ST. TROPEZ

We set sail for St. Tropez, on the theory that if you are within a hundred miles of St. Tropez, you at least have to look at it. St. Tropez is a rich mixture of diverse elements. There is a whiff of Sodom and Gomorrah to it, and a little of a superb detention home for delinquent girls. With this, there is a kind of three-month-long Easter Parade for semi-nudists, mixed with the livelier aspects of an international congress. Thrown in for good measure is some of the color of an artists’ colony, plus the bustle and trading of an Oriental bazaar, all against a bleached background of an old fishing port which gives shape and supplies a frame of beauty for the confused goings-on of this nerve-wracking playground, where you are in constant danger of being run over by a Ferrari as you stroll along in front of the cafés that face the harbor, or of being greeted effusively by the one person you have spent all spring avoiding in Paris.

Some French friends, among them Françoise Sagan, came on board for drinks. Since we had stocked our vessel from Ships’ Stores, a glorious institution which carries all kinds of liquor, tax-free, and at a price to make drunkards long for the sea, we had an impressive cellar and made a host of friends over a thousand miles of Mediterranean coastline with comparatively painless generosity.

While we were drinking, Miss Sagan’s dog got into a quarrel on the dock with a slightly larger dog who served as mascot on a French corvette tied up near us. The dogs were separated, with no great harm done, much to the amusement of the sailors who were playing boules on the seawall, but I’m sure they would have been embarrassed if they had known to whom the dog belonged. The French have an excessive respect for writers, and it extends even to the animals of writers. It is difficult to imagine an American dog being treated with a difference because his master has just received a good review in the Sunday Times, and perhaps it is this admirable quality in the French character that accounts for the attraction of France through the years for writers from Chicago, Fresno, and New York.

Miss Sagan had just had the first installment of a new book of hers published in a weekly in Paris, and I envied her her perfect calm as she sat there in the late June dusk, sipping rum and knowing that at that very moment thousands of her compatriots were judging her once again. Miss Sagan is an extraordinary phenomenon. The nearest parallel in our own literature is Lord Byron, who, as he put it, woke up one morning famous. Miss Sagan woke up famous at the age of eighteen, which is a little early in the game for that particular exercise, but she goes on serenely, writing what she wants to write, modest but stubborn and quietly undeterred, it seems, by the avalanche of praise and blame which has swept over her since the appearance of Bonjour Tristesse. We could use her, in what are called Creative Writing courses in our universities, perhaps not to teach young America how to write, but how to behave once having written.

Every morning a mass migration takes place from St. Tropez westward to a long stretch of sand known as Tahiti Beach. Thousands of people lie out there day after day broiling in the sun, turning all shades from purplish tan to orange-tinted sienna, as the devotées of this chic and fiery shrine conform to the modern notion that the best holiday is the one in which you approach most closely death by sunstroke and heat prostration.

There is a constant racket of engines from speedboats towing water skiers, from a helicopter that seems to patrol the beach regularly, from little one-man craft with noisy outboard motors that you can rent by the half-hour and that make you think longingly of the days when the only sound to be heard along this coast was the slap of wind in sails or the occasional complaint of an oarlock.

Skin divers who come up suddenly under your bows add a little of the excitement of blood sports to the scene, and every few days there are harrowing items in the newspapers of decapitations and amputations by propellers. Other dangers crop up at night, when the harbor-side activity is at its most intense, with everybody strolling, shopping, flirting, ogling, drinking, eating, and gossiping at the same time. There is the danger that you might be seen with the wrong group or in the wrong restaurant or the danger that you might be overheard praising the wrong movie. The jeunesse dorée and non-dorée of Paris seems to have moved down in its entirety from its usual haunts on the Left Bank and the 16th Arrondissement, the girls in skin-tight denim pants, cut low over the hips and designed to be worn honorably only by perfect size tens, and even then only if they are under eighteen years old. With them there are the usual older beasts of prey of both sexes, to supply the necessary perfume of decay to the performance. Everybody says that St. Tropez is impossible in July and August and almost everybody comes in July and August. Looking at the place objectively you finally reach the conclusion that when you were twenty you would have loved it, that if you had a twenty-year-old son you might possibly, and with some uneasiness, send him there for a two-week holiday, to be filed away under the heading of Experience, and that if you had a twenty-year-old daughter you would fight to the bitter end to keep her from coming within a day’s ride of the place.