A French Novel

Epigraph

Like a spring, young children grow

Then blossom in a summer

Surprised by winter they no longer show

What once they were.

Pierre de Ronsard, ‘Ode à Anthoine de Chasteigner’, 1550

Dedication

For my family and for Priscilla de Laforcade who is a part of it

Table of Contents

Title Page

Epigraph

Dedication

Foreword

Prologue

1. Clipped Wings

2. Lost Grace

3. Flashbacks of Myself

4. Vowels, Consonants

5. Fragments of an Arrest

6. Guéthary, 1972

7. Natural Hells

8. The Original Rake

9. A French Novel

10. With Family

11. End of an Era

12. Before They Were My Parents, They Were Neighbours

13. Revelations about the Lamberts

14. Hearing Problems

15. Affective Prognathism

16. Quiet Days in Neuilly

17. A Claustrophobic Chapter

18. Divorce, French-Style

19. Van Vogt’s ‘Null-A’ and Fred’s ‘A’

20. Madame Ratel Paints

21. Forgotten Finger

22. Return to Guéthary

23. Rue Maître-Albert

24. Cassettes

25. The Revealing Child

26. A Scientific Digression

27. The Trip Across Paris

28. Brother of the Above-Named

29. Could Try Harder

30. Force-Fed Children

31. Prison Break

32. Dreams and Illusions

33. The Dishonest Truth

34. The Second Father

35. The End of Amnesia

36. The Day I Broke My Mother’s Heart

37. Parental Inventory

38. The French Dream

39. Compulsive Liars

40. Release

41. New York, 1981 or 1982

42. Results

43. The A in Atlantis

Epilogue

Footnotes

By the Same Author

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

FOREWORD

The greatest quality of this book is undoubtedly its honesty. When a book is as honest as this, it can lead, almost unintentionally, to genuine revelations about what it means to be human – in this respect, literature is still leagues ahead of the sciences. In reading A French Novel, we realise that a man’s life is divided into two phases: childhood and adulthood, and that it is completely pointless to further refine this analysis. Formerly, there existed a third phase, known as old age, which linked the two, when childhood memories flooded back, giving a semblance of unity to a human life. But to enter into old age, one must first accept it, leave life behind and enter into the age of memory. Caught up in desires and in adult plans, the author is not at this stage, and has almost no memory of his childhood.

He does, however, have one, involving shrimping and a beach on the côte Basque. Like Cuvier reconstructing the skeleton of a dinosaur from a single fragment of bone, from this single memory Frédéric Beigbeder reconstructs his whole family history. It is a serious, solid work in which we discover a French family, a relatively harmonious blend of bourgeoisie and aristocracy of staunchly rural stock. A family heroic to the point of lunacy during the First World War, and consequently rather more circumspect when the Second World War breaks out. After 1945 they are gripped by a lively appetite for consumerism, an appetite which after 1968 will extend to a new level, becoming widespread in the sphere of morals. A family like many others, most of which belong to the upper classes; but it is the very ordinariness of Beigbeder’s family history that makes it compelling, since the whole history of twentieth-century France unfolds before our eyes, related without apparent effort. On first reading, we get a little confused sometimes with all the characters; that is the only thing for which one might criticise the author.

In adolescence, everything changes. Memories flood back, but there are two things basically, two things in particular that linger in the author’s memory: the girls he has loved, the books he has read. Is that all there is to life, is that all that remains? It would seem so. And here too, Beigbeder’s honesty is so obvious that we would not think to challenge his conclusions. If it is indeed this and this alone that seems important to him, it’s because it truly is. Deep down, the pleasure of autobiography is almost the opposite of that of the novel: far from losing oneself in the author’s world, we never forget ourselves when reading an autobiography; we compare ourselves, we connect, we confirm, page after page, our sense of belonging to a common humanity.

I was less interested by the sections about the nights spent in custody for taking cocaine on the public highway. It’s curious; I should have empathised, having myself spent a night in prison for an offence almost as stupid (smoking a cigarette on a plane) – and I can confirm that conditions in custody are not exactly comfortable. But the author and his friend the Poet protest a little too much; they mouth off. The portrait of the writer as a boy, a sickly little thing, all chin and ears, doing his best to follow in the footsteps of the big brother he admires, is brief, but it is so powerful that I felt I could sense that child reading over my shoulder through the whole book. In this delinquent episode, something is wrong: the child does not recognise himself in the adult he has become. And this, too, is probably the truth: the child is not father to the man. There is the child, there is the man; and between the two there is no connection. It is a discomfiting, embarrassing conclusion: we would like to think that there is a certain unity at the core of the human personality; it is an idea we find difficult to let go of; we would like to be able to make a connection.

