The Counterfeiters (51 page)

A moment later (I don’t know where Proust had gone) I found myself alone in the room. A sort of majordomo clad in a long green and black frock-coat came to close the shutters, like a museum attendant when it is about to strike five. I got up to leave and had to file through a series of lavish drawing-rooms at the side of the majordomo. I slipped on the polished floor, almost fell, and finally, losing my balance, fell sobbing to the floor at the feet of the majordomo. I then began to explain, with a great display of bombast
and rhetoric, which I considered proper to cover the absurdity of my confession:

“I lied just now when I pretended I pulled the books down by mistake; I knew they would fall if I pulled the string, and I pulled it just the same. I could not resist.”

I had got back to my feet, and the majordomo, supporting me in his arms, slapped me on the shoulder several times in the Russian manner.

In the compartment of the Annecy train a worker, after having tried in vain to light his pipe:

“At the price matches are, it really counts when they don’t light.”

I am so afraid (and I should dislike it so much) of letting my emotions bend my thinking that it is often precisely when someone is most inclined against me that I am tempted to speak most highly of him.

At the time of my reading to R. Martin du Gard (August, Pontigny), I was obliged to recognize that the best parts of my book are the parts of pure invention. If I spoiled the portrait of old La Pérouse, it was because I clung too closely to reality; I neither knew how nor was able to lose sight of my model. The narrative of that first visit will have to be done over. La Pérouse will not come to life nor shall I really visualize him until he completely displaces his original.
²⁸
Nothing so far has
given me so much trouble. The difficult thing is inventing when you are encumbered by memory.

Have completely gone over this chapter; I think it is rather good now.

Certainly it is easier for me to put words into a character’s mouth than to express myself in my own name—and particularly when the character I am creating differs most from me. I have written nothing better or with more facility than Lafcadio’s monologues, or Alissa’s journal.
²⁹
In this sort of thing I forget who I am, if indeed I have ever known. I become the other person. (They try to find out my opinion; I have no interest in my own opinion. I am no longer someone, but several—whence the reproaches for my restlessness, my instability, my fickleness, my inconstancy.) Push abnegation to the point of complete self-oblivion.

(I told Claudel,
³⁰
one night when he, as a friend, was worried about the salvation of my soul: “I have lost all interest in my soul and its salvation.” “But God,” he replied, “He hasn’t lost interest in you.”)

In life as well, the thoughts and emotions of others dwell in me; my heart beats only through sympathy. This is what makes any discussion so difficult for me. I immediately abandon
my
point of view. I get away from myself—and so be it.

This is the key to my character and work. The critic who fails to grasp this will botch the job—and this too: I am not drawn toward what resembles me, but toward what differs from me.

Jacques Rivière has just left me.
³¹
He has been staying here for three days. I read him the first seventeen chapters of
Les Faux-Monnayeurs
(chapters one and two are to be completely redone).

It might be well to introduce into the very first chapter a fantastic and supernatural element—an element that will later authorize certain deviations in the plot, certain unrealities. I think it would be best to do a “poetic” description of the Luxembourg—which must be as mythical a place at the Forest of Arden in the fantasies of Shakespeare.

The difficulty arises from the fact that I must start anew with each chapter.
Never take advantage of momentum
—such is the rule of my game.

The book now seems frequently animated with its own life; it reminds one of a plant developing, and my brain is simply the earth-filled pot that contains and feeds it. It even seems to me unwise to try to “force” the plant, that it is better to let its buds swell, its stalks stretch out, its fruits ripen slowly. If you try to advance the hour of natural maturity you impair the fullness of their flavor.

Since they are preventing me from reading and meditating, I shall note as they come the remarks of the
fat lady who, with her husband, is occupying two of the other seats in my compartment:

“Just the same, they’re convenient, these cars with exits in each compartment—in case of an accident” (our car is one with a corridor). “Look! You’d think it was a fellow on top of the roof—that weathervane. I didn’t know Amer-Picon had a factory at Batignolles.”

THE HUSBAND
: “We’re in the suburbs. The suburbs, which already …”

THE WIFE
: “There are a few clouds, but it won’t rain. You might as well take off your coat. La! la, la, la.”

THE HUSBAND
: “Eh?”

THE WIFE
: “La, la, la, la. Isn’t that Rouen over there?”

THE HUSBAND
: “Oh, la, la! Two hours from here.”

THE WIFE
: “Look at the shape of those chimneys.”

THE HUSBAND
: “Argenteuil … asparagus.”

The lady caught my eye. She bent over toward her husband, and from that moment on they spoke only in a whisper. So much the better. Nevertheless I heard:

THE HUSBAND
: “It isn’t sincere.”

THE WIFE
: “Of course not. To be sincere it would have to be …”

Admirable—the person who never finishes his sentences. Mme Vedel, the pastor’s wife.

The translation of
Tom Jones
, the proofs of which Dent has just sent me, is most mediocre. I decline to write the introduction. After a long parley involving Rhys (Dent’s representative), Valery Larbaud,
³²
and myself, the Dent firm abandons the undertaking. I find
myself again confronted with my
Faux-Monnayeurs
, but this brief plunge into Fielding has enlightened me as to the insufficiencies of my book. I am wondering whether I shouldn’t expand the text, intrude myself (in spite of what Martin du Gard says), make comments. I have lost touch.

The style of
Les Faux-Monnayeurs
should offer no surface interest—no handhold. Everything must be said in the flattest manner possible, which will cause certain sleight-of-hand artists to ask: what do you find to admire in that?

