Worst Birthday Cake Ever

Not many​ people born in 1929 are still productive, but Dominique Fernandez, winner of the 1982 Goncourt Prize for the novel Dans la main de l’ange, turned 95 a little before his new memoir, Les Trois Femmes de ma vie, appeared – the three women are his grandmother, mother and wife. It wasn’t even the first book he published last year, but followed the novel Un jeune homme simple. Fernandez is undeniably an insider, who benefited from any number of introductions (his work appeared in a magazine edited by François Mauriac before he turned twenty), while he established himself as a prolific novelist and travel writer, specialising in the art and music of Italy. He is also a gay writer with a distinctive and often paradoxical way of exploring his desires, both in life and on the page.

Fernandez’s grandmother Jeanne was the daughter of a Toulon sugar merchant with modest literary pretensions, author of the first visitors’ guide to Monaco. Her mother brought her to Paris in hopes of arranging a brilliant marriage, hopes almost instantly realised when Jeanne lost control of her horse in the Bois de Boulogne and was rescued by a Mexican diplomat. Arriving by train at his family home near Monterrey to be married, she passed through an archway of flowers while crowds sang the ‘Marseillaise’. It was the train’s last stop, since the railway line had been built for the occasion.

Widowed at 37 by a riding accident almost as fortunate as the first (her husband was far below her fighting weight in terms of character), she took her son, Ramón, to Paris. She hadn’t troubled to ingratiate herself with her in-laws, and they had excluded her from the inheritance. She wrote a book on the history of French hairstyles and a guide on how to live frugally, recommending stews over roasts at dinner parties, for instance, since your guests will mop up the sauce with bread and be satisfied with a smaller quantity of meat. She prospered. Fending off the advances of the king of Norway, who offered her a cosy little flat for their encounters (‘But I need a large one!’ she replied), she made a name for herself as a fashion journalist, founding French Vogue and helping to establish Schiaparelli.

Her son became a highbrow playboy dependent on her for the financing of his pleasures. His wife, Liliane, was intensely puritan and self-denying, the survivor of a childhood of stark poverty in the Auvergne. Life there was much as it had been in the Middle Ages, with people living off chestnuts, cabbage, potatoes and lard. She was almost comically at odds with her husband’s values – if anyone complimented her on an outfit she made sure never to wear it again. Ramón swept her off her feet all but literally when they met at a scholarly gathering, warning her to cover her hair with a scarf before they roared off in his Bugatti. This sign of consideration touched her. It should have brought her back down to earth when they made the return journey at the same breakneck speed because he needed to telephone his mother. He did so at six o’clock every day. In the 1920s, telephones were mostly used for essential communication, but this was an essential communication – a condition of Jeanne’s largesse.

When the couple married, Jeanne turned off the money tap. Liliane made herself responsible for her husband’s debts, paying them back out of her teacher’s salary. He was supposed to correct the proofs of Le Temps retrouvé for Gallimard, but it was she who did the work. (He did find the time to write a novel, Le Pari, which won the Prix Femina in 1932.) She was a severe mother to Dominique and his sister, Irène, disapproving of toys and allowing only educational games.

After they separated, Ramón visited to have his laundry done, his socks darned and his shirt buttons replaced, tasks Liliane undertook without protest. He swore to spend Christmas 1935 with his wife and children. At two in the morning the doorbell rang. It was Betty, Ramón’s mistress, soaked to the skin and carrying a heavy package. She explained that Ramón had meant to come but was too drunk to stand. He had sent her to deliver ‘this’ instead. ‘This’ was a whole hen covered with slices of truffle arranged to resemble the scales of a fish, a reference to a Dumas novel in which a monk blesses such a dish, calling it a carp in order to get round the banning of meat on Fridays. This joke would not have been welcome even if he had delivered it on time, in person and in sobriety, and may have been devised to sting the austere, abstemious Liliane.

On one gala occasion Ramón and Liliane failed their children simultaneously. At the Comédie-Française on 16 April 1942, during the interval of Goethe’s Iphigenia in Tauris, Dominique was looking at some Goetheana in a display case when someone stood in his light. The shadow was cast by his father, accompanied by Betty, now Ramón’s wife. His parents pretended not to know each other, which would be a defensible reflex except for the presence of the children they had created. Only Betty made a gesture of welcome and sent the children a smile, before Ramón grasped her hand and led her briskly away.

