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Why, oh why, do I love Paris?
Published 20 November 2008
Travelling directly by train in two and a half hours from city centre to city centre, you have a feeling of having moved suddenly between two very different worlds
Why, oh why, do I love Paris?
Back from a weekend in Paris, I wonder for the hundredth time why I don't live there. It is a curiously shocking experience arriving in the city via Eurostar. If you fly to Paris, you pass through airports that muffle the senses. Travelling directly by train in two and a half hours from city centre to city centre, you have a feeling of having moved suddenly between two very different worlds which, though only 213 miles apart as the crow flies, might be separated by an ocean. The immediate sense I get on arrival is how much more beautiful and citizen-friendly Paris is than London. During the years of plenty some Londoners convinced themselves that their city was superior in every way: more beautiful, with trendier museums, more money, and even - preposterous idea - better restaurants. We were told that young Parisians yearned to live and work in London. Now that our financial institutions have been cut back to size, the absurdity of these claims is obvious. London may be a wonderful place, but it cannot hold a candle to Paris, which is a work of art in her own right. One could spend a lifetime in the Louvre and the Musée d'Orsay. My bonus when visiting these museums is to have a wife who is a painter, and can "talk me through" pictures far better than one of those machines with headphones.
I recently suggested in the Independent that the Spectator is a front for a bizarre sect that throws outlandish parties rather than, as some innocent souls may believe, a weekly magazine. Barely a week passes without some new extravaganza, normally hosted by the ebullient Andrew Neil, who is the Spectator's chief executive, along with about a hundred other things. He makes F Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby look like a curmudgeonly recluse. On Monday the magazine threw what it described as a "prestigious black-tie" dinner for those who wanted to meet its "glittering contributors", at a cost of £149 each. In a couple of weeks there is a bash at Brown's Hotel in London. News has just reached me of a Spectator evening with Andrew Roberts, the excellent historian, for those willing to stump up £125 each, at the Hyatt Regency London, The Churchill on 8 December. And so it goes on. The magazine's delightful PR girl has suggested that I am bitter at not being invited to these presumably lucrative parties, and no doubt she is right, though I suppose I could buy a ticket like other readers. But I also wonder whether it is really in the Spectator's interests for it to be turned into a party-throwing organisation.
We are all of us used to receiving threatening letters from banks or utility companies claiming we owe them money and demanding immediate payment on pain of death. I have recently come across two letters from educational establishments in an even more intimidating vein. The first was from a supposedly reputable school, which my younger son left four years ago, asserting that I owe it several hundred pounds, though without offering any explanation. Conceivably I do. I have no idea. What was striking was the brutish tone of the letter. Twenty or thirty years ago such a missive would have been courteous and gentle - "no doubt it has slipped your mind", etc - whereas now it is written in the language of the bailiff. The second letter was sent to my same son by the university at which he is now studying, threatening him with ejection and banishment if his fees were not paid immediately, though they were only a week or so overdue. His county council seems to have been at fault, but no matter. If my son were of a nervous disposition, he might have been cast down to be addressed in such a way by an institution which is supposed to have care for its students and - or is this preposterously romantic? - to teach them good manners.
I have a shaming confession to make. Until about two weeks ago I had never picked up a book by Somerset Maugham. I suppose I was afflicted by the general feeling that he is irredeemably middlebrow. When I read English at university more than 30 years ago, Anthony Trollope was the victim of a similar prejudice. My dons had never read him. Since then, of course, he has been reappraised. Might Maugham also be revived? In the preface to my American edition of Of Human Bondage, Gore Vidal takes a gloomy view on the basis that Maugham has been written off by academe, and so students are never introduced to his work.
Yet he is being noticed. Blackwell in Oxford, where I live, has a gratifyingly large selection of his books. Some of his short stories have been dramatised recently by Radio 4. Selina Hastings is preparing a biography of him, which is bound to attract much interest. My edition of Of Human Bondage claims it is one of the 100 best novels of the 20th century. That may be pushing it a bit, but it is a profound study of an artist, based on Maugham, and I would far rather take it to a desert island than many celebrated modernist novels. His power as a writer may yet overcome the neglect of academics.
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