Exactly two years ago, in June 2012, I was here in Florence, both as writer in residence at the Santa Maddalena Foundation and as finalist for the Gregor von Rezzori Prize. That was the first time I’d been a writer in residence anywhere, and I was a bit scared. I’d been told it can be a dream or a nightmare, depending on how you get along with Beatrice. It turned out to be more of a dream, and I venture to say that I got along well—very well even—with Beatrice Monti della Corte, the founder and moving spirit behind this “retreat for writers and botanists,” and of the event that brings us together today. It’s true, she can be intimidating. Her irony and her complete lack of sentimentality can be hard to take, as can her close friendships with the famous and talented of this world: if she tells you about a nice young guy who started a rock group with some friends, it’s Mick Jagger. What I love are the stories of how she traveled to Ethiopia with Curzio Malaparte when she was ten; how sometime later she shacked up at Henry Fonda’s place together with Rex Harrison, James Stewart, and Laurence Olivier; and how my favorite author, Henri Michaux, timidly flirted with her when she was a young—and, she admits, “pretty foxy”—gallerist. In fact she was a knockout, and still is. I loved it when she told me about her friends, her houses, her loves, and above all about the love of her life, the person around whom and for whom she made Santa Maddalena: Gricha.
Like everyone here, I started calling the celebrated Austro-Hungarian writer Gregor von Rezzori, who would have turned one hundred this year, by his nickname, Gricha, as if he hadn’t been dead for the last fourteen years and we’d just taken the dogs for a long walk in the countryside. I’d read and admired The Snows of Yesteryear and Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, and since my first visit I’ve read his other books. I admire his supple, roving style, his madcap freedom, his way of not giving a damn about anything. I love him the way I used to love Nabokov, only he’s less pedantic, less full of himself than Nabokov. When you open the door to one of his books, you don’t feel as if you have to watch your step. Gricha is friendly, welcoming. Even when he pokes fun at you, you feel he likes you. God knows he’s present in his books, as he’s present in every room in Santa Maddalena—in particular the little office on the first floor of the tower where I so liked to work, and which he discusses in depth at the start of his marvelous Anecdotage. His presence is everywhere, you’d think he’d just gone shopping in the village, but above all he’s present in Beatrice’s conversation. I think that’s what I liked the most here. The way she loved him, the way he loved her, and the good vibrations with which this love still fills the building, the garden, right down to the conclaves of glowworms that gather once night has fallen around the pyramid dedicated to his memory. You could tell this story from Beatrice’s point of view, but as I’m a man and a writer, I tend to associate myself with Gricha, and I think that Gricha completely lucked out. He led the life of a high-class vagabond, and then at over fifty he met Beatrice and spent the next thirty years with her. He lived with her at Santa Maddalena and wrote the great books that he’d had neither the leisure nor perhaps even the inclination to write before that. I think Gricha was a happy man. It’s not often that you can say that of a writer.
That’s the first topic that I’d toyed with for this lecture: Is it possible to be both a great writer and a happy man? Are there examples? Who? I started to hunt around, then branched off into another subject that also has much to do with my trip to Florence two years ago.
As I said, I was a finalist for the Rezzori Prize. I didn’t win, Enrique Vila-Matas did. A timid, starry-eyed man, he seemed saddened by the news, as if from then on his less fortunate comrades would turn their backs on him. We tried to console him by saying that he deserved it, and that not just the prizewinner but also all the finalists receive a check. This generosity deserves to be mentioned because I believe it’s unprecedented. Before the prize was awarded there was a lecture like the one I’m giving today, by the Canadian novelist Michael Ondaatje. Back then it was held in the Medici Riccardi Palace. As all art lovers know, the Medici Riccardi Palace houses a chapel whose four walls are decorated with a fresco by Benozzo Gozzoli, representing the procession of the Magi to Bethlehem to worship the baby Jesus. The chapel isn’t big, and you can only visit it in small groups at specific times. That’s better than nothing. Still, with at least twenty people per group, by far the best option is to visit it outside opening hours, like a museum on the day it’s closed—which I was able to do thanks to Max Rabino.
