The notion of the novelist as intellectual and bookman, as universally well read and well informed about what is going on in the contemporary literary world, has been gaining substance all through this century, at least in the academy, if some of the letters I receive are any guide. They assume knowledge in me of the modern novel, of literary theory, all of that, that I lack either totally or as nearly so as makes no difference. All novelists, at least when writing novels, are really to be classed in terms of Lévi-Strauss’s pensée sauvage; we are not cultivated people. As the great anthropologist pointed out, that does not mean we primitives are not also in pursuit, like scientists and other sternly sane people, of a mise en ordre, a fitting of life into a chest of drawers. But the methods and principles of our fitting, and indeed of our chests of drawers themselves, are often remote from reason, tradition, the protocols of scientific analysis, and all that venerable galère (in the university context) of desirable qualities.
Some novelists, such as Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge, are of course also distinguished academics, and others become quasi-academics because they are reviewers; that is, they have to sound expert. I cannot, from my own very limited experience, imagine anyone’s reviewing for sheer love of it, for pleasure, indeed for anything much more than the welcome supplement of income it brings to those two Cinderella professions, writing and teaching. Even reluctant reviewers must, willy-nilly, learn quite a lot. I have reviewed very little in my life; and have equally fled (as a fly a spider’s web) every kind of literary ‘world’, or circle, that has threatened to enmesh me. I read of such worlds, say in terms of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century salons, or of present-day campus society, with a kind of incredulity that anyone taking part in them could ever have enjoyed, or can enjoy, them.
My long-held opinion is also that lack of memory (of the indexing, encyclopedic, good-teacher kind) is of very great benefit to a maker of fiction—is, indeed, one very sufficient reason that highly intelligent academics and scientists so seldom make satisfactory novelists. Knowing everything objective about a highly subjective art is a fearsome handicap; and Monsieur Jourdain’s sort of innocence is a better presage for it. A novelist needs a memory of the re-creative sort, the ability to summon up scenes, events, characters, and the rest for his or her readers; but this very seldom requires the accuracy and particularity of recall that so many suppose. When I hear of novelists being sunk in ‘research’, I grow immediately suspicious.
The required virtue is much more akin to a being at ease with the instinctive and the only half conscious, a sort of knowing of one’s own junkroom. I have collected old books all my life, sufficient by now to amount to quite a small library. Remembering where everything is has escaped my powers, though not, for some mysterious reason, remembering everything that I somewhere have. I ought to install some rational system that would allow me to move smoothly to the right shelf in the right case; it would certainly spare frequent fruitless and cursing searches. Yet I am a novelist, and the haphazard and disorganized way I keep my books, as I indeed write them, somehow suits me best. It is, in short, very far from the sort of memory that has names, titles, dates, exact details at its fingertips—precisely the memory that every university values so highly and tries to instil in its students.
The prospective nightmare during my own Oxford finals in French concerned a paper on sixteenth-century grammatical theory. The subject had bored me beyond belief in tutorials and reading, and I had done no work on it at all. The night before the examination I borrowed a friend’s swotted-up notes, and duly regurgitated them the next morning on paper; the next day again I had forgotten the subject entirely, and have remained in the same wicked state of ignorance ever since. The only alpha mark I received in a not very distinguished second-class degree was, needless to say, awarded for sixteenth-century French grammatical theory.
I say all this by way of warning that though I would happily claim to have been deeply formed by France and its culture, I am as ignorant of postwar contemporary French literature and all its underlying theories as I was long ago of ancient French grammatical theory. All this has had singularly little influence on me. What very skimpy reading I have done of Derrida, Lacan, Barthes, and their fellow maîtres has more often left me baffled and frustrated than enlightened, and has led me—in a way I know must seem appallingly old-fashioned—to attribute many twentieth-century French cultural phenomena to a nefarious Germanic influence that crept over the country in the late nineteenth century, and that has blanketed, blurred, betrayed all that lucidity, wit, elegance, etc., associated with an older tradition. I must admit that this attachment to the eau Perrier of that old tradition is due in considerable part to sheer lack of comprehension of the muddy clouds that seem to me to spring from too much prose by the gurus mentioned above. I suspect that even if I were French I would not understand; the fact of my not being French merely envelops everything in a kind of double ambiguity. I am not quite sure what they mean, but like the Irishman, I am also not sure that I would understand even if I did understand.
