I read an account by a woman about how a grown man inveigled her into an affair when she was 14. The woman describes how her two years with the exploiter acted as a kind of psychic bomb. The experience blasted her away from herself, leaving her still in the same body but with no idea who she really was or why she kept on living. She knew one thing: she couldn’t have sex except as a living appliance, an automaton dedicated to faking it. All right, also a second thing: she was mad as hell.
Her name’s Vanessa Springora, and after patching up her emotional damage she went on to live quite a life—as a film director, the chief of a Paris publishing house, and now author of Le Consentement (available in English as Consent), the story of her long-ago exploitation. She’s 52 and her former exploiter is 87 and not doing so well. Gabriel Matzneff was one of France’s more celebrated men of letters, renowned both for his well-turned prose and his underage mistresses. Post-Consentement he’s been canceled American-style and then some. Prizes rescinded, publishing contracts yanked, he was last seen hiding in Italy because the police wanted a word. I’ll add that he’s hairless and resembles a turtle with sensitive cheekbones and a high opinion of itself.
Reading Le Consentement, I find my reaction is a bit off from the usual. Not that I deny the affair was a horrible thing and the man should be reviled. Nor that the girl’s consent mattered little because she couldn’t possibly know what she was getting into. Nor that intellectual opinion, as so often, showed itself to be daffy, this time by accepting the affair because its perpetrator also produced noteworthy sentences. But out of the whole mess, the chunk that sticks tightest in my craw is an observation made by a minor player.
The young girl, suffering from life with a childish, selfish, lying, two-timing exploiter of youth, went for advice to an ancient, friendly man who reminded her of her grandfather. The advice he gave was terrible, namely that she should suck it up because her guy was a talented writer and females should do what they can to help great men do their great writing—there was Tolstoy’s wife with her typing skills, now there was the girl with her 15-year-old vagina. But even that isn’t the thing that gets me. When the girl complained about how Matzneff lied to her and deceived her, her confidant delivered the following: “But literature is all about lying, my dear young friend! Didn’t you realize?”
The person saying this was Emil Cioran, a philosopher so distinguished that Susan Sontag admired him and I, a non-philosopher, at least know his name. Half a century of being celebrated as a heavyweight thinker, and Mr. Brain comes out with that? Sure, Cioran. If two things share an element in common, they must be the same thing. India has a coastline and so does Virginia, so India was in the Civil War and Virginia is the home of yoga. But allow Kelsey Grammer, TV’s beloved Frasier, to take up the case. He told the ghostwriter of So Far…, a memoir with very large type, about a conversation he had in the days before he became famous. Writing from memory, I reconstruct it this way. An insurance salesman described how he’d put the screws on potential buyers by playing up his supposed concern for their loved ones. “I guess we’re in the same business,” the salesman said. Grammer let him know otherwise. “I’m an actor,” Grammer said, or trumpeted. “What you do is lying!”
I mentioned up above that intellectual opinion is often daffy. Don’t let my offhand tone fool you. I’m pissed. If only I could get through them, I suspect that most of the books produced and admired by deep thinkers would prove to be shucks. Meanwhile, I’m left feeling stupid, like all those other people so flatfooted they think lying isn’t creating and that grownups shouldn’t fuck children. Subtract the sobbing teenager, and the sexual abuse, and I’d still be mad. For me l’affaire Matzneff is one more proof of a highly irritating postulate: that if you’re a real intellectual you don’t have to think.