VAUCLUSE DIARY

Sunday 24 May 2020

What I have done so far today: binge-read news first thing in the morning and again after lunch. Only the headlines, mostly, because I can write the stories myself, so little is new. Have sworn not to click on any article with Trump in the headline. Discovered Politico’s European Edition and was annoyed that most of the cartoons in their weekly roundup were sourced in the US. Does Politico not take to non-English language humour? Or is it just the difficulty of translating the captions? Website too anglo-centered. Opened the Atlantic and discovered I hadn’t read it in a while.

What is new in the news is that the focus is shifting from the virus to the economy. What is heartening, in Europe, is how unanimous public and political opinion has been about putting lives before the economy, how many jobs have been saved, and why not? Isn’t it better in every way to subsidize salaries than resort to unemployment?

Raging mistral (north wind) blowing outside. The entry and stairs down to the main house are littered with petals from little dying roses, once pink now beige. My Marseille mother-in-law would take to her bed when the mistral blew, sending grit and leaves into the house. Paul, our next door neighbour, yesterday afternoon promised “mistral le samedi ne va pas jusqu’à lundi” (mistral on Saturday, gone by Monday). Here’s hoping.

I have been to the dry cleaner twice in 3 weeks and again next week, with the duvets. I have rinsed cushions and strewn them across the terrace in the sun, hoping 60 years of strains will disappear in the (bright) sun. My husband, not normally an enthusiastic handyman, finds all kinds of little jobs to do. Yet I don’t think our life would be very different without the virus, so we can count ourselves lucky. Nothing new there. Oh, there would be more possible distractions, especially in Paris. On the whole I like being forced to stay home, no excuses to be made for my unsociability. I think this life is just fine, except that I would like to see my babies in the flesh.

‘What do you want to do this afternoon?’ asks my husband. ‘Go for a bike ride,’ I say. Even not looking at him I feel his nod as he disappears downstairs to practice the flute.

VAUCLUSE DIARY

Saturday 23 May 2020

I have been wearing my black jogging pants for 3 months. I do wash them now and then, and there have been a few days when it was too hot for fleece, but basically they’re my quarantine uniform. They aren’t black any more but grey, and they have holes, but the holes are tiny. For comfort they’re hard to beat; for summer I want to buy a dress that doesn’t touch my body anywhere below the shoulders. This assumes I will conquer my fear of entering a shop and trying on a dress.

Quarantine regime in France update: for the past two weeks we have been able to leave home for any length of time, without an on-your-honour permission slip; but no farther than 100 km. Which excludes Paris. Without a good excuse. It is pretty amazing how disciplined the French are. So far.

Anything becomes routine pretty fast. Our daily: stroll, masked, to the village to buy our baguette and Le Monde. Lunch. Read (reread) the news, which fills the time available; shop for food (once a week). Bike. Hike. Facetime with kids in their time zones. Dinner. Read. Bed. Repeat.

Reading this week (in case I ever come back to this and wonder): Graham Green, Trollope, Mary Norris, the comma queen, David Sedaris. Books borrowed from Libby, which has the guilting function of watching how fast you are reading them, and putting up nudges like “are you finished?'“ and “one person waiting.”

The photo is the village last week from a hill above. Broom is everywhere flowering, and I’m translating Leopardi’s poem “Broom.”

VAUCLUSE DIARY

Wednesday 6 May 2020

Note to myself: order fruit and veg tomorrow to pick up Friday.

I’m back weeding the gravel. I had a couple of weeks off, but now the weeds are coming up again on the side I first began weeding—what? 6 weeks ago? We’re hoping for a gravel delivery next week, which will hide them for a while. It’s a satisfactory sort of task. My husband is vacuuming, a chore I hate, too much noise.

