French Lessons: A Memoir (23 page)

In Canet, the morning of my first interview, I was too restless to stay at my hotel, so I walked around the old part of town until it was time for my lunch date at the Bardeche cottage. Walking through the market, I saw coming toward me
an old man with a big crater in the middle of this forehead
and a shopping basket in his hand. I thought, that guy looks
like a war criminal if there ever was one-a week in France
without speaking a word of English, anticipating the meeting, had put me in a melodramatic frame of mind. When I
showed up at the bungalow it was Bardeche; he was the man
with a crater in the middle of his forehead.

"Oh, it's you," I said, surprised, and he didn't understand
how I seemed to recognize him, even though we had never
met.

"A first scene in a movie," I thought.

The hole in the head came up again in conversation; Bardeche referred to it fondly, pointing to himself. He had gotten it as the result of an auto accident in the 19Sos; his family
teased him, in front of me, that it had worked like a lobotomy, because it had calmed him down from his anger of the
postwar purge years, when he was denouncing everyone
and everything.

What no one in the family was saying was that he was still
angry, but he had found other, more devious channels for
unleashing his anger on the world. He was extremely subtle.
He behaved like a very generous, very distinguished professor, with marvelous stories he was willing to share. I
spent three days at that bungalow, interviewing Bardeche in
his study. I asked him about his attraction to 1930S fascism,
his views about cinema (he had co-authored an important
early film history with his ill-fated brother-in-law), the purge
of collaborators after the war, his career as a belated fascist
polemicist. He hadn't been allowed to teach in forty years,
he was dying to teach, he missed the amphitheater at Lille, full of students during the war. There were moments of remarkable human sympathy. Weren't we simply two people
working together, listening to each other? When he said,
laughing, about a specific sentence in one of his books,
"that's precisely the genre of absolute sentence I'm in the
habit of writing," I laughed back. I wasn't thinking about
ethics-I was enjoying his self-mockery.

I ate lunch each day with the extended family. There were
children my age, who teased me about why in the world I
wanted to talk to their crazy father; there were grandchildren and au pairs and family friends, all gathered on a
vine-covered veranda. Sardines cooking over a grill on
grapevine wood. On the third day of the interviews, I arrived at the cottage with a contribution to lunch: a plum tart,
the biggest I could find at the market.

Bardeche's wife Suzanne said, "Robert loved these
plums." There was a respectful silence at the table. I understood that she lived with her dead brother every day, he was
there at the table.

I had no ethics to guide me. I was listening; maybe I was
neutral. I was as young as I would ever be as a French professor. My father was there with me-in my head, I mean.
He was light brown, brown in his suit with his sandy hair. He
was giving me advice: "Take it slow, just let him talk ... Now,
now's the time to step in, give him an opening."

My father was running his hand through his hair the way I
do, feeling for his thoughts: "If you let him keep talking
you'll learn something new." He was my age, the young
prosecutor at Nuremberg wearing his headphones, the man
with the intense gaze whom I knew from a framed newspaper clipping, taken from a Czech newsmagazine. He had earphones on to hear the testimony. He was listening, he
was intensely focused, but I couldn't tell what he thought.

So on we went, Bardeche and I, in our game. I didn't talk
about being Jewish-I didn't want to give him an opening.
Nor did I fight with him, about fascism or anything else. I
knew his line: I didn't want to raise our passions, when
there was no hope of my changing his views nor any danger
that his views could win out. He was a museum piece; I was
the curator. He, in turn, was delicate with me, dancing only
on the edge of his Holocaust revisionism by referring
obliquely to Free Speech-and how Americans know well
enough to protect it.

He was working as hard as he could to get me to like him.
He told me a long pathetic story about his attraction to the
Jewish quarter in Paris, wandering outside the temple after
sabbath services in the fifties-when he was reviled
throughout all of France as an anti-Semite-but what he
was doing was admiring the Jewish girls with their
freckles-not pretty, necessarily, but so appealing! He
wasn't going to let me get any closer to his anti-Semitism
than this bit of philo-Semitism, but it was close enough. My
tape recorder whirred away in the background, and I
rubbed my freckled nose in nervous excitement. As the afternoon sun shone in the windows on his walls of books
and papers, I saw myself in his study as a professor doing
important historical fieldwork; through the passing of time
together and the growing familiarity of our conversation,
Bardeche had ceased to be the person whose most deeply
felt ideas horrified me.

