Flying Visits

by Clive James

  Yet paradoxically the nobility and the high bourgeoisie gave more to Biarritz than they ever took away. Private patronage resulted in an astonishing array of public works. On Eugénie’s orders, a tunnel was driven through the rocks to give access from the Grande Plage in the north to the Côte des Basques in the south. Miles of walkways appeared, all lined with tamarisks and hydrangeas. Casinos and grand hotels duly materialised. Everyone who was anyone built a château or a villa. Architecture was encouraged to reflect the festive mood by running riot. Turrets, gables, gazebos and similar ridiculosities proliferated, forming a pop-up picture-book skyline against the pink extravaganza of the sunset.

  Mad with enthusiasm, some of the more adventurous spirits even dared to immerse themselves in the sea. Previously the idea had not occurred to anyone. Eugénie had not been the only illustrious name to admire the onrushing ocean of Biarritz and environs. Stendhal, Taine, Flaubert, Victor Hugo and other great romantics had all, at one time or another, pronounced themselves awed by the remorseless waves. But it was a long step from admiring them to actually getting in amongst them. Eventually the fad caught on, but like every other nineteenth-century diversion it was accompanied by a lot of ritualised fuss and elaborate machinery.

  Even in the closing years of the belle époque, a fashionable lady in full walking-out regalia needed a moving staircase, or trottoir roulant, to get her and her various attendants down to the beach. Once there, she disappeared into la cabine de l’établissement and spent three-quarters of an hour getting changed for an encounter with the waters that was never allowed to exceed more than a few minutes, lest death intervene.

  Having approached the water’s edge, she was divested of her peignoir by a guide-baigneur and stood provokingly revealed – still fully dressed from neck to knee, but marginally less voluminously. The guides-baigneurs, most of them Basques, were themselves fully dressed, including straw hat: only their hands, feet and that part of the face not covered by a handlebar moustache could be regarded as bare.

  While one guide-baigneur alertly held the peignoir, another guide-baigneur, or in the case of more exalted clients two other guides-baigneurs, accompanied the lady a few inches into the pitiless torrent. Supported by her muscular champions, the lady gave herself up to the mercy of the deep. What went on beneath the waves must remain forever unknown, but one trusts that class barriers were suitably eroded. Ankles must have touched. Knees must have collided. Surely the occasional rendezvous was made, as it is today in the winter resorts, where fine ladies sometimes invite their ski instructors to bed, although never to dinner.

  Upon her retreat from the pounding vagues, the lady was once again enveloped in her peignoir and escorted back up the beach for another three-quarters of an hour in la cabine, after which the trottoir roulant was ready to hoist her back to civilisation. The rest of the day could be spent discussing her adventure with other ladies of her own rank.

  The whole routine went without a hitch until the day in 1908 when the Comtesse de Madron put her foot in it. She got one of her buttoned boots caught in the mechanism of the trottoir roulant. Minus four toes, she sued everyone, and the offending device, like so much else, was closed down for keeps in 1914.

  Sealed in a bubble of indifference, Biarritz was preserved by neglect. Two World Wars with a Depression in between left it looking pretty much as it had been when life was still sweet. Art deco was added to the conglomerate of styles; another Prince of Wales, thinner this time, was added to the aggregate of princely visitors; but the old confidence was gone. The fashionable action moved to the Mediterranean. Biarritz still served the turn as a plush funk-hole, but as a display case it was past tense. The postcards on sale from year to year showed little that was altered, still less that was new. During the Second World War the Germans installed concrete gun emplacements to enfilade the beaches in case the Allies tried a right hook. The Allies never came and the gun emplacements, too solid to blow up, were turned into flower-beds.

  To put it cruelly, Biarritz became a ghost town – a magnificent but dispirited relic of the old Europe. After the Second World War the high-born and well-placed still came for the season, but only if they were of a certain age. Their sons and daughters went to St Tropez, where the waves were very flat but there was a chance of seeing Brigitte Bardot’s behind. Nobody thought of the big waves at Biarritz with any special fondness until 1956, when Richard Zanuck and Peter Viertel arrived on the coast to scout locations for The Sun Also Rises.

