Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey Read online

  And yet the fact that they had come to Australia devalued them in my eyes. Why would anyone leave Rome or Athens or Beirut or Leningrad? Italy had scary terrorists, Greeks had military dictatorships, the Middle East had wars, the Russians had brave dissidents. To me, the banal certainty of three meals on the table, a steady job and stable politics seemed a pallid swap. My pen pals were still out there, amid the danger and the culture. So it was to them that I continued to look for my lifeline to the world.

  The culture I particularly envied was French. One dull Sunday afternoon Darleen swooped down and swept me off to a Rodin exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. It was the first art I had ever seen up close. I gazed at Rodin’s desperately heroic Burghers of Calais, his towering Balzac, his delicately entwined Lovers.

  From Rodin, I moved on to the Impressionists, the Surrealists, the Dadaists, the Fauves. It was easy to love Cézanne’s landscapes because they so much resembled our own. His clear Provençal light might have been Sydney light; his rock-ribbed hillsides differed only in their extra centuries subdued to the hand of man. At the time, I didn’t realize I loved these paintings because they were showing me a way to look at my own country. I thought I loved them because they showed me a country that was better than mine.

  There was a name for this syndrome: Cultural Cringe—the Australian belief that just about anybody anywhere did things better than we did. And no wonder. It was always other people and places we saw reflected in books and movies, never ourselves. I was seventeen before a major Australian novel (Patrick White’s The Tree of Man) elbowed its way onto one of my classroom reading lists. In history, we spent weeks studying the U.S. Civil War, but no time at all on the Australian miners’ rebellion against British troops at the Eureka Stockade. Australians still made few films. Our painters still often used misty European hues rather than the stark palette dictated by Australia’s own crisp light and air.

  We didn’t even recognize the gifts of our native plants. One of my chores was sweeping up the pesky brown detritus that fell into our yard from a neighbor’s tree. I didn’t know that the Minié balls I was consigning to the compost were macadamias. These delicious nuts didn’t become famous until an American exported seedlings to Hawaii.

  With materials borrowed from Darleen, I began painting. Slowly my palette, easel and pieces of primed Masonite began to take over the space on the back veranda that my science lab had occupied. Instead of copper sulfate solution, dribbles of acrylic paint began to threaten the contents of my mother’s ironing basket.

  My artistic inspirations were all French. If Israel represented my craving for risk and adventure, it was France that made me hunger for a culture that was old and arrogant, serene in its own superiority.

  In 1968, I finally began to study French at high school. For someone of my temperament, it was an auspicious year to start. I had developed the bad habit of doing my homework sprawled in front of the television set. As I struggled to devise sentences using the irregular verbs “to be” and “to have” the TV news offered a brief film clip from Paris. The street seemed to be on fire. In the midst of the flames, a devastatingly handsome Parisian student ripped up a cobblestone and hurled it at the police. It was May 1968, and the événements were under way.

  “Il est un beau étudiant,” I wrote. “Il est en fureur. Il a colère.” Et moi, I thought, j’ai colère aussi. I wanted to hurl cobblestones, too—or I thought I did. I wanted to hurl something. I tingled all over with vague, nameless passions and urges. I wanted trouble, desperately. I wanted to kiss boys, take drugs, be hauled by the hair into a police van at an antiwar protest.

  My parents were just as desperate to ensure that I did none of the above. For the next four years the tiny word “No” loomed large in Concord. No, I couldn’t go on a date. No, I couldn’t go to the beach with my girlfriends. No, I most certainly could not go and scream “Baby killer” at LBJ when he visited Australia.

  Of course, I obeyed. Adolescent rebellion is a problem when your parents are your friends. But I ranted, I cried. I would have locked myself in the bathroom except that, since we only had one bathroom, locking oneself in it for any length of time seemed thoughtless. So I flounced through the house, singing loud, tuneless renditions of every song I knew with the word “free” in it: “Born Free,” “I Want to Be Free,” “set me free, why don’t you, babe?” I blasted the “come mothers and fathers” verse from “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” at maximum volume, knowing that Bob Dylan’s spectacular lack of vocal ability drove my father to distraction. I sulked in my bedroom over copies of Rules for Radicals and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. My parents ignored it all, and in between outbursts we continued to get on famously.

