Inside a Pearl (37 page)

My old comfortable, dowdy New York was gone. St. Vincent's had closed. Whereas everyone used to rent and move every few years as they could afford a bigger place, now everyone bought and gentrified their property. The cobblers and that strange little shop in Noho that sold pink sugar were gone, and the very New York institution of the “coffee shop” that sold cheap, delicious food had been replaced by an influx of nail shops and branch banks. There were no more bookstores. Someone said there were more bookshops in Paris than all of America—could that be true?

Luckily I came back to America with Michael. He might rant against the empty decorousness of our old life in Paris, but he had lived in Europe for four years and at least knew what I missed. He made the new New York bearable by introducing me to a whole gang of gay writers in their thirties and forties. And of course I gradually made new friends of my own, my age and younger (everyone was younger).

And we went back to France, but to Provence rather than Paris. We'd rented an old peasant house just outside Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where we spent many summers. Michael found the local accent more understandable than Parisian French, which was spoken too quickly for him. The house, called the Mas de Fé (the “mas of faith”—a mas being a Provençal farmhouse), had acres of grounds and a spring-fed swimming pool (
un basin
), pines at the top of the hill and olive groves at the bottom. We were in the Alpilles, across the street from the same convent, now a retirement home, where Van Gogh had been confined after he cut his ear off.

The owner of the house was Madame Daudet, the very old widow of Léon Daudet's son, a doctor. Léon and Charles Maurras had founded Action Française, a far-right party that was protofascist.
His
father, Alphonse Daudet, was a famous novelist of the late nineteenth century who financed the publication of
La France juive
, the central text of modern French anti-Semitism. He also wrote one of my favorite novels,
Sapho
, which is about a penniless young man from the provinces who falls in love with a beautiful woman. At first he assumes she is a
grisette
, one of those poor girls who make artificial flowers, like Mimi in
La Bohème
, but who he eventually discovers is much older, close to forty, and a famous courtesan. As a child he played around his father's desk and would look with awe at a miniature version of a statue of her—a voluptuous Sappho. I've always thought that would make a good situation for a gay story set now, the forty-year-old New York model who hooks up with a twenty-year-old Iowan who thinks they're the same age but doesn't realize the New Yorker is the same man whose nude photos he used to jerk off to. Now please, no one steal that idea.

Alphonse Daudet, a native of Provence, also wrote
Letters from My Windmill
. Though Daudet never lived inside one,
Windmill
became perhaps the most famous book about Provence—the real windmill he had in mind was just a few miles away. Then he wrote a diary about his case of terminal syphilis,
La Doulou
, which is dialect for
la douleur
(pain). Julian Barnes translated it as, “In the Land of Pain.” He'd heard that the Daudets had died out, but I arranged for him to have tea with our Madame Daudet. Julian found her to be a tough, royalist, formidable woman. I almost forgot to say Alphonse's other son, Lucien Daudet, was Proust's lover for a while and the author of one of my favorite camp books,
Dans l'ombre de l'impératrice
(
In the Empress's Shadow
), about his years as unofficial gentleman-in-waiting to the widowed Empress Eugénie. Proust was a close family friend of the Daudets'; maybe they chose to ignore that he was Jewish—as he did.

Proust's mother had first suspected that he was gay when she saw a photo of her son and two other young dandies with big eyes, pale faces, black bee-stung lips, and clipped mustaches. These were Lucien Daudet and the young Jewish composer from South America Reynaldo Hahn (another lover). For years Proust was drawn to look-alike aesthetes until, like us all, he went for straight rough trade: a chauffeur and two waiters, one French and one a Swedish giant.

Madame Daudet gave me a new red paperback anthology of her father-in-law's writings. No wonder he'd been such a successful right winger. Unlike our own Republicans, with the exceptions of George
Will and William F. Buckley, Léon could write with spirit and eloquence. Though she must have deplored the fact that I was openly gay, she seemed to like that I was a writer beavering away in her family house every July. In August, when we'd left, she took up residence with her twenty-two children and grandchildren. It was a miracle she could fit them all in, but we kept finding rolled-up blue rubber mats in out-of-the-way places. I would picture children placed head-to-foot (
tête-bêche
) in each of the wide, lumpy double beds with their horsehair mattresses.

