My Years in Paris

Usually, memoirs bore me a little. I must confess they do not “bore” me as much as leave me with a debilitating jealousy. Edmund White is no exception to this rule—though I don’t really want his life (no one can handle White’s life but he alone), it would have been interesting to be a fly on the wall of his life—a gist of which is encapsulated in Inside A Pearl. The book is about the time White spent living in Paris (1983 to 1998) and one can imagine that a lot of people mentioned are now checking whether their egos have been crushed or stoked in the book. Because as an author, White has this ability to confuse the line between truth and stories, and he is viciously indiscreet as he does so. And though he is often cold in dissecting his own life and of others, the man is exceptionally sweet on France’s social elite so much so that his eyes seem to mist over whenever he finds himself describing them. There is one telling occasion when White and a Vogue photographer travel to Marseille. There they interview and photograph “everyone in that city”. By everyone White doesn't really refer to everyone but only ones who matter—the beautiful set you may wish to have lunch with, probably everyday. It is probably not a coincidence that Proust is the writer he cites most often, because in many ways Proust—White wrote his biography— appears to be the invisible hand guiding him through Paris. Indeed, there are moments, such as a sketch of the Rothschilds “tottering forth for yet another dinner party—beautifully dressed, slender, on time, impeccable”, when the writing appears to be slipping into a loving update of Proust’s great novel. To be fair, if White has a soft spot for those things French, he is also aware of the country’s peculiarities. His struggles with the language are central to this process, giving him the insight of an anthropologist when negotiating the social minefield of a French dinner party (“never take twice from the cheese plate”). When he does learn the language, the verbal jousting of French intellectuals only makes him appreciate the “simple declarative sentences” of American prose all the more. According to White, this clean style is something he achieved in one of the books he writes in France, his novel The Beautiful Room Is Empty. It is also on display in a good deal of this memoir. His account of the AIDSrelated death of his lover in Morocco succeeds in being at once verbally spare and emotionally unsparing. It sounds unfeeling but Inside a Pearl is an uneven book. As it goes on, the chapters get shorter, the writing more anecdotal, and at one point there is a chapter-long digression about trips to London that might be retitled “Parties I have enjoyed”.

A generous interpretation would be that White’s uneven structure is an attempt to mimic the workings of memory, which often behaves like a bad novelist, with its crudely drawn characters and messily unresolved plots. But that seems unlikely. If his experience of spending 15 years in Paris was as refined as living “inside a pearl”, his memoir seems more like the “heap of jewels, unstrung and unpolished” that Nahum Tate saw in Shakespeare’s King Lear. Yet each episode gleams so beautifully it almost doesn’t matter that some of the jewels turn out to be made of paste. Sex laces its way through the book, omnipresent but not particularly important, just something one does, as often as possible, until the sky suddenly clouds over with the advent of AIDS. He tells the story of his lovers who fall to the disease, two of them weirdly yoked together with him as their health rapidly declines. Though he–a “slow progressor”–remains healthy, they die. The unreflective urgency of the prose here, its sheer velocity, makes this section devastating. But then, as at the dinner table, the conversation segues rapidly into the next topic, England in this particular case. At the centre of the book is his friendship with the critic Marie-Claude de Brunhoff, who embodies much of what it is about the French that White loves; the relationship is a touching one. But like many of the relationships described in the book, it comes and goes rather fitfully. Promising character studies often just stop, pushed aside by someone else whose story is, for the present, more interesting.