you've got mail - javier cercas and hedwige jeanmart exchange letters (part two)
Unfortunately, it’s going to take a little longer before Belgian and foreign authors can get together at Passa Porta. In the meantime, we’ve invited several European writers to exchange letters.
After Peter Terrin (whose exchange with Peter Stamm can be read here), we asked Belgian writer Hedwige Jeanmart with whom she’d most like to correspond. She opted for the great Spanish writer Javier Cercas. An initial letter was sent from Barcelona, where Hedwige Jeanmart has been living for several years, to… Verges, fewer than 100 miles away, where Javier Cercas settled when lockdown was announced.
It didn’t take long for a reply to arrive, which brought about many more. The opportunity to question with irony and wit the usefulness of literature and the role of writers at a time of immobility during a pandemic... A rare exchange, to be read here.
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Verges, 16 December 2020
A fortnight ago, I was writing to you from Barcelona, where I had gone to run some errands, but now I'm back in Verges where, as I mentioned in my other letter, I have been staying with my family since the outbreak of the pandemic. And yes, it is a very beautiful town, like all or most of the towns in the Empordà region.
Lately, you must have been asked many times, as I have, whether you think we will emerge from this nightmare as better human beings, and whether you personally have learnt anything from it. I don't know how you reply, but I always say that, since it's easier to learn from a bad experience than a good one, we could learn a great deal from the pandemic: for example, that we need much better public health care than we have now, or that investing in scientific research is not a whim but a matter of urgency. But I am almost certain that we won’t learn anything, and that we will come out of this crisis just as barbaric and stupid as we went in, making exactly the same mistakes, or very similar ones, as if we were all bent on proving Bernard Shaw right, time and again, when he wrote: “We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience”. (How could we ever have thought that such a thing as this would never happen to us, that it was just something from the Middle Ages, when human history is a history of epidemics? How could we have been so naive, or rather so arrogant, to think that science and technology would protect us from catastrophes such as the present one?).
This, from the collective point of view. On a personal level, I also tend to reply that I haven't learnt anything, and that I don't think I’ve discovered anything new about myself. But now that, with the arrival of the vaccine, the light seems to be appearing at the end of the tunnel, as they say (let's hope it's not the light of an incoming lorry), I'm beginning to think that perhaps I have discovered something after all: that I don't need to travel as much as I used to, nor live in a big city, nor see anyone (or almost anyone), and that I can live in a small village such as this one, almost without ever leaving it, with my family, my dog, my books, my films, and my music, and I wouldn’t miss anything (or hardly anything), isolated from the world like an anchorite, or just about. Since it is impossible that I am becoming a sage, I can only conclude that, at the age of 58, I am turning into an old man.
But let's not get too dramatic. I was very happy to read that your crisis of confidence in literature – let’s call it that, so we understand each other – was simply due to a "moment of weakness". And I fully appreciate how this difficult situation, especially being a mother with young children in your care, could have provoked it. In fact, I have read that some of our fellow writers – both men and women, with and without children – have had problems concentrating during this period, and some have even stopped writing. This has not been the case with me. Quite the contrary: in my case, had this not been a collective catastrophe, it would have been a personal blessing.
It’s like this: for almost a year, I barely left the house – even though I had so many trips planned, across Europe and America, to promote my latest novel – so I was able to fully devote myself to what I really enjoy, which is writing, reading, and daydreaming (it is very clear to me that true success as a writer consists in not having to promote your own books because they promote themselves). And I did this with peace of mind because my family was well and, in spite of the disaster taking place around us (at times, the daily death rate in Spain was twice that of the Civil War), I was aware that I could do nothing to prevent it; or rather, that the best thing I could do was exactly what I was doing, which was, not leave the house and carry on working.
The other day, I told you that some truths are inconvenient, which is why people often prefer lies. Well, I’m afraid this is another one of those truths. And I still prefer the truth, however inconvenient, to lies because, just as we know from the Gospel that truth makes men and women free, we also know that lies only make us slaves.
