The City at Three P.M.

by LaSalle, Peter;

  As a note, I might insert here that from my observation, the recent boom in American multicultural writing hasn’t impressed the French intelligentsia to any great degree, or it hadn’t when I was there. It could be that in its complexity it doesn’t reduce itself to the easy clichés as depicted in the mural I spoke about, even though I’d argue that more than anything the basic idea of multiculturalism is intrinsically and wonderfully American; or it could be that the straightforward narration and sentimental approach in many (surely not all) such works, which could often bring Oprah to crocodile tears, come across as so old-fashioned and utterly traditional—read “bourgeois”—that outside of celebrating writers of substantial, proven verbal and structural prowess like Toni Morrison, the French appear not to have wholeheartedly taken to it. Meanwhile, the usual suspects of dazzling sixties and seventies experimenters are still those who frequently constitute contemporary American reading lists at French universities—Pynchon, Gass, Bartheleme, Gaddis, Coover, and Hawkes—and when I asked one professor at Nanterre how she could put together a course reading list of contemporary American work that didn’t include at least one female author or somebody of color, I got a dismissing look that seemed to say that I was an adult, wasn’t I, and I should know better—that literature is not sociology; the exchange put me in the role of just an American jerk, Jer-ee Lew-ees’s doppelganger, all right, standing there lost in the haughtily named Salle des Professeurs, a ramshackle faculty lounge and mailroom. Anyway, getting back to Hawkes, today in France his reputation remains quite solid, but it becomes trickier with another experimenter—or apparently an experimenter—Paul Auster.

  To be frank, it’s very complicated, a case that shows how the French attitudes, which up until this stage in my admittedly random personal observing seem pretty logical, to the point of easy predictability, can possibly backfire.

  Let me explain.

  In a gracefully written 1957 book-length study called The French Face of Edgar Poe, Patrick F. Quinn analyzes Gallic fervor for Poe; in an opening chapter called “But What Do They See in Him?” he talks of an explanation expressed by writer Laura Riding and notes:

  The essential clue to this, according to Laura Riding, is that Poe always preserved a very respectful attitude towards French culture, and the French have been gracious enough to return the compliment. The two Poe heroes who are preeminently perspicacious and logical men, Dupin and Legrand, are endowed by Poe with French ancestry so that their intellectual clarity may seem the more plausible. Poe had, seems to have had, a wide acquaintance with and a warm appreciation of French literature and philosophy, and by using, for the most part correctly, a good many French words and phrases, he offered the best credential the French could wish to see—a good knowledge of their language.

  Riding might have been onto something very fundamental, despite Quinn not giving much credence to the opinion. He concludes it simply served as a handy thesis to support Riding’s own biases concerning the mustached, shadowy-eyed master of horror as, in her blunt words, “a mediocre but vulgar talent.” But, to continue on this tack, it does appear to figure into Paul Auster’s truly phenomenal popularity in the last dozen or more years in serious circles in France.

  If at least one relatively recent book by Auster—Hand to Mouth, which contains an extended, maybe narcissistic autobiographical essay and an assembly of some of his very early apprentice writings—earned only a “Books in Brief” squib in The New York Times Book Review, and a glib one at that, in France Auster is so talked about and widely read that he has become a bit of a media personality. (I should make clear that I’m certainly not holding forth the NYTBR as any arbiter of final importance; however, as a writer who himself has written for the Times Book Review—once, which was enough for me, after a staff editor reworded about half of what I wrote, taking the teeth out of any critical opinion expressed therein—and also suffered on a story collection of my own the “Books in Brief” brush-off of the ilk that has been mentioned here, albeit a kind and praising little notice, I think I can be honest about what such treatment means and doesn’t mean as a somewhat useful barometer of standing.) A new Paul Auster book in translation will invariably merit a giant advertising placard in the Paris Métro stations. I’ve seen an almost comically reverential article, long, where a reporter for the high-brow Parisian daily Libération followed Auster around his New York apartment quietly recording his every move from kitchen to study, from study to kitchen, etc., as the newspaperman elevates the day to nearly that in the life of a minor saint; a number of years ago Auster, also involved in filmmaking, was a member of the “jury” at the Cannes film festival, an entity as culturally meaningful as the big rise of exposed trestling and escalator paraphernalia commonly called the Centre Pompidou or the goldenly flaky morning croissant (among our own easy clichés for France?).