During the Occupation, Ramón was a collaborator, and not much mourned even by his fellow collabos when he died in 1944. Fernandez expresses hurt that in those years Liliane didn’t show more enthusiasm when sending him off to meet his father, an emotion that hindsight might have been expected to put into perspective. She was a passionate anti-Nazi – and there were pupils at Fernandez’s own school who were shot by the Germans. In a memoir, though, there is no requirement to justify emotions.

Raymond Aron visited Liliane after the liberation of Paris, and was interested enough in what she said to take notes. The intellectual fare was more stimulating than the remains of Fernandez’s fifteenth birthday cake, which was all there was to eat, a sort of pudding made of white beans, solid and indigestible, imperfectly baked in an improvised haybox oven since the gas was off. In 1946 Liliane remarried. Angelo Tasca, an Italian journalist, was as high-minded as she was, but much more in touch with the pleasure principle. As Liliane saw it, music (and aesthetic productions generally) lulled the moral conscience, though she made an exception for Beethoven’s Ninth. Tasca treated his new family to a La Scala touring production of The Barber of Seville, which Liliane managed not to enjoy. He also took them to see Claude Autant-Lara’s film The Devil in the Flesh, of which her condemnation seems more logical, as a mother of teenagers, since it deals with precocious sexuality. A hymn to the exploration of pleasure would never find favour with her – let alone one in which a woman profits from her husband’s absence at the Front to seduce a 15-year-old.

One regret that Fernandez owns up to is that he followed the convention prevailing between teenagers and stepfathers by resenting Tasca’s presence. He and Irène insisted on Tasca clearing his work from the dinner table twice a day, though there was room enough to eat without drastic rearrangement, as if the intruder were playing Battleships rather than being engaged in work of substance. Fernandez didn’t then know enough to ask any questions about Tasca’s fascinating life – he co-founded the Italian Communist Party with Gramsci, and had escaped Italy for Moscow in the 1920s before falling out with the Comintern over agricultural policy.

In​ a less bookish context it would be absurd to say you wrote a 400-page novel in order to let your mother know you were gay. This was L’Étoile rose, published in 1978, polemical, didactic and occasionally soupy. The narrator, David, welcomes the arrival of the word ‘gay’ in France from America, comparing it to the dove returning to Noah’s Ark with its message of hope, though he admits it hasn’t quite taken to its new habitat. In the new memoir as well as in L’Étoile rose Fernandez insists on the political dimension of homosexuality, the obligation it brings to question every value, and expresses disdain for those gay men so perfectly assimilated that they disregard any broader programme of change. This is a bit rich given his own advantages: some people get a better view because they are standing on the shoulders of giants, others because they’re standing on a stack of Granny’s address books.

The difference between this ideology of liberation and its American model is made clear in L’Étoile rose by an explicit hostility to abortion. The (rudimentary) argument seems to be that legal abortion deprives men of any excuse for not having sex with women. David quotes Pasolini’s dictum that in a society where everything is forbidden you can do anything, while in a society that allows only a single thing, that thing becomes compulsory. Pasolini seems to confuse the set of prohibitions that gave him the sexual partners he wanted (straight young men deprived of access to women) with a desirable social dispensation. There’s not much justice in restricting the rights of half the population so as to gratify the preferences of the few who covet sex with men who are available rather than willing.

In one outstandingly odd section of L’Étoile rose Fernandez’s anglophilia shades into hallucination, with a portrait of a utopia only loosely resembling Cambridge. The colleges are an all-male environment that somehow doesn’t seem single-sex. David is beguiled by the students’ lives, particularly their communal meals, both formal and informal, in great halls. He sees student life as being made up of nurturing cells – the place at the refectory table, the stall in the chapel, the college room – each providing the appropriate food: a bowl of soup, a communion wafer, a bottle of milk keeping cool on the windowsill. In Fernandez’s fiction there’s a strong association between sexual mysteries and the male singing voice in high registers. The castrato voice, for instance, is central to Porporino, his novel set in 18th-century Naples. In Les Trois Femmes de ma vie the young Dominique listens to Peter Pears singing Britten’s Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo in a booth at the HMV shop on Oxford Street, with a thrilled sense of eavesdropping on two levels of erotic complicity, not only between Michelangelo and his beloved but also between singer and accompanist. In L’Étoile rose he writes about the young chorister threatened by physical maturity. Fernandez makes much of the fact that in English a boy’s voice is said to ‘break’. Other languages use the analogy either of neutral growth or positive ripening, while ‘pour le jeune adolescent anglais, qui “brise” sa voix, il s’agit d’une catastrophe.’ The word ‘treble’ itself lacks an equivalent in French, which can do no better than ‘enfant soprano’.

