Dreaming in French

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My latest review, of Alice Kaplan’s Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis, is up at The Daily Beast:

Dreaming in French is, above all, an attempt to validate an undervalued aspect of American culture: the study abroad narrative. The stories of girls overseas have not often been part of the canon of American expatriate writing, Kaplan points out. We have a wealth of material from Norman Mailer, George Plimpton, Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, et al, from their own days on the GI Bill, their Guggenheims, or their Fulbrights. Young American men in Paris were intent on “embrac[ing] irresponsibility,” as James Baldwin put it, producing work that is “gritty, irreverent, macho, [and] frequently alcoholic.” Their female peers, on the other hand, were determined “to embrace a new language and master a highly coded way of life.” Kaplan, a deft historian, avails herself of a range of sources in order to reconstruct their experiences, talking to their classmates and the families who housed them, reading their letters home, looking at the photos they and their friends took, watching the available footage of them speaking French, and reading the newspapers they would have read.

I was once a student at Columbia’s Reid Hall in Paris and a professor at New York University’s Paris campus—I can confirm that the experience of studying abroad marks you for life, forcing you to interrogate your identity as you reconstitute it in a foreign setting. You are not simply “translating” yourself into that language; you are building your identity within it. “True philosophy,” Kaplan quotes Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “means learning to see the world anew.” In their time in the City of Lights, Kennedy, Sontag and Davis didn’t just get an education. They acquired a worldview, and one that would leave an inarguable imprint on history.

(Read more)

In his review for the New York Times Book Review, Dwight Garner wrote that “Alice Kaplan’s ‘Dreaming in French’ is an easy book to admire but a hard one to muster much enthusiasm for.” I couldn’t disagree more– I haven’t felt so enthusiastic about a book in quite some time.

“The obstacle that Ms. Kaplan confronts,” he says, “is that these women did not leave a great deal behind in terms of written accounts of their Paris years. What little there is can seem larval. (…) [Kaplan] dilates on the books these women read, the plays they saw, the shifting French intellectual climate. She is forced to utter broad generalizations, like, ‘France gave each of these women a deep and lasting confidence, confirmed their spirit of adventure and guaranteed their freedom from home constraints.’ That’s a pleasant enough sentence, but it could be written about a summer spent with Outward Bound.”

Garner’s clearly never been a twenty year-old American woman discovering Paris for the first time. In fact, Kaplan’s book is a serious contribution to feminist historiography, unearthing– through material that is thin for obvious reasons– a parallel female experience abroad during a period which we have understood largely through male expatriate accounts.

I love this anecdote, about the way in which adopting a French identity allowed Davis to circumvent the “violent dialectic of inheritance and disinheritance” in which she grew up in segregated Birmingham, Alabama.  When Davis and her sister were teenagers, Kaplan recounts, they proved this by going into a shoe shop in Birmingham and pretending to be from Martinique, speaking only French and broken English. The shoe salesmen treated them with deference and catered to them in the front of the store, whereas American blacks would have been escorted to the back. After keeping the ruse up for awhile, they finally burst out laughing and told the staff in flawless English: “‘All Black people have to do is pretend they come from another country and you treat us like dignitaries’” (150).

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“The odyssey of American men in Paris, from Hemingway to Richard Wright, is canonical, as familiar to us as a ride on a bateau mouche. For the women students of the same generation, no matter what their ultimate destinies, the traces of their experience are harder to convey. (…) These young women are determined not so much to ‘embrace irresponsibility’— James Baldwin’s idea about the expatriate student— as to embrace a new language and master a highly coded way of life” (5).

–Alice Kaplan, Dreaming in French: the Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis.

Benjamin on lovers and homelands

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In a love affair, most seek an eternal homeland. Others, but very few, eternal voyaging. These latter are melancholics, for whom contact with mother earth is to be shunned. They seek the person who will keep far from them the homeland’s sadness. To that person, they remain faithful.–One Way Street

Je me souviens

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Hello from the British Library, where I’m reading Harry Mathews’s The Orchard, a series of reminiscences of George Perec after his death in 1982. After reading a few of the entries (“his Afro hair and his goatee gave his face the projective power of a primitive mask,” 1) I got curious enough to image search a picture of Perec. If you’ve never seen one, get ready.

