Paris, April 30, 2009
Dear Melvin Mapple,
I am glad to see how enthusiastic you are. But do take care of yourself. It’s been a while since you mentioned Scheherazade. How is she? This will be a short letter, I’m behind with my correspondence.
Best wishes,
Amélie Nothomb
I mailed this letter feeling satisfied that I had found the right tone, and the ideal distance between coolness and fervor. If the soldier no longer had any doubts, it was because he was so inclined by nature: it would be absurd of me to incriminate myself, and typical of my own tendency to make myself feel guilty for all the woes in the universe.
There’s no better way to get a new perspective on things than to read a stranger’s letter: an actress from Saint-Germain-des-Prés wrote to me on April 23; I’d never heard of her before. She said she had seen me at the Odéon Métro station on April 15, in tears. This had upset her greatly, but she hadn’t dared come and speak to me. It was the first time she had ever seen me, and this was just how she imagined me. She felt very close to me and now she asked if I would write a text for her that she could perform on stage, something which would help me transcend my suffering. She sent several photographs of herself to back up her request.
I immersed myself in her photographs, wondering all the while what I could have been crying about at the Odéon Métro station on April 15: what could have gotten into me, to go there to cry my eyes out? I probed my memory in search of a cause for such mid-April despair, when suddenly it became perfectly obvious: the crying woman she had seen in the Métro was not me. The actress had seen a likeness between me and another strange woman sobbing at the Odéon. For her own dark reasons that was how she pictured me. My latent flea-market-psychoanalyst self posited that it was her own tearful face in the reflection of the window of a train passing through the Odéon station that this woman from Saint-Germain-des-Prés had seen, in fact, and unable to recognize her own identity she had attributed it to an ectoplasm whom she had christened Amélie Nothomb.
Why me? Who could say. I am about to write something grave and true: I am that porous creature upon whom people call to play a devastating role in their lives. We all have our narcissistic side, and it would be only too easy to blame these recurrent phenomena on whatever it is in me that is exceptional, but nothing in me is more exceptional than this unfortunate porosity of mine, which I suspect of wreaking havoc. People sense that I am fertile soil for their secret vegetable patch: Melvin Mapple had found what he needed in my loam to nourish his artistic fantasies; the actress wept her lettuce leaves in my garden of sprouting tears; it is incredible how often the masses toss the contents of their seed packets in the direction of my private preserve. I find it moving, but I cannot rejoice, because I know I shall be held responsible should any of these personal projects fail, projects about which I know nothing.
I would reply to the actress in a month or so, which is my usual time frame and which I would have done better to respect in Melvin Mapple’s case. So many letters, it was endless. Don’t get me wrong: I love it. I love reading letters and writing them, especially with certain people. However, from time to time I need to clean out my system, the better to enjoy the activity.
What are you supposed to do when there are forty or more epistles requiring your attention? You sort. For example, I refused to read the thirty-five homework assignments sent to me by a French teacher who was counting on me to correct her week’s workload. “My students have read your books, so you owe them,” she wrote, seeming to think that her absurd reasoning actually meant something.
That afternoon I drank a Grimbergen while taking deep delight in the substance of the numerous letters I had saved until last. I was enjoying the pleasure of having regained my appetite. Epistolary hunger is an art, and I aim to excel in it.
The next day several planetary events occurred that went unreported by the newspapers. They were all busy talking about a pandemic, and I suppose they were right—the press is good at choosing its actions but not its subjects—for there was indeed an epidemic raging, but it was an epidemic of great and beautiful risks, of success.
Life continued its Parisian amble. There arose a sudden and unexpected interest in a book published during the reign of Louis XIV: an absolute gem of refinement, despite the era, which was one of absolute power. The book tells a story that was meant to have taken place one hundred and twenty years earlier. No one, anymore, is even aware of this huge gap between the two eras. Such a dizzying, scarcely perceptible artifice is the hallmark of a masterpiece. The Chinese who live in France are no more foreign than I am. I will never stop rhapsodizing over this country, which is more than ever the country of La Princesse de Clèves.
I worked out that Melvin Mapple would receive my letter on May 4. I did not dwell on it. This is how you must go about it. If you follow the path of a letter in your mind, one way or another it will not reach its destination. You must let the recipient do his work. Experience has shown that letters are never read the way one imagines: therefore, it is preferable not to imagine anything.
I have been a letter writer for far longer than I have been a writer, and I probably would not have become a writer—at least, not this writer—had I not started off as an assiduous letter writer. Already at the age of six I was forced by my parents to write one letter a week to my maternal grandfather, a stranger who lived in Belgium. My brother and my older sisters were subjected to the same regime. Each of us had to fill an entire letter-sized page addressed to this gentleman. He answered with one page per child. “Tell him what happened at school,” my mother would suggest. “He won’t be interested,” I retorted. “That depends on how you tell it,” she explained.
