Long before that late afternoon on the rue de Provence, I was inhabited by images of women and reveries of a specific nature. The mundus muliebris, the attributes of feminine ambience, intrigued and preoccupied me. This was different from those spontaneous arousals, the nocturnal flow of images that so often led to sensations blurring the boundaries between the imagined and the real, when images almost literally turned into flesh. My reveries changed with time. The erotic and the sexual gradually became differentiated. At the beginning, together with the sensations and memories of the night train, I recognize my mother’s fur muff, her gloves, her fur hat. There was her ample fur coat, and the cut crystal cologne flask on her dresser from which I decided one day to take a swallow, crying out almost at the same time: fire! (I recall the soothing effect as Elsa, our cook, gently rubbed my chest and belly with soap in the lukewarm water of the portable tub on the kitchen table, next to the jar in which she kept her pet frog.)
In family conversations, frequent mention was made of fur, for reasons of business as well as fashion. Astrakhan, chinchilla, beaver, sable, mink were familiar words overheard in sentences in which the Russian word shooba (fur) came up together with occasional references to the exotic-sounding Hudson Bay Company, a chartered London-based trading company going back, I was told, to the days of English adventurers in Canada, Indian trappers, and rival fur traders from various nations. When I was a boy, I loved to touch Mama’s fur coats, especially once my father had shown me how one goes about judging the quality of a fur by gently stroking my mother’s coat in both directions. I stroked and smelled her furs and relished the names of the small bottles of perfume displayed in her bedroom: Lanvin, Chanel, Patou. I took whiffs and kept repeating these names I had heard my mother pronounce in a casual manner. Their sound alone—especially the two syllables “Pa-tou,” which brought my lips forward as for a kiss—titillated me.
Mama was not the only woman who appealed to my senses. There was my grown-up cousin Yula. That I was in love with her—I was all of eight years old—became clear to me on her wedding day, together with my resentment of her soft-spoken Romanian bridegroom, who looked a little like Gary Cooper. The wedding took place just around the corner from the Leipzig Gewandhaus, and I came to associate Yula’s sensuous face with the temporary baldachin in the large living room, the ritualistic shattering of the glass, and the names of Haydn and other composers gracing the streets of that musical quarter. I had fallen in love with Yula’s immense dark eyes, her contralto voice, the faint Russian singsong of her speech, and the pale down above her upper lip.
Though smell and touch affected me, the sound of the human voice carried an even stronger erotic charge, especially in the lower registers. I was ready to be stirred by Carmen and Cherubino long before I heard these roles performed. Gender disguises appealed to me. Mozart’s young page Cherubino, sung by a mezzo-soprano, appears at some point in the opera dressed as a young woman. And Beethoven’s intrepid Leonore in Fidelio saves her enchained husband in the tyrant’s dungeon by disguising herself as a young man. Such situations aroused me as much as the dark timbre of the voice. I am of course skipping a number of years, for I did not discover Le nozze di Figaro and that hymn to love and freedom that is Fidelio until after we escaped from France during the Occupation, at the close of my adolescence. But the eight-year-old boy at the Leipzig wedding and the prurient teenager in Paris, filled with cravings, were quite the same as the budding opera fan who stood in line at the old Metropolitan Opera in New York, impatient to be once again enveloped by the mellifluous voices of Bidú Sayão and Ezio Pinza.
I have kept a picture of my mother as a volunteer Red Cross nurse in Russia during the war. The photographer had her pose in her white uniform, her eyes lifted toward an invisible azure, bringing out the oval contour of the face to make her look like a Renaissance figure. The madonna-like quality of the expression is both inviting and strangely remote. There exist less iconic representations of my mother, such as that other snapshot revealing her dreamy face half-hidden by a broad-rimmed hat tilted à la Greta Garbo. In the live images sheltered by memory, I see her tender, at times ironic smile. I admired her movements, her composed gestures, the way she held the slightly flattened Turkish cigarette between her long fingers, allowing the smoke to veil the features of her face. I observed the imprint of her lipstick on the cardboard tip. She allowed me to keep her empty cigarette boxes, which for months continued to carry the faint odor of Oriental tobacco blended with her perfume. Mama was a habitual smoker, especially after meals and at the card table, and I was eager to imitate the self-possessed way she had of drawing on her cigarette, including the delicate tappings of her forefinger, with which she flicked the ashes.