  Darleen, who could have been my advocate, was suddenly gone. Lured to Melbourne by a job as an advertising copy writer, she was now earning the phenomenal salary of a hundred dollars a week—almost twice what my father made. I moved into her room and hoped that the vibrations emanating from her décor—hessian drapes appliquéd with hippie-esque daisies, interesting junkyard-salvage bookshelves, rice-paper lanterns—would work some kind of transformation on my style-impaired psyche.

  From Melbourne, Darleen became another pen pal. Her first letter arrived doodled all over like an illuminated manuscript with inks she’d purloined from the ad agency’s art department. She had nicknamed me Face, gently mocking my discovery of heavy black eyeliner. “Heard you moved swiftly—up with the posters, on with the records—the dragon is dead—long live the face. How do you like the bed—bet you’re getting good sleeps—well that’s good—no lines for the face—right?”

  From a distance, we drew closer. The letters got longer and more intimate. She sent me poems (Exley, Eliot), book recommendations (Tolkien, Vonnegut) and advice about boys: “With no brothers I found it hard to be natural at the beginning of my courting days.” One day a letter arrived sharing sisterly confidences about work and romance. In it, she predicted our future: “We’ll have little houses in Glebe and/or a dome house in the country, and we’ll wizz around, drink lots of tea with mum, pick dad up from the races and cricket. And I’ll either have a dog and lots of babies or a briefcase in the back seat and you’ll have lots of impressionable young owl-eyed boy students five years your junior from your English classes at uni.” She ended this letter with the words I’d longed for all my life: “And do you realise what an incredibly wonderful amazing thing it is to me to find I have a sister who has all the qualities, and more, that I look for in a friend. Much happiness, thank you face.”

  Worried that my curiosity about drugs would lead me into the company of creeps, she sent me a Glad sandwich bag containing a tiny amount of pot, also scored from her agency’s art department. (No doubt from the “bad types” from whom the nuns of Concord had hoped to shield her.) I waited till Mum went down the street on a grocery errand, rolled a flaccid, emaciated joint, stood at the door of the back veranda and smoked it, fast. The spasm of coughing that followed was so intense that the dog started barking in sympathy. The back fence didn’t melt. The magpies didn’t start singing in harmonics. I didn’t see God. Disappointed, yet ever the optimist, I fished a couple of seeds out of the crease in the bag and shoved them into the loamy soil among the begonias.

  I decided that if I was to be imprisoned by the bourgeois values of my backwater country, at least I could write to some brave French soul out there on the ramparts. I had visions of her, my French alter ego. She wore tiny black mini-skirts and lashings of eyeliner. She chose her lovers with discernment. I visualized her hurling cobblestones by day and retreating to an intimate Left Bank brasserie where she argued about Simone and Sartre as the blended smoke of Gauloises and marijuana thickened in the candlelight. I decided to ask my French teacher to help me find her.

  Miss Fitzpatrick probably wasn’t the right person to ask. Sixty-something, her steel-gray hair wrenched into a prim bun, Miss Fitzpatrick was a caricature of the spinster schoolmarm, living with her elderly sister
s and puttering to school in an ancient, pea-green Morris Minor that never went above thirty miles per hour. She always wore homemade, long-skirted Liberty-print dresses with a starched lace handkerchief attached to her lapel by a large safety pin. For thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds reveling in the rebellious atmosphere of the late 1960s, watching our elders scream, “Fuck the pigs!” at anti-Vietnam rallies, she should have been a gift from the gods: the ultimate fossil to satirize and send up.

