Something to Declare Read online

  Cobb's history is archival, discursive, buttonholing, undog matic, imaginatively sympathetic, incomplete, droll; sometimes chaotic, often manic, always pungently detailed. In Classical Education (1985) he describes watching a cinema newsreel about the assassination in Marseilles of King Alexander of Yugoslavia: “there was even a shot of the King, through the open rear door of the car—I think it was a Panhard-Levassor—lying on the floor.” “I think it was a Panhard-Levassor”: it is in such tangy asides— usually between dashes; he puts much, even semi-colons, inside his dashes—that the charm of Cobb's writing lies. His sentences, as miniatures of his overall narrative manner, often just grow and grow; though it is a Byronic rather than a Proustian extension, one of spurts and dashes, furiously alive, furiously observing. The historian as novelist? Up to a point. In Paris and Elsewhere Cobb proposes “the framework of a novel that has not been written and that I will not be likely to write.” It is set in Ixelles, one of the independent municipalities of Greater Brussels, between the mid-Forties and mid-Fifties. Cobb evokes with care and vigour the townscape and its socially stratified populace; he describes the inhabitants' various itineraries and jots down decorative street scenes; he remembers the changing quality of the light; he hints at death and murder and transformation. But he's right: he wouldn't ever have written this novel. The historian, especially of the Cobbian kind, is a sort of novelist, but one who instead of inventing plot and character is obliged to discover them; who instead of setting characters in motion against one another with some foreknowledge of their natures and destinies tries to guess at what often incoherent characters were up to amid a distraction of lies and suppressions. This may well be the harder kind of work, especially when the sought plot proves nugatory, fragmented, trampled into indetectability by previous searchers; or, when found, is unpleasing to the reader or even to the historian himself.

  David Gilmour sees Cobb's career in terms of a curve, beginning with a long obscurity, as the provincial academic explored and relished his second identity. He attained general recognition only in the mid-Seventies, following his appointment as Professor of Modern History at Oxford. During this period France gave him the Légion d'honneur; literary editors sought his prose, and the radio his voice; one year he was a “controversial” chairman of the Booker Prize. (He was controversial mainly for remarking in his judicial speech that he'd never read Proust, an admission some thought a joke, and others deliberately pseudo-philistine. In fact, Proust wasn't his period, and Proust's personnel were hardly petites gens. It is the typical, conventional, popular novelist, the scourer of the streets and celebrator of the ordinary, who is of most use to such a historian. Cobb's taste was thus for Simenon, Pagnol, Cendrars, Queneau, René Fallet, Sue, MacOrlan, and Restif de la Bretonne.) Then, from the mid-Eighties, the curve descended, in a return to comparative obscurity, but now accompanied by illness and unhappiness. By the time of Cobb's death in 1996 the only historical work of his available in English was The People's Armies— ironically a translation by another hand.

  This is sad, but not entirely a surprise. Cobb never wrote a big, popular book, not least because he never lowered his sights or tour-guided his terrain. He sought to convey his fascination, but never tried to ingratiate himself with the casual reader:

  First of all, then, we have to deal with the sans-culotte as such— that is to say, with a person not as he was, let us say, in 1792, or as he would have become in 1795 or in 1796, but as he was for a brief period from 1793 to 1794. For the life and death of the sans-culotte can be circumscribed within a period running more or less from April 1793 to April 1794, allowing for a possible overlap up to Thermidor year II or even to Brumaire year III. It would be stretching the species too far to describe, as a Norwegian historian has done … [etc.]

  Cobb knew that the truth lay in the detail, and the detail meant complication, elaboration, doubt. He would never have made a TV don. As a reviewer he was famous in literary editors' offices for the unanswered telephone and the unguessable delivery date: his copy,typewritten to the very edge of innumerable small index cards, would arrive when it chose to arrive—always brilliant, always vastly over length, always uncuttable. The wise editor would sit tight, knowing that when the elusive text did finally turn up it would surely make a lead review. In a way, these semi-public years of Cobb's were the untypical ones. He was the sort of historian who inspired other historians, who taught by example, who was a quiet cult. Becoming a foppish opinion-monger, goosing the tabloid readers of Middle England, hoovering up the three-book advance: this was never his world. He would rather have another three a.m. calvados and watch the Rouen fishmongresses gut the night's catch by kerosene lamp.

