Inside a Pearl Read online

  In Paris, however, there were still rituals in place for promising new people, new ideas, new trends (which a bit later, in the nineties, would eventually be colloquially labeled tendance, or “tendency”). Something new was said to be très tendance. If you were a mere trend, no one wanted to be stuck with seeing you more than once; the host expected you to stay on message during your single visit and communicate clearly what was new about you and your work.

  I’d written a novel about my life as a tormented teen in the Midwest in the 1950s. It was hailed in the English-speaking world because it was well written, at once a breakthrough thematically and an “instant classic.” The French couldn’t quite grasp the novelty or the importance of my accomplishment. After all, France was the country of Proust, André Gide, Jean Genet—all three among the most celebrated innovators of the twentieth century and all three writers who wrote quite openly about being gay: Gide’s journals and his memoir, If It Die, as well as his early novel The Immoralist; Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers and his four other novels; Proust’s entire oeuvre, in which so many of the men and women turn out to be homosexual. How could my slender volume compare to this massive achievement, which had preceded it by fifty, seventy, eighty years?

  Nor did the French like the whole idea of “gay fiction,” though they’d invented it. France was opposed to the notion of identity politics and even more so to the literature of special interest groups. In France there was no black novel, no Jewish novel, certainly no gay novel. To be sure, Jews wrote about being Jewish but everyone, Jewish and gentile alike, regarded with horror the category of “the Jewish novel.”

  If specific identities were rejected in France, it was in favor of “universalism,” a concept so dear to the Enlightenment and the Revolution, the ideal of the abstract citizen, stripped of all qualifications, equal to everyone else before the voting urn and the court of justice. In the arts it meant that the individual with all his quirks was thrown into high relief but the group he belonged to was pushed into the background. French schoolchildren in history class did not learn about Napoleon’s Corsican heritage, just as in literature class no one mentioned that Proust’s mother was Jewish (nor had Proust himself mentioned it). Proust made his narrator heterosexual and his family Catholic so that against this gold standard of propriety he could describe in detail his lesbians, his intergenerational gays, his gay sadists and rent boys, and more broadly the secret world of homosexuality that interpenetrates the visible world of class and age distinctions. His contemporaries congratulated Proust on his “courage” in exploring the twisted world of homosexuality, since he said nothing to enlighten them about his own orientation. The only trouble with universalism was that if it had been progressive originally, now it had become conservative.

  Translation is always difficult. The lush metaphors of my Nocturnes for the King of Naples, so slippery in English, had to be sorted out in French. Time and again, of a figurative conceit I’d carefully crafted, I was told, “But you can’t mean both things in French.” Even the word “boy” (garçon) was suspect; it sounded too much like a waiter or a pedophile’s delight. That’s why A Boy’s Own Story was translated as Un jeune Américain. I wanted it to be called Signes de Piste (a 1930s collection of Boy Scout novels) or even Feu de Camp, but I don’t think any French person understood what I was getting at.

  Not that the French were impervious to the allure of the exotic, but they preferred to locate the Other elsewhere. Within France they wanted everything to be uniform, starting with themselves. No wonder those French living in the capital resented the question, “Where are you from?”

  “Paris, why do you ask? I’ve lived in Paris all my life.”

  “And before that?”

  “Marseilles. Surely you can’t hear the accent?”

  “Not a trace.”

  “But is there anything I do differently from all other Parisians?”

  “Of course not. You wear the same dark clothes and are just as skinny and murmur just as softly and take the same group tours to the same places like Vietnam or Anatolia or Egypt and have never toured France itself. You know the canals of Venice better than your own medieval monastery of Moissac or the chalets of Franche-Comté—though your grandparents still vacation close to home.”

  Reassured, your friend smiles and says, “I still don’t understand.”

  “In America, we’re proud of our regional and national differences. We say, ‘What are you?’ And the answer is ‘Irish’ or ‘Italian,’ though our ancestors came over from Galway in the 1840s. We say, ‘Where are you from?’ and the answer to that is, ‘Arkansas, my mother never wore shoes till she was ten,’ and we’re proud of this.”

