Something to declare
Julian Barnes (Picador, £8.99)?
Sebastian Faulks, Pat Barker, Peter Everett, Ian McEwan, Richard Holmes, Theodore Zeldin, Gillian Tindall, Rose Tremain, Hilary Mantel, Geoff Dyer, Michà¨le Roberts. In recent times these and many other British writers have created or recreated stories out of France, continuing a tradition that goes back through Lawrence Durrell, past Dickens and then to Fanny Burney and her uncle Arthur Young. France remains a rich seam for British writers because it is fascinating to British readers-although for no clear reason,
Few of the writers listed above strike it rich with French readers. Novels with a British perspective on the French Revolution, for example, do not go down well. The fury over Grace Elliott's eyewitness account of the Terror, recently brought to the screen by Eric Rohmer, is only one example. But there are two British writers-on-France who do well at both ends of the tunnel, although their approaches to the subject could not be further apart. Whereas Peter Mayle describes ordinary blokes sorting out ordinary problems over a glass of vin ordinaire, Julian Barnes has opted for a different level of cultural reference-most famously, Flaubert-and, as a result, has found himself elevated by the ministre de la culture to the rank of officier des arts et lettres.
Something to Declare is 17 essays culled from 24 reviews and articles written over 18 years, all reflecting Barnes's French experience: Elizabeth David to Mallarmé, Simenon to Tom Simpson, Edith Wharton to Georges Brassens. Mostly, he writes about Flaubert. The earliest essay was written when he was 35, the latest when he was 53. Age is important since our perception of France, as of any great work of art, modifies as we evolve. Barnes puts it nicely in an essay on Richard Cobb: "Your alter country is all that your first was not; commitment to it involves idealism, love, sentimentality and a certain selective vision. Over the years, however, you may discover that the alluring differences only half-conceal grinding similarities (the snootiness of the elites, the complacency of the bourgeoisie, the conservatism of the proletariat); you may also start noticing aspects which seem aimed at destroying what initially drew you to the country."
Barnes returns often, in the later essays, to this theme of youthful adoration mellowing into disappointment. It is there in his response to the petty vindictiveness of the two giants of cinema -François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. We sense it again when he looks behind the feats of the heroes of the Tour de France and finds them all, as far back as 1896, abusing chemicals. Closest to home is the case of Elizabeth David. In the 1980s, she recorded "the melancholy fact that during these last 15 years I have eaten far worse meals and more expensively than I would have believed possible in a civilised country." For her, the rot set in only five years after the publication of French Provincial Cooking and Barnes goes on to say that "one of the ironies of ED's career... was that she encouraged Britons to seek good food in France at a time when its national cuisine was passing through one of its worst crises in centuries."
The attraction of France for people of Barnes's generation is the longing for what has now mostly vanished. We seek a France that existed before the reforms of the 1970s with the same innocence as my French postman who says he'll never go to England because of the suffocating fog.
Nostalgia is not, of course, limited to Anglo-Saxons. I am convinced that when my quixotic neighbour, José Bové, now an international icon of Gallic independence, demolished with a bulldozer what should have been our local McDonalds, the reason was not so much that he hates Americans but that he is powerless to prevent the younger generation of his countrymen preferring McDonalds to the four-table family restaurant.
Barnes assumes a certain level of knowledge in his readers but he is always accessible. Perhaps sometimes too flip, with phrases like "the novelist as Magimix" or "the nouvelle vague was still a surfer's paradise." But generally he writes a measured, careful prose that demonstrates the length and breadth of the research material he has absorbed. To make his point that Courbet was an "in-your-face realist," he gives us seven quotes from the painter's correspondence, each followed by a date, implying knowledge of every letter. But while another writer might run with that research, producing a thrill of excitement in the pursuit of connections, Barnes picks over it laboriously and rarely stimulates us to look further.
Barnes's choice of subject is flattering to a culture not known for its modesty. Ultimately, though, it is disappointing. In this collection, all the essays except two are concerned with literary figures-even the essay on Truffaut is a review of his correspondence and those on Brassens, Brel and Vian dwell mostly on their lyrics-and all the principals are dead. Together they tell you as much about France as a collection of French essays on Thackeray, Lindsay Anderson, Agatha Christie and Charlotte Brontà« would tell you about England. Barnes, naturally, can only interpret what he knows-and what he knows will travel. A French friend recently criticised his use, in Cross Channel, of a club not dissimilar to the Folies Bergà¨res. "That's the kind of place only you English fantasise about," she said. English and Americans, I corrected: that's presumably why he chose it. The table agreed, however, that a French writer would have placed the character as a hostess in a club échangiste.
Over half of the 300 pages of this collection are concerned with Flaubert, Barnes's abiding passion. We have Barnes on the Third and Fourth volumes of Gallimard's Correspondance, on the Flaubert/Turgenev letters, the Flaubert/Sand letters, on Flaubert's Carnets. We have Barnes's views on Flaubertiana: by Lottman (biography), Vargas Llosa (homage), Sartre (ramble) and du Plessix Gray (biography of Louise Colet). But it is the closing piece about one of the minor characters in Madame Bovary which shows Barnes at his best. In 1984, Barnes took the dusty old master off the shelf of pox-ridden 19th-century French writers and showed an unknowing readership how modern Flaubert is. But amid all his passion and inventiveness, there was no examination of the work. Barnes told us that Flaubert was a master and felt no need to justify his claim. Now he gives us an example from the text. He shows us the care Flaubert took to create a character, a young boy "whose age is never given, nor do we know what he looks like." Justin is craftily woven through the novel. He is present, without contrivance, at all the fatal turnings in Emma Bovary's life, complicit in her adultery and finally in her suicide. "This climactic moment," writes Barnes, "is the only occasion in the novel when Emma speaks to Justin... if Madame Bovary were a mansion, Justin would be the handle on the back door, but great architects have the design of the door-furniture in mind even as they lay out the west wing."
"I wish he'd shut up about Flaubert," Kingsley Amis once moaned. To which Barnes's reply is, "fat chance: Flaubert, the writer's writer par excellence, the saint and martyr of literature, the perfector of realism, the creator of the modern novel..." But possibly Barnes misunderstood why Amis wanted him to shut up. Not because Flaubert is not all of these things but because, too often, Barnes fails to engage by remaining hidden, only commenting on what others have written about Flaubert. Which is a pity. It makes Something to Declare a misnomer. "I always have a desire to go through the red channel," Barnes says in Flaubert's Parrot, "it always feels like an admission of failure to come back from the continent and have nothing to show for it."
Barnes has a lot to show for his lifelong interest in France. And rather than assembling some tired book reviews, his publisher might have done better to commission 300 pages of Barnes' mature reflections on a less moribund France.
