Something to Declare Read online

  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!”

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  Tour de France 2000

  “To the memory of Tom Simpson, Olympic medallist, World champion, British sporting ambassador, died 13th July (Tour de France 1967)”

  In early July, as the first Tour de France of the new millennium meandered joustingly down the flat western side of the country, I visited a small cycling museum in the mid-Wales spa town of Llan-drindod Wells. Halfway round this testament to curatorial obsession, among the velocipedes and the 1896 Crypto Front Wheel Drivers, the passionate arrangements of cable clips and repair-outfit tins, there is a small display window containing the vesti-mentary leavings of the British cyclist Tom Simpson. A grubby white jersey with zippered neck, maker's emblem (Le Coq Sportif), big Union Jacks on each shoulder, and discoloured glue bands across the thorax indicating the removal of perhaps a sponsor's name, perhaps the coloured stripes awarded for some previous triumph. Black trunks with peugeot embroidered in surprisingly delicate white stitchwork across the left thigh. Chamois-palmed string-backed cycling gloves with big white press-buttons at the back of the wrist, and the fingers mittenishly cut off at the first joint. This is what Simpson had been wearing on 13 July 1967, during the thirteenth stage of the Tour, when he collapsed on Mont Ventoux, the highest of the Provençal Alps. Thirty-three years to the day of his death, the 2000 Tour was due to climb the mountain again.

  Back in 1962, Simpson had been the first British rider ever to wear the race leader's yellow jersey (only three other Britons have acquired it since); he'd been World Champion in 1965, and in 1967 had already won Paris-Nice, the early-season classic flatteringly known as “The Race to the Sun.” He was a strong, gutsy cyclist, popular with fellow riders, the press, and the public. He also played up cheerfully to the Englishman's image, posing emblematically with bowler hat and furled umbrella. The memorial to him near the summit of Mont Ventoux lists his achievements as “Olympic Medallist, World Champion, British Sporting Ambassador,” and the last of these three is no sentimental piety. If sport increasingly becomes a focus for slack-brained chauvinism, it also, at its best, acts as a solvent, transcending national identity and raising the sport, and the sports person, above such concerns. Simpson was one of those transplanted stars (like John Charles in Italy, or Eric Cantona in Britain) who managed to win over a foreign public, and thus did more to harmonize Europe—or at least, reconcile diversity—than a thousand Brussels suits. His martyrish suffering on a French mountain added to the myth. His name is still widely remembered in France—more so, probably, than in Britain.

  Mont Ventoux, which rises to just over nineteen hundred metres, doesn't appear especially sharp-sided or rebarbative from a distance. For those on foot, it is comparatively welcoming: Petrarch climbed it with his brother and two servants in 1336, and a local hiking firm offers night-time ascents for the reasonably fit with a promise of spectacular sunrises. For the Tour rider, it is another matter. Other mountains in the race may be higher or steeper, but seem more friendly, or more functional; or at least more routine, being climbed most years. Ventoux is a one-off. Its appearance is perpetually wintry: the top few hundred metres are covered with a whitish scree, giving the illusion of a snowbound summit even in high summer. A few amateur botanists may scour its slopes for polar flora (the Spitzbergen saxifrage, the Greenland poppy), but there is little other recreational activity on offer here. Ventoux is just a bleak and hulking mountain with an observatory at the top. There is no reason for going up it except that the Tour planners order you to go up it. Cyclists fear and hate the place, while the fact that the Tour only makes the ascent once every five years or so increases its mystique, builds its broodingness. In his autobiography, It's Not About the Bike, Lance Armstrong called the Tour de France “a contest in purposeless suffering”; the climb of Mont Ventoux illustrates this implacably.

  When the tree line runs out, there is nothing up there but you and the weather, which is violent and capricious. Legend has it that on the day Simpson died a thermometer in a café half-way up the mountain burst while registering fifty-four degrees centigrade (officially, the temperature was in the nineties Fahrenheit). But there is one thing cyclists fear as much as heat: wind. One task of the support riders in a team is to protect their leader from the elements; they cluster round him on windy stretches like worker bees protecting the queen. (This abnegation is also self-interested, for in the Tour the monarch is also a cash crop, his prize money being divided among the team at the race's end.) But on the mountains, where the weaker fall away, the top riders are often left to themselves, unprotected. And Ventoux, where the mistral mixes with the tramontane, is officially the windiest place on earth: in February 1967, the world gusting record was set there, at 320 kilometres per hour. Popular etymology derives Ventoux from vent, wind, making it Windy Mountain; appropriate but erroneous. The proper etymology—Vinturi, from the Ligurian root ven- meaning mountain—is duller but perhaps truer. Mount Mountain: a place to make bikers feel they're climbing not one peak but two; a place to give bikers double vision.*

