No Nylon Singlets

The first time I went to France, I was 9 years old, and we drove all the way there in my mother’s tiny Datsun. The second time, I was a teenager, and sans parents, and I kissed a boy called Sylvain who wore snow-washed jeans and a horrible white nylon vest. Ah, Sylvain. Chéri. To my knowledge, there is only one extant photograph of the two of us together. We’re sitting on a low wall somewhere in the countryside just east of Montélimar, and my face wears a rapturous expression.

In truth, I’m not as keen on Sylvain as I’m pretending to be. But barely a week into my French exchange, one thing I do know is that I am crazy about his birthplace, which seems to me to be in every way superior to Yorkshire: the food, the freedom, the gorgeous boys. Is France my destiny? Back at home, I will turn my nose up at white baps and egg custard. I will wonder why we cannot have baguettes for breakfast, and lemon tart for tea. Poor Sylvain, whose arrival every evening outside our tent at le camping was signalled by the jangling of his outsized silver identity bracelet: I didn’t send him even one letter afterwards. And yet it was Sylvain of whom I thought forty years later, when I read Diane Johnson’s delicious novel Le Divorce. This was, I admit, slightly odd of me. Johnson is American, and her book, published in 1997, belongs to a long tradition of fiction about Americans in Paris. Among its elegant pages you will find no nylon singlets; its greatest debt is to Edith Wharton. But something about its fizz – the sparks that rise from her young heroine, another innocent abroad – took me straight back to the summer I decided I would henceforth be drinking my coffee (strong, black) out of a bowl rather than a mug. How many novels can work like this on a person, I wondered, delighted by my discovery – and then I went off in search of a silk scarf, to be knotted just so around my neck. I came to Le Divorce in a roundabout way. For a long time I’d been meaning to read an earlier book of Johnson’s, The True History of the First Mrs Meredith and Other Lesser Lives. In an interview, Phyllis Rose, the author of Parallel Lives, a classic book of essays about Victorian marriages, had told me that her biggest inspiration had been Johnson’s account of the life and death of Mary Ellen Peacock, the doomed wife of the novelist George Meredith. When it was republished in 2020, almost fifty years after it first came out, I finally devoured it (I was on holiday in France, as it happens). To be clear, The True History of the First Mrs Meredith is marvellous, and revelatory, too; I filled many notebook pages with quotations from it. But it could not be more different from Le Divorce. The first is dark and gloomy: a Victorian drawing-room with the shades pulled down. The second is all light: the spring sunshine bouncing off the Seine as you sit outside a brasserie with a cold coupe in your hand. It is hard to believe the same woman wrote both, though the fact that she did somehow only makes Le Divorce the more enjoyable. The scholar has slipped out of the library and into Galeries Lafayette to buy a new lipstick. Isabel Walker is a California girl and a film school dropout. With nothing much better to do, and a strong urge to escape – she has never been abroad before, unless you count Tijuana, which she does not – she travels to Paris to visit her adored stepsister Roxanne, who is married to a Frenchman. But her arrival is ill-timed. The Frenchman in question, Charles-Henri, has left Roxy, who is pregnant with her second child, for his mistress. What’s to be done? Charles-Henri’s grand and somewhat snobbish French family, the de Persands, are unruffled. Roxy’s mother-in-law Suzanne, used to the ways of French men, counsels patience. Histrionics will not change anything. Pride, dignity and a good lunch are the thing. Roxy, though, is not only an American, but a highly romantic American. She cannot quite man- age the sang-froid that is expected of her. For Isabel, all this is concerning. She had been expecting to be free to mooch around, Frenchifying herself a little, perhaps doing some babysitting of her niece Gennie on the side; managing a crisis had not been among her plans. But the city still holds promise. ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a young American person not fully matriculated must be in want of a job,’ she notes. ‘Americans in Paris fell upon my neck like swains, with a plethora of paying tasks.’ Quite soon she takes her place in the eccentric expat community, among its wealthy hostesses, gay art dealers and CIA spooks. Isabel is a little . . . judgemental about the French. Don’t they smoke too much, and aren’t the men appallingly sexist? But like a character in a novel by Edith Wharton or Henry James, she is about to get an education. A love affair of her own forces her to rethink her prejudices. She isn’t quite the girl she thought she was. In spite of herself, she finds it rather delightful to dress up, to be taken out to eat, to be given presents from – yes – Hermès. (Her love of good things, and good times, reminds me a little of another American in Paris: Sally Jay Gorce in Elaine Dundy’s brilliant comic novel of 1958, The Dud Avocado.) Le Divorce has a proper, old-fashioned plot, one that turns on a painting reputed to be by a student of the artist La Tour, which now becomes the most highly contested item in Roxanne’s and Charles- Henri’s divorce; its ending is pure melodrama, and involves a gun. But you read it for its social comedy, not for its construction, and it’s thanks to the former that you will forgive this novel anything. Johnson used to live in Paris, and she knows the French so well: their attachment to the decencies; their horror of vulgarity; their especial reserve. They are so very chic, and so very adult. The best scenes in the book – extended set pieces which delicately air-kiss such high- minded matters as love, politics and even war (the novel takes place against the backdrop of the Bosnian crisis) – occur either in the de Persands’ intimidatingly refined country house outside Chartres, or in the Paris restaurants where Isabel watches her urbane and much older lover carefully denuding his plate of a rich sauce. Ah, Isabel. She’s great. Her voice is witty, peppy, wistful and, as the book goes on, increasingly wise. (Again, I think of Sally Jay Gorce.) One happy by-product of her American innocence is that she describes everything in a straightforward yet confidential manner, as if she is talking to a girlfriend. When, for instance, she describes her first sexual encounter with X (no, I’m not giving you his name), she is as precise about the dinner menu (ravioli de courgettes, veal chop, gratin de fruits rouges) as about the appearance of his naked body: ‘It’s funny to note, in view of what we know about the harmful effects of sunlight, which gives freckles and wrinkles, that what is kept inside the pants . . .’ (and there let us draw a veil). It is distinctly sexy, but more than this, it is enchanting. In the end, the real subject of Johnson’s book may be that great and ineluctable thing: charm. Can it be learned? She suggests that, in extremis, it can. But also that various people and places may aid its development. We want – we long – to live up to certain things. Café Flore demands something of Isabel that McDonald’s does not. All these things made me fall for Le Divorce. It is a funny and sagacious book. But mostly, I like it because it reminds me of being young. To Isabel, things matter a lot – and yet, they hardly matter at all. At moments, she could crawl along the pavement; at others, she could kiss the sky. She is learning all the time, but whatever happens, she’ll bounce back. I remember all this; I miss it, even as I am glad to have left it all behind. Johnson begins most chapters with an epigraph, and one of these, from the French moralist La Rochefoucauld, sticks in the mind: ‘One is never as unhappy as one thinks, nor as happy as one hopes.’ Carefully, I turn my mind again to Sylvain, and to that summer in the Drôme. I see it more clearly now, of course. I was sad to leave, but not too sad; I knew even then that my happiness was a chimera: a longing for joy rather than the thing itself. Like Isabel Walker, in France I learned something about charm, as well as about snails and ceps and sorbets. Most of all, though, I learned that it is better – safer – to have a future than a destiny.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 80 © Rachel Cooke 2023