Postcard from France: Living Inside Your Own Stories

It can be a problem, as a writer, to know where work starts and play ends, or work ends and

play begins. This is never more so than on holiday when I feel I am living inside my own stories.

So, here I sit, in this café at the end of and ancient quayside – in use since this town was a Phoenician trader’s port in 600BC. Like the 17^th century Maison D’Estella where we stay the quayside plays in a recent novel :

… Now we’re on the quayside and I stumble on the uneven lava blocks that pave it and – quite naturally – he takes my arm. I can hear the jingling of boat tackle and the shout of seamen’s voices but these there are no boats drawn up on the quay just waiters and waitresses setting out cutlery and napkins in the smart pontoon cafés huddling here in the place where ships once docked, drawn up side by side, ready to unload. Madame Patrice said that, didn’t she?

‘You know Madame Patrice? You said you knew her,’ I say.

‘I think I probably do. I knew her husband Ettiene from another time. He was a great scholar. And I am acquainted with Madame Patrice. But I’ve not been here so long, this time...’ From my novel An Englishwoman in France.

And this week I walked around the corner fromthe Maison d’Estella  to a tall thinhouse on the Place de la Glacière – visiting the apartment of my writing friend Avril. This is in another ancient building which has cut into its roof the highest terrace in the town. Here from the same novel the time slips back to 300 AD and nine year old Tib is looking down over the town from the ramparts of the house of his father, the Roman governor of this part of Gaul.  

;…Tib: Good Fortune, 301 AD

A warm, salty breeze lifted the bright reddish hair of the boy, sometimes called Tib, who was sitting with his legs dangling from the flat roof of the house of his father, Helée, governor of this city which was now laid out below the boy like a map.

In front of him the neat road – square blocks of basalt – led straight down to the busy river harbour, widening halfway where it joined with both the straight road down from the barracks to his left and the narrower road to his right  that led down from the  graceful Temple of Venus. The clusters of houses on either side of the road were laid out in a grid, their black stone walls relieved by clumps of wild fig and bulging garden plots.

Tib raised his eyes and watched closely as the elegant ships hauled down their sails and resorted to the power of muscle and oar to manoeuvre their vessels into the teaming river port finally to squeeze into spaces alongside vessels already drawn up at the long harbour wall.

But however fast or elegant the ships were in reaching and tying up at Good Fortune, they had to wait their turn to be unloaded by the labourers and slaves working for the long-haired man – looking more like a pirate than a harbourmaster – who goaded them on with a combination of roars and threats which they answered in good measure. Even up here on the hill Tib could hear the deep, gravelly sound of their throaty curses.

Tib felt proud of the order and efficiency of hundreds of years of harbour routine that drove the port to such success. His father’s tax scrolls were witness to that. Now he watched the shouting workers on one part of the dock heaving ashore great jars containing fine goods – silverware, spices, pottery and wine imported into Gaul from lands across the Great Inner Sea. Then he leaned sideways to see slaves manhandling racks of  the equally tall earthenware jars now containing wine and grain, salt and oil , ready to take them in the other direction,  to the Imperial City of Rome…’ Also from my novel An Englishwoman in France

These days, of course the pink tiled roofs of 2000 years of town development obscure the grid and prevent a direct view of the quayside. But, further to the right within  the sweep of the River Hérault - whose wide estuary attracted the Phoenician traders to build the port – is the exquisite Art Deco façade of the early 20^th century Maison Laurens.

Avril Joy's image of the Chateau Laurens
 from her terrace....

Now then, this location on the river plays a part in my new - not yet published -  novel to be called The Search for Marie France. In the novel I have a fictional building used as the headquarters of  the occupying Germans. In the real history of this town the Chateau Laurens actually did fit this ambiguous role. 

‘… Alone at last, Marie France could glance around herself with open curiosity at this familiar yet not familiar place.  She thought of the day she saw the cloister opposite - now just a pathway to the orchard -  used for target practice.  She wrote in her notebook:   “Three soldiers, two with their jackets loosened and one in his shirtsleeves (as white as Auguste’s mother could wash them) cleared the cloister and   brought out a sweating, terrified man – a Gitan by his looks - and tied him to the medieval stone column which must in its time have absorbed the sound of a thousand plainsongs. The soldiers took black pistols from their leather belts, exchanging grins. Other soldiers strolled across from their trucks and motorbikes to view the fun. Auguste, fear in his own eyes, backed away into a corner of the opposite cloister.

Then the three soldiers began to play this strange game - a not-to- kill game - where the soldiers fired at the man with orders not to kill him. He jumped and jerked as the pistol shots splintered the old stone around him. The soldiers jeered as the poor man wet himself and held their noses and shouted ‘schmutzigen Zigeuner‘ when he shit himself. It was a relief when he was dragged off, eyes rolling but physically unharmed, out to a truck then onto the camp down the coast where we know now that gypsies, politicos and people like my own mother and father were interned  before being transported East. The cloister smelled differently then. The scent of blood and excrement was in the air.”  Marie France put down her pen and absently rubbed the swollen joints on her writing hand…’
From The Search for Marie France.

