Traveling Back to France During My Michigan Lockdown

“Look me up whenever you come to Paris.” 

That’s what famed author Edmund White said to me when we met at an awards banquet in D.C. in the late 80s.  I was frazzled in the 90-degree heat that weekend and not prepared to meet an author I admired so much.  He was the very first person I saw as I walked into the banquet and I probably gushed when I told him how much I admired his work. 

White surprised me with his very specific praise for a story I’d contributed to the anthology Men on Men 2, a story that would become the title piece of my first collection a year later.  Both the story and the collection would help get me national recognition, earn me scores of reviews, and start a series of book tours that ultimately led to readings on three different continents.

White meant what he said.  My spouse and I did look him up a few years later on a trip to France.  We were taking advantage of a great exchange rate and basing ourselves in Paris for three weeks, planning day trips.  When we asked White at dinner what we should make a point of seeing  that tourists tended to miss, he didn’t hesitate: Vaux-le-Vicomte, whose official website is here

I had never heard of this chateau only an hour’s drive from Paris.  The team of artistic geniuses involved in building it for Louis XIV’s superintendent of finances, Nicolas Foucquet, was the same trio who later designed and built Versailles and its gardens.  White assured us of two things.  Versailles was mammoth and would be teeming with busloads of loud and cranky tourists (he wasn’t exaggerating).  Vaux was more jewel-like and he’d be surprised if we would find more than a few dozen people touring the chateau and its exquisite grounds.

He was right.  The day we visited was sunny, and like Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited, we were “drowning in honey” as we moved from one amazing room filled with gorgeous paintings, sculptures, furnishings to another–and then out into the gardens to enjoy elegant vistas that seemed almost too perfect to be real.

That day and White’s advice came back to this week when I read the biography above of Foucquet, who was tried on a trumped-up charge of treason and for various financial crimes by the young king.  Louis XIV wasn’t just jealous that Foucquet had the most beautiful dwelling in France,  he was out to flex his muscles and show other rulers who was in charge in France.  He was also moved by people scheming against Foucquet for complicated reasons that would make for a great miniseries.  Foucquet’s long imprisonment in a remote fortress reads like chapters from The Count of Monte Cristo.

But despite his ignominious last years, he left behind a monument of architecture, painting, and landscape gardening that some call the most beautiful building in France.  Even rooms with a less-than-august purpose were magnificent: Vaux was one of the first chateaux to have a dining room.

©Sylvia Davis

Like millions of other Americans, I’ve had cabin fever for weeks now, but this biography opened up an unforgettable day for me, one that happened thirty years ago.  It sent me to a closet where I keep my travel photo albums—remember those?  I hadn’t thought of them in years and realized now that each one is a doorway to another life, another time, and a very welcome escape.

Lev Raphael is the prize-winning author author of 27 books in genres from memoir to mystery.  He offers individualized writing workshops and manuscript editing at writewithoutborders.com.

 

Twitter Vive la France! photo below: (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Writer’s View: Washington Post Reviewer Puts Readers In Boxes

Michael Dirda at The Washington Post has your life in books all figured out.  He recently explained that whether you read fiction or re-read fiction is completely dependent on your age.

When you’re young, you love re-reading books or having the same books read to you. Later on you read series and then engage in competitive reading. In college required reading that takes up your time, and once you graduate and box up those books, you only read best sellers.

Finally, as a senior, you have no interest in new books, so you re-read old favorites.  Why?  Get ready for some cheesy prose:

Seen it all. Been there, done that. It’s then that people nearly always do return to the books they loved when young, hoping for a breath of springtime as the autumn winds blow.

Did you hear some melancholy violin music playing in the background?  I know I did.

There are no studies quoted in his musings, no statistics, just the writer making gross generalizations based on his idiosyncratic experience.

I’ll share my own experience as a reader and longtime reviewer for newspapers, radio stations, and online magazines.  See how it matches yours.

I’ve been re-reading books ever since elementary school.  It started with The Three Musketeers and I, Robot.  Then it moved on to various books by Henry James whom I discovered in junior high school and truly fell in love with in college along with Edith Wharton, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, and George Eliot.  I’ve revisited all of them periodically over the years.  I didn’t wait to become an AARP member.

And I never competed with anyone. Reading was always private for me, an escape and a joy.  That’s unlike Dirda, for whom page count conferred “cachet.”  He writes that in “ninth grade, I doggedly worked my way through a two-volume history of English literature mainly to show off.”  Mine is bigger than yours surely had to be more interesting than that.

But I guess not.  Imagine having that kind of sterile competition to deal with along with all the other problems of mid-adolescence like acne, gossip, and embarrassing parents.  And what kind of brain-dead school did he go to that encouraged such a twisted view of reading?

While I had plenty of required reading in college as an English major,  I often went beyond those reading lists to read widely, especially books in translation by Russian and French authors: Turgenev, Gogol, Balzac, Zola. If that meant not finishing a required book in time for a class, my own choices usually won out.  But if we were assigned a novel by Henry Fielding, I wandered off and read several other books of his to get a better feel for his literary universe.

My detours were always fun. Assigned to read Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, I felt obliged to read Fielding’s hilarious parody Shamela.  The first book is all about a good servant girl beset by a lascivious lord and the triumph of virtue; the second is all about that servant girl conning the same lord into marriage.  Why isn’t Downtown Abbey’s Julian Fellowes sinking his teeth into that nasty little masterpiece?

As for being a slave to the best seller list, I feel sorry for Dirda if that’s how he lived his post-college years.  I haunted bookstores back in the day and usually looked at what was new and hot, but sales and publicity didn’t matter to me.  What counted was whether the subject or the writing grabbed me. Preferably it would be both.  And there’ve been dozens, maybe hundreds of best sellers over the years that friends and reviewers have raved about that have left me cold.  Sometimes nauseous (or nauseated if you prefer).

Starting in the 1990s, I spent many years as a book reviewer in print, on-air and online.  I sometimes re-read a book I was crazy about, like Terrill Lankford’s LA thriller Shooters and Charlie Huston’s vampire PI book Already Dead.

But my full initiation into reading a series has only come in my 50s with books by Bernard Cornwell, Martin Cruz Smith, and C.S. Harris. Nonetheless, I’m still always on the lookout for writers who’ll engage me and take me on a fresh voyage. Writers like the amazing Lori Rader-Day, Janet Fitch, and Penelope Fitzgerald.  The genre can be fiction, but I’m a big fan of biography and history too, as long as the prose is fine and the narrative engaging.

Michael Dirda may have his theory about how readers read, but it’s really just a theory until he can back it up with facts.  Though theory could be too elevated a term.  It’s more like a notion, and a fairly dubious and ageist one, too.

Maybe he’ll explain the use of slow cookers for various age groups next.

Lev Raphael is the author of 26 books in genres from memoir to mystery, most recently State University of Murder.  You can read his latest interview about it here.