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Overview
In 1951 Gaines Post was a gangly, bespectacled, introspective teenager preparing to spend a year in Paris with his professorial father and older brother; his mother, who suffered from extreme depression, had been absent from the family for some time. Ten years later, now less gangly but no less introspective, he was finishing a two-year stint in the army in West Germany and heading toward Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship, having narrowly escaped combat in the Berlin crisis of 1961. His quietly intense coming-of-age story is both self-revealing and reflective of an entire generation of young men who came to adulthood before the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War.
Post's experiences in high school in Madison, Wisconsin, and Paris, his Camus-influenced undergraduate years at Cornell University, and his army service in Germany are set very effectively against the events of the Cold War. McCarthyism and American crackdowns on dissidents, American foreign and military policy in Western Europe in the nuclear age, French and German life and culture, crises in Paris and Berlin that nearly bring the West to war and the Post family to dissolution—these are the larger scenes and subjects of his self-disclosure as a contemplative, conflicted "Cold War agnostic."
His intelligent, talented mother and her fragile health hover over Post's narrative, informing his hesitant relationships with women and his acutely questioning sense of self-worth. His story is strongly academic and historical as well as political and military; his perceptions and judgments lean toward no ideological extreme but remain true to the heroic ideals of his boyhood during the Second World War.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781587293047 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Iowa Press |
| Publication date: | 04/25/2002 |
| Series: | Singular Lives |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 248 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Rue St-Julien-le-Pauvre
My father, brother, and I sailed for France shortly after my fourteenth birthday in September 1951. Before then I knew Europe only from fragments around the house, the National Geographic map of Europe that papered the wall next to my bed, stereoscopic pictures in West Texas parlors, the Second World War. Since the end of the war, the bits of Europe in Dad's study seemed to brighten along with his hopes of returning to manuscripts that had survived. A professor of medieval history at the University of Wisconsin, he had sabbatical leave to do research in the French archives.
I did not want to quit Madison for a year in Paris, not even though my mother now lived there. She had been in mental hospitals in Wisconsin for a few years after the war. Shock treatments had not ended her severe depression, and her doctors recommended a lobotomy. "There's no other cure," Dad was told. He refused. Instead Mom was released from the hospital and left Wisconsin. This was around the time when The Snake Pit appeared in movie theaters, the nation's first fumbling attempt to confront mental illness. I said nothing when friends echoed the sensationalist publicity, nothing about the resemblance I saw between Mom and posters of Olivia de Haviland. I did not want to see the film; either Dad or the theater forbade me in any case. Mom stayed for a while with her mother in Texas, then went to Europe early in 1949, seeking her separate peace in its ruins.
Europe seemed far away, a place I still imagined from wartimephotographs and newsreels of blitzkrieg, burning cities, refugees, concentration camps, death. Meanwhile, the beginnings of the Cold War, the "loss of China," and the outbreak of the Korean War had brought new enemies and nightmares. Communism threatened Europe, Asia, and the American way of life. Communism was "red fascism" and "totalitarian," an ideology likened to Nazism. Joseph Stalin, Time magazine's "Man of the Year" in 1942, was now Hitler's evil successor. The conviction of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg early in 1951 for espionage, along with President Truman's firing of Gen. MacArthur a month later, proved to many that Communist agents and sympathizers could be found anywhere in the United States. We heard this constant refrain from our own senator, Joseph McCarthy, and in radio dramas like The FBI in Peace and War, which taught me that the bad guys worked for the Soviet secret police (NKVD in those days).
Dad loathed McCarthy, whom Granddad Post, a former West Texas cowpuncher, described as a "whomper-jawed hypocrite." In neighborhood and school fights over McCarthy, of which there were many, I followed Dad's lead. Political venom seeped into normally harmless "so's your old man" standoffs, which escalated into feuds with overtones of disloyalty if you did not support Joe. Still, I feared Communism. News, radio, and movies told me that Europe was again some sort of battleground, only this time without actual battles. The Iron Curtain sounded like a black metal drop in a vast auditorium, and I wondered how it might hurt Mom.
I didn't know what to expect, and Dad offered little reassurance. He was preoccupied with teaching and the household, unschooled in child psychology. I had been taught to wait for my elders to explain things when they were ready. That, I thought, accounted for Dad's impatience whenever I asked when Mom would come back. In fact, he was emotionally far more vulnerable than I would ever have imagined, and he would change the subject to spare both of us the hurt. He had left some of her clothes hanging in the bedroom closet, and I had not given up hope. But I had adjusted to her absence and was surprised when Dad told John and me that she wanted to see us.
