W. War
The visible memory of war lives on in France more than it does in Britain. I’m talking about the First World War. You see the memorials — the rifle-toting poilu, the angel, the marble obelisk — in every tiny village. The few dozen names inscribed there testify to the human price France paid in the First World War. Our local village still has a population of little more than a hundred yet its small memorial records over twenty names of young men who died in 1914-18. It’s impossible to imagine, as you look round at the chateau, the church, the few clustered houses, what such a death toll must have done to the community.
Memorials of the Second World War also linger more prevalently than across the Channel. On the Atlantic beaches the winter storms slowly slide Hitler’s vast blockhouses out to sea. Each year these monstrous concrete gun emplacements creep further down the dunes as the coast erodes. And here and there on remote country lanes you will come across a plaque or a headstone marking some frantic ambush of the Resistance movement, a list of the names fusillés par les Allemands and the date of the fatal encounter.
X. Xavier Rolland
Is the name of a young farmer who lives near our house. He works his farm alone, milking his 150 goats, ploughing and harvesting his few hectares of fields with corn, sunflowers and maize. He is possibly the hardest working person I have ever encountered. The demands of the unending routine of his daily round — despite the advantages of machinery — make the quality of his life closer to a nineteenth-century counterpart than a modern farmer. The precariousness of his existence is shaped and controlled by the exigencies of the Common Agricultural Policy of the EEC. He ploughs his fields to the very edge of the roads. He obliterates hedgerows and ancient ditches and cuts down trees and woods to gain a few extra square metres to increase his subsidy. He takes two days off a year to visit the agricultural fair in Paris. He is “close to the land” but his relationship with nature seems more like that of a tenant with a rapacious and demanding landlord. There seems no love of the countryside: the size of the field, its harvest and the compensation he receives from Brussels seem to blind him to the beauty of the place he lives and works. He’s a young man — the decades stretch ahead. I wonder what will become of him.
Y. Youth
Last year I went back to Nice and revisited the places I used to frequent as a nineteen-year-old. In 1971 I rented a room in an old lady’s flat in the rue Dante. In 2003 I stood at the door to the stairway and told myself that, thirty-two years ago, I had stood on this exact spot, this very spot. I had a beer in the cafe I used to visit every night. The decor was the same but the kindly patron had long since retired. I took a photograph of the small hotel I had stayed in on my first night. I walked around the quartier that I had known so well but could summon up no ghostly version of my younger self — I experienced no Proustian shiver. Yet my few months in Nice in 1971 were wholly formative for me. It was in Nice that I learned to speak French and where, for the first time, I lived alone and found myself. It comes as no surprise to me that France called me back.
Z. Zone
“Le Zone,” to give it its full name, is the name of a small beach bar on the Atlantic coast near Arcachon that I frequent from time to time. I love the ocean and the beach but I don’t like being in the sun: “Le Zone” provides the perfect solution. I sit in the shade of a wide umbrella with a cold beer and a book and watch the comings and goings of the beach, the breakers creaming in, the sound of surf in my ears.
In a dark and rainy London in the middle of the Second World War, the writer and critic Cyril Connolly drew a circle on a map of south-west France and indulged in a little wishful thinking, dreaming of peace. Wish number one: a yellow manor farm inside this magic circle…” A golden classical house, three storeys high with oeil de boeuf attic windows looking out over water… a terrace for winter, a great tree for summer and a lawn for games, a wooded hill behind and a river below …” and so on. Connolly was articulating a dream of pleasure and escape that we all indulge in from time to time. I understand its power and I have responded to its siren call. I realize how lucky I am to have this double life, this Anglo/Franco existence. And, though we live in a house with some of the components Connolly requires, I find that it’s on this Atlantic beach that I feel most at one with my adopted country.
I think this has something to do with the inherent democracy of a beach in summer. Beach clothing, the essential idleness and contentment of beach life, erase society’s divisions and stresses in the same way as a tan homogenizes complexions. In this beach bar we are all anonymous. Most of the time as I sit here and read my book (and make notes) the people around me are French adolescents. I might as well be invisible. I sit and listen to their conversations, I watch their manoeuvrings, their games and ploys. These urgent, bright, lithe girls and boys pay no attention to me, a middle-aged man with a beer, a book and a pen in hand. In this beach bar on the edge of the Atlantic on the west coast of France I feel I have been accepted. I am in my magic circle. My magic French circle. Anglo/Franco coalesce and commingle, become one.
I have found my zone.
2004
Literature
While I was at university (1971-5), studying English Literature, my taste was shaped not so much by the syllabus of the courses I was following or the academic criticism I read for my essays but by the books pages of the Sunday Times and the New Statesman. In the Sunday Times I went — unfailingly, immediately — to Cyril Connolly’s weekly review, and in the back half of the New Statesman I read everything that was on offer.
The seduction of Connolly’s hedonistic, unscholarly, romantic enthusiasms is easily explained. I have read, over the years, almost every word he has written and he figures frequently in these pages. The New Statesman had an altogether more acerbic, influential effect. In the early 1970s I waited each week for its arrival with a hungry expectation that has never been repeated with any other publication. The literary editors in those years were Claire Tomalin and Martin Amis and when you draw up a roster of its contributors at that time some of its allure can be explained: Julian Barnes, Craig Raine, Blake Morrison, James Fenton, Christopher Hitchens, Peter Conrad, Jeremy Treglown to name a few. The house style was mordant, knowing, witty and took no prisoners. It shaped my own reviewing practice and my early reviews, including one for the Statesman itself that I present here for sentiment’s sake, were an effort to achieve a similar cool, intellectual stringency. As a result I have to admit that, while I hope I was never ruthlessly or maliciously savage, I was often very harsh as a reviewer in my early days — something I take care to recall when I receive the odd critical spanking myself.