I’m now - fuelled by great company and wonderful imaginative food from Licked Spoon - working here on a new novel  at the Maison D’Estella.

More about that – actual work in progress! - before the end of this week.

Certainly, alongside bookish company, drinks on Avril’s high terrace have been an extra inspirational treat this time.

Wish you were here

love

Wendy

Sweet Suite Francaise Posthumous Triumph

Inside Cover: Irene's Manuscript

I would point out that in the Iconic reading group teased me that I read these books as a writer, not purely as a reader.  This is evident here, I think... I did protest to them that this was what I was: a writer!


Suite Francaise  - really a suite of two novels which might have grown been three -  was famously written by Irene Nemirovsky during the German occupation of France  before her removal in 1942 to Auschwitz and ultimate death. The rediscovery and  publication  of the work sixty five years later is a story in itself.

Irene - already a well known writer - embarked on the novel in the rural  village of Issy-l'Eveque where she and her husband and two small daughters lived, having fled occupied Paris.

I have just finished writing my latest novel - to be called The Art of Retreating - partly set in Occupied France and partly in the present day, so had read dozens of scholarly histories,  factual anecdotal memoirs and factual personal stories to get inside the particular experience of one of the six  main characters -  the aged writer Francine Costington.

I  kept Suite Francaise - at the far side of my table -  to read after I had finished writing my own novel.  This was because,  being fiction, this novel is essentially a secondary source; secondary sources are normally weak and can lead to thin storytelling and unconscious imitation..

Major novel Written During WW11

It turns out though that t Suite Francaise relates intensely to Irene's personal experience and could be seen to have memoir-ish insight, although -  as  I had to keep reminding myself as I read this triumph of a novel -  it was written living on top of the events it pictures. Also - very important for a modern reader - written with no fore-knowledge that the vicious tide of occupation of her country would recede and France would regain its sovereignty. She had no idea then that the Germans would not win the war.

The prose here is vigorous, detailed and full of energy. By page seven she has established the setting and the tensions and the place of pre-war Paris. She has reflected on the subtleties of the life and lifestyle of the different characters.

Material objects are important here. This involves lists: of what the mistress of writer Garbriel Corte  has to take  ... First she hid her jewellery ... over that she put some underwear, some washing things, two spare blouses, a little evening dress so she'd have something to wear when she arrived - she knew there would be delays on the road - a dressing gown and slippers , her make-up case and of course Gabriel's manuscripts. She tried in vain to close the suitcase...


(NB Gabriel's manuscripts lose the battle...)


And do read the  loading of Madame Pericand's car (Chapter 6 p 29 in my copy)  This is a masterpiece of listing to render great layers of meaning for the novel.

This is followed by this list '... groups of people appeared outside their houses - woman, old people and children, gesticulating to each other, trying at first calmly, then with increasing agitation sand a mad, dizzy excitement to get family and all the baggage into a Renault, a saloon, a sportscar...

This is a powerfully  French thick-textured novel  teaming with the people of Parisian  bourgeois society and their servants (often disrespectful) and their fellow travellers..

The languid, somewhat unpleasant character, writer Gabriel Corte, declares on page 16, 'A novel should be a street full of strangers, where no more than two or three people are known to us in depth.' But Irene Nemirovsky does not follow Gabriel's rubric; This novel sports a cast of dozens of people and by the time we have read the novel we feel we know many of these characters and share with them the annihilation of their bourgeois concerns. From the modern perspective it is poignant to overhear the discussion of the importance of keeping valuable carpet and furniture safe, of preserving the the inherited linen.

 By page 11 we are acquainted with all the characters, including Albert the ever reappearing cat and the aged grandfather of a family group M Pericand.who gets left behind and is later retrieved.
            'Nanny, my dear Nanny,' Madame Pericand groaned in a barely audible voice, 'We forgot ...'
           'What? What did we forget?'
           'We forgot my father-in-law,' said Madame Pericand, dissolving into tears.

So in the first book of the Suite Francaise - Storm in June - we have  people fleeing in refugee columns from the advancing Germans, stumbling along, attacked by low flying aeroplanes, meeting jobsworth guards at the crowded railway stations;  people who get lost, fade away, lose their precious possessions. The we witness many of them returning to an occupied Paris,. taking up their homes and their work where they can before the darkest side of the occupation begins to bite.

The second book here Dolce is an account of life in an occupied rural village - I imagine not unlike the village that was Irene Nemirovsky's refuge and where she began what would have been a greater, even more sprawling novel of France in World War 2, had she not been taken to Auschwitz.

What I loved about this book was:  the skillful, complex storytelling; the acute insight into the human motive which has relevance today; the wit and the lack of sentimentality; the energy and quirkiness of the characters and the fluency and energy of the prose rendered so well in this translation by Sandra Smith.

Highly recommended for readers and writers alike.