A Conversation with Jean Genet's biographer, Edmund White


For sixteen years Edmund White lived the expatriate life in Paris. In "Our Paris: Sketches from Memory" and "The Flaneur" he offers an insider's perspective on Parisian Life. I recently tracked him down in Manhattan where he commutes to his teaching position at Princeton.

Casually clad in a navy blue T-shirt, khaki shorts and sandals Edmund White set his tongs aside and opened the door of his Westside (Manhattan) apartment. I was greeted with the aroma of roasting chickens that made a right turn out of the kitchen and followed me into the living room where I assumed the interviewer's position on the sofa. White offered me a beverage and then plopped into an oversized leather chair and we began our discussion of Paris.

TG: When did you first go to Paris?
EW: In the sixties, I think '68. But I wasn't there for May (the student riots led by Danny The Red-Daniel Cohn-Bendit). I just went as a tourist for a week but I got sick and had to cut my vacation short and fly home.

TG: When did you go back?
EW: Three times in the seventies and then I moved definitively in '83 and I stayed sixteen years.

TG: Why did you decide to stay?
EW: I decided to move because I got a Guggenheim for a year and thought that that would be a good place to go. I'd always been fascinated by Paris but intimidated by her.

TG: Why were you intimidated?
EW: In the sixties Americans were very unwelcome because most Parisians were Communists and certainly most intellectuals or people you might meet were. It was the height of our war with Vietnam and people didn't make many distinctions between anti-war protesters in America and pro-war government. And I didn't speak the language. I didn't really learn French until I moved there. I was already forty-three years old. People think that is very old to learn a language but you can do it.

TG: How did you learn?
EW: I went to the Alliance Française and I read books. I got a job with American Vogue by lying and saying that I spoke perfect French. One of my first assignments was to interview Eric Rohmer who is one of the most brilliant people, certainly one of the most brilliant filmmakers. I couldn't understand a word he was saying to me but I had rehearsed my questions and I recorded his answers. I ran back to my translator, the person who was translating my novels, and got him to translate. So I sort of learned on the job as it were. But it took me a very long time to learn because I hung out with Americans for the first two or three years I lived there. The boy I had gone over with moved back to America and so did most of my friends. Nobody stayed too long, six months or a year because they couldn't get work papers. Unless you are working for an American company as I was and earning dollars it's very difficult. Pretty soon I was with my French friends, many of whom I had met at the gym. I think the gym's a very good place to go to if you're serious about settling in France, and go alone and you'll meet people to talk to-boys and girls.

TG: Where was the gym?
EW: In the quatrieme, right behind the Centre Georges Pompidou, a place called the Espace Vit' Halles. It was kind of a pun- a lot of fun. And since I'm a writer I had a very privileged position because writers are esteemed in France. People would invite me out. Everybody would invite me out one time and nobody invited me twice- I was passed around as a sort of curiosity as an American writer living in France. There are a lot of literary hostesses who want to say: Edmund White, Je le connais. Once will do. And I think you become a nuisance until you learn to speak very good French.

EW: But as I started to say, the way that I really learned was probably the least recommended way, which is to lay on a couch 12 hours a day and reading all of the latest novels in French and looking up every word. I now have a huge French vocabulary that makes the French laugh. They say nobody uses those words. Then I had a few French lovers. To this day I have no reluctance to speak French with friends but I do with people I don't know very well and especially in professional situations. I recently interviewed Catherine Millet, the woman who wrote La Vie Sexuelle de Catherine M. I interviewed her in French, on stage in Brighton (England). I'd ask my question in French and then I'd have to repeat it in English for the audience and then translate her answer. It's hard to be simultaneous interpreter. And there are a lot of expressions that you can't really translate.

TG: Where did you live in Paris?
EW: I lived for eight years on the Ile Saint Louis in an apartment I found through an American friend. He sublet it. He was professor at NYU and he had heard of this place on the Rue Poulletier, right across the street from the Eglise St. Louis-en-l'Ile. It was 17th century building-3rd floor, 2 rooms-it was perfect. It was meublé (furnished), kind of ugly and falling apart but it didn't matter. The views were magnificent. Then I moved to America to teach at Brown for a year and a half so I had to give up that apartment. When I came back I lived in Diane Johnson's then apartment on the Place Maubert. And then ii moved to the apartment I kept for the rest of the time I was in Paris on the Rue Saint Martin, between the Tour St Jacques and the Centre Georges Pompidou. It was mainly an office building but it was a big apartment-seven or eight rooms for the same price I had paid for two rooms on the Ile Saint Louis. I had a lover at this point with whom I did the Our Paris book and he had AIDS and was dying but we had some very good times before he died.

