Casablanca bar, Thessaloniki
What am I doing here, in a downtown street in northern Greece at midnight? Next week, I’m due to fly to Lanzarote to interview Jose Saramago, the Nobel laureate; the week after that, I’ll be in Lisbon and Oporto with a microphone to make another programme for the BBC. What wilfulness, then, has brought me to this acceptable but entirely superfluous moment? There is self-evident pleasure in drinking passable Greek beer and watching Greek men discoursing gravely at the bar in their shirtsleeves and crocodile-skin shoes and, in the Greek way, never putting their cigarettes down. But why here, when I could, if I so wished, be doing exactly the same thing in another Greek bar, a three-and-a-half hour flight away in the Uxbridge Road, west London, within walking distance of my own bed?
The answer is to do with a former engineer and communist, and another city altogether. First, a few strokes of background. During the 1980s, I worked as a book editor. In the way of publishing, the satisfying moments weren’t invariably synonymous with the most successful. I won’t deny that it was a pleasure regularly to see commuters on the Tube reading an English translation of a German novel – Perfume – to which I had acquired the British rights. But being interested in European writers in go-it-alone Thatcher’s Britain was a generally self- flagellatory process. My journeys to the Paris offices of French publishers each spring of that decade, for instance, were agreeable evasions; in business terms, they almost always produced admiration that far exceeded sales. I persisted. In one case, the latest work by a French novelist at the height of his powers so impressed me that I decided to translate the book as well as acquiring the rights. (I wasn’t entirely foolish this time, as American rights were also sold.) The novel in question was Un Dejeuner de Soleil by Michel Deon, a stupendously rich and energetic fictional biography of a French writer, which came out with the English title Where Are You Dying Tonight?, a homage to Evelyn Waugh. The reviews it garnered were excellent; the sales made me want to weep.
This is, barring exceptions, an everyday story for publishers of European fiction in Britain. In literature, as in politics (although strangely not fine art or architecture), we live with our backs to Europe. Our faces are upturned to the economic warmth of America’s sun – despite having, I think, considerably more to fear from a mass-culture creation called Anglo-America than from the nations of Europe, individually or collectively. (If you don’t consent to this proposition, just reflect on what Anglo-America will most easily set aside: historically central qualities – spiritual nonconformism, educated scepticism, tolerance – to be replaced by the gold standards of profit and attitude, both of which, as we know, are intolerant yardsticks.)
As far as our insular literary identity is concerned, it wasn’t always so. Since Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote appeared in 1605 – the first modern novel, “the first true novel”, as Milan Kundera called it – a permanent literary trade has existed between ourselves and the Continent. Within a century and a half, Cervantes’s source code for the novel had become the acknowledged model for Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett and Laurence Sterne. Another century later, Charles Dickens – along with the European realists – converted Quixote’s horizontal wanderings into fiction that scaled the ladders of class division, so much so that when I once asked the Spanish novelist Javier MarIas about Cervantes’s influence, he said: “I got my Cervantes from Flaubert.” The dusty but occasionally pyrotechnic Alain-Rene Lesage stole the form of Don Quixote for his novel Gil Blas; specifically, it was Fielding’s interest in Smollett’s translation of Gil Blas that induced him to write Tom Jones.
Those days belong to a Europhile past. In Marcel Proust’s time, there was little cultural scepticism about Europe. The 1920s, in fact, were the era when Americans began to consume Europe. And, because Paris is central to this story, let us rest on the Americans’ arrival there: Ernest Hemingway to hone his artist-in-garret performance; F Scott Fitzgerald to make a laboratory for his Romantic excesses; Gertrude Stein to dabble in Bergsonian ideas; Ezra Pound to be Pound; Henry Miller to explore the relation between his artistic and sexual potency. Paris welcomed them – come one, come all, and not merely because of the dollar exchange rate.
Which is where my presence at this bar table comes in. I’m here for a symposium entitled “Between History and Geography: the novel and globalisation” – organised with the support of the Greek regional government and the Institut Francais by a magazine edited from Paris, and possibly unlike any other.
The sole concern of L’Atelier du Roman, which began publishing in 1993, is with novels. No poetry, no plays, no short stories (aside from the little narratives of J J Sempe’s illustrations); just full-length works of fiction.
Published four times a year, each issue opens on a subject or novelist: recently, it has treated Michel Houellebecq’s beautiful, incendiary Les Particules Elementaires (Atomised in English) to ten analytical essays, celebrated Robert Walser’s gift for simpli-city, and meditated on the charming, heroic Italo Svevo under the heading “The path of modernity is still open”. It is frequently mischievous in its polemic. The most recent appeared under the title “Once upon a time there was Europe”.