It used to bore me stiff. It was a worse nightmare than homework. I had to fill the blank paper with sentences that might, at a push, interest my faraway ancestor. That is the only period in my life when I have experienced the anxiety of the empty page, but it lasted for years, all through my childhood—for centuries, in other words.
“Comment on what he’s written to you,” my mother advised one day, on seeing me draw a blank. Commenting means describing the other person’s words. Upon reflection, that was what my grandfather had been doing: his letters commented on mine. Not a bad idea. So I did likewise. My missives commented on his commentary. And so on. It was a bizarre, dizzying dialogue but not devoid of interest. The nature of the epistolary genre was revealed to me: a form of writing devoted to another person. Novels, poems, and so on, were texts into which others were free to enter, or not. Letters, on the other hand, did not exist without the other person, and their very mission, their significance, was the epiphany of the recipient.
Just as it is not enough to write a book to be a writer, it is not enough to write a letter to be a letter writer. Very often I receive missives in which the sender has forgotten or never knew that he or she might be addressing me, or someone else. These are not letters. Or sometimes I might write a letter to someone, and that person might send me an answer that is not an answer; not that I asked him a question, but there is nothing in his text that gives me any indication that he has even read my letter. That, to me, is not a letter. To be sure, it is not given to everyone to have a talent for repartee; nevertheless, it is something that can be learned and which would be beneficial to a great many people.
Baghdad, May 4, 2009
Dear Amélie Nothomb,
Thank you for your encouraging words on April 30.
Scheherazade is fine, don’t worry. If I haven’t mentioned her, that’s because nothing has changed on that end.
We’ve had news from some soldiers who went home two months ago. Alarming news. Far from diminishing, the physical and psychological ailments they were suffering from here have gotten worse. The doctors looking after them talk about their reinsertion: the same word they’d use if we were getting out of prison. And apparently ex-prisoners do a be
tter job at reinserting themselves. A prisoner is less of a stranger than one of us.
No one is crazy enough to want to come back to Iraq, but the guys say they have no life left in the US. The sad thing is they have nowhere else to go. And anyway, the problem is not the place. They say they don’t know what to make of their lives anymore, what to live for. Six years of war have erased everything that came before. I know what they mean.
I think I told you, more than once, that I wanted to go back to the States. Now I realize I wrote that as if it went without saying, but I’d never really thought it through. What will I find at home? Nothing and nobody, other than the army. My parents are ashamed of me. I’ve lost all trace of the people who used to be my friends, even supposing that shared misery constitutes friendship worthy of the name. And let’s not forget the detail of my weight. Do you really want to see people again when you’ve put on three hundred pounds? Three hundred pounds! If I weighed three hundred pounds, already that would be obese. Well I don’t weigh three hundred pounds, I’ve filled out by three hundred pounds! It’s as if I were three people.
I’ve started a family. Scheherazade and I have a child. It would all be perfectly charming if the family didn’t consist solely of me. Hey guys, let me introduce my wife and kid, they’re in here keeping nice and warm, that’s why you can’t get a good look at them, I prefer to keep them inside, it’s more intimate, it’s easier too, to protect them and feed them, what’s so surprising about that, there are women who breast-feed their children, I’ve decided to feed my family from the inside.
In short, for the first time, I am beginning to realize that I don’t feel like going home. I hate being here, but at least there is a framework to my life and my human relations. Above all, here in Iraq, people know who I am. I don’t want to see the expression on my parents’ faces when they see me again for the first time, I don’t want to hear what they’re going to say.
Once again, what is saving me is my artistic project. I can never thank you enough for that. It’s the only dignity I have left. Do you think my father and mother will understand? Right, maybe I shouldn’t ask myself that question. You don’t become an artist so that your parents will understand you. Still, I do think about it.
I’m afraid they’ll make fun of me. If I had an agent, or someone like that, I wouldn’t feel so ridiculous. You were in the States not long ago, maybe you met some people there who could help me? Or maybe you know of an art gallery in New York or Philadelphia? Or someone influential at the New York Times? I’m sorry to bother you with this. I don’t know who else to ask.
Sincerely,
Melvin Mapple
I raised my eyes to the sky. This soldier was only the 2,500th person to imagine that I belong to a network of public relations on a global scale and in every domain. So many people view me as the providential person who will be able to get them into the most sophisticated circles or introduce them to inaccessible individuals. One day a Belgian nun wrote to me saying she wanted to meet Brigitte Bardot: not only did her request seem perfectly natural to her, but in the eyes of this nun it went without saying that I was the person to contact in order to fulfill her dream. (I’ve gotten letters from people begging me to put in a word for them with Amélie Mauresmo, Sharon Stone, and Jean-Michel Jarre. Go figure.)
It is incredibly irritating, people use me as an address book; I am amazed by the fact that they constantly solicit me for favors. I would never, personally, dare make such a request of anyone; I wouldn’t even think of it. What incredible bad taste, to take something as good-natured as the correspondence between writer and reader and confuse it with cronyism or an employment agency.
