The Difficulty of Being (8 page)

The swiftness of the dream is such that its scenes are peopled with objects unknown to us when awake and about which in a trice we know the minutest details. What strikes me is that, from one second to the next, our ego of the dream finds itself projected into a new world, without feeling the astonishment which this world would rouse in it in a waking state, although it remains itself and does not participate in this transfiguration. We ourselves remain in another universe, which might suggest that when falling asleep we are like a traveller who awakes with a start. Nothing of the kind, since the town, where he did not believe himself to be, surprises this traveller, whereas the extravaganzas of a dream never disconcert the waking man who falls asleep. So the dream is the sleeper’s normal existence. This is why I endeavour to forget my dreams on waking. The actions of a dream are not valid in a waking state, and the actions of the waking state are only valid in the dream because it has the digestive faculty of making them into excrement. In the world of sleep this excrement does not appear to us as such and its chemistry interests us, amuses us or terrifies us. But transposed into the waking state, which does not possess this digestive faculty, the actions of the dream would foul life for us and make it unbreathable. Thousands of examples prove this, because in recent times a good many doors have been opened to these horrors. It is one thing to look for signs in them and another to allow the oil stain to spread over to the waking state and extend there.
Fortunately our neighbour’s dream bores us if he recounts it to us and this fact stops us from recounting our own.

What is certain is that this enfolding, through the medium of which eternity becomes liveable to us, is not produced in dreams in the same way as in life. Something of this fold unfolds. Thanks to this our limits change, widen. The past, the future no longer exist; the dead rise again; places construct themselves without architect, without journeys, without that tedious oppression that compels us to live minute by minute that which the half-opened fold shows us at a glance. Moreover the atmospheric and profound triviality of the dream favours encounters, surprises, acquaintanceships, a naturalness which our enfolded world (I mean projected onto the surface of a fold) can only ascribe to the supernatural. I say naturalness, because one of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing in it astonishes us. We consent without regret to live there among strangers, entirely separated from our habits and our friends. This is what fills us with dismay at the sight of a face we love, and which is asleep. Where, at this moment, stirs the face behind this mask? Where does it light up and for whom? This sight of sleep has always frightened me more than dreams. I made the verses of
Plain-Chant
about it.

A woman sleeps. She triumphs. She need no longer lie. She is a lie from head to toe. She will give no account of her movements. She deceives with impunity. Taking advantage of this licentiousness, she parts her lips, she allows her limbs to drift where they will. She is no longer on guard. She is her own alibi. What could the man watching her blame her for? She is there. What need has Othello of that handkerchief? Let him watch Desdemona sleeping. It is enough to make one commit murder. It is true that a jealous man never ceases to be one and that afterwards he would exclaim: ‘What is she doing to me there among the dead?’

Emerged from sleep the dream fades. It is a deep sea plant which dies out of water. It dies on my sheets. Its reign mystifies me. I admire its fables. I take advantage of it to live a double life. I never make use of it.

What it teaches us is the bitterness of our limitations. Since Nerval, Ducasse, Rimbaud, the study of its mechanism has often given the poet the means of conquering them, adapting our world otherwise than according to the dictates of good sense, shuffling the order of the factors to which reason condemns us, in short making for poetry a lighter, swifter and newer vehicle.

I CANNOT READ OR WRITE. AND WHEN THE CENSUS
form asks me this question, I am tempted to answer no.

Who knows how to write? It is to battle with ink to try to make oneself understood.

Either one takes too much care over one’s work or one does not take enough. Seldom does one find the happy mean that limps with grace. Reading is another matter. I read. I think I am reading. Each time I re-read, I perceive that I have not read. That is the trouble with a letter. One finds in it what one looks for. One is satisfied. One puts it aside. If one finds it again, on re-reading one reads into it another which one had not read.

Books play us the same trick. If they do not suit our present mood we do not consider them good. If they disturb us we criticize them, and this criticism is superimposed upon them and prevents us from reading them fairly.

