‘They treat me more like a devil than a god’

6 December 2008

Lloyd Evans finds that Bernard-Henri Lévy is not the ageing French dandy of caricature but a serious intellectual with views on everything from Barack Obama to the Muslim veil

Oh goody. He’s late. Every journalist wants the interviewee to miss the appointment, if possible by several hours. It gives us the advantage and obliges our subject to apologise or face being lacerated in print for the transgression. French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy arrives 35 minutes after the agreed time and greets me with a disarming combination of lightly salted regret and a plausible excuse. In France, Lévy is so famous that he’s known by the simple acronym BHL, like a furniture superstore or a killer virus. He has an enormous personal fortune, a glamorous movie-star wife and a continent-hopping lifestyle and, at 60, he enjoys the sort of Beckhamesque levels of celebrity no British intellectual could hope for. Even in London, he’s a superstar, over here this time for a sold-out ‘Evening with Bernard-Henri Lévy’ hosted by Intelligence Squared.

So I was expecting someone flamboyant and faintly absurd, an ageing dandy with dyed hair and crumbling good looks and a shirt (the shirt is BHL’s sartorial trademark) ripped open to the waist to reveal a chest bronzed by the African sun at his Moroccan hideaway. Instead I’m shaking hands with a lean, middle-aged intellectual with a decent but not spectacular head of hair, dark energetic looks and a shirt which is indeed open but whose shy cleft reveals a very modest acreage of flesh. There’s one David Hasselhoff touch. He’s wearing sunglasses and we’re indoors, but he whips them off straightaway and sits opposite me with such an air of concentrated gravity that I feel faintly ashamed that I’d planned to open by asking if he really said, ‘God is dead but my hair is perfect.’ No, no, that’s the wrong approach. This guy is smart, serious and sincere, so instead I ask about the credit crunch. He answers in fluent, thickly accented English. ‘It is a cancer with metastasis. Or a golem, as we say in the Jewish tradition, a self-animated monster which is out of control. The problem is that nobody really knows what’s happening. The only thing we see for certain is the fear in the bankers’ eyes.’

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ian skidmore

December 4th, 2008 5:37pm Report this comment

you are fortunate to have met him. But why knock Brown ? He doesn't and the interview was about Levy

Dixon

December 4th, 2008 6:57pm Report this comment

He bears an uncanny resemblence to Robert De Nero, who of course IS The Devil ( AKA, Louis Cypher ).

Its the very notion of a "serious intellectual" that bothers me. I recommend Paul Johnsons examination of that breed in his book "Intellectiuals".

Michael hanlon

December 4th, 2008 7:57pm Report this comment

As well he got it out before Evans finished the "demur" note. He hadn't called him a god, he's suggested he was treated like a god.

Nicholas Storey

December 5th, 2008 1:55pm Report this comment

I mistrust the self-appointed guardians of our modern world - whether as with this chap, they are described as 'intellectuals' or, in the case of Jeremy Clarkson, they are described (or, rather, describe themselves)as the voice of common sense and the common sense of the reasonable man, at that. I mistrust them because they are packaged and sold to us in large doses and are about as useful as Mr Oliver's general approach of: 'bung it all in a bowl, give it a good old stir up and smack in the oven for 2-3 hours' to make a Xmas meal - but there is noi escape from these characters; their fatuous approaches; their serious or (as the case may be) smugly grinning faces and their damned opinions on the world, as though they are more worth having than Joe Bloggs'.

sean birnie

December 7th, 2008 9:32am Report this comment

"I point out that Muslim women don’t feel compelled to wear the veil but do so as an expression of individual liberty"

Really? What all of them? Do you have any proof for this absurdly generalised contention?

I know that journalists believe themselves to be above the normal conventions regarding burden of proof (or maybe just haven't figured out how to use google and post "links" to back up their claims).

So come on, where is the evidence that all the women of Iran, Saudi, Somalia, Pakistan, Sudan etc willing embrace the veil and the second class citizenship it clearly implies (as BHL eloquently points out) as a symbol of "liberty"?

What absolute poppycock.

Nicholas Storey

December 9th, 2008 2:49pm Report this comment

In reply to Sean Birnie: I hope that you are saying that the right to wear the Muslim veil should be a right of choice for Muslim women. But, the trouble is that it would then defeat its own purpose; this corollary, surely, is a matter for Muslim people to grapple with and to resolve (if it is capable of resolution). I am unconvinced that a French Jew is the man for the job - and, if one needs to talk about rights - who claims the qualification here, Mr Birnie?

Tina Trent

December 10th, 2008 6:17pm Report this comment

"I point out that Muslim women don’t feel compelled to wear the veil but do so as an expression of individual liberty."

I'm sorry, I don't understand. Something lost in the translation. Is Evans joking? Is this what passes for wit? Rumination? Journalism?

There are facts. Facts matter, right? And in reference to Afghanistan, and Iran, and elsewhere, saying such a thing isn't merely inaccurate: it is perverse. It isn't just denial; it is denial whipped into a joke, delivered as a punch line, which somehow makes it even worse.

And what bemused pleasure he seems to take saying it. Astonishing.