Jean-Paul Kauffmann: Air and angels

Former Beirut hostage Jean-Paul Kauffmann tells Gerry Feehily how he found freedom in a Paris church.

It's just to the right as you make your way into the Parisian church of Saint Sulpice, a dark, narrow chapel you'd miss but for a sign that alerts you to the fact it contains a 25-foot mural painted by Delacroix. In a grey half-light one makes out a scene, one of the Old Testament's more inscrutable encounters, where Jacob, returning to the lands of Esau, the brother he supplants, fights with an angel by the ford of Jabbok.

Perhaps it's the gigantic trees towering above the adversaries, or perhaps the strangely abstracted, tender expression on the angel's face as he nips the frenzied Jacob's thigh, but the mural has an unfathomable presence. Frustrated by the terrible light, most visitors move on. One who stayed behind, however, was author, editor, and former journalist Jean-Paul Kauffmann. The book he has written about it, Wrestling with the Angel (translated by Patricia Clancy; Harvill, £14.99), is a tale of how this allegory of good and evil called out to a dark place in his own life, so much so he spent the best part of four years gazing on it.

"There are some paintings which, if you look at them long enough, start looking back at you," he says. "In a sense you become elected. From that moment on, the task is to find out exactly why this is so."

A lifelong fan of detective novels, particularly of Belgian author Georges Simenon, Kauffmann decided to conduct his inquiry along the lines of the fictional detective Maigret. "Maigret's methods always fascinated me. Like him, I began with the elements closest to me, the basic facts of Delacroix's life, this dry character who considered one of his best friends, Baudelaire no less, a failure, and the endless rumours that his father was not Charles Delacroix, the revolutionary senator, but Talleyrand, the great courtier, survivor of the Terror and Napoleon."

Like Maigret, he also believed in the soul of objects and places, which led him away from the mural and into the basements, the off-limit corridors and towers of one of Paris's least-loved churches. "In France at least, churches must have sombre, penumbral façades, must look propitious for meditation. Saint Sulpice, on the other hand, was designed by Servandoni, considered by Diderot the greatest theatre set designer ever. A masterpiece of classical architecture, Saint Sulpice is like a huge theatre, and in this sense it's almost pagan."

Backstage at Saint Sulpice, Kauffmann discovered a lost world, which included the studio of an ageing American sculptress who has devoted her life to carving angels. "For me an endless web of corréspondances began to build up. One of Delacroix's earliest works, after all, was of the church's north and south towers. It couldn't be a coincidence that it's beneath these towers he completes his final commission, his testament."

But if Delacroix is considered one of France's first proto-modernist geniuses, he stood, as it were, on the shoulders of giants. In the next chapel to the right stands another painting, a vision of purgatory by a once-famous contemporary, F J Heim. "Baudelaire, Delacroix's most perspicacious commentator, admired Heim almost equally. Great journalist that he was, however, he couldn't resist saying that in spite of his gifts, Heim missed perfection by a millimetre. There is something fatal in that kind of praise."

Indeed, one senses that Kauffmann's sympathies lie closer to this forgotten figure whose relevance, to a 21st-century sensibility, seems lost in time. "Somewhere there's a parallel for me between Jacob, the cold, calculating younger twin, who even out of the womb grabs on to his elder brother's heel, and Delacroix," he says. "Delacroix was a passionate man, but he also had a drop of ice in the heart, and learned much from the elder master, Heim. But his genius is so luminous that he is almost inhuman, an archangel and Lucifer at the same time. In the end, I suppose, our hearts go out not to the winner, but to the also-ran, the figure lost in his own century."

But in searching for that part of the past that history has not pardoned, but let fall away, Jean-Paul Kauffmann also delves into his own biography. "I had the privilege of being born in Brittany in 1944," he laughs, "just days after the Germans had withdrawn from the region. My father, a baker, considered his job something of a social mission, and we lived in a village where the appearance of a car was something of an event; a trip to Rennes, only 20 kilometres away, an adventure. I grew up in an extremely stable society, which hadn't changed very much from the France Balzac described in his novels of rural life."

It was after studying journalism in Lille that Kauffmann plunged into, and later fell foul of, the chaos and contradictions of the 20th century. "Sometimes a vocation can be the result of a misconception. A voracious reader as a child, I wanted to write. Nevertheless as a reporter, a roving one, I was able to make my own tastes and inclinations productive." So, in spite of covering news around France and in the war zones of Angola and Lebanon in 1981, he mainly focused on literary subjects. "I wasn't the sort who realises himself through close contact with destruction. Of course, it has a morbid fascination, but I was happier visiting Simenon in Belgium, or having Anthony Burgess cook me dinner in Monte Carlo."

Shortly after helping to co-found in 1984 L'Evenement, a cultural and political weekly, he had that brush with chaos that few French people have forgotten about. While covering the civil war in the Lebanon, he was kidnapped by the Islamic Jihad. "For three years I didn't see daylight," he says. "Blindfolded and chained to a chair in a basement somewhere in West Beirut, with Syrian artillery pounding the very building I was trapped in, I was confronted with the fact that evil has no 'why'. With terrifying lucidity, my captors, who regularly subjected me to mock executions, simply said that questions no longer existed."

If such conditions were unendurable, his release and return to France in 1988 was equally so. "The first thing I did was renounce journalism," he says. "There is always a certain element of voyeurism in reporting. To have passed to the other side of the looking glass, to be the object of that gaze, meant in effect that I could no longer exercise my profession."

This renunciation brought him full circle, to his first vocation. "The ordeal was a revelation, not so much in its details, but on my release I felt an overwhelming sense of urgency. I had to write. Despite offers from several editors I refused to talk directly about that ordeal, though. Perhaps it's that bluntness, that directness in Anglo-Saxon culture which led former British hostages to name the experience, and thus to expel it. French culture has a different tendency, however, towards obliqueness and circumlocution."

But it is this very tendency that has produced three of the most distinctive books to have come out of France in recent years. Aided by a gifted translator, Patricia Clancy, whose English is a seamless rendering of the lively, thoughtful original, the author has managed to transcend personal circumstances that could only mark and define one for life. "The first and second books, whether in my travels to the Kirgelian Islands, or the account of Napoleon's captivity in Saint Helena, are thematically related to my own experience. Wrestling with the Angel even more so."

But as a weave of art history, biography, and personal meditation, Wrestling with the Angel is also reminiscent of W G Sebald's fictions, in which a wandering narrator must return in the end to the eternal enigma of the self. "I wrestled with Delacroix's mural for years, but I feel that it has yet to yield up all its mysteries." But at the end of his search, in a lightless basement in Bordeaux, he finds for himself, and for the reader, in a lost masterpiece by Heim, what he has been looking for. "The interest of a journey is not only in its destination," he says. "Blackened by fire, hidden for years, a painting, like the self, can still be restored. In the end, there is always a future."

Biography

Descended from migrants fleeing the 1870 annexation of Alsace by the Prussians, author and editor Jean-Paul Kauffmann was born in Corps-Nuds, Brittany in 1944. After studying journalism in Lille, he worked at the foreign desk of Radio France International before joining in 1977 the newly established Matin de Paris. In 1984, while in Beirut covering the civil war, he was kidnapped by the Islamic Jihad and held hostage for three years. He is the author of Voyage to Desolation Island (1993), The Dark Room at Longwood (1999), a study of Napoleon's exile in Saint Helena which won seven literary prizes, and Wrestling with the Angel, translated by Patricia Clancy and published by Harvill this month. He lives between Paris and the French south-west with his wife, Joîlle, and is currently editor of Amateur de Cigare.