Inside a Pearl Read online

  And the food could be good or it could merely be amusing and “typical.” Typique was one of her favorite words to launch a zinger against the country that had bewitched and abducted us. Once she called from Paris and Michael answered. She asked him what we were having for dinner and he began to describe the main course.

  “And three vegetables,” she said haughtily, “the Americans and their three vegetables!”

  And of course at first I was gloomy and discontented to be back in America. My greatest accomplishment, speaking French, was useless here. I’d hear French spoken at the next table or on the street by tourists and joyfully assault perfect strangers who, as often as not, reacted coldly to this old man’s effusions. And yet their very coldness seemed heartwarmingly French to me.

  After sixteen years of living in Paris I was out of step with Americans. The same day a friend of mine named Hal Rubenstein wrote in his column that you must never arrive at a dinner empty-handed and must always bring flowers or wine, I’d said to him, purely by coincidence, “I wish people would never bring flowers—the host has enough to do without finding a vase and pricking his fingers on thorns. And never wine—he’s already carefully selected them. All right, some chocolates, maybe …”

  I went on to explain that I’d interviewed the Duchess of Beaufort, who owns Badminton House, one of the great English country houses, and she had thought all house gifts were a preposterous, newfangled custom. “Curious, that,” she’d said.

  This snobbish effusion didn’t make me popular with my friend.

  I was much older now, in my sixties, an age when it’s difficult to make new friends. The people who were willing to befriend me, young gay writers, would eventually ask for a blurb or a Guggenheim recommendation and then vanish as soon as I delivered them. Other people would call me their “new best friend” and then stop returning my calls—not from any hostility but from negligence. Americans were so enthusiastic on first meeting; I’d forgotten that enthusiasm didn’t mean anything. The cliché among Europeans was that friendships with Americans didn’t go anywhere.

  And I now had a fatal Old World sense of conversation—that it should be exciting and frivolous and provocative and preferably scandalous. I’d mentally prepare two or three hot topics before every evening. But my style was withering to Americans, who like to graze peacefully in conversation, and my “sparkling” style inhibited general conversation—which would revive, I would notice, whenever I went into the kitchen for the next course.

  Four old friends—Marilyn Schaefer, Sigrid MacRae, Stan Redfern, and Keith McDermott—were welcoming. At Princeton, Joyce Carol Oates did everything to make me feel welcome, gradually introducing me to many people of interest at the university. A couple of times I lost old friends because I gossiped about them. I’d forgotten that Americans had the bad habit of running back and tattling to the injured party: “I think you should know there’s something Edmund is saying about you …” (Usually something sexual.) I’d forgotten, too, that Americans can be puritanical and self-righteous snitches. In France most people enjoyed sex scandals, which shocked no one but titillated everyone. Moreover, everyone knew that the milieu was more important than any one member of it, and no one would rock the boat to save one passenger. Or rather, no one saw any harm in a bit of spicy gossip, certainly no reason to set off feuds and cause ruptures in the group cohesion. Boris Kochno, who’d been Diaghilev’s last assistant, friend to Stravinsky and Picasso, and the lover of Christian Bérard, said to me in his nineties that he could see that the most important thing was to preserve the milieu. Though he was Russian, he’d lived his whole life in France, and his wisdom seemed typically French. Americans, I remembered, to my chagrin, didn’t esteem the group but only conceded value to the individual friendship (unless the American was old, worldly, and female, and could recognize the sanctity of the group).

  I’d acquired a lot of odd habits in France. Michael and I rented a car and went on an extended tour of Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans, then flew home. My American friends were puzzled—were you on a book tour, they’d ask, giving a lecture? No, I’d say, we were on a pleasure trip. Pleasure? Were you visiting relatives?

  Then I had too much social energy. I’d ask people to dinner and they’d say, “Dinner? Next Tuesday? At eight? Well, usually I work till seven and then work out for two hours. And remember I’m a gluten-free vegan. But yeah, I guess I could come. What’s the occasion—is it your birthday?”