Mama was far from a chain smoker. For that kind of greedy inhalation I had the less appealing example of her steady bridge partner, Madame Solal, whose yellow arthritic fingers held a perennial Gitane cigarette tremblingly, and who always came accompanied by her lover, Monsieur Baudry, a lanky man, mostly silent in his black suit, who looked a little like the actor Louis Jouvet. It was from Mama, I believe, that I first learned the word “amant,” the French word for “lover,” which I somehow came to associate with low divans, opaque lampshades, and the Chinese game of mah-jongg, which in those years occasionally diverted my parents and their friends in the evening.
My own friends at school, when we were about fifteen, exchanged or invented secrets about mothers in general, and more specifically about the mothers of girls we knew. These were secrets of a mythical nature—sex fantasies about older women. We did not know the word “fellatio,” nor today’s aseptic expression “oral sex,” but we were excited by the verb “sucer” and the vulgar locution “faire un pompier.” We lived at the same time with the decorous familiar image of maman, and that other image of an unknown figure, her disquieting and alluring other incarnation, as she undressed and revealed herself in the intimacy of a man. These were mysteries. And the stories we told one another, in what amounted to confabulatory contests, more often than not described the taste of certain mature women for young boys and adolescents. In other words, we all had a chance.
These fantasies were embroidered, some of them given as the truth or half-truth of what had been experienced by one of us, or more likely by someone we claimed to know. It didn’t matter. We all pretended to believe what was reported, telling and retelling details of amorous successes as we walked each other home after school on those gray winter days, reluctant to separate (I walk you home, you walk me home), until it was almost dark and there was no further way of delaying the return to the late afternoon snack and the hated homework in physics, chemistry, and solid geometry.
Occasionally, as in the case of our classmate Pierre Masselli, good fortune seemed to take a more concrete shape. Masselli, with his handsome Corsican profile and alabaster skin (most of us exhibited the usual teenage acne), was more mature than the rest of the class, having had to repeat two entire years. He was what was known as a cancre—a hopelessly lazy student. He taught us to play poker, cheated regularly, figured out countless ways of conning the more gullible in our group, and regaled us with detailed, though unverified, accounts of trysts with an opulent blond widow who owned the bakery around the corner from our school. Masselli was in fact expelled from the lycée when he jumped out of the first-floor window of the study room on his way to an appointment at the bakery and landed in front of the censeur, the chief administrative officer in charge of school discipline.
My private dreams of commerce with women fluctuated between sensations of indolence and images of pleasurable pain. I had heard that it could be a savage sport, with no holds barred. These shifting moods, in which I saw myself alternately as the aggressed and the aggressor, led me to incongruous mental associations. As I sat fondling Nitscha’s small breasts in a movie theater in the far-off working-class district of Barbès-Rochechouart—a theater owned by her Levantine entrepreneurial father—I kept thinking of the professional wrestler who was said to be her mother’s lover. I imagined this wrestler-paramour wearing the defiantly tilted cap of the Parisian pimps as one sees them in the movies, dancing a sexy java with Nitscha’s heavily made-up mother. I myself had never danced the java, nor even come close to any of the dance halls, or bals-musettes, where promiscuous proletarian couples unhinged their joints to the sound of an accordion. But in the films of the period, the kind in which a young Jean Gabin might have been featured, one could often watch some ruffian and his woman dance with quick small steps in bumpily syncopated three-quarter time.
Certain words, if I came across them in print, aroused me. They aroused me even more when I repeated them to myself aloud. One such was the word “sein,” for the female breast, which I first glimpsed in a novel my mother was reading. Other words, learned in the schoolyard, had a still more powerful effect: “bander,” for the stiffening of the male organ, “branler” for a pull-and-thrust manual caress, “jouir” for orgasm. These words did not strike me as crude. Their metaphorical nature gave them special potency, for “bander,” related to archery, suggests a bow stretched to the utmost; the verb “jouir,” from the Latin “gaudere,” points to the essence of pleasure; and “branler,” the energetic word for masturbation, was centuries ago associated, no doubt because of the brisk to-and-fro movement, with a regional folk dance known as le branle. I was certainly far from suspecting at the time that the efficacy of metaphors was central to the nature of my lascivious thoughts. Though we learned about metaphors and similes at school, I did not really understand how they functioned. Retrospectively, I like to think that an early taste for poetic figures of speech was closely related to my lasting aversion for crude terms, especially of the four-letter Anglo-Saxon variety. These words, with their explosive onomatopoeic sounds, I later came to associate with the heavy drinking and violence I so often witnessed in the army.
