French Lessons: A Memoir (15 page)

The French critics have always taken Hindus for a masochist, a Jewish critic willing to take the greater writer's verbal abuse. What they don't acknowledge as easily is the
power Hindus exercised as Celine's only Jewish friend,
the thrill, for a thirty-two-year-old American professor, of
rescuing a writer in trouble, then putting him under a
microscope.

What's Celine to me? When I was nineteen, a college student, I wanted his musical slang; I emulated his exile. When
I was thirty-two, a professor-the age of Milton Hindus
when he left for Denmark-I wanted to catalog his every
anti-Semitic quotation with scientific precision. I am thirtyeight, and Celine is still with me: it's his anger I envy most
today, his anger and his directness.

Hindus is the person in me who wants to please, who
wants to get it right, who can't say when he's angry, what he
wants-or admit his power when he has it.

Hindus is the good student, the placater. Celine is the reaction to platitudes, fakery, injustice; the counterattack.

After a week in Texas with the Celine-Hindus letters, I felt I
understood the two men; if pressed I could have kept the
correspondence going, playing each role wholeheartedly.

In Search of the French "R"

My students often call me "Madame." Especially in the
South, where "Madame" is such an easy slide from "Ma'am."
Not Ms., not Professor, not Dr., but "Madame," without a
surname, in that sweet serious way they learn in gradeschool French class. When I hear myself called "Madame," I
become the shopkeeper, the governess, the secretary, the
schoolteacher, trained in body and voice to serve. I am a Parisian woman in a white smock, standing behind her pastries or her scarves or her fountain pens, patiently waiting
for my customer to decide. I am the teacher of my first fifthgrade French class at Northrop School in 1965. My fifteen
students rise in their blue uniforms. They say "Bonjour Madame" in unison when I enter the room.

"Madame, Madame," I hear the cry for help from the back
of the room. "Comment dit-on 'doorknob' en francais?"

When I hear "Madame" I am not an intellectual. I am part
mother, part policeman, part dictionary.

"Poignet de porte ..." (I'm pleased that I know it)

"mais je ne Buis pas dictionnaire!" (professional responsibility: I'm not a dictionary).

"La prochaine fois, cherchez le mot vous-meme." (Next
time, look it up yourself.)

The first French teacher I ever called Madame was Madame Holmgren, her looks emphatically French, her name
inexplicably Norwegian. She was a tired dowdy woman
with very black hair, beige clothes, and an almost sickly pale
skin punctuated by a mole. Thinking back, I imagine that
she must have been a war bride supplementing a husband's
slender income and putting her daughter through private
school. Her daughter, Christine, was in our class. Christine
was dressed as though she had been born a hundred years
before the rest of us. Her hair was combed severely and
kept out of her face with an oversized tortoise shell pin. She
had round owl glasses with black frames. Her uniform
blouse had a round Peter Pan collar, rather than the square
kind that we wore. The top button of her blouse was buttoned tight, hiding her neck. Her mother's body was an object of extreme fascination because of the hair on her legsdark whiskery hair, the first hair any of us had ever seen
on a grown woman's legs. Did we speculate on the hair under her arms or did we see it when the weather turned hot,
and the dresses sleeveless? Did we imagine that she never
used deodorant because a grownup told us that the French
were supposed to smell, or did we decide she didn't smell
the same as we did? We talked about Madame Holmgren behind her back. It was 1965; the United States had barely
closed its military bases in France. France was still a defeated,
shabby, foreign place. We associated Madame Holmgren
with the unknown excretions of a womanhood that we were
on the verge of experiencing in our own bodies. Was it Nurse
Nelson, our hygiene teacher, who told us that THERE ARE
NO TAMPAX IN FRANCE?

Poor Madame Holmgren, not knowing all we had said
about her, had to teach us the names of French body parts
from a blue book about the Famille Vincent. The class dissolved into titters over Le Bras, with its arrow pointing to
Mme Vincent's arm. For us the word wasn't about arms, it
was a bra, a brassiere, more bra-like for that embarrassingly
sexual "r" we were supposed to put in our throats saying it.
Making the "r" meant moving your tongue around and feeling the vibrations in your throat. That was mortifying. "Bras"
with its sticky sound was just one more part of the foreign
sensorium already represented by the legs, underarms, and
odors of Madame H. We refused to say the word and refused her an explanation of our refusal beyond our giggles.
To this day I hesitate when I write "bras," still tempted to
spell it without an "s."

In my school you weren't supposed to try too hard. You
were supposed to be good at things without lifting a finger.
Good at sports, an effortless fling of stick and the field
hockey puck sailed halfway down the field. Good in class,
capable of a sarcastic retort but never too involved in the argument. A-minus on the quiz without studying. Who would
want to wrench their mouth out of shape to make a French
"r" or a "u"? It would be like admitting you kissed boys, or
wanted to. Or that you looked yourself over in the mirror
when nobody was looking. Trying too hard meant not belonging, not being really smart.

We wore uniforms-navy jumpers with button-down
powder-blue shirts underneath (preferably Gant or Brooks
Brothers, with loops in back.) If you slouched just the right
way you could make the jumper loose enough above the
waist to stick your hands in through the sides, as though it
were a muff.

Most of the time I was in line, part of the great majority
who didn't want to make an ass of herself. An R Resister. I
could speak in long strings of words ending in "ya know?"
without ever really opening my mouth-this in spite of
buck teeth and braces. I could laugh with an inward snort,
like a pig, or with an outward "heehee," by blowing the air
through my teeth. My language was slouched, in a studied
kind of way, like my jumper. I could listen without appearing to listen, speak without appearing to speak. My vernacular skills were refined; why should I change shapes?

