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Novelist and playwright, Goncourt Academician, film director and actor, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt has now published a tribute to his mother: Journal d’un amour perdu (“Diary of a Lost Love”). At the Rive Gauche Theatre in Paris meanwhile, he is appearing on stage in his play Madame Pylinska et le secret de Chopin (“Madame Pylinska and Chopin’s Secret”). At 59, he is one of the most frequently translated and performed French-language writers.
I wouldn’t be here if...
If I hadn’t been lucky enough to meet a woman who loved life, the arts, the theatre and literature and who was generous, exciting and passionate: my mother. I feel as if my life is her work, and that’s fine by me! Some sons are confrontational and keen to break away. Not me: I see myself as continuing her trajectory. Since her death [in March 2017], it’s not my mother I miss, it’s her.
In Journal d’un amour perdu (“Diary of a Lost Love”), the book you dedicate to her, you write: “The key to my life is that I believed in my mother’s gaze...”
The way a person looks at you is extremely important. Hers was a look of love that made me feel lovable and it enabled me to trust myself and to trust life. By accepting who I was, she pushed me on and looked for the best in me. She was a former top athlete, a competitive sportswoman, and she had the idea that, when you do something, you’ve got to aim for the top or you may as well stay where you are.
But this sprinter, who became a physical education and sports teacher never pushed you into sport.
Not in the slightest! Whereas my father, who’d been a boxer and a judo competitor before becoming a physiotherapist, placed a lot of emphasis on it. He prioritised e_ort, whereas she didn’t at all. It was so natural for my mother to run fast that she barely thought about it: she just came in first. For years, I found it so natural to write that I didn’t think about it either. I was convinced all children sat down to write when they got home from school.
What did you write when you were a child?
Swashbuckling stories, because I’d read The Three Musketeers. And I wanted to do loads of other stu_ besides writing. But a vocation sneaks up on you from behind and you can’t get away from it. It’s not a revelation, it’s an organic necessity that ends up taking over. Everyone predicted I’d be a writer – everyone except me!
Who was the first person to predict it?
My teacher of French, Latin and Greek, Mr Barney, when I was in Year 9. I was at the Saint Just School in Lyon where my mother taught physical education. They used to meet in the sta_room and Mr Barney told her I was a “born writer”. He was always spotting the influence of the books I’d read when I wrote. I was a chameleon, you see. Then, when I was 16, Alban Vistel [awarded the Order of Liberation after WWII and a writer and publisher of graphic novels] whispered to me as he handed me the “Resistance Prize”, “You will find your salvation in writing”.
As a child, you fought with your father. You even talk of defiance. Why was that?
I refused to acknowledge he was my father. He’d seen me come into the world with a harelip and showed me no a_ection; instead, he used to check me over for defects. He was afraid for me almost all his life. I met his suspicion with defiance. And then, he belonged to that class of
people who think they’re always right. I can’t stand that. We were total opposites. He was very conventional. Nothing was fun with him. I like fooling around. Fun is a part of my lifestyle, which doesn’t preclude serious thought. I rebelled against him. It got quite violent to the point of hatred on my part, although not on his. I could see he loved me, but I had trouble returning his love. Later on, we managed to fix our adult relationship.
At the Ecole Normale Supérieure (graduate teaching college), you did a PhD in philosophy. You were a model student. Did you like the college?
I approached it the way I approached the rest of my life: I grasped it by the horns! I was very keen. I continued studying because I wrote well. I became a philosophy teacher and taught for five years, and I loved it. I still see my old pupils. Philosophy isn’t about passing on knowledge, it’s about freedom. I gave them a toolkit for thinking and told them, “Don’t say what I say, don’t think what I think: think for yourselves”.
What made you stop teaching?
The fact that I could earn my living immediately with royalties. It just seemed to happen and then things moved very fast. My first play (La Nuit de Valognes – Don Juan on Trial) in 1991 went down well and the second one (Le Visiteur – The Visitor, 1993) won accolades. I discovered I’m one of the lucky ones who can write for a living and so I devote my time to writing. But I wasn’t reckless about it. I started o_ by taking a year’s leave of absence, then I took a second one... and when I got to the fifth year, they politely asked me to resign, which I did, because my plays were already being performed in several countries. I didn’t run away from state education: I found another kind of life.
Another kind of life associated with the “event” you described in February 1989 in the Hoggar Desert in Algeria. You say it represented “a second birth”.
Yes, it was a second birth. I was 28. My first play was starting to do the rounds and I was asked to write a script about Charles de Foucauld [a French soldier who became a Catholic monk and a hermit]. And that was how I fetched up in the Hoggar Desert: I was there to retrace his journey. I was one of a dozen people all from di_erent walks of life, and the trip involved a 10-day hike with nights spent sleeping under the stars, from Tamanrasset to Charles de Foucauld’s hermitage on the Assekrem Plateau. One day, as we were going up Mount Tahat, I got to the top and I was so elated by what I saw that I called down, “I’m going on ahead, I’m going down now”. But I had no sense of direction! In the joy of my escapade, I went o_ course and when I got down, I couldn’t find the camp. It was seven in the evening and night would fall rapidly. I was lost, I didn’t have a drop of water, I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt and the wind was getting up.