  I ended up at first socializing with foreigners, other writers such as Salman Rushdie and Peter Carey and Francine du Plessix Gray, or Europeanized Americans like Ned Rorem. I didn’t want to fall back into an all-gay ghetto, as I’d done in New York before going to Paris, but it was tempting, given the way people socialized. Many gay guys were as awkward around women as prep school boys, and straights were overeager to establish their tolerance of gays.

  I was used to devoting a large part of my budget to inviting people to dinner or to the theater, but the gesture took most Americans by surprise and often confused them. In Princeton everyone went Dutch, carefully dividing the bill down to the last cent, which shocked me.

  People dressed up less often, yet even Paris now was much more casual. I remember Sydney Picasso, Claude’s American ex-wife, once saying to me, “Remember how we used to dress in the eighties? All those crazy outfits? Now we wouldn’t dare.”

  In America I became obese, I suppose because the portions were bigger in restaurants and sugar was added to so many foods. It seemed to me that the secret of French cuisine was smaller portions, multiple appetite-quenching courses starting off with a big salad, and unexpectedly rich small indulgences—a sinfully gooey cheese or dessert. But no one in Paris took seconds, at the risk of being labeled gourmand (greedy). Only after I had become uncomfortably fat did I go on a diet and lose eighty pounds, though most people would say I was still heavy.

  Until I became old and fat I was still going to saunas, but soon I discovered the whole paradise of cruising gerontophile chubby chasers on the Web.

  People in the general public (on planes or even at dinner) had never heard of me. People said, “Should I have heard of you?” And I was so embarrassed by the whole subject that I said, “No. No one’s ever heard of me.”

  Cheekier writers I know answer that question by saying, “Only if you’re cultured.”

  If someone knew my name he was usually a middle-aged gay. I got used to supposedly educated men saying brightly, “I don’t read. But my wife does.” And she was brought up to meet the writer, but she would turn out to be clueless, a reader of foil-covered airport paperbacks.

  In America I had to confront the writer’s loss of prestige and the public’s neglect. In France and England I’d been on endless radio and TV chat shows. In London, Jeremy Isaacs had interviewed me for an hour on Face to Face when everyone assumed I’d soon be dead from AIDS. In America literary writers didn’t have the same access to the media. We had reality show stars for that.

  My old friends in New York had been decimated by AIDS. I passed so many apartment buildings in the Village or Chelsea where a lover or trick or friend had once lived. There’s where I once went to dinner with that cute airline steward. I’d shown up with three bottles of wine for two people—that’s when I admitted to myself I was an alcoholic. Also it was the third time in a month I’d lost my contact lenses. Where was that guy now? I’d sat by several deathbeds at St. Vincent’s, but not all the people who’d disappeared were accounted for. Gay life was organized in such a way that one day you realized you hadn’t seen an acquaintance for months, years.

  My old comfortable, dowdy New York was gone. St. Vincent’s had closed. Whereas everyone used to rent and move every few years as they could afford a bigger place, now everyone bought and gentrified their property. The cobblers and that strange little shop in Noho that sold pink sugar were gone, and the very New York institution of the “coffee shop” that sold cheap, delicious food had been replaced by an influx of nai
l shops and branch banks. There were no more bookstores. Someone said there were more bookshops in Paris than all of America—could that be true?

  Luckily I came back to America with Michael. He might rant against the empty decorousness of our old life in Paris, but he had lived in Europe for four years and at least knew what I missed. He made the new New York bearable by introducing me to a whole gang of gay writers in their thirties and forties. And of course I gradually made new friends of my own, my age and younger (everyone was younger).

  And we went back to France, but to Provence rather than Paris. We’d rented an old peasant house just outside Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where we spent many summers. Michael found the local accent more understandable than Parisian French, which was spoken too quickly for him. The house, called the Mas de Fé (the “mas of faith”—a mas being a Provençal farmhouse), had acres of grounds and a spring-fed swimming pool (un basin), pines at the top of the hill and olive groves at the bottom. We were in the Alpilles, across the street from the same convent, now a retirement home, where Van Gogh had been confined after he cut his ear off.