It took me many years to realize the great abyss between the French and English traditions of language use, or rhetoric: the pervasive influence of the metaphorical on the first, and of the literal on the second; life perceived through the intellect, through forms and concepts, and life perceived (more or less) as it appears; words as pure algebra, words as practical and Euclidean; as carefully bred garden pansies and as, in Lévi-Strauss’s pun, wild heart’s-ease. No doubt expert comparative linguists will cry in outrage at such a crude distinction, and I must, if I am forced, retreat behind the subtitle of this book.1 Such an abyss, wrong though I may be to suppose it, forms very much a part of my own imagined France.
I may read a French text and feel I have understood it perfectly in every semantic and grammatical sense; but because I am not born French, nor bilingual, a final understanding—indeed, the final understanding—is forever beyond me. Like every writer, I read a text in my own language against a kind of absent text, made of all the alternative words and turns of phrase that might have been used; in French, alas, I have no such instinctive thesaurus. In practical terms this does not worry me as perhaps it should. I think of it privately as ‘the ghost’, which haunts every contact I have with France; but all old houses have a ghost, and what we shall never quite finally know is, in my philosophy of life, an essential part of any attraction and enjoyment. I should not like France ever to become, in an emotional sense, at its heart, not foreign to me. This ghost of never completely knowing is, I believe, the quintessential part of any true and lasting love, whether between persons or between nations.
I suppose the dark side of the abyss was best demonstrated in the nouveau roman episode, that classic case of a wine that does not travel. Its exposition, in the hands of its main theorists, such as Robbe-Grillet and Butor, was fiercely logical; but with a handful of exceptions, its practice, to us backward British, bewilderingly dull. A kind of honorary French part of me by no means thought that of every nouveau roman he read; but his quarrelling English twin insisted that this was obsessively impractical, by the values and standards of his traditions. Novelists may reject the societies they live in morally and politically, but not all normal readers into the bargain.
I was assured on all hands during a visit to Paris in 1981 that the nouveau roman, like the structuralist and deconstruction debates, was ancient history, long dismissed by the contemporary French mind. Story now ruled; the Balzac it had once been found pointless to imitate was reinstalled. (‘By a small oversight they buried themselves,’ one literary journalist drily told me, ‘instead of him.’) When I remarked that the theories remained very much on some British and American minds, I was met with dismissive shrugs: typical, that the Anglo-Saxons should be so far behind.
Everyone in 1981 (including M. Mitterand) knew that the greatest living French writer was Julien Gracq. As it happens, I do not disagree with that verdict—and think the general ignorance of his work in Britain a very sad thing indeed—but the point I am trying to make is the folly of our occasional academic engouement for movements and theories that require a native soil, their own specific language and culture, even to exist, let alone to be exercised. I might import the vinestocks, the exact methods of Burgundy or the Rhône valley, to England; I am not going to produce their wines. Intellectuals may adore the sophistication, the complexity, the sheer incomprehensibility of much of the Gallic theorizing; but we novelists never took it to our hearts, I am afraid. We never saw it as our duty to bore our readers, just as nowadays I think few of us accept the implications of the more extreme forms of deconstruction, which so cleverly deny us any clear reason for writing in the first place.
I did once plan—and indeed started to write—a publisher’s nightmare: a novel to be half in English, and half in French. My written French was in any case nowhere near adequate to the task, but what finally killed the idea for me was the impossibility of feeling truly at home in both cultures, of expressing both methods of viewing, and reacting to, experience. I have in recent years done some translating of plays for the National Theatre, and have found it there too. Superficial meaning flows easily enough from one language into the other, yet deep down they seem to me never to marry, never quite to fit. I can even see this in, so to speak, my own mirror, in having my own work translated into French. Annie Saumont, who has done all my recent books, has excellent English. She is furthermore a gifted writer of fiction herself, with several books in her own language. I know I am very lucky to have her, and was delighted when she won a prestigious translation prize a few years ago for Daniel Martin. Yet her solutions to the problems my texts pose quite often set me back at first reading because of what they leave out of the exact nuances of the English meaning, or (more rarely) the circumlocutions she is forced into to express them. Always I have a little private reaction to her work on mine, and it is a humiliating one not for Annie, but for myself: I still don’t understand either French or the French.
