SAINT VALERY-EN-CAUX: a town with rugged cliffs and a tragic past—the backdrop for my latest novel

Just back from a two-day jaunt to Saint Valery-en-Caux, a small town in Normandy flanked by towering cliff walls. Saint Valery has an interesting history. It was the site of the last major battle before the French capitulated to Germany in June 1940. Rommel surrounded the town with his Panzer divisions and bottled up a French and Scottish force, taking some 20,000 prisoners after the Allies surrendered. The part of the town that faced the seafront, heavily damaged by German artillery, was completely razed four years later to give the occupying force a clear view of the sea in the event of an attempted Allied landing. (The actual D-Day landings took place some 50 miles to the south.) The rubble from the demolition was dumped into the sea to impede Allied landing craft. You can still see chunks of brick and mortar at low tide.
     That part of town was hastily rebuilt after the war with graceless, blocky buildings of brick and concrete. The older neighborhoods are composed of traditional structures made of brick and silex stones. The silex comes from the chalk cliffs, resembling the cliffs of Dover, that rise over the rocky beaches on both sides of the harbor. A lighthouse with a green lamp guards the entrance to the narrow port. Each day, the local fishing fleet, consisting of half a dozen small trawlers, leaves the port at high tide to return when the tide rises again. Over the years, many Saint Valery fishermen have been lost to the churning sea; their names and the names of their craft are engraved on marble plaques in the local chapel.

At low tide, the harbor is almost completely emptied of water, its 40-foot stone walls rising like the fortifications of an ancient castle. Seagulls, huge birds about a foot long with fearsome red-tipped beaks, hover over the port, often swooping down to swipe fish off the counters of the vendors' stands that line the quai.

We often buy fish there. It is so fresh that the sole and skate and turbot and cod are still flopping around on the counters. Today we bought two sole and a large sea bass. The fisherman's wife who runs the stand offered to skin the sole for us, but they were still alive so we declined. We have seen the fish mongers skin live sole for other customers, but didn't have the heart to order such a flaying. In any case, as the seller insists, sole cannot be eaten the day of the catch. It has to "rest" 24-hours.
    On arriving yesterday we headed straight to the Hôtel de la Poste on the central market square for a lunch of moules marinières and fries. That is always our traditional first-day meal, since this establishment has the best mussels of anyone along the Channel coast. After a long drizzly walk on the near-deserted beach, we took a drive along the coast, through the picturesque town of Veules-les-Roses to the village of Varengeville-sur-mer. There's a linen goods shop in Varengeville that Sylvaine always likes to visit. This part of Normandy is the world's biggest producer of flax, from which linen textiles (and lots of other things, including bread) are made. Most of it goes to the Chinese textile market, but the Lin et l'autre shop in Varengeville features 100% local merchandise.
   

Back in Saint Valery, we had dinner at the unassuming Eden Café, which offers some of the best local seafood in town. We both had a dozen oysters from nearby Veules-les-Roses and skate with capers. Before leaving this morning, we took another walk on the beach. The weather was mild for September. There was almost no wind. The sea was calm, with gentle waves rippling on the receding tide. The water is a milky aquamarine colour, due to the pounding of waves against the base of the chalky cliffs. The cliffs themselves tower like canyon walls more than hundred feet high. Sylvaine says she can hear the sound of the insides of the cliffs straining to break free. All I hear is the wind and surf. At the top of one cliff, near the casino, sits the remains of a German pillbox that once surveyed the sea with machine guns at the ready. Today it is just a perch for seagulls.
   

During the war, the German occupiers forbade the fisherman to go out further than 500 yards, lest they seek to communicate with enemy ships. Several boats were blown out of the water for venturing past that limit. The locals, those old enough to remember, tell me that the people who went along with the Germans got along; those who resisted were mercilessly suppressed. Yet there were resistors, just as there were collaborators, and black marketers, and lonely women who fell into the arms of handsome German soldiers. Strange, dark things happened here in those days—and their repercussions are still felt today.
     That is the subject of my latest novel.

ROCK STAR WANNABES: THE BLAZERS, 1966

Here's another amusing souvenir I stumbled upon while sorting through all the junk stored in my attic in France: a rare photo of the amazing Blazers. (Left to right, George Welch, Arthur Ducore, a kid whose name I forgot, and yours truly.)

