Inside a Pearl (7 page)

As a youngster, Albert had met Genet in Beirut. Perhaps partly because of this encounter with the charismatic writer, Albert had become the world's leading expert on Genet. Although he worked on many other writers (including Marguerite Duras; Georges Shéhadé, the Francophone poet from Lebanon; Pierre Guyotat; and Kateb Yacine, the Algerian nationalist writer), he published at Gallimard a collection of Genet's political writings and prepared the Pléiade definitive edition of Genet's plays. And I was supposed to be writing Genet's biography. Genet had died in 1986, the year before I was commissioned to write the book. I kept trying to pry information out of Albert until I realized it would be simpler to hire him using some of my advance money. At the time, Albert was working part-time for IMEC (L'Institut Mémoires de l'Édition Contemporaine), a private library that housed the archives of publishing houses and contemporary writers. When he wasn't at IMEC, Albert was making a living as an advertising copywriter. Once we started collaborating, he was able to quit his advertising work.

I took seven years to research and write my biography of Genet. Albert helped me at every step—writing summaries of interviews he conducted with people who'd known Genet, finding me relevant texts and photocopying them, establishing dates in a clear chronology, fact-checking
everything I'd written. We went together to Alligny-en-Morvan, Genet's village in Burgundy, where we visited a dozen people who'd known him, including his godmother—who was over a hundred years old and spoke to me in the dialect of the region, which her granddaughter had to translate into French. Even though the wife of my French editor, Ivan Nabokoff, was the sister of Pierre Joxe, the minister of the interior in Mitterrand's government, I couldn't convince Joxe to open Genet's adoption dossier. But Albert found plenty of other details: that one of Genet's childhood friends was named Querelle (the name of one of his later novelistic heroes); that one could still visit Mettray (Genet's penal colony when he was an adolescent); that one could read the very literary letters Genet wrote to a woman he'd met in Czechoslovakia, a German Socialist refugee; that the widow of his doctor was still alive, a woman whose husband had prescribed Genet his massive doses of Nembutal (she'd helped Genet prepare the final draft of his longest play,
The Screens
, and she even showed me X-rays of Genet's kidneys). Albert tracked down Genet's record of arrests for petty crimes (for stealing a bolt of fabric from a department store and the autograph of a French king, and for doctoring a train ticket). We met a former convict from one of his prisons; an actress who had played the Madame in
The Balcony
and who shared her letters from Genet; the Swiss translator who accompanied Genet among the Black Panthers in America; the adopted son of one of his lovers and his principal heir; his obstructionist agent in London; the two high-born Palestinian women who'd played such a large role in his old age, and so on. Our interviews took me to Damascus and all over France and the United States.

Albert had a very precise manner—the product of a good French Catholic education. He loved to clarify his terms, nail down a fact, take notes in the hour after an encounter, annotate his reading. At the same time he was quick to see his own absurdities and those of others. And he was affectionate. I guess I define intelligence as the power to make new, surprising, wide-ranging associations and never to rely on automatic, untested generalities. With Albert I felt that I was in the presence of someone like Wittgenstein who was actually thinking out loud, thinking right in front of you, thinking a thought for the first time.

He was a great womanizer. Perhaps he was aided by the catholicity of his tastes. Although he had a beautiful, cultured wife who was a nonstop reader, an art dealer, and related to Georges Shéhadé, the Francophone poet from Lebanon, Albert had many adventures and affairs. The other day my French scholarly friend Alice Kaplan had dinner with Albert and a new girlfriend—who turned out once to have been his shrink. He was the male version of Catherine Millet, the author of
The Sexual Life of Catherine M.
, which details her thousands of conquests. I've always been fascinated by libertinism and promiscuity, particularly the often philosophically self-assured French variety, and when I reviewed
The Sexual Life
I called it “the most explicit book about sex ever written by a woman.” I interviewed Millet at the literary festival at Brighton before a packed crowd, translating back and forth from English into French. I also spoke about her on the BBC. She was a very courteous, intelligent woman, an art critic who's written a study of Salvador Dalí.

