Love In A Foreign Language - Leaving Intellect For Sexual Intimacy, D.H. Lawrence In The Jungle

Bartleby (Bart) Phipps had never intended to be a world traveler, growing up in a conservative middle class family in a small New England town.  His father, a lawyer at the small family firm of Beatty, Phipps & Collier was a member of the New Brighton Country Club, Rotary, Kiwanis, and St. Maurice's Catholic Church; and his mother was a homemaker, volunteer, and member of the Hospital Auxiliary.  There was nothing unusual or unseemly about the Phipps family, and Bart's father was sure to keep it that way. 

Bart's early years were modest and unremarkable, a good student, a reasonable athlete, and a rising member of the community.  His only straying from what seemed to be his prescribed path - Yale, law school, prestigious K Street partnership - was his fascination with things foreign.  It only took a look at the illustration of the Cafe Des Deux Magots in his French II grammar to give the settled world of New Brighton a shake; and when Alain de Villiers-Rochefoucauld joined his country day school as an exchange student, he was convinced that his future would not be in Connecticut but somewhere far removed. 

Lefferts and Yale were only de rigeur stops along the way to a profitable career, good marriage, and homes on Nantucket and St. Bart's; and treated as such. Not exactly a purgatory (there was the delightful Michelle Green), but a right of passage.  

And so it was that not long after graduate school, another credentialed waystation, that he went overseas as far from his predictable future as he could get - to Africa and a Sahelian country bordering the Sahara, profoundly Muslim, traditional, with romantic remainders of the long French colonial past (the two ex-colonial sisters from la France profonde who ran the Amitie pension with paper and pencil, did marvels with the capitaine from the river, entertained the voyageurs in from the bush with Pastis and foie gras). 

 

It was there that he met Antoinette de Miramon-Fargues, an economist with the French embassy and heir to Valliere, the chateau in the Dordogne, the forests in Alsace, and a hotel de ville in the 16th Arrondissement of Paris.  She had a premier education at the Ecole Nationale d'Administration, the university which has produced France's political and industrial elite, had co-authored papers on the economic impact of unionism, and had chosen a career in diplomacy rather than academia or national politics. 

Surprisingly, she spoke little English.  She had little interest in learning the language so immersed had she been in French culture, and since her work had carried her throughout the former colonies of the empire, she was at no disadvantage.  In a few years, without English in the emerging EU and the global economy, she would have indeed been disqualified for many positions, but for now she was happy in her monolingual world. 

She spoke some English of course, but it was broken and formal; and when Bart asked if he could join her at the bar of the Amitie, she answered in French, then a hesitant, 'OK'.  

Love affairs often begin easily between two foreigners in a foreign land  The disassociation and the distance from one's own country and the responsibilities of family, marriage, and brotherhood left far behind make the affair uncomplicated by external conditions and more susceptible to romance in the old sense of the word.  Something unreal or unrealistic.  Something with very temporal possibilities - that is relationships that started in Bamako, Kinshasa, or Niamey would stay there, remembered, but only as apart of another life. 

  

It was within this context and these expectations that Bart and Antoinette began their affair. Neither one looked beyond the town, the desert, the souks, mosques, and the foreign enclave, for although there is future in any relationship, they had no interest in it.  An affair here, transitory and unreal though it might be, was theirs and theirs alone, confected without constraint or the expectations of others.  

All of which makes the subject of language intriguing.  Antoinette spoke only broken English, and despite Bart's promising start with French II and the Cafe des Deux Magots, he had never gotten much past the conditional tense.  

There are some experts in socio-linguistics who say that a relationship between people of different languages can never have the intimacy of those from the same culture.  Without humor, they say, perhaps the most identifiable trait of being human, and the one which most differentiates man from the apes, partners will always remain on different planes.  Humor is the most subtle, the most perceptive, the most insightful of the range of human characteristics - a world of asides, double-entendres, and intimations - and without being able to share that particular vision, couples will necessarily remain apart. 

Others claim the opposite.  Language is an intellectual artifice behind which individuals often hide.  Logic, exegesis, precision, experiential range all interfere with the more important emotional and physical connection between people.  Lovers may stumble over language, but if they are aware, they will leave it aside and develop the relationship toward what one critic calls 'one's inner rooms'.  A Lawrentian vision. 

As in most things there is a third way - progress and procedure. Enjoy the moment broken grammar is fixed or vocabulary added, and fluency begun. 

Bartleby was of the 'artifice' school, perhaps because his life up until then had been defined by language and written expression.  Lefferts, Yale, and graduate school had all been cognitive, analytical, expository places.  He had defended theses, written critical essays, spoken at colloquies and conferences.  His job was to convince, to persuade, and to deflect criticism. 

 

Here, in the middle of nowhere with a woman to whom he was attracted without knowing her or why, he turned the corner. 

At first he stumbled, mimed, and signed to try to express simple practical coordinates, and she was no different.  It was a lingua franca, a mix of French, English, and guesses from German and Romance languages; but soon the serendipity of the friendship was clear.  They were both Type 2, people who dismissed the idea of the essentiality of language and stopped trying.  Lovemaking sealed the compact.  Nothing more was really necessary, but the touches, smiles, and little acknowledgments said all that needed to be said. Again D.H. Lawrence. 

Did Bartleby and Antoinette know each other? Had they not had other, compromising lives, might they have become fully intimate - that is minds engaged along with everything else? 

Perhaps, but that didn't matter.  There is something special, unique, and unforgettable about 'trysts in the jungle' as Josef Conrad once described the inevitable partnership of foreign bodies. Everyone who has been involved in such affairs knows full well that they shouldn't go on,  Myth is persistent because it is never challenged.