Sounds were in fact inseparable from voluptuary sensations. In a novel by Colette that lay on my mother’s night table and which I leafed through stealthily, I found a transcription of a woman’s moans as she is overcome by mounting pleasure. I returned again and again to the same page, seeking to fathom its secret. I kept imitating those moans as I walked in the street and could feel my own excitement rising. I also kept repeating the word “maîtresse,” which I looked up impatiently in various dictionaries in my father’s study. But the dictionary definitions—a woman who grants her favors to a man who is not her husband—failed to satisfy me. They seemed so much colder than the two magical syllables. The word “favors” was especially disappointing. It had no color and no smell to it. “Maîtresse,” on the other hand, suggested domination, enslavement, perhaps even cruelty—and it stirred me.
Yet as I look back at my behavior with girls my own age, I do not find myself very enterprising. Mia, the tomboyish daughter of our dentist, had returned from her summer vacation making fun of my inexperience. I didn’t even know the meaning of the word “flirter,” which she pronounced with an affected British accent. As for Dany Wolf, my central occupation during the summer of 1939 in Deauville on the brink of war, she gave me a most memorable thrill—I was then almost sixteen—when on a rainy day, coming up behind me as the rest of us were playing a game of Monopoly, she simply placed her hand on my shoulder and then moved it to my neck, where I could feel the warmth of it. This unsolicited affectionate gesture moved me more deeply than the kisses we exchanged at night on the beach. Yet this was a year or more after the visit to the rue de Provence.
My bolder fantasies were played out in imaginary situations, in nocturnal scenarios that brought me to the verge of a release from a drawn-out tension, when semiconscious movements would complete in a half-awake state what the dream had begun. For hours I was unable to forget what had seemed so real, including the shape and features of the woman in my dream. Years later, in my classes, when commenting on the opening pages of Proust’s novel, where he describes how, in his sleep, a woman was born from an awkward position of his thigh, like Eve from Adam’s rib, I glossed this transparent and symbolic evocation of what is vulgarly known as a wet dream, trying myself to remain delicate and decently allusive. But I knew only too well what young Marcel had experienced, including the keen longing for the dream-woman who had vanished, and whom I was determined to find somewhere.
I never liked the term “se masturber.” The very sound of it conjured up images of twisting and torturing, of movements distressingly mechanical and lifeless. It also suggested a blemish, a shameful surrender to a harmful habit. My parents, without dotting the i’s, without ever referring directly to me, talked in oblique and ominous fashion about self-abuse, solitary vice, the dangers of mental debility, even downright insanity. Dark rings around the eyes (I immediately checked in the mirror) were supposed to be tell-tale signs. These were commonplace notions fostered, it would seem, by old-fashioned medical textbooks and imparted to families by stern family doctors of the kind I knew and feared as a child. Views have evolved. Best-selling surveys and studies now advocate self-caressing. Sex counselors apparently insist that solitary exercises are not at all reprehensible or harmful, but sound training, that they develop the sensitivity for good love-making and skills in self-control. If such counselors had a poetic fiber, they might add that solo practices activate the imaginative process and fantasy in general. Between the literary imagination and solitary erotic activity there exists a bond by no means limited to the enjoyment of the type of amatory books that, as the saying goes, one reads with one hand. Flaubert somewhat crudely likened the act of writing to an onanistic performance. It may well be that all solitary pleasures involve the invention of a scene, even the invention of the other. Such inventions can turn out to be invasive when it later comes to a real partner in love.
MAGGIE’S QUESTIONS ABOUT the girls I knew may well have betrayed a genuine curiosity. In that softly lit room on the rue de Provence, she was hearing about the mores of a distant country. My friends and I did not much more than kiss the girls we went out with—and even that seemed quite daring. The upper-middle-class world of the 16th arrondissement was far removed from the promiscuities evoked in the songs of Maurice Chevalier and Mistinguett, or in the films with Jean Gabin and Arletty. In our district, which included Passy and Auteuil, girls and boys not only studied separately, they played apart. The boys went to the Lycée Janson de Sailly or to the Lycée Claude Bernard; the girls to the Lycée Molière (where Simone de Beauvoir taught in those years) or to the Lycée La Fontaine near the Molitor swimming pool and skating rink, where we often lingered. The Lycée Molière stood across the street from Jacques’s modern apartment building, which featured the innovation of an underground garage. One of the attractions of the building was going down to the garage at night and starting his father’s car. But the real attraction was to wait in the street for the exit of the girls when we got out of our own classes earlier. We stood on the sidewalk, exchanging jokes, hiding our pleasure and embarrassment behind a blasé expression, pointing out this or that girl, comparing the ones we found attractive, or those with whom we thought we might have a chance, as though we were worldly connoisseurs. The girls themselves chattered away, at best acknowledging our presence with a sneaky side glance. Then they dispersed. It was all so close, yet so distant.