  Your interlocutor will then say, “In France we have no class differences in our way of speaking and only four slight, very slight, regional accents, impossible for a foreigner to detect.”

  “The Provençal accent is easy enough, like when they say ‘vang’ for vin or ‘pang’ for pain.”

  “But no one says ‘pang’!”

  I can remember when Hector Bianciotti, an Argentine novelist living in Paris, interviewed me for a two-page piece in the Nouvel Observateur, a weekly left-of-center glossy that’s roughly equivalent to the weekend magazine of the English Guardian. He and I met in the downstairs bar at the Montalembert, a few doors from the offices of Gallimard, the premier publisher. With its brown velvet walls and heavy leather club chairs, the room had been a meeting place for writers since the time of Sartre and Beauvoir, who’d more famously also liked the Café Flore three blocks away. I had seen photos of Sartre taken here with his followers, including his handsome secretary Jean Cau. In another photo Jean Genet was being introduced to the author of La Bâtarde, Violette Leduc. She was upset that day because Genet said, “I’ve been enjoying your Asphyxie,” though the book was named L’Asphyxie and Genet’s way of saying the title suggested he was enjoying the feeling of moral and mental disarray in the work—or so she imagined in her hysterical, paranoid way. Like Genet, she was a fatherless child, as was their wealthy patron, Jacques Guérin—another “bastard.” (Ironically, later the three bastards would collaborate on a short black-and-white film, now lost, about a baptism in which Genet played the baby.)

  Hector asked me a few random questions about my enfance dans le Ohio, but rather than tossing off a witty remark or two, I started giving a complete report: “…then, at age seven, I moved from Cincinnati to Evanston, Illinois.” At last I noticed the look of panic and even disdain crossing Hector’s face. “I don’t need to know all that. It’s just an article, not a hagiography!”

  When the article appeared in print, it had several mistakes in it and my friend Gilles said,

  “It’s of no importance. No one will remember. No one will even finish reading it.”

  I mentioned that in America we had fact checkers and that we had to put red pencil dots over every statement after we’d verified it from three sources. Gilles merely waved a hand as if driving away an annoying insect. When I went on pointing out the mistakes, Gilles said, “My poor Ad.” He pronounced my name in what he believed was the usual American way, Ad. “I think you have no idea how important Hector is. He will probably win the Goncourt this year and soon he’ll be a member of the French Academy. He’s done you a tremendous honor.”

  Hector had begun to write in French, not Spanish, only a few years previously. People said he was helped by his lover Angelo Rinaldi, a Corsican novelist and the extremely acerbic critic for L’Express. (Hector wrote one terrific book about his coming out in the Pampas, Le Pas si lent de l’amour.) In the years to come, Angelo would like every other book I wrote and hate the alternate ones. His vitriol in general won him lots of attention, since most French critics were routinely positive. An older writer explained to me that during the Vichy years of the Nazi occupation, right-wing critics had been so brutally nasty that ever since, the left-wing style had been pleasantly anodyne; the slightest reservation was read as a violent dismissal. Gilles h
ad been right about Hector, who was invited to join the Academy, and a few years later so was Angelo. I would often see Angelo, always grimacing, each time his hair a color never encountered in nature, headed to his chambre d’assignation on the Île Saint-Louis, usually in the company of a teenager he’d met at a gym during wrestling practice.

  I can’t remember how, but in some way Milan Kundera became aware of me. He wanted someone to translate two of his political essays from French (which he’d recently begun writing in, too) into English. I told him I could not even translate a French menu in restaurants—was confit de canard “duck preserved in its own fat”? And did a financier have something to do with cake or a pastry? Kundera said he didn’t want anyone too sophisticated. Sophistiqué had kept in French some of its original sense of sophistry, of an ingenious playing with words, and I took it that what Kundera hated was what Fowler in his Modern English Usage calls “elegant variation”—the pointless and confusing interchanging of near synonyms so that the reader thinks something new is being discussed.

