Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture (11 page)

On 20 March 1907 the Whartons and James, with Cook at the wheel, set off from Paris in the Vehicle of Passion. This was James's generic sobriquet for the Wharton motor; individual engines had their particular nicknames, such as “the Chariot of Fire,” “Alfred de Musset,” “George” (after Sand), and “Hortense” (after the erotic novelist Hortense Allart). The journey must have had an extra edge of shading for James, because exactly a quarter of a century earlier, in 1882, he had himself made
A Little Tour in France,
also published in periodical then hard-bound form. Many of the places he visited then he was to revisit with the Whartons, especially on the southern section: Angoûleme, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Carcassonne, Nîmes, Avignon, Bourg-en-Bresse, and Dijon. Leon Edel characterizes his Tour as “neat, well-placed, inexpensive”; now he was involved in the whirl and luxury of the Whartons'. His had been a typically nineteenth-century journey: by train and horse to squalid inn. Now the Vehicle of Passion sped them to a hotel which would be rejected if it failed to reach Edith's high expectations. Sometimes a whole town was judged unfit for Whar-tonian overnighting. Sometimes a whole region: in central France, she notes, “one is often doomed to pine” for “digestible food and clean beds.” James, with more tolerance, or resignation, had previously identified “that familiar and intermittent hospitality which a few weeks spent in the French provinces teaches you to regard as the highest attainable form of accommodation.”

Motoring now permitted the fastidious to indulge a certain topographical snobbery. There was no need to approach a town through the “mean purlieus” of the railway station, the “area of ugliness and desolation created by the railway itself”; your first impression of a place could once again—as for your posting grandparents—be “romantic or stately.” This cocooning effect extended beyond the mere avoidance of marshalling yards: speed, the motor, chosen
compagnons de voyage,
and avant-courier'd servants all minimized the kind of chance human contact thrown up by earlier, slower, solitary travelling. Wharton's book chronicles peasant faces glimpsed in doorways and the flushed servant at the auberge, but it's significant that the two largest human presences in her text were already long dead: George Sand and Madame de Sévigné.

James's
Little Tour
is inclined to make us nostalgic for that era of leisurely, meticulous yet also somewhat lazy travel, our guide a highly sophisticated man taking his sensibility, like some great dog, for a walk.
A Motor-Flight
is the work of a genuine modern tourist. Someone with just as much art and sensibility as James, but closer to us; someone facing—and choosing to face—a hastier flurry of sense impressions, a quicker mental satiety; someone also whose presence and activities, unlike those of the solitary ruin-bibber, are going to change the land under inspection. “The demands of motoring are introducing modern plumbing and Maple furniture into the uttermost parts of France,” Wharton acknowledges. Those romantic old inns, where it is “charming to breakfast, if precarious to sleep,” are already doomed.

Although Wharton offers herself as “the trivial motorist, the mere snarer of haphazard impressions,” we should not be misled by this self-presentation as an aesthetic amateur. The French cathedrals were for her vivid embodiments of architectural principles long understood and digested, rather than (as for the true trivial motorist) a puzzle of intersecting elements for which the guidebook must supply the crossword solution. When she discusses the “hale durability” of the Romanesque, laments that France “has never wholly understood the use of brick,” drops an aside about what English Gothic lost by committing itself to the square east end; when she disentangles the Crusader church at Neuvy-Saint Sépulcre, luxuriates in the façade of Reims cathedral, wittily castigates the “hairless pink monster” at Albi; when she decries the work of Viollet-le-Duc without being so doctrinaire as to ignore his occasional coups; when she praises the benign neglect of buildings, which allows them to show their “scars and hues of age” rather than appearing as spruce old ladies; when she invokes the aesthetic centrality of the Italian hill-town whose architecture embellishes and completes the contours of the landscape—on such occasions we attend to an authority, not to a mere motorist.

At the same time—and this is part of what makes her close to us—she is not content to treat the successive edifices before her like some version of wine-tasting, an occasion for fine minds with fine purses to display their fine discriminations. What does it, can it, should it mean for a person of a later, swifter civilization to examine these remnants of an earlier, slower yet surer civilization? Can we view them imaginatively, or only solipsistically? What sort of pleasure, what rousing to reverence can we legitimately expect? She addresses such questions at the start of the book, at Amiens, and returns to them near its close, at Reims. She was skilled at focusing them because—like James—she was aware of coming from “a land which has undertaken to get on without a past,” whose citizen-tourists at large in Europe were inclined to treat the architectural expression of vast historical forces as a mere aesthetic diversion. This approach is even commoner nowadays, and we should all be rebuked and enlightened by Wharton's example.