I'd met Michel Foucault in New York when I ran the New York Institute for the Humanities. Foucault was like me in one regard—he hated to talk about ideas during social evenings. (Richard Sennett, the sociologist and the founder of the Institute, once said to me, “You'll tell everyone about your sex life; your only secrets are your ideas.”) Foucault's partner, Daniel Defert, had given a fascinating seminar on how the Spanish colonists had classified the Aztecs according to medieval rankings based on clothes, the
habitus
(as in “The habit makes the man”). Foucault conducted a seminar on the last volume of his History of Sexuality, which was to be about the difference between the late pagan emphasis on which sex acts were permissible if committed between masters and slaves, or masters and masters, with little regard for the gender of the participants (e.g., a free man must never be the passive partner with a slave) and the early Christian obsession with sin, buggery, and fornication, not just in deed but in thought.

Foucault spoke English through an act of will—I don't think he'd ever studied it and he wasn't worried by his very strong accent. I thought that anyone as smart as he would of course speak English—or any other language he set his mind to. He was surrounded with
beautiful ephebes such as Hervé Guibert, Mathieu Lindon, and Gilles Barbedette, but sexually his type was burly and macho.

But he never thought the sexual identity of someone was all that revealing, and as his disciple I mustn't pretend I'm saying something profound about him by talking about his kinkiness. He was both fiery and sweet, a rare combination of traits. He showed me that you can be passionately aggressive about advancing your views, arguing your position, but in the bosom of your friends mild and even humble, certainly sweet. Maybe that explains his aversion to discussing ideas except in the classroom; he was deeply engaged in intellectual discourse, was quick to the point of paranoia in defending his theories, but he didn't want combativeness to poison his social evening.
Ce qu'aimer veut dire
by Mathieu Lindon (the son of Beckett's publisher) is an extended, intimate view of Foucault by a real friend.

Toward the end of his life Foucault thought the basis of morality after the death of God might be the ancient Greek aspiration to leave your life as a beautiful, burnished artifact. Certainly in his case his gift for friendship, his quick sympathy, his gift for paradox, his ability to admire left his image as a man, as an exemplary life, highly burnished. The people who said his promiscuity or his death from AIDS diminished him were just fools.

Marie-Claude would not countenance my complaints about the French language.

“But your French is perfect!” she said in English.

She and I spoke English all the time except at her dinner parties, where she'd invite the latest literary star to bask in our short-lived adoration. I'd been put through similar paces when
A Boy's Own Story
had come out in France (
Un jeune Americain
). I'd assumed that one charming older gay man, the editor of
Science et Vie
, was actually interested in me personally and would want to see me often in the future. In fact, I'd made a modest little splash, and the editor as a true Parisian needed to know everyone and everything
dans le vent
,
à la page
,
au courant
—all ways of referring to what's new, the latest manifestation of
l'air du temps.

Of course journalists back in New York had to keep up with the latest trends, but they wouldn't have invited the trend to dinner. New Yorkers were always exhausted after their twelve hours at the office and two hours at the gym and hour at the shrink's; when they got home, they would crawl into a hot bath, and from there to a huge immaculate bed where they ate their plate of take-home lobster ravioli and watched a talk show until they sank into restless, clamorous sleep. They couldn't be bothered seeing their oldest friends, much less a total stranger. A friend in New York was defined as someone you never needed to see, who would never get angry at you for ignoring him.

In Paris, however, there were still rituals in place for promising new people, new ideas, new trends (which a bit later, in the nineties, would eventually be colloquially labeled
tendance
, or “tendency”). Something new was said to be
très tendance.
If you were a mere trend, no one wanted to be stuck with seeing you more than once; the host expected you to stay on message during your single visit and communicate clearly what was new about you and your work.

