Free Inside a Pearl by Edmund White Page B

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 had been right about Hector, who was invited to join the Academy, and a few years later so wasAngelo. 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 Janá č ek in Brno, and I wanted to point out that Janá č ek 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 Janá č ek’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 themovies 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