RG: Total amnesia. Ah, wait a moment, yes…A phone call from de Gaulle, at the time of a big steel strike. The TV shows a journalist interviewing a striking worker. De Gaulle rings up: ‘What kind of business is this? By what right does a journalist use the familiar tu to a working man? They went to school together?’ And then he hung up.

FB: But your relations with de Gaulle himself? Did you ever put him to the test with irony? I don’t suppose you’re going to deny you revered the man?

RG: Yes. No. I don’t revere, I respect. Allow me to quote myself. I don’t need to remind you how important his place in history was to de Gaulle. In Tulip, which was reissued in 1970—you’ll recall it’ s a story set in the distant future—I wrote: Resistance: the German movement which opposed the invader between 1940 and 1945 when the French occupied Germany under the commander of a tribal leader called Charles de Gaulle. The latter had finally been defeated by the Chinese at Stalingrad and committed suicide with his mistress Eva Braun in the ruins of Paris. At which I got a fiery letter from de Gaulle […] asking me if I intended to spend the rest of my life oscillating between idealism and cynicism. The old boy handled satire very well. I remember a dinner at the Elysée palace where a minister’s wife protested so that the King was sure to hear her the way a well-known singer of the day imitated him. ‘But Madame,’ de Gaulle said, ‘He’s very good at it; and besides, on a poor day, I sometimes imitate him myself.’ The way the great Charles has been sanctified, mummified, scrutinized and corrected calls for pity. And I can’t think of anything more afflicting than the way in which his ideas and his thought are subject to endless exegesis. I hate relics. In my view all relics, whether those of Marx, Lenin, Freud or Charles de Gaulle, are nefarious. […]

Besides, as far as de Gaulle is concerned, the surest way to betray a purely ethical heritage, is to seek to make it an object of current political consumption. When I once said on TV that my relations with de Gaulle derived more from metaphysics than ideology, the media sneered and smiled: the vertical smile of jerks, as first defined by the American novelist Richard Condon. What I’d meant was that what drew me to de Gaulle and bound me to him was his sense of those things which are immortal and those that aren’t, for the old man believed in the everlasting nature of humanistic values which today are dead, and which sooner or later the world will rediscover: as the French Revolution had rediscovered the old Polis and the Renaissance has rediscovered Antiquity.

FB: Why do you think so few writers and artists supported de Gaulle when he came back to power in 1958?

RG: Because instinct in writers and artists requires them to have neither respect nor sympathy for leaders, for chiefs and bosses and great statesmen, for providential men, for those who save their country and so on. If writers and artists all aligned themselves with established power we would despair of the world. Anyway, in the world of ideologies, no sooner do you pronounce the word ‘great man’ than you think of power, of Hitler and Stalin. These days, due to abundance, shit is in a state of confusion. The world seems to have no choice: the brain gets either stuffed or washed. Add to the above the individualism of the French when speaking of ‘great men’ in politics, and the average Frenchman feels personally diminished, as though he’d been robbed of something. I know a very distinguished gentleman who hasn’t voted once in his whole life because to vote for someone other than himself enrages him. That’s a lot more frequent than people realize. Look at the history of the twentieth century. You’ll see that for all the votes de Gaulle got, he still paid for the Kaiser, for Hitler, for Mussolini and for Petain. […]

FB: So what is Gaullism to you?

RG: A memory. There was a moment in history, an encounter, a spirit that passed over the French people. Now it’s all gone well, and that is also good. There will be other moments, other men, other encounters, further spirits. It wasn’t the last. It was a living thing and what is living cannot be preserved, embalmed; it wasn’t once and for all. It arrived well and left well. I am happy to have been alive at the time. Today, eighty percent of the young in France do not know what a ‘Companion of the Liberation’ is, and that’s all right too. If there is one thing that de Gaulle demands, it is originality; that means an end to the reliquary. There is a lesson to be learned from the way he refused to organize his succession, don’t you think? He didn’t want to be continued. He always spoke of renewal, and that does not mean marching toward the future backwards with our eyes fixed on a holy image. In the Soviet Union they embalmed Lenin under glass and exhibit him, look what that offered: an embalmed, straw-stuffed Lenin, a wax figure, a thing once and forever, forbidden to change anything…

FB: I seem to remember that at some point de Gaulle had suggested you might take up a political career?

RG: Twice. Both times with irony and scorn, as if to say I didn’t deserve anything better. Well, he didn’t exactly tell me to go to hell—that wasn’t his way—but there was a lofty disdain in his suggestion. The first time was at the start of his ‘crossing the desert’, before I left for Bern; the second […] was at the apogee of the R.P.F. when he was surrounded by eager young future marshals. Each time with an ironical smile that said, ‘You too!’ […] I was thinking of leaving the Foreign Office altogether, to start up a projected literary-satirical weekly. Luckily, the project came to nothing, and I went to see de Gaulle, rue la Pérouse, less to ask his advice but just informally, to keep in touch. He offered no advice at all, but he did question me for a quarter-hour…about Malraux! Malraux gave him huge fun—Madame de Gaulle called him, ‘That devil!’