  Auster had the right stuff for ascendancy. What is usually considered his most intriguing work, The New York Trilogy, an early trio of narratives often with detective-novel overtones, originally appeared from a small press in America, Sun & Moon out of Los Angeles, possibly indicating an attractive neglect at the time by the massive, basically profit-driven publishing powers that be in America. Also, the French flat-out adore detective novels—what they call policiers—and the detective novel at its best is, of course, an American form, the origin sometimes being traced back to stories by Poe (“The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Gold Bug,” “The Purloined Letter”). Actually, the grand execution of the form—the more noir and hardboiled the better, replete with felt “Bogey” fedoras, rain at night in the muddy Hollywood hills, and leggy, overlipsticked dames with blond poodle cuts and rich, rich daddies—entails the kind of icons that also could have found their way into that classroom mural, along with the bowling pins and the hot dog, granting the latter did look more Parisian than Coney-esque in the depiction. I thought it telling that while teaching at Nanterre on my last trip, I found in the photocopy room some extra copies of the first page of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice lying around, being used as a text in an introductory translation course. In The New York Trilogy, Auster can play a very intriguing game with the detective-novel genre, poking fun at it while taking its conventions seriously enough to give it a fresh, and tricky, intellectual application, which seems to be aiming at a postmodern metaphysical legerdemain smack in the Borges tradition (the French revere the Argentine wizard); that intent qualifies it as being at least potentially experimental and avant-garde, even if the prose is strictly straightforward.

  Add to that the fact that his gamesmanship with the reader echoes a ton of French literary theory, which for a time seemed to be defining France as a land of high-tech critic/ linguists rather than actual practicing poets and novelists, while the likes of Barthes and Derrida argued, admittedly quite interestingly, for the end of authorial authority, with every reader, bien sûr, his or her own Sun King. Auster himself, a New Jersey guy who went to Columbia, lived in France when younger and has done considerable translating of French works into English; before his fiction garnered much response he was known as the editor of the Random House anthology of modern French poetry, and some of The New York Trilogy actually is set in France, a location treated with admiration. The old literal French connection, what Riding saw as helping Poe, maybe kicked into high gear.

  I have asked one French novelist—somebody who teaches American literature and is distinguished enough as a writer to have once had a book of his own short-listed for the Prix Goncourt—about Auster, and he said the ultimate anointing was when a novel by Auster, Moon Palace, was put on a list for an annual national competitive examination in France for what amounts to higher-level teaching certification in various fields, a test called the Agrégation. This is where the plot becomes as tight as that in a good policier, maybe as tawdry, too.

  In the distant past, acceptance in France was usually more a matter of the earnest effort of a single person, often without much accompanying widespread
or institutional backing. Baudelaire became fixated on the work of Poe, a figure he considered, no doubt, “mon semblable, mon frère,” and about whom, it’s said, he told his mother that this man on the other side of the Atlantic had already dreamed his own dreams, to the extent that Baudelaire possibly spent more long hours translating Poe’s work than he did composing his own in his rather short lifetime. Maurice-Edgar Coindreau, a legendary French translator who lived and taught in the United States, worked hard in the thirties to give a faithful rendition of The Sound and the Fury and is always credited with introducing the writing of Faulkner to France, where he was enthusiastically taken under wing by Sartre himself in a famous essay examining time in F.’s work; it was Coindreau who translated Goyen, by the way, and therefore introduced him and also many other American authors besides Faulkner to his countrymen. Today, the machinery—a good word for it, several French professors I spoke to agreed—is understandably far more sophisticated and complicated, maybe all leading to the inclusion on the aforementioned Agrégation exam, which I’ll explain in a minute.

