The Loneliness of the Long Distance Book Runner Read online

  It is a most civilised way of whiling away an afternoon; an indulgence really, like the mixing of Pernod and water. We are utterly seduced by this ambience of lazy talk and cigarettes. This state of torpor, it lasts until the jack bounces unexpectedly close to the bank of spectators. A melodramatic rush of activity then ensues; people shuffling back, others having to extricate themselves from chairs. The boules also, on occasion, whizz through the air like cannons. Missing their target (a boule needing to be dislodged), they then scatter spectators in all directions.

  The Mairie and everyone at the art school are getting worked up about the imminent arrival of Julian Schnabel. New York’s high priest of abstract art will be making an appearance at the Musee des Beaux-Arts for the vernisage. Marmite explains that this is like a private preview-cum-party to mark the start of an art exhibition. He gives me an invitation.

  What first strikes me about the paintings are their huge size (twenty-two-foot-square paintings) and all the crucifixes on show. I don’t really get it. Marmite is more analytical and says Schnabel’s success is a natural evolution of the art scene, as predicted by Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word, a book Marmite finds in the English centre. It concludes that modern art has become as academic and as cliquey as the salon painting against which it first rebelled. Marmite isn’t wholeheartedly in agreement. He, after all, has to make his way in this world.

  I fail to decipher the Schnabel art on show, finding it painful, almost, to behold. There is adequate compensation though: delicious canapés and champagne, courtesy of the Mairie’s largesse. I don’t hang around long enough to catch a glimpse of Schnabel but I do get to meet an art student called Anne.

  The exhibition ends three weeks later but three of Schnabel’s works are left to grace the walls of the Maison Carrée, a well preserved temple built in the first century bc and dedicated to Lucius and Caius Caesar, grandsons of the Emperor. This is an irritant to us because every time we walk back to Marmite’s flat after a pétanque session, we pass the temple and are reminded of the Emperor’s new clothes inside.

  Marmite has begun sketching the boules players. We keenly observe their idiosyncracies. The bellyman displays fewer than the others, preferring to spend as little time as possible in sizing up his throw. When presented with a throw requiring a fine judgement, he plucks from his back pocket a handkerchief into which he noiselessly blows his fat nose. Slow in settling down to throw, the wigman tends to pace up and down the corridor of play before remarking the throwing circle by scraping his shoes hard and repeatedly into the ground. After badly misjudging a throw he is inclined to go through the motions with an imaginary boule, rectifying the error in his mind if not in reality. In spite of his tender years, the young pretender has already acquired several habits; energetically hitching up his jeans in a general air of self-exhortation to perform well, then banging the ground with the boules before knocking them against each other as though putting them through a test of loyalty. The flashman, we joyfully note, likes to juggle with his.

  The largest crowd gathers for the bellyman. But other pétanque players, despite carrying less esteem, also have their followers. The standard of play is variable, especially when it is friendship, as opposed to ability or generation that binds the participants together in competition. Age has modified the stance of some competitors. For those with stiffened arthritic backs, magnets, discreetly carried in pockets, are lowered on elastic to retrieve the boules. Marmite wonders if a good toke on his joint might further alleviate their discomfort.

  With the afternoon’s games finally on the wane, I part company with Marmite to see how the tadpoles are faring. Eminently watchable, their food attacks are carnivorous and candid. Impatient children, seeking for proof of the promised transmogrification, don’t have long to wait. Limbs appear, tails shrink and a new creature is formed.

  It happens while Anne and I are making plans to leave Nîmes. Marmite witnesses it before me. Everyone finds it hard to believe. The bellyman losing his touch? Concentration knots his facial features into an expression of unwavering determination. But his adversaries, in sensing unprecedented fallibility, gang up. The wigman scores victories without placing the jack in the bumpier regions. The young pretender is less inhibited. The flashman postpones his time of departure for work. They become aware of the bellyman’s struggle to hold his own when the jack is thrown out far from their feet, a tactic to put uncertainty into his mind.

