Anathemas and Admirations (66 page)

What he is, much more obviously, I understood when I realized that as a young man, contemplating entering the priesthood, he devoured the mystics, I assert as fact that had he not been one himself, he would never have launched himself so methodically, so desperately, in pursuit of extreme states. Extreme,
this side of the absolute
. His works on drugs proceeded from the dialogue with the mystic he originally was, a repressed and sabotaged mystic waiting to take his revenge. If we were to collect all the passages in which Michaux deals with ecstasy, and if we were to suppress all references in them to mescaline or any other hallucinogen, would we not have the impression of reading explicitly religious experiences, inspired and not provoked, and deserving to figure in a breviary of unique moments and dazzling heresies? The mystics aspire not to subside into God but to exceed Him, swept on as they are by something remote, by a delirium of the ultimate, which we encounter among all those who have been visited and submerged by trance states. Michaux joins the mystics through his “inner gusts,” his longing to attack the inconceivable, to force it, to break it open, to go beyond, without ever stopping, without retreating before any danger. Having neither the luck nor the misfortune to weigh anchor in the absolute, he creates his own abysses, provoking ever new ones, plunges into them and describes them. These abysses, it may be objected, are only
states
. No doubt. But for us everything is a state, and nothing but a state, consigned as we are to psychology ever since we were forbidden to wander in the Supreme. . . .

A true mystic, yet an unrealized one. We understand Michaux insofar as he has undertaken everything in order not to conclude, keeping his irony at the very extremities to which his researches have led him. When he has reached some limit-experience, an “impure absolute” where he vacillates, where he no longer knows where he has come out, he never fails to resort to a familiar or comical turn of phrase, in order to make it clear that he is still himself, that he
remembers
that he is experimenting, that he will never completely identify himself with any of the moments of his quest. In all of these simultaneous excesses cohabit the ecstatic outbursts of an Angela di Foligno and the sarcasms of a Swift.

It is admirable that a man so constituted to destroy himself should have lived for many years in full possession of his vitality. “I take out the old man . . . , his damn body that breaks down, to which he clings so, our one body for the two of us,” he writes in 1952, in
Vents et Poussières
. Always that interval between sensation and consciousness, always that superiority over what he is and over what he knows. . . . Thus he has managed, in his metaphysical perturbations — in his perturbations
tout court
— to remain, by the obsession of knowledge, external to himself. Whereas our contradictions and incompatibilities eventually subjugate and paralyze us, Michaux has succeeded in making himself the master of his, without slipping toward
sagesse
, without being swallowed up by it. All his life he has been tempted by India — merely tempted, fortunately, for if by some fatal metamorphosis he had ended by yielding to such enchantments, beclouded, he would have abdicated his prerogative of possessing more than one flaw that leads to wisdom and yet at the same time being fundamentally refractory to it. What a catastrophe had he taken to Vedanta, or to Buddhism! He would have left his gifts there, his faculty for excess. Deliverance would have annihilated him as a writer: no more “gusts/” no more torments, no more exploits. It is because he has not lowered himself to any formula of salvation, to any simulacrum of illumination, that frequenting him is so stimulating. He offers one nothing, he is-what he is, he has no recipe for serenity, he continues, he feels his way, as if he were beginning. And he accepts one, on condition that one offers him nothing, either. Once again, a non-sage, a non-sage on his own. It astonishes me that he has not succumbed to so much intensity. It is true that his intensity is not of that accidental, fluctuating kind which is manifested in fits and starts: constant, lawless, it resides in itself and relies upon itself, it is inexhaustible precariousness, “intensity of being,” an expression I borrow from the language of the theologians, the only one suitable to designate a success.

1973

14

Benjamin Fondane

6 Rue Rollin

T
HE MOST CREASED and furrowed face one could imagine, a face with millennial wrinkles never still, animated as they were by the most contagious and the most explosive torment: I could not contemplate that countenance enough. Never before had I seen such harmony between appearance and utterance, between physiognomy and speech. Impossible for me to think of Fondane’s slightest remark without immediately perceiving the imperious presence of his features.

I used to see him often (I knew him during the Occupation), always planning to stay no more than an hour, and I would end up spending the afternoon — it was my fault, of course, but his as well: he loved to talk, and I lacked the courage and still more the desire to interrupt a monologue that left me exhausted and enthralled. Yet it was I who was the garrulous one during my first visit, which I had paid with the intention of asking him some questions about Shestov. Probably out of a need to show off, I asked none at all, preferring to set forth the reasons for my own interest in the Russian philosopher of whom Fondane was the disciple — though less faithful than inspired. It may be apposite to note here that between the two wars Shestov was very well known in Rumania, and that his books were read more fervently there than elsewhere. Fondane had no idea of this and was greatly surprised to learn that in the country of his birth, we had followed the same trajectory as he. . . . Wasn’t there something disturbing about this, and much more than a coincidence? Many readers of Fondane’s
Baudelaire
have been struck by the chapter on boredom. I myself have always linked his predilection for this theme to his Moldavian origins. A paradise of neurasthenia, Moldavia is a province of an unendurable dreary charm; in 1936 I spent two weeks in Jassy, the capital, where if it had not been for alcohol I would have foundered in the most dissolving of depressions. Fondane loved to quote lines by Bacovia, the laureate of Moldavian ennui, a boredom less refined but much more corrosive than Baudelaire’s “spleen.” It is an enigma to me that so many people manage not to die of it. The experience of the “abyss” has, as we see, remote sources.