The world was larger then and distances greater. We took the Milwaukee Road to Chicago, the New York Central from there to New York City. My brother and I had stamped steamer trunks and suitcases with odd-looking labels, our first hint of the language barrier we would soon have to cross. Cie Gle [Compagnie Générale] Transatlantique struck me as a jingle, not the name of a mighty steamship company. After a few days in New York, which was foreign enough for me, we embarked on the Liberté.
When we lost sight of land, I felt completely unmoored. I associated large bodies of water with mental hospitals on the shores of Lakes Mendota and Winnebago, where Dad took John and me on some of his trips to see Mom after the war. He would ask us to wait near the car while he spent a couple of hours inside with her. If they did not appear at the front door during the first hour, I knew she would not come outside to sit with us on a bench under large elm trees. When she did, I had little idea of what to say. On the Liberté, there was little I could hold on to. Not the rolling of the ship, the throbbing of the propellers, the seasick smell of seawater, the cramped tourist-class cabin, the gray roof of sky bolted to the dark ocean at a featureless horizon. Movies didn't help. A grainy black-and-white French detective film foretold a dismal year. In it, Jean Gabin and other unsmiling characters spoke a language I did not understand on rainy backstreets of Paris at night, and a slim young woman attempted suicide by jumping into the Seine from a bridge. I recognized the look on her face before she jumped.
I found a glimmer of hope in the menu for dinner one evening. The dishes were listed in French on the left — saumon froid à la Parisienne, gigot d'agneau rôti, salade de chicorée aux oeufs, entremets, poire — in English on the right. On the cover was a sketch of Notre Dame viewed from rue St-Julien-le-Pauvre on the Left Bank, with assorted doorways to the left of the street and the small Romanesque church of that name to the right. Dad told us one of those doors led into the apartment that Mom had found for us. I imagined her walking out the door, crossing the cobblestone street, and opening the gate to the park next to the small church. I decided to hold on to that menu.
We landed at Le Havre on 1 October. Blue-clad stevedores wearing berets clambered aboard. Europe, a narrow band of skyline when I had first seen it a few hours earlier, turned into bombed breakwaters, piers, warehouses, and railroad yards. I pictured dive-bombers and dogfights. I wondered why the French hadn't repaired things; in the long interval since V-E Day, our Madison street, West Lawn Avenue, had been resurfaced, and I had progressed from grade school to junior high.
In my passport, stamps totaling 3,500 francs adorned the visa the French consulate general in Chicago had issued in August. A lot of money, I thought, until I started carrying francs aboard the Liberté. The Department of State, two pages after its seal and Dean Acheson's signature, had added a restriction against travel to Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia, as well as to Japan and Okinawa; no problem for us, this official mingling of wars. When the French authorities at Le Havre stamped entrée in my passport, their eyes conveyed authorization, not welcome.
On the boat train to Paris, the novelties grew. Compartments separated people into tiny communities behind glass windows and sliding doors. Going into the corridor was an adventure. Freight cars on sidings resembled old toys: rusty little containers with small wheels, curved roofs like bread loaves, two round bumpers at each end; droll playthings, not in the same league with the real thing we knew at home on the Milwaukee Road, Chicago & North Western, and Illinois Central. We saw hedge-lined fields, no silos, few tractors, roads bordered with symmetrical trees, and villages of stone. At grade crossings, men and women cranked the gates by hand. Everyone seemed to be old and dressed in dark blue.
Mom met our train at Gare St-Lazare, an enormous barn with bulky iron girders. I was thrilled to see her on the platform. Her smile overwhelmed my anxiety that her eyes might blame us for her leaving, that she might change her mind as soon as she saw us. As she hugged me, I remembered her fragrance, traces of which I had sought in her bedroom closet at home when I missed her badly. We gathered our luggage, waved to several acquaintances we had made on the boat, and found a porter who led us outside to the taxi queue. While we waited, I looked at Mom out of the corner of my eye as I watched oddly shaped black cars hiss by on the cobblestone just as in the Jean Gabin movie. She wore a brown suit and hat. She was as slender as I remembered, even prettier than the photo she had sent to Dad back in the spring as if to introduce us to the woman we would find in Paris. Soon it was our turn for a taxi. "Rue St-Julien-le-Pauvre," Mom said to the driver, "c'est près de Notre Dame." I was astonished: she spoke French!