  As I drove towards the mountain the day before the Tour climbed it, there was cloud hanging over its summit, but otherwise the day felt clear, if breezy. This changed quickly on the upper slopes. Cloud covered the top fifteen hundred feet or so; visibility dropped to a few yards; the wind rose. By the side of the road, hardy fans who had arrived early to claim their places were double-chocking the wheels of their camper vans and piling stones halfway up the rims for extra security. The Simpson memorial— the profile of a crouched rider set on a granite slab—is placed where he fell from his bike, a kilometre and a half from the summit on the eastern side. Its handsome simplicity is subverted by the clutter of heartfelt junk laid on the steps in front of it. Some mourners have simply added a large white stone from the nearby slope; but more have strewn the site with a jumble of cycling castoffs: water bottles, logoed caps, T-shirts, energy bars, a saddle, a couple of tyres, a symbolic broken wheel. It is part Jewish grave, part the tumultuous altar of some popular if dubious Catholic saint. All this was difficult to take in because the cold and the wind were pulling so much water into my eyes. It felt locally strange to be attempting some vague act of homage while being barely able to stand; more largely strange in that the winds—gusting at more than 150 kilometres per hour that day—seemed to have absolutely no effect in dispersing the cloud. After a few minutes, I got back into the car and drove down the mountain to Bédoin, where I found that the bones of my fingers and toes still ached from the cold. I craved a whisky. An hour or so later, snow fell on the summit.

  When Petrarch set out on his ascent, he encountered, like any modern journalist, a quotable peasant who just happened to have climbed the mountain himself fifty years previously. However, the fellow “had got for his pains nothing except fatigue and regret, and clothes and body torn by the rocks and briars. No one, so far as he or his companions knew, had ever tried the ascent before or after him.” Petrarch's brother headed for the summit by the most direct, and therefore hardest, route; while the poet, being wilier or lazier, kept trying other paths in the hope of finding an easier way. Each time the trail proved false, and such shameful halfheartedness brought Ovid to the climber's mind. “To wish is little: we must long with the utmost eagerness to gain our end.” For Petrarch, the excursion up the Ventoux turned out to be a metaphor of the spiritual journey: it is uphill all the way, and there are no shortcuts.

  But bikers, like hikers, are always looking for shortcuts. Next to the Simpson display window in Llandrindod Wells, I saw a publicity photograph of Mrs. Billie Dovey, a prewar cycling belle pro moted as “the Rudge Whitworth ‘Keep Fit Girl.’” This smiling, bespectacled icon pedals towards us in sepia innocence, an advertisement for comradely
physical improvement, mens sana in corpore sano. But, as in most sports, the higher and the more professional you go, the less Corinthian it becomes. Various factors led to Simpson's death on 13 July 1967: the heat, the mountain, the lack of support (he was riding with a weak national team), the pressure on a rider approaching thirty to win the Tour before his time passed. But the prime cause of Simpson's heart attack on Mont Ventoux was the use of amphetamines, which helped his body ignore sense, and made his last words a dying plea to be put back on his bike. Traces of amphetamines were found in Simpson's body and among his kit. Speed kills, the moralists asserted. But Simpson's case was hardly egregious. Amphetamines—famously used to keep bomber crews alert on long missions—were widely consumed by cyclists in the postwar years. Their explosive effect caused them to be nicknamed la bomba in Italian, la bombe in French, and the somewhat more sinister atoom in Dutch. In the late Fifties, the legendary Italian rider Fausto Coppi was asked on French radio if all riders took la bomba. “Yes,” he replied, “and those who claim the opposite aren't worth talking to about cycling.” “So did you take la bomba?” the interviewer continued. “Yes, whenever it was necessary.” “And when was it necessary?” “Practically all the time.” The five-time Tour winner Jacques Anquetil told the French sports daily L'Equipe in the year Simpson died, “You'd have to be an imbecile or a hypocrite to imagine that a professional cyclist who rides 235 days a year can hold himself together without stimulants.”