  At the time Kundera was very paranoid that the Czech equivalent of the KGB was trying to bump him off, so I had to buzz him precisely at noon, neither a minute before nor a minute later, and I’d be accompanied by his wife Vera up to the first landing of his rue Littré apartment. Then he would walk with me up the last flight of stairs. If he was famous as a wrestler, he must have been a featherweight, because he was very frail, though his pictures made him look big and powerful. He didn’t know English very well. He knew that about meant “more or less” but he didn’t know it was also a preposition, as in “about love.” We wrangled over many words in that way. His essays, as I recall, were about the spurious idea that Prague was closer culturally to Paris than to St. Petersburg. His own father had been a musician for Janáček in Brno, and I wanted to point out that Janáček had adopted a Russian play (Ostrovsky’s The Storm) in Kát’a Kabanová not a French one, but I didn’t dare. Yet he was very sweet and played a record for me of one of Janáček’s chamber works and gave me a running commentary on its secret plot: “Here he sees her again about to board the train.” His wife fed me a treasured Czech recipe which was so garlicky that the next day Marie-Claude wordlessly gave me chlorophyll gum and at the movies the couple in the row in front of us got up and took different seats when MC and I sat down behind them.

  My early, brief moment of Parisian celebrity came and went. Afterward few people in France could place me but some gave troubled little smiles of recognition when my name was mentioned. “Mais bien sûr,” they whispered politely. This French system of making a fuss over whatever was new and then promptly forgetting it meant that many young innovators had their moment in the sun right away, without having to wait years as they would have to in America. But it also meant that new ideas—feminism, say, or gay liberation—weren’t revolutionary or very interesting, since they were treated as this year’s fad, no more, and quickly were cycled out of sight. In America an idea was accepted only after it was judged to be of real, lasting significance. Then it stuck around forever, especially if it became a department in American universities—gender studies or queer studies. If I’d introduce an American intellectual to French friends in the mid-1980s, and say, “She’s a leading feminist who’s queering the Renaissance,” they’d make a face and say, “Feminism. You mean that’s still being discussed in America? We had that here in the early seventies, but it’s hopelessly vétuste, démodé. No one ever mentions it. No more than any woman now would wear Berber jewelry or a tuxedo or a hoop skirt.”

  Chapter 5

  My great love during those years was from Zurich, the manager of a small chain of Swiss cinemas, whom I met in Venice. I’d been spending several weeks every year in Venice with my best friend, David Kalstone, who lived in New York, taught English at Rutgers, and in the summers lived in Venice. David spoke Italian and loved Venice, a great pedestrian city if you were a good walker, and he was. He was nearly blind, but Venice’s walkways were well lit and the steps over bridges were clearly outlined in white pebbles. It was a city without cars and, though it was awesomely labyrinthine, David knew all its byways. He was a great friend of Peggy Guggenheim and we spent many evenings in her historic, if tedious, company, always accompanied by her little dogs. In her garden (a garden was a rare feature for a Venetian palazzo), Peggy had a white marble Byzantine throne and around it her various shih tzus were buried. Sometimes Peggy herself would sell tickets to her museum and if tourists asked her if Mrs. Guggenheim was still alive, she’d assure them she wasn’t.

  Every artistic or political or entertainment personality who came through Venice felt obliged to contact Peggy, and if the dignitary was sufficiently important she’d give him or her a cocktail party. That’s how I first met Gore Vidal, who in those years lived full time in Italy. He blurbed my second novel, Nocturnes for the King of Naples, but later, toward the end of his life, he turned against me because I wrote a play about him and Timothy McVeigh.