The centuries-old building at #10, one of a row built over vaulted medieval cellars, is about fifteen feet wide and seven stories high (six étages if you count in French). We lived on the ground floor, which since the 1960s has been occupied by restaurants under at least three different owners. When I was in Paris in May 1989, the name "Les Colonies" had been freshly painted over the door, the front window had been narrowed, and the elegantly dressed proprietress was putting finishing touches on decorations. She responded cordially to my request to look inside, saying the whole interior had been redone. I recognized some of the woodwork, showed her where our kitchen had been, and pointed out the skylight our cat had used as his private entrance.
That was my home from October 1951 to June 1952, a time that proved far from dismal and gave me life-long moorings. In reconstructing that period, I have come to appreciate how much history is linked to memory and the senses. Much of our historical consciousness involves remembering personal encounters with events, people, artifacts, and moral dilemmas. Often at random, without textbook regard for continuity and causation, we remember the smell, the weather, and the mood during these encounters.
In the late Joseph Brodsky's poem "A Halt in the Wilderness," an old Orthodox church in Leningrad has been replaced by a new concert hall, but dogs still return to the spot they once knew well:
Perhaps the earth still holds that ancient smell; asphalt can't cover up what a dog sniffs. What can this building be to such as dogs! For them the church still stands; they see it plain. And what to people is a patent fact leaves them entirely cold. This quality is sometimes called "a dog's fidelity."
Brodsky's dogs help me recall my encounters with Europe and the Cold War with what fidelity I can summon. First impressions linger long after the things that impressed me have changed. True, these impressions are confused with what I learned later, yet they still retain their ancient smell. Needing to remember Mom while she was away gave me an unusually active and faithful memory before this story began.
Madison remained far away from Paris. Telephoning the States took at least two operators and one hour just to get through and was prohibitively expensive to boot. I met Communists and Russians and learned these were not synonymous, found free games on café pinball machines, faced riot police. I saw church windows 600 years older than my country. I liked our neighborhood, snails, and the French. Homesickness faded as Paris became a homecoming.
The French Communist Party (PCF) plastered our neighborhood with anti-American posters. The party controlled the largest confederation of labor unions and had substantial support from intellectuals, but it also had internal frictions, both before and after its ouster from the coalition that governed the Fourth Republic until May 1947. After that, any member who challenged the party line from Moscow risked expulsion for being a Trotskyite. The number of Communist seats in the National Assembly — though not the party's percentage of the vote — fell sharply in the national elections of June 1951. Ambassador David Bruce and his staff at the American embassy viewed this and other setbacks as evidence of the declining strength of French Communism. In a comprehensive report on party strength in May 1952, they concluded that the PCF no longer constituted a serious threat to the French state, though it continued to draw credit for its wartime resistance and to be capable of some damage through occasional strikes as well as "peace" propaganda against colonialism, NATO, and America.
In 1995 I began corresponding with William Avery Crawford, the author of this report, later to become ambassador to Romania. Now a retired Foreign Service officer, Crawford has quite a tale to tell about his brush with McCarthyism while we were both in Paris. As a young officer in 1944, he had responded to a State Department call for volunteers for Russian language training. After courses at Harvard, he had completed tours of duty at our Moscow embassy and at the department's Soviet desk, studied for a year at Columbia University's Russian Institute, and in 1950 had been assigned to the Paris embassy.
President Truman's Executive Order 9835 of March 1947 had established "loyalty boards" in government agencies, and Senator McCarthy's allegation in February 1950 that the State Department was aswarm with Communists had increased pressure on the diplomatic service to rid itself of anyone disloyal to the United States. To Crawford's astonishment and roughly coinciding with the submission of his report, he received a letter from the department's Loyalty Security Board asking him to explain a secondhand report that he had written a letter in 1945 indicating he was "extremely enthusiastic about Russia." He recapitulated his enthusiasms to the board, with the caveat that neither Communist ideology nor the Soviet system of government was among them. He was pursued no further, but his case illustrates the atmosphere of distrust in Washington and the flimsiness of many of the allegations.
