Influences of a lifetime

Olivier Todd is one of France's most distinguished journalists and novelists. Born in 1929 in a suburb of Paris, Todd developed a flair for writing early in his life, and it has proved to be his life-long passion. As a journalist, he has held important positions in the print media, including editorship of the news magazines L'Express and the Le Nouvel Observateur. As a novelist, he has won a number of awards and is an important figure on the French literary scene. He is also one of France's most reputed biographers, having chronicled the lives of singer Jacques Brel and novelist Albert Camus.

In this interview with NIKHIL PADGAONKAR, Todd talks of his career as a writer, of Jean-Paul Sartre, the man who did much to give it shape, and of Albert Camus, one of the more recent subject of his investigations. Excerpts from the interview:

Nikhil Padgaonkar: You are known as both a journalist and a novelist. Do you make any distinction between these two sensibilities?

Olivier Todd: I do not very much like this pigeonholing - "pure" literature versus journalism. As far as I am concerned, I published novels before becoming a journalist, and I do not see any difference except that when you write a novel, you work on your own, whereas when you are a journalist, you get out and talk to people. Take the biography (as a genre), for example. For me, it is like a very long article and only the methods are different. A lot of important writers have also been excellent journalists - George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene. Even in India, there are people like this, such as Khushwant Singh. After all, he is both a columnist and a novelist.

In your case, has your identity as a journalist evolved independently from your identity as a novelist and biographer?

Not independently, and in fact, I quite often put journalists in my novels, although I keep promising to myself that I will not do it again. The biggest problem as a novelist is dealing with solitude. Journalists do not work entirely on their own - or else they cannot be very good ones.

As a novelist, which themes have been most central to your concern?

Looking for one's father, the problems facing journalists, and also Vietnam. As a journalist, I covered the (Vietnam) war, and had a lot of sympathy for the communists initially. But in 1973, I made my way to the Vietcong zone, and I suddenly thought that we (the communist sympathisers) had made a big mistake. The magazine I was working for then - Le Nouvel Observateur - was vaguely socialist, and we supported them (the Vietcong), and after walking out of that zone, I told them that there was no chance of a reconciliation (between our beliefs and the ground realities). Anyway, out of this came a novel which was about the adventures of three journalists who go into the Vietcong zone, and then I also wrote a book about the fall of Saigon. As a journalist, I have probably written about almost everything under the sun - and probably too much - though I like writing portraits more than anything else.

Why is the theme of the absent father so important?

Well, I started out in life as what one would call a "bastard". My mother was an Englishwoman living in France, and my father, I was told, was an Austro-Hungarian Jew who had disappeared before my birth. When I was forty-years-old, I decided to look for him - and I found him in America. He is still alive by the way. The result of all of this was a novel which, people tell me, is my best one so far - though I would not really know since I do not like my books in general.

Now, I am no longer a bastard incidentally, since my father legally recognised me. Nevertheless, being a bastard is a double theme (in my writings). Jean-Paul Sartre, who knew me and whom I looked upon as a father figure, always told me that my main problem (with this situation) was not my legal status, but that I was torn between England and France. And I think he was right because until I was thirty-years-old, I really did not know whether I was English or French. My first articles were published in the Times Literary Supplement, and I have always written in English - although never a novel.

You mention Sartre as a father-figure. In what ways did he influence you?

It is very difficult to say except that his presence was all- pervasive. I didn't relate to him philosophically at all. Politically, we shared similar views until my return from Vietnam when we began to disagree. It was more the atmosphere of the moment, of which he was a part, that left its mark on me. I much prefer re-reading George Orwell or Graham Greene to Sartre. And after my book on Camus, I feel differently about Sartre.

You know, very often writers are inferior as persons to their works. I discovered this little by little. I had a lot of affection for Sartre - a son's affection, you may say - but the more we learn about his private life, the less happy I am about him. Yet, I cannot forget that it was he who took my first book, gave it to a publisher, and it appeared on the stands a few weeks later. It will take a great deal of time to sort out Sartre, the public figure, from Sartre, the man. For instance, his publishers, Gallimard, still have a lot of his letters to a Russian girlfriend which they will not publish because his daughter fears they will not cast him in a very sympathetic mould. Sartre loved humanity but he did not like human beings as individuals - he was not interested in people, although he seemed to overflow with affection for them.

