‘
I’d prefer not to
,’ throwing open the door to the ‘possibility of an island.’ ” Why not? After all, that may be an acceptable definition of a writer.
Nor does it have anything to do with your living in Irelandand your fiscal expatriation. It’s true that in my case I could technically do this too, since between my American adventures, my trips, and the way I live, according to my lawyer’s expert calculations I end up spending far less than the famous “six months a year” that qualify you as a tax resident in Paris. The fact is, I don’t take advantage of this and continue to pay those confounded taxes like a good boy, a good citizen. But why, fundamentally? Is it really out of virtue? Purely out of my civic duty? Or is it also—let’s be frank—because I don’t dare, I haven’t got your nerve, and it would make a mockery of the big fuss I make with my concern for mankind. (“What, he makes us feel guilty, he makes us look like swine who put their interest before honor, happiness before justice! He spares us none of his indignation! He denounces so-and-so! He calls on you to vote for some other one. And now we find out that he’s stashed all his money away in Ireland or Malta, yuck …”) So it’s nothing to show off about. Nor is it a good idea to try to be too crafty.
What troubles me, what I find staggering, is not even what you say about war, that it makes you feel sick, the lack of courage you attribute to yourself, your “good soldier Schweik” * side, hesitating as in Hašek between disobedience and lack of respect, passive resistance and militant anarchism, affability as a strategy, internal desertion, shirking, the silent revolt. That’s how everyone functions. No one, apart from fools, deliberately exposes themselves to danger. It’s only in books and particularlyin the weak novels of Drieu, Jünger, * or Montherlant † that combatants are courageous in the sense that you seem to give the word. I’ll even let you in on a secret: I’m not sure that I’m any braver than you are. It’s possible that violence, the real violence I saw in Sarajevo, Africa, Southern Asia, Afghanistan, frightens me just as much as you, precisely because I know it, because I can smell its usual packaging from miles away. You can’t imagine my state of panic in 1998, for example, when I was reporting for
Le Monde
in Panjshir and had to stay close to Massoud, who didn’t bat an eyelid as shells from 155s fell a few feet away from us, whereas I … As for these men of war, like Massoud for example, whom I have spoken of so highly, as for the ones I ended up becoming an adviser and friend to, like the Bosnian Izetbegović, ‡ would like to point out that it wasn’t so much their heroism that fascinated me but their way, as Malraux said, of
making war without loving it
. There too, we are more or less in agreement. And it’s my turn to reassure (or disappoint?) you, by telling you that you are not less “ridiculous” but less of a coward than you think.
But there are two other things in your letter that are unacceptable or that I, in any case, cannot accept. The anecdote about your father and that ugly line of Goethe’s about injustice and disorder.
First, the anecdote.
It’s certainly a pity that you did not have the time or inclination to ask him more about it.
Of course, that’s often the way.
You don’t think about it when your parents are there.
When you do think about it, it’s because they’re no longer entirely there and you don’t dare.
And when, like myself two weeks ago—perhaps because of our correspondence, who knows!—you summon up the courage to phone a ninety-four-year-old aunt, your mother’s elder sister, the last witness to so many things (and also the first witness, incidentally, to my existence, since she was the midwife in Béni Saf, the Algerian village to which my mother returned to give birth to me), when you cross the line and think, “It’s too silly
I’d prefer not to
,’ throwing open the door to the ‘possibility of an island.’ ” Why not? After all, that may be an acceptable definition of a writer.
Nor does it have anything to do with your living in Irelandand your fiscal expatriation. It’s true that in my case I could technically do this too, since between my American adventures, my trips, and the way I live, according to my lawyer’s expert calculations I end up spending far less than the famous “six months a year” that qualify you as a tax resident in Paris. The fact is, I don’t take advantage of this and continue to pay those confounded taxes like a good boy, a good citizen. But why, fundamentally? Is it really out of virtue? Purely out of my civic duty? Or is it also—let’s be frank—because I don’t dare, I haven’t got your nerve, and it would make a mockery of the big fuss I make with my concern for mankind. (“What, he makes us feel guilty, he makes us look like swine who put their interest before honor, happiness before justice! He spares us none of his indignation! He denounces so-and-so! He calls on you to vote for some other one. And now we find out that he’s stashed all his money away in Ireland or Malta, yuck …”) So it’s nothing to show off about. Nor is it a good idea to try to be too crafty.
What troubles me, what I find staggering, is not even what you say about war, that it makes you feel sick, the lack of courage you attribute to yourself, your “good soldier Schweik” * side, hesitating as in Hašek between disobedience and lack of respect, passive resistance and militant anarchism, affability as a strategy, internal desertion, shirking, the silent revolt. That’s how everyone functions. No one, apart from fools, deliberately exposes themselves to danger. It’s only in books and particularlyin the weak novels of Drieu, Jünger, * or Montherlant † that combatants are courageous in the sense that you seem to give the word. I’ll even let you in on a secret: I’m not sure that I’m any braver than you are. It’s possible that violence, the real violence I saw in Sarajevo, Africa, Southern Asia, Afghanistan, frightens me just as much as you, precisely because I know it, because I can smell its usual packaging from miles away. You can’t imagine my state of panic in 1998, for example, when I was reporting for
Le Monde
in Panjshir and had to stay close to Massoud, who didn’t bat an eyelid as shells from 155s fell a few feet away from us, whereas I … As for these men of war, like Massoud for example, whom I have spoken of so highly, as for the ones I ended up becoming an adviser and friend to, like the Bosnian Izetbegović, ‡ would like to point out that it wasn’t so much their heroism that fascinated me but their way, as Malraux said, of
making war without loving it
. There too, we are more or less in agreement. And it’s my turn to reassure (or disappoint?) you, by telling you that you are not less “ridiculous” but less of a coward than you think.
But there are two other things in your letter that are unacceptable or that I, in any case, cannot accept. The anecdote about your father and that ugly line of Goethe’s about injustice and disorder.
First, the anecdote.
It’s certainly a pity that you did not have the time or inclination to ask him more about it.
Of course, that’s often the way.
You don’t think about it when your parents are there.
When you do think about it, it’s because they’re no longer entirely there and you don’t dare.
And when, like myself two weeks ago—perhaps because of our correspondence, who knows!—you summon up the courage to phone a ninety-four-year-old aunt, your mother’s elder sister, the last witness to so many things (and also the first witness, incidentally, to my existence, since she was the midwife in Béni Saf, the Algerian village to which my mother returned to give birth to me), when you cross the line and think, “It’s too silly
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