspect the wrinkles solidifying around a face whose many charms he would have wished to preserve’. As you can see, the problem is not new: Proust used the name of the château that belonged to my great-grandfather Thibaud. A mild state of inebriation began to envelop reality, to temper my speed, to make my childish behaviour seem acceptable. A new law had been passed by the republic a month previously forbidding smoking in nightclubs, so a crowd had gathered on the pavement along the avenue Marceau. I was a non-smoker expressing solidarity with the pretty girls in patent-leather pumps who huddled around the proffered cigarette lighters. For a second, their faces were lit like a painting by Georges de la Tour. I was holding a glass in one hand, using the other to cling to friendly shoulders. I kissed the hand of a waitress still waiting for a part in a major motion picture, pulled the hair of the editor of a magazine with no readership. An insomniac generation gathered on Monday nights to stave off the cold, the loneliness, the financial crisis already looming on the horizon – God knows, there’s no shortage of excuses to get plastered. There was also an actor who dabbled in art-house cinema, a few out-of-work girls, bouncers both black and white, a singer on his way out and a writer whose first novel I had published. When the latter took out a white wrap and began to tip powder onto the bonnet of the gleaming black Chrysler parked in the access road, no one protested. Flouting the law amused us: we were living in an era of Prohibition, it was time to rebel like Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier, Brett Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney, like Antoine Blondin, who was rescued from a police station by Roger Nimier disguised as a chauffeur. I was meticulously cutting the white crystals with a gold credit card while my writer friend bitched that his mistress was even more jealous than his wife, something that he considered (and as you can imagine, I was nodding vigorously in agreement) an unforgivable lapse of taste, when suddenly a strobing light made me look up. A two-tone car pulled up in front of us. On the doors were strange blue letters underscored by a red stripe. The letter ‘P’. Consonant. The letter ‘O’. Vowel. The letter ‘L’. Consonant. The letter ‘I’. Vowel. I thought of that TV game show, Countdown. The letter ‘C’. Oh, fuck. The letter ‘E’. Doubtless these widely spaced letters had some hidden meaning. Someone wanted to warn us of something, but what? A siren began to wail, the blue light whirled as on a dance floor. We both scarpered like rabbits. Rabbits in slim-fitting jackets. Rabbits in ankle boots with slippery soles. Rabbits unaware that in the 8th arrondissement 28 January 2008 was the first day of the hunting season. One of the rabbits had even left his credit card with his thermally moulded name lying on the bonnet of the car, while the other did not even think to throw away the illicit packets hidden in his pockets. This dawn marks the end of my endless youth.
5
FRAGMENTS OF AN ARREST
You are the one I have been searching for all this time,
in the throbbing vaults, on the dance floors where I never danced,
amid the forest of people,
beneath the light bridges and the sheets of skin, at the end of painted toenails hanging over the end of blazing beds,
in the depths of these eyes that hold no promises,
in the back yards of ramshackle buildings, among lonely dancers and drunken barmen,
between green rubbish bins and silver convertibles,
I looked for you among fractured stars and violet perfumes,
in icy hands and syrupy kisses, at the bottom of rickety staircases,
at the top of brightly lit elevators,
in pallid joys, in seized opportunities, in fierce handshakes,
and in the end I had to stop looking for you
under a starless vault,
on white boats,
in downy necklines and dark hotels,
in mauve mornings and ivory skies, among marshy dawns,
my vanished childhood.
The police wanted to confirm my identity; I did not protest, it was something I too needed to confirm. ‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’ asks Lear in Shakespeare’s play.
I haven’t slept a wink all night. I don’t know whether the day has dawned: my sky is a crackling white fluorescent tube. I am squeezed into a lightbox. Deprived of space and time, I occupy a container of eternity.
A custody cell is the part of France where maximum pain is concentrated into the minimum square footage.
It is impossible to cling to my youth.
I have to dig deep within myself, like the prisoner Michael Scofield digging a tunnel in Prison Break. To remember in order to go over the wall.
But how can someone take refuge in memories when he has none?
My childhood is not some paradise lost, nor some ancestral trauma. I imagine it more as a slow period of obedience. People have a tendency to idealise their childhood, but a child is first and foremost a bundle that you feed, carry and put to bed. In exchange for bed and board, the bundle conforms on the whole to policies and procedures.
Those who are nostalgic about their childhood are people who miss the time when they were looked after by others.