I wasn't always a clarinet player. There was a time, during my impressionable teen years, when I fell under the spell of the Beatles and joined a rock band called the Blazers.  We used to rehearse in George Welch's basement on Octavia Street in uptown New Orleans. His parents were very tolerant (or very deaf), since we would spend hours twanging our guitars with the amplifiers cranked up and singing off-key harmonies until our voices cracked. Naturally the Beatles were our idols and models, so we massacred all their hits to our immense satisfaction and decided we were ready for the big time. It never happened for us. I only remember three gigs: once at George's church; once at our alma mater, Benjamin Franklin High School  (it was just before lunchtime and one of our classmates pulled the plug on our amplifiers so he could go eat); and once on the occasion pictured above: the 1966 Latin Club party (which explains the togas). We retired shortly after that and I went back to trying to learn the clarinet. I guess you'd call that a good career move.

TORTURE IN THE MARKETPLACE: A French funny hat band massacres "All of Me"

"Whenever  you feel like criticizing anyone...just remember that all people in this world haven't had the advantages you've had." That was the advice Nick Carraway's father gave him in The Great Gatsby. It's a wise observation and I generally try to abide by it. So I'm not going to make fun of these guys I encountered at an open-air market near Paris this morning. Honest. They seemed to be having a good time and no one was hurt. I looked on with good-natured amusement, captured the moment on my cheap cell phone, and present it here in hopes that it brightens your day.

TELL IT TO THE JUDGE: why indicting Assad for war crimes is better than a military strike

A couple of days ago, I proposed an alternative to a risky military strike against the Syrian regime: charge President Bashar al-Assad with war crimes before the International Court of Justice in the Hague. I hadn't seen that idea mentioned anywhere else until today, when Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times wrote:  "Involving the International Criminal Court sounds wonderful but would make it more difficult to hammer out a peace deal in which President Bashar al-Assad steps down."

I won't flatter myself by suggesting that Kristof got the idea from my blog, but I will take issue with his assumption that war crimes charges would dissuade Assad from stepping down. The flaw with that reasoning is the notion that Assad would seriously negotiate himself out of power whether or not he faced the threat of a war crimes prosecution. As I argued in my earlier post on Syria, it is delusional to think that a hereditary dictator like Assad will negotiate a peace deal whose result would be to strip away his power. Like Gaddafi in Libya, he will fight on until he is defeated, captured, or killed.

The beauty of bringing charges before the ICJ is that they would hang permanently over Assad's head, designating him in the eyes of the world as an indicted war criminal, and providing the mechanism for imposing a severe but legal punishment (life imprisonment for example) if and when he is ousted from power. So why rush into a dangerous, possibly illegal, and probably ineffective military strike? Retribution deferred is still retribution. As Leo Tolstoy put it in the title of a famous short-story, "God sees the truth but waits."

WHAT, ME WORRY? A goofy snap of France's president goes viral

It's silly season in France. Not for any lack of serious subjects. Unemployment is hovering around 11%, the government is pushing an unpopular pension reform, President François Hollande is trying to win support for a punitive strike in Syria. But the thing that caused the biggest buzz this week was a goofy photo of the president taken during a class visit on the first day of school. Snapped at an unfortunate moment, the photo makes Hollande look like a cross between Daffy Duck and Alfred E. Neumann. The French wire service AFP initially distributed the photo along with a routine story on the president's school visit. The image immediately sparked howls of laughter and went viral on the Internet. Seeking to preserve the president's dignity, AFP withdrew the photo—but not before it had been widely copied and distributed on the web. That unusual step by the French wire service led to charges that the government had intervened to censor the image. Both the Elysée and AFP denied this, but the attempt to remove the picture from circulation only drew more attention to it. At a time when Hollande's approval ratings are at an all-time low, the photo flap was the last thing he needed. But at least no one in France is demanding to see his birth certificate.

THE WEASEL TWO-STEP: On Syria, France replaces the U.K. as Washington's gung-ho ally—but what good will come of it?

 Remember when Fox News was bashing the French as "weasels," Homer Simpson dismissed them as "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" and the Congressional dining room handed Paris the ultimate insult of replacing French fries with Freedom fries on its lunch menu? 

