French Lessons: A Memoir by Alice Kaplan

school in the fall in my new role as the
girl who had been away to Switzerland. At the annual
French Chapel I got to read the story of the birth of Jesus in
French, showing off my new accent. My teachers were impressed at my "r" and the way my intonation rose and fell. A
representative had come from Vassar College to tell us that
students there could design their own courses of study; one
boy had lived six months in a teepee in order to understand
the life of indigenous Americans. Vassar had a policy of ad mitting "unusual students" after the junior year. They admitted me.

    I was a freshman in 1971, the height of the Vietnam War. I
took courses in political science and economics, telling myself I wanted to understand what had gone wrong in the
country. I tried to concentrate on the charts in Samuelson's
Economics, guns on one curve and butter on another, but I
couldn't. French was what I was good at. I had a stack of purple and white Nouveaux Classiques Larousse on the floor of my
dormitory; I was in a survey course of French theater from
the Middle Ages to the Theater of Cruelty. In the dorm, my
friends were passing around a book of Eastern Philosophy
for Westerners called Be Here Now. "I don't want to be here
now!" I told my roommate. I hated the idea of living in the
moment.
    I left Vassar at the end of my freshman year to join my sister in Berkeley. I knew I was going to like it as soon as I
stepped off the plane. The air was easier to breathe, cool
and dry. On the way home from the airport, my sister
stopped at the Black Muslim bakery to get us muffins for our
breakfast. There were people in the bakery wearing fezzes,
saris, earrings as long as their necks, long robes, and short
leather jackets. The world was bigger here than at Vassar,
filled with people who had their own ideas about how to
live. You could see across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco
and across the Golden Gate Bridge to Mount Tamalpais. The
horizon was bigger here. My sister arranged for me to live in
a grass-matted Japanese teahouse in back of the house she
rented. I did political work to meet people. I worked for the
April Coalition City Council campaign, the McGovern for
President campaign, and for Bobby Seale, member of the
Black Panther Party, when he ran for mayor of Oakland. At Panther headquarters I met Ann Smock, who taught French
literature at Berkeley. I learned from her that Jean Genet had
been in New Haven to support the Panthers during their
1971 trial. Students and faculty at Yale had gone on strike in
solidarity. It was a revelation to me that literature could be
political-mastering the guns and butter charts might not
be the only way to change the world.

    I enrolled in Ann Smock's contemporary poetry course in
the spring of my sophomore year. She talked about literature in a way that I recognized from my private experience
of reading but had never heard articulated. She didn't worship literature as "high art" the way my high school English
teachers did. She didn't drop names. She entered the poem
she was teaching. She showed us around. She was baffled by
literature, amused by it, suspicious of it. Literature is essential to survival and impossible to understand. Literature lies
and tells the truth about lying. Writing is the opposite of
making something present, I learned from her. Writing is
effacement. I say: a flower! and there rises the one that is absent from all bouquets. The paraphrase is from Mallarme's
"Crise de vers" (crisis in poetry), which she taught us. There
were poems in French that were nothing but love affairs
with the layers of meaning of a single word over time, she
told us. For a French poet the Littre dictionary was more
essential than having a soul: the dictionary was the soul of
poetry.
    I got so wrapped up in a point she was making about the
Littre that I lit the filter end of my cigarette. Everyone in the
class laughed when they noticed. I took the cigarette