Summer readings
Cevennes, France
by As Byatt
Sunday 15 August 2004 01.10 BST
What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude. My first experience of southern heat and light was when I was au pair to a French family in a vineyard on the hot plain near Nîmes. We now spend our summers in a tiny house in the Cévennes, not far from Nîmes, but in very different country. There is ridge after ridge of craggy mountain hillside, all densely wooded with oaks and chestnuts up to the bare stony mountaintops, where the flocks of sheep spend the summers.
The mountains were eaten bare by the sheep before the 18th century and the trees are the work of one imaginative man called Fabre, who replanted huge areas of mountainside. I like it here because the sheep and the uplands remind me of the Yorkshire moors, the magical landscape of my childhood holidays. But this is on a grander scale and it is mostly very hot and bright.
Our house is on the edge of a village. We have two bedrooms and a living room - the house is the converted carriage shed of the house opposite. When we came, it was infested up to its upper balcony with a dense jungle of brambles, nightshade and bryony. It had been empty for 11 years. We cleared the land with machetes and, after much soul-searching, cut down a 100-year-old mulberry and built a pool and a terrace in front of our door.
The terrace looks down on to our own patch of rough hillside, going down steeply to a river which moves fast and has been known to rise five metres. I sit on the terrace and write, in a kind of bowl of bright blue light, staring at the edges of the mountains, which are never the same for half an hour - sometimes vague and misty, sometimes bright green and gold trees, and at night a black silhouette against the stars, the crest of a line of conifers, the knife-edge of a ridge like a lizard's back.
I've become a creature of routine, here in the sun. I get up early, walk to buy the bread, in the grey morning, take a walk round the hillside for an hour, climbing up under trees, passing a collection of goats and geese, saying good morning to the same six or seven people. You can think writing out on foot, the rhythm is good for thinking. Then I sit at a metal table in the weather, and write furiously - longhand - until I need to stop for lunch. I have a large number of stones and a monstrous fossil which I carry out ceremoniously to hold the papers down.
The weather here is extreme whatever it is doing. If it is hot and still, you can see the heat shimmer. But there are sudden tempests of wind, which rattle in from nowhere, and pages fly up and over the edge of the terrace and whirl away in the river. I get more patient as I get older. Bad weather here is unworkable in. The storms bang in one's head, and all electric things - computer, telephone, television - have to be turned off.
We had a summer hailstorm so violent once that huge pieces of ice came down an air vent and mashed up the Collected Letters of Arthur Henry Hallam which I'd borrowed from the London Library. There is nothing to do in bad weather but endure. I sit on my bed and read Terry Pratchett and watch the trees bend and hurl themselves about.
In the afternoons, I sleep, and then I swim, and then I read, and then I walk down to the local auberge and eat dinner in a courtyard under great trees (cedars, palms, a lime.) In our early days here, we used to shop for delicious food in the local market and make meals to eat by candlelight. Now I've got it down to essentials - I've not got so long left to write books in - and I never cook. Salad and sheep's cheese and melon for lunch. Delicious mussels and omelette aux cèpes and poulet aux ecrevisses cooked by a good friend in the evening - and I can go on working over dinner. I carry a bag of books down with me and read German with a dictionary before the food arrives and then useful research books with the meal. I have my own bottle and drink a glass or two with my dinner.
I've got the solitude right too. No house parties, no visitors. We do have another small house at the other end of the village where the family can stay and cook and play table tennis and go for walks and come up the river to swim in the pool. My main problem is people feeling sorry for me when neither my husband nor my family are here. They come in and invite me to social gatherings, and I stare wildly at them with my head full of uninterruptable strings of words I must remember, and ideas I must keep hold of, and stammer that I like being alone, I need to be alone. But they don't quite believe me. They think I must be sad when I am fiercely happier than I have ever been.
· AS Byatt is the author of many novels. Possession won the Booker Prize in 1990
No comments:
Post a Comment