The Mausoleum of Lovers

Review

Rather difficult to “review” journals. What’s the reader to evaluate, the prose? How interesting the trivia? I don’t typically read Goodreads reviews before I write my thoughts, but I felt pretty sure that mine wouldn’t change much. I read a few lamentations, Oh, Hervé needed an editor. I do not want journals to be heavily edited. I think that ruins them. Sure, maybe a few typo corrections or whatever, but to have entries removed by someone else veers into making judgement about what is important and what is not. Two people are empowered to make that decision, the journalist and the reader, especially with a posthumous publication. Especially with a writer so known for being ‘merciless’ and so willing to be pornographic in his work. I would like the thing warts and all.

As for warts, there are a few. Hervé declared at one point that this should be some aspirational fusion of novel and journal, and sometimes I wonder if what I’m reading is fictionalized or exaggerated (the Giles character is concerning, maybe that’s putting it galactically lightly). I think there could be complaints of self-centeredness, but I don’t know what else you’d expect in a journal.

I remain fascinated with Guibert. I admire the writing in a similar way that I admire Ernaux’s. I like the completely unsparing nature of it. He is also clearly a constant reader, and references all sorts of books, some of those I ordered immediately.

It is clear that Guibert vacillated between deep depression and some bouts of joy (seemingly always associated with objects of his love, particularly T and Vincent). There is a lot in this that I can understand. Guibert says of T., “I would like for T. to be overcome with missing me, and for him to call me to say so” (p109) but also, “Idea for a letter to T.: imagine that your silence is burying you in my heart: recollection of defunct affection, and I don’t know if my sadness comes from there, or elsewhere” (p11). I can understand both of these.

There is a lot of discussion of suicide in the journals. I think Guibert often thought of last words (“Don’t commit suicide so as not to grant victory to those who are mediocre” p141; “The fantasy of last words” p150). I have no doubt at all that the last words in these journals were intentional, and that they reflected T.’s love and mourning for him:

T. cried in my arms, on my bed, it was worse than the suffocation I had around my heart after having had my lung pierced with a syringe.

Crushing. Guibert attempted suicide a few weeks before his death. I do not think that a suicide in the context of AIDS and the progression of his condition can be considered a suicide of despair, but one cannot set aside a clear fascination with it. Each time that thought occurs it digs a little rut and the rut becomes easier and easier to slide into and it becomes something that the mind goes to as a fantasy of safety and dread. I appreciate the clarity with which he wrote of that feeling, even if it is rarely articulated directly.

Notes

Bold is my emphasis.