French intellectual life is, like its government, somewhat burdensomely centralised. In many ways, Paris is an impossible city: self-admiring, babbling, garish, rigidly polarised between left and right. But whatever its “possibilities of metamorphosis”, it has generously preserved its manner towards literary exiles. It is saved from intellectual narcissism – le syndrome Bernard-Henri Levy – because its readiness for serious chatter is stirred in with a great openness to cultural metissage. Like Honore de Balzac’s Madame de Bargeton in A Harlot High and Low, the city doesn’t mind what the attention is, so long as she is at the centre of it. In this respect, one literary emigre has done Paris a great favour. L’Atelier du Roman is edited by Lakis Proguidis, a Greek who trained and began his working life as an engineer. Persecuted for his communist beliefs under the regime of the Colonels, he came to Paris, where he worked as a garcon de restaurant. His interest in literature gave him the absurd ambition to start a magazine devoted to novels; unlike other absurdly cherished ambitions in the poorly funded world of literary magazines (in Paris as in London), he has succeeded, with his wife, Doris, in publishing more than 20 issues of L’Atelier du Roman in the past seven years.
I started reading L’Atelier five years ago. A couple of years later, I met Proguidis – thin, courtly, attentive, with, as the French say, a serious head – at a reception on the Quai de Conti, where we discussed our mutual love of Italo Svevo. This culminated in my writing a piece for his magazine, about how poor Svevo had been wrecked by success. Meantime I had been appreciating the intervening issues, and the magazine’s internationalism. I read pieces on or by – sometimes an entire issue devoted to – Ernesto Sabato, Gunter Grass, Jose Saramago, Fernando Arrabal, Witold Gombrowicz, Danilo Kis, Philip Roth, Henry James, Tahar ben Jalloun.
Milan Kundera, a Paris resident and one of the magazine’s prime supporters, wrote a regular column. My friend Michel Deon was another supporter. Given that Proguidis can afford to pay his contributors only in glory, how does he extract work from them? Charm, obviously; and then also their likely agreement with the aims of the magazine: on the one hand, to promote an “independent aesthetic dialogue” about reading and writing fiction; on the other, to counter the general cultural hedonism, the aridity of university teaching and the transformation of books into what he calls “seasonal products”. L’Atelier is uninterested in the conveyor belt of the present, but it is not behind the times: it was one of the first places to marshal the arguments when l’affaire Houellebecq blew up on the publication of Les Particules Elementaires. With its connections and spies everywhere, and bound and printed to last, it reads like a high-quality literary serial, in which the book and the very life of the book coincide.
Though the magazine’s financial future is permanently perilous, it refuses to retire behind the shrunken perimeter of the subsidised “little magazine”. With ill-bred enthusiasm, for example, it throws open its doors to contributors and the public on the first Tuesday of every month at Le Lucernaire, a cafe-restaurant in Paris’s Rue Notre Dame des Champs. Students come – boys and girls disenfranchised from the novel’s past by cult studies and critical theory fashion – to talk and find out that it is not just the febrile present that counts. Even the reticent Kundera comes to the meetings; he is rarely seen elsewhere and now publishes abroad before he publishes in France, so antagonised is he by the side-taking of the French press.
The morning after my arrival in Thessaloniki, I size up my distinguished fellow contributors. At the Balkan Press Centre, a stone’s throw from a lucid Aegean, what is remarkable about the papers presented is the array of open-mindedness. There are a couple of French writers and a French publisher, a Greek novelist and magazine editor, an Italian essayist, a young Spanish professor, a Polish novelist and myself. Concern about globalisation is expressed with concomitant anxiety about erecting counter- measures, such as the refusal of foreign texts; doubt is expressed wittily, notably in the novelist Philippe Renoncay’s proposition that if there is nothing but similarity to look forward to, then there is no “other”, therefore no story, and all we can expect to be offered in a globalised world is the one form that requires no story – in other words, pornography.
The contributions go on for two days. In between, we eat, drink, talk. On Sunday, the regional Greek minister of culture comes to close the conference. His faint impatience – he is accustomed to the fussing of more or less effective aides – and his words are those of a politician. But he departs from a prepared text to invite the symposium to return next year, and to say that he would like to add another title to his portfolio, that of minister of the novel.
The threshing of words during these two days is something I would have expected, in common with other conferences, to leave me with a brain full of sawdust. That it doesn’t is welcome, and makes me feel that such dogged concentration on a single subject – the future of the novel – is a rebellious, rather than indulgent, gesture.
As I leave the warm city, I meditate on the Thessaloniki experience: it seems to me that the campaign of L’Atelier du Roman, conducted with considerable intelligence about the opposition – cultural white noise and political dumbing down, possibly globalisation, too – depends, as Paris’s elegant but complacent cultural life has done so frequently, on immigrant voices that have learnt that openness is a cultural, as well as personal, prerequisite in our affairs.
This is a lesson we could well learn again in Britain. I remember saying at Thessaloniki that I believed globalisation was a thirst for adventure distorted by the power of capital, and that any great novel was an accessory and a restraint, a tool of irony against such adventuring. Another speaker replied that he felt globalisation and its trappings – the free trade, cyberspace, airports, satellite communications, corporate branding – all favoured distance over intimacy, whereas a novel always favours intimacy over distance. Intimacy is a human privilege, and perhaps there is the answer. Can anyone imagine a literary occasion in London as international, and intimate, as the Atelier‘s monthly meetings? Can anyone imagine a member of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport wanting to declare himself a minister of the novel?
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