Public Enemies Read Online Free PDF Page A

editor of the influential magazine
Les Inrockuptibles
.
    † Frédéric Beigbeder (born 1965) is a French novelist, commentator, and literary critic.

February 16, 2008
    For almost a week, dear Michel, I haven’t managed to reply to you.
    There was my day for writing my “Bloc-Notes” article.
    Then there was the gathering we organized with Philippe Val, Laurent Joffrin, and Caroline Fourest around Ayaan Hirsi Ali, * that radiant young woman who’s been condemned to death in the Netherlands for having dared to make some statements about Islam, of the kind that seven or eight years ago got you yourself dragged into court. (I don’t agree with those statements: I don’t believe for a minute that Islam is intrinsically hostile to democracy and human rights, but I’m struggling for her and for you to be entitled to express that opinion.)
    There was the jury of the French Golden Globes equivalent, which I agreed to chair as a favor to a friend—that took up another day.
    There have been the thousand concerns that I found orinvented and that, caught up as I was in the madness and bustle of the day, caused me to put off replying to you.
    But more than anything, there was the word
confession
that you ended with. Despite the passing years, I see that it still has the same ability to paralyze me …
    Dear Michel, you have to understand that I am one of the few writers of my generation to have written novels (twenty years ago, you’ll say, but in that respect I haven’t changed) in which I consciously sought to create characters who were nothing like me.
    You have to understand that in
Comédie
, which you quote (and which I published in the—oh so dramatic—aftermath of my own film’s release; welcome to the club, by the way, and good luck!), everything was organized, literally everything, up to and including setting up the Great Confession, to give away as little as possible, to hide while appearing to open up and certainly not to yield to that illusion of transparency, of baring your heart, and so on, for which I feel an almost phobic aversion. False confessions, then … “screen confessions,” the way psychoanalysts talk about screen memories … cunning, clever confessions whose entire purpose was to stand in the way of the big, juicy confessions I promised, even though I knew that I would have to shirk them. More than ever, when writing that book, I felt how patently true it is that turning your back on ambiguity can only be to your detriment.
    You speak of Philippe Sollers, about whom, by the way, I think you’re being unjust (the same goes for Garcin, who has the merit—rare nowadays—of keeping the proper distance in talking about both actresses and dead friends). I’d like you to know that the only serious disagreement Sollers and I have ever had over thirty years of real friendship is when he says(although, in passing, I’m not sure whether he applies the rule to himself) that writers are there to “tell how they live.” The formula itself petrifies me. When he pronounces it, it plunges me into an abyss of perplexity, and I always feel like replying that I believe exactly the opposite—that writers have every right and can talk about whatever they like but not how they live, not their inalienable secret life!
    As for television and the way you think you should behave there, I agree with your recommendations. I concur with your analysis of the need to perfect an “act” that allows us to hide and protect our “deep self.” I also agree about the risk that, in doing so, like the “man who lost his shadow,” you can lose the trace of the “deep self,” let it lie fallow, forget it. Where you’re wrong, or where I fear you rate me too highly, is when you attribute to me a capacity for indignation that shields me from that risk so that, fired up in a polemic, a political battle or a rage, I supposedly let the “real” me rise up to the surface. Sadly, indignation has no role in this. You can