A Year Under the Ripening Franco-Italian (or Maybe Greek) Sun
Travel writing falls into two distinct categories. The first, ably represented by Paul Theroux, treats travel as a kind of war-is-hell story. Even if the worst thing ever to have happened to you en route is that the airline lost your luggage on the way back from Orlando, you can sympathize with Theroux’s sardonic xenophobia. One gets the impression that Theroux doesn’t like to travel at all; he is driven to travel, the way some are driven to climb mountains. Likely Theroux, and similar but gentler souls like Bill Bryson, have done less for the tourism industry than the second kind of travel writing, which puts restlessness next to Godliness. But if you scratch a little deeper into this second genre, it often isn’t about travel at all. It’s about staying put. These are the books about buying an ancient farmhouse in southern Europe, renovating it, and then entertaining all your hometown friends at sumptuous meals made from indigenous ingredients, supplemented by vast quantities of indigenous wine.
Cutting the travel out of travel lit has several advantages for the writers. For one thing, their encounters with foreign bureaucracies are limited to their real estate transactions and to setting up utilities. No mean undertaking, but in many ways preferable to the unending hassles of securing visas and train tickets. It’s not really travel lit at all, although publishers and bookstores classify it as such. It has more in common with Gourmet and Architectural Digest than it does with the accounts of more mobile writers. Renovation-Foodie lit, we could call it.
The book that launched this genre as a publishing phenom was Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence (1991). Only a few years earlier, the films Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources (based on the novels of Marcel Pagnol) had met with international acclaim, leaving many people hungry for more accounts of life in the French countryside. Mayle’s story of his first year as a permanent resident in Provence is weak on the reno side of things, although it has its share of adventures in masonry. But it’s very strong on the foodie side. Much of the book is a gluttonous and detailed account of the meals he prepared and consumed. Food is an integral part of travel lit – the Theroux school prefers to describe offal, the weirder, the better. But the Mayle school is more like an affectionate restaurant review:
“The main course arrived – rosy slices of lamb cooked with whole cloves of garlic, young green beans, and a golden potato-and-onion galette. The Châteauneuf-du-Pape was poured, dark and heady, “a wine with shoulders,” as Maurice had said…
“The cheese was from Banon, moist in its wrapping of vine leaves, and then came the triple flavors and textures of the desserts – lemon sorbet, chocolate tart, and crème anglaise all sharing a plate. Coffee. A glass of marc from Gigondas. A sigh of contentment.” (96)
Apparently, Mayle spent fifteen years in the advertising business before he turned to writing.
A Year in Provence has a prematurely aged feel; there is something muffled about it and the books that followed. Compare it to Lillian Beckwith’s accounts of her life as a foreign Englishwoman in the Hebrides in the 1940s and 50s. Beckwith’s stories, though gentle, have an immediacy that Mayle’s lack. Rumour has it that Beckwith didn’t disguise her characters well enough, and her neighbours grew – understandably – to resent being figures of mild fun. She eventually left the Hebrides for the Isle of Man. Mayle also left Provence for a few years, and although he returned, he now lives in “an undisclosed location.” This is said to be the result of busloads of literary tourists coming up the driveway to his first house, but I have to wonder if the locals started giving him the cold shoulder as well.
Mayle’s characters are highly mannered. Some of them are actually named Fanny and Marius, the names of the title characters in Marcel Pagnol’s plays first staged some 75 years ago. They play boules. They speak in a mixture of French and English that makes them permanently foreign, although it is their country. The homage to Pagnol is somehow stodgy and stuffy. I was surprised to turn to the author photo on the back to find a youngish-looking man, reminiscent of John Denver in the 1980s. He wears an open-necked shirt, and his hair has been bleached by the sun. Or maybe it’s gray – it’s a black-and-white photo, so you can’t really tell. A website devoted to his work reports that he was born in 1939, which would make him 52 at the time of publication. Not a young man then, but still much younger-looking than the authorial voice suggests. (Here’s a similar picture.) Little wonder that when the BBC dramatized the books, they cast the distinguished and snowy-headed John Thaw in the main role. Because the only thing that’s really fresh in these books is the produce.
Maybe I’m just grouchy from having binged on all this northerner-moves-to-
the-Mediterranean lit, because turning to James Chatto’s memoir of his time as a young man in Greece, The Greek for Love (2005), didn’t improve my mood. Chatto’s story of new love set against the charming scenery of Corfú is sweet – it’s touching that he wants to preserve the early years with the woman who became his wife. But he ricochets from cliché to cliché while doing so. The couple even buy a house and renovate it, according to strict principles of authenticity and accuracy that bemuse the locals. But it is in the descriptions of food that this book either really shines or really grates, depending on your perspective:
“More food arrived. Three souvlakia each, a tower of thickly hewn bread and two plates of fried potatoes, golden, salty, and piping hot. We made space on the table for a salad bowl filled with cool, moist chunks of cucumber, crunchy green peppers and crimson tomatoes so ripe that their sweet juice became a dressing that we soon enhanced with mellow, coral-coloured vinegar and yellow oil from the two small bottles that Georgie’s wife brought. On separate dishes were more slices of feta dressed with oil and dried oregano flowers, and very small, firm black olives, slightly pointed at one end and without much flesh on their pits, that tasted sweeter and nuttier than any olives I had ever eaten.