Were you afraid at that moment?
It was a very abstract kind of fear. A sentence kept running through my mind, “It takes three days to die of thirst”. I called but no one answered. I thought I was about to spend a horrible night. I tried to cover myself in sand to protect myself from the wind, and then... I had the most beautiful night of my life, a spiritual night, a “night of fire”, as Pascal calls it, in other words, a night when I literally experienced extasy. I split into two people, I came out of myself and was met by warmth and light. I entered that space, lost myself in it, vanished into it.
Was it a hallucination?
You could see it like that. But the extraordinary thing is, you’re still free in the moment of revelation. You can accept it or you can ignore it. If you choose to ignore it, you can bring out all sorts of reductive arguments. If you accept it, you can change.
And you changed?
Yes. A real alchemy took place in me that night and totally changed who I was. That’s all I know but it’s what I believe. The human condition is a mystery, but I stopped confronting that mystery with panic: I embraced it with trust. Trust is like a tiny flame that doesn’t light anything up or dispense knowledge, but it keeps you warm.
After that spiritual night, when did you get back to your group of walkers?
Thirty-two hours later. In the morning the sun came up, and I realised then that I was on the wrong side of the mountain. I spent the day going back up. By the end of the afternoon, I was on my way down again, and that was when the Tuareg guide spotted me and came to meet me. He threw his arms around me. While I’d been nestling in bliss, they’d spent the night in a pit of anxiety. My secret seemed almost improper. I couldn’t exactly tell them I was better than ever!
It took you a long time to tell your “secret”.
Yes, because a revelation is a revolution. It was a very private event and I kept it to myself. Then I told my parents.
How did they react?
A lot of envy and jealousy from my father, who was an unhappy atheist. My mother was profoundly moved. She wasn’t mad about religion and regarded spirituality with deep suspicion, so I’d been brought up an atheist. After the Hoggar incident, we talked a lot about such things. She abandoned atheism and became an open-minded agnostic.
But why, several years later, did you decide to go public with the experience?
I was being hassled by readers and journalists, who kept asking me: where does your optimism come from? How do you manage to talk about terrible things without putting the light out? Eventually one day, I gave in. I said: because I have faith. But I’m still just as much a philosopher as a believer, because believing and knowing are two di_erent things. I can’t pass on my faith: I can only bear witness.
Was that second birth what makes you the writer you’ve become?
For sure! The thing that enables me to question and talk about serious things is that I’m always looking for the hope in them. I was given an extraordinary gift when I was born. I’m not a writer who believes, I’m a writer who trusts.
And why do you write so much?
And you know what, I exercise a fair bit of restraint! Otherwise my publisher would never be able to deal with it all. I’m like a sponge for information: I get passionately interested in everything – religions, civilisations, ways of loving, ways of falling out of love... And my interest quickly gets turned into a story. It’s like having an orchard in my head with trees that bear stories, fairy tales, novels and plays. And I go into that orchard every day to see what’s ready to be picked. It’s inconceivable I’ll live long enough to spawn all the stories in me!
Should we see a sense of urgency in this writing bulimia?
Yes, very clearly. It’s generational. If you look at a photo of my class at graduate teaching college in 1980, many of them have died. Girls and boys... I sat with them when they were ill and when they died. So, if I’ve got the odious privilege of living on, I mustn’t waste a second. But there’s nothing sad about that. Old people used to say, “Always remember you’re mortal”. I want to say that in today’s language: “Always remember you’re alive”.
When readers and audience members tell you, “You tell us stories that help us to cope,” do you like being told that?
It’s the best compliment there is! Not that I realised it at first. What it means is: you’ve given me something, you’ve helped me navigate a tough time. For me, literature has that healing dimension. Reading helps us to live. But I fully realise that being on the bestseller lists can arouse immediate suspicion in critics. Even I only find one or two worthwhile titles when I look at those lists. But like all knee-jerk reactions, it’s stupid! I mean, look: 4,000 copies made me a genius; 40,000 meant I was talented; and after 400,000, suddenly I was rubbish! But I’m still the same writer.
Who are the authors who have helped you most?
The first was Alexandre Dumas. He instilled in me a love of reading if not literature. Then Colette, who writes so freely and sensitively about sensual awakening, going right to the heart of things without dogma or judgment. I still like to touch base with Colette now and then. And also Julien Green, who’s a master at exploring the way love and religion a_ect one’s inner life. And then, of course, there are the two big “killers” in literature: Proust and Dostoyevsky. You read them and you put down your pen and think, “I may as well give up now!” And then there’s Diderot. I wrote my doctoral thesis on him. I don’t think like him at all, but he taught me about enthusiasm, curiosity and freedom.
In your book, you say you felt like throwing yourself under a ship a few months after your mother died. It’s surprising to find a suicide urge in someone who says he loves life ...
Every optimist knows exactly what pessimism is because he’s 10-20% a pessimist, and vice versa. I love life, but sometimes I’ve su_ered terribly and just wanted to leave it. On that ship, which I’d gone on so often with my mother, all I could see was what I was missing. I couldn’t cast o_ my grief. But I didn’t jump in the end. I can at last say now that I’ve survived her departure.