Some of us occasionally gathered at my friend Leo Lamont’s apartment from where, with the help of binoculars, we could peer into the gym of the Lycée La Fontaine. We were five or six, fighting to take turns, for we had only one pair of binoculars. In all truth, we did not see very much—only what the narrow windows and their deceptive reflections allowed. And what we did make out was not very revealing. In those days, students did not really undress or change clothes for gym class. We just shed our jackets and our ties. The girls took off their outer garments. The gym room, with its hanging ropes, parallel bars, and wall ladders, remained permanently odorous. The real redolence, however, filled our imagination, as we watched, or thought we watched, those girls from a great distance.
Scant contact made for feverish fantasies. School decorum affected even the awareness of our own bodies. Did I ever see the naked body, or even the bare torso, of any of my schoolmates? I remember faces, some last names. (The use of the first name, a sign of some intimacy beyond the school grounds, was strictly reserved for close friends.) It was different, of course, at the sports club, the swimming pool, or during the summer at the seashore. There we consorted with friends known to our parents, congregating in groups, or bandes, that included girls. But even at the beach, there was a certain discretion or modesty. Bikinis were unknown, and even boys still wore bathing suits, some of which did not fit too well. Thighs were not on display. In the 1930s, tennis champions like Fred Perry and Gottfried von Cramm still wore white flannel trousers during the tournaments we watched at the Roland Garros Stadium. And when we boys played ball in the inner courtyard at school, we kept our long trousers on, which did not prevent us from scraping our knees painfully. The memory of the hard falls on the cement is mixed with that of the acrid smell wafting across from the urinals in the préau, the covered part of the courtyard.
Boys who had sisters found it easier to meet girls, provided these sisters were neither too young nor too old. Jacques’s sister Denise, some three or four years younger, was to her great chagrin excluded from our colloquies. We simply did not pay attention to her. I myself did not have a sister, for she lay buried in another country. But I had a cousin approximately my own age, Irène, who lived two streets away from us, on the rue Massenet, where I spent many hours playing fierce ping-pong with her brother, Sascha, who became one of my steady companions. One day when Sascha was out for a while, Irène and I, in a playful mood, began to wrestle. Soon we found ourselves on the floor. I felt her strong legs clasping me around the waist, and she could feel my arousal. We both jumped up, our faces flushed. We never wrestled quite like that again.
Irène later served as my confidante and well-intentioned, though not always successful, go-between when, during the summer of 1939, I became seriously infatuated with Dany Wolf, whose nipples I could make out through her wet bathing suit—a fact I refrained from mentioning in the love poems, plagiarized from Alfred de Musset, that Irène, my trusted emissary, kept bringing to Dany’s room so as not to awaken the suspicions of her parents, who might have wondered about the deluge of these missives had they arrived by mail. To be an assiduous plagiarist at the age of sixteen did not help me uncover the coveted treasures of Dany’s body, but it taught me more about metrics and metaphors than all my Latin and French classes combined. Eventually I came to understand that the pastiche was not merely a device for satirizing the style of different writers, but a salutary exercise for finding a voice of one’s own.
In 1937, when we were between fourteen and fifteen, our only mixed social gatherings, except at the seashore close to our vacationing families, were the fairly stiff tea and dance parties planned by our parents, when tea and lemonade were served, and chairs were lined up along the walls of the salon and the dining room—hardly the right atmosphere for unrestrained romance. But by 1938 and 1939, as we moved closer to war, we discovered the excitement of more spontaneous occasions initiated by one of us, known as surprises-parties, pronounced the French way. These surprises-parties, which were no surprise at all, still required parental approval for the boisterous event to take place in some apartment from late in the afternoon until well into the evening. The parents in question would discreetly leave the apartment during these hours, doubtless with some misgivings, hoping there would be no disaster, but also relieved not to have to witness the din and the confusion. We tried our best not to be too wild for fear of compromising our chances for future use of the premises.
