Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN: 1620406330
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
When Edmund White moved to Paris in 1983, leaving New York City in the midst of the AIDS crisis, he was forty-three years old, couldn't speak French, and only knew two people in the entire city. But in middle age, he discovered the new anxieties and pleasures of mastering a new culture. When he left fifteen years later to take a teaching position in the U.S., he was fluent enough to broadcast on French radio and TV, and in his work as a journalist, he'd made the acquaintance of everyone from Yves Saint Laurent to Catherine Deneuve to Michel Foucault. He'd also developed a close friendship with an older woman, Marie-Claude, through which he'd come to understand French life and culture in a deeper way.
The book's title evokes the Parisian landscape in the eternal mists and the half-light, the serenity of the city compared to the New York White had known (and vividly recalled in City Boy). White fell headily in love with the city and its culture: both intoxicated and intellectually stimulated. He became the definitive biographer of Jean Genet; he wrote lives of Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud; and he became a recipient of the French Order of Arts and Letters. Inside a Pearl recalls those fertile years for White. It's a memoir which gossips and ruminates, and offers a brilliant examination of a city and a culture eternally imbued with an aura of enchantment.
good situation for a gay story set now, the forty-year-old New York model who hooks up with a twenty-year-old Iowan who thinks they’re the same age but doesn’t realize the New Yorker is the same man whose nude photos he used to jerk off to. Now please, no one steal that idea. Alphonse Daudet, a native of Provence, also wrote Letters from My Windmill. Though Daudet never lived inside one, Windmill became perhaps the most famous book about Provence—the real windmill he had in mind was just a few
amphitheater, they’d all drummed their feet on the hollow-sounding floors instead of applauding. When I read to them from my complex, not entirely successful novel Caracole, a pimply male student attacked me for writing in a cultured “Thomas Mann style,” as if that were a terrible sin, and for recording painful events that had happened to me when I was much younger rather than reporting my current angst. I knew from Nabokov’s novel The Gift that Berlin could be a summer paradise of interlocking
suspected that James thought MC was too dowdy and unimportant to occupy such a large part of my affections, which naturally I resented. Bernard took me to meet Amyn Aga Khan, who seemed like a nice, regular, tall Harvard grad and businessman. He lived in a lavish hotel particulier behind the Musée d’Orsay. Amyn owned a real estate development along the Costa Smeralda, in Sardinia, but he appeared humble and cozily collegial until the servant took our drinks order and said, “And Your Majesty?”
them to advantage, and they stuck with that. Americans made the mistake of imagining that the outfit made the woman and that anyone wearing something beautiful would look good. French women knew how to suppress and benefit from their bodily peculiarities—how to deemphasize a fat ass or disguise a flat chest or thick waist. All things being equal, a French woman would like to look stylish, but not if the new styles emphasized her weak points. The Sunday magazine of the Times in London asked me to
clawing at her silk ribbon, said impatiently, her words in character for a period novel, “All our visitors ask us about them. If you must know, they’re a penniless Spanish duke and duchess; they wait on us the two weeks a year we’re here and then they have the run of the place the rest of the year. The neighbors have told us they entertain heavily.” Chapter 12 Each time I left Bernard Minoret’s on the rue de Beaune, I’d walk home. I’d go past my favorite building, the Académie Française, with