French Lessons: A Memoir (25 page)

When I took a group of students to Paris for the first time
in June of 1988, I wanted to control their experience. Obligatory walks. A scavenger hunt. Look what I saw! Love what I
loved! I wanted them to have experiences in French. They
looked back at me with their amused eyes and they gave me
a name, MadKap, short for Madame Kaplan. MadKap in
French is "tourbillon," a spinning top. It was good to be alive
with them and answer to the name they gave me.

In France I gave the women a big speech about flat shoes,
quoting Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex on how even
the right to walk through the city was denied to women. The
women in our Duke-in-Paris program have problems making their way through the city. They are constantly harassed.
Their language method books don't prepare them for the
kind of dialogue they need. Sherri and Jerry come up with
the right method: You look up really mean at the person
who's harassing you, you look him right in the face, and you
say in the snootiest sixteenth-arrondissement accent you
can muster, "On se connait?" (Do we know one another?)

Every week the students turn in their diary pages, reporting on their adventures in the city, their sentences, and
through them I relive my own discovery of France.

It is exciting to be there, la-bas, the object of our study is all
around us and not an ocean away. The books I assign are in
the bookstore down the street, they don't need to be ordered six months in advance; the museums have the art
evoked in the books and the books have places in them you
can go to, a metro stop away. Paris is the uncontested capital
of French intellectual life and its districts and history are all
laid out for us to see; we can even read about the cafes we're
sitting in as we sit in them. At last I am working in the place I
am working on. At home, I think, I am envious of my
friends in the English department who teach their own national literature. They are connected, they are in the fray,
and I am removed. Here I feel at peace, not split in two.

Why do people want to adopt another culture? Because
there's something in their own they don't like, that doesn't
name them.

French still calls out to me in the most primitive way. If
I'm in a crowded room and there are two people speaking
French all the way on the other side of the room, I'll hear,
loud as day, as though a friend were calling my name. My
ears prick up. I become all ears, hearing every word, noticing the words I don't know or haven't heard for a while and
remembering when I last heard them. I'll eavesdrop shamelessly, my attention now completely on that conversation,
as if I belong in it; I'll start trying to figure out how to get in
on it.

I go back and forth in my thinking about my second language. Sometimes I think, it's only the wealthy students who
get French; it's only an expression of their class privilege.
My privilege that I went away to Europe when I was fifteen
and the shape of my mouth and the sounds going in and out of my ears weren't frozen into place yet. An accident of
class. Or, I think, why have I confined myself to teach in this
second language, this language which will never be as easy
as the first one? Why have I chosen to live in not-quite-myown-language, in exile from myself, for so many yearswhy have I gone through school with a gag on, do I like not
really being able to express myself?

Then something will happen, in the classroom, and I'll
see this French language as essential in its imperfection: the fact
that we don't have as many words is forcing us to say more.
The simplicity of our communication moves us, we're outside of cliche, free of easy eloquence, some deeper ideas
and feelings make it through the mistakes and shine all the
more through them.

In French class I feel close, open, willing to risk a language
that isn't the language of everyday life. A sacred language.

It is hard to separate what happens in French class from
what happens in reading literature in French, in an intellectual tradition that is so sensitive to the nuances of language.
It has to do with that shift in identification that goes along
with studying literature, where you're able to feel close to a
character who isn't you. A conservative fraternity student
broke into English the week we were studying Algeria to say
that Arab women wore veils "because they were dogs." He
had a scowl on his face when he said it, which made him
look like a dog. I can still see the look on his face at the end
of The Battle of Algiers, a movie about the Algerian revolution
which ends with crowds of women on the march, crying
out their rallying cry, an ethereal sound made by beating the
tongue up against the roof of the mouth, "ulululululululul."
Change on a face is amazing to behold in a student. The lights went on after the film and I looked over at him; he
looked stunned. He walked out of the room ululating to
himself, trying out the sounds of the women he had referred to as "dogs" the week before. This same student at the
end of the semester, searching for a way to say in French
that he had learned to express himself better and that he
had new thoughts to talk about, used a phrase he learned in
an article by Franz Fanon about the changes in Algerian
women during the revolution, "Nous nous sommes
devoiles"-"we took off our veils." A reflexive, collective
verb.

Moments like this one make me think that speaking a foreign language is, for me and my students, a chance for
growth, for freedom, a liberation from the ugliness of our
received ideas and mentalities.

Last week we read a novel I didn't really understand, it
seemed too simple and I didn't know how I was going to
teach it. I assigned an explication de texte to Catherine L, a student who came to French through her French Canadian
grandmother and her Catholic schooling. Explication de texte
gets more precious to me as I grow older with literature. I
don't think it works the same way in English because Americans don't have the institution of explication de texte, the history and sense of ritual that gives the activity its charm and
power. In French class we bend over the language, we caress
it and we question it, and we come to understand.

In this particular novel, Patrick Modiano's Remise de peine, a
crime has occurred in the narrator's childhood. We, the
readers, don't know what the crime is, but we know that the
novel is working its way slowly toward this unspoken event.
The narrator is speaking about the strange time in his child hood leading up to the crime; sometimes he speaks in his
child voice and sometimes he speaks as an adult remembering.

In the paragraph that my student Catherine L has chosen
for her explication, the narrator is recounting the way he
watched the adults arriving at the house just as he was going
to bed:

Les autres les rejoindraient au cours de la soiree. Je ne pouvais m'empecher de les regarder, par les fentes des persiennes de notre chambre, une fois que Blanche-Neige avait eteint la Iumiere et nous avait
souhaite bonne nuit. Its venaient, chacun a leur tour, sonner a la
porte. Je voyais bien leurs visages, sous ]a lumiere vive de !'ampoule
du perron. Certains se sont graves dans ma memoire pour toujours.
Et je m'etonne que les policiers ne m'aient pas interroge: pourtant les
enfants regardent. Its ecoutent aussi.