Max Rabino is a dear friend of Beatrice’s. A dilettante, a lover of art, and a wellspring of knowledge, like some characters in Chekhov’s plays he seems to belong to the house. I had a friendly crush on Max. What I liked about him was his blend of ancient wisdom and childish innocence: a real Taoist, this Max. To continue: With him I had the privilege of visiting the Chapel of the Magi, and during this visit he remarked, If you look at the procession of the Magi, you see dozens of people, maybe even a hundred (I didn’t count them). Among them, the figures in the foreground are personalities at the Medici court: Cosimo, Lorenzo, Lorenzo’s three sisters, the condottiero Sigismondo Malatesta, as art historians tell us. The others were apparently picked at random in the street, around 1460. Whether it’s the noblemen and noblewomen in the foreground or the masses behind them, they were without doubt all painted from nature. Even if you don’t know who the models were, you’re sure they looked just like that. Once you reach the holy infant, however, the faces change to those of angels, saints, and a host of heavenly figures. All of a sudden they become more regular, more idealized. What they gain in spirituality they lose in expression, in originality, in vitality: you can be sure they were no longer painted using real models.
I like landscape paintings, still lifes, and nonfigurative works, but above all else I love portraits. When I visit a museum, the portraits first grab my attention, and I think that if I’d been a painter, I would undoubtedly have been a portraitist. In my domain I consider myself a portraitist. I’m sure that’s why Max’s comment affected me the way it did. Since then I’ve tried the experiment a number of times, and I recommend that you try it, too. Look at a portrait, any portrait. You’ll see that instinctively, intuitively, without even realizing it, you’ll distinguish between those that are painted using a model, and those that represent fictious characters based solely on the imagination. You don’t need a guide to know that Ingres’s Monsieur Bertin and Bellini’s Doge Loredan really existed. With Michelangelo’s characters and Raphael’s virgins, however, it’s another thing altogether. I’m not saying that one is better than the other; I’m just saying that they’re different, and that this difference jumps out at you. And what I wondered next is if this difference that is so evident in painting can also be seen in literature.
The question interests me all the more in that for the past twenty years or so I have no longer written novels—that is, if you take novels to be works of fiction dealing with fictional characters. I now write what for lack of a better term you could call works of nonfiction. And I’m the first to insist, perhaps even over-insist, that what I’m telling is true, that the characters I’m trying to represent all have their models in reality and aren’t creatures of my imagination.
People rightly say that this appeal to the “real” calls forth a whole slew of objections. I can repeat all I want that Limonov exists, for example, but that doesn’t stop the Limonov in my book from being partly the real Limonov and partly a character I made up. Even I don’t quite know where the one stops and the other starts, and I’m forced to admit that there is no clear-cut boundary between the two. This ambiguity is peculiar to literature and doesn’t exist in the cinema. Film critics will tell you that things are complicated, that the boundary between documentary and fiction is becoming increasingly fuzzy. But that doesn’t stop there from being one, and it’s clear: in a fiction film the characters are played by actors, and in a documentary you see the real people. In my view it’s as simple as that, and I defy you to name a film that escapes this binary classification.
Allow me to digress. Ten years ago or so I shot a documentary called Retour à Kotelnitch in the small Russian town of Kotelnich, which no one knows except the people who are unlucky enough to live there and those who’ve seen the film. I spent several months there, filmed the inhabitants, and struck up relationships that were often complex. They couldn’t figure out why I was filming them or what I wanted to do with the images, and it wasn’t easy to explain because I didn’t know myself. I was waiting for something to happen, and something did happen, something terrible: a young woman whom I liked and who had worked for us as an interpreter was brutally murdered, killed together with her eighteen-month-old baby by a madman with an ax. The film crossed a line. Instead of drifting in search of a subject, it started telling something, something that was both tragic and fiction-like, and some of the inhabitants of the town whom we had filmed without knowing what story we would tell became, by the force of events, tragic, fiction-like figures as well. The most tragic and fiction-like figure of all was the husband of the murdered woman and father of the murdered child, who was also the local officer of the FSB—the organization that used to be called the KGB. He was mysterious, both charismatic and disturbing, wary to the point of paranoia when he was sober and, as soon as he’d had a drink—which happened often—able to tell us his deepest secrets as if we were the best of friends. That said, the story I want to tell takes place not in Kotelnich but in Venice, where the film was presented at the Venice Film Festival in 2003. The producer had brought the poet and scriptwriter Tonino Guerra to the screening, and I was both touched and daunted to show my film to a man who had written the screenplays of so many masterpieces by Fellini, Antonioni, Francesco Rosi, the Taviani brothers, Theo Angelopoulos, and Andrei Tarkovsky. After the screening we all went out for a drink at a café on the Lido. With his white mustache, cap, and corduroy vest, Tonino Guerra looked every bit like an Italian patriarch dispensing justice under an oak tree. We waited for his verdict, which he finally handed down. He didn’t like the film. He found it both confusing and sinister—I was devastated, as you can imagine—but he found one good thing about it: the actors were extraordinary, especially the FSB guy. I said timidly, “In fact he’s not an actor, he’s really from the FSB. There are no actors in the film, just real people from Kotelnich.”
