The Difficulty of Being (7 page)

The cinematograph is fifty years old. My own age, alas. A lot for me. Very little for a Muse who expresses herself through the medium of ghosts and with equipment still in its infancy if one compares it with the use of paper and ink.

It seems likely that the remark ‘Do write about the marvels of the cinematograph,’ derives from the films
Le Sang d’un Poète
and
La Belle et la Bête
, conceived at an interval of fifteen years, and in which everyone sees the embodiment of that curiosity which impels us to open forbidden doors, to walk in the dark humming to keep up our courage.

Now,
Le Sang d’un Poète
is only a descent into oneself, a way of using the mechanism of the dream without sleeping, a crooked candle, often mysteriously blown out, carried about in the night of the human body. There the actions link as they please, under so feeble a control that one could not ascribe it to the mind. Rather to a kind of somnolence helping memories to break out, free to combine, to entwine, to distort themselves until they take shape unknown to us and become for us an enigma.

Nowhere is less fitted than France for the exercise of this faculty which has recourse neither to reason nor to symbols. Few French people are prepared to enjoy an exceptional event without knowing its source, its object, or without investigating it. They prefer to laugh at it and treat it with contempt.

The symbol is their last resort. It gives them some scope. It also allows them to explain the incomprehensible and to endow with hidden meaning whatever draws its beauty from not having any. ‘Why? Is it a joke? Whose leg are you pulling?’ are the weapons that France uses against the new form, which some proud spirit takes on when it manifests itself, contrary to all expectation, and intrigues a few of the open-minded.

These few open-minded people are at once taken to be accomplices. Sometimes snobs, who have inherited the flair of kings, follow them blindly. This creates a mix-up which the general public cold-shoulders, incapable of recognizing the signs of a new embryonic form which it will acclaim tomorrow. And so forth. The marvellous then, since a prodigy
can only be a prodigy in so far as a natural phenomenon still eludes us, would be not the miracle that sickens by the disorder it causes, but the simple miracle, human and absolutely down to earth, which consists in giving to objects and to people an unusual quality that defies analysis. As is proved to us by Vermeer of Delft.

This painter certainly paints what he sees, but such accuracy, pleasing to everyone, shows us where he deviates from it. For if he does not use any artifice to surprise us, our surprise is the more profound, faced with the peculiarities which earn him his uniqueness and preclude us from making the slightest comparison between his work and that of his contemporaries. Any other painter of the same school paints with the same frankness. It is a pity that such frankness does not divulge any secret for us. In Vermeer space is peopled from another world than the one he depicts. The subject of his picture is only a pretext, a vehicle through which to express the realm of the marvellous.

This is what I was coming to: that the cinematograph can ally itself with the marvellous, as I see it, if it is content to be a vehicle for it and if it does not try to produce it. The kind of rapture that transports us when in contact with certain works is seldom due to any attempt to move us to tears, or to any surprise effect. It is rather, I repeat, induced in an inexplicable manner by a breach which opens unawares.

This breach will occur in a film in the same way as in a tragedy, a novel or a poem. The rapture will not come from its opportunities for trickery. It will come from some error, from some syncope, from some chance encounter between the attention and inattention of its author.
^*
Why should he behave
differently from the Muses? His talent for deceiving the eye and the mind also deceives one about his claim to nobility.

Cinematography is an art. It will free itself from the industrial bondage whose platitudes no more condemn it than bad pictures and bad books discredit painting and literature.

But, for mercy’s sake, don’t go taking it for a magician. This is the way people talk about a craftsman, avoiding by this term fathoming his ventures. His gift does not lie in card tricks. He goes beyond jugglery. That is only his syntax. It is elsewhere that we must salute the marvellous.
Le Sang d’un Poète
contains no magic, nor does
La Belle et la Bête
.

The characters in the latter film obey the rule of fairy-tales. Nothing surprises them in a world where things are accepted as normal, the least of which would disrupt the mechanism of ours. When Beauty’s necklace changes into a piece of old rope, it is not this phenomenon that shocks her sisters, but the fact that it changes into rope because they touch it.

