by Irwin Shaw
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.
CANNES
Cannes harbor the next noon was so crowded that we had to anchor in the roadstead. Hundred-foot yachts there are as common as baby carriages in Central Park, and the traffic problems are very similar to those clogging Times Square. As you look at the forest of masts, you have the feeling that the population explosion of this century has spread to shipyards and that perhaps the anti-conception pill which is being offered to the prolific mothers of India might profitably be peddled at ship chandlers’ shops as well. In the middle of all that teak and polished brass you get the feeling that just about everybody in Europe owns a yacht, if not two, and you are assailed by the false but heavy conviction that the era of unlimited prosperity for the common man has arrived, decked out in nautical caps and yacht club flags. As the mere temporary lessee of a ship, you have the uncomfortable sensation of being a representative of the genteel poor, a disappointing specimen who, clumsily, was not on the spot when the wave of the future came along and carried everybody else to opulence.
It was here that I realized for the first time that the Captain and his family, who had produced a black cat with a bad temper and a caged canary with a good one, were giving our fair white ship an extra touch of hominess, a kind of semi-detached, laundry-bedecked South Kensingtonness, hard to discern at first but finally magically overwhelming. It was in Cannes, too, that we made our first fruitless search for a replacement for the faulty gas-burner in our refrigerator. Second beat of the tom-tom in the dark jungle.
The chief attraction of Cannes during the season is, as far as I have been able to make out, that it is enormously crowded. It has the same glorious sunshine, of course, as the rest of the coast, but the beaches are derisively narrow and the costs are cynically high. It is only the presence of more of his fellow men than can be comfortably accommodated in the area that brings the eager holiday maker to this seething city. Most writers tend to deplore crowds, since one of the main reasons for anyone to become a writer is the desire to be alone a good part of the time. But this year I found something optimistic about this turbulent congregation of French, Germans, English, Danes, Swiss, Dutch, Italians, Belgians, Venezuelans, and Americans on the thin rind of beach in front of the great hotels. Here are people who love their fellow men, and love them so well that they come from all quarters of the world to spend their precious three weeks of holiday cemented solidly in among them. On the beach at Cannes, you would get no vote of war against anybody.
We had to go ashore to deliver large packets of money to the ship’s agent who had arranged our cruise. He is riding high these days, of course, and only deplores the fact that harbors are not being built quickly enough to accommodate all his clients. There is a feeling that Greece, with its innumerable islands and endless miles of coastline and a shrewd harbor-building program supported by the tourist authorities, will soon take the play away from the traditional ports of the Mediterranean. While the agent was counting my money, a blond young Englishman in impeccable white shirt, shorts, and knee-length socks, came into the office to tell the agent that if anybody was looking for an expert captain, he was on tap. He looked anxious and shifty, and with his pre-war white elegance reminded me a little of passages of Lord Jim and made me wonder what failure of nerve or integrity had put him on the beach at this booming season.
On the quay outside the office my wife called out a name and, when the lady in front of us turned around, snapped her picture. It was a friend of ours from Paris, but the expression on her face as she found herself caught by the camera lens was not friendly. “For God’s sake,” she said, “don’t print that. I’m not supposed to be here.” Some twelve feet away we now noticed a gentleman, hovering uncertainly and trying to look unconnected to anybody. We promised not to print the picture and to this day have loyally kept that promise, although the lady looked charming in slacks and a wide straw hat and the light was perfect.
ANTIBES
We dropped anchor off the Cap d’Antibes and lunched with some English friends on the terrace of Eden Roc, that Taj Mahal of seaside luxury, and watched my son water ski off the same little dock from which I had learned the sport on my first trip to France after the war, in the summer of 1949, the year before my son was born. I remember it took me about twenty tries before I could stand up. My son, aged eleven, stood up on the first go and whirled around the bay of Golfe Juan with debonair assurance. I asked my English friends if this was evidence that the race was improving but got no sensible answers.
We played tennis on the pine-shaded courts of the Hotel du Cap, surely one of the most pleasant places in the world for missing smashes and double-faulting. The same old English pro with rheumatic legs was still giving lessons, calling out, in perfect Cockney, “Pliez les genoux, Madame,” and “Regardez la balle, Monsieur,” to ladies who were not bending their knees any deeper than the ladies of 1949 and to gentlemen who were not looking at the ball any more closely than the clients of that golden year. Memory has its own rules a
nd nostalgia doesn’t go by the book—for some people it is the call of a nightingale in a moonlit garden, or a woman’s smile in candlelight that brings back with unbearable sweetness the feeling of vanished joy. For me, that rasping Cockney voice calling, hopelessly, in the afternoon shadow of the pines, “Pliez les genoux, Madame,” transported me, with a shock of remembered pleasure, back into the perfect weather of my first peaceful summer in France.
