I turned the pages in a kind of ecstasy or annihilation. . The houses, the roads and buildings of that drab provincial town, and all the humans and institutions, and everything else fell away, as did the illusion that had sustained them, and I saw that I was falling, like everything else, falling through a limitless void, in slow-motion, without adhesion, the roar of an immense cosmic violence in my ears. But rather than terror, for the first time I felt blessed, liberated, relieved of the weight that had been crushing me all my life.
After this powerful encounter, Passolet gave up drinking and moved to Paris, where he began studying theatre in the Conservatoire National. Initially imagining he would become an actor, he lost interest in the idea after a few years and dropped out, but not before having made many friends in the Parisian avant-garde of the mid-seventies. ‘People liked me because I wasn’t there,’ he later wrote. ‘At least, not as a threat or a rival, which is how most men are condemned to confront one another. I was agreeable because I never felt I had the right to judge or despise anyone.’ Despite his popularity, Passolet was still afflicted with depression and anxiety throughout these years, and was institutionalised several times. Somehow he managed to keep this fact, and the worst upheavals of his nervous condition, from his friends.
A woman in her fifties named Silvia Bresson-Levaint, the childless wife of a respected theatre director, developed a particular fondness for Passolet. They became close friends, and the Bresson-Levaints would invite Passolet to spend periods at their summer house on the shore of Lake Annecy, at the foot of the French Alps. It is there that Madame Bresson-Levaint encouraged the young Jean-Pierre to write. He had, in fact, been writing for several years, without any real direction or thought of publishing. ‘I wrote from the right-brain,’ he later recalled. ‘That is, from the dream-channel, the imagistic source into which one descends after falling asleep. . What I wrote was shit, really, but it was the beginning, the scratchings at a surface I would spend decades excavating.’
Silvia Bresson-Levaint was the kind of woman who might have run a literary salon in an earlier era; she had many friends who were writers and artists, having earned a Master’s at the Sorbonne and considered a career in academia before getting married. Jean-Pierre would accompany Silvia on walks along the shores of the lake, during which they would passionately discuss Schopenhauer, whose evocations of the suffering that coursed through existence resonated so profoundly with the young man. Madame Bresson-Levaint perceived in her friend an intelligence, a depth of feeling and a dexterity with words which she knew was rare and worth cultivating. She urged him to set down his insights with greater discipline and purpose.
Passolet had never told Madame Bresson-Levaint, nor anyone else, about the abuse he had endured years earlier. The memories of rape and violence still tormented him, triggering panic attacks so severe he had once tried to kill himself by hacking into his wrists. After an April day spent walking in the Alpine foothills, Passolet came to pieces while sitting by the fireplace with Madame Bresson-Levaint. ‘It was as if a dam had burst inside of me,’ he wrote, ‘blown apart by the shock of a happiness that had asked nothing of me, had concealed nothing from me, and which therefore I found unbearable.’ He unburdened himself of his past, and Silvia listened, distraught, while cradling the young man to her breast. The next day, having discussed the matter with her husband, she offered to let Jean-Pierre stay on at the lake house for as long as need be, so that he might try to confront or transmute his suffering, perhaps by shaping a book from his experiences. (The Bresson-Levaints had little faith in psychoanalysis, or psychotherapy in general, despite Silvia’s friendship with Jacques Lacan. Previously, the couple had seen a close friend, a certain Madame Ducroix, kill herself with pills and wine despite years of intensive and costly analysis.)
Passolet, who was twenty-two and otherwise without direction, accepted the offer. He lived by the lake for a year, alone but for the domestic employee, a thirty-year-old Algerian woman named Celine Begadour, and frequent visits by Madame Bresson-Levaint. The house was well-stocked with literature, and Silvia would bring books from Paris which she felt would inspire Passolet. He read La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère and the moralists; the essays of Montaigne (which moved him almost as much as Schopenhauer had); Proust; Pascal; Hegel; Sarraute and the nouveaux romanciers; the Sufi poets; the Gnostic scriptures of Nag Hammadi; almost the entirety of Freud, and much else besides. ‘Most of the real reading I have done in my life, I did during that year,’he later claimed. He wrote each morning, and walked for hours by the lake and into the nearby forest, immersed in himself.
Although Madame Bresson-Levaint expected that he would use this period to write some kind of memoir or autobiographical novel, the book that was born of that solitary year turned out to be something very different. Set in an unnamed, mist-enshrouded country during a time of war, and populated by characters who appear and then drop out again without logic or pattern, only to reappear with different names and personalities, Cities in Crystal is one of the few novels I know deserving of that much-overused epithet, ‘dreamlike’. It is also a singularly menacing read: although no violence or horror is depicted directly, it is impossible not to sense, on almost every page, the proximity of an intense, brooding malevolence. The elusive narrative is haunted by the presence of a beautiful, dark-haired woman with lines on her face suggesting a hard life and a fierce character. I had read in one of Passolet’s interviews that, although this figure was undoubtedly an avatar of Celine, the woman who came each morning to cook and clean for him, and though he was, in fact, in love with Celine, he remained ignorant of either circumstance until long after the book had been published. ‘Celine walked into my writing the same way she walked into my unconscious: quietly and unnoticed,’ he said. In the novel’s inexplicable final scene, the human characters all transform into birds — sparrows, hawks, peregrines and ravens — and fly together into the sky, ascending through the earth’s atmosphere, dissolving finally in the beyond.
After a year, Passolet returned to Paris with the typescript of his first novel in his briefcase. It was not difficult for Silvia Bresson-Levaint to persuade a publisher friend to accept it. The book was a modest success and, with the royalties, Passolet rented a small studio apartment on the rue Garancière, near to the Jardin du Luxembourg, where he liked to take walks early in the morning. Though he had gained confidence since the publication, Passolet’s success did not spell an end to his psychological turmoil. That winter, while working on an early draft of what would, almost a decade later, become his most famous book, Heaven, he suffered a crisis more severe than any that had gone before. After a volley of desperate, barely coherent letters and phone calls to his friends — though not, oddly, to Silvia Bresson-Levaint — Passolet disappeared. Unable to contact him, his friends (he had long been estranged from his mother and elder brother) had little choice but to believe he was dead, most likely by his own hand.