In the French National Assembly, the Communists voted against military budgets, tax increases to pay these bills, and proposals supporting NATO, German rearmament, European recovery, or anything else that Moscow and the PCF put under the umbrella of American imperialism, the alleged successor to Nazi hegemony. That umbrella covered everything from generals to drinks. In 1944 French Communists had acclaimed Gen. Eisenhower for his role in the liberation of their country. In January 1951 chanting "Eisenhower get out!," they staged hostile demonstrations outside his temporary headquarters at the Astoria Hotel — on the Champs-Élysées near the Arc de Triomphe — when he returned to take command of Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE). When Gen. Matthew Ridgway arrived in Paris in May 1952 to succeed Eisenhower, a full-fledged riot erupted as marchers tried to reach Place de la République. Police shot and killed one demonstrator and arrested around 700 of the 5,000 participants, including Jacques Duclos, head of the PCF's delegation in the National Assembly, who taunted authorities for acting as "valets" for their American masters.
Three years earlier, Paris streets had run with Coca-Cola, which the Communists denounced as a foul symbol of American imperialism. They were not alone. French wine producers feared competition from this syrupy alternative beverage, and Le Monde saw Coca-Cola as a symbol of the American "civilization" that threatened French "culture." Thanks to prolonged litigation and the faith of well-placed French politicians in the ability of their countrymen to follow their national palate, my brother and I could find Coca-Cola in local café s.
French officials reacted to the Communists in assorted ways. They suspended civil servants who participated in the strike called by the Communists to protest Eisenhower's arrival early in 1951. They expelled the pro-Communist physicist Irène Joliot-Curie from the French Atomic Energy Commission, having already dismissed her like-minded husband, Frédéric, as head of the commission. Responding to Soviet propaganda that Communism had saved the world from Hitler, the French government pointed out that the Soviet Union had done nothing to help Poland and the West in 1939-1940.
In early 1952 the French foreign minister, Robert Schuman, declared that, while France would like to find an honorable end to its war in Indochina, France would certainly not "open doors to Communism." In the spring the Center-Right government of Antoine Pinay adopted tougher methods than usual. Paris police closed the doors of a theater that staged a Communist anti-American play, and police in major cities throughout France invaded PCF headquarters in search of firearms and other evidence of subversion. Nearly 10,000 police and security guards confronted half that number of demonstrators against Ridgway. In June, as my family prepared to return to Madison, the French interior minister, Charles Brune, announced to the Anglo-American Press Club that his government would not outlaw the Communist Party because it would be even more dangerous hidden. He assured everyone that police would soon start spraying demonstrators with indelible blue dye for future identification. The New York Times mused that the French might consider red for the extreme Right and plaid for demonstrators from the Center. Outside New York, however, painting Communists blue was not the American way, and Washington was not convinced that France took the Communist menace seriously enough.
I remember the atmosphere of demonstrations and strikes, the symbol of Picasso's dove of peace, and the most ubiquitous evidence of French Communism: posters denouncing atomic weapons, German rearmament, NATO, and American imperialism. Most of them told us to leave: "Les Américains en Amérique!" and "Americans go home!" Beneath these, enterprising employees of Trans World Airlines had added, "via TWA." Around the corner on rue Galande, which ages ago had been the first leg of the Roman road from Lutetia (Paris) to Lugdunum (Lyon), an especially lurid anti-American poster on a wall opposite our boucherie displayed a large black spider feeding on victims caught in its web against a blood red background. As we walked by that sign one evening on our way to a restaurant near Place Maubert, our butcher pointed to the poster, waved his meat cleaver at us, and jokingly shouted, "Go home!" His laughter filled the narrow corridor of the ancient street. My parents laughed back and waved.
Laughing at Communism was permissible in Paris, partly because some French Communists laughed at themselves. The grave digger who lived above us at #10 let us know early on that he was a Communist and proud of it. He wore a soft cap and owned two beautiful retrievers, one black, the other yellow. Before long the dogs wagged their tails whenever John and I approached, and the owner, who shared Dad's interest in stamps, wanted to know what conditions were really like in the United States. The two men sometimes stood on the cobblestones chatting away after a day's digging, one wearing muddy boots, the other carrying notes on Roman law. The Frenchman, Dad reported, was a decent fellow with a sharp mind and lively sense of humor.
Our landlord, a Russian painter named Nikolai Vasil'evich Makeev, had left his country in the early 1920s along with hundreds of other intellectuals whose revolutionary euphoria had turned into disenchantment with the repressive policies of the Bolshevik regime. Like many of them, Makeev settled in Paris, part of a large and disparate Russian community in exile. He rented his apartment to us while he spent the year in the south of France with his young Belgian mistress and baby. He left oil paintings behind. Propped against walls and easels in the dingy storeroom at the back, they seemed like silent relatives of his. It was spooky in there.
