From L’Express (29 september 1994): 98–117. Reprinted by permission of Le Groupe Express. Translated by Sophie Vallas.
SP: You have two cities in your life—New York, which haunts your whole work, and Paris, where you live now. How do you manage this double passion?
JC: Do you remember Pépé le Moko? There’s a scene in this movie when the heroine, this blond girl who’s just arrived in the Casbah, asks Pépé if he knows Paris. “Paris is my last hole,” he says. These words hold true for me too. Paris is indeed my last hole, my spiritual home. Paris is a voice, a voice that speaks to me and that soothes me when I walk on its streets. In other words, New York was driving me crazy. It’s a schizophrenic world where everyone is free to be anything. At one point I suddenly saw the person I was developing into and it wasn’t the person I wanted to become. I love New York as much as I hate it. This city was bringing me death. Being away from it does not mean ceasing to write about it, whether better or worse—it doesn’t matter. And yet, even if I was told that I wouldn’t be able to finish a novel in Paris, I would stay here. The enchantment I experience here is too great. I’m so attached to it, it’s as if my life now depended on it.
SP: What is the reason for such an enchantment?
JC: The space. I was becoming claustrophobic in New York—this impression of being at the bottom of an abyss, surrounded by vertiginous walls. Such heights have nothing to do with the human. Whereas Paris bathes in an amazing flood of space, as if the buildings were ships floating on the ground. It’s very lyrical for me. And the balconies, the lines of the balconies on the facades. They look like the staves and barlines on a partition. I couldn’t live in a building or a room without balconies. They structure a view, they give it a magical frame. It would be useless to look for such a thing in New York. Anyway, my hometown was the worst place for me to live in.
SP: Why?
JC: That’s something I understood the first time I came to Europe. In Europe there’s a sense of the past, even a way of stressing the presence of the past, which I really need—even if I wasn’t conscious of it before. The United States live in the constant tension of an eternal present. It’s a schizophrenic universe that was turning me into a geek—you know, the guy who tears off chicken heads with his teeth on fairs. When I reached that point I was no longer sure I was human anymore. I was looking for something I knew nothing about.
SP: Why are you so faithful to some of your characters, and especially to Isaac Sidel, the “red commish?”
JC: It wasn’t my intention to write more than one novel about him. He’s probably a fantastic go-between. This supercop who’s considered as the real mayor of New York haunts the nine circles of hell. He knows everyone and all the wastelands. When Blue Eyes got killed, his ghost took possession of Isaac’s stomach in the shape of a tapeworm. And the “Commish” became an uninterrupted melody to me. I feel very close to him. One of his problems is that he’s unable to understand who he is—that is, both American and European. Isaac cries easily. He is obsessed by a woman that a police chef should avoid like the plague: she works both for the FBI and for the KGB. He spent three months with her, in school, forty years earlier. She was born on the ruins of the Nazi lunacy. She is a wreck, and yet she manages to retrieve the sense of what a human being is. She’s this voice emerging from the surrounding chaos which Isaac is desperately in love with. Because he too is a creature of history, and because he suffers from its absence.
SP: Some of your characters have their own appointed rabbis, who are not precisely mainstays of their synagogues.
JC: A rabbi is essential. He has the power to magically solve any of your problems. The term comes directly from the slang used by the police—a world in which political supports are determining. In other words without a rabbi you’ll never get a promotion. I was my brother’s rabbi for a while, when he worked for the homicide squad in New York, simply because I had become friends with several commissioners.
JC: Every one of us should have one. A rabbi’s your guide, your champion, your voice—a coherent voice. My only rabbi is the text, the words in the text. One of the reasons that pushed me to write was that I was unable to speak. I could only grunt incomprehensible words. At the university I found myself sitting next to rather strange students. Four or five among them would become Nobel Prize winners. They expressed themselves with such dazzling clarity. Whenever I listened to them, I would freeze on the spot, and the only possible revenge was for me to grab hold of a sheet of paper. There I was at least more coherent. I could speak to myself, not with sounds but with written signs. I had to transpose the music of sounds into writing.
SP: Why do you say that the writer is a gangster?
