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 shewas, 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 membersof 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
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 shewas, 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 membersof 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
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