Fruit cake and coffee with evaporated milk, in bed, while reading a
Paris Review article about young
novelist Édouard Louis and his writer's rage. A rage that saw him write his
first novel at 19, and published at 21. In 2014. Not only published at 21 but because it's a best seller, he's been
published out of poverty at 21.
The point about the poverty is an important one. Not only because it
raises other issues for the young writer as he's then, almost, sucked into the
world of "cocktail parties and dinners" that he had dreamed about
when he first arrived in Paris - "but more and more I realize you can see
the literary world as a school of submission. You always have to shake everyone’s
hand, in what can be seen as a quiet celebration of the bourgeoisie" -
but, also, because it was his and his family's own poverty that politicised him into writing what he has, and
in the style that he does.
I'm reading about Louis as a small airplane buzzily trails an
advertisement banner (which I don't bother to read) back and forth across the
bright blue sky above the city bowl and as the woman next door gets
-breath-less-ly- fucked against the wall that divides our two apartments.
In just over three years I've only heard sex next door once before.
However, often, daily, her heels click-and-clack across the tiled floors as she
prepares for work, for which she always promptly leaves by banging shut and
locking the front door at precisely 7 am.
Peace then again reigns. I can't help but wonder if she's wearing those high
heels right now? I've only set my eyes on her once before, a man was trailing
her into her flat; she briefly turned at the door and momentarily caught my
eye; I have no recollection of how she looks. Nor of how the man looked that
trailed her into her flat.
It’s a quite and calm Sunday morning. After the welcome string of cool,
sometimes moody autumnal days this last week, my guess is that everyone's
rushed off to the beaches, both the icy but more pretentious ones on the
Atlantic seaboard, also the warmer and much more down to earth ones on the
Indian seaboard. That leaves everyone and everything in-between quiet and calm,
as it should be: 31 degrees today, 36 tomorrow; while I dread these death throes
of summer, what comforts me is that they are just that, summer's death throes.
Just how, exactly, did that traumatised
child become the assured and beautiful young man who gazes so calmly from the
author photo on the book jacket?, questions novelist Neil Bartlett writing
about Édouard Louis in the Guardian last month.
“Whom did he meet, once he had escaped to the city, and how? Who was it who
helped him save and repossess his life – and who inspired him to write this
well?” Those, too, are my burning questions.
I hunker even more deeply down into the Paris review piece despite
feeling guilty about reading, which for some bizarre reason I associate with
not working. That bizarre reason - despite the fact that I'm inspired, that my
mind is whirring and clicking with the satisfaction of being exposed to new
ideas, perspectives - is because reading has always been such an intense
pleasure, also such a wonderful escape, that I feel guilty at the luxury
thereof, that it seems impossible to associate with
work, with studying.
Back to Louis, who makes a strong case for his having written a
political novel, also for not being apolitical: "All authors are
political, even if they don’t realize it. Being apolitical merely reinforces
the status quo, supporting the powerful over the weak."
He maintains that many writers "don’t want to know how to speak
about politics because they’re from the bourgeoisie," and because
"they’ve been protected from the rough edges of political change." On
the other hand, the people he writes about are "ceaselessly marked by the
consequences of political choices".
"My mother would say, Under Mitterand, we always had meat on our
plates. Even if I could show her that Mitterand wasn’t as generous to the poor
as she thought, the point is that when the government reformed its policies—on
welfare, for example—we felt it in our stomachs. Today I can complain about the
government all I want, but political decisions won’t determine the amount of
food on my plate tonight."
Louis's writer's fire reminds me of Frantz Fanon's fire: Lewis Gordin in What
Fanon Said (2015), writes that throughout his book, Black
Skin, White Mask (1995), Fanon struggles to hold the fire at bay, the
result of which "is an ongoing heat that occasionally bursts into
flame".
Louis: "Politics isn’t a question of words, he says, it’s a
question of meat [on your plate]. I try never to forget that."
How would I describe him after my relatively brief introduction
today? Hungry, angry, brilliant & beautiful... and a writer that
I'm going to keep my attention focus upon.