     Consider the irony of the flip-flop that has just taken place on Syria. Britain, which hurtled headlong into George Bush's Iraq adventure in 2003, will sit this one out following a Parliamentary vote against military intervention against Syria. France's Socialist President François Hollande, meanwhile, announced that despite Britain's defection, France would stand by the U.S. in a still undefined punitive strike against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to retaliate for his alleged use of chemical weapons against his own rebellious population. 

     "The chemical massacre by Damascus cannot and shall not remain unpunished," Hollande told Le Monde on Thursday. "Otherwise, we would risk seeing an escalation that would normalize the use of these weapons and threaten other countries." Quite a change from the dramatic speech of former French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin who eloquently defended his "old, proud nation" in its refusal to join the U.S. and Britain in their ill-considered attack on Iraq. 

     What's going on here? French public opinion, like that in Britain, is heavily weighted against taking any direct military action in Syria. But France's presidential government, unlike Britain's parliamentary system, does not require the chief executive to seek parliamentary approval for foreign military interventions. With a freer hand, Hollande is able to take whatever steps he deems to be in the French interest—and his own political interest. But what is his motivation?

     Though the Obama administration is doubtless pleased to see the French lining up alongside the U.S. on this issue, Hollande's main consideration was not to ingratiate himself with Washington. Beyond his stated determination to punish what France considers a moral and legal atrocity, he seeks to reinforce his country's role as a major player on the international scene. France's recent incursion in Mali, like its earlier support for the anti-Gaddafi forces in Libya and its calls for direct support of the Syrian rebels, is in line with an interventionist reflex that has been evident for decades. The era of Gaullist neutrality is long over. 

     Another apparent motivation for Hollande is a desperate need to shore up his public image at home, where he has become a highly unpopular leader with a reputation for feckless leadership in the face of an entrenched economic crisis. Even though French public opinion opposes action in Syria, it may be in Hollande's interest to demonstrate toughness and decisiveness in the international arena. 

    The real question about the threatened U.S.-French action is what good it might do. Hollande says

the aim is not to provoke the fall of Assad regime, but to encourage him to negotiate with the rebels. This is a total delusion. Anyone who knows anything about Bashar al-Assad, or his late father Hafez al-Assad, or any mideast dictator for that matter, should realize that they would never consider negotiations whose only outcome would be to weaken or strip away their own power. Whatever action the West might take in this instance or in the future, Assad will most probably fight on until he is defeated, captured, or killed.

     As for the possible negative fallout of an intervention, the scenarios are chilling: Syrian retaliation against U.S. allies Israel, Turkey and Joradn, terrorist strikes against Western targets, a defiant re-use of chemical weapons, or an escalation that leads to a boots-on-the-ground action by the U.S. The ultimate danger is that of a broader proxy war involving Iran (in support of the Assad's Alawite regime), Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states (in support of the Sunni rebels), and Russia (Assad's main international ally and arms supplier). Given that most military experts and diplomats doubt the effectiveness of a slap-on-the-wrist action in changing the course of the Syrian conflict, the risks appear by far to outweigh any possible gains in terms of soothing our consciences and preserving our "red line" credibility. 

   

 Of course it is impossible to ignore the horror of seeing 1,400 Syrian civilians, including 400 children, indiscriminately murdered by chemical weapons. Assuming Assad's regime is ultimately proven to be the culprit—which few seem to doubt at this point—he should and must be punished. But why the rush, and why is an immediate military strike the only approach under consideration? Here's my modest proposal: file formal war crimes charges against Assad and other top Syrian leaders with International Criminal Court in the Hague. That may seem like a largely symbolic act—until and unless Assad ultimately falls from power or is captured. In that case, he could be tried and convicted as a war criminal and end his days in prison instead of his gilded presidential palace. That would be a moral—and legal—stance against breaking the taboo on chemical weapons. In other words, let the punishment fit the crime.

WHERE ARE THE ORCHARDS OF YESTERYEAR?

We live on the outskirts of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, 12 miles west of Paris, on the edge of what was once a region of small farms and fruit orchards. The farms are largely gone now, eaten up by suburban expansion, but a five minute walk from our house takes us to the remnants of the orchards. When we moved to this area in 2000, a number of them were still active, producing raspberries, apples, pears and peaches for sale in local markets. Today, sadly, most of them are no longer cultivated. They lie fallow and overgrown as their owners presumably wait for land prices to rise so they can sell their fields to housing developers for a tidy profit. We are witnessing the end of an era that goes back to pre-Roman times.
 

