Compared with the women of France, the average American woman is still in the kindergarten.
Edith Wharton
IT CLUNG IN MY MIND like the edge of a dream as I surfaced this morning. The sun streamed in, the curtains lifted and swayed and I glimpsed some – if not all – of what my journey is about. At the age of thirty-five, as I start the rest of my life, am I not simply wondering this: How to be? Or more exactly, how to be as a woman?
And surely this question is mine to explore, for was it not first put to the world by a French woman and most famously taken up by an Australian? Without intending to, I find I’ve put myself in the footsteps of women’s ideas, as well as their lives.
Simone de Beauvoir said it in 1949: Woman is not born, but made. It was one of those eureka moments when everyone slaps their forehead and says, but of course! Woman was the second sex: woman was the made-up gender. Her identity was fabricated. And the making of a woman was framed by all kinds of unjust or untested assumptions. Women were to be the mothers, the helpmeets, the handmaidens. Discriminated against in work and education and society, women were constructed to be second class.
And yet, there’s that ringing phrase: Woman is not born, but made. Today women like me have all the freedom in the world. We can decide what and who we want to be. Whether we want a capital-C career or not. Whether we want marriage. Whether we want children. We can make ourselves. We can decide. I can decide.
And here I am in Paris, the city that attracts women who want to make themselves, from Edith Wharton to Gertrude Stein. Paris is where a woman can make – or remake – herself.
And then, like a one-two punch, there’s the famous follow-up question, bluntly put by a six-foot-tall Australian libertine with huge dark eyes: What will you do? asked Germaine Greer in concluding The Female Eunuch.
In liberal societies, women can do anything men can do. We can be as important or modest as any man, as brave or cowardly, as brilliant or foolish. But the thing that Paris reminds us is simply this: whatever we do, we will always be women – it’s our one irreducible fact, it’s our destiny, it’s our responsibility to discharge.
And, I don’t always think this, but right now, today, as the sun lifts the curtain on a Paris morning, I can’t help thinking it’s also our good fortune.
There’s a plaque to Edith Wharton outside her house in 53 rue de Varenne, one of the most exclusive locations in the Faubourg Saint-Germain.
Translated into English the plaque says:
In this building from 1910–1920 lived
Edith Wharton
American Writer
1862–1937
She was the first American writer to move to France
for the love of this country and of its literature.
‘My years of Paris life were spent entirely in the rue de Varenne –
rich years, crowded and happy years.’
Like Henry James, the work of Edith
Wharton brought to life – in delicate and biting style –
the high society of which she was a part.
Association la Mémoire des Lieux
The French admire Edith Wharton because she was a great writer who lived in Paris. And they appreciate her because, unlike so many, she stayed in Paris during World War One. She worked tirelessly to assist impoverished refugees and campaigned to persuade the United States government to enter the war. The French gave Mrs Wharton a Legion of Honor and even today regard her as something of a national monument.
Edith Wharton actually looked a bit like a monument, rather large and solid. Her jaw-line was square enough to serve as a plinth. The patrician’s aristocrat, Edith actively encouraged strangers to feel intimidated by her. After all, her aunt was the exclusive Mrs Jones of New York, whose relocation to a house further up 5th Avenue gave rise to the term keeping up with the Joneses.
Even her best friend, Henry James, was a little frightened of Mrs Wharton, and referred to her variously as The Angel of Devastation, Bonaparte and Attila. On the rare occasions when he was persuaded to visit Edith Wharton, Henry James felt like a captive prisoner. From the luxury of rue de Varenne he wrote to a friend: I am kept here in golden chains, in gorgeous bondage, in breathless attendance and beautiful asservissement.
