We haven’t transcended the creature world to the point that we can avoid being painfully homesick for our dogs. Unlike the scrawny street dogs of Mexico, French dogs are offered up for petting once it is determined you are worthy. This is a happy consolation and when as a houseguest I said “couche-toi, mon petit???? to an immense Alsatian guard dog he flopped to the floor. Victory in our time! He understood me.
Now it is November 1 and in the middle of the night a violent wind arrived with gusts, I later learned, of seventy m.p.h. The shutters slammed like rifle shots and I was naked on the balcony of the Nord Pinus in Arles trying to figure out how to secure them when a scenario hit me. What if an errant gust caught these huge shutters and locked me out? Someone might respond to my bellows and call the police and I’d be caught in a spotlight. Luckily this is France and it’s far less likely that machine guns would be raised toward my round brown figure. Just pondering all this made me think of my diet, not that I wanted to be all that attractive to the police. Metaphoric food leaps came to mind. This chilly wind is the first mistral of the autumn season. Below me in Arles’s Place du Forum is the statue of Gabriel Mistral, a poet of note. His frozen glance is aimed vaguely at the Rue des Arenes, the location of La Charcuterie, a bouchon (bistro) Lyonnais, a rare place indeed down in Provence, the home of France’s healthiest cuisine, the fish and fresh vegetables that might be making me less substantial. Surely the cool wind might call out for the sliced beef snout and sausages I had yesterday when the wind was warm but my artistic curiosity got the best of me. We’re always praying for good health, a mental activity that can’t overcome the biological imperative a bear feels when cool weather hits and he prefers to eat a fawn rather than berries.
Of course in a foreign country it is as easy to be brought up short by melancholy as it is at home. The question “What am I doing here?” is pretty complicated. I admit that the path between Michigan and Arles began abruptly. Back home the media, the Industry of Alarm, was moment by moment vomiting forth its distortions, and from Washington our blimpy suits were addressing the American People with a totally dishonest air of familiarity, then fleeing anthrax germs in the reverse of any conceivable profile in courage under the misassumption that they were more vital to our well-being than postal workers. Our country drifted in a state of free-floating anxiety with the single bonus that we no longer heard of Gary Condit.
What better to do than to make a trip to France and fight terrorism with red wine and garlic? In the arena of such violence a novelist and poet with his fragile armament of language reminds one of the kitsch nineteenth-century painting called Orphan in a Storm. Hundreds of writers were quite willing to say a piece but the New York firemen were invariably more to the point. Current events were never the literary writer’s metier. It takes awhile to forge in the smithy of your soul the uncreated conscious of your race, as Joyce would have it. I admit it’s pleasant when you can best serve your country by shutting up and going to France and wandering around Provence and Bourgogne, empty of tourists, eating and drinking and thinking not very deep thoughts.
Perhaps there’s a bit of xenophobia in the hearts of all of us. Years ago two men I knew made their first trip to New York City, got separated at Grand Central Station, and never found each other again until returning home. This is funny and stupid enough to be disarming. When I’m alone in a foreign country and get lost in a city or the woods I admit I mostly enjoy the sensation. I also enjoy listening to a language I don’t understand because you’re thrown back on the fragility of the human race and comprehend again that languages are only sequences of agreed-upon sounds.
In the seventies on my first trip to France I was coming back from a journalistic trip to Russia. I was dead broke but managed to wangle some money out of the Paris office of a magazine I occasionally wrote for in the States. Some money is a palliative when you’re unsure if the meal you’re eating is going to cost you a few bucks or a fortune despite your arduous figuring of the menu prices. You’ve heard a lot of fearful gossip about swindles and all sorts of thievery. You’re actually quite sick from a Russian parasite but existing quite well on red wine, Lomotil, and the energy of your curiosity. In a bistro a lovely woman is wearing a transparent blouse and her nipples are perky. This must be a fine country, you think. The street running past the bistro was a hangout of two of your heroes, Apollinaire and Henry Miller. You’re thirty years old and regret again that all the money you had saved for a trip to France at age eighteen was spent on an unsuccessful eye operation.
For me in the early seventies the cityscape of Paris was totally literary. It seems a little daffy now but at the time the idea that I was walking in the same places as Rilke and Rimbaud had walked was akin to a priest or nun visiting the Mount of Olives or Bethlehem.
Save for bread and wine everything I ate seemed new and exotic, and of course the bread and wine themselves were better than my sandwiches and graduate-student Gallo back home. I had eaten a little French food in Montreal at a lunch given our convention of poets by Pierre Trudeau where he quoted at length and by memory Valéry and Rilke in French and German, not the sort of thing Lyndon Johnson was doing at the time. I had also eaten twice in New York’s Brittany du Soir, a budget place favored by Francophile writers. I’m never quite sure how I became food obsessive though I can exclude early training. Ultimately food is only a part of the fabric and life. It is mistaken to try to extrapolate the precise content of a society from it as many writers do with France. After a ten-day binge and eating aioli (cod and vegetables with a pungent garlic mayonnaise) for lunch now I’m aiming for a bowl of soup this evening in Aries, my curiosity about food momentarily assuaged.
