68 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER21, 2020
lived longer. Confronting AIDS de-
manded that he draw on his higher tal-
ents—a minute fascination with the
body; a sensitivity to how secrecy and
projection shape friendships—and made
many former vices useful. Among the
allures of “Written in Invisible Ink” is
seeing Guibert’s defiance of death
emerge from his macabre affectations,
and his bold witness arise from a pen-
chant for indiscretion.
“
T
o the Friend Who Did Not Save
My Life” is the rare book that
truly deserves the epithet “unflinching.”
Its author may be afraid to die, but
on the page his voice doesn’t crack,
his hand doesn’t tremble. He suffers
throughout—passed between quacks
and celebrity homeopaths because of
mysterious symptoms; reliving sexual
encounters as nightmarish premoni-
tions—but along with this comes an
exhilarating lucidity. Guibert feels trans-
parent, as though walking around with
“denuded blood,” but the world, too,
has been stripped naked, revealing char-
latans and saints, startling moments of
ugliness and grace.
The novel begins on the day after
Christmas, 1988. Guibert has left Paris
for Rome to avoid friends as he waits
for the results of a blood test that will
determine his eligibility for a new med-
icine. The reader knows how the story
ends, but Guibert doesn’t, and the lay-
ering of narratives creates a maze of
dread and disorientation.
The first third of the novel revolves
around the death of Muzil, an alias for
Michel Foucault, who died four years
before Guibert received his diagnosis.
Kindly and stoic, Muzil laughs on his
deathbed and discreetly makes provi-
sions for friends. But he also espouses
an obsessive concern for privacy, which
Guibert betrays:
I was writing reports of everything like a
spy, like an adversary, all those degrading lit-
tle things... he would have liked to erase
around the periphery of his life, to leave only
the well-polished bare bones enclosing the
black diamond—gleaming and impenetrable,
closely guarding its secrets—that seemed des-
tined to form his biography, a real conundrum
chock-full of errors from end to end.
If Muzil dies a sphinx, disguising all
weakness and leaving behind only the
black diamond of his intellect, Guibert
chooses another form of self-efface-
ment, transforming his condition into
a social and existential mirror. Like
Thomas Eakins’s “The Gross Clinic,”
the novel is both surgical theatre and
social tableau.
In Linda Coverdale’s masterly trans-
lation, originally published in 1991, “To
the Friend” powerfully evokes the AIDS
epidemic’s uncertain early days. Gui-
bert writes with hindsight but preserves
a sense of each moment’s confusion
and foreboding. He gets lost on the
way to a half-shuttered hospital on the
outskirts of Paris; stopping at a gas sta-
tion for directions, he notices the at-
tendant’s suspicion, likely at seeing so
many nervous young men headed in
that direction. Nurses dismiss the dis-
ease’s seriousness—“nothing but a kind
of cancer”—and “slip on their latex
gloves as though they were velvet gloves
for a gala evening at the opera.”
Muzil speaks of AIDS creating “new
tenderness, new solidarities” among gay
men, but Guibert finds himself reluc-
tant to even make eye contact with a
junkie he recognizes from a clinic in
Rome. He describes AIDS as a “disease
of witch doctors and evil spells” from
Africa and hides his medicine from
men he suspects of wanting to steal it
for “their African pals.” The best that
can be said of such moments is that,
with racism as with AIDS, Guibert does
his readers the favor of being shame-
lessly transparent about his sickness.
The novel’s final portrait is of a rich
pharmaceutical-laboratory manager
named Bill. An unforgettably preda-
tory figure, he’s known Guibert since
the writer was a teen-ager in Paris, hav-
ing once attempted to seduce him. He
reappears in the novel as a name-drop-
ping, Jaguar-driving purveyor of false
hope, insinuating himself as the pup-
pet master of Guibert’s small group of
seropositive friends. Bill promises to
enroll Guibert in the trials for a new
medicine but then deflects, deceives,
and delays him, even mentioning that
he’s already given another twinkish
young writer the (ultimately ineffec-
tive) inoculation. Survival becomes a
petty social intrigue, a reality show with
life-or-death stakes.
Bill is the “friend” to whom the novel
is addressed. Guibert frames him as an
enemy not only of his survival but of
his book’s very possibility—the mirage
of a cure undermines the nerve required
for his literary confrontation with death.
I
ntimacy with death is often mistaken
for morbid complicity with it. “The
myth of Hervé Guibert,” Jeffrey Zuck-
erman writes, “is that of the cruelly
beautiful man who betrayed his friends,
the writer of sex and death who would
die of a sexually transmitted disease.”
The reality was of a writer who knew
not only that silence equals death but
also that nothing could be more fatal
to art than disguising death under false
hope, decorum, and sentiment.
Curiously, Guibert insistently asso-
ciates Bill with the United States. He
is the only character in “To the Friend”
with an English name, and spends much
of his time jetting off to New York and
Miami. Most damningly, he cries during
Hollywood films, susceptible to the
same vapid optimism that he dangles
before his friend in lieu of treatment.
Inextricable from the malfeasance
that has made the United States uniquely
vulnerable to COVID-19 is a widespread
failure to imagine one’s own mortal-
ity—and a tendency to project it onto
others, whose deaths are deemed un-
fortunate inevitabilities. At the core of
this callousness is the misconception
that acknowledging death is antithet-
ical to “really living.” But it isn’t the
dying who are truly deathly. Guibert,
who faced down AIDS with such irrev-
erence, achieved an almost indestruc-
tible vitality in the duel.
Death never made him heavy. Among
the lighter moments in “To the Friend”
is a dinner party for a closeted elderly
priest, who is retiring as his AIDS wors-
ens. Guibert arranges for one of the
guests, a beautiful young man, to at-
tend naked. Everyone pretends that
nothing is out of the ordinary, and what
at first seems like a prank becomes a
moment of transcendence, as the old
priest experiences what is “doubtless
the first real vision he’d ever had in his
entire ecclesiastical career.”
Perhaps it’s this mischievous affirma-
tion of life’s mess and sensuality, even in
the face of death, that will define Gui-
bert’s contribution to the literature of ill-
ness. Rejecting its taboos, he scaled AIDs’
very long flight of steps and fearlessly
recorded what he saw on the climb.