  I met my Swiss cinema magnate one night on what we called the molo nero, a “dark dock” for cruising, a pathway between the Piazzetta San Marco and Harry’s Bar—by day a major thoroughfare for tourists heading to the vaporetto stop but at night a byway where gays could be found milling around, to the extent that they congregated anywhere in this least gay of all cities. (In those days, they also went to a gay beach out on the Lido, to Haig’s Bar across from the Gritti Palace hotel, and to the public toilets on one side of the Rialto Bridge.) There, on the molo nero, around midnight when the crowds had dissipated (most tourists were day trippers, since hotels in Venice were so expensive), a few gays would linger, though they could be scared off by the glare of approaching boats. One evening, sitting on a fence all dressed in white was a tan, smiling man not in his first youth, closer to my age—a decade younger, as it turned out.

  As I approached he said in accented English, “You must be American.”

  “I am. How could you tell?”

  “The way you smiled at me even though I’m a stranger.”

  Later, I thought it must have been my sloppy appearance that gave me away, the fact that my shirt wasn’t tucked in.

  I couldn’t imagine why this handsome man would be interested in me, so I said, “You should come back to the palace where I’m staying. It’s pretty spectacular. The kitchen was John Singer Sargent’s studio, and Henry James slept in the library in a sort of medical metal bed.”

  I’m not sure he knew who James or Sargent was; the past interested him not at all.

  When we were standing in the middle of the immense marble floor of the library, he took my glass from my hand and put it on the floor, then he kissed me passionately.

  It turned out that he had my novel A Boy’s Own Story in his bag. His longtime lover, the art dealer Thomas Ammann, who had just broken up with him, had brought back from New York the new gay book everyone was talking about, so I think it pleased This—short for, Matthias and pronounced “Tees”—to have the author of the new vogue book in bed. Thomas had left him for George, a beautiful young Greek man who was a model and who’d just had an affair with Rock Hudson (Hudson’s AIDS had not yet been made public). This was disease-phobic, and used not one but two condoms. (“I’m Swiss,” he explained.) Within a few years both George and Thomas would die of AIDS.

  This asked me if I’d been “careful” and of course I said yes, though just the night before I’d slept with a young Spaniard who’d worked my nipples so hard they were still aflame and I winced whenever they were touched. But at that time, in the early eighties, there was no test for AIDS and no one knew exactly what caused it. We suspected it was caused by sex, but how? It seemed too unfair to us that a single exposure could infect someone; in our guilt-ridden way we wanted the disease to be the punishment for a long life of vice.

  But even by those standards I’d been what the French called vicieux (a compliment in the world of gay French small advertisements). I’d slept with some three thousand men, I figured, and big
-city gay men of my generation asked, “Why so few?” My figures were based on the rate of three a week for twenty years, between the ages of twenty-two and forty-two in New York, but many of my coevals “turned” two or three “tricks” a night, using the whore’s slang of the period (a “trick” was a once-only encounter, a word I had to explain recently to gay grad students). Truth be told, I would often go to the sauna, where I’d meet a dozen men a night. But to This I pretended to be far more innocent. He was reassured and thought of me as a sort of responsible gay leader thanks to my work with Gay Men’s Health Crisis.

  I wasn’t ready to change my ways. I was so used to undressing mentally almost every man I met (and often went on to do so literally) that promiscuity was my first response to the least sign of reciprocity. I loved sex, but I never experienced it in its “pure” state; to me, it was always blended with at least some shred of romantic fantasy.

  Soon I began to visit This in Zurich every other week and he came to Paris occasionally. When he traveled to my city we stayed on the rue du Cherche-Midi in the beautiful apartment belonging to Andy Warhol and his business associate, Fred Hughes. It was reached by crossing a formal French garden, mainly of gravel, that was dominated by a sphinx with the head of an eighteenth-century female courtier. Inside, in the salon, there were a newly upholstered Second Empire couch and a huge circus painting by José María Sert resting on the floor. The kitchen was the latest in stylishness and efficiency, designed by Andrée Putman, a French woman who looked like a man in drag (“More man than pute,” people said). In her store in the Marais, Putman was recycling designs from the past by Charlotte Perriand and Jean-Michel Frank. Warhol’s apartment looked as if someone with money and taste hadn’t quite moved in.