  The owner of the house was Madame Daudet, the very old widow of Léon Daudet’s son, a doctor. Léon and Charles Maurras had founded Action Française, a far-right party that was protofascist. His father, Alphonse Daudet, was a famous novelist of the late nineteenth century who financed the publication of La France juive, the central text of modern French anti-Semitism. He also wrote one of my favorite novels, Sapho, which is about a penniless young man from the provinces who falls in love with a beautiful woman. At first he assumes she is a grisette, one of those poor girls who make artificial flowers, like Mimi in La Bohème, but who he eventually discovers is much older, close to forty, and a famous courtesan. As a child he played around his father’s desk and would look with awe at a miniature version of a statue of her—a voluptuous Sappho. I’ve always thought that would make a good situation for a gay story set now, the forty-year-old New York model who hooks up with a twenty-year-old Iowan who thinks they’re the same age but doesn’t realize the New Yorker is the same man whose nude photos he used to jerk off to. Now please, no one steal that idea.

  Alphonse Daudet, a native of Provence, also wrote Letters from My Windmill. Though Daudet never lived inside one, Windmill became perhaps the most famous book about Provence—the real windmill he had in mind was just a few miles away. Then he wrote a diary about his case of terminal syphilis, La Doulou, which is dialect for la douleur (pain). Julian Barnes translated it as, “In the Land of Pain.” He’d heard that the Daudets had died out, but I arranged for him to have tea with our Madame Daudet. Julian found her to be a tough, royalist, formidable woman. I almost forgot to say Alphonse’s other son, Lucien Daudet, was Proust’s lover for a while and the author of one of my favorite camp books, Dans l’ombre de l’impératrice (In the Empress’s Shadow), about his years as unofficial gentleman-in-waiting to the widowed Empress Eugénie. Proust was a close family friend of the Daudets’; maybe they chose to ignore that he was Jewish—as he did.

  Proust’s mother had first suspected that he was gay when she saw a photo of her son and two other young dandies with big eyes, pale faces, black bee-stung lips, and clipped mustaches. These were Lucien Daudet and the young Jewish composer from South America Reynaldo Hahn (another lover). For years Proust was drawn to look-alike aesthetes until, like us all, he went for straight rough trade: a chauffeur and two waiters, one French and one a Swedish giant.

  Madame Daudet gave me a new red paperback anthology of her father-in-law’s writings. No wonder he’d been such a successful right winger. Unlike our own Republicans, with the exceptions of George Will and William F. Buckley, Léon could write with spirit and eloquence. Though she must have deplored the fact that I was openly gay, she seemed to like that I was a writer beavering away in her family house every July. In August, when we’d left, she took up residence with her twenty-two children and grandchildren. It was a miracle she could fit them all in, but we kept finding rolled-up blue rubber mats in out-of-the-way places. I would picture children placed head-to-foot (tête-bêche) in each of the wide, lumpy double beds with their horsehair mattresses.

  One year I tried unsuccessfully to argue the rent down by pointing out to Madame Daudet that the two bathrooms and kitchen hadn’t been modernized since the 1950s, that one salon was filled with her junk and sealed off, and that the furniture was all decrepit.

  “Decrepit!” she stormed. “That shows how much you know. They’re all museum pieces. You can find things just like them in many Provençal museums.”

  She was referring to a dark wooden cage hung halfway up one wall for storing flour out of reach of the rats. Oh, that and a raised wooden receptacle with a sliding panel for the salt.

  In truth, I loved that house and we felt privileged to stay there. One morning a car came rattling up the half-mile-long gravel driveway, trailing dust. Out stepped a bearded man with his wife. He said he was the son of Augustus John, the English painter and famous portraitist of W. B. Yeats and T. E. Lawrence. He and his parents had lived in this very house for twenty-five pounds a year, and were among the last Brits to leave the Continent before the Nazi invasion.

  Beside one of the beds upstairs was a painted lifelike Virgin, four feet tall, staring down at the bed with glass eyes. We had to put underwear over her head if we wanted to sleep or have sex. The one window in that room was tiny and the walls were a foot thick, all designed to keep out the cold in the winter and heat in the summer. There were two mammoth armoires richly carved; we could never figure out how anyone had got them in there unless they’d been built in the room.

