Marie-Claude would invite new French novelists or philosophers of the moment to dinner, and these young men from the provinces, who now taught in Paris high schools and lived with women in the twentieth arrondissement, would appear intimidated but also puzzled and surprised by what they were encountering. Who was this aging American fag barely able to speak French? Here was this slender woman in her sixties—with her short pearly gray hair, the floating ecru and beige panels of her layered Japanese clothes, her lacquered red shoes, her ivory cigarette holder, her slightly weary graciousness—offering them some of her famous tapenade on toast (“famous” like all the rituals of this woman’s life, at least to the faithful). She was perhaps most famous for her low, smoky voice, though in fact it was someone else’s, Jeanne Moreau’s. On the phone MC was often mistaken for Jeanne Moreau and immediately put through, an error she relished. One of my naïve girlfriends from the gym thought Marie-Claude couldn’t possibly be French: “Is she English, German?” I wondered what sounded foreign—her timbre? Her articulation? Her slow speech? When she was diagnosed with cancer the first time she did consider giving up smoking, but her doctor assured her that stopping would be too much of a shock to her system. (Another friend thought not smoking might destroy her lovely, distinctive speaking voice.)
To me MC seemed completely continental. She even had a very European way of being tired. She would say, “But we’re all terribly tired. Everyone is worn out.” It wasn’t quite clear if she meant that the troubled politics of recent weeks had exhausted everyone, or whether in these impoverished latter days everyone we knew had to work like coal miners to stay afloat. I knew that if, in my empirical Anglo-Saxon way, I proffered these possibilities of what she meant by general weariness (since in English we craved examples), Marie-Claude would vaguely reject them, saying, “Non, c’est pas ça,” without elaborating on what she meant. “Everyone is terribly, terribly tired.” I found that the French rarely descended to the indignity of an example. They couldn’t think with them, and we couldn’t think without them.
For years Diane Johnson, the American novelist and author of Le Divorce, was my expat pal and coconspirator in noticing and simultaneously scorning and admiring French foibles. Researching her novels, which she increasingly set in Paris, Diane frequently consulted with MC about French manners and morals and expressions. Since the death of Mary McCarthy there had been surprisingly few American novelists living in Paris, where the dollar was becoming weaker and weaker against the franc. Younger American writers were living in Prague or Budapest and would soon enough be moving to the still more affordable capitals of Latvia or Lithuania. This push toward Eastern Europe seemed likely to be less fruitful, since even fewer Americans would ever learn Slavic or Baltic languages or Hungarian, and so would have less of a chance for a real intellectual exchange with the people of these countries. At least in the twenties and thirties a few of all the American artists living in Paris had learned French and were influenced by contemporary French painting and literature.
Now Americans didn’t like feeling intimidated by a superior culture but enjoyed dipping randomly into Czech or Hungarian cuisine, folklore, or even politics in a lightly condescending, neocolonial way before running back to their enclaves in bookstores and reading their copies of English-language newspapers and attending concerts by American or British music acts. That’s probably why so many young Americans scorned France and believed the French were rude or snooty; they weren’t used to dealing with their equals or their more intellectually and artistically refined counterparts in other languages. Whereas the English expats, mostly painters, I’d met on Crete intended to stay there if they could (their lives were better in Chania than they’d ever been in Liverpool), no American I knew intended to die outside the United States. We all assumed our culture was the best—since our disillusionment with our culture had not yet had time to set in.
David McConnell, an American novelist (The Silver Hearted), was one of the very few Americans I knew in Paris. He rented Dominique Nabokov’s apartment and, most generously, had a brief affair with me. (I say “generous” because he was young and beautiful, way out of my class.) But then he became besotted with a tough little garage mechanic—as who would not?—a guy with a motorcycle and a pretty face and an indeterminate sexuality. David was one of the few younger people among my countrymen who seemed to be as much a culture vulture as were those of my generation. And to retain a sparkling, eccentric sense of humor as well.
I’d interviewed Mary McCarthy, who was nice enough, a diplomat’s wife, but then she’d become very nasty because in my rapturous article about her I’d called her slipcovers “chintz” instead of “sprigged muslin” or something. She said I’d never be a successful writer because I paid no attention to details. She was always cross, as if permanently enduring a bad hangover (une gueule de bois, a “wood muzzle”); her American husband, Jim, deserved his reputation as “the nicest man in Paris.”
Diane Johnson was married to a noted American pulmonologist who tirelessly flew to Africa to treat AIDS victims with lung ailments, and she and I often laughed at Marie-Claude’s announcement, not infrequent, that everyone was exhausted.
“How could everyone be exhausted at the same time?” Diane asked, with her infectious laugh bubbling just below her speech and sometimes drowning it. “And besides, in America if we’re tired we take a nap, don’t we, or have a good night’s sleep, don’t we, and then we wake up refreshed, right? We don’t have this condition, do we, this existential condition of being weary? At least I never heard of it back in Illinois.” And yet it seemed like an odd peccadillo of Marie-Claude’s until I read in Zeldin’s The French that most French people claimed to be exhausted.
If we laughed at two or three of Marie-Claude’s foibles, we did so because we adored her otherwise: she was our point man for understanding all things French. In her novels Le Divorce, Le Mariage, and L’Affaire, Diane dealt with the sometimes calamitous encounter between French and American laws, customs, and attitudes. And language. MC understood all these fine points of her own culture partly because she was a French-born Jew who had been raised in Mexico. She knew every out-of-the-way French expression and took a connoisseur’s delight in them. Her father, a watchmaker named Bloch, had had the means and the wit to move his entire Jewish family—his wife, his two daughters, his mother-in-law, and her sister—from France in 1941 to Mexico City, where the girls were enrolled in French schools. There the whole family survived the war, and there MC had not only learned Spanish but “American.” She’d met American soldiers and dated them, on the sly, when she was just fifteen or sixteen, learning their slang. She made some little mistakes in English but was so at ease in all three of her languages that if I complained I was tired and couldn’t go on speaking French anymore she’d blink and say, “But I thought we were speaking English. Sorry.”
