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My replies are sent on postcards free of my own address: ‘Sorry, no’; ‘Don’t do conferences’; ‘Regret travelling elsewhere in the world’; and so on. The opening line of my reply to French invitations was not perfected for some years. Eventually it became: ‘Je regrette que je ne suis conférencier ni de témperament ni d’aptitude…’ I was rather pleased with this: if I pleaded mere incapacity it might be read as modesty, and if I pleaded temperamental unsuitability alone, conditions might be improved until it would be too difficult for me to refuse. This way I had rendered myself invulnerable to any comeback.
It was the sheer amateurishness of the invitation to Marrant that made me read it twice. Perhaps I don’t mean amateurish; more old-fashioned, as if it came from a vanished world. There was no municipal seal, no promise of five-star accommodation, no menu-list for S&M devotees of literary theory. The paper was unheaded, and though the signature looked original, the text above it had that faded, blurry, purply look of the Roneo machine or pre-war carbon paper. Some of the letters on the original typewriter (clearly an old manual, with sticky-up keys for a single-finger operator to peck at) were cracked. I noted all this; but what I most noted - what made me wonder briefly if I might for once have the temperament and the aptitude - was the sentence which stood by itself above the signature. The main text explained that the conference would take place in a certain small village in the Massif Central on a particular day in October. My presence would be welcome but a reply was not expected; I merely had to arrive by one of the three trains listed overleaf. Then came the statement of intent, opaque, whimsical, seductive: ‘The point of the conference consists in being met at the station: attendance is performance.’
I checked the letter again. No, I wasn’t being asked to give a paper, sit on a panel, fret about Whither the Novel. I wasn’t being wooed with an A-list of fellow conférenciers. I wasn’t being offered my fare, my hotel bill, let alone a fee. I frowned at the looping signature untranslated into type. There was something familiar about it, which I eventually located, as I did the insouciance and cheeky familiarity of the invitation, in a particular French literary tradition: Jarry, pataphysics, Queneau, Perec, the OULIPO group and so on. The official unofficials, the honoured rebels. Jean-Luc Cazes, yes, surely he was one of that gang. A bit of a surprise that he was still alive. What was that definition of pataphysics? ‘The science of imagining solutions.’ And the point of the conference consisted in being met at the station.
I didn’t have to reply: this, I think, was what enchanted me. I didn’t have to say whether I was going or not. So the letter was lost and rediscovered among that sticky scatter of bills and receipts, invitations and VAT forms, proofs, begging letters and PLR print-outs which habitually shrouds my desk. One afternoon I got out the appropriate yellow Michelin map: no. 76. There it was: Marrant-sur-Cère, thirty or forty kilometres short of Aurillac. The railway line from Clermont-Ferrand ran straight through the village, whose name, I noticed, wasn’t underlined in red. So no listing in the Michelin guide. I double-checked, in case my yellow map was out of date, but there was no entry, nor one in the Logis de France either. Where would they put me up? This wasn’t a part of the Cantal I was familiar with. I grazed the map for a few minutes, making it work like a pop-up book: steep hill, point de vue, hikers’ trail, maison forestière. I imagined chestnut groves, truffle-hounds, forest clearings where charcoal-makers had once practised. Small mahogany cows jigged on the slopes of extinct volcanoes to the music of local bagpipes. I imagined all this, because my actual memories of the Cantal reduced to two items: cheese and rain.
The English autumn succumbed to the first spiky prod of winter; fallen leaves were sugar-dusted by early frost. I flew to Clermont-Ferrand and stayed the night at the Albert-Elisabeth (sans restaurant). At the station the next morning, I did as I had been told: I booked a ticket to Vic-sur-Cère without mentioning to the clerk that my actual destination was Marrant. Certain trains - the three listed on my invitation - would stop at Marrant, but they would do so exceptionally, and by private arrangement with certain individuals connected with the railway. This touch of mystery pleased me: I felt a spy’s relish when the departures board showed no intermediate stop between Murat and Vic-sur-Cère. I had only hand-luggage anyway: the train would slow as if for a routine red light, would pause, squeak, exhale, and in that moment I would make a goblin disembarkation, shutting the door with a sly caress. If anyone saw me get off, they would assume I was an SNCF employee being done a favour by the driver.