“I remember Georges Perec grinning madly as he danced a furious jerk with Catherine B. in Andy Warhol’s apartment, which Renaud C. had borrowed for a big party. After working up a tremendous sweat, Georges Perec asked to take a shower. He soon reappeared among us with only a towel around his waist. He was irresistible” (6).

New site

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Things are still a little buggy around here while I work out the site transfer– apologies. But I love how clean the new site looks! No more brown. A nicer setting to post non-book related things. Twitter sidebar fixed. Cleaner navigation bar. Sad to say goodbye to Badaude‘s excellent header, but I’ll preserve it on the About page.

The RSS link should be working now, too.

Swimming Home, by Deborah Levy

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When I was in London in October, I ran into Stefan Tobler of And Other Stories Press at a White Review reading. He put a book in my hand called Swimming Home, by Deborah Levy, and promised I would love it. It had a blurb from Jeanette Winterson on the back, an endorsement which even in these cynical times I take seriously. Unable to get to it right away, I put it aside and took it home to New York with me for the holidays, and finally had a chance to read it on a plane ride to Seattle just after the New Year.

I drank it down with the kind of concentration you can only attain on a long plane ride, where being anonymous and surrounded by strangers as you all breathe recycled air creates a kind of atemporal reality buffer, so you fall deeper into a book than you might have in the comfort of your own home. Very short– pushing the boundaries of the novella– Swimming Home depicts a group of English people who are enjoying a perfectly banal holiday in France until a naked girl called Kitty Finch shows up in their midst. She has a well-crafted story and, apparently, no place to go. The characters take her in, and allow her to stay in the bungalow they are renting.

Kitty’s a slippery character, the kind of slightly older girl who seems, to a young teenager (as indeed she seems to fourteen-year-old Nina), to be extraordinarily exotic, knowing, and wise, but who just as quickly can slip into extreme flakiness or outright lunacy. Predictably, she gets involved with Nina’s father, the renowned poet Joe Jacobs. It becomes clear that Kitty has gone there on purpose in order to show her poetry to Joe– believing that he alone can understand it, and even more weirdly, claiming that only she can understand his.

But the point isn’t the plot, or Levy’s language, or the deliberate yet casual strokes drawn between the characters that delineate their relationships and needs. What Swimming Home points to is the insufficiencies and failures of language and storytelling to get across what we really mean: our urgencies, our worries, our fears. Laura, the close friend and holiday companion of Nina’s mother, Isabel, can’t understand why Isabel has allowed Kitty to remain on the premises.

Laura changed the subject and wanted to know if she thought Kitty Finch might be a little… she searched for the word… ‘touched’? The word stuck in her mouth and she wished she had another language to translate what she meant, because the only words stored inside her were from the school playground of her generation, a lexicon that in no particular order started with barmy, bonkers, barking, and went on to loopy, nuts, off with the fairies and then danced up the alphabet again to end with cuckoo.

We compose our own stories to understand the world, as Nina does to make sense of her parents’ relationship, only to find she has completely misjudged it, or as Joe does in order to minimize the effect Kitty has on him, typing her as a particular kind of person he has encountered many times before:

‘I can’t stand THE DEPRESSED. It’s like a job, it’s the only thing they work hard at. Oh good my depression is very well today. Oh good today I have another mysterious symptom and I will have another one tomorrow. THE DEPRESSED are full of hate and bile and when they are not having panic attacks they are writing poems.’

But try as he might, Kitty gets in. Funny, irreverent, and deeply unsettling, Swimming Home charts an unusual path through what might otherwise seem to be territory as familiar and knowable as a backyard swimming pool. But Levy’s storytelling method leaves much hinted at under the surface, unspecified and troubling.

