My book belongs to a lively tradition of memoirs of people who came here and wanted to share their experience. I think of Lady Fortescue’s Perfume from Provence, published in 1932 and became an instant best seller.
Fortescue set up house in Opio, near Grasse in the Cote d’Azur, and after her husband died, found an old house worth renovating and living in, which she wrote about in Sunset House (1937), also a brisk seller that earned her the moniker, Sunset House Fortescue. I like the area around Grasse as well, which came to life in an interesting novel by Peter Susskind, Parfum, after the fact that Grasse is the perfume capital of the world. Those dry crumbly sandstone hills and Aleppo pines move the spirit very deeply. That area was home to James Baldwin, the cookbook writer James Olney whose Simple French Food is some of the liveliest, freshest prose I know, and brings to life the thyme and rosemary of Provence as keenly as does M.F.K. Fishers’s books, especially her own beautiful memoir of Marseille and Aix en Provence, Two Towns in Provence (1983). What put the place within reach of nearly everyone in the world was Peter Mayle’s memoir, A Year in Provence (1991) and his follow up, Toujours Provence a year later. They carry on the tradition of Fortescue, which might be described as an appreciation filtered through English tastes and attitudes. Laurence Durrell’s Provence (1994) is more breezy and lyrical, and more to my taste.
I’m different than the others in my own memoir – I wanted to learn from the French how to enrich my life, how to return to simpler values. I look at the southern French as masters of their crafts, who possess a wisdom handed down many generations. I don’t feel or act like a tourist in this book; I know I came here to shed some habits and clean up my spiritual life, and the land bids one to do just that. There is a quality of light here that makes things transparent and profound. Even the homely hollyhocks that grow out of cracks of the sidewalk seem almost like gangly, ghostly monks leaning into the wind. The fields of sunflowers that inspired Van Gogh sometimes move me to joyful tears, as if I came upon a field of schoolgirls in old straw bonnets all looking up into the sky with such simple happiness. I forget sometimes how easy it is to be happy; but this country, and these patient, unchanging people, the farmers and blacksmiths, the goatherds and butchers, tell you to slow down, to leave your worldly selves behind and step into the fields like children.
What I wrote is a kind of transformation story, about someone who has been living at high speed a long time, working in a very competitive job in a university where ego is everything and success is the only measure of one’s life. My first week in Provence told me I was a very small pebble in the universe and that the real sense of time was not nine to five, but eons of rock and weather. I smelled the earth, maybe smelled things I had never known before, the scent of wild herbs crushed by the sheep in the field, the sweat of real labor, the aching familiarity of onions frying in olive oil at noon, the unexpected sweetness of lavender as it is being harvested on a hillside in early July. What pleasures, and they have been around forever, but are no longer part of urban life. You have to come here to experience it.
Strangers in Paradise is about one’s senses waking up, about smell and its mysteries, touch and its spiritual reach into nature. Even the voices I hear sometimes in the afternoons in Apt, the little market town at the heart of the Luberon villages, send shivers through my spine as I recall how many centuries monks and nuns sang and prayed in the monasteries here. The old cobbles ring with sandals now, but not fifty years ago they rang with horse shoes and the metal grinding of old wagon wheels. Their echoes linger.
I’m a different kind of writer from Frances May, whose Under the Tuscan Sun (2003) is about acquiring the fine things of Tuscany, making them yours. I don’t know want to possess Provence; I want it to possess me. I can’t be Peter Mayle and buy an expensive house and have the place rebuilt by masons and architects; I couldn’t do what Forescue does in building her elaborate garden, the Domaine, to the astonishment of everyone around her. I have no such ambitions. My desire is to be transformed so that the second half of my life can be lived in participation with the beauty of the natural world, in a time when it would seem we are at war with the planet and are destroying the forests and the oceans, the air and the diversity. I am a pilgrim whose shrine is this simple, repetitive, monotonous life of sun rise and sun set, season following season, the generous hand of nature feeding us right out of the sandy, rocky soil of these hills.
The title of my book comes from the musical Kismet, which premiered on Broadway in 1953 and became a popular movie in 1955. It is set in Baghdad, curiously enough, in the time of the Arabian Nights. Vic Damone, in the movie version, sings the song “A Stranger in Paradise” to Ann Blyth. He fell in love at first sight, as I did with this region. By coincidence, I saw this movie before leaving the country to live in Beirut, Lebanon. I was twelve years old, scared, bewildered, and shaken to my roots when I landed there. Three years later, I was different, a boy in love with the Mediterranean, with Arab cultures, with the food of those dry rocky hills and olive groves. That song haunted me all through my teen age years, but I didn’t know why.
What Provence is to the history of modern painting, the Southwestern United States is to the history of photography. Both arts culminated in places where the lime stone hills and dark, twisted foliage writhe under pure blue skies much of the year, and the light pours down as if passed through quartz or champagne. As a photographer and writer, I have known the light of Texas much of my adult life, and I found it darker, riper, sweeter here – and set within nearly identical hills and mountains, arroyos and mesas. Perhaps that is why I felt so instantly at home here and wanted to my life to blend in with the severe, imposing landscape.