Has the image of Sartre in France changed since his death?

Yes, it has. Thousands of people attended his funeral. It was the last great parade of the old left-wing. People of all classes - even those who could not read his works - were there. Today, people realise that politically, Sartre was wrong, especially in his blind defence of communism. Do not forget that at one point, he returned from Moscow and said that no intellectual was as free as the Soviet intellectual, and that what you and I think does not matter - it is what those who live behind the iron curtain think that does. Camus, in his analysis of the French and Bolshevik revolutions, was right and Sartre was wrong. That being said, Sartre's attitude towards colonialism was correct, but the way he resorted to violence all the time seems to me very questionable. So, politically, he is out and I don't think people will read his philosophical works for much longer either. I think we will remember him as an artist, to use a word he hated. He was a great writer, and he will be remembered for his novels, his plays, and some of his essays. Sartre, of course, would have found this terrible, because he thought his philosophy was what was most important. Writers often make this mistake.

It is well known that Sartre and Camus confronted each other over the question of Algerian independence. How was that confrontation viewed then, and how is it viewed today?

They disagreed about Algeria, but they had, in fact, parted ways much earlier - in 1951, when Camus wrote an essay called "The Rebel". At the heart of the book is a criticism of the idea of revolution in general, and of the Bolshevik and French revolutions, in particular. This was original for the time since we did not have the new historians such as Franois Furet. Sartre did not like the book and he was wondering how he could review it in his journal, Temps Moderns. So he gave it to a young philosopher by the name of Francis Jeanson, asking him to be polite. Now, Jeanson wrote an absolutely vitriolic attack against Camus, not only denouncing his thesis and accusing him of not being historical enough, but he also attacked Camus' character and said that he was reactionary. Camus was bitterly disappointed by this and replied in an extremely haughty way, and then Sartre intervened, and he too was vitriolic. The whole episode left Sartre amused and Camus, very sad. Sartre, on the whole, quite enjoyed a little row, but Camus did not, and he did not manage to point out that he was not anti-Marxist. What he was criticising was Marx's idea of a future society. Anyway, as a result, the two never saw each other again.

Today, people say that Camus has made a comeback, in part because of the publication of his posthumous novel, The First Man. Now this is not true because Camus never lost his readership.

But is this continued fascination for Camus not also due to the fact that he was ostracised by the French left-wing?

People thought he was arrogant and too sure of himself, and he would often use the subjunctive tense which is rather difficult to use in French. On the whole, many people thought he was not up to it politically or philosophically. We have a paradox here: Sartre, for better or for worse, was a genius - he touched on all sorts of things - philosophy, novels, short stories, and he even wrote a song. Camus does not have that width, but he has the profundity. Today, it is no longer fashionable to be anti-Camus, but an increasing number of people are anti-Sartre, but we will see what posterity has to say about them. I will bet that both have some works that shall be read for a very long time.

The French still remember the German occupation of France during the Second World War and of the Algerian War of Independence. Today, as France looks back on this period, how do Sartre and Camus figure in the debates over those moments in history?

Well, both took up political positions, but neither one liked militancy. Camus was a member of the Algerian Communist party before the war and he left it, in fact, because of the brakes the party was putting on the "native's demands." Many people do not know this. Now, we have gone through three periods in France: right after the liberation, there was this dogma that every Frenchman had been part of the resistance. Then we went through a period, especially after Bernard Henri Levy's book, in which all Frenchmen were viewed as collaborators. Then, the historians went to work, and what did they discover? Among other things, that only three hundred thousand people were members of the resistance. And how can we identify them? Well, those who were in the resistance, more often than not, had false identity papers. Camus did. Sartre did not.

But beyond Sartre and Camus, something else has happened. The age of the master-thinker is over. We cannot go to them to solve the economic problems of the world. Both Sartre and Camus were completely uninterested in economics, but this did not prevent them from taking a stance on economic affairs, especially by quoting Marx here and there, in and out of context. That generation of thinkers has now passed.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Features
Previous : Goodbye to glasses
Next     : Symbol of division