In the end, a police station is like a day-care centre: they undress you, feed you, keep an eye on you, stop you from leaving. It’s not illogical that my first night in prison should take me back so far.
There are no more adults, only children of all ages. To write a book about my childhood therefore means talking about myself in the present. Peter Pan is amnesiac.
It’s curious that we say someone ‘saved his own skin’ when he runs away. Isn’t it possible to save your skin while staying put?
I can taste salt in my mouth, just as I used to at the beach at Cénitz when I accidentally ended up swallowing seawater.
6
GUÉTHARY, 1972
Of my entire childhood, one single image remains: the beach at Cénitz, near Guéthary; Spain barely visible, sketched along the horizon, a blue mirage suffused with light; this would have been around 1972, before they built the purification plant that stinks, before the restaurant and the car park blocked the path down to the sea. I see the image of a scrawny little boy and an emaciated old man walking side by side along the beach. The grandfather is much more dashing, tanned and handsome than his sickly, pale grandson. The white-haired man skims flat stones on the sea; they skip across the water. The little boy is wearing an orange swimsuit with a seashell embroidered on the terrycloth; his nose is bleeding, a wad of cotton wool pokes out of his right nostril. Count Pierre de Chasteigner de la Rocheposay looks very like the actor Jean-Pierre Aumont. He shouts, ‘Do you know, Frédéric, I’ve seen whales, blue dolphins, even an orca, right here?’
‘What’s an orca?’
‘It’s a big, black killer whale with teeth as sharp as razorblades.’
‘But …’
‘Don’t worry, the monster can’t come close to the shore, he’s too big; here on the beach you’re in no danger.’
To be on the safe side, I decided that day never to set foot in the water again. My grandfather was teaching me to shrimp with a net, and I remember why my elder brother was not with us. At the time, an eminent doctor had told my mother I might have leukaemia. I was on a rest cure, in ‘rehab’, at the age of seven. I had come to the seaside to gather my strength, to breathe in the fresh salt air through a nose clotted with blood. In my grandfather’s house ‘Patrakénéa’ (Basque for ‘The Peculiar House’), in my damp room, a green hot-water bottle would be slipped into my bed; it made a sploshing sound when I moved, and regularly reminded me of its presence by scalding my feet.
The brain twists childhood, to make it better or worse, to make it more interesting than it was. Guéthary 1972 is like a recovered sample of DNA; like the white-coated forensic officer in the 8th arrondissement police station who has just swabbed the insides of my cheeks with a wooden spatula to get a mucus sample, I should be capable of recreating everything from this single strand of hair found on the beach. Unfortunately I am not skilled enough: closing my eyes in my squalid little cell, I can reconstruct only the rocks chafing the soles of my feet, the murmur of the Atlantic roaring in the distance alerting us to the rising tide, the slippery sand between our toes, and my pride that my grandfather has made me responsible for holding the bucket of shrimps wriggling in the brine. On the beach, a few old ladies pull on flowery bathing caps. At low tide, the rocks form little swimming pools, in which the shrimp are held prisoner. ‘You see, Frédéric, you have to scrape around inside the fissures. Go ahead, it’s your turn.’ As he held out the shrimping net, my grandfather, with his white hair and pink espadrilles bought from Garcia, taught me the word ‘fissure’; keeping the net close to the jagged edges of the rocks beneath the water, he caught the poor creatures as they jumped backwards into his net. I tried my luck, but caught only a few listless hermit crabs. But it didn’t matter: I was alone with Bon Papa, and I felt as heroic as he. Walking back up from Cénitz beach, he picked blackberries along the roadside. It was miraculous for a little city kid holding his grandfather’s hand, to discover that nature was a sort of giant smorgasbord: the ocean and the trees teemed with gifts, you had only to stoop and pick them up. Until then I had only ever seen food come out of a fridge or a shopping trolley. I felt as if I were in the Garden of Eden, its pathways burgeoning with fruit.
‘One day, we’ll go to the woods at Vaugoubert and pick ceps under the fallen leaves.’
We never did.
The sky was an uncharacteristic blue: for once, the weather was fine in Guéthary, and the houses seemed to get whiter as we watched, like in those ads for Ajax: The White Tornado. But perhaps it was overcast, perhaps I’m trying to arrange things, perhaps I just need the sun to shine upon the one memory I have of my childhood.
