French Lessons: A Memoir (22 page)

Only a few students cross the barrier from wanting a good
accent into real intellectual interests; they go to France and
study political science and history and literature and then
they come back to us. Like Edna.

Edna is my conscience, my whole metier speaks to me
through the person of Edna.

Edna came into my office yesterday. It was raining cats and
dogs outside. Edna said, "Bonjour Madame. Il fait un temps
bien Belge" (what Belgian weather we're having). The idiom
is a Belgian joke, the French equivalent of the Polish joke.
It's relatively insignificant on the scale of ethnic slurs-after
all, it does rain more in Belgium than in France-but hearing Edna say it made me wince. She had come to study Le
Pen and his slurs, not to make slurs of her own.

Edna, discarding, borrowing, and passing in French, reminds me of the time I said "Que je suis bete!" to a French
novelist and feminist philosopher, Monique Wittig. I knew
her essay on "The Mark of Gender," about pronouns and
the normative use of the third person singular "he." Wittig
argues that when you use "he" in sentences in the place of
"she" (for example: "the American citizen must know that
his rights are inalienable"), you're not merely trying to make
life easier by eliminating a superfluous pronoun, you're accepting that the male pronoun, the "he"-and hence, by implication, the male-is the universal subject. "He" represents both "he" and "she": "she" is an afterthought. The
theory is her linguistic activism.

Wittig and I had both showed up for a lecture in the
wrong room. We were looking through the door at the
empty amphitheater. "Que je suis bete," how stupid I am to
have forgotten the room number, I said, lapsing-with a rising intonation that Micheline once taught me to practice -into my ordinary-French-person, pass-the-time-away
speech. Wittig looked at me in shock, she took in each word
seriously and saw that the words and the deed didn't correspond. "No, you're not stupid," she said, concerned. I had
put on my Bordeaux matron sociolect, and it came out sounding like a dubbed version of TV's "Dallas," high and slightly
affected: "OOOOH, how steouupid of me!" Monique
Wittig, for whom verbal style signifies, was not going to let
my cliche pass unnoticed. She looked at me in a way that
said, "kill the language that makes us dumb." The cliche was
the price I was willing to pay for that perfect bit of intonation. Like Edna today. Wittig wasn't buying it-nor should I.

While I am thinking all this, Edna is laughing at her own
opening remark in such an embarrassed way that I suspect
the absurdity of a North Carolina Belgian joke has struck
her, too; perhaps she'd reached a crossroad during the work
of the previous week. Sure enough, for the first time, she
pulls out an article from the New York Times, an article by
Richard Bernstein on Le Pen which she had underlined in
sea green. She's "broken a rule" by letting herself read in English. "Finally," she tells me, "I've found an article that actually deals with the speech of Le Pen. Those articles from the
daily French press are so useless, so cliched-'Where is Le
Pen now?' 'Where is he going?' 'Where will he be in five
years?'-whereas Bernstein has had time to think about it.
He analyses Le Pen's way of speaking ... he understands
that Le Pen manipulates through a language style." Edna
hands me the Bernstein article, I read it, and as the talk goes
on, I realize we have slipped quite happily into English.

'-Sidaique,' 'Judaique': Why are the form and the sound
of a word so powerful?"

" 'Sidaique' has the memory of 'Judaique' in it-the memory of the deportations."

"He dishes it out with that smile."

It was our first intellectual conversation in English. I remember some of the English words she used; the phrase
"my French granny" in particular, which came up in the context of an old lady in Paris who had lent Edna books to read.
Does she have an actual French grandmother, or did she
adopt an alternative French family, like so many of us francophiles do? The word granny sounded so American: I wondered what made her think about her granny in her own
tongue. Speaking to Edna in English for the first time was
charged, charmed, as though our native English had gained
from our relationship to French all the clarity and peculiarity of a mastered foreignness.

It didn't matter what language we were speaking, Edna
and I, for the rest of the semester, because there were ideas
and problems we were passionate about that we were trying
to learn about together. We'd switch languages in midstream; we'd quote English phrases in French and French
phrases in English; on Tuesday we'd speak in English, on
Wednesday entirely in French.

In the end we weren't speaking in one language or the
other-we were speaking to each other:

"I know why I like making Belgian jokes-they make me
feel so ... French!"

