Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture (8 page)

Truffaut was lucky to find the right language himself. He was, in the phrase he applied to Vigo, “a spectator who fell in love with films.” At fifteen he founded a
ciné-club,
at eighteen he started as a film critic. His life thereafter was utterly in and of the cinema, that place of light and warmth as rain and darkness descend outside. He was writer, director, actor, co-producer, critic, historian, interviewer, and activist. “Films are smoother than life,” Truffaut explains to Léaud on celluloid in
La Nuit américaine.
“For people like you and me, our happiness lies in films.” His private life also unreeled much within the surrogate family of the cinema: he married the daughter of a leading French distributor and producer; many of his affairs were with actresses.

“Films resemble the people who make them,” he wrote. In his published letters, as in his films, Truffaut is genial, accessible, humorous, and melancholy. He is affectionate, playful, stylish; not averse to luxury (“Better to weep in a Jaguar than in the Métro”); instinctive rather than intellectual, an autodidact with some of that breed's hectoring propensities. He is wary of theory, just as he is wary of those who claim to love humanity in the abstract; he prefers the specific instance and the particular individual. The only shocking thing to emerge from his letters is that he was a small man who had a fetishistic collection of Eiffel Towers. And the only strikingly unFrench thing is a complete lack of interest in food. Lapsing for a moment into theory, he comes up with a surprising, and surprisingly pat, reason: “Bruno Bettelheim explains that, with food, one has the same relationship as with one's mother, and I really believe that that's the case with me. The fact remains that an hour after a meal I am incapable of saying what I ate.” In his letters Truffaut's mother is as scarce as a menu: she pops up only to comment acerbically that
La Peau douce
is “a little less vulgar” than
Jules et Jim.

“Good films are ones that are made in ordinary rooms, with one's backside on a chair.” And the professional problems that beset Truffaut were also ordinary: the
nouvelle vague
could not vaporize the old frustrations. There was the slipperiness of finance; the moaning of writers whose work has been adapted and therefore traduced (Maurice Pons disapproved of Bernadette's bicycle in
Les Mistons,
while David Goodis liked
Tirez sur le pianiste
much less when he saw it with subtitles: his ignorance of French had previously allowed him to believe that the film was being more faithful to his book); the uppitiness of some actors; the cecity of critics; and the inaccurate praise of fans (Truffaut once met some Alabaman film buffs who congratulated him on a hitparade of movies, none of which he had actually made).

Truffaut's evident lovability and his professional cheerfulness enclosed an undertow of gloom—he
made Jules et Jim
“under the impression that it's going to be amusing and discovering as I go along that the only thing that saves it is its melancholy”—while his affability often gave away to touchiness. “Every artist,” he wrote in 1965, “must dream of reaching … the point at which ‘opinions’ [about his or her work] are meaningless”; but like most artists Truffaut never recognized that he'd reached the point, and to the end of his life was writing letters of rebuke and correction to journalists who misrepresented him. This lack of final confidence might also explain the diligence with which he encouraged Truf faut Studies wherever they appeared. Alternative explanations would include natural courtesy and natural ambition. There is also a toughness and aggression that stayed with him long after his rumbustious critical apprenticeship. When an agent tried to push an actress on to him, he replied: “If I may judge from your letter, from the way it is typed and laid out, and the condition in which it arrived, complete with documents, I should say that Mademoiselle X might best be offered the role of an illiterate slut.” When hustled for his signature on a petition, he did more than merely decline:

Dear Madame,

Since you charmingly insist that I add my signature to the list of those who have signed the Manifesto for Survival, I find myself obliged, other than by silent abstention, to inform you of my disagreement with its text which is, in my opinion, completely woolly, vague and insipid and bristling with too many capital letters.

Truffaut's taste for literary abuse is most fully deployed in his 1973 exchange with Godard over
La Nuit américaine.
It consists, in fact, of a single letter from Godard and a single reply from Truffaut, but even so strolls into any future anthology of artistic quarrels. “Yesterday I saw
La Nuit américaine,”
Godard begins. “Probably no one else will call you a liar, so I will.” Truffaut is “a liar” because of the absence of “criticism” in the film, because he fails to tell the truth about film-making, its processes, personnel, and off-screen entanglements. “Liar, because the shot of you and Jacqueline Bisset the other evening at Chez Francis [a Paris restaurant] is not in your film, and one can't help wondering why the director is the only one who doesn't screw in
La Nuit américaine.”
If Godard were to make a comparable movie, it would include such truths as “how the old man from Publidécor paints Maria Schneider's backside in
Last Tango,
how Rassam's switchboard operator telephones and how Malle's accountant balances the books.” Having established Truffaut's bad faith and his own moral superiority, Godard then seeks to touch his former friend and collaborator for money. It is, after all, because Truffaut's films—and those of Malle and Rassam—are so expensive that there isn't enough cash around to fund Godard's latest. So why doesn't Truf-faut come in as co-producer: “for 10 million? for 5 million? Considering
La Nuit américaine,
you ought to help me, so that the public doesn't get the idea we all make films like you.”