Like Shestov, Fondane liked to start with a quotation, a simple pretext to which he kept referring and from which he drew unexpected conclusions. In his developments there was always, despite their subtlety, something alluring; subtle he certainly was, he even abused his subtlety, it was his patent vice. In general, he couldn’t stop — he had the genius of
variation
— and it seemed, when one listened to him, that he had a horror of the
period
. This was glaringly apparent in his improvisations, as it was in his books, especially
Baudelaire
. On several occasions he told me he ought to cut a good many pages, and it is incomprehensible that he did not do so when we realize that he was living in the quasi-certainty of an imminent disaster. He believed himself to be threatened, and indeed he was, but it may be that inwardly he was resigned to the victim’s lot, for without that mysterious complicity with the Ineluctable, and without a certain fascination with tragedy, there is no explanation for his rejection of all precautions, the most elementary of which was that of changing residences. (He was betrayed by his concierge!) A strange “unconcern” on the part of someone who was anything but naive, and whose psychological and political judgments testified to an exceptional perspicacity. I still have a very exact memory of one of my first visits, during which, after enumerating Hitler’s dizzying faults and flaws, he launched into a visionary description of Germany’s collapse, and this in such detail that I was convinced then and there that I was witnessing a delirium. It was only an anticipation of the facts.

In literary matters, I did not always share his tastes. He insistently recommended Hugo’s book on Shakespeare, a virtually unreadable work that reminds me of a phrase recently used by an American critic to describe the style of
Tristes Tropiques
: “the aristocracy of bombast.” The expression is a striking one, though unfair in that instance.

I understood better his partiality for Nietzsche, in whom he loved the foreshortenings that were so much denser than those of Novalis, about whom he had reservations. In truth he was always less interested in what an author said than in what he might have said, in what he
concealed;
in this he adopted Shestov’s method — that is, the
peregrination through souls
much more than through doctrines. Uniquely sensitive to extreme cases, to the beguiling twists and turns in certain sensibilities, he once told me about a White Russian who had suffered in silence for eighteen years because he thought his wife was cheating on him. After so many years of mute torment, one day, unable to bear it any longer, he had it out with her, whereupon, after acquiring the certitude that all his suspicions had been false, incapable of enduring the notion that he had tortured himself for nothing over such a long period, he went into the next room and blew his brains out.

On another occasion, when he was describing his years in Bucharest, Fondane gave me an abject article attacking him, written by Tudor Arghezi, a great poet but a still greater pamphleteer, in prison at the time for political reasons (this was just after the First World War). Fondane, then a very young man, had managed to visit him there for some sort of interview. In return, the poet had proceeded to write a caricatural portrait so unspeakable that I have never been able to understand how Fondane could have shown it to me. He had his moments of detachment. . . . Usually indulgent, he ceased to be so toward those who supposed they had
found
. . .— those, in short, who converted to anything at all. He greatly esteemed Boris de Schloezer and was terrible disappointed to learn that the magisterial translator of Shestov could have
shifted
to Catholicism. He couldn’t get over it and identified the occasion with a betrayal.
To search
was for him more than a necessity or an obsession — to search without stopping was a fatality, his fatality, perceptible even in his way of speaking, especially when he was enthusiastic or would vacillate continually between irony and breathless-ness. I will forever blame myself for not having written down his remarks, his
trouvailles
, the leaps of a mind turning in all directions, constantly in combat with tyranny and the nullity of facts, greedy for contradictions and somehow in dread of
succeeding
.

I see him now, rolling cigarette after cigarette. Nothing, he used to say over and over again, equaled the pleasure of lighting up on an empty stomach. He kept on doing so despite a gastric ulcer that he proposed to deal with later, in a future about which he nursed no illusions. . . . The wife of his oldest friend told me at the time that she could not love him because of what she called his “sickly look,” On his face he did not, it is true, bear the signs of prosperity, but everything in him was beyond sickness and health as if both were merely stages he had transcended. Whereby he resembled an ascetic, an ascetic of a prodigious vivacity and verve that made one forget, while he was talking, his fragility, his vulnerability. But when he stopped talking — he who in spite of everything had mastered his fate — he gave the impression of dragging around something pitiful and, at certain moments,
lost
. The British poet David Gascoyne (who was also to suffer, under other circumstances, a tragic fate) told me that he had been haunted for months by the image of Fondane after he encountered him by chance on the Boulevard Saint-Michel on the day of Shestov’s death. It will readily be understood why, even after thirty-three years, a being so fascinating is singularly present in my mind, and why, too, I never pass by Number
6
Rue Rollin without a pang.

1978

15

Borges