I'd written a novel about my life as a tormented teen in the Midwest in the 1950s. It was hailed in the English-speaking world because it was well written, at once a breakthrough thematically and an “instant classic.” The French couldn't quite grasp the novelty or the importance of my accomplishment. After all, France was the country of Proust, André Gide, Jean Genet—all three among the most celebrated innovators of the twentieth century and all three writers who wrote quite openly about being gay: Gide's journals and his memoir,
If It Die,
as well as his early novel
The Immoralist;
Genet's
Our Lady of the Flowers
and his four other novels; Proust's entire oeuvre, in which so many of the men and women turn out to be homosexual. How could my slender volume compare to this massive achievement, which had preceded it by fifty, seventy, eighty years?

Nor did the French like the whole idea of “gay fiction,” though they'd invented it. France was opposed to the notion of identity politics and even more so to the literature of special interest groups. In France there was no black novel, no Jewish novel, certainly no gay novel. To be sure, Jews wrote about being Jewish but everyone, Jewish and gentile alike, regarded with horror the category of “the Jewish novel.”

If specific identities were rejected in France, it was in favor of “universalism,” a concept so dear to the Enlightenment and the Revolution, the ideal of the abstract citizen, stripped of all qualifications, equal to everyone else before the voting urn and the court of justice. In the arts it meant that the individual with all his quirks was thrown into high relief but the group he belonged to was pushed into the background. French schoolchildren in history class did not learn about Napoleon's Corsican heritage, just as in literature class no one mentioned that Proust's mother was Jewish (nor had Proust himself mentioned it). Proust made his narrator heterosexual and his family Catholic so that against this gold standard of propriety he could describe in detail his lesbians, his intergenerational gays, his gay sadists and rent boys, and more broadly the secret world of homosexuality that interpenetrates the visible world of class and age distinctions. His contemporaries congratulated Proust on his “courage” in exploring the twisted world of homosexuality, since he said nothing to enlighten them about his own orientation. The only trouble with universalism was that if it had been progressive originally, now it had become conservative.

Translation is always difficult. The lush metaphors of my
Nocturnes for the King of Naples
, so slippery in English, had to be sorted out in French. Time and again, of a figurative conceit I'd carefully crafted, I was told, “But you can't mean
both
things in French.” Even the word “boy” (
garçon)
was suspect; it sounded too much like a waiter or a pedophile's delight. That's why
A Boy's Own Story
was translated as
Un jeune Américain
. I wanted it to be called
Signes de Piste
(a 1930s collection of Boy Scout novels) or even
Feu de Camp
, but I don't think any French person understood what I was getting at.

Not that the French were impervious to the allure of the exotic, but they preferred to locate the Other elsewhere. Within France they wanted everything to be uniform, starting with themselves. No wonder those French living in the capital resented the question, “Where are you from?”

“Paris, why do you ask? I've lived in Paris all my life.”

“And before that?”

“Marseilles. Surely you can't hear the accent?”

“Not a trace.”

“But is there anything I do differently from all other Parisians?”

“Of course not. You wear the same dark clothes and are just as skinny and murmur just as softly and take the same group tours to the same places like Vietnam or Anatolia or Egypt and have never toured France itself. You know the canals of Venice better than your own medieval monastery of Moissac or the chalets of Franche-Comté—though your grandparents still vacation close to home.”

Reassured, your friend smiles and says, “I still don't understand.”

“In America, we're proud of our regional and national differences. We say, ‘What are you?' And the answer is ‘Irish' or ‘Italian,' though our ancestors came over from Galway in the 1840s. We say, ‘Where are you from?' and the answer to that is, ‘Arkansas, my mother never wore shoes till she was ten,' and we're proud of this.”

Your interlocutor will then say, “In France we have no class differences in our way of speaking and only four slight, very slight, regional accents, impossible for a foreigner to detect.”