Roland Jaccard's film: «Jacques Lecarme et moi» (Jacques Lecarme and me)»

Each month, we feature a column by one of the personalities who give us the pleasure of taking up the pen in turn. Writer Roland Jaccard recounts his favorite film, as implausible as it is politically correct: the movie of his life.

Or at least, he relatedhas. Roland Jaccard, who kept his word from book to book, died a free man on September 20, a few days before his 80th birthday, the age at which his father and grandfather took their own lives. This is his last column for Le Regard Libre.

Jacques Lecarme, Honorary Professor of Literature at the Sorbonne, a friend of Serge Doubrovsky (it's not generally known that it was he who established self-fiction as a literary genre) and an outstanding literary critic (Sartrian, with a Drieu tendency), remarked to me after reading my diary that he doubted I was an avid reader: a taste for aphorisms rules out an addiction to Balzac, Tosltoï or Dostoïevsi. I could only agree with him. Nor is it certain that I've read all the books I've reviewed or edited. «Good reviewers,» he adds, "are the ones who draw the gun the fastest, keeping reading time to a minimum of a few homeopathic samplings." I'd go even further: anyone who can't tell in less than a page the sexual and political orientation - or even the bank account - of the writer he's reading should refrain from ranting about literature.

Jacques Lecarme appreciates my profound and quiet apolitical stance, which is not, as with Cioran, a cover for apostasy. I leave him the responsibility for this statement: there's so much more to say. On the other hand, how can we not concede to him that indifference to politics corresponds to the constant fact that we all couldn't care less about the public good, except when we aspire to political responsibility or literary glory. But you'd have to sink pretty low to want to become a town councillor or a minister of the Republic. Dictator to the limit....

Not unaware of my friendship with Gabriel Matzneff, Jaques Lecarme pointed out to me that there are problems with literary evaluation. He told me that one of his students had fallen in love with Gabriel Matzneff and offered herself to him: he had found her too old. She compensated by giving a lecture on the life and work of her idol. So I read and studied Matznev's work,« Lecarme continues. There's no intellectual or stylistic value to it, nothing but arrogant posturing and the parade of a predator of little girls. He may be handsome, but he's a real jerk. It's not enough to graduate from high school to become a writer. Montherlant, who was his teacher and protector, had immense talent, Matzneff has only borrowed his impostor tics.» I've often wondered whether I too have borrowed imposter tics not from Montherlant, but from Cioran. It's true that he encouraged me to do so.

What troubled Jacques Lecarme was how my love for L. led me to turn the myth of Pygmalion on its head, how I was, according to him, pygmalionized and overtaken by my creation. Have I really been? I believed in her precocious genius, but I confess I find it a little difficult to read her now that she's become a woman of letters. Whatever Lecarme thinks of her - and I'm very proud of him, after reading him carefully (it happens to me) for having edited Le bal des maudits I prefer the carefree, light-hearted style of Gabriel Matzneff to the overworked writing of L. In fact, it's a typically feminine flaw: taking things too seriously. One exception: Françoise Sagan.

I'll leave the conclusion to my friend Jacques Lecarme, even if he believes that friendship, in any case, is impossible and unattainable: «Every writer is a crocodile splashing about in his own pond. From time to time, these predators pretend to hunt in packs. It's a vain illusion: to kill the competitors and remain the only male in the herd to get all the women, that's the principle of survival and the founding impulse.» Freud didn't think otherwise, and neither did I. But that was the world of his time. But that was the world before...

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