When I think about that summer in France, my first summer as a professor, I see the Mouchard and the Bardeche families sitting on benches, facing each other, introducing
me to intellectual life in the country I had chosen to study. I
see the righteousness of the Mouchards and the seductive
charm of the Bardeches. I see the body of Robert Brasillach,
Bardeche's brother-in-law, hanging from the execution post
in 1945, and I see the body of Jean Zay, Helene's father, rotting in a ditch. I see my father, sitting at the Nuremberg trials
with his earphones on, listening, but telling me nothing.

When I got back from France in September I transcribed
my most interesting conversations with Bardeche. I sat at
my desk with headphones on and listened to my voicethe innocent sound of it in French, and the "hmmm"s I produced, like an analyst, when I didn't like what Bardeche was
saying but didn't want to cut him off. I talked through my
introduction to the interview with Linda On, line by line,
thought by thought. She challenged me, differently than her
friend Claude had done, by urging me to put into writing
the contradictions and challenges of the situation-not to
make it too "clean," or resolved. It was Linda On who
helped me understand, when I was most agonized about
what to say, that writing isn't a straight line but a process
where you have to get in trouble to get anywhere. Because I
was disturbed, it was better writing than any I had done
before.

My interview with Maurice Bardeche appeared as an article and as the last chapter of a book, both with Bardeche's
permission. He was an impeccable collaborator, had for
years published his own journal-a raving extremist journal, but a journal nonetheless, and was extremely comfortable with the rituals of proofreading, giving permissions.
His correspondence with my editors was punctual and
clear.

In November 1985, as my book on fascism was going to
press, my working relationship with Bardeche having come
to a tidy end, I received a four-page handwritten letter from
him with this cover note attached:

Dear Alice Kaplan, I hesitate to send you the letter that is
attached to this note. I am afraid that it might cause you
pain. Remember, even if it irritates you, that I have much
sympathy for you and much confidence in you. That is
why I've written it. You must not be afraid of the truth of
others; you must try to understand.

Is it too banal, too obvious, to point out that going to interview Bardeche had put me in a daughterly role? I had sought
out the relationship; he had welcomed it. Now he was going
to get me back for what he had given.

The anger and disgust he had hidden so successfully was
right there for me to see in the four pages that followed his
note, beginning with his frustration about all that we hadn't
said at Canet Plage. He was setting out to haunt me, and to
block me from thinking back on him with any peace of
mind:

You see, dear Alice Kaplan, how right you are in your reflections on the interviews. It's worse than you think. Because, after the interviews, there are letters. Not only is
the monster not as monstrous as you thought, but he
speaks. Not only does he speak, but he takes his tools out
of his toolbox like an electrician who is going to do repairs. It's hideous.

He referred to me as an "anthropologist of anti-Semitism"
and to himself as the "Negro." Like all American professors,
he claimed, I believed that the Frenchmen who lived through the occupation were "Negroes," who thought and
felt like "Negroes," with brains and sensibilities absolutely
foreign to those of a good American. He was going to give
me some indications about the "Negro"-about him-that
might be useful to me:

i. No French intellectual knew about the existence
of the concentration camps, he began.

2. Jews died, because of allied bombings, because of
disease; that was not the fault of the Nazis.

3. Painful as it is to acknowledge, there can be, and
was, extermination without will to exterminate. "Pas de
volonte d'extermination": no will to exterminate.

Bardeche was offering me, a Jew, the Holocaust without
guilt. "The Jews just died like flies," he said; "how I hesitate
to cause you pain." He insisted on the "martyrdom" of all his
negationist comrades, like Robert Faurisson, who were being punished for announcing the truth, as he had been
when he published Nuremberg ou la terre promise. He punctuated his letter with the ghoulish form of address, "chere
Alice Kaplan," as though repeating my name over and over
made his sentences carry further, because they were addressed to a Jew.

