True Pleasures (22 page)

It's a solitary figure I make, a thirty-something woman with her bright lipstick and her black leather bag strapped across her shoulder. I'm conscious of my aloneness as I walk through the quiet streets of the Faubourg Saint-Germain and listen to my footsteps rebound off the pavement. No one is waiting for me; no obligations require my attention. I am surplus to social requirements. Perhaps I should feel lonely. But I don't. Like a cat, I choose to be pleased with myself and my own company. I prowl these ancient streets with a sly sense of freedom.

Dispel the myth of your heroine's frigidity
, urged Morton Fullerton. But frigidity was a myth that clung long and hard to Edith Wharton. Janet Flanner, the
New Yorker
's acerbic Paris correspondent, referred to her after her death as the
literary, correct, meticulous Mrs Wharton
… She went on, acidly:
From the Rue de Varenne
[Edith Wharton]
finally started her frigid conquest of the faubourg … Mrs Wharton was perhaps too formal even for the faubourg
.

There's a reason why Janet Flanner was so harsh on Edith Wharton. Flanner was a prominent member of the artistic community in Paris which gathered around the charismatic and revolutionary figure of Gertrude Stein. Mrs Wharton must have seemed quite the stuffy Grande Dame with her
belle époque
gowns and her Proustian salons compared to the breakthrough salon hosted by Miss Stein at rue de Fleurus.

What Janet Flanner didn't, perhaps, understand was just how much Edith Wharton and Gertrude Stein had in common. These two women couldn't have been more different, yet they shared a set of ideas about Paris, about tradition and freedom, about the role of a civilized society and the place of women in it.

In 1940, Gertrude Stein published a book called
Paris
,
France
. It is a love letter to her adopted country. It opens with, and then intermittently repeats, this curious little refrain:
Paris, France is exciting and peaceful
. At first I hated this phrase. How could somewhere be both exciting
and
peaceful? The phrase lacked all logic, even poetic logic. It seemed to me sloppy writing of the worst and most pretentious kind. And at first I found the book itself hard going (what grudge did Ms Stein have against punctuation?).

But this funny little book gradually drew me in. Ms Stein proceeds by degrees to explore why a fundamentally conservative society provided the fertile soil for breakthrough modernism. Through her portraits of bourgeois servants and peasants and shopkeepers and pets she reveals a society based on tradition, order and ritual. She shows us something of the worldly, unsparing French acceptance of human nature and life and death. France, according to Ms Stein, is a complex, unsentimental, deeply civilized society. She says:
The French need to be civilized and in order to do so … must have tradition and freedom
. Tradition and freedom.

Twenty years earlier, in 1919, Edith Wharton wrote her own love letter to France,
French Ways and their Meaning
. Of course, Mrs Wharton's world is sprinkled rather more with dukes and
Académiciens
. But, from her very different perspective, she arrives at a similar conclusion.

Mrs Wharton said:

There is a reflex of negation, of rejection, at the very root of the French character: an instinctive recoil from the new, the untasted, the untested, like the retracting of an insect's feelers at contact with an unfamiliar object; and no one can hope to understand the French without bearing in mind that this unquestioning respect for rules of which the meaning is forgotten acts as a perpetual necessary check to the idol-breaking instinct of the freest minds in the world. It may sound like a poor paradox to say that the French are traditional about small things because they are so free about big ones
.

Like the decisive clues in the treasure hunt, up pop those twin ideas again:
tradition
and
freedom
. For these two very different women, Paris, traditional and free, created a kind of creative space. A space within which to invent an art, or a life.

It was easy to tag Edith Wharton as an old fuddy-duddy. It's well known that she didn't admire James Joyce or TS Eliot. Nor did she enjoy Radclyffe Hall's controversial lesbian novel
The Well of Loneliness
. But her objections were aesthetic, not moral. The form of things was very important to her. How you did, artistically speaking, was every bit as important as what you did. And indeed, the traditional nineteenth-century forms and style of Mrs Wharton's novels have to some extent overshadowed the genuinely progressive ideas within them.

In fact, Mrs Wharton, traditional on the outside, was wonderfully free on the inside. She relished the flowing dance of Isadora Duncan.
It shed light on every kind of beauty
, she thought. Diaghilev, with composer Stravinsky and his Ballet Russes,
broke down old barriers of convention
, she said, with his
wild, free measures
. She was
an admirer of the groundbreaking
Le Sacre du Printemps
and
L'Oiseau de Feu
.

And then there's Gertrude Stein. She is credited with the birth of modernism in her salon. She was a lesbian, an iconoclast, a revolutionary user of language. Her friends included the literary and artistic avant-garde, like Hemingway and Picasso. Yet this wasn't the whole story either. Underneath the revolutionary veneer, Gertrude and Alice lived with the order and regularity of the most stolid bourgeois couple. They were as tidy and fussy as maiden aunts, except that instead of pastel landscapes, they had modernist masterpieces on their walls.

