with self-loathing and shame over my sex, but I had no idea where all these feelings came from. Later, attentive readers would understand that there was something affected about this collection, whereupon I became very upset. But the poems were good. Nicole read them when I was finished the following evening, and she congratulated me for having found the way out that I had unconsciously sought. Here I had a worthy successor to approach…honeysuckle.
Book number two received respectful treatment as well. By this time I had finished my basic courses and had just begun doctoral studies in comparative literature. The book became the starting point for a debate about genre which I lost interest in after the first article. I applied for a new grant with the Ministry of Culture, and when I got the money, Nicole and I began to think in earnest about having cubs.
We decided to be just as wise and organized in becoming parents as we had been impulsive and passionate in our two-someness. I immediately began to plan for my next book, and at the same time applied for yet another grant. Along with the miserable compensation I got from the Comparative Literature Department, we could get by on the money. We applied to the Cub List.
The third collection didn’t offer the same birth pangs at all as the second had, and my stern, wise fox confirmed what I felt myself. Something new was in the process of being born in my writing career, something grander and more original than I had accomplished before. With every day our application for a cub climbed up the long waiting list, and poem was added to poem without the quality going down. Nicole observed the connection as obvious.
Then my life was crushed. The annihilation was meticulous and definitive. During the years to come I would curse the day I forgot the manuscript on Angela’s kitchen table, the evening I stumbled over Nicole Fox’s legs; if I hadn’t learned what happiness was, it could never have been taken away from me. And it all depended on a single animal. Snake Marek.
I didn’t even know he existed. During the entire humiliating and drawn-out process that was my case, I didn’t know that Snake Marek existed. I found that out much later, by chance; it’s not interesting and doesn’t add anything to the story. The important thing is what he did. The decisive thing is the way in which he sat deep inside the dark culvert of the Ministry of Culture, letting bitterness ooze out of every stitch of his insignificant body. With my first two poetry collections I had passed his Argus eyes, but the third time my application forms were on his desk he caught sight of me. And for some reason that spiteful reptile decided to crush me. One day I received a letter saying that my grant money would not be coming. A new decision had been made, it read, and it had been decided to freeze my grant “for the time being.”
I didn’t take this seriously. I tried to reach one of the assistants at the Office of Grants on the phone, without success. Then I let the matter rest. When I mentioned in passing my worry to Nicole, she became hopping mad.
She initiated a massive apparatus. They couldn’t be serious, you didn’t do this kind of thing to the few geniuses that the city had produced. Nicole wrote petitions and organized debates (which were not particularly well attended). She wrote letters to the editor and tried to get others to do the same thing (but only one was published). And when at last she threatened a sit-down strike outside the Office of Grants, she finally got a response. An assistant—it proved much later to be Snake Marek himself—wrote an open letter in response. The letter was sent to the arts editors at the newspapers, to the Department of Comparative Literature, and home to me and Nicole. “The quality of Bataille’s poetry,” it read, “is such that a grant would send the wrong signals.” Neither more nor less.
Perhaps I could have brought myself through the ordeal if that letter hadn’t been written. I would have been able to lie low for a few months and then dared to come out of the apartment. Looked my colleagues in the eyes again after the summer, perhaps even smiled apologetically at Nicole Fox’s exaggerated reaction. But the Ministry of Culture had written its letter, and the wording was diabolical.