Cleansed and salted by the cold waters off the Cape, we put into the harbor of Antibes for the night. The harbor was so full that we had to tie up next to another boat and cross the decks of three vessels to reach shore. We dined at a restaurant from whose terrasse you look through the archway in Vauban’s wall at the port. In an access of summertime gluttony, we had melon and bouillabaisse and several cold bottles of Provençal blanc-de-blanc, all topped off with a huge soufflé au Grand Marnier, everything rich and perfect and only possible for vacationing stomachs.
The owner of the restaurant is a friend of mine and we talked, as one always does in such places, of how much better it was in the old days. This lament is not only to be heard in Antibes. One hears it in Boston, in New York, at Far Rockaway, in Sorrento and Beirut, and I imagine it was also heard, at other times, in Thebes and Troy and in the halls of Montezuma.
At six-thirty in the morning, my son and I crossed the decks of our neighbors, moving quietly in espadrilles so as not to wake them, and walked into the town to look at the market. Later in the morning it is ravaged by the attacks of housewives, but at that hour it is complete, with all its arrangements of food and flowers at their most beguiling, an indescribable piled fragrance of figs, melons, peaches, strawberries, raspberries, cucumbers, onions and carnations filling the washed, shadowy air under the high shed, the colors, the smells, the Midi cries of the vendors, all combining to assure you of the abundance of the surrounding earth from which all this ripeness has sprung.
NICE
Toward mid-morning, on a milky sea, we passed the airport at Nice, a long lane of concrete along the sea-front, and I remembered the first time I had seen it, during the war, when a tank armed with flails was being used to explode mines the Germans had left under the runway, and some American paratroopers were hurling grenades into the water and diving in after fish they blew to the surface. The cleared part of the runway had been given over to a squadron of Piper Cubs that were acting as spotters for our artillery sited in the hills above Monte Carlo and for a destroyer lying off the coast, which also had the German positions on the other side of Menton within range. One of the cameramen of our unit had gone up with the C.O. of the squadron and crossed the German lines for his first view of Italy, but had drawn no fire. Recently I had a reunion in Chicago with the cameraman, who now works as a free lance photographer there. He is married now, with two children, and he has not drawn any fire in Chicago either. He is a little heavier than he was in 1944 and conscientiously does the eleven-minute-a-day exercises prescribed in the famous Canadian Air Force manual. In 1944 the Army made sure he got enough exercise to keep in shape without the aid of manuals put out by a foreign power.
As our ship passed close to the airport, jets were swooping in one after another, unloading people in bright clothes in front of the shining new terminal. What fishing is done now in these waters is done more quietly. If there was any artillery in the neighborhood it did not reveal its presence to us.
MONACO
Monte Carlo makes you sigh. If you are lover of the ornate, solid, overblown past of the Grand Hotels, the days of the ballerinas and Russian princes, you sigh because their time is so clearly over. If you are one of those idealists who has hopes for a reasonable and well-planned future, you sigh at the insensate piling up of steel, concrete and glass which has been inflicted on the Principality of Monaco by the corporations from all over the world that have been attracted there by its obliging tax structure. It is urbanism with a goiter, architecture by megalomaniacs, and soon a tree there will be a curiosity, a lawn a cause for wonder. In a few years perhaps only money will grow in the gardens and only stock-manipulators will be permitted past the frontier.
Still, the beach at the Sporting is handsomely conceived, with long lines of cabanas facing the sea on concrete walks. There are two large pools and a restaurant and the tennis club hanging on a cliff above as a background, and waiters in white coats carrying trays of cold langouste to the parties lunching outside the cabanas, in between games of gin rummy and bridge. It is all very much like a camp for condemned millionaires, given a touch of humanity by children diving off the boards and plump brown girls in bare feet playing volleyball on teams composed mostly of young men who, you are sure, have never worked a day in their lives.
We sailed out of Monte Carlo at midnight. It was clear and calm. A million pinpoints of light glittering in the charitable darkness transformed the garish principality into insubstantial electric lace.
