Of course, I’d lied to the editors of Vogue and told them I spoke perfect French.
My first assignment was to interview Éric Rohmer, the most intellectual of all French film directors, an elderly genius obsessed by midinettes (shopgirls). And yet in 1984 he was only sixty-four, which naturally seemed ancient to me then. Someone had said that seeing his movies was “kind of like watching paint dry.” I preferred what my friend Jacques Fieschi had said, that Rohmer was “this sensual intellectual.”
Rohmer had been born Maurice Henri Joseph Schérer. I’d admired his talky films Claire’s Knee and My Night at Maud’s. I’d rehearsed my questions carefully with Gilles Barbedette, who’d translated my novel Nocturnes for the King of Naples. I had to tape Rohmer’s answers, since I had no idea what he was saying—which of course meant that I couldn’t pose any follow-up questions to the provocative and original things it turned out that he was saying. In Hollywood movies the star absorbs and perfects the foreign language seamlessly, and in a matter of days, since language plays no part in the plot. But my fear of daunting linguistic encounters only added to my mounting agoraphobia: I seldom left the apartment. I’d sit in a chair and rehearse what I might say, what Rohmer might say, and how I’d answer, and hours of invented conversations would play out in my head. I’d think something in English and immediately try to translate it into French. I’d practice translation so much that I could say many things, at least the sort of things that typically I’d say in my own language. Comprehension, however, was another thing altogether. After I’d present my own carefully displayed sentence like a diamond necklace on black velvet, the other speaker, the French person, would throw his sentence at me like a handful of wet sand. It would sting so badly that I’d wince, and an instant later I would wonder what had just happened to me. Perhaps worst of all, I’d failed to grasp little nice things shopkeepers or neighbors were saying about the weather or the wild strawberries, pleasant comments I was unable to acknowledge or engage with. John Purcell couldn’t speak but could understand, and together we made up an inept sort of team. What I could do was read French books and look up the words. Sometimes now when I glance over the novels and nonfiction works I was patiently annotating in those days, it astonishes me that there was ever a time when I didn’t know those words.
I’d lie on the couch and read and read. Marie-Claude, who knew the publicity girls at all the publishing houses, had put me on every list for freebies; in addition she’d call to nudge them along if she was excited about a particular title. She’d say, “But Monsieur White is American Vogue in Paris,” letting them imagine I might write up an obscure first novel and start a bidding war for it in the States.
What I learned soon enough was that American magazine editors weren’t interested in anything happening in France unless it was happening to other Americans: a hit play where the audience had to vote every night whether to behead Marie Antoinette or not? No interest. The reopening after many years of the Musée Guimet, one of the great collections of Asian art? No interest. Fashion was interesting, since anyone could buy it and everyone would eventually be affected by it. A lawsuit by Margaret Mitchell’s heirs against Régine Deforges, a French woman who’d adapted the plot of Gone with the Wind to France during World War II (the Nazis were the Yankees), was interesting since it dealt with an American classic and an American legal victory, though it was shortlived as Ms. Deforges later won her appeal.
Fortunately I didn’t understand the limitations of my role as American cultural reporter in France until after I’d read through hundreds of books and looked up thousands of words—many of them time and again. At one point it occurred to me that I had to look up the same word five times before I’d learned it. And of course I nearly always got the gender wrong. Jane Birkin, an English actress who sang in French in a high, squeaky voice, in interviews always confused the le and the la and French comedians impersonating her always used this habit of hers as the basis of their send-ups. I remember once saying la mariage and a five-year-old corrected me, “But it’s le marriage.” Quickly, her mother, blushing, whispered to the little girl, “Don’t correct Monsieur. He’s a professor.”