That connection we immediately make is in the pages the author devotes to his daughter, probably the most beautiful in the book. Because imperceptibly he realises, and we realise with him, that the childhood years his daughter is going through are the only years of true happiness. And that nothing, not even his love for her, will prevent her from stumbling over the same obstacles, from sinking into the same ruts. This increasingly poignant blend of secret sadness and love culminates in the magnificent epilogue, which in itself would justify this book, in which the author teaches his daughter, as his grandfather taught him, the art of skimming stones. In that moment the circle is closed and everything is justified. The stone that skips magically ‘six, seven, eight times’ across the sea. A victory, albeit limited, against gravity.

Michel Houellebecq

PROLOGUE

I am older than my great-grandfather. Capitaine Thibaud de Chasteigner was thirty-seven years old when he fell during the second battle of Champagne, on 25 September 1915 at 9.15 a.m. between the valley of Suippe and the outskirts of the Argonne forest. I had to pester my mother to find out more; the hero of the family is an unknown soldier. He is buried at the Borie-Petit château, in Dordogne (my uncle’s place), but I saw his photograph in the château Vaugoubert (belonging to another uncle): a tall, thin young man in a blue uniform, with cropped fair hair. In his last letter to my great-grandmother, Thibaud says he has no wire-cutters to clear a path to the enemy’s lines. He describes the flat, chalky landscape, the incessant rain turning the ground into a muddy swampland, and confides that he has received the order to attack the following morning. He knows he will die; his letter is like a ‘snuff movie’ – a horror film made using no special effects. At dawn, he fulfilled his duty, singing the ‘Chant des Girondins’: ‘To die for one’s country is the most noble, most enviable destiny!’ The men of the 161st Infantry Regiment launched themselves into a hail of bullets; as intended, my great-grandfather and his men were ripped to shreds by the German machine guns and asphyxiated with chlorine gas. It might be said that Thibaud was murdered by his superior officers. He was tall, he was young, he was handsome, and La France ordered him to die for her. Or rather – and this gives his fate a curious topicality – La France ordered him to commit suicide. Like a Japanese kamikaze or a Palestinian terrorist, this father of four sacrificed himself knowing precisely what he was doing. This descendant of the crusaders was doomed to imitate Jesus Christ: to give his life so that others might live.

I am descended from a gallant knight crucified on the barbed wire of Champagne.

1
CLIPPED WINGS

I had just found out my brother had been made a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur when I was arrested. The police did not handcuff me straight away; they only did that later, when I was being transferred to the Hôtel-Dieu, and again when I was transferred to prison on the Île de la Cité the following night. The President of the Republic had just written a charming letter to my elder brother, congratulating him on his contribution to the economic dynamism of France: ‘You are a perfect example of the sort of capitalism we want: a capitalism of entrepreneurs rather than one of speculators.’ On 28 January 2008, at the police station in the 8th arrondissement in Paris, officers in blue uniform, guns and truncheons dangling from their belts, stripped me completely naked in order to search me, confiscated my phone, my watch, my credit card, my money, my keys, my passport, my driving licence, my belt and my scarf, took samples of my saliva and my fingerprints, lifted up my testicles to see whether I had anything stuffed up my arsehole, took front, side and three-quarter photographs of me holding a mugshot placard, before returning me to a cage two metres square, its walls covered with graffiti, dried blood and snot. At the time I did not realise that, a few days later, I would be watching my brother receiving the Légion d’honneur in the Salle des Fêtes of the Élysée Palace, which is not quite so cramped, and that through the picture windows I would watch the leaves of the oak trees in the grounds moving in the wind, as though waving to me, beckoning me to come into the presidential gardens. Lying on a concrete bench at about four o’clock in the morning that dark night, the situation seemed simple to me: God had faith in my brother, and He had abandoned me. How could two people who had been so close as children have had such different fates? I had just been arrested for using class-A drugs on the public highway with a friend. A pickpocket in the next cell hammered on the glass half-heartedly, but regularly enough to keep the rest of the prisoners from getting any sleep. Sleep, in any case, would have been impossible, a utopian dream, since even when the convicts stopped bawling, the police shouted to each other along the gangways at the top of their lungs, as though the prisoners were deaf. The air was pervaded by the smell of sweat, vomit and undercooked microwaved stewed beef with carrots. Time passes very slowly when you don’t have a watch and when no one thinks to switch off the flickering strip light on the ceiling. Lying on the filthy concrete floor at my feet, a schizophrenic in an alcoholic coma groaned, snored and farted. It was freezing, but I was burning up. I tried to think of nothing, but it was impossible: when you bang people up in a tiny little cell, their brains work overtime trying in vain to ward off panic; some fall to their knees and beg to be let out, others have a nervous breakdown, try to top themselves, or confess to crimes they didn’t commit. I would have given anything for a book or a sleeping pill. But since I had neither, I started writing this book in my head, with no pen, my eyes closed. I hope that this book lets you escape from it all, as it did me that night.