I had been imagining some old-fashioned French train, the ferrovial equivalent of the Roneoed invitation, but I found myself in a smartly-liveried, four-carriage job with driver-controlled doors. I updated my descent at Marrant: I would rise from my seat as we left Murat, stand casually close to the door, wait for the conspiratorial humph of compressed air and be gone before the other passengers could miss me. I managed the first part of the manoeuvre without trouble; ostentatiously casual, I didn’t even look through the glass as the anticipated deceleration finally took hold. The train stopped, the doors opened and I got off. To my surprise I was hustled from behind by what logically I took to be other conférenciers - except that they were two broad-hipped, headscarfed women of uplands rubicundity whom you would expect to see behind a trestle table selling twelve eggs and a skinned rabbit rather than signing copies of their latest novel. My second surprise was to read the words VIC-SUR-CÈRE. Shit! I must have been dreaming - my station must be after Vic, not before. I scooted back between the humphing doors and pulled out my invitation. Shit again! I’d been right the first time. So much for private arrangements with certain individuals. The bloody driver had gone straight through Marrant. Obviously no taste for literature, that fellow. I was swearing, and yet in a remarkably good mood.
At Aurillac I hired a car and took the N126 back up the Cère valley. I passed through Vic, and began looking out for a D-road east to Marrant. The weather was closing in, a fact I noted with benign neutrality. Normally I’m intolerant of fuck-ups: I find that enough things go wrong at my desk without more going wrong in all the contingent aspects of the literary life. The inert microphone at a public reading; the self-erasing tape-recorder; the journalist whose questions fail to fit any of the answers you might be capable of fabricating in an entire lifetime. I once did an interview for French radio in a Paris hotel room. There was a sound-check, the recordist pressed the switch and, as the spools began to circle, the interviewer shaved my chin with the microphone. ‘Monsieur Clements,’ he asked, with a kind of intimate authority, ‘le mythe et la réalité?’ I stared at him for quite some time, feeling my French evaporate and my brain dry. Eventually, I gave him the only answer I could: that such questions and their appropriate responses no doubt came naturally to French intellectuals, but that since I was a mere pragmatic English novelist, he would get a better interview out of me if he perhaps approached such larger matters by way of smaller, lighter ones. This would also, I explained, help warm up my French for me. He smiled in concord, the engineer wound back the tape and the microphone was placed again like a tear-glass to catch my drops of wisdom. ‘Monsieur Clements, we are sitting here in your hotel room in Paris one afternoon in April. The window is open, and outside is unrolling the daily life of the city. Opposite the window is a wardrobe with a tall mirror in the door. I look in the wardrobe mirror and in it I can almost see reflected the daily life of Paris which is unrolling outside the window. Monsieur Clements, le mythe et la réalité?’
The D-road climbed sharply towards a barrier of high mist or low cloud. I switched on my windscreen-wipers in anticipation; then twisted the headlights to full beam, prodded the fog-lamp, wound the window down a little and chuckled. What an absurd idea to escape from an English October to one of the wettest parts of France: like the American who saw the Second World War coming and relocated to Guadalcanal. Visibility was no more than a few metres, the road was narrow, and on the nearside the ground dropped away into the unknown. Through my ha
lf-open window I thought I heard cowbells, a goat and the squeal of bagpipes, unless it was just a pig. My mood continued to be one of cheerful certainty. I didn’t feel like an anxious tourist groping for a destination; more a confident writer who knows where his book is going.
I came out of wet mist into sudden sunlight and a sky of Ingres blue. The village of Marrant was deserted: the shops had their shutters down; the trays of vegetables outside the épicerie were covered with sacking; a dog snoozed on a doorstep. The church clock showed 2.50 but creakily struck three as I looked. The boulangerie had its opening hours engraved into the glass of its door: 8h-12h, 16h-19h. It made me feel nostalgic: these old-fashioned timings had ruled when I first discovered France. If you hadn’t bought your picnic lunch by twelve you went hungry, because everyone knew that in French villages the charcutier has to take four hours off to sleep with the baker’s wife, the baker four hours to sleep with the owner of the quincaillerie, and so on. As for Mondays: forget it. Everything would shut down from Sunday lunchtime to Tuesday morning. Now the pan-European commercial impulse had reached everywhere in France, except, oddly, here.
