Paris Was Ours (20 page)

My Literary Paris

I
N PARIS
, I lived on rue Guynemer. Rue Guynemer, once rue du Luxembourg, is situated in the sixth arrondissement across from the Luxembourg Gardens and is named after Georges Guynemer, a handsome World War I pilot. There is a photograph of Georges Guynemer in the war museum at the Invalides; in it, he is leaning on the fuselage of his biplane; he is wearing a leather helmet with the goggles pushed up against his forehead and looking resolutely away from the camera. According to the caption, the photograph was taken the day before Georges Guynemer was shot down; neither he nor his plane was ever found.

Soon after I moved into my apartment on rue Guynemer, the concierge informed me that the French novelist Françoise Sagan lived a few doors down on the same street.

Ah, oui
.
Bonjour tristesse
.

DIVORCED, WITH THREE
small children, I had come to France in the midseventies for a change of scene. Also, since I was born in France, I felt instinctively that I was French. The fact that I did not have any relatives or know many people in Paris, I told myself, did not matter. The beauty of the city
would be enough; I would not be lonely. (Strangely enough, there is no specific word for “lonely” in the French language:
seul, isolé, abandonné
, some people even use the word
perdu
.)

Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas famously lived around the corner from rue Guynemer at 27, rue de Fleurus; farther down the street, where rue Guynemer intercepts rue Vaugirard, Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald spent several months in a building with elegant French windows that opened onto the Luxembourg Gardens, which must have been the setting for the North’s apartment in
Tender Is the Night
: “high above the green mass of leaves.” In addition, not far and within walking distance, there is a place Paul Claudel, a rue Corneille, a rue Racine, and a rue Regnard, streets all named after famous French writers.

I spent the first year improving my French, learning my way around the city on buses and Métros, learning to say “monsieur” or “madame” when I addressed someone, learning how to wrap a scarf around my neck the way French women do, learning to run up the stairs to my apartment before the
minuterie
shut off and left me groping with my key in the dark, and, finally, learning how to order cuts of meat from the butcher around the corner on rue de Fleurus—unfortunately, once, on a Monday, the day French butchers are traditionally shut, I went to a
chevaline
and bought five hundred grams of
viande hachée
before I realized my dreadful mistake. I was, in a word, getting settled in my new life in Paris.

I don’t remember exactly how or when I decided to go back to school. I remember that it was a decision taken at the last minute. All of a sudden, I had to fill out forms, assemble papers, copy them: my birth certificate, my transcript from college, my
passport, my resident visa. Then I had to stand for several hours in a long line of students to register. The lines were divided according to letters of the alphabet, and I made the mistake of first standing in the line that included the letter
E
—the first letter of my surname at the time—when instead I should have been standing in the line that included the letter
S
—the first letter of my maiden name. This error caused me several more hours of standing, and, the last in line, I just made it before the office shut and before I would have had to wait another year to register at the Sorbonne. I was applying for a master’s degree,
une maîtrise
, in American literature, at Paris III. As it turned out, my bachelor of arts degree from an Ivy League university was considered insufficient qualification for the French master’s program, and I was informed in no uncertain terms that I would have to take an additional undergraduate year and first obtain my
licence
. This news came as a blow—a blow to my pride and a blow, I thought, to the American education system, which was held in so little esteem. It also meant that I had to take eight courses.

That second year is a blur. Looking back, I picture myself hurrying across the Luxembourg Gardens in all types of weather—rain, a rare snowstorm, cold, damp—clutching my bag of books on my way to the rue de l’École de Médecine, where most of the classes were held. (A few were held in entirely different locations, but I have now forgotten where or how I got there.) I also picture myself hurrying back home at noon in time to have lunch with my children and to walk the dog, then, in a still greater hurry, setting out once more across the Luxembourg to yet another class. Thursday was my day of respite. I had classes, but since an afternoon class was
followed by an evening class, with just enough time for dinner in between, I had arranged for a babysitter. So every Thursday, promptly, at seven, I crossed the boulevard Saint-Michel to the Balzar, a restaurant, I learned later, much frequented by writers, intellectuals, and professors at the Sorbonne. Each week, I sat at the same table and ordered the same plat du jour and a little carafe of red wine to drink with my dinner. Did I feel
seule, isolée, abandonée
, or
perdue
sitting alone at my table? Probably, but I also felt adventurous—or as if an adventure was possible. While I waited for my meal, I propped a novel by a favorite writer—Donald Barthelme, Nathalie Sarraute, Franz Kafka—prominently in front of me. Someone, preferably a very good-looking, intelligent man, I imagined, attracted by my excellent taste in literature, was sure to seek me out.

