French Lessons: A Memoir (19 page)

I had never seen Guy look scared.

"I've never hit anyone," he said. He tiptoed out of the
house.

I don't know what it was like for Guy to finish his papers
that semester. I know I was relieved to be alone. There was
no expert eye over my shoulder, no thicker book across my
desk, no rigorous schedule making me look lazy. Suddenly I
wasn't lazy anymore. I could work for hours without noticing the time. I wondered-in that secret part of my brain
where I admitted my responsibility-if I hadn't provoked
Guy into hitting me.

Guy and I got back on speaking terms ten months later. It
was the beginning of my second year at Yale, his third year.
He walked into the Commons lunchroom behind a woman
with a huge bandage on her hand. They joined me. She was a first-year student in French from California. She had
burned her hand lighting the gas stove in her apartment on
Bradley Street, down the street from Guy. Guy had gotten
her to the doctor. He was "rescuing" another first-year
student.

Unlike me, Rachael wasn't hooked by Guy. She already
had a boyfriend, a writer in Boston who was halfway
through a first novel based on the childhood of Jimmy
Hoffa. Rachael wasn't obsessed with French, either. She
liked avant-garde writers, Beckett and Blanchot in France
and Burroughs and Wallace Stevens at home. She liked
theories, the wilder the better: Norman O. Brown's polymorphous perversity, Gilles Deleuze's schizo-desire. She
liked pinball machines and grilled cheese sandwiches.
Rachael, Guy, and I ate lunch together in the Commons every week. Rachael could do a perfect imitation of Professor
Harold Bloom saying "Oh my dears, oh my dears." Together
we made up names for our professors and fellow students:
"the yachtsman"; "le beau tenebreux." She had a story about
each of them. Together we invented a character named Irving, our academic valet. "Irving is writing me a footnote on
the Hegelian notion of the releve." "Will you ask Irving what
metalepsis is?" Being with Rachael made the world look like
a comic strip-an American comic strip. William and I went
into a new phase of our competition-we vied for Rachael's
friendship.

I resolved to go ahead with a dissertation on French fascist writers. I had never really stopped thinking about them
since I discovered Celine as an undergraduate. I chose Dan
as my adviser-a Malraux scholar. He lived down the street,
and walking home from school one day, I asked him to direct my dissertation. He invited me into his house for a beer to celebrate. He knew the left critique of fascism inside out,
but he hadn't read the fascist intellectuals; he asked me
about pronouns in their writing and whether there were
questions of style I could focus on. I'd get exasperated talking to him because I had my own idea of what I wanted to
do and he would make it more complicated, or more
straightforward. I felt vengeful about working on fascist
intellectuals-intellectual life isn't really so high-minded;
look at the trouble these people got themselves into.
French people! As much as I loved France, I was dying to
find the country's blemishes, her crimes. I also thought that
deconstructionist theory could get me further in my dissertation. Maybe I could have it both ways-I could deconstruct fascism, and I could show that intellectuals were just
as subject as anyone else to fascist longings. Derrida had
talked about the primacy of voice in Western philosophy, so
that's where I began, with descriptions of voice in novels
and essays written by writers who were enthused about
fascism.

I read books that weren't in print anymore: Robert
Brasillach on the Nuremberg rallies, Drieu la Rochelle's perverse theories of French depopulation, Marinetti's FrancoItalian futurist manifesto, avant-garde artists pulling themselves out of the maternal ditch, soaring along in their sports
cars through the modem city. The French fascists loved the
energy of the futurists. The hardest writer to describe politically was Celine, experimental in his style, reactionary in his
ideas. He could say the worst drivel and make you laugh; his
political position was racist and reactionary but antiauthoritarian at the same time-like one of those rightwing populists on call-in radio.