In the winters it was gray and would rain every day, but my apartment was snug and had good heat. I lay on my couch, actually a daybed, and read. I had just two rooms. My bedroom was twice the size of the double bed with tall French windows looking out on the slanting roof of the Saint-Louis-en-l’Île church with its upended stone volute like a colossal snail that had broken through the rain-slicked tiles and was inching down toward the gutters at geological speed. The sitting room was larger, with two windows, a desk, a basket chair, a dining room table, and the daybed in an alcove. The apartment had been the study of the landlady’s deceased husband, an epigraphist, and on the walls held up by metal brackets were ancient stones inscribed by the Romans, marble fragments he’d excavated in Algeria.
Language problems guided me in my choice of friends. Women, especially old bourgeois women, spoke more clearly than their male or younger counterparts. The very speech patterns (emphatic, precise) I might have found annoying in English came to me in French as a blessing. My favorite old woman was my landlady, Madame Pflaum, an Austrian who’d lived in Paris since the 1930s. She had me to tea with her best friend. The two women had known each other for over forty years but still addressed each other as vous and referred to each other as “Madame Pflaum” and “Madame Dupont.” Perhaps because she was a foreigner, Madame Pflaum spoke her adopted language with unusual care.
At the gym I met Barbara, a girl with a pretty, chubby face and an almost neurotic level of curiosity, and I cherished her for her clear enunciation, her avoidance of slang, and her linguistic patience. Like any good teacher, Barbara took my cloudy, twisted sentences and reworked them into model phrases out of a textbook. “Do you mean …” she’d say in French, and then rephrase my hazy remark in crystalline language.
Barbara had divorced parents—an architect father who worked in his spacious studio overlooking a garden and a batty, out-of-work mother who lived in a project for the poor, an HLM (Habitation loyer modéré, or medium-rent housing), though hers was located in a sleek skyscraper that Pompidou had thrown up in La Défense in the 1970s to modernize the capital, rival New York, and ultimately destroy the Parisian skyline. Fortunately for many Parisians, Pompidou would die before he could commit more mischief.
Barbara had sex on the brain and always wanted to know what different boys in the gym looked like naked in the locker room. She either was slightly dim or pretended to be. Over and over she’d ask me her slow, precise, primary questions about homosexuality.
“Now tell me, Edmond, have you ever tried sex with a woman? Are you afraid of the vagina? Do you think that there are teeth in there?”
But no matter how irritating her questions might be, she spoke clearly and slowly and always corrected my French in an inoffensive and automatic way. For instance, I had a habit of interchangeably using the adjectives immense, grand, and gros, yet Barbara had assigned a different nuance to each word. She was also a stickler for the progression of tenses—only a pluperfect could be nested inside a past clause. Despite her careful and kind ministrations, I never mastered these nuances. Barbara suggested I buy the Grévis, a thousand-page grammar text with which every French person is familiar. That this pedantry coexisted with an unhealthy or obsessive sexual curiosity should not have surprised me. What is certain is that if she were a mumbler, as many of us Americans are, I’d never have had anything to do with her. I envied her because she dated a slender young German with a mild, gentle manner and a large, uncircumcised penis, which he would towel-dry at length while chatting affably with me in the locker room. Then again, there was always a bit of seduction in the air.
At the gym I only met ordinary French office workers who like people everywhere led a treadmill existence called, colloquially, Boulot-Métro-Dodo—Parisian slang for “Job-Subway-Bed.”
A bit infuriatingly, at Marie-Claude’s dinners no one spoke in any predictable way. They were all intellectuals and writers who I learned had to show how ironic they could be, how droll, how quickly and easily they could anticipate every objection their interlocutors might make. The advancement of a simple idea or piece of information was not the object. The task was to show they were civilized beings who caught every allusion. They were capable of enclosing linguistic brackets inside conversational parentheses.
Moreover, they interrupted constantly, which, it amazed me to learn, was not considered rude in Paris. Madame de Staël, in her book about Germany, had written that German was not a proper language for intelligent conversation since you had to wait till the end of the sentence to hear the verb and couldn’t interrupt. I found interruptions especially irritating because I needed my full allotment of airtime in order to stagger toward my point.
