Read Online Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture by Julian Barnes - Free Book Online Page A

that the only thing that saves it is its melancholy”—while his affability often gave away to touchiness. “Every artist,” he wrote in 1965, “must dream of reaching … the point at which ‘opinions’ [about his or her work] are meaningless”; but like most artists Truffaut never recognized that he'd reached the point, and to the end of his life was writing letters of rebuke and correction to journalists who misrepresented him. This lack of final confidence might also explain the diligence with which he encouraged Truf faut Studies wherever they appeared. Alternative explanations would include natural courtesy and natural ambition. There is also a toughness and aggression that stayed with him long after his rumbustious critical apprenticeship. When an agent tried to push an actress on to him, he replied: “If I may judge from your letter, from the way it is typed and laid out, and the condition in which it arrived, complete with documents, I should say that Mademoiselle X might best be offered the role of an illiterate slut.” When hustled for his signature on a petition, he did more than merely decline:
Dear Madame,
Since you charmingly insist that I add my signature to the list of those who have signed the Manifesto for Survival, I find myself obliged, other than by silent abstention, to inform you of my disagreement with its text which is, in my opinion, completely woolly, vague and insipid and bristling with too many capital letters.
    Truffaut's taste for literary abuse is most fully deployed in his 1973 exchange with Godard over La Nuit américaine. It consists, in fact, of a single letter from Godard and a single reply from Truffaut, but even so strolls into any future anthology of artistic quarrels. “Yesterday I saw La Nuit américaine,” Godard begins. “Probably no one else will call you a liar, so I will.” Truffaut is “a liar” because of the absence of “criticism” in the film, because he fails to tell the truth about film-making, its processes, personnel, and off-screen entanglements. “Liar, because the shot of you and Jacqueline Bisset the other evening at Chez Francis [a Paris restaurant] is not in your film, and one can't help wondering why the director is the only one who doesn't screw in La Nuit américaine.” If Godard were to make a comparable movie, it would include such truths as “how the old man from Publidécor paints Maria Schneider's backside in Last Tango, how Rassam's switchboard operator telephones and how Malle's accountant balances the books.” Having established Truffaut's bad faith and his own moral superiority, Godard then seeks to touch his former friend and collaborator for money. It is, after all, because Truffaut's films—and those of Malle and Rassam—are so expensive that there isn't enough cash around to fund Godard's latest. So why doesn't Truf-faut come in as co-producer: “for 10 million? for 5 million? Considering La Nuit américaine, you ought to help me, so that the public doesn't get the idea we all make films like you.”
    Godard's sovereign scorn can hardly be untainted by envy. Since 1959 moviegoers had, on the one hand, been arguing the various merits of Les 400 Coups, Jules et Jim, L'Enfant sauvage, an d La Nuit américaine (backed up by Tirez sur le pianiste, La Peau douce, and Fahrenheit 4S1), while on the other hand they had observed the grim decline of the maker of A bout de souffle into smug sloganeering. Happily, Truffaut does not allow his greater success to prevent a precise and ferocious settling of accounts. His six-page letter is the more violent for having been bottled up so long: Truffaut had not previously replied to Godard's sneers. Now he does. Godard thinks the truth should be told about the cinema and sex?
You cast Catherine Ribeiro, whom I had sent to you, in Les Carabiniers, and then threw yourself on her the way Chaplin throws himself on his secretary in The Great Dictator (it wasn't I who made the comparison) … With