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<\/p>\nBy Patrick Autr\u00e9aux (tr. Tobias Ryan).<\/p>\n
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I had caught a glimpse of him among the noisy characters of a bygone age, retrospectively, as their names were nothing more than echoes. On the shelf, his books rubbed shoulders with Hocquenghem, Dustan, Guibert, Collard, and several others. I had found them second-hand, and by a luck worthy of notice, learned that his first novel, N\u00e9ons<\/em>, was to be republished, seeming to loom from the inexhaustible reserves of the forgotten.<\/p>\n This inaugural blow had initially, however, been recognised by a strange fairy godmother. Marguerite Duras herself singled him out with the hand of Justice. A gesture (and a long interview in Lib\u00e9ration<\/em>) with which she had embraced the text, stripping it to the bone, and knighting its author. But fairies are as powerless as the Lord above when it comes to guaranteeing one\u2019s destiny.<\/p>\n Denis Belloc was certainly not the author of just one book. Others followed, up until 2000: Suzanne<\/em> on his mother\u2019s youth and his father who died from a heavy blow taken in a boxing match; Kepas<\/em> about dope; and several novels torn from what Duras called \u201cthe social night\u201d. And then nothing. We went from the AIDS years to those of the PACS. The rest died, and he, the only prole, was silent, exhausted by alcohol and smack, so one of his American fans reported. And perhaps that\u2019s how he would have summed it up: it pisses me off<\/em>. The cry of a man who could no longer avoid the obvious: in the literary milieu he was never on anything but borrowed time.<\/p>\n It’s beautiful but it\u2019s seedy, says the tranny Triche in Les Ailes de Julien<\/em>. She is lecturing a young runaway who is discovering nighttime Paris. \u201cOn the days when it\u2019s dark, I forbid you from loving the night!\u201d she says. Aren\u2019t the places that go beyond seedy those to which we must descend in order to write? It is with a wary eye one must approach Belloc\u2019s books. He wrote too little and too much. Two ley lines are traced across frequently autobiographical terrain: that of the family, a violent father, drunken mother, and fugitive son, and, within this triangle, a swamp: the threat of incest or insult, welts and shiners, brazen language as tight as a net from which it seems you will never escape; and secondly, the world of queens, fixes, and prostitutes, soft cries which break through the night heading back up Boulevard de Clichy, not whore folklore but a solitude so defiled that you no longer exist. A kind of coma, Belloc sighs, where nonetheless a desire for purity exists. But one which leads to suicide. You have shown us the night in your head, Duras said.<\/p>\n In a televised interview following the publication of N\u00e9ons<\/em>, the blabbermouth doing the interrogation suspected him of having exaggerated. As though warning a na\u00efve john, very sweetly, he responded that in reality things were rougher still. His harsh, raw, violent language was remarked upon. It\u2019s everyday speak, he retorted. Two realities confronted one another in the arena where the dark, horned body of the world lurks, terrifying even those trapped within it. We run up against it, brutally deflower it, fuck standing in pissoirs, come drips, if at all, live alongside towelheads, kikes and fags, whom we despise but are all smiles with in the stairwell. We listen through the walls, which separate us only to box us into our isolation. There are the sounds of sick bodies and the strikes of madmen from above. Sounds like that get everywhere, never once letting you so much as dream. We read nothing except brand names and supermarket flyers, sometimes L\u2019Humanit\u00e9<\/em> or a Stephen King to give us a fright. There\u2019s an abusive father, a mother who\u2019s a nag and a souse. That is until his last novel, Un Samedi soir chez Bob<\/em>. It gets to you, you want to flee, you easily understand the kids who run away, but we keep our noses attuned to the stench of a reality from which nothing can tear us, from where we will be expelled to nowhere but the garbage heap. And to avoid that, we stay with our cheek pressed to the filthy tarmac or the hood of a car. All things pass. Or else we nail ourselves to the night with the blows of pills or dope.<\/p>\n It is a murky, almost Beckettian world through which we trudge. We act, but we\u2019re treading water. We become \u201cmade-up absences\u201d. And when ejaculations are bitter, we are nothing more than the relics of an imagined innocence: \u201cI am my schoolbag set down in the pissoir.\u201d We swallow all life\u2019s plastic, all of everyone else\u2019s detritus, our own, everything that floats and pollutes us. We lumber our children with the waste we bear, and the infections we got from lovers we despised. There is the occasional guardian angel. Not saviours, but those who, all the same, want to protect us, who want better things. And above them, the never complacent author, not hiding behind the adornments of identity, nor covering up anything despicable, but writing without judging those whose lives he unfurls before us.<\/p>\n This was D. Belloc, who held onto his initial without explaining why. We ask too many questions, and rarely the right ones. Let\u2019s say his first name is only a particle, almost a crutch, a writer being the kind who limps through life. Because there was also Denis Belloc, at least in as much as he can be seen in his rare televised interviews. For the talk show host Pivot, who, according to Raymond Cousse, was \u201ca fence offering literary critique\u201d, he has the aura of a first-rate novelist, under high protection, Duras leaning over his cradle. Three books later, with M\u00e9phisto Ardisson, he appeared at Le Palace looking like the perfect junkie author.