I don’t recall a surprise-partie ever taking place in my parents’ apartment. Maybe I never asked, knowing that they would be reluctant. They were much too afraid for their Meissen, Rosenthal, and Limoges porcelain on display. This concern of theirs may well be at the origin of my aversion to porcelain figurines in general, and to figurines of ballerinas in particular. Even the presence of a single friend could be disastrous. When Ernest Lash, whom I had befriended in England, came to stay with us, we quickly succeeded in maiming the figurine of the famous ballerina Anna Pavlova dancing “Swan Lake”—a special favorite of my mother’s—by throwing tennis balls in the living room. Surprises-parties represented a far greater threat to the integrity of porcelain ballerinas.
Our noisy social occasions required the indispensable pick-up—another English word we misused. All it meant was a portable electric phonograph that one of us provided, since not all our friends’ apartments came with a phonograph. We all brought records, mostly of the swing and jitterbug variety. We were fond not of the big bands, but of what we considered real jazz. We revered the names of Coleman Hawkins, Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Count Basie. We had our local heroes on the French scene—Django Reinhardt, a guitar virtuoso of gypsy origin; Stéphane Grapelli, a masterful jazz violinist; and those who later joined them to form the Hot Club de France. English, or rather the American idiom, was decidedly the fashion. France had its own crooners like Jean Sablon, and jazz bands like those of Jo Bouillon and Ray Ventura. And there was the whimsical chansonnier Charles Trenet, known as le fou chantant. But we responded with greater enthusiasm to foreign imports like Lionel Hampton and Teddy Wilson. I myself was especially fond of saxophone improvisations.
For our parties, we bought cheap imitation champagne known as mousseux at the Prisunic, a French version of Woolworth’s. We perspired abundantly dancing the hectic “Tiger Rag” and the not much more temperate “Honeysuckle Rose.” But we also liked the slower tunes that allowed us to hold each other tightly and dance “cheek to cheek,” an expression we had learned from a Fred Astaire film. Some tunes became the recurrent accompaniment of a specific romance. Nitscha and I would melt to the languorous rhythm of “Music, Maestro, Please,” the full lyrics of which only recently came back to me, prompted by a retired American scholar I met in the Chianti. I can recapture the sentimental mood as Nitscha and I swayed in each other’s arms: “Tonight, tonight I must forget . . . ” It amazes me how much English we heard and repeated, without really knowing or understanding it. But we were learning from the crooners, much as I later got my first snatches of Italian from the opera buffa recitatives I learned by heart.
The mousseux, needless to say, went to our heads. Some of us became sick and were soon sprawling on the floor. At one of these events, on or near the avenue Mozart, I remember finding myself on top of a parental bed next to a girl with whom I had been dancing and drinking until she began feeling dizzy. She was out, and I kept kissing her though she was completely unaware of it. She was pale and unconscious. We lay there fully dressed—even I was mostly motionless—until we were discovered by the parents, who had decided to return earlier than expected. I am not sure any surprise-partie took place in that apartment soon again.
Anita was the name of the dark-haired girl who had been so vivacious until she became ill and passed out. We both acquired something of a bad reputation with my friend’s parents. I was not altogether proud of having kissed her inanimate lips. I hoped to redeem myself in my own eyes. I succeeded in making an appointment with her in a newly created Pam-Pam bar on the Champs-Elysées (“pam” for pample-mousse, or grapefruit), the latest rage, where young people—the kind that the extreme right was denouncing as decadent—congregated to sip exotic fruit juices. But I never managed to get to the appointment. All of a sudden, I developed a fever and a disfiguring rash, which turned out to be a belated case of chickenpox, an ironic reminder that I had not really outgrown my childhood. It felt like a regression, as I lay in the dark, with my mother again assuming full control over me. I consoled myself listening to Radio Luxembourg, a station that for some reason played a great deal of jazz in those days. The other consolation was that for a couple of weeks I was out of school with a valid excuse that made me feel almost virtuous. But by the time I was in circulation again, Anita was no longer available. She had taken up with a supercilious fellow by the name of Guy, who somehow always managed to look suntanned and whom I detested. Anita disappeared from my horizon. It was a lesson in the impermanence and mutability of things.