‘To make a dirty surface clean—a very simple, very human matter.’ Says Saul Bellow in Dangling Man (1944), which I am reading. I’m not sure I ever read it to the end before, but it’s an orange-spined Penguin, reprinted in 1966. I was working as a CUSO teacher in Akrokerri Teacher Training College in Ghana, and a fellow volunteer and Canadian was discovering Bellow and made me want to read him too, but, as I say, I’m not sure I finished the book, not then, at least. That’s probably where I bought the book, maybe in Kumasi, though I don’t remember a/the bookshop in Kumasi. Or maybe someone gave it to me, my English flatmate, a lifelong friend and anthropologist? I turn the book over to see if there’s a price tag, with a bookshop name. This was before bar codes. All I find is 3’6 printed in the top right corner. And at the bottom: ‘not for sale in the USA or Canada.’

In Dangling Man, set in 1942, the protagonist is waiting to be called up; he’s been waiting seven months, it’s hard to settle down to anything when you’re waiting. It’s a kind of freedom… yesterday the plumber came to look at some work to be done in the house. How long are you going to be here, he wanted to know. We shrugged, who can say? And we laughed. The building trades go back to work officially next week. He’ll do the work next week, if it rains. If it doesn’t rain he has a job outside to finish, but it it rains, as forecast, he’ll come. No problem, we say, we’ll be here. Anytime is good.

Last night we had a message from the airline: Your flight (mid-June to California) has been cancelled. Too much uncertainty, the message said. Please go online to rebook. Sure, but for when?

Thousands are reading War and Peace, it seems. I borrow Bleak House from the San Francisco online public library and notice that many Dickens’s novels have waiting lists. I put a hold on the audio version and check out the print. Over a thousand pages. I’m discovering audio books. Maybe a throwback to mummy reading books at bedtime? The problem is you fall asleep and the story continues all by itself in the dark.

VAUCLUSE DIARY

Monday 4 May

‘The virus will not hurt everyone equally.’ This, from an Economist article about car sales, has become a truism, in terms of society too, with places that are densely populated, polluted and with low income inhabitants suffering out of proportion to others. There have been days when, reading Le Monde it has seemed that everyone in rea (nimation) is called Mohammed. In addition to the nursing homes, of course, where poorly paid caregivers are likely immigrants too. France is taking this on board, at least rhetorically, and brainstorming, at least from political platforms, about the working conditions of ‘essential workers.,’ a lot of whom have to choose between going to work or going hungry.

Well, not to preach, but describe…it is a sunny day in the south of France; we have just had lunch and are going to run errands two towns away. We’ll head again for the asparagus farmer, whose crop, normally exported to Paris restaurants and even NY (but only the white asparagus, they have green over there), is not going anywhere far these days. Our next door neighbour would like 2 k of the ‘tips and stalks,’ that is the broken ones, cheaper ‘and there’s no waste.’ He boils them and eats every inch of each with olive oil from last season’s olive crop and a little salt. My sister-in-law wants strawberries, from the same place, for jam. And we’ll get strawberries and asparagus, and see what else has been picked today.

Next Monday the first stage of our confinement will end, and shops will open, and we can travel 100 km without an ‘attestation.’ Way not far enough to hug my granddaughters… but I think I might go to the coiffeur three days in a row.

Eavan Boland

The Irish poet Eavan Boland died suddenly of a stroke two days ago. She’d returned to Ireland from Stanford where she ran the creative writing department when the university sent faculty and students home this spring because of the Covid virus. I knew Eavan because we lived for several years in the same group of condos on campus and met at the recycling bins, or at events, a poetry reading, say, at which Eavan would deliver one of her lucid introductions. Or I’d run into her on campus, heading ‘home’—at least so far as ‘home’ was her campus condo—or to the little grocery shop tucked into the law school residences; usually she was listening to her earphones. We also met, infrequently, to gossip (Eavan was a great gossip) over coffee. She was an easy woman to talk to. She was a busy woman, at events most evenings during term, returning to Ireland, her true home and background to most of her poems, when term ended.