But France, more than any other culture, is a tight, silver skein of names and references and half-stated allusions. Whereas America is so populous that even the writers don’t know all the names of the other writers, in France the members of the general educated public recognize the names of all French writers, whether they’ve read them or not. Of course it helps that writers are so often interviewed on television and by the press. What is true of writers is true of every other category of civilized experience; everyone knows the name and address of the best pastry maker, the best source of bed linens and napery, the best caterer, the best saddle and harness maker. They’re listed in every middle-class person’s mental collection of les bonnes adresses. Pourthault for sheets. Hédiard for food. Berthillon for sherbets and ice creams, so confident of its status that it closed for the entire month of August. Furthermore, failure to know any one of these names can even suggest inferior social origins.
This little world is a ball that is always in the air, bounced from hand to hand. Maybe it aids the native speakers that French (not Spanish, as everyone says) is spoken more rapidly than any other tongue, facilitating an unequaled density of reference and qualification. The composer Virgil Thomson, who lived a third of his long life in France, once pointed out that the French never grope for a word or stutter or go blank and say, “Uh …” He suggested that the French, unlike us, have what today we’d call a social GPS, an instant device for orienting themselves and navigating their way through their own culture, whereas we are not only often at a loss for words but also for opinions. The maddening confidence of the French (about the sequence three cheeses should be eaten in, from mildest to strongest, about exactly when to arrive at a party and when to leave, about how to sign off in a friendly but correct formal letter) fills in all social, and verbal, blanks.
I quickly learned that for a linguistic neophyte like me, the most difficult encounter to deal with was a party attended by a group of friends who’d all known each other forever. They’d be hard enough to cope with if they were speaking English, since even then they’d all be talking in shorthand. In French, they became incomprehensible.
The easiest social situation, I found, was talking to one person who was in love with you, someone who was studying your face for the slightest frown of confusion. The eyes, I figured out, always betray a failure to understand. If I didn’t want to flag my distress in a small dinner party or provoke a tedious explanation made merely for my benefit, I lowered my eyes like a Japanese bride. A diner à deux is the easiest exchange because we quickly become accustomed to a lover’s accent, turn of mind, range of reference and vocabulary—and he instantly gears his words to our level of comprehension.
I never failed to understand MC’s French. (We called Marie-Claude by her initials, pronouncing the letters in the English fashion and not as “Emm-Cay” à la française.) But the same person becomes more difficult to understand on the phone, where one has none of the same visual cues. After a party the most difficult event is a narrative French film, in which the actors usually speak more carelessly than random individuals on the street. Mumbling is proof of artistic verisimilitude. A television newscast is the next most difficult occasion, since it usually depends on a vocabulary and metaphors peculiar to itself. As a foreigner I realized what a closed world the news is for all but the initiated, an obscurity that is obviously worrying in a democracy.
Some American or French friends who were bilingual wondered why I was spending so much time with kids from the gym. I was too embarrassed to admit that I had chosen these particular kids for the slow, clear way they spoke French. When the great writer Emmanuel Carrère and his wife came to dinner, they teased me for my “adolescent evenings” (tes soirées ado).
I’d always been a bit arrogant about my lack of a need for intellectual stimulation. I had a scholarly, researcher’s side, which reveled in reading up on difficult subjects, but I also had a silly, social side that found it more relaxing to chatter about nothing, as if I wanted my “artist” side to prevail over the “intellectual” role. I suppose I thought an artist shouldn’t be too cerebral. Camus said that American novelists were the only fiction writers who didn’t think they also needed to be intellectuals. Whereas a French writer such as Gilles Barbedette, my translator and friend, wrote novels and essays and read only serious things such as Montaigne and Nietzsche, in America a friend such as Brad Gooch could listen to rap, read theology, dress in drag—Brad was closer to my sensibility. Even the range of Brad’s biographical subjects—Frank O’Hara, Flannery O’Connor, and the Persian mystic Rumi—showed his mix of piety and camp. That he was also an Armani model further broke the mold of the intellectual.