And if the marvellous is to be found in my film, it is not in this direction that one should expect it; it will show rather in the eyes of the Beast when he says to Beauty: ‘You caress me as one caresses an animal’, and she answers him: ‘But you are an animal.’

Indolence, in the robes of a judge, condemns, in our poetic ventures, what it considers unpoetic, basing its verdict upon that semblance of the marvellous of which I am speaking, and deaf to the marvellous if it does not bear its attributes.

When one sees fairies they disappear. They only help us in a guise which makes them unrecognizable and are only present through the sudden unwonted grace of familiar objects into which they disguise themselves in order to keep us company. It is then that their help becomes effective and not when they appear and dazzle us with lights. It is the same with everything. In
La Belle et la Bête
I have not made use of
that slope down which the public would like to slide more and more rapidly without it being spared any dizziness.

I persist in repeating: Marvels and Poetry are not my affair. They must ambush me. My itinerary must not foresee them. If I opine that a certain shady place is more favourable than another to shelter them, I am cheating. For it may happen that a road exposed to full sunlight shelters them better.

This is why I care to live just as much in Beauty’s family as in the Beast’s castle. This is why fairy-like atmosphere means more to me than the fairy element itself. This is why the episode, among others, of the sedan chairs in the farmyard, an episode which does not spring from any phantasy, is, in my opinion, more significant of this fairy quality than any artifice of the castle.

In
Le Sang d’un Poète
, the blood that flows throughout the film disturbs our critics. What is the point, they ask, of disgusting and shocking us on purpose? This blood which sickens us compels us to turn our heads away and prevents us from enjoying the happy inventions (by happy inventions they mean: the entry into the mirror, the statue that moves, the heart that beats), but from one to another of these shocks that awaken them what link is there, I ask you, except this blood which flows and from which the film derives its title? What do they know of the great river, those who only want to enjoy the ports of call? And what would these happy inventions, as they call them, be worth, if they were not the result of an architecture, even if an unconscious one, and connected to the rest by this bond of blood? They sleep and think that I sleep and that my awakening wakens them. Their torpor condemns them to taste nothing of a meal but the pepper. They feel nothing but the pricks. It is these that excite them, give them the fidgets, compel them to run from place to place.

In
L’Eternel Retour
the lovers’ castle seems to them right
for poetry. The brother’s and sister’s garage wrong. They condemn it. Strange foolishness. Because it is precisely in this garage that poetry functions best. In fact to understand the surrender of the brother and sister to their innate and, as it were, organic disregard of grace, poetry is at our finger-tips—and I draw closer to the terrible mysteries of love.

Such is the fruit of certain experiments I have made, which I am still carrying out, and which are the sole object of my quest.

As Montaigne says: ‘Most of Aesop’s fables have several meanings and interpretations. Those who make myths of them choose some aspect that accords well with the fable; but for the most part this is only the first superficial aspect, and there are others more vital, more essential and innate, which they have been unable to penetrate.’

THE PRINCE DE POLIGNAC USED TO SAY:
‘
I DON
’
T
really like other people.’ But when his wife asks him: ‘Why are you so gloomy?’ and he replies: ‘I like some people and some people like me,’ and adds: ‘Alas! They are not the same people,’ he admits his loneliness. I like other people and only exist through them. Without them the balls I serve go into the net. Without them my flame burns low. Without them my flame sinks. Without them I am a ghost. If I withdraw from my friends I seek their shadows.

Sometimes stupidity and lack of culture take their place. I am taken in by the slightest kindness. But then, how am I to make myself understood? They do not know what I am talking about. So therefore I must find a means of being understood. Do I go too fast? Is it due to syncopation? Are the letters of my words not large enough? I search. I find. I speak. They listen to me. And this is not the need for exercise. It is the taste for human contact.