Finally, after I’d been in France for a year and a half, she and I began switching from one language to the other without transition, and in midsentence. Harry Mathews, who had lived in France since the 1950s, would get irritated with us. “Either French or English, not both, please. If you keep that up, Ed, you’ll lose your English—without gaining French.” Somehow “gaining French,” didn’t sound right and he walked off with a quizzical expression on his face.
Harry lived with the French writer Marie Chaix, and they translated each other’s books. My American friends and I were always testing each other: “Would you say that in English?”
I began to claim that trying to understand all those intellectuals with their qualifications and parentheses had made me appreciate simple declarative sentences of the subject-verb-object variety. The second book I wrote while living in France, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, was my most American, the leanest, cleanest prose I’d ever written, and without a single French expression in it. It was my sequel to A Boy’s Own Story. Thanks to Roditi’s warning, my career was back on track again. There were constant pitfalls in shifting from French to English. For instance, the French would say, “We passed a very funny evening with her,” when they meant a fun evening—they’d spent a fun evening. Or they’d say, “He’s an excellent cooker,” which to some English-language ears makes the subject sound like a stove. Or they’d say, “I know her since forever.” There were lots of faux amis going back and forth. Malicieux means sly, not “malicious.” Actuel in French means “present” and isn’t used in our sense of “actual”; Henry James—who’d been educated in French—would refer to “the actual president of the United States.”
At her dinner parties Marie-Claude’s husband, Laurent, would sit at the table with a look of terminal boredom. As the French would say, “Il est empaillé dans le coin.” (“He’s stuffed in the corner,” as a taxidermist’s bear or antelope is stuffed.) Laurent made no attempt to hide it. His boredom was a form of narcolepsy he was always about to sink into. An onlooker might have guessed he was the one who didn’t understand French, for after all it’s impossible to look alert for long if no message is getting through. On his own, Laurent was a lively, playful, gentle man who liked to joke and whose eyes danced with merriment as he clowned around. He loved being a teaser. But at MC’s state dinners, he appeared no more engaged than Prince Philip at royal events and a good deal less willing to go through the motions. He was very, very slender and carried not an extra ounce of fat on his body. Though he was already in his sixties when I met him, he was still taking yoga classes every morning. He and Harry Mathews both wore vests sewn with large pockets for pens and pencils that they bought at Hollington, a store near the Odéon. The vests were very well made, built to last, in a plain durable-looking fabric with subdued colors—artisan chic, you might have said. Laurent had a narrow, tall, Gothic face lengthened further by his bald head. Even his baldness, like Nabokov’s, was distinguished, as if an excess of genetic refinement had banished everything hirsute. His unusual last name, de Brunhoff, with the aristocratic particule, could be traced back to Swedish ancestors; one of his female antecedents had been a Swedish king’s mistress, although Laurent scoffed at such a claim and waved an impatient hand at it. I can still picture a nearly extinct Laurent, gray with ennui, wedged behind the round table between two vociferous, gesticulating writers. No one ever asked him anything other than to pass the grated cheese.
Marie-Claude’s apartment was large by Paris standards but small by those of any other city. She had four modest-sized rooms. One in the back was her daughter Anne’s bedroom, a space I never saw even by accident in my twenty-five years of visiting there. The other one in the back was Laurent’s studio. The two larger rooms in the front were the “public” rooms. The sitting room/dining room had two couches forming an L, big, sunny French doors surrounded by plants and looking down on the boulevard St. Germain, and lots of exquisite shells and carved objects on the white marble mantel above the fireplace. On one wall was a small painting of a curious little man in an improbable flying machine and another small painting of superimposed tinted papers that looked Japanese and had, in fact, been bought at a Japanese art gallery on the place des Vosges. Marie-Claude loved the Japanese aesthetic and for years had studied the language. She had a computer that gave her Japanese and Chinese characters. She was friendly with Madame Tsushima, the daughter of the Japanese novelist Osamu Dazai (No Longer Human) and with the man who’d translated a part of The Tale of Genji into French. There were very few things here or in her perfect little summerhouse on the Île de Ré off the Atlantic coast, but each felt talismanic. I gave her a few expensive gifts that seemed to me to conform to her taste but after presenting them to her I’d never see them again.
Whenever I went to MC’s in Paris for dinner (and I went hundreds of times), everything followed a ritual. I arrived at eight thirty and she was impeccably dressed in one of her pale, flowing skirts and layered tops, her body lightly perfumed with honeysuckle, always the same. When a woman always wears the same perfume, she does so to please the people around her, not herself. Honeysuckle, say, is her “brand,” whereas on her own she might like to vary her scents. Because I arrived before everyone else, she usually invited me to go upstairs to her tiny studio in a maid’s room to visit her latest Cornell-type boxes, though it was impolitic to mention Cornell to her, and there I could see what use she’d made of the model pillars I’d brought back from the gift shop of the Roman forum, the Fatima hand from Cairo, the tin ex-voto of a soldier in World War I uniform, or the one of a man on crutches I’d found in Crete. She decided to call her boxes théâtres immobiles in an upcoming gallery show for which I wrote the catalog essay (pretending to be Cocteau so I could turn out the glib, poetic words). Later René de Ceccatty wrote the brilliant preface to a book full of fantasias on her boxes composed by dozens of French, English, and American authors, including Richard Ford, a dear friend, and David Lodge.
