This is How Books Live

At the beginning of May 2010, a small book entitled Tête haute: Souvenirs made its discreet appearance in bookstores amid the bestsellers, books by celebrities, summer novels, soccer player biographies, literary prize banners, stories about politicians, white, black, red, beige, and yellow collections, and covers with slices of color like those on traffic lights.

The author had just celebrated his ninety-second birthday.

On the cover of the book, we see the photo of the young Lieutenant Schreiber at the turret of his tank, looking out over a stretch of snow-covered plain. Alsace, 1944. Whenever I entered bookstores, I didn’t notice anything except that cover. Or, more often, its absence.

How could people help a published author with a small print run from a modest publishing house? The press service had conscientiously sent copies to at least a hundred journalists, contacted the editorial boards, and called them back again. Friends mobilized, talking about it to those around them and sending text messages (“JC’s book is out!”). For my part, I referenced those war memories at each of my (rare) media appearances. Before publication, I even arranged to have lunch with the person in charge of the culture pages at a weekly magazine; the man promised me he would read Jean-Claude (I would have never undertaken a thousandth of such a process to discuss my own writings). Charles Dupêchez did his best, telephoning right and left (in the nonpolitical sense), but he didn’t have a network of people who owed him a favor or a band of trusted accomplices, things that are useful and even indispensable in the grand editorial fun fair. The inconvenience of being a gentleman.

After something happens, we always tell ourselves that the result was predictable and that we had been discerning enough to see it coming. I hadn’t seen anything at all, and was convinced that when the book appeared, the articles would rain down, the interviewers would brandish their microphones, and the makeup artists on television sets would pick up their brushes and pat the forehead of that imposing old man who was ready to tell the audience about his astounding passage through the century.

No, I could not imagine—not in May nor even in June of 2010—that this soldier’s memoirs would collide with such total indifference.

“Collide” is not the right word, for it implies a shock, a rejection, a tension. A reaction, in other words. Lieutenant Schreiber’s words did not provoke anything of the sort. They were drowned in a viscous magma that suffocated every sound and neutralized any debate, not forbidding the expression of ideas, but rendering them inaudible. An intellectual space that was perfectly soundproof. One could shout, take exception, proclaim its truth, but no echo would come to reflect back these appeals. A censor that did not say its name and that nevertheless acted more effectively than every authoritarian “no.”

I began resorting to this kind of analysis after June 18, the cutoff date that Charles Dupêchez had told us was the symbolic end of a period during which the book could, logically, arouse media curiosity. Yes, the general’s voice on the BBC in 1940, and this book, the voice of an old soldier who, as a young tank driver in ’44, met the leader of Free France and had several chances to speak with the great man after the war.

But nothing happened on June 18, 2010.

That’s not true; many things happened, as a matter of fact. Everyone was talking about the recession and the horrible traders who, carrying on their dirty obsessions, had claimed millions of euros in bonuses for themselves. Next to them, a politician accused of embezzling one hundred and fifty thousand euros to finance a political party seemed like a pickpocket. And all of them, the traders and the politicians, became small potatoes in the face of a billionaire (the richest person in France) who had offered precisely one billion euros to a photographer friend. People were also talking quite a bit about the lawsuit filed against the former president of the Republic. And the filming of a movie starring the wife of the current president. People snickered as they recounted the anecdote—true or false—according to which Woody Allen had been forced to shoot one scene, in which that tremendous actress was portraying a woman coming out of a bakery, a baguette under her arm, thirty-six times. But most of all, soccer, soccer! Matches, goals, scores, transfers of human merchandise, to the tune of millions of euros, from one club to another. Current events.

No, nothing else for June 18, 2010. Nothing about Lieutenant Schreiber.