A Dutiful Son E-Book

Pascal Bruckner

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Pascal Bruckner's memoir reads like a novel, a Bildungsroman which charts his journey from pious Catholic child to leading philosopher and writer on French culture. The key figure in Bruckner's life is his father, a virulent anti-Semite, who voluntarily went to work in Germany during the Second World War. He is a violent man who beats his wife. The young Bruckner soon reacts against his father and his revenge is to become his polar opposite, even to the point of being happy to be called a 'Jewish thinker', which he is not. 'My father helped me to think better by thinking against him. I am his defeat.' . Despite this opposition, he remains tied to his father to the very end. He has other 'fathers', men such as Sartre, Vladimir Jankélévitch and Roland Barthes who fostered his philosophical development, and describes his friendship with his 'philosophical twin brother', Alain Finkielkraut. . A great read for anyone interested in the 1960s, the intellectual life of France and the father and son relationship.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title

The Author

The Translator

Saying my Prayers

Part One Horrible and Marvellous Days

Chapter 1 His Majesty Koch’s Bacillus

Chapter 2 Conjugal Endearments

Chapter 3 The Semitic Poison

Part Two The Great Escape

Chapter 4 The Glorious Taste of the Outside World

Chapter 5 The Great Awakeners

Part Three In Final Settlement

Chapter 6 An Unforeseen Legacy

Chapter 7 The Virulence of the Widower

Chapter 8 You Ought to do a Stefan Zweig

Epilogue

Copyright

The Author

Pascal Bruckner was born 15 December 1948 in Paris. He is one of the “New Philosophers” who came to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s. Much of his work has been devoted to critiques of French society and culture.

His fiction includes Lunes de fiel which was made into the film Bitter Moon by Roman Polanski and My Little Husband published by Dedalus in 2013. His essays and novels have been translated into more than thirty languages and received worldwide acclaim.

The Translator

Mike Mitchell has translated more than seventy books from German and French.

His translation of Rosendorfer’s Letters Back to Ancient China won the 1998 Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize after he had been shortlisted in previous years for his translations of Stephanie by Herbert Rosendorfer and The Golem by Gustav Meyrink. His translations have been shortlisted four times for The Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize: Simplicissimus by Johann Grimmelshausen in 1999, The Other Side by Alfred Kubin in 2000, The Bells of Bruges by Georges Rodenbach in 2008 and the Lairds of Cromarty by Jean Pierre Ohl in 2013.

His recent translations from French include Where Tigers are at Home by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès, My Little Husband by Pascal Bruckner and Ink in the Blood by Stéphanie Hochet.

Ingmar Bergman: The creative juices flow when the soul is threatened.

Saying my Prayers

It’s bedtime. Kneeling at the foot of my bed, head bowed, hands together, I murmur my prayer in a low voice. I’m ten. After a brief review of the day’s sins, I make a request of God, our all-powerful Creator. He knows how regularly I attend mass, how fervently I receive communion, how I love Him above all else. I simply ask Him, implore Him, to bring about the death of my father, while driving if possible. Brakes failing while he’s going downhill, black ice, a plane tree, whatever suits Him best.

‘I leave the choice of accident to you, God, see to it that my father kills himself.’

My mother arrives to tuck me in and read me a story. She looks at me tenderly. I intensify my fervour, put on an air of devotion. I close my eyes and say under my breath, ‘I’m leaving you now, God, Maman’s just come into my bedroom.’

She’s proud of my ardent faith and at the same time worried that one day I might be tempted to become a priest. I get up at six in the morning to go and serve at mass in the Jesuit Collège Saint-Joseph, the junior secondary school I attend in Lyons, and I’ve already brought up the possibility of going to the Petit Séminaire for my baccalauréat years. It’s a low mass, a short one, that is, I’m not qualified for the long ceremonies requiring a complex liturgy. When I get lost, I cross myself, it gives me composure. At that early hour there aren’t many people in the church, not much more than a sparse scattering of devout old women straight out of bed muttering their prayers. I’m God’s little eager beaver: the smell of the incense intoxicates me just as the priest intoxicates himself, filling his cruets with cheap white plonk and knocking back a full one himself as early as seven in the morning. His glazed expression makes us giggle. Lighting the candles sends me into raptures, I love this moment of contemplation before lessons. I receive communion, I adore the taste of the host, that unleavened bread that melts on your tongue like a biscuit. It fills me with strength, I mumble my Latin responses without understanding them, which makes them all the more beautiful. I serve at mass with sycophantic ardour – I want to have the best marks in paradise. When I screw up my eyes, it seems to me that Jesus is sending an affectionate wink in my direction.