“Really?” Tonino Guerra said with a suspicious look.
“Really.”
He didn’t seem convinced. The more I repeated to him what seemed to me to go without saying, the more he suspected that I was kidding him, and I finally decided that it was the best compliment anyone could—or would—ever pay my film.
Max’s comment both disturbed and enlightened me for another reason, having to do with the book I was working on during my stay in Santa Maddalena. Only three months ago I wouldn’t have said a thing about it because it wasn’t finished, and I know from experience that you shouldn’t talk about your books as long as they’re still in the works: every secret you divulge, especially when it’s tinged with optimism, is sure to cost you a week of discouragement. But now the book’s done, it’s set to come out in France this fall and in Italy next spring. So not only can I talk about it, I want to.
That’s not easy to do briefly because it’s a big book, to which I dedicated seven years of my life. In a nutshell, it’s an account of the first days of Christianity. It takes place between A.D. 50 and 100, when no one so much as suspected that they were living “in the year of our Lord.” It’s set in Greece, Jerusalem, and Rome, and the main figures are the men we call Saint Paul, Saint Peter, Saint John, and so on, but who at that time were simply called Paul, Peter, John, et al. They weren’t saints with halos but men, complex and fallible like the rest of us. Like us, they bickered among themselves, they were jealous, and each was convinced he knew more about their faith than the others. The only thing they had in common was an extremely strange belief, and the strangest thing of all is that this belief, which should normally have disappeared with them, endured, that in less than three centuries it devoured the Roman Empire from within, and that today still a quarter of humanity continues to adhere to it.
As you all know, this belief is about the life, teaching, death, and—if you believe the believers—the resurrection of a Galilean preacher called Jesus of Nazareth. You can think what you want about him and what was done to his message, but you can’t deny that he’s a major historical figure. I don’t think it’s going too far out on a limb to say that of everyone in history, he’s the one who’s been represented the most. And all of these representations, whether in paintings, literature, or film, are based on four short accounts that, put back-to-back, fit in a pocketbook and that were written by four very different authors, let’s say, fifty to eighty years after Jesus’ death. I wanted to know who one of these authors was. For reasons that I won’t go into here and that you’ll understand, I hope, if you read my book, I chose Luke. My book, consequently, became a biography of Luke the Evangelist. As we know almost nothing about him, it’s largely imagined. I tried to picture who this Luke was, what he thought, what he believed, and to reconstruct the physical and mental context in which his life took place. Since what we call the Gospel According to Luke is a portrait of Jesus, I found myself making a portrait of the portraitist.
So unavoidably I came up against the question of resemblance. Does the portrait Luke painted of Jesus resemble the real Jesus? The question isn’t absurd because the real Jesus isn’t imaginary. He existed. Whether he was resurrected or was the son of God is another thing, a matter of faith. But that he lived in the place we now call Israel, that he breathed the same air as we do, that he ate and drank and pissed and shat like any other human being, no one aside from a few screwball atheists will contest. Take any famous scene from his life: his appearance before the Roman governor Pilate, for example. You’re obliged to imagine it; nevertheless it’s not imaginary. It’s not even subject to doubt, such as the raising of Lazarus or the adoration of the Magi. Roman historians refer to it. It took place. It came about in a space and a time that we can’t determine with absolute precision but that, like all points in space and time, was absolutely precise. It happened at a certain place, at a certain time, at a certain temperature. These two men, Jesus and Pilate, weren’t mythological figures, gods or heroes, living in a fantasy world where everything is possible because nothing is real. They were a colonial officer and a local visionary: men like you and me, who had specific faces, wore specific clothes, and talked with specific voices. Their meeting didn’t take place like things we imagine, in one of an infinitely variable number of ways, but the way all things happen on earth, that is, in one specific way that excludes all others. We know next to nothing about this specific way, this unique way, that had the privilege of passing from the virtual to the real. Yet it happened. Tons of fiction and legend have been grafted onto it, but it does not belong to the realm of fiction or legend: it belongs to reality. So while it may be illusory to try to make a realistic representation of it, it’s perfectly legitimate.