In the end then, Edith Wharton and Gertrude Stein – and who would wish to downplay how wonderfully different they were? – created an orderly framework for their extraordinary lives. Mrs Wharton's rather secretive progressiveness co-existed comfortably with a deep respect for tradition and old gardens and refined manners. Equally, Gertrude Stein's radicalism co-existed comfortably with dry teas and walking the dogs. Tradition and freedom they sought, and won.

But there's more.

Paris was important both to Edith Wharton and Gertrude Stein because of the way it treated women. In Paris, women were not deemed additional or ornamental to civilization: they were the instrument and the evidence of civilization. Women
were
civilization.

The more civilized a society is, the wider is the range of each woman's influence over men, and of each man's influence over women
, said Edith Wharton.
Intelligent and cultivated people of either sex will never limit themselves to communing within their own households … The long hypocrisy which Puritan England handed on to America concerning the danger of frank
and free social relations between men and women has done more than anything else to retard real civilisation in America
.

Gertrude Stein echoed this view:
The relation of men to women and men to men and women to women in a state of being civilized has very much to be considered. Frenchmen love older women, that is women who have already done more living, and that has something to do with civilisation
.

Of all the things Gertrude Stein said about Paris, her most famous line is this:
It's not what Paris gave you but what it didn't take away from you that was important
.

I think what Paris didn't take away from Gertrude, or Edith, or the dozens of other women who came here, was their invented selves, their created womanhood. In Paris they could be the kind of women they chose to be, straight or gay, promiscuous or monogamous, creative, independent, open, traditional and free.

That's why Paris was exciting. And that's why it was peaceful too.

In Australia we do girls very well: young, fresh, ignorant, sexy girls. Not that I was one of them. I was pale and bookish and wore black tights in winter and secondhand sixties' frocks in summer. It's not as though I didn't try to become a sun-burnished bikini type, but it simply didn't work. I certainly didn't catch the boys: all I got was a sunburn.

In France they like women, grown-up women. Ellen once said to me that the French don't consider that a woman starts to become interesting until she is thirty-five years old. It's why Paris always attracted older women of fame or substance, like Maria Callas or Olivia de Havilland or Pamela Harriman, who felt appreciated here. (And why
so few French women emigrate. When Germaine de Staël went to England she was genuinely puzzled by the way English women were treated.
‘Is a woman a minor forever in your country?'
she asked her neighbor Susannah Phillips.
‘It seems to me that your sister
[novelist Fanny Burney]
is like a girl of fourteen
.')

But what does it mean to be a woman, a grown-up woman? When you're young you imagine that maturity of mind must, automatically, accompany a maturing body. Except it doesn't happen. You can get to thirty-five and still feel like a little child.

The truth is, we aren't psychologically rewarded for adulthood anymore and all our advertising is directed to how we can stay
young
and
fresh
and
carefree
. It used to be that children were solemnly initiated into adulthood. Menstruation, a twenty-first birthday, or marriage, or the birth of a child – these were the milestones. And causes for ritual celebration. But not anymore. Or at least, not as demonstrations of adulthood.

Even as a schoolgirl laboring up the hill to the white convent, I knew I wanted to grow up. I wanted to be a worldly woman, although I hardly knew what that meant. And I sensed that it would be hard to achieve this in Australia, an ancient continent but a young country, a teenage nation. In the end, of course, my solution was to seek out exotic travel and interesting jobs and look for the great conversations that would shape the clueless teenager into a sophisticated woman. I'm not sure I had much success.

Years ago, when I was on my first and only diplomatic posting to Belgrade, the senior local staff member was a plump Serbian aristocrat named Marina. She had been part of the Embassy for twenty years. ‘Darling,' she said to me, with her ruined smile, ‘I have seen so many of you
Australian women. You are all the same. You are romantics.' She said this as if it were a dirty word. ‘You expect too much,' she said. ‘You're always disappointed. You expect the men to be something they are not. Darling,' she said, ‘you have to learn how to manage men. European women,' she repeated smugly, spreading her moist ringed hands, ‘we know how to manage men.'

I hung my head for a moment, and then returned to my dark little office and resumed hand-wringing and heartbreaking over my faraway boyfriend's infidelities. I knew she was right, but what could I do?

Edith Wharton thought about this issue too and, with some rare compassion towards her countrywomen, concluded that American women couldn't help but be immature simply
because
they were American.

Why does the European woman interest herself so much more in what the men are doing? Because she's so important to them that they make it worth her while! She's not a parenthesis, as she is here – she's in the very middle of the picture. Where does the real life of most American men lie? In some woman's drawing room or in their offices? The answer's obvious isn't it. The emotional center of gravity's not the same in the two hemispheres. In the effete societies it's love, in our new one it's business
.

Gertrude Stein also carefully calibrated levels of national maturity. She too concluded that the character of a nation had a very real effect on the lives and disposition of its citizens.

France really prefers civilisation to tumultuous adolescence, France prefers that the adolescent learns reserve and logic and civilisation and fashion as he emerges out of adolescence, France who thinks that
childhood and adolescence should be felt instinctively as not an end in itself but as a progression toward the state of being civilised
.