I had been fond of Melvin Mapple, I thought he was different. I was dismayed to see him displaying such common behavior. At least he did apologize for bothering me with it. It was a nice change from such horrifying declarations as “I thought you might have fun helping me,” or the equally genuine “If you help me in my endeavors it might give meaning to your life.”
Once I got over my mood, I became aware of just how worrying this letter really was. The soldier was informing me that if his status as an artist was not recognized he would refuse to go back to the United States. Did he have any right to do this? Fortunately, it seemed that he did not. Moreover, at what point would he be able to consider himself a recognized artist? I have noticed that the criteria for recognition vary dramatically from one individual to the next. Some people will think they are recognized artists if their next-door neighbor tells them so; there are others for whom no recognition is valid short of the Nobel Prize. I was hoping that Melvin Mapple would belong to the first category.
So although I had initially thought I would turn down his request, I suddenly saw the situation in a more amusing light. I didn’t know anyone in artistic circles in the United States. In Europe I did know a few gallery owners, in Paris and Brussels. It would be difficult to get any Parisians to go along with such a bizarre enterprise, as it would be with the majority of their colleagues in Brussels, but I did know of one vague sort of gallery (more of a bar à bière than a gallery, to be honest) in the Marolles quartier, where the owner, a man by the name of Cullus, was a friend of mine. I immediately called and told him how he could contribute to a worthy cause: an American soldier in Baghdad had gone on the opposite of a hunger strike, let’s call it a satiety strike, to protest against the invasion of Iraq, and he viewed his obesity as a sort of militant body art. All he needed to obtain recognition was the approval of an art gallery somewhere on the planet. A pure formality, because it went without saying, alas, that the soldier could not exhibit himself in all his opulence in Brussels. He needed the name of a gallery just to add to his file, the way a writer needs the name of a publisher to feel she exists. Cullus embraced my suggestion enthusiastically, and asked me to spell out the soldier’s name for him so that he could add it to his catalog. I did as he requested, suppressing a desire to laugh, because the catalog in question was a slate where the beers were listed on the left and the artists on the right. Cullus asked me to send him a photograph of Mapple for his portfolio, and we said goodbye.
Delighted, I wrote to the American:
Paris, May 9, 2009
Dear Melvin Mapple,
I don’t know any gallery owners in your country, but I do know a few in mine. I have excellent news: the renowned Cullus Gallery in Brussels will be delighted to include you in their catalog. I imagine it won’t be possible for you to go there, even though Cullus would surely be only too happy to meet you and exhibit you. That doesn’t matter: what does, is that you can now affirm that you have a gallery, which gives you official status as an artist. Isn’t that wonderful? You will be able to go back to the United States with your head held high, and you needn’t be ashamed of your obesity—you can even be proud of it, since it is your work of art and has been recognized as such.
I think I can understand how difficult, even impossible, it will be for you to go back to the US. But this is a problem that concerns your friends now more than it does you yourself. I cannot promise you that you are going to be living in a fairytale. But at least you will have a purpose in life, something that is so sorely lacking among the soldiers you wrote to me about. Bravo!
Best wishes,
Amélie Nothomb
This episode put me in a good mood. I would like to point out that there was not the shadow of a cynical or even ironical intent in what I had done. Cullus in the Marolles may not have been Perrotin in the Marais, but he was nevertheless a gallery owner worthy of the name. I had qualified his gallery as renowned because it did indeed have a certain notoriety in Brussels. And I did not think there was anything dishonorable about the fact that they sold beer first and foremost: there are more beer drinkers than there are collectors of contemporary art, that’s just the way it goes. As for me, when I go to see Cullus, it is for his bière blanche, but while I’m savoring it, I take the opportunity
to look at the exhibition, and I gaze at the works and enjoy them all the more intensely for the pleasure I take in my beer.
I know that all the other art galleries thought Cullus was some sort of joker who had nothing to do with their cabal. That is not my opinion, nor would it have been the opinion of Melvin Mapple, I am sure. So my satisfaction was that of someone who has introduced two people who were destined to meet.
Suddenly I realized that I had forgotten one detail. Relieved that I had not yet closed the envelope, I added this postscript:
Cullus the gallery owner would like a photograph of you as you are now. Send it to me and I will pass it on.
This was Saturday, so I rushed to mail the letter before the last noontime collection.
The following week, I had a visit from a Hungarian student who was devoting his thesis to me at the University of Budapest; he spoke very strange French, which gave me the pleasant impression that I was a Voivode or an archimandrite. Eastern European countries do wonders for your ego, I’ve often noticed.
I met a talented young novelist I’d been wanting to get to know for years. Unfortunately she was so doped on Xanax that communication was scrambled. Even though she was sitting right across from me, I felt like my words had to transit several worlds to reach her brain. Eventually she explained:
“I can’t seem to cut down on my dose of tranquilizers.”
“Isn’t it dangerous?” I asked, aware that my question was perfectly stupid.