In premeditating the possibility of posting a blog essay from a rural hideout in southern France, I had anticipated imaginary difficulties of a technical kind. Nothing of the sort has arrived, but I do face a problem of a different kind—at least if I want to deal with a contemporary personal situation. For what has made the past week so delightful for us—slow-paced relaxation beneath monotonously sunny skies, featuring a lot of gab with old friends—is not in itself a topic with a lot of intrinsic narrative pull for the general reader. I suppose I had vaguely imagined the possibility of a sophisticated journalistic piece of comparative pandemicology in which I delineated the prevailing but subtly differentiated ways in which the Covid crisis is affecting two modern, industrialized nations one on either side of the Atlantic.
That would involve actually knowing something about those things of course. Since the principal strategy we have adopted, in common with most other sensible people, is to avoid all possible empirical experience of Covid, I actually know very little about the granular scene in America and virtually nothing about it here in Provence, where we have been hiding away from it, and most other things, on principle. However it is possible to conduct some primitive research even from the hermetically sealed interior of a limousine speeding along the highways. On our way from Nice to Salernes we saw a good deal of graffiti, especially in and around Draguignan, encouraging us to “de-mask” and to recognize vaccination for the sinister violation of our liberty that it really is. So it is clear that some of the unhelpful hostilities of our own national experience flourish here as well. There is no (enforced) masking in interior spaces, though many people at an open market in the town square did in fact wear face-coverings.
We did not come here to spend time at weekly markets, however. Our situation is closer to that of those gentlefolk in Boccaccio’s Decameron who flee the Plague ravaging the city to the comparatively safe rustication of a rural village. Our Fiesole is called Salernes, a modest inland town in the Department of Var. Our host, at whose commodious country house we are staying, is a very old and dear friend from Oxford undergraduate days more than sixty years ago. After a long and varied career as father in a remarkable family, captain of industry, entrepreneur, volunteer executive in higher education, and cultural philanthropist, he now spends most of his time in a beautiful historic house in Sussex. But he has several times welcomed us to Salernes for late summer visits, often with other guests as engaging and interesting as himself.
This year’s house-party has had its special character, partly because it has been for all of us a long-deferred respite from the pandemic, and undertaken by all only with some difficulty and a little apprehension. For a time, travel restrictions for the three countries involved—France, Great Britain, and the United States—seemed to be in weekly flux. Adding to the sense of a movable feast is the fact that people have come and gone at different times. We have been as many as twelve, but are now down to six, and for our last few days will be but four—Joan and I, our host Andrew and his delightful partner Lee. So the week we have already spent has had its variable rhythms, crescendos, climaxes, and diminuendos.
The classic literary mode for introducing groups of people brought temporarily and fortuitously together long antedates Chaucer’s famous catalogue of his pilgrim-narrators in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. My smaller number perhaps more closely approximates what we memorably find at the beginning of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where the narrator and his auditors are old friends brought together in the confines of a cruising yawl—probably only somewhat larger than the paved veranda on which we have spent most of our shared hours, reading, eating, and above all talking. The males in four of the six couples were classmates at Jesus College, Oxford, around 1960. The other two men are the host’s younger engineer brother, who has lived for many years as an ex-pat in Cleveland, and the husband of one of the host’s business colleagues back in the day. The six women are conspicuous for a wide range of professional and artistic experience and achievement. So there has been a good deal of shared experience and ancient friendship, seasoned, however, by some serious diversity of cultural attitudes and political views. In academic terms there were some people more oriented toward the sciences, and some to the humanities. Thus we have had ample raw materials for the most conspicuous pleasure of our stay, its nearly unceasingly rich conversations.
As you know, the word companion derives from Latin words denoting a person with whom you break bread. And it is not without significance that a minor genre of our literature—Table Talk—has preserved the meal-time conversations of such worthies as Dr. Johnson, Coleridge, and G. B. Shaw. Many of our conversations, while less pontifical than these classics and hardly aspiring to publication, fall into this genre. This means that the pleasure of conversation was often compounded by the pleasure of French food, much of it produced locally in the world’s finest market gardens. And of course one must not forget the French wines, most of them local and of modest price but ample supply. As lubricants of significant conversation, they are probably unsurpassed. As is well known, and immortally expressed by A. E. Housman, “…malt does more than Milton can, to justify God’s ways to man”.
As a group of vaccinated elders—several of us even boosted--we have been following a regime of shared or communal isolation. It does not satisfy anybody’s strictest rules. There are the comings and goings, and of course a minimal amount of masked commercial contact, though less even than at home. But we have been very cautious. A medical expert whom I trust has assured me that it is “virtually impossible” for anyone—vaccinated or not—to contract the virus while properly masked in the open air. The open air of Provence is particularly appealing. And although the two-hour lunch and three-hour dinner have been prominent features of each day, there have been many other pleasures. We have had some nice country walks, solitary or shared, and an occasional al fresco beverage in the town square. Later today we are scheduled for the test that will allow us to fly home. So that is the report to date. We look forward to our final two days here.
