Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis by Alice Kaplan (review)

Alice Kaplan’s delight in France’s culture, literature, philosophy, and history permeates her latest book, Dreaming in French. Like her earlier French Lessons (1993), this work entices readers to fantasize of living as Americans in France or to reminisce about their own study abroad days. Here, Kaplan weaves together well-known source materials with new interviews and private papers to trace the lasting impact of a year in Paris on three exceptional yet exceptionally different women. One learns a bit about that magical turning point at the threshold to adulthood of the former First Lady and editor Jacqueline Bouvier, the lesbian intellectual Susan Sontag, and the Civil Rights activist and scholar Angela Davis; but above all one learns the deep and broad ways in which a year in Paris can inspire, complicate, and intellectually hone young people from any background. Kaplan meticulously examines their lives studying in Paris during their late teens or early twenties, the impressions they made on their friends and hosts, and their own self-reflective writings to demonstrate how spending a year in Paris as Americans shaped not just their perceptions of the larger world but most essentially the places they called home. Their three experiences are vastly different, and yet the themes of astute self-awareness, lasting intellectual connection to France, and France’s reciprocal interest in their accomplishments transect all three stories.

At first glance, the three women Kaplan chooses as the subjects of this work have little in common other than fame based on politics and writing. Bouvier came from wealth and privilege in Virginia, growing up amid tales (mostly tall ones) of her French ancestry; Sontag from the middle-class Southwest where she relished Djuna Barnes’s depiction of lesbian social life in Nightwood as she struggled to deny and then accept her sexuality; and Davis from racially divided Birmingham, Alabama where she found a form of escape in France’s language and paths towards political activism in its literature and philosophy. Yet their stories seem to intertwine inevitably, at times through surprising connections Kaplan details explicitly (including, for example, Sontag’s invitation from Bouvier—then Onassis—to review a book of photography and Davis’s attendance at the college where Sontag’s ex-husband taught), yet more often through intangible similarities in their processes of defining themselves. They each learned a tremendous amount from life in Paris, regardless of any academic pursuits, through attending the theater and cinema, reading the newspapers, writing observations from café tables, and befriending fellow Americans and local Parisians. Each of them witnessed political unrest during their Paris years, whether the aftermath of the German Occupation, the outbreak of the Algerian War, or the uneasy early years of Algeria’s independence. As much as they learned about France and the French, they learned even more about the United States and themselves. Kaplan’s work indicates that it does not matter in what decade one goes to Paris, where one studies, or in what socioeconomic class one circulates; the journey will be profound and lasting.

Kaplan counters her romantic passages on the experience of living abroad with reminders of the harsh daily realities of these three young women: Bouvier lived in a Paris of rationed food, scarce coal, and primitive bathrooms; Sontag split from her husband and son to live in run-down hotels with Harriet Sohmers, who drove her to despondent fits of jealousy; Davis witnessed France’s hypocritical brutality towards Algerians while it criticized the U.S.’s racism towards African Americans. Yet for them all, France continued to beckon intellectually, aesthetically, and politically and offer support throughout their public lives. Bouvier Kennedy found solace from her painfully public role as First Lady in French books and solitary return visits to intimate French friends, Sontag returned regularly to Paris to write and connect with intellectuals and the openly lesbian nightlife, and Davis...