  In another bedroom with one window, there were two double beds and a single bed in an alcove. Next came a smaller room with a single bed and prie-dieu and a crucifix on the wall, again with one small window. It felt very monastic in there.

  Finally there was a larger room with a little wrought-iron balcony and French doors beside its own small bathroom. Downstairs there were just the big brick-floored salon, with a huge refectory-size dinner table and ladder-back chairs, and the sorry little kitchen with its primitive equipment from another period. High-flying American friends who rented it from us for a week in July complained of the lack of modern appliances. I forgot to say that through a blocked-off door from the kitchen was the three-room apartment of the guardian (the gardien et concierge), his wife, and his six-year-old son, who was lonely and in love with Michael and would ask me plaintively in his heavy Provençal French, “M’suh, can your son come out to play with me?”

  The guardian kept two large, fierce dogs in a kennel behind the house. We felt safe until the day some tan and rowdy teenage boys from town decided to swim naked in our pool. I didn’t know whether to scare them off or befriend them—silly me, I opted for shooing them away.

  Though I wrote a lot in that house, with the slat ceilings expertly crafted like the bottom of a boat, my favorite thing was to read in the prie-dieu room all night long with no fear of the hour, the besotted way one reads as a child. I bought the Pléiade editions of Jean Giono’s novels. He quickly became one of my favorite writers, with his sexy Stendhalian heroes and lyrical nature descriptions, his notion of Provence closer to Milan than Paris. Years later I found out that some of the first talkies were of Giono’s novels. Certainly one of the best recent big-production French films was of his Horseman on the Roof. He was my secret fetish author, the one I didn’t want to write an essay about because I didn’t want to share him with my few readers.

  Still, why wasn’t he better known? I discovered he’d once been famous but that he’d made two disastrous career moves. On the eve of World War II he’d come out as a pacifist, and then after the war he’d been condemned, incorrectly, as a collaborationist (in fact he’d hdden several Jews on his various farms). For a few years after the war his books couldn’t be published in France because of his unpopular political stands. Whenever I tried mentioning him to French friends in the nineties, they’d shrug a
t me as if for some perverse reason I’d lighted on some insignificant and now justly forgotten French author, impossibly dust covered. The French intellectuals were so conformist that they even had iron-clad trends in their antiquarian enthusiasms. The odd thing is that they revered Céline, who was actively pro-Nazi.

  Marie-Claude, Michael, and I made a pilgrimage to Giono’s uninteresting hometown of Manosque, which has a museum dedicated to his memory. MC had learned to indulge my strange whims for writers of the past whose reputations had dimmed, such as André Gide, who’d taken one of the first anti-Soviet stances, or Daudet, whose Numa Roumestan I was reading, a masterful study of the difference between the Provençal and the Parisian characters; although Daudet was brought up in Provence, he preferred the cool, measured character of Parisians to the flamboyance of the southern blowhards he had known. Or what about Daudet’s Le Petit chose, a touching story of his difficult youth, his version of David Copperfield? Dickens himself was a Daudet admirer.

  Living in Provence and cooking Provençal recipes, everything from the labor-intensive soup called pistou to saffron-flavored milk in which you soaked fresh pasta overnight, I was haunted by the region’s two greatest writers, Giono and Daudet. On the wall next to one toilet in the house was a banner on which was inscribed a poem by Frédéric Mistral, the modern champion of the Provençal dialect and a Nobel Prize winner. One of my translators shyly confessed to me that her left-leaning parents had met in the thirties in one of the summer camps Giono had organized in Provence at Contadour for workers who were having their first paid vacations. She seemed embarrassed by the connection, which she suggested history had eclipsed. Her parents became Communists.

  I’m sure Giono would have despised me, an American snob and fag, although he was sufficiently aware of American culture to adapt the story of Johnny Appleseed for the well-paying Reader’s Digest. He’d posited his Johnny as a Provençal folk hero who’d really existed and had reforested the arid local landscape, but Giono hadn’t counted on American fact checkers, who couldn’t turn up any such personage of Provençal myth and eventually canceled the publication. Giono also translated Moby Dick and was an avid reader of Faulkner.