Inside a Pearl by Edmund White Read Free Book Online Page B

nose on the glass.
    I couldn’t quite see how French city dwellers could idealize the
paysan
unless it was just one more strategy for despising the bourgeoisie. I can still picture Hubert and me walking down a country lane with tilled fields on either side discussing the word “peasant.” The fields were full of sunflowers taller than us that had been starved of irrigation and allowed to brown, wither, and die so that their seeds could more easily be harvested, and I felt that
paysan
must be a derogatory word for anyone except a royalist like Hubert. Finally, a little to my relief, we decided that their word
paysan
didn’t quite carry the same meaning as our “peasant,” and that no French Hamlet would exclaim bitterly in an excess of self-hatred, “Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!”

Chapter 4
    Of course, I’d lied to the editors of
Vogue
and told them I spoke perfect French.
    My first assignment was to interview Éric Rohmer, the most intellectual of all French film directors, an elderly genius obsessed by
midinettes
(shopgirls). And yet in 1984 he was only sixty-four, which naturally seemed ancient to me then. Someone had said that seeing his movies was “kind of like watching paint dry.” I preferred what my friend Jacques Fieschi had said, that Rohmer was “this sensual intellectual.”
    Rohmer had been born Maurice Henri Joseph Schérer. I’d admired his talky films
Claire’s Knee
and
My Night at Maud’s.
I’d rehearsed my questions carefully with Gilles Barbedette, who’d translated my novel
Nocturnes for the King of Naples
. I had to tape Rohmer’s answers, since I had no idea what he was saying—which of course meant that I couldn’t pose any follow-up questions to the provocative and original things it turned out that he was saying. In Hollywood movies the star absorbs and perfects the foreign language seamlessly, and in a matter of days, since language plays no part in the plot. But my fear of daunting linguistic encounters only added to my mounting agoraphobia: I seldom left the apartment. I’d sit in a chair and rehearse what I might say, what Rohmer might say, and how I’d answer, and hours of invented conversations would play out in my head. I’d think something in English and immediately try to translate it into French. I’d practice translation so much that I could say many things, at least the sort of things that typically I’d say in my own language. Comprehension, however, was another thing altogether. After I’d present my owncarefully displayed sentence like a diamond necklace on black velvet, the other speaker, the French person, would throw his sentence at me like a handful of wet sand. It would sting so badly that I’d wince, and an instant later I would wonder what had just happened to me. Perhaps worst of all, I’d failed to grasp little nice things shopkeepers or neighbors were saying about the weather or the wild strawberries, pleasant comments I was unable to acknowledge or engage with. John Purcell couldn’t speak but could understand, and together we made up an inept sort of team. What I could do was read French books and look up the words. Sometimes now when I glance over the novels and nonfiction works I was patiently annotating in those days, it astonishes me that there was ever a time when I didn’t know those words.
    I’d lie on the couch and read and read. Marie-Claude, who knew the publicity girls at all the publishing houses, had put me on every list for freebies; in addition she’d call to nudge them along if she was excited about a particular title. She’d say, “But Monsieur White
is
American
Vogue
in Paris,” letting them imagine I might write up an obscure first novel and start a bidding war for it in the States.
    What I learned soon enough was that American magazine editors weren’t interested in anything happening in France