He is the man you don’t want to bury. However, after months of fighting cancer, Bernard Pivot died at the age of 89 this Monday in Neuilly-sur-Seine, announced his daughter Cécile Pivot. The one we grew up with, for many of us. Friday night friend. The ideal teacher who made us read and often laugh, in this “Circle of Dead Poets” that “Apostrophes” sometimes became. The liberator who explained that you could be a lover of books, football and Beaujolais, without coming across as a redneck.
Pivot played Candide and never judged anyone. When the journalist created this legendary program in 1975 on Antenne 2, France was divided into irreducible camps. Intellectuals versus athletes. We ignored each other or measured each other. Pivot, one foot in each camp, a book in hand, made you uninhibited.
One evening live, he had a huge smile when faced with a guest pitifully confessing to having never read Stendhal: “But how lucky you are! You will discover for the first time the Charterhouse of Parma, the Red and the Black…” He opened his greedy eyes, as if he too would have liked to have not yet read these classics to savor all their freshness like a teenager. It was all him, when others would have frowned: still, Stendhal, it’s in the school textbooks, you’re overdoing it…
This great reconciler — his latest bookreleased in 2022, is a praise of friendship — has managed to make the French adore one of the most hated activities at school: the dictation. Many have forgotten what a television show it was, this Master Pivot test, at the time when only three free channels existed, long before platforms and social networks. Its French and then world spelling championships, the Dicos d’or, marked the years 1985-2005. An imperfect subjunctive delighted him like the dribbling of one of his favorite players.
Pivot, five-letter word meaning “that on which everything rests and everything else turns.” He would say that one should not exaggerate, but many things revolved around him in those years, such as the sale of books, which a move to “Apostrophes” could multiply by two or ten, at a time when the The power of television remained immense. We talked about it all weekend.
Pivot and decisive passer, the admirer of Michael Platiniwhom he invited on his show for his autobiography written shortly after his career – and he feasted on the faces of the other guests -, loved to play with all the flavors of the language and share them, like a good vintage.
Author of the “Wine Lovers Dictionary”, he had learned everything about grape varieties in Quincié-en-Beaujolais, the village where his family took refuge during the war and where he owned a house. He said he had inherited from the local winegrowers the art of conversation, of which he would become the great cathodic sommelier.
“Friends, Dear Friends”, his final book, written during his illness, is a reverie on this feeling which can last longer than love. One of his final sentences twists the heart: “After fifty-seven years of friendship, one entered the other’s bedroom for the first time. Because he was lying on his deathbed. » Words so sweet that he recorded on white sheets until his last breath.
The intoxication of the great writers
One day, Pivot had a competitor, another literary program on the only channel next door, which was called “La Rage de lire”. But there was only one Pivot and his opponent never took off, quickly put in parentheses by “Apostrophes”. He alone knew how to find the tone, as the son of Lyon grocers who knows how to talk to everyone. In a store, we don’t look down on anyone and we sell everything, as long as the products are of quality. It was also his business.
He invited best-selling authors as well as more demanding writers, such as Marguerite Duras to whom he devoted an entire face-to-face program. The archives of his major interviews with Georges Simenon and Vladimir Nabokov, who asked for whiskey in his teapot on set, are part of literary and cathodic history. Speaking of alcohol, one evening he had to evacuate Charles Bukowski, the sulphurous author of “Diary of a Disgusting Old Man”, dead drunk in the middle of a broadcast. The joys of live. Pivot handled it like a bartender kindly accompanies a customer who is too tipsy.
There were so many, real joys, like this very high-level sketch on the meaning of words between Raymond Devos and the linguist Claude Hagège. We still knew how to listen, not to cut people off. Other times, he behaved almost like a boxing referee, as with Christine Angot, whom he observed verbally knocking out another guest. He loved the show and the fight, some purists criticized him for it. The scholar did not hate creating a buzz. To sell a book, you had to embody it.
A trompe-l’oeil retreat
Before the image, there was the written word. A graduate of the Journalists’ Training Center, Bernard Pivot joined Le Figaro littéraire at the age of 23. He often said that he had worked as a columnist there, already in love with stories about writers. In 1974, having become head of department, he left the newspaper when d’Ormesson took over as general director. “ Jean d’Ormesson paid for my swimming pool,” he laughed about his severance pay. The transaction must have gone well because the attractive writer and journalist had his napkin ring with “Apostrophes”. Among his other favorites, Patrick Modiano, future Nobel Prize winner, totally inhibited on screen, whose tongue Bernard Pivot managed to loosen.
Rachmaninoff’s little music, which accompanied the credits, also preceded moments of history, such as the arrival of Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In 1990, the host also welcomes Gabriel Matzneff, lightly described as a “pussy collector”. This extract came back to him like a boomerang in January 2020, with the publication of “Consent”, the story in which Vanessa Springora accused the writer of having abused her and her extreme youth. Pivot was part of a literary world which then overwhelmingly considered the seducer of teenage girls as one of its own.
At this moment, the host has just retiredand still, at 84, he still writes a column in the Journal du Dimanche and regularly publishes books, something he had always forbidden in his television years, from “Apostrophes” (1975-1990) to “ Bouillon de culture” (1991-2001), then “Double Jeu” (2002-2005).
When he left the small screen, he was 70 years old and we believed in real goodbyes, but it was difficult to know him. The first non-writer elected to the Goncourt Academy in 2004, he became its president from 2014 to 2019. With a mischievous slogan: force the jurors to read! No more small arrangements between publishers.
A lover of words who became a star on Twitter
At a time when others are dropping out, Pivot is catching on to modernity by becoming one of the stars of Twitter, with his very early morning witticisms, long as regular as a train timetable, collected in a book, “Tweets are cats “. If he had become very discreet there since his illness, it is on this network that he found his fans to announce the release of his final book, in February 2022: “At the end of my life I feel so deeply this that I owe to the friendship that I praised it…” In 2015, he even went on stage to play “Help! The words ate me.”
He never lost his boyish enthusiasm. In 2018, we met Bernard Pivot during a cruise organized for the media retirement of Jean-Michel Larqué, host on RMC and former captain of the Greens, a club of which the man of letters was a supporter all his life. He agrees to tell us about his passion for Saint-Étienne, when he learns that Rachid Mekhloufi, star of the club in the 1950s, is on board. He disappears like a cat, and goes to sit next to his idol.
Very shy, the president of Goncourt, then aged 83, religiously listened to his 84-year-old elder. Like an interview just for him. His very first show was called “Open the quotes”. How sad it is to close them. To the sound of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 1, end credits.