JC: Language is terribly cruel. The words have their own point of view; this should never be forgotten. It’s precisely what the political correctness that’s fashionable in the U.S. at the moment is trying to negate: banishing expressions or imposing others only results in perverting language. Those voluntarist simplifications will never prevent it from being irrational, complex, impossible to master. Language can do anything. The gangster and the writer share a similar relationship with irrationality. The former exploits the irrationality of men, and the latter that of words. For both of them irrationality is a fearsome weapon, provided that they keep a firm hold on it. Faulkner was one of the first to take that road. He got as close as possible to the dangerous zone while neutralizing its destructive potential. In my opinion language can kill. Stalin knew that better than anybody else. He perfectly understood the power of words as well as the threat they represented for him. Because he could not subject them to his will, he imagined that by crushing the writers he would crush the words.
SP: Are you aware of the risks you submit your reader to?
JC: There is no such thing as an innocent reader. The reader is part and parcel of the whole thing! The act of writing is probably immoral in itself, but it’s also the most moral act there is since you derive no benefit from it. You just kill yourself, that’s all. I always burst out laughing whenever I hear a director or an actor saying, as they’re retiring: “This job is exhausting. I’m going to write a book.” Well, go on, treat yourself! Sometimes I feel as knocked out as a boxer pelted with too many blows.
SP: Is it always that painful?
JC: Always. There’s no such thing as a book you easily finish off, or then it’s a worthless book. I spend my whole time chasing words that slip away. But I’m stubborn. I write in the same way I play Ping-Pong. It’s exactly the same.
SP: Are you a good player?
JC: I never learnt how to play, my style is bizarre, my service could be better, but I put an amazing concentration in it. When my opponents feel close to victory, they often drop their guard. That’s when I overcome my handicap and I win. It’s a matter of vigilance. Ideas are just like balls. They fall on you unexpectedly and slip through your fingers if you have a moment’s inattention. All the New York Ping-Pong clubs have disappeared. Here in Paris I go to a club run by the subway workers of Paris, in the 13th Arrondissement. I go there every day. Most of the time, I play against Georges Moustaki or against a jockey who’s a real virtuoso. I almost always lose—it’s the only way to learn. When I started reading Joyce, I knew that I would never write a sentence endowed with such beauty, such might, such melody. But I could try and find my own road. You finally succeed after you’ve learnt to overcome a feeling of failure.
SP: How did you discover your own road?
JC: Strangely Freud was the writer who influenced me the most. When I read Moses and Monotheism I was struck by the fact that he calls Moses “the Egyptian,” and it opened new perspectives. In one word he disclosed a whole deep, invisible structure. I am no philosopher. But on that day I understood that the strangest connections are sometimes not the least justified.
SP: Could you expand a little?
JC: I’m thinking of what I owe my brother. For years he was the embodiment of sadness. And whenever he was obliged to commit a deed that was much worse than what he was naturally capable of, this sadness increased. Because you know, I don’t want to overdo it, but there is no real difference between the police and the criminals. They come from the same background, and all of them are gangsters. Every other decade a huge scandal in the ranks of the police confirms this. I mean, among the cops also, if there’s money to be made. In the end the cops have simply legalized the outlaws—in New York, at least, and maybe only in New York, it doesn’t matter. There has always been a common ground between cops and criminals. The Mafia had its blocks, its neighborhoods, which the police would never enter, and vice versa. In this way they managed to establish a form or order. As soon as the Federals turned up to clean the whole place, chaos came back. Today the only calm and crimeless neighborhoods—such as Pleasant Avenue, the only Italian street in Harlem—are those that the Mafia still controls. But their territory is no longer what it used to be.
SP: Who is trying to take over?
JC: The Chinese, the Russians, or others who will probably be less organized and much more destabilizing than the Italians. The Italians, at least, had a certain sense of aestheticism as well as the elegance to assassinate each other. My brother was an expert on the Mafia. When I was doing research for Blue Eyes and Marilyn the Wild, he took me to Bath Beach, an Italian neighborhood under control. We went into a restaurant—everyone instantly fell silent. They knew he was a cop, they thought I was one too. Everyone was strangely affable towards us, and we could feel fear underneath. This was enough, at the time, to hold chaos in check. But today . . .
SP: The gangs that now dominate your natal Bronx have forgotten what fear is.
JC: I thought I knew this borough. I went back there recently, taking the opportunity of a script on those freelance reporters who work every night for television channels. It’s no longer possible to say that it’s a jungle—the word supposes a form of brutal beauty. No, it’s a dead jungle. If nothing changes, war will soon invade the whole city. The most serious problem New York—and probably the U.S.—has to face is that the city is now unable to give an education to the youth. Half of the schools of the country are now equipped with detectors to prevent the kids from bringing their guns in class. Who could study in such conditions? Eleven-year-old kids commit murders. They are born in an apocalyptic world. They go to schools that are besieged. How could they know what the word human means?
