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ADVENTURES IN THE FRENCH TRADE

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Preface..................................................................xi1. Beginning and end.....................................................12. Initiation: Bcheron..................................................33. New York/Angoulme....................................................174. Boston/Vichy..........................................................215. Hugo 2000: Fiction....................................................376. Kandahar 2001: Fact...................................................457. Chiasmus..............................................................558. Derrida...............................................................729. Bellow in Boston......................................................8010. Antinomian Steiner...................................................8411. A Professor Retires..................................................10012. Genet in New Haven: Repercussions and Resonances.....................10513. Mother Harvard.......................................................11314. The Heart of the Matter (A Graduation Speech)........................11515. Louis Wolfson........................................................12316. Walter Benjamin......................................................13517. Afrancesado: Coda in Buenos Aires....................................154Acknowledgments..........................................................159Notes....................................................................161

Chapter One

One grows up with the stoical passions of a would-be hero and ends up, with any luck, an epicurean, savoring pleasures too nuanced and fleeting to be compatible with the monumental aspirations of youth. The template is from Montaigne but carries a validity that stretches at least as late as the Antimmoires of Malraux: an all too Western world of resistance heroics yields to an aesthetic realm of ongoing metamorphosis as the author-psychonaut makes his way to India and points east. I too appear to have followed the template, but in my own case what strikes me is how French the fantasies informing beginning and end, the stoical and the epicurean, turn out to have been.

The beginning: It all made sense, the kind of fantastical sense that has always intrigued me, when I one day attended to the specifics of one of the family legends of my youth. I had been, I was told, a miracle child, not by virtue of any talents but by dint of my survival. I had been born in 1944 with a hematological complication resulting from what was beginning to be known as RH factor, a condition that at the time was tantamount to a death sentence for the newborn child. The miracle was that I was one of the first children in medical history (or at least in the medical history of Yorkville, the new York city neighborhood in which I was born) to avert the curse through a total blood transfusion. No doubt the sense of threat was compounded by the fact of being born a Jew in 1944 in the deeply German neighborhood of Yorkville. But it was only years later that the true allure of my survival, its coherence with a life attending to matters French, was revealed to me. For the RH condition, I learned, was in fact the result of a reaction of rejection induced in the mother by the birth of a previous child. Now, it happens that my mother, who knew not a word of French, was named Frances. And my elder brother just happened to be born on June 13, 1940, the day of the entry of the nazis into Paris. Under the circumstances could I have any more apt task in life, which I entered in the glory days of the resistance, than to liberate occupied France(s)? And thus it may have been that the well nigh universal tendency to stoical heroics that affects many a youth should choose, in my case, the world of the anti-nazi resistance as its arena.

After the stoical, the epicurean. Some years ago I found myself particularly drawn to a strikingly trivial poem of Mallarm. It was a mere four lines in length and was addressed-indirectly-to one of the poet's friends, Louis Metman:

Tant de luxe o l'or se moire N'gale pas, croyez-m'en, Vers! dormir en la mmoire De Monsieur Louis Metman.

Not all that shimmering gold, the poet teases his verse, could equal the sheer luxury of reposing in the recesses of the memory of the poet's esteemed friend. Yes, one wanted to say, there could be no more lavish pleasure than to find oneself the site in which the various intricacies of Mallarm's poems would emerge from their dormant state and coalesce into new coherence. Indeed, for years Mallarm had struck me as a limit case in literature, and I had secretly coveted the prospect, as a critic, of disclosing a Mallarman dimension in writers one would otherwise not suspect of such an affinity. Yet the words dormir and mmoire de-"sleeping" in "memory of"-pointed to a second dimension that seemed almost funereal; and it was then, upon realizing that this exquisite quatrain was no doubt the only poem in the French language in which I could substitute my own name (at the rhyme, no less!), without any appreciable poetic loss, that I found myself indulging the plagiarist's fantasy of having stumbled upon my own ideal epitaph. Surely, to have spent one's life as the locus in which the implicit intricacies of a great poet's work might achieve their maximal resonance would not be a negligible way of summing up an existence. not in all the pages of the great Blanchot has the intimate bond between l'espace littraire and death-that "all too shallow stream," a peu profond ruisseau, as the poet calls it-affected me as deeply as in my plagiarist's fantasy of an epitaph to die for.

Chapter Two

The annual holiday party at the R*** home, just off Harvard square, was always a pleasure, with its assortment of local literary types and ample punch bowl, but this year's celebration was slightly different for us. Our son was arriving that night from college and was now so presentable, so alert, that it seemed almost an act of generosity on our part to ask to bring him with us. There were the affinities, of course. Ezra was completing his studies at Washington university in St. Louis, the university founded by the grandfather of T. S. Eliot, and our host's distinction was such that he had been granted by Eliot's widow the assignment of editing the juvenilia of the St. Louis-born poet. Each, that is, represented differently a legacy of the family Eliot. Then there was the sheer grace of our host. It was more than ten years earlier that Ezra had first caught sight of Christopher R***. He had come to a dinner at our home and immediately walked over to our then six-year-old son and introduced himself: "Hi, my name is Christopher. I'm fifty-nine; how old are you?" Coming in Christopher's Oxbridge English, the introduction had made an impression on Ezra, and I could sense that he was not uninterested in seeing what a decade or more could do to a fifty-nine-year-old.

I had another reason for being happy to bring our son along. My first night in France, forty-five years earlier, happened to have found me, an exhausted sixteen-year-old, arriving near midnight at a comparably elegant (and emphatically European) gathering. The venue was Bcheron, a sixteenth-century manor in Touraine. That...