We passed the Casino and I imagined what it was like at that hour around the tables. I used to patronize casinos and play chemin-de-fer. I didn’t lose much and sometimes I even won, but after several summers, the faces of the other players began to bother me. The distortions which greed, disguised or undisguised, caused on otherwise perfectly acceptable and everyday faces disturbed me. The real reason it disturbed me was that I began to see that no one was immune to it. By the simplest process of reasoning I came to the conclusion that my face hanging over the table must affect the others as their faces affected me. So I now avoid casinos. A writer’s life is such a gamble, anyway, that the itch to bet should be more than satisfied every time he sits down at the typewriter in the morning or receives a letter from his publisher.
Edified by this recollection of years of abstention from vice, I watched the lights of the last corner of France fall behind us as we set our course across the Gulf of Genoa toward the Ligurian coast. When we went down into our cabin and climbed into our bunks the noise of the screw and engines was steady and throbbing and gave us a brave illusion that we were cutting through the water at great speed. Sleeping at sea, with the cradling motion of the ship and the hypnotic rush of water past the portholes, brings an atavistic refreshment to an act that for modern man has become complicated and often frightening. The certainty that no phone can ring, no telegram can be delivered, serves as a sleeping potion, and the knowledge that next morning you are going to wake with the coast of Italy in view puts a smile on your dreams.
III
PORTOFINO
As every one has said, Portofino is like the setting for an opera, a pink and corn-colored arc of buildings leaning over the busy little harbor, a fishing-cum-tourist village whose cobbled main square slopes down into the water, everything gay with umbrellas and café awnings and embroidered linen tablecloths hung out like flags on the stands that are put up each morning and taken down each night. It is hard to avoid the picturesque in Italy, and perhaps in our day we are over-wary of being pleased by it. Modern art has conditioned us against beauty that makes too forthright a claim on our senses, but it may be that we should remember we are travelers, not abstract painters, and give ourselves over without esthetic misgivings to such simple pleasures as the sight of Portofino on a summer’s morning, with the steep green hills around it, the bougainvillaea hanging in red and purple explosions from the cliffs and the tourist boats coming in from Rapallo and Santa Margharita with their crowds of brightly dressed sightseers.
Indolence is the order of the day on this coast. You stroll around the town, you sit under an umbrella and have a glass of cold Munich beer, you watch a four-year-old boy dancing a shepherd’s measure, alone in the cobbled sunshine as he plays gravely on a flute, making a small Mediterranean music that satisfies him even if it is somewhat puzzling to more sophisticated ears.
You look in the smart shops and buy a red straw hat for your wife, you admire the other yachts and wonder who the people on board can be, you eat at one of the many restaurants that line the square, you spot a Rothschild in a rubber raft, you
order fritto misto because you are by the sea and it’s your first day that year in Italy, and lasagna al pesto, which is a local specialty made of wide flat pieces of pasta in a sauce of olive oil mixed with garlic and basil that has been crushed in a mortar. You overhear someone inside the restaurant trying to communicate with Rapallo just a few miles away and saying, “Pronto, pronto,” over and over again with rising impatience, and you know that while many other things may have changed since your first visit to Italy, the telephone system remains heroically untouched by progress. You look at the people around you and are struck once again with the number of faces that are adorned by beautiful bold noses, confirming your theory that the Italians are the handsomest people in Europe. You look in the little bar where a bearded English boy who was hitch-hiking around Europe used to strum a guitar and sing cowboy ballads in an inaccurate accent last summer, but he isn’t there this year.
You decide to go swimming and you find out that your Captain is not all Haig & Haig old sea-dog twinkle. The year before, we had been annoyed by the fact that the ship’s dinghy had no motor, so that if we wished to swim outside the dirty waters of the harbors we had either to row for hours or leave our mooring, a long and often complicated process, and run the risk of its no longer being free when we put in again after the swim. During the winter we had asked the agent to have some sort of motorized small craft provided for the voyage, and we now had a huge motorboat, suitable for the harpooning of whales, taking up most of the space on the after deck where it was lashed down because it was too heavy to be carried on davits off the side. When I asked the Captain to put it in the water he flatly refused, as it meant taking down stanchions, dismantling the rail and re-doing all the rigging for thirty feet of canvas awning. All this would be an hour’s work for four or five strong men, and the Captain’s daughter, while sturdy enough, I am sure, to dance Giselle and Swan Lake on the same program, could hardly be expected to help manhandle a ton of teak and iron. The Captain’s wife, who incidentally was an excellent cook in calm water (in rough weather she had to lie down), was not quite up to the job either. My son and I were, of course, ready to join in, but the Captain was adamant, making the whole operation sound very much like the first ten years of the erection of a pyramid.