The Thursday evening class—one of the eight classes I had to take—was on American economics from 1945 to the present, beginning with a hefty dose on the New Deal, which, according to my notes, FDR introduced four hours after he was sworn into office. For my term paper, I wrote on the controversy then brewing over whether the United States would give the British Aircraft Corporation and the French Société nationale industrielle aérospatiale landing rights for their supersonic aircraft, the Concorde. The issue had yet to be resolved when I wrote the paper, although on May 24 of that year, 1976, the Concorde was due to fly joint inaugural flights from Paris and London to Dulles International Airport. The nominal flight time was said to be three hours and fifty minutes, which meant that the Concorde would arrive in the United States sooner than it left Europe by the clock, since its speed exceeds
the rotational speed of the earth. I got a grade of 17 (17 out of 20) on my paper.

I did not do quite as well in my other courses. In one, I had to compare opera librettos to the novels they were based on (I compared
La traviata
to
La dame aux camélias
); in another course I read Shakespeare in French; in another I translated texts (from English to French and French to English—I did well on the latter, not so well on the former); in another, the hardest of all, I studied linguistics (I still have nightmares about linguistic “trees”).

A difficulty of a different sort was my age: Although I was in my early thirties, I was always by far the oldest student in the class. As a result, I was considered suspect: I belonged to the other camp. The teacher camp. Then, the division between teacher and student was enormous. The relationship between the two was, at best, formal: one did not speak out of turn, one addressed the teacher respectfully by his or her title. At worst, the teacher was often rudely dismissive or cruel:
Mais non, mademoiselle, votre réponse est complètement idiote
. There was, in other words, no easy camaraderie in the classroom.

The third year, the year of
la maîtrise
, was also the year of Monsieur Le Vot. M. Le Vot, a handsome, articulate man in his midfifties, was my professor and thesis adviser. He taught American literature. M. Le Vot, along with Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Vladimir Propp, and Gérard Genette, to name but a few of the famous structuralist and semiotic theorists, were out to demystify literature and to show that like any other product of language, it is a
construct
and can be analyzed and classified. They no longer considered literature to have a vital essence or to be
unique
; they considered
literature to be akin to a system of rules. Their clinical approach to literature undermined the reader’s cherished belief that what is “real” is what is experienced; it undermined the reader’s common sense. And for a time, it undermined mine.

This time I was only required to take a single course, M. Le Vot’s. The class met for three hours once a week, on Tuesday afternoons, in a room with a beautiful and distracting view of the Paris rooftops. There were eight of us in the program—all but me were French—and we sat fairly informally at a long wooden table. M. Le Vot began by giving us a brief survey of American literature, whose subjects, he told us, followed a clockwise movement, from the West (wild nature), to the North (metaphysical problems), to the East (urban problems); only the South (its nostalgic quest for history) was different. After that, we were ready to begin. We would read William Faulkner’s
As I Lay Dying
.
As I Lay Dying
was one of my favorite books. I had read the novel so many times, I almost knew it by heart. This would be easy, I thought.

