Inside a Pearl (31 page)

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.