As Kafka said, “I’m very ignorant. The truth exists nonetheless.”
With the exception of John, perhaps, none of the four Evangelists witnessed the events they describe. None of them even tries to give the impression that he did. Luke wrote fifty years after Jesus’ death, and he states clearly that his is a second- or even thirdhand account. That doesn’t stop you from reading his Gospel the way you read any historian, or from asking about each detail: Is it true? Did Jesus say what Luke has him say? Did this anecdote happen? Is this trait authentic?
The more I read the Gospels—the Book of Luke and the three others—the more I came to appreciate the difference I mentioned above, between portraits that were done using a model and portraits done from the imagination. Between characters, speech, and anecdotes that could have been distorted but that nevertheless resemble something real, and others that fall under the category of myth or pious imagination. Another example: Jesus’ arrest on the Mount of Olives. There, too, the scene is so real you could cut it with a knife. In the middle of the night, a commando hastily arrests a guerrilla leader. Dim lanterns, truncheons, semidarkness: it’s like something out of a painting by Tintoretto or Caravaggio. One of the leader’s men tries to resist. He takes out his sword, swings, and cuts off a soldier’s ear. This soldier, John the Evangelist tells us, was named Malchus. Luke adds that Jesus touched the wound and healed it. For me this short scene contains a striking juxtaposition of two registers. I believe the cut ear, and I believe that the guy whose ear was cut was named Malchus—otherwise why write it? But I don’t believe that the ear was then miraculously repaired, not just because I’m skeptical about miracles, but above all because the detail clearly belongs to the category of those that are meant to edify, and not of those that are told simply because they happened.
What I wonder, deep down, is whether an internal criterion allows you to say whether a portrait resembles its model, and if an anecdote is authentic. I think there is, but I’m forced to admit that it’s hugely subjective: it’s what you call ringing true. You feel it, but you can’t demonstrate it. However, another, more objective criterion is what the exegetes call the embarrassment criterion: when something must have been embarrassing for the author to write, when he would certainly have preferred to omit it, but retained it out of scrupulousness, you can say chances are good that it’s true. When Mark tells us, for example, that Jesus’ brothers and sisters thought he was mad and wanted to have him put away, you believe it. When Mark shows the disciples bickering like cats and dogs instead of outdoing each other in piety and nobility of spirit, you believe it. And when the four Evangelists, for once unanimous, tell us that Peter, the most senior and faithful of Jesus’ disciples, the rock on which Jesus wanted to build his church, denied his master three times in the night that followed his arrest, you believe it, too, because it’s not at all flattering for Peter. It’s exactly the same thing with painting. If a court painter gives the king a noble, energetic face, you think that it might resemble him or might not: there’s no way of telling. But if he paints him with a squint and a wart on his chin, you can be sure of one thing: the king had a squint and a wart on his chin. The bottom line is that what we believe bears a resemblance is, if not ugly, then at least imperfect.