  There is a line of disenchantment and melancholy running through Cobb's life and work. But it is not about himself; it is about France. It may be that other countries, like politicians, are there to disappoint us; and that those who take a second identity are more vulnerable to such disappointment. Your alter country is all that your first was not; commitment to it involves idealism, love, sentimentality, and a certain selective vision. Over the years, however, you may discover that the alluring differences only half-conceal grinding similarities (the snootiness of élites, the complacency of the bourgeoisie, the conservatism of the proletariat); you may also start noticing aspects of that otherness which you dislike, or which seem aimed at destroying what initially drew you to the country. Where now are the idling Rouen trolleybus with its pole unhooked, the jolly shop-window mime artists, the companionable sadsacks in all-night bars? Items of old France are still there, in places; the four-table family restaurant can yet be found, though with greater difficulty. But your love has become vulnerable, nostalgia threatens to become corrosive, and a moment of terminal fracture beckons. All of this happened to Cobb.

  He was always a good hater, of course. His France—urban, northern, provincial, pedestrian, noisy, unpuritanical, festive—was in contrast to, and predicated upon, another France: bureaucratic, official, suburban, safe, rule-crazy, scared. Cobb had bright scorn for: the Bordelais, the police, bossy women behind guichets, Victor Hugo (“France's National Bore”), Sartre, Le Corbusier (“the Swiss démolomane” “the implacable Helvetian”), Jean-Luc Godard (another implacable Helvetian), Baron Haussmann (“the Alsatian Attila”), the Boulevard Saint-Michel—indeed, the whole of the Latin Quarter—Georges Pompidou (a “visionary vandal” worse than Haussmann), pedestrian precincts, and the scrubbed petrification of buildings restored for people to look at rather than live in.

  Just as he was a historian of individuality, Cobb was a believer in the individualistic city, one marked by variousness and the human scale: different people leading different lives in different yet neighbouring streets. In his lifetime he saw the heart of Brussels wrecked, and parts of Paris go, especially the Marais and the Six-ième. He watched the French capital become increasingly a single-class city, in a process of social cleansing promoted by money, municipal vanity, and museumification.

  This may seem exaggerated. Paris has probably suffered less than many other Western European cities; while the lover of rural France has watched even starker transformations than the lover of urban France.* But each later generation draws a new base line, and finds it hard to imagine what has already been lost. The defining France Cobb first encountered in 1935 would have been closer to Edith Wharton's France of thirty years earlier than to De Gaulle's and Pompidou's of thirty years later. The Fifth Republic was at least as effective (being more sly, and acting with more general consent) as Louis XIV or the Revolution in the continuing drive to centralize, standardize, and domesticate the nation. This smug postwar expansionism provoked one of Cobb's most splenetic denunciations, of the:

  ten years of Gaullist paternalism and political anaesthesia and exclusive concern for the material comforts of an unquestioning and vulgar pursuit of the new car, the TV, holidays in more and more exotic surroundings, early marriage, a family of manageable size, and the youthful climb up the technocra
tic ladder, as people, on the road to material success and managerial position, moved further and further out of the city, to live in pseudo-rural “neighbourhood” estates: riding, swimming-pool, tennis, park, children's playground, patio, whisky, invitations to young married colleagues in the same income group, a limited infidelity (in the same income group), talk of the next car and the next holiday, rapid trips abroad for the firm (discreet infidelity, limited to the Common Market zone), masculinity and violence expressed in terms of horsepower and speed of driving.

  It all got worse (it always does); indeed, it reached a poignant climax in 1989, when Cobb was so disgusted by the Bicentennial celebrations that the Revolution's great historian resolved never to write about France again. This was a sad, love-lost, and possibly naïve decision. Renan said that “getting its history wrong is part of being a nation,” and a nation rarely gets its history as wrong as when congratulating itself on a famous yet intensely contradictory event. Cobb might have known this. But it is a measure of the largeness and precision of his love for the country that it could in the end so disappoint him.

  * That story of the mildly peaky peasant killed by alcohol deprivation and modern medicine is widely told; it has become an enduring and necessary Rural Myth.

  (2)

  Spending Their Deaths

  on Holiday

  Three beers, one ashtray, three singers: (l. to r.) Jacques Brel, Léo Ferré, Georges Brassens

  Don't talk to me about Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, that lost Beach Boy, or any of the lesser pop-rock deaths. I get no necrothrill from a drug overdose, a stoned slump into the void glorified as “life at the edge,” an episode of melodramatic self-indulgence inflated into the greatest loss to the musical world since the early death of Schubert. No: the three deaths I prefer to hymn are sourly ordinary, dragging hospital terminations of the kind more likely to await the rest of us: heart disease, cancer, cancer. Boris Vian on 23 June 1959, Jacques Brel on 9 October 1978, and finally Georges Brassens on 29 October 1981 at 23:15 precisely. That was the moment at which French song— Francophone song, to be exact, since Brel was Belgian—died for me; or at least stopped being interesting.