On the other hand, I knew what it was supposed to sound
like. I heard Holmgren's "r." And I knew that by comparison
our resistant "r" was a flat, closed-off smashed version of the
truer sound. So let's say I did decide to risk it, make it ok, this
foreign "r," I still had a dilemma: the American "r" sounded
stupid, Midwestern, but to get the French one right I knew
there would be an awkward apprenticeship where it would
come out all slobbery and wrong. Like kissing a boy with
braces on.

How to do it? Where to do it? Will my braces stick to his?
Will they pry us apart with pliers?

Won't everybody laugh?

If I hadn't gone to Switzerland I would have stayed stuck.
If it hadn't been for Frichot, his smile with the glint, his approval, disapproval. I liked to look up at my teachers and see
them smile. I became a teacher because I wanted the chance
to give the smile, or withhold it. There is nothing cruder,
nothing simpler, in terms of pedagogic power than what
goes on in a language classroom: listening, repeating, listening, spurred on by the sound and rhythm of someone else's
voice, by mockery and desire for revenge.

The language classroom is bare-bones pedagogy, the
rawest pedagogical situation I have ever been in. A place where content means almost nothing and power, desire,
provocation almost everything.

I like the story about a French critic who came up against
one of those perpetual language students who was only interested in the sound of French and wasn't afraid to admit it.
The critic had just delivered a lecture, in French, on the
writer Georges Bataille. It was a complicated argument: a
theory of the avant-garde (including a definition of modernism), quotations from Bataille's little-known anthropological writings, and a whole new perspective on the
1930s. A single hand was raised in the question-and-answer
period: "Sir," an American asked in her best French, "aren't
you speaking in the accent of Marseilles?"

Learning languages can show up people's craziness in dramatic ways.

I had a student who ate constantly in class. It was summer
school, an intensive course, long consecutive hours of
work. I finally put my foot down when she brought in a
chicken. An entire chicken cut into pieces-she'd slip a
piece out of her bag every fifteen minutes or so and gnaw on
it ferociously. She spoke with meat and bones in her mouth,
a latter-day Demosthenes. Every time I introduced a new
vocabulary word, she started chewing on another joint. No
one could concentrate, the smell of chicken overwhelmed
us, the sound of crunching bone competed with our exercises. It was my mouth against hers: I had to forbid this R
Resister even the smallest snack.

The famous stories I know about language learning are in
this genre, battles of the will with fierce parental overtones.
The polyglot writer Elias Canetti describes his mother teaching him German by holding the book away from him,
throwing her hands over her head when he got it wrong and
shouting "My son's an idiot! I didn't realize that my son's an idiot!" And Louis Wolfson, a mental patient from New York
who lived with his mother, has written a whole book in a
stiff, self-taught French about learning languages in his
mother's house as a way of negating her presence. Then
there is the case of Freud and Breuer's patient Anna 0, the
brilliant young German woman who insisted on speaking
English to her doctors and nurses, and who, like a teacher,
got them to speak English back. Speaking about her treatment in the language that was foreign to her, Anna 0 invented one of the great catch phrases of psychoanalysis: the
talking cure.

Talking cures: like analysts, language teachers are always
in search of the foolproof method that will work for any living language and will make people perfectly at home in
their acquired tongue.

I was told the story of language teaching when I was learning to become a teacher. Once upon a time, the story goes,
all languages were taught like Greek and Latin. Learning was
based on grammar rules and translation. You talked in your
own language about the dead language you saw written
down. Then in the late nineteenth century came the Direct
Method, the ancestor of Berlitz. You spoke in class in the
language you were trying to teach; you worked on pronunciation; you practiced grammar out loud.

Pearl Harbor gave the first big boost to the teaching of
modern languages in the United States. Linguists developed
practical and efficient methods for the soldiers and spies
going off to Europe. From the forties on, people looked to
linguistics to revolutionize language teaching: language
classrooms would be "labs" with scientific data and results;
the emphasis would be on speaking, speaking like natives and learning like native speakers do. In the late i95os, Noam
Chomsky argued that children acquire language more or
less automatically by the time they are five and whatever
makes it happen can't be duplicated by adults-it has nothing to do with situation. Chomsky's insight did language
teachers absolutely no good: they couldn't duplicate genetic processes, and they couldn't hope to reproduce childhood as a model for second-language learning.

A second historical boost to American language teaching
came with the Soviet launch of Sputnik into space. American fear about being behind the Russians in math, science,
physics, and foreign languages fueled a National Defense
Education Act, which promoted a method based on the
memorization of set dialogues in foreign languages, called
ALM (Audio-Lingual Method). ALM didn't last long: it came
under fire for its Skinnerian behaviorism, its dependence
on rote memorization, its dry and arbitrary content. Its
critics began to called it "planned parrothood" because, although it gave teachers total control, it created students who
could do nothing but mimic.

Language teaching methods make for a tale of enthusiasm
and skepticism, hope and hope dashed. Every once in a
while someone comes along and promises a new language
method, like Rassias at Dartmouth. Rassias instructors snap
their fingers in class to keep the words coming quick and
even, like Beatniks, and I've heard it said that instructors will
go as far as to crack eggs on students' heads, just to keep
their juices flowing. ALM with new props? Still no perfect
method in sight.

Whatever the method, only desire can make a student
learn a language, desire and necessity. This is why some immigrants learn language so well-they have to. In a class room, you can make the language student feel "just off the
boat." The method is called "immersion" (sink or swim),
and it works very well. But even with immersion-especially with immersion-you need more than language, you
need to represent the culture that the second language lets
you in on.