I was lucky, when I got to Oxford, in 1946, to find myself under Merlin Thomas at New College. As I soon discovered, other students envied his students their good fortune. He was young, quick, friendly, and had a sense of humour that was sometimes Rabelaisian. I went up originally to read French and German, but my German tutors paled beside Merlin, and in my second year I thankfully (though I sometimes regret it now) gave up German. Of course I had other French tutors, but they also tended to pale beside Merlin. One was Dr Enid Starkie, a famous figure in the faculty at that time, and in le tout Oxford also. I was a heretic, and never really took to her. Her French accent was bizarre. I remember smuggling a French friend into one of her lectures. When she began to recite something from Rim-baud, he turned to me in profound puzzlement: ‘What language is this?’ Then there was old Professor Rudler, lecturing on la passion chez Racine, a very unpassionate performance indeed. (Later, in France, I was to hear Nadal on Corneille, the very antithesis, rather like some grand ornament of the French bar pleading a case of crime passionel before a rapt jury of students.) A friend of mine and I watched the audience rapidly diminish as the course of lectures proceeded; when it arrived at precisely two—ourselves—we decided it was our moral duty to stick the course out to the end, which we did.
The time we were obliged to spend on Old French and its literature was then very generally hated, and regarded by most of us as supremely pointless, a torture we (supposedly) owed above all to the fact that Sir Alfred Ewert was head of the faculty. It took me a shameful number of years to realize that for me, at least, it had been one of the most valuable parts of the course, and certainly so with regard to the art of storytelling. If I had been told at the time I should one day introduce a new translation of Marie de France in America (as I did, in the 1970s), I should have laughed. I hope the quotation from La Chastelaine de Vergi that is epigraph to my first published novel, The Collector, shows my symbolic debt.2 I still read Marie from time to time; and fall in love with her all over again. She is so far away; then, as close as a physical touch.
Merlin managed to get me into the then newly instituted Maison Française in the Woodstock Road, under Henri Fluchère. Our rooms all had important paintings, and I slept for a year with a Léger on the wall above my head. The food was also distinctly better than was generally found then in Oxford. We had lunch and dinner every day with Fluchère and his attractive French housekeeper. It was the rule that at table we must speak French, something of an ordeal for most of us, given the very low value then put within the faculty (Dr Starkie was typical of it in this) on speaking French with any fluency or with a decent accent. There were quite often distinguished French guests, such as the composer Darius Milhaud (who was only too happy to drop into English outside the sacred dining room), and then our contributions would virtually cease. On one occasion the guest was an odd little man in scoutmaster’s shorts, and the rule about speaking French was waived. We knew he was some professor from ‘the other place’ (Cambridge), but not why; lunch over, he was surrounded on the lawn outside by an excited gaggle of English-faculty students. That was my only living encounter with the famous Dr Leavis, though his spirit has grown much closer at the several Cambridge seminars I have happily attended since.
We were all a little bit in awe of Fluchère. Very recently I read Courte-line’s fictionalized memories of life in a nineteenth-century French cavalry barracks, the sarcastically titled Les Gaîtés de l’escadron, and felt a strange faint echo of life at the Maison Française. It certainly had nothing to do with Fluchère himself—a kind and humorous man behind the facade—or the comparatively civilized life of the house; much more, I suspect, with finding ourselves pitched into a foreign setting and culture, away from the ‘home’ of England, and embarrassed by our own ineptitudes and naïvetés in it, like so many recruits to an ancient regiment.
Modern students will find it hard to believe how ignorant most of us were in those days of the actual France. The war had banned us from Europe, of course; and also, because of military service, delayed our entry into university, so we were mostly well over normal age. Of course we got to France on vacations, but I think even then most of us went with English friends. It remained a foreign place; going there was still something of an adventure. We had occasional contacts with students, but few with any other kind of French.
