A PEARL: My Years In Paris by Edmund White
White has already written two other books about Paris ( Our Paris: Sketches From Memory and The Flaneur) but these were more traditional travel narratives than this new work. Inside A Pearl is more like a companion volume to his 2010 memoir City Boy, offering a wealth of entertaining anecdotes about his friendships with the rich and famous, other writers, and his various boyfriends and numerous lovers.
The book concentrates on his friendship with Marie-Claude de Brunhoff, an older woman, polished and elegant, and married to the author of the Babar The Elephant books. She helps shape and refine White’s understanding of Paris and the French and adapt to the cultural and linguistic complications.
If you’re a fan of White you’ll notice some repetition from his previous books. For example, his relationships with his boyfriends Brice and Hubert are explored (they were also featured in his novels The Farewell Symphony and The Married Man). Yet there are fascinating insights into writers such as Ned Rorem and James Lord and, due to his work for Vogue, encounters with Azzedine Alaia, Yves Saint Laurent and Christian Lacroix.
One chapter also takes us across the channel to London and provides interesting, gossipy profiles of his friends and acquaintances there: Neil Bartlett, Adam Mars-Jones, Alan Hollinghurst, Julian Barnes and his literar y agent wife Pat Kavaugh (who famously had an affair with Jeanette Winterson), and even Nigella Lawson. He can also be extremely indiscreet and candid – Lauren Bacall comes in for a vicious serve.
There is less explicit sexual detail than some of his previous books yet, as an English newspaper declared, “The frisky old goat is still at it!” The subsequent article is about White and his partner Michael Carroll (who is 25 years his junior). One of the book’s closing chapters describes the couple moving back to New York, much to Marie-Claude’s disappointment. But adapting to life back in New York proved difficult for White with so many of his old gay friends now dead and the differing customs and attitudes. He also blames the American food for gaining weight!