  Yet no one ever uttered a disrespectful word in her classroom. Other teachers had to bellow to get our attention. Miss Fitzpatrick could silence a class of rowdy adolescents with the raise of an eyebrow. When she read us the poetry of Verlaine and Ronsard, the room became so quiet that the only sound was the rhythmic pop of tennis balls from the courts outside. She transfixed us with French novels. When she read Antoine de St. Exupéry’s memoir of his desert plane crash, I held my breath as she reached the passage where the downed pilot sees the nomad coming to his aid. In French, she read St. Exupéry’s mellifluous paean to universal humanity and, looking up over the wire spectacles perched on her nose, translated it in her sweet, soft voice: “You are the well-loved brother.…” In the pause that followed, I wasn’t the only one snuffling into my Kleenex.

  Miss Fitzpatrick spoke French with an impeccable Parisian accent, and spun tales of regional life in Normandy and Provence as if she had supped on soupe de poisson in every portside café and cheered the boule players in every sycamore-shaded square. In fact, she had never left Australia.

  Every afternoon, in French class, she drew us a little bit further into her illusory world. As the cicadas drummed in the eucalyptus trees outside the classroom window, I filled exercise books with essays on French culture so detailed that in one, on cuisine, I noted that a satisfactory accompaniment for saumon au beurre blanc would be a Puligny Montrachet 1961. The only salmon I had ever tasted had come out of a can, and wine, in our house, meant sweet sherry.

  Unfortunately, when it came to the language itself, I didn’t turn out to be the prodigy I’d hoped. I could read and write well enough, memorizing great swaths of obscure vocabulary. But when the words left the page and floated out into the air, they might as well have been Swahili. Because I learned words by writing them down, my brain stubbornly clung to the way their spelling was supposed to sound in English. And because I had trouble understanding correct pronunciations, I had trouble reproducing them. My spoken French was a raspy collection of diphthongs in which I habitually swallowed the consonants that should have been stressed and barked out the ones that were meant to remain silent.

  When I told Miss Fitzpatrick that I wanted a French pen friend, she said she’d be delighted to help.

  I forgot to mention Paris.

  I had imagined fiery dispatches from the Paris barricades, scrawled in haste on table napkins. Instead, Janine wrote to me on delicate azure stationery, her letter folded as carefully as a piece of origami, her penmanship impeccable. Her address was a placid village in Vaucluse, Provence, a village so tiny I searched in vain for it on all the school library’s maps of France. St. Martin de la Brasque, population 516, didn’t even have a high school. Janine boarded during the week in a town called Manosque, near Marseilles, where the disciplinary regime sounded tougher, if possible, than the tyranny being exacted upon me in Concord.

  In some ways her letters were a great advertisement for the French education system. Written half in French, half in English, they rarely contained a grammatical slip. Janine had started studying English two years earlier than we had begun French. After receiving my first letter, she kindly wrote that my French wasn’t très mauvais. But then, she hadn’t heard me try to speak it.

  Her proletarian credentials, at least, seemed impeccable. Her father was a farmhand who made his living pruning and cultivating the vines of the Lubéron. The farmer’s daughter in her showed an avid interest in Australian sheep populations and wheat-growing acreage. To my mortification, and in confirmation of my own worst fears, the only Australian culture she’d heard of was agriculture.

  But when I probed her for working-class consciousness, all I got was a dissertation on the aggravating behavior of the minets, or beaucoup snob, who peopled her school. Instead of being feted for her peasant origins, as I imagined she would be among the Maoist student radicals of Paris, it seemed she was enduring a quiet torment from the bourgeois pupils at her boarding school.

  It soon became clear that there wouldn’t be any epistolary discussion of French philosophers. Janine wrote that she preferred “adventure books.” But what really shocked me was the arrested state of her knowledge of popular culture. Janine had never heard of my heroes du jour, Leonard Cohen and Dustin Hoffman. Her knowledge of modern music ended with the Beatles. When I asked her about French cinema, she replied that she adored Brigitte Bardot. She had seen no Jean Renoir, no François Truffaut.

  I stared at the charming valediction, “I kiss you on the two cheeks,” and wondered at the paradox of one so French yet so unsophisticated.

