At Home and Abroad

by V. S. Pritchett

  To follow the Seine from its source is to see what uncertainties and little deaths occur at the beginning of great things. The trickle makes a puddle or two under walls and manor gates, it dries up in the summer, and without the reviving water of the pretty Douix River that bursts out of a cavern near Châtillon, the Seine might vanish altogether. It recovers and, sparkling with vigor, runs down the middle of the village street at Mussy where it meets its first laundress scrubbing her washing on the bank. Before reaching Troyes, it is big enough to drive waterwheels; and, now ten yards wide or more, it works the flour mills and stocking factories of the solid little cathedral town. Here it rates a long stone quay in the Flemish manner, but at the end of the quay it dives underground, and I fear that it becomes a sewer, for I saw a woman standing over a grating there talking to her husband who was down below. Beyond Troyes, it winds across lightly wooded and open plains, dusty in summer and bleak in winter—champaign country they call it—until it reaches the woods and watery glades of Moret and the forest walls around Melun and Fontainebleau. The Aube and Yonne give it heart; and near Charenton, where the Marne comes in, some three hundred kilometers from its beginning, Paris is created. The trickle has become more than three hundred yards wide at the Pont Neuf and has established the most important inland port of France.

  The fact is surprising. We thought Paris was above mere trade. The explanation springs from the nature of the river. The Seine is slow-flowing water; its descent is gentle, it winds. The English Channel is only 112 miles from Paris as the crow flies but the Seine more than doubles that distance. It is quiet enough to be a link in the extraordinary canal system of Europe, by which a barge can travel from Amsterdam or Le Havre to the Mediterranean. As you look over the bookstalls near Notre Dame, you see Dutch and Belgian barges living below you. Farther up the Seine, toward the Austerlitz railroad station, you spot those small seagoing boats of five hundred tons that trade between Paris and London. From Paris to Rouen, the phutting of barge engines goes on all day—they don’t travel at night—and between Rouen and Le Havre, at the river’s mouth, they are joined by the great cargo ships.

  All the same, as you walk under the plane trees along the riverbank in the center of Paris and look down at the cobbled quays, you don’t get a strong impression of commerce, unless it comes from a steam shovel emptying unending loads of gravel from the quarries of the north. You rarely see a crane; the cargoes are handled by hand. Most of this is done at the canal docks at St. Denis and the new barge docks at Gennevilliers in the Paris suburbs. (This, incidentally, is a hot place for Communist propaganda, as you see by the slogans daubed on the river bridges. These have been astutely obliterated by turning the Latin alphabet into something that looks like Greek lettering.) There also are the timber quays above Notre Dame and at the Pont de Bercy in sight of the cathedral, and there are the wine quays and the acres of wine cellarage with their evocatively labeled “roads” between the casks: Vouvray, Barsac, Chablis. In the last one hundred years the mercantile pandemonium of the central quays has declined, but the barge traffic is greater than ever.

  The Seine has flowed, like a life stream, through the heart of Western civilization. It bears on its current all the thoughts of the Sorbonne, all the learning and grace of Latin culture, all the waywardness and simplicity of nature. It is a fortunate river to have on its banks the Cathedral of Rouen and the hundred belfries of that city, to have been gazed at there by Corneille, to have nurtured Paris, the one city in the world whose people have known how to think and please and live and to awaken the minds of all who have been lucky enough to spend a year or two there when they were young. To those of us who were born in foreign lands the Seine is more than a river, it is a gift from France to all who have seen it. It must be the most remembered river in the world.

