Inside a Pearl Page 25
The Atlantic coast, unlike the Mediterranean, is subject to major tides. The Atlantic-side beaches of Ré swoop gently toward the ocean floor and when the tide is out, miles of extra sand and rock are exposed, leaving pond-sized tidal pools and providing a happy hunting ground for gatherers of mussels and clams. At low tide, morning or evening, you can see bathers, bucket in hand, inspecting every uneven and algae-strewn stretch of wet sand for their supper.
Sometimes we’d go to a closer beach where there was a bar shack, and we’d have a drink before riding our bikes along the path on the top of a retaining wall. To get there, we’d have to bike through what the French call un camping, a vacation trailer camp that functions only in the warm weather. I suppose these camps, scattered throughout Ré, make it more democratic, as if the Hamptons on Long Island were host to many campgrounds; the poor in their trailers (what the French call caravans) were always present.
I’ve always suspected these French campings were witness to the hottest teenage sex in the country. While the parents from France and Germany and Holland reclined in plastic and aluminum chairs or cooked wieners on the portable grill, the adolescent girls and boys ran off together, excited by a sudden lack of supervision and the randy exoticism of all this freedom and all these nationalities. In fact, the now middle-aged French novelist Michel Houellebecq, author most famously of The Elementary Particles (Les particules élémentaires), and the great white hope of the French novel, has explored in the bitterest terms the laxity of his parents’ generation—the soixante-huitards (sixty-eighters), with their sun-battered faces, receding hairlines, and gray ponytails (whose tents and trailers you still see in campings all over France)—and he blames them for the moral fecklessness of his own generation. As Houellebecq recounts it, the campings were notorious wife-swapping (échangiste) venues—and at least as he’d like to tell it, the reason for so many divorces and fractured families and fucked-up offspring in France.
Many of MC’s Paris friends had substantial summer houses on the rue du Palais in Ars, and we’d sometimes drop in on them for a drink. Her best friend was also named Marie-Claude, and is now buried next to MC on the Île de Ré under white rosebushes, rather than in MC’s ghastly family crypt in the Montparnasse cemetery. Marie-Claude Dumoulin was an editor at Elle, her husband one at Lui, and their son one at L’Express. They were the most knowing family I’d ever met. There wasn’t a single vacation hotspot in Cambodia they hadn’t visited, a single new Romanian novelist they hadn’t read, a single nautical race anywhere in the world they hadn’t competed in, a single bid for power in the mayoral race of Clermont-Ferrand they hadn’t already investigated and profiled. Marie-Claude Dumoulin knew everything about clothes and home furnishings, her husband was a tireless sailor, and their son was a crack political reporter. Conversations seldom got off the ground before taking a nosedive, because the Moulins weren’t interested in ideas and were impatient with gossip. What they prized above all else was usable information, grist; but they all three already knew all about whatever subject you might mention.
Harry Mathews, who’s lived in France since the fifties, told me that in his opinion every nation shares the faults of all others, but each nation has developed one fault to an extravagant degree. The French fault, he said, was always wanting to be right. A French person will deny the proof of his senses and all the savants of the world and cling to the notion that the world is flat, if he or she started out with that view. Concomitant to that fault is a simultaneous impatience with—and hunger for—the new. Impatience because admitting that something is new to you is humbling, information that has not already been absorbed. Hunger because the only way to one-up friends and relatives is to know the new before they do. The easiest tactic is to dismiss a new bit of information from the outset as not worth knowing. I remember traveling to Istanbul with MC and a stylish young Parisian, Guillaume Bouvier. As we entered the Grand Bazaar, the vast covered market, with its hundreds of stalls, Guillaume said, “There’s nothing here. Let’s go,” and MC quickly concurred.
I exploded, “You’ve already dismissed the biggest bazaar in the world?”
I thought they might be right, as stand after stand sold the same aubergine-colored car coats and the same rubber tires, boxes of Tide and industrial dish towels. But then at the very center, within a locked cage, was an old mosque and the small jewelry district, with its antique brooches and rings and sand-blasted tea glasses from the 1940s—all the things we loved and would buy. Of course the French, like the Japanese, want their luxe to come from half a dozen brand names, such as Gucci or Hermès or Christofle, and it’s no wonder that ripped-off products, such as Chinese copies of Izod shirts, are confiscated by French customs officers and the offenders are arrested and fined.