I suspect it suited Edith Wharton to retain some distance in most of her relationships. She wasn’t a confessional type: she liked to keep her own counsel. In society she approved of stimulating general conversation, not personal revelation. And she was particularly careful to keep strangers and hangers-on at a distance. Mrs Wharton is never more aloof than in this truly pompous segment of her autobiography, A Backward Glance:
Among the friendships then made I should like to record with particular gratitude that of the Countess Papafava of Padua, from whom I first heard of the fantastic Castel of Cattajo, and through whose kindness the intricately lovely gardens of Val San Zibio were opened to me; of Don Guildo Cagnola of Varese, an authority on Italian villa architecture, and himself the owner of La Gazzada, the beautiful villa near Varese of which there is a painting by Canaletto in the Brera; of the countess Rasponi, who lived in the noble villa of …
And so, I regret to advise, Edith Wharton continues on for some paragraphs. Much of A Backward Glance is like this, and, as a tactic to distance the presumptuous reader, it works superbly.
Edith Wharton, the formidable hostess, the magisterial author, the patrician American – these personae were real. But there was more to Edith Wharton than this.
From the outside Edith Wharton’s former home is austere and severe, surrounded by embassies and other grand homes. But as I peer into the privacy of her courtyard, I can see a burst of wisteria – delicate, mauve, playful – springing up the sandy walls and tumbling over the black wrought-iron balconies.
Now meet another Edith Wharton, a woman unravelled by passion. She felt like a slave, and a goddess, and a girl in her teens …
In June 1909, at the age of forty-seven, Edith Wharton consummated a romance with a journalist named Morton Fullerton. He was the grand folly of her life; the one man for whom she sacrificed all pride, all dignity, all hauteur. She had always kept a daily diary; now she kept a separate love diary in which she addressed Fullerton as you, recorded all their moments together and traced the hopeful surges and timid retreats of her emotions.
Morton Fullerton was a complex man, a character who might, in fact, have been found in a novel by either Henry James or Edith Wharton. He was bisexual. He was also itinerant, decadent, charming and unreliable. His nature made it impossible for him to live in the bright sunlight of his American homeland; he was better suited to the more forgiving shadows and corners of European capitals. Even while he was conducting his affair with Edith Wharton, Fullerton was managing several other complicated relationships.
In The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth, Mrs Wharton has mastery of a chaotic universe. She is sane, compassionate, satirical. Who would have thought a love affair with a second-rate journalist would undo this great author? Yet it does. She is reduced to the same embarrassing clichés used by every woman in love. She writes terrible poetry in honor of their sexual encounters. She is grateful, anxious, tremulous.
Here she is worrying about clothes: There is the black dress I had on the first time we went to the Sorbonne to hear B[aker] lecture last December. I remember thinking: Will he like me in it? … There is the tea-gown I wore the first night you dined with me alone … You liked it, you said …
Here she is, amazed that wonderful he could love unworthy her: I don’t suppose you know, since it is more of my sex than yours – the quiet ecstasy I feel sitting next to you in a public place, looking now and then at the way the hair grows on your forehead, at the line of your profile turned to the stage, your attitude, your expression – while every drop of blood in my body whispers: ‘Mine-mine-mine’.
Of course, Fullerton wasn’t hers, hers, hers at all, and the relationship eventually fizzled out in a sad flurry of pleading letters from Edith. But I don’t think we need to pity Edith Wharton her painful love affair. It was one of the great experiences of her life. Worse than too much pain was the prospect of no sensation at all. Edith once wrote a searing image of a life lived without deep experiences, a life untouched:
I have sometimes thought that a woman’s nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is the hall, through which everyone passes going in and out; the drawing room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting room, where members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors are never turned, no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes.
This, in fact, expresses Edith’s view of the kind of life she felt condemned to live in America – a life of surface activity but deep inner loneliness. Edith was in her late forties when she began her affair with Morton Fullerton. She was at her peak as a writer and a woman. She wanted to open all the doors of her soul, no matter how invasive the visitor might be.
In Edith’s expansion as a woman, Paris was important. America, she felt, condemned a woman to live within a category: I was a failure in Boston…because they thought I was too fashionable to be intelligent, and a failure in New York because they were afraid I was too intelligent to be fashionable. In Paris, however, there was space for Edith Wharton to be fully herself, to explore the heights and depths of her own character.