  I can’t help but feel bad for the bellyman but Marmite is largely indifferent to his declining talent. The chirpy self-assurance is going. Ripples of both empathy and discontentment run among supporters who have basked in his parochial glory. Some have even won money by betting on him. He experiments with his action, not crouching so low to the ground. But then his belly becomes a hindrance rather than a help – no longer helping to achieve an equilibrium of body. This new posture doesn’t lend itself to boules-throwing exactitude. In releasing the boule it is obvious that he is off balance, at risk even of toppling over to complete the humiliation. In cursing the boules, he tosses them higher into the air but altering their trajectory fails to work. Confusion and resentment widen the furrows upon his brow, along which run large beads of sweat. He employs acts of superstition that have previously ended barren spells. He rubs a yellow rag frenziedly against his hip. His nose is blown hard while he prolongs the time spent in terrain assessment, marking and remarking the grit in the throwing circle. He even appears to reduce his pastis intake. His mistakes cause increasing embarrassment. His rare victories are now due more to opponent error.

  A man purporting to clear houses has phoned regarding the advertisement in the Le Sémaphore cinema. Marmite has taken the message, which is, broadly, that the man has a large number of English books that he wants rid of at a price to be established. I phone the man from Anne’s flat and it turns out that the books are in Alès, a town lying lies 25 miles north-west of Nîmes, on the left bank of the Gardon River. At the risk of appearing too keen, I fix up a meeting for the following day. He gives me directions to a car park near to the town’s centre.

  I spot a white Renault Trafic van and pull up alongside. A man in his fifties jumps out at the sight of the Princess with its English plates. He wastes no time in yanking open the back doors to his van. The sight of hundreds of books greets me. It is often the case, upon being called out to inspect a library for sale, that the books will be all good or all bad. Within seconds I know that it hasn’t been a wasted trip. Now I need to enter negotiating mode. I make a show of counting the books as my mind does the calculations. I see promising titles. How now to convey an impression of insouciance? You tend to do your best negotiating when you genuinely are prepared to walk away from the deal. But it’s difficult to feign that frame of mind. Neither of us is keen to suggest a figure. I say, rather dishonestly, that as a general lot they’re okay while adding, honestly, that I can’t see any really rare items. ‘Allez cinq cent francs,’ suggests the man. I nod, trying to keep a serious face.

  The Austin Princess isn’t the most stylish of vehicles but it has good cabin space that I put to full use. I love the smell and the jumbled piles of all these books; vast quantities of American Penguins and Vintage paperbacks, many of which have the name and address of their former owner stamped on the inside cover. Going by past experience, it won’t hinder the selling of them.

  The Princess is overheating again but it gets me and the books back to Nîmes. Lacking confidence to approach a garage, I can’t continue to patch up its radiator. So the Princess ends its days in the grounds of the art school where the students make a sculpture out of it. Marmite keeps me informed but after completing his ‘academic’ year, we lose touch. We both stop the drinking; Marmite no longer convinced of alcohol’s incantatory powers to produce good art.

  Before leaving Nîmes, I visit the Jardin de la Fontaine one last time with Anne. I show her the pond where the tadpoles are moving with less hectic abandon; their tails having all but disappeared. May is warming t
he days. We pass by the boulodrome. I haven’t witnessed the tadpoles’s complete metamorphosis but in place Picasso there is a definite indicator of time passing. Still venting joy or frustration in his inimitable fashion, a rotund and familiar figure is engaged in a game of boules with a set of players I don’t recognise.

  Anne has quit art school and moved to Montpellier where I want to try my luck with the recent spoils from Alès. I take up residence in the city’s youth hostel at the bottom of rue de l’Université. We have been told about a book market held on Saturday mornings under Les Arceaux, the city’s ancient aquaduct. The project is to sell books there, out of the back of a van.