• p11 - Idea for a letter to T.: imagine that your silence is burying you in my heart: recollection of defunct affection, and I don’t know if my sadness comes from there, or elsewhere.
• p21 - Getting back to work on La mesquinerie, and stopping almost immediately: I tell myself that this project is stricken with a curse. I have only typed one page, and I’m still not happy with it. And what if this text disturbed me so much that I didn’t want to “tidy” it up? What if I carried out, upon myself, a sort of censorship, which is failure. Really, I can’t do it.
• p25 - The photo that someone other than I could take, that isn’t bound to the particular relation I have to this or that, I don’t want to take it.
• p27 - This evening, evidence of one of my fantasies: to capture (and divert?) the desiring gaze directed by a man at a woman.
• p44 - Pure and stinging wound of the jealous imagination, at the edge of hatred.
• p46 - ==Suicide would be the ultimate gift, the last letter to T.==
• p58 - T. still has his body (the pure pain of imagining him with J.-P.)
• p72 - The fact that T. has never given me, let alone shown me, a drawing he may have made.
• p105 - Of the absence of T. I end up thinking that he doesn’t exist (“too beautiful to be true”).
• p109 - I would like for T. to be overcome with missing me, and for him to call me to say so.
• p121 - But when he returns, T. breaks this ambient voluptuousness by dint of small assaults . . . but he is also feeding the journal, which was singularly empty of him of late, and so singularly empty.
• p130-131 - “I wanted to speak to you of something that is much stronger than inhibition: it is perhaps a bit of a haughty idea of the body, but it is mine, I feel as though I have engaged it in a very profound adventure with you . . . I want only for my body to exist with you alone, without you my body is mutilated, without you my body doesn’t exist. . .”
  • TB: these are a few lines of a much longer segment.
• ==p131-132 - “T., I thought earlier that the general novel I told you about, Le recit de la mesquinerie” would end with this letter: beginning with an attempted novel, then continuing in the form of a journal, then arriving at the letter, which is the true form of this narrative, its sincere form. The movement, a game of arrows, like masks removed one after another: he → I → you. The model of the love letter.”==
• p141 - Don’t commit suicide so as not to grant victory to those who are mediocre.
• ==p144 - The worst is experienced in dreams to lessen the worst of life.==
• p150 - The fantasy of last words.
• p159 - Before going out, I always leave a note on my table, for T., in case he stops by my place: “If you come here during my absence, think that I am thinking of you, often, often, into my sleep, and even very far from you, like a living incrustation that heats all the conduits of my body and my head, into the cold, into the emptiness. And if I were to die (you know my fantasy) I would want to be in that incrustation for you, which would slightly dilate those same conduits, but by allowing for many other streams to flow, without ever weighing down, like a very strong presence in oblivion and affection, far from misfortune and obsession; in case of death I don’t want to obsess you, I want to be a sweet memory, an invisible ring, a heart sewn without stitches, without scars, under your own skin…”
• p162 - . . .if there weren’t hope for a single reader, one day, I wouldn’t write anymore, but I would write even less if there weren’t a love to recount, because it is love that I want the reader to be able to discern.
• p184 - Pain isn’t heroic: it cuts me from writing. But what is marvelous, is the realization that pain is endurable. I imagine that death won’t be very different from life: I am already living at such a distance from those who are dear to me.
• p197 - I dream that T. is nibbling my shoulder under my clothes. We have just been reunited, I press myself against him, and all he does is that, nibble on my shoulder, but his recovered presence renders this instant, this sensation sublime. I close my eyes very hard and I repeat faster and faster: “This can’t be true, this can’t be true,” as though to delay the moment at which doubt will rob me of him, at which I will realize that in fact this body next to mine is barely real. I wake up and I cry. I confront the cold of the room to write this down, naked and somewhat disgusted.
• p199 - Hatred suddenly for the place where I live; I hate this table and I hate this armchair, I hate my bed, I hate these walls, not to mention the hatred for myself.
• p221 TB: A note here re: a military coup in Poland suggests a date somewhere in December 1981.
• p239 - When I think of my desire, still unexpressed, I tell myself: this can only resolve in darkness.
• p246 - Yesterday, after three deliberated weeks of distance, I force myself for the first time to see T. again, alone. He is wearing a new, quite ugly, clumpy gray wool jacket, and now he always has a sports bag slung over his shoulder, he has become his body’s perpetual trainer (but in looking at my body this morning in the mirror, I tell myself that this physical alert doesn’t shelter me from degradations, on the contrary), I ask him where he bought this jacket and he tells me that he didn’t buy it, that a boy gave it to him, a boy named Eric, whose name he pronounces for the first time before me, and who has been his lover, he tells me, for a long time. Jealousy almost has no currency between us, but this information, which could be anodyne, distances him from me even more, makes him into even more of a stranger. Then I cry in his arms and tell him that I am ashamed, that I am unworthy of him, but as soon as he is gone, I regret these sentences and without him my trouble abandons me (why must I insist on believing that he is my salvation—in the manner of a crucifix fixed to a bedroom wall—if he no longer has the means to be so?).
• p267 - Beauty of the Stendhal quotation related by M.: “I didn’t love her enough to forgot that I am ugly.”
  • TB: Curious ‘forgot’ rather than ‘forget’ - typo? I cannot find anything quite like this quote in English, so I would guess a misprint.
• p293 - Desire for death and cocks.
• p303 - Don’t even want to describe the episodes of my relationship with T. anymore: but as of the second night, we aren’t sleeping together. I feel as though I’m an actor who is tired of always performing the same play—who once had something of a success, and who is rolling, without momentum, in the uncertain, but menacing, or appeasing idea, of a last performance.
• p309 - This evening, somewhat out of boredom, I cast a glance at the previous notebooks: I’d like to copy them out backwards, beginning from here. The further I go into the past, the more I have the impression that these things I’ve written down have evaporated, emaciated, have gradually been absorbed by the neighboring books.
  • TB: Guibert would pursue this idea in Fou de Vincent, 1989.
• p331 - As though incapable of still loving T.: a decline?
• p333 - Walking regenerates my spirit and my hope. I walk too little. Stop always being the fortress of myself: beware but also roam.
• p346 - Having the impression of completing a masterpiece of literature, and being more or less called a pansy by a neighbor.
• p352 - In the solitude of insomnia, such a great thought of love for T.
• p362 - I am asked to do a fashion show (for that boutique of Japanese clothing I’m currently wearing), I go see the person in charge, I tell her: “I foresee that this show will make me suffer, now my suffering is precious to me, I would say that it is almost my principle work tool, and I cannot surrender it to you for 2,000 francs.” Sophie reported to me that I made a very bad impression.
  • TB: Deeply funny.
• p372 - T., whom I have neither seen nor heard from in over a fortnight, calls me: there is in my joy—I am certain that there could be no greater joy, if not to be immediately with him—such an impression of familiarity that it doesn’t seem like a body distinct from mine is speaking to me, but the same common body speaking to itself.
• p377 - (To think that pain is in itself the manifestation of the loved one.)
• p381 - . . .And you, reader, male or female, of these lines, if you have no hope left either, beleive me, you can recover it, even if you feel alone know that from my grave I want to comfort you just as has just been done for me.
• p399 - Difficult now to fall in love.
• p400 - TB: There is a story on this and 401 detailing a love. The object of the love loses three fingers in an accident, and so he buries them in the woods. The lover, upon hearing, scrambles to the forest to find them. When the two men find them, the lover eats the loved’s fingers before him. Pretty sure this is somewhere in Written in Invisible Ink, or at least I have read this before somewhere almost down to the word.
• p423 - It may also be the recognition in oneself of what is bad that determines suicide?
• p447 - Being gay or being sad, being desperate, it’s the same thing, it’s the same being. . .
  • TB: wonder if gay as in gay or gay as in happy?
• p481 - Bad results. I felt myself strong going to pick them up. I felt myself weak going to retrieve the previous ones, that had revealed themselves to be good.
  • TB: results either leading up to, indicative of, or in the immediate context of Guibert’s AIDS diagnosis. The entries being undated makes it difficult to say for sure.
• p499 - Marriage with C., beautiful serene day, without agitation.
  • TB: Guibert married Thierry Jouno’s (other) partner, Christine, so that the royalties of his works would pass to her and her children after his death. As far as I can tell, Christine is still alive.
• p512 - When he arrived, he got out a flick-knife to cut one by one the pages of my book.
• p524 - When I make an nth declaration of love again to Vincent, I see him fall into a painful state of distress that suggests what must precede a murder.
• p539 - Sunday, July 22nd, ten thirty in the morning with the masseur, I started the video.
  • TB: Presumably “Modesty and Shame”; I’m not sure, but I think this is the first dated entry. In any event, some entries after this are also dated. He does not seem to begin dating his entries until he feels that he is really dying from AIDS.
• p547 - “You are stricken with buyer’s fever,” T. said to me the other evening, irritated that all the paintings I buy are portraits of Vincent. “You’d do better treating yourself to some hustlers,” he added.
• p564 - There are empty days during which one has the impression of having been forgotten by the world. One envies those busy days one cursed when they were thus.
• p566 - ==I must also die as late as possible for T. and C. because, as long as I remain alive, the illness will remain in my camp and won’t fall into theirs.==
• p569 - C. told me this morning that I had always been, with my sadness, like a corrosive acid drip.
• p571 - T. cried in my arms, on my bed, it was worse than the suffocation I had around my heart after having had my lung pierced with a syringe.
  • TB: Guibert’s final entry.