Godard's sovereign scorn can hardly be untainted by envy. Since 1959 moviegoers had, on the one hand, been arguing the various merits of
Les 400 Coups, Jules et Jim, L'Enfant sauvage,
an
d La Nuit américaine
(backed up by
Tirez sur le pianiste, La Peau douce,
and
Fahrenheit 4S1),
while on the other hand they had observed the grim decline of the maker of
A bout de souffle
into smug sloganeering. Happily, Truffaut does not allow his greater success to prevent a precise and ferocious settling of accounts. His six-page letter is the more violent for having been bottled up so long: Truffaut had not previously replied to Godard's sneers. Now he does. Godard thinks the truth should be told about the cinema and sex?

You cast Catherine Ribeiro, whom I had sent to you, in
Les Carabiniers,
and then threw yourself on her the way Chaplin throws himself on his secretary in
The Great Dictator
(it wasn't I who made the comparison) … With every shot of X—in
Week-End
it was as though you were tipping a wink at your pals: this whore wants to make a film with me, take a good look at how I treat her: there are whores and there are poetic young women.

Funding difficulties?

I need have no worries on your account, in Paris there are still enough wealthy young men, with a chip on their shoulder because they had their first car at 18, who will be delighted to pay their dues by announcing: “I'm the producer of Godard's next film.”

Bad faith?

I've felt nothing but contempt for you [since 1968]—as when I saw the scene in
Vent d'est
showing how to make a Molotov cocktail and, a year later, you got cold feet the first time you were asked to distribute
La Cause du peuple
[Sartre's newspaper] in the street. The notion that all men are equal is theoretical with you, it isn't deeply felt, which is why you have never succeeded in loving anyone or helping anyone, other than by shoving a few banknotes at them.

Godard is not just a liar, but a phony, a poseur, an élitist, a narcissist, “a piece of shit on a pedestal,” an assiduous cultivator of his own subversive image. He treats individuals disdainfully while fawning before an abstract concept of “the masses.” Even his militancy is false:

You need to play a role and the role needs to be a prestigious one; I've always had the impression that real militants are like cleaning women, doing a thankless, daily but necessary job. But you, you're the Ursula Andress of militancy, you make a brief appearance, just enough time for the cameras to flash, you make two or three duly startling remarks and then you disappear again, trailing clouds of self-serving mystery.

This thorough trashing of Godard's character and by extension his work (“Films resemble the people who make them”) ends with a well-aimed quote from Bernanos: “If I had, like you, failed to keep the promises of my ordination, I would prefer it to have been for a woman's love rather than for what you call your intellectual development.”

The spectacle is exciting, the more so if we declare our man the winner; but finally depressing. Co-ordinees and collaborators in their youth, Truffaut and Godard have now diverged totally. Their quarrel is also part of the old one between head and heart, the aes thetic and the moral, theory and individualism; the strategy of offence versus the strategy of charm. Whereas Truffaut was good at customer relations, being civil and helpful to those genuinely interested in his work, Godard was famously cavalier and confrontational, offering contempt as proof of integrity. Invited to London some years ago to lecture at the National Film Theatre, he accepted, then changed his mind at the last minute and sent a jaunty telegram:

IF I AM NOT THERE TAKE ANYONE IN THE STREET THE POOREST IF POSSIBLE GIVE HIM THE HUNDRED POUNDS AND TALK WITH HIM OF IMAGES AND SOUNDS AND YOU WILL LEARN FROM HIM MUCH MORE THAN FROM ME BECAUSE IT IS THE POOR PEOPLE WHO ARE REALLY INVENTING THE LANGUAGE STOP YOUR ANONYMOUS GODARD.

When this message was read out to the expectant crowd, many applauded, either from sycophancy or aesthetic agreement. One dissident stood up and shouted, understandably if perhaps too all-encompassingly, “Sod the Frogs!”

On 21 October 1984, Truffaut died from a brain tumour. His last published letter (of January 1984) was characteristic:

On 12 September last, I was operated on for an aneurism of the brain, but film criticism was
20years ahead
of conventional medicine, since, when my 2nd film,
Tirez sur le pianiste,
came out, it declared that such a film could only have been made by someone whose brain wasn't functioning normally!

Godard's introduction to these letters ends with a posturing flourish that would not have surprised Truffaut: “François is perhaps dead. I am perhaps alive. But then, is there a difference?” Another error of category from Jean-Luc. There is a difference, sad and enormous, not least for those of us who now feel cheated out of the remainder of the Truffaut canon. Godard, ever-radical, went to direct a European commercial for Nike.

(4)
The Land Without
Brussels Sprouts

A simple recipe

In 1959, Evelyn Waugh revised
Brideshead Revisited
for a collected edition. Fourteen years on from first publication, he admitted that the novel had a number of “grosser passages” which required modification. These had been provoked by the conditions of wartime composition:

It was a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster—the period of soya beans and Basic English—and in consequence the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language, which now with a full stomach I find distasteful.

Nor did this “bleak period” end in 1945. Austerity and rationing continued under the peacetime Labour Government, which Waugh biliously characterized as “the Cripps-Attlee terror” but many thought a rare reforming administration. “I suppose you will not come back to this country,” he wrote to the Paris-based Nancy Mitford in July 1946. “You are very wise. The food gets drearier and drearier.” An elderly friend of mine recently confirmed this observation. “We ate better during the war than after it,” he recalled. Rationing was prolonged until 1954, while exchange-control regulations restricted foreign travel except for those with money in their shoes.