Marie-Claude invited me to stay for two weeks in her summerhouse. It was a fisherman’s cottage on the Île de Ré, in a small village that smelled of the brackish sea. Her house was at the end of a tiny street just wide enough for one car, a street called the ruelle des Musiciens. A high wall around her house was pierced by a green-painted wood gate, inside which was not only the cottage but also, somewhat unusually, a garden (another house had been torn down to make room for the garden). The cottage had a large eat-in kitchen, quite modern, with big windows and French doors letting on to the garden. The kitchen flowed into the sitting room, where there were twin couches and a rattan chair, its back swelling like a cobra’s hood, drawn up beside the blackened fireplace. On every wall were curious pictures, suitable, I suppose, for the tastes of the whimsical artist of Babar. Upstairs there were three bedrooms, one of which had a double bed for the lady of the house, the other two tiny.
Everything smelled of the sea, and every morning Marie-Claude would dash off on her bicycle to do her courses, her shopping in the town market, which was covered and the size of a New York block. There, she would buy us the fish we would eat every night, broiled, the vegetables she’d make into a sumptuous ratatouille, and the tiny sardines that she’d decapitate, gut, and marinate and that we’d eat raw in olive oil and green peppercorns. Unpeeled potatoes she’d cook on top of the fire in a closed clay pot called a diable, which she’d rest on top of an asbestos pad over a low flame. That was a strange dish for the French, who normally are incapable of eating an unpeeled potato. They would dry up and shrink and become deliciously charred in the diable—we’d eat them with salt and pepper and lavish lashings of butter.
It was a house consecrated to peace, beauty, and reading. MC always brought home fresh flowers, especially sunflowers and the hollyhocks that grew wild outside the gate and on abandoned plots on the island. She would arrange her vased flowers in a still life composed of that day’s eggplant, tomatoes, purple-edged lettuce, and feathery fennel.
MC’s daughter, Anne, was in her element, too. She worked day and night in the garden. She was an accomplished photographer who had published a book of pictures of ornate tombstones in Italy. She had also taken the definitive photo of Georges Perec, with his wild, Einstein hair, from which the French government had made an honorary stamp. (Imagine if the States made a stamp with John Ashbery’s portrait, or if the UK made one of Ronald Firbank.)
Ré was the Hamptons of France. Because of high-speed trains, it was only three hours away from Paris. In my first days there, you had to take a ferryboat over to the island, but in the late eighties they built a bridge, which many people opposed because it made the island too accessible to hordes of day trippers. Luckily, MC’s village of Ars-en-Ré was farther out on the island than the larger, more popular scenic port of Saint-Martin-de-Ré. Ars had been a fishing village for the working poor, but now politicians (including a prime minister, Alain Juppé) mingled there with writers, film directors, and actresses.
In the center of the village stood a church that had a bumpy, tapering steeple, half black and half white for maximum contrast and visibility to those at sea. Around the church were the post office, a newsstand, a café, and a snack bar. Down by the harbor were a couple of good restaurants and a shop selling expensive nautical wear and equipment (such as a brass circular compass and cut-glass liqueur bottles set in a mahogany caddy that would always right itself even when the boat was severely listing to one side). And there were all the moored boats, of all sizes and kinds, and the dry docks, and beyond, an antiques shop. Marie-Claude and I would often go walking out on the long, earth-filled breakwaters.
By some magical fetishism, I sometimes think that if I dialed old phone numbers of friends, long since dead, they’d answer even if, in those days, there was one less digit in the number than now. By the same token, I think that if I flew to Paris and took the TGV to La Rochelle and a hundred-dollar taxi to Marie-Claude’s green door in its whitewashed wall, she’d be there, sitting in the garden, smoking, drinking good Lapsang souchong tea from a bumpy black metal teapot and a small glazed cup. She’d be in her rattan chaise longue, which she folded up at night and stored in the garden shed. There would be the pierced round metal picnic table painted a dull green and the matching hard-metal chairs under the fig tree (I understand why nudes are outfitted with fig leaves, which are enormous).