The station also had a lunchtime look as I approached it. The booking-office and newsagent’s kiosk were both closed, though for some reason the public-address system seemed to be broadcasting music. An amateurish brass band oompahing away: Scott Joplin by the sound of it. I pushed open a grimy glass door, turned on to an unswept platform, noticed thistles growing between the sleepers and saw, to my left, a small welcoming party. A mayor, or at least a man looking like a mayor, from sash of office to chinstrap beard. Behind him was the most peculiar municipal band I had ever seen: one cornet, one tuba and a serpent, all going hard at the same bit of ragtime, music-hall or whatever. The mayor, young, plumpish and sallow, stepped forward, grasped my upper arms and gave me a ceremonial two-cheek kiss.
‘Thank you for meeting me,’ I said automatically.
‘Attendance is performance,’ he replied, smiling. ‘We hope you are pleased to hear the music of your country.’
‘I’m not American, I’m afraid.’
‘Nor was Satie,’ said the mayor. ‘Ah, you didn’t know that his mother was Scottish? Well. The piece is called “Le Piccadilly”. Shall we continue?’
For some reason unknown to myself yet approved by the mayor, I fell in directly behind him and kept step as he led the way. Behind me the ad hoc trio struck up ‘Le Piccadilly’ again. I got to know the piece pretty well, since it lasts just over a minute and they played it seven or eight times as we processed down the platform, over an unguarded level-crossing and through the dormant town. I expected the charcutier to protest that the brassy blast was affecting his sexual concentration with the baker’s wife, or at least an inquisitive urchin to speed out of a shady alley-way, but we passed only a few inert pets, who behaved as if this three o’clock concert was normal. Not a shutter stirred.
The village petered out by a lilting lavoir, a humpy bridge and a spread of immaculate but untenanted allotments. An old Citroën appeared from nowhere and suavely overtook us. You don’t see many of those cars any more: you know, the black ones that sit wide and hippy on the road, running-boards at the side, Maigret at the wheel. But I didn’t spot the driver as he disappeared in a dusty curve.
We passed the cemetery, with my backing group still pomping out ‘Le Piccadilly’. A high wall, the steeply prongs of a few plutocratic tombs, then a quick view through a chained gate. Sun flashed on glass: I had forgotten the custom of building little greenhouses over and around the tombs. Is it symbolic protection for the departed, self-interest for the mourners, or simply a way of ensuring fresh flowers for a longer season? I never found a gravedigger to ask. In any case, you don’t really want answers to every question. About your own country, perhaps. But about others? Leave some space for reverie, for amical invention.
We halted outside the gates of a small manor-house of proportions laid down by God. Biscuity stone, thunder-grey slate roof, modest pepper-pot towers at each corner. A venerable wisteria in its miraculous second flowering hung over a front door reached by double-sided steps which no doubt had once served as a mounting-block. The mayor and I now walked side by side across the gravel, our feet inciting a distant, unthreatening bark from the stables. Behind the house were some rising beech woods; to the left a shaded pond with several varieties of edible wildlife; beyond that, a sloping meadow eased towards the sort of lush valley that the British would convert into a golf-course. I stopped; the mayor propelled me forward by an elbow. I climbed two steps, paused to inhale the wisteria blossom, climbed six more, turned and saw that he had disappeared. I was not in the mood to be surprised - or rather, what would normally have surprised me struck me as perfectly understandable. In ordinary, pedantic life I might have asked myself at what precise point the band had stopped playing, whether the Maigret Citroën was garaged in the stables, why I hadn’t heard the mayor’s feet on the gravel. Instead, I merely thought, I am here, they are gone. Normally, I would have tugged on the bell-pull which hung down through a rusty, iron ring; instead I pushed the door.
