Inside a Pearl by Edmund White

                                              A Review by Raphie Klarfeld, M.D.

Inside a Pearl is a book of White's memoirs about his approximately sixteen years in Paris. His interest in Paris began when he met Marie Claude de Brunhoff in 1975 at a party in New York. His description of her is of a grande dame with a polish and elegance that drew him to her magnetically. She was the wife of the creator of the Babar the Elephant children's books who lived in Paris. He  later traveled with a new lover, John Purcell, twenty years his junior and a student at Parson's, to Paris where his friendship with MC grew. He knew very little French and developed a strong curiosity about French language and culture. It took about one and one-half years at Alliance Francaise to begin to understand what much of the conversation going on around him was about.

As he began to understand he learned that, contrary to his belief that the French were predominantly left politically, that many were far to the right and even monarchists. Mitterand was the first leftist president in half a century. It became clear that he could curry favor by praising France as the cultural center of the world, a beacon of freedom and global fashion headquarters. He discovered the French interrupted each other constantly during conversation; writers of fiction in America were seen as not being intellectuals whereas French writers were; and one in six Frenchman lived in Paris. The French frequently socialized during the week whereas Americans worked late, went directly home and, exhausted from work, went to bed early. Paris was full of book stores which had become rare in the U.S. The French also did not like the smell of cooking food in the same place they were eating. His experiences with learning French were to me personally reminiscent of the four and one-half years I spent in Germany. I was eighteen when I first arrived and attended the Goethe Institute in a very intensive language learning experience and was fluent at about nine months, but before that I felt the same sense of isolation that White described. He recalled a situation in which he was to interview an author for television. He had rehearsed the questions he would ask but could not understand the finer points of what the author was saying and would just have to move on with the next question.

The rest of the book had to do primarily with the different people he met while he was there. Michel Foucault was a powerful figure regarding social philosophical ideas but did not like to discuss those ideas during a social evening. Foucault's English seemed to be self-taught also and spoken with a strong accent. He could be combative defending his ideas and seemed to not want to poison his social evening with intense philosophical discussion. Other people included the playwright Jean-Marie Besset, Peggy Guggenheim, Salman Rushdie, author Benjamin Moser, composer and Pulitzer Prize winner Ned Rorem, author John Hawkes, biographer  of Giacometti and Picasso, James Lord who also wrote My Queer War, courtier Azzedine Alaia (White wrote about him in Vanity Fair), movie diva Maria Felix, and many others. Many of the people listed were minor figures that I did have to search out on the internet.

The time in France ended with the meeting of his current partner of many years Michael Carroll who was living in Pilsen Czechoslovakia, home of pilsner beer. He was 25 years White's junior and was teaching English there serving with the Peace Corps. It was at that point that White was offered a professorship at Princeton which he accepted, and they both moved to Princeton and later after receiving tenure moving to New York. He found developing friendships in the U.S. difficult as compared to New York because people did not tend to venture out during the week. He praised Joyce Carol Oates for her efforts in helping him meet people at Princeton. He felt after 16 years in Paris out of step with Americans. As I mentioned earlier this is something I could also relate to after my sojourn in Germany.

I found the book most interesting and certainly well-written. His vocabulary is vast and I was glad I was reading on a Kindle so that I could frequently and easily look up words. I would recommend it to anyone as a good book but, particularly, to those familiar with White's work.