Downstairs the other guests had started arriving and MC would serve them red wine—the French never seemed to drink anything else—and homemade tapenade on little squares of toast. Around ten o’clock, her shy, mannish, but beautiful daughter, Anne, would come in and help MC pull the round table out from the wall, remove the towering flower arrangement, and set the table.
The meal began with traditional bourgeois fare like a beet salad or stewed leeks or eggs cooked in red wine. But the second course was often a horrible surprise—one of Marie-Claude’s famous inventions like chicken in a peanut butter and crème fraîche sauce, which she called à la circasienne for some reason. Whereas she was an unreservedly excellent cook in her house on the Ile-de-Ré, simple fresh fish and fresh salads and vegetables and fruits, in Paris she could be too “original,” in the foreboding French sense of that word. Of course the wines flowed freely for everyone but me, and in any event people were too busy competing for airtime to notice what they were eating.
MC might have some of her English-speaking friends, such as James Salter’s daughter, Nina, who was a book editor, or Diane Johnson and her husband. Diane was an animated, observant, kind woman. Her husband, John Murray, as tall as she was short, would fall asleep when the conversation wandered too far from his interests, yet he was a deeply compassionate man who visited our mutual friends hospitalized with AIDS; I know that Gilles Barbedette was comforted whenever John came to his sickbed. John had been decorated by the French government for providing free treatment to patients with AIDS-related TB in Africa. He and Diane collaborated on one of the first articles published about AIDS in the United States, in the New York Review of Books. Diane was as vivacious as her husband was reserved.
Often MC tried to mix people who didn’t know each other. She wasn’t the sort of managing, aggressive hostess who can draw people out and chatter confidently. She was really very shy except with close friends, so there were many silences (as the French say, “an angel is passing,” un ange passe). With friends, especially on the phone, she loved to recount every detail of her life, often styled as “battles” to protect the rights of the children—her attractive, middle-aged daughter and her son who stayed in endless conflict with his mother. To the degree that MC was a fashion plate and frivole, Anne was imposing in her khakis and Brooks Brothers men’s shirts. I’ve heard that since her mother’s death she is alert, cheerful, and gainfully employed. I’ve known several butch daughters who were cavaliers servants to their girlish, self-dramatizing mothers.
Laurent, Marie-Claude’s husband, had a brother named Thierry. Thierry had been a successful concert pianist, a piano teacher for society women, and the lover of the Mahler biographer Henry-Louis de la Grange, who had inherited millions from his rich American mother. One day Thierry threw it all over and became a monk. Worried that he’d commit the sin of aestheticism, he chose an ugly, modern cement monastery, and only reluctantly did he accept his abbot’s moneymaking scheme of recording a monastery choir singing Gregorian chants. At the end of his two-year novitiate, Thierry’s abbot gave him a lawn party to celebrate taking holy orders, where every other guest was a duchess and her lunch companion a smelly, toothless monk.
Thierry in his zeal found monastic life too worldly and easy and he became a hermit in a cave in the Pyrenees. He was looked after by nuns in a nearby convent who prepared his austere meals. He rose at 4 A.M. and began the day kneeling on stone and praying for several hours.
From time to time, he would come to Paris for a few days to see his mother, a former piano teacher, his other brother the doctor, and then, MC and Anne. He stayed with MC. In Paris he wore normal clothes, often slacks, shirts, and a warm down jacket he’d bought at Le Vieux Campeur, the vast sportswear emporium. Thierry was cheerful and a good listener to MC’s rants about her battles to protect the worldwide Babar merchandising revenues from “La Dame”—Laurent’s new wife, Phyllis Rose. In France, by Napoleonic law, Laurent would not be able to disinherit his middle-aged “children,” but I pointed out to MC that now that her ex-husband was an American citizen living in America, he could leave everything to his cat if he wanted to.
MC went on red alert when La Dame dared to write a book in which she mentioned her friendship with Thierry the monk. “Oh no, this time she’s gone too far. Her book will never be published in France, I’ll make sure of it.”
Since Phyllis’s book was titled The Year of Reading Proust, I assured MC that it might not be translated anyway, since the French already had thousands of books about reading Proust, but it was important for MC and her amour propre to believe that she was powerful enough to thwart a French publication. Thierry just seemed bemused by the whole affair.
After dinner, her guests might leave directly from the table, full of promises to see each other very soon—or else retire to the adjoining library (secretly MC’s bedroom, but for guests her second salon, the bed camouflaged by a red cover and a heap of black and gold pillows). There, people half-reclined and drank an herbal tea, a tisane—MC prided herself on the tilleul-menthe, a lime flower–mint blend she bought at a monastery shop on the rue Pont Louis-Philippe—and I wondered if I had to stay till the very end as a sort of man of the house.