And yet it was arrogant of me to think that I was self-sufficient, that I didn’t need to be with smart people since I was smart enough all on my own. I always found my evenings with creative, analytical people especially enthralling, but something perverse made me not seek them out. Albert Dichy—who is funny, observant, and subtle and has a great memory and vast levels of information—always made me laugh hard and sent me off into a paroxysm of serious reading. Fortunately, we worked together researching my biography of Jean Genet; given how contrarian I am I might not have befriended him otherwise.
Albert was a dapper middle-aged Jew from Beirut who’d grown up speaking French because it was the only language his parents had in common. His mother, from Turkey, spoke Ladino, a form of medieval Spanish, and his father was an Egyptian whose first language was Arabic. Albert was sent to a French Jesuit lycée in Lebanon—which he hated because all the students were boys and he didn’t like males. In the streets Albert and his brother spoke Arabic, which eventually Albert’s brother taught in a French university; much to the dismay of his Jewish parents, the brother converted to Islam and married a second-generation Arab woman. Albert’s grandfather had been a rabbi.
When the Lebanese civil war started in 1975, the family took refuge in Britanny. Albert, his mother, and his brother were all French citizens since one of Albert’s maternal ancestors had taken French citizenship, and after that every succeeding generation had been careful to register at the French consulate. Only Albert’s father—who’d lost his Egyptian citizenship when Farouk was deposed and then lost the Iranian passport he’d bought when the shah was ousted—had had to wait to emigrate to France.
Albert’s first job in France had been going door-to-door and doing customer interviews for an electrical appliance company. Milan Kundera, who’d recently left Czechoslovakia and arrived in Rennes, was still so intimidated by “officials” asking questions that when Albert showed up at his door one day Kundera docilely submitted to Albert’s lengthy and detailed interview about his sweeper. Albert used to say he had in his possession one of the few unpublished interviews of the great Kundera.
As a youngster, Albert had met Genet in Beirut. Perhaps partly because of this encounter with the charismatic writer, Albert had become the world’s leading expert on Genet. Although he worked on many other writers (including Marguerite Duras; Georges Shéhadé, the Francophone poet from Lebanon; Pierre Guyotat; and Kateb Yacine, the Algerian nationalist writer), he published at Gallimard a collection of Genet’s political writings and prepared the Pléiade definitive edition of Genet’s plays. And I was supposed to be writing Genet’s biography. Genet had died in 1986, the year before I was commissioned to write the book. I kept trying to pry information out of Albert until I realized it would be simpler to hire him using some of my advance money. At the time, Albert was working part-time for IMEC (L’Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine), a private library that housed the archives of publishing houses and contemporary writers. When he wasn’t at IMEC, Albert was making a living as an advertising copywriter. Once we started collaborating, he was able to quit his advertising work.
I took seven years to research and write my biography of Genet. Albert helped me at every step—writing summaries of interviews he conducted with people who’d known Genet, finding me relevant texts and photocopying them, establishing dates in a clear chronology, fact-checking everything I’d written. We went together to Alligny-en-Morvan, Genet’s village in Burgundy, where we visited a dozen people who’d known him, including his godmother—who was over a hundred years old and spoke to me in the dialect of the region, which her granddaughter had to translate into French. Even though the wife of my French editor, Ivan Nabokoff, was the sister of Pierre Joxe, the minister of the interior in Mitterrand’s government, I couldn’t convince Joxe to open Genet’s adoption dossier. But Albert found plenty of other details: that one of Genet’s childhood friends was named Querelle (the name of one of his later novelistic heroes); that one could still visit Mettray (Genet’s penal colony when he was an adolescent); that one could read the very literary letters Genet wrote to a woman he’d met in Czechoslovakia, a German Socialist refugee; that the widow of his doctor was still alive, a woman whose husband had prescribed Genet his massive doses of Nembutal (she’d helped Genet prepare the final draft of his longest play, The Screens, and she even showed me X-rays of Genet’s kidneys). Albert tracked down Genet’s record of arrests for petty crimes (for stealing a bolt of fabric from a department store and the autograph of a French king, and for doctoring a train ticket). We met a former convict from one of his prisons; an actress who had played the Madame in The Balcony and who shared her letters from Genet; the Swiss translator who accompanied Genet among the Black Panthers in America; the adopted son of one of his lovers and his principal heir; his obstructionist agent in London; the two high-born Palestinian women who’d played such a large role in his old age, and so on. Our interviews took me to Damascus and all over France and the United States.