The nearby village of Mareil-Marly, first populated during the Celtic period, was for centuries surrounded by prosperous vineyards. Like most of the vines in France, they were killed off by the Phylloxera virus in the mid-19th century. Those around Mareil-Marly were never replaced, but the fruit orchards survived. One of our great pleasures when we moved here was to walk through the picturesque village and follow a narrow path, surrounded by ancient stone walls, that led to a pear and peach orchard on the edge of town. The neat rows of trees had been pruned and shaped for more than a century,  their branches curving out and upwards until they resembled candelabras. From early summer on, the pears would appear on the branches, grow bigger, and finally ripen in September.
 

Another of our favorite walks, often with our German shepherd Tasha, took us down a narrow country road lined with plum, hazelnut, and walnut trees. Off the road, behind a thicket of bushes, there was a big field enclosed by hedges. On its periphery, there were regular rows of apple trees bearing tons of fruit that no one bothered to collect anymore. They weren't much good to eat, but my son Julian and I used them to play a game we invented called "apple baseball." As soon as one was hit with a bat, it exploded into a spray of pulp, soon to be replaced by another pitched apple, then another.

Tasha would run around in frantic circles trying to catch the apples in midair. In the center of the field there was a double row of raspberry bushes that were tended and harvested by people we never saw. We would help ourselves liberally to the berries, as we did to the plums, hazelnuts and walnuts we encountered on our walks.
    Tempus edax rerum, as the Romans used to say. Time devours all things—including our beautiful orchards. The other day, Sylvaine and I tried to return to that field (without Tasha, long since devoured by time) and see what remained. The bushes and trees around it had grown so thick that we almost needed a machete to get through. The owners (whoever they are) had piled brushwood and branches across the path to block the entrance. But we persisted and finally penetrated into the field. It was much the same as we remembered it. The apple trees were still there, and so were the raspberry bushes, but no one cultivated them anymore; they were overgrown and infested with weeds. We helped ourselves to a few stray berries then left our field of dreams with no intention of returning. We knew what the future held for this idyllic place.
 

  It is the same future that is in store for the ancient pear and peach orchards nearby. On a recent walk, we saw a sign announcing that the fields would be cleared this fall and construction would begin on 60 housing units. This ancient land where vintners and fruit farmers tended their plants for more than two thousand years will soon be covered by concrete and cinderblocks. When we return to France next summer, we won't be walking this way.

OUT OF THE DEEP-FREEZE: NOTES ON A NOVEL IN THE WORKS

Interviewed recently by French magazine Nouvel Observateur, author Richard Ford describes the months, sometimes years, of preparations that precede the writing of his novels. He says he makes hundreds of notes and stuffs them in his refrigerator, along with notes for other unfinished projects, and only takes them out when he's ready to actually start writing.
     I have never tried the refrigerator method, but I find Ford's approach intriguing as I begin work on a new novel set in New Orleans. My two previous novels, The Armageddon Project (2007), and one whose name I will withhold as it is currently making the rounds of publishers, were plot-driven thrillers set largely in France. My current project (also to remain nameless at this point) is much more character-based and is set in my home town, which makes it a very different kind of novel requiring a different approach.
     Consider the setting: paradoxically, coming from New Orleans makes it difficult to write about New Orleans. The more you know about a place, the more you may take for granted in terms of what general readers know about it. But if you spell out too much, describe well-known things, events, and landmarks, you risk falling into clichés. And a lot of what is written about New Orleans—or depicted on the screen—has this defect. Consider the film The Big Easy or the TV series K-Ville.
    The bigger challenge is the depiction of characters. That's where Ford's approach is useful, because portraying characters requires, obviously, that the author know those characters as intimately as he knows his best friends. If characters are modelled or suggested by real people, an author can rely on observation and personal knowledge to transform them into fictional figures. Characters that are wholly invented require that the author create their personalities, physiques, and backgrounds out of thin air. Much harder. But in both cases it is necessary to fill in all the blanks, to know the complete back story of each character, sometimes going back several generations, even if only a fraction of those stories winds up on the page.
     That is the stage I am at now. So I am having fun making notes on the characters, inventing their histories, anecdotes from their past, frictions with their parents, traumas suffered, hopes and dreams, quirks and flaws. Fiction writing is like playing God: whatever you want to happen, you can make it happen; whatever you want a character to do or be, you can will it. And of course, you get to decide the outcome. Real life is not like that, which is a good thing. Who'd want the responsibility?