Another mishap in timing occurred soon after I met Suzy, a very tall girl who was an extraordinary dancer, who taught me to jitterbug, and who consoled me after the loss of Anita. I soon became proficient at spasmodic dancing. It was difficult to separate Suzy’s physical attributes (she not only was lanky but had a long nose) from the seductiveness of her dancing movements and the fun of the lessons. My infatuation, at any rate, was real while it lasted, and her entire person, including the way she pushed back her hair and laughed when I made a clumsy step, was an indissoluble part of it. Just as I was making progress in various ways, my parents announced that we were leaving for “winter sports” in Megève. “Winter sports” struck me as quite funny, since my parents did not ski and were hardly what one would call sportspeople. I was not thrilled, to say the least, to spend that vacation time in their constant presence. The worst was the timing. I was sure to lose Suzy, as I had lost Anita. I did not wish to leave, gave all sorts of reasons, claimed to abhor the Alps, created scenes. My mother was not fooled. She saw right through my reluctance. It seemed to amuse her. Her ironic smile irked me. But there was no escape. I left with my parents by the night train, in a foul mood. For once I did not enjoy the train ride.
Megève, a ski resort not far from the chain of Mont Blanc, was a disaster. I disliked it from the moment our taxi made its way through the street covered with dirty snow and fresh horse manure. Not only was I relentlessly in my parents’ company when I was not with the ski group (where I made no friends), but my mother and father insisted that I wear those infamous itchy woolen undergarments known as winter combinaisons. My durable distaste for skiing is surely related to those endless days of epidermic discomfort. The discomfort was compounded by the political mood during that winter of 1937–1938. Many of the clients in the small chalet-hotel could be overheard angrily referring to “that Jew,” Léon Blum, who had a year or so earlier become prime minister. The Front Populaire, a coalition of leftist parties, had come to power and launched a program of highly controversial social reforms, such as the forty-hour week, salary raises, and a system of workers’ representations giving increased power to labor unions. The forty-hour week, in particular, seemed to provoke intense anger, as did the sit-down strikes, any talk of intervention in the Spanish Civil War, or the most casual recall of the Stavisky fraud case—a financial scandal that had led to the famous riots of 1934 that rocked the foundations of the Third Republic. My father, aware of the guests’ comments, explained to me what I had not already gathered from the newsreels. Behind it all one perceived mounting chauvinism and anti-Semitism to which even a fourteen-year-old boy was sensitive. French Jews themselves could be heard making anti-Semitic remarks, referring to the influx of unwanted German Jews, and even worse, of East European Jews, especially since Hitler’s National Socialist Party had taken over in Germany.
“Juif” (one did not even have to say “sale juif” or “youpin”) was for many an offensive word. If one wanted to be delicate, one called the Jews israélites, which is how assimilated French Jews liked to refer to themselves. It did not help that Léon Blum was by his background and inclination an intellectual, and that other prominent names in his cabinet were those of Blumlein and Georges Mandel, who was later murdered by the Vichy militia. Before launching on a political career, Blum had been trained as a scholar at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, had served as theater critic for an important avant-garde literary journal, had taken part in the Dreyfus case, and had written one book on Stendhal and another advocating sexual experience for women before marriage. None of this endeared him with the arch-conservatives. As for my mother, she greatly praised his book on women and marriage, which seems to have made more of an impression on her than his socialist theories.
Daily exposure to the other French families in the hotel made me aware of a malaise deeper than the itch produced by the long woolen underwear. France had developed its own brand of fascism. There was much talk of a certain Colonel de La Roque who had been president of the Croix-de-Feu, a rightist, ultranationalist confederation of war veterans. This same Colonel de La Roque had recently created the fascist-inspired Parti Social Français, a forerunner of the party led today by Jean-Marie Le Pen. And there was the even more sinister ex-Communist, Jacques Doriot, leader of the P.P.F., the Parti Populaire Français. Doriot was soon to become a venomous collaborator of the Nazis during the Occupation and a model for the Vichy milice that specialized in hunting down and torturing Jews as well as members of the French Resistance.
Much as I was preoccupied with thoughts of Suzy, of jazz, and of my Parisian friends, I was experiencing a sense of estrangement, even a rift, during that brief winter vacation in Megève. I became aware of an anomaly. Socially and economically, my parents belonged to the well-heeled world of the mostly non-Jewish families in the hotel. Politically, however, my parents were moderate liberals with vague sympathies for the non-extreme left, linking the values of culture, freedom, and tolerance to the notion of an intelligentsia—a word that was always pronounced with respect and with a Russian accent. The Communist Party they despised out of bitter experience, even though it now posed as the great champion of liberty and as the only valid anti-fascist force. As for the ultranationalism and xenophobia of the French variety, they had every reason to fear it. My parents were suspicious of both extremes. No wonder I felt that they were out of tune with the other hotel guests.
