The Era of Suspicion

The day after his birthday, I went to see the editor at Éditions du Seuil, where a few of my books had been published. I hadn’t done it before because the publishing house was going through a difficult time back then (Olivier Bétourné was not yet there to take the helm). The boat was tipping, taking on water, and many of the authors were paddling toward more solid ocean liners. Putting the old man aboard a Titanic was not a wise choice. I also wanted to distance myself from the writing of his book, limiting my role to that of an intermediary. Later, I told myself, the editor would find an experienced writer who would know—far better than I—how to give Lieutenant Schreiber’s memories a form that was skillfully structured and concise; “journalistic” in the good sense of the word.

So I met with the person who edited my work at Éditions du Seuil, telling him about the man and his life while keeping silent about my multiple rebuffs. May the writer who has never lied to editors cast the first stone at me!

The literary director, Bertrand Visage, expressed an enthusiasm verging on rapture, an unreserved support. His conviction was so clear that immediately after the meeting, I called my friend: “Jean-Claude, we’ve got them! The Siegfried line is within reach of our tanks.”

That evening, the old man appeared transfigured, rejuvenated, and spoke at length, a glass of whiskey in hand, about those years of war when the world of indifferent people had forgotten Lieutenant Schreiber and his companions in arms. He spoke with a new intonation, a little less astute than usual, as if the words he was uttering were already writing themselves on a page.

No publication of any one of my own books had ever given me as much joy as this project’s finally being accepted.

One week later, Bertrand Visage, who had notified the directors of Éditions du Seuil, called me back, his voice broken. Those war memories were not wanted in the house’s collections. A meeting, he said, had been organized especially for this, given the undisputed significance of the author (a Servan-Schreiber!). The project was examined, evaluated, and rejected.

I know who the members of this council are, but I will not speak about them because that seems to me quite insignificant compared to the pain that their decision caused the old man.

This rejection was much more difficult to hide. I explained to Jean-Claude that this was yet another publishing house that was not at the level of what he was going to recount in his text. For the first time since the beginning of our editorial ordeal, he had to pretend that he believed me by exaggerating his gullibility: “Well, there are plenty more fish in the sea … especially if you’re telling me that they’re going down, the poor things.”

The decision made by Éditions du Seuil, with its air of “secret meetings,” awakened a suspicion in me: were there things in the old man’s life that were unknown to me? Influential enemies whose pollution would make the publication of his memoirs a thorny matter? Would the abundant book production by other Servan-Schreibers harm our modest project? Or could it be opposition from the family clan, afraid of Jean-Claude’s outspokenness? Or, even worse, were there potential shadowy areas in his biography, those nasty little secrets that the French have a talent for unearthing in the pasts of their great men? Some medal of the Vichy Regime’s Order of the Gallic Francisque lying in an old drawer, the usurped identity of a Resistance fighter, a stripe unfairly sewn onto the sleeve of a uniform that was too smooth?

In the case of Lieutenant Schreiber, this suspicion didn’t make any sense. He had never claimed to have a superhuman heroism, a glory worthy of being loudly proclaimed. If he spoke about his war, about his wounds, his decorations, it was only to answer my questions, and even this was done with a cautious humility, a self-censoring, even, that forbade him from showcasing his exploits in any way. His participation in the Resistance was limited, he said, to a few simple facts (“I passed weapons to my comrades”). As for his capacities as an officer … here is what the commander of the Fourth Cuirassiers wrote on January 20, 1941 (a date, we should note, that is hardly the right moment for showering praise on a soldier of Jewish background): “A young reserve officer cadet of exceptional vitality and spirit. Has given his utmost from the beginning of the campaign, volunteering for every difficult mission. Has earned two glowing commendations. Was wounded in combat. With his extensive knowledge, very sharp intelligence, and a very pleasant mindset, he has all of the qualities to make an excellent officer.”

Should I mention that it was not Jean-Claude who spoke to me about this rating? I found it when I was starting my process of verification, trying to understand what could have frightened away the prudish reading committees.

We already know that this young Officer Cadet Schreiber, who promises to “make an excellent officer,” will be dismissed from the army in April 1941 as a Jew. I also pushed my research in that direction: perhaps this dismissal was convenient for a young soldier who had had enough of exposing himself to shells? Was this anti-Semitic measure not, in actual fact, some secretly desired path to rescue? An evasion? A chance to leave as a victim? A hidey-hole that was morally above reproach?

I know a good number of novelists who would be enchanted by such a subject: today’s literature adores these murky waters, these muddy psychologies. Stain and ambiguity, the heights of human complexity!

Sorry to disappoint you, my dear fellow writers. The complexity of Lieutenant Schreiber is elsewhere. It is found in a letter he wrote to his colonel in that same year, 1941: “Though Catholic by religion, I am of Jewish background. But the idea that I cannot serve my country under the same conditions as all of my compatriots is painful and unbearable for me. I wish that a chance could be given to a young cavalry officer cadet, barely twenty-three years old, and that he would be permitted to prove as much in military life as in civilian life that he is right to be proud to be French.”

Nice words? Rhetoric? The actions will come soon: the Resistance, the journey to Spain, a stay in a concentration camp, North Africa where the army enlists the man it did not want in France, the Landing, the Liberation….

Too simple for a modern novel, isn’t it?

The night that I told him, in veiled terms, about Éditions du Seuil’s backing down, he showed me a photo he’d found in one of the boxes from which, at my insistent requests, he would sometimes pull out an old album. The snapshot was yellowed and covered in a fine net of cracks. This one featured the banks of the Rhine, dreary gray trees whose branches had been cut off by shell explosions, and the silhouettes of combat engineers, the sappers who, under endless artillery fire, would raise the bridge to let the tanks across.

Jean-Claude put on his glasses and examined the photo, shaking his head slightly. “Those guys especially were the ones who suffered as we went through Germany. In our tanks, we were more or less safe. But those guys, the bridge builders, were defenseless targets on the open riverbank. There were only a few survivors from each unit. And then there was the infantry, of course. A lot of Algerians and Moroccans. They managed to cross the river and hang onto the right bank. The loss of men was enormous! When we had made it across, there were dead men everywhere. I saw a few survivors of a Moroccan Tirailleurs regiment, and then that soldier; he was stretched out, killed, his eyes wide open and … full of tears, as if at the last moment, he had realized what was happening to him. A young boy….”

Listening to Lieutenant Schreiber, I understood that glorifying his role in the war had never been his obsession. This erasure of the ego had allowed his memory to preserve the living and the dead inside the indistinct mass. A face, a spoken word, a fleeting effigy of the other.

The night of our defeat, I also told myself that a single fragment—yes, a gray sky reflected in those young dead eyes, filled with tears—was worth more in its unfathomable simplicity than all of that literature about small contemporary neuroses.