Free Inside a Pearl by Edmund White Page A

all other Parisians?”
    â€œOf 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.”
    â€œIn 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.”
    â€œThe Provençal accent is easy enough, like when they say ‘vang’ for
vin
or ‘pang’ for
pain
.”
    â€œBut 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 sheimagined 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,
    â€œIt’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