Albert had a very precise manner—the product of a good French Catholic education. He loved to clarify his terms, nail down a fact, take notes in the hour after an encounter, annotate his reading. At the same time he was quick to see his own absurdities and those of others. And he was affectionate. I guess I define intelligence as the power to make new, surprising, wide-ranging associations and never to rely on automatic, untested generalities. With Albert I felt that I was in the presence of someone like Wittgenstein who was actually thinking out loud, thinking right in front of you, thinking a thought for the first time.
He was a great womanizer. Perhaps he was aided by the catholicity of his tastes. Although he had a beautiful, cultured wife who was a nonstop reader, an art dealer, and related to Georges Shéhadé, the Francophone poet from Lebanon, Albert had many adventures and affairs. The other day my French scholarly friend Alice Kaplan had dinner with Albert and a new girlfriend—who turned out once to have been his shrink. He was the male version of Catherine Millet, the author of The Sexual Life of Catherine M., which details her thousands of conquests. I’ve always been fascinated by libertinism and promiscuity, particularly the often philosophically self-assured French variety, and when I reviewed The Sexual Life I called it “the most explicit book about sex ever written by a woman.” I interviewed Millet at the literary festival at Brighton before a packed crowd, translating back and forth from English into French. I also spoke about her on the BBC. She was a very courteous, intelligent woman, an art critic who’s written a study of Salvador Dalí.
I’d met Michel Foucault in New York when I ran the New York Institute for the Humanities. Foucault was like me in one regard—he hated to talk about ideas during social evenings. (Richard Sennett, the sociologist and the founder of the Institute, once said to me, “You’ll tell everyone about your sex life; your only secrets are your ideas.”) Foucault’s partner, Daniel Defert, had given a fascinating seminar on how the Spanish colonists had classified the Aztecs according to medieval rankings based on clothes, the habitus (as in “The habit makes the man”). Foucault conducted a seminar on the last volume of his History of Sexuality, which was to be about the difference between the late pagan emphasis on which sex acts were permissible if committed between masters and slaves, or masters and masters, with little regard for the gender of the participants (e.g., a free man must never be the passive partner with a slave) and the early Christian obsession with sin, buggery, and fornication, not just in deed but in thought.
Foucault spoke English through an act of will—I don’t think he’d ever studied it and he wasn’t worried by his very strong accent. I thought that anyone as smart as he would of course speak English—or any other language he set his mind to. He was surrounded with beautiful ephebes such as Hervé Guibert, Mathieu Lindon, and Gilles Barbedette, but sexually his type was burly and macho.
But he never thought the sexual identity of someone was all that revealing, and as his disciple I mustn’t pretend I’m saying something profound about him by talking about his kinkiness. He was both fiery and sweet, a rare combination of traits. He showed me that you can be passionately aggressive about advancing your views, arguing your position, but in the bosom of your friends mild and even humble, certainly sweet. Maybe that explains his aversion to discussing ideas except in the classroom; he was deeply engaged in intellectual discourse, was quick to the point of paranoia in defending his theories, but he didn’t want combativeness to poison his social evening. Ce qu’aimer veut dire by Mathieu Lindon (the son of Beckett’s publisher) is an extended, intimate view of Foucault by a real friend.