If you add another key element to understanding a country, such as television, the view expands though still falls well short of a whole picture. Transpose your thinking to the United States and imagine the deranged portrait of us by a foreigner limiting his study to what we eat and what we watch on television. Our cultural differences, however, are indicatory on television. In Arles I had watched parts of three nature documentaries out of Paris, shown during the day-time hours when children are watching, that have caught polar bears, black bears, and immense ocean turtles coupling with gusto. The turtles themselves are lovely creatures but the filming was transcendent, showing the lovers on the ocean bottom then rising up in embrace to the surface for air. Any toddlers or children watching such programs might presume that lovemaking is a normal activity, perhaps an attractive possibility in the future, just as it isn’t a criminal waste of time to make an effort to prepare a meal. Conversely, French television is in the Stone Age in their special effects for movies that are supposed to frighten you. At first I thought one of these programs to be a comedy effort but learned otherwise. The monster was unworthy of a cheapish Halloween costume in a Missouri suburb. This isn’t a grand failing and the ladies in the lotion commercials leave you sucking hot wind. Now we’re back in a world where lingerie is seen as a theater of intimacy. This is underclothing that offers absolutely no protection from the elements and is not imaginable in Kansas or Wyoming. And the price of the ticket to this theater of intimacy is expensive indeed. Through the shopwindow in Paris I deduce that a single article is worth a substantial meal and a very good wine.
Now, the night before I leave Aries, I phone down for a wake-up call and the desk girl quickly delivers some unwanted fresh fax paper to my room. I recall that when I was in Paris with a friend he called reception for two foam pillows what with having an allergy to feathers. He received a nice omelet and was pissed off in that he’s quite proud of his language abilities. I drink and eat everything in France and it’s never made me ill, which is more than I can say for Florida, but then I have to eat everything unless I specifically point at the menu. My memorized lines have offered remarkable new items in my culinary experience. It can’t be totally my fault. Years ago when we were in Paris together and Jack Nicholson had just come up from Nice he said that once you’ve played golf with a group of
Frenchmen you’re quite surprised that the country is so well run. Despite the caveats and our own technological genius France is still well ahead in the not so simple matter of how to live life from day to day.
Where do I actually belong, if anyplace, in this country that has meant so much to me as an escape, a balm, an immense reservoir of food, art, and literature? Years ago I contributed an essay to an issue of the Psychoanalytic Review that concentrated on the idea of “dislocation.” How, where, and why do we feel at home mentally if not physically? Where can we isolate our seemingly genetic geopiety?
Answers easily evade us as they become too obvious, too close to the nose to be noticed, just as we are blind to our own peculiarities, the idiosyncrasies that we have lived with so long that we are surprised when others think them odd. And perhaps the dominant advantage of travel for a writer is to pull oneself out of the nest in whose comfort the vision can become self-serving, truncated, the nest itself losing oxygen with time so that the life lived becomes drowsy.
It’s comic to look back and see how much you’ve missed by immediately making a habit out of your location. In Paris in the earlymorning hours I like to walk from my hotel near the Invalides to the Luxembourg Gardens, and if I have time after circling these gardens I continue on to the Jardin des Plantes and then back. I’ve done it so often that on some occasions the walk becomes somnambulistic and I’d be far better off taking out my map and trying something new. But now this morning, in foggy Burgundy, it occurred to me that my patterns reflect the country mouse needing some reminders of home. The gardens give me the flora I depend on for minimal balance, and I stick to the Hotel de Suede on Rue Vaneau partly because it’s near both my publisher’s office and his apartment but mostly because of all the birds I see in the garden of the Matignon. I’ve even sat in the bathtub with my monocular and a dampish French bird book in order not to miss anything out the window. I also admit that on my present walk I can’t resist reading all the menus behind their little glass windows, or following an attractive bottom for a block though French girls tend to walk much faster than I do. On the way back I stop for a glass of Brouilly at the Select, a café on Montparnasse, and might read a newspaper though in my later years my tolerance for them is short. At the Select the cat Micky greets me at my table as he does other regular patrons.
If I go back to my first trip in the seventies when I stayed with a friend at his mother’s intimidating Normandy chàteau, I had the reassurance of a forest, gardens, horses, birds, the Dreux River, part of which had been diverted to feed the moat around the château so that you could lean on a wall and look down at large pike circulating in the clear water.
Later on at St. Malo in Brittany where I attended a literary festival each spring for several years the main attraction was, simply enough, the Atlantic Ocean and studying the captured pools at low tide, watching elderly ladies pluck crustaceans from the rocks, the delicious oysters and fish available, the sound of the incoming tide through the window at night, the ocean herself an incredible weapon against the claustrophobia that has marred and often controlled my life. All my mortal valves open up fully when I walk the long beach at St. Malo.
With the Saumur area it is the presence of the Loire. I suspect river sounds have a genetic component for us. I heard that in ancient India the insane were often tied to trees beside rivers for this soothing aural embrace. There’s also this feeling that if you see people fishing you are in a good place, though hours pass without them catching anything out of the Loire.