There was another building alongside the garden, a stone garage, with a bathroom attached to its side. The bathroom had the only shower, a toilet, and a large sink and vanity, as well as the washer-dryer. The whole setup reminded me of Junichiro Tanizaki’s essay “In Praise of Shadows,” which begins with a description of a Japanese bathroom (all shadows and dim shoji screens and pine branches and wooden fixtures) and compares it favorably to Western bathrooms with their surgically bright surfaces, all antiseptic metal and porcelain. This bathroom definitely seemed on the Japanese end of the spectrum. Even its smells were those of fresh herbs, Proust’s iris root, lavender soaps, Roger & Gallet Extra Vieille toilet water, and the ocean.
Upstairs, above the garage, was a large guest bedroom under the exposed beams with an unframed double bed on the floor covered with a nubby white fabric. A staircase dropped down and pulled up by rope-pulley. Double windows looked down on a small garden where every flowering plant was white. The room was full of lazy buzzing wasps and dead spiders immobilized in the center of sticky webs, white pebbles and gaudy shells brought back from the beach.
Late in the afternoon, in the summer, the sun didn’t go down till ten o’clock. MC and I would bike to the beach, walk through a pine forest, and cross the dunes onto what the French called une plage sauvage, to distinguish it from a manicured beach with cabanas, like those along the Riviera. The beaches of Ré are dotted every half mile or so with a massive series of concrete pillboxes built by the Nazis as a defense against a coastal Allied invasion. It would have taken a lot of dynamite to dislodge them from the dunes. The elements had tilted and shifted them and they’d become the make-out sites for teens, who’d left their empty booze bottles and used condoms on the uneven sandy floors; the walls inside and out were covered in graffiti.
The Atlantic coast, unlike the Mediterranean, is subject to major tides. The Atlantic-side beaches of Ré swoop gently toward the ocean floor and when the tide is out, miles of extra sand and rock are exposed, leaving pond-sized tidal pools and providing a happy hunting ground for gatherers of mussels and clams. At low tide, morning or evening, you can see bathers, bucket in hand, inspecting every uneven and algae-strewn stretch of wet sand for their supper.
Sometimes we’d go to a closer beach where there was a bar shack, and we’d have a drink before riding our bikes along the path on the top of a retaining wall. To get there, we’d have to bike through what the French call un camping, a vacation trailer camp that functions only in the warm weather. I suppose these camps, scattered throughout Ré, make it more democratic, as if the Hamptons on Long Island were host to many campgrounds; the poor in their trailers (what the French call caravans) were always present.
I’ve always suspected these French campings were witness to the hottest teenage sex in the country. While the parents from France and Germany and Holland reclined in plastic and aluminum chairs or cooked wieners on the portable grill, the adolescent girls and boys ran off together, excited by a sudden lack of supervision and the randy exoticism of all this freedom and all these nationalities. In fact, the now middle-aged French novelist Michel Houellebecq, author most famously of The Elementary Particles (Les particules élémentaires), and the great white hope of the French novel, has explored in the bitterest terms the laxity of his parents’ generation—the soixante-huitards (sixty-eighters), with their sun-battered faces, receding hairlines, and gray ponytails (whose tents and trailers you still see in campings all over France)—and he blames them for the moral fecklessness of his own generation. As Houellebecq recounts it, the campings were notorious wife-swapping (échangiste) venues—and at least as he’d like to tell it, the reason for so many divorces and fractured families and fucked-up offspring in France.
Many of MC’s Paris friends had substantial summer houses on the rue du Palais in Ars, and we’d sometimes drop in on them for a drink. Her best friend was also named Marie-Claude, and is now buried next to MC on the Île de Ré under white rosebushes, rather than in MC’s ghastly family crypt in the Montparnasse cemetery. Marie-Claude Dumoulin was an editor at Elle, her husband one at Lui, and their son one at L’Express. They were the most knowing family I’d ever met. There wasn’t a single vacation hotspot in Cambodia they hadn’t visited, a single new Romanian novelist they hadn’t read, a single nautical race anywhere in the world they hadn’t competed in, a single bid for power in the mayoral race of Clermont-Ferrand they hadn’t already investigated and profiled. Marie-Claude Dumoulin knew everything about clothes and home furnishings, her husband was a tireless sailor, and their son was a crack political reporter. Conversations seldom got off the ground before taking a nosedive, because the Moulins weren’t interested in ideas and were impatient with gossip. What they prized above all else was usable information, grist; but they all three already knew all about whatever subject you might mention.
