The Difficulty of Being (5 page)

It is in this way that a war is disastrous. If it does not kill, it transmits to some an energy alien to their own resources; to others it permits what the law forbids and accustoms them to short cuts. It artificially glorifies ingenuity, pity, daring. A whole younger generation believes itself to be sublime and collapses when it has to draw on itself for patriotism and fate.

The surprise of these exiles from drama would be great if they were to discover that those tragic episodes, whose sudden cessation has left them on the brink of a void, are just as plentiful in this void as in themselves. That it would be enough to retreat into themselves and pay the costs within instead of without. If the war could enlighten them as to how to use their talents on their own later on, it would be a rough school. But it only gives them an excuse for living faster, and real life appears to them like death. When I write that I escaped, after the letter to Maritain, I mean this literally. I experienced all the palpitations, the anguish, the uncertainty, the patience, the resourcefulness about which that captain used to talk to me. And this was not my first escape, nor my last. I have more than one to my credit.

Jacques Maritain often visited me at the clinic where I was disintoxicating myself of opium. I had taken opium, formerly taken daily by our masters under the label of laudanum or opiates, in order to alleviate intolerable nervous pains. After the death of Raymond Radiguet, whom I thought of as my son, these pains had gained such an ascendency that Louis Laloy, at Monte Carlo, advised the palliative. Opium is a living substance. It does not like to be hustled. It made me ill. It was only after a quite long trial that it came to my aid. But it slowed up the works and I feared it. My numerous attempts to flee from it, my checks, my relapses, my success (due to Dr Lichwitz) after five failures, would be worth dwelling on at length. How many cells I escape from, how many sentries
take aim at me, how many fortresses I am led back to, the walls of which I succeed in vaulting!

My first important escape (for I do not count those from school, my flight to Marseilles and other escapades) was in 1912. I came of a family that loved music and painting, and for whom literature meant little or nothing. My father used to paint. Whenever an artist opens his box I smell the oil paints. I see him. My grandfather collected excellent pictures, Stradivarius and Greek busts. He arranged quartets. In which he played the cello. I drew. I wrote. I gave myself up, blindly, to gifts, which if they are not channelled scatter our efforts and act like a pox. Naturally people flattered me. I met no obstacles. I found followers. I succeeded in bewitching a fair number and in being intoxicated with my mistakes.

Without any doubt this line was leading straight to the
Académie
. One day I met Gide. He made me ashamed of my writing. I was embellishing it with arabesques. He was the source of a sudden awakening, the approach to which cost me dear. Few people will allow one to discover oneself. They accuse us of going over to the other camp. Deserter here, suspect there: it is the loneliness of Calchas.
^*

The Russian Ballet of Serge de Diaghilev played its part in this critical phase. He was splashing Paris with colour. The first time I attended one of his performances (they were giving
Le Pavillon d’Armide
) I was in a stall rented by my family. The whole thing unfolded far away behind the footlights, in that burning bush in which the theatre blazes for those who do not regularly go backstage.

I met Serge de Diaghilev at Madame Sert’s. From that
moment I became a member of the company. I no longer saw Nijinsky except from the wings or from the box in which, behind Madame Sert, topped with her Persian aigrette, Diaghilev followed his dancers with a pair of tiny mother-of-pearl opera glasses.

What memories I have of all this! What could I not write about it! That is not my purpose. After the scandal of
Le Sacre
, I went to join Stravinsky at Leysin, where he was looking after his wife. There I finished the
Potomak
, begun at Offranville at J. E. Blanche’s house, under the eye of Gide. Returning to Maisons-Laffitte I decided to put an end to it or to be reborn. I became a recluse. I tortured myself. I questioned myself. I insulted myself. I punished myself with self-denial.

I kept nothing of myself but the ashes. The war came. It found me well prepared to escape its traps, to judge what it brings, what it takes away and how it delivers us from stupidity, now busy elsewhere. I had the good fortune to be living close to the marines. Among them an incredible freedom of thought prevailed. I have described this in the
Discours du Grand Sommeil
and in
Thomas l’Imposteur
.
^†

I repeat that, in Paris, the field was free. We occupied it. As early as 1916 our revolution began.

