interview with leonard schwartz (1985)
LS: I’d like to ask you some questions about the work of Benjamin Fondane. But his oeuvre is so massive. Where should we begin?
EMC: With Leon Shestov. Shestov is absolutely necessary in order to understand Benjamin Fondane. That was the greatest encounter of his life on the human level and on the philosophical level as well. In the States, of course, Shestov is not known. He has nothing to do with Anglo-Saxon philosophy, with Husserl or with Wittgenstein; in fact he’s the opposite of all that. What is interesting in the case of Shestov is that for him literature was a method of undermining philosophy. He often quotes Tolstoy against Hegel, for example, which is very interesting as a method, I think, to quote something from Ivan Karamazov after quoting from Kant and Hegel: because he found that the truth was there in literature and not in philosophy. You know, you shouldn’t forget that Shestov played a very important role in divining the philosophical side of Dostoyevsky; that side was known before, of course, but no one realized until Shestov how deep it was. Shestov is for me the greatest historian of philosophy and yet a philosopher himself. All his work for me consists of the task of undermining the credit of philosophy, the prestige of philosophy. Shestov was of course despised by all the official philosophers; he was undermining their profession; that was why they neglected him.
Yet Shestov’s and Fondane’s work seem very different, at least stylistically. Shestov’s work is well-reasoned, controlled, etc. whereas Fondane’s is something entirely else, is...extraordinary. Fondane was really...a warrior. He was very aggressive intellectually, always for something or against something, while Shestov was reflective, polite, and, at most, ironical. Shestov was a raissoneur, whereas Fondane could have been an actor; he was always putting on a show, in the good sense of the word. Fondane’s way of discussing problems was through undulations, attacking things in waves.
LS: Certainly if one compares their two essays on Husserl—
EMC: Two different worlds. One thing you shouldn’t forget is that Shestov was philosophically a very cultured man—he could have been a professor. He was initiated at the start, whereas Fondane came to philosophy only through Shestov; it was why he had a limited vision of philosophy. But it doesn’t matter...Fondane was a poet, a writer. Philosophy was not an accident in his life. Yet one feels that Fondane was at the start, that philosophy was a discovery for him.
LS: One feels that in fact Fondane’s irrationalism had deeper roots than his relation to Shestov. I don’t know, it seems to me he suffered from a poet’s kind of distrust of analysis and logic, and from a kind of frustration or even despair in relation to language, as if he couldn’t say all that he wanted to say.
EMC: Yes, that is true, there was a sort of helplessness in Fondane before language. But only because he was fascinated by it. His temperament was so explosive that he would burst out from the limitations of language, would want to explode words...but at the same time he was a man of the word. Sometimes he had a tendency to want to say everything. As I’ve told you, the last time I saw him was at the police station, after his arrest, and what he told me then was that one should cut a hundred pages or so from his book on Baudelaire. And it is true; he had a tendency to write too much. That was his un-French tendency, to make everything big.
LS: Do you see any sort of connection between Paul Celan and Fondane?
EMC: I knew both Fondane and Celan well, and I suppose it is true that they had something in common. They came from almost the same geographic area in Romania: Bukovina and Moldavia are provinces that border on each other. Both were Jewish poets and both had an intellectual curiosity which is not absolutely normal in a poet. But they were very different as men. Fondane had an immense presence; all became enlivened around him; we were very pleased to hear him speak. Around Celan one felt a kind of uneasiness. As I’ve told you before, Celan was so susceptible, so vulnerable: Everything hurt him. You know, when I have a dialogue with someone I speak without a system, I don’t prepare everything, I’m not on guard. I say what I like! Arbitrary, whimsical. But with Celan one always had to be on guard. He was a wounded man, in the metaphysical and psychological sense of the word, and that was why one felt so uneasy. Whereas Fondane was the contrary: You felt you didn’t have to supervise yourself.
LS: Were you close to Celan?