But there’s something else. For me, it is the difficult moments, the periods of greatest fragility, vulnerability, vertigo, and doubt – to use your words – that most stimulate me to write, as though writing were a substitute for the certainties and securities that I lack, a defence against the attacks of life, as Cesare Pavese puts it. I think this is why I started writing, and why I am still writing. “When I think of my calling I do not fear life,” says Nina, the naive and moving character that Chekhov created in The Seagull. And that is another reason why, unlike what I used to believe when I was young, I do believe that literature is useful, as I also told you in my previous letter.
I know this is an idea that makes us writers uncomfortable, but maybe it’s time to reclaim it. Of course, the usefulness of literature is not like the usefulness of medicine, which is to save lives, or the usefulness of a key, which is to open a door. Its usefulness – to borrow the title of a book by Nuccio Ordine – is the usefulness of the useless. Literature is above all a form of pleasure, like sex (that’s why the expression "compulsory reading" is an oxymoron, just like "happy marriage"); and yet, like sex, it is also a form of knowledge – of others and of ourselves. And tell me, dear Hedwige, can you think of anything more useful than pleasure and knowledge? I don't. I don’t know if pleasure and knowledge make us better human beings, but I'm sure they make us more human, and for that reason I don’t think life is worth living without them. In the end, that’s what literature is for: to live more fully, in a richer, more intense, and more complex way.
Come to think of it, I was talking about this just the other day with Salman Rushdie, in a public debate organised by the Guadalajara book fair in Mexico. At first, he too was wary of the idea of the usefulness of literature, but in the end, he changed his mind and said: "Maybe what is not useful is our concept of usefulness". He’s right, don't you think?
A big hug, and see you soon (on the terrace of Las Delicias, when possible).
Javier
Translated from the Spanish by Francisca Rojas del Canto
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Barcelona, 21 December 2020
You and Salman Rushdie are absolutely right. To hell with this concept of usefulness. I’m already off to a bad start with this letter, having immediately closed off all room for debate. But I totally agree. It might have been shrewder of me to give the impression of having a more distinct opinion (if only to be a little coquettish or to show off a bit), or even to contradict you. Too bad, I agree with you 100%.
Your “usefulness of the useless” recalls a personal anecdote. A long, long time ago (when I was still a student), I came upon a novel in a bookshop by Iouri Dombrovski, whose title in French is La Faculté de l’inutile. (1) Sumptuous and irresistible, I fell in love with the title at first sight. I’d never heard of Dombrovski and the back cover didn’t give away much. Neither did I give a single thought to the polysemy of faculté in French, nor to the surprises that some translators have in store for us. I was wholeheartedly invested in the title, imagining that I’d be leaving the bookshop with a sort of guide that would allow me to hone an essential skill that, along with contemplation and reverie, I’d been looking to master for a long time.
I really enjoyed La Faculté de l’inutile but not for any of the reasons I’d bought it: the title turned out to be the name given by Stalin to university law faculties in the USSR and was therefore superfluous (oh, I love the word “superfluous” so much that I might return to it). As a result, I found myself in the Gulag. I’m telling you this uninteresting anecdote (uninteresting to everyone but me, seeing as I still remember the details perfectly) because it illustrates my long-standing appetite for uselessness over usefulness. My encounter with Dombrovski may well reveal other things, like the importance of a particular title or translator, or my ambiguous relationship to back covers – but above I imagine that it conveys the pure pleasure and surprises that an unexpected encounter can bring.
Another anecdote just came to mind (my last, I promise) on the same subject. When my son was 10 he won a reading competition at school. This competition wasn’t for set reading (which should be an oxymoron) although, that being said, the idea of a competition relating to reading bothers me just as much (devouring the largest number of books possible in a certain amount of time as if they were hamburgers or calçots (2) is way beyond me). But so be it. As a prize, he got to choose one book from a selection made by his teacher and so he returned home proudly one afternoon with The Story of Helen Keller because, clouded by pride at having received his first ever prize, he’d read the title as Killer instead of Keller. Deadly disappointed, he nonetheless resolved to read the life of Helen Keller and it made a significant impact on him – much more than the story of a serial killer would have.
