Dominique Nabokov and I went to Marseilles and interviewed and photographed everyone in that city. The centennial of Victor Hugo’s death was 1985 and Edmonde Charles-Roux, the talented and impeccable wife of the Socialist mayor, Gaston Defferre, who was also Mitterrand’s minister of the interior, organized a museum exhibition of works by Hugo’s descendants. Then she invited them all—and many friends and journalists—to a big banquet at a bookstore called Les Arcenaulx on the Old Port; the low-ceilinged store (now a restaurant) had originally been a naval warehouse built under Louis XIV. I was seated next to a ravishing, elegant blonde, the daughter of a senator. She pointed out her lover at the table of honor, a tall young descendant of Victor Hugo. I felt I was in a novel—seated with a duchess, the beautiful, middle-aged mistress of a Hugo boy.
After we had interviewed everyone and seen everything and spent thousands of Vogue’s dollars on meals and transportation, I said to Dominique, “There’s nothing here. No Vogue lady would ever want to come to Marseilles. It’s the French equivalent to Akron.” She was quick to agree with me. Marseilles, with its souk all up and down its main street, its frozen then nuked bouillabaisse served in cafés where diners were plagued by beggars, its mafia, its riffraff who joined the Foreign Legion (the office was next to our ugly modern hotel on the Old Port) instead of serving jail time, its hill of old neighborhoods so dangerous that the Nazis, after conquering the city, bombed it back into the Stone Age (the only example in history where the conquerors gave up on the captive city and reduced it to rubble)—this Marseilles struck us as irredeemable, though its partisans kept claiming there was a wonderful hidden Marseilles we hadn’t yet discovered.
Edmonde Charles-Roux was one of those perfect French older women who seem to have everything under control. She had worked for Coco Chanel and later written her biography. She’d directed French Vogue but parted ways in the sixties when Condé Nast had not permitted her to put a black model on the cover. She’d written a novel that had won the coveted Prix Goncourt, the equivalent to the American Pulitzer or the English Booker. And now she was married to the mayor of Marseilles. Years later, when I interviewed her about her unlikely friendship with Jean Genet, criminal and prostitute, she showed up on time for the meeting in an impeccable Chanel suit, well coiffed and perfectly manicured, her notes arranged so that she could give me the most information in the shortest possible time. While conducting the scores of interviews for the biography, I’d learned that other writers were the best—they remembered colorful details, used specific, nuanced descriptions, and avoided all the “marvelous” and “fabulous” talk. I couldn’t help but admire Madame Charles-Roux for her powers of organization and her resolve to do every job, no matter how minor, properly.
From my roost on the Île Saint-Louis, I’d often see the Rothschilds, in their eighties, tottering forth for yet another dinner party—beautifully dressed, slender, on time, impeccable. No wonder these people lived so long with their drive to perfection in everyday life.
Dominique Nabokov and I went to Lyons to interview Pina Bausch, who was one of the most original choreographers of our day and was about to bring her company to the States for the first time to dance at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Having appeared in films by Fellini and Almodóvar, she would later be the subject of Wim Wenders’s splendid 3-D Pina, shot immediately after her death from archival footage and new sessions with her company. But at the time, I’d never heard of her. We attended rehearsals for a week in a dreary, working-class neighborhood of Lyons before she agreed to see us.
Bausch liked to work with dancers of all ages, sizes, and nationalities. Her home base was the German industrial city of Wuppertal, where she was first hired to do ballets for the local opera company, though soon she’d formed her own troupe and was doing evening-length original dances. One of these we saw her revive was Café Müller, a recollection of her days growing up in her parents’ provincial hotel and restaurant.
The women were dressed in heels and dresses, their legs bare and muscular. The men were usually in suits and ties, looking like thirties gangsters. The music was often romantic, sentimental, German ballads or South American tangos. If the clothes and music were decorous, the dancing was violent and confrontational. Women slammed into walls self-destructively and men pulled them away and held them repeatedly. People ran and collided. Sounds and words were emitted, a break with the balletic rule of silence. The dancers were Asian or Mediterranean as well as blond and Germanic.
They were also rehearsing a new piece in which a young woman came out center stage, stopped, and said, “Bonjour, j’habite Paris,” what seemed like a thousand times. Bausch, who was seated in the audience, didn’t seem to give her any guidance. She just wanted this moment to be repeated again and again, as though this wearisome repetition itself would eventually wear itself down into the right dimensions. The dancer had a very pugnacious way of saying “J’habite,” almost as if she were saying, “I beat!”
