A Writer's World (53 page)

In most ways traditional French life seemed to me as robust as ever. The acolytes still swarmed around the celebrant at Chartres like white squires around a champion. The labourers at the Louvre lugged their masterpieces from room to room with the jolly disrespect of furniture removers. The vendeuses in the boutiques of St Honoré remained mistresses of that hardest of hard-selling techniques, the technique disinterested – ‘it is
entirely
up to you,’ they seemed to be saying, like their mothers before them, ‘if you think so sophisticated a fabric is
really
your style …’ I wandered through the castle at Grimaud in Provence one warm moonlit evening, with the soft lights of the village below the hill, and the Mediterranean a whispering hiss somewhere out of sight, and felt the old velvety magic no less pungent than of old, however frenzied the traffic on the highway far below, or thickened the scummy water on the beaches of St Tropez. The elderly man who helped me park my car in the garage of the Hôtel de la Poste, Corps, Isère, manoeuvred me between its pillars with all the old
scrupulous concern – a twitch of the fingers there, a roll of the right arm there, until like a conductor reaching the last chord of fulfilment he dropped both arms with a half-triumphant, half-despairing gesture that told me to turn my ignition off. ‘Well, we are still the same in some ways,’ said the old friend at Samoëns, where long ago I lived and wrote a book, ‘not much richer, still eating the same soup’ – just as he would have answered the same question, I do not doubt, in just the same wry inflexion, with just the same crinkling of the face, with an identical toss of the eau-de-vie in its little cut-glass tumbler, if it had been put to him at any time since, say, the turn of the last century.

But as I feared, the more I looked, the more differences I sensed. Even Samoëns, which was much the same on the surface, had deeply changed beneath, for the old alpine culture of Haute-Savoie is almost dead now, most of the mountain farms are weekend retreats for Genevans, and only rarely does one see that dear familiar of the valley roads, the lady knitting on the green grass while her cows, their bells tinkling in the sweet air, lollop and munch behind her. It was not the specifics of France that seemed different: it was far more the generalities, the atmosphere or the climate of life.

First of all France was much younger than it used to be. That lady with the knitting had been, almost by definition, a lady of a certain age, and most of the classic archetypes of France, from the Paris concierge to the Dordogne farmer, were elderly people. Part of the allure of the country was certainly this maturity, which made for the crankiness, the leatheriness, the stubbornness I have always relished there. It used to feel as though the French would never change because by the nature of mortality they would never have time.

Now France feels younger, physically I mean, than any other Western nation I know. Even the bombazine madame at the cash desk, when I looked at her more analytically, seemed half the age she used to be. Those indefatigable wine-breathed farmers are no longer to be seen urging great snorting horses across distant fields. Even the bank manager is likely to be not the foxy and ingratiating bourgeois you are hoping for, but a sleek executive in his early thirties, with a lacquered if plumpish wife, one assumes, and probably a degree in economics. As for the French motorist, who used to chug so endearingly along in a high-rumped corrugated baby Citroën, his cigarette bobbing up and down as he chatted to the companion slumped prickly and expressionless at his
side, now he almost invariably travels faster than sound in a futuristic orange blur.

This youngness of France disconcerted me. I had known it was coming, for the French birth rate of the 1940s and 1950s was very high, and I suppose I have unconsciously watched it happening over the years. Even so, when I sat down and considered it, and looked around me at the new faces of the country, I felt taken aback. It was like meeting an elderly aunt in Carnaby Street, shopping around for jeans. It gave me an odd chemical sensation, as though I had touched a new cell formation, artificially achieved in a laboratory.

And yes, with youth has come a new catholicity. There is no denying it. The supermarket, the shopping centre, television, the family car, the deep freezer, Kleenex, all the instruments of universal change have affected France as potently as they have affected all the rest of us. Even the look of the landscape has changed in the past five years or so. France is much better painted nowadays. Its northern villages have thrown off at last that blight of despair which had hung around them like a mist since Verdun and the Marne. Its southern coasts, once so serene and sage-scented, are as gaudily exploited as any Spanish costa. Even Paris, if mostly inviolate in the centre, proliferates on the fringe with high-rise blocks and concrete patios. Le Corbusier is dead, and as if awakening from a long bemusement French architecture is throwing off his drear influence, and building more delicately, more airily, with more sense of pleasure and less of social dogma (for if Corbusier originals at least had grandeur, Corbusier copies were mostly baleful frauds).