Many French people were difficult conversationalists. Asking them not only where they were originally from but what they did in life was considered rude—I suppose because many of them did nothing (many Parisians are rentiers, people who live off the rents of their properties) or because they weren’t proud of their jobs, which simultaneously supported and interfered with their intellectual and artistic passions. That did away with the top two American conversation openers. Americans aren’t usually quite so paranoid, but the French are constantly alert to the possibility of a real or imagined slight. And being able to put someone down, even a complete stranger, is considered an admirable gift. That leaves the movies as a safe topic. A chatty but pointless anecdote designed to fill a silence (“And so we got completely lost around Vendôme”) can elicit an “Et alors?”—which, depending on how it’s pronounced, can mean “Then what?” or “So what?” or “Why are you telling me this?” Whereas Americans like to match anecdotes, the French at least try to make a general point. All the stories in Proust move from the specific to the general. Not only are the French, who are so protective of their families’ reputations, mystified by childhood horror stories and confessions, they’d rather tell the kind of salacious sex stories that shock Americans—and, interestingly, the more sophisticated and international French people are, the more raw their stories can seem. Only strictly Catholic and royalist families are reduced to discussing the weather in great detail. It’s a sign of “Parisianisme” to talk dirty—and it’s proof that no matter how titled and aristocratic you are, in the 1960s you mounted the barricades and joined the student protests, too. Even the most resplendent countess can talk slang like a sailor (“Ça me fait chier!”: literally meaning “That makes me shit,” a not necessarily racy way of saying, “How annoying!”). Or a bejeweled hostess might say something is con, literally “cunt” but figuratively “stupid.” A child who is shy and won’t come out to meet guests is called, half admiringly, sauvage—which means “shy,” but literally, of course, “wild” or “savage.” I once heard a very presentable French mother speaking faulty English and shocking the matrons of Houston: “My daughter is wild, very wild,” when the girl refused to curtsy. On the other hand French children are brought up to kiss all the guests good night, even complete strangers—a touching, delicious custom when the child is a pretty, freshly bathed little girl.
While English speakers feel some team effort is necessary to keep a conversation going, the French don’t mind if it founders completely. With friends they might make an effort but not with relative strangers, in case their loquaciousness might give some covertly hostile person the upper hand. Information can be used as a weapon and hostility is the default position. And too much laughing or whooping is considered vulgar.
All of which is not to say the French aren’t good conversationalists. After all, they invented the art of conversation, and when someone has a good, scurrilous, fairly shocking story to tell (usually involving someone else), everyone is amused and the rejoinders are fast and clever. I read once that Americans talk about money so they won’t have to talk about sex, whereas the French talk about sex so they won’t have to talk about money. Milan Kundera and Italo Calvino both treasured “lightness” in writing; I wonder if they would have esteemed it so much if they hadn’t both lived in Paris. Long-winded explanations are deemed pointless and embarrassing and are abhorred; when I used to hold forth, Gilles Barbedette would say, in English, “Thanks, Teach.” In New York, I was used to drawing people out on their areas of expertise, which of course was flattering to the person being quizzed and informative to the other guests. But in general the French resist personal disquisitions and resent pointed questions. Americans think it is polite to grill a stranger; the French think of it as an invasion and an affront. Because I was an American and, after all, a writer, the French would gamely answer my questions—mistaking my politeness for professional, Balzacian curiosity.
Proud Marie-Claude boasted that she’d never consulted a recipe, and every cookbook she received she disdainfully handed over to me, marveling that I could be bothered with them at all. (And yet she wanted to collaborate with me on a cookbook; I pointed out that successful chefs all had TV shows.) The best course was the cheese and we all tucked in, able at last to identify what we were eating. The dessert was often a cherry clafoutis, the custard dried out and cracking, the cherries unstoned and burnt on top.
No matter. The conversation was lively as long as MC remembered to pose constant if oblique questions of the stiff young high school teachers in their suits of green Socialist corduroy and their manners which switched, exactly on the third drink, from nervous, tight-lipped petit-bourgeois propriety to a “Normale Sup” style—referring to the École Normale Supérieure (the teachers’ school which both Sartre and Beauvoir attended)—of table thumping. You could feel a nearly geographical transition from Sunday dinner with their families in the suburbs to a smoky Left Bank café. Usually she wouldn’t invite the wife or girlfriend of the new true genius, but if MC was talked into it the young woman was even more paralyzed with fear than her lover by all these rich bohemian ways—the presence of all these foreign writers, the ghastly cold chicken the young woman tried to hide under her lettuce leaves, the robotic entrances and exits of MC’s daughter, the oddly flirtatious manners of a celebrated French novelist with his ironic smile and monk’s tonsure and his internationally acclaimed wife (MC’s top-shelf, blue-chip acquaintances and summer neighbors in Ré, the novelist Philippe Sollers and Julia Kristeva, the famous philosopher and scholar).
Of course I spent a lot of time alone in Paris. Most foreigners write about having been unbearably lonely in Paris. I wasn’t, thanks to MC and Gilles Barbedette, both of whom I’d met in the States, after all. True, I seemed to have more free time in Paris than in New York. Someone said that if you’re depressed in Paris, all you have to do is go outdoors and your spirits will be raised immediately. For me the transition felt more as if someone were lifting the lid and enabling me to float. I wandered idly, like a cloud, looking at the used books in the stalls along the Seine, the bouquinistes. Paris was full of things an older person likes—books, food, museums. Years later when an American complained of Paris I said, “I like it. To me it seems so calm after New York. As if I’d already died and gone to heaven. It’s like living inside a pearl.”
Near me, just across the street from the Tour d’Argent and down toward the pont Sully, there was a bouquiniste who sold biographies and novels of quality. The biggest star of the bookstalls seemed to be the once popular but now ignored collaborationist Paul Morand. My ability to read French was improving week by week since I looked up so many words. Most of my day was spent on the couch reading and looking up words and listening to the rain. Strange to say, but soon my vocabulary was better than that of most of my French friends; I amused them with my growing vocabulary of far-fetched words. Mind you, at the same time I often didn’t understand common expressions that used ordinary words in normal ways. “Tu m’en veux?” a friend asked—which literally meant, “Do you want me of it?” but colloquially signified, “Do you hold it against me?” It’s an ordinary expression. Marie-Claude gave me dictionaries of odd and picturesque French words. She herself was a bottomless repository of them.