One of the most interesting things about Bausch’s method was the way, one by one, she’d ask her dancers to show her what they did or said when they were anxious, thrilled, or frightened. She’d then take this intimate personal moment and assign it to another performer or to the rest of them, but not to the originator. It was sort of like method acting, in that the director was pulling out of the memory or private repertory of individuals their idiosyncratic expressions of deep feeling, except that the expression was more an action than anything verbal. Certainly repetition seemed to be crucial to her method, too. A man endlessly sets aright chairs that a woman keeps knocking over; a man extends the arms of a second man and drapes a nerveless woman over them, then the arms give way and dump her on the ground. The interactions often seemed nightmarish and transgressive, violations of decorum, and I couldn’t help noticing they were almost all hetero sexual. Rarely did two members of the same sex touch each other.
She liked to play with the elements of earth and water. In one piece, a woman repeatedly shovels dirt on another woman writing on the ground. In another piece the dancers scoop water into buckets, then drench each other. During rehearsals Pina said little, and then only in intimate hushed conferences with individuals. It was like a combination of exercise class and psychotherapy. Her main advice to her performers was “Dig deeper,” as if everything were coming from them, not from her. People compare Pina Bausch to Robert Wilson, but Wilson was never interested in the psychological makeup of his performers, only in stage pictures. They both favored small idiosyncratic hand gestures and beautiful sets, although Wilson’s were more beautiful and he designed the lighting as well.
After we waited around for a week in this dreary Lyons neighborhood, we were finally given a time to interview and photograph Pina Bausch: at midnight in a local café filled with noise and smoke. A gay male nanny with a ginger mustache, a German, brought her three-year-old son, Saloman, to her and she nursed him with her flat breast. She said the child’s name had come from a gay man who’d designed the sets for Café Müller, a man who’d died—while the kid’s biological father was just some transitory man she’d slept with. That sounded like the most German thing I’d heard in a while.
Of course, France had its own odd ducks, especially the writers I was meeting—a whole generation of poètes-maudits. One was Gabriel Matzneff, an outspoken pedophile who’d written a book called Less Than Sixteen (Les moins de seize ans) about his attraction to—and adventures with—boys and girls who were under sixteen. He was a bald man who had his gleaming scalp polished at Carita. He was a practicing Russian Orthodox believer. In 1985 I wrote a novel, Caracole, and he protested my use of this title in France since he had a 1969 pamphlet called La Caracole. My Paris editor immediately backed down, afraid of a lawsuit, and I chose the alternate title Le héros effarouché (The Startled Hero), from a Mallarmé poem I used as an epigraph: “Let me introduce myself into your story as the startled hero.”
Matzneff came from a White Russian family and started riding horses at age ten. He majored in classics and studied philosophy with Gilles Deleuze and Vladimir Jankélévitch. He became close to President Mitterrand, who wrote an article testifying to their friendship (imagine Bush or even Obama bearing witness to a friendship with an artist, much less a notorious pedophile). He was considered one of the most original writers of his generation, admired by Mauriac, Aragon, and Julian Green (who became a close friend).
As for his pedophilia, he explained that he was less attracted to males or females than he was to those under sixteen, who for him constituted a third sex. When he first presented these ideas, I think for French readers they had a classical, old-fashioned sound about them. After all, for years there had been a homophile publication in France, Arcadie, and André Gide, the Nobel Prize–winning author, had said he was not a homosexual but a boy lover. Loving boys sounded Greek, like something Plato or a bucolic poet might do. Matzneff admitted that sixteen was not an absolute cut-off age for women, although he said he would never have a central relationship with a boy over seventeen. He claimed that the two most sensual beings of his life were a girl of fifteen and a boy of twelve.
When I met Matzneff, he had just been accused of having sexual relations with retarded children at a facility called the Corral. The names of other intellectuals, such as Michel Foucault, René Schérer, and Félix Guattari, were wrongly dragged into the affair. All of the accusations against Matzneff were withdrawn—although seven of the educators at Corral eventually served prison sentences. A young man at Corral raped and murdered a patient there after he’d spent time in a psychiatric hospital. As everyone admitted, it was imprudent to have allowed him to stay at Corral.
Guy Hocquenghem was a killingly handsome young novelist who published a book about the Corral scandal defending his friends, called Les petits garcons (The Little Boys). Guy, whose curly hair and sharp features impressed everyone, usually wore a sardonic smile. He seemed fondly contemptuous of everyone. He and his friends were often stoned, and when I visited Guy in his Montmartre apartment, the air was thick with pot smoke. I’d first met him in New York when he was still in his mid-twenties, soon after he’d published his first book, Homosexual Desire (1972), which was surely one of the first works of queer theory, along with Dennis Altman’s Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation (1971).
