Allegorizings

  AWAY FROM THE heartland that connection took me, away from Europe absolute towards the outer reaches. Asia began on the outskirts of Vienna, Metternich used to say.

  The timetables had decreed that although my journey so far had taken me under the English Channel and through several mountain ranges, I had seen nothing of those organic borderlines. Only shifts in the night beat of the wheels had told me in my slumbers that we had laboured up a mountain gradient or raced down the other side, and Europe being modern Europe, not even the murmur of customs officials marked our passage in the dark from one State to another. It was a sort of virtual travel.

  It was the same now. I went to sleep in the wooded suburbs of Vienna, I woke to find myself on a wide plain that might be in another continent. Mitteleuropa was left behind, and as we travelled towards the Mediterranean I felt I was retreating from the penumbra of Franz Josef’s empire into altogether different states of being, through cultures Latin, Slav and Magyar, through countrysides decidedly short of Gemütlichkeit.

  My sleeper was Austrian again, but the train was Italian—Trenitalia’s Don Giovanni—and already outside our windows onion domes had given way to campaniles, cosy cottages had become those four-square farms of the lowlands that speak to this day of Roman origins. Landschaft was campagna now, and when we stopped at Udine I saw silhouetted in profile outside my window, perfectly motionless, lost in thought and a little melancholy, the head of a man straight from the Venetian cinquecento, except for his trendy rimless spectacles.

  But the train did not carry me to Venice. At Mestre I turned eastward and found a connection that would take me to my second coastline—or as Metternich might have said, the last coastline of civilization. It was another Italian train, called the Goldoni, and it was bound for Ljubljana, Zagreb and Budapest. I was told it went on to somewhere with a name like Nyiregyhaza, but I didn’t believe in that. Anyway, there was hardly anybody on it, and I had my dove-grey compartment all to myself.

  First we ambled through the vineyard country of Friuli, which was ablaze with a million dandelions, and then we climbed abruptly into that strange harsh outcrop of the Balkans, the series of ridges collectively known as the Karst—Carso in Italian. This is proper outsider’s landscape, scrubby country for foxes and banditti, where the functionaries of Habsburg Europe travelled in fear of their lives and virtues, and the partisans of World War II ambushed Nazis right and left.

  It is not remote country—getting rather suburban in places, in fact—but it is strangely suggestive and ambiguous, with its scattered hamlets, its lonely war memorials and its signal boxes far from anywhere. It is like a bitter mirror image, as it were, of my other outsider countryside, far away in amiable Wales. And just as an antique railway had carried me away from the Irish Sea into the genial mountains of the west, so another hoary device would take me from these more unsettling heights down to the Adriatic. When the Goldoni stopped at the frontier station between Italy and Slovenia, I trudged down the long platform, entirely empty but for me and my shadow (for it was midday by now), and found my way to my final connection, the funicular tram that runs from Opicina on the ridge of the Karst to the seaport of Trieste.

  The Ferrovia Elettrica Trieste-Opicina was built in 1902. Its wooden trams run precipitously down the face of the Karst to their terminal at sea-level, and for the steepest part are taken in hand by a separate funicular engine. It is a very old-fashioned, well-maintained, polished survivor of a lost Europe, and when my No. 2 Tram drew softly away from the terminal that day, and prepared to plunge over the escarpment, it gave me my first sight of the ocean since I had left Porthmadog behind the Merddin Emrys. There the Adriatic lay below us, blue as blue, with the old port sprawled around its bay. It looked like a City-State, an enclave, silent and serene on the rim of an imaginary continent.

  As we tumbled down towards the city I could just see, far away to the east, a line of snow-capped mountains. During my whole journey, Atlantic to Adriatic, I had never seen the Alps before! They made me feel as though my whole trip had been no more than parable, and as a matter of fact by the time we reached sea-level the weather had changed, the skies had blurred, and those celestial alps had faded into hypothesis.

  A Bag of Tricks

  AS MOST OF us sometimes do, I pined one day for Provence, and I found that even before I left home to write an essay about the place, my mind was full of Provenceness.