I’ve always admired Eavan’s poetry. We shared a generation, and the concerns and frustrations of women of that generation, including the domestic ones, which she both celebrated and decried. She was wonderful at back gardens ( ‘The War Horse’) and kitchens full of humming shaking white machines. More and more the personal reached for the universal, a story about her grandmother, say (see below), widening to the socio-politico-historical domain. But always she was a lyricist, a writer of songs, the elegaic a constant register (once I said I like humour in poems, and she looked at me, startled: ‘I don’t have humour in my poems.’) Never a heavy line, a word too many. I bought her books as they came out; I am eager to see the next, and as it turns out, last one, History, announced in this week’s New Yorker.

Coincidently the New Yorker has one of Eavan’s poems in the current issue: ‘Eviction.’ I recommend you listen to her read it on the New Yorker website.

Eviction

By Eavan Boland

(New Yorker, 27 April 2020)

Back from Dublin, my grandmother
finds an eviction notice on her door.
Now she is in court for rent arrears.
The lawyers are amused.
These are the Petty Sessions,
this is Drogheda, this is the Bank Holiday.
Their comments fill a column in the newspaper.
Was the notice well served?
Was it served at all?
Is she a weekly or a monthly tenant?
In which one of the plaintiffs’ rent books
is she registered?
The case comes to an end, is dismissed.
Leaving behind the autumn evening.
Leaving behind the room she entered.
Leaving behind the reason I have always
resisted history.
A woman leaves a courtroom in tears.
A nation is rising to the light.
History notes the second, not the first.
Nor does it know the answer as to why
on a winter evening
in a modern Ireland
I linger over the page of the Drogheda
Argus and Leinster Journal, 1904,
knowing as I do that my attention has
no agency, none at all. Nor my rage.

I notice, for myself, the plainness of the language, the expert handling of line, the simplicity of the syntax, anaphora, the way closure is built up through rhyme and half-rhyme: ‘page’…’agency’…’rage’; the repetition of the sound ‘g..’ hard and soft, as the poem is hard and soft.

VAUCLUSE DIARY

Thursday 30 April 2020

So here’s the end of April upon us. What, I wonder, will May bring? We look around at other countries, to see how the slight tweaks they are making to their confinements are working out. I’ve begun listening to Cuomo, the governor of NY state, who is a fine communicator under the present circumstances, less formal, more ‘one of us’ than the French executive, whose manner of handling what must be a very difficult situation, I for one have also admired. There are politicians in this country that I am glad are NOT in charge.

Meanwhile…having read that asparagus growers who normally send most of their crop to fine restaurants are almost giving their crops away locally, we drove two towns southeast yesterday to one of them and came home with a kilo of white asparagus that was absolutely delicious. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten freshly-harvested asparagus before. We were able to stand in a building and watch a worker load dirty, ill-assorted stalks into a machine from which the stalks emerged clean, sized and peeled and ready to be shipped—except no, they won’t be shipped. Thus it was that we had 3-star Parisian restaurant asparagus for supper.

And for desert, strawberries picked that morning, with some left for today’s lunch. No need to wash them, the seller said, no pesticides. They were small, not the big, hard ones supermarkets sell in California, with a shelf life of who knows how long.

There were other things on offer too, such as new potatoes.

I roped my husband into helping colour my hair. We managed not to get any goop on the walls.