Hocquenghem was usually with René Schérer, his high school philosophy teacher whom he’d started having an affair with when he was sixteen and Schérer was in his forties. Twenty years later, they were still close friends and they somewhat programmatically called themselves lovers. Schérer was yet another apologist for pedophilia. He was the younger brother of the filmmaker Éric Rohmer. When I knew Schérer, he’d been inculpated in the Corral affair and his career was destroyed. To be sure, in his writing, he’d advocated pedophilia as the point at which the loving adult—who was neither a parent nor an instructor—might help to “liberate” the child from the killing strictures of society and parental control. Schérer had been influenced by Félix Guattari, whose Anti-Oedipus (coauthored with Gilles Deleuze) marked an entire generation, and by Charles Fourier, the nineteenth-century utopian philosopher. He championed a closer look at Fourier’s previously unpublished Le nouveau monde amoureux (The New World of Loving), a text that advocated the free expression of everyone’s desires.
I met most of these people through Doug Ireland, an American leftist gay journalist I’d known for years. Altogether Doug lived in France a decade, but before that he’d managed Bella Abzug’s campaign, making her the first truly radical politician in Washington in years. Doug was a columnist for the Village Voice and later wrote in French for Libération. Doug was a big, smiley guy who’d contracted polio as a youngster because his parents were Christian Scientists and wouldn’t allow him to receive the Salk vaccine. When I knew him, he was still in pain and drank a lot. I’d first met him when I ran the New York Institute for the Humanities, a think tank at New York University that counted among its members Susan Sontag, Joseph Brodsky, and Derek Walcott. Doug raised quite a few eyebrows by living in his institute office and washing out his clothes in the bathroom. I think he also cooked on a hot plate. As a leftist critic of the Democratic Party during the Clinton years, he also wrote the widely syndicated “Clinton Watch” column, having been a member of the Dump Johnson movement in the sixties. Later, he began writing a blog called DIRELAND.
Doug, René Schérer, and Guy Hocquenghem were the core group of these evenings, though Matzneff was sometimes on hand. I think the Corral scandal spelled the end to a lot of the rhetoric of the seventies which had advocated liberation of all sorts and had conceptualized individuals as “desiring machines.” I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was witnessing a crisis not only in the careers of these men, once so influential, but also an end to a whole anti-psychiatry movement advocated by Guattari. Guy had also made a rather amateur movie called Race d’Ep, with his ex, the charming Lionel Soukaz, who is still alive. The title of their film could be translated as The Race of Faggots, since d’Ep was a sort of anagram of pédé, a pejorative for homosexual. (This kind of colloquial word reversal, trendy with young people, is called verlan, which itself is itself a near anagram of the word l’envers, or “inverse.” Verlan still constitutes a youth argot of amusing code words. For instance, women, femmes, are called meufs.)
The greatest pedophile writer was Tony Duvert, who lived a tormented country life in his mother’s house in Loir-et-Cher and was constantly in a struggle with poverty and the scorn of his neighbors. He wrote many books, notably in the seventies Journal of an Innocent, When Jonathan Died, and Atlantic Island. Duvert was published by Beckett’s publisher, Éditions de Minuit, often in very limited editions; his advocacy of pedophilia and his hostility to families made Jérome Lindon, the publisher, nervous. He was such a hermit that no one noticed when he died; his decomposed body was found in his house many days after his death in 2008. A biography of sorts, Tony Duvert: the Silent Child, came out two years later, written by Gilles Sebhan. I say “of sorts” since there were so many factual gaps in the story, often filled by sentimentalizing and generalizing.
The strangest writer I knew was Pierre Guyotat. He was a heavy, bald man who looked like the great god Baal. For a while Guyotat wrote in a language of his own invention that seemed to be composed mainly of consonants. Later, he returned to regular French, what he called “the normative language.” He wrote about such violent aspects of rape, torture, slavery, prostitution and homosexuality that for a long time his works were banned. When Mitterrand was elected in 1981, one of his first acts in office was to lift the ban on Guyotat’s Eden, Eden, Eden and to encourage Antoine Vitez’s staging at the magnificent Théâtre National de Chaillot of Guyotat’s Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers—a book about the Algerian war, in which Guyotat had participated as a soldier. When he deserted he was arrested by the French authorities. (The Chaillot would be the equivalent of the National Theater in London or the Kennedy Center in Washington.)