I liked to wander the streets and sit in the Café Flore and for lunch order toast and a slab of fois gras and a salad; or go to the Village Voice English-language bookstore and check out the new titles and chat with the proprietor, Odile Hélier; or stop by my favorite French bookstore, La Hune, next to the Flore, and sort through the new philosophy works or the new French novels, all of them arranged on long tables. In America I’d never kept up with what was recently published, but in Paris I did. Partly because books seemed the mildest, most manageable entry point for French culture at large. Partly because everyone around me here felt it was important to keep up.
Here I was in my early forties starting out all over again. In New York I’d been shabbily dressed, but in Paris I became more and more smart. I shaved my mustache, which I’d worn for the previous ten years as an emblem of the gay clone. Overnight the French gays had shaved theirs off and my few gay friends mocked me for still having one. I didn’t invest any importance in any aspect of my appearance, and off it went. I wore bright silk pocket squares. I bought suits from Hugo Boss and Kenzo and even Yamamoto and ties from Proust’s favorite, Charvet, and Church shoes. I tried out different colognes and changed my scent every two or three months. For a while, it was Blenheim Bouquet by Penhaligon’s, then finally I settled on Bois du Portugal by Creed, which I still wear. The idea of donning dress-up clothes every day and shaving and perfuming myself before going out would have been unthinkable in my roach-trap one-room apartment in the West Village. There I wore a leather bomber jacket, ripped jeans commando style, and T-shirts, no scent at all; cologne would have struck New York gay guys as effeminate, and some gay bars banned customers from wearing it or even scented deodorant. I’d seldom worn underpants under my jeans. Mostly I never noticed what I was wearing, though I had my hair expensively cut and kept my teeth as white as possible. When one of my old gay friends in New York passed me on the stairs, he got a whiff of my “sissy” cologne and grumbled, “Cologne! What’s happened to you? Paris has ruined you. You’ve gone completely Cage aux Folles.” In Paris, I worried over how I looked and what I ate, and I went to the latest movies and operas, though I liked French theater no more than American. Nevertheless, I thought of myself as a “cultural reporter” and I felt obliged to attend plays directed by Antoine Vitez and to take Marie-Claude to Racine’s Britannicus at the Comédie Française, directed by Klaus Michael Grüber, possibly the first German ever to work in that temple to French drama. Grüber had the actors crowd downstage toward the footlights and whisper their Racinian alexandrines with their arms around each other’s shoulders. It was a very effective way of bringing out the beauty of the language. They looked like the statue of the conspirators outside San Marco in Venice.
To be honest, I loved to go to the theater in London but felt that most French stage actors shouted and that the plays were either classics served up with a bizarre new visual interpretation or adaptations from works of prose by writers such as Kafka or Musil. Jeanne Moreau appeared in a one-woman adaptation of The Servant Zerline, a Musil novella. People said that she’d only recently become sober after years of excessive drinking and she was doing this demanding role to prove how thoroughly she’d dried out. I’d seen Moreau appear not long before in a French version of La Celestina, the Spanish Renaissance classic about a prostitute and her madam, and her performance had been impeccable. For Vogue I’d phoned her to ask her to write an homage to François Truffaut, who’d just died, and within twenty-four hours she had turned in a brilliant reminiscence in English—her mother’s language.
I became friendly with Jean-Marie Besset, a playwright and director who lived half the year in New York. He was always charming if a bit too world-weary, too exhaustively social (a phenomenon the French called “M’as tu vu?” which means “Did you see me?”). Jean-Marie was from a village in the south called Limoux, where he staged a season of plays and where they produced a sparkling white wine they weren’t permitted, for jealous geographical legal reasons, to call champagne. And for some reason the French didn’t think of champagne as a “real drink.” Friends who knew I was a reformed alcoholic still offered it to me. “What? Not even a little glass of champagne?” The French, otherwise, were more polite than Americans about not pushing alcohol, maybe thinking I was on a “cure” for my liver—a common occasional privation for the highly disciplined French.
I had lots of sex in Paris. Like everyone.
In mixed company, a French friend used to begin sentences with “My grandmother’s lover …,” not a phrase one often heard in America.
I had an American woman friend who had come to Paris with her nice but nerdy husband, and when they returned to America a little while later she wept bitter tears. She was forty-something and had a beautiful body but an unremarkable face, and in Paris she had tons of sexual adventures while her husband was off at work. In America, no one on the street would ever look at her.
I’d meet actresses at dinner parties, since Parisian hostesses felt they should mix and match their guests—a novelist, a general, a judge, a movie star, a decorator. Early on I became friendly with Nathalie Prouvost, a rich woman who entertained frequently in her little house in the courtyard of a great apartment building, first one on the rue de Verneuil and later another a block away in the building where Lacan and Bataille had lived. Nathalie introduced me to Jean Clausel, who did something in the department of honors, and who Nathalie relentlessly petitioned until the department made me a knight and later a commander of the French order of arts and letters—a rank I shared with Sylvester Stallone.
Nathalie had Asian servants who crept silently and expertly among the diners. That was the moment when many hostesses decided it was more intime for everyone to sit together and eat in the kitchen—an enormous kitchen that had been entirely refurbished at great expense—which meant that we ate a lot of cold meals, given the French horror of the smell of cooking food. “Ça sent la graisse?” an insecure hostess would inquire. “Does it smell like grease in here?” I’d try to assure MC that Americans liked cooking smells, which we found cozy and inviting, but I read that the French had always detested the odor of food, and that in fact the first French Rothschild, James, in the mid-nineteenth century had built an underground train to bring the cooked dishes from the distant kitchen to the dining room at his estate of Château de Ferrières.