Aries is easy. The Rhône which frequently smells sick-unto-death is a few blocks from my hotel, the Nord Pinus, which has rooms large enough to write in. The city with its overwhelming antiquity is containable so that you can walk its borders. The market is a polyglot splendor, less bourgeois than the markets of Avignon or Aixen-Provence. If your tummy is slow to recover and you’re worried about your ability to eat lunch, drink a midmorning pastis and visit the market in Aries, the vividness of which will crank up your primal appetites. As I’ve said so many times before, “Eat or die.” The Camargue is also close by and when you drive out for dinner at Chez Bob’s (great name) you see grand salt marshes and clouds of birds.
Marseilles is a scant hour’s drive or train ride from Arles and is nearly always an essential of my French visits partly because my translator and friend Brice Matthieussent lives there, and partly because it’s a city in a lovely location and lacks the sometimes irritating show-place aspects of Paris or Marseilles’s American counterpart, San Francisco. I was also drawn to the city by early French warnings of “Watch out for the Arabs and Corsicans,” which are akin to our own “Don’t go to Harlem, New Orleans, the south side of Chicago, or Detroit,” the ubiquitous “Don’t drink the water in Mexico, or Arizona for that matter, where alkaline water is sure to attack your entrails.” Warnings have goaded me onward all of my life.
It is in Marseilles that I not only walk fearlessly in my Lone Geezer costume, and splurge by staying in Le Petite Nice built on a rock peninsula jutting into the Mediterranean (the hotel is also the home of the splendid Passadat restaurant), but I travel over the granitic and cactus-covered mountain past Cassis to Bandol to Lulu Peyraud’s Domaine Tempier where I am fed a grand lunch and meet her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren and drink her splendid wines.
My last stop of several days is in western Burgundy in the Morvan area where I stay at the home of Gérard Oberlé, a writer and book dealer, and his business partner Gilles Brezol. They live in a manoir with 30,000 books and a dog named Eliot who capably guards the collection and guides me to his favorite places on the property, animal holes, an old shed containing a fox skeleton, a place along a fence line where he barks at neighboring Charolais cattle whether they are there or not. Over the years I have sadly watched him leap ahead of me in age as dogs do.
This area of the Morvan is densely forested in places and I never quite get used to the idea that Julius Caesar was one of the first prominent local residents because the land is so decidedly rural and half wild with a reassuring density of green that would make Ireland fans happy. There is a tendency to eat too much here at the Manoir de Pron, an amount, in fact, that can’t be walked off by an older man and an old dog. Once I stayed here a few days after a long French book tour and when I finally reached Paris I spent twenty-four hours drinking water without even touching bread. Yesterday morning a gentleman took me fly-fishing for trout on a small pond but there was a stiff, cool northern breeze and the brown trout glided by as elegant and as unreachable as my unattainable French sentences.
Way back whenever Lewis Thomas said in his profound The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher that at heart we humans wish to be useful. This feeling of usefulness can be difficult for a writer to manage in the places I live, whether the small farm in northern Michigan, the cabin near the Canadian border, the casita near the border of Arizona and Mexico. The love of literature is not widespread in these areas, a monstrous euphemism I don’t need a pat on the back all that often but once or twice a year it’s nice to reenter the larger human community as a stray dog, whether on occasional trips to Chicago, or to New York, and especially to France where the worth of my lifelong efforts are presumed to be useful if not admired.
A number of years ago during a state of exhaustion caused by my greed in working too hard in Hollywood (why blame them?) I was invited to give a lecture at a literary festival in Aix-en-Provence. I nearly didn’t have the sense to go and when I reached the destination I still had black butterflies whirling in my head, a French idiom for the blues, which seems more striking than our “lump in the throat.” In addition I had garden-variety jet lag so got up in the predawn dark at the Hôtel Le Pigonnet and walked downtown, passing through the cathedral where mass was being said. Outside I sat down in the baptistry steps in the first light and watched dozens of men and women set up their market stalls of fish, vegetables, meats, and cheeses. Meanwhile, I had seen a striking young woman enter the church, tripp
ing up the steps beside me. Naturally I followed and what with mass being over I thought she might light a candle and pray for a future boyfriend who might be a sodden American. Instead, she climbed up to the organ loft and began playing Bach at a volume that jellied my bone structure and overexamined mind. Back outside the music seemed to hum through the stone steps into my backside. People at some of the market stalls listened raptly. I admit that tears formed and continued throughout her rehearsal. I can’t say my spirit began to soar but it at least levitated so that on the walk back home even my peripheries of vision widened and the world at large regained lyric possibilities.
At lunch that day with twenty writers at the Café de Deux Garçons I was nearly asleep in my chair when a waiter asked me to sign the guest book. Everyone seemed to be watching as I leafed through the pages, not getting the point. I noted signatures like Balzac and Camus and the sweat of midwestern embarrassment popped out on my forehead. I signed without a flourish wishing to hide under the chicken thighs (with lemon and garlic) and drank a glass of wine in a single long gulp, staring at the ceiling and wondering about future messages from the French gods, a country where living well is the only revenge.