FB: You finally took up your post at the French Embassy in Bern, and you stayed there eighteen months. Careful what you say, I am Helvetian…

RG: Don’t worry: I have no memory of the place at all…An eighteen-month hole in my memory. I vaguely remember a clock with little men striking the hours or something like that. It seems I did some stupid things there. I’m told I went down into the bear-pit, the Bärengraben, perhaps hoping that something would finally happen. Nothing happened at all. The bears didn’t budge. They were Bernese bears. The fire-brigade came and pulled me out two hours later. […] The effect Bern can have on people is bizarre. It’s certainly one of the most mysterious places on earth, a sort of Atlantis that hasn’t been found yet. The sort of place, you know, where everything takes place elsewhere. I finally sent Bidault a personal telegram: in code, Top Priority: ‘I have the honor to inform you that at one in the afternoon it snowed for twenty minutes in Bern. It must be noted that this snowfall was not forecast by the Swiss meteorological service and I leave it to Your Excellency to draw the appropriate conclusion.’ Bidault’s conclusion was sharpish. He told his personnel director, Bousquet, ‘Send him off among the madmen.’ That was how I was appointed spokesman to the French delegation to the United Nations in New York. Before leaving I was allowed a few weeks’ leave for reasons of stress—stress in Bern!

I spent them at the Hôtel des Théâtres on the Avenue Montaigne, then much frequented by the most beautiful models in the world: Dorian Leigh, Assia, Maxine de la Falaise, Bettina of course, Nina de Voght and Suzy Parker among others. The hotel had a tiny elevator and when you had the good fortune to go up with one of those goddesses you were taken straight up to heaven. Unfortunately, also there was also the celebrated Marquis de Portago, who killed himself later at the Twenty-Four Hour race at Le Mans. He had a stable of fantastic cars; I had just the elevator. […] Also resident there were Capa, the famous Life photographer, who had covered the Normandy landings and would later be blown up by a land-mine in Indochina, Irwin Shaw, Peter Viertel, Ali Khan. What went on in those rooms must have been marvelous, things such as I can only imagine, for reasons of morality and inexperience. I was entitled to no more than a rapid glance, and only when one of those extraordinary creatures opened the wrong door. The door would open, one had to work fast, with just one’s nose, to catch a few whiffs of paradise; then the door would shut. They were visions; I was visited, in the mythical sense of the word.

FB: Okay. Pure poetry, huh?

RG: I sometimes go back to the bar at the Hôtel des Théâtres, and I think what my life might have been if I had any initiative.

FB: All right. So after this crisis of humility, if you’ve recovered, let’s leave for New York and your first contact with America.

RG: It’s just about impossible to have a first contact with America. It’s probably the only country that is really like what you thought it was like before you went there. The first thing you note on arrival is that American film is the truest in the world. Even the worst American film is truthful. That makes discovering America very difficult. All you get is a long series of confirmations. Every frame of an American film, whatever its inanity and the inverisimilitude of the whole, is freighted with authenticity. America is a film. It’s a country which is cinema. That has a deeper meaning than the usual relationship between film and reality. It means that American reality is so overwhelming that it wipes everything else out, so that all means of artistic impression in America, theater, painting, music, etc., are specifically American. For thirty years, like the whole western world, France lives in an American civilization. And the authenticity of that way of life is fashioned in America. So that in part we face the threat of playing a purely imitative role. The French part always looked to the eighteenth and nineteenth century, whereas French life today requires American vitality. […] I think Europe can only rediscover its reality and its vitality by returning to its real origins, the Italian cities, the French provinces, the German principalities, by a form of super-nationalism that can only be created through its roots. Otherwise, Europe will be no better than a failed America.

Never in the history of the world has there been a form of popular expression more representative of and symbiotic with a civilization than the American cinema. Every little psychological, political, ethical or ethnic frisson in the nation is immediately reflected on film.

[…] When I arrived in New York all I felt was a sense of déjà vu. Every silhouette, every street corner, every slice of daily life was like those out-takes of film that spill onto the floor.

[…] The strongest and most ingrained American myth is the division of mankind into ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. […] That is the basis of machismo, of the American dream of ‘success’ which causes such ravages in the American psyche, which destroyed Jack London and Fitzgerald, which pushed Hemingway to suicide. It’s the one thing that never changes. […When I was in a gambling room in a New Orleans motel] the feel was of a family, no whores around, just men, real men. That’s what I hate most: pure balls, nothing but balls, a comic-strip mentality.

[…] For some seventy-five years America has swung—on the ‘Who am I?’ level—between Captain Ahab and his white whale and Jack London’s hobos. He was, at his beginnings, the first hippy. […] San Francisco holds the American record for alcoholism and suicide. Why? I think it’s because life is much slower there. People have time to think. And to come to a conclusion.