Inside a Pearl (33 page)

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.