Two years later, on the occasion of my solemn communion, I indulge in an orgy of goodness. I smile at everyone, the Angel of Good himself is living inside me. With sensual pleasure I sniff my new gilt-edged missal, the pages of which rustle when you turn them. I’m floating above the ground in my alb, I’m bathing in unction. Uncles and aunts cover me in kisses that I in turn freely lavish on my cousins. My zeal fills my mother with pride and a secret concern. It is good to have faith but within limits: the town of Lyons, former centre of the silk industry, is full of wretched abbés in stained cassocks and worn-out boots, the whipping boys of their hierarchy, the laughing stock of the street urchins, the proletarians of the Roman Catholic Apostolic Church. Many of them die young, abused and exhausted.

‘Hurry up and get into bed, it’s late already.’

‘Yes, Maman, right away. Just one more minute, I haven’t finished yet.’

I quickly go over the sins I’ve committed that day, adding two or three just as later on I will add a few items of income to my tax return in case I’ve omitted something more important. I thank the Lord for all His goodness towards me.

‘Please, God, get rid of him, I’ll be very good.’

My mother has no inkling of what’s troubling her little cherub, all she sees in me is innocence and sweetness. The reason for my request to the Almighty goes back several weeks.

I have some geometry homework that I decide to finish after dinner. I skip it and go to bed, maths not being one of my strong points. My father comes to enlighten me and when I stubbornly persist in not understanding anything, he gets impatient. The more he tries to explain things to me, the less I understand. I’m tired. His advice is followed by shouts, his shouts by howls of rage accompanied by smacks. I’m an imbecile, a disgrace to the family. He’s huge, so very imposing. A few minutes later I’m on the floor, I curl up in a ball to escape his blows, I slip under the bed from which his powerful hand drags me out in order to instil the rudiments of arithmetic in me. But above all, and this is what I cannot forgive myself, I beg him to spare me. ‘Have mercy, Papa, have mercy, I’ll work very hard. Please stop.’

The clouts, the kicks don’t really matter. They hurt but the pain goes away. But to humiliate yourself before your torturer, to beg him to spare you because you’ve seen a murderous gleam in his eye, that’s inexcusable.

Later on, when watching detective films, I will always deplore the tendency of the victims to beg their killers’ mercy. It arouses their sadism instead of making them relent. If one has to die, it should be with dignity. My mother comes upstairs, separates us, gives me a long hug while I’m still sobbing, my cheeks bright red. Afterwards my father comes to give me a kiss.

‘Right then, let’s make peace. We’ll finish everything off tomorrow morning.’

I mumble a faint ‘yes’ but resentment has taken hold of me. It’s a pool of pus that gradually seeps into every one of my thoughts. War has been declared: there will be armistices, often happy ones, intervals of harmony, but something has started that will never stop. Even when we’re playing in the evening, under the sheets, at being in a sleigh on an icefield surrounded by wolves, I don’t go along with it any more. Now it’s him who’s the carnivore about to devour me. The blind trust I used to have in him has been broken.

God doesn’t answer my prayers and four years later I stop believing in Him. Until then every evening, or almost, I hear the metal gate open and see the lights of his car on the drive. I go upstairs to shut myself in my room, disappointed and tense. My mother tidies her hair and goes out onto the doorstep to brave the storm. During the night I dream that my body has left my bed and is floating through the air. I’m stuck to the ceiling, as if I were paragliding. I want to stay hanging in the stratosphere, to see the world from above without having to share in its trials and tribulations.

Brutal fathers have one advantage: they don’t lull you with their gentleness, their sentimentality, they don’t try to play at being big brothers or mates. They wake you up like an electric shock, make you someone who’s eternally fighting or eternally oppressed. What mine passed on to me was his fury and for that I’m grateful. The hatred he instilled in me also saved me. I sent it back at him like a boomerang.

