Inside a Pearl Page 24

  The greatest pedophile writer was Tony Duvert, who lived a tormented country life in his mother’s house in Loir-et-Cher and was constantly in a struggle with poverty and the scorn of his neighbors. He wrote many books, notably in the seventies Journal of an Innocent, When Jonathan Died, and Atlantic Island. Duvert was published by Beckett’s publisher, Éditions de Minuit, often in very limited editions; his advocacy of pedophilia and his hostility to families made Jérome Lindon, the publisher, nervous. He was such a hermit that no one noticed when he died; his decomposed body was found in his house many days after his death in 2008. A biography of sorts, Tony Duvert: the Silent Child, came out two years later, written by Gilles Sebhan. I say “of sorts” since there were so many factual gaps in the story, often filled by sentimentalizing and generalizing.

  The strangest writer I knew was Pierre Guyotat. He was a heavy, bald man who looked like the great god Baal. For a while Guyotat wrote in a language of his own invention that seemed to be composed mainly of consonants. Later, he returned to regular French, what he called “the normative language.” He wrote about such violent aspects of rape, torture, slavery, prostitution and homosexuality that for a long time his works were banned. When Mitterrand was elected in 1981, one of his first acts in office was to lift the ban on Guyotat’s Eden, Eden, Eden and to encourage Antoine Vitez’s staging at the magnificent Théâtre National de Chaillot of Guyotat’s Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers—a book about the Algerian war, in which Guyotat had participated as a soldier. When he deserted he was arrested by the French authorities. (The Chaillot would be the equivalent of the National Theater in London or the Kennedy Center in Washington.)

  I first met Pierre Guyotat at the apartment of Gilles Barbedette. He was a heavy, sepulchral man with some but not much conversation whenever the subject strayed from him and his work. He had undergone an injury as obscure as Henry James’s; apparently he’d had a psychotic episode and lived in a trailer and failed to eat and had fallen into a coma. He’d written a book about it, Coma, and other books about other moments in his life, such as an adolescent visit to relatives in Scotland.

  These more autobiographical books were beautiful and accessible, and again like the late-period James, Guyotat dictated them. From time to time he spoke ad lib. I once saw him onstage, seated, talking, while dancers whirled about him. He appeared for several days at the Centre Georges Pompidou. A hundred people attended every night. He sat enthroned on a stage with a microphone, his presence impressively basaltlike. He intoned phrases sometimes in French and sometimes in his made-up language. Often it sounded as if he were saying the French word for testicles (testicules). There was no clear idea how long this would go on, and I, who hate attending readings, was itchy but then settled into the experience, nearly mesmerized. Clearly he had been deeply traumatized by his own experience of the Algerian war—his visual memories of severed limbs, rape, violence of all sorts—to which, phantasmagorically, he’d added slavery. I’d known a few English-language writers in America (like William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, Samuel Delaney) who loved portraying violence and sexual cruelty for its own sake. But in France, land of Sade and Bataille, such extremes are more common.

  Guyotat sometimes referred to himself in the third person and once sent me a postcard saying, “No one has done more for Guyotat this year than you.” Stephen Barber, the man who wrote my biography, Edmund White: The Burning World, and is interested in Antonin Artaud’s drawings, took care of Guyotat in England for a while until Stephen’s patience wore thin. Whatever other vices he may have, Guyotat is at least not a pedophile. In fact, someone in the know once told me, “Guyotat’s sexuality does not involve other people.”

  The French still believe in the avant-garde and imagine that someone extreme must necessarily be the next good thing. By that way of thinking, Guyotat is the main literary embodiment of the avant-garde in France, though he seems to be haunted by his childhood, by his coma, and by the atrocities of war, and has sought only the most vivid, not the most experimental, way to explore these subjects.

  Sometimes he is seen as an heir to Jean Genet, and once, during a staging of Genet’s The Balcony at the Odéon theater, we invited Guyotat to do one of his monologues before the play to a smaller audience. The stagehands said he had to end his “act” at least a half an hour before the play was due to start so they would have time to dress the stage. We told Guyotat this, but he replied, “Time is inscribed within the work—it is not exterior to it.” We prayed that time would be inscribed in time, and it was; just at the last moment, Guyotat left the stage, applauded mainly by his biographer, a charming, young woman.