Makeev asked us to feel at home, retain Leonid, and take good care of Kotik. Leonid cleaned the apartment every week. He was a shy, short, and swarthy man who spoke French with a thick Russian accent, pronouncing our name "Posht." He wore dark baggy trousers tied around his waist with a rope, and he walked with a shuffle. He was warmhearted, dependable, and unfailingly courteous, especially to my mother, who had the least trouble of any of us in carrying on a conversation with him. Kotik, an affectionate black-and-white cat who lived up to his Russian name ("little tomcat"), divided his time between the apartment and, through the skylight in the water closet, a feline society that favored rue St-Julien-le-Pauvre. He passed back and forth through the skylight, jumping down onto the shoulder of anyone who happened to be using the toilet; sometimes we forgot to warn guests. Kotik danced with his dinner now and then, and Mom called his ballet characteristically Russian. After devouring half of a cow's lung, to which she treated him every couple of weeks, Kotik would play with the remnant, tossing it in the air and pirouetting across the multipurpose middle room from Mom's dressing table to the portable counter covering the bathtub opposite the kitchen stove.
In 1977 I described Kotik and the apartment to Nina Berberova, who had taught at Princeton University in the 1960s and whom my wife and I had just met during a research leave I spent there. We had been introduced to her by Richard Sylvester, a close friend, Slavicist, and expert on the poetry of her first husband, Vladislav Felitsianovich Khodasevich. Nina came to dinner. During my account over coffee, the candles on our dining-room table guttering as we leaned back in our chairs after dinner, Nina began to nod, as if she had heard it all before, and soon said she knew the apartment.
"Are you sure?" I asked, "it's at #10."
"My dear," Nina replied, "I have been in that apartment. I knew Makeev. I was married to him." She leaned forward into the candlelight, accentuated each verb, and paused at the end of each sentence, savoring the dramatic effect of her story. She told us she had married Makeev in the 1930s. He had been a Socialist Revolutionary during the First World War and one of the youngest delegates to the Constituent Assembly in 1917, where he was a close friend of Aleksandr Kerensky, head of the provisional government before the Bolsheviks seized power. Nina lived with Makeev until 1946, emigrated to the United States in 1950, and later sent money to him every year at a nursing home in Provence until his death in 1975. In her memoir, The Italics Are Mine, she identifies him only with the initial "N." When my wife and I returned to Paris in May 1989, Nina's books were all the rage there, and her picture in bookstore windows seemed to say, "See, I do know this place." She died in 1993. Three years later Dick Sylvester and I found Khodasevich's grave in a cemetery in Boulogne-Billancourt; we observed what Dick said is a Russian custom, taking hard-boiled eggs to the graves of loved ones around Easter.
Since that evening in Princeton, I cannot return to #10 without thinking of Nina. Her revelations, and now the memory of them, have combined with my introduction to Russians on rue St-Julien-le-Pauvre. How much of the long history of Russian idealism and expatriation did I intuit in 1951-1952? Probably less than this confusion of memories can reliably tell, but in 1952 it was certainly enough to send me home doubting that the only good Russian was a dead or a White one.
Rue St-Julien-le-Pauvre, the park, and the church across the street: these defined my corner of Paris, a secure base for exploration, a reassuring destination every time I return. Shortly before Germany invaded France in the spring of 1940, the writer Julian Green, born of American parents living in Paris, had visited this same corner where he had memories of finding inner peace when he first stumbled upon the little church at the age of sixteen during the First World War. For still deeper personal reasons, this church, street, and park form the soul of my Paris. After a long struggle, my family was restored in that place at the very moment when my childhood feelings became adolescent emotions. There I shall always feel centered, not free of doubts but pretty sure of who I am. There I am closest to my parents, now dead, not blind to their faults but consoled. This ancient neighborhood may seem indifferent to the comings and goings of generations, but it knows I lived there just as I know it marked me for life.