Part One

Horrible and Marvellous Days

Chapter 1

His Majesty Koch’s Bacillus

We’d set off during the night, a troop of little imps in bobble hats, holding each others’ hands, led by the nurses. The air was an ice crystal, burning our throats and lungs. The flakes, falling in their thousands, were so hard they scourged our faces, hurt like crystals. The snow crunched under our soles, muffling our steps. The wind was tearing it off the roofs of the chalets, reducing it to powder in gusts, transforming the darkness into a maelstrom of white. Each one of us saw his comrades transformed into moving statues from which plumes of vapour rose with every breath. We sang Christmas carols, O Tannenbaum, Stille Nacht, to keep our spirits up.

The road was closed to traffic, apart from the horse-drawn sleighs, jingling as they carried families wrapped up warm in blankets. When we looked up we could just about make out the distorted range of the Vorarlberg peaks. Everything was urging us to hurry up. Everyone was afraid of leaving the troop, being forgotten, buried under the white shroud. Inevitably one of us, ground down by cold and fear, would have an accident and his underpants would have to be changed quickly and it would earn the poor lad the name Buxenschiss (someone who dirties his pants). Finally the stained-glass windows of the church appeared: we climbed the steps into the graveyard where the crowd of parishioners was already gathering for midnight mass. After the hostile outdoors there was the warm atmosphere of a mountain Christmas with hymns and organ. The building had nothing of the Tyrolean buildings with onion-shaped domes and extravagant decoration: it was an unpretentious church with ochre walls, a pencil-shaped, black-slate steeple and a very bare nave. Close by the altar was a fir tree decorated with balls of various colours, a stucco St Nicholas, silver lametta and wobbly candles from which the wax dripped down, threatening to set the tree on fire. Two buckets of water had been provided in case of accident. A blond angel was stuck at the top of the tree, its wings spread wide as a sign of mercy. A huge crib housed Jesus, Mary, Joseph and all the other figures, made of terracotta that were as tall as we were. We were waiting for the moment when the donkey and the bull were going to turn their heads and start to bray or moo. The congregation consisted of mountain folk, rough farmers or stockbreeders in leather trousers, women in floral skirts and traditional headdresses. The war had finished barely six years ago, the French occupation of Vorarlberg had ended between 1947 and 1948. The majority of the congregation were women: many of the men were perhaps still prisoners of war or dead.

Our attention was drawn to the Dorftrottel, the village idiot, a boy of about fifteen with a goitre, close-cropped hair and a simpleton’s face, whose task it was to amuse the congregation while they were waiting for the service to begin. He mimed a farcical version of the mass, making his audience roar with laughter. He’s the one we’ll bombard with snowballs, sometimes stones, later on, when we leave, under the indulgent eye of the priest. Having made fun of the service, he’d earned this little punishment. The priest intervened when the clown was on the ground and started to cry. The village choir, accompanied by a small local orchestra, sang Mozart’s Coronation Mass with magnificent incompetence. The soprano, a simple innkeeper from the village, went up so high her voice seemed to have reached breaking point, she threw the orchestra into a panic, but got her breath back and finished the aria, exhausted. In that little European church Mozart’s music lifted up the souls of these boors who, not long ago, had been involved in the defence of the Reich. Even today I cannot hear the Laudate Dominum without getting a lump in my throat. Exhausted by the lateness of the hour, drowsy from the heat, I generally fell asleep at the Agnus Dei to wake up at the end of the mass, roused from my sleep by the bells ringing out and the prospect of presents. The congregation were drinking mulled wine spiced with cinnamon, wishing each other a Happy Christmas and lighting candles on their parents’ graves in the cemetery. Many left on skis, long runners turned up at the end simply attached to their boots with straps.

It was the fifties in the Kleinwalsertal, a remote district of Vorarlberg, an Austrian enclave in Bavaria. Suffering from a primary infection from having played in the dirty blankets of an uncle with renal tuberculosis, the family disease par excellence, I had been sent to a Kinderheim (children’s home) in Mittelberg, a little village at 1,200 metres above sea level, when I was one and a half. I gabbled a German dialect before French and my mother who, to her great disappointment, I called Mutti, had for several years been obliged to engage a bilingual governess, Frau Rhuff, as interpreter. The woman’s brother, mentally ill, had been killed as part of the Gnadentod (‘mercy killing’ as Adolf Hitler called it) programme without her knowing precisely whether he’d been gassed in a hermetically sealed truck or finished off with a lethal injection. The Vorarlberg dialect, close to Bavarian, was a language of farmers, as hard as granite, of jealously self-enclosed mountain tribes. It sounded as if you were gargling gravel and made you force out the vowels, so harshly did the consonants hit the palate. My parents came from Paris to see me and my mother stayed on, alone with me for a few weeks longer. At that time the journey in a Renault 4CV took almost 24 hours, especially in winter when you were faced with snowstorms and icy roads.

