Sharon Harrigan

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Paris Journal: Remembering Anne-Marie Albiach

The great French poet Anne-Marie Albiach died on Sunday, after a protracted illness. Anglophones may know her work from the superb translations by Joseph Simas, Lydia Davis, or Rosemarie Waldrop, or from essays by Paul Auster, Norma Cole, or Alan Davies. Her most famous books are Etat and Mezza Voce, and her work has been called “poesie blanche,” or white poetry, because of its tendency towards abstraction and nonnarrative sense.

I met Anne-Marie when I was twenty, living in France for six months, as part of Columbia’s junior year abroad program. The poets George and Chris Tysh introduced me (long distance) to the expatriate American poet Joseph Simas, who in turn led me to Anne-Marie. Soon I found myself working for her, doing her shopping and errands, accompanying her on medical visits, and, most important, providing her company during the evenings when her panic was at its worst. She read my poems and pronounced them “very American,” and never before or since have I felt my nationality so acutely.

She was a famous recluse, but she held court in her apartment in Neuilly-sur-Seine, on the outskirts of Paris, where I was often allowed to crash dinner parties with literary legends I was too young and naive to be as intimidated by as I would be now. In my memory, we served the same meal to everyone: an entree of radishes, fromage blanc, and fresh herbs; lamb chops broiled with fresh rosemary for the plat; salad; strong, stinky, delicious, soft munster cheese; wine and bread, of course; coffee, and sometimes vodka at the very end. She didn’t drink but liked to try to get me drunk, perhaps because I seemed so straight laced. When I first returned to France a few months ago, I felt a compulsion to make this meal again and again, as if in her honor.

She was a figure larger than life. A woman whom followers made pilgrimages to visit. Mysterious and haunting on the page and in person, her art so elegant, logical, spare, and austere it almost disappeared. So essentially what I think of as “French” (the way she thought of me as “American”) that France doesn’t seem the same now, without her.

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Paris Journal: My Binder of Women

Yesterday we were dining at a Vietnamese restaurant at Place d’Italie, the Chinatown of Paris. Two tables away, a young attractive woman prepared her date’s Pho, fastidiously placing sprouts, greens, peppers, and lemon juice in his bowl of broth and meat. He held a large cell phone in front of her face and texted the entire time. Even if the message had been urgent, he could have placed the phone discreetly in his lap. At that moment, I was embarrassed to be a woman.

I was reminded of the time someone pulled me aside and told me that my husband had a perspiration stain on his tie. She said, “Don’t bring it to his attention. That would just embarrass him. When he’s at work one day, discreetly take it to the dry cleaner, then replace it in the drawer, and he’ll never be the wiser.” I’m not proud to say that there have been times when I’ve internalized the idea that women’s work should be invisible and unacknowledged.

The situation for women in France is both better and worse than in America. Birth control is readily available, as is daycare and maternity leave. But officials address us by our husband’s first name, and we’re expected to wear heels even while traversing the entire city.

My husband calls my daughter’s school here “the land feminism forgot.” So many of the families came here for the husband’s job, and he is the only one who has a work permit. The school is full of highly educated women who cannot legally work and who, predictably, become very involved in school activities. At the parent association meetings, the speakers use the feminine plural, which is only grammatically correct when there are zero men. I’m reminded what it must have been like for my mother’s and grandmother’s generation.

Maybe it’s the election season, with its pandering and slandering of women, that made me especially sensitive to these situations. I am in no position to pass judgment on anyone’s choices, since I have been in almost every role: sole breadwinner, stay-at-home mother, freelancer, and full-time staffer. I’m convinced we need to stick together, as women, instead of justifying our choices by berating those of others.

I could fill this binder with a book’s worth of portraits, but I’ll close with one of the kind of woman I’d like to be, several decades from now. Yesterday, I spent the day with Aimée, the seventy-year-old mother of my one of my friends. (Note to all my other friends: Even if you can’t make it to Paris, send me your parents.) Aimée is traveling around Europe by herself, because she is, as my friend said, “the definition of plucky.” We walked from St. Germain des Pres to Etoile, then back to the Louvre, through rooms and rooms of antiquities, Renaissance paintings, and Egyptian treasures. I was the one who finally begged to stop for food and rest. She is an avid hiker, so it was natural for her to walk the streets of Europe instead of taking tours, and when I saw her she was on her fourth country. Every half hour or so, she would look at me and say, “I can’t believe I’m actually in Paris!” I admired her childlike wonder and enthusiasm, her perseverance and intrepidity (not cancelling the trip just because her traveling companion got sick at the last minute). She made me proud to be a woman.

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Paris Journal: Strange Food

Ella shuffled through a cookbook on our bookshelf, left by one of the former tenants. “Can we make brains today?” she asked. “Tongue?” No and no, I said. “Whole steamed fish?” she asked. “Maybe,” I said. “But I don’t know if the fishmonger cleans out the guts for you here in France. It’s not like in America.”

In the several butcher shops on our block and in the open-air markets held in our quartier twice a week, rabbits, unrefrigerated like so much else, hang with everything except their fur, their eyes and paws intact, looking like they are going to jump into a bush and hide. Chickens often don’t lose their heads, keeping also their claws and remnants of feathers. Crabs will scurry when poked, as will large shrimps. And yes, we nudge them a little, sometimes, because everybody else does. I searched a French foodie blog for instructions for cooking live gambas, a kind of large shrimp. The site recommended I saute them while still alive. Alternatively, I could guillitine their wriggling necks. Watching a YouTube video is as close as I’ll get to that French historical ritual.

