On his landing, there was a piece of the set from “Apostrophes” and a Spiderman doormat. In his living room, the glass table showed records by the Beatles, Gainsbourg and Pierre Perret. The library lined up “Pléiades”, “Quartos” and “Bouquins”. We expected a denser jungle of paper, a less controlled exuberance of volumes. “ You haven’t seen my office… », he smiled.
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Books, Bernard Pivot, who died this Monday, May 6 at the age of 89, spent his life receiving them, refusing to let anyone else open the envelopes containing them, discovering them, smelling them, keeping this sensual contact with the object which will always characterize great readers. Then he gave them: tons to the library of the village where he grew up, Quincié-en-Beaujolais, the library which today bears his name, and many to his relatives, targeting their tastes. Did the postman like caving? He was entitled to Norbert Casteret and Michel Siffre. The concierge was turning the tables? She will inherit the spiritualism manuals. Tomorrow will he offer God, science, evidence in Saint-Pierre?
“The Big Book”
As a child, Pivot loved to delve into a picture book about the Great War that he called “ the big book “. With his friends, he went fishing in the Saône. When the stud was slow to bite, Bernard took out a novel. “ We talked about everything, but very little about literature. He attracted friendship “, says one of his childhood friends about him.
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In 1955, by passing the entrance exam for the Journalist Training Center (CFJ), the bad high school student became a good student. He dreams of The Team. We send it to Literary Figaro where he remained until 1974 and where he was kicked out by the new director, a certain… Jean d’Ormesson. He will then take over the management of the magazine Read and, after having written a column on Europe 1 between 1970 and 1973, created the literary program “ Ouvert les guillemets ” on the front page.
Bukowski and the others
Should we remember the rest? Cuote of Bukowski, babbling of Modiano, luminous limpidity of Claude Hagège, anger of Simon Leys, crudeness of Gainsbourg, long hours spent with Simenon, Yourcenar or Solzhenitsyn: we all have something of “Apostrophes” in us. “ Pivot made the book considered important to those who were not accustomed to readingexplains Olivier Bessard-Banquy, academic and author of The literary industry. He put it at the heart of society.When he spoke, he was Mr. Everyman, an everyman who didn’t let anyone fool him… “.
Some famous confrontations prefigure “buzz” TV, such as the one which saw the sinologist Simon Leys ridicule the Italian academic Maria Antonietta Macciochi, a groupie in love with Mao, or the one where Daniel Cohn-Bendit tried to convince the novelist and essayist Paul Guth, champion of a traditional morality, of the happiness of being “ undressed by a little girl of five and a half years old “.
Started on January 10, 1975 on Antenne 2, showered with awards, “Apostrophes” would become for 724 issues the essential “check-point” of literary success, the only program capable of propelling an unknown person into the light in two hours…
Some criticisms emerged: Régis Debray called Pivot “ dictator », the philosopher Philippe Muray in The novel workshop there will see one of the “ factors of destruction of literature ”, condemning the writers “ to behave like guinea pigs among themselves » and Gilles Deleuze will regret a “ literature turned variety show “. But the public will be there, loyal as well as numerous.
After “Apostrophes”
The final clap falls on June 22, 1990. Pivot will again flirt with words, creating two new shows, “Bouillon de culture” then “Double je”, setting up his famous “dictations”, launching into the maxim by tweet ( a million followers), going on stage to read his texts, reviewing in the press, writing a few books himself. Beyond his taste for football, his other great passion, and his loyalty to Saint-Etienne, he more readily reveals what he also is: a great sensualist.
Wine, gastronomy, cigars and women made him happy as much as zeugmas and palindromes. A regular customer of his friends Paul Bocuse and Georges Blanc, he became the ambassador of Beaujolais and a vintage bears his name. In one of his books, he confesses to loving looking into necklines and recounts how one of his mistresses liked to strip him while he read… He left his wife Monique, mother of his two daughters, after twenty- five years of union, but the couple will remain linked by real friendly ties.
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In 2015, he took over as president of the Académie Goncourt. “ His reign was that of transparencyremembers Didier Decoin, his successor. Any juror employed by a publisher is excluded; voting is done at random and not in a predetermined order. At the end of Hervé Bazin’s presidency, there were four of us reading. Today, everyone spends their summer there. Pivot empowered us all. »
On the other hand, he refuses positions for which he feels incompetent: director of a television channel, presenter of 8 p.m., successor to publisher Robert Laffont. As a result, we look for the faults in this man who himself admits to having had his whole life “ an undeserved chance “.
His
Affect perhaps? This wall that books, which can also become a fortress, have erected between him and his people? “ My father was physically present at home, but actually absentsays his daughter Cécile, who wrote a beautiful essay with him on their shared passion for reading, Read ! (Flammarion, 2018). He shouldn’t have been disturbed. He never read us stories in the evening, he didn’t guide us in our choices. He also didn’t help us at all to live with his notoriety. I understand today that he devoted his life to such exhilarating work. But it took me a very long time to accept it “.
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Cécile is also the mother of an autistic child, Antoine. Although no one has ever questioned the affection his grandfather had for him, several of his relatives believe that he was never able to overcome his initial embarrassment in the face of this different child.
The collar era
And then there is the time, this cursed time which saw him caught up in controversy twice. The first anecdotally, in September 2019 when one of his tweets on Greta Thunberg (“ In my generation, boys looked for little Swedish girls who had a reputation for being less uptight than little French girls. I can imagine our astonishment, our fear, if we had approached a Greta Thunberg.” ignites the web and earns him accusations of sexism.
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The second when the Matzneff affair splashes him, he who preferred to speak to him lightly (“ Why did you specialize in high school girls and kitties? “) of his hunting board rather than questioning the fact that he catches more chicks than roosters. He explained it, without convincing everyone, recognizing that he did not “ having found the words » at a time which “ put literature before morality “.
For a man with hitherto unassailable popularity, to whom Pierre Perret dedicated a candied song in friendship (“ He makes even the most stupid people intelligent, it’s Bernard Pivot »…) and John Le Carré a chapter from his memoirs (“ Bernard Pivot’s tie ), the episode was painful to live through. They say in Africa that an old man who dies is a library that burns. For everyone who loves “ this unpunished vice that is reading », in the words of Valery Larbaud, the death of Bernard Pivot is a book that closes.