After Stravinsky, Picasso. At last I knew the secret without knowledge of which all mental effort is fruitless. A world existed in which the artist finds before he seeks and finds unceasingly. A world where the wars are the wars of religion. Picasso, Stravinsky were its leaders.

One attaches too much importance to the word genius. One is too economical with it. Stendhal used it to describe a woman who knew how to step into a carriage. In this sense I had genius and very little talent. My mind went by instinct
straight to the mark, but did not know how to use it. One can guess what the friendship meant to me of the creators of
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
and of
Les Noces
. I elbowed my way through a mass of quarrels, disputes, trials for heresy. I searched for myself. I thought I recognized myself, I lost sight of myself, I ran after myself, I caught myself up, out of breath. As soon as I succumbed to some spell I was up in arms against it.

That youth progresses by injustice, is justice. For soon enough comes the age of looking back. One returns and can then enjoy what one strode over or trampled underfoot on one’s way.

The first chimes of a period which began in 1912 and will only end with my death, were rung for me by Diaghilev, one night in the Place de la Concorde. We were going home, having had supper after the show. Nijinsky was sulking as usual. He was walking ahead of us. Diaghilev was scoffing at my absurdities. When I questioned him about his moderation (I was used to praise), he stopped, adjusted his eyeglass and said: ‘Astonish me.’ The idea of surprise, so enchanting in Apollinaire, had never occurred to me.

In 1917, the evening of the first performance of
Parade
, I did astonish him.

This very brave man listened, white as a sheet, to the fury of the house. He was frightened. He had reason to be. Picasso, Satie and I were unable to get back to the wings. The crowd recognized and threatened us. Without Apollinaire, his uniform and the bandage round his head, women armed with pins would have put out our eyes.

A little while later the
Joseph
of Hofmannsthal was given a triumphant reception. I was in his box. At the tenth curtain call Hofmannsthal leant over to Diaghilev: ‘I would have preferred a scandal,’ he told him. And Diaghilev, in the same
manner he had used when he said to me ‘Astonish me,’ replied to him: ‘But you see … you see that’s not so easy.’

From 1917, when he was fourteen, Raymond Radiguet taught me to distrust the new if it had a new look, to run counter to the fashions of the
avant-garde
. This puts one in an awkward position. One shocks the right. One shocks the left. But, at a distance, all these contradictions come together under one label. Clever the one who can sort this out. The young people who visit our ruins see only one style. The age called ‘heroic’ displays nothing but its daring. This is how a Museum works. It levels. Ingres and Delacroix side by side, Matisse with Picasso, Braque with Bonnard. And even, let me say, in a recent revival of
Faust
, the old garden set, the work of Jusseaume, had become, thanks to dust and unconscious similarities, a magnificent Claude Monet.

But this phenomenon of perspective does not concern youth. Youth can only assert itself through the conviction that its ventures surpass all others and resemble nothing.

FRANCE IS A COUNTRY THAT DISPARAGES HERSELF
. This is all to the good, for otherwise she would be the most pretentious country in the world. The essential thing is that she is not self-conscious. Whatever is self-conscious neutralizes itself. In my novel
Les Enfants Terribles
I took great care to show that this sister and this brother were not self-conscious. Had they been conscious of their poetic strength they would at once have been aesthetes and have moved from the active to the passive. No. They loathe themselves. They loathe their room. They want another life. That, no doubt, of such as imitate them and lose their privileges for a world that only exists through the certainty that privileges are elsewhere and that they don’t possess any.

I have at home a letter of de Musset’s written at the period most rich in genius. He complains that there is not one artist, not one book, not one painter, not one play. The Comédie-Française, he says, is crumbling in the dust, and Madame Malibran is singing in London because the Opéra sings out of tune. Every period in France has this peculiarity that, with all the richness under her nose, she sees nothing there and looks for it elsewhere.