7
NATURAL HELLS
When the police descended on us on the avenue Marceau, we were a dozen revellers huddled together, lighting cigarettes around a car whose gleaming bonnet was striped with parallel white lines. We were more like Marcel Carné’s Youthful Sinners than Larry Clark’s junkie Kids. As soon as the siren began to wail, we scattered to the four winds. The officers only managed to net two delinquents, like my grandfather shrimping, delving into the fissures – in this case the entrance to Alma-Marceau métro station, whose shutters were closed at this late hour. While my friend – let’s call him the Poet – was being arrested, I heard him protest, ‘Life is a nightmare!’ The baffled face of the Policeman in front of the Poet will continue to make me smile until my dying day. Two keepers of the peace carried us right up to the bonnet of contention; I remember having enjoyed this exercise in nocturnal levitation. The ensuing dialogue seemed to be perched midway between Poetry and Public Order.
Policeman: ‘What the hell were you thinking, doing something like that on a car?’
Poet: ‘Life is a NIGHTMARE!’
Me: ‘I am descended from a gallant knight who was crucified on the barbed wire of Champagne.’
Policeman: ‘All right, that’s it, take this lot down to Sarij 8.’
Me: ‘What’s Sarij 8?’
Policeman II: ‘The service for reception, research and judicial investigation of the 8th arrondissement.’
Poet: ‘“As human beings advance through life the romance which dazzled the young man, the fabulousss legend which enchanted him as a child, these wither and grow dim of themselvesss …”’
Me (simultaneously brown-nosing and showing off): ‘That’s not his. Surely you must have read Baudelaire’s Artificial Paradises, Captain? You know that artificial paradises exist to help us escape our natural hells?’
Policeman (into his radio): ‘Boss, we’ve got a violation here!’
Policeman II: ‘You’re crazy to do this on a public highway! Why don’t you hide in the bogs like everyone else? That’s provocation, that is!’
Me (wiping the powder from the bonnet of the car with my scarf): ‘We are not everyone else, Commandant. We’re WRRRRITERS. OK?’
Policeman (brutally grabbing my arm): ‘Boss, the apprehended individual tried to destroy a piece of evidence!’
Me: ‘Hey, hey, easy does it, Mr Officer Sir, no need to break my arm. I liked it better when you carried me.’
Poet (with vehement head movements intended to express human dignity and the pride of the misunderstood artist): ‘Liberty is an impossibility …’
Policeman: ‘Can’t you get this guy to shut up?’
Poet (convinced he is convincing, articulating every syllable, one finger raised like a tramp muttering to himself in the métro): ‘The Powers That Be need aaartists to ssspeak truth to power.’
Policeman: ‘Are you playing the fuckwit with me?’
Poet: ‘No, because you’d be sssure to win.’
Policeman: ‘Well, now, I think that warrants a little time in the cells! All right, boys, bang them up!’
Me: ‘But … my brother is being awarded the Légion d’honneur!’
We were levitated into the wailing two-tone car.
I don’t know why, but I immediately thought of a scene from The Gendarme of St Tropez (1964), where Louis de Funès and Michel Galabru run after a group of nudists on the beach to paint them blue. We used to watch it as a family every spring in Guéthary, in the living room that smelled of wood fires, floor polish and Johnnie Walker on the rocks. Another reference would be Pellos’s comic strip Les Pieds nickelés en plein suspense (1963), but I couldn’t work out which of us was Ribouldingue, and which was Filochard.
I had already been in the back of a police car once, during the Paris Salon du Livre in March 2004. I had tried to go up to President Chirac to give him a T-shirt emblazoned with the face of Gao Xingjian. The Chinese were the guests of honour at the Salon that year, but the winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Literature, a Chinese dissident living in exile in France and a naturalised Frenchman, had been bizarrely ‘forgotten’ by the organisers. Here, too, muscular arms had lifted me off the ground; here, too, I had found the experience somewhat mind-blowing. I have to admit, I was lucky that time: one of the guys carrying me got a reassuring message on his walkie-talkie.
‘Don’t beat him up, he’s famous.’
That day, I thanked God for my notoriety. They released me after an hour, and the following day my brief incarceration made the front page of Le Monde. One hour spent banged up in a police van in order to seem like a fearless defender of human rights offered an excellent ratio of physical pain to media benefit. This time, they were going to lock me up for a little longer, for a cause that was significantly less philanthropic.