  There in my subconscious, only waiting to be summoned, were the olive trees and the lizards and the long summer shadows, the rackety cicadas, the wine smells, the sunflowers dipping in their ranks—the poet Mistral, too, and Cézanne forever painting Mont Victoire, and Bardot at Saint-Tropez, and car rallies and pastis and garlic and gypsies—the whole bag of tricks subsumed in my mind, since I am of a certain age, by the legendary image of Le Train Bleu, which for a couple of generations between the wars sped its complement of statesmen, stars, aristocrats, thriller writers and ne’er-do-wells through the starlit night to Nice and Monte Carlo.

  It often happens that fancies become realities, and so it was when I took the train from London next morning. It was certainly no Blue Train, but Eurostar whisked me directly under the Channel to Provence faster than Anthony Eden or Coco Chanel could ever have dreamed, and in no time at all l found myself in a truly figurative Provençal town. What was it called? I forget now, but it gave me all I wanted for a start.

  My hotel was satisfyingly eccentric, replete with velveteen curtains, sacred images on landings and clockwork budgerigars in gilded cages. The shops appeared to specialize in boxes, dainty cardboard containers of every size and decorative function. Crystallized raspberries seemed a big thing, too. Citizens with beards were playing extremely slow games of boules in the central square, and for dinner I ate lamb’s trotters and tripe, flavoured strongly with thyme, or maybe it was red mullet on a bed of artichokes and pine seeds.

  What more could I want? I sat over my coffee that first evening, and thought for a time that my job was done already, between the fact and the fancy. I was wrong, though. Provenceness is an elusive abstraction, scorning fantasy and microcosm alike. As they say in the advertisements, conditions apply.

  PROVENCE IS NOT an altogether easy part of the world, in my view. Perhaps it is a bit too emotional for comfort. Although they are almost always delightful in the particular, its people can be brusque in the general—or at the driving wheel. Its weather, which in tourist theory is celestially benign, can burst into blistering heat or tropic downpour, and I prefer to steer clear of the big Provençal cities, which are violently heroic and congested. In that dear little introductory town I bought a white sun-hat embroidered with the letters OM, because I fondly thought of it as representing the calm Buddhist mantra Om Mane Padme Hum, Hail to the Jewel in the Lotus. It really stands for something much more relevant—Olympique Marseilles, one of the most excitable football clubs in Europe.

  Conditions apply, and stress is endemic to Provence, even among its beauties. There is an organization called Les Plus Beaux Villages de France, which offers the visitor an itinerary of matchlessly picturesque country locations. You can follow it if you like all across Provence, but Heaven help you if you do, for to qualify for membership a Plus Beau Village must evidently be totally forbidden to cars, accessible only by appallingly steep labyrinths of sun-baked medieval alleys and infested by thousands of people all too blatantly similar to yourself.

  I have evolved my own disciplines for the enjoyment of Provence. I avoid, for instance, all multi-starred, multi-forked or rosetted gourmet establishments. I generally steer clear of the coast. I am never seduced by the theme-parkism that has lately invaded these parts, the 350 Nile Crocodiles of Europe’s biggest Crocodilery, all Nougat Factories or Yogurt Distilleries. For me one delightful Provençal outdoor market can stand for all the others, and although it may be civilized to share the pleasures of those old gentlemen at their ball game, I try not to be carried away—it can last almost as long as cricket.

  B
eware of big festivals! They are ubiquitous in Provence, and although they seem to be riddled with obscure political squabbles, they are almost fatally exuberant. I had never quite got over the festival at Aix-en-Provence a year or two before, and this time I stumbled into the most high-spirited of them all, the Festival of the Theatre at Avignon. Magicians, clowns, jugglers and living statues filled the streets, choirs sang, trumpeters trumpeted, buskers went from table to table of a thousand cafés, and I found myself a momentary curiosity when footballing youths noticed the OM on my hat.