VAUCLUSE DIARY

Wednesday 29 April 2020

A nail-biting storm of hail and rain two nights ago—nail-biting because, is the roof going to leak again?—and an overnight solid downpour yesterday, clearing up in the afternoon in time for our usual walk: down to the cemetery, up the trail along the stream, cross the stream, follow the path that rises gradually to the valley called ‘L’aube’, which used to be full of vegetable plots, because there are numerous natural springs up there, but is now mostly going wild, with remnants of quince trees, cherries, a persimmon we haven’t found yet, but know it’s there—and lots of broom taking over, also some beehives up at the road, where we mostly turn back, since we’ve been out for half an hour, probably gone further than the allowed 1 km, and it will take us half an hour to retrace our footsteps, through field and wood again. Occasionally we cross the road, continue up another trail to the top of the mountain called Pied Porcher, but a little warily, because 1) the gendarmes, we are told, patrol the village and its surroundings 3 times a day; and 2) my sneakers’ treads are smooth, and if I twist something sliding downhill in scree and need to be rescued it would be very embarrassing. Clearly I need new shoes, but where would I find those right now?

However, our PM announced new measures, easing confinement after May 11th, including the possibility in regions without too many cases of the virus of going 100 km without a permission slip (one writes this ‘attestation’ oneself, and one is supposed to write a new one every time one leaves one’s house). This region doesn’t have a lot of cases, and so, if we are good, hopefully we will be among the fortunate. But it does eliminate the possibility of returning to Paris, should we want to (to return the car we rented for a month two months ago?), and as for returning to the Bay Area (our tickets are for mid-June) that is looking improbable. I see today on the Stanford University Covid update that the university is going to try to get researchers back to work, but still hasn’t made plans for Fall Quarter. How oh how will they get the students safely back on campus?

One day melts into the next and changes little. It’s time for lunch: homemade potato puree with cream and butter, some meat/spinach thingies the local butcher makes, a salad, cheese, fruit, wine…I know, I know, this doesn’t sound like a bad life, and it isn’t. I have a friend in Paris who would give anything to get out of the city and walk in the woods or fields for a few days, and yesterday I heard from a friend in Turkey, who went from a fellowship to work in the poetry archives in Dublin home to Turkey where he is confined in a house in a city with five other people, including a grandparent.

VAUCLUSE DIARY: Café Zoom

Sunday 26 April 2020

In this privileged confinement it is really quite lovely to have one day melt into the next until one has to look up the day and the date, should one need it—for example to order provisions the day before we go to collect them, from the sidewalk in front of the produce shop, where the butcher and the baker will also deposit our orders, making a single transaction (3 cheques), a single outing a week. Last week I thought it was Wednesday when it was Thursday and I almost forgot to order the food. I feel relieved of most obligations—to visit museums, say, or see the film everyone is talking about, utterly guiltless about my unsociability…bliss is an empty calendar?

Last evening, however, for the second week, I went to a Café Zoom, by invitation of a UK friend, who seems to have an endless supply of fascinating friends and friends of friends, who write, compose music, sing, play giant music boxes, harmoniums, translate, send messages in bottles from (a sampling) Mexico City, New Zealand, and closer to home, Brittany. Next Saturday night will be moderated by Charles Boyle, the one-of-a-kind editor and publisher of CB Editions (and himself a poet and author of un-pin-downable books, available via the London-based CBeditions, where readers can order from a Confinement selection.

Charles has invited his authors to appear, read, juggle at next week’s edition of David Collard’s Zoom café, which is how I (a proud CBe author) first turned up at the café last weekend. I may be becoming addicted…first it was the fun of trying something new, after listening to children talk about their staff meetings on Zoom, now I wonder whether this is a small part of coming transformations, whether as participant or ‘audience’ member, discreetly waving to friends from around the world whose faces (and kitchens and bookshelves) pop up on your screen at 8pm, Greenwich time, on Saturday night.

Yesterday we climbed a mountain, one that is right next door, on foot. But my ‘baskets’ (tennis shoes), which didn’t expect such intense use and no shoe shops open, have smooth treads, and coming down I kept slipping on scree. I was afraid I’d twist a leg and have to be rescued, by—horrors—a helicopter or a team of firefighters who, obviously, have better things to do at the moment, not to mention the expense to public services whose pockets are worse than empty. I saw a front-page story in the local papers about this unlocal person who took it upon herself to take a forbidden hike and…Oi!