I don’t usually make a plug for publishers when I talk about their books, but I’ll make an exception here. Recently, in The London Review of Books, Jenny Diski referred to And Other Stories as the future and best hope of publishing:

And Other Stories, the publisher of Deborah Levy’s novel, is a more interesting response to the commodification of writing. For £20 or £35 you can subscribe to two or all four of the new novels they will publish in the next year. You don’t choose the authors or the books; in fact, you don’t have any idea what they will be publishing. Stefan Tobler started And Other Stories in order to publish an international list of the kind of fiction, both translated and in the original English, which he believes is being rejected by mainstream corporations. The books or manuscripts are suggested by agents, interested members of the public, friends or colleagues, writers themselves; a shortlist is sent out for discussion to reading groups that have been set up around the world. Their thoughts are relayed back to an acquisitions meeting comprising what Tobler calls ‘the core team’, although people on the mailing list are welcome to attend. In the end, Tobler and his colleagues retain editorial choice, and are prepared, after broader consultation, to take a decision based on their own judgments. In much the same way as the old independent publishers.

Subscribers are welcome to participate in the process, but they aren’t putting their money on their favourite. They are staying curious and trusting Tobler and his small team to come up with four books that will engage and surprise them, even perhaps not please them, or maybe, as it was for me with Levy’s book, give them great satisfaction and a sense of relief that the book is there, handsomely designed and well produced, in the world for others to discover.

For more information, go to their website at www.andotherstories.org.

Ellis Avery, The Footsore Flâneuse

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Ellis Avery, author of The Last Nude, out this week from Riverhead and set in Paris in the 1920s, went to Paris earlier this year on a sabbatical with her partner (Sharon Marcus, who has also written brilliantly on Paris) to do some research. Unfortunately, a foot injury prevented Ellis from flâner-ing around the city the way she’d hoped. Then she found she could get around just fine on a bus and a bicycle! Here, her tale of flânerie aboard public transport.

 

 The Footsore Flâneuse: Claiming One’s Own Paris on Public Transportation
 
The glamorous Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka had the good fortune to live in Paris in the 1920s.  While writing about her, I had the good fortune to live in Paris in 2008.  My partner and I had the further good fortune, that sabbatical season, to be working on projects we loved.  Sharon was researching Sarah Bernhardt; I was finishing the first draft of my Tamara de Lempicka novel, THE LAST NUDE.  I was unlucky in only one area: my right foot.  I would later discover my Parisian foot trouble was just one manifestation of a literally bone-breaking but ultimately treatable form of arthritis, but at the time, I thought I had an injury that simply refused to heal.  In any case, they were scotched, my plans for long walks in my favorite walking city.

The foot injury made it easy for me to stay home and write my thousand words a day, five days a week.  Sure, but what’s Owen Wilson doing in that Midnight in Paris poster?  He’s walking through Paris.  Ever since the first gimlet-eyed flâneur strolled out of the pages of Baudelaire, cane in hand, this is what writers have done.  Bad enough, as scholars who work on the female city-stroller, the flâneuse, have pointed out, that a woman idly walking the streets is apt to be taken for a streetwalker.  (I have, even dyked out in my old-man shoes).   Far worse for my flâneurial ambitions, however, was the fact that I could not stroll.  I could gimp along, sure, the way a moth can, but every step cost me.   I could not cross the Palais Royal, change trains at the Place d’Italie métro stop, or even stand long enough to chop, sweat, and sautée an eggplant at home without needing an Advil.

But I was optimistic.  At home, in New York, where I make a discipline of distilling my urban observations into a haiku a day, the raw material is often just out the window.  (Night.  The drag queen at/the corner pauses, wonders:/ Walk home, or cab it?)  Surely this would be the case in Paris, too?

Our SabbaticalHomes.com sublet, the least expensive of a few palatable options, and, revealingly, the only one for which the owners had posted no pictures, did not offer much to see out the window.  Oh-so-Parisian windowbox geraniums, yes, but the rooftops of the postwar Thirteenth arrondissement are not known for their charm, and the drizzling sky remained the color of vichyssoise for days.  The interior of the apartment was even less inspiring: in addition to the living-room/dining-room, dominated by a couch we dubbed The Silent Killer for reasons that would become clear to each guest who attempted to find comfort in its maw, the apartment featured two tiny windowless closets—one for the shower, one for the WC—and an extremely dark bedroom, home to an aging bed whose sagging mattress was propped up, in places, with sofa cushions.  A narrow L-shaped hallway lined in cabinets and rustic-tiled counters promised to open up onto the kitchen, until we realized it was the kitchen: when we cooked, we swiftly learned, food crusted between those rustic tiles.  The day I noticed, from my spot on the floor by the Silent Killer, that the wallpaper print in the hallway matched the woven-straw wallpaper, no doubt tasteful and expensive in the Seventies, that adorned the living-room/dining-room, was the day I knew I had been staring at those wallpapers for too long.