The French will not admit not knowing something. The most that they’ll concede of their own ignorance is that they “no longer know it”: “Je ne sais plus.” At any museum exhibit in Paris, the biggest crowds aren’t looking at the paintings but standing in front of the explanatory plaque telling the history and provenance of the whole concept of the show. Here is where the know-it-all culture vultures are feeding themselves so they can overwhelm their friends who’ve not yet seen the exhibit. The United States is a fractured culture in which every subgroup has its own website and fanzine, and no two chapelles (as the French call small in-groups) can or want to communicate with each other. The gun hobbyists don’t want to know the antique doll collectors, who scorn collectors of black mammy cookie jars. But in France, there is still some sense of the collective, which is reinforced by this uniform “knowingness.”
Once the Dumoulins had heard about something or professed to know about it already, they immediately lost interest in hearing any more. Suddenly the subject had lost all of its savor.
On the Île de Ré, MC had her athletic side. She could swim vigorously for half an hour in the freezing Atlantic. She loved to bicycle long distances, through the fields beyond which the black and white church tower of Ars floated and shifted, like the twin Combray steeples in Proust endlessly playing with each other. Ré was famous for its salt farmers (usually old women), who would fill ditches with seawater, let it burn off in the sun, then rake the salt into piles; this is the salt that sells for twenty dollars a bottle at Zabar’s in New York or Hédiard in Paris. The utterly flat land, the huge, blue skies animated by soft white clouds lined in gray, the steeple dancing over the green fields, the Wordsworthian solitude of the lady salt farmer bent over in the drained ditch, the sun’s warmth on the back of one’s neck—these were some of the exhilarating elements of a bike ride to the next village. It might be Saint-Clément-des-Baleines (St. Clement of the Whales), the snobby Les Portes-en-Ré, or the “big-city” commune of Saint-Martin, with its handsome prison, which always makes me think of Manon’s deportation to Louisiana.
In the winter Ré was deserted. The summer population of two hundred thousand would dwindle to twenty thousand. It rarely snowed, but the air was briny and chilly. Thick fogs often descended over the garden. The shopkeepers seemed friendlier and less harried. MC bought me a cire, a green, knee-length, impermeable raincoat that had a hood. Since it didn’t breathe, I could work up a considerable sweat under it just by walking around. She and I would make a fire in the fireplace and settle in on our matching couches, sometimes with a matching book. I remember one year we were both reading Ishiguro’s nightmarish The Unconsoled. We’d look up every few pages and say, “The poor man is about to play a concert but he doesn’t know where he is or who all these people are.” Maybe we both loved the book because we were so happy being together, with no distractions beyond MC’s long international phone calls. She might talk to her daughter Anne back in Paris, who wanted to know details about fertilizers in the garden, and the window repair in the dining room. Or book talk with Ben Moser in Holland, living with an older gay literary couple. Ben—tall, intelligent as only a Texan can be, enthusiastic, young—was one of MC’s most devoted fans. He found everything a
bout MC glamorous, fascinating, attachante.
May 1968, the moment when the students in Paris took to the streets and revolted against the stiff class consciousness of traditional, Gaullist France, still fired MC’s imagination. She often referred to the rapture of the whole city of young comrades (“Under the paving-stones, the beach!” had been a popular slogan). Despite or because of her age, she seemed to represent that romantic long-ago time. She had watched the skirmishes in the streets from the window of her elegant Boulevard-St-Germain apartment.
