Inside a Pearl
Authors: Edmund White
To Ann and Lincoln
â¦and the wit and the laughing awareness that is France made all of us alive.
âM. F. K. Fisher,
Long Ago in France
Chapter 1
I discovered France through Marie-Claude de Brunhoff. I'd met her at a party in New York around 1975 and I'd been struck right away by how polished and elegant she was. Marie-Claude gleamed like the inside of a nautilus shell. She wasn't tall, but she held herself as if she were. She had a white ivory cigarette holder into which she screwed one cigarette after another. A small group of Americans had already begun to object to cigarette smoke in a closed room, but at a cocktail party it still seemed inevitable. I chain-smoked and thought nothing of it.
Marie-Claude was beautiful, with big, wide-awake eyes, a low voice, layers of pale clothes that billowed around her in floating panels, shoes that were immaculate and of a startling red. She seemed completely focused on the person she was talking toâme, in this case. But there was a slight lag in her responses, almost as if in spite of her excellent English she might first be translating everything into and out of French. Later, her English (or rather “American”) became much more assured, pell-mell and rapid.
She seemed more interested in me than I merited, and I wondered if she'd mistaken me for someone more important. When I'd lived in Rome in 1970, I noticed that foreigners often promoted me a notch or two in their imaginations; I'd certainly benefited from this geographical social climbing. It wasn't that Marie-Claude treated me with deference. It was just that she bothered to ask me questions and flirt with me.
I was puzzled by the flirtation. Americans were, and are, the least seductive of people. After all, America and Britain are the countries
where a politician can be pushed out of office or impeached if it's discovered he has a mistressâor even an overeager intern with no sense of discretion. In France, seduction is a form of politeness and means no more than any other courtesy. It is the necessary liquid in which all the denizens of the social fishbowl need to swim. A prime minister is mocked if he doesn't have a mistress.
I'd learn this only later, when I lived in France, but Marie-Claude was already using her warmth and femininity to flatter me. In France,
coquette
is a positive word, and even a little boy of five or six, say, who has tilted his new cap at a fetching angle, will be described approvingly as
coquet
(
“Comme il est coquet, le petit!”
his grandmother will say).
The next day on the phone, the hostess (who was also my agent) told me that that French woman was married to the man who did the children's books about Babar the Elephant. That hadn't been one of my books as a child; I think the American Babar readers were in a higher socioeconomic class, the sort of people who visited France, and maybe even spoke French, or wanted to. But even I knew
of
Babar, though the character struck me as very colonial, from the same era as pith helmets.
I dimly remembered a monkey, an old lady, and of course all those elephants in green clothes wearing crowns. There was a quaint, brightly colored charm about these images that I had a hard time imagining was still being generated in our day. My agent told me that Laurent de Brunhoff's father had started the Babar series in the 1930s, then died, before the war, of tuberculosis. He'd first invented the tales and drawings as bedtime stories for his three sons. In the 1950s, one of those sons, Laurent, began turning out new Babars. Of course, critics always compared Laurent's books unfavorably to his father's seven original Babars, but in fact Laurent created many beautiful books including a yoga-for-elephants book and a book of museum visits in which the Mona Lisa was an elephant, as was the nude woman eating lunch on the grass in the
Dejeuner sur l'herbe
.
I later learned that Marie-Claude was born in Paris on September 7, 1929, and that she'd been a literary critic for
L'Express
,
Le Monde
, and the
Quinzaine Littéraire
. She didn't look nearly so old when I met her,
though years of tanning had taken their toll. She hated to have her picture taken, which is why so few exist.
I wondered if Marie-Claude had flirted with me because she wanted something. I was suspicious, like all New Yorkers. And hadn't she been told that I was the coauthor of
The Joy of Gay Sex
and impervious to her allure? But of course I was susceptible to itâand as my years in France later showed me, straight and gay women never shied away from taking a gay man's arm, serving him his favorite dish, remembering his pet peeves, deferring to his phobias, kissing him on both cheeks at the beginning of the evening and at the end (or three kisses in the South of France). In our years together, I knew that most of Marie-Claude's warmth came from a sense of friendship, but to that was always added a soupçon of seductiveness.
After the initial meeting, Marie-Claude wrote me from Paris several times in dark blue ink on her sky-blue stationery. The writing was very large, and ten or fifteen words could fill a whole page. As a result, each letter was short but looked long. She seemed to have no idea how to punctuate and her English spelling was at best impressionistic. Later, I learned she was no more orthodox in French orthography. She sent me a book, Michel Tournier's
The Erl-King
. She later wrote a fanciful portrait in English of Tournier. Everything about Paris seemed as glamorous as Gitane smoke to this States-confined guy.