  [1963]

  4

  Europe’s Mediterranean Coast

  There are two Mediterraneans: the native Mediterranean of work and living, and the foreigners’ playground. The pleasure phase began in the eighteenth century with the Grand Tour, the aristocratic and educative journey to France and Italy by English and Germans; for centuries northern Europeans had had to admit that only the Italians knew how to build cities, palaces and country houses, that only the Italians had manners. And then, in the 1830s, Lord Brougham discovered the climate of Cannes, in Provence. Soon all the comfortably-off families of Europe were establishing themselves for the season in that southern sun-trap, building villas all the way from Hyères to Rapallo; and the French and Italian cartoonists were drawing comic pictures of the whiskered English, always dressed in kilts and gazing with horselike hauteur at the foreign scene. The retired colonelcy and gentry of Europe, the scandals and eccentrics of Victorian society, the spinsters, settled in their pensions: they were there to escape the northern winter and to live cheaply. The painters followed, searching for the picturesque—the wash hanging in the slums of Naples, the peasant on mule or donkey, standing (if possible) under vines at a well, or beside a crumbling church or palace.

  This paradise lasted until 1914. There followed a larger crowd: the tourists who always settle around painters. Cézanne and Van Gogh had worked in Provence; Picasso and Matisse were there now. In the cheap 1920s the Mediterranean was deep in post-Impressionism.

  The next war finished that. First of all mass tourism, based on mass motoring, came in, bringing the motel, the apartment houses, the campsites. After 1956, the package tour dealt the final blow at the scene of la douceur de vivre. The words Eats, Snacks, Fish and Chips, French Fried, Night—and Nite—Club appeared in the streets of the basket makers and the fishermen, and turned quiet, pretty places into circuses. Fishermen who preferred their women to wear four petticoats and to be bloused to the chin found the bars and cafés filled with girls in bikinis and large women in pants that looked like pumped-up inner tubes. The respectable townspeople noted that the social tone of tourism had gone down: the newcomers could not bear the local food and drank the local wine to excess and—most shocking to a Mediterranean—not knowing or caring where it came from.

  In short, the flood of sun-seekers from northern Europe and America runs to millions. Spain claims fourteen million a year, France and Italy reckon on equally fantastic figures. I think all exaggerate. But it is true that the city of Venice receives 700,000 people in a year. The outskirts of Málaga have become a fantastic Montmartre. The beaches have become an international rotisserie of naked Anglo-Saxons and French. North of Valencia—a stretch of coast that had been untouched for centuries and was simply a land of juicy market gardens or vines—you now strike a continuous suburb of apartment blocks, hotels and camping sites running through Tarragona, Barcelona, and with one or two breaks (such as the marsh and mosquito country between the frontier and Marseilles) all the way through France to Portofino. The old, touchingly sentimental idea that you went to the Mediterranean not only for the sun but to recover the good life that had been preserved here from the pressures of machine civilization—food grown in the village, fresh, unrefrigerated, tasting of its natural and not chemical flavors; wines from the vines nearby; festivals that had not been contaminated by city culture-forcing—this old idea, and the notion that it was your duty to know the people, have been frankly chucked out. The sun-seekers of today come in by automobile and plane, and they demand machine-age life. They have no interest in Mediterranean man or woman, except as a lover, servant or provider of pleasure.

  And in this the newcomers are on the winning side. From the eighteenth century onward, Mediterranean society was stagnant, surpassed in power by the Atlantic countries. In the nineteenth century the Industrial Revolution remained, with a few exceptions, in the north. But since the last war, industry has started to move into the sun, especially industries based on oil and electronics. Huge modern constructions have sprung up. The south is becoming more “modern” than the north. And this movement fits perfectly with the worldwide decline of the traditional peasantry, which bore the weight of civiliza
tion on its back. The peasant is leaving the land for the big cities. He is beginning to let the stone walls of the Italian mountain terraces go unrepaired. The family is scattering. If there is a traditional Mediterranean way of life, one would have to look for it a few miles inland.