I had been taught, as part of the deconstructionist cli mate, that it was more interesting to think in terms of rhetorical structure than historical periods, and I had chosen to
work on material that made history impossible to ignore.
France had fallen in six weeks in 194o; the country had been
occupied by the Germans, but the French themselves had
formed a government at Vichy with its home-grown enthusiasm for anti-Semitic nationalism. The books I was reading
were all wrapped up in position-taking; some of the fascist
writers were so far gone in their enthusiasm for Hitler that
they considered the Vichy proponents old-fashioned and
ineffectual. They had their sights set on the new Europe.
Meanwhile, I knew so little about the history that I had to
look up most of the proper names in dictionaries. I was sure
that no one in New Haven had ever read the books I was
reading; they weren't "literary." Whatever value they had
was in showing what it sounded like for an intellectual to
endorse European fascism. I was dying to show how
screwed-up intellectuals could get about the truth. Here was
my chance to transgress a purity that I mistrusted in literary
studies. I loved thinking about France in crisis, France
where politics ruled literature, where censors shaped editions, where writers were out of control with hate and
prejudice.

Other motors were fueling my interest in the thesis, and
they had nothing to do with school. There was my imaginary conversation with my father about punishing war criminals. In his last year of life, my father had read Hannah
Arendt on the Eichmann trials. I tried to get into his head by
reading it. I fixed on the phrase that Arendt had used to describe the horrors of the Nazi mentality, the phrase I wanted
to ask him about: "The Banality of Evil." How could so many people-soldiers and bureaucrats but also intellectuals and
poets-be blind to so much horror?

Dan reminded me of what everyone at Yale knew: that de
Man's uncle, Henri de Man, had been an important socialist
in Belgium and had signed a collaboration pact with the
Nazis in ig4o. By coming to the United States, de Man had
freed himself from an embarrassing episode of family history. I imagined the disinterested rhetorician, cleansed of
his family's historical improprieties. The pure intellectual
had found his true home in the American University, where
parties and politics didn't matter. Clearly he would have
thought it was bizarre that I wanted to stick my nose in so
much bad thinking. I never went to talk to him about my
thesis.

Dan read my drafts right away. At first he was grouchy-I
was sloppy, I couldn't spell, my English was awkward from
reading too much French-but as I got going, he started distinguishing what was clear from what was turgid, and even
though he hadn't read any of the texts I was working on, he
could tell when my arguments were too slight.

I was writing about fascism and desire. Crowds, wanting
to be part of the Motherland, following the voice of a leader.
The themes were coming together-I had been so hesitant
a student, and now, at the dissertation phase, was the sea
change. I was a "late bloomer." I knew what I wanted to
write; I was writing in my own voice.

Dan read my pages faster and faster as I went on; after six
months he said, "this is good." "C'est bien!" I didn't feel like a
dog scrounging for a bone, I felt great.

In the fall of 1979 I went to look for jobs for the first time.
You applied by putting together a dossier of letters of recommendation at the Career Center, answering ads in the
Modem Language Association job list, and waiting for your
dossier to be ordered in the hope that the next step would
be an interview at the MLA convention, which took place at
the worst possible time of year-the three days after
Christmas. The first year was a bust for me-I wrote fifty letters and five schools ordered my dossier, but no one asked
me for an interview. I speculated with Dan that a dissertation
on fascism looked like I must be a fascist-you didn't work
on literature you didn't admire. As part of his concern about
my job prospects, Dan started to take a proprietary interest
in my person. He didn't like my hair, which I had just cut
short to the scalp and spiky. "No one will hire you looking
like that. You look scary."

"You sexist dog," I said, "you only like women with long
hair." We were getting along pretty well.

The next fall Dan was denied tenure. He hadn't gotten the
one or two interesting jobs at the senior level that had come
on the market, and he didn't want to teach at a crummy
school. He decided he would rather go to law school.