  I spent the academic year of 1966–7 teaching as a lecteur d'anglais (the slightly posher term for assistant) at the Collège Saint-Martin in Rennes. My task was to instruct my pupils in “English conversation and English civilization,” which in effect meant devising various strategies to keep them quiet and avoid the glowering irruption into the classroom of the surveillant général, an ex–Algerian War veteran who terrified me even more than he did the boys. Some of my pupils, by means of diligently failing the baccalauréat and being sent back to retake it, were almost the same age as me, and certainly more sophisticated. I'm not sure how reliably English civilization was depicted in our conversations—I remember being grilled about London night-clubs (I bluffed tremendously) and London girls (ditto); though I would become more plausibly authoritative on the key cultural question of that time, whether or not the Beatles would break up. More benefit probably flowed in the opposite direction. Living among priests I became familiar with the kindlier side of the Catholic religion; eating at the school I found that roast beef came in other hues than field-marshal grey; and in my solitude I was enriched and consoled by the discovery of French song.

  For about two-thirds of that year the top of the French hitparade was squatted on by “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” that haunting confection from Procul Harum. But the singers who roared from my squeaky French player with a stylus-weight of about two kilos were all local: Brassens and Brel, Vian and Reggiani; high-boho Léo Ferré, pointedly engagé Jean Ferrat, soufflée-voiced Ingénieur des Ponts et Chaussées Guy Béart, lugubrious Anne Vanderlove, bouncy Georges Chelon, yearning Barbara, chubbily smutty Pierre Perret, winsome Anne Sylvestre, and promising Rennes-born débutant Jacques Bertin. I gave a polite nod to earlier generations (Piaf, Trenet, Rossi), a shrug to the international cabaret artists (Aznavour, Distel, the ear-cupping Bécaud), a pained smile to that Hayley Mills of chanson, Françoise Hardy, and a sneer to the home-grown yéyé-mongers, Hallyday, Claude François and Eddy Mitchell. (“Clo-Clo” had at least kept his own name. Mitchell began life as the priestly sounding Claude Moine, Hallyday as the distinctly unrockerish Jean-Philippe Smet. On the other hand, “Clo-Clo” made up for this with a spectacularly unstylish death, involving the bath, electricity and, it was rumoured, a minority sexual practice.)

  Procul Harum's line-up changed even before their song became a hit, and its less than cogent words were penned by Nobody Remembers Whom. Most of the singers I admired, by contrast, were individualists who wrote or co-wrote their own stuff; while some owned the whole aesthetic means of production and were badged with the lordly initials “ACI”—auteur-compositeur-interprète. The three who have accompanied me most down the years, their poppy, fizzing vinyl surfaces finally traded up to CD, are Boris Vian, Jacques Brel, and Georges Brassens. All three had emerged during the early Fifties, when they were first recorded by Jacques Canetti, brother of the Nobel-winning Elias. Vian, wry and urbane, sang at the world with a cutting edge of sardonic disbelief. Brel, urgent and impassioned, sang at the world as if it could have sense shaken into it by music, could be saved from its follies and brutalities by his vocal embrace. Brassens, intimate and formal, sang at the world as if it were an old lover whose ways are teasingly familiar and from whom not too much is expected. Vian died at thirty-nine; Brel at forty-nine; Brassens, in a final act of non-conformity, just managed to stagger past fifty-nine.

  Many of the singers I listened to expressed a vibrant anti-clericalism; but the indulgent Père Fleury in the next cell to mine only complained at the volume of secular ranting when he was in the middle of confessing a pupil. Most of the Fathers treated my atheism—like my nationality, my long hair, and my austerity in the face of wine—as something basically odd but tolerable. Père Marais, one of the more ironical and inflammatory priests (who fondly remembered London bus-conductors shortening “Thank you” to “Kew”) used to apostrophize me with an amused eye: “You just wait for the next world, you civilians, then we clergy will show you who's going to be saved. You may have the upper hand now but later on you're really going to be in the shit.” Père de Goësbriand, from an aristocratic Breton family, who was much teased for having been shot in the left buttock during the war (“Running away, Hubert?” “We were surrounded!”), overheard me arguing one day with Père Marais, and afterwards voiced his anxiety: if I hadn't been baptized, he pointed out, then I had no soul and hadn't a prayer of getting to Heaven. He was much preoccupied with this final destination; on another occasion, he told me with a confidential wink, “Of course, you don't think I'd put up with all this if there wasn't Heaven in it for me at the end, do you?”

