Inside a Pearl Read online

  When Neil got hepatitis, he had a liver transplant, but at first the new liver refused to kick in. Neil never succumbed to convalescence completely, and even when he seemed close to death kept busy and artistically active—until miraculously, at seemingly the last possible minute, the liver began to function. I’ve often thought of Neil’s courage in facing these travails during my own health scares and emergencies.

  Once Neil, when he was still in his twenties, came to visit me in Paris. Because his plane was delayed (this was before the Eurostar Chunnel train running under the English Channel), I told him to take a taxi directly from the airport to MC’s. She had also invited to dinner Yannick Guillou, an elegant, uptight (or guindé, as the French say in reference to spats) Gallimard editor, who played the harpsichord for half an hour each morning before going to work, and who owned a castle in Normandy.

  Neil arrived in a black leather biker jacket and jeans with the whole seat torn out and no underwear. Yannick was astonished by this vestimentary oddity but charmed by Neil’s Oxford accent, education, and exquisite manners. Neil’s personality was both outrageous and decorous.

  Equally odd were the clothes of the gay English writer and critic Adam Mars-Jones, who wore striped military pants and an officer’s tunic. Because in France there was no youth culture, these costumes looked particularly strange to Parisians. But Adam also spoke beautiful French, was tall and slim, wonderfully polite and sortable (meaning you could take him anywhere). He met some of my ladies, such as Didi d’Anglejan, an American who’d married an aristocrat and gained a title. I’d told my ladies that Adam’s father was a judge and a lord—that worked wonders. Nor did it hurt that he’d attended Westminster and Cambridge.

  On one of his visits to Paris, I prepared him lunch and said that unfortunately I’d been in a rush and that the only thing I’d had time to prepare was rabbit and mustard sauce. My wonderful butcher on the Île Saint-Louis kept a stone vat by the front door of rabbit parts marinating in Dijon mustard. The trick was to bring this mixture home and sauté it with white wine, then at the last moment stir in crème fraîche. It took ten minutes to do and was served with rice and a vegetable.

  Adam exclaimed, “You’ve been too long in France. Imagine, apologizing for rabbit!”

  He was still young, but already Adam was a blocked writer, making him a severe critic of film and other people’s fiction. When I’d first come to England for the very successful launch of A Boy’s Own Story, which eventually sold a hundred thousand copies there, Adam wrote a negative review, but I invited him all the same to my launch party and after that we became friends. He stayed with me in Paris that one time and I stayed with him in Islington rather often. Once, I introduced him to Amy Gross, then the features editor of American Vogue. I wanted Adam to become the film critic for Vogue—he was strapped for cash since he’d fathered his daughter Holly. Amy told me, “His prose is beautiful, his argumentation is brilliant. But I never ever agree with him about a single movie.” She hadn’t hired him, out of that very personal whimsicality characteristic of all the best editors; she then went on to work for Mirabella before helping launch O, The Oprah Magazine as editor in chief.

  MC was intrigued by Adam’s daughter, and I feel that Holly humanized him. Sometimes he seemed nothing more than an overgrown, precocious lad, a sort of Eagle Scout of the intellect, master of some intricate sophistry du jour that he served up to everyone. MC bought Holly a pretty Parisian frock, which made Adam bluster, and then he became a latter-day Colonel Blimp.

  Adam had provided his very high-grade seed to a lesbian who’d selected him to fertilize her. I remember being shocked when Adam took Holly to Gay Pride while she was still a little girl; children make us conservative, or at least in my experience they usually do. We subject them to conventions we ourselves have paradoxically been fleeing all our lives. Adam also presented Holly to his various lovers, usually men who weren’t as smart and attractive as her father. I’d known people who’ve always taken inferior lovers in order to point up their own superiority. I remember once trying to make conversation with one of Adam’s Scottish lovers with whom I didn’t have a lot in common. Knowing a little about his background, I finally decided to ask him how tweed was made. He came to life describing how everyone in his family would pitch in and stretch the tweed they’d woven while singing a traditional tweed ballad. He sang and demonically stretched the imaginary tweed, making his knuckles so sore and red that Adam had to bandage them.

