At home with Francine Gray

Interview by Kevin T. McEneaney

Instead of dancing white snowflakes to announce the Christmas season, a nearly invisible pinprick drizzle of rain coated my windshield Monday afternoon as I pulled into the driveway of America’s grande dame of letters, Francine du Plessix Gray, who lives in nearby Warren, CT. Historian, essayist, novelist, raconteur, and memoirist, Gray cordially received me in her country home for a conversation about her latest novel, The Queen’s Lover (2012), which recounts the story of Marie Antoinette’s secret Swedish lover, Count Axel von Fersen. Based upon Fersen’s letters to his sister, the docu-drama novel portrays Fersen fighting with French troops for American independence and later orchestrating a failed attempt to extract Marie, who was often unfairly maligned, from Paris. The failure of her escape sealed her doom, leading her to the scaffold during the Terror. Ms. Gray assured me it was not difficult to write from a man’s point of view, that, for her, it was completely natural; and that in her youth she was often labeled a tomboy.

   Her memoir Them (2005), which won the National Book Critics Circle award in 2006, is considered to be a classic of that genre. The memoir contains all the drama of an ambitious family-chronicle novel as well as the brutal but compassionate honesty of noted masterpieces, such as the Autobiography of John Cowper Powys or the Memoirs of Elias Canetti. When I asked about the importance of honesty in writing, Gray cautioned me by saying that “Compassion makes criticism tolerable.” Them, which concludes with moving lyrical elegy, contains the eccentricity exhibited by Dostoevsky’s characters, the family drama of Turgenev, and the endearing pathos of Ivan Bunin’s short stories about émigré Russians in an alien world.

   Gray’s very readable biography of Madame de Staël (2008) creates a dramatic contest of wills between Madame de Staël and Napoleon Bonaparte, contrasting Napoleon’s whim and arrogance with de Staël’s balanced and tolerant humanism. I asked Ms. Gray if she thought that women might have more adaptive political gifts than men. She replied with a hesitant “perhaps,” yet then cited the marvelous work Golda Meier accomplished in founding Israel, the crucial role of Margaret Thatcher in stabilizing the finances of a teetering England, and the current success of Angela Merkel in providing the most significant governmental role in Europe. Among American politicians, she admires the retiring Olympia Snowe as a centrist Republican who listens to her constituency. Gray hopes that Hillary Clinton will decide to run for the presidency.

   Ms. Gray confessed that, at the moment, she was writing an article on Marie-Antoine Carême, Talleyrand’s great chef, who cooked for the King of England as well as the Tsar of Russia. Talleyrand, the subject of Roberto Calasso’s recent novel The Ruin of Kasch, was a gifted conversationalist, gourmet, and wine savant who believed that diplomacy began at the dinner table.

   Ms. Gray’s biography of Louise Colet, a poet and once-mistress of Flaubert, is another favorite book of mine. Ms. Gray was not aware that that biography as well as her early travel book on Hawaii had influenced the writings of Hunter S. Thompson, on whom I’ve done some recent research.

   Gray’s favorite writers? Saul Bellow, William Gass, Don DeLillo, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, Alice Munro, Camille Paglia, William Styron, and Philip Roth, a former friend whom she no longer sees because of her close friendship with Claire Bloom. She admires the versatile and accessible writing of David Eggers, yet wonders if his writing measures up to that of her favorite icons. Gray has just read Katie Roiphe’s current collection of essays In Praise of Messy Lives and highly recommends this provocative book. The World as I Found It (1987), a novel about the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein by Bruce Duffy, remains one her favorite novels in recent decades. At the moment she is about to read Pramoedya Toer’s great Indonesian novel (a favorite of mine) This Earth of Mankind (1980).  

   When I asked Ms Gray about her comment in an old interview that “art is form of revenge against mortality,” she said that she would now change that quip to: “art is form of revenge against reality”—that life is transient, and she now accepts completely the fact of mortality. She mused that all of life, even death, is transformation.

   Ms. Gray loves living in the country and has long lived in Warren, but many of her lifelong friends and neighbors, like the Millers and Styrons, have passed away. Gray finds solace in her sons and grandchildren. Thaddeus lives nearby, and Luke lives in Brooklyn. Luke, a serious painter, has upcoming show next year at the Gary Snyder Gallery in Manhattan.

   Ms. Gray remains a devoted fan of opera, and we concluded our discussion of art by mutually admitting our admiration for the superb Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, yet as I drove home through the rolling  hills of our climate-warmed mist, I glanced at the soft, brown earth and could only imagine the snowflakes from Dmitri’s various recorded lieder. I then recollected the wisdom of Francine’s philosophical observation: art is revenge against reality.