  Above all I put out of my mind the social glamour that for so long gave an incomparable sheen to the fable of Provence. It has gone the way of the Blue Train! But still . . . if ever I feel like recapturing something of its lost magic, I try looking in the evening, when the lights are coming on, across the bay of Antibes to the waterfront of Cannes on the other side. How cool and elegant the distant town looks then, how remote seem its publicity feuds, traffic jams, and tabloid absurdities! Coward and Colette might still be strolling over there, with the Astaires perhaps, and the Scott Fitzgeralds, and that very nice fellow the Duke of Angoulême.

  FOR IT IS one of the fascinations of this place that Provence has such stunning histories of its own. It has had its kings and princebishops and even popes, ruling their own minute or magnificent fiefs. Ancient ranks and traditions have meant a lot around here. In the yard of a small rural hotel in Vaucluse I came across a plaque commemorating, as recently as 1988, a “historic” visit by two local Royal Highnesses, and there are places where one may still hear the Provençal tongue, a language far older than France itself.

  It is the localness of things that gives Provence its marvellous variety, whether in dukes or cheeses. A night spent in almost any Provençal village is like a night spent in another country. One hill town may unexpectedly sprout bonsai trees; another apparently dedicates its entire existence to the memory of a particular medieval poet. Food is often specific to its neighbourhood, and when an entire village turns out to play boules in the cool of the evening, it seems to me that local conditions most certainly apply. Even the smell of the land is local, depending on its product. If it happens to be lavender-growing country, everything from the soap to the soup will emanate the scent of its harvest, and driving gently though the high lavender fields of the Plateau de Valensole is like drifting through a dream of deep purple.

  They tell me that Provence is especially interesting to geologists (not least the innumerable gorges that are for me much the most depressing features of its landscapes). Geographically it certainly offers something of almost everything. Sometimes it suggests to me Oregon, sometimes the Australian Outback, sometimes South American prairies. Those damned gorges are incessantly likened, of course, to Colorado, and some of the mountains tug at my always homesick heart with evocations of Wales.

  It is France, though. It is always France. In the dark cathedral of Apt, in the very heart of Provence, not far from the venerated veil of St. Anne the Virgin’s mother, a terrible death list reminds us of all the young men who went from this paradise to die for France at Verdun or on the Somme. The French delights are here, but the French tragedies linger too: good or bad, everything is heightened, extenuated or forgiven by the old caress of the South.

  WHAT THEN ARE the especial consolations of Provence? For me they are the consolations of doing nothing in particular. I was doing just that the other evening after dinner when a small French boy, perhaps seven or eight years old, emerged all alone from our nearby hotel and threw himself face down on a chaise-longue beside the swimming pool. After a moment there he turned over, lay upon his back, let his arms dangle and looked up as in a trance at the evening sky.

  He was only seven or eight, but I knew exactly what he was feeling. He was breathing the afternoon happiness of that chaise-longue. He was bewitched by the rhythm of the cicadas all around. He was lulled by the ambient perfumes of thyme, rosemary, and possibly banana ice-cream. He had achieved the Provençal nirvana, and when I heard his mother calling from the hotel—Pierre! Pierre!—he sprang to his feet in perfect contentment and ran away to Maman.

  So did I, in a manner of speaking. Next day I took the Eurostar (né Le Train Bleu) home from Provence to Waterloo, and with it came all manner of sweet after-tastes.

  Five

  Do you see that venerable character?

  Growing Old Reluctantly

  I AM ENTERING my eighties, and thinking a lot about it. Growing old gracefully, or serenely, or wisely, is the generally preferred denouement to life, especially among those who are not experiencing the process for themselves. But for myself, I know of no compensations for the frailties of senility, the fumble and the forgetfulness, and I am growing very old reluctantly.

  This is partly because, having enjoyed the human condition so thoroughly for so long, I hate to see it degenerating in myself—its enthusiasms waning, its strengths declining, its talents withering, its abilities shrinking, even its appetites not what they were. It is partly, of course, because life’s range is becoming so limited, so to speak: it’s no good contemplating a really big final masterpiece, or planning a wild expedition somewhere, because you can’t be sure you have enough time. But I am reluctant to join the ranks of the octogenarians chiefly because I so dislike some of the temperamental symptoms of old age.