What the reader wants is to read himself. When he reads what he approves of he thinks he could have written it. He may even have a grudge against the book for taking his place, for saying what he did not know how to say, and which according to him he would have said better.

The more a book means to us the less well we read it. Our substance slips into it and thinks it round to our own outlook. That is why if I want to read and convince myself that I can
read, I read books into which my substance does not penetrate. In the hospitals in which I spent long periods, I used to read what the nurse brought me or what fell into my hands by chance. These were the books of Paul Féval, of Maurice Leblanc, of Xavier Leroux, and the innumerable adventure books and detective stories which made of me a modest and attentive reader.
Rocambole
,
M. Lecoq
,
Le crime d’Orcival
,
Fantômes
,
Chéri-Bibi
, while saying to me: ‘You can read’, spoke to me too much in my own language for me not to get something, unconsciously, from them, for my mind not to distort them to its own dimensions. This is so true that, for instance, you often hear a tubercular patient say of Thomas Mann’s book
The Magic Mountain
: ‘That is a book one couldn’t understand if one hadn’t been tubercular.’ In fact Thomas Mann wrote it without being this and for the very purpose of making those who had not experienced tuberculosis understand it.

We are all ill and only know how to read books which deal with our malady. This is why books dealing with love are so successful, since everyone believes that he is the only one to experience it. He thinks: ‘This book is addressed to me. What can anyone else see in it?’ ‘How beautiful this book is,’ says the one they love, by whom they believe themselves to be loved and whom they hasten to make read it. But that person says this because he or she loves elsewhere.

It is enough to make one wonder if the function of books, all of which speak to convince, is not to listen and to nod assent. In Balzac the reader is in his element: ‘This is my uncle,’ he tells himself, ‘this is my aunt, this is my grandfather, this is Madame X …, this is the town where I was born.’ In Dostoievsky what does he tell himself? ‘This is my fever and my violence, of which those around me have no suspicion.’

And the reader believes he is reading. The glass without quicksilver seems to him a true mirror. He recognizes the
scene enacted behind it. How closely it resembles what he is thinking! How clearly it reflects his image! How well they collaborate, he and it! How well they
reflect
!

Just as in museums there are certain pictures with legends—I mean that give rise to legends—and which the other pictures must consider with distaste (
La Giaconda, L’Indifférent
, Millet’s
Angelus
, etc.…). Certain books give rise to legends and their fate is different from that of other books, even if these are a hundred times finer.

Le Grand Meaulnes
is typical of such books. And one of mine:
Les Enfants Terribles
, shares this strange privilege. Those who read it and read themselves into it became, through the fact that they believed themselves to be living my ink, the victims of a resemblance that they had to keep up. This resulted in an artificial confusion and the putting into conscious practice a state of affairs for which unconsciousness is the only excuse. The works that say to me: ‘I am your book’, ‘We are your books’ are innumerable. The war, the post-war, a lack of liberty, which at first sight seem to make a certain way of life impossible, do not discourage them.

In writing this book in the Saint-Cloud clinic I drew inspiration partly from friends of mine, a brother and a sister, whom I believed to be the only people living in this way. I did not expect many reactions because of the principle I was affirming. For who, I thought, will read themselves into this? Not even those with whom I am dealing, since their charm lies in not knowing what they are. In fact, they were, as far as I know, the only ones not to recognize themselves. For from their counterparts, if any exist, I shall never learn anything. This book became the breviary of mythomaniacs and of those who like to daydream.

Thomas l’Imposteur
is a legend, but it is a book which does not give rise to legends. During the liberation it all but
had the same effect as
Les Enfants Terribles
. A number of young mythomaniacs lost their heads, disguised themselves, changed their names and took themselves for heroes. Their friends called them
Thomas l’Imposteur
and told me of their exploits, when they did not do so for themselves. But mythomaniacs who become identified with their own fable are very rare. The others do not like to be unmasked. Moreover, it is very simple. A book gives rise to legends at once or else it never will.
Thomas l’Imposteur
will never share the fate of
Les Enfants Terribles
. What would a mythomaniac make of a mythomaniac? It is like an Englishman playing the part of an Englishman.