  Recently in New York, I hosted Guyotat for the Department of French at New York University. Guyotat, who is very shy but warm, said, “Please don’t ask me to read”; someone from the French embassy whispered to me, “Monsieur Guyotat doesn’t want to read”; then the first thing he did was to stand and read aloud in a completely incomprehensible English. Absurd as he can be, there is no doubt Guyotat is a genius, one of the truly remarkable people I’ve known in my life.

  All of these French writers had the courage of their eccentricities: Marguerite Duras announced in Libération that she knew who’d killed “le petit Gregory”—a small-town boy who was the victim of a notoriously grisly unsolved murder. Duras had visited the house and intuited it was the mother, though no evidence to incriminate her was ever turned up and she was cleared in 1993. Duras was certain the woman had murdered her child because the garden was neglected.

  We were far from America with its tenured creative writing profs, each blessed with a loving wife, many children, and a local church—men who spoke gravely about the Third World and once served in the Peace Corps. I remember a novella that Henry Miller once wrote called A Devil in Paradise, about his married happiness and his life in the Big Sur. All is disturbed when a prewar Parisian friend from his sexual heyday—a friend who is sickly and unhealthy in his values and attitudes and covered with sores—invites himself to stay with Miller and his family. Eventually, Miller has to ask the broken-down syphilitic, dirty and all dressed in black, to leave. Although the decision to oust the creep is a painful one, Miller realizes that his bohemian, transgressive days are over. So many of the pages of Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch symbolized for me the clash between healthy but bland America and the diseased but deep France.

  Alain Robbe-Grillet was a friend of mine and I spoke at his memorial ceremony, along with Bernard-Henri Lévy and a dozen other people. With Nathalie Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet was one of the first proponents and practitioners of the New Novel. He’d written the most influential critical book of the era, For a New Novel, in which he’d commanded novelists to banish psychology and anthropomorphic metaphors—“The sea struggled with the sky”—in favor of very precise, almost scientific descriptions (he’d trained as an agronomist). Robbe-Grillet had written influential novels such as The Erasers and Jealousy (or maybe the French title, Jalousie, is better, since it also refers to the tropical louvered window, which is the same word in French). In Jealousy there is a famous “scientific” description of a banana stand, how many centimeters apart was each tree, etc. There was a major dispute at the time between those who said that the book was “objective,” as Robbe-Grillet himself claimed, or “subjective,” written from the jealous husband’s point of view. Today most of the people who still read the book take the subjective, psychological point of view.

  I first met Robbe-Grillet in the early seventies at a cocktail party hosted by Tom Bishop, head of the French department at NYU and a great defender of the New Novelists. I went with Richard Howard, Robbe-Grillet’s translator, a close friend of mine at the time and of Susan Sontag, who dedicated her Against Interpretation to him. As Alice Kaplan has said in Dreaming in French, her book about the role Paris played in the lives of Jacqueline Kennedy, Sontag, and Angela Davis, during the sixties Susan and Richard were allies introducing French artists and intellectuals to America, she th
rough her essays and he through his translations. At the party for Robbe-Grillet, Richard translated for me; in those days I couldn’t say a complete sentence in French and Robbe-Grillet, though he’d taught for years in the States, at least pretended he couldn’t speak English. Working at a cultural magazine then, I took it on myself to commission an article from him on Forty-second Street—a seedy strip in Manhattan of porn stores, hookers, and dirty movies and a place that excited his imagination.

  Ten years before that I’d seen the film Last Year at Marienbad, which Robbe-Grillet had written for director Alain Resnais. I’d gone with my favorite English professor at the University of Michigan, Caesar Blake, a gay black man. I’d loved its stylish anomie, as formal as French topiary. Caesar said that he hadn’t quite been able to “isolate” its themes.

