“I feel European,” says Jeremy Clarkson, the presenter of Amazon’s The Grand Tour, in an interview with the Daily Beast website a few days ago. “When I go to America and people ask where I’m from, I say I’m from Europe.”
Most people will surely understand what he means – even if not all will agree with his characterisation of Brexit supporters as “a few coffin-dodgers in Barnsley deciding that they don’t want to live next to a Syrian”.
There are various layers of identity. For example, when I visited Memphis, Tennessee, some years ago I felt more of an alien than I would have done in France, Italy or Spain. The Southern culture was more radically unfamiliar, as were the cheap and tacky outskirts – miles and miles of broken tarmac punctuated by boxy motels, fast food outlets and billboards.
I tried to stroll from my motel into the city centre, when of course no one walks anywhere in America (not counting untypical places like Manhattan). I saw a bullet in the grass by the road. When I climbed on to a bus, not a single one of the puzzled but kindly faces that swivelled round to peer at me was white.
Memphis people would think of me as coming from Europe, I guess. In Spain, on the other hand, which can still seem a mysterious country to an outsider, I feel British (I’m half Scottish) more than European. I can barely understand spoken Spanish, which greatly increases the sense of being an outsider.
In France I feel more at home because I can speak French. Writing an obituary of an old fighter with the Free French has involved exchanging emails with his daughter. A bond of trust was formed – because of the language. On the day of the Commons Brexit vote she emailed: “Ô pôvre”, explaining that this was a Marseille expression.
These are troubled times, she said: “Germany has gained economically, while crushing (écrasant) the old continent”.
Strong stuff, I thought. But of course we know that many French are just as disillusioned as the angriest Brexit supporters.
Michel Houellebecq, the novelist, who has just been made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour, has written about anger in his new novel Sérotonine. The English translation isn’t out till September, but I find that Houellebecq’s French is easy to read, beautifully precise and clear.
One of his techniques is the cool accumulation of selected detail. The narrator, the usual (for Houellebecq) self-loathing middle-aged man, describes his morning routine – the brand of coffee (Malongo); the mineral water (Volvic, generally) with which he washes down his Captorix new-generation antidepressant. He doesn’t light a cigarette until he’s had his first gulp of coffee. That bit of self-control is his main source of pride – which tells you all you need to know.
“Nothing narrows the mind so much as foreign travel,” John Mortimer has his provoking father say in his play A Voyage Round My Father. “Stay at home. That’s the way to see the world.”
Philip Larkin was in no danger of becoming narrow-minded, then. Two family holidays to Germany in the 1930s put him off “abroad”.
The poet preferred familiar spa hotels and seaside resorts, cathedral towns, Skye, the Channel Islands. Nothing too exotic.
In summer 1969 he stayed at a hotel in Bantry, Ireland, and in a letter to his mother reports that it is “rather Frenchified… Certainly the chef has a heavy hand with garlic.”
That is one of a selection from 4,000 letters he wrote to “Mop” or “my very dear old creature” in Letters Home, published last year, with letters to Larkin’s father, Sydney (“Pop”), and to his sister Kitty, 10 years older.
They show why he wrote about love and loneliness with such blistering insight, as in “Faith Healing”: “In everyone there sleeps / A sense of life lived according to love. / To some it means the difference they could make / By loving others, but across most it sweeps / As all they might have done had they been loved. / That nothing cures.”
After the sudden death of her husband Sydney, in 1948, “Mop” becomes increasingly lonely, anxious and depressed. She is given electric shock treatment.
Her son Philip, on the other hand, is able to enjoy humdrum things. In 1952 he tries to cheer his mother up: “Every day comes to us like a newly cellophaned present, a chance for an entirely fresh start.” He decorates the letters with “creature” drawings of a one-eyed blob-like thing that smokes and drinks.
But he’s alive to his gloomy tendencies. “Yesterday,” he writes in 1965, “I drove to Spurn Head, which is a very odd promontory at the mouth of the Humber. It was quite nice, not lonely enough for my liking…”
Andrew M Brown is obituaries editor of The Daily Telegraph
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.