  I thought I’d make an ideal partner for Adam, but he apparently thought otherwise. We did, however, collaborate on a collection of short stories called The Darker Proof, published in the UK by Faber. I came up with the title and he came up with the idea. Adam thought that the AIDS epidemic had produced nothing but doctors’ warnings and no dramatic accounts of or by the people directly concerned. Gays, who’d been the province of experts for a century, were in danger of being “re-medicalized.” He’d written three stories and I two long ones, which if presented together made a nice-sized volume; publishing it as a paperback original made it more affordable for readers and got it into print sooner. Each of us kept writing more of the stories and years later collected them in separate volumes. Mine was called Skinned Alive, after the late Titian of Apollo cutting off the flesh of the satyr Marsyas following Apollo’s victory in a musical contest. I remember vividly lying on a mattress in Adam’s front parlor, looking up at a poster of Morrissey on the wall. That Adam should have Morrissey as his favorite singer in common with my nephew was unexpected. I also remember visiting Adam’s parents’ huge flat in the Inns of Court, where he prepared me once a breakfast of fish: “sprats,” every bit as exotic to me as rabbit.

  In the years that he was “blocked” as a writer, not only did Adam write the stories in our book (which later were included in his own second collection, Monopolies of Loss), but he also wrote one of a series of “broadsides” published by Chatto & Windus, edited by Carmen Callil—polemics that could be read in a single sitting on a contemporary subject. Adam’s was called Venus Envy and it opened with the idea that male authors like Martin Amis—being envious of female writers and their feminist apologists, and searching for other important-sounding topics they might themselves credibly address as straight men and fathers—took on the utterly uncontroversial and unobjectionable cause of ridding the world of nuclear weapons and defending the environment in order to regain their “rightful” moral high ground. Adam also wrote a novella, called The Waters of Thirst, that portrayed an AIDS caregiver as a sort of emotional saprophyte feeding off his patients. It seemed typically perverse of Adam to be critical of the very professionals who were so scarce and in need of encouragement in the early years of the plague. I suppose I learned from Adam, and the English in general, that the spirit of criticism should be unrelenting and never put off for a more “appropriate” time.

  The two most intelligent people I knew in London were Adam and Marina Warner. I was happy to bring them together for an evening; although they were cordial, they never sought each other out independently of me. That’s perhaps always the case when two people are semblables. (I don’t know how many times well-meaning friends have wanted to introduce me to a potential suitor, usually another elderly professor.)

  Marina, a novelist and mythographer, trailed a reputation of having been one of the great beauties of her day, going back to Oxford. She became a chat-show staple in the seventies, and the English band Dire Straits even recorded a song about her: “Lady writer on the TV. / Talk about the Virgin Mary …” The singer is thinking about his girlfriend while the lady writer on his screen is discussing her new book (Marina’s groundbreaking Alone of All Her Sex). One of my wicked friends once sped up a video of Marina; her head constantly tick-tocked from side to side in her usual display of little-girl winsomeness. She combined all the arts of an experienced beauty with the fierceness of an omniscient intellectual and a militant feminist.

  Unlike some feminists, Marina was very womanly. Her ho
use in North London was delightful, with a small garden out back, a large, comfortable eat-in kitchen, and a double salon. There were many, many books, some of them sent to her for review; curious bibelots and pictures that she’d come across in her mythographic researches; some decorative reminders that her mother was Italian and her grandfather, Sir Pelham Warner, was a celebrated cricketeer. Marina sounded very posh, a bit like the queen. She’d grown up all around the world, including Cairo and Brussels, had studied Italian and French at Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford and on the Continent, and could read several other languages. Marina wrote novels, but she was best known for her exhaustive nonfiction compendia on subjects ranging from religious symbols to supernatural phenomena like ghosts and fairies and ectoplasm.