The Interview

As an American student in France in the years 1973-74, I
had been closed off from the French students who might,
in another context, have been my friends. French students
with my political affinities were profoundly anti-American
because of their opposition to our war in Vietnam. I saw
more of their graffiti than of them. It took a certain kind of
political conservatism, or accidents of family and class, to
open up a twenty-year-old French person to friendships
with Americans. People my age who spent a year in France
report the same experience: it was North Africans who were
friendliest, most open. Oddly enough we had a lot in common, the students who had come to France after decolonization and the Americans who had come to France to get
themselves some culture.

The minute I became a professor everything changed for
me in my relationship to France. Those students who had
remained strangers to me, hidden in their Grandes Ecoles
and Facultes, studying for their exams, writing their theses,
were now my colleagues, friendly and curious about the research going on in American universities.

I discovered this fact rather startlingly a year after com pleting my dissertation and taking my first job. My new colleagues introduced me to a complex Parisian network of
friends of colleagues, apartment exchanges, and name after
name of people to look up on future trips to France. This
network, the security of a salary, and the means to travel
made me start to think about France as a living library, an
enormous proving ground for my thesis.

I would start by making contact with people who had
played a role in the i93os. But the fascist intellectuals I had
written about were dead. Drieu la Rochelle, the most decadent of the lot, had committed suicide at the end of the war;
Brasillach, an esthete literary critic who had edited the most
vicious of the fascist weekly newspapers, was executed for
treason in 1945; Celine had died of an aneurysm in 1961.On
my first research trip to France as a professional scholar in
the summer of 1982, I set out to find the only fascist intellectual discussed in my dissertation who was still alive; his
name was Maurice Bardeche. Bardeche was the keeper of
the archives of the executed writer Robert Brasillach; he had
been Brasillach's best friend at the Ecole Normale and had
married Brasillach's sister, Suzanne. At the end of the war
Bardeche, like Brasillach, was arrested and imprisoned. He
had been a tenured professor at the University of Lille; he
was stripped of his title. After his brother-in-law Brasillach
was executed, Bardeche went off the deep end. He wrote
pamphlets against the Liberation, against the purge of fascists, against the Nuremberg war crime trials. He denounced the Jews; he doubted the truth of the Holocaust.
In the first book he published after the war, Nuremberg ou la
terre promise, he maintained that the gas chambers were museum pieces set up by the Allies to destroy the German
spirit. He helped found the genre now known widely as Revisionism or, more accurately, Negationism.

Negationism comes in different flavors: fascist, antiZionist, American, French. In 1 980, the French intellectual
world was shaken when a literature professor named Robert Faurisson started publishing revisionist articles. Partly in
response to the Faurisson scandal, the French historian
Vidal-Naquet wrote an essay called "A Paper Eichmann" in
which he presented a checklist of the basic tenets that were
cropping up in the burgeoning negationist output, including Faurisson's:

i. There was no genocide of Jews, Gypsies, etc., in
World War II; the instrument symbolizing genocidethe gas chamber-never existed.

2. The "final solution" was only intended as a
relocation of Jews to their "home" territory in Eastern
Europe.

3. The number of victims of the camps is more like
fifty thousand than the six million that are claimed. The
deaths were natural, due to allied bombings or to "facts
of war."

4. Nazi Germany either is not responsible for the
outbreak of World War II, or it shares that responsibility
equally with the Jews.

5. The major enemy of humankind in the 193os and
i 94os wasn't Hitler's Germany but Stalin's USSR.

6. Genocide is an invention of allied propaganda,
inspired by Jews and the Zionist agenda; the figure six
million is linked to the Jewish propensity for false
statistics such as those found in the Talmud.

I wrote to Maurice Bardeche in the spring of 1982 with a
queasy stomach, knowing whom I was writing to, but ambitious to see him. The heart of darkness wrote back by return
mail; of course I was welcome. He would be at the family vacation house in Canet Plage, near Perpignan. I could take a
hotel room on the beach.

I stared at Bardeche's friendly letter, full of the warm formulae that French writers trade in with such ease. "Chere
Alice Kaplan," it read, in his hand, and as I read I said to myself that my last name was the same as that of the Grand Rabbin, the head rabbi of France. An unmistakably Jewish
name. A Jew being welcomed by a fascist. Maybe the labels
didn't mean anything anymore? I was going to find out if
they did.