One year I tried unsuccessfully to argue the rent down by pointing out to Madame Daudet that the two bathrooms and kitchen hadn't been modernized since the 1950s, that one salon was filled with her junk and sealed off, and that the furniture was all decrepit.

“Decrepit!” she stormed. “That shows how much you know. They're all museum pieces. You can find things just like them in many Provençal museums.”

She was referring to a dark wooden cage hung halfway up one wall for storing flour out of reach of the rats. Oh, that and a raised wooden receptacle with a sliding panel for the salt.

In truth, I loved that house and we felt privileged to stay there. One morning a car came rattling up the half-mile-long gravel driveway, trailing dust. Out stepped a bearded man with his wife. He said he was the son of Augustus John, the English painter and famous portraitist of W. B. Yeats and T. E. Lawrence. He and his parents had lived in this very house for twenty-five pounds a year, and were among the last Brits to leave the Continent before the Nazi invasion.

Beside one of the beds upstairs was a painted lifelike Virgin, four feet tall, staring down at the bed with glass eyes. We had to put underwear over her head if we wanted to sleep or have sex. The one window in that room was tiny and the walls were a foot thick, all designed to keep out the cold in the winter and heat in the summer. There were two mammoth armoires richly carved; we could never figure out how anyone had got them in there unless they'd been built in the room.

In another bedroom with one window, there were two double beds and a single bed in an alcove. Next came a smaller room with a single
bed and prie-dieu and a crucifix on the wall, again with one small window. It felt very monastic in there.

Finally there was a larger room with a little wrought-iron balcony and French doors beside its own small bathroom. Downstairs there were just the big brick-floored salon, with a huge refectory-size dinner table and ladder-back chairs, and the sorry little kitchen with its primitive equipment from another period. High-flying American friends who rented it from us for a week in July complained of the lack of modern appliances. I forgot to say that through a blocked-off door from the kitchen was the three-room apartment of the guardian (the
gardien et concierge
), his wife, and his six-year-old son, who was lonely and in love with Michael and would ask me plaintively in his heavy Provençal French, “
M'suh, can your son come out to play with me?
”

The guardian kept two large, fierce dogs in a kennel behind the house. We felt safe until the day some tan and rowdy teenage boys from town decided to swim naked in our pool. I didn't know whether to scare them off or befriend them—silly me, I opted for shooing them away.

Though I wrote a lot in that house, with the slat ceilings expertly crafted like the bottom of a boat, my favorite thing was to read in the prie-dieu room all night long with no fear of the hour, the besotted way one reads as a child. I bought the Pléiade editions of Jean Giono's novels. He quickly became one of my favorite writers, with his sexy Stendhalian heroes and lyrical nature descriptions, his notion of Provence closer to Milan than Paris. Years later I found out that some of the first talkies were of Giono's novels. Certainly one of the best recent big-production French films was of his
Horseman on the Roof
. He was my secret fetish author, the one I didn't want to write an essay about because I didn't want to share him with my few readers.

Still, why wasn't he better known? I discovered he'd once been famous but that he'd made two disastrous career moves. On the eve of World War II he'd come out as a pacifist, and then after the war he'd been condemned, incorrectly, as a collaborationist (in fact he'd hdden several Jews on his various farms). For a few years after the war his books couldn't be published in France because of his unpopular
political stands. Whenever I tried mentioning him to French friends in the nineties, they'd shrug at me as if for some perverse reason I'd lighted on some insignificant and now justly forgotten French author, impossibly dust covered. The French intellectuals were so conformist that they even had iron-clad trends in their antiquarian enthusiasms. The odd thing is that they revered Céline, who was actively pro-Nazi.

