"I first met Francine du Plessix Gray in Morocco in 1983. Gray had interrupted the completion of her third novel, October Blood, and was en route to Paris to finish her articles about Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie and the French Resistance, which would appear in Vanity Fair that fall and for which she would receive the National Magazine Award for Best Reporting.
Gray was born in the French Embassy of Warsaw in 1930 where her father, a specialist in Slavic languages, was a member of the French diplomatic corps. After he died in 1940, his plane shot down by Fascist artillery, she and her mother emigrated to America and her mother married Alexander Liberman. Her mother was a noted hat designer and her stepfather is the painter, sculptor, and editorial director of Condé Nast. Francine du Plessix attended the Spence School, Bryn Mawr, and two summer sessions at Black Mountain College before graduating from Barnard where she majored in philosophy. She was the only woman on the nightshift at United Press International for two years and was a fashion reporter in Paris. In 1957, she married painter Cleve Gray and later had two sons, Thaddeus, now a banker, and Luke, now an artist. For the first years of her marriage she painted, a vocation for which she had had a yearning since childhood. She returned to writing by doing art criticism for Art in America, where she was book editor in 1964; and in 1965, she began to contribute fiction and political essays to The New Yorker. Her first two books were nonfiction: Divine Disobedience: Profiles in Catholic Radicalism (1970), for which she won a National Catholic Book Award, followed by Hawaii: The Sugar-Coated Fortress(1972). Three novels followed: Lovers and Tyrants(1976), World Without End (1981), and October Blood(1985). Her new collection of essays, Adam & Eve and the City (1987), displays her keen observations of the political, literary, and domestic scene. Gray has taught at the College of the City of New York, Yale University, Columbia University, and Princeton University, and was writer in residence at the American Academy in Rome.
We began the interview at her home in Warren, Connecticut, a town so small it does not have its own post office. So much of her time is spent traveling, she has found this remote area of New England a perfect refuge from urban and social distractions, and a fine place for work. We met in winter, a week before Christmas. Pushkin and Sabaka, companion standard poodles, accompanied us on a tour of the stone farmhouse: huge hearths, a labyrinth of small, dark eighteenth-century rooms alternating with lighter, newer spaces, walls lined with bookcases and contemporary paintings. The tiny bedroom where she spends her early morning hours reading is painted a dark green. By contrast, her study, a barn that used to be Cleve’s studio, is airy and white. It is furnished with an IBM word processor, and such varied classics as St. Augustine’s Confessions, Finnegans Wake, the complete works of Samuel Beckett and of Roland Barthes, The Perfectibility of Man in Christian Thought, and E. R. Dodds’s The Greeks and the Irrational. Postcards of particularly beloved paintings—by Titian, Piero della Francesca, Caspar David Friedrich—are tacked to the bookcases above her desk.
We paused only for dinner by the fireplace of the Grays’ living room, and lunch in an historic nearby town; most of our day and a half talk took place in Francine’s study where she sat in front of a picture window. Dressed casually in somber-hued slacks and sweater, she could be taken for a one-time fashion model: tall, elegant, fine-boned, with intensely intelligent and aristocratic features; her manner is warm, friendly, and gracious. On one occasion she wore glasses and took notes as we spoke, wishing to make her remarks as thorough as possible. The following morning she was up early, carefully expanding upon statements made the evening before. Her accent and intonations are still distinctly European. “How odious!” she might exclaim, or “Formidable!”
Gray honed my edited version of the transcripts of our conversation on her word processor, condensing the lengthy original. We made our final changes just before the publication of her collection of essays, Adam & Eve and the City..."
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