<\/p>\n The two journalists try to play on the hoodlum\u2019s unwholesome ways, as though the only things of which he was comprised were the pissoir rent boy, one that like to be fucked, and the small-time recidivist crook, in and out of borstal and the nick; and who, in his Chinese Portrait, calls himself a cocksucker, meaning it as an insult, bearing all vices but faggotry especially, a sleazy cancerous disease, a violent death in an airplane crash, torture, one, obviously, of impalement, arsenic. But from one programme to the next, we see a reserved man who smiles little, perhaps from fear, perhaps not giving a damn \u2014 it\u2019s the same thing. And in contrast, it\u2019s the vulgarity of the questioners that embarrasses. The lack of delicacy and disdain from one; the voyeuristic interest of the other. Confronted by them, we might say he conceded, more so than not responding, with the elegance of a man who has had to come through solitude and debasements so devastating that only effacement without fuss or posturing remains.<\/p>\n In front of Pivot, who seems to be putting up with him, he confirms he is a painter and that he has had numerous exhibitions. He has to explain that colour and graffiti saved him from a spiral that could have led to his end. A painter-writer, one that also knows that writing leads to the troubling sill of a window. He said that to Pivot, for whom it appeared \u201cliterary\u201d, and on whom, as he listens, we can make out a distant pout: don\u2019t overdo it, mate<\/em>. Don\u2019t overdo it, no, and not only for those who fondle books more so than they read them, but for us, who don\u2019t always want to know what a writer really is. We can sense that Belloc would like to talk about painting, just to show how dangerous writing is, if treacherously normalized by the fence opposite him, who deigns to offer his petty judgements, who observes and condescends. But he keeps his head. Belloc has a rageless, taciturn wisdom, which makes us wonder if he won\u2019t suddenly get up and say: \u201cSir, I see your disdain and your arrogance. The vulgarity of your questions revolts me: you\u2019re pissing me off. Not only you, Sir, but everything you represent. All of it does my head in.\u201d But he keeps his counsel, and a handsome smile cracks across his young, serious, almost sad face.<\/p>\n At M\u00e9phisto\u2019s the vulgarity is more cynical, it\u2019s more a grimace than a smile at the corners of his lips. After all, Ardisson is something of a TV Laclos: he does moralizing scandals. Denis Belloc no longer talks about painting, but of smack devouring everything (sex, friendship, the body, writing too, and no doubt painting), of slang, for which he was criticised, and of realism. He could have talked about the fundamental illegibility of those who speak clearly, but prefers to imply that writing goes too far; that writing makes you relapse; that writing is still possible, even when the critics throw their acid. It is true that the writer annoys the acid-throwers. Pissing off the world is a defence for those without the power to do harm. That\u2019s what I see on his face: an incredible innocence accusing itself of every vice, and no doubt possessing them; an innocence which knows filth so intimately he has no need for malice.<\/p>\n Belloc, like any uncertain thief-saint, can see the evil in people\u2019s eyes. From this humble strength, he derives no glory. In front of Pivot, Collard had the charm of someone who was going to die, and Hocquenghem looked down at the fence, who stayed on his guard with him; with Ardisson, bewigged Dustan seduced by counter-seducing. Belloc sweats, ashen, with something almost serious to him. His pale, dull flesh remains moulded by the milieu from which he emerged. A petty delinquent and a victim, he got out but seems to be stuck in his camp. Not that he wants to be. He stands in-between. It\u2019s always bored me, life, he says. Perhaps he knew he was trapped anyway. There is no chance to defect, no social salvation, only toleration and compromise. He knows he is trapped but he doesn\u2019t wrangle or campaign. Class struggle puffs him up, he wrote somewhere. But calling himself a faggot brings out a playful smile. Does it embarrass you? He would end up among the last of the fairies, but of the kind not to make a fuss, \u201cI never liked talking,\u201d preferring to doss about on the fringes of days: \u201cI watch, and I wait for the night.\u201d One who lives in \u201cimmense solitude\u201d; Hocquenghem would write that he suffered less from oppression than from separation.<\/p>\n Unknown saint, living in limbo, there is little to no doubt that Belloc was always going to drown there. That was all the more evident once he stopped writing. Fifteen years later and his death has passed unnoticed. And we could already see that when he sat opposite those TV guys: young, still, but having seen it all, he confuses them because his murky clarity is immiscible in the world of letters.<\/p>\n All the better. It\u2019s that which constrains him, honest man and writer, to gathering a kind of manna at a border from which almost nothing can be seen: that which flocculates when we write \u201ctightening the nuts and bolts\u201d, as he said, or, to quote Duras, \u201cat the words\u2019 crest\u201d; there, where the black, horned body of what one has to write, that which no one can ever truly read, lurks. But whose business is that, after all? What counts is that you have danced with the moths, and are finally able to fall silent.<\/p>\n In N\u00e9ons<\/em>, we are asked: have you reconciled with life?<\/em> And his response: somewhat<\/em>. We are never reconciled to life.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/Patrick-Autreaux-Couleur-768x1024.jpg\")
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