by Edmund White
Undoubtedly these remarks show what an anthropological approach I took toward “the French.” Later I came to disapprove of this spirit of observation and speculation about the national character of what the Peace Corps calls “our host country nationals.” I came to think that individuals should be judged on their merits and not used to build up a portrait of a whole nationality. I’d read somewhere that tracing national character was a puerile pursuit, not one to be encouraged, but one that Americans are especially prone to. Only about 30 percent of Americans have passports, and half of those have traveled only to Mexico or Canada. We are an insular, incurious nation—but there I go again.
In many ways Mitterrand was the best friend French capitalists ever had. Because he was supposedly a Socialist, the labor unions came to heel. For that, he’d mastered all the progressive rhetoric necessary. Although many bankers and investors initially fled Paris for New York, soon they came trickling back, especially when Mitterrand realized his more extreme policies (taxation of the rich) wouldn’t work. I heard that Marie-Hélène de Rothschild said that New York was impossible because rich people there only socialized with other rich people of exactly the same level of wealth, and that our New York rich people worked long days and had to be in bed by ten, making social life impossible. No one had amusing artists or writers to dinner. And besides, everyone in America ate asparagus with knives and forks, instead of with their fingers as civilized people did.
I realized the rich had come home to Paris and were reassured the night I was asked to accompany the French editor of French Vogue to a masked ball given for a cause at the Palais Garnier, the old opera house. The two hosts were Madame Mitterrand and Madame Chirac (at that time wife of the mayor of Paris). For the first time every rich woman felt safe to bring out her jewels, no longer afraid they’d be confiscated. The evening started with the entirety of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera starring Pavarotti. Then in the lobbies there was a sit-down dinner for hundreds, followed by an actual masked ball. TV cameras were wheeling about lighting up one woman after another and televising her gown. It was the sort of stuffy evening I hate except to tell others about it. Years later, my partner Michael and I went to Elton John’s fiftieth-birthday party, where hundreds were in costume. Elton was dressed like an eighteenth-century courtier with tiny cannon explosions going off in his white wig. He and his lover arrived in the back of a freight truck decorated inside like an eighteenth-century drawing room. Trumpeters lined the entranceway. We were entertained by black singers from America singing spirituals and formally dressed couples from Wales demonstrating ballroom dancing onstage. Michael recognized every rock star attending, but I’d never heard of any of them. We were seated with Ismail Merchant, of the filmmaking duo Merchant and Ivory, and his date, a beauty who turned out to be Mr. Naples, who’d been flown in for the occasion. He turned and asked me in Italian who was the man he was accompanying. At another grand dinner, given by Diane von Furstenberg to launch a new perfume, I was seated next to France’s then most famous model, Inès de la Fressange. I asked her what she did. The others at our table gasped. She thought it was funny and explained she’d just come back from India and was opening a dress shop of her own. In those days Diane von Furstenberg lived in Paris, not New York, and she was with André Elkan, the editor of Panta, an Italian magazine similar to Granta. He was doing a book-length interview of the very old Alberto Moravia, who was always seated in the corner.
And yet when I first moved to Paris I couldn’t really socialize with French people because I couldn’t speak the language. The best description of what it’s like to speculate about what other people are saying in a language you’re trying to learn comes from Ben Lerner’s hilarious recent novel Leaving the Atocha Station (in which the narrator moved to Madrid): “Then she might have described swimming in the lake as a child, or said that lakes reminded her of being a child, or asked me if I’d enjoyed swimming as a child, or said that what she’d said about the moon was childish.” Neophytes in a new language live from one hypothesis to another.
In the meantime, the expat I saw most often was Marilyn Schaefer, a friend from New York who came to Paris for a year in 1983. She’d been such a friend since I was fourteen that it was a real consolation to have her nearby (she’s still a close friend). She understood French only very approximately. One night a waiter was saying something with such a tragic expression that Marilyn said, “Quel dommage.” Her French-speaking date said the waiter had asked them if they wanted to be on their mailing list. I saw a lot of Sarah Plimpton, George Plimpton’s sister (as serious as her brother was jokey), a slender woman who wrote poetry and painted and would eventually marry Robert Paxton, the great historian of the Vichy period. Sarah frowned skeptically at everything I said, as though she were hard of hearing or I were a liar. Over lunch I told her I was just planning to stay for a year. She said, “I thought the same thing. Just one year. Now it’s nineteen years later. It’s really the land of lotus eaters here.”
She’d previously fallen for André du Bouchet, one of France’s top poets, who, like Sarah, wrote in short, unpunctuated free verse lines, la poésie blanche. She sublet her Marais apartment to Marilyn, and the most remarkable thing about the apartment was the orgasmic yelping of a female neighbor each morning, her rhythmic cries filling the courtyard. When the woman descended the stairs and came into the courtyard, on her way out to do her shopping, applause would erupt from all around.