Everywhere, too, this new young France greets one in Franglais, that hybrid tongue of the advertising men and the trendy young which Academicians so despise, and which more than anything else, I think, disturbed my emotions in France this time. Franglais is inescapable – in bungalows or
hot
dogs
,
Play
Cottage
and
Garden
Centers
,
Choc
-
Bars
and
Poulets
Far
West
. People said I was stuffy when I grumbled, but one cannot live in Wales without knowing that language is truly the substance of nationhood, and that each compromise with a foreign idiom, each adaptation of a catchy foreign phrase, is a whittling away of the national identity. I loathed every symptom of Franglais, and thought I had reached its nadir when, strolling down the Rue de la Paix hardly a stone’s throw from Opéra, Louvre and Madeleine, I saw a house advertised in an estate agent’s window as being only twenty-five miles from ‘Paris–France’. 

Especially in Paris, France, I thought I sensed some subduing of the spirit. Young though the French may be, they do not seem greatly daring. By the standards of Chelsea or California they are rather sedate. I missed the legendary spark of Paris. Hardly anybody hooted at me, however abysmally I drove. The café bravos of the Left Bank were slumped in their textbooks. A strange sense of gentlemanly tolerance seemed to grip the capital – even the semblance of phlegm, as the rain slanted viciously across the Tuileries, and the coatless Parisiennes, bent double against the summer wind, doggedly pushed their way back to their offices after meagre slimmers’ lunches.

Somehow the city seemed
muffled
. Perhaps it is the zoning restrictions, which have kept from the heart of Paris that fairground ostentation so essential to the new London.
Le Monde
was extraordinarily balanced and restrained, set beside the same day’s
Times
, and I searched in vain for scrawled slogans of protest, or Sunday demonstrations. Even the policemen of Paris, dreadfully though they may behave in hidden dungeons of the Sûreté, look disconcertingly nice – their faces set in expressions of kindly repose, as they twiddle their batons benevolently beside the river, or lean obligingly from the waist to help frail old ladies. For one who, like me, habitually thinks of Paris policemen hunched in leather jackets in riot trucks at dawn, this benign new image comes as a deflationary blow. It gives Paris a feeling of premature fulfilment, as though after war and rebellion, bitterness and repression, it has settled into acceptance at last, and left the outrage, the glitter, and the creativity to others.

This is no more than instinct – a sort of metaphysical hearsay. I can only report a sensation of sterility which the country gave me, rather like the deadened feel of a landscape sprayed with insecticides. France was as kind to me as always, and seemed to me as ever one of the grand strongholds of civilization.

But it did not
fire
me. I felt no tingle of excitement there, and when I try to account for this lack of frisson, I put it down chiefly to a fading of
la
gloire
. This is not the fault of the French. It is simply that the style of French grandeur is out of date. How bloated and grandiose that black sarcophagus of Napoleon, around whose high vault the pigeons heedlessly flutter, and in whose anti-chambers the Marshals of France lie arrogantly in defeat! How tasteless the immensities of Versailles, corridor upon corridor, battle blurred into battle, the gilt, the ugly mirrors, the superfluity of opulence seeming nowadays less regal than nouveau-riche! The scale of that old France is wrong, and in an age of disposable merit the vast splendours of
the French heritage, the acres of pictures and the inexhaustible formality, seem like barren relics of discredited values, not merely pathetic but vulgar too.