On my way to Canet I stopped in Orleans to see a friend
of my teacher Linda Orr's, Claude Mouchard, a poet and
critic who shared her interest in history and revolution,
who, Linda told me, would share my interest in the 193os.
We sat in a walled garden in the back of his rambling house.

Our talk soon turned soon to my intellectual reasons for
being in France: the visit to Bardeche. Claude reacted to my
announcement coolly, telling me about Bardeche's edition
of Balzac. He laughed about the fact that Bardeche had a
fairly decent reputation as a literary critic in spite of his
politics.

Then he shifted in his seat: "You know of course that his
brother-in-law, Brasillach, and his newspaper were responsible for the assassination of Helene's father."

Helene, Claude's wife, was in the kitchen.

He filled in the history. Helene Mouchard was born
Helene Zay; her father was jean Zay, Minister of Education
in the 193os, who was imprisoned by the Vichy government
during the Occupation. He was finally taken out of prison
under false pretenses in 1944 and murdered by a group of
men disguised as Resistance fighters who were part of a
thug squad called the "Milice"-a fascist law-and-order
gang who scrounged around doing evil in the last years of the war. The newspaper Je Suis Partout, edited by Robert
Brasillach, had called for the death of the Popular Front ministers, and these thugs had taken them up on it. Now as I sat
in the garden I remembered Jean Zay's name from rightwing Vichy propaganda that I had pored over, and from Celine, who had made the name into a famous pun: Je vous
Zay (for "Je vous hais"-I hate you).

"Have you thought about what it means to even agree to
talk with this man? There has to be an ethics for your
interview-you have to formulate an ethics for the situation
you're going into. Have you considered it fully?"

A hundred thoughts went through my mind in response
to Claude's challenge. Ethics? Does ethics mean my behavior? Does it mean I have to decide how I'm going to react to
Bardeche before I've even met him? Am I not allowed to
smile? Should I shake his hand? None of these thoughts had
occurred to me before, in any detail; I had been too determined to get the interview in the first place. Maybe that was
for the better, I thought. Shouldn't I be open to surprises?
Isn't the point that I don't have to have a prepared response,
that I should be ready for the accidents of a real conversation? On the other hand, maybe Claude Mouchard was offering me something with this idea of ethics. A French
person couldn't go to see Bardeche the way I was going; the
visit itself would be a declaration of affinity. It was as though,
in France, the events of the war had happened very recently; nor was this the first time I had noticed how raw the
subject remained in daily life. Why did my national removal
make my situation any different? Was I going to see the
equivalent of a Lieutenant Calley, or a Richard Nixon, or
some old crank revisionist-a French Arthur Butz-who
happened to have gone to Harvard?

I don't know what I would have said to Claude at that mo ment if Helene Mouchard, born Helene Zay, hadn't come
into the garden, leaving his question hanging in midair. In a
sense I wasn't ready to answer his question; I was too young
and too eager for my interview and too hungry to learn everything I could about France, by observing. The thought of
an ethics stayed in my head that summer, and returns periodically to haunt me. What does it mean for a Jewish intellectual to work on fascism? Is my role that of a prosecutor or
that of a spy? What produces my energy for this kind of
work? What is in it for me?

Claude Mouchard was my guide on a long afternoon walk
through Orleans, the city that Joan of Arc had liberated from
the English in 1429. Our conversation twisted and turned, in
a way that was very foreign to me then and since has become
one of rituals of French intellectual life I enjoy most.
Mouchard and I continued to circle back to Bardeche as we
commented on the space around us. What are the ethics of
interviewing Bardeche? How can you do it? See here this
statue of Joan of Arc, it represents a right-wing France, the
France of Bardeche; do you recognize the images of Marianne, symbol of the Republic, she represents the left, she is
the symbol of Helene's family. I will never forget the difference between Joan of Arc and Marianne as I learned it that
afternoon. One a boyish, straight-haired innocent warrior,
the other lush and wavy-haired and passionate. I was hungry
to see the places, the traces of the ideologies referred to in
the hundreds of pages of literary criticism and history I had
read at Yale. Claude was a compelling if didactic guide. I surprised him by what I didn't know. 11 m'a fait la legon.