I didn’t attempt Jesus’ portrait: I wouldn’t have risked it. More modestly, I tried to make a portrait of one of his four official portraitists. I tried to paint a plausible portrait, if not a perfect likeness, of Luke. Not an easy undertaking, as we’re dealing with a man not only about whom we know nothing but who lived nineteen centuries ago. Many times I asked myself how to write a historical novel that doesn’t ring hollow. I reread the masterpieces of the genre, one of the most famous being Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar. Even if it’s a bit long, I’d like to quote the passage in which Yourcenar explains how she proceeded:
The rules of the game: learn everything, read everything, inquire into everything, while at the same time adapting to one’s ends the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, or the method of Hindu ascetics, who for years, and to the point of exhaustion, try to visualize ever more exactly the images which they create beneath their closed eyelids. Through hundreds of card notes pursue each incident to the very moment that it occurred; endeavor to restore the mobility and suppleness of life to those visages known only to us in stone. When two texts, or two assertions, or perhaps two ideas, are in contradiction, be ready to reconcile them rather than cancel one by the other; regard them as two different facets, or two successive stages, of the same reality, a reality convincingly human just because it is complex. Strive to read a text of the second century with the eyes, soul, and feelings of the second century; let it steep in that mother solution which the facts of its own time provide; set aside, if possible, all beliefs and sentiments which have accumulated in successive strata between those persons and us. And nevertheless take advantage (though prudently, and solely by way of preparatory study) of all possibilities for comparison and cross-checking, and of new perspectives slowly developed by the many centuries and events separating us from a given text, a fact, a man; make use of such aids more or less as guide-marks along the road of return toward one particular point in time. Keep one’s own shadow out of the picture; leave the mirror clean of the mist of one’s own breath; take only what is most essential and durable in us, in the emotions aroused by the senses or in the operations of the mind, as our point of contact with those men who, like us, nibbled olives and drank wine, or gummed their fingers with honey, who fought bitter winds and blinding rain, or in summer sought the plane tree’s shade; who took their pleasures, thought their own thoughts, grew old, and died.1
I find this passage beautiful. I approve of its proud, humble method. The poetic list of invariants—“those men who, like us, nibbled olives and drank wine, or gummed their fingers with honey, who fought bitter winds and blinding rain, or in summer sought the plane tree’s shade; who took their pleasures, thought their own thoughts, grew old, and died”—leaves me pensive because it touches on a huge question: What is eternal, unchanging, in what Yourcenar calls “the emotions aroused by the senses or in the operations of the mind”? And what, as a consequence, is not part of history? The sky, the rain, thirst, the desire that pushes men and women to mate: fine, but in our perception of things, in the opinions we form of them, history—that is, the changing nature of things—quickly creeps in and never stops occupying places we thought were beyond reach. But what I can’t go along with in what Yourcenar says has to do with keeping your shadow out of the picture and leaving the mirror clean of your breath. That is, the presence of today’s author. I believe profoundly that that’s something you can’t avoid. I think that shadows—and the tricks by which you try to remove them—will always be visible, and in that case it’s much better to accept them and work them into the narrative. It’s like shooting a documentary. Either you pretend that you’re seeing people “for real”—as they are when you’re not there to film them—or you admit that by filming them you change the givens, and that what you’re filming is a new situation. I’m not bothered by what’s known in technical jargon as the direct gaze: when people look straight into the camera. On the contrary, I work it in and even draw attention to it. I show what this gaze is interacting with, the things that are supposed to remain off-screen in classical documentaries: the team during the shoot, me directing the team, our quarrels, our doubts, our complex relationships with the people we’re filming. I’m not saying this approach is better. Of the two schools, all you can say in favor of mine is that it’s more in tune with modern sensitivities, with their penchant for suspicion, making-ofs, and looking behind the scenes, than Marguerite Yourcenar’s proud and somewhat naive claim to step aside and show things as they are in their true essence.
What’s amusing is that unlike more modern painters such as Ingres or Delacroix, who were careful to depict Tacitus’ Romans or biblical Jews realistically, the old masters naively applied the modernist credo and Brechtian-style detachment. If they’d been asked, many of them would no doubt have admitted that Galilee in Jesus’ day probably didn’t look much like Flanders or Tuscany in theirs, but the question never occurred to most of them. The desire for historical realism wasn’t part of their intellectual framework, and I think that basically they were right. They were truly realists, to the extent that what they represented was truly real. It was them, it was the world they lived in. The Blessed Virgin’s home was the home of the painter or his funder. Her clothes, which were painted with such care and love of detail, were those worn by the old masters’ wives or lovers. And they didn’t hesitate to put themselves in their paintings. One work I love, painted by the great Flemish master Rogier van der Weyden, shows my hero Saint Luke painting a portrait of the Virgin Mary—because one tradition that has absolutely no basis in history, but that nevertheless enchants me, is that Saint Luke was a painter: he’s even the patron saint of painters. In the painting by Rogier van der Weyden, this portrait of Saint Luke is among those that leave you in no doubt. It was modeled on someone real: Rogier van der Weyden himself. His Saint Luke is a self-portrait. I was thrilled when I discovered that, because in my book I did exactly the same thing: I painted myself as Saint Luke. Just as Flaubert says of Madame Bovary, I could say, “Luke is me,” and honestly I think that was the most reasonable choice. No doubt my Luke bears no likeness to the real Luke; no one knows what the real Luke was like. But at least it resembles me, and that’s a start. Whom your work resembles doesn’t matter that much, I believe; what counts is that there’s a resemblance.
Speech delivered in Florence in June 2014