I owe the pleasure I was able to take in Paris, despite these unpromising circumstances, to three things:

One: the elevator.  The hollow spines around which the central staircase of many an old Parisian apartment building once spiraled have since been filled with tiny, tiny elevator shafts, such as the one that housed the lift to our sublet.  One person with one large suitcase filled it completely.  “Its merit,” as a neighbor would wryly tell us in elegant French, “is in existing.”  Vive l’existence!

Two: Vélib.  Although the ball of my right foot hurt after just a few steps, my heels worked fine, and so did my legs.  Research revealed that my American Express card just happened to contain the chip that permitted me to use my Parisian all-you-can-ride transit pass, Navigo Découverte, to unlock Vélib, the city-wide free-bike system: I couldn’t contain my glee.  “You are Vélibérée!” Sharon cried.  I could borrow a bike from the rack by the bus stop, pedal it uphill to the métro stop, and leave it behind while I took the subway, and then I could pick up another bike when I got out of my train.   Or I could just ride a bike the whole way: there’s no cure like exercise for injury-related depression.

The chunky public bicycles took me to Shakespeare and Company bookstore in the Fifth arrondissement, where I joined David Barnes’s writing group, and up to Culture Rapide in the Twentieth, where I could hear my fellow English-speaking poets read alongside French and Francophone freestylers.  Culture Rapide sat beside the truly gritty Place Fréhel, a vacant lot littered with beer bottles named for a chanteuse who died in 1951.

I was glad the bicycle system could connect me with my fellow living writers, but even more grateful that Vélib could take me into the heart of my novel.  I visited Lynn Jeffress, a novelist from my writing group, at 27, rue de Fleurus, who took my picture in front of the courtyard pavilion Gertrude Stein had used as her dining room.  I found Le Sentier, the seedy garment district where a key scene in my novel is set, and slid down an alley as narrow as a drain, quixotically named Street of the Moon.  Men passed me in either direction, wheeling garment racks.  I whirred past the sullen little fortress of a columned church—Our Lady of Good News—and found myself face-to-face with a massive arch featuring mythological naked men beneath suits of empty armor: how weirdly fitting, for the garment district.  My ride through Le Sentier allowed me to describe the neighborhood without gilding it with sentimentality or tarring it with melodrama.

Vélib also brought me to the Place de la Contrescarpe, steps from Hemingway’s first Paris apartment and home to a Hemingwayesque character in my novel.  In one of the bakeries that fronted the place, I bought a flaky Breton kouign aman, asked for them to heat it up on the spot, and ate it at one of the cafés on the place while the waiter’s back was turned.  As I ate and drank, the brazier beside me rendered the evening chill decorative rather than sinister; the cup of coffee warmed my hands.  The trees and fountain at the center of the place—in the Middle Ages, a village square—lent a gracious look to the student quarter, but Hemingway’s rummies and poivrottes still collapsed here and there amid the clusters of kids in the cafés.  A yellow dog with a torn ear trotted over to beg the flaky crumbs off my fingers.  It was the best pastry I ever ate in Paris.

Three: the bus.  Sometimes it hurt too much even to ride a bicycle.  As the autumn deepened, it began to grow too cold and wet to ride.  My nearest métro stop, Place d’Italie, was unwalkably far, but it wasn’t long before I could spot the insignia of the boxy mint-green bus that stopped near our apartment building from several blocks away: a black 67 emblazoned on a pink square.  In order to announce their alternate, nighttime schedule, many Parisian buses bore spooky, Halloweeny lettering, proclaiming, Le soir, cet autobus devient noctilien!  In the evening, this bus becomes nocturnal!  I savored the reptilian word noctilien, so much more sinister than its English counterpart, as I watched the wrong 67, not mine, approach from the wrong direction, stop, disgorge passengers, and swish away in a wash of pneumatic hiss and prerecorded chime.