Eventually, Nathalie eschewed the kitchen in favor of her dining room. She’d decorated all her rooms in the Gustavian style of eighteenth-century Sweden—which meant cabriole legs and fine carpentry but no gilt or velvet, and pastel colors and white slipcovers and pale silks and wood that had been “antiqued” nearly white. There was something summery and cool about her salon, with ceiling-high glass doors on two sides and more rustic, countrified Swedish versions of French ormolu. The slipcovers of shot silk matched the curtains perfectly. I brought an English friend to meet Nathalie and later he asked me, “Who’s your nouveau riche friend?” I said, “You only imagine she’s nouveau riche because everything in her house is sumptuous and new and matches. But her mother is a countess, Anne de Maigret, tracing her noble lineage back to 1367, and Nathalie herself was invited years ago to the Proust Ball where she had to dress like her great-grandmother—who was a model for one of Proust’s duchesses. She was in a salon scene in that Ornella Muti Proust movie, Swann in Love. And her son is married to the princesse de Polignac. Her own family, the Maigrets, are related to the Poniatowskis, the Gramonts, and the Clermont-Ferrand family.”
(I was reminded of that Frenchman who visited the Duchess of Devonshire and looked at her magnificent but heteroclite rooms at Chatsworth and commented, “The usual désordre anglais.”)
My friend made a face and said, “She acted in a movie?”
By now I was in a proprietorial rage.
“You don’t understand—the French don’t like your worn-out old antiques and threadbare carpets. They want everything to be new and to match, and what’s broken down is shunted off to a museum or the flea market. And no wonder French flea markets are the best in the world. They want what’s chic and they sell off their old furniture. Since France has been a rich country for a thousand years and always a slave to fashion, the puces are groaning with fine furniture of even the recent past. What’s chic right now is a black-and-chrome kitchen and a salon in the manner of Gustavus.”
All of which is to explain why the English often break out in hives in France. When faced with a formal garden or the severely pollarded trees along the Seine, my friend would exclaim, “This is frightful. Why can’t they just let nature be? Why must every last stick be tortured?”
Once an Englishman said to me in a near whisper, “Edmund, you live with them. You hear them. What do they say about us?”
I laughed and said, “They never ever talk about you except when they’re making a trip to London for everything that’s what they call terribly British—and they say it in English: ‘terribly British.’ They want Peel shoes, and Turnbull & Asser shirts, and hats from Lock’s.”
I became so Gallicized that I couldn’t even understand the point of one English billboard that pictured a despised tiny “nouvelle cuisine” meal as opposed to a hearty English dish. To me the French serving size seemed much more reasonable and appetizing. And I admired the French emphasis in cuisine on presentation. The only thing that puzzled me—after all, both my parents were Texans—was the chilly reception one would get in a three-star restaurant which the ratings books would single out for its “accueil chalereux.” Really? A “warm welcome”? The French could seem rude. When you asked someone how he was doing, he couldn’t just say, “Fine,” but would cut immediately to a startlingly abrupt “Et vous?” (“And you?”) Of course, this whole worn-out, standard exchange was nothing but empty ritual, but one Americans liked to treat as sincere.
My English friend and I once stayed in a huge château that had long ago belonged to a king but had since become a hotel. On the extensive grounds, the plantings were in geometrical patterns, which, as we strolled through them, had Jonathan frothing at the mouth.
I said, “But your English landscape artists like Capability Brown didn’t exactly practice benign neglect. You’d have a ha-ha that was invisible from the house and separated the working pastures with the animals from the pleasure grounds, and the pleasure grounds, even though they looked natural, were carefully and expensively built with ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ ponds and hills that had to be either leveled or created, and had these different sections divided into vernal ‘rooms’ in which different flowers would bloom at different seasons. What could be more artificial?”
“Yes,” Jonathan sputtered, “but it all looked natural.”
I had first met Nathalie through Marie-Claude, who’d invited Nathalie to dinner with her lover, Marc Cholodenko, a novelist, screenwriter, and translator. Soon Marc was translating my own novels. Marc lived in a one-room apartment on the Left Bank, but he was usually to be found at Nathalie’s house. He told me once that I shouldn’t have bothered to bring a certain champagne since Nathalie owned the vineyard. He was handsome, with curly blond hair, pale blue eyes, and a well-knit body. His passion was polo and he owned two ponies, which consumed everything he earned. His best friend was a friendly, charming young duke who was Marc’s age and had drawn Marc into the costly, glamorous world of polo. Marc’s other passion, also expensive, was bespoke clothes from Savile Row. Since I usually went to London every six or eight weeks, he’d use me as a courier to carry his jackets from his Paris tailor (who’d marked the places where they didn’t fit in soap) to his English tailor on the side street behind the Burlington Arcade, and from there to Paris again—back and forth through a series of adjustments. After the jackets and trousers had gone through several fittings, they were at last ready to be worn. To me the finished product looked pinched, although I had nothing to compare them to. The only other person I’d known to wear bespoke clothes was my father, who’d gotten his in Cincinnati.
Marc wasn’t very tall, but he held himself erect and wrapped himself in his tight tweeds and struck graceful attitudes. He was friendly, if not very warm; finally I figured out that he didn’t want to appear anything beyond pleasant and cool. I’d read descriptions in nineteenth-century French novels about young French aristocrats who held themselves aloof, looking down their noses at people with a certain morgue and mépris. At first, as the true son of my mother, the psychologist, I imagined that Marc must have been wounded as a child (he spoke with vague scorn of his father, a race-track tout). Or was he ashamed of being a Polish Jew among so many aristocrats? Nathalie confessed that Marc was like another son and resented her real son. Of course, Marc was above all a distinguished novelist, who’d won the Prix Goncourt for his Les États du désert and who titillated his many readers with his delicately erotic fiction. He was also a serious art lover and visited the Louvre at least once a week.
