Brigitte Salino: Bernard-Marie Koltés (2009)

This is a major biography about a major writer, although he was a playwright (and is now an internationally translated playwright), but still international fame has eluded him. It could well be that the, er, 'meanings' of his plays have escaped people, although meaning is not what he aimed at: why does everything have to 'mean' in order for people to understand?

In the photo on the front page we see Bernard-Marie Koltés walking towards the camera, towards Elsa Ruiz, a woman he felt comfortable with, in Montmartre (where he is buried), walking to have a conversation with her in the Café des deux Moulins, now made famous by the film Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain. He's wearing a Burning Spear tee-shirt (he loved reggae and wanted to be black), and appears to have completely empty pockets. In fact, an overgrown street urchin?

Bernard-Marie Koltés lived on the edge. Right from the start he had no intention of working for anyone, full-time and for an extended time, that is: that would have meant trading his mind for a business, and there is no way he wanted to live like that: that would be a kind of enslavement. Koltés  just wanted to write, and wasn't too concerned about living in poverty, living on the outside of the bourgeois society he, as a Marxist, detested.

In those days (he was born in 1948 and died of AIDS in 1989) he kept things quiet but not secret, and lived on the edge of constant danger, visiting gay cruising sites frequently and perhaps thriving on the element of danger. No doubt his life is in his plays, the tensions, the constant threats, the sex trade, the drugs trade, maybe he prostituted himself for the money or for the sheer knowledge of the experience, trade as a form of surviving in life, who knows as there's little information given, only suggestions.

Salino believes he left six major plays behind: La Nuit avant les forêts, Combats de nègres et de chiens, Quai ouest, Dans la solitude des champs de coton, Le Retour au désert and Roberto Zucco. But there are many more books published by Minuit, including a large one of his letters, which this very informative book makes use of.