The “wrong direction,” for me, was out toward the stadia that lay between the city and its beltway, the Périphérique: the 67 terminated at the Stade Charléty.  The “right direction” brought me closer to the city center, first uphill to the charming Butte aux Cailles, where thickly-planted chestnut trees lobbed their buckeyes at passers-by.  I could follow the example of the old ladies in the neighborhood and fill a plastic bottle with water from the artesian spring at the heart of Place Paul Verlaine.  Or I could buy a delicate, buttery quiche Lorraine from my favorite bakery, Legendre, and limp it down the street to check out stark, tile-lined Place André Masson, named for a painter who had died in 1987.  “That place was like the drain of an abattoir,” I reported to Sharon that night.

“Once you see his work, you’ll know why,” she deadpanned.  I realized that even if you’re worthy of commemoration by Parisian city planners, the more recently you’ve died, the more remote and crummy your place will be.  Poor Masson.  Poor Fréhel.

Farther north, and deeper into the heart of the old city, the bus let me off at the end of the linden-lined Île Saint-Louis.  I could stand at the easternmost tip of the island and look down to where, just feet below, the seventeenth-century breakwater split the river like the prow of a ship.  The bus route turned west from the Pont de Sully, traversed the rue du Rivoli, and brushed past the Louvre, where I could either pick up another bus or limp my way west toward the Palais Royal.  I could rest at Le Nemours and nurse a café crème while surveying the expanse of paving-stone outside the Comédie Française.  This is where I developed my Principle of Perfect Parisian Places: I’m sitting outside with my coffee, and I’m looking out at people, not cars.

Well, that just about covers most of Paris, huh?  Au contraire, this experience is harder to come by than it sounds.  To offer a few clarifying corollaries to this simple expression of pleasure:

1)    Cars aren’t driving past me.
2)    My sightline isn’t blocked by a parked car.
3)    Nor is it blocked by a plastic hedge.  (Why, Les Deux Magots?  Why?)
4)    I’m at a café, not a restaurant: no one is bullying me to order food I don’t want.

Place Saint-André-des-Arts hits all these marks gracefully, as do Place Stravinsky and Place de la Sorbonne.  From my café perch overlooking Place Colette, I could watch well-dressed Parisians cross under the plane trees, pause to listen to an open-air chamber orchestra, gape at the acrobatic skateboarders, or pass through the fanciful spun-glass arch marking the Palais Royal métro entrance.  I grinned.  I was a cane-chair flâneuse.

If I stayed on the 67 bus, it headed north from the center of Paris, out past the old city walls and into the Pigalle, home to the Moulin Rouge and other schlocky monuments to the skin trade.  From there, I could take the squat little Montmartrobus up absurdly charming streets, coiling past an unlikely vineyard and windmill before reaching the foot of the massive Sacré Coeur, that domed white-wedding-cake folly of the Belle Epoque.  From there I could drink in some of the best views of the city before taking a funicular back down the hill to Place Saint-Pierre.  I could curl up with another crème at one of the brazier-heated cafés and listen to an all-girl brass band on Place Suzanne Valadon beat the air into a giddy Cajun froth.  It hurt to dance, but I felt so grateful to Paris, and so blessed: my Navigo pass had brought me this far. –Ellis Avery

An advance look at 2012

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The Millions has a great round-up of their most anticipated books of 2012, and since they're all from US publishers I won't complain that they didn't include mine, which is coming out in April but in France and in French, so, ok.