What did you want to achieve in writing Strangers in Paradise?
There’s a beautiful line in one of Jack Gilbert’s poems in The Great Fires. It’s from the poem “Tear It Down,” “We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.” He says later, we must “reach the body within the body,” and my intention in writing Strangers was to forget all the clichés about Provence, all the stuff that makes it into a kind of escapist Valhalla for office workers and tired rich people. I wanted to even dismantle the crust of Roman culture that so dominates the place, and find that elusive, more delicate, feminine trace of Greek influence – the smaller, whiter temples, the more rustic houses, the beautiful eye of Greek imagination, and behind it, whatever that primordial self was that helped to shape the modest human presence here. My book is like a series of self-instructions and reminds me in a way of Henry Adams’ The Education, the way he has to figure things out and doubts what he knows at every step. I liked that approach, that simple candor, and my own move toward the heart of this region required that I never stop asking questions, that I crept slowly toward my goal and did not succumb to the notion that I deserved to live here or that my money or my reputation required a special privilege or benefit. I was just me, and it didn’t matter who I was, just that I was alive and curious and wanted a home that was different from my experience.
America is still so young and formative that it only sees itself as the place you go to to get away from your own country. But things are changing and I see more and more Americans looking around the world for somewhere else to live, to fill in the gaps and longings of their lives. I wrote this book to represent what anyone might feel or do on a quest to change. I share the process of transforming oneself, of daring to accept a foreign language and an old culture as one’s new identity. Think of how the French, the English, the Germans have all had long traditions of transplanting themselves. That doesn’t exist in American literature. The expat artists of the 1920s were living in Paris and Mexico City to learn something to take back with them later; the Beats lived in Marrakech and New Delhi to excape from the American ‘50s. But who goes away to give up something of one’s old identity just for the love of change, for the mystery of becoming someone else? Perhaps Paul Bowles did when he went to Morocco, and maybe Baldwin, Paul Robeson, Charlie Chaplin all did for various reasons trade identities. But Baldwin wrote very little about that experience. More to my own time is Johnny Depp, whose new life in southern France is very much in line with a generation’s quest for change, deep and perhaps irrevocable change of identity.
Strangers In Paradise is part of some larger process of self-questioning by Americans who no longer feel their country is innocent or the only haven of democracy. We have weathered many disappointments in the latter 20th and the start of the 21st century. We feel older and more chastened by our failures abroad, in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Afghanistan. The world sees us differently as well. Some Americans are not only upset by what they see and hear as America’s conduct as the only superpower, but feel like Josef Joffe in his new book, Uberpower, that America’s not using its power wisely, but foolishly. All those cowboy films about swagger and shoot first diplomacy doesn’t do us any good – our politics lacks humility, our foreign aid is too clever and strategic to help the world. Not all countries are weak and old-fashioned; “Old Europe” may still have a few things to teach us about citizenship on planet Earth. And to get that knowledge one has to step out from the bubble of self-congratulatory journalism and nationalism and touch reality again.
My book is in part that effort to know the other side, to get through the American looking glass into the world again, to see what it thinks, what it feels. I will always be an American, but I must also be someone who feels how others think and see us. To do that one must drop the mask, drop the ego, and be a humble student of human nature. That too is what my book is about.
What sort of people have you met in Provence over the years?
Many, of all stripes and conditions. Among my favorites, the poet Gustaf Sobin, whose great awareness of the region made me want to be a student too. I like his little novel, the Fly Truffler, which is about a man who dreams powerful visions of his dead wife after eating a truffle, and while the engines of modern life grind up the little farm he owns and is about to lose to the developers. It tells the whole story of how fragile the place is and how it cannot sustain the amount of exploitation that now afflicts it.
My neighbor Andre Fulconis, the historian of my village, is a very competent scholar, and the grandson of one of Provence’s great sculptors and artists. His conversations into the twilight took me into the secret Provence only the locals know. No foreigner could possibly discover this sort of lore on their own. The jokes, the riddles about names of places, the rivalries and sometimes madness of the old farmers, all that poured from his well-stocked mind, and became music in his precise, Parisian accent.
Then there was Mireille Lauthier, a book keeper, wife of a crusty, red-necked farmer above the village, was like so many young women here who had been educated and chafed against tradition. She wanted city life, she loved parties and dancing, but she also knew the land. Her folks were from the fruit growing fields around Cavaillon, and when she left, her generation went with her. She didn’t look back, but her mother told me through tears that the young were no longer interested in growing the pears and melons and that the groves would die. Mireille barely touched the earth when she walked; she loved fast cars, the night life, a good drink at the village bar, and the city lights were in her eyes. But when she left, and alas she did leave for the big time, she was breaking cords. Perhaps she knew it; it wasn’t easy for her to break away from everything she knew, even if she didn’t like her country life.
I live in a hard little village run by five families; if I lived here for two hundred more years, I doubt I would be anything more than “l’Americain,” the foreigner. But the nods are warm, the hellos and the kisses on the cheek, the handshakes with both hands, our dinners under village roofs all make it seem as if the veil lifts now and then and we are welcomed. After nearly 20 years, we are a step closer, but the heart of Provence is many miles beyond our progress. |