  Pont de Montvert, Late August 1990

  I’ve come down from Mount Lozère, passing near to where Robert Louis Stevenson had slept the night under the stars. Drinking a cool can of Coke on the humpbacked bridge (Pont-de-Montvert) that spans the swift-flowing Tarn, I feel an acute sense of well being. I’ve been following in the footsteps of the writer’s 120-mile solo hiking journey through the sparsely populated areas of the Cévennes Mountains. Travelling without a donkey (just as well given that Stevenson’s Modestine was a stubborn beast he could never quite get the better of), I’m now confident about completing the walk despite sore, blistered feet. It’s my own fault, choosing to wear a black pair of Dr Martens that never properly fitted me. It’s been cold in the tent at night and yet hot, very hot on some days after what was a distinctly inauspicious start, landing up at the wrong Le Monastier, some 150 km off course from Le Monastier-sur-Gazeille, where Stevenson actually began his walk.

  At one end of the bridge is the tourist office, which has for sale a bilingual (English/French) edition of Travels with a Donkey with an unusually detailed map of Stevenson’s route. I resist a strong impulse to buy it. My funds, after all, are running low.

  On the bridge, I skim through my travel notes.

  ‘Wrong bloody Le Monastier. Fool. Put right by an amused lady in the village’s boulangerie, I venture, weeping with frustration, into a nearby church. Above its altar is a sign that has an implacable logic to it: ‘La Route est Longue’! Must now spend an unscheduled night in the train station in Le Mende, a town whose Cathedral is adorned with Gothic devil dogs carved in a permanent retch. I feel (and look) a bit like them after too much wine. – Return to La Bastide, couple of lifts, arrive in Le Monastier in heavy rain. Spot a commemorative plaque dedicated to Stevenson and his donkey. ‘LE 22 SEPTEMBER 1878, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON POUR SON VOYAGE A TRAVERS LES CEVENNES AVEC UN ANE.’ (I’ve left my Anne in Montpellier) –

  Leave at noon. Punishing early ascent; ripped by thorns and a sad proliferation of barbed wire. 2.30 arrive in St Martin de Frugeres. Exhilarating descent at 3.45. Arrive in Goudet. Blistered feet. The river, described by Stevenson as ‘an amiable stripling of a river’, is today at least 60 feet wide, teeming with dirty black trout. Icy cold to the touch. Fly fisherman tries his luck as the sun goes down behind the chateau Beaufort –

  Very cold at night in the tent. Ussel 11.45 a.m. WWI memorial. Sweat stinging the eyes. Feet burning, try wearing espadrilles. Begin to revel in the surroundings but there remains, as Stevenson says, a lingering desire for a companion in travel. –

  Le Bruchet 4p.m. stone walls dividing fields in which tractors and farm machinery lie abandoned. Directed to campsite, only me camping. Feels like I’m walking on hot coals – hope they cool sufficiently to allow me to continue to Pradelles. Next day, more drizzle. To the east green gently rolling hills. My water bottle swings to and thro’, metronome like and making me aware of a fairly constant stride pattern. Pass Mount Fouey – phoeey 3600 feet, scarcely aware of the height – Limp into Pradelle at 5.45 p.m. Ensconced in sleeping bag for 12 hours, recovering from tiredness brought on my climb into town. It’s damp & miserable so make it a rest day. Get out my books. Finish reading The Bell Jar and Death of An Expert Witness. In Langogne, deduce Allier to be much swollen by recent rainfall given the description of it by Stevenson. Beautiful descent into Le Cheylad L’Eveque. Plod on but climb Lozère with surprising ease.’