The intellectual Julia Kristeva and her husband, the novelist Philippe Sollers, spent the summers on the Île de Ré in a remote house on a peninsula that overlooked a huge empty bay. Julia and Philippe were a fascinating couple who had no equivalent in America. She wore big barbaric jewelry and designer clothes and was a feminist only in America, at Columbia, where she often taught. In France, she was way beyond anything so primitive as feminism (too seventies!). She was, among other things, a psychoanalyst—a job title that in France requires no special training or accreditation, nothing beyond hanging out a shingle and opening an office for business. She and Philippe were always up to date. If there was an exhibit dedicated to Vivant Denon, the artist whom Napoleon appointed the first director of the Louvre Museum, Philippe had already written a book about the subject. He’d also written about Watteau, Nietzsche, James Joyce (whose Finnegans Wake he had translated in part into French), Mozart, Casanova, De Kooning, Sade, Francis Ponge, and countless other writers and painters and thinkers. Italy and the eighteenth century were two topics he kept returning to. All the arts, including music, obsessed him. MC said that every September he went to Venice with a Belgian woman novelist, Dominique Rolin, his lover, twenty-three years older than he. MC found his constancy to her admirable. In fact, Rolin published an account of their love story, Thirty Years of Crazy Love (Trente ans d’amour fou), and in 2000, Philippe wrote Passion Fixe. Although he was always welcoming with me, I found his know-it-all attitude annoying. When Genet’s The Balcony was presented at the Odéon, he participated in a colloque. Sollers’s stance was that he alone had actually read Genet and that everyone else was talking through his or her hat (I’d heard him adopt a similar strategy about Céline and Sade). If anyone dared to challenge him, he drew on his cigarette and exhaled a cloud of smoke, smiling all the while a big, mocking smile. His smoke was the equivalent of a skunk’s odor. There he was on stage with Albert Dichy, the world’s most erudite Genet scholar, Sollers all knowing and all the while puffing. (To be fair, Sollers wrote a laudatory review of my Genet biography in Le Monde des Livres, for which I was entirely grateful.)
As it happened, Sollers and Kristeva were the most famous people MC knew. Around Sollers she was very quiet, as if afraid to say something foolish, though she was more expansive when we were alone with Kristeva. Sollers was mercurial. In the past, among other things, he had been a semiologist and a friend of Roland Barthes. In the seventies he became a Maoist. When I knew him I think he was in his Catholic stage. Sollers often railed against people he regarded as fools. He thought his hit novel Femmes should have been published in the States for a lot of money. (Columbia University Press eventually brought it out, probably without paying him a big New York advance.) He blamed this “failure” on Tom Bishop, who’d organized at NYU a French production of Virginia Woolf’s play Freshwater in 1983 with the roles played by such luminaries as Ionesco, Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Jean-Paul Aron—“the flowers of French literature,” Sollers grumbled. “All making fools of themselves. Their foolishness cost me two hundred thousand dollars at Random House or Doubleday. If only these writers had not disgraced themselves! We were all tarnished by their absurdity.”
Kristeva had written a roman à clef about French literary types called Les Samuraïs—which was supposed to repeat the success of Simone de Beauvoir’s Les Mandarins but failed to do so.
Legends already, oddly both Sollers and Kristeva wanted to sell out. But they were condemned to remain fixtures of high culture, famous but never rich.
I once took MC with me to London, where we attended a big party for lots of literary people. MC wore her long, Japanese-style layered clothes, mostly beige; her gaudy outsized necklaces she created herself out of baubles she bought at the market in Ré; and her red shoes and eternal cigarette holder. This very contrived look won her nothing but mocking looks and comments from English literary ladies in their tweeds and genuine pearls and hand-me-down cardigans. Suddenly I hated the English all over again for their dowdiness and smugness, their horrible sense of humor, and their common sense. And I thought that it was no wonder England never had a bold avant-garde in painting, no wonder their response to Picasso was so feeble, far less imaginative than that of Czechoslovakia, for Chrissake. In the 1980s the Tate had its first ever show of Cubists—in the 1980s! Walton and Britten were the best they could do in music. Only in fiction, where gentility and the wretched class system are actually viable subjects, did the English excel. The horrible, deflating English sense of humor, the terrible tendency to “take the piss out of” everyone and everything. You’d think, I thought bitterly, that the English would be ashamed of their commonsensical reaction to all the great modernist tendencies. Their failure to have a Giacometti or Stravinsky or Balanchine or Günter Grass, their sickeningly merry way of laughing at whatever is “pretentious” or “takes itself too seriously.” And this disgusting piss-taking response only goes on. Only the English have failed to recognize Robert Wilson’s genius. They alone rejected Schoenberg in favor of Elgar.