On the evening of Christmas Day I went back with them to the hotel where they were staying, a little guest house called Kaffee Anna. The fir trees lined the route; with the piles of snow on their branches they looked like servants in livery carrying parcels. We got to their room in the inn: at the foot of another tree, a miniature one this time, magnificently decorated and bearing sweets and other delicacies, were the presents in their glittering wrapping, some hidden deep within the branches. Since then the fir has for me always been the tree in whose shade presents grow. Every year I was given a model railway carriage or an engine. When I was very young my father put together a magnificent Märklin electric train for me that he later set up at home, in France. He would spend hours up in the attic and after several years he had created an entire region with its town, its tram, its hills, its cable car, its pedestrians, its cars, two or three stations, tunnels and viaducts. Under the table was a skein of electric wires. Model railways and, more generally, his love of trains and the work of a railwayman was a passion he passed on to me. I never ceased to be delighted by the details, precise down to the last millimetre, and the variety of the models I was given – a chemical pellet dissolved in the chimney of the steam locomotives made smoke. To reconstruct the world on a small scale instead of mastering it, that is the potent pleasure of model-building. The world in miniature turns us into occasional gods endowed with absolute power. Enveloped in solicitude, I looked out of the windows marbled with ice. The blizzard intensified and the great forest, of which I held a richly bedecked hostage prisoner in my room, trembled, filling me with terror.

Since then going to the Alps has been to return to childhood, to the land of toys, funicular railways, bells hanging round the cows’ necks, places that look like toy villages, openwork balconies, frescoes painted on the farmhouses. I love the old-fashioned civilities, the simple rites of alpine cultures, even the omnipresence of milk in the food. Every time I get somewhere above 1,000 metres, I’m at home, in my landscape of the mind. I’m even moved by the yodel, that joyful sobbing in the throat that went from Switzerland to country music with its trills, its quarter tones and the easy-going accompaniment of the accordion. It’s the inhospitality of the mountains that attracts me: they welcome you with a rejection, forcing you to face vertiginous cliffs, the mineral hardness of the ridges, the deceptive stillness of the glaciers. And when I set off for the peaks, racked by a fear that delights me as much as it makes me feel queasy, it is in the hope of finding, on my return, my old friend the fir tree. For me its tongue will always be the prattle of early childhood. Wherever that commoner among trees grows, in the shade and the north wind, there is babbling, sudden bursts of laughter. It remains the tree of an impalpable frontier separating platitude from altitude, the sentinel that welcomes us to the realm of height. Reaching up to the sky, it awaits the snow, ready to assume the burden for which it so obviously seems destined. When the flakes finally arrive, it lets itself be covered, its branches be decked with a thick coating of white, and wakes in the morning glittering with icicles, capturing the light with its needles. All day long its extremities, studded with tiny jewels, crack and crumble.

To the emotions it arouses can be added another: being the tree of hearth and home. Rimbaud cursed winter because it was ‘the season of comfort’. That is precisely what makes it dear to me. I love those little villages clustered round a church and a mountain stream with its refreshing murmur, those wooden chalets with low ceilings, clean and scented furniture, box beds covered with a thick white duvet awaiting the traveller. Every room radiates opulence and simplicity, every nook and cranny seems to be a snug little cubby hole. And for me the falling snow creates a sense of intimacy, it gathers people together, appeals to the bashful lover, the sedentary hermit inside us. Unlike the rain, that mindlessly follows the law of gravity, the snow falls nobly, just kisses the cornices, consents to settle on a cushion prepared by other flakes. It muffles the noises, hides the ugliness we spread around us, gives a feeling of immobility as if, after having agreed to fall, it were slowly rising up from the ground to the sky. It isn’t cold, it warms your heart, becomes the subtle enhancer of desire. Whenever, in the mountains, I open my eyes on a night rendered blue by full, soft flakes, I imagine I can see standing out, enigmatic and kind-hearted, against the snow-hooded branches, the face of the woman I love running towards me.