If intense emotion could interfere with the workings of a watch, David’s would have stopped at half-past six, or so he says, to mark his first experience of choral evensong. Those boy choristers testify to our original condition – ‘what God wanted for us’ – and their intercession allows us (we males), while we listen, to experience both our potential sexes at once, reaching back to a time before division. The students of this imaginary Cambridge, bathed in their own interior androgyny during chapel services, prefer milk to wine and the glide of a punt to escapades in fast cars.

On a return visit many years later, David and his lover attend evensong in King’s College chapel on Ash Wednesday. It’s a solemn occasion. The organ is not played. The Frenchmen aren’t there to worship, exactly, but to pay their respects to the head chorister, Thomas Paul Hunton (not an immediately credible British name), at his farewell performance. There is no appeal against the sentence of puberty. Hunton will be relegated to his home town of Leeds, as if in disgrace. (Does he forfeit his education along with the high notes?) His trajectory as Fernandez imagines it is the opposite of Ariel’s. He must descend from freedom and be enslaved to an adult body. At the climax of the service he sings Allegri’s Miserere from the organ loft as the last few candles are blown out one by one.

It’s assumed that everyone in the chapel is in tune with the novel’s hero as he laments the choirboy’s emblematic fall from two-sexes-in-one to mere masculinity. Religious imagery may not have had a primary charge for Fernandez, given that none of the three women in his life was a believer in God, a surprising fact since their backgrounds were so different: bourgeois respectability for Jeanne, peasant deprivation for Liliane, stifling luxury for his wife, Diane.

For Fernandez, the Bible is a reservoir of images filtered through, and neutralised by, art history. Otherwise he could hardly have written a passage so emptily transgressive as the ending of the novel that won him the Goncourt, Dans la main de l’ange, a first-person version of the life of Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose sordid death is transformed into martyrdom. A karate expert like Pasolini should easily have seen off his attacker, Giuseppe Pelosi. In Fernandez’s telling, Pasolini initiates the violence to provoke a sacrificial killing. Even Pelosi’s ring, left so prominently in the gravel of the crime scene (an element that puzzled the police), is part of the director’s mise en scène – a final aestheticising touch, a homage to the altars in baroque churches with their precious stones set into the marble. It is by instinct that Fernandez’s Pasolini spreads out his arms as if on a cross, looking at Pelosi with an expression of mute adoration which has the desired effect of triggering the final assault. He dies at peace, having signed his only work of art that is guaranteed to be remembered. Alternative reading: without at least a twinge of belief, blasphemy turns into kitsch.

L’Étoile rose​ takes the form of a letter addressed to David’s lover Alain, though he only gets a name after 300 pages. David feels that since 1968 the pace of social change in France has been so rapid that the age gap between him and Alain, younger by fifteen years, might just as well be centuries. The two men live in different worlds and communicate as best they can across an ideological abyss. They met in 1968, and Alain is less of a character than a personification of that watershed year. The age gap is required by the structure of the novel, but seems integral, with its strong overtones of teacher and pupil, to Fernandez’s conception of love between men. The desire of one contemporary for another has no resonance for him. He follows the classical Grecian model, though overlooking the semi-institutional nature of the original, its function as a sort of eroticised finishing school. The power imbalance was less obvious at a time when youth held all the cards.

Liliane was on the same side of that abyss as her son, though sexual acts between men had not been illegal in France since 1791. It can’t have been easy for her to read the book, which recounts a life similar to though not identical with her son’s. David’s mother is a devout assistant in a bookshop, his absent father not a collaborator but someone who fights with the Germans in Russia. David’s sexual initiation as a schoolboy takes place more or less in public, in a crowded metro carriage where he ejaculates helplessly when caressed by a stranger whose name he never knows. Elsewhere details are transformed, so that the unforgettably disgusting white-bean birthday cake becomes something much more appetising when served up at a bourgeois schoolfriend’s party, properly baked from bean flour and with caramel made from black-market sugar oozing down its sides.