I first met Pierre Guyotat at the apartment of Gilles Barbedette. He was a heavy, sepulchral man with some but not much conversation whenever the subject strayed from him and his work. He had undergone an injury as obscure as Henry James’s; apparently he’d had a psychotic episode and lived in a trailer and failed to eat and had fallen into a coma. He’d written a book about it, Coma, and other books about other moments in his life, such as an adolescent visit to relatives in Scotland.
These more autobiographical books were beautiful and accessible, and again like the late-period James, Guyotat dictated them. From time to time he spoke ad lib. I once saw him onstage, seated, talking, while dancers whirled about him. He appeared for several days at the Centre Georges Pompidou. A hundred people attended every night. He sat enthroned on a stage with a microphone, his presence impressively basaltlike. He intoned phrases sometimes in French and sometimes in his made-up language. Often it sounded as if he were saying the French word for testicles (testicules). There was no clear idea how long this would go on, and I, who hate attending readings, was itchy but then settled into the experience, nearly mesmerized. Clearly he had been deeply traumatized by his own experience of the Algerian war—his visual memories of severed limbs, rape, violence of all sorts—to which, phantasmagorically, he’d added slavery. I’d known a few English-language writers in America (like William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, Samuel Delaney) who loved portraying violence and sexual cruelty for its own sake. But in France, land of Sade and Bataille, such extremes are more common.
Guyotat sometimes referred to himself in the third person and once sent me a postcard saying, “No one has done more for Guyotat this year than you.” Stephen Barber, the man who wrote my biography, Edmund White: The Burning World, and is interested in Antonin Artaud’s drawings, took care of Guyotat in England for a while until Stephen’s patience wore thin. Whatever other vices he may have, Guyotat is at least not a pedophile. In fact, someone in the know once told me, “Guyotat’s sexuality does not involve other people.”
The French still believe in the avant-garde and imagine that someone extreme must necessarily be the next good thing. By that way of thinking, Guyotat is the main literary embodiment of the avant-garde in France, though he seems to be haunted by his childhood, by his coma, and by the atrocities of war, and has sought only the most vivid, not the most experimental, way to explore these subjects.
Sometimes he is seen as an heir to Jean Genet, and once, during a staging of Genet’s The Balcony at the Odéon theater, we invited Guyotat to do one of his monologues before the play to a smaller audience. The stagehands said he had to end his “act” at least a half an hour before the play was due to start so they would have time to dress the stage. We told Guyotat this, but he replied, “Time is inscribed within the work—it is not exterior to it.” We prayed that time would be inscribed in time, and it was; just at the last moment, Guyotat left the stage, applauded mainly by his biographer, a charming, young woman.
Recently in New York, I hosted Guyotat for the Department of French at New York University. Guyotat, who is very shy but warm, said, “Please don’t ask me to read”; someone from the French embassy whispered to me, “Monsieur Guyotat doesn’t want to read”; then the first thing he did was to stand and read aloud in a completely incomprehensible English. Absurd as he can be, there is no doubt Guyotat is a genius, one of the truly remarkable people I’ve known in my life.
All of these French writers had the courage of their eccentricities: Marguerite Duras announced in Libération that she knew who’d killed “le petit Gregory”—a small-town boy who was the victim of a notoriously grisly unsolved murder. Duras had visited the house and intuited it was the mother, though no evidence to incriminate her was ever turned up and she was cleared in 1993. Duras was certain the woman had murdered her child because the garden was neglected.
We were far from America with its tenured creative writing profs, each blessed with a loving wife, many children, and a local church—men who spoke gravely about the Third World and once served in the Peace Corps. I remember a novella that Henry Miller once wrote called A Devil in Paradise, about his married happiness and his life in the Big Sur. All is disturbed when a prewar Parisian friend from his sexual heyday—a friend who is sickly and unhealthy in his values and attitudes and covered with sores—invites himself to stay with Miller and his family. Eventually, Miller has to ask the broken-down syphilitic, dirty and all dressed in black, to leave. Although the decision to oust the creep is a painful one, Miller realizes that his bohemian, transgressive days are over. So many of the pages of Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch symbolized for me the clash between healthy but bland America and the diseased but deep France.