Toward the end of his life Foucault thought the basis of morality after the death of God might be the ancient Greek aspiration to leave your life as a beautiful, burnished artifact. Certainly in his case his gift for friendship, his quick sympathy, his gift for paradox, his ability to admire left his image as a man, as an exemplary life, highly burnished. The people who said his promiscuity or his death from AIDS diminished him were just fools.
Marie-Claude would not countenance my complaints about the French language.
“But your French is perfect!” she said in English.
She and I spoke English all the time except at her dinner parties, where she’d invite the latest literary star to bask in our short-lived adoration. I’d been put through similar paces when A Boy’s Own Story had come out in France (Un jeune Americain). I’d assumed that one charming older gay man, the editor of Science et Vie, was actually interested in me personally and would want to see me often in the future. In fact, I’d made a modest little splash, and the editor as a true Parisian needed to know everyone and everything dans le vent, à la page, au courant—all ways of referring to what’s new, the latest manifestation of l’air du temps.
Of course journalists back in New York had to keep up with the latest trends, but they wouldn’t have invited the trend to dinner. New Yorkers were always exhausted after their twelve hours at the office and two hours at the gym and hour at the shrink’s; when they got home, they would crawl into a hot bath, and from there to a huge immaculate bed where they ate their plate of take-home lobster ravioli and watched a talk show until they sank into restless, clamorous sleep. They couldn’t be bothered seeing their oldest friends, much less a total stranger. A friend in New York was defined as someone you never needed to see, who would never get angry at you for ignoring him.
In Paris, however, there were still rituals in place for promising new people, new ideas, new trends (which a bit later, in the nineties, would eventually be colloquially labeled tendance, or “tendency”). Something new was said to be très tendance. If you were a mere trend, no one wanted to be stuck with seeing you more than once; the host expected you to stay on message during your single visit and communicate clearly what was new about you and your work.
I’d written a novel about my life as a tormented teen in the Midwest in the 1950s. It was hailed in the English-speaking world because it was well written, at once a breakthrough thematically and an “instant classic.” The French couldn’t quite grasp the novelty or the importance of my accomplishment. After all, France was the country of Proust, André Gide, Jean Genet—all three among the most celebrated innovators of the twentieth century and all three writers who wrote quite openly about being gay: Gide’s journals and his memoir, If It Die, as well as his early novel The Immoralist; Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers and his four other novels; Proust’s entire oeuvre, in which so many of the men and women turn out to be homosexual. How could my slender volume compare to this massive achievement, which had preceded it by fifty, seventy, eighty years?
Nor did the French like the whole idea of “gay fiction,” though they’d invented it. France was opposed to the notion of identity politics and even more so to the literature of special interest groups. In France there was no black novel, no Jewish novel, certainly no gay novel. To be sure, Jews wrote about being Jewish but everyone, Jewish and gentile alike, regarded with horror the category of “the Jewish novel.”
If specific identities were rejected in France, it was in favor of “universalism,” a concept so dear to the Enlightenment and the Revolution, the ideal of the abstract citizen, stripped of all qualifications, equal to everyone else before the voting urn and the court of justice. In the arts it meant that the individual with all his quirks was thrown into high relief but the group he belonged to was pushed into the background. French schoolchildren in history class did not learn about Napoleon’s Corsican heritage, just as in literature class no one mentioned that Proust’s mother was Jewish (nor had Proust himself mentioned it). Proust made his narrator heterosexual and his family Catholic so that against this gold standard of propriety he could describe in detail his lesbians, his intergenerational gays, his gay sadists and rent boys, and more broadly the secret world of homosexuality that interpenetrates the visible world of class and age distinctions. His contemporaries congratulated Proust on his “courage” in exploring the twisted world of homosexuality, since he said nothing to enlighten them about his own orientation. The only trouble with universalism was that if it had been progressive originally, now it had become conservative.
