Limonov by Emmanuel Carrère

Author:Emmanuel Carrère [Carrère, Emmanuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374709211
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2014-10-21T07:00:00+00:00

5

EDUARD’S FRIEND FABIENNE ISSARTEL, the Parisian nightlife queen, said to him: “You’re angry at everyone, you don’t agree with anyone. I know just the person you should meet.” She set up a lunch at Brasserie Lipp with Jean-Edern Hallier, who’d recently relaunched L’ Idiot international.

* * *

Founded twenty years earlier under the patronage of Jean-Paul Sartre, L’ Idiot in its first incarnation was a late-sixties polemical weekly; Jean-Edern Hallier, its publisher, was a flamboyant, one-eyed shit-stirrer, and even his own journalists suspected him of being a paid provocateur, in the employ of Georges Pompidou’s police. Among this rich boy’s exploits—Fabienne had told Eduard the story, guessing he’d appreciate it—had been a trip to Chile to present the anti-Pinochet resistance with funds collected among the French limousine liberals. But the resistance never received a cent, Jean-Edern returned empty-handed, and no one ever found out where the money went. Jean-Edern had cloaked himself in the garb of the great writer, and situated himself somewhere between his friend Philippe Sollers, with whom he’d created the avant-garde literary magazine Tel Quel a while back, and the younger Bernard-Henri Lévy, whose good looks and precocious success he envied.

Jean-Edern could have passed as good-looking himself—he was rich, he had a Ferrari and an apartment on Paris’s Place des Vosges—but his outward mien concealed a bitter, self-destructive jester who had sabotaged the work of the good fairies bent over his cradle. He revered recluses like Maurice Blanchot and Julien Gracq, who’d been his teacher, but did everything he could to get on TV. Everyone who knew him, and even loved him, can remember, between the bouts of generous affection, other moments when the chasm of his envious soul opened wide. It was as if you sullied yourself just being around him. Brodsky might have said that like our Eduard, Jean-Edern was less reminiscent of Dostoyevsky than of his dreadful hero Svidrigailov. But he was a Svidrigailov bursting with panache, leaving broken hearts, bankruptcies, and scandals in his wake; a Svidrigailov whom François Mitterrand, so proud of his sophistication and his literary taste, made no bones about calling a great writer. Jean-Edern, in turn, threw his weight behind Mitterrand when he ran for president in 1981, hoping for a reward—a ministry, a television station—that never materialized. Overnight, he became the new president’s sworn enemy, spreading rumors about him—which today people are only too happy to say were open secrets, but I don’t think they were, in any event, they came as news to me—about Mitterrand’s friends who’d collaborated with the Nazis during the war, his cancer, his illegitimate daughter.

Later it came out that the antiterrorism task force at the Elysée Palace devoted a great deal of its time to listening in on Jean-Edern Hallier’s telephone calls and the calls of his friends; even the pay phone at the Closerie des Lilas, the restaurant where Hallier spent a lot of his time, was tapped. Hallier circulated a pamphlet around Paris called The Lost Honor of François Mitterrand. No one dared publish it.

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