  Still, in becoming modern, Mediterranean life cannot possibly cease to be itself. The sun, the wind, the matchless light, the fruitfulness of the soil do not change. It is we northerners who change when we come south. We come down over the Alps, over the rocky hills of Provence or the spurs of the Pyrenees, or the sudden drop from the tableland of Castile, into softer, warmer air that acts at once upon us like a potion. We are changed by the clarity of the light—and this is important to us who live either in mists or in a northern light so hard that it illuminates nothing—because the Mediterranean light makes us see each thing, each stone, wall, house, tree, separately, so that we accept it—as Mediterraneans do, for itself. We cease to live in the future; we start to live in the present hour. We begin to feel, as they do, the satisfaction of small near things. We begin, without knowing it, to contemplate. We feel—it is not entirely an illusion—something ancient stirring in ourselves. What is it? This year I came down from Castile to Valencia and I felt there what in Castile I can never feel. In Castile I was faced by something austere, puritanic, noble, soldierly and saintly—but alien. In Valencia I was reunited with my civilization.

  It is the sight of the long milky strip of the Mediterranean, the largest lake in the world, softening this coast of orange groves and almond trees and small farms of the richest huerta, or garden, in Spain—where in fact a man can be well off on ten acres of its fertile soil—that starts the change in us. That sea is unlike all others. Its shores contain the foundations of Western civilization. It was for centuries the scene of the greatest creative force in the Western world, and indeed from its works the whole world has had an imprint. Until the Age of Discovery it was the whole known world. The map shows us the fringe of Africa crumbling into outer space. China is a rumor, the Americas not even conceived. We would not be what we are but for Greek genius, for Roman administration and law, for the Renaissance and the discoverers. We are looking at a sea where something was born, grew, matured in the course of violent centuries and became complete. It is moving, in our uncompleted time, to see the Mediterranean completion; indeed innumerable completions of civilizations and cultures. The very ruins commemorate not tragedy but a one-time fullness of life.

  Valencia is a dull little city, now made hideous by new building; one hopes it can afford its modernity. Its traditional meaning lies in its orange groves, its farms, its rice fields—a sinister modern meaning lies in the air base not far off—and in its port. The orange carts and the orange lorries drive in dense procession down the road, under the dusty trees, to where the ships are waiting. You have hit upon the basic fact of Mediterranean life: for twenty-five hundred years, its wealth has been that of sea traders. The other thing that strikes you is that the flash of sea and sun and blossom seems to be in the eyes and temperament of the people. Castilian pride, melancholy and classical clarity of speech have given place to a gay, quick, excitable, difficult Spanish that seems to have crumbled. And you notice, when people talk to you, that the fanaticism of central Spain is replaced by tolerance and liberal ideas; as in all seaports, as with all sea traders, the mind is open to the foreign.

  Valencia was, and is, a republican city, and its religion, if it happens to be religious at all, is accommodating, good natured, half pagan. Now this is not Spanish. In fact if one redrew the map one would find that Valencia, Barcelona and Marseilles, the regions of the France-Spanish border, are historically one, with a people whose speech is full of Provençal words, with chopped-off endings and squeezed vowels. This was a sort of state with colonies of its own, trading colonies and monopolies, with its own laws and wars, its own piracies; so that behind the petty trade or the bigger commercial interests, there is evidence in stone, in churches, fortresses and great houses, of a past individual greatness, a sense of style fitting to city-states that had a court life. These places have produced great men who lived, fought or worked there. It is not easy in Valencia to forget the Cid.

  In Barcelona one has no time to think of the past. This is a rich and thriving city, the center of Spanish textile manufacture; its large port is full of ships and heavy with traffic. Here you meet the Mediterranean boosters— hard-headed, money-minded men who shout their commercial dreams in harsh voice, who like the large and splendacious. The spirit of the place is rhetorical. The wide avenues are like vainglorious public speeches. The evening drive, six deep in showy cars, up the Avenue of the Generalissimo, conveys extravagant luxury. The restaurants are the latest thing. The rich are enormously rich; and the city absorbs the poor peasant who comes up from the south. For generations this Catalan city wanted to be free from Madrid, and it fought against Franco. Now the cult of the Catalan language is dying and the desire for independence has gone. The anarchist movement has gone. All this has been swept away by the growth of Catalan affluence.