What I want to convey is that these two literary encounters based on misunderstandings gave us both the chance to be parachuted into a place we hadn’t at all anticipated and we left this place if not happier (the themes of both of these books don’t lend themselves to happiness in the strictest sense of this term) but more human. More intense and complex, as you put it. And that’s magical.
I experienced this same type of magic a little while ago. I accepted an invitation to be on a literary jury thinking it would be a great chance to sample at random the Franco-Belgian literature of which I knew so little. Well, I can confirm that it was anything but useless. Not only did I get “a kick” out of it (to express the experience crudely), but I also came out of several reading experiences very differently from how I went in. You might describe this transformation as the unison of pleasure and knowledge?
You’ll notice (as I just have) that I’m much more comfortable talking about literature from the point of view of the reader. This makes me think. I feel as though my attempts to split myself across two camps that I consider to be the same camp have always been clumsy. This way, I’m probably trying to clear myself of a certain responsibility that comes with writing. On refection, I find this to be somewhat cowardly and hypocritical. Or perhaps falsely modest, proud, a way of surviving?
It’s not easy to admit the extent to which, despite all the doubts I’ve mentioned, we believe in literature with a kind of unwavering desperation because, beyond its usefulness (whose universality we could well question, but I won’t), it’s essential for the self. Your letters have perhaps allowed me to confront a truth which is neither beautiful to the ears nor beautiful to write: you read the self just as you write the self. In relation to others, of course, even through some futile hope of getting closer to them. But, like the first page of Gombrowicz’s Diairies, literature is, nonetheless, by necessity, “Monday. ME. Tuesday. ME. Wednesday. ME. Thursday. ME.” Although I have no scruples swallowing up Gombrowicz’s MEs (sometimes even as I laugh), I confess to finding it a lot harder seeing mine thrown to the wolves, and to risk being seen as self-obsessed. This idea, to borrow your term, makes me nervous and most likely inhibits me.
Which, who knows, might be a slight advantage during this forced isolation? Perhaps it offers some form of protection. Thanks to the pandemic, writers are reading and writing, staying at home with their dog or cats, in their natural urban or rural environments, listening to music or the sound of silence, at a distance, protected from the kind of exposure that might not always agree with them. Is this posturing? Cliché? Part of the coquettishness I was apologising for at the beginning of this letter? I really don’t know.
You write that a piece of work should ideally be able to live without the intervention of its author. I agree with you on that point too. I won’t go into details about the name, the title (that would be very nihilistic) or even the back cover that have played tricks on me in the past, nor certain interviews, but personally I’ve never understood the interest of bios or photos, for example. Yes, the reply might come that you can’t separate the work from its author, which I’ve just confirmed ten lines up – and so I risk contradicting myself in trying to protect one from the other. Maybe the dilemma is quite simply this: we can’t stay alone with ourselves forever but how do we accept the fact that others may devour us.
So, in order to find a certain balance within ourselves, let’s hope against hope that this forced isolation won’t last forever. In the meantime, without any hope of a walk in Verges, I take regular walks along the Carrer de Verdi from the top to the bottom and I’ve never found this street so beautiful and so rich – so wonderfully literary, even. My progress is slow and I have to stop regularly but each time I learn more about the places and the people along the way – it’s a real discovery. These people relate stories of their lives in episodes; with each trip outside, I envisage the next instalment. I’m as happy as they are to break our collective isolation; it’s a little when you’re starving and you break off the end of a baguette as soon as you’re on the pavement. It’s both sad and very positive.
I’d like to end on a positive note so I’ll stop there. Lots of love and don’t lose sight of that terrace meeting one day soon.
Hedwige
Translated from the French by Daniella Shreir
(1) Translated as The Faculty of Useless Knowledge in English.
(2) Calçots are a type of Catalan onion known for their softness and sweetness. They’re often eaten directly off the barbecue during festivals. There are even eating competitions that involve calçots.
how nice that you were able to take the time for some literature
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