Moreover, unlike the Americans, the French understood pleasure, and its importance. It is only in sophisticated societies that intellectuals recognize the uses of the frivolous, she said. Edith Wharton wanted to be fashionable and frivolous and sophisticated and intelligent all at the same time. She wanted the precious right to be contradictory. Why shouldn’t she transcend the tedium of strict categories for women and their behavior? She realized she couldn’t be various, spicy and contradictory in America. It was a society that dealt in simplicities. But in Paris, well, it was quite different.
After her death, when the first biographies of Edith Wharton were being written, Morton Fullerton wanted people to understand the extent to which Mrs Wharton had achieved complexity and completeness. Please seize the event, he urged, however delicate the problem, to dispel the myth of your heroine’s frigidity …
It’s a solitary figure I make, a thirty-something woman with her bright lipstick and her black leather bag strapped across her shoulder. I’m conscious of my aloneness as I walk through the quiet streets of the Faubourg Saint-Germain and listen to my footsteps rebound off the pavement. No one is waiting for me; no obligations require my attention. I am surplus to social requirements. Perhaps I should feel lonely. But I don’t. Like a cat, I choose to be pleased with myself and my own company. I prowl these ancient streets with a sly sense of freedom.
Dispel the myth of your heroine’s frigidity, urged Morton Fullerton. But frigidity was a myth that clung long and hard to Edith Wharton. Janet Flanner, the New Yorker’s acerbic Paris correspondent, referred to her after her death as the literary, correct, meticulous Mrs Wharton … She went on, acidly: From the Rue de Varenne [Edith Wharton] finally started her frigid conquest of the faubourg … Mrs Wharton was perhaps too formal even for the faubourg.
There’s a reason why Janet Flanner was so harsh on Edith Wharton. Flanner was a prominent member of the artistic community in Paris which gathered around the charismatic and revolutionary figure of Gertrude Stein. Mrs Wharton must have seemed quite the stuffy Grande Dame with her belle époque gowns and her Proustian salons compared to the breakthrough salon hosted by Miss Stein at rue de Fleurus.
What Janet Flanner didn’t, perhaps, understand was just how much Edith Wharton and Gertrude Stein had in common. These two women couldn’t have been more different, yet they shared a set of ideas about Paris, about tradition and freedom, about the role of a civilized society and the place of women in it.
In 1940, Gertrude Stein published a book called Paris, France. It is a love letter to her adopted country. It opens with, and then intermittently repeats, this curious little refrain: Paris, France is exciting and peaceful. At first I hated this phrase. How could somewhere be both exciting and peaceful? The phrase lacked all logic, even poetic logic. It seemed to me sloppy writing of the worst and most pretentious kind. And at first I found the book itself hard going (what grudge did Ms Stein have against punctuation?).
But this funny little book gradually drew me in. Ms Stein proceeds by degrees to explore why a fundamentally conservative society provided the fertile soil for breakthrough modernism. Through her portraits of bourgeois servants and peasants and shopkeepers and pets she reveals a society based on tradition, order and ritual. She shows us something of the worldly, unsparing French acceptance of human nature and life and death. France, according to Ms Stein, is a complex, unsentimental, deeply civilized society. She says: The French need to be civilized and in order to do so … must have tradition and freedom. Tradition and freedom.
Twenty years earlier, in 1919, Edith Wharton wrote her own love letter to France, French Ways and their Meaning. Of course, Mrs Wharton’s world is sprinkled rather more with dukes and Académiciens. But, from her very different perspective, she arrives at a similar conclusion.
There is a reflex of negation, of rejection, at the very root of the French character: an instinctive recoil from the new, the untasted, the untested, like the retracting of an insect’s feelers at contact with an unfamiliar object; and no one can hope to understand the French without bearing in mind that this unquestioning respect for rules of which the meaning is forgotten acts as a perpetual necessary check to the idol-breaking instinct of the freest minds in the world. It may sound like a poor paradox to say that the French are traditional about small things because they are so free about big ones.
Like the decisive clues in the treasure hunt, up pop those twin ideas again: tradition and freedom. For these two very different women, Paris, traditional and free, created a kind of creative space. A space within which to invent an art, or a life.