  When I first met Robbe-Grillet I was surprised that he was always smiling and seemed to be taking a rueful pleasure in all the absurdities of American life. It was the same sort of smile I later recognized in Philippe Sollers, the editor of the influential journal Tel Quel, a smile that embraced everything ridiculous or aggressive and that seemed to be saying, “Bring it on!”

  Years later, in the late nineties, after I’d returned from France to America, I was asked to dine with Robbe-Grillet and his wife after a colloque on Roland Barthes, who was discussed as if he were passé (news to me). Robbe-Grillet and his diminutive wife, Catherine, were invited with some of the NYU faculty to a local eatery where men played bocce ball in the back. It was an unusually warm spring night and the waiter had propped open the door. Suffering from the usual French fear of drafts, the fierce Catherine, who was reputed to be Jean de Berg, the sadomasochistic novelist, said to the waiter in French, “Close the door.”

  “Oh, no, madame, it’s too warm—”

  “Close the door, I said,” she repeated with a tone that could not be contradicted.

  And he did.

  I heard rumors that Catherine liked to torture fashionable couples from Paris in their Norman château-fort, complete with a dungeon. I asked my informant what role Robbe-Grillet played. “Well, he is the author of Le Voyeur.” Reputedly Catherine kept track in a diary of which tortures were administered to which victims, just as old-fashioned hostesses used to paste wine labels and inscribe the menu in a livre d’or beside her guests’ names so they wouldn’t be subjected to the same dishes twice.

  After the disaster of 9/11, Catherine appeared in New York with the young humorous novelist Frédéric Beigbeder (he and several other alert French authors churned out their World Trade Center books before any Americans managed to). Catherine was complaining that all the S&M places in New York had been shut down by Mayor Giuliani and that tonight she would suffer the indignity of beating lesbians, of all things. Frédéric, who’d awarded me a literary prize at the film festival at Deauville, tried to console her. I said that on Twenty-third Street near Sixth there was a restaurant where slaves lapped water on all fours out of dog bowls.

  “Gone,” she said mournfully. “Closed.”

  I saw Robbe-Grillet at the medieval nunnery that the Institute Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine (IMEC) was redoing as a study center outside Caen. I’d heard that IMEC, though an archive dedicated to modern writers and editors, was building a greenhouse for Robbe-Grillet’s precious collection of cacti. He told me that the plural in French should be cactées and explained the etymology. For the privilege of taking care of the cactées, IMEC received all of Robbe-Grillet’s papers and the many, many films he shot.

  Chapter 18

  Marie-Claude invited me to stay for two weeks in her summerhouse. It was a fisherman’s cottage on the Île de Ré, in a small village that smelled of the brackish sea. Her house was at the end of a tiny street just wide enough for one car, a street called the ruelle des Musiciens. A high wall around her house was pierced by a green-painted wood gate, inside which was not only the cottage but also, somewhat unusually, a garden (another house had been torn down to make room for the garden). The cottage had a large eat-in kitchen, quite modern, with big windows and French doors letting on to the garden. The kitchen flowed into the sitting room, where there were twin couches and a rattan chair, its back swelling like a cobra’s hood, drawn up beside the blackened fireplace. On every wall were curious pictures, suitable, I suppose, for the tastes of the whimsical artist of Babar. Upstairs there were three bedrooms, one of which had a double bed for the lady of the house, the other two tiny.

  Everything smelled of the sea, and every morning Marie-Claude would dash off on her bicycle to do her courses, her shopping in the town market, which was covered and the size of a New York block. There, she would buy us the fish we would eat every night, broiled, the vegetables she’d make into a sumptuous ratatouille, and the tiny sardines that she’d decapitate, gut, and marinate and that we’d eat raw in olive oil and green peppercorns. Unpeeled potatoes she’d cook on top of the fire in a closed clay pot called a diable, which she’d rest on top of an asbestos pad over a low flame. That was a strange dish for the French, who normally are incapable of eating an unpeeled potato. They would dry up and shrink and become deliciously charred in the diable—we’d eat them with salt and pepper and lavish lashings of butter.