I asked myself why I was here. Sure, I’d won a Guggenheim and a small but regular contract with Vogue to write once a month on cultural life. Right now I was writing a piece about why Americans liked Proust so much. Back in America I’d worked around the clock heading the New York Institute for the Humanities and teaching writing at Columbia and New York University. I never seemed to have time for my own writing. When I was president of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the biggest and oldest AIDS organization in the world, I hadn’t liked myself in the role of leader; I was power mad and tyrannical, much to my surprise, always ordering people to shut up and vote. And secretly I’d wanted the party to go on and thought that moving to Europe would give me a new lease on promiscuity. Paris was meant to be an AIDS holiday. After all, I was of the Stonewall generation, equating sexual freedom with freedom itself. But by 1984 many gay guys I knew were dying in Paris as well—there was no escaping the disease. Michel Foucault, for one, had welcomed me warmly during a brief visit in 1981, but he and Gilles Barbedette, a mutual friend and one of my first translators, had both laughed when I’d told them about this mysterious new disease that was killing gay men and blacks and addicts. “Oh no,” they said, “you’re so gullible. A disease that only kills gays and blacks and drug addicts? Why not child molesters, too? That’s too perfect!”
They both died of AIDS, Foucault first, then Barbedette. I helped Foucault’s surviving partner, Daniel Defert, start up the French AIDS organization AIDES. But I went to only a few meetings. Everything in France was different and beyond my competence. Whereas we in America could only think of having a disco benefit to raise money for research and treatment and prevention, in France AIDES had the cooperation of Mitterrand’s minister of health, Édith Cresson. We brought our very sense of marginality and pessimism to the disease, whereas French gays made everyone recognize it was a national disaster. Whereas the public in America was hysterical, in France the government instructed journalists not to make too much of the at-risk groups lest there be a gay backlash. As a result gays weren’t attacked, but they also weren’t properly forewarned. Across the Channel, Mrs. Thatcher’s scare tactics were much more effective in keeping the numbers of AIDS patients down. Or maybe, I thought, the English just tricked less. London was so spread out and the tube stopped running early.
I had moved to Rome from New York thirteen years earlier, when I turned thirty. I wanted to acquire some polish and international culture, but my mentor Richard Howard complained that in my letters I made Rome sound “like a kickier version of Scranton.” Accordi
ng to Richard, I had failed to see that Rome was “one of the central cities of Western culture.” I had re-created my New York life in Rome but in an inferior version. I drank too much sour white wine and, like a character in Chekhov, took too many naps.
I wanted to make my Parisian sojourn better than my time in either Rome or New York had been. Whereas Rome in those days had been a village and my New York was a gay ghetto, I wanted Paris to be a real grown-up, pansexual adventure. I had been a teacher for the last eight years—at Yale, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, New York University—and now I was a student again. Now that I was in my forties and had a successful novel to my name, I could either go on doing the same things until I retired—or begin anew. I stopped smoking and then, a year later, stopped drinking. David Rieff, Susan Sontag’s son, said to me, “I guess you have to start all over again. You’re too famous to live in New York, right?” Was that true—was I famous? I didn’t feel famous, though Susan had told me, “You’ll never be really poor again.” She had already arranged for me to receive a cash award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and to win a Guggenheim. She was famous; people nudged each other when she walked past. I suppose lesser lights like me always overestimate or underestimate their celebrity (“But my novel wasn’t listed by the Times as one of the best books of the year”). It seemed to me that only a few educated gay Americans my age had ever heard of me.
Here I was in Paris, where I knew only two people and couldn’t speak the language. Rather than consolidating my position in New York and writing a sequel to A Boy’s Own Story, I had disappeared into Paris and dived off a cliff and I was writing a novel that managed to satirize all the people who’d helped me, including Susan and Richard Howard as well as Richard Sennett, who’d given me my job at the New York Institute for the Humanities. It was called Caracole and was set in a weird amalgam of Venice and Paris and other centuries. I described it by saying it was as if you were taking a comparative literature course and fell asleep the night before the exam and had a bad dream. It was also sort of about the Austrian domination of Venice. Édouard Roditi, a new friend in his seventies whom I’d met when Conjunctions had asked us to interview each other, said, “Caracole is a very fine novel and you won’t have a career if you write another one like it.”
The only people who liked Caracole were Alan Jenkins at the Times Literary Supplement and the director Louis Malle. He and I met for lunch at a nearly empty restaurant on the Île de la Cité I’d suggested, and he said his father had brought him there as a child. He told me he wanted to option my book because it reminded him of his childhood in occupied France—since my book was about a superior people being tyrannized by conquering inferiors. He explained that he’d gone to a Catholic school during the war that had protected a Jewish boy from the Nazis—until the boy was betrayed and led off to a death camp.
I said, “Why bother with my novel? The story you just told—there’s your next film.”
Ultimately he agreed and went on to make Au revoir les enfants, one of his best movies.
Once again I’d shot myself in the foot.