  THREE THINGS IN particular repel me in the behaviour of my peers. First, I detest their generational pride, the pride of period. It is a kind of snobbery, and a particularly pernicious kind. The good old days, the good old days! What crass prejudice it is to imply that people of other age-groups are less perceptive, less gifted, than our own contemporaries. I loathe the smile of superiority that crosses elderly twenty-first-century faces when they hear some familiar sentimental melody of the 1930s—“now that’s what I call a tune!”—just as I despite the old dogmatists who refuse even to try to understand contemporary art—“what’s it meant to be?”

  With this all too well-known characteristic of old age come more sutble intimations of jealousy, resentment, and other discreditable traits which have been in secret gestation during the long years of innocence and hope. For example, gossip breaks out, the pastime above all of the envious and the disappointed. Don’t you know them, those pleasant old ladies, laughing so heartily over a piece of information built around a nugget of malice? Gossip is smiled indulgently upon by senior citizens—“Oh, my dear she’s a terrible gossip!” they say of each other with a sort of wry admiration—but often it contains within itself an endemic seed of bile.

  And finally there is complacency, the fault of the aged par excellence. How often have we heard the old folk not boasting exactly, nothing as crude as that, but happening to mention in conversation the achievements of their own youths, when they captained teams, or pulled off famous contracts, or married immensely handsome first husbands! It is as though the successes of the past are somehow more genuine than those of the present, more worth the remembering—and, incidentally, the mentioning.

  MANY OTHER IRRITATING evidences make me reluctant to acknowledge my own generation, but these are the chief. The more I recognize them in others, the more I try to repress them in myself. But age, alas, is age is age. . . . Do you see that venerable character looking along the book shelves there, now and then removing a volume to read a passage, and sometimes smiling in quiet appreciation? Yes, that’s me, reluctantly octogenarian, reminding myself of my own works, and thinking how much better we did everything in those days.

  Falling Over

  THE OTHER DAY I fell over in the street at a seaside resort in Wales. Helpful passers-by took me into a neighbouring department store, where the in-house first-aid team assiduously bandaged, cleaned and disinfected me, and gave me a cup of tea. “Do you often do this kind of thing?” one of them laughed as we parted.

  The sad truth is, I do. I have been falling over for years. I have tripped, slid, toppled and collided with lampposts in several continents, often because I am reading a book as I
walk, or contemplating a distant skyline, and I carry with me always the scars of a wandering mind.

  It wasn’t exactly a fall, but it was a lack of proper attention that led to the permanent disfigurement of my left middle finger, when sixty-odd years ago I let the steel hatch of a Sherman tank fall upon it as I was thinking of something else. And I suppose if I had looked properly where I was going I would not have stubbed my left big toe on an iceblock on Mount Everest, so that every five years since 1953 the toe-nail has come off.

  More often my mishaps have happened in the middle of cities, sometimes prosaically, sometimes rather spectacularly. Falling over in an icy Edmonton is so commonplace, it seems, that it hardly counts as falling at all, only carelessness, and when I collapsed in a main street there nobody took the slightest notice of my writhing figure in the snow. On the other hand jogging in Los Angeles once I tripped at full speed, and rocketing flat out along the sidewalk between the legs of the pedestrians, satisfactorily astonished one and all.

  In my experience three good cities to fall over in are Trieste, Manhattan, and St. Petersburg. I was once walking with a friend across Trieste’s Piazza Unità when I tripped on a paving stone, and to entertain my companion lay flat on my back like a stage corpse: the municipal response made me ashamed of myself, for when I opened my eyes again I found that dozens of anxious citizens had swarmed about my recumbent form, murmuring commiserative advice. I once fell over beside the lined-up horse carriages at the southern end of Central Park in New York, and I shall never forget the looming silhouettes of the assembled cab drivers, in their capes and miscellaneous hats, crowding genially over me as I lay in the gutter amid the pungent smell of horse-flesh. And when I tripped and fell in St. Petersburg I was instantly befriended by a retired bomber pilot of the Red Air Force, who took me to his shabby apartment for a restorative wash-and-brush-up before guiding me to a nearby McDonald’s for what he assured me would be my kind of coffee.