Here are the books I'm looking forward to myself, or which I've already read and loved:

BenI'm particularly looking forward to Ben Marcus's The Flame Alphabet (Knopf), and not just because his mom was my dissertation advisor. Here's what The Millions had to say:

In Ben Marcus’s Flame Alphabet, language is the poison that youth inflict on adult ears. Utterances ushered from children’s mouths have toxic effects on adults, while the underage remain immune to the assault. The effects are so harmful that The Flame Alphabet’s narrator, Sam, and his wife must separate themselves from their daughter to preserve their health. Sam sets off to the lab to examine language and its properties in an attempt to discover an antidote and reunite his family. Marcus’s uncharacteristically conventional narrative makes way for him to explore the uncanny eccentricities of language and life. (Anne) 

 

EllisThe Last Nude, by Ellis Avery (Riverhead). I reviewed it for The Daily Beast and will let you know when that runs. Set in Paris in the 20s, and featuring a cast of characters from Tamara de Lempicka to Sylvia Beach, with a Hemingway double to boot, The Last Nude owes more to Jean Rhys than to Hemingway.  Like Rhys, Avery draws her characters with a sharp wit and a strong sense of empathy. Look for an essay on Paris from Ellis on this blog later this week. Here's what The Millions said:

With starred reviews from both Booklist and Library Journal, Ellis Avery’s second novel The Last Nude imagines the brief love affair between the glamorous Art-Deco Painter Tamara de Lempicka and the young muse for her most iconic painting The Beautiful Rafaela.  Set in 1920s Paris, among the likes of Jean Cocteau, Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, and a fictional American journalist named Anson Hall (a sort of Ernest Hemingway type), Avery explores the costs of ambition, the erotics of sexual awakening, and the devastation that ensues when these two converge.  Critics have praised The Last Nude as riveting, elegant, seductive, and breathtaking. (Sonya)

 

SmutSmut, by Alan Bennett (Picador). What The Millions had to say:

  Given the existence of Nicholson Baker’s House of Holes, a new book entitled Smut would seem to have a lot to live up to—at minimum, it should descend into dimensions so filthy and moist that they would cause Baker’s own thunderstick to droop in disgusted admiration. Instead, the absurdly prolific, versatile, and esteemed writer of The History Boys and The Madness of King George provides a pair of very English stories about the sexual adventures of two middle-aged, middle-class British women. So, rather than a lightspeed journey smack into a rigid “Malcolm Gladwell,” Smut is, in the words of the Guardian, a “comedy of false appearances.” And that’s probably not such a bad thing. (Jacob)

 

ParisParis, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down, by Rosencrans Baldwin (FSG, April). Because I don't know how many times I've tweeted that exact sentence. Based on Bladwin's essays for The Morning News. Here's The Millions's take:

In the grand expatriate tradition, Baldwin went to Paris looking for la vie en rose and found himself in a McDonald’s. The editor of The Morning News and author of You Lost Me There moved his family to Paris for a copywriting job and soon learned that it’s not all croissants and cathedrals. Learning to live with constant construction, the oddities of a French office, the omnipresence of American culture, and his own inability to speak French, Baldwin loses his dream of Paris but finds a whole new reality to fall in love with. (Janet)

 

Equally excited for the sequel to Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, for the next volume of Sontag's essays (which I'm slated to review for the QC) and for Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be? to be published in the US (I reviewed the Canadian edition for The Quarterly Conversation).

But I say enough, enough, enough of books with titles like Nobody Here Loves You More Than Me/Nobody Here is More Sad Than You/Nobody Here But Us Chickens.

Read the rest here.

 

 

Sexy, Gender-y Oulipo

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Happy 2012! I hope you all had a lovely New Year's; I celebrated in the utmost style (tea roses, candles, little ebony elephant placecard-holders) in downtown Manhattan with a lovely group of friends old and new, discussing everything from "silent courtship" to Marie Calloway to Michelle Tea to the way Daphne Guinness is trying to turn herself into a shoe. Since then I have done something weird to my neck and have spent the last 24 hours trying not to move it.

This inexplicably has given me permission to do nothing productive all day, and so I'm trying to squeeze in a little work tonight. My latest project is a collaboration with Scott Esposito of The Quarterly Conversation– I'll tell you more as it gets closer. All I can say now is: I'm writing a long essay about Oulipo, and Edouard Levé, and Hervé Le Tellier. And where there is Le Tellier, there is sex.

Thing is, a brief search of Project Muse (nice redesign! Still a little buggy though) and JSTOR have not turned up much in the way of "Oulipo and gender" or "Oulipo and sex." I'm not saying the articles don't exist. I'm just saying in my lazy, torticular state I can't find them. Anyone have any leads? Or thoughts?