Liliane replied to her son’s public avowal privately, with a letter. She had felt somehow responsible for his leaving home so young, and was relieved by his confession of a particularity for which she bore no responsibility, adding that it was not a matter of his having chosen a vice but of submitting to a fate. Her sophistication was only intellectual: she had known prominent gay figures, including Cocteau and Marcel Jouhandeau, who were part of Ramón’s social circle (and of his mother’s), but had assumed that their heterodox sexuality was an affectation designed to make them seem more interesting. When in his memoir Fernandez denounces apolitical gay men, their sexuality no more than a particularity that enhances their social appeal, he sounds a disconcertingly similar note.

The bravest part of L’Étoile rose is the account of David’s therapy sessions in the 1950s with a colleague, Dupin, who was leaving his job as a schoolteacher in provincial Lorraine to set up a psychoanalytic practice. Knowing each other professionally and socially made the relationship easier in its early stages. David eventually comes to see any therapeutic approach as repressive, but at first felt it comforting as well as slightly anticlimactic to leave behind the lurid hell of guilt and sin (as he puts it) for the charmless purgatory of a clinic. Fernandez doesn’t try to minimise the amount of time homosexuals of that epoch spent trying not to live their own lives.

By the time Liliane read her son’s novel, Fernandez’s ten-year marriage to Diane de Margerie had ended in divorce. Yet this was anything but a show marriage. They had met in Rome through Jeanne and corresponded for four years without ever lapsing from the polite form ‘vous’, partly perhaps out of consideration for Diane’s status, since she was the wife of Prince Pignatelli, by whom she had a son, though the marriage was over. But distance can have as much seductive power as a presumptuous intimacy, and there was no limit to what they could discuss in their high-minded way, establishing a private language of taste in the process of recommending recordings of Beethoven sonatas. De Margerie knew what she was getting into, and not only because she happened, while dining at Le Vieux Paris one evening, to witness Fernandez at another table being coerced and humiliated by a young man. On another occasion Fernandez had the good manners to leave his diary out for her inspection, open at a helpful page. Les Trois Femmes de ma vie is almost an inventory of the ways in which the barriers between private and public writing can be crossed, and recrossed, in the building and breaking of relationships.

The section devoted to de Margerie is the longest in the book, which seems appropriate since it describes a relationship of extraordinary complexity. In the end she made the first move. ‘Diane be praised,’ he writes, ‘for showing me the way I wanted to go but didn’t have the nerve.’ The sentiment would be more persuasive if it wasn’t immediately preceded by a reference to the ‘trap’ (piège) that had been laid for him, and the assertion that she resorted to something that would fit the modern definition of an ‘agression sexuelle’. The first three categories specified by the French penal code – violence, coercion and threat – can be excluded, which leaves only surprise. What we have here, presumably, is a classic pounce.

When he visited her in Rome he had the experience of infringing an unfamiliar set of taboos. It took one hotel receptionist a matter of minutes to check (from their passports) that these occupants of a double room were not married. He rang the room before they had even finished undressing, telling them to get out before he called the police. When they booked separate rooms de Margerie was better at joining Fernandez than he was at making the journey in the other direction. He would creep along the corridor for fear of running into a member of staff, while she moved with more assurance – she was a diplomat’s daughter, after all – armed with her knowledge of flexible Roman morals and a suitably large banknote.

Culturally they were a compatible couple, though there were a few divergences of taste. He adored Sicily, for instance, though she, having lived in Rome so long, found it primitive, which to him was the point. He set out to prove it by buying a house, unbeautiful in itself – a prefab on a concrete base – in a remote coastal extremity of the island, an area stripped of distracting amenities, bearing no mark of antiquity and preserved from the tourist hordes by its drastic rusticity. Even the church was bare and ugly. He wanted Diane to see the true pagan Sicily, and she did. Local youths, sex-starved to an extent that would have satisfied even Pasolini, besieged the house, uttering moans of desire as they feasted their eyes on this slim blonde foreigner in her swimsuit, while her husband feasted his eyes on their lithe, tanned, half-naked bodies. It’s a scene straight out of Suddenly, Last Summer.