Harry Mathews, who’s lived in France since the fifties, told me that in his opinion every nation shares the faults of all others, but each nation has developed one fault to an extravagant degree. The French fault, he said, was always wanting to be right. A French person will deny the proof of his senses and all the savants of the world and cling to the notion that the world is flat, if he or she started out with that view. Concomitant to that fault is a simultaneous impatience with—and hunger for—the new. Impatience because admitting that something is new to you is humbling, information that has not already been absorbed. Hunger because the only way to one-up friends and relatives is to know the new before they do. The easiest tactic is to dismiss a new bit of information from the outset as not worth knowing. I remember traveling to Istanbul with MC and a stylish young Parisian, Guillaume Bouvier. As we entered the Grand Bazaar, the vast covered market, with its hundreds of stalls, Guillaume said, “There’s nothing here. Let’s go,” and MC quickly concurred.
I exploded, “You’ve already dismissed the biggest bazaar in the world?”
I thought they might be right, as stand after stand sold the same aubergine-colored car coats and the same rubber tires, boxes of Tide and industrial dish towels. But then at the very center, within a locked cage, was an old mosque and the small jewelry district, with its antique brooches and rings and sand-blasted tea glasses from the 1940s—all the things we loved and would buy. Of course the French, like the Japanese, want their luxe to come from half a dozen brand names, such as Gucci or Hermès or Christofle, and it’s no wonder that ripped-off products, such as Chinese copies of Izod shirts, are confiscated by French customs officers and the offenders are arrested and fined.
The French will not admit not knowing something. The most that they’ll concede of their own ignorance is that they “no longer know it”: “Je ne sais plus.” At any museum exhibit in Paris, the biggest crowds aren’t looking at the paintings but standing in front of the explanatory plaque telling the history and provenance of the whole concept of the show. Here is where the know-it-all culture vultures are feeding themselves so they can overwhelm their friends who’ve not yet seen the exhibit. The United States is a fractured culture in which every subgroup has its own website and fanzine, and no two chapelles (as the French call small in-groups) can or want to communicate with each other. The gun hobbyists don’t want to know the antique doll collectors, who scorn collectors of black mammy cookie jars. But in France, there is still some sense of the collective, which is reinforced by this uniform “knowingness.”
Once the Dumoulins had heard about something or professed to know about it already, they immediately lost interest in hearing any more. Suddenly the subject had lost all of its savor.
On the Île de Ré, MC had her athletic side. She could swim vigorously for half an hour in the freezing Atlantic. She loved to bicycle long distances, through the fields beyond which the black and white church tower of Ars floated and shifted, like the twin Combray steeples in Proust endlessly playing with each other. Ré was famous for its salt farmers (usually old women), who would fill ditches with seawater, let it burn off in the sun, then rake the salt into piles; this is the salt that sells for twenty dollars a bottle at Zabar’s in New York or Hédiard in Paris. The utterly flat land, the huge, blue skies animated by soft white clouds lined in gray, the steeple dancing over the green fields, the Wordsworthian solitude of the lady salt farmer bent over in the drained ditch, the sun’s warmth on the back of one’s neck—these were some of the exhilarating elements of a bike ride to the next village. It might be Saint-Clément-des-Baleines (St. Clement of the Whales), the snobby Les Portes-en-Ré, or the “big-city” commune of Saint-Martin, with its handsome prison, which always makes me think of Manon’s deportation to Louisiana.
In the winter Ré was deserted. The summer population of two hundred thousand would dwindle to twenty thousand. It rarely snowed, but the air was briny and chilly. Thick fogs often descended over the garden. The shopkeepers seemed friendlier and less harried. MC bought me a cire, a green, knee-length, impermeable raincoat that had a hood. Since it didn’t breathe, I could work up a considerable sweat under it just by walking around. She and I would make a fire in the fireplace and settle in on our matching couches, sometimes with a matching book. I remember one year we were both reading Ishiguro’s nightmarish The Unconsoled. We’d look up every few pages and say, “The poor man is about to play a concert but he doesn’t know where he is or who all these people are.” Maybe we both loved the book because we were so happy being together, with no distractions beyond MC’s long international phone calls. She might talk to her daughter Anne back in Paris, who wanted to know details about fertilizers in the garden, and the window repair in the dining room. Or book talk with Ben Moser in Holland, living with an older gay literary couple. Ben—tall, intelligent as only a Texan can be, enthusiastic, young—was one of MC’s most devoted fans. He found everything about MC glamorous, fascinating, attachante.