  All the same, Barcelona has a double character. It is superbly placed under its mountains. With an extravagance that also characterizes Marseilles, an atrocious pseudo-Byzantine church has been put on the top of the hill that dominates the city. It is an aspect of the ghastly Sacré-Coeur complex that has ruined Latin ecclesiastical architecture in this century. More fitting—as an extravagance—is the notorious art nouveau “cathedral,” the Sagrada Familia, which is still unfinished and which is having a vogue among architects. But in spite of its gaudy side, Barcelona has its other, indigenous Mediterranean side. Its narrow streets are packed with small trades, small shops, small bars of rabid individuality.

  And here you come across another basic thing in Mediterranean life: patience. This feeling is perhaps ancient, some recollection from the early days of the Folk. You are walking under the trees of the Ramblas when you hear the sound of whistle and tambour from one of the eighteenth-century squares. On a platform in the middle, a small orchestra is making a sharp yet wistful piping, and a group of young people are dancing. It is a little folk dance, the sardana, that goes on and on without the swirlings and stampings of Spanish dancing, an innocent pastoral thing in the heart of a modern city. It goes on in the evenings in all Catalan towns; children join it, and their mothers too. When you see it being danced in some little town by the sea at six in the afternoon the feet of the dancers seem to be making the small even steps of the Mediterranean waves when the sea is quiet, even but sharp. That evenness, a sort of sweet monotone, is one of the essential Mediterranean elements.

  Any Mediterranean knows what he wants, what it should be like, where it comes from. In a restaurant he asks searching questions about each item of the food, how it is cooked, and he will complain on principle if there is the smallest doubt or disappointment, so that often the chef nervously comes up from the kitchen halfway through a meal to see how his customers are taking it. It is a point of honor to complain. In a shop he makes the same demands; patiently the assistant brings out all the cloth, all the shoes, and is not in the least upset if the customer refuses all. On the contrary, the assistant admires the discrimination. For life is not buying or selling; it is getting what you exactly wish for, what you can afford. The wish is everything, and for that, patience is indispensable and life is timeless.

  This matter of the wish is of great importance to all Spaniards and even to Catalans, who sometimes claim not to be Spaniards. I had to break my Mediterranean journey and came back later from Paris to Marseilles. In the dining car of the train a huge, fat Catalan was eating, drinking a great deal of wine and shouting to people around. It was very hot. He wanted the window to be opened. This was refused because, at the speed we were traveling, everything would have been blown off the tables. The French are great lawyers when it comes to rules. They lay them down with an abrupt air of intellectual authority. Spaniards do not like the superiority of the French. And so our Catalan is at
first dumfounded, then the furia española breaks out; he swings his fist and bashes the window. In this he asserts his hairy masculinity, and he shouts for more wine.

  The French are used to the eccentricities of foreigners, especially in the wagon restaurant. They remark merely that a rather low class of person travels nowadays, but they have other customers to think about, so they bring the Catalan his bill. He studies it, opens a wallet stuffed with notes. He has made a personal estimate of what he thinks the meal was worth, which is very little. He puts down five francs for a forty-franc lunch—and refuses, in a voice that deafens the whole dining car, to pay a penny more.

  An exemplary Mediterranean comedy—or more precisely, a Franco-Spanish one, the clash of two cultures—now takes place. The French worship le règlement —the rule, the system—which is like a written constitution in abstract language and which covers all contingencies. Slowly they put it into action. A plain waiter calls for the superior waiter, the superior one calls in a Spanish speaker who calls in the headman who calls in one or two controllers. Quite a crowd. But the Spaniard holds out. Then a whisper. Someone runs off into the next coach to get the State authority. He appears. A neat, terse fellow wearing the red-white-and-blue band of the republic. “I must ask you to pay your bill. What is the objection?”

  There is an instant and final answer, the answer by which the Spaniard utters his impenetrable and immovable Spanishness. He shouts, “¡Porque no me da la gana!”—not quite “Because I don’t wish to,” but rather, “The desire or will to do so has not visited me.” One can act if one has it; but it is psychologically impossible, as if one’s will had gone out of one’s entrails, if one has not got the gana.