  Zanuck was the producer of the movie and Viertel was the writer. The minute they clapped eyes on the surf at Biarritz they started not producing and not writing. They had their surfboards shipped over from California. These were Malibu, or hot-dog, surfboards, the ancestors of the potato-chip surfboards in use today. When Zanuck and Viertel stood up on the waves, the locals were variously outraged and enchanted. Some of the village elders said it was against the laws of both God and gravity. But the younger men couldn’t wait to join in.

  Few Frenchmen had ever gone in for body-surfing, and you still don’t see much of it even now. As a direct result of the long season Zanuck and Viertel spent not working on The Sun Also Rises, the French think of surfing as an activity carried out exclusively on surfboards. Old Australian crocks like Blakemore and myself can occasionally be seen shooting the breakers on our bare chests – all right, bare stomachs – but for the natives surfing is something you do standing up.

  The awful truth is that young people all over the world think the same way. My generation has been bypassed. On the Sydney beaches when I was young, a surfboard was something only a weightlifter could ride: built of wood, it went straight for the beach like a landing barge while the rider crouching on top of it pretended to be in control. The first Malibu boards arrived at about the time I left, so I never learned to ride one. In fact I never even touched one until I met Peter Viertel in Biarritz. Viertel has white hair by now but his way of life – which includes being married to Deborah Kerr – keeps him young. He can still stand on the waves like a boy on a dolphin. Under his tuition I finally got to stand up on a surfboard, if only for a few seconds. It feels great.

  Surfing has helped to revive the energies of Biarritz. Surfers come there from all over Europe and indeed the world: a new, penniless royalty. There are elegant French surfers with degrees in science, stunning wives or husbands, and surfboards with sails on them. There are German surfers who look as if they took up the sport because terrorism was too much like work. You see van-loads of Australians with John Newcombe moustaches and countersunk eyes like tacks in a carpet. Half my age and not even sure which country they are in, the Australians climb into their Rip Curl wet-suits and sit for hours half a mile off the Côte des Basques, patiently waiting for a wave worthy of their steel. Last year, on a flat day, I heard one of them say: ‘Shit, this is no good. Let’s go to Spain.’

  Usually it is good enough. You can see why a generation brought up on skateboards, surfboards and Crystal Voyager should want to make Biarritz one of their summer stopovers. Unfortunately, from the viewpoint of the municipality, the surfing boom is not enough by itself to generate prosperity. Too many surfers are bums. They sleep in a van, dry their clothes on top of it, eat off the pavement and don’t even tip the lady in the WC. Most of the cash is brought to town by ordinary people who wouldn’t mind if the surf disappeared tomorrow, so long as the sand was still there.

  Wealth resides not in the few hundred surfers but in the thousands of ordinary paddlers who bring their children. As the old hotels continue to rot away, it looks like common sense to replace them with the kind of modern building that will pack the punters in more efficiently. Alas, the results are horrible to behold. Rearing up out of Biarritz’s otherwise dinky eclecticism, the typical new hotels look like a cross between a typewriter and a toilet. So far there are only about a dozen of them, but they point the way that things might go. By now the original buildings are falling down of their own accord. To restore and maintain so many bizarre ol
d edifices would seem quixotic even supposing it were technically possible. The temptation to let them all collapse is reinforced by the suspicion that most holidaymakers wouldn’t care. What they want is hot showers that work. Yet a compromise ought to be possible. Perhaps the interiors could be gutted and the façades kept – apart from people in the social swim, nobody ever saw what was behind them anyway.

  Biarritz is a jumble of a town and no single solution to its problems can possibly be right. The Basques being a fiery lot, they might easily talk themselves into a ruinous snap decision concerning the town’s most immediate problem, which is what to do about the advancing sea. On the Côte des Basques the beach is reputedly getting smaller year by year, while the cliffs show a disconcerting tendency to cave in, with detrimental effects on property values. The mayor is in favour of a scheme by which piers would be built at regular intervals, thereby producing a string of bijou beachettes with plenty of sand in them but no surf. This is a notch better than an earlier scheme to turn the whole beach into a marina, but it still ranks as a catastrophe, since even the non-surfing Basque elders are well aware that the unbroken line of sable d’or on the Côte des Basques is the chief glory of Biarritz.