We walked out the narrow door of #10 into life itself. At #8, the new Gallery 8 featured abstract art and advertised exhibitions of works by Dubuffet and Giacometti. Around the corner, on rue de la Bûcherie, George Whitman had just opened Librairie Mistral, the bookstore he later renamed Shakespeare and Company to preserve the name of Sylvia Beach's post-World War I establishment on rue de l'Odéon. He stocked works that were censored back home. It did not take me long to memorize the numbers of the best pages in Lady Chatterley's Lover, and in September 1995 I thanked Whitman for letting me browse as a boy. He had lost many of his front teeth since then.
Our little park and garden, called Square René Viviani, afforded the city's best view of Notre Dame and entertained throngs of children on weekends and holidays. Its guard swigged red wine from a bottle in his onion-roofed shelter right across the cobblestones from our front window. In the church of St-Julien-le-Pauvre, named after a medieval bishop who gave his money to the poor, the University of Paris had held its assemblies in the Middle Ages. A Melchite chapel since the nineteenth century, the church exposed John and me to icons and Orthodoxy for the first time. Next door to the church, in the Caveau des Oubliettes, once a dungeon, we heard folk songs about the virtues of drinking a little without rolling under the table. Down to the right, past The Tea Caddy and a baroque doorway, hunched up against the angle between two taller buildings across rue Galande, a produce shop displayed its colorful still life next to artists who painted the view across rue St-Jacques of the tower and gargoyles of St-Séverin.
Although not Catholic, we soon considered Notre Dame "our lady," too, because of the comfort we drew from her familiar profile and quotidian bells. John and I attended midnight mass there on Christmas Eve, the third Christmas since the end of rationing in France. We returned to the bountiful reveillon Mom had prepared at #10, with rich pâtés, runny cheeses, and a chocolate bûche de Noël. Singly or together, members of the family would step into Notre Dame just to get their bearings. I still do that. In March 1996 I sat on the center aisle at a Saturday evening mass given by the Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger. When Lustiger came down the aisle after the service, nodding left and right, our eyes met for a split second. He looked to the other side, then paused, looked back at me as if he had noticed something needy or kindred; and extended his hand to shake mine. I have never felt so overwhelmed by such a simple gesture nor so ready to describe someone as holy. A few days later I learned that Lustiger is a converted Jew, that his mother died at Auschwitz.
To the south and east of our apartment, rue Monge led from Place Maubert to the ruins of a Roman arena, and rue St-Jacques to the Sorbonne and Panthéon. We walked down rue de la Huchette to Place St-Michel. We followed boulevard St-Michel to the Roman baths and medieval house of Cluny, Luxembourg Gardens, and Montparnasse; boulevard St-Germain to the Odéon theater and former monastery chapel of St-Germain-des-Près. To the north and east, bridges linked us with the Gothic masterpieces, revolutionary prison, and large flower market on the Île de la Cité. Except for the boisterous central market (Les Halles), the Right Bank seemed formal and formidable, with royal gardens, concert halls, opera, museums, department stores, fancy shops, and the archives where Dad worked. We took buses and the Métro when distance or time required, railroads for day trips to Fontainebleau, Versailles, and Chartres. Posted inside every public conveyance were signs reserving seats for les mutilées, a lacerating reminder of wars.
Whatever the outing, my parents took care to look for detail, nuance, the idiosyncratic. For Dad, the point was to imagine the story behind an object; for Mom, to understand human nature. Dad gave lectures on history, architecture, food, and wine, exercising our minds, senses, and patience. He took us to the Louvre, where the Mona Lisa could not hold a candle to the Nike of Samothrace or nude statues. We met Dad one day for lunch at a café near the Archives Nationales and then walked north together to the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, where Foucault's pendulum and Lavoisier's laboratory equipment made a deeper impression on John than on me. We attended Cyrano de Bergerac at the Comédie-Française and La Traviata at the Opéra, whose opulent foyer and staircase I have associated with Verdi ever since. We saw acrobats, clowns, and animals at the Cirque d'Hiver, its one ring more thrilling than our three-ring memories of Barnum & Bailey had led me to expect, although Dad agreed there was nothing comparable to watching the circus train unload and huge tents go up outside Madison at dawn one summer day before Pearl Harbor.