8
THE ORIGINAL RAKE
Why Guéthary? Why does my only childhood memory constantly bring me back to the red and white mirage of the Basque Country, where the wind swells sheets pegged to washing lines like the sails of a motionless ship? I often think: That’s where I should have lived. I would be different; growing up there would have changed everything. When I close my eyes, the sea at Guéthary dances beneath my eyelids, and it’s as though I were opening the blue shutters of the old house. I gaze out of that window and tumble into the past; suddenly, I see us again.
A Siamese cat is scampering out of the garage door. We head down to the beach, me, my brother Charles and my aunt Delphine, who is the same age as us (she is my mother’s youngest sister), with buttered ginger cake wrapped in tin foil, rolled-up beach towels under our arms. Along the way, my heart beats faster as we come to the train tracks, for fear of having an accident as my father did in 1947 when he was my age. He was carrying a kayak, one end of which was clipped by the San Sebastian train and he was dragged along the tracks, bleeding profusely, his hip ripped open along the metal rail, his skull fractured, his pelvis crushed. Ever since, there has been a sign at the crossing advising walkers: ‘Warning, one train may hide another.’ But my heart is also beating faster because I hope we might see the girls who man the level-crossing barrier. Isabelle and Michèle Mirailh had golden skin, green eyes, perfect teeth, denim dungarees cut off at the knee. My grandfather didn’t approve of us hanging around with them, but it’s not my fault if the world’s most beautiful women are socially disadvantaged; that is surely God trying to re-establish some semblance of justice here on earth. It hardly mattered anyway, since they only had eyes for Charles, who looked straight through them. They would light up as he passed – ‘Hey, there’s the blond Parisian boy’ – and Delphine would proudly say, ‘So you remember my nephew?’ He walked ahead of me down the hill towards the sea, a golden prince with indigo eyes, a boy so perfect in his polo shirt and white Lacoste Bermuda shorts walking towards the beach in slow motion, his polystyrene body-board sticking out under his arm, amid the burgeoning terraces of hydrangeas … then the smiles of the girls would fade as they saw me trotting along behind, a tousled skeleton with uncoordinated limbs, a sickly clown with incisors broken in a game of conkers in the Bagatelle gardens, knees crusted with purple scabs, a peeling nose, clutching the latest contraption to come free with Pif Gadget. It was not that they were repulsed by my appearance, but when Delphine introduced me, their eyes were elsewhere: ‘And, er … this is Frédéric, his little brother.’ I blushed to the tips of the jug ears that stuck out from my blond mop. I couldn’t bring myself to speak, paralysed with shyness.
I spent my whole childhood struggling not to blush. If someone spoke to me, scarlet blotches appeared on my cheeks. If a girl looked at me, my cheekbones took on a garnet hue. If a teacher asked me a question in class, my face flushed purple. Out of necessity I had perfected techniques to hide my blushes: retying my shoelace, turning round as though there were something fascinating behind me, setting off at a run, hiding my face behind my hair, taking off my jumper.
The Mirailh sisters, sitting on the low whitewashed wall by the edge of the train track, swung their legs in the burst of sunshine between summer showers while I did up my laces, breathing in the damp earth. But they paid me no heed: I thought I was beet red, but in fact I was transparent. Thinking back about my invisibility still makes me angry, it filled me with such terrible sadness, such loneliness and bewilderment! I bit my nails, I had a terrible complex about my protruding chin, my elephant’s ears and my skeletal thinness, which made me the butt of taunts at school. Life is a vale of tears, there’s nothing to be done: never in my life did I have more love to give than I did on that day, but the girls who manned the barrier wanted none of it, and my brother was not to blame if he was better-looking than me. Isabelle showed him a bruise on her thigh: ‘Look, yesterday I fell off my bike, see there? Here, touch it, ow! not too hard, you’re hurting me …’, while Michèle tried to charm Charles by leaning back, her long black hair streaming, her eyes closing like those dolls whose eyes shut when you lie them down and open again when you sit them up. Oh my fair damsels, if you but knew how little he cared about you! Charles was fretting about the game of Monopoly we would pick up again that night, about his mortgaged houses on the rue de la Paix and the avenue Foch; even at the age of nine he lived the life he does today, with the world at his feet, the universe bending to his conqueror’s whims, and in that perfect life there was no place for you. I can understand your admiration (we always want what we cannot have), because I admired my triumphant elder brother as much as you did, I was so proud to be his younger brother I would have followed him to the ends of the earth – ‘Oh brother who art dearer to me than the brightness of day’ – and that’s why I don’t resent you; quite the opposite, I am grateful to you: if you had loved me from the first, would I ever have written?
