Table Of ContentDavid Plante was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1940. He
is the author of one book of non-fiction, Difficult Women, and
several novels, including The Ghost of Henry James, Slides and
Figures in Bright Air. The Family, the first part of his magnificent
trilogy about a family of working-class French-Canadians, The
Francoeur Family, was nominated for the 1979 National Book
Award. His most recent novel is The Catholic. A regular contributor
to the New York Times and the New Yorker, he lives in London.
DAVID PLANTE
The Foreigner
TRIAD PALADIN
GRAFTON BOOKS
LONDON GLASGOW
TORONTO SYDNEY AUCKLAND
Triad/Paladin
Grafton Books
8 Grafton Street, London W1X 3LA
Published by Triad/Paladin 1987
Triad Paperbacks Ltd is an imprint of
Chatto, Bodley Head & Jonathan Cape Ltd and
Grafton Books, A Division of the Collins Publishing Group
First published in Great Britain by
Chatto & Windus. The Hogarth Press 1984
Portions of this book have previously appeared in the New Yorker.
I wish to thank the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for its support.
Copyright © David Plante 1984
ISBN 0-586-08606-4
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Collins, Glasgow
Set in Ehrhardt
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may
be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publishers.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it
shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated
without the publisher's prior consent in any
form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar
condition including this condition being imposed
on the subsequent purchaser.
For Catharine Carver
'In Spain you could not tell about anything.'
Ernest Hemingway
Part I
1
I was brought up in two countries.
The outer country, vast, was America.
I belonged to another, a small one within the large: the French
parish, in Providence, Rhode Island, into which I was born.
The small French parish had no rights in America, which really
had rights over me.
I was frightened of America, and one day, all by myself, I tore
up the American flag.
I was also frightened of the French Church, so frightened I
knew I would have condemned myself if I had dared desecrate any
of its dark totems: a missal, a rosary, a sheaf of blessed palm.
These objects of the French Church could save me only within
myself. I had to concentrate on them while I prayed. American
objects exposed me to a dangerous outside which demanded my
attention whether I liked it or not. I had no faith in what was
outside, and I couldn't in any way fix on the American flag to pray.
But America, whether I liked it or not, would take me out of
myself, to where there was no salvation, and destroy me.
Trying to fantasize what it would be to live in another country,
I'd stop myself and think: you phony.
Whenever I was asked by friends in college what my nationality
was, I would answer, 'French.' On all the forms I had to fill out,
whenever I saw Nationality, I would write French. It meant blood,
but 'French' did not mean 'coming from France.' In the parish,
France, as a country, was hardly referred to, and I had no more
sense of it than I had of England or Italy or Spain. It belonged,
with those other countries, to Europe. My parents had no idea
when their ancestors left from France for Canada, or from what
part. One of my aunts mentioned a great great aunt who arrived in
Quebec possessing only a pair of lace gloves and an ivory fan, and
that was all we knew. France, that distant country, was not our old
country.
II
We came from French Canada, and at the beginning of every
day in the parish school, we sang, '0 Canada, terre de nos aleux.'
I was never curious about French Canada.
I was curious about France.
During the Easter break of my freshman year, I flew to Chicago
with my roommate, invited by his family. Charlie told his parents
that I could speak French, that I was 'French.' Their eyes opened,
and I, surprised, realized that to speak French, to claim French
blood, was, in the middle vastness of America, to have distinction.
I wanted to be sincere, but I regretted telling them I was Canuck
and explaining what a Canuck was, because I liked the special
interest they had in my being, as they'd thought, o[France.
Charlie lived in Oak Park, on North Kenilworth Avenue, across
from the house where Ernest Hemingway was brought up, and
from which, perhaps, he had left to go to Europe for the first time.
Charlie wanted to be a painter; he said, laughing, he would one
day go to Paris and be a painter.
I thought he was taking the big risk of being a phony.
Back in Providence and Boston, I developed a vivid expectation
of what France might be like from what I imagined no one from
the parish could appreciate: paintings. In the cities' museums, I
went from room to room studying the French painters, and in their
pictures I glimpsed marble topped cafe tables with green bottles,
fans and opera glasses on the red velvet elbow rests of opera
boxes, apples on a rucked tablecloth, a ballet slipper and a pink
sash. There were, too, lines of poplar trees, bridges over streams,
church steeples rising above multi-angled roofs, and bulging
haystacks colored in different pictures by blue to red phases of
sunlight.
I was more aware of things in these pictures than I was of what
appeared in the kitchen at supper on the bare Formica table at
whiCh my parents and my brothers and I silently ate: the bottle of
milk, the jam glasses, the mismatched plates and knives and forks
and spoons heaped to one side, the loaf of cellophane-wrapped
bread, the bowls of mashed potatoes and canned string beans, the
cracked platter of pork sausages, and the boudin, a black blood
pudding which only my parents ate.
An American took me into Europe. After oysters and cold white
12
wine with Hemingway, I walked with him along fresh washed
gravel paths by fountains blowing in the bright light.
He'd liked the French painters. He'd studied them in Paris
when he was hungry and his hunger made the lines and colors
clear and sharp. He'd learned from them; what he learned was, he
said, 'a secret.'
Hemingway was an authority of Europe; because of what he
knew, I didn't question his right to be there. I couldn't imagine
him arriving by boat, not knowing about the streets, museums,
cafes, and not speaking the languages; he seemed to have known
Europe all his life. He could, in Paris, order a drink I had never
heard of, a 'fine,' and drink it with the familiarity of someone who
had drunk 'fines' all his life. He knew what cafes to go to, what
restaurants, what dancings; he knew what to say to taxi drivers and
waiters and prostitutes, in their argot. It was especially in his
description - the paddock under the new leafed tree, the pink
racing paper - that l sensed the certainty of his possession of
Europe. .
He had a right to live in Europe, an American who had made
another country his own. In Europe, he could even sin, and simply
because he was there he was justified in his sinning. I, in America,
was an unjustified sinner.
He was what I wanted to be, but would have to risk everything
to become: a foreigner.
Though I lived outside the parish now, a boarder at Boston
College, I remained, in myself, a parochial; that is, my life was
centered on my private thoughts and feelings. My roommate
Charlie ran for freshman class president and won, and it occurred
to me that I would never have thought of becoming president. I
had no idea what a president did, and I had no interest in the
college as a social institution. Civic duty was demanded of me, and
never originated with me. But I was pleased that Charlie, who
everyone knew was my roommate, was president.
He would make me go out to dances with him to the Catholic
girls' colleges.
When I introduced him to girls I met at the hops, I said, 'This is
Charlie, the class president, my roommate.'
My freshman year, I was in ROTC, training to be an officer in
13