For the French bicentennial celebrations in 1989, I did a commentary for the BBC with Germaine Greer and the Oxford historian J. H. Plumb, who couldn’t understand what the astounding costumes by Jean-Paul Goude and Alaïa “symbolized.” For my part, I said that they were original and beautiful, which was enough for the Parisians, who, after all, lived in the world capital of fashion. All these black ballerinas in long white skirts; the Russian girl waltzing with a polar bear on a rink borne high by sailors in their midi blouses; thousands of soldiers marching with lit tapers in their hands; those spectacular red and blue fireworks above the Arc de Triomphe; the Marseillaise sung by Jessye Norman in the place de la Concorde. After the splendors of the most expensive spectacle in history—and Goude’s masterpiece—the deflating English questions about what it all “symbolized” seemed characteristically stunting.
I guess I’d been the target of English scorn as an out gay writer. I’ve had Germaine Greer and the anti-Zionist critic and poet Tom Paulin attack my novel The Farewell Symphony for being “disgusting” on a late-night chat show, Late Review. Paulin took the novel to task for its “sexual boasts,” and Greer described a sexual scene I hadn’t written. A few years before, A. S. Byatt and Germaine Greer, also on TV, had condemned the erotic pursuits of the narrator of Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Folding Star. And now Greer described a moment of “anal jackhammering” on an elevator in The Farewell Symphony that I’d never even imagined, much less rendered. More recently, Greer attacked my Rimbaud biography for its supposed advocacy of anal sex, which she for one was categorically opposed to.
Naturally there is an ancient rivalry and even enmity between England and France. For many French people England is still a country of comical snobbishness, outworn traditions, and bowler hats. The French are unaware of lowering English social phenomena. For the French, skinheads have never existed anywhere (except maybe in Germany) and lager louts are some forgettable exception to the cult of the gentleman.
Despite bouts of strangely selective and fleeting Anglophilia, the French have largely resisted England and the English. For a century, a store near the Palais Garnier called Old England has been selling tartan skirts, tweed jackets, and Barbour coats. Upper-class French families send their children to England every summer to acquire the language (those who are really upper class also send them to Vienna).
I attended Culture Club’s first Paris concert, in October 1983 at L’Espace Bal
lard. Here were all these teenage French girls wearing their Hermès scarves and carrying their Gucci bags standing around watching the stoned-seeming English cross-dressing lead singer, Boy George, sing a reggae-style song, “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” The evening never really took off. The French girls didn’t get this man with the big nose, Kabuki makeup, dreadlocks woven with satin ribbons, and voluminous cloak. Blue-eyed reggae was a bit much for the French, who were so hostile at the time to multiculturalism. It often seemed to me the English Channel was wider and deeper than the Atlantic.
In the pre-Chunnel eighties, we still flew to Heathrow from Charles de Gaulle, on British Airways—with the understanding that English planes alone were equipped to navigate the fog.
The myth was that people ate poorly in London and superbly in Paris, but increasingly exactly the opposite was true, especially for everyday bistros at normal prices. In London one was served large helpings of roast beef and fresh peas with mint and delicious summer pudding for dessert, whereas in Paris at a comparable restaurant one had a greasy confit de canard, soggy fries, and a stale crème caramel. The English server might easily be a fresh-faced, superpolite debutante hoping to get a job as a publicist at Faber and Faber, while the waiter in France, as likely as not, was a sullen Moroccan who’d worked twenty years at the same crappy place.
Of course I’m not talking about temples to haute cuisine, where the French win every time hands down. I ate at the Tour d’Argent, with its view of Notre Dame, slow, fussy service, and tagged and numbered roast ducks put in a press to extract the blood for the sauce—the press looked like some medieval torture device. I remember the owner, Monsieur Terrail, swarming about. Once, a very fat, middle-aged American who liked to have his ice cream served on a plate, not in a bowl, was served it the wrong way by an uninitiated waiter. The customer, who always dined alone, snapped his fingers; Monsieur Terrail rushed over and saw the terrible offense just as the chubby customer indicated his disappointment merely by opening his hands reproachfully, as though opening a book to a particularly damning passage.