Issue 103, Summer 1987
I first met Francine du Plessix Gray in Morocco in 1983. Gray had interrupted the completion of her third novel, October Blood, and was en route to Paris to finish her articles about Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie and the French Resistance, which would appear in Vanity Fair that fall and for which she would receive the National Magazine Award for Best Reporting.
Gray was born in the French Embassy of Warsaw in 1930 where her father, a specialist in Slavic languages, was a member of the French diplomatic corps. After he died in 1940, his plane shot down by Fascist artillery, she and her mother emigrated to America and her mother married Alexander Liberman. Her mother was a noted hat designer and her stepfather is the painter, sculptor, and editorial director of Condé Nast. Francine du Plessix attended the Spence School, Bryn Mawr, and two summer sessions at Black Mountain College before graduating from Barnard where she majored in philosophy. She was the only woman on the nightshift at United Press International for two years and was a fashion reporter in Paris. In 1957, she married painter Cleve Gray and later had two sons, Thaddeus, now a banker, and Luke, now an artist. For the first years of her marriage she painted, a vocation for which she had had a yearning since childhood. She returned to writing by doing art criticism for Art in America, where she was book editor in 1964; and in 1965, she began to contribute fiction and political essays to The New Yorker. Her first two books were nonfiction: Divine Disobedience: Profiles in Catholic Radicalism (1970), for which she won a National Catholic Book Award, followed by Hawaii: The Sugar-Coated Fortress (1972). Three novels followed: Lovers and Tyrants (1976), World Without End (1981), and October Blood (1985). Her new collection of essays, Adam & Eve and the City (1987), displays her keen observations of the political, literary, and domestic scene. Gray has taught at the College of the City of New York, Yale University, Columbia University, and Princeton University, and was writer in residence at the American Academy in Rome.
We began the interview at her home in Warren, Connecticut, a town so small it does not have its own post office. So much of her time is spent traveling, she has found this remote area of New England a perfect refuge from urban and social distractions, and a fine place for work. We met in winter, a week before Christmas. Pushkin and Sabaka, companion standard poodles, accompanied us on a tour of the stone farmhouse: huge hearths, a labyrinth of small, dark eighteenth-century rooms alternating with lighter, newer spaces, walls lined with bookcases and contemporary paintings. The tiny bedroom where she spends her early morning hours reading is painted a dark green. By contrast, her study, a barn that used to be Cleve’s studio, is airy and white. It is furnished with an IBM word processor, and such varied classics as St. Augustine’s Confessions, Finnegans Wake, the complete works of Samuel Beckett and of Roland Barthes, The Perfectibility of Man in Christian Thought, and E. R. Dodds’s The Greeks and the Irrational. Postcards of particularly beloved paintings—by Titian, Piero della Francesca, Caspar David Friedrich—are tacked to the bookcases above her desk.
We paused only for dinner by the fireplace of the Grays’ living room, and lunch in an historic nearby town; most of our day and a half talk took place in Francine’s study where she sat in front of a picture window. Dressed casually in somber-hued slacks and sweater, she could be taken for a one-time fashion model: tall, elegant, fine-boned, with intensely intelligent and aristocratic features; her manner is warm, friendly, and gracious. On one occasion she wore glasses and took notes as we spoke, wishing to make her remarks as thorough as possible. The following morning she was up early, carefully expanding upon statements made the evening before. Her accent and intonations are still distinctly European. “How odious!” she might exclaim, or “Formidable!”
Gray honed my edited version of the transcripts of our conversation on her word processor, condensing the lengthy original. We made our final changes just before the publication of her collection of essays, Adam & Eve and the City.
INTERVIEWER
If you had another life to live, would you choose to be a writer again?
FRANCINE DU PLESSIX GRAY
Hell no. Have you ever met a writer who’d want the same karma a second time round? I doubt if one exists. We write out of revenge against reality, to dream and enter the lives of others. The next time round I’d like to be a great athlete with a political mission, like Billie Jean King or Arthur Ashe, or perhaps a lieder singer. However if you’d confine me to a literary trade for another life, I might like to be a sane poet, as long as I could be sure to be very, very sane. Poetry was my first and greatest love, my gate to literature. Long before I knew I’d be a writer, I memorized the whole of Milton’s “Lycidas” by heart, or all three hundred lines of Valéry’s Cimetière Marin. A need to stay in touch with sumptuous verbal cadences, internalize the glory of language. To this day the first aspect of prose that grabs me, as a reader, is its tonal texture, its musicality. Prose is only as good as its approximation of the condition of poetry—that condition in which not a rhythm, not a particle of sound can be changed without upsetting the entire page.
INTERVIEWER
Yet poetry is one of the few genres in which you haven’t published.
GRAY
A secret vice, probably inherited from my remarkable mother. As a girl during the Russian Revolution, she helped to keep her family alive by reciting poetry to Soviet soldiers in exchange for hunks of bread. To this day, in her late seventies, she has a phenomenal memory for verse, and can recite hundreds of lines of Pushkin, Lermontov, Akhmatova by heart. Her love for poetry has colored my life, and may have made me a writer.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve worked in a great variety of genres. Has any one form been particularly helpful to your general progress as a writer—fiction, essay, criticism, journalism?