It was easy to tag Edith Wharton as an old fuddy-duddy. It’s well known that she didn’t admire James Joyce or TS Eliot. Nor did she enjoy Radclyffe Hall’s controversial lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness. But her objections were aesthetic, not moral. The form of things was very important to her. How you did, artistically speaking, was every bit as important as what you did. And indeed, the traditional nineteenth-century forms and style of Mrs Wharton’s novels have to some extent overshadowed the genuinely progressive ideas within them.
In fact, Mrs Wharton, traditional on the outside, was wonderfully free on the inside. She relished the flowing dance of Isadora Duncan. It shed light on every kind of beauty, she thought. Diaghilev, with composer Stravinsky and his Ballet Russes, broke down old barriers of convention, she said, with his wild, free measures. She was an admirer of the groundbreaking Le Sacre du Printemps and L’Oiseau de Feu.
And then there’s Gertrude Stein. She is credited with the birth of modernism in her salon. She was a lesbian, an iconoclast, a revolutionary user of language. Her friends included the literary and artistic avant-garde, like Hemingway and Picasso. Yet this wasn’t the whole story either. Underneath the revolutionary veneer, Gertrude and Alice lived with the order and regularity of the most stolid bourgeois couple. They were as tidy and fussy as maiden aunts, except that instead of pastel landscapes, they had modernist masterpieces on their walls.
In the end then, Edith Wharton and Gertrude Stein – and who would wish to downplay how wonderfully different they were? – created an orderly framework for their extraordinary lives. Mrs Wharton’s rather secretive progressiveness co-existed comfortably with a deep respect for tradition and old gardens and refined manners. Equally, Gertrude Stein’s radicalism co-existed comfortably with dry teas and walking the dogs. Tradition and freedom they sought, and won.
But there’s more.
Paris was important both to Edith Wharton and Gertrude Stein because of the way it treated women. In Paris, women were not deemed additional or ornamental to civilization: they were the instrument and the evidence of civilization. Women were civilization.
The more civilized a society is, the wider is the range of each woman’s influence over men, and of each man’s influence over women, said Edith Wharton. Intelligent and cultivated people of either sex will never limit themselves to communing within their own households … The long hypocrisy which Puritan England handed on to America concerning the danger of frank and free social relations between men and women has done more than anything else to retard real civilisation in America.
Gertrude Stein echoed this view: The relation of men to women and men to men and women to women in a state of being civilized has very much to be considered. Frenchmen love older women, that is women who have already done more living, and that has something to do with civilisation.
Of all the things Gertrude Stein said about Paris, her most famous line is this: It’s not what Paris gave you but what it didn’t take away from you that was important.
I think what Paris didn’t take away from Gertrude, or Edith, or the dozens of other women who came here, was their invented selves, their created womanhood. In Paris they could be the kind of women they chose to be, straight or gay, promiscuous or monogamous, creative, independent, open, traditional and free.
That’s why Paris was exciting. And that’s why it was peaceful too.
In Australia we do girls very well: young, fresh, ignorant, sexy girls. Not that I was one of them. I was pale and bookish and wore black tights in winter and secondhand sixties’ frocks in summer. It’s not as though I didn’t try to become a sun-burnished bikini type, but it simply didn’t work. I certainly didn’t catch the boys: all I got was a sunburn.
In France they like women, grown-up women. Ellen once said to me that the French don’t consider that a woman starts to become interesting until she is thirty-five years old. It’s why Paris always attracted older women of fame or substance, like Maria Callas or Olivia de Havilland or Pamela Harriman, who felt appreciated here. (And why so few French women emigrate. When Germaine de Staël went to England she was genuinely puzzled by the way English women were treated. ‘Is a woman a minor forever in your country?’ she asked her neighbor Susannah Phillips. ‘It seems to me that your sister [novelist Fanny Burney] is like a girl of fourteen.’)
But what does it mean to be a woman, a grown-up woman? When you’re young you imagine that maturity of mind must, automatically, accompany a maturing body. Except it doesn’t happen. You can get to thirty-five and still feel like a little child.