The horrible gist of it, as far as I was concerned, was not
that he had written a negationist polemic-he had written
many of those, the details of this one came as no surprise to
me-but that he would address his revisionism directly to
me, fashioning it, personalizing it, as a result of the complicity we had established in our interview.

In the ending flourish to his letter, he let me know he understood a thing or two about me, about my desire to be
accepted in France and my need for camouflage:

"If once again, you get the chance to be French for a little
while, come see us."

When Bardeche's letter came I traveled quickly back to
that day when I was eight, so powerful in my imagination
that I often think it the basis of my entire sense of history,
when I violated the privacy of my dead father's desk drawers
and found the evidence from Nuremberg: photos from
Auschwitz. Evoking those pictures with my eight-year-old
self-consciousness, the horror came back, the horror of being too young to live with this much horror, too young to
have a dead father. Then, returning to my adulthood I measured my father's absence again, its twenty-year duration.
My father hadn't been there to kill the bats; he hadn't been
there to explain the photographs of Auschwitz; he wasn't
there to tell me what to say to Bardeche. I understood how
much I owed to his death, his absence a force field within
which I had become an intellectual; his image, silent and
distant with headphones over his ears, a founding image for
my own work. Headphones were also an emblem for loneliness and isolation: they transmitted voices, they absorbed
testimony; but they had no voice to give back.

I still have a photocopy of my response to Maurice Bardeche's letter, as superficial as I could make it-I wasn't
going to pour my heart out to someone who had just knifed
me-and as beside the point, with only an allusion or two
to what I really thought in case he cared to read between the
lines. "As you must imagine," I wrote,

I was very struck by your letter, not only by your enormous talent as a propagandist-in spite of the fact and
also because it is Alice Kaplan that you're going after-but also by everything you say about the 'bad anthropology'
of my text. Seeing yourself in black and white, desiccated
and reconstructed in the service of a theory of literary fascism, must be annoying and even disagreeable. Please accept, dear Maurice Bardeche, the expression of my
cordial salutations and my thanks, once again, for all that
you have taught me.

Alice Kaplan

I put my response in the mail; it was the last communication I had with Bardeche. I put Bardeche's four-page letter to
me in a file marked "Bardeche." I put the file in a storage
box. I piled the storage box with several others in a crevice
behind a brick chimney in my bedroom. It took me five
years to decide to reread the letter and forty-five minutes to
dislodge the storage box from its crevice. I had forgotten
most of the details: the comparison Bardeche makes between himself and "Negroes" (accusing me of exploiting
him); the references to Jews dying like flies (implying submammalian genetic weakness); the phony wish not to hurt
me as he is attacking me, the knowing cut in the end about
my wanting to be French. I asked Philippe Roussin, a friend
and colleague with whom I was working on Celine, to read
the letter out loud during one of our dinners so that I could
listen to its intonations through his native inflection. He was
a good actor: he read the letter like an aged pedagogue, caressingly paternalistic, with a growling, sadistic undertone
to his voice (my image of the professor in Ionesco's The Lesson). I put my hand over my mouth, stifled shrieks, laughed
in disgust, and shuddered. After he had finished, I grabbed
the letter out of his hand and pushed it aside, dangerously
close to a glass of icewater. There was nothing more to say.

"Don't get it wet," he said, "you may want to give it to the
Center for Jewish Documentation in Paris ... it's a classic
racist document."

I've rewritten the story of my first research trip to France
several times, with slightly different emphases and different "morals"-from empathy to vengeance-based on the
same structure. Mouchard and Bardeche are polar opposites, Marianne and Joan of Arc. Mouchard/Marianne is
rigid, didactic, judgmental, or else a beacon of intellectual
virtues, who doesn't hesitate to challenge the views of a
young colleague whose project he takes seriously-and
personally. Bardeche/Joan of Arc is, in turn, sadistic,
psychotic, manipulative, tragic. Linda Orr and Claude
Mouchard are another polarized duo, representing the freedom of writing versus the constraints of ethics, but also two
different intellectual styles: in shorthand, American and
French. I am naive, calm, omniscient, duped, manipulative,
powerless, or cannily silent, depending. My father is always
in the wings.