What ruined that ski vacation almost more than the combined effect of my separation from Suzy, my parents’ oppressive presence, the itchy underwear, and the climate of political hostility, was the fear of the imminent arrival of the school report, the bulletin trimestriel, which was bound to be calamitous. Even though I had bribed our concierge, Monsieur Émile, into promising to intercept that report, my apprehension throughout the stay in Megève spoiled what little fun I might have had. How right I was to suspect that something would go amiss. The cries of indignation I could hear coming from another room shortly after we returned to our Paris apartment left no doubt in my mind as to Monsieur Émile’s betrayal. Obviously my father was a more generous and more reliable client.
SOON I WAS dancing again cheek to cheek with Suzy to Fred Astaire’s tune “Heaven, I’m in heaven . . . ” We enjoyed repeating and appropriating fragments of lyrics, making foreign expressions, which we frequently misused, part of our daily vocabulary. English words were the fashion, even for those who, in those ideologically charged years, deplored the weaknesses of British parliamentary democracy or looked askance at the American cult of the dollar and the complacent faith of Americans in their never-never land of endless success and happy progress. English words and English-sounding verbal appendages were common usage, long before there were outcries about the bane of franglais. My friends insisted on calling me Vicky, imagining that it had an English flavor. Victor, with its sonorous accent on the second syllable, sounded too pompous. There was the bearded, patriarchal figure of Victor Hugo, who seemed to be remembered exclusively for his bombast and oracular pieties. And there was the laughable figure of the Italian king, Victor Emmanuel III, with his diminutive body and underslung jaw. Vicky sounded less antiquated to our ears than Victor—a name that, pronounced the French way, lent itself to puns and stale jokes about cuckolded stationmasters.
We were affected by an Anglo-Saxon fad. It mattered little whether we understood all the words of the songs. We repeated the titles and the refrains without bothering to probe for their meaning. I believe I understood from beginning to end “You must have been a beautiful baby . . . ” which I learned from a record by the Andrews sisters. I soon knew it by heart and sang it expressively to various girls, always stressing “’cause baby look at you now.” I still sing the song, with nostalgic repetitions of the words: “’cause baby, ’cause baby, ’cause baby.”
English had invaded many domains in the 1930s—not only popular music and the world of movies, but politics and sports as well. Le swing, le jazz hot, le jitterbug, le Hot Club de France, were common terms. American films had familiarized us not only with the faces of James Cagney, William Powell, Myrna Loy, Clark Gable, Loretta Young, Tyrone Power, and Gary Cooper, but with what we took to be the everyday amenities of American life, such as plush nightclubs where guests revealed themselves as accomplished performers and were launched overnight on phenomenal careers, fancy golf clubs where clever impresarios met hard-drinking tycoons, well-stocked bars in the basements of suburban homes, and resplendent station wagons such as the one driven with panache by Katharine Hepburn. English expressions were prescribed on the tennis court, and we always said “ready” as we were about to receive our opponent’s serve, “deuce” to indicate the tie (the French “égalité” seemed too prosaic), and we referred to a game as a “match.” Tennis was, of course, not a proletarian pastime in those days. But anglophilia contaminated even less elitist sports. Soccer was called “le football” (or more succinctly “le foot”), “dribbler” was an accepted verb, and “corner” as well as “goal” and “penalty” entered accredited dictionaries, though they were pronounced with a stubborn French accent. Even the world of politics was touched. One referred to “un meeting” where “le leader” of a party was to give “un speech.” The terms, I discovered, are all perfectly at home in the Petit Larousse Illustré. Taken for granted, naturalized French, they made it possible, even without schooling in English, to acquire a sizable vocabulary.
My own schooling at the lycée had very little to do with the English tongue as it is spoken. It was as abstract, as academic, as obsolete a language as Latin or Greek. It came indeed to be officially recognized as a substitution for one of the “dead” languages. When I entered the upper classes, both Greek and Latin were required subjects for at least four years. But then the option of replacing Greek with one of the modern languages was offered by government decree, and my parents insisted that English would be of greater use to me in life than the language of Homer and Hesiod. I did, however, continue with Latin, though my translations from Virgil remained, to put it mildly, whimsical.