“‘This is so delicious,’ I gasped between bites.
“‘Of course,’ confirmed Ilias. ‘Georgie’s wife grows everything herself. It’s much easier.’”(27)
If I had been there, I might have been able to ask the obvious question: easier for whom? But Chatto is a food and wine writer by usual trade, and no doubt his regular readers expected a generous serving of moist cucumber, crunchy peppers, and crimson tomatoes when they bought his book. (The rest of us just order a small Greek salad and are done with it.)
Mr. Mayle and Mr. Chatto, don’t take this carping too seriously. It’s really all Frances Mayes’s fault. Hers was the first of these Mediterranean pilgrimages that I read, and as a result all your sweet local ruminant’s milk curdles instantly in my mouth. Under the Tuscan Sun (1996) is the most successful book of this genre, if we use a fat movie contract as the standard for success. The movie has flaws, but we’ll stick with the book here, which is plenty irritating in its own right.
Mayes is a poet and a professor of creative writing. The latter must pay better than the former does, because the book is a particularly intense version of reno-foodie lit, replete with hilarious episodes with the plumbing and the quaint ways of the locals.
“New peas pop right out of the crisp pods. I thought shelling them was a meditative act until I saw a woman in town sitting outside her doorway with her cat sleeping at her ankles. She was shelling an immense pile of peas and had already filled a large dishpan. She looked up and said something rapidly in Italian and I smiled, only to realize as I walked on that she’d said, ‘It shouldn’t happen to a dog.’” (128).
The recipe that follows contains fresh-shelled peas. That’s funny. I think that Mayes thinks it is funny, too, but her too-sweet, overripe imagery is so overwhelming that any vinegar she adds at this point is utterly lost.
Mayes has a poet’s fascination with words, including those that describe the house project:
“Restoration. I like the word. The house, the land, perhaps ourselves. But restored to what? Our lives are full. It’s our zeal for all this work that amazes me. Is it only that once into the project, what it all means doesn’t come up? Or that excitement and belief reject questions?” (85)
This is the closest she ever seems to come to any kind of sustained reflection. Why is life in San Francisco – also widely considered paradise – not satisfying enough, that she needs to secure a second place where the climate is gentle and the food delicious? What is the purpose of ownership and renovation? I’ve heard that you can rent Tuscan villas. It’s even possible that you can buy houses that have already been renovated. What is it about leaving your mark on another place? Why is it that reno lit writers always report a greater respect for historical authenticity than any of the locals have? Reno-foodie lit can be a pleasant diversion, I suppose, but most of it would be richer with a healthy dose of self-awareness and self-examination. Mayes seems to be exactly the kind of person Barry Unsworth skewered so effectively in After Hannibal (1997), his novel about outsiders buying villas in Umbria. (Chalk one up for Unsworth’s self-awareness; he’s a foreigner in Umbria himself.)
Mayes is wrong. This is not a literature of restoration; it’s a literature of attempted transformation. The transformation of the house from wreck to beauty stands for the transformation of self that northerners (San Francisco just barely counts) seek from the Mediterranean sun. This is why a new or rejuvenated sex life makes shy appearances in nearly all these books. (Even Patricia Atkinson, whose account of running a vineyard in France is a model of discretion, meets a new fella in her second book.) It also explains the prevalence of middle-aged writers, or writers who sound middle-aged. Most young people would not have the time or financial resources to take on a foreign renovation, but there is also a difference in psychology. The work of youth is establishment. The work of middle age is transformation.
Versions of the northern pilgrimage from early in the twentieth century made the Mediterranean a place of sexual awakening for the young: E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908), or Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April (1922). But the story of young people freeing themselves from sexual repression doesn’t have much zing for contemporary readers – that kind of literature has shifted to looking at the recovery from divorce, or middle-aged life in general.
A film that captures all the contradictions inherent in the transformative pilgrimage is François Ozon’s The Swimming Pool (2003). Here, the hot sun of rural France is associated with youth, and only comes to change the middle-aged protagonist in a very unexpected way. (I’m not going to spoil the movie for you here. I highly recommend it.) When James Chatto swims naked in the sea off Corfú, it is a kind of baptism, and therefore a transformation. The pool in Ozon’s movie is considerably more ambiguous, but manages to effect a transformation without any of the usual pallid sacraments of eating flavourful local vegetables or warm, golden olive oil – let alone restoring centuries-old plaster.