  I went to a public meeting at which the mayor proposed his scheme at enormous length. A spoke was put in his wheel by a prodigiously ancient Basque who got to his feet – this process in itself consuming a good proportion of the evening – and announced that the Côte des Basques was exactly the same now as it had been when he was a boy. The meeting erupted. People were screaming at one another. Suddenly it was easy to see why successive Spanish Governments, whether of the Left or the Right, have always found it hard to keep the Basques in line.

  If you drive down to San Sebastian the Spanish Basques will serve you a dish of prawns cooked in salt that taste better than anything else you have ever eaten. Unfortunately they might also blow up your car. The Basques are simply an explosive people. They play half a dozen different versions of pelote. One version is played with the bare hand, which comes to resemble a catcher’s mitt. The fastest version, cesta punta, is played with a long basket strapped to the right wrist. The venue is a sort of giant squash court and the ball travels fast enough to kill. The players wear crash helmets and spend a lot of time falling on their heads.

  The chummiest version of pelote is called grande chistera. It is played with the long basket but in the open air and against only one wall. The game is not quite as sensational as cesta punta but it involves the spectators in a big way, since there is no net between them and the action. If you take your eyes off the ball you can end up with a bad headache. A girl sitting only a few feet away from me got absorbed in conversation with her boyfriend. They had only just arrived. He was watching the ball and she wasn’t. It hit her in the right temple. He had to take her home. Having just blown 30 francs in a matter of seconds, he was one very embittered Basque.

  The Basques were in Biarritz before the whales went away and will probably be there when they come back. But in the meantime they are willing to make the rest of us feel welcome. There has probably never been a better time in Biarritz than now. The old days had a lot of style but little substance. Think of all those elegantly turned-out gentlemen lined up on the esplanade and searching the beach for the glimpse of an ankle. Nowadays you can see some of the most heartbreakingly pretty girls in the world springing around with hardly anything on at all. Sucking in our paunches, Blakemore and I stride seawards in a masterful manner. Can anyone doubt that life today is better, now that the gap between those who lie about and those who work for a living has narrowed to the point that they are often the same people? Anyway, as a place in which not to do something, Biarritz is unbeatable. Already we have not written a film and a play. Next year we might not write a musical.

  August 27, 1978

  Postcard from Rome

  BRITISH Airways were justifiably proud of getting your correspondent to Rome only three hours behind schedule. After all, Heathrow had been in the grip of those freak snow conditions which traditionally leave Britain stunned with surprise.

  In England, British Rail loudspeakers had been smugly announcing prolonged delays due to locomotives coming into contact with inexplicable meteorological phenomena, such as heaps of water lying around in frozen form. Airport officials were equally flabbergasted to discover more of the same stuff falling out of the sky. But now my staunch Trident was leaving all that behind. In a dark but clear midnight, Rome lay below. Those strings of lights were roads all leading to the same place.

  All my previous visits to the Eternal City had been done on the cheap. In those days I was still travelling on the weird escape routes frequented by students. Some of the students turned out to be eighty-year-old Calabrian peasant ladies carrying string bags full of onions. The charter aircraft belonged to semi-scheduled airlines whose pilots wore black eyepatches and First World War medals. Their point of arrival was Ciampino, Rome’s no. 2 airport – an inglorious military establishment ringed with flat-tyred DC-4s and Convair 240s too obsolete for anything except fire drill.

  I used to live in the kind of cold-water pensione on the Via del Corso where the original rooms had been partitioned not only vertically but horizontally as well, so that the spiral staircase beside your bed led up to a bare ceiling. You had to apply in writing to take a bath. Lunch was half a plate of pasta on the other side of the Tiber. Dinner was the other half.