I’m going to tell you something I’m not proud of: I am more squeamish than my nine-year-old daughter. I watch the rest of my family order blood sausage at a restaurant, foie gras (and liver of most other description), and I discreetly pass.. I tried escargot, though. Once. And how was I rewarded? At the dinner table, my throat started to hurt. My swallowing became painful, my air barely escaping through my mouth. Later, I realized I wasn’t inflicted with an abrupt case of tonsilitis. I discovered my only allergy ever: to snails, otherwise known as slugs, a kind of garden pest I used to pull off my vegetables between my thumb and index finger. I can’t help thinking my body was rejecting this foreign object because it was, well, so strange.

I’ll give in to Ella’s begging for tete de veau (cow’s head, pictured above, in its uncooked form) at a restaurant, but it is not something I will try at home. Really, I think the cookbook should come with a disclaimer

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Lost in Translation: Preservatives

 

The male form of the word, preservatifs, means condoms. They are available in parks and metro stations in Paris, so ubiquitous I forget they’re there except on days like today, when I pause at the turnstile to close my umbrella and find my fare. The way the dispenser is placed, right at the entrace, it appears to be related to my ride, a necessary travel item, like luggage. It makes me think of crowded rush-hour trains, commuters pressed leather jacket to leather jacket.

The female form, preservatives, is a bad word, with the same meaning as in English. My boulangerie promises that their all-natural produits contain none of these.

Then there are the other chemicals, the ones in the public service announcements for women. Yesterday, we saw one before the children’s film, Kirikou et Les Hommes et Les Femmes (Kirikou and Men and Women). It’s a sweet little-kid movie, and my fourth-grader was the oldest child in the theater. The ad showed a hold-up at a bank, with a hostage inching slowly, carefully toward her purse. We think she is going to reach for her phone and call the police, but instead she pops a pill. I thought it was a Valium, at first. But no, the punch line is: Nothing should ever get in the way of remembering to take contraceptives. Looking around the theater, I wondered who the intended audience for this message was. All the adults there, almost by definition, already had kids. Maybe it was aimed at the elementary-school set, to indoctrinate them early. My daughter’s school agenda includes helpful tips like “Going out for the weekend? Don’t forget your preservatif,” alongside others, such as “Why not have an apple for dessert today, instead of a sweet?” The French holistic approach to education. It’s only natural.

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L’Assassin à la pomme verte, par Christophe Carlier


Je viens de finir L’Assassin à la pomme verte, juste à temps pour l’événement à la librairie ce soir. Félicitations à Carlier d’être sélectionné pour le prix du premier roman. Quel honneur !

C’était un vrai plaisir de le lire. (Même si, à cause de mon français faible, je suis sûre que beaucoup de subtilités m’ont manqués.) J’apprécie, surtout, le style : c’est élégant, philosophique, poétique mais concis, hanté, et il me donne la peau des poulets. C’est un conte moral tellement séducteur et malin. Quelques comparaisons qui me viennent vite : les films d’Eric Rohmer  (surtout les contes morales). Les films d’Alfred Hitchcock (surtout Rope). Le film Crimes and Misdemeanors de Woody Allen (c’est-à-dire Woody Allen quand il est le plus profond). Paul Auster (surtout The New York Trilogy). Comme Auster, Carlier mélange la philosophie avec l’art des policiers (c’est comme quelques journalistes ont dit vis à vis Auster, « Kafka goes gumshoe. »

J’adore comment Carlier décrit l’hôtel comme un microcosme du monde. L’insularité donne l’air du luxe et de la prison. C’est un zoo, comme Sébastien nous dit, si éloquemment :

« Rivé à mon poste, comme un gardien de zoo, je vois sortir le soir les panthères hautaines et les longs reptiles qui déplient avec lenteur leurs anneaux sous la lune. Leur présence chasse les espèces communes que je croise dans ma vie a rebours : bancs de poissons ternes et grisâtres, singes pouilleux, oiseaux au cou maigre et mite. »

Sébastien est un personnage tres expresif, un observateur astucieux. J’aime la façon qu’il voit tout, alors meme que personne ne le voit. Par exemple :

« Dans quelques heures, quand je me réveillerai entre mes murs, l’hôtel m’apparaitra comme un rêve étrange. L’illusion durera jusqu’au moment ou je reprendrai mon service. Il m’est arrivé de rencontrer des clients qui venaient se promener à Montmartre pendant la journée, et dont le hasard me faisait croiser la route. Ils ne m’ont jamais reconnu. »

Les échos (comme le couteau de l’assassin qui réapparait à la réception de l’hôtel et sur le bagage de Craig) sont lyrique dans une manière très satisfaisantes. Et la façon que la phase « ti amo » est ressuscité dans la lettre de Vicky (dans laquelle elle fait semblant d’être Craig) a l’air poétique et aussi de la justice poétique. Les parallélismes sont très bien composés, comme une machine élégante.

Encore une autre section que j’aime bien, de la part de Craig, séduisaient beau, avec son ambiance de promis et du retenue. Je ne penserai pas d’une chambre d’hôtel dans la même manière à partir de lire ce passage-ci :

« La salle de bains est un territoire mystérieux de la féminité. Mais, par une indiscrétion inhérente aux grands hôtels, je savais tout, ce soir-la, de l’intimité d’Elena : la texture du peignoir qu’elle jetterait sur ses épaules en sortant de son bain, la couleur de la serviette qu’elle nouerait autour de ses cheveux et l’odeur du savon au miel qui laissait une trainée dorée sur l’email de sa baignoire. Je portais à mes pieds les mules en éponge dans lesquelles elle avait enfilé les siens. Je connaissais le chiffre de l’oreiller ou elle poserait la tête en s’endormant. Pour éteindre la lampe de chevet, nous ferions le même geste, pratiquement à la même heure. »

Je suis impatiente pour ce soir, quand je peux aller à la librairie ou l’auteur lira quelques passages et signera mon copie. Ce sera mon premier événement littéraire ici, à Paris !