TG: Of the various arrondissments you've lived in which is your favorite?
EW: Ile Saint Louis is very deserted in the winter and can be very melancholy. The merchants complain because the people who have apartments on the Ile Saint Louis oftentimes don't live there. They come for two weeks or a month in the summer. Just on my corner was a guy I got to know because I wrote the biography of Jean Genet and I took 7 years to research it. Genet's first publisher had a magnificent flat looking out toward the Institut du Monde Arabe. It had furniture by Diego Giacometti and Alberto and paintings by Picasso. But they were there a week a year. There is also something poetic about coming home to the island after being in the "city" and finding it 5 degrees colder and damper, more mysterious and foggy. Don't forget that Swann in Proust was supposed to have lived on the Ile Saint Louis. In the Flaneur I write about the Hotel Lauzun where Beaudelaire lived and Le Club des Hachachins with all of those people smoking hash-hish.

TG: When you lived on the Rue Saint Martin it was more like a true quartier?
EW: A real quartier but a rather seedy one. We were at the corner of the Rue des Lombards where they have all of the really old prostitutes- in their sixties and seventies. We knew all of them. They were fun. Our concierge was marvelous, genuine French concierge.

TG: When you were in Paris what was your favorite bistro coin? Was it in that neighborhood?
EW: I liked Le Grizzli on the Rue Saint Martin. The owner was from Endorra and we'd go there 3 or 4 times a week. Did Diane (Johnson) tell you about Le Quercy? It's her favorite new restaurant. It's about $15 per person.

TG: Where did you go when you wanted to splurge?
EW: My favorite restaurant is Le Grand Vefour. It has historic associations, it's in the Palais Royale, it has little hand painted walls in the Pompein style. It has exquisite food and marvelous, seamless service. I think it's the nicest place. It's not too big and even if you're put in Siberia because of your American accent, Siberia itself is quite nice. So, I usually get French friends to call for reservations because they do have a quota on Americans and they tend to put you in bad places because they think you're a tourist. Americans I used to take to the Jules Verne because it's in the Eiffel Tower and the views are spectacular. If you go in the summer it's still light out and you can see for miles.

TG: What was your favorite café?
EW: The Café Beaubourg. I would go there and write for hours. The waiters all knew me.

TG: What's your favorite season in Paris?
EW: I think autumn. Paris is a kind of melancholy city and I think it's at its most melancholy in the fall. I like to stay in and read and one of the things I like about Paris is that it's always raining and you're not tempted to go out of doors. If you can stay in a cozy little apartment all day and read, why not? You can remain anonymous and lead a fairly eccentric life-you can do what you want in Paris. The fall is the season of the rentré and if you have book coming out it's very exciting. And of course the new shows, new movies, the new everything. Paris is the only city in the world where sometimes there are 5 curtains going up on operas. And that's extraordinary.

TG: What's your favorite park or garden?
EW: I suppose the Luxembourg. It has so many different activities. Kids on horseback, les boules. It's a good place to sit and read. All of the Queens of France are around the big garden behind the palace. I also like the Monceau and the Montsouris.

TG: Do you go back to a particular museum?
EW: I like the Marmottan because it has such a nice collection of Impressionist paintings. It's in a house and has lots of Monets. It's pretty extraordinary. I am very interested in Oriental art so I like the Musée Guimet that was just recently redone.

TG: How did you stay in touch with America?
EW: I always read the Herald Tribune, every day of my life. I still miss the Trib because it' so condensed and useful plus more articles about Europe than you find in the American press.

TG: Did Thanksgiving hold any special significance for you?
EW: Yes. I would always have a bunch of Americans and French people to dinner. There is a shop called Thanksgiving where I would buy what I needed.

TG: How has Paris affected your work?
EW: It affected my work in the opposite way of what you'd think. When I started writing my most American books while living in Paris when I first went there I was feeling nostalgia plus I could see America more clearly. I remember once a punk kid interviewed me on television in England and he said: " Mr. White, you're known as a writer, a homosexual and an American. When did you first discover you were an American?" And I said: "When I moved to France." And it's true because you become very clear about what are the typical American characteristics, what the myth is about America abroad and the reality. You learn about who you are. And for a novelist, especially one interested in manners and morals it's very good to live abroad. A lot of writers panic and think that they are going to lose touch with their own country and its evolving folkways and you do but even that's not so bad because when you move back after five or ten years the differences are so striking. When I left in 1983 no one was talking about political correctness and when I came to Brown in 1990 to teach for a year it was a hotbed of political correctness. When I stopped teaching in '82 I was a gay militant but by the time I came back in '90 I had lesbian and gay students slamming doors in my face because I said things that didn't suit the fads of the moment. In the seventies I had championed the photographer Robert Maplethorpe and had written the introduction to his first book nude photographs of black males and by 1990 he was seen as a vicious white male exploiting blacks whereas in 1978 he was seen as championing blacks.

TG: How are you different for having lived in Paris?
EW: I think less driven about my career and more respectful of genuine merit rather than just financial success-in both my work and the works of others. More likely to be drawn to somebody who is an eccentric but isn't a success. Even to see the virtue in somebody who has a really foul character. The French love someone who is a "sal caractére mais il est trés attachent". When you live there for a while you learn that even quite nasty people can have their charm. The joie de vivre-cooking and entertaining. The French have a real gift for friendship. Some of my most intense and loyal friendships have been with French people. They can be very nasty to tourists but they are very attached to their real friends.