The first, moving chronologically by publication, is Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier. I read this novel in my teens and I can still recall the impression it made on me then. It is a great novel of adolescence — you might say The Catcher in the Rye of contemporary French literature. It deals with the relationships between three school friends in provincial France at the end of the nineteenth century and the adventures that befall its eponymous hero, Meaulnes. The boys discover, in the depths of the French countryside, a lost domain, an old manor house, and at the same time are captivated by the girl who lives there, Yvonne. It’s hard to analyse the magic that this book works. It’s to do with secrecy, with the stirrings of adolescent sexuality but, more movingly, with the transience of our childhood pleasures and pains. Lurking behind the sunlit felicities of the simple story is the idea of death and its inevitability. All the more poignantly, the novel was written and published in 1913, a year before the outbreak of the First World War. Alain-Fournier, twenty-eight years old, was killed in the first month of the conflict and his body never recovered. The memento mori prescience of the novel’s atmosphere found an eerie parallel in the author’s own fate. And the undertone of melancholia that sits beside the precise and beautiful descriptions of a provincial adolescence is very French.
There’s a similar but more brazen confrontation with the human condition in my second choice: Albert Camus’s celebrated L’Etranger (The Outsider). Its status as a modern classic makes it difficult to imagine what it must have been like to read this short, laconic novel at the time of its publication in 1942 in the middle of the war, with France occupied by the invading Germans.
Camus’s hero, Mersault, is a truly modern man in his godlessness and his uncompromising, ironic understanding of the absurd nature of human existence. He is chillingly and brutally honest in his refusal to ameliorate his relentless non-conformity. Again the extra-literary resonances of the novel contribute to its exemplary nature. Camus was an Algerian, a citizen of France domiciled in North Africa. There is, in Mersault’s blunt diffidence, his absolute disinterestedness, a challenge to the culture of France and Europe. Here is a Frenchman with a different and very uncomfortable attitude — but who is as French as any Parisian waiter, for all that. These tensions foreshadow the Algerian war of the 1950s — effectively a French civil war — whose ramifications are still powerfully felt in the country half a century on.
My third novel was published in 1970 and won the Goncourt Prize of that year. Michel Tournier’s Le Roi des Aulnes (The Erl King) is an extraordinary account of the life of one Abel Tiffauges, whom we follow from ungainly schoolboy to humble garagiste to a prisoner of war of the Germans in East Prussia. There he is transformed into, literally, a form of ogre — a child stealer (the erlking of legend). The novel is a haunting mixture of beautifully observed reality (Tiffauges’s boarding school is enduringly horrible) and an expert reinvention of familiar myth. While it deals with the Second World War and the Nazi terror it is also an example of the kind of novel that only a French writer can achieve. Tournier is an immensely learned author with powerful opinions of true and controversial intellectual heft. And although he uses these ideas to buttress the cultural and literary leitmotifs of the novel they never overwhelm it. There is a tendency to denigrate French abstract thinking by contrasting it with Anglo-Saxon plain speaking. Each cultural predisposition has its extremes: impenetrable pretentious waffle on the one hand and pipe-and-slippers philistinism on the other. Tournier’s novel manages, however, to walk a line between intellectual profundity and narrative excitement with unusual poise and fascinating, stimulating flair. It is a very French novel.
Which is why I admire it so. I love France, I love its culture and its people. I was educated in one of its universities and I have lived in the country for ten years now. But like all countries and all peoples there are complexities of attitude, problems of understanding and comportment. All three of these novels explore aspects of the French “character” and in so doing elaborate, sometimes inadvertently, on themes peculiar to it. Generalizations about a country or its population are facile and effortlessly disproved (I’m speaking as a spendthrift Scotsman), but Camus said once, “situveuxêtre philosophe, écris un roman.” Novels, then, with their complexity, their scope, their built-in engagement with our common humanity, may be an ideal way of getting under a nation’s skin. So what do these three tell us about France? My feeling is that all three of them are darker than they may first appear and I think one can point to a strain of pessimism in French life and behaviour that these works echo. When Camus says, “everything that exalts life adds at the same time to its absurdity” he is not airing some convoluted intellectual trope but facing up to a pitiless fact about our existence that we would be better off acknowledging. Does this darkness contribute to that wilful stubbornness, that contrariness we non-French so often find in the French? Perhaps so — and tant mieux, I would add. The world seems palpably, rebarbatively absurd this week, hellbent on war. A dose of French contrariness is both provocative and salutary in the face of the new hegemony to whose tune we seem obliged to march, these days. A discordant note in a military band has never been so welcome.
2003
Evelyn Waugh (2) (Introduction to A Handful of Dust)
Madame Bovary rewritten by Noël Coward. Is this too harsh — or too glib — a redaction of A Handful of Dust, considered by many readers to be Evelyn Waugh’s finest novel? My one-sentence summary is not intended to be facetious but arose from a thought-experiment I imposed on myself. I tried to imagine what it must have been like to read the novel when it was first published (in 1934), to imagine what the experience must have been to read Waugh without the mighty baggage of the posthumous reputation. The problem is that we know too much about Evelyn Waugh — the biographies, the journals, the letters and the memoirs flesh him out in a manner rare amongst twentieth-century British writers. Virginia Woolf runs him close, Philip Larkin is coming up on the rails, but it is unusual to have so much information so comparatively soon on a writer who died only a generation ago. This weight of public judgement and analysis (and self-analysis) makes it hard to return to the novels as an innocent and unknowing reader: the bloated Catholic apologist, the misanthropic, check-suited Tory squire, stands at your shoulder and hindsight’s 20/20 vision provides answers that are both too swift and too pat. Hence the attempt at a thought-experiment and hence the reference to Noël Coward and Madame Bovary. And in this spirit it seems to me that above all else A Handful of Dust—this complex, fraught, tension-riven novel — is essentially, pre-eminently, two things: namely, it is a society novel (which is not the same as a novel about society) and a novel about adultery. I had forgotten how Tatlery the book is: how it was so plainly written for a small elite of London and County readers who would pick up the many smart references and the in-jokes. It is bright and brittle and knowing in its depiction of that milieu and written with an insider’s ease and familiarity. This tone of voice seems a little mannered and tiresome today (as indeed does Noël Coward’s) but it was designed at the time to play to a well-heeled and well-connected gallery.
It is also a brutally cold and clear-eyed look at a wife’s betrayal of a loving husband. Brenda Last, like Emma Bovary, is a provincial lady married to a stuffy and somewhat dull, prematurely aged man (“a bore,” as Cyril Connolly dubbed Tony Last). John Beaver is a metropolitan version of the clerk who takes his pleasure selfishly and lovelessly. From here the comparisons begin to grow a little strained. Flaubert may have said “Madame Bovary c’est moi” but Waugh would never have made that claim about Brenda. A Handful of Dust is a portrait of adultery seen from the side of the blameless cuckold — there can be few more ruthless and unredeeming literary portrayals of a woman than Waugh’s of Brenda Last. As the affair between Brenda and Beaver continues and the lies become more and more brazen (and therefore condemnable) one begins to question the veracity of the earlier portrayal of the Lasts’ marriage: how could Tony Last (a good man, though set in his ways) have ever married anyone as vapid, heartless and lacking in human warmth as the Brenda who takes up with Beaver? I would argue that the portrait of Brenda is inconsistent and dislocated (wife and adulteress seem different people) because it is not her character that particularly interests the author but the nature of what she has done to her marriage. The betrayal is everything and Waugh is unsparing in the way he wrings every final humiliation from it.