Godzilla and Mothra, together again

“A public figure can never be an arist and no artist should ever become one unless, his work being done, he should choose to retire into public life,” Cyril Connolly once decreed. And, as Gerry Feehily goes on to observe in a commentary for The Guardian, there may be no greater extremes representing that statement, pro and con, than Michel Houellbecq and Bernard-Henri Levy. But whereas Houellbecq seems to have retreated to a retirement of “music, soft-porn films, documentaries, obnoxious public statements on Islam or mai 68,” and so on, Feehily says Levy, “for all his famously derided vanity and fluffy hair, is an engaging, dynamic, and informative foil to Houellbecq” in a new book out from Houellbecq comprised of their letters and called Public Enemies.