"Bernard-Henri Levy: 'Je Suis un Superstar' "

Gaby Wood,The London Observer, Sunday June 15, 2003

With his movie-star lifestyle, celebrity friends and best-selling books, writer-philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy is the darling of the French chattering classes. But can 'BHL' be serious?

When I arrive at Bernard-Henri Lévy's sumptuous apartment in the centre of Paris, a film crew is just packing up. There could hardly be a more fitting introduction: Lévy has, as his fellow intellectual Pierre Bourdieu once put it, an 'immoderate taste' for television studios, and his ubiquity has become something of a joke. Lévy is a bestselling writer, philosopher, political campaigner, pundit and luscious-locked superstud in France; but perhaps his greatest facility is for fame itself. At any given moment, he might be seen on the cover of Paris Match magazine, in the windows of numerous bookshops, and on several chat shows simultaneously. He and his glamorous wife, the indomitably pouty actress Arielle Dombasle, are the gossip columns' favourite couple. His clothes (open-necked white shirts and designer suits), his friends (Yves Saint Laurent, Alain Delon, Salman Rushdie), his homes (the flat in Saint Germain, a hideaway in the South of France, an eighteenth-century palace in Marrakech that used to belong to John Paul Getty) are endlessly commented on. He is rarely referred to by his full name, and is known instead as a brand: BHL. He is like an unfathomably French combination of Melvyn Bragg, J.K. Rowling and David Beckham. If Bernard-Henri Lévy didn't exist, you couldn't possibly invent him.

For a moment, though, it seems I might have to. Despite the recent departure of the TV crew, Lévy is not at home. I am greeted instead by Harry, Lévy's Sri Lankan butler (he also has a chauffeur, a Daimler, and several maids in Morocco). Harry is dressed immaculately, in a white Nehru-collared jacket and black trousers, and, after asking me what I'd like to drink, he ushers me into a vast and musty room that looks like a relic of several empires at once.

The place is crammed with Orientalist trinkets - hundreds of onyx eggs in an ancient cabinet, two heavily embroidered Chinese silk lampshades, Moroccan bowls overflowing with exquisitely wrapped chocolates, three enormous reclining Buddhas, a stuffed cockatoo perched beneath a boundlessly funereal arrangement of white lilies, another strange item of taxidermy in a cut-crystal cage, and a divan so overstuffed with pillows as to suggest that Lévy may be some sort of sultan of the Left Bank.

Lévy has still not arrived, and Harry is too discreet for extended conversation, so I find myself peeking at the books. A good few of them have been thrown, with studious abandon, about the room. Can they tell us anything about the mind of the philosopher? I'm not sure. I spot something odd about the gargantuan volume of Pascal on the floor. The pages look wrong, as if they've been painted over. And sure enough, on closer inspection it turns out not to be a book, but a fake - a trompe l'oeil drawer carved out where the words used to be.

At that very moment, Lévy sashays into the room. He is wearing the foundation required by his televisual activities, and this clearly bothers him enough to affect his manners. As I go to shake his hand he says: 'I don't usually wear make-up, you know.'

Lévy's reputation for narcissism is unparalleled in his home country, and he's not unaware of the fact. The headline of one article about him coined the immortal dictum, 'God is dead but my hair is perfect'. He has been known to say that the discovery of a new shade of grey leaves him 'ecstatic', and that people who vote for Jean-Marie Le Pen cannot buy Philippe Starck furniture or Yohji Yamamoto clothes (as if their aesthetic taste were their greatest offence). Maybe it's the make-up, but Lévy seems a little tense. He's keen to get me out of the sultan's salon and into his far more austere study, where a modern sculpture of a deliberately empty-headed Lenin provides an unwitting reminder of Lévy's own relationship to Pascal. He sits down, furrows his brow, makes a few bossy demands about how the interview is to be conducted, and proceeds noisily to inhale substantial amounts of phlegm at regular intervals.

Lévy's in the news because his twenty-ninth book, an investigation into the murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, has been at the top of the bestseller list in France since it came out just over a month ago. Lévy's discovery, or contention, is that Pearl's death was a 'state crime' committed in effect by the Pakistani government, because Pearl knew too much about the links between its secret service, nuclear scientists and al-Qaeda. The book led Lévy on a year-long quest he admits became something of an obsession. 'That part of the world,' Lévy explains, 'is where I have been, since my adolescence, most irresistibly drawn. Not the Middle East, despite the fact that I am Jewish, not China and the Far East, despite the fact that I was once very close to what in the Sixties was called Maoism, not Africa, though I know it well. So in writing about Pearl I often had the sense that I was retracing my own steps.'

It's not unusual for Lévy to insert himself into his writing, but this book takes a new form he terms 'roman-quête', or 'investigative novel', indicating that where the facts run out, he has gone ahead and made some up. He allows himself some dramatic musings, for example, on what might have passed through Pearl's mind in the last moments of his life: 'He thinks of Mariane, that last night, so desirable, so beautiful -- what do women want, deep down? Passion? Eternity?'

Whether or not these imaginings are to everyone's taste, there is a more unsettling doubt raised by the fusion of genres. Some of Lévy's critics have long considered even his most solidly non-fictional books to contain elements of untruth. Twenty years ago he was taken to task by Pierre Vidal-Nacquet for gross factual errors, the most patent of which was having Himmler stand trial at Nuremberg, when he had already committed suicide. Others have simply assumed that Lévy's books are veiled forms of autobiography anyway.

This view couldn't be further from Lévy's own since, as he explains, 'I'm not trying to be devious or coy here, but I am curious about everything -- except myself. All of my books are turned to face others, not inwards towards myself. Half of my contemporaries have already published autobiographies -- Martin Amis has, and he's younger than me. But I have no desire to do that.'