On Reading / Writing / Writing Habits

• p133 - (Re-read Fermina Marquez and Reunion to retrieve the desire, the impetus, to write sch a novel.)
• p157 - Writing is my faculty of love, my human faculty. There is a mystery in the erotic fantasy, in its mixture of extreme banality, and total restoration, of the breath of importance, of which nothing is left, like a breath.
• p161 - It would be thus with the blockage of books (three or four expectant manuscripts, rejected: Le recit de la mesquinerie, Vice, Les aventures singulieres, and now L’image fantome) just like the closed typewriter case: it blocks writing at the same time, it deprives it of its confidence (writing should always have a bit of arrogance), and if one of those blocked books happened to be sucked into the conduits of publication, it would provoke something like the unclogging of a sink. . .
• p183 - Right now I am reading, with a rather stricken detachment, Christopher and His Kind by Christopher Isherwood: stricken because these are memoirs which are meant, with half a century of distance, and setting aside Nazism, to somewhat represent my kind of life, due to the fact of homosexuality, due to the fact of writing. But the life described seems not worth the effort, and I find myself doubting whether my life coincides too much with this life, perhaps because the writing is disappointing (I cannot identify with C.I. since my desire is incapable of identifying with his writing.)
  • TB: I love Isherwood’s writing, particularly A Single Man and Christopher and His Kind.
• p202 - (A book is a request for love.)
• p265 - So pleasurable to take a myth into one’s hands (Moby Dick), to like it, and at the same time to find it imperfect, badly put together, its imperfection is like a gift, a manner all its own to remain close and fraternal.
• p273 - The book is really only alive at the moment at which it is being written, as it is hatching itself in hiding, like a conspiracy. When one is typing it, it is already almost dead: beside oneself.
• p279 - I am trying, for the third time, to read Conrad (Heart of Darkness) but I have the impression, mysteriously, of reading Chinese, my eyes glide over the text without grasping anything.
• p280 - A beautiful name for a character: Mauve. . .
• p282 - “To write, is thus to show oneself, to show off, to bring about the appearance of one’s own face near by the other.” Michel Foucault (Self Writing)
• p299 - The publisher’s advice: “Write a masterpiece.”
• p327 - Is not the whole work of writing (but then like an idiot I will have passed it right by) on the contrary to hide its secret?
• p349 - T.’s somewhat consternated temper, he is reading Des aveugles and seems to complain about everything that isn’t conventional without ever noticing the originality. It seems especially to me that he isn’t reading the writing, that he’s only reading the narrative, and what is this narrative if not a limit to writing—several limits?
• p417 - “If I am not the first to have respect for myself, and for my work, others won’t have any.”
• p418 - Melville, Conrad, Hamsun: they all recount their experiences (the navy, vagrancy); me, what is my experience? Must I know it or ignore it?
• p449 - The pleasure there will be in writing something one knows one will tear up.
• p467 - Was not abandoned by the duration of the whole book (Adultes!) by the thought that I might have been making utter shit.
• p485 - (It is often by disorganizing the story that one makes it progress.)