Yet they were the true expression of France’s patriotism: and as that sense of glorious nationhood weakens, as weaken it must, so France becomes less French. I cannot have it all ways. When I returned to Boulogne at the end of my visit, I told myself that the hovercraft trip would not be so utter after all. Some of the strangeness had gone out of France, and the French were becoming, for better for worse, a little more like everyone else. ‘We are all citizens of the world nowadays,’ another friend had sententiously observed to me in Paris, hoping I suppose to comfort me, for he did not know my irredentist tendencies. Yet a curious anomaly revived my spirits: for when, with its habitual heavings, seethings and rumblings, the hovercraft opened its jaws to us on the other shore, and I drove into Dover for tea, good gracious, when I thought about it, what an incorrigibly separate country I found myself in then, how queer its habits, how insular its tastes, how droll its public customs, how complacent its leathery Saxon faces, happily sipping their tea-bag tea, and debating whether to embark upon a macaroon or a synthetic cream slice!

Not long before the First World War my mother, in the innocence of her girlhood, arrived at Leipzig to study at the Königliche Conservatorium der Musik, founded by Mendelssohn some seventy years before and by then one of the most celebrated music schools in the world. So happy were the three years she spent in this old Saxon city, and so affectionate her memories of it, that I grew up myself with a vague but indelible reverence for the place that coloured my childhood and was permanently to affect my attitudes.

What a place it always sounded! Leipzig’s university was among the most influential in Europe. Its trade fairs had thrived since the twelfth century. Schiller wrote his ‘Ode to Joy’ in Leipzig, Bach composed the ‘St Matthew Passion’, Wagner was born there, Goethe and Schumann were
students, Mahler conducted the civic theatre orchestra. And there were giants about in my mother’s time, too. Arthur Nikisch was
Kapellmeister
of the great Gewandhaus Orchestra, with its world-famous concert hall next door to her Conservatorium, and Robert Teichmüller was her professor of the piano. Hardly had Richard Strauss conducted the first performance of
Salome
along the road in Dresden than he came and conducted it in Leipzig (my mother, forbidden to go to an opera so unsuitable for maidenly minds, climbed out of a window and went anyway).

Oh, she had heard the chimes at midnight! There were glorious parks in Leipzig, she loved to remember, and delightful cafés in ancient squares, and there was music everywhere. Not least, there were the charming Saxon people. Some of the friends she made in Leipzig remained her friends to the end of her life, through two wars against the Germans that killed her only brother and fatally gassed her husband.

Before I came to Leipzig myself, for the first time in my life, reading around the subject made me perceive that my mother’s view of the city had been, in its girlish enthusiasm, partial. She had not made it clear to me that in her day, Leipzig – like the rest of the Second Reich – must have been in a ferment of militant pride, as even the charming Saxons progressed towards that clash of vainglories, the Great War. She never told me that the Reichsgericht, the Imperial Supreme Court of all Germany, sat in an immense palace a few hundred yards from her Conservatorium, or that the city was the headquarters of the 13th Army Corps. She never mentioned the War Monument in the market square, with the Emperor Wilhelm I in front of it and Germania triumphant on top.

Perhaps she herself did not realize that Leipzig was a showplace not just of German art, music, literature and scholarship, but of the burgeoning German materialism too. On Blücherplatz they were about to build the biggest railway terminal in Europe, if not in the world, twenty-six parallel tracks beneath a colossal shell of steel and glass. The tram network was a model of efficiency and modernity, and while my mother liked to recall long merry evenings with fellow students in picturesque outdoor eating places, she forgot to tell me about the three Automatik Restaurants, forerunners of Manhattan’s Automats, already operating in the city. She had come to Leipzig as a pilgrim to a purely artistic grail. German culture was all the rage among her kind of Britons then; when, half-way through her course, my proud grandfather went out to visit
her, he brought a brace of Monmouthshire pheasant as an oblation to Professor Teichmüller.

The great Hauptbahnhof is busier than ever nowadays. The
Heinrich
Heine
express from Prague to Paris was just leaving from Platform 16 when my train came in from Berlin, and almost the moment I stepped into Willy Brandt-Platz (né Blücherplatz) a spanking red tram-train swept in to take me to my hotel. Old Leipzig was shattered in the Second World War, and at first sight the genius of the contemporary city seemed to me distinctly more materialist than artistic.