  The physics teacher, Père Daumer, a fleshy, hip-heavy, hairless man who was never out of his cassock (his nickname among the pupils was “The Third Sex”) also displayed moral concern for me.

  After I had been in residence a few weeks, he took me aside and explained that some of the words I was hearing over meals at my end of the refectory table were vulgar and not repeatable in polite conversation.* I, in return, worried about Père Daumer, who despite a severe conservatism in religious matters was a devotee of films on television, and was thus obliged to wade through a lot of soul-tarnishing stuff: Godard's A bout de souffle had aroused his particular disapproval. However, such was his cinematic passion that he would doggedly stay in the fag-fogged TV room until the credits. Then he would rise and pronounce judgement before going off to bed. “Not worth the trouble” was a favourite verdict. Once, to my delight, he gave some piece of sinful froth the full treatment. “Lacking both interest and morality,” he remarked, doffing his little square black cap at me. “Bonsoir, Monsieur Barnes.”

  There was considerable doctrinal disagreement in this house of Eudistes. Not from Père Calvard, an ardent Breton patriot who managed to combine Druidism and Catholicism wit
h no ideological difficulty; nor from the football-mad Père Le Mauff, who would briskly assert, “Metaphysics is rubbish” before going off to tend his hive of bees, his broken-winged buzzard, his month-old fox-cub. The dispute was the sempiternal one between Ancients and Moderns, and embraced teaching methods as much as beliefs. Père Tupin, a young firebrand who believed in “dialogue” with pupils, and would even discuss masturbation with them, had recently got into trouble with the authorities for taking the words of a pop song as text for his sermon. (He got into trouble with me over this too, since to my amazement he hadn't chosen Brel or Brassens but a piece of dreck warbled by someone like Sylvie Vartan.) Presiding over these theologically sultry days at the College was Père Denis, a Père Supérieur renowned for his fair-minded timidity, his desire to approve of most things he set eyes on, and a certain tentativeness in conversation. Père Marais used to recall at frequent intervals— and always with undiminished glee—an outing with the Père Supérieur and one of my predecessors as lecteur d'anglais. At one point they had passed a dog. “Tell me, Monsieur Smith,” the Superior had asked with an exact but hesitant civility. “Do you have dogs in England?”

  I like to remember that Boris Vian was one of the amplified voices with which I used to blast Père Fleury (who dodged behind trees when he saw a nun approaching, and who also rolled the fattest gaspers I have ever seen, each requiring two full cigarette papers). But this must be a false memory. Vian's fame as an interpreter didn't really begin until 1979, twenty years after his death, when Philips released a commemorative LP. In 1966–7 he was mainly known through the voices of others: Serge Reggiani had begun his career performing Vian's work; Peter, Paul and Mary made a transatlantic campus heart-plucker out of “The Deserter”; and Jean Ferrat had offered up his smokey-jazz homage “Boris.” Vian was remembered instead as everything except an interpreter: song-writer, poet, novelist, playwright, translator, actor, jazz trumpeter, pataphysician. He was the most cosmopolitan of my top three; his photo-biography begins with him standing, aged twelve, behind a chubby adolescent in long shorts and a crisscross sweater who turns out to be the fourteen-year-old Yehudi Menuhin; later we see him with his arm round Miles Davis, chatting to Ellington, meeting Erroll Garner at Orly airport in 1957; here he is on the beach at Antibes and Saint Tropez, behind the wheel of his Aston Martin, his Morgan, his 1911 Brazier; on film he lurks in the shadows with Jeanne Moreau in the Vadim version of Les Liaisons dangereuses. He wrote songs with Aznavourian profligacy: over 700 of them, some jazz-influenced, some in the style of rock humoristique that he pioneered with Henri Salvador. Despite “Le Déserteur,” he didn't write “protest songs” so much as songs of satirical provocation, anarchic moralities like “Le Petit com merce,” which laments the plight of an arms salesman so successful that all his clients kill one another off and reduce him to penury. In his lifetime Vian wasn't held to be a convincing interpreter of his own work, but the 1979 Philips disc gives the lie to this: his ironic, whippy-tongued delivery was the apt match for his sly and worldly songs.