The global village is the set of points of encounter of these entities in constant Brownian movement across the contemporary globe, expected, as in conferences and symposia, or casual and unexpected, at work or on holiday. It is the question ‘What are you doing here?’ which has punctuated my life in Santiago de Chile, Seoul and Mysore. But this is only one kind of encounter in the global village. Impermanence, isolation, unforeseen contingency in rental car, bar and hotel room with CNN are its dimensions. Even the highly organized circuits of what might be called business or professional tourism – the academic symposia in beautiful places, the Villa Serbelloni on Lake Como, the Fondazione Cini in the waters of Venice, the luxury business get-togethers within reach of beach and golf – are not the real locus of the global village. It really takes shape in the local network of human communications which fits together indigenous families, peripatetics and foreigners, arrivals, projects and departures. In short, it operates primarily through global circuits of domestic hospitality. For that is the basic pattern of life of most married academics, as of other settled professionals. The men and women who come into our houses are not ‘family’ but they are as familiar as if they were, whether they happen to come from New Delhi or Florence or whether they do so in Helsinki or Manhattan. They are part of our small everyday world. Very likely we have heard about them, they about us, even when friends bring us together for the first time, which will generally not be the last. We have the same points of reference and share the same news and gossip. We may well arrive with them from somewhere else to establish a new, permanent or semi-permanent existence in a new environment, as happened to us in my early years in the New School in the 1980s. We live among them, they among us, as neighbours.
In my case it has been an extraordinarily enjoyable life, comfortable, varied by travels, increasingly accompanied by Marlene, combining work, discovery and holiday, novelty and old friendships. Only the knowledge that people who live in poverty, the constant presence of disaster and death can also laugh, or at least tell good jokes, gives me the courage to say: it has been a lot of fun. It has not been a professional life of dramatic action, hardship or (except in the mind) of danger and fear. Like others in the small favoured minority to which I belong, I am amazed at the ‘patent contradiction between one’s own life experience … and the facts of the twentieth century … the terrible events which humanity has lived through’.3 By the criteria of professional success, it has not been unsatisfactory. It has given me more private happiness than I ever expected.
Has it been the life I had in mind when I was young? No. It would be pointless, even stupid, to regret that it has turned out this way, but somewhere inside me there is a small ghost who whispers: ‘One should not be at ease in a world such as ours.’ As the man said when I read him in my youth: ‘The point is to change it.’
19
Marseillaise
I have gone to France almost every year since 1933, except during the Second World War. The country has been part of my life for almost seventy years, indeed for longer, because my mother had begun to teach her children French at home from the elder Dumas’s Les Trois Mousquetaires, an enormous stiff-bound volume which we never finished. She and her sisters had been sent as teenagers to perfect their French at a pensionnat in Belgium. I belong to the last European generation for which French was still the universal second language. Even after a long travelling life, I have probably gone to Paris more often than to any other foreign city: and for all of us Paris was and remained the core of our experience of France.
I had first encountered it physically during a brief stopover on the way from Berlin to England in the spring of 1933. I travelled with my uncle, who presumably still had some final arrangements to make in Berlin, and must have had some business in Paris, for that city was certainly a detour from the direct route to London. I assume it must have been film business, for his later activities in Paris were based on an extensive network in the French movie scene, no doubt derived from his days at Universal, reinforced by his acquaintance with the emigrant film technicians he had known in Berlin.
As boys from families such as mine expected to go to Paris sooner or later, I was excited, but not surprised. Indeed, excited not only by Paris but also by the prospect of passing Nazi frontier controls in the company of a young and well-dressed middle-class communist called, I think, Hirsch, also going to France for undisclosed reasons, with whom I struck up an acquaintance in the train corridor and who taught me my first phrase of colloquial French (‘merde alors’). My uncle had booked us into the Hotel Montpensier in the rue de Richelieu, between the Comédie Française and the Bibliothèque Nationale, of whose existence I was then unaware; a building which introduced me to the basic pattern of French lifts in the 1930s, apparently unchanged since the early days of the Third Republic. (On his later business trips to Paris my uncle stayed in somewhat less basic establishments – during his most sanguine era, the Georges Cinq.) That evening, and perhaps the next, he took me for a stroll along the Grands Boulevards, the long stretch of cafe-lined avenues from the République in the east to the Madeleine in the west, which in those days were still the main promenade of Paris, as they had been from the days of Haussmann, pointing out the whores, who were then called grues (cranes) and the red-light district around the boulevard Sébastopol, one of whose brothels is now being preserved as a historic monument from the ravages of property development. However, I did not enter any of them until some years later, when, in the course of a night on the town with a Hungarian communist, I lost my virginity in an establishment – I can no longer recall its address – with an orchestra of naked ladies, and in a bed surrounded on all sides by mirrors. The Hungarian, Gyorgy Adam, strongly urged me to visit Hungary, where the married middle-class ladies summering on Lake Balaton were, he assured me, only waiting for fellows like us. He was subsequently jailed in the days of the Stalinist purges, but remained a convinced Marxist. The only married lady with whom I ever tested his hypothesis on Lake Balaton, many years later, was my wife with whom I spent a short vacation there in the guest-house of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, a rather charming family-type establishment in which visitors kept their own bottle of wine from one meal to the next.
The next day, alone, I went to the nearby Louvre, then still flanked by the gigantic wedding-cake of the monument to Gambetta, which did not survive the holocaust of (mainly Republican) statuary during the German occupation and since the war. I was impressed by the size of the Venus de Milo and, more sincerely, by the Victory of Samothrace and doubtless stopped before the Mona Lisa. But she did not speak my language. Another picture did, Manet’s Olympia. Perhaps it was natural that a virgin boy of fifteen should be transfixed by the cool, adult gaze of that astonishing image of a naked woman, glorying in luxe and calme, and for the moment visibly uninterested in volupté. And yet, what made my first encounter with this masterpiece so unforgettable was not the sensuality – after all, the Louvre is full of sexy nudes – but the sense that this wonderful painter was not interested in the incidental emotion but in ‘the truth’; in the stumbling words of a later generation of adolescents in ‘telling it like it is’. The Olympia is what I remember from my first visit to Paris. If I needed converting to France, Manet was the right missionary.