Founder of Read in 1975, Bernard Pivot, who died this Monday, May 6, knew how to put literature within everyone’s reach. His departure from the editorial office in 1993 did not prevent him from showing a very loyal attachment and attention to the first literature magazine in France. In 2011, he received us at his home, in his Parisian apartment. He then presented himself with modesty and mischief, got excited talking about literature and writers and delighted us by always finding the right word… Selected pieces.
You write in The words of my life : “I am a man who became public thanks to a succession of chance winks. ” Really ?
BP In any case, chance dominated my life since I was hired as an intern at Literary Figaro by Maurice Noël when I was not at all an enthusiastic reader but quite simply because, during the conversation, I told him that my parents made Beaujolais, and rather good ones, and that he wished in have a caquillon. I came from Lyon, I was leaving the Journalists’ Training Center, I was looking for a place and they sent me to Le Figaro. But if someone had told me Le Monde or, above all, L’Equipe, I would have taken… I absolutely didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. But I felt that it was my chance, and I then had a kind of stubbornness, ardor, energy, which made me react with the will to succeed.
It was from that moment that I started reading like crazy. To make up for lost time. After three months, Maurice Noël hired me, not only because my parents’ Beaujolais was good, but also because he undoubtedly judged that I was a promising journalist. It’s a miracle ! You realize ? I had never heard of the names he mentioned, starting with this enigmatic Marguerite Yourcenar whom I would go to see at her home, in the United States, thirty years later for a tête-à-tête. If I have one quality, it is that I know exactly what I can or cannot do. When my name was mentioned to run a television channel or a publishing house, I immediately said no, I have no qualifications to do that.
Reading you, we discover that you loved words before loving books…
BP Yes, that’s true. But again, it’s because of the circumstances. Because of the war. I lived in a small village in Beaujolais and I only had two books at my disposal: an edition of Petit Larousse dating from the 1930s and La Fontaine’s Fables. I really liked walking around Le Petit Larousse, writing down words in the miserable notebook that I always had with me. And I took words from La Fontaine’s Fables, the meaning of which I looked up in the Larousse and which I also wrote down in this notebook. So I liked reading dictionaries before reading novels. At that age, during the war, I didn’t read novels at all. I didn’t start reading until I was twelve or thirteen.
You are in favor of using the expression “calculate someone”. It is widely used by young people who have distorted the initial meaning of the verb. To what extent should we let words evolve and designate something other than what the dictionary definition fixed?
BP Until there is logic. When a girl says of a boy: “He calculated me”, she understands very well what she means: it has a broader meaning, it is not just “he admired me” or “he looked at me”, but also “he asked himself the questions: do I have a chance of pleasing him or that it would go a little further? » But there are other words whose evolving meaning is not taken into account by current dictionaries. The word “rabble”, for example. Canaille is an awful word to begin with. A scoundrel is a bandit, a killer. Now, today we use this word with a little humor – I even made Rascal apostrophes, where we talked with mischief and playfulness about naughty things… I like that words evolve, that they don’t stay locked in their original meaning. Colette, for example, had created “fragonarde” to designate a voluptuous woman, who has curves, like those that we can admire in Fragonard’s paintings. I come back to your question about chance: perhaps if I had had an entire library at my disposal, I would not have read Le Petit Larousse. But as luck would have it, it was the first book I had at my disposal and, as a result, I never forgot dictionaries.
Should a writer create neologisms?
BP No, a writer does what he wants, he owes nothing. He has complete freedom to create or not to create. That’s not what I expect from a writer. I don’t believe that Modiano, whom I like very much, created many neologisms. But so much the better if some authors create them. San Antonio, or rather Frédéric Dard, had a genius for neologisms.
So what is the role of a writer?
BP Every ambitious writer probably wants to change the world, but I don’t really believe in it, except in the humanities. Marx or Freud indeed changed the world. I think that most writers write first because they feel the need to translate what their sensitivity, their experience, their joys and their sorrows have taught them about life. From there, the role of a writer consists of providing the reader with something to nourish their sensitivity, their reflection, their dreams, their anger.
How do you recognize a great writer?
BP Has its own style. Great writers make language and syntax evolve. Take Proust or Céline: five lines from one of the two, and you recognize it straight away! Same thing with Modiano, Echenoz, Le Clézio, Sollers… This is also why I say that I am not a writer: I do not have a style. I try to be a good journalist. Good writers have a particular syntax, a choice of words by which we recognize them, a music.
Who are the writers who affected you the most?
BP It is complicated to answer this question because style coexists with the way we read. For style, I would say Paul-Louis Courier and Voltaire. I am dazzled by their style. Courier’s pamphlets and Voltaire’s letters. Same thing with Céline, Proust, Flaubert, Stendhal, but also Rimbaud, Verlaine, Baudelaire. I still really like Blondin and Aragon, Vialatte, Félicien Marceau. Among this year’s authors, the novel whose style struck me the most is Birth of a Bridge by Maylis de Kerangal, which I found extraordinary and new.
Looking back, how do you analyze the success ofApostrophes ?
BP Why Apostrophes worked so well? It is complicated. There is, of course, admiration, which is central. We cannot do literary criticism or literary broadcasts without deeply, sincerely admiring. But it wasn’t just that because I was sometimes able to make quite harsh criticisms. I remember very well a program with Roger Peyrefitte who had written a book entitled Propos…
