Emigre Bids Friendly ‘Au Revoir’ to Southern California Stress

Twelve years ago, my best friend--a UC Irvine French professor named Howard Appel--took a leave of absence from his job, sold his house in Laguna Beach and moved to the south of France with his wife, Francoise, whom I also love dearly and miss prodigiously. He has never moved back.

He has returned every few years to visit his friends in Southern California and his family in the state of Washington, but that’s all. Today when he talks with his 86-year-old mother on the telephone, their conversations end as they always have ended for the past decade. She says: “Howard, when are you coming home?” And he says: “Mother, I am home.”

I’ve had about the same degree of difficulty with this as his mother--until last week. Howard and Francoise Appel have just finished one of their periodic visits. We were lucky enough to have them for four days, and we talked a lot about what has been seen by many of his friends here as his defection to France.

For the first time, my head wasn’t cluttered with subliminal anger at him for leaving. As a result, there were open lines of communication that had for so long been clogged with a sense of abandonment. I’ve finally let him go.

One of the problems of seeing your best friend cut out on you is that you tend to look only at the negatives, at what he left behind. His friends. His family. His country. His boat. His automatic dishwasher. An idyllic climate. The ocean he loved. I saw him running away from something, but that was only partly true. A relatively small part. This time I listened to what he was going to .

Howard actually brought off something most of us spend our lives dreaming about: He walked away from the stresses of modern American society to a life of contemplation and the kind of basic work in which most of the satisfaction comes from the act of working, itself. Although he is producing fine pottery and magnificent vegetables from his garden as a result of that work, many of us considered this almost frivolous for a teacher of his skill. He is also converting a 15th-Century farmhouse to something approximating the livability of Laguna Beach--a project that could probably fill several lifetimes.

Howard and Francoise were able to make this drastic change in lifestyle in their late 40s because of a fortuitous real estate investment that provides them a modest income and because their tastes and needs are simple. Although Francoise has a sister in this area of southern France and loves it there, the prime motivation for the move came from Howard.

“The life offered us in France was attractive,” he says. “That part of France is full of beauty and history. What I could do there that I couldn’t here was to have time to do what I wanted. We’re not isolated. I still see a lot of my American friends, and I read a lot. And there’s no language barrier or culture shock for me in either direction. I was physically more comfortable in the United States but I’m psychically more comfortable in France. I have a lot of ease and grace in my life there.”

He puts great value on grace and was finding less and less of it in this country. Grace and reason.

“The French often choose leisure time over pay,” he said. “I like that. I also love the rationality of the French. When I listen to the two sides in the abortion fight over here, I hear emotion rather than reason. I’m not talking about either position but about the manner of argument--and the lack of analysis. Reason, by contrast, is pretty to see and to listen to.

“That carries over especially to politics. Ever since the Vietnam War, I’ve seen no possibility of reasonable politics here--or of men of reason holding high public office in the U.S. The mayor of my town in France may be a fascist klutz, but he’s a bright fascist klutz, and the brighter our politicians are, the better the chance they’ll come up with reasonable solutions. I haven’t seen that here since the escalation of the Vietnam War.”

He doesn’t express these views often because they tend to reinforce a misconception about his reasons for leaving.

“I know that a lot of people,” he said, “felt that if I could go off to a foreign land and be happy, it was a rejection of their values. I felt some hostility over this for a while, but not any longer.

“I was never rejecting their values. I’m profoundly American. But the American values I admire most aren’t nearly as much in evidence as they were when I was growing up. Values like basic honesty and the feeling that work can be its own reward instead of measuring its value solely by money. In France, I am not gainfully employed, but I work very hard.”

So in addition to his friends--which are a given--what does he miss the most about the United States?

“The openness of the American mind,” he said without hesitation. “When a project comes up, Americans think of all the reasons it will work, but the French think of all the reasons it won’t work. Both extremities are wrong, but the American view is a lot easier to live with.”

To which Francoise nodded a vigorous assent and then added a French footnote. “But in France,” she said, “we have the feeling always of a stable society, more structured and traditional. And old people are seen as useful there.”

Howard spends much of his time in France alone, tilling his soil, making his pottery, rebuilding his house. He reads a lot, and he thinks a lot. I had time to ponder that during my six-week drive alone across the United States last summer, and for the first time I had a real sense of the joy and satisfaction of that kind of internal life.

I’m still periodically irritated with him for leaving, especially when I need to turn the light of his intellect and the warmth of his compassion on one of my own problems--and he isn’t there to consult. That will probably never change. But I understand better than I did why he put down so far away, and--although I know I’m graven to this country--maybe I envy him a little, too.