May 1968, the moment when the students in Paris took to the streets and revolted against the stiff class consciousness of traditional, Gaullist France, still fired MC’s imagination. She often referred to the rapture of the whole city of young comrades (“Under the paving-stones, the beach!” had been a popular slogan). Despite or because of her age, she seemed to represent that romantic long-ago time. She had watched the skirmishes in the streets from the window of her elegant Boulevard-St-Germain apartment.
The intellectual Julia Kristeva and her husband, the novelist Philippe Sollers, spent the summers on the Île de Ré in a remote house on a peninsula that overlooked a huge empty bay. Julia and Philippe were a fascinating couple who had no equivalent in America. She wore big barbaric jewelry and designer clothes and was a feminist only in America, at Columbia, where she often taught. In France, she was way beyond anything so primitive as feminism (too seventies!). She was, among other things, a psychoanalyst—a job title that in France requires no special training or accreditation, nothing beyond hanging out a shingle and opening an office for business. She and Philippe were always up to date. If there was an exhibit dedicated to Vivant Denon, the artist whom Napoleon appointed the first director of the Louvre Museum, Philippe had already written a book about the subject. He’d also written about Watteau, Nietzsche, James Joyce (whose Finnegans Wake he had translated in part into French), Mozart, Casanova, De Kooning, Sade, Francis Ponge, and countless other writers and painters and thinkers. Italy and the eighteenth century were two topics he kept returning to. All the arts, including music, obsessed him. MC said that every September he went to Venice with a Belgian woman novelist, Dominique Rolin, his lover, twenty-three years older than he. MC found his constancy to her admirable. In fact, Rolin published an account of their love story, Thirty Years of Crazy Love (Trente ans d’amour fou), and in 2000, Philippe wrote Passion Fixe. Although he was always welcoming with me, I found his know-it-all attitude annoying. When Genet’s The Balcony was presented at the Odéon, he participated in a colloque. Sollers’s stance was that he alone had actually read Genet and that everyone else was talking through his or her hat (I’d heard him adopt a similar strategy about Céline and Sade). If anyone dared to challenge him, he drew on his cigarette and exhaled a cloud of smoke, smiling all the while a big, mocking smile. His smoke was the equivalent of a skunk’s odor. There he was on stage with Albert Dichy, the world’s most erudite Genet scholar, Sollers all knowing and all the while puffing. (To be fair, Sollers wrote a laudatory review of my Genet biography in Le Monde des Livres, for which I was entirely grateful.)
As it happened, Sollers and Kristeva were the most famous people MC knew. Around Sollers she was very quiet, as if afraid to say something foolish, though she was more expansive when we were alone with Kristeva. Sollers was mercurial. In the past, among other things, he had been a semiologist and a friend of Roland Barthes. In the seventies he became a Maoist. When I knew him I think he was in his Catholic stage. Sollers often railed against people he regarded as fools. He thought his hit novel Femmes should have been published in the States for a lot of money. (Columbia University Press eventually brought it out, probably without paying him a big New York advance.) He blamed this “failure” on Tom Bishop, who’d organized at NYU a French production of Virginia Woolf’s play Freshwater in 1983 with the roles played by such luminaries as Ionesco, Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Jean-Paul Aron—“the flowers of French literature,” Sollers grumbled. “All making fools of themselves. Their foolishness cost me two hundred thousand dollars at Random House or Doubleday. If only these writers had not disgraced themselves! We were all tarnished by their absurdity.”
Kristeva had written a roman à clef about French literary types called Les Samuraïs—which was supposed to repeat the success of Simone de Beauvoir’s Les Mandarins but failed to do so.
Legends already, oddly both Sollers and Kristeva wanted to sell out. But they were condemned to remain fixtures of high culture, famous but never rich.
