Inside a Pearl by Edmund White Page B

unequaled density of reference and qualification. The composer Virgil Thomson, who lived a third of his long life in France, once pointed out that the French never grope for a word or stutter or go blank and say, “Uh …” He suggested that the French, unlike us, have what today we’d call a social GPS, an instant device for orientingthemselves and navigating their way through their own culture, whereas we are not only often at a loss for words but also for opinions. The maddening confidence of the French (about the sequence three cheeses should be eaten in, from mildest to strongest, about exactly when to arrive at a party and when to leave, about how to sign off in a friendly but correct formal letter) fills in all social, and verbal, blanks.
    I quickly learned that for a linguistic neophyte like me, the most difficult encounter to deal with was a party attended by a group of friends who’d all known each other forever. They’d be hard enough to cope with if they were speaking English, since even then they’d all be talking in shorthand. In French, they became incomprehensible.
    The easiest social situation, I found, was talking to one person who was in love with you, someone who was studying your face for the slightest frown of confusion. The eyes, I figured out, always betray a failure to understand. If I didn’t want to flag my distress in a small dinner party or provoke a tedious explanation made merely for my benefit, I lowered my eyes like a Japanese bride. A
diner à deux
is the easiest exchange because we quickly become accustomed to a lover’s accent, turn of mind, range of reference and vocabulary—and
he
instantly gears his words to our level of comprehension.
    I never failed to understand MC’s French. (We called Marie-Claude by her initials, pronouncing the letters in the English fashion and not as “Emm-Cay”
à la française.)
But the same person becomes more difficult to understand on the phone, where one has none of the same visual cues. After a party the most difficult event is a narrative French film, in which the actors usually speak more carelessly than random individuals on the street. Mumbling is proof of artistic verisimilitude. A television newscast is the next most difficult occasion, since it usually depends on a vocabulary and metaphors peculiar to itself. As a foreigner I realized what a closed world the news is for all but the initiated, an obscurity that is obviously worrying in a democracy.
    Some American or French friends who were bilingual wondered why I was spending so much time with kids from the gym. I was too embarrassed to admit that I had chosen these particular kids for the slow, clear way they spoke French. When the great writer EmmanuelCarrère and his wife came to dinner, they teased me for my “adolescent evenings” (
tes soirées ado
).
    I’d always been a bit arrogant about my lack of a need for intellectual stimulation. I had a scholarly, researcher’s side, which reveled in reading up on difficult subjects, but I also had a silly, social side that found it more relaxing to chatter about nothing, as if I wanted my “artist” side to prevail over the “intellectual” role. I suppose I thought an artist shouldn’t be too cerebral. Camus said that American novelists were the only fiction writers who didn’t think they also needed to be intellectuals. Whereas a French writer such as Gilles Barbedette, my translator and friend, wrote novels and essays and read only serious things such as Montaigne and Nietzsche, in America a friend such as Brad Gooch could listen to rap, read theology, dress in drag—Brad was closer to my sensibility. Even the range of Brad’s biographical subjects—Frank O’Hara, Flannery O’Connor, and the Persian mystic Rumi—showed his mix of piety and camp. That he was also an Armani model further broke the mold of the intellectual.
    And