This memory came back to me spontaneously: when you are in prison, childhood floats back to the surface. Perhaps what I took for amnesia was merely freedom.
9
A FRENCH NOVEL
All four of my grandparents were dead before I was truly curious about their lives. Children take their own immortality for a generality, but their parents’ parents pass away without giving them time to ask all their questions. By the time when, having become parents themselves, children finally want to know where they came from, the graves no longer answer.
Between the two world wars, love reasserted itself; couples came together; I am a distant result of those couples.
Sometime around 1929, the son of a doctor in Pau who had hacked off a number of legs at Verdun attended a recital at the Conservatoire Américain in Fontainebleau, where he was doing his military service. A widowed singer (born in Dalton, Georgia) by the name of Nellie Harben Knight was performing Schubert lieder, arias from The Marriage of Figaro and Puccini’s famous ‘O mio babbino caro’ wearing a long white dress trimmed with lace – at least I hope so. I found a photo of Nellie wearing that dress in an edition of the New York Times dated 23 October 1898, which states: ‘Her voice is a clear, sympathetic soprano of extended range and agreeable quality.’ My great-grandmother with her ‘clear soprano’ was accompanied on her tours by her daughter Grace, who well deserved her Christian name. A willowy blonde girl, with blue eyes permanently fixed on her piano keys, like the heroine of a Henry James novel, she was the daughter of a colonel in the British Army in India who died in 1921 of Spanish influenza: Morden Carthew-Yorstoun met and married Nellie in Bombay, having earlier served in the Zulu War in South Africa, with Lord Kitchener in the Sudan, and having led a New Zealand regiment, the Poona Horse, during the Boer War with Winston Churchill under his command. The soldier from Pau managed to catch the eye of this orphan of intriguing ancestry, and later to hold her hand during some frenzied waltzes, foxtrots and Charlestons. They discovered they shared the same sense of humour, the same love of Art – Jeanne Devaux, young Béarnais’s mother, had been a painter (she had notably painted a portrait of Marie, wife of the poet Paul-Jean Toulet, in Guéthary), a profession almost as exotic as that of a singer. The young man from south-west France suddenly became an ardent music lover who regularly attended the soirées at the Conservatoire Américain. Charles Beigbeder and Grace Carthew-Yorstoun met up whenever he was on furlough; he lied about his age: born in 1902, at twenty-six he should have been long since married. But he loved poetry, music and champagne. The prestige conferred by his uniform (Grace, after all, was a soldier’s daughter) did the rest. Young Grace never returned to New York. The couple were married at the town hall of the 16th arrondissement on 28 April 1931. They had two boys and two girls; the second son, born in 1938, was my father. On the death of his own father, young Charles inherited a spa in Pau: the ‘Sanatorium of the Pyrenees’. It was a vast property of nearly two hundred acres (forests, copses, meadows, gardens) rising to a peak among the hills of Jurançon, at an altitude of 335 metres. As in The Magic Mountain, a well-to-do clientele in dinner jackets contemplated the spectacular sunsets over the central Pyrenees and, to the north, the expansive vista over the town of Pau and the Gave valley. It was hard to resist the call of the forests of mature pines and oaks, where children could gambol freely before being packed off to boarding school – in those days, parents did not raise their children themselves, and, as we will later see, that’s still true to some extent. Charles Beigbeder resigned from his position as a solicitor with no regrets and took my grandmother to breathe the healing air of Béarn, where she could yell at the servants to her heart’s content and forge bonds with the local British community. With money from his wife and his mother, my grandfather invested in my father’s business. Soon our family owned a dozen sanatoriums in the region, renamed ‘The Health Spas of Béarn’, and my grandparents acquired the Villa Navarre, a superb house in Pau in the English cottage style, where Jean-Paul Toulet, Francis Jammes and Paul Valéry were regular visitors (family legend has it that the author of Monsieur Teste wrote his correspondence very early in the morning; the butler, whose name was Octave, used to grumble at having to wake at 4 a.m. to bring him his pot of coffee). A Catholic and a militant royalist, Charles Beigbeder looked like Paul Morand and was an assiduous reader of the far-right journal Action française, something which did not prevent him being elected president of the Cercle Anglais (exclusively male, it was, at the time, the most elegant club in Pau; he organised literary salons there). In the 1950s the family inherited a villa on the Basque coast, Cénitz Aldea (meaning ‘Near Cénitz’ in Basque) in Guéthary, a little village that had been fashionable since the Belle Époque. Tuberculosis did much for the fortunes of my family, and I have no hesitation in saying that the discovery of streptomycin by Selman Waksman around 1943 was an absolute catastrophe for my inheritance.