The truth is, we aren’t psychologically rewarded for adulthood anymore and all our advertising is directed to how we can stay young and fresh and carefree. It used to be that children were solemnly initiated into adulthood. Menstruation, a twenty-first birthday, or marriage, or the birth of a child – these were the milestones. And causes for ritual celebration. But not anymore. Or at least, not as demonstrations of adulthood.
Even as a schoolgirl laboring up the hill to the white convent, I knew I wanted to grow up. I wanted to be a worldly woman, although I hardly knew what that meant. And I sensed that it would be hard to achieve this in Australia, an ancient continent but a young country, a teenage nation. In the end, of course, my solution was to seek out exotic travel and interesting jobs and look for the great conversations that would shape the clueless teenager into a sophisticated woman. I’m not sure I had much success.
Years ago, when I was on my first and only diplomatic posting to Belgrade, the senior local staff member was a plump Serbian aristocrat named Marina. She had been part of the Embassy for twenty years. ‘Darling,’ she said to me, with her ruined smile, ‘I have seen so many of you Australian women. You are all the same. You are romantics.’ She said this as if it were a dirty word. ‘You expect too much,’ she said. ‘You’re always disappointed. You expect the men to be something they are not. Darling,’ she said, ‘you have to learn how to manage men. European women,’ she repeated smugly, spreading her moist ringed hands, ‘we know how to manage men.’
I hung my head for a moment, and then returned to my dark little office and resumed hand-wringing and heartbreaking over my faraway boyfriend’s infidelities. I knew she was right, but what could I do?
Edith Wharton thought about this issue too and, with some rare compassion towards her countrywomen, concluded that American women couldn’t help but be immature simply because they were American.
Why does the European woman interest herself so much more in what the men are doing? Because she’s so important to them that they make it worth her while! She’s not a parenthesis, as she is here – she’s in the very middle of the picture. Where does the real life of most American men lie? In some woman’s drawing room or in their offices? The answer’s obvious isn’t it. The emotional center of gravity’s not the same in the two hemispheres. In the effete societies it’s love, in our new one it’s business.
Gertrude Stein also carefully calibrated levels of national maturity. She too concluded that the character of a nation had a very real effect on the lives and disposition of its citizens.
France really prefers civilisation to tumultuous adolescence, France prefers that the adolescent learns reserve and logic and civilisation and fashion as he emerges out of adolescence, France who thinks that childhood and adolescence should be felt instinctively as not an end in itself but as a progression toward the state of being civilised.
Once again, you see, there’s that link between civilization and art and being grown-up.
Here’s Edith Wharton again: No nation can have grown-up ideas till it has a ruling caste of grown-up men and women; and it is possible to have a ruling caste of grown-up men and women only in a civilization where the power of each sex is balanced by that of the other.
So now we come to a distinctly infuriating Catch 22. To get a grown-up society you need grown-up women. But you can’t mould and form grown-up women, except in a grown-up society.
Some people think it’s grown-up for women of a certain age to put sex behind them. They think that sex is a pastime of youth and immaturity. But the French don’t. They don’t equate sex with age. They equate sex with sexiness.
Sexuality is a very personal thing, of course. But I don’t see why a woman should have to declare herself sexually washed up at some arbitrary age, any more than she would declare herself intellectually completed. Sexuality is not like a small-town festival that the deputy mayor dutifully declares to be closed, or an inner light that a resentful warden suddenly switches off. Part of the trick, though, is finding in yourself a certain adult sexuality, which is, I think, a different quality from youthful sexuality. It’s more subtle, like old wine or antique jewelry.
Of course, the women of Paris offer sure evidence of the potential appeal of the older woman. Here’s a list I made up – it’s a roll-call of grown-up sexiness: Edith Wharton had her love affair with Morton Fullerton when she was forty-seven. George Sand was sixty years old when she took her last lover, Charles Marchal. He was thirty-six. She wrote: It is as if I see everything for the first time. Germaine de Staël made her second marriage at the age of forty-five. Her husband was twenty-three years old. Nancy Mitford commenced her great love affair with Gaston Palewski when she was in her early forties.