Alain Robbe-Grillet was a friend of mine and I spoke at his memorial ceremony, along with Bernard-Henri Lévy and a dozen other people. With Nathalie Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet was one of the first proponents and practitioners of the New Novel. He’d written the most influential critical book of the era, For a New Novel, in which he’d commanded novelists to banish psychology and anthropomorphic metaphors—“The sea struggled with the sky”—in favor of very precise, almost scientific descriptions (he’d trained as an agronomist). Robbe-Grillet had written influential novels such as The Erasers and Jealousy (or maybe the French title, Jalousie, is better, since it also refers to the tropical louvered window, which is the same word in French). In Jealousy there is a famous “scientific” description of a banana stand, how many centimeters apart was each tree, etc. There was a major dispute at the time between those who said that the book was “objective,” as Robbe-Grillet himself claimed, or “subjective,” written from the jealous husband’s point of view. Today most of the people who still read the book take the subjective, psychological point of view.
I first met Robbe-Grillet in the early seventies at a cocktail party hosted by Tom Bishop, head of the French department at NYU and a great defender of the New Novelists. I went with Richard Howard, Robbe-Grillet’s translator, a close friend of mine at the time and of Susan Sontag, who dedicated her Against Interpretation to him. As Alice Kaplan has said in Dreaming in French, her book about the role Paris played in the lives of Jacqueline Kennedy, Sontag, and Angela Davis, during the sixties Susan and Richard were allies introducing French artists and intellectuals to America, she through her essays and he through his translations. At the party for Robbe-Grillet, Richard translated for me; in those days I couldn’t say a complete sentence in French and Robbe-Grillet, though he’d taught for years in the States, at least pretended he couldn’t speak English. Working at a cultural magazine then, I took it on myself to commission an article from him on Forty-second Street—a seedy strip in Manhattan of porn stores, hookers, and dirty movies and a place that excited his imagination.
Ten years before that I’d seen the film Last Year at Marienbad, which Robbe-Grillet had written for director Alain Resnais. I’d gone with my favorite English professor at the University of Michigan, Caesar Blake, a gay black man. I’d loved its stylish anomie, as formal as French topiary. Caesar said that he hadn’t quite been able to “isolate” its themes.
When I first met Robbe-Grillet I was surprised that he was always smiling and seemed to be taking a rueful pleasure in all the absurdities of American life. It was the same sort of smile I later recognized in Philippe Sollers, the editor of the influential journal Tel Quel, a smile that embraced everything ridiculous or aggressive and that seemed to be saying, “Bring it on!”
Years later, in the late nineties, after I’d returned from France to America, I was asked to dine with Robbe-Grillet and his wife after a colloque on Roland Barthes, who was discussed as if he were passé (news to me). Robbe-Grillet and his diminutive wife, Catherine, were invited with some of the NYU faculty to a local eatery where men played bocce ball in the back. It was an unusually warm spring night and the waiter had propped open the door. Suffering from the usual French fear of drafts, the fierce Catherine, who was reputed to be Jean de Berg, the sadomasochistic novelist, said to the waiter in French, “Close the door.”
“Oh, no, madame, it’s too warm—”
“Close the door, I said,” she repeated with a tone that could not be contradicted.
And he did.
I heard rumors that Catherine liked to torture fashionable couples from Paris in their Norman château-fort, complete with a dungeon. I asked my informant what role Robbe-Grillet played. “Well, he is the author of Le Voyeur.” Reputedly Catherine kept track in a diary of which tortures were administered to which victims, just as old-fashioned hostesses used to paste wine labels and inscribe the menu in a livre d’or beside her guests’ names so they wouldn’t be subjected to the same dishes twice.
After the disaster of 9/11, Catherine appeared in New York with the young humorous novelist Frédéric Beigbeder (he and several other alert French authors churned out their World Trade Center books before any Americans managed to). Catherine was complaining that all the S&M places in New York had been shut down by Mayor Giuliani and that tonight she would suffer the indignity of beating lesbians, of all things. Frédéric, who’d awarded me a literary prize at the film festival at Deauville, tried to console her. I said that on Twenty-third Street near Sixth there was a restaurant where slaves lapped water on all fours out of dog bowls.
“Gone,” she said mournfully. “Closed.”
I saw Robbe-Grillet at the medieval nunnery that the Institute Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine (IMEC) was redoing as a study center outside Caen. I’d heard that IMEC, though an archive dedicated to modern writers and editors, was building a greenhouse for Robbe-Grillet’s precious collection of cacti. He told me that the plural in French should be cactées and explained the etymology. For the privilege of taking care of the cactées, IMEC received all of Robbe-Grillet’s papers and the many, many films he shot.