How ridiculous are those who try to express her greatness in words! ‘Greatness, purity, constructive works.’ Such is the modern refrain. Meanwhile greatness, purity, constructive
works are produced in a form that remains invisible to them and would seem to them a disgrace to the country. And the critics judge the works and do not realize that they are judged by them. Who makes the greatness of France? It is Villon, it is Rimbaud, it is Verlaine, it is Baudelaire. All that splendid company was put in the lock-up. People wanted to drive it out of France. It was left to die in the poorhouse. I do not mean Joan of Arc. With her it’s the trial that counts. Sad is her revenge. Poor Péguy! I was so fond of him. He was an anarchist. What would he say of the use made of his name?

France’s attitude after the liberation was simple. She did not take one. Under the yoke of armed force, how could she? What line should she have taken? Said to the world: ‘I didn’t want to fight. I don’t like to fight. I had no weapons. I shall not have any. I possess a secret weapon. What? Since it is secret, how can I answer you?’ And if the world insists:
‘My secret weapon is a tradition of anarchy.’

That is a powerful answer. An enigma. Enough to perplex the great powers. ‘Invade me. All the same in the long run I shall possess you.’

Since such a Chinese attitude has not been adopted and we have talked a lot of hot air, what chance is now left to us? To become a village, as Lao-Tze advocates. To be no longer enviable save through the invisible, more spacious than the visible, and sovereign.

Lao-Tze, speaking of the ideal empire, says: ‘To hear the cocks from one end of the land to the other.’

What is France, I ask you? A cock on a dung-heap. Remove the dung, the cock dies. That’s what happens when you push folly to the point of confusing a dung-heap with a heap of garbage.

EVER SINCE AS A CHILD I WATCHED MY MOTHER
and my father leaving for the theatre, I have suffered from the fever of crimson and gold. I never get used to it. Every curtain that rises takes me back to that solemn moment when, as the curtain of the Châtelet rose on
Round the World in Eighty Days
, the chasms of darkness and of light became one, separated by the footlights. These footlights set the bottom of the wall of painted canvas aglow. As this flimsy wall did not touch the boards, one obtained a glimpse of coming and going in a furnace. Apart from this gap the only aperture by which the two worlds communicated was a hole edged with brass. The smell of the circus was one thing. The narrow box with its uncomfortable little chairs was another. And as in the rooms of Mena-House, where the windows open on to the Pyramids, in the little box the oceanic murmur of the audience hits you in the face, the cry of the attendants: ‘Peppermints, caramels, acid-drops,’ the crimson cavern and the chandelier which Baudelaire liked better than the show.

As time passes, the theatre I work in does not lose its prestige. I respect it. It overawes me. It fascinates me. There I divide in two. I live in it and I become the child permitted by the ticket seller to enter Hades.

When I put on
La Voix Humaine
at the Comédie-Française,
and later
Renaud et Armide
, I was astonished that my colleagues should consider this theatre to be the same as any other and would produce plays there written for no matter where. The Comédie-Française remained in my eyes that house of marble and velvet haunted by the great shades of my youth. Yesterday, Marais telephoned from Paris saying they had asked him to return there, but this time on first-class terms. He asked my advice, no doubt in order that I might dissuade him. I have a number of reasons for doing so. But I hesitated to reply. The naïve respect which this theatre rouses in me had just waved its red cape. In a flash I saw Mounet-Sully crossing the stage from right to left in the guise of the young Ruy Blas. He was old. His beard was white. Almost blind, his head sunken between his shoulders, he held a candelabrum. And his walk was the Spaniard’s.

I saw de Max, with a hand covered in rings, shaking his black locks in the air and trailing his veils. I saw Madame Bartet, old bird without a neck, singing Andromache. I saw Madame Segond-Weber, in
Rodogune
, poisoned, and goose-stepping off the stage with her tongue out.

All this was hardly likely to encourage a young man. And yet I hesitated to say to him: ‘refuse’. Once the receiver was hung up again, those superb old-stagers were still operative. Reason told me: ‘This actor has just made your film. He is acting in your play. He is to act in your next. He is in demand everywhere. He is highly paid. He is free.’ Unreason showed me the child that I had been, led to my Thursday seat by an attendant with a pink bow and a grey moustache, and Marais in that frame of gold, playing the part of Nero in which he is incomparable.