Our first assignment was to draw a diagram. The diagram was to be divided into fifty-nine parts so as to correspond to the fifty-nine chapters in
As I Lay Dying
. Above each, we were to write the name of the chapter’s narrator—Darl, Jewel, Tull, Addie, and so forth; underneath the names, we were to write where the action takes place—house, road, river, and so on—and then write in the number of days. The idea for the diagram was based on the five categories central to the literary theory so dear to M. Le Vot’s heart (his black heart, I, by then, had decided): time-order, which is divided into prolepsis (anticipation) and analepsis (flashback); duration (length of episodes); frequency (how often an event is narrated); mood
(which can be divided into distance; diegesis, recounting the story; or mimesis, representing the story), and perspective or point of view; and finally, voice or the act of narrating, of which there are two basic kinds: heterodiegetic, where the narrator is absent from the narrative, and homodiegetic, where the narrator is inside the narrative (as in the first person).

No, no. Never. I would not make a diagram. Children made diagrams. In addition, I had never heard of prolepsis, analepsis, diegesis, mimesis, heterodiegetic, or homodiegetic. First, I planned to denounce M. Le Vot’s and all his fellow structuralists’ deluded and pretentious methods; then I planned never to darken M. Le Vot’s classroom door again, but M. Le Vot had already put his books and papers inside his briefcase and wrapped his silk scarf around his neck, and with a brief wave au revoir, with one elegantly gloved hand, he himself was out the door before I could open my mouth to object or complain.

I still have my diagram. Three and a half pages that my children and I Scotch-taped together lengthwise on the dining room table, the fifty-nine divisions carefully ruled in red, the rest of the information neatly written below in blue ink.

I made diagrams for William Styron’s
Lie Down in Darkness
; Flannery O’Connor’s
Wise Blood
; Carson McCullers’s
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
; Tennessee Williams’s
A Streetcar Named Desire
; Joyce Carol Oates’s
Expensive People
; Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby
; Nathanael West’s
Miss Lonelyhearts
; John Gardner’s
Grendel
(I would write my thesis on John Gardner’s novels); Robert Coover’s story “The Babysitter,” in
Pricksongs and Descants
; Richard Brautigan’s
Trout Fishing in America
; and a few of Donald Barthelme’s stories in
City Life
.

I learned a lot that year. In, for instance, our first assignment,
As I Lay Dying
, I learned that by studying the nineteen contrasting voices—Darl’s objective listing, Vardaman’s senseless “My mother is a fish,” Dewey Dell’s subjective meditation—how and why Faulkner so mightily succeeds in representing both an emotional reality and the simultaneity of an experience. In our second assignment, Styron’s
Lie Down in Darkness
, another favorite novel, I could make out how, by making a diagram showing the progression of the seasons, of time, of place, and of the longer and longer use of analepsis, a pattern took shape, a kind of spiral indicating a nostalgia for a lost paradise, emblematic, perhaps, of that felt by the author for the lost grandeur and dream of the American South, and I could begin to understand how Styron was able to write so movingly and convincingly. I learned, in other words, that a careful, analytical, and even technical reading of a novel, instead of—as I had initially feared—spoiling the pleasure of that novel, greatly enhanced it.

M. Le Vot was an excellent teacher. He was passionate about his subjects. His English, though flawless, was spoken with a slight, appealing accent. He encouraged us to speak up and was never dismissive or rude. He graded fairly. He wore elegant English tweed jackets, cashmere V-necked sweaters, highly polished shoes, and a wedding ring. Nonetheless, I fell deeply in love with M. Le Vot. I also fell deeply in love with American literature.

On a warm June day, after I had handed in my thesis and passed the oral examination, I went to say good-bye to M. Le Vot. I crossed the Luxembourg for almost the last time, as I was soon going back to America, and I walked slowly. I admired
the tall chestnut trees and the flowers in bloom and stopped for a moment to watch the children sailing their boats in the boat basin. M. Le Vot was sitting behind his desk in his office and he stood up to greet me. He told me that my dress was pretty and that I had gotten a
mention bien
on my thesis. I told him that, inspired by his teaching, I now wanted to write fiction. “Courage,” he said, smiling, “et bonne chance.” Then, in what I interpreted as a blessing of sorts, M. Le Vot kissed me lightly on both cheeks.