Free Inside a Pearl by Edmund White

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?”
    â€œParis, why do you ask? I’ve lived in Paris all my life.”
    â€œAnd before that?”
    â€œMarseilles. Surely you can’t hear the accent?”
    â€œNot a trace.”
    â€œBut is there anything I do differently from