GRAY
Well, I think I needed the discipline of journalism more than many other writers because I’ve always had a terrifically painful ambivalence of love and terror towards the act of writing. So being forced at the age of twenty-two to sit at a typewriter on the night shift of United Press and turn out radio stories in a matter of minutes—sometimes a matter of seconds, since we were always trying to beat AP to the radio wire—this took some of the fear away. Like five percent. That was 1953; another decade passed before I dared to submit any sample of personal writing for publication. The sample was “The Governess,” which The New Yorker bought in 1963, and served as a green light to Go Ahead. I’d written its first version in my senior year at Barnard, ten years before. In 1975, twenty years after that first college version, twelve years after it was published in The New Yorker, it became the first chapter of my first novel, Lovers and Tyrants. So—an elephantine gestation for fiction, with all the terror this length of time implies.
INTERVIEWER
Could you explore some of the roots of that terror?
GRAY
One childhood episode stands out as particularly vivid, in Paris, in the 1930s. My father was an eccentric, extremely conservative Frenchman who deplored most aspects of the twentieth century, particularly the laxness of its education. And, according to his wishes, I spent my first nine years confined to my room, tutored at home by a governess quite as tyrannical as my father. She was a rabid hypochondriac, convinced that the mere sight of another child might lead me to catch some deadly germ . . . I lived in extreme isolation. Once a week we commuted to a correspondence school where I’d receive the assignments for the following week—typically French, didactic, desiccating assignments, memorizing Latin verbs and the dates of battles won by Napoleon. But when I was eight years old an unprecedented event took place—a new teacher came in and gave us the following assignment: Write a Story About Anything You Wish. I was filled with excitement and anguish by this novel freedom. I began as a severe minimalist. Here’s the cautionary tale I wrote: “The little girl was forbidden by her parents to walk alone to the lake at the other end of the green lawn. But she wished to visit a green-eyed frog who could offer her the key to freedom. One day she disobeyed her parents and walked to the lake, and was immediately drowned. The End.” The following day, during his daily visit to the study room my father perused the composition and raised a storm. “Pathetic dribble! You dare call that a story? What will become of you if you don’t ever finish anything!” And he grabbed the paper from my little desk and tore it to shreds. It was a May evening in 1939, fourteen months before he died in the Resistance. My father had been the love of my life, and he’d warned me that I should never write again. I didn’t attempt fiction again for over thirty years.
INTERVIEWER
Yet when you came to the United States as a child, in the 1940s, didn’t you immediately excel in English literature?
GRAY
Ah yes, but solely as a critic and journalist. I arrived at the age of ten not speaking a word of English and I did learn it very fast—I won the Spence School spelling bee just fourteen months later. Throughout high school I was an accomplished essayist and reporter, always editing the school paper, and when I went up to Bryn Mawr I came in second in the freshman essay contest with a study of Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Throughout college I barely took one literature course beyond freshman English. It seemed too easy. I’m an explorer, I preferred getting C’s in physics or B’s in seminars on Kant or on medieval theology; nothing short of St. Thomas seemed much fun. Throughout my first two years of college I’d aspired to be a medievalist. When I transferred to Barnard an extraordinary philosophy professor, John Smith, converted me to the nineteenth century. Yet while writing my senior thesis on Kierkegaard something inspired me to enter a writing contest, and I wrote three little autobiographical texts about my childhood in Paris, and won something called the Putman Creative Writing Award, and with the prize money I bought a third-hand Plymouth and went down to New Orleans for the summer with a band of jazz musicians. I didn’t do much else but hang out and listen to George Lewis and drink a lot of bourbon.
INTERVIEWER
The college writing prize didn’t encourage you to write yet?
GRAY
No, I didn’t experience it as terror at the time, simply as dalliance, procrastination. Saint Augustine said “Give me chastity and continence, but not quite yet.” I needed to do something iconoclastic, and perhaps I sensed that my writing was too staid at the time to satisfy me. Time Inc. had come to Barnard recruiting earlier that year and offered me a job, but I sure wasn’t ready for anything as staid as that. I was very much of a tomboy, and also under the spell of the budding Beat generation. At United Press I was the only woman on the graveyard shift—midnight to eight a.m.—which partly satisfied my needs for a counterculture. And in the following decade, before I “became a writer,” I worked as a journalist in Paris, and when I returned to the United States and married I painted for eight years. I’d had an early gift for drawing; it took me much probing, until my mid-thirties, to choose between painting and writing and several other aspirations. So, to answer your original question: My deepest affinities lie at the very opposite pole from journalism, in dense, subjective, meditative texts; fiction has been a very late vocation, and most painful in execution, though paradoxically the days when I’m writing fiction are quite the happiest days of my life. Yet the practice of journalism has allayed the terror I felt towards the act of writing, it’s been a great source of reassurance, the only kind of writing I knew I could always do very well.
INTERVIEWER
Do you feel you’re a better journalist than novelist?
GRAY
I don’t know what that means, because I look on my work as a total entity, with each form influencing the others. Even if nonfiction of the kind I’ve published in Adam & Eve and the City is my best form, it’s because I have the discipline of observing life in a novelistic way—listening to the nuances in people’s conversations, observing the flower here, and everywhere the crooked little edge of lace. It’s the capacity to observe such details that differentiates a terrific first-rate journalist like Pete Hamill, say, from great lyrical nonfiction writers like Joan Didion or George Orwell.