The others would join them in the course of the evening.
I couldn't help but watch them, through the gaps in the
blinds in our room, once Snow White (nickname for their
nanny] had turned off the light and wished us good night.
One by one they came and rang the doorbell. I saw their
faces clearly under the bright light from the bulb on the
stoop. Some of these people are engraved in my memory
forever. And I'm surprised that the police didn't interrogate me: because children watch. They listen, too.

Catherine L took us through the paragraph like a detective.
She showed us how the verbs changed, how the repetitive
imperfect of habit ("ils venaient"-they used to come; "Je
voyais"-I used to see) gave way to a judicial passe compose:
the fact, definitive, that those faces are engraved in memory forever ("certains se sont graves"). Then the present of
memory itself, the retrospective moment ("je m'etonne"I'm surprised). She outlined the themes: the stupidity of the
authorities, the policemen, not to know or value the observations of children. Catherine L concluded very simply by
giving us the missing sentence, the sentence that explains all
the rest. "Children watch," she said, quoting Modiano, "they
listen, too." She explained it to us: "What he really means to
say is that they write. Children grow up and they write about
what they saw and heard."

I was so busy with the administrative details of my dayfaculty meeting, advising majors, writing letters, filing
reports-that it wasn't until night came that I thought back
on that moment from class and had time to savor it. I cried,
not sorrowful tears but tears of happiness from discovering
something I hadn't known about before. Why was I so
moved by what she said? She had put her finger on Modiano's need to catch up with his past, and on his sadness.
She had explained to me his sense of a past that can't be
erased but which is always incomplete. That's the meaning
of the single paragraph she analyzed and also what the
whole novel is trying to say. There are truths about the past
but there is no authority, no policeman, ready and able to
pin them down.

Maybe it was simpler, what moved me. I was thinking
about being a child myself and seeing and hearing but not
being able to say yet, not having the words for what I saw. Or
having them, but no one asked. No one asks the child what
is going on, and the child sees, and listens, and engraves
those memories and those people one after another in a private language. It's only later-maybe it's too late-that the pain of those memories is brought forward to the present
time of writing. Remise de peine. In English it means a commuted sentence.

There was the time in Paris when I told Leilani that Jordan
almonds were "dragees." I told her a hard "g" instead of a
soft "g," so she pronounced it "dragues" (the verb "draguer"
means to pick someone up). The saleslady laughed at her.
There was the afternoon Micheline's brother came to the
house. I heard Micheline ask, "Tu es au courant pour
Charles?" I understood, from the context, that "pour" could
mean "about," as well as "for," and that Charles was dead.
There was the time I argued with my mother about a cut of
veal at the Marche des Grands Hommes in Bordeaux. She
looked at me strangely. She didn't understand a word I
said-I was shouting at her in French.

Halfway through my life I look back. I can't have a memory without it being shot through with French.

When I was an adolescent, French was my storehouse
language. I collected secrets in French; I spoke to myself in
French. I know now that my passion for French helped me
to put off what I needed to say, in English, to the people
around me.

I might have stayed in hiding if it weren't for this bookmy ambition to finish it forced me to talk to my family. I
spoke with my mother, my brother and sister; I heard what
they had to say. Sometimes we fought; sometimes we came
to new terms. My father was dead. I couldn't talk to him,
except in the place I've reserved for him in my head-the
bubble. There was one person left I needed to write. In
February, 1992, after a draft of my book was finished, I wrote
to Mr. D. I apologized for twenty-two years of silence; I tried to thank him for the gifts he had given me-for Paris. I tried
to explain the political passion that had excited me in Berkeley; I told him that I used the phrase "capitalist pig" in my last
conversation with Louise, that she had taken offense and accused me of not appreciating him. Had she told him? Was
he angry? Did he think I didn't appreciate him? I sent him
the books I had written on French fascism and Celine, inscribed with thanks. I told him I was taking students to
France that summer, that I would like to convey to them the
excitement about the city that he conveyed to me on my
first trip there in 1970. I told him I hoped it wasn't too late to
hear from him.

Mr. D wrote back as soon as he received my letter, on the
stationery I remembered. He recalled the name of the hotel
my mother and I had stayed at in Paris: L'Hotel des Deux
Continents. He reminded me that he and I had climbed to
the top of Notre Dame and studied the gargoyles there. He
answered my questions.

"I am glad you were a flaming liberal in your youth," he
wrote, "that is the time to revolt and question."

He wrote, "I am happy that you wrote me as you did."

Mr. D sent my letter to Louise. She wrote me. She didn't
remember our last phone conversation as well as I did, but
she hadn't ratted on me-she never would have tried to
come between me and her father. I'd imagined she had, because I'd wanted to steal him away from her-I'd wanted a
father all to myself.

For twenty-two years, a story of my own invention had
kept me angry at my friend and alienated me from my
mentor.

Three months later, I saw Mr. D and Louise again. He invited me to the opening of an exhibit of his art collection at a museum in Minnesota. I stood in the receiving line with
hundreds of other people. He looked older, standing at the
head of the line, but I recognized him immediately. It occurred to me that he wasn't going to recognize me-I was
sixteen the last time he had seen me. When I got to him I
told him my name, and we hugged one another. I went into
the exhibit room where the Mondrian was hanging-the
same painting that had hung in the D living room when I
was growing up: there was Louise.

Why did I hide in French? If life got too messy, I could
take off into my second world. Writing about it has made
me air my suspicions, my anger, my longings, to people for
whom it's come as a total surprise. There was a time when I
even spoke in a different register in French-higher and excited, I was sliding up to those high notes in some kind of a
hyped-up theatrical world of my own making.