She is, indeed, that rare and oxymoronic thing, the wise tourist; one eager to give an account of “what he sees,
and feels beneath the thing seen”
(the italics, as well as the masculine pronoun, are hers). She has great powers of mental comparison: leaving Beauvais, she finds that she has not really quitted it because she is still—and her phrase is scentedly Jamesian—“imprisoned in that tremendous memory.” She treasures buildings that carry the imagination back in a direct flight, to a time when “piety still walked with art.” Tourism for her is thus not passive but constructive, re-creative.

There is a completeness as well as a wisdom to her: she moves easily between landscape, architecture, and humanity, treating them as overlapping rather than self-contained areas of study; she can do that hardest of art-critical jobs, which is to make tapestries sound interesting; and just when you think she might be coasting she will be startlingly evocative. The carved mermaids on the choir-stalls of Saint Savin leap out at us as “creatures of bale and beauty, who seem to have brought from across the Alps their pagan eyes and sidelong Lombard smile”; the Pyrenees, when viewed from the taming distance of the terrace at Pau, are “subjected to a kind of indignity of inspection, like caged carnivora in a zoo.”

But it would be a mistake to represent her either as an automatic praiser—she is robustly dismissive of Toulouse and the vulgarity of Lourdes, of false decoration and meretricious bedizening—or as a mere building-broker. Her landscapes are vivid, and peopled with a peasantry she attends to carefully, if lyrically. When she writes of Pyrenean hill-country men “so disciplined by industry, yet so romantically free,” or of the French provincial face provoking “the same kind of interest as a work of art,” she is not just another rich urban foreigner charmed by local colour. What she finds in these glimpsed physiognomies is what she also seeks and celebrates in old buildings: something that carries the imagination back in a direct flight. She is aware that the motorist who arrives in the uttermost parts of France with an expectation of modern plumbing and Maple furniture is also finally a menace to the “independence and simplicity of living,” the “thriftily compact traditional life” which has over centuries formed and defined the landscape's inhabitants. What she celebrates about France on the human side is its civic order and elegance, the amenity of manners, the vivacity, good temper, and intelligent enjoyment of life. These terms are always comparative. Today the motorist will find the approaches to French towns no more “romantic or stately” by road than they are by rail; and just as there is a commercial clutter of Mr. Bricolage and his confrères disfiguring the outskirts, so there is more of an overlay to the perceptible character of the people. We can no longer see back as clearly as she could.

Wharton and James agreed about much, but not everything, of what they visited together. Each had an aesthetic in which Italy was the touchstone; they liked their old buildings old, and were suspicious of restoration. She is more wholehearted in admiring the Graeco-Roman remains of Provence. He had judged the Pont du Gard finally “a little stupid” (an adjective also applied to the Tour Magne at Nîmes, and to the round towers of Chambord), and was lordly in his diminishment of Roman architecture: “The Roman rigidity was apt to overshoot the mark, and I suppose a race which could do nothing small is as defective as a race that can do nothing great.” She thought Avignon engagingly Italianate; he had loathed it, finding the Palais des Papes “as intricate as it is vast, and as desolate as it is dirty.” For once he would happily applaud the arrival of the restorers, “for they cannot well make it less interesting than it is at present.” But their most instructive disagreement came at Bourg-en-Bresse, whose principal attraction was and is the church at Brou.

James's account begins with a sentimental evocation of Matthew Arnold's then-celebrated poem about Brou. He twits and pardons Arnold for his geographical inexactitude, sketches the flamboyant piety that lay behind the construction of the church, dabbles with his guidebook, describes the famous tombs, gives them little butter-dabs of approval—admirable, admirable, charming, exquisite, splendid, ingenious, elaborate, precious—before concluding that, though fine, the monuments are not quite so fine as their rivals in Verona. He makes a slightly arch mother-in-law joke, marvels that the whole edifice wasn't destroyed in the Revolution, and segues effortlessly into a rhapsodic description—more fun for us, and, one senses, for him too—of the simple yet epicurean lunch of boiled eggs, bread, and local butter that he subsequently consumed in Bourg.