THANK YOU DEAR READERS!

I've just discovered that I have readers. Until now, I had no idea if anyone was reading my posts. I recently started clicking on things and it turns out I've had about 20,000 "hits" since I started the blog, and average more than 100 a day. I don't know how that compares with the norm, but it is heartwarming to learn that people are actually seeing what I write. And a number of them respond with comments that, for some reason, don't appear at the end of my posts. I clicked on a "comments" link today and, lo and behold, found a bunch of intelligent, funny, and encouraging remarks from readers. So for those of you who have sent comments, thank you. And if anyone knows how I can manage to have them appear with the posts, please let me know.

A WALK THROUGH MULTICULTURAL PARIS

The French novelist and poet Victor Hugo once wrote that "Paris is the capital city of every educated man." The African-American singer and dancer Josephine Baker proclaimed "I have two loves, my country and Paris." Ever since the French Revolution, Paris has been a magnet and a refuge for foreigners rich and poor. Since the independence movements of the 1950's and 60's, natives of the former French colonies in Africa, Indochina, and the West Indies have flocked to Paris and other French cities in search of work, social benefits, and a better life than they left behind. As a result, some 11% of the French population is now of immigrant origin. Paris has become a cosmopolitan city with an ethnic mix that frightens some—witness the rise of the far-right, anti-immigrant Front National party (20% in the polls)—but strikes others as as a source of cultural richness. Sylvaine and I observed this fascinating human patchwork on a recent trek from the Buttes Chaumont park in the east of the capital to the Gare de l'Est in the center (see map). Along this promenade, Sylvaine snapped pictures as part of a photo project showing various aspects of Paris. Highlights:

Belleville, located on a hill south of the Buttes Chaumont park, dates back to the 16th century and was incorporated into Paris only in 1860. In the 19th century, it was such a source of working-class ferment that the Baron Haussmann, who redrew the map of Paris under Napoleon III, drove the Boulevard de Belleville through its centre to allow for troop movements and buffer the bourgeois quarters from the revolutionary masses. Today, it is dominated by Arab and Asian immigrants whose languages and native dress give it a Third World tinge that contrasts sharply with the traditional French architecture. The southern part of Belleville, largely inhabited by Asians, is particularly striking with its ubiquitous Chinese and Korean ideograms emblazoned over shops selling everything from Peking duck and egg rolls to Chinese vegetables, computers and cell phones. Were it not for the view of the Eiffel Tower visible in the distance, it would be hard to guess that this bustling quarter was part of Paris.

Chateau d'Eau, near the Porte Saint Denis, is a transported slice of Africa. Black youths dressed in flat-billed baseball caps and hooded sweatshirts like American gangstas congregate on street corners and exchange rapid chatter in various indecipherable (to us) languages, while older immigrants in native dress stroll down the street with shopping bags or pushcarts, stopping to munch on ears of grilled corn sold by a sidewalk vendor who cooks them over open coals.

Place de la République, one of Paris's best-known landmarks, is a towering stone column encircled by haut-relief bronze plaques depicting various historic chapters in the march of French liberté, égalité, and fraternité from the storming of the Bastille prison in July 1789, to the proclamation of the Third Republic in September 1870. It is surrounded by a fountain and an immense open square where hundreds of people congregate on these hot summer days to sip coffee and beer at outdoor tables or cool off by wading in the fountain. Fittingly enough, the ethnic mix here is a snapshot of the modern French republic, from Français de souche (those with French roots), to Asians, Africans, Arabs and of course backpacking tourists from around the world. Unlike the feeling of separateness one gets in certain ethnic neighbourhoods, the atmosphere here is one of people coming together, or at least enjoying a peaceful coexistence. The illusion of the Front National xenophobes is that somehow the "foreigners"—most of whom are actually French citizens—can be sent home and France can reclaim its racial and cultural purity. Like it or not, these diverse ethnic communities are permanent strands of the modern French tapestry.