Francine du Plessix Gray, Searching Novelist and Journalist, Is Dead at 88

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/14/books/francine-du-plessix-gray-dead.html

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Francine du Plessix Gray, a French-American writer who, in her novels and journalism, explored the complexities of cultural identity, the obstacles confronting women seeking their place in the world and her own privileged but anguished early life, died on Sunday in Manhattan. She was 88.

Her son Thaddeus said the cause was complications of congestive heart failure.

Mrs. Gray, as she preferred to be called, was the daughter of a French father and a Russian mother and had arrived in New York at the age of 10 speaking no English. Her father, Bertrand Jochaud du Plessix, was a down-at-heels aristocrat in the French diplomatic service who, flying from Casablanca to France to join the Free French forces, died when his airplane was shot down over Gibraltar.

Her mother, Tatiana Yakovleva, was a Russian whose family fled to Paris after the Bolshevik Revolution. There she became muse to the revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. After the death of her husband, she escaped France with her daughter and Alexander Liberman, the future editorial director of Condé Nast, whom she later married. For more than 20 years Ms. Yakovleva was a celebrated hat designer for Saks Fifth Avenue.

Mrs. Gray chronicled her privileged but emotionally deprived childhood, and her troubled relationship with her father, mother and stepfather, in “Them: A Memoir of Parents,” which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2006.

By that time she had become well known as a far-ranging reporter with a stylish pen, the author of searching studies of the Berrigan brothers, Ivan Illich and other left-wing Roman Catholic activists in “Divine Disobedience: Profiles in Catholic Radicalism” (1970), and of women’s status in the waning days of the Soviet Union in “Soviet Women: Walking the Tightrope” (1990).

Mrs. Gray established herself as a novelist in the mid-1970s with “Lovers and Tyrants,” the semi-autobiographical story of a young French-American woman trying to understand herself and create a meaningful life.

Critics were particularly captivated by the early sections of that book. Julian Moynahan, in a review for The New York Times, described her heroine’s trip to her grandparents’ native region in France as “crammed with unforgettably drawn characters, rich emotion and complex social portraiture,” peppered with insights that “perhaps only a cultural ‘amphibian’ like Mrs. du Plessix Gray would clearly see.”

Her preoccupation with earnest searchers, thirsting for meaning and an alternative to the frivolities of modern life, found expression, in opposing ways, in “World Without End” (1981), the story of three friends who tour Russia on an existential quest, and “October Blood” (1985), a merciless, keenly observed depiction of the fashion world.

She was equally unsparing in writing about her parents in “Them.”

“Like any proper biographer,” Mrs. Gray wrote in the introduction, “I strove for a compassionate severity, for that balance of ruthlessness and tenderness that were at the heart of my mother’s own character and that she might have been the first to respect.”

Francine du Plessix was born on Sept. 25, 1930, in Warsaw, where her father was the commercial attaché at the French Embassy. Domineering and contemptuous, he held his adoring daughter in thrall; she suffered from a bad stutter and desperately craved his approval.

Her mother was an equally forceful presence, with a basilisk gaze that “had the psychic impact of a can of Mace,” Mrs. Gray wrote in her memoir. Ms. Yakovleva was emotionally distant. After Francine’s father died, the mother left it to friends to tell her daughter, a year after the fact.

Before ascending to the top of Manhattan’s social pyramid, the family lived in genteel poverty. Francine won a scholarship to attend the Spence School. She enrolled at Bryn Mawr but after two years transferred to Barnard, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1952, writing her senior thesis on Kierkegaard’s view of the death of Christianity. For two summers she studied at the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where her mentor was the poet Charles Olson.

After writing radio reports on the overnight shift at United Press for two years, Mrs. Gray moved to Paris to report on fashion for the French magazine Réalités, an experience that led to a nervous breakdown.

She returned to the United States and in 1957 married the painter Cleve Gray, with whom she lived in Warren, Conn., in Litchfield County. For several years she applied herself to the easel, painting landscapes and still lifes.

Mr. Gray died in 2004. In addition to her son Thaddeus, Mrs. Gray, who moved to Manhattan in 2014, is survived by another son, Luke, and five grandchildren.

She began writing art reviews for Art in America, where she was the book editor in the mid-1960s, and became a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Times and other publications.

But she struggled to find her footing as a fiction writer.

“My self-knowledge was belated by the fact that my parents, whom I adored, belonged to a world in which I was a total misfit — the international jet-set crowd, the high-fashion world,” she told the reference work Contemporary Authors in 1992. “It’s a milieu which confused me for years.”

Diffidently, she reworked a story she had written in college about her autocratic governess. It was published in The New Yorker in 1967 and later became the first chapter of “Lovers and Tyrants.”

A lengthy stay in Hawaii, where her husband was a visiting teacher, led to “Hawaii: The Sugar-Coated Fortress” (1972), a profile of a state she described as “an autistic Eden, a plastic paradise, in which the militarism and racism of the American empire are cloaked in a deceptive veil of sunshine and flowers.”

She later wrote biographies of the poet Louise Colet, the Marquis de Sade, Simone Weil and Madame de Staël. “The Queen’s Lover,” a historical novel about Marie Antoinette, was published in 2008.

In 1982, invited by The New York Times Book Review to describe her development as a writer, Mrs. Gray provided a severe self-assessment. “Few scribblers I know have struggled so hard for so little,” she wrote. “I am too many things I do not wish to be — a Jane of all trades shuttling back and forth between scant fiction, voluminous reporting, innumerable and unmemorable literary essays.”

She added, “I write out of a desire for revenge against reality, to destroy forever the stuttering powerless child I once was, to gain the love and attention that silenced child never had, to allay the dissatisfaction I still have with myself, to be something other than what I am.”