By pure chance one summer, I got a job in a French wine factory helping to process the vendage, quite the hardest and most unromantic work I have ever done. We were not even allowed sleep, because lorries from the more distant vineyards would come rumbling in at all hours, often in the middle of the night, and we had to be up to receive them. My knowledge of really blue argot leapt during those weeks; and we put things in the vats that have stopped me from drinking that particular kind of apéritif ever since. When I left, I hitched a lift in a Citroën on the nearest road. It was driven by an unusual millionaire from Lyons, a gentle elderly man with heart trouble. He was looking for someone to help crew his yacht at Collioure nearby—a small ten-ton ketch, not millionaire-like at all. With him was his friend, a married but much younger woman from Paris. For several weeks I virtually lived alone with them, in paradise after my bout in hell. M., the friend, was also unusual: fiercely honest as well as very good-looking. She had a very brave record in the Resistance, among other things. Of course I fell in love with her; she was only a few years older than I was myself. The only reward I received was to be allowed to become something of her confidant and her butt: what the Resistance had really been like, why she loved both her Parisian husband and the gentle millionaire (and could never love me—and how ridiculous and sentimental my transparent near calf love for her was); her feelings about life, the impossible naïveté of the English, the monstrous selfishness of her bourgeois compatriots. She was as well read as she was left-wing, and not only in the fashionable authors of the time: Camus, Sartre, Aragon. Her scorching honesty, even about her own faults, her humour, her impulsive moods, her sometimes savage teasing—all these were dazzling. She was like something one had read about in books, but here by some miracle was in the flesh. I have never been able to see countless French heroines, from Joan of Arc on, through Phèdre to Antigone, without the ghost of her face behind. ‘M’ did not stand for Marianne, but so far as I was concerned, it might well have done so. She was, with Merlin, by far the best tutor I ever had on France.
I went from Oxford for a year to the University of Poitiers, where I was appointed to the faculty of English (once again thanks to Merlin Thomas) as lecteur; reader I may have been in title, but in all else I was like an assistant at a lycée, and a bad one. Above all else Poitiers made me realize how ignorant I was of English literature. Absurdly, most of the reading I did that year was in my own language, not in French. The head of the English faculty I did not get on with, but L., the professeur-adjoint, was much more sympathetic, with a normalien mind far sharper and more learned than mine was ever to be, far more stringent and severe in its logic, far drier. We used to go on long walks to listen to the plainchant at the neighbouring monastery of Ligugé, and I also taught in my spare time in the city’s Jesuit college. But the French Catholic mind has always remained closed to me. Claudel, and other impassioned icebergs, I never read with pleasure.
Years later, when I discovered Gracq, I was amazed to hear that he was, or had been, a close friend of Adjoint L. (who indeed features as L in Let-trines). The brilliant L.’s story in later years has been sad; but the memory of him has survived.
So too has that of various French students I came to know well. A principal private interest with me all my life has been nature, and it was through these friends that I came to know French nature, in Poitou and the Vendée. My most vivid and happiest memories of Poitiers lie far more in bird-watching expeditions, impromptu shooting trips, and the like than in anything academic; in the naturalists’ mecca of the Brenne; in glorious meals, raie au beurre noir, moules au pineau, endless oysters beside the bay of Aiguillon; in beurre blanc—which remains to this day my favourite sauce—beside the Loire, as also that region’s wines, especially from that delectable little area round Savennières, just east of Angers (about to die, I want a glass of Madame Joly’s Coulée de Serrant in my hand; you may keep your Montrachets and the rest). I didn’t really begin to know rural France until that time. But I will come to that.
I faced something of a crisis at the end of my year at Poitiers. Of all I learned from both Merlin Thomas and L., perhaps the most useful was something negative: I could never be a true teacher, even far below their levels. I had begun a first novel at Poitiers. I knew that it failed, even by my own jejune standards, and that to become a true novelist would take me many years. Teaching is a convenient profession for would-be writers, in the time it allows for the other activity; but it becomes a trap, and in proportion to how seriously the teacher takes his or her teaching. I had applied for a job at a bizarre-sounding college in Greece, clearly a dead end in academic terms. Then Merlin wrote to say he had heard a post as French master at Winchester was vacant, and he would be happy to recommend me. It came to a day when I had a choice: go to Winchester, and a sensible and modestly promising future, or to Greece, and exile myself from all that Oxford, and England, stood for.
I chose Greece partly in a mood of deference to the acte gratuit of Gide and the existentialism of the time. But that is another story. When I eventually returned to England, I was totally under the Greek spell, and France seemed like a distant episode in the past. What brought me back to it was another chance: an antiquarian bookseller. Francis Norman’s shop, just off Heath Street in Hampstead, must, in its flagrant untidiness, its seemingly endless dusty piles of books, have appeared typical to a casual passer-by of any other lazy secondhand dealer’s; those of us who went in, however, very soon knew we were in a book lover’s paradise. Francis Norman was, behind his shyness, a very distinguished scholar, a delightful man, a prince of booksellers—I might almost say a Maecenas, for his prices were often ludicrously low. At the end of the many years I knew him (and lived for his catalogues, long after I had left Hampstead myself ), our conversations often took a distinctly unusual form for the normal antiquarian bookshop. I would hand him some small treasure I had unearthed, say a mazarinade from the time of the Fronde, whose price anywhere else in London would have been at least five pounds.
