Anonymity comes for us all soon enough, but it has encroached with mystifying speed upon the French writer Hervé Guibert, who died at 36 in 1991. His work has been strangely neglected in the Anglophone world, never mind its innovation and historical importance, its breathtaking indiscretion, tenderness and gore. How can an artist so original, so thrillingly indifferent to convention and the tyranny of good taste — let alone one so prescient — remain untranslated and unread?
Happily his extensive, idiosyncratic body of work is being slowly exhumed, and freshly translated. His journals are now available in English, along with his memoirs, including “Crazy for Vincent,” an account of his obsession with a young skateboarder, mostly straight, who served as his reluctant muse. This month arrive new editions of his most well-known work, “To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life,” translated by Linda Coverdale, and “Written in Invisible Ink,” an omnibus of short fiction, edited and translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman.
Guibert was a pioneer of autofiction and the author of one of the truly great AIDS novels, “To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life,” in which he documented the breakdown of his body with detached fascination. “My muscles have melted away,” he wrote. “At last my arms and legs are once again as slender as they were when I was a child.” His photography criticism, much influenced by Roland Barthes, is marked by freshness and curiosity. For those of strong constitution, there are his funny, frightening and surreal stories, featuring some very acquired tastes (pray you never acquire them), including fantasies of dismemberment. Whatever his subject, he possessed an aloof, silvery style — a cool envelope for the hot material. Flinch, cringe, weep, laugh at his books; only indifference seems impossible.
Guibert was a programmatically disobedient writer, in Elena Ferrante’s phrase, who found comedy in tragedy, lust in death and in AIDS “something sleek and dazzling in its hideousness.” “It was an illness in stages,” he wrote, “a very long flight of steps that led assuredly to death, but whose every step represented a unique apprenticeship. It was a disease that gave death time to live and its victims time to die, time to discover time, and in the end to discover life.” His candor can be so extreme as to feel like provocation, and his love of provocation can tip into outré pornography. Even he could be disturbed by his brutal scenarios. “I want to puke,” he would confess in his notebooks. Extremity — on the page and in life — was the credo of this self-professed descendant of Sade and Genet, contemptuous of the writerly temptations for self-regard or bourgeois comfort. I can think of no words more repellent to him than “faculty housing.”
How free is a writer? And how ought we use our freedom? This is the pulsing question in Guibert’s work. In his first book, the autobiographical novel “Propaganda Death,” one winding scene full of horror and bravado concludes with a childhood memory. Guibert’s mother, furious at him for muddying his shoes, berates him in public. She threatens to send him to school wearing his sister’s high heels. Holding his mother’s hand, feeling very small, Guibert tells us, “I felt ashamed.”
It’s a word that almost never again appears in his work. Instead, he hurtles toward all he finds frightening, anatomizing and eroticizing his terror and disgust. There can be something showy in his systematic attack on various taboos, but his inquiry is never flippant and never boring. There is a strangeness to his sentences, in their coil and snap, that gives the prose a freshness and ease. He seemed to write with enviable effortlessness. His drafts, the translator Zuckerman notes, contain few corrections or evidence of hesitation. He simply seemed to pour out onto the page.
Guibert died after achieving an uneasy sort of celebrity. “To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life” lightly fictionalized the final days of the philosopher Michel Foucault, Guibert’s neighbor and friend, called Muzil in the book. The book is a homage to a friendship as well as a record of its gaudy betrayal. Guibert revealed to readers that Foucault did not die of cancer, per the public record, but of AIDS-related complications. He aired his friend’s laundry with ruthless efficiency, his closet full of “whips, leather hoods, leashes, bridles and handcuffs,” his love of “violent orgies” in San Francisco’s bathhouses.
The breach of trust still disturbs me, even as I think I understand Guibert’s brand of logic — for him, it was a commitment to a higher truth. “Secrets have to circulate,” he liked to say. And this in an era when AIDS was bound up in ignorance and silence. Individuals were forced to become scientists, as Larry Kramer once said, hunting down treatments. (The plot of Guibert’s book hinges on his hope for a miracle drug, dangled by the American manager of a pharmaceutical lab, the faithless friend of the title.) They had to become their own desperate lobbyists, putting on pressure for a cure, and archivists of a vanishing community.
There is a scene in the documentary “How to Survive a Plague,” about the first generation of H.I.V./AIDS activists, in which protesters visit the AIDS quilts in Washington, D.C., created to commemorate victims. Many are moved, but one man stands apart. How beautiful the quilts are, he says, and how unbearable it is to commemorate an epidemic with beauty. “This is what I’m left with,” he says, indicating a small box of ash and bone chips, the remains of a friend or lover. “This is what George Bush has done.”
Guibert never liked to think of himself as militant — merely truthful. “My painting is not violent; it’s life that is violent,” Francis Bacon, one of Guibert’s heroes, once said. Guibert was a sojourner to the ends of the map and the darkest fringes of the imagination. Where others might be afraid, or prohibited, to go he traveled and tarried and reported back.
Near the end of his life, hospital visits took the place of trysts, and a rotating cast of lovers was replaced by another of doctors and nurses. He went one day to have his blood drawn. A nurse tied the tourniquet, and talked with him while his blood trickled into the tube. “What do you write?” she wanted to know. “Thrillers?” “No,” Guibert said. “Love stories.”
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