Sollers, I met him as much in his books as from time to time, and later, at La Closerie des lilas, his late afternoon haunt, where, accompanied by the faithful Josyane Savigneau, he held forth, was indignant , laughed, without bitterness or resentment, always in a good mood, between two fat laughs, loaded with tobacco and strong alcohol. His great pleasure: commenting on current events, reviewing his latest readings; the man was built of lime and sand, playing on his charm, even if the Sollers star had faded.
Our last meeting dates back to February 2022, in his narrow office, on the 1st floor of Gallimard editions. He had just published Graal. Once again, he had evoked his great love, Dominique Rolin, who called him “Jim”, met in 1958, when he published Une curieuse solitude, evoked some memories of youth, the approach of death, while showing me a photo of his future burial, on the Ile de Ré, his family and intimate refuge since always.
There was already like a veil, a diffuse shadow between Sollers and the world; something had frozen, frozen. This impression, I had felt it a year before, at the time of the exit of its autobiographical Agent secret, superb song of the swan before the hour. His childhood had caught up with him, obsessed him. And his great pride was the publication in four volumes of his correspondence with Dominique Rolin.
The desk was cluttered with miscellaneous items and his reissued “Folio” books. On the walls of this lair populated by “extravagant ghosts”, in his words: the reproduction of a portrait by Giuseppe Castiglione, the Jesuit who lived in China in the 18th century, portraits of Joyce and Voltaire, a Chinese poem written on a calico.
He spoke casually about Lacan, Bataille, Beckett, the operas of Mozart, Rameau, the small pieces of Webern, of Venice, discovered in 1963 and which he had not frequented since the disappearance of Dominique Rolin. Once again, he had quoted the Marquis de Sade: “The past encourages me, the present electrifies me, I fear the future little”, excerpt from Juliette, which was already found in Portraits of Women. I thought of the words he had said some thirty years earlier: “Existence is an optical illusion: literature is there to overthrow it.” Already, a kind of epitaph.
Between two puffs of cigarettes, the smoking habit he shared with Italo Svevo and Joseph Conrad, he told us, calmly, smiling: “Today’s world is boring. I wouldn’t like to be 22 these days, because all perspective is closed, forbidden. Suddenly, the past appears to us as miraculous. And that doesn’t even bother me. I prefer to react with irony. It is a considerable weapon but which is no longer understood. It is disappearing, like the French spirit and the spirit of the Enlightenment. Don’t you think we are in a human mess, with this post-Digital Empire? As I say in Secret Agent, here we are in an extremely tense period, which shows on all sides what looks like a desire for totalitarianism. Again and again, Rimbaud, this remarkable combat comrade, as I said in my interviews with my friend Josyane Savigneau, An infinite conversation. And he had added: “It’s because with me, everything is work!” »
And this work will henceforth nourish his posthumation: on June 22, Gallimard will publish his abundant and edifying correspondence with his eldest, the poet Francis Ponge, begun in 1957. In a missive sent when he was 22 years old, the young Sollers quotes the poet of the Illuminations: “But now it’s the night that I work. »
And as they say in Venice, between his beloved island of Giudecca and the Zattere: “Sogni d’oro”, dear Philippe Sollers.