‘Honestly, you can’t let this go for just a pound.’
‘Dog-eared. Not worth cataloguing.’
‘But it’s complete, for goodness’ sake. Not a tear.’
‘I really don’t want more for it.’
‘This is ridiculous. You know I’m not an impoverished teacher any longer. I’m jolly well going to give you more.’
‘Oh well . . . I suppose . . . if you must . . . I don’t know . . . would one pound fifty be too much?’
Very occasionally he had not to be beaten up in price, but rather satisfied that you were worthy of the book. I remember once having to argue with him for nearly half an afternoon to prove that I deserved a Commenius; that I knew the great Czech was a genius, the patron saint of European education and all the rest; in short, that I could promise to respect and love the book as much as the seller himself did.
He always carried a large stock of French books, and they, or those I bought, were the road that led me back to France. What I discovered in that shop was the France that no university can teach its students: not in the least that of the famous writers, and the classics, but an endless galimafrée of minor poets, minor plays, forgotten memoirs, forgotten theological and political debates, Revolutionary pamphlets, trial reports, eccentricities, collections of anecdotes. Of such trivia I have gained over the years quite a collection, and of a kind that any self-respecting book collector would turn from in horror. Famous ‘firsts’ do not interest me in the least; but countless things that no one has read again since they were first published, yes. One obscure trouvaille at Francis Norman’s gave me the germ of The French Lieutenant’s Woman: Claire de Duras’s Ourika of 1824. There was no indication of author on that text. I had never heard of the book, the copy was badly foxed, and I didn’t anticipate much reward for the five shillings I paid for it. If I paid even that it was simply on the strength of a glance at the opening sentence. One of the things I learned in that shop is that I adore narrative, real or imagined. It has become for me the quintessence of the novelist’s art—and I liked the feel of the immediate bald plunge into the story of Ourika. But I thought that I would be disappointed, that I had lumbered myself with one more insipid nouvelle in the Marmontel tradition—some piece of didactic morality tinged with a dilute romanticism, and a wasted buy even to someone with my inveterately magpie attitude to book collecting. I took the little octavo, with its green marbled-paper covers, quarter-bound in worn black calf, home and sat down to prove my fear right. Long before I finished I knew I had stumbled on a minor masterpiece.
I reread it almost at once and have done so a number of times over the years. If anything, my admiration for Ourika has grown, and grown more than I realized. I chose the name of the hero in my own novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman quite freely—or so I thought at the time. It came as a shock, months after my typescript had gone to the printers, to pick up Ourika one day and to recall that Charles was the name of the principal male figure there also. That set me thinking. And though I could have sworn I had never had the African figure of Ourika herself in mind during the writing of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, I am now certain in retrospect that she was very active in my unconscious.
Only in two cases can I confess that classics have consciously influenced me. One French writer I have always deeply liked and been seduced by is Marivaux, while the one novel I have always adored, from schoolboy days, and read countless times, is Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes. I know it has many faults, yet it has haunted me all my life. Fournier’s own life itself has driven me again and again to the Sologne, to stand where he stood—to Yvonne’s lost château, before Uncle Raimbault’s shop at Nançay, in that tiny attic bedroom above the school at Epineuil. His novel lies somewhere behind all of mine. I have my own professional influence-tracers nowadays, but none seems to me adequately to realize the effect of this one on me.
I was able to go to France very little in the 1950s and early 1960s. That was when Francis Norman’s shop was so important for me, its books my only French reality, and indeed much more an imagined one than anything else, and nine parts out of ten a past reality. But since those years I have been to France—or I had better say my France—almost every year. My France has no cities (above all, no Paris), no museums, no libraries, no famous châteaux, no autoroutes—and, with one or two exceptions such as Fournier, no literary connections. Through various circumstances I have lost touch with everyone I once knew there, so it also has no French friends, of the human kind, anyway.