Wharton's account makes no reference to James's text of 1882, any more than it does to his living presence beside her in the Panhard twenty-five years later. It must have been intimidating to address an unchanged subject already discussed by an accompanying Master. No doubt she had
read A Little Tour;
though when last, we do not know. How could there not be, at some level, an element of competitiveness in her description? She too begins with a jocund treatment of Arnold's poem, wondering if he could ever have seen the church at Brou, so inaccurately does he locate it. As for the edifice itself: for a start, it disobeys Wharton's precept that old buildings should look old—this one is “scrubbed, scraped and soaped as if its renovation were a feat daily performed by the ‘seven maids with seven mops’ on whose purifying powers the walrus so ingeniously speculated.” Externally, it is “a celluloid toy.” Internally, it reminds her of the Albert Memorial, all pious expense and little taste. It is “pastrycook's art.” Alongside this informal mockery resides her precise architectural sense. Where James murmurs suavely that Margaret of Austria's shrine is “the last extravagance of a Gothic which had gone so far that nothing was left it but to return upon itself,” Wharton makes the same point in a more vernacular style (“the last boiling-over of the heterogeneous Gothic pot”), emphasizes her extra knowledge (“One sees the same result in almost all the monuments of the period, especially where the Spanish-Netherlands influence has added a last touch of profusion”), and seals it with a memorable metaphor: “Expiring Gothic changed its outline as often as the dying dolphin is supposed to change his colours—every ornament suggests a convulsion in stone.” And whereas James moves lightly on to lunch, Wharton moves seriously on to a comparison with the mourning sculptures on the tomb of Jean-sans-Peur in Dijon, which she values highly (and which James had found of “limited interest”). A leery mind might hazard that despite her true reverence for James, she is out to pull architectural rank; while also ensuring that her freshness of tone impresses him—and us—with her modernity.

James occasionally made fond mock of Edith Wharton's travel-fever, portraying her as a bossy bird of prey swooping down on the more sedentary and bearing them off “on india-rubber wings.” But they were clearly excellent and devoted
compagnons de voyage.
James reported that on the motor-flight he had “almost the time of my life,” and looking back he gave out gratified exhalations. “Ah, the lovely rivers and the inveterately glorious grub.” “Ah, the good food and good manners and good looks everywhere!” For her part, Edith Wharton declared that “Never was there a more admirable travelling companion, more ready to enjoy and unready to find fault—never bored, never disappointed, and never
(need
I say?) missing any of the little fine touches of sensation that enrich the moments of the really good traveller.” No sooner had they got back to Paris than she whisked him away for another brief flight. And in April 1908 James responded enthusiastically to the idea of meeting in Amiens with the suggestion of “a little
tournée,
under motor-goggles, in Normandy.” He had a specific and powerful destination in mind: “& oh, will you take me to Croisset, by Rouen, as a pendant to Nohant?” It would indeed have been a fitting pendant—first Sand's house, then the vestiges of Flaubert's—but the plan fell victim to the complications of Wharton's emotional life.

One final motor trip should, however, be mentioned. Shortly after the publication of
A Motor-Flight Through France
the two novelists were driving from Rye to Windsor when James suggested making a detour to Box Hill to visit the aged George Meredith. Wharton was at first unwilling, as she judged herself unlikely to shine in such impromptu circumstances; then she agreed to the route-change but insisted upon staying in the car at Box Hill. Determinedly, James overcame her objections and took her with him into the house. Meredith, terminally ill, deeply deaf, and “stat-uesquely enthroned in a Bath chair,” had great difficulty cracking the identity of this unknown woman who had turned up unexpectedly with Henry James. It was, she later recalled, “a laborious busi ness, and agonizing to me, as the room rang again and again with my unintelligible name.” Eventually, Meredith twigged; whereupon he picked up the book lying open at his elbow, and held it out with a smile. “I read the title, and the blood rushed over me like fire. It was my own
Motor-Flight Through France,
then lately published; and he had not known I was to be brought to see him, and he had actually been reading my book when I came in!”