Eventually I saw that as a Jew Marc resembled Proust’s Swann or Proust himself, and just as Swann was the only Jewish member of the Jockey Club, Marc must have been among the few French Jews who played polo. When I mentioned Marc’s duke to MC, she sniffed, “Noblesse de l’Empire”—that is, a Napoleonic noble and therefore supposedly lower in rank than the nobility of the ancien régime. As a reader of Proust, I found these distinctions mildly interesting, but as an American I thought it was all a bit silly. It was hard to believe people took rank, origins, and tailoring so seriously. And I wasn’t sure MC truly understood the fine distinctions between the older nobility and the Napoleonic one. Marc once said to me, with his most innocent-seeming expression, “So you really like Marie-Claude? Surely you can see she’s extremely stupid.”
I was shocked. MC had been so generous to me, inviting me to her table at least once a week, introducing me to le tout Paris, gently correcting my mistakes in French (“You go chez le dentiste, not au dentiste. You never wish someone a good evening, une bonne soirée—it sounds so vulgar. And you offer someone a drink, you don’t buy them one like you do in America.”). She’d read thousands of books in her three languages. Her job was to write reports on new French books for Knopf and on American books for Gallimard. She could also read and speak Spanish.
Occasionally, like the rest of us, she made a mistake. She failed to see how inflammatory Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses would be in the Muslim world, although few people in the West did until the ayatollah pronounced the fatwa. I knew Rushdie, and he himself was surprised. He was attending Bruce Chatwin’s funeral with his wife, Marianne Wiggins, when the curse was suddenly cast. British secret service men accompanied the two to an armed vehicle and eventually to the first of many “bunkers,” and they began a life of constant migration from one hiding place to another. Eventually Marianne Wiggins left him and for the next several years we’d see Salman and his new wife, Elizabeth, at literary parties in London. We always knew he was in attendance as soon as we spotted the crew-cut, burly plainclothes security men guarding the door with wires in their ears.
Marie-Claude had never been educated beyond the lycée level, but then most middle-class girls her age had gone no further. MC had traveled extensively and with her good English would help guide Laurent on his promotional tours in the States. They’d be greeted in Minneapolis by a Babar parade, say, and when Neiman Marcus celebrated Paris Week they had Babar as the star—no Americans appreciate Paris more than the well-heeled culture-vulture women from Dallas and Houston; and indeed the open-minded, intellectually curious MC was friendly with Stanley Marcus and his daughter Wendy. MC was a collector of literary gossip, remembering every name and anecdote from the past four decades of Parisian commérages. I sometimes thought of Ezra Pound’s “Portrait d’une Femme” (“Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,” if that meant nothing ever sank out of sight but continued to float on the surface for all eternity. I’m a bit like that, and consider myself an archeologist of gossip). MC had strong instincts about people and wasn’t afraid to voice them. Sometimes she was completely wrong and would say, for example, of a completely lovely guy, “He’s a real Jesuit!”—meaning not to be trusted.
Above all, she had a great gift for friendship. She’d spend long hours on the phone with her ancient friend Kitty in Geneva, or with James Salter’s expat daughter Nina, or with her dear Peter and Amy Bernstein in New York, or with Koukla MacLehose in London—Marie-Claude had friends everywhere. Koukla was French but working as an agent in London; she’d developed an early, visionary interest in Scandinavian authors. Her husband Christopher was a Scot, and one of the last independent publishers in England, the head of Harvill Press, publishing many of the previously untranslated authors whose books (like the popular Scandinavian thrillers) are read in every corner and in every airport of the Anglophone world.
MC’s friendships encompassed as well the children of her friends, whom she’d quickly integrate into the ongoing drama of her life. Koukla’s tall, handsome son from an earlier French husband was a cinematographer who was dubbed by MC “The Grand Duke” for his patrician looks (the “title” stuck). The two shared friendly drinks and jokes and stories, and he was often incorporated into her dinner evenings. MC was always anxious to meet the Grand Duke’s latest girlfriend, or to discuss his fledgling career in the competitive and bustling Paris film industry. Her throaty Jeanne Moreau voice never changed register according to her interlocutor’s age—MC was at home with any and every drop-in. In later years, Benjamin Moser, a prodigious young literary critic from Texas (and the prizewinning author of a biography of the Ukrainian-born surrealist Clarice Lispector, who emigrated as a baby to Brazil and began writing in Portuguese), was one of her closest friends. Ben left New York, where he’d been working as an editorial assistant at Knopf, to live in the Netherlands with not one but two older men, one of them a famous author. Now he’s writing Susan Sontag’s biography. MC was never competitive with her friends, never valued them as mere contacts, always was fascinated by the details of their lives.
Many of the American literary people passing through Paris spent an evening or two with MC and me. Louise Erdrich—the author, most famously then, of The Beet Queen—had been my student in a literature seminar at Johns Hopkins; she would always be accompanied to dinner with us by her husband, the writer Michael Dorris. There was something noble and tragic about Louise, I thought. She was an Ojibway from Minnesota, tall and lithe, young and sweet, and she seemed very close to her husband, who was also a Native American. We’d eat out, then stroll back along the boulevard Saint-Germain to MC’s apartment. It always seemed to be cool out but not cold, a breeze was always blowing, and there was often a drizzle. Before meeting Louise, Michael had adopted as a single parent several “special needs” Native American children. Apparently one of his children had become so attached to an older retarded friend that when Louise and Michael decided to move the whole family to a ranch out West, the despairing boy had stepped in front of a car, preferring death to separation from his friend. Another time, while on a lonely book tour of America, I tried to phone them at their Minneapolis home but somehow suddenly couldn’t reach them. Later it turned out that they had changed their phone number because another of the adopted kids was now a grown man who’d begun threatening and stalking them. Paradoxically, Louise and Michael seemed not only tragic but also blessed. In Paris, they were always holding hands. They were young and attractive and gifted; they even wrote a few books together. And then we discovered how weak our powers of observation were, or conversely how hidden were the private lives of our friends. Louise accused Michael of having abused her daughters. Then it was revealed that Michael wasn’t an Indian at all but an Anglo posing as one. His supposed tribe had no record of him. And then the news came that he’d checked into a motel and killed himself.