  I think I liked Marina more than she liked me. I chose her as my best friend in an English newspaper feature, and we were photographed together in a London square under her parasol, but when I swapped flats, my Paris apartment for a lovely house on Gloucester Crescent, and lived near her for two months, I never saw her (to be fair, she was going through a period of bad health and a nasty breakup). Although she’d been married to the writer William Shawcross and had a son, the talented artist Conrad Shawcross, since her divorce she’d been for many years with Johnny Dewe Mathews, a painter and an eternal boy, handsome and scatterbrained, a wonderful comrade to her Conrad. Johnny was a talented watercolorist whose style was unfashionably traditional and realistic. Marina, like me, was friendly with Bice Curriger and Jacqueline Burckhardt, the Swiss directors of the avant-garde art magazine Parkett. Marina was always trying to get them to write something about Johnny, whose work must have looked trivial and rétardataire to them. Later, she had an affair with a longhaired, younger academic who looked like a seedy rock musician and was writing his thesis on literary hoaxes. Finally she ended up with a much more appropriate man, an Oxford don of mathematics. She was hired as a professor by the University of East Anglia, which freed her from endless scrambling after freelance assignments. For years Marina had worked so hard to keep afloat with her house and her son. Conrad turned out to be a trendy sculptor in the tradition of Jean Tinguely, by which I mean he made pieces that destroyed themselves. Once I was with Marina in Paris, where everyone was impressed with her convent-bred French and vast erudition, beautiful manners—and enduring beauty.

  I think Marina wasn’t really comfortable with homosexuality. She and I first met in Manhattan at a luncheon talk she gave to the members of the New York Institute for the Humanities. I can’t remember her subject, but in the question-and-answer period, I brought up what I thought was a relevant example about gay male pornography. She often mentioned my comment in the years to follow as a bit of cheekiness at the moment of our meeting. And once when I took over her house while she was away, Marina left as her only instruction, “Don’t let the char catch you boys naked.” Every part of that sentence alarmed me, since in America we said “cleaning lady” and in France technicienne de surface. “Char” sounded Dickensian to my ears, and why should we be running around naked, especially my superconservative Brice? All we did in her house was invite twenty of my English friends to dinner and serve them the duck breasts I’d brought over from France.

  If I mismatched the two brains, Marina and Adam, I made a similar mistake with Julian Barnes. He came to Paris with his wife, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh, and I took them to L’Ami Louis, one of the “in” restaurants then—a place that looked like a simple, neighborhood restaurant, decidedly plain, where the cheerful waiters threw the customers’ coats up onto a ledge above the booths and where the cuisine was Lucullan, with slabs of fois gras and big chickens or lamb legs roasted on the spit, the opposite of the (to many) mingy nouvelle cuisine then so popular.

  Since Julian was the most Francophile of Englishmen, I mistakenly thought he’d like to meet his opposite number, my translator Marc Cholodenko, a novelist who’d won the Prix Goncourt but more relevantly was the most Anglophile of French writers. Later, I realized neither man was interested in the other country except as a way of criticizing their compatriots through counterexamples. That evening, the conversation was stiff and had frequent silences until Marc drifted off and chatted with a pretty woman in a neighboring booth who was with an older man.

  Marc returned to us with a thoroughly French tale. The woman was a call girl and was on a paid date with an Israeli industrialist. Marc knew her because years before his best friend, a timid young duke of seventeen, had been taken by his father to Madame Arthur’s bordello where he’d lost his virginity to this very woman—then considerably younger and more beautiful. Unexpectedly he fell in love with the woman and wanted to marry her and make her his duchess. He fought for days with his outraged parents, who were at last worn down and conceded. But then the call girl refused. She liked her work—and here she was, years later, middle-aged though still pursuing her profession.

  Julian was suitably impressed. When he went to the toilet, Pat (who was notorious in London literary circles for her affair with Jeanette Winterson), looked around and said, “What’s annoying about Paris is that every woman looks like a lesbian but none is.”