EMC: We were friends. He translated one of my books. But we ceased to be friends when he moved to the 16th. That is for me another world!—the haute bourgeoisie, and so on, live there: Celan too, since his wife was a marquise. It was finished. In Paris, friendships are a question of neighborhood.
LS: I was speaking recently with Edouard Roditi and he offered the following hypothesis on the question of Celan’s suicide: that Celan’s suicide was triggered by his visit to Israel. That is to say, while there he met other poets from the same region of Romania originally, who had moved to Israel and turned to writing in Hebrew while he, Celan, had stayed in Europe and continued to write in German. Roditi suggested that Celan may have felt a profound regret or remorse at that time for not having done the same.
EMC: I respect and admire Roditi very much, but I think that here he is in error. I think it’s an interesting idea, but that Celan’s relationship was not so deep. For Celan, what was tragic and profound to the very end was his relationship with German. That is certain. In the family in Czernowitz they spoke German. German was his language. A change of language would have been unthinkable. All the same he suffered to be feted in Germany; it was a false position for him. It was tragic. He told me once, after he’d won the Buchner Prize, that he was unhappy because of it. I’d written a text on the Jewish destiny, and I remember that after Celan had read it, he came to me and told me that it was too much, that I had exaggerated everything. It’s true that towards the end he was moving closer to a religious perspective. But I do not think he was a religious man, and I know he was never as keen on the Bible as for example Fondane was.
LS: In your series of aphorisms, “Strangled Thoughts,” you’ve written that a “writer worthy of the name confines himself to his mother tongue and does not go ferreting about in this or that alien idiom.”
EMC: Yes, for me that’s generally so, and most so with poetry, because it is impossible to write real poetry in a language that is not native to you. To be a poet is not really a choice; poetry is only written with words that are inborn, that are unconscious. A second language will always remain a conscious one and so something exterior. But poetry is always subterranean.
LS: Yet Fondane is an example of someone who made that transition; he began by writing in Romanian and later switched to French.
EMC: Yes, but all the same he’s not a French poet. He’s not considered a French poet by the French, and he isn’t one.
LS: Why not? He certainly was very interested in French poetry and moved to Paris because of his interest in Dadaism. But surrealism had already arrived, and—
EMC: Yes, and it’s a very lucky thing he didn’t collaborate with them!
LS: Why’s that?
EMC: There are two reasons why I never wanted to meet André Breton. First, he was insensitive to music, and second, he despised Dostoyevsky. I could have accepted him if he rejected only one, but not both! For me that was too much. Breton could have been a very good policeman. But his literary judgments were ridiculous.
LS: Yet Fondane, I think, drew something from surrealism. And in one of your books, you write, a great aphorism, “I dream of a language whose words like fists would shatter jaws.” Breton’s dream was similar in a way; he wanted poetry to make an impact on the world, not only to live in the mind.
EMC: Of course, that is true. What is important about surrealism is that at the beginning it was a liberation, an opening of the air. When you stop to think that it came after Anatole France and all those people, it was something! Like Communism, at the beginning, it was not so bad. But like Communism, it ended exactly the same way, with purges. In history, generally everything ends with intolerance. But the thinker must remain aloof from ideologies and movements.
LS: In favor of what, though? In both Fondane’s and your own work the notion of being stupefied plays an important role. Fondane’s Rimbaud, for example, experiences everything and fails in all, since he always remains conscious, conscious of the falsity of his position. But Rimbaud is exceptional: The rest of us await a kind of stupor in the end, instead of a heightened consciousness of failure, which is after all a form of knowledge. Yet in your work this kind of stupor or loss of consciousness is often seen as something desirable. You’ve written, “It is precisely when we are stupefied that we begin to understand, that is, to perceive the insanity of all truths.”
EMC: Yes, but that type of non-valuation is often present. You find it already there in Valéry. To be stupefied is part of a French tradition of thinking, related of course to the Christian one. In the latter, there’s the expectation that something good will happen in the end. But for the poet, who experiences what reality is, there’s only the expectation of this stupor, which is desirable; at least it’s not an illusion. Fondane’s Rimbaud does not partake in the Christian tradition.