2
LOST GRACE

I do not remember my childhood. No one believes me when I say that. Everyone remembers their past; what’s the point of living if you forget your life? I have nothing left of myself: from zero to the age of fifteen, I am confronted by a black hole (as defined in astrophysics: ‘a compact mass having a gravitational field so intense that no matter or radiation can escape’). For a long time I believed that this was normal, that others experienced the same amnesia. But whenever I asked, ‘Do you remember your childhood?’, they would tell me endless stories. I’m ashamed that my autobiography will be written in invisible ink. Why is my childhood not indelible? I feel excluded from the world, because the world has an archaeology and I do not. I have covered my tracks like a criminal on the run. When I mention this disability, my parents roll their eyes to heaven, my family protests, my childhood friends get angry, former girlfriends are tempted to produce photographic evidence.

‘You haven’t lost your memory, Frédéric. It’s just that you don’t care about us!’

Amnesiacs are hurtful; their nearest and dearest take them for revisionists, as though forgetting is always a choice. I’m not lying by omission: I rummage through my life as if it were an empty trunk, and I find nothing; I am a wilderness. Sometimes I’ll hear people whispering behind my back: ‘That guy, I can’t quite work him out.’ I agree. How is it possible to work someone out when he doesn’t know where he comes from? As Gide says in The Counterfeiters, I am ‘built on piles having neither foundations nor substratum’. The ground gives way beneath my feet, I hover on a cushion of air, I am a bottle adrift on the sea, a Calder mobile. In order to please, I gave up having a backbone, I wanted to blend into the background like Zelig, the human chameleon. To forget one’s personality, lose one’s memory in order to be loved; to become, the better to charm, that which others wish one to be. In psychiatric terms this is a personality disorder known as ‘deficiently centred consciousness’. I am an empty vessel, a life without substance. In my childhood bedroom on rue Monsieur-le-Prince, pinned on one of the walls, I’m told, I had a poster for the film My Name is Nobody. I probably identified with the hero.

I have always written stories about men who have no past: the heroes of my books are products of an age of immediacy, cast adrift in a rootless present – transparent inhabitants of a world in which feelings are as short-lived as butterflies, in which forgetfulness is a safeguard against pain. It is possible – I am living proof – to retain only a few scraps of one’s childhood, false for the most part, or fashioned after the fact. Such amnesia is encouraged in our society: even the future perfect is on the road to grammatical oblivion. My handicap will soon be a commonplace; my particular case will become the general. Nonetheless, we must accept that it is not usual to develop Alzheimer’s symptoms in middle age.

Often I refashion my childhood out of politeness. ‘Come on, Frédéric, you must remember?’ I nod sagely: ‘Oh yes, of course, I collected Panini stickers, I was a Rubettes fan, it’s all coming back to me now.’ I am terribly sorry to have to confess here: I remember nothing; I am my own imposter. I have no idea where I was between 1965 and 1980; perhaps this is why I am so lost today. I hope there is some secret, some mysterious hex, some magic spell I could discover which would lead me out of this personal labyrinth. If my childhood was not a nightmare, why does my mind keep my memory in a coma?