As an American schoolboy, crouched on a lavatory after dormitory lights out, Edmund White ‘read Rimbaud and Verlaine in en face translations, obsessively, secretively’. Later, he found Gitanes glamorous, noticed that Europeans misread his social standing in a gratifying way, and among the thousands of men with whom he had sex in New York recalled ‘a short, jolly French tourist (or was he a sailor from Marseille?)’, très bien monté, with whom he went to see an early Depardieu film: ‘The little Frenchman kept pushing my hand onto the enormous bulge in his trousers, and whispering incomprehensible dirty words into my ear.’

However, his reasons for settling in Paris in 1983 and remaining a resident there until 1998 were mercenary rather than sexual or cultural. After receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship worth $16,000, he discovered that he could avoid paying taxes on both sides of the Atlantic if he curbed his visits to America and made carefully timed forays to Venice, London or Zurich to avoid qualifying as a French taxpayer.

The sponsor of his Parisian existence was Marie-Claude de Brunhoff (1929–2008), a book reviewer who had married the younger of the father-and-son team that produced the Babar the Elephant books. It is MC, as White calls her, who enlivens many of the best scenes in this memoir. He writes with love of this flirtatious and worldly woman who piloted him across depths and shallows. His evocation of their friendship shows White at his most tender and astute; it makes MC live again and is delightful to read. There are vivid sketches of Paris street life, of the va et vient, poste et riposte of smart Parisians, with shrewd analyses of French manners – their emphasis on what is correct, their esteem for privacy, their resort to general principles, the institutional authority. Some readers, too, will be set aquiver by luscious descriptions of raunchy young men over whom he hovered and swooped in gyms and park bushes.

There are also heart-wrenching chapters in which White describes the failing health and anguished death of his young lover, Hubert Sorin. The Spartan nobility of his tributes to those killed by AIDS cannot be gainsaid. But Inside a Pearl has faults. White has suffered several small strokes, which seem to have marred the last third of the book. The beautifully crafted sentences become clumsier, his vocabulary no longer seems so apt, the paragraphs sometimes lapse into disjunctive jerks, as if they have been cut and pasted. There are crass moments, as when the sight of Julian Barnes with Pat Kavanagh provokes the thought that ‘great love marriages were always childless’. The stylish, mischievous name-dropping of the earlier chapters starts to coarsen.

A long section on London’s literary hubbub contains splendid sideswipes at the peevish dreariness of Germaine Greer and Tom Paulin (neither of whom, of course, is either a Londoner or even English). Readers will chortle at White’s artless admiration of Neil Bartlett (‘one of England’s finest writers’); Marina Warner (‘a chat-show staple in the seventies … very womanly … posh, a bit like the queen … I liked Marina more than she liked me’); Adam Mars-Jones (‘you could take him anywhere’, even when wearing ‘jeans with the whole seat torn out and no underwear’); Hermione Lee (‘like Dorothea in Middlemarch, though not so gullible’); Nigella Lawson, who corrected him when he said that Oscar Wilde was upper class (‘I’d forgotten that these nuances meant so much to Brits’); and Martin Amis (‘a good, concerned family man … like a wise, retiring grandfather, benign’).

White once took MC to a London literary party, at which she brandished her ivory cigarette holder and wore her usual billowing, multi-layered beige clothes above flaming red shoes, with gaudy necklaces which she had made from baubles found in flea markets. Her garb drew mockery from ‘English literary ladies’ wearing, so White claims, ‘tweeds and genuine pearls and hand-me-down cardigans’. Who can these women have been: spruce Jeanette Winterson, whom he mentions elsewhere, or pukka Maggie Gee? ‘Suddenly I hated the English,’ White continues, ‘for their dowdiness and smugness, their … horrible, deflating sense of humour’ and, he admits, for ‘their common sense’. There is nothing dowdy about Inside a Pearl; there is much kindliness, indomitable spirit, smiley self-regard, with smatterings of common sense and an abundance of what White calls ‘silly fun’.