SP: Why has New York become the wild city, “la ville sauvage par excellence,” as one of your latest books asserts?
JC: Because it’s the only metropolis in the world that loomed up from the dregs of society. At the end of the nineteenth century it was the scene of a real battle waged by the poorest—the Irish, who gave birth to the first modern gangs—to defend their positions in the city. And the rich lost their power. In other words they still controlled Wall Street and the banks, but they had lost the political scene. New York is the only city in which the most destitute found a way to educate themselves and to dislodge the well-off. It’s a historical fact. Because I wrote about it, I am now blamed for being the spokesman of the poor. But the rich have their own spokesmen, who are numerous enough. They don’t need me. In other words I dance with the misfits and the drop-outs, and not with the mighty. When I used to teach in Stanford, I lived close to San Francisco for a while. I was missing something, and I was powerless to know what, until one day I saw a man walking on the street and talking to himself. In California nobody behaves like this. Everyone behaves in a very rational, controlled, and polite way. It drove me crazy. And yet I love to go to Hollywood. But not under any circumstances.
SP: What do you mean?
JC: When I’m working on a scenario, I settle in a hotel room, on the twentieth floor. This is where I receive the people I have appointments with, where I eat, and from where I order the videos I need. I never set foot outside, not even once. The surrounding city looks like a jungle to me. It’s a fantastic city provided that you don’t stay there more than a week.
SP: Why did you give feminine first names to the two male characters of your latest novels?
JC: What I’m trying to suggest without insisting too much on it is that everyone is more or less androgynous. Men are supposed to be tough and women to be tender creatures, whereas you can say the exact opposite in many cases. In this period of strange madness such gendered statements are meaningless. On the other end we have a desperate need for the feminine side of humanity, or at least for the values this side is supposed to embody. The twentieth century has kept glorifying macho barbarity, and if we launch into the next century with such a brutal way of looking at the world, I wouldn’t put too much money on our survival.
SP: When you chose to live on this side of the Atlantic, were you aware that you were coming back to the continent your parents had left?
JC: What I know is that today, for the very first time, I can write on my mother. I have a few photographs of her. I change them into words, and I change the words into images. It’s the only dialogue I’ve been able to establish since she died. Four months ago I was in Hamburg and I was aimlessly wandering in the town. I happened to reach the harbor. I was shown where the docks were. And there, I suddenly realized that my mother had walked those quays, those wooden piers. Coming from Russia and after a long journey, she had reached Hamburg and embarked on the boat to the U.S.
SP: Hadn’t you tried to see the place before?
JC: I had never consciously thought about it. And suddenly, this emotion. Hamburg invented my mythology.
SP: Would you say that Europe is giving back to you the missing links of your past?
JC: Perhaps. I had to live in France to start feeling compassion for my parents, for instance. For years I had been angry at them for having no sense of language. They remained powerless to master the signs of the New World because they could not understand English. When I arrived in Paris, I found myself in the very same situation. Today I speak an elementary French, but I would be unable to express anything complex in this language. When I listen to kids speaking on a bus, I am eaten up by jealousy. They will ultimately discover what will always remain elusive to me: the music of the language.
SP: What are you working on right now?
JC: I’m working on a rather strange, three-hundred-page comic book, New York 1999, for an American publisher. And I’m setting a precedent since I’m the first writer to retain the rights over his own characters. What is paradoxical is that the U.S. would never have offered me this possibility if I hadn’t already experienced it in France. The volumes I co-wrote with Loustal and François Boucq have enthralled American people. Once again, as for the cinema or the roman noir, the French taught them that comic books were a form of art.
SP: Perhaps living here will allow you to find your true place in the U.S.
JC: I think so. It’s probably a matter of believing, just as Marco Polo did, that wherever you go, you have something to do there. And yet it’s strange. France has offered me experiences. It has allowed me to live as a writer. And if Paris is so important to me, it is also because the city endlessly lends itself to this very adventure that used to be my passion when I lived in the Bronx. In the Bronx, I used to live between two hills, and the great challenge was to go on top of them to see what was beyond. In Paris you just have to turn a corner, and suddenly you’re entering a different world. The city is telling you a story. And all the storytellers have had the same mission ever since the mists of time: to absorb the suffering of mankind and to find a way to soothe it.