Then there was Colette, who serves as proof that being a grown-up woman doesn’t make you good, necessarily, or wise. But it sure does make you sexy. In 1920, Colette was forty-seven years old. She was a very powerful, sexual woman. But even today it still seems shocking that she began a discreet affair with her sixteen-year-old stepson, Bertrand de Jouvenal.
It was summer and the young, handsome and earnest Bertrand was staying with his stepmother and two of her younger girlfriends at his father’s holiday house in Brittany. Colette’s novel Chéri, about the doomed love affair between an ageing courtesan and a young gigolo, was being serialized in the newspaper. No wonder, then, that Bertrand noticed Colette looking at him one day as he ran in off the beach. When she passed her arm around his waist he trembled. She kissed him goodnight – on the mouth.
Soon after that the three women decided it was time to make a man of this beautiful boy. Colette suggested to Bertrand that his sexual initiation take place with the youngest of the three women, Germaine Beaumont. But by then, Bertrand had succumbed to Colette emotionally. Bertrand told a friend that his stepmother had been demanding, voracious, expert and rewarding. Their liaison lasted, on and off, for nearly five years.
Here’s another story about wilfulness and sexiness. During World War Two Coco Chanel stayed on in the Hôtel Ritz, which had been commandeered by the German High Command. She formed a relationship with Baron Hans Gunther von Dinklage, a Nazi. He was one of those urbane German aristocrats who wangled a tour in Paris and treated the Nazi regime and the war as a rather tiresome but necessary irritant. At the end of the war Chanel was interrogated. When asked if it were true that she had consorted with a German, she reportedly replied: ‘Really, a woman of my age cannot be expected to look at his passport if she has a chance of a lover.’
Of course, at fifty-seven, Coco Chanel was more beautiful than ever. And women like Josephine and Nancy Mitford took great care about their appearance into their later years. But George Sand, according to Charles Dickens, was as plain as Queen Victoria’s nurse. Edith Wharton was immaculately dressed but looked like a bad statue in a public park. And Germaine de Staël was over-weight and tastelessly dressed.
You see, it was never about how they looked, it was about their vitality and verve and spirit. They had worked it out: how to be, as a woman, as an older woman. And they didn’t deny themselves their own sexuality.
It’s one of those bright and calm Sundays which are worthy of your Sunday best. As I walk from Rachel’s to Omar’s restaurant, I savor the slower pace of the quartier, the gentler tone. At Chez Omar I tentatively push open the heavy restaurant door. In the gloom I see several young men sitting and leaning and smoking. They seem neither surprised nor interested to see me. From the placid Parisian sidewalk I feel as though I have accidentally walked in on an out-take from a mob movie.
One of the young men walks out the back. Omar emerges, dapper and unconcerned. We step outside, and after a moment the young man pulls up in a large Mercedes. Omar takes over the driving and I am ushered gently but impersonally into the passenger seat.
Omar takes me to lunch at the Dôme restaurant, one of the famous old brasseries of Montparnasse. He tells me that when he arrived in Paris as a young migrant from North Africa he used to work here as a waiter, and later at nearby La Coupole. But now he is an important man, and the waiters treat him with elaborate and practiced deference. We take our seats and eat fine, bland sole. I have a glass of wine: Omar doesn’t drink. It’s all rather like being taken out for a treat by your great-uncle.
Omar seems, well, not particularly interested in me. He doesn’t ask me a lot of questions. He seems content merely to sit and chat intermittently, in a rather desultory fashion. I try to coax some memories of his earlier days in Paris, but I can see it’s all a bit hazy now. Or perhaps not important. I realize that this is a quiet man, a peaceful man. He has made his money, he is looking after his extended family, he is respected and admired.
Every now and then Omar surprises me with an observation.
‘At La Coupole you know,’ he says, ‘there is a dance hall downstairs.’
‘Oh?’ I say.
‘Older women would come there to dance with the young men,’ he goes on, ‘to find comfort.’
‘Really?’ I say.
But the conversation goes no further.