Once MC and I had dinner after a reading with John Hawkes and his wife. Hawkes had just won a French literary prize for one of his recently translated novels, and I remember that MC and Hawkes were both gobbling their antipsychotic pills at the table. When I described the whole scene over the phone to her a while later, my mother said sagely, “If you’re looking for normal people, there are millions and millions of them out there.”
“Jack” Hawkes was a jolly, passionate man who approved of the extremes of desire in all its forms. He might have agreed with William Blake, who wrote, “Better to kill a baby in its crib than nurse an unacted desire.” Hawkes was one of the few novelists who actively admired me for writing about sex. He was a truly passionate zealot, like John Brown, say, but his zeal was for experimental fiction and the world of the senses. Although he was a true New Englander—born in Connecticut, educated at Harvard, a professor at Brown for thirty years—he was an anti-Puritan, though he brought the same glittering-eyed fanaticism to his radicalism. He told us that he seldom read but that once a year his wife would read out loud a masterpiece such as Moby-Dick and then he’d write his own version. (I loved his strange, twisted novels and wondered what classic had triggered my favorite, The Blood Oranges.) He arranged for me to replace him as a professor of creative writing at Brown.
I would stop by MC’s apartment late in the afternoon and she’d be in her bedroom. The big bed where she slept at night became her office by day. The bed was covered with a Chinese spread. The shelves along one wall were groaning under books, most of them old and in French, classics one might want to refer to. On the big desk and on the floor all around, under the desk, were piles of new books—the proofs she was reading and evaluating as a literary scout. MC would be propped up in the bed, smoking and drinking smoky Lapsang souchong tea.
This room, like the adjoining salon, was papered in gold squares that had dulled attractively and acquired a faintly green patina. Anne would be watering the dozens of plants; because she was obsessive-compulsive, she had to kneel beside the plants to make sure the moisture was seeping through, just as when she closed the front door, she had to stand and look at it for several minutes to make sure it was really closed.
Anne came once to pick up Marie-Claude from a party where most of the guests were arty lesbians, French and American, and they all swooned over Anne, whom they’d never seen before. It’s true that she was a handsome person, with a somber charm, lightened from time to time by a deadpan humor that could easily be missed. Older people, her mother’s age, who’d known her forever, were very fond of her; perhaps to them there was something eternal about the “young lady” of the house.
MC did all the shopping in lightning-fast visits to the open-air market over in the Place Maubert. I never went with her (I would have only slowed her down!) but I knew she had her speedy methods—she’d whisper to each merchant how much she wanted of each thing and then swoop back in five minutes to collect it and pay for it, unless she’d been allowed to a run a tab.
When I sat beside her in the afternoon sipping tea, I would often be privy to her phone conversations, which were as slow and thorough and repetitious as her shopping was swift. My own telephone style was brisk and terse when I couldn’t avoid talking on the phone altogether (I was really meant for instant messaging, though my fingers are too clumsy). I was amazed that MC immediately assumed that other people would be so interested in the details of her triumphs and defeats, which they were. She ended a conversation most often with the Italian words “Avanti, popolo!” (“Onward, people!”—the opening words of a Communist song, “La Bandiera Rossa”).
When her Scottish friend Suzy was going through a messy divorce, MC was capable of listening to the details for hours. Without espousing the language of feminism for a moment, she at least subscribed in silent practice to the idea that sisterhood is powerful. Her friends confided in her and were, in turn, treated to her confidences. I would have feared boring people with the minutiae of my life, although I knew as a novelist that a story becomes involving only once it takes on flesh. I recognized that in all the most exciting prose there was a constant pressure to describe, narrate, recount, and that the syntax was always buckling under the weight of squirming details.
MC’s sister, Thérèse, lived on the rue de la Grande Chaumière just off the boulevard du Montparnasse in an artist’s studio. Thérèse’s husband was a sculptor whose art consisted of stacking green squares of glass one upon another. Occasionally he had a show, and occasionally his dealer sold a piece. The government had bought a large piece for a rest stop on the autoroute not far from Paris. Thérèse had a daughter who taught yoga and a son who was a photographer, so MC worried about all of them. The husband was terribly melancholy about his lackluster career. As a journalist, I’d known many rich, famous artists. I understood, however, that most working artists in every country were poor and unrecognized, even in France.
MC’s mother was an amateur artist painting modest realistic scenes. MC owned one from their Mexican years, and I wondered if MC supported every family member to some extent. Until the death of her mother’s sister, both of the old women had lived on the aptly named rue de Paradis, seldom going out. MC’s mother shopped and cooked and waited on her sister, who was bedridden. MC could never specify what was wrong with her, who she said was “très, très malade.” Like MC, the two older women lived on homeopathic medicines, mysterious sugar pills that melted under their tongues, which specialist “physicians” administered. And although almost everything about the French health system was admirable—so many Italians headed for the great cancer hospital at Villejuif that the operators answered in Italian—there were a few things about it and the French public’s attitude toward disease that were maddening. It used to be, for example, that doctors and patients alike seldom pronounced the word “cancer.”