Part of me expected a bobbing chambermaid with gauffred mob-cap and an apron tied in the middle of her arching back with a floppy double bow. Instead, I found some more purply Roneoed words informing me that my room was at the top of the stairs and that I would be expected in the salon at seven-thirty. The boards creaked, as I knew they would, in a comforting rather than sinister fashion. The shutters of my room were propped half-open, giving enough light for me to take in the jug and bowl on a marble washstand, the brass bedstead, the curvy armoire. A Bonnard interior, lacking only a cat, or perhaps Mme Bonnard sponging herself in the bathroom. I lay on the bed and hovered halfway to sleep, untempted by dreams, unperturbed by reality.
How can I describe the sense of being there, in that village, in that room, the familiarity of it all? It was not, as you might think, the familiarity of memory. The best way I can explain it is to make a literary comparison, which seems fair enough in the circumstances. Gide once said that he wrote in order to be reread. Some years ago I interviewed the novelist Michel Tournier, who quoted me this line, paused and added with a certain smiling complacency, ‘Whereas I write to be reread on the first occasion.’ Do you see what I mean?
Downstairs at seven-thirty, I was greeted by Jean-Luc Cazes, one of those old-fashioned, Left-Bank, anarcho-rock characters (tired leather blouson, pipe wedged in the corner of mouth), the sort of genial zinc-bar philosopher you suspect has an alarming success rate among women. Handing me a vin blanc so viscous with cassis as to arouse the suspicion that Canon Kir must have had a lot of inferior white wine on his hands, he introduced me to the other guests: a Spanish poet, an Algerian film-maker, an Italian semiotician, a Swiss crime-writer, a German dramatist and a Belgian art critic. Cazes was fluent in all our languages, though we each spoke French more or less approximately. I meant to ask the others about their invitations, their arrivals, their receptions, their tunes, but somehow it never came to that; or if it did, I have forgotten.
Dinner was served by a shy peasant girl with high, nasal vowels, her a moving towards i: ‘Si vous n’ivez pas suffisimint, vous n’ivez qu’à deminder,’ she told us with nervous authority. A thick, cabbagy, ham-bony soup which I imagined snoring gently in a large copper for five days or so. A tomato salad with a vinegary dressing. An omelette aux fines herbes which ran baveuse when you put the spoon into it. A plate of pink gigot with gravy like thinned blood. Round, big-beaned haricots verts cooked until floppy, and drenched in butter. Salad. Four types of cheese. A fruit bowl. Wine in unlabelled litre bottles with a row of stars across the shoulder like an American general. Cutlery handed down from course to course. Coffee and a vieille prune.
We talked easily: this was not, after all, a conference, and M. Cazes was less animateur than encouraging presence. The others … you know, I can’t remember what they said, though at the time it made sense to me, especially in the light of what I knew, or thou
ght I knew, about their reputations. For myself, I discovered an improbable spontaneity when my turn came to address the table. I had, of course, prepared nothing, secure in the promise that attendance was performance; yet I eased into a confident tour d’horizon of various French cultural topics, and managed strangely well. I talked about Le Grand Meaulnes, Le Petit Prince, Greuze, Astérix, the comédie larmoyante, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, pre-Great War railway posters, Rousseau, Offenbach, the early films of Fernandel and the semiotic significance of the yellow triangular – nay, tricornic – Ricard ashtray. You should understand that this is not how I normally behave. I have a poor memory and little capacity for generalisation. I prefer to discuss a single book, or better still a single chapter, or best of all a single page which I happen to have in front of me.
I told them a story to illustrate what I meant by Gallic charm. I once appeared on ‘Apostrophes’, the television book programme, with a French novelist who had written the autobiography of his cat. He was a well-known writer who had unhooked several domestic literary prizes. When the host asked him about the composition of his latest work, he replied, ‘I did not write the book, my cat wrote the book.’ This response irritated the host, who began attacking the novelist. ‘I did not write the book,’ he replied every time, a Gauloise smokescreening his white polo-necked sweater and mustachioed smile. ‘My cat wrote the book.’ We all chuckled at this example of whimsical provocation.
I’d better warn you that there was no coup. No sudden electrical storm across a midnight sky, no feux d’artifice or irruption of mime artists. No one walked, arm mythically extended, towards a full-length mirror, vanishing into and beyond it; there were no visiteurs du soir. Nor was there a coup in the French sense: no flamboyant episode with svelte conférencière or tangy servant-girl; Mme Bonnard did not get out of her bath for me. We went to bed early after shaking hands all round.