From the very first line of my first book I have sought a direct expression of the state of my character—some sentence that would be a direct revelation of his inner state—rather than to portray that state. The expression might have been clumsy and weak, but the principle was right.

All those heroes I have hewn out of my own flesh lack this one thing: the modicum of common sense that keeps me from carrying my follies as far as they do.

Lady Griffith’s character is and must remain somewhat outside the book. She has no moral existence, or even, as a matter of fact, any personality; this is what is soon going to irritate Vincent. Those two lovers are made to hate each other.

The difficulty lies in not constructing the rest of my novel as a prolongation of the lines already traced. A perpetual upheaval; each new chapter must pose a new problem, be an overture, a new direction, a new impulse, a forward plunge—of the reader’s mind. But the reader must leave me as the stone leaves the slingshot. I am even willing that, like a boomerang, he should come back and strike me.

Wrote the three chapters to precede the opening of the school year at the
pension
(Édouard’s Journal: conversations with Molinier, with the Vedel-Azaïs family, with La Pérouse).

I want to bring each of my characters successively before the footlights to allow him the place of honor for a few moments.

A breathing-space necessary between the chapters (but I’d have to make the reader take one too).

Bernard’s elder brother convinces himself he must be a “man of action.” In other words, he becomes a partisan. He has his riposte ready before his adversary has spoken; he hardly lets his interlocutor finish his sentence. Listening to others might weaken him. He works steadily and aims to teach himself, but in his reading he seeks only ammunition for his cause. In the beginning he still suffered from a slight discrepancy he felt between his thoughts and his words; I mean that his words, his
statements before like-minded friends, were often ahead of his thoughts. But he took care to get his thoughts into step with his words. Now he really
believes
what he affirms, and doesn’t even feel it necessary to add “sincerely” to each of his declarations as he used to do.

Bernard has a talk with him after his bachelor’s exam. He was on the point of going back to his father. The conversation he has with his conservative brother throws him back into revolt.

The poor novelist constructs his characters; he controls them and makes them speak. The true novelist listens to them and watches them function; he eavesdrops on them even before he knows them. It is only according to what he hears them say that he begins to understand
who
they are.

I have put “watches them function” second—because, for me, speech tells me more than action. I think I should lose less if I went blind than if I became deaf. Nevertheless I do
see
my characters—not so much in their details as in their general effect, and even more in their actions, their gait, the rhythm of their movements. I do not worry if the lenses of my glasses fail to show them completely “in focus”; whereas I perceive the least inflections of their voices with the greatest sharpness.

I wrote the first dialogue between Olivier and Bernard and the scenes between Passavant and Vincent without having the slightest idea what I was going to do with those characters, or even who they were. They thrust themselves upon me, despite me. Nothing miraculous in this. I understand rather well the formation of an imaginary character, and of what cast-off part of oneself he is made.

There is no act, however foolish or harmful, that is not the result of interacting causes, connections, and concomitances. No doubt there are very few crimes of
which the responsibility cannot be shared, to the success of which several did not contribute—albeit without their knowledge or will. The sources of our slightest acts are as diverse and remote as those of the Nile.

The renouncement of virtue through the surrender of pride.

Profitendieu must be completely redrawn. When he first launched into my book, I didn’t properly understand him. He is much more interesting than I thought.

Boris. The poor child realizes that there is not one of his qualities, not one of his virtues, that his companions cannot turn into a shortcoming: his chastity into impotence, his sobriety into absence of appetite, his general abstinence into cowardice, his sensitiveness into weakness. Just as there are no bonds like shortcomings or vices held in common, likewise nobility of soul prevents easy acceptance (being accepted as well as accepting).

Jarry.
³⁴
He had a keen sense of language; or rather, of the weight of words. He constructed massive, stable sentences, their full length touching the ground.

Another article of their code was what I might call “the doctrine of least effort.” With the exception of a small minority, who were considered show-offs and malcontents, all of these children made it a point of honor, or of self-esteem, to obtain everything by paying
or straining as little as possible. One of them might be proud of having obtained a desired object at a bargain, another might have discovered the solution of a problem without having devoted any effort to calculating, perhaps a means of locomotion that will allow him to leave for class five minutes later—the principle remained the same. “No useless effort” was their foolish motto. None of them had been able to comprehend that there can be reward in effort itself, that there can be any other recompense than the goal achieved.

There is a possibility that this attitude of mind (which I personally consider one of the most tiresome) becomes less dangerous as soon as it is catalogued. It happens that we name things only when we are breaking with them; this formula may quite well presage a new departure.

The clothing of these children reflected the same ethics. Everything about them breathed strictness; everything was parsimoniously measured. Their jackets (I speak of those who were most elegant) circled them like the bark of a tree burst in front by the growth of the trunk. Their collars left their neckties only the tiniest space for the tiniest knot. This even applied to their shoes, of which several of these young fellows artfully tucked in the laces so as to let only the indispensable be seen.

I was to have left on 6 November for the Congo; all the arrangements were made, cabin space booked, etc. I put off the departure until July. Hope of finishing my book (this, however, is not the principal reason for my staying).

I have just written Chapter x of Part Two (Olivier’s unsuccessful suicide). Ahead I can see only a terrible confusion—underbrush so thick I don’t know which
branch to begin hacking. According to my method, I take patience and study the thicket carefully before attacking it.