  Pat was one of my favorite people. I used to say it was because I liked cold women, but that was just one of the provocative things I liked to say. Pat adored Julian and was, in fact, very ardent—a slender, beautiful redhead with high cheekbones who was originally from South Africa and had an Irish family. She’d been an actress, appearing in the film version of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, but was now one of the best agents in London, representing James Fenton, Andrew Motion, Ruth Rendell, William Trevor, Adam Mars-Jones, Hermione Lee—and Martin Amis, until he left her after twenty-three years for Andrew Wiley, the notorious poacher. Pat died of a brain tumor in 2008 at age sixty-eight, and Julian was and still is, I think, inconsolable.

  People used to say the great love marriages were always childless. Certainly Julian and Pat seemed very much in love and inseparable. Children would have spoiled their complicity. Their idea of a good vacation was to go hiking together through Provence.

  While they were in Paris on this same trip, I invited them to see an Azzedine Alaïa fashion show, which Julian thought was preposterous (“You’ve been thoroughly corrupted”), but once he was there, I made sure he was seated next to Tina Turner, who told him that he was one of her favorite authors. Despite his low esteem for something as frivolous as fashion, he could see that Alaïa’s dresses were perfectly molded to bodies that were unusually fit.

  Once, a few years later, Pat and Julian invited me to a meat restaurant in London and said, “Edmund, you’ve been gossiping about us,” and I said, “Of course. You’re the only subject of conversation in London, and if I didn’t gossip about you, I’d have nothing to say. I’ll tell you exactly what I said. That Pat is a lesbian and she’s in love with you, Julian, and you’re in love with her.” They nodded and said, “Essentially that’s true.”

  Julian had written a negative review of my 1985 novel Caracole, but then again almost no one had liked it. I thought it wouldn’t be very sportsmanlike to hold that against him. He said, for one thing, that it was under-aerated with dialogue. I had been influenced by Nabokov’s observation that if he wanted to see whether a novel was a crappy bestseller, he’d just flip through it and if he saw too much dialogue, he knew it wasn’t for him. He reasoned that since dialogue always sounds alike, the writer couldn’t establish his own special tone if he handed the book over to his characters and their banal yammering.

  Julian and I quickly established a truce of not reading each other’s books, which was a relief, though on the sly I’ve read half a dozen of his novels and admired them.

  He and Pat did everything perfectly. They took turns cooking—he did the salad and she the main course and the pudding. They had me and my partner, Michael, to dinner with the painter Howard Hodgkin and his very camp partner, the music writer Antony Peattie. Howard said that he regretted that England’s culture was more literary than vi
sual, though he has collaborated with at least two writers, Julian and Susan Sontag. A late bloomer, Howard was an abstractionist whose canvases, at least to his mind, often commemorated specific encounters with friends.

  Like Philip Roth, Julian has very intense friendships with women, notably Hermione Lee, who was one of his first readers, Judith Thurman, and Lorrie Moore. Like me, he’s attracted to brainy, ardent women, people like Dorothea in Middlemarch, though not so gullible.

  He also had a laddish side. He has an immense snooker table that fills one whole room of his North London house. But Julian is not a natural wit like Martin Amis, nor does he share Martin’s fascination with low life. Julian is a headmaster’s son and has that gooseflesh, underloved, boarding-school look, complete with the horsey face and long, blue nose. He’s the most British man I know, and I always felt my highly colored American ways were somehow cheap and glaring in his eyes.

  I liked the English and I think they liked me. I was better known in Britain as a writer than anywhere else, and of course that was agreeable. And yet I wasn’t a caustic éminence grise like Gore Vidal but rather a pudgy, easygoing but witty guy like millions of others. It was always very exhilarating for me in England. They had so many newspapers and I was always being asked to do a column about “My Hero” (James Merrill), my five favorite books about New York, or some other ephemeral subject. I was on lots of book-chat shows on the radio, where I tried to keep up with the fleet-footed English talkers and eschew American ponderousness. Three times I was on the hourlong TV arts program The South Bank Show. When I was in England it was thrilling to be able to speak my own language, or some version of it. When I spoke French I felt I was a rat in a maze, guided by a single point of light in the right direction but constantly going down blind alleys and having to retrace my steps (rebrousser le chemin), whereas in English I could just babble and occasionally astonish even myself with what came out of my mouth.