During the period we now call the interwar years (as though these young people could have anticipated that their post-war was also a pre-war), life was more austere in the great houses of the verdant Périgord. A countess who, as we know, had lost her husband in the second Battle of Champagne found herself alone at Quinsac, living in the château of Vaugoubert with two girls and two boys. In those days, Catholic war widows remained sexually faithful to their dead husbands. And of course, their children were called upon to sacrifice themselves. The two girls looked after their mother, something she encouraged in them – they did so for the rest of their lives. As for the two boys, they were automatically enrolled at the French military academy of Saint-Cyr, where an aristocratic ‘de’ in one’s name was highly regarded. The elder boy agreed to marry an aristocratic girl who was not really his choice. Sadly, she quickly cuckolded him with a swimming instructor: the young man was heartbroken at being so poorly rewarded for his docility. He filed for divorce; in retaliation, his mother disinherited him. The younger brother, too, suffered misfortune: posted to the garrison at Limoges, he fell in love with a ravishing commoner, a dark-haired girl with blue eyes who danced atop pianos (problem number one), and whom he impregnated out of wedlock (problem number two). Their union had to rapidly be formalised: the marriage of Comte Pierre de Chasteigner de la Rocheposay and the ravishing Nicole Marcland, known as Nicky, took place on 31 August 1939, in Limoges. The date was ill-starred: the very next day, Germany invaded Poland. Bon Papa barely had time to invade Bonne Maman. The phoney war awaited him, in which the Maginot Line proved as unreliable as the rhythm method. Pierre found himself a prisoner. When he escaped, a nun having lent him civilian clothes and false papers, he returned to France to sire my mother. It was then that he learned that he too was to be disinherited, since his mother the countess found it difficult at Sunday Mass to acknowledge this marriage which was beneath her station, despite the fact that it had been celebrated by the local priest in the chapel of her own château. Curious are the customs of the Catholic aristocracy, which entail disinheriting those who are already more or less orphaned. The lineage of the Chasteigners de la Rocheposay goes back to the Crusades (I am descended from Hugues Capet, though I imagine that in this I am one of many), and includes a Bishop of Poitiers, who was ambassador in Rome to Henri II. Ronsard dedicated an ode to one of my ancestors, Anthoine, abbot of Nanteuil. Though written in 1550, these lines remained relevant to me on that fateful night’s stay in January 2008:
As time, so pass the trappings of this world
According to its motion
Life is fleet, and seasons, suddenly unfurl’d
Fast whither to a notion. […]
Like a spring, young children grow
Then blossom in a summer
Surprised by winter they no longer show
What once they were.
Despite the warning given to my great-great-grandfather by ‘the Prince of Poets’, my grandfather was thus sacrificed on the altar of the Great Passion. In love, he made the same choice as the Duke of Windsor had three years earlier, and as Madame Cécilia Ciganer-Albeniz would sixty-eight years later when she married Nicolas Sarkozy: sacrificing château rather than happiness. When the war was over, Pierre de Chasteigner occupied Germany with his whole family for several years, in the Palatinate, then resigned his commission in 1949 so he would not be posted to Indochina. He was thus forced to investigate an activity no one in his lineage had attempted for about a millennium: work. He settled in a Paris apartment with shelves weighed down with volumes of the Bottin Mondain and the erotic works of Pierre Louÿs, on the rue de Sfax, while taking orders from his brother-in-law who ran a pharmaceutical laboratory. These were not his happiest years. When one no longer has the money to live like a king in Paris, one takes one’s wife to the seaside to make a fourth in bridge and more children. Now, Nicky’s father owned a house at Guéthary, of which she had fond memories. The Count and Countess decided to buy a little place there in return for a lifetime annuity to a Madame Damour, who had the good grace to shuffle off this mortal coil with little delay. So it was that the aristocratic military man and his six children moved in to Patrakénéa, directly opposite Cénitz Aldea, the holiday resort of the bourgeois-bohemian, Americano-Béarnais, Beigbeder family. The reader should now begin to understand the strategic importance of this place. In Guéthary, my two families will become friends, and my father will shortly meet my mother.
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