We used Dad's Zeiss binoculars to follow his lessons on rib vaulting and stained glass at Notre Dame, Sainte-Chapelle, Chartres. He had bought the binoculars in Germany in the late 1920s. When the war broke out, he loaned them to the U.S. Navy in response to a nationwide call, assuming they would become a casualty. To his surprise, the navy returned them after the war, reconditioned and accompanied by a certificate that Dad mounted above his desk near the engraving of Saint Jerome. Once, when our attention flagged, he recaptured it by recalling how one of his undergraduate students had named the "flying buttocks" as an innovation of Gothic architecture. With Dad sometimes daring us, we ordered the French version of hamburger steak at the Restaurant des Beaux Arts on rue Bonaparte, snails and tripe at Pharamond's near Les Halles, choucroute garnie at Brasserie Lipp on boulevard St-Germain. He loved the St-Germain quarter. In Robert Doisneau's 1952 photograph of the abbey church, taken from the boulevard side of the Deux Magots, a tall man in a dark suit is walking away from the camera, his head and limbs at familiar angles. I think it is Dad.
Mom traced personalities in the ferronnerie (wrought ironwork) above window ledges and around balconies. She covered her head with a dark scarf before entering churches. She introduced John and me to a Parisian teenager named Jacques, who lived on rue du Dragon just south of boulevard St-Germain. She taught us how to shop, purchase Métro tickets, get haircuts, ask directions, argue politely. She knew the French better than Dad did, just as she knew how to calm a horse by touching its mane or make Leonid feel respected. In her everyday dealings with Parisians, she usually found something everyone could laugh at. One day, her container of crème fraîche started to drip on the floor of the laiterie, and several women began to show concern. "Oh, il fait pipi" (oh, it's peeing), Mom said, to the delight of all.
Paris was a dirty gray in those days, merely flecked with the colors of shops, posters, gardens, and window boxes. The smell of urine was everywhere, especially strong around the sidewalk pissoirs used by men and boys. Dad told us these nineteenth-century urinals were also called vespasiennes, after the first-century emperor who had public urinals built in Rome. (Unlike the French, he charged a fee for using them; on his deathbed, according to Suetonius, Vespasian said, "I think I am becoming a god.") The pungency of autumn leaves seemed peculiar without the seasonal rituals of Badger football and the World Series. A wave of homesickness hit me in early October on the family's first walk in the Luxembourg Gardens, as it does to this day whenever I stand at the Medici fountain there, a reflex locked within memory.
My brother and I noticed that our parents neither bragged nor apologized about being American, that they could discuss the qualities of something French without comparing it to the American equivalent (cheese being the major exception). They were genuinely cosmopolitan, having adapted the West Texas virtues of integrity and hospitality to both their social life and worldview. They saw no necessary contradiction between patriotism and love of other countries and none between strong convictions and an open mind. They read the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune as well as French newspapers. In the Tribune, they followed Art Buchwald's columns on Paris while I turned to the comics (Dick Tracy, Smilin' Jack, Donald Duck, Joe Palooka) and sports, perplexed to see that Ted Williams was recalled to active duty in the spring of 1952 for service in Korea.
My parents gave and took with the French, disarming affronts and returning a twinkle in the eye. I heard Mom use the phrase çe n'est pas juste (that's not fair) with devastating effect when the French knew it was warranted. I saw Dad join the laughter after ordering four churches (églises) instead of nuns (religieuses) at the local patisserie for our dessert one evening. Thanks to such examples, I survived the embarrassment of asking the barber to cut my horses (chevaux) instead of my hair (cheveux).
John and I learned how to buy croissants, milk, wine, salade niçoise. We dueled with baguettes and drank café au lait from deep soup bowls. We ate mild radishes with unsalted butter and wild strawberries in buttery pastry shells. We tried foods that we would have rebelled against at home, although I never did learn to like calves' brains, which Dad taught the chef at one of our neighborhood restaurants how to cook au style du Texas. We drank wine at dinner, Dad wishing he could afford to buy cases of 1947 because, he correctly predicted, that would turn out to be one of the great vintages of the postwar years. We admired the way Mom conversed with shopkeepers and closely examined certain paintings. While looking at the twelfth-century windows at Chartres, we heard Dad say, "Boys, no one will ever be able to re-create that blue." We saw both professional regret and wartime sadness in his face when he told us that a charred bundle of parchment was all that remained of a manuscript he had hoped to read in the cathedral library; a stray bomb had hit one of the cathedral's storage sites.