I once took MC with me to London, where we attended a big party for lots of literary people. MC wore her long, Japanese-style layered clothes, mostly beige; her gaudy outsized necklaces she created herself out of baubles she bought at the market in Ré; and her red shoes and eternal cigarette holder. This very contrived look won her nothing but mocking looks and comments from English literary ladies in their tweeds and genuine pearls and hand-me-down cardigans. Suddenly I hated the English all over again for their dowdiness and smugness, their horrible sense of humor, and their common sense. And I thought that it was no wonder England never had a bold avant-garde in painting, no wonder their response to Picasso was so feeble, far less imaginative than that of Czechoslovakia, for Chrissake. In the 1980s the Tate had its first ever show of Cubists—in the 1980s! Walton and Britten were the best they could do in music. Only in fiction, where gentility and the wretched class system are actually viable subjects, did the English excel. The horrible, deflating English sense of humor, the terrible tendency to “take the piss out of” everyone and everything. You’d think, I thought bitterly, that the English would be ashamed of their commonsensical reaction to all the great modernist tendencies. Their failure to have a Giacometti or Stravinsky or Balanchine or Günter Grass, their sickeningly merry way of laughing at whatever is “pretentious” or “takes itself too seriously.” And this disgusting piss-taking response only goes on. Only the English have failed to recognize Robert Wilson’s genius. They alone rejected Schoenberg in favor of Elgar.
For the French bicentennial celebrations in 1989, I did a commentary for the BBC with Germaine Greer and the Oxford historian J. H. Plumb, who couldn’t understand what the astounding costumes by Jean-Paul Goude and Alaïa “symbolized.” For my part, I said that they were original and beautiful, which was enough for the Parisians, who, after all, lived in the world capital of fashion. All these black ballerinas in long white skirts; the Russian girl waltzing with a polar bear on a rink borne high by sailors in their midi blouses; thousands of soldiers marching with lit tapers in their hands; those spectacular red and blue fireworks above the Arc de Triomphe; the Marseillaise sung by Jessye Norman in the place de la Concorde. After the splendors of the most expensive spectacle in history—and Goude’s masterpiece—the deflating English questions about what it all “symbolized” seemed characteristically stunting.
I guess I’d been the target of English scorn as an out gay writer. I’ve had Germaine Greer and the anti-Zionist critic and poet Tom Paulin attack my novel The Farewell Symphony for being “disgusting” on a late-night chat show, Late Review. Paulin took the novel to task for its “sexual boasts,” and Greer described a sexual scene I hadn’t written. A few years before, A. S. Byatt and Germaine Greer, also on TV, had condemned the erotic pursuits of the narrator of Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Folding Star. And now Greer described a moment of “anal jackhammering” on an elevator in The Farewell Symphony that I’d never even imagined, much less rendered. More recently, Greer attacked my Rimbaud biography for its supposed advocacy of anal sex, which she for one was categorically opposed to.
Naturally there is an ancient rivalry and even enmity between England and France. For many French people England is still a country of comical snobbishness, outworn traditions, and bowler hats. The French are unaware of lowering English social phenomena. For the French, skinheads have never existed anywhere (except maybe in Germany) and lager louts are some forgettable exception to the cult of the gentleman.
Despite bouts of strangely selective and fleeting Anglophilia, the French have largely resisted England and the English. For a century, a store near the Palais Garnier called Old England has been selling tartan skirts, tweed jackets, and Barbour coats. Upper-class French families send their children to England every summer to acquire the language (those who are really upper class also send them to Vienna).
I attended Culture Club’s first Paris concert, in October 1983 at L’Espace Ballard. Here were all these teenage French girls wearing their Hermès scarves and carrying their Gucci bags standing around watching the stoned-seeming English cross-dressing lead singer, Boy George, sing a reggae-style song, “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” The evening never really took off. The French girls didn’t get this man with the big nose, Kabuki makeup, dreadlocks woven with satin ribbons, and voluminous cloak. Blue-eyed reggae was a bit much for the French, who were so hostile at the time to multiculturalism. It often seemed to me the English Channel was wider and deeper than the Atlantic.
In the pre-Chunnel eighties, we still flew to Heathrow from Charles de Gaulle, on British Airways—with the understanding that English planes alone were equipped to navigate the fog.