Fernandez​ claims not to have strayed from his wedding vows (they married in 1961). De Margerie detected in him, early on, a paternal instinct – they had a daughter and a son. As he says with touching directness, ‘Laetitia et Ramon, nous les avons désirés ensemble, nous les avons eu, ils ont fait notre joie.’ By his account what broke up the marriage was not infidelity, but a refusal to be unfaithful to his talent. In the autumn of 1970 he showed de Margerie the manuscript of a novel, Les Enfants de Gogol, whose central character is an admirable wife and mother fully in control of her life. She read it as a portrait of a despot, an assessment with which a number of his friends agreed, and wanted him to withdraw the book. He refused to be censored and went ahead with publication, accepting the consequences. He acknowledges the power of novels to reveal the secrets their writers think they are keeping.

He was dismayed when de Margerie denied him more than formal access to the children, but (as he doesn’t say but may have come to understand) he had given her the opportunity to inflict subtle damage on his sense of himself. He had taken on the role of tutor to her son by her first marriage, which aligned him symbolically with his mother’s second husband, Angelo, the man of responsibility who made good the defects of his predecessor, even if this was a perspective Fernandez acquired after the fact. Now he was forced to acknowledge his similarity to his actual father, the traitor and playboy.

Fernandez and de Margerie were eventually able to establish a cordial relationship that left room for wry humour. She sent him a copy of her 2007 essay collection, Noces d’encre, with a dedication warning him against phoning her to say that ink weddings were the ones she was best at. He was present in her last days (she died in 2023, aged 95) and paints an admiring portrait of undimmed vitality, despite near blindness and dementia. On one visit she didn’t recognise him, but asked their daughter about the identity of the gentleman with the attractive bearing and magnificent white hair, saying he was exactly her type. Laetitia replied that he had been her husband, to which she said: ‘Not possible! If I’d known, I’d have made more of the opportunity.’ The family was reconstituted around her, for the first time in more than fifty years, on the day she died.

At the end of Les Trois Femmes de ma vie, Fernandez devotes 75 pages to a meticulous assessment of his ex-wife’s literary output. It is here that the book takes on its peculiar depth and distinction. De Margerie valued herself as a writer, one who competed on equal terms with men, refusing the final ‘e’ on ‘écrivaine’. She resented the way her contributions to the Encyclopaedia Universalis and the Quinzaine Littéraire were credited to ‘D.F.’, assumed to be by her husband. The shared first initial was an unfortunate coincidence, but emblematic of a larger danger, that her literary life would be engulfed by his. Fernandez points out that he introduced her to those publications, which merely restates the problem. As long as they remained a couple she would be assumed to be riding his coat-tails. She didn’t publish any books until after the breakdown of the marriage. Fernandez suggests that the rupture over Les Enfants de Gogol was engineered or exploited by her, that she issued an ultimatum she knew could never be accepted.

It was after she had watched his humiliation in the restaurant that she asked him to live with her, not to redeem him morally but to break the grip of this pretty leech. The writers who most deeply engaged her, such as Jouhandeau and Proust (about whom she wrote four books), were lovers of their own sex, and this preoccupation did not wane. The incident at the Vieux Paris was the basis of one of her strongest stories (‘Quel âge avez-vous?’), in which she inserts herself into the scenario without sentimentality.

Fernandez dismisses her four novels as lacking solidity of setting but praises her work in other genres. When he quotes from her memoir Le Ressouvenir, her voice comes through very strongly. A passage about Shanghai during the typhus epidemic of 1943 is fiercer than anything I’ve read by her husband, describing a beggar, limbless and blind, she would encounter on her way to school, his begging bowl attached to his neck, who gurgled with joy and rocked back and forth when a coin was dropped in it – and the fat man swathed in embroidered robes who stopped with a smirk to drop a small black button into the bowl instead. When she describes her upbringing of oppressive luxury, the intensity is hardly less: ‘I long ago turned myself into a frivolous object whose dress was my skin.’ It’s hard to know where the spotlight is meant to fall, on the power of de Margerie’s writing or Fernandez’s fairness of mind in acknowledging it. There are readers who will look out a book of hers before they tackle another of his. There’s always the risk of being eclipsed when you take on the role of curator to a rival’s work.

In an essay, de Margerie remarks on the expression of the stag in a Moreau painting (Diane à la biche), which she interprets as frenzied curiosity – the animal mistakes Diana for a mortal, not understanding that she belongs to a realm barred to him. ‘She wants to be desired while escaping from desire,’ Fernandez writes, ‘she needs a man but even more to keep him at a distance, she dreams of the love that she knows will be a deathtrap for her.’ When her parents chose Diane as their daughter’s name they must have had some awareness of its associations. They could never have imagined how well she would make them fit.