Left on our own, John and I found small carnivals with dodgem rides, shooting galleries, lottery wheels. We took the Métro to the edges of the city if necessary, once nearly getting into a fight with a gang of French boys who resented our aggressive style of driving the tiny electrical cars. We went to movies that opened on the Champs-Élysées, such as The African Queen with Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, The Lavender Hill Mob and The Man in the White Suit with Alec Guinness, a demonic French film about Bluebeard, and Fanfan la Tulipe, a farce of adventure and sex at the time of Louis XV. Ads for the Folies-Bergère caught our eyes. We sat at cafés with Jacques, whose quick mind and kind patience gave us just what we needed in a French companion; watching him was an education in facial language and speaking from the front of the mouth.
John and I played the soccer game at the Café Le Petit Pont around the block and got used to calling it "football." To our delight we were often joined by Gavin Langmuir, a Canadian war veteran wounded at Normandy who quickly became our idol. Working on his Harvard Ph.D. in medieval history, Gavin had bumped into Dad at the Prèfecture de Police when both were applying for cartes de séjours. His high regard for our father impressed John and me as much as his war record. Whenever Gavin came to dinner at #10, everyone understood that he must arrive early for a few games of soccer. Now retired from Stanford and living in Palo Alto, Gavin recalls a convivial atmosphere at #10, "almost like their second honeymoon." Mom was "lovely company, mentally sharp with a livelier sense of humor" than Dad, who himself was "anything but pompous." Gavin does not remember any tensions in our apartment. I do.
My imagination was hard at work that year as I got to know my mother again. I had little to go on except memories, hopes, and fears. Mom clucked at John and me to bundle up against the cold, as she had done in Madison during the war; the apartment at #10 was poorly heated, and it snowed several times that winter. She called me "kid" and "hon" again, hugged me when I came home from school, tilted her head as she listened to me recount my day. She hummed her favorite tunes from Chopin and Boccherini and called to Kotik in a bilingual melody. She pantomimed Kotik's ballet and impersonated shopkeepers. She slapped her hip with one hand after good jokes, just the way I had seen her do on her brother's ranch in Haskell County. Pans chattered in the kitchen, sauces and herbs were topics of conversation at dinner, and she welcomed our praise of her French cuisine, which often surpassed that of restaurant chefs. She was a warm and generous hostess, sometimes pairing Gavin with Alice, a graduate student of voice at Indiana University whom we had met on the Liberté, who sang arias after dinner at #10. Mom smoked Gauloise Bleue cigarettes and looked French at sidewalk cafés. The French obviously admired her wit and her legs. She happily described how she would redecorate our house in Madison. Mom's well, I would rejoice to myself, there's nothing to worry about. She'll come back to Madison with us. She loves us.
Or is she, will she, does she? I dreaded reminders of her wartime breakdown. Once in a while, eyes staring at the table, she would sup on bread crumbled into a glass of clabber, go right to bed without saying a word, and sleep past breakfast. She would take long walks alone, leaving no note. One time I saw her coming out of Notre Dame, head down and scarf unremoved as she turned north toward the Right Bank instead of south toward home. I did not follow her, confused as I was by apprehension that I would make matters worse if she saw me and by remorseful doubt that I could help her even though I was no longer the child who had been unable to stop the war. On rainy nights her wanderings made me think of the woman who tried to kill herself in the movie on the Liberté, and the bridge in the movie began to look like the Petit Pont. One weekend a French film company talked its way past the concierge in our absence to invade our apartment and use its picturesque front window as a backdrop. "That's not like the French," Mom sobbed over and over, as inconsolable as she had been during the war when she stopped hugging me and I began to realize I was losing her.
(Continues...)
Table of Contents
Foreword albert e. stone Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1 Rue St-Julien-le-Pauvre Chapter 2 Americans Abroad Chapter 3 The Home Front Chapter 4 From Cornell to Fort Sill Chapter 5 Honest Johns and Germans Chapter 6 Maneuvers Chapter 7 War over Berlin? EpilogueWhat People are Saying About This
James M. McPherson
This beautifully written memoir offers a historian's incisive perspective on the cold war years. . . . Post interweaves autobiography and history with great charm and wit to produce an engaging account of the post World War II generation.
David McCullough
One of the best books I've read in a good while. . . . clear-eyed, thoughtful, honest, and often very moving. As one of the same generation as the author, I found myself saying again and again, yes, this is how it was back then--back when we were inside that extremely different time.
Jill Ker Conway
Memoirs of a Cold War Son views an almost forgotten era in recent American history. He makes us remember what young Americans were like in postwar Paris, how they felt about the Berlin crisis and the building of the wall. . . . An important historical record.