In our English classes, conversation or any idiomatic usage was out of the question. Grammar and stylistic exercises led to arduous renderings of prose texts from English into French and from French into English. These were the typical class exercises and home assignments, known as version and thème—translations from and into a foreign language. In addition, we were required to learn a great deal of poetry by heart, and to recite it in class, though our erratic pronunciation was hardly ever corrected. There would not have been much point to that; our teachers’ declamation of the language of Shakespeare would surely have puzzled British ears.
Before assigning a poem to be memorized, our teachers would first read it to us aloud, often bombastically, and with patently fake British intonations. The very idea of American English was frowned upon. Lycée teachers of English (the poet Mallarmé had been one of them) were often eccentric individuals. Our most memorable prof d’anglais, Monsieur Labé, appeared to me as uncanny as Coleridge’s ancient mariner, whom he seemed determined to reincarnate. He, too, had a long gray beard and a glittering eye. The expression “gray-beard loon” at the beginning of the poem was as though conceived with him in mind. With a visionary look, Monsieur Labé would raise himself full height from his desk chair, book in hand, one arm outstretched, and declaim the opening lines in solemn fashion. He became a seer, and no longer saw us. Yet he was not ridiculous. His vatic manner amused but also impressed us. I was titillated by the sound effects of his nasal chant and the marked scanning.
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free . . .
It was then and there, and not in my French classes, that I first tasted the delights of alliteration and assonance.
Monsieur Labé could become quite oracular, and then his forked beard would respond by flowing in separate directions, as though agitated by the conflictual winds of inspiration. He initiated us to Wordsworth’s sonnet:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
I did not quite understand what a “sordid boon” could possibly be, nor why it deserved an exclamation mark. Nor did I have a clear idea of how and to whom we had given our hearts away. The words “spending” and “powers” also remained somewhat foggy in the context. But no matter. Something did click. And I enjoyed reciting the poem. As Monsieur Labé chided us for our mistakes, filling in the gaps in our memory with reproachful emphasis (we were not allowed to glance at the textbook when we recited), he began to look more and more like the wraiths of Proteus and old Triton at the end of the sonnet, as I imagined them rising from the sea and blowing a contorted horn.
Another sonnet by Wordsworth that Monsieur Labé revealed to us with contagious enthusiasm added significantly to my notion of the London cityscape. The poet’s view from Westminster Bridge extended well beyond my father’s descriptions of Hyde Park and the Cumberland Hotel. I loved the rhythm and the breadth of the opening line,
Earth has not anything to show more fair . . . ,
and I was very taken with the visual survey:
. . . silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theaters, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky . . .
I was good at learning these assigned poems by heart. I enjoyed reciting them to myself as I walked to the lycée in the pale morning light, hoping to be called upon to stand up and recite them to the class. I was especially fond of some of the songs from Shakespeare’s plays, partly I suspect because they were short and easy to learn, but also because their surface simplicity allowed me to imagine things as mysterious as the underwater sea changes that transform the bones and the eyes of the drowned father into coral and precious pearls:
Full fathom five thy father lies . . .
I could not imagine my own father at the bottom of the sea. He was neither a sailor nor a swimmer, and I hardly saw him in the company of sea nymphs. The great moment in the song came with “Hark! now I hear them . . . ,” announcing what was really the silence of a revelation.
There was also the more domestic Shakespeare poem about winter, “When icicles hang by the wall . . . ,” describing everyday scenes and gestures associated with the cold: Dick who “blows his nail,” Marian’s nose looking red and raw, and milk found frozen in the pail. What I liked best in this song was the nonsense refrain “Tu-whit, tu-who,” merrily imitating the sound of the owl. Monsieur Labé looked his most vatic when he read to us with elegiac languor and Gallic stresses Keats’s autumnal ode:
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too . . .
We recited obediently, but remained mystified. We did not discuss the poems. Literary analysis, or explication de texte, as it was called, was reserved for classes in French literature, where we rehashed platitudes about Racine’s biblical play Athalie or the heroic Spain of Corneille’s Le Cid, whose grandiloquent couplets we were tempted to parody rather than admire. But it was my English classes in the Parisian school that illustrated, well before I came across it in another life and on distant shores, T. S. Eliot’s assertion that great poetry can communicate before it is understood. As for my familiarity with the English language, it was in those days limited to a strange blend of the crooners’ idiom and that of nineteenth-century British poets. Years later, American army talk would add to it another dimension. That army language, as I found out, was hardly romantic or sensuous. Nor did it induce complex erotic reveries. It was far removed from the world of my mother’s fur muff and her subtle perfumes.