Our puzzling discourse unsettles me and suddenly ignites memories of my younger self. For a long time I had only the most tenuous hold on my identity. Friends and family would treat me as if I was a known personality with distinctive characteristics. But deep inside I felt unformed. I looked at the world from behind a regulation set of eyes, but inside my skin I was little more than a mass of emotions and sensations. As the French say, I didn’t feel bien dans ma peau. I simply did not know how to bring my floating attributes together into a coherent personality. And so I sometimes found it hard to connect with people, to discover the self beneath their skins. I guess I was simply a young woman, and a late developer. I guess I am still developing.
After lunch Omar seems to brighten up. ‘Now I shall show you a little bit of Paris,’ he says. ‘Shall we go to La Mosquée?’
La Mosquée is beautiful. It sits on the edge of the 5th arrondissement near the Jardin des Plantes. Under the white minaret it’s a 1920s Moorish-style complex with white colonnades, tinkling fountains and blue-green tiled courtyards. There’s the mosque itself, a library and a bath-house. And a salon de thé, elaborately decorated with banquettes and a painted ceiling and cushions and mosaics and rich colors. After we’ve had a look around, we adjourn to the little salon courtyard and eat sweets and drink mint tea from gold-patterned colored glasses. The Sunday light filters into the space.
For the first time, Omar appears at home, and I realize that this little part of Paris, this island of Islam, means more to him than all the flashy restaurants frequented by his own clientele. Here he seems complete as an Algerian and a Parisian. This sense of cultural melding reminds me of the gorgeous African women I see on the Métro, with their licorice curls and full lips. They accessorize their brightly colored cotton turbans and kaftans with stiletto heels. They add a joyous new dimension to traditional chic.
Once I might have felt a nervous compulsion to clown and patter and tease this curious gentleman taking me out for the afternoon. But now I relax with him into a Sunday mood. I simply sit and enjoy his stories of his family. Some of it I don’t really understand – it’s a conversation directed not at me, but at some interior space in his memory, or his heart.
Before we depart the conversation drifts to the tragic death in Paris of the English Princess Diana. Omar suddenly looks very serious.
‘You know that Diana was killed because of her relationship with a Muslim man.’
I look startled.
‘Sure, of course,’ he says bitterly. ‘She was free here. But the British, they couldn’t let her be.’
We walk back to the car and Omar tentatively passes an arm around my waist. I gently drift out of his embrace. We smile cautiously.
As Omar drops me off he says to me, ‘Come and see me next time you are in Paris.’ And, ‘Will you write about me and my restaurant?’
I walk through the door to see Rachel lying on her chaise longue reading Vanity Fair.
‘How was that?’ she asks.
‘Odd,’ I say. ‘But good.’
Edith Wharton’s death was a major public event. She was a great and famous author, very rich and well respected. And she had planned her death well. Her letters and papers were in order. She had even marked some documents clearly, For my biographer. She was well aware that history would judge her and that her letters and documents would eventually form part of a fuller picture of Mrs Wharton.
But no one was prepared for this. In her desk was a fragment of a novella and it was pornography. Superbly written and realized, but clearly, pornography. It reveals its author to be a woman with a detailed knowledge of sex and sensuality. A woman who has, as the French might say, been well and thoroughly fucked.
Here’s just a little of what Mrs Wharton wrote:
As his hand stole higher she felt the secret bud of her body swelling, yearning, quivering hotly to burst into bloom. Ah, here was his subtle forefinger pressing it, forcing its tight petals softly apart, and laying on their sensitive edges a circular touch so soft and yet so fiery that already lightnings of heat shot from that palpitating center all over her surrendered body, to the tips of her fingers, and the ends of her loosened hair. The sensation was so exquisite that she could have asked to have it indefinitely prolonged; but suddenly his head bent lower, and with a deeper thrill she felt his lips pressed upon that quivering invisible bud, and then the delicate firm thrust of his tongue, so full and yet so infinitely subtle, pressing apart the close petals and forcing itself in deeper and deeper through the passage that glowed and seemed to become illuminated at its approach …
To add to the taboo-breaking frisson of this passage, I should tell you that it describes the first formal act of incest between a father and his adult daughter.
And it was written in 1935 when Edith Wharton was seventy-three years old.