Gaya Scienza

A New Biography of Bernard-Marie Koltès

For these few days in Paris I took the recently published biography of Koltès by Brigitte Salino (Bernard-Marie Koltès, Stock, 2009, 360p) together with the six plays which make up his oeuvre.

Brigite Salino is a theater critic at Le Monde. Her book is better than I anticipated when I started reading the first pages. Not bad at all, after all, if not the definitive biography. A short, easy read. Koltès was a very private man, and when I read on page 34: "Alors que Bernard-Marie a toujours considéré son homosexualité comme une affaire strictement privée et qu'il en a très peu parlé, il lui est arrivé de confier à certains amis que quelque chose s'est joué à travers les rencontres nouées dans les cafés algériens," and realized how often Koltès's letters, published earlier this year, were quoted, I suspected Salino's book would not provide much more than the letters. Not to diminish the interest of the letters: but very little is revealed in them on Koltès's homosexuality. In 1970 Koltès is 22 years-old. He lives in Strasbourg and attends the TNS school: "En même temps, Koltès réserve ses nuits à d'autres que ses amis. Sans leur en parler. Si étrange que cela puisse paraître, certains d'entre eux, hommes ou femmes, disent aujourd'hui n'avoir pas su qu'il était homosexuel." At the end of 1973 he spends one month visiting the Soviet Union with a friend, Alain Jeannenot, with whom he shares an appartment in Strasbourg. Are they lovers? It does not seem so... but their relationship is not discussed. "En 1974, Bernard-Marie Koltès a vingt-six ans. Sa vie tangue et bascule, il plonge dans la nuit blanche de la poudre, et les jours sombres des pissotières, la possible prostitution qui va avec. En dire plus n'ajouterait rien. Tout est raconté, sans que rien ne soit dévoilé, dans le roman inspiré par Strasbourg à ce moment-là: La fuite à cheval très loin dans la ville." No, we would have liked to learn more...

Starting with 1976, Koltès's move to Paris and the writing of his first major play, La nuit juste avant les forêts, Salino's biography becomes more informative and captivating. When Koltès decides to visit Central America in the summer of 1978 (a sojourn which will be one of the significant events in his short life), we learn that a Nicaraguan lover, met in Paris, had invited him to join him in his country. We meet Carlos Bonfil, a Mexican, "son ami-amant de coeur - un des rares hommes à avoir vraiment compté dans sa vie", Rasta and Momo, "deux autres hommes qui ont habité la vie de Bernard-Marie Koltès", Hammou Graïa, met on the shooting scene of L'homme blessé, Chéreau's 1983 movie, and Isaak de Bankolé, who will both act in Koltès's later plays. The so critical relationship (not sexual, by the way) with Patrice Chéreau is recounted in details. The Kaposi sarcoma, diagnosed in early 1984. His death in Laënnec Hospital in 1989.

It is commonly acknowledged that Koltès kept his private life, his homosexuality, very separate from his public life and his work. The exact opposite of the contemporary gay writer Hervé Guibert. In a rare interview to Le Gai Pied in 1983 he says:

Mon homosexualité n'est pas un pilier solide sur lequel je peux m'appuyer pour écrire. Sur mon désir, bien sûr, mais pas dans sa particularité homosexuelle. D'ailleurs l'expression du désir me paraît être la même chez l'homosexuel et l'hétérosexuel. Le langage du désir un un langage intérieur qui ne me semble pas défini, délimité, d'après le destinataire. Il y a pourtant une forme de déracinement propre à l'homosexuel. C'est une chose que je perçois mais que je n'arrive pas encore à situer. Lorsque je l'aurai comprise, je pourrai en parler. (Le Gai Pied, 19 février 1983, reprinted in Une part de ma vie, éditions de Minuit, 1999)

Maybe. But at the core of two of Koltès's strongest plays, La nuit juste avant les forêts and Dans la solitude des champs de coton, lies an obscure desire between men, "l'érotisme indissociable de tout le théatre de Koltès," writes very rightly Ms Salino.

2009.10.11

Koltès, Fellow Traveler

What, today, amazes me most each time I am back in Paris is the number of good bookstores in the city. It was a great pleasure last week to be able to wander among books in the librairies lining the streets of the Quartier latin, then cross the Seine and go to Les Mots à la Bouche, the best gay bookstore in Paris, rue Sainte Croix de la Bretonnerie in the Marais. New York, in contrast, has become a desert for that matter. The price control on books in France (le prix unique), imposed by law during the first months of François Mitterand's presidency in 1981 has had a wonderful effect. I don't know how long it will last. In the meantime, let's enjoy it.

I was excited to find, among several interesting new books, a volume of letters by Bernard-Marie Koltès (Lettres, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 2009, 226p), the great French playwright who died from AIDS twenty years ago last April 15th at the age of 41...

This correspondence - edited by his brother François and published for the first time - is certainly very incomplete. It does not include any letter he received. Koltès, as his brother remembers in the short introduction, "didn't keep anything or barely anything, especially the letters he received. He used to live with very little: little furniture, a few books, and nothing else. Each time he would leave a place, he would give away the books and would only take a travel bag with him, and always his Rimbaud." It gives, however, a fair and interesting picture of Koltès's life.

Koltès was a very private man. He (almost) never publicly discussed his homosexuality, and his plays have no openly gay characters. His letters provide, from time to time, a few hints of his cruising, when traveling abroad. He was a frequent traveler.

I have intricate love stories every other day, and several simultaneously. But I live by myself, in a small efficiency, over a vegetables market, in the middle of the noisy Paris. I have so many things to tell you: thunderstorms over Prague, one-night loves though final, first-rate dawns, dreams, forewarnings, no memories but plenty of projects. Let's hurry!

He spent his adult life always struggling with the lack of money, moving endlessly from shared rooms to cheap hotels, to small apartments, while traveling extensively, in order, as he claims several times, to collect impressions and ideas for his writings. Most of the letters provided are to a few friends (but no lover) and his family (his mother for whom he had a very strong attachment, his brother François, his nephew Emmanuel to whom he writes simple, touching, letters each time he discovers a new country, calling him petit mec). A strange sense of loneliness emerges from them. To his mother who worried about his future he wrote:

There is also a lot of pleasure, you know, to go against the tide: in a society where money is king, not to have money; in a society where love is orderly, have dissolute love; is not more absurd, or distressing than going backwards.

Koltès was a fascinating traveler. Thanks to his detailed letters we follow him from his first trip to Canada and the US during the summer of 1968 (he is 20) to his regular stays in New York, which he fell in love with, over the last years of his life. In between, he went to the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Africa, Mexico and Central America, Brazil. He always tried to avoid a touristic approach, preferring to mingle with the locals. Cruising was his way to meet new people. He always wrote lovingly about the places he visited, despite sometimes the financial (or other) difficulties he encountered.

In 1968 while a student of journalism in Strasbourg he saw Maria Casarès act in Médée at the TNS, directed by Jorge Lavelli. It was a shock and a turning point: he would dedicate his life to dramatic art. He did exactly that. Some of the letters show how concerned he was about his writing and the quality of the translation and production of his plays.

A few days before his death his wrote, from Lisbon, to his brother François the short note which ends the present collection:

In God we trust
Do we?

Overall these letters are a touching and gay introduction to Koltès.

2009.05.03