Chapter 3
I attended French language classes at the Alliance Française, but there of course only the instructor could speak the language correctly and with a native accent. Our teacher seemed to sympathize with the Japanese students, who apparently shared not a single phoneme with the French. They were utterly incomprehensible, though they studied really hard and turned red with the effort to pronounce the tricky r and the nasal on and the flutey ü. The Arabs were all gifted linguists and lacked nothing but vocabulary. Many of them were enrolled just so they could have a student visa. They often added a harsh aspirated h where it didn’t belong. One well-dressed Spanish woman was reproached for having a loud, metallic voice. The poor lady was told that her way of speaking, perhaps acceptable south of the Pyrenees, could only offend the soft-spoken French. An English girl was told that she had a misplaced confidence in her French, especially her faulty way of pronouncing u as oo.
Then one day we discovered our teacher was sort of crazy. She said she was sick of always asking the questions. Surely there were things we wanted to know about France. The Spanish woman, trying to moderate her tones, asked the teacher to inform us about Normandy. The teacher leapt into action. She drew a cow on the chalkboard and said, “Oh, Normandy is famous for its butter.” Then she drew a fish: “And for its fishing industry.” She drew a bed: “A fourth of all hospital beds are for the mentally ill.” She wrote 1/4 on the blackboard and for emphasis repeated, “La maladie mentale. I myself have had electroshock treatments,” then wrote, Traitements par électrochocs.
I was hanging out mostly with other Americans I met at the gym or at the Alliance Française or whom I’d first encountered in the States. It seemed all these Americans were always huddling together talking about them. The French, they complained, had no friends but only family members. They were incapable of making friends after childhood. The French never went anywhere alone but always en bande. Or the French were never open and honest in love: everything they said was strategic. Frenchmen adored women and liked them as no American males did. Conversely, Frenchmen were bullies and pigs beneath all their hand kissing. The French thought we were naïvely kind and childish, bons enfants. If they liked an American, they’d say he or she was nice, “but not at all stupid” (gentil mais pas de tout bête), but they just as often accused us of being crudely materialistic, or they thought we were prudes and hypocrites—perverted in the boudoir and Tartuffes in the salon, rapists and puritans. The French alone had mastered l’art de vivre. The French had a fierce primitive respect for the peasant, though only 5 percent of the population lived on the land. The French thought Americans dined exclusively on hamburgers and the Italians on pizza. The French were snobs; they, after all, were the only truly democratic people—they had invented égalité and fraternité. They readily gave asylum to political refugees; conversely, they were the worst chauvinists and racists. The French were cheap (every busker and beggar said as much); conversely, the French owned more second homes than any other people. The French never invested in stocks, only in property—pierres (“stones”). They spoke of “evolved” attitudes all the time: “Il est très évolué!” I’m not sure we Americans could embrace the eugenicist biological principles underlying such a term. Was our multiculturalism compatible with the notion of an inevitable and uniform biological development?
It was all beginning to sound like Flaubert’s dictionary of clichés, Le Dictionnaire des idées reçues (“Blondes are hotter. See brunettes.” “Brunettes are hotter. See blondes”). If I had one generalization about the French, I formulated it thirty years ago and still believe it despite its eugenicist sound: they evolve faster than any other people, and what was true of them a decade ago is no longer true. The French are immersed in ideas and pride themselves on being rational. They can almost instantly discard a prejudice and embrace a new, better idea. Americans mostly cling to familiar ideas and repeat them year after year. Only the French change their minds.
Whereas Americans were spread across the continent, one in six French people lived in the greater Paris area. This concentration, of course, facilitated communication and social coherence. The French gathered to discuss ideas in “philosophical cafés.” They favored book-chat shows on TV where serious issues were debated—and where sometimes quite outlandish ideas were advanced with daunting rhetorical energy and icy confidence. Just recently, while watching a rebroadcast of a French book-talk show on a New York cable channel, I heard an aging French male author, Patrick Grainville, argue that all experience could be reduced to the symbol of the octopus (le pieuvre)—which in his 2010 novel, Le Baiser du pieuvre, embraces a Japanese woman and brings her down to his watery realm. He spoke with such fervor about the sea creature that he seemed to have hypnotized himself into believing what he was saying. As one French critic asked, “Is the octopus a projection of the female sex or should we see in its tentacles a phallic all
usion? Definitely, this animal spitting ink—wouldn’t that be a fine metaphor for the writer?” No wonder the English think the French have no sense of humor—at least no feel for the ridiculous. I suppose the French can see when an enemy deserves to be laughed at, but they can’t quite conceive when they themselves are courting ridicule. This imperviousness has permitted the French (unlike the English) to embrace Lacan and Derrida and to foster the avant-garde in literature, the theater, and the other arts. English humor—deflating, commonsensical, alert to the excesses of self-importance—is a prophylactic against all that is new or experimental. Humor, especially satire, is always conservative.
The French may make diagnostic pronouncements about their own culture, but they dislike it when foreigners do so. The English writer Theodore Zeldin won wide esteem in France when he published France: 1848–1945 in five volumes, but he irritated the French reading public in 1982 when he brought out his book The French, about contemporary French society. Suddenly Zeldin went from being the unquestioned expert in French history to being one more unreliable British pundit. And as I write it, I’m wondering if this book of mine will ever be published in France.