  A lot of water has gone over the viaduct since then, and this time I was a bona fide traveller. Even at one o’clock in the morning Leonardo da Vinci airport, tastefully done out in fluted chromium, was a treat for the eyes. My hotel was in Piazza Trinitá dei Monti at the very top of the Spanish Steps. The décor was strictly veneers and cut glass, but it was heavily tricked out with the Medici coat of arms and the bath came ready equipped not just with a plug, but a dinky sachet of foam-producing green goo. My waiting readers were subsidising this luxury. Could I justify their confidence? What can you say about so old a city in so short a space? I sank cravenly into the foam.

  Sleep allayed my fears, but they came back in the morning. I appeared on the Spanish Steps just in time to be greeted by the cold weather, which had been racing down Europe during the night. Rome suddenly froze up solid. The Triton, forever blowing his conch in the Piazza Barberini, abruptly became festooned with icicles. As unashamedly ostentatious as ever, the wealthier Roman women shopping in the Via Condotti instantly adopted a uniform – mink and boots. In a bar a little fat lady who looked like a bale of furs reached up to spoon the cream from a glass of hot chocolate higher than her head. For once nobody was in any danger of being kidnapped. Cold weather meant plenty of snow in the mountain resorts. The terrorists were all away skiing.

  With only a few days at my disposal I decided to leave most of my usual haunts unvisited, apart from a quick trip to St Peter’s to see how well the Michelangelo pietà had been repaired. Since I had last seen this masterpiece it had been attacked by a hammer-wielding Australian of Hungarian origins. Perhaps he was trying to effect improvements. Anyway, he had given the Madonna a nose-job. The nose was now back on and the whole statue, I was glad to see, had been separated from its adoring public by a glass wall. Taking it for granted that none of my compatriots had been flicking ink darts at the Sistine ceiling, I headed out by car to the Catacombs.

  Out on the old Appian Way it was as cold as Caligula’s heart. Sleet drenched the roadside ruins. Like a leftover from La Strada, a lone whore solicited business from passing cars. A couple of millennia ago the cars would have been chariots but she would have looked roughly the same. Hilarius Fuscus has a tomb out there somewhere. Apart from his name he is of no historical interest, but with a name like Hilarius Fuscus how interesting do you have to be? The Catacombs, however, were mainly for the nameless. In the Catacombs of Domitilla, for example, more than 100,000 people were buried, but only seventy of them came down to modern times with any identity beyond that conferred by the heap of powder their bones
turned into when touched by air.

  A German monk took me down into the ground. ‘Zer soil is called tufa. Volcanig. Easy for tunnels. Mind zer head.’ In this one set of catacombs there are eleven miles of tunnels, one network under another. The two top levels have electric light throughout. ‘Mine apologies for zer electric light. Mit candles is more eery. Zis way.’ People had been filed away down here by the generation. Some of the frescos remain intelligible. You can see the style changing through time: suddenly a Byzantine Christ tells you that the Empire of the West is in decline. The sign of the fish is everywhere. ‘You also see zer sign of zer turdle dove. Symbol of luff und piss.’

  When we arrived back at the surface the good friar’s next party was alighting from its coach – a couple of hundred Japanese, all of them with cameras round their necks. Some of the cameras had tripods attached. I had been lucky to get what amounted to a private view. Nor were there many tourists at the newest of the Catacombs, the Fosse Ardeatine. The people buried here all died at once, on March 24, 1944. For the whole story you have to go to Anzio, about thirty-five miles down the coast.

  Anzio is a small town built around a port. A few hundred yards from the port there are some ruined foundations on a low cliff. Standing in the ruins, you can look along the beaches. The Allied forces came ashore here in January 1944. The landing was unopposed but it took a long time to develop a beach-head. Italy was already out of the war but the Germans were not: far from it. Kesselring counterattacked with horrific violence. The whole area became an enormous battlefield. The flat littoral terrain was ideal for the German armour. Right over your head, the Ju88s came bombing and strafing. The Allied forces were stymied for months.