Was there anything special that we were being tested for?
“Ah, oui.” He looked even more apologetic. “La syphilis.”
The English Écrevisse
“Writing is a dog’s life, but the only life worth living.” That was Flaubert’s opinion, and it is a fair expression of the way it feels if you choose to spend your working days putting words down on pieces of paper.
For most of the time, it’s a solitary, monotonous business. There is the occasional reward of a good sentence—or rather, what you think is a good sentence, since there’s nobody else to tell you. There are long, unproductive stretches when you consider taking up some form of regular and useful employment like chartered accountancy. There is constant doubt that anyone will want to read what you’re writing, panic at missing deadlines that you have imposed on yourself, and the deflating realization that those deadlines couldn’t matter less to the rest of the world. A thousand words a day, or nothing; it makes no difference to anyone else but you. That part of writing is undoubtedly a dog’s life.
What makes it worth living is the happy shock of discovering that you have managed to give a few hours of entertainment to people you’ve never met. And if some of them should write to tell you, the pleasure of receiving their letters is like applause. It makes up for all the grind. You abandon thoughts of a career in accountancy and make tentative plans for another book.
My first letter arrived shortly after the publication in April of A Year in Provence. It came from Luxembourg, polite and complimentary, and I kept looking at it all day. The next week a man wrote asking how to grow truffles in New Zealand. Then the letters began to arrive in a steady trickle—from London, from Beijing, from Queensland, from Her Majesty’s Prison at Wormwood Scrubs, from the expatriate community on the Riviera, from the wilds of Wiltshire and the Surrey hills—some on embossed, true-blue, toff’s writing paper, others on pages torn from exercise books, one on the back of a map of the London Underground. The addresses were often so vague that the Post Office had to perform small marvels of deduction: “Les Anglais, Bonnieux” found us, despite the fact that we don’t live in Bonnieux. So did my favorite: “L’Écrevisse Anglais, Ménerbes, Provence.”
The letters were friendly and encouraging, and whenever there was an address to reply to, I replied, thinking that would be the end of it. But often it wasn’t. Before long we found ourselves in the undeserved position of resident advisers on every aspect of Provençal life from buying a house to finding a baby-sitter. A woman telephoned from Memphis to ask about the burglary rate in the Vaucluse. A photographer from Essex wanted to know if he could make a living taking pictures in the Lubéron. Couples thinking about moving to Provence wrote pages of questions. Would their children fit in in the local schools? How high was the cost of living? What about doctors? What about income tax? Was it lonely? Would they be happy? We answered as best we could, but it was slightly uncomfortable to be involved in the personal decisions of total strangers.
And then, as summer set in, what had been dropping through the mailbox started coming up the drive. Letters turned into people.
It was hot and dry, and I was doing some Provençal weeding in the bone-hard ground with a pickax when a car arrived and the driver emerged with a broad smile, waving a copy of my book at me.
“Tracked you down!” he said. “Did a little detective work in the village. No trouble at all.”
I signed the book and felt like a real author, and when my wife came back from Cavaillon she was properly impressed. “A fan,” she said. “You should have taken a photograph. How amazing that someone should bother.”
She was less impressed a few days later when we were leaving the house to go out to dinner and found a pretty blonde lurking behind the cypress tree in the front garden.
“Are you him?” asked the blonde.
“Yes,” said my wife. “What a pity. We’re just going out.” Blondes are probably used to reactions like that from wives. She left.
“That might have been a fan,” I said to my wife.
“She can go and be a fan somewhere else,” she said. “And you can take that smirk off your face.”
During July and August we became used to finding unfamiliar faces at the front door. Most of them were apologetic and well-mannered, just wanting their books signed, grateful for a glass of wine and a few minutes sitting in the courtyard out of the heat of the sun. They all seemed to be fascinated by the stone table we had finally managed to install with such difficulty.