  It was a house consecrated to peace, beauty, and reading. MC always brought home fresh flowers, especially sunflowers and the hollyhocks that grew wild outside the gate and on abandoned plots on the island. She would arrange her vased flowers in a still life composed of that day’s eggplant, tomatoes, purple-edged lettuce, and feathery fennel.

  MC’s daughter, Anne, was in her element, too. She worked day and night in the garden. She was an accomplished photographer who had published a book of pictures of ornate tombstones in Italy. She had also taken the definitive photo of Georges Perec, with his wild, Einstein hair, from which the French government had made an honorary stamp. (Imagine if the States made a stamp with John Ashbery’s portrait, or if the UK made one of Ronald Firbank.)

  Ré was the Hamptons of France. Because of high-speed trains, it was only three hours away from Paris. In my first days there, you had to take a ferryboat over to the island, but in the late eighties they built a bridge, which many people opposed because it made the island too accessible to hordes of day trippers. Luckily, MC’s village of Ars-en-Ré was farther out on the island than the larger, more popular scenic port of Saint-Martin-de-Ré. Ars had been a fishing village for the working poor, but now politicians (including a prime minister, Alain Juppé) mingled there with writers, film directors, and actresses.

  In the center of the village stood a church that had a bumpy, tapering steeple, half black and half white for maximum contrast and visibility to those at sea. Around the church were the post office, a newsstand, a café, and a snack bar. Down by the harbor were a couple of good restaurants and a shop selling expensive nautical wear and equipment (such as a brass circular compass and cut-glass liqueur bottles set in a mahogany caddy that would always right itself even when the boat was severely listing to one side). And there were all the moored boats, of all sizes and kinds, and the dry docks, and beyond, an antiques shop. Marie-Claude and I would often go walking out on the long, earth-filled breakwaters.

  By some magical fetishism, I sometimes think that if I dialed old phone numbers of friends, long since dead, they’d answer even if, in those days, there was one less digit in the number than now. By the same token, I think that if I flew to Paris and took the TGV to La Rochelle and a hundred-dollar taxi to Marie-Claude’s green door in its whitewashed wall, she’d be there, sitting in the garden, smoking, drinking good Lapsang souchong tea from a bumpy black metal teapot and a small glazed cup. She’d be in her rattan chaise longue, which she folded up at night and stored in the garden shed. There would be the pierced round metal picnic table painted a dull green and the matching hard-metal chairs under the fig tree (I understand why nudes are outfitted with fig leaves, which are enormous).

  There was another building alongside the garden, a stone garage,
with a bathroom attached to its side. The bathroom had the only shower, a toilet, and a large sink and vanity, as well as the washer-dryer. The whole setup reminded me of Junichiro Tanizaki’s essay “In Praise of Shadows,” which begins with a description of a Japanese bathroom (all shadows and dim shoji screens and pine branches and wooden fixtures) and compares it favorably to Western bathrooms with their surgically bright surfaces, all antiseptic metal and porcelain. This bathroom definitely seemed on the Japanese end of the spectrum. Even its smells were those of fresh herbs, Proust’s iris root, lavender soaps, Roger & Gallet Extra Vieille toilet water, and the ocean.

  Upstairs, above the garage, was a large guest bedroom under the exposed beams with an unframed double bed on the floor covered with a nubby white fabric. A staircase dropped down and pulled up by rope-pulley. Double windows looked down on a small garden where every flowering plant was white. The room was full of lazy buzzing wasps and dead spiders immobilized in the center of sticky webs, white pebbles and gaudy shells brought back from the beach.

  Late in the afternoon, in the summer, the sun didn’t go down till ten o’clock. MC and I would bike to the beach, walk through a pine forest, and cross the dunes onto what the French called une plage sauvage, to distinguish it from a manicured beach with cabanas, like those along the Riviera. The beaches of Ré are dotted every half mile or so with a massive series of concrete pillboxes built by the Nazis as a defense against a coastal Allied invasion. It would have taken a lot of dynamite to dislodge them from the dunes. The elements had tilted and shifted them and they’d become the make-out sites for teens, who’d left their empty booze bottles and used condoms on the uneven sandy floors; the walls inside and out were covered in graffiti.