  The world of those who deal in American writing in France appears a relatively small, very closely connected one, much tighter than anything we could imagine in America. In America (alas, Toto, we must be honest!) favor-trading and such does thrive in literary/academic circles, but even with gossipy, multi-martini-tipsy New York the alleged center, the country itself is so big and so messily and happily diverse— universities with established M.F.A. and Ph.D. programs thousands of miles apart, power bases seemingly everywhere, writers themselves living seemingly everywhere—that there are at least occasionally some built-in checks and balances. In France, many I spoke to were open about, even openly proud of, hearty networking. University jobs are frequently acquired through personal contacts, a lot of publishing is done that way, too; and because literary agents traditionally have been an anomaly in France (though less so lately), to have a cousin who knows somebody who works at Gallimard or Éditions du Seuil is a good way to get your work onto the freeform modernistic desk in a well-appointed office of such a major publisher there in the Left Bank arrondissements. Further, higher education remains mostly under central control, and each time I myself have traveled to France to teach for a semester I’ve received a handsome page announcing my status, a certificate of appointment from the national ministry of education adorned with baroquely official stamps, the whole kit suitable for framing. So in a best-case scenario, for purposes of this discussion, a publisher and academics interested in the publisher’s American author (one of them perhaps the translator, others who may have written on the author and had their own doctoral students give papers on the author at the couple of major national conferences each year on American lit) seem to gladly join forces, if only informally, to generate interest; as said, the final coup is having the book included—via adoption by a panel of prominent academics—as the single contemporary American offering on the list of about ten texts for this Agrégation exam in British and American studies (with a heavy emphasis on literature), sort of a civil service test given along with another exam that awards a lesser certification. Which means many professors at all the universities throughout the country will be lecturing that year on that particular contemporary American writer if he or she is on the list, always a Shakespeare play on it, too, naturally; which means that essay collections and study guides will instantly be prepared on the writer’s work (I had an estimate from a professor recently retired from the university at Poitiers that a student could conceivably spend over 6000 pre-Euro francs, just under a thousand dollars, on books by and about the ten or so authors on the Agrégation), and which also means that this entire yearly crop of those going on to teach literature written in English will perhaps be more familiar with this single contemporary American writer than any other they will deal with in the remainder of their professional lives, convinced that because they are now more or less authorities on the writer, he or she has to be important. Maybe offering a hypothetical equivalent closer to home might help: Think of everybody wishing to advance in university—and most high school—teaching from snowy Bangor, Maine, to balmy Santa Barbara, California, with lost Boone, Iowa, of the fields of shoulder-high corn somewhere in between, expected by the U.S. federal government to sit down one Saturday morning with Bic pens poised, waiting for the starting signal of the United States Department of Education’s American, British, and Commonwealth Studies National Examination that will include questions dealing with ten pre-assigned books—the contemporary American literature representative being Rabbit Run, for example— and you get the idea: suddenly everybody is from then on a Rabbit Run expert and subsequently a John Updike scholar, like it or not. (Updike, incidentally, being the variety of easily approachable social realist who while always translated has never largely attracted the French academics, outside of his single surprisingly avant-garde excursion, The Centaur, a prize-winner there; he was understandably given a good measure of attention in the old USSR, a land of socialist realism.) Several years ago Paul Auster’s Moon Palace, which itself aspires to dreamily scrutinize the American psyche, was included, and that appeared to be the final step in his anointing. Until something a little weird happened once the hype died down.