The death of Thomas de Fontenoy is mythological. A child plays at horses and becomes a horse. A mythomaniac reads
Les Enfants Terribles
. He plays at horses and thinks he is a horse.

PERHAPS I KNOW TO WHAT EXTENT I CAN GO TOO
far. Yet this is a sense of measurement. Of which I have very little. Rather I pride myself on a sense of balance, for this need be no more than the skill of a somnambulist moving along the edge of the rooftops. This leaves me if something wakes me or if, as can happen, through foolishness I wake myself. It is not this sense I am talking about. I am talking about the sense of measurement that perplexes me because it relates to methods with which this book deals, methods which I record without analysing them. I am quite at sea in the world of figures. They are a dead language to me and I do not understand them any more than I do Hebrew. I count on my fingers. If one has to work anything out on paper I am lost. All sums are beyond me. Any calculations I make are resolved as if by magic. I never set them out. I never count my lines, nor my pages, still less my words. When I write a play the act imposes its curve upon me. I have a little trouble over the descent. A click in my mind informs me that it is the end. So far I have never asked myself: ‘Is it too long?
^*
Is it too short?’ It is what it is. I cannot judge. In practice it turns out to be as it should be.

A film, to be used, must be at least two thousand four hundred metres long. This is not a satisfactory length. It is
too long to suit a short story. Too short to suit a novel. No matter. That is the set length. One must keep to it. While I was shooting
La Belle et la Bête
that was the management’s great anxiety. I would be too short. In vain I countered this by my own methods; the figures contradicted me and they are law. The film grew shorter. The faces grew longer. I continued to go my own way.

A film is made up of longs and shorts. It has an internal rhythm. Figures do not know this rhythm. The counter’s figures were correct. So were mine.
^†

When, on the last day, I questioned my script-girl about the balance between the script (which is one thing) and the action (which is another) she replied, in amazement, that I was right on the mark. I was entitled to two more shots held in reserve. In fact, without knowing this, I had decided the evening before on two further shots. There remained the length of the film, which I refused to extend. End to end, cut up, cut, recut, it had its two thousand four hundred metres. Not one more, not one less.

If I recount this anecdote, in which I appear to have come off so well, it is to give an example, drawn from life, of a victory gained over arithmetic by those figures which dwell within us and work themselves out of their own accord. Poetry is only figures, algebra, geometry, workings-out and proofs. However neither figures nor proofs can be seen.

The only proofs that poets can give are the kind which I record. Accountancy imputes them to some devilish luck. The Inquisition would have made us pay dearly for them.

A long work may not be long. A small work may be big.
The measurements that govern them are of our own calculation.
Adolphe
is a big book. Proust is short.

At Marcel Proust’s apartment, boulevard Haussmann, the figures which I set against those of the mathematicians were proved true. It was their very hive. One could follow their work under a pane of glass. One could almost touch them with one’s finger. The cork hood to the brass bedstead, the table crowded with phials, with a theatre-phone (a device enabling one to listen in to certain theatres), with a pile of exercise books and, as on the rest of the furniture, a pelt of dust which was never dusted off, the chandelier wrapped in brown holland, the ebony table on which are piled, in the shadows, photographs of cocottes, of duchesses, of dukes and of footmen of grand houses. The chimney-piece with its tarnished looking-glass, the covers, and that dust and that smell of anti-asthmatic powder, a sepulchral smell, this whole Jules Verne room was a
Nautilus
cluttered with precision instruments for the working out of our figures, our numbers, our measurements, and where one seemed fated to see Captain Némo appear in person: Marcel Proust, slight, bloodless, with the beard of the dead Carnot.
^‡