I went on the job market for another round. This year Dan
went to check on my dossier before it went out. He found a
letter with a sentence in it that read, "her French didn't used
to be very good." "Right," he said when he told me about
it-"your French was terrible when you were in kindergarten." As soon as he removed the letter with the slur, I
started getting interviews. One of the schools that called me
said I was the first "Yalie" they'd been able to interview in
three years. They couldn't understand dissertation titles like
"Catechresis and the Impossibility of Reference"-much less the dissertations. They had a hundred undergraduate
French majors, half of whom spent their junior year in
France, and they wanted these students to know something
about the place-books and ideas, that sort of thing. The
anti-deconstruction backlash was in gear; I was going to
benefit from it.

The week before I finished the thesis I went to Dan's to
work on the rough draft of my conclusion. He said, "I want
to go to bed with you." Just like that.

"Oh, come on!" His wife and son weren't home. I can tell
you what I was wearing that day-a blue plaid skirt and a
white T-shirt, and I was freckled and strong from jogging
with William and Rachael. I sat on the couch in his living
room, and I gave him a little lecture about why he thought
he wanted to sleep with me:

"You're leaving literature and I'm your last connection to
literature, and you're powerful with me, so of course it's
symbolic and you're wanting to hang on, via me."

He grinned. "Your writing is sexy," he said. "Reading your
writing makes me want to sleep with you."

"My writing? Come on!"

Of course, I wanted to sleep with him. I felt electric and
powerful-my writing was sexy, desire passed through it. Of
course, I didn't want to sleep with him. I was too close to
being done, I needed to concentrate. How dare he risk my
degree for a lark?

"You're out of your mind," I said.

"No, I'm not," he said. Neither of us ever mentioned it
again.

We jogged our way through the last six months in New
Haven, Rachael, William, and I. We jogged together and lis tened to the news. Synagogues were being bombed in
France and fascism didn't seem so far removed. We ran six
miles each day, past the reservoir, to the Hamden movie theater, and back to the corner of Lawrence and Orange Street.
If I wasn't relaxed. I'd go to the Yale gym and swim another
mile. I was taking a job in an unknown state where I didn't
want to go, but I was lucky to have a job. The women in literature met in the sauna at the gym and made nervous conversation about jobs. We worried. I kept going to get my clothes
taken in at Rosie the tailor's, and when Rosie told me I was
getting too thin, I felt like I was back in Switzerland.

When I finished the thesis, I turned it over to a committee
of four readers and waited for the reports to come back.
One of them was Fredric Jameson, a Marxist critic who was
writing a book about an English modernist with fascist sympathies named Wyndham Lewis. I used to brave the lines of
bearded Marxists outside his door, and he had rewarded
me with bibliography and encouragement all along. He
liked the thesis. There was an older guy, who had been in
Paris in the thirties, and he liked it. And an Italian, who
thought I was moralistic, but liked it. Dan was proud: "It's
important for you that Jameson likes it" (Jameson was another world, not deconstruction, but another legitimate
way of reading); "I knew he'd like it. Damn it, I knew it was
good."

My dissertation passed through the department, although Dan said that there was an argument in the faculty
meeting. "Why would she want to work on those horrible
writers?" There was some debate about whether I should
get a prize. They hemmed and hawed and finally decided
no, "because it wasn't literature." Dan was angry with them; I
told him I didn't need a prize. Their argument was my prize.

Dan left for law school that summer, in California; Guy and I left for our jobs. Yale was still placing students, although the market for Ph.D.'s was terrible. One school advertised for an instructor who would teach five courses a
semester of French, Spanish, and piano-for S 14,000 a year!
Guy took a job at a big state university in the northwest; I
headed south to another state school. Rachael went to California with a job in comparative literature. Guy and I had to
teach first-year French to students who didn't want to be
there but had to be, because it was a requirement. I went
home every night and read the want ads-just to know that
there were jobs in the world other than the one I had. I saw
French mistakes I had never even dreamed of-letters that
didn't exist, words that bore no relation to any language. I
graded and wept.