Never a dull moment!

Charles-Henry was not always an easy person to work with, even though I enjoyed the job itself. It took him forever to sign off on a final version of a translated artice. The magazine published both wonky articles about U.S. foreign policy toward African countries and "Americana" articles from publications like the Smithsonian Magazine, National Geographic, the Atlantic Monthly, and others that highlighted the careers and successes of African Americans in the U.S. Because a good part of his job was finding good translators, he was on the phone all the time. After hiring me, he hired another member of the editorial staff who was (and still is) a French woman who had been living first in Canada and then in the U.S. since about 1967. She and I are still in touch.

We worked in a room big enough to hold three desks and with no separations between them. With all the loud talking and laughing Charles-Henry did on his daily phone calls to translators, some of whom were friends of his from the days before he was hired by USIA. He had worked as a free-lance translator in Washington for 10 years before being hired by USIA. He was always late, and so was the French edition of the magazine. It was part of my job to work with the English-language staff to find a way to keep him on track and on time, but that wasn't easy. It was hard to pull an article he was editing out of his hands and tell him "now it's ready for publication" if he didn't agree, and he hardly ever did. The magazine kept falling farther and farther behind. It was also hard for us two assistant editors to focus on our own work in that tumultuous environment. Charles-Henry didn't seem to care if the magazine was late, only that it was, in his eyes, perfect. I used to say of him that the placement of one comma in a multi-page translation was as important to him as the essence of the text.

One of the first questions Charles-Henry asked me when I started working with him was where the English-language Académie met and how it worked. How often did it publish new editions of its dictionary? Of course, he was comparing the anglophone world to the francophone world centered on Paris and to the Académie Française. I told him there was no such institution as the Académie Anglaise. Then how do you know which American terms and expressions are correct and which ones are incorrect? We just know, I told him. We work together and come up with the best vocabulary and expressions we can. We know the grammar of the language. We have plenty of dictionaries and encyclopedias, even though they are not published by the government. He looked skeptical, but with a twinkle in his eye. He was just teasing, I guess. I'm not sure, though.

He was also very stubborn and opinionated, especially when it came to language. One day, he was editing an American article in which the author had described a small town as a hamlet. He asked me why the town was described as a hamlet and not a village. I said I wasn't sure. In the U.S. we don't really refer to small towns and settlements as "villages," I said. That term is too precise and reserved for use about small towns in Europe and Africa, whereas the term "hamlet" is figurative. A village is smaller than a small town, but a hamlet can be either a tiny town or a town that's a little bigger but basically rural and maybe remote. And on and on. We must have talked about it for half an hour. I guess that was good for my French. He maintained that there must be a difference between village and hamlet because they were two different words.

In the end, I realized that in French there are the same two words, village of course, but also hameau, which means hamlet. Walt and I live in a hameau. So I asked Charles-Henry what the difference was between un village and un hameau in French. "Oh, there is no difference," he said. We two assistant editors burst out laughing. What a waste of time! Never a dull moment! That, by the way, was one of Charles-Henry's favorite sayings in English, and he didn't seem to think it could be translated into French. The best I can do is « on de s'ennuie jamais quand Charles-Henry est là. »

Charles-Henry was a purist when it came to language. He was also a purist when it came to food and cooking. For years he scolded me because I put carrots in my blanquette de veau and actually served the carrots with the veal and the cream sauce. How can you call it a blanquette if you put orange carrots in it? Never mind that many French cooks put carrots in their blanquette and eat them alongside the veal, the rice, and the white sauce. He didn't.

On another occasion, in 2008, he and I had lunch at a café near Notre Dame called Le Louis-Philippe. He ordered a blanquette. When the waiter brought it to the table, we found out that it wasn't served just with white rice, but with a mixture of white rice and (black) wild rice. He was outraged. He got so hot under the collar — apoplectic actually — that he developed a nosebleed. He stood up, threw some money on the table to pay for his lunch, and left to restaurant to sit on a sidewalk bench outdoors, waiting for me to finish eating my bœuf bourguignon. Looking back through my photos, I see that not only did the blanquette include white and black rice. I also see at least one piece of carrot in there!