I have said somewhere that I am better at making friends than at making love. Love is mainly an affair of short spasms. If these spasms disappoint us, love dies. It is very seldom that it weathers the experience and becomes friendship. Friendship between man and woman is delicate; it is still a form of
love. In it jealousy is disguised. Friendship is a quiet spasm. Without possessiveness. The happiness of a friend delights us. It adds to us. It takes nothing away. If friendship takes offence at this, it does not exist. It is a love that conceals itself. I strongly suspect that this passion for friendship that I have always had comes to me from the sons of whom I am cheated. As I cannot have them I invent them. I should like to educate them. But I perceive that it is they who educate me. Apart from the fact that youth, and its presence in our house, compels us never to take any step which could not set it an example, it has weapons suited to its struggles for which ours are out of date. We have to learn from it. It has little to learn from us. Later our essence impregnates it and makes for it a soil in which to bloom. Words are futile. In my school one would hear the flight of a fly. And I’m a chatterbox.

The giving of guidance if asked for is quite another thing. I don’t excel in that either. I talk fluently about something else and it is by this means that I am of service.

Max Jacob used to say to me: ‘You have no sense of companionship.’ He was right. What Wilde said to Pierre Louys suits me better. Failing to understand him, he made a scandal of it: ‘I have no friends. I have only lovers.’ A dangerous construction if it comes to the ears of the police or a man of letters. He meant to say that he always went to extremes. I think in this he was simply putting on side. He might have said: ‘I only have companions.’ And if I had been Pierre Louys, I should have been still more offended.

Where would I find pleasure in companionship? When I trail from café to café, from studio to studio, arm in arm with companions? Friendship occupies all my time, and if any work distracts me from it, I dedicate this to it. It (friendship) saves me from that anguish men experience as they grow old.

Youth is not what my friends want of me and theirs only
interests me in so far as it reflects their shadow. Each one uses it to his advantage, enjoys his fun where he finds it. Tries to remain worthy of the other. And time flies.

‘Our attempt at culture came to a sad end
,’ said Verlaine. Alas how many failures I record! There was reason enough for flight. But the soul is tenacious. Destroy its niche, it rebuilds it.

Garros’s plane is on fire. It crashes. Jean le Roy arranges my letters fan-shape on his mess-tin. He grasps his machine-gun. He dies. Typhoid carries off Radiguet. Marcel Khill is killed in Alsace. The Gestapo tortures Jean Desbordes.

I know quite well that I used to seek the friendship of machines that spin too fast and wear themselves out dramatically. Today paternal instinct keeps me away from them. I turn towards those who are not marked with the evil star. Cursed be it! I detest it. Once again I warm my carcase in the sunshine.

A SESSION AT DR B
’
S, WITH NITROGEN PROTOXYDE
, comes to my mind. The nurse is giving this to me. The door opens. Another nurse comes in and says the word Madame. I leave our world, not without believing that I am countering the gas with a superior lucidity. I even seem to have the strength to make some very subtle remarks. ‘Doctor, take care, I am not asleep.’ But the journey begins. It lasts for centuries. I reach the first tribunal. I am judged. I pass. Another century. I reach the second tribunal. I am judged. I pass, and so it continues. At the fourteenth tribunal I understand that multiplicity is the sign of this other world and unity the sign of ours. I shall find on return one body, one dentist, one dentist’s room, one dentist’s hand, one dentist’s lamp, one dentist’s chair, one dentist’s white coat. And soon I must forget what I have seen. Retrace my steps before all these tribunals. Realize that they know that it is of no importance, that I shall not talk about it because I shall not remember. Centuries are added to centuries. I re-enter our world. I see unity reforming. What a bore! Everything is one. And I hear a voice saying at the door: ‘… wishes to know if you will see her tomorrow.’ The nurse is finishing her sentence. Only the name of the lady has escaped me. This is the duration of the centuries from which I’m surfacing, this the expanse of my dizzy journey. It is the immediacy of the dream. All we remember is the interminable dream that occurs instantaneously on the brink
of awakening. I have said that my dreams were usually of the nature of caricatures. They accuse me. They inform me of what is irreparable in my nature. They underline organic imperfections I will not correct. I suspected these. The dream proves them to me by means of acts, apologues, speeches. It is not like this every time, unless I flatter myself, not having unravelled the meaning.