I tried to read the Tournier, since it was an article of personal faith that I knew French. I'd studied it two years in high school and even won a county-wide
prix d'honneur
, but now, looking back, I wonder if our teacher could actually
speak
French. He was good at grammar and drilled us in it relentlessly, if patiently, as he knotted and unknotted his enormous pale hands. He'd somehow fought on the Gaullist side before we entered the war, and he had hung on the classroom wall a sort of diploma of gratitude from the Gaullist government that declared,
“Pour la gloire.”
I'd read Rimbaud and Verlaine in
en face
translations obsessively, secretivelyâafter lights-out in my boarding-school dorm, sitting on the toilet. I owned a volume of Madame de Sévigné's letters entirely in French, which I'd convinced myself I'd read, but all that had happened was that my eyes had passed, unregistering, over all the
words. I was like someone who convinces himself he's dieting just by buying a few lo-cal foods.
For Time-Life Books, in the early 1970s, I'd co-written a book about
Homo erectus
called
The First Men
and had been invited by a staffer, a French woman named Simone, to a lunch with two French anthropologists. They were members of an important
Homo erectus
dig in the Dordogne and had been brought over to New York to advise us on our book. Simone agreed to translate. I amazed and pleased everyone by saying a few words in French at the beginning of the meal. But as I drank more and more white wine, I acquired a fatal confidence and soon was stringing together long chains of French words and tossing them like bouquets at the worried-looking experts. Finally, Simone said, unsmiling, “You know, you're not making any sense. No one can understand a word.” When I think of that moment now, late at night, forty years later, I still cringe.
One night in New York I picked up a short, jolly French tourist (or was he a sailor from Marseilles?) who couldn't speak a word of English. We had great sex and convinced ourselves we were communicating effortlessly until he took me to see
Going Places,
one of Depardieu's early hits, during which if I glanced up even for a second from the English subtitles I was completely lost. The little Frenchman kept pushing my hand onto the enormous bulge in his trousers and whispering incomprehensible dirty words into my ear. His shamelessness alarmed meâand then I was chagrined that I was being so prudish and American. When the lights came up at the end the couple beside us were lesbians and smiled encouragingly.
I'd spent a few days in Paris in the mid-1960s with my officemate from New York. Then, in 1970, the poet Alfred Corn and I drove from Rome to Paris, where we stayed for a few nights in a hotel on the Ãle Saint-Louis. Al and I visited museums, surely, but what I remember were the Left Bank cafés, full of male students with suit jackets that they'd drape over their narrow shoulders without putting their arms through the sleeves. They were all murmuring this maddening, confident language, their mouths bitter with espresso, tiny glasses of cognac, unfiltered cigarettes, and words, words, words. The girls were all in
black, their pale, cynical faces unpainted except for moon rings of mascara. Al and his then-wife, Ann, spoke Frenchâthat was the language they spoke to each other.
Paris still seemed like a set out of a nineteenth-century opera, with its broad avenues, narrow streets, skinny houses teetering up into the sky, and lines of four or five students linking arms, trotting out into the night, and laughing mirthlessly. A Hungarian friend of mine observed that the French resisted globalization, which meant Americanization, longer and more effectively than any other people. They had their own way of cooking, dressing, smelling, talking, which resembled no one else's. The cafés, which spilled out onto the sidewalks, glowed and pulsed in the misty night like pods about to spawn.
When I came back to live in Paris in the summer of 1983, I arrived armed with the success of a novel,
A Boy's Own Story,
and a Guggenheim fellowship for sixteen thousand dollars. Nicholas Wahl, a scholar who ran the Institute of French Studies at New York University, arranged for me to stay in an apartment he sometimes rented for a semester on the Ãle Saint-Louis. I think he intended for me to live there just a few months, but I ended up staying in that apartment for the next six years, depriving him of his favorite stopover. I stayed in France till 1998 but at two later addresses.
Oddly enough, people often asked me if as a writer I went to Paris for inspiration. That never occurred to me. I guess I didn't think writers were that influenced by their setting. And I didn't think of inspiration in that way. Was the idea that one would be moved by the residue of all the great writers of the past? Perhaps one was inspired by living writers one met and talked toâbut to me they were more present in their work than in their presence, and presumably their work was available in Topeka as much as in Paris. The fact that Voltaire had once eaten at the Procope restaurant didn't affect me at all. And yet in some vaguer and more exciting way Paris was part of my fantasies about my future, which I usually dreamed about while flying home to New York. I'm the kind of guy who's always wanted to be elsewhere.
I had a new lover, or rather companion, named John Purcell, who went with me somewhat grudgingly to Paris during the summer of 1983. Everyone says he or she wants to live in Paris, but the reality is somewhat dauntingâa strange language spoken rapidly, a culture that rivals and a history that far surpasses America's, winters during which it rains every single day, an exorbitantly expensive town. No wonder so few Americans go there for long, just long enough for their fantasies to wear off and the cold, wet reality to dawn on them like a bad hangover.
