An Anglo-French rapprochement and a summer of small treats

Muriel Spark and Iris Murdoch remind me of la belle vie

I am so at large this week that I’m writing from a small town in the south of France – don’t worry, you’ve probably never heard of it. Holidays are for reflection. What follows is all sitting-under-the-shadows, sun-splashed reflection, from a place where the tiger mosquitoes are voracious and life is good.

It’s been often said of the British that they love France but don’t love the French. I do love the French. I love them in all the arts, and in their hunched, admirable determination to focus on the good life, particularly when served on a plate. I love their sense of community, their politics of place and the beauty of their language, with which I struggle. I even love their grouchy pessimism.

In this, they’re like us. Imagine the extraordinary good luck of being born into such a culturally rich, geographically blessed, green, folded corner of the planet, secure, in recent times, from war or famine; and then managing to depress yourself into a state of self-loathing and grim certainty that it’s all over, your country’s finished, the future’s black. Bonkers, of course. The more I look around me here, the more I think the French are, au fond, really rather British.

The art of pessimism

Artists, declared that brilliant loon Ezra Pound, are “the antennae of the race”. He argued that the true artist was able to feel an oncoming earthquake, or could smell “a forest fire which we do not yet feel or smell”.

This comes into the category of useful nonsense. I wouldn’t go to my wise, deceased friend David Hockney, still less most of today’s artists – or musicians, or novelists – for advice about global warming, or the bond market, or anything else, beyond how to make good pictures, or books, or songs.

But Pound does offer an insight into why immersion in the media – a human activity built by failed artists – is so depressing. Consider: we are still at the start of a young administration; yet almost every newspaper, blog or social media post is already explaining why Andy Burnham is useless, deluded and doomed. In fact, we all are. The world is burning – but there is no answer that doesn’t involve national bankruptcy. The better Ukraine does against Russia, the more dangerous Vladimir Putin becomes. There’s no room in Britain for migrants because the country is already full up with dangerous criminals released early from jail.

And so forth. But if we regard the media generally as ant-antennae, it all makes more sense. Journalism nervously probes ahead, looking for trouble, so trouble is dodged. The “what if we” and “on the other hand” parts of policy dilemmas are thrashed through, not in confidential state documents, but on front pages, websites and blogs. If that’s an explanation, and those in power eventually take avoidance action, then the logical corollary must be that journalism’s necessarily bleak image of our times (a world without genial neighbourliness, strong families, courage or hard work) must also be out of kilter.

Politics and the English language

Here in France, we have journalistic neighbours. One evening, we were having a nostalgic conversation about past masters of political writing, and who might stand up today. I don’t want to sound overly self-serving, but I really think today’s New Statesman contains some of the best political prose anywhere. I could give you many examples but, how about, almost at random, Anoosh Chakelian’s phrase from her recent visit to Clacton ahead of the by-election: “Where kiss-me-quick meets slow decline, and penny falls meet crypto millions.” Snap, crackle, pop. Any of the 20th-century greats would have been proud of that.

The secret of a happy life

The summer is also a time for reading, including old favourites. This year I’ve been immersed in Muriel Spark and Iris Murdoch. They are both writers who were famous in their time, and are now either on the edge of cultural obliteration or being crowned queens of English literature. It will be the latter, if only because we go to good writers for – I come back to the word – what is useful. Murdoch wrote beautifully about love, our search for meaning and the everyday tragic. I interviewed her once, about Plato. She was terrifying. I felt like a small bird confronted by a giant cliff. But I have always enjoyed her assertion that the secret of a happy life is “continuous small treats”, preferably inexpensive.

Spark is even tougher. She once described life over 70 as being like a battlefield, in which your friends lie dead and dying around you. I’m not quite there yet. But I have become merely connective tissue, through which one twinge connects to another. Old age, they say, isn’t for the faint-hearted. Then I spot another small treat, preferably encased in pastry, and all is well once more.

[Further reading: Count Binface’s endgame]