Talk About Books! : ‘Apostrophes’ May Be No ‘Geraldo’ But It’s Got France Tuned In

The cultural section of the U.S. Embassy here recently organized a speech by the visiting American author Tom Wolfe to a group of French intellectuals and writers. The setting was the splendidly ornate Hotel Talleyrand, owned by the Americans and reeking of Old World culture and charm.

Standing in his trademark white suit amid Gobelin tapestries and Louis XIV furniture, Wolfe proceeded to mock what he described as the sorry, depraved state of Western civilization. He was particularly critical of television, which he described as a moral wasteland of talk shows on which “the topic cannot be outrageous enough.”

“There are talk shows where a very nice-looking man or woman comes on the screen smiling and says, ‘Our subject today is bestiality,’ ” Wolfe said.

Television, he added, reflects the “sweeping aside of standards” in the Western World.

Later that day, Wolfe found himself in a Paris television studio as an honored guest on the most popular talk show in France, a live, prime-time transmission on the air every Friday night. The subject was not bestiality or anything like it. It was books. Wolfe’s fellow guests were the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and the essayist Jean-Marie Le Clezio.

The show, “Apostrophes,” has been among the most widely watched in France for 15 years. It reaches at least 6 million people a week, and its host, Bernard Pivot, 53, is one of the most popular men in the country.

The astonishing success of Pivot’s talk show is due in part to the host’s personality. Pivot is a nervous and impishly animated man who delights in provoking “chemical reactions” among his erudite guests.

But on another level, it is a reflection of the kind of status that literature has in France, where writers are held in much higher esteem than politicians or rock stars. President Francois Mitterrand has appeared on the Pivot show--to discuss poetry, not policy. Former President Valery Giscard d’Estaing has also made an appearance, to discuss his study of novelist Guy de Maupassant.

True, there is some evidence that the French would rather watch people talking about books than read the books themselves. Surveys show a general decline in book readership among the French.

But two more literary talk shows modeled on “Apostrophes” recently were started on alternate networks, causing a writer for the Paris newspaper Liberation to comment on this strange marriage of reading and viewing:

“Television needs books for its image and books need television for sales. This paradoxical pact (gives) France, where people read less and less, the most literary television in the world.”

Pivot said in a recent interview that he does not have any illusions about the reason for his success.

“My popularity in this country is due precisely to the fact that I deal with writers,” he said. “Writers are very popular in France, and I am the one who makes the writers talk. Viewers can identify with me because I am not an intellectual. I am only a go-between for those who write and those who want to read.”

(Pivot was a mediocre student, and is passionate about Beaujolais wine and soccer; he has written one unsuccessful novel, a love story.)

What Pivot does with great skill, and what distinguishes him from his rivals on two other networks, is guide the discussion among his guests. He uses the pressure of the live telecast to provoke interesting responses without embarrassing his guests or making them feel too ridiculous.

During the Wolfe show, Pivot used anthropologist Levi-Strauss, a student of primitive tribal life, as a catalyst for discussing Wolfe’s best-selling novel, “Bonfire of the Vanities,” which is set in present-day New York City.

“I knew that Levi-Strauss had been in New York during the war,” Pivot said, “and I wanted to mix him with a novelist writing about New York. Levi-Strauss is an anthropologist and, in a way, Tom Wolfe is a sort of anthropologist of New York.”

Wolfe’s novel is an account of a collision between the rich, white upper class of New York and the politically potent black underclass. In it, Wolfe alludes to one of the South American Indian tribes studied by Levi-Strauss to make a comical comparison with the activities of his characters.

At another point, Wolfe describes the smooth, self-assured walk of one of his characters as a “pimp roll”--a ghetto expression that in the French version stopped the translator cold.

To Levi-Strauss’ amusement, Pivot leaned toward Wolfe and, peering over his half-frame spectacles, asked in French, “Mr. Wolfe, what is a ‘pimp roll?’ ”

An interpreter passed the question to Wolfe, who for a moment appeared to be blushing. But he relaxed when he realized that Pivot was not going to make him stand up in his white suit and demonstrate before 6 million people on live television.

“A pimp roll is a walk that is supposed to exude confidence,” Wolfe said.

After the show, Wolfe was full of praise for Pivot and his ability to juggle the several guests and keep the conversation going despite the language barrier.

“You’re really very good,” he told Pivot, and he told him about several proposals for literary review programs on American television.

Pivot smiled and said he did not think a show like his would have much chance of working in the United States, or even in Britain.

“You have to be a little Latin, like me, for a show like this,” he said. “An Anglo-Saxon cannot make it work.”

Later, he confided to an interviewer that he found Wolfe’s writing a little trivial and shallow, particularly in comparison with the great depth of Levi-Strauss’ writing.

“American writers are always surprised by my program,” he said. “They can’t get over the fact that at 9:30 p.m. one can speak live about books without being interrupted by commercials or by a singer.”

In recent years, Pivot has had several American writers on his program, including John Updike, Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, William Styron and Arthur Miller.

French publishers complain that Pivot favors French writers above all others. Even an obscure French writer will get billing over a better-known foreigner. Pivot’s personal favorites--Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Michel Tournier, Patrick Mondiano and Jean d’Ormeson--are unknown to most Americans.

Another complaint is that Pivot has not done much to help the ailing French fiction market by inviting more serious novelists to appear on the program, as distinguished from the authors of nonfiction.

One of the ironies about the rise of “Apostrophes” is that it has corresponded to the general decline of readership here for serious novels.

Michel Polac, the host of a competing but much more contentious literary talk show on another network, argues that the talk shows have actually contributed to a decline in readers.

“Many French don’t like to read,” he said, “but they like to listen to programs about books so they can talk about them at dinner parties without having to read them.”