Lévy is something of a conundrum. On the one hand, he is such a po-faced laughing stock that the famed anarchist pie-thrower Noël Godin has hit him a record five times. On the other, huge numbers of people buy his books. He is not the most serious thinker the French have, but he is charismatic and accessible and constantly in demand. It would be churlish only to laugh at him, since to dismiss much of what he's done would amount to a kind of conservatism. Lévy drew people's attention to Serb concentration camps in Bosnia, tried to rescue Afghan rebel leader Ahmed Shah Massoud just before his death, was sent by the French government on a fact-finding mission last year to see how Afganistan might be reconstructed, and now runs a newspaper there that promotes 'moderate Islam'. He founded an anti-racist group to empower Arab and black people in France, and warned of the dangerous recent rise of Jean Marie Le Pen. He is taken very seriously in very high places.

Still, it's perhaps not essential to take him quite as seriously as he takes himself. I ask him what it means to be a public intellectual when much of what is public about him is his private life. His wedding to Arielle Dombasle 10 years ago was attended by Alain Delon, Yves Saint Laurent, François Pinault (the tycoon who owns Gucci and Christie's) and, by Lévy's own count, 20 or 30 international photographers.

'That,' he says, 'had nothing to do with my being an intellectual. If Paris Match was interested in my wedding it was because I married an actress.' But they were interested in you before your wedding, I suggest. He smiles to himself a little: 'Yes,' he says, 'it's true.'

Lévy claims to have no explanation for this, and is exasperated by the way in which his designer suits and unbuttoned white shirts have been fetishised by the press. 'If I wore green-and-red checked shirts, I'd understand,' he says, 'but white shirts? There's nothing more banal, more idiotic than a white shirt!'

But, I ask, would he say he was interested in fashion? He sighs. 'I was interested once, 15 years ago, in one designer, about whom I wrote one or two pages, and whose name was Yves Saint Laurent. But what interested me about him was the semiology of his draughtsmanship.'

'So he didn't give you any clothes?'

'No. Never.' Lévy opens the jacket of his blue suit to show me the label -- Charvet, a deliberately unrecognisable brand. 'You see?' he says. 'It's absurd.'

Lévy says he just gets on with his work 'without wondering whether the fact that I am a star might get in the way'. He insists that he does nothing to encourage his fans. 'People,' he says, 'don't know that much about my life.'

Bernard-Henri Lévy was born in Algeria in 1948. His mother was the daughter of a rabbi, and his father had fought in the Spanish Civil War. During the Second World War, Lévy père joined the Free French, and afterwards founded a lumber company that made him a millionaire. Bernard-Henri has a sister, Véronique, and a brother, Philippe, who was run over by a car in 1968 and about whom he will not speak except to confirm that he is still in a coma.

He studied at the École Normale Supérieure under the tutelage of the great Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, who was later committed to an insane asylum after murdering his wife. The news about the murder came to Lévy as a terrible shock, but he still considers the man his mentor: 'Afterwards,' he says, 'I came to reinterpret the silences I had taken to be philosophical and the gaze I had thought meditative as expressions of his mental disarray. It's one of the great mysteries of the French intellectual scene how this man of unbridled insanity could have taught us rigour and rationality.'

There is some debate over what exactly Lévy did in May 1968. Many assume he was leading demos, like other student radicals. Others have suggested that he watched the entire revolt on television, thereby learning an important lesson about the power of the media. He himself wrote 30 years later that he was not on the barricades, but with a girlfriend who was in hospital (or might this be a veiled reference to his brother?). When I ask him about the period, he offers the BHL version of solidarity: 'I was ideologically quite aligned with the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist movement of the time, but in my own way,' he says, 'my own very individualistic and not very team-spirited way.'

At the age of 28 he published Barbarism with a Human Face, and became the most famous member of a group called the nouveaux philosophes who turned against Marxism. He was hailed as the new Camus, mistaken for the new Rimbaud. Lévy became such an overnight success he was dubbed a 'publicity philosopher', and the group was suspected of being, in one TV commentator's words, 'an intellectual marketing coup'. An article in the New York Review of Books reported that metaphysics had been 'resurrected as media hype'.

Soon after that, he met Arielle Dombasle, who has said that when she first saw him she thought Lévy was Jesus Christ. He was on his second marriage by then, and had two children. Lévy and Dombasle embarked on a seven-year secret affair before he made her his third wife in 1993. Dombasle is regularly voted one of the most beautiful women in the world by her countrymen, is rumoured to have the smallest waist in Paris, and has recently found success with an album on which she sings techno versions of Fauré and Handel. In public, she still addresses Lévy, formally, as 'vous'.

Five years ago, Lévy directed his wife in his first feature film. She starred opposite Alain Delon, who played a writer clearly based on Lévy himself. The film was universally panned, not least for the final scene in which the writer dies in a ballooning accident, exploding, as it were, in his own hot air. Lévy is still proud of the film, which he says is 'a lot like me'.

Since he thinks no one knows anything about his life, would Lévy say that BHL is a character, a construction?

'Yes,' he admits, 'but a character constructed partly by myself and partly by others. It's a puppet, and there are times when it can turn against you.'

'But is there any of you in it -- are you pulling the puppet's strings?'

'Yes, of course. He's not a stranger to me. But I can hide behind him, and through him I can fight -- against Islamists, fascists, bad guys. BHL is a good soldier. BHL is a good mask... When one attacks BHL one does not attack Bernard-Henri Lévy. And BHL is a caricature. He is all of those things.'

'So,' I conclude, after this barrage of third person proclamations, 'you don't feel personally attacked when people criticise you?'

'No,' Lévy says, 'Often, I feel -- with good reason -- that they are aiming at someone else.'

Qui a tué Daniel Pearl? is published by Grasset.