What my France consists of is endless obscure countrysides, their tiny towns and lost villages, the more remote the better; some, especially all that lies south of the great curve of the Loire, from Nantes to Nevers—La Vendée, the valleys of the Creuse and the Vienne, down through Auvergne to the Causses and the Cevennes—I am usually revisiting, not seeing for the first time. I know many corners far better than I do many parts of England, indeed think of this France as not foreign in any meaningful sense, so strong is it in my mental landscape, in pensée sauvage terms. Friends couldn’t understand why my wife and I didn’t live in France, or at least have a holiday home there; but the pleasure lies (for me, still does) in the random, drifting, returning nature of this kind of relationship with France, the way it allows me to indulge the many faces of my imagined country.
I was on such a holiday just before Elizabeth died. We revisited some favourite botanical sites on the Causse Noir and the Causse de Larzac, near Millau. It may seem strange for a writer to let a glimpse of a few rare flowers dictate his holiday, but so it is. (As most British naturalists now know, France is a kind of miracle as regards countless species rare in this country; for me, being there is a little like a child’s being given the freedom of a sweet shop.) Then on, the rare orchids remet, to see a bridge in the Cevennes. An abbé was brutally murdered on it in 1702: a bleak upland bridge, a very un-Junelike evening. The lady of the drapery and gift shop at one end of the bridge, where the abbé had once lived, seems taken aback that this mad Englishman should be interested in this unmarked place and remote event. We discuss Mazel’s account of the murder (he was there) for a minute or two; she has read that, but not Marion or Bonbonneau. I buy a pot of the delicious local honey she sells. Such days, in a heaven of flowers in the morning (Cephalanthera damasonium growing with C. longifolia, unheard of), at the scene of an obscure historical incident (but one that has always fascinated me; it was the spark that started the Protestant Revolt) in the evening—such is my France.
Yet it is not the naturalist or the historical dilettante in me that primarily drives me back to it. Far more, it is a kind of more general aesthetic lack, if I do not souse myself in it every so often. I mentioned my liking for Gracq earlier. That is certainly based on the subtlety of his novels, such as Le Rivage des Syrtes and Un Balcon en forêt (for my money, the finest—et le plus fin—novel of the Second World War), but also on those descriptions of rural France that appear in Lettrines and elsewhere. Years before I read him, or even heard his name, I had firmly decided on my own favourite small area of the Loire—that stretch of the south bank that runs to and past St Florent-le-Vieil, past the Ile Batailleuse and the Ile Melet (where Elizabeth and I long ago picked out for ourselves the one place in France where we would happily break our own rules and live—once one of those fermes épanouies sur leur terre-plein fortifié qui défie la crue. This farm is in ruins, long uninhabited, now more heron-perch than anything else, but I dream of owning it every time I see it). The chance that this landscape is a favourite of Gracq’s also, and has been memorably (in Les Eaux étroites) described by him, like his childhood at St Florent, is perhaps a poor reason to like him as a writer. But I admire his sharp and sometimes quirky views (the étrange manque de liant in Flaubert, yes) of life and literature also; above all the shrewd, rich meditations in the quite recent En lisant, en écrivant, essential reading for both practising novelist and serious student. A goût de terroir runs through all I know of his work: a rootedness, a nostalgia, an almost peasant independence, despite all his sophistication and complexity in other ways.
I am trying, through Gracq, to put my finger on what I most love in France, imaginary France; why I may claim it has formed me deeply. At heart it is not the literature, ancient or modern, its wit and elegance, its delicacy and perceptiveness, its variety. It is nothing political or social; it is not its wines and foods, all its subtleties and richnesses in the art de vivre. If anything, it is a richness of freedoms, and even there not so much in allowing people to choose from such richness, as in making the choice available. It remains the mother of so many things besides those that du Bellay listed in his famous poem, and not all desirable; yet it is for me the eternal homeland for all those whose personal mise en ordre partakes of pensée sauvage.
I sometimes imagine what I would be if I did not read French, however less than perfectly, did not know its culture, however erratically, did not know its nature and its landscapes, however partially. I know the answer. I should be half what I am; half in pleasure, half in experience, half in truth.
1. This essay was first published in Studies in Anglo-French Cultural Relations: Imagining France, edited by Ceri Crossley and Ian Small (London: Macmillan, 1988). It now incorporates additional material on ‘Ourika’ (see pp. 52–53) that appeared later (1994) in an essay on Claire de Duras’s short novel of that name.
2. Que fors aus ne le sot riens nee (‘No one knew of it but them’).