  From my own informal talking to several professors of contemporary American literature in Paris, I found near consensus that they suspect they might have overrated Auster. Auster still sells extremely well in France, is widely read. And the popular media has been very drawn to him, photogenic guy that he is—in France, the universe’s acknowledged epicenter of fashion and the “right look,” physical appearance can also count, and the country has to be among the few places on the globe where male vanity is seen as normal and not affectation; I’ve even read that when Faulkner came to Paris the press gushed about his wonderful silver hair! Anyway, for some of the intelligentsia, Auster today maybe isn’t quite the literary wonder he was first thought to be.

  Personally, I’ve had my own doubts, surely finding Auster to be a writer of considerable and serious potential in the very original, even startling, concepts of some of his fictions, yet one who seldom pays off on the promise of the plot. He is often noticeably awkward in his handling of basics like narrative pacing, clichéd in his descriptive observation—New York street people straight from Central Casting or his Paris a somewhat tour-book Paris, that sort of thing—and occasionally a touch pretentious, especially in what seems his ongoing posturing about postmodernism—recurrent suggestion of deep intertextuality, and self-referential bending of genres between fiction and autobiography—while the product being delivered before the reader’s eyes is in a style that instead of being anything validly postmodern, sometimes appears to have even missed much of the message of modernism; I mean, the narration now and then could just as well be that of standard, more mass-marketable easy realism, if it were written a bit less unevenly. Still, Poe could be uneven, too, one must emphasize, bordering on clumsy, and many times the work of a raw, exciting talent doesn’t look smooth or academically—meaning “sleepily”—correct. And, above all, compared to the knuckleheaded tome that occasionally does find its way to the cover-feature, two-thousand-word plus treatment with color artwork by the NYTBR—another slick comedy-of-manners novel about a midlife yuppie divorce or whatever—just about anything by Auster is pure, uncut Proust or James Augustine Aloysius Joyce.

  In offering his own lukewarm response to Auster, the recently retired Poitiers professor I alluded to earlier spoke of a rush to judgment and complained to me that the French are too easily excited by anything that looks even faintly postmodern. And during drinks at the terrasse of a café across from the Sorbonne one sweltering late May afternoon, the Parisian professor who was actually the head of the Agrégation committee when Auster was included—the same prof who came to University of Texas on exchange and so nobly put Hawkes on his reading list there—was conditional in his remarks on Auster, stressing that when he was the committee head, with final say, he
personally didn’t feel he was anointing anybody as a master whatsoever but just showcasing writers he himself, very personally, thought should be read simply because there was something indeed intriguing, not necessarily immortal, about them; he also gave his opinion that Moon Palace is “the perfect American novel for French readers,” the way it covers a sizable chunk of U.S. geography and culture—the “so American” element again. When I brought up the Auster case with one young guy, a rising academic hotshot teaching at Nanterre who wrote his own dissertation and then a book on Richard Brautigan (Brautigan apparently having always been quietly respected in France and lumped with the rest of the sixties American experimenters mentioned earlier), the hotshot tilted his head so he could maybe hide some behind the twin reflecting lenses of his tortoise-shell glasses, assuring me with no small measure of saving be spectacled face something to the effect of, “Well, Auster’s prose is so simple that he really is quite valuable to work with in the lower-level courses, where our students’ reading knowledge of English isn’t that good”; it was a comment, I might add, that the head of the Agrégation committee I spoke of did smilingly agree with when I mentioned it to him. Also, in the small core library for the university’s British and American Studies department at Nanterre, conscientiously well stocked and serving as an undergraduate library collection for what is considered essential in the field, I found not the expected full shelf of Auster’s many works—novels, poems, screenplays, and nonfiction—but just: The New York Trilogy (even if it is flawed, a fascinating, admirable, and thoroughly worthwhile package, and, to repeat, his very best fiction); Moon Palace, which had been on the exam; a book on his work by a French critic (actually, I do know of at least a few books on him done by American publishers); and one of those hefty, and high-priced, glossy-covered study guides with essays by professors from throughout France, which had been assembled, according to that cover, specifically to help prep for the test that had addressed Moon Palace.