Translation is always difficult. The lush metaphors of my Nocturnes for the King of Naples, so slippery in English, had to be sorted out in French. Time and again, of a figurative conceit I’d carefully crafted, I was told, “But you can’t mean both things in French.” Even the word “boy” (garçon) was suspect; it sounded too much like a waiter or a pedophile’s delight. That’s why A Boy’s Own Story was translated as Un jeune Américain. I wanted it to be called Signes de Piste (a 1930s collection of Boy Scout novels) or even Feu de Camp, but I don’t think any French person understood what I was getting at.
Not that the French were impervious to the allure of the exotic, but they preferred to locate the Other elsewhere. Within France they wanted everything to be uniform, starting with themselves. No wonder those French living in the capital resented the question, “Where are you from?”
“Paris, why do you ask? I’ve lived in Paris all my life.”
“And before that?”
“Marseilles. Surely you can’t hear the accent?”
“But is there anything I do differently from all other Parisians?”
“Of course not. You wear the same dark clothes and are just as skinny and murmur just as softly and take the same group tours to the same places like Vietnam or Anatolia or Egypt and have never toured France itself. You know the canals of Venice better than your own medieval monastery of Moissac or the chalets of Franche-Comté—though your grandparents still vacation close to home.”
Reassured, your friend smiles and says, “I still don’t understand.”
“In America, we’re proud of our regional and national differences. We say, ‘What are you?’ And the answer is ‘Irish’ or ‘Italian,’ though our ancestors came over from Galway in the 1840s. We say, ‘Where are you from?’ and the answer to that is, ‘Arkansas, my mother never wore shoes till she was ten,’ and we’re proud of this.”
Your interlocutor will then say, “In France we have no class differences in our way of speaking and only four slight, very slight, regional accents, impossible for a foreigner to detect.”
“The Provençal accent is easy enough, like when they say ‘vang’ for vin or ‘pang’ for pain.”
“But no one says ‘pang’!”
I can remember when Hector Bianciotti, an Argentine novelist living in Paris, interviewed me for a two-page piece in the Nouvel Observateur, a weekly left-of-center glossy that’s roughly equivalent to the weekend magazine of the English Guardian. He and I met in the downstairs bar at the Montalembert, a few doors from the offices of Gallimard, the premier publisher. With its brown velvet walls and heavy leather club chairs, the room had been a meeting place for writers since the time of Sartre and Beauvoir, who’d more famously also liked the Café Flore three blocks away. I had seen photos of Sartre taken here with his followers, including his handsome secretary Jean Cau. In another photo Jean Genet was being introduced to the author of La Bâtarde, Violette Leduc. She was upset that day because Genet said, “I’ve been enjoying your Asphyxie,” though the book was named L’Asphyxie and Genet’s way of saying the title suggested he was enjoying the feeling of moral and mental disarray in the work—or so she imagined in her hysterical, paranoid way. Like Genet, she was a fatherless child, as was their wealthy patron, Jacques Guérin—another “bastard.” (Ironically, later the three bastards would collaborate on a short black-and-white film, now lost, about a baptism in which Genet played the baby.)
Hector asked me a few random questions about my enfance dans le Ohio, but rather than tossing off a witty remark or two, I started giving a complete report: “…then, at age seven, I moved from Cincinnati to Evanston, Illinois.” At last I noticed the look of panic and even disdain crossing Hector’s face. “I don’t need to know all that. It’s just an article, not a hagiography!”
When the article appeared in print, it had several mistakes in it and my friend Gilles said,
“It’s of no importance. No one will remember. No one will even finish reading it.”
I mentioned that in America we had fact checkers and that we had to put red pencil dots over every statement after we’d verified it from three sources. Gilles merely waved a hand as if driving away an annoying insect. When I went on pointing out the mistakes, Gilles said, “My poor Ad.” He pronounced my name in what he believed was the usual American way, Ad. “I think you have no idea how important Hector is. He will probably win the Goncourt this year and soon he’ll be a member of the French Academy. He’s done you a tremendous honor.”