The myth was that people ate poorly in London and superbly in Paris, but increasingly exactly the opposite was true, especially for everyday bistros at normal prices. In London one was served large helpings of roast beef and fresh peas with mint and delicious summer pudding for dessert, whereas in Paris at a comparable restaurant one had a greasy confit de canard, soggy fries, and a stale crème caramel. The English server might easily be a fresh-faced, superpolite debutante hoping to get a job as a publicist at Faber and Faber, while the waiter in France, as likely as not, was a sullen Moroccan who’d worked twenty years at the same crappy place.
Of course I’m not talking about temples to haute cuisine, where the French win every time hands down. I ate at the Tour d’Argent, with its view of Notre Dame, slow, fussy service, and tagged and numbered roast ducks put in a press to extract the blood for the sauce—the press looked like some medieval torture device. I remember the owner, Monsieur Terrail, swarming about. Once, a very fat, middle-aged American who liked to have his ice cream served on a plate, not in a bowl, was served it the wrong way by an uninitiated waiter. The customer, who always dined alone, snapped his fingers; Monsieur Terrail rushed over and saw the terrible offense just as the chubby customer indicated his disappointment merely by opening his hands reproachfully, as though opening a book to a particularly damning passage.
Monsieur Terrail, as thin and nervous as a Boldini portrait, hissed at the waiter, “Are you trying to ruin me?”
Americans were often angry in the better French restaurants. Their idea of an expensive restaurant was one where the service was rapid, obsequious, and obliging. Yet in the French tradition, the more expensive the restaurant, the slower; the three-hour lunch would leave many American executives apoplectic.
If you could hear only one person in a restaurant, you could be sure it was an American. John Purcell’s theory was that Americans thought they were interesting and wanted everyone to hear what they were saying.
In Proust, characters, often aristocrats, don’t mind talking to someone dubious, but they don’t want to be introduced. What was the big deal? It turned out that in La Belle Époque, you could call on someone once you’d been introduced. No longer were you dealing with chance encounters; now you were obliged to receive someone or pay calls on him or her. Today the phone and Internet have made visits like that obsolete, but still the French feel no obligation to someone they haven’t formally met. Whereas Americans are helpful to total strangers who ask directions, the French breeze right past foreigners asking where the Louvre is, or even deliberately point them in the wrong direction. Meanwhile, there is a law in France punishing those who do not help a person in danger—a woman fighting off a rapist, say. In America, no such law would be necessary (although there is one in Massachusetts). In France an article of the penal code states that whoever could prevent a criminal act against a stranger and does not intervene (when by doing so he would run no risk to himself) can be sentenced to five years in prison and a fine of one hundred thousand euros. Of course, in America, even good Samaritans are wary of being sued. In America, St. Martin himself, when he gave half of his cloak to the beggar, might have been sued for infecting the beggar with bedbugs.
Why this difference? Since the United States was, for so long, a pioneer culture, helping was a survival skill. In France, people only move once, from the provinces to Paris, and in your new city you’re stuck for the rest of your life with everyone you regularly meet. No wonder the French are so cautious about rushing into intimacies.
Americans weren’t the only eccentrics in restaurants. Once I was at Le Grand Véfour, my favorite restaurant and one of the oldest in Paris, situated in the beautiful neoclassical peristyle of the Palais-Royal. The arcades of the Palais-Royal used to teem with prostitutes and cutthroats. Now the gorgeous complex is an island of tranquility, with its shaggy gardens designed by Marc Rudkin, the Pepperidge Farm heir.
Le Grand Véfour had velvet chairs topped with the names of great French writers. On the walls were Pompeiian-style paintings and on two sides were big plate-glass windows. One afternoon, a much older man at the next table was presented with a dessert intricately decorated with nets of spun sugar that formed an abstract sculpture in miniature. I couldn’t resist asking him what it was. The man—who was French—turned from his wife to me and gaily explained that he’d mounted a campaign to erect a monument to the “noble asses” that had fought in 1916 in the terrible battle of Verdun and this pièce montée was in honor of the poor animals.
I couldn’t help smiling, and he turned grave and began to expostulate, “But no, Monsieur. Thousands of little donkeys from northern Africa were wounded or gave their lives for France at Verdun!”
Later, when I checked, I figured this man might be Raymond Boissy, the president and founder of a donkey-appreciation society called ADADA (L’Association Nationale des Amis des Ânes) to honor the beasts that brought bread, wine and munitions to French soldiers on the front lines.