Marie-Claude, Michael, and I made a pilgrimage to Giono's uninteresting hometown of Manosque, which has a museum dedicated to his memory. MC had learned to indulge my strange whims for writers of the past whose reputations had dimmed, such as André Gide, who'd taken one of the first anti-Soviet stances, or Daudet, whose
Numa Roumestan
I was reading, a masterful study of the difference between the Provençal and the Parisian characters; although Daudet was brought up in Provence, he preferred the cool, measured character of Parisians to the flamboyance of the southern blowhards he had known. Or what about Daudet's
Le Petit chose
, a touching story of his difficult youth, his version of
David Copperfield
? Dickens himself was a Daudet admirer.

Living in Provence and cooking Provençal recipes, everything from the labor-intensive soup called
pistou
to saffron-flavored milk in which you soaked fresh pasta overnight, I was haunted by the region's two greatest writers, Giono and Daudet. On the wall next to one toilet in the house was a banner on which was inscribed a poem by Frédéric Mistral, the modern champion of the Provençal dialect and a Nobel Prize winner. One of my translators shyly confessed to me that her left-leaning parents had met in the thirties in one of the summer camps Giono had organized in Provence at Contadour for workers who were having their first paid vacations. She seemed embarrassed by the connection, which she suggested history had eclipsed. Her parents became Communists.

I'm sure Giono would have despised me, an American snob and fag, although he was sufficiently aware of American culture to adapt the story of Johnny Appleseed for the well-paying
Reader's Digest
. He'd posited his Johnny as a Provençal folk hero who'd really existed and had reforested the arid local landscape, but Giono hadn't counted on
American fact checkers, who couldn't turn up any such personage of Provençal myth and eventually canceled the publication. Giono also translated
Moby Dick
and was an avid reader of Faulkner.

Hubert was long since dead and buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery, but his thirty-something brother Julien and his companion, François, who was my age, would come visit for two or three days. They'd drive from Nice, about two and a half hours away. They were nice guys who owned a TV repair shop; with them my greatest anxiety was preparing large lunches and dinners of many courses in the tiny, antiquated kitchen. We'd sit out on the huge terrace and look up at the starry night sky, profiled by pointy cypress trees, which seemed as blazing and animated as in a Van Gogh painting. They brought our basset hound Fred (I'd named him after the young psychiatrist Frédéric Pascal, not knowing there was a comic-book character named Fred the Basset). Fred now belonged to Julien and François. They doted on him and told endless anecdotes about him, as people do about their children.

We had lots of visitors, including the poet Sharon Olds, whom we hurt unintentionally by asking about her ex-lover. The following morning she descended from the room of the Virgin Mary statue with two new poems, each mentioning a different one of us and using some of the offending parts of our conversation the day before as ideas for the opening lines.

One day Jean Stein, who as a teenager had been one of Faulkner's last loves, came by for dinner on the terrace with an actress, Natasha Parry, wife of the stage director Peter Brook, and Kennedy Fraser, the former
New Yorker
fashion writer. More and more Saint-Rémy was becoming a spot for fashionable international people to stop off in. It had a charming maze of streets that wound among the buildings, including the birthplace of Nostradamus. Princess Caroline of Monaco had a house in the area. The English writer Peter Mayle had recently enshrined the region with the series of books that began with
A Year in Provence
.

James Lord came and stayed in a nearby hotel but was always drunk, lunch and dinner, so we got fed up and dropped him. I thought he'd
just let our silence pass, but he confronted me and I had to explain. I'd written a flowery dedication to him in one of my books; James cut it out and sent it back to me without comment. Bernard Minoret was vexed with me: “
Ecoute!
Call him. He's an old man.” The truth was I could bear a drunk evening with James every once in a while in Paris, but here in Provence we were three hours at table for lunch and three more for dinner, and often, while drunk, he would drive us in his powerful Mercedes a hundred miles per hour back from Aix and scream at a woman we were passing, “Get out of the way, you cunt!” He would become belligerent with strangers at an adjoining table in a three-star restaurant: “What are you staring at, you cow?” Now both James and Bernard Minoret are dead, and I miss the glamor and excitement of their company not to mention their immense erudition. One of my books is called
The Burning Library
, an allusion to the saying that when an old person dies a library burns. Bernard's mental library was the size of the Bibliothèque nationale.