Hector had begun to write in French, not Spanish, only a few years previously. People said he was helped by his lover Angelo Rinaldi, a Corsican novelist and the extremely acerbic critic for L’Express. (Hector wrote one terrific book about his coming out in the Pampas, Le Pas si lent de l’amour.) In the years to come, Angelo would like every other book I wrote and hate the alternate ones. His vitriol in general won him lots of attention, since most French critics were routinely positive. An older writer explained to me that during the Vichy years of the Nazi occupation, right-wing critics had been so brutally nasty that ever since, the left-wing style had been pleasantly anodyne; the slightest reservation was read as a violent dismissal. Gilles had been right about Hector, who was invited to join the Academy, and a few years later so was Angelo. I would often see Angelo, always grimacing, each time his hair a color never encountered in nature, headed to his chambre d’assignation on the Île Saint-Louis, usually in the company of a teenager he’d met at a gym during wrestling practice.
I can’t remember how, but in some way Milan Kundera became aware of me. He wanted someone to translate two of his political essays from French (which he’d recently begun writing in, too) into English. I told him I could not even translate a French menu in restaurants—was confit de canard “duck preserved in its own fat”? And did a financier have something to do with cake or a pastry? Kundera said he didn’t want anyone too sophisticated. Sophistiqué had kept in French some of its original sense of sophistry, of an ingenious playing with words, and I took it that what Kundera hated was what Fowler in his Modern English Usage calls “elegant variation”—the pointless and confusing interchanging of near synonyms so that the reader thinks something new is being discussed.
At the time Kundera was very paranoid that the Czech equivalent of the KGB was trying to bump him off, so I had to buzz him precisely at noon, neither a minute before nor a minute later, and I’d be accompanied by his wife Vera up to the first landing of his rue Littré apartment. Then he would walk with me up the last flight of stairs. If he was famous as a wrestler, he must have been a featherweight, because he was very frail, though his pictures made him look big and powerful. He didn’t know English very well. He knew that about meant “more or less” but he didn’t know it was also a preposition, as in “about love.” We wrangled over many words in that way. His essays, as I recall, were about the spurious idea that Prague was closer culturally to Paris than to St. Petersburg. His own father had been a musician for Janáček in Brno, and I wanted to point out that Janáček had adopted a Russian play (Ostrovsky’s The Storm) in Kát’a Kabanová not a French one, but I didn’t dare. Yet he was very sweet and played a record for me of one of Janáček’s chamber works and gave me a running commentary on its secret plot: “Here he sees her again about to board the train.” His wife fed me a treasured Czech recipe which was so garlicky that the next day Marie-Claude wordlessly gave me chlorophyll gum and at the movies the couple in the row in front of us got up and took different seats when MC and I sat down behind them.
My early, brief moment of Parisian celebrity came and went. Afterward few people in France could place me but some gave troubled little smiles of recognition when my name was mentioned. “Mais bien sûr,” they whispered politely. This French system of making a fuss over whatever was new and then promptly forgetting it meant that many young innovators had their moment in the sun right away, without having to wait years as they would have to in America. But it also meant that new ideas—feminism, say, or gay liberation—weren’t revolutionary or very interesting, since they were treated as this year’s fad, no more, and quickly were cycled out of sight. In America an idea was accepted only after it was judged to be of real, lasting significance. Then it stuck around forever, especially if it became a department in American universities—gender studies or queer studies. If I’d introduce an American intellectual to French friends in the mid-1980s, and say, “She’s a leading feminist who’s queering the Renaissance,” they’d make a face and say, “Feminism. You mean that’s still being discussed in America? We had that here in the early seventies, but it’s hopelessly vétuste, démodé. No one ever mentions it. No more than any woman now would wear Berber jewelry or a tuxedo or a hoop skirt.”