  In one letter Janine opined that the Côte d’Azur youths who experimented with drugs sont idiots. Since I was avidly tending the seedlings that had sprouted from my marijuana seeds, I found her views on this subject pas sympathique. Engaging as she was, Janine was no alter ego. Or at least not that year. I was longing to taste life and push limits, and I couldn’t understand anyone my age who didn’t feel the same.

  But corresponding with Janine had done wonders for my cultural cringe. Sydney, it seemed, was nowhere near as cut off from the world as St. Martin de la Brasque. I began to consider that I might not be so close to the ends of the earth as I had always imagined.

  7

  Which Side Are you On?

  “Today’s the day Nixon (aargh!) became President,” wrote Joannie in her first letter of 1969. “We had to watch it in school just before lunch and it was absolutely repulsive. When Spiro T. Agnew came on screen everybody booed—nobody likes him. Then when Nixon was taking this oath, most everybody clapped but I hissed. My friend and I made this deal that we’re never never NEVER going to call Nixon President. Just plain Nixon, but not P———Nixon.”

  If Janine lacked adolescent rage, Joannie had plenty. She was burning mad about the war, about pollution (“Yesterday, air pollution levels were unhealthy for the 64th time this year. Fun”), and about the conservative tilt in American politics.

  Joannie was exactly what I’d hoped for in a pen pal: her American life was right in the path of history. Both her brothers had been subject to the draft. One, the molecular biologist, was protected by his academic status, but the other had gone through the tortuous process of declaring himself a conscientious objector. Her sister lived in Berkeley and was friends with the members of Country Joe and the Fish, whose antiwar songs were famous even in Australia.

  That year, to my ineffable envy, Joannie took her vacations in San Francisco and London, from whence she dispatched descriptions of the hippies. In Haight-Ashbury, she wrote, “there are lots of bearded guys strolling around in strange outfits. Some of the girls have on minis and some have long embroidered gowns.… They’ve got good views on peace.” In Piccadilly Circus—“is it wild there! … all nationalities and varying degrees of cleanliness … great floppy felt hats are THE fashion there now—not so in America, where it’s sunglasses. What’s up in Australia?”

  What was up, for me, was a pair of black faux-satin flared pants that I’d asked the Greek seamstress who lived across the road to make up for me. The pants were so wide around the ankles that the excess fabric flapped in the breeze like a deflated spinnaker. The top half of the outfit consisted of a serape my mother had helped me make out of a square of upholstery brocade with a piece of fringe sewn all around. When I put my head through the hole in the center, I looked like I’d been throttled by a sofa.

  Darleen might have saved me from this fashion disaster, but from the distance of Melbourne, she was spared the sight of me. Mrs. Papas, the seamstress, tried her be
st. A statuesque woman with a high, heavy brow, her dark eyes surveyed me as I tried on the pants and attempted to walk without tripping over the wildly flapping hems. “Why you not let me make you very nice dress?” she said. “Better for you, more pretty.”

  But in 1969 I didn’t want to be pretty. I wanted to be mysterious, wild, disheveled, disreputable. One snapshot taken that year perfectly captured my looking-for-trouble mood. I was gazing down, away from the camera, hair falling enigmatically across my face as I tried to achieve the pout of an alienated radical. I liked this picture so much I had copies made and sent them to all my pen pals. Their replies—a diplomatic “Je te trouve très belle” from Janine, a polite “You have a nice hair” from Mishal and a phlegmatic “Don’t worry; you should see some of the pictures that get taken of me” from Joannie—indicated that I would have to work a little harder to achieve the desired impression.

  Our inspiring school principal Sister Ruth had gone off on a mission to New York City where she’d spent time working in a literacy program in Harlem. When she returned, she addressed a school assembly. We stood there in the concrete playground, a sea of prim mauve school uniforms, as the summer sun beat down and caused patches of dark sweat to bloom on our backs and under our arms. Sister Ruth talked passionately of the hardships of lives in the ghetto and the courage of the civil rights movement. She wanted us to take from her speech a sense of how lucky we were in our tranquil, privileged country. Instead, I longed to be a Freedom Rider in Montgomery or a Yippie in Chicago.