  I look up from the notebook. Pont-de-Montvert has retained the stony granite-built traditional aspect of traditional villages in this part of the Cévennes. Stevenson writes that it is here that the repressive Abbé de Chayla lived – the ‘Archpriest of the Cevennes’ who sparked the rebellion of the Camisards. His house in Pont-de-Montvert served as a prison for Protestants who were tortured. As Stevenson recounts, Chayla ‘closed the hands of his prisoners upon live coal, and plucked out the hairs of their beards, to convince them that they were deceived in their [religious beliefs].’

  I look for signs of where the house might have stood before it was burnt down in July 1702 and the Abbé killed.

  ‘One by one, Séguier first, the Camisards drew near and stabbed him. “This,” they said, “is for my father broken on the wheel. This for my brother in the galleys. That for my mother or my sister imprisoned in your cursed convents.” Each gave his blow and his reason; and then all kneeled and sang psalms around the body till the dawn. With the dawn, still singing, they defiled away towards Frugèresmap, farther up the Tarn, to pursue the work of vengeance, leaving Du Chayla’s prison-house in ruins, and his body pierced with two-and-fifty wounds upon the public place.’

  The subsequent Protestant rebellion was severely repressed by Louis XIV. I have a good feeling about this place that I can’t explain. It’s got nothing to do with its Protestant heritage for I have no affinity to any religion. It’s pleasant also to be close to so much water in the heat of the day. The village was built at the confluence of the Tarn, Rieumalet and Martinet rivers, beside which is situated the municipal campsite. As is usual, the facilities are good. After showering I get into conversation with a German couple who are desperate for reading material. I give them the Sylvia Plath and the P. D. James but they insist on handing me 50 francs after I decline a beer from their camping van fridge. What is going on? This was a trip to take stock of my life but I’ve unintentionally become involved in a book deal of sorts.

  I use the money to buy the bilingual edition of Travels with a Donkey.

  (From Clear Waters Rising by N. Crane ‘It wasn’t until I read his journal that I realised he’d lopped off the end of this passage when he rewrote the text for TWAD. After “I travel for travel’s sake,” he added in the original: “And to write about it afterwards…”’

  A Royal Customer, Bangor, November 2009

  The book in my hand connects me to royalty, albeit tenuously. Laurie Lee’s The Firstborn is illustrated with black and white photographs taken by the author. He wrote it while contemplating the future of his newborn child.

  A few days following my birth in October 1964, my aunt gave my mother a copy of this book.

  ‘This moment of meeting seemed to be a birthtime for both of us; her first and my second life. Nothing I knew would be the same again. She is of course just an ordinary miracle, but is also the late wonder of my life. So each night I take her to bed like a book and lie close and study her.’

  Recently, I removed the book from the ‘family, not for sale, I’ll murder you if you do’ shelf. It was given a description of its condition and edition (second impression) and put on sale through Amazon.

  A member of the Royal Family has just purchased the book online.

  Book Blindness, Twickenham, 1997

  According to my database, the book is in the box labelled ‘Strawberry Hill 22’, which in another life contained Sainsbury bananas. I’ve been through boxes 21 and 23 and am now looking through box 22 for the third time. In my mind’s eye the book resembles an Everyman’s Library (Dent) small format hardback. I recheck my database. I recheck my invoices. No record of a sale. The book must be there. I make myself read out the title of every book and it is only then that I spot it. It’s a bloody paperback.

  Book blindness is a condition that afflicts all sellers at one time or other.

  Travelling to Paris, 1989

  Phil
, friend and sub-editor, has presented me with a guidebook as a leaving present in which he has inscribed the following lines from a poem by Auden:

  ‘Look, stranger, at this island now

  The leaping light for your delight discovers,

  Stand stable here

  And silent be,

  That through the channels of the ear

  May wander like a river

  The swaying sound of the sea.’

  Having quit my job, I am now officially destined for France. A change of clothes fills my rucksack and I have a suitcase of books either written in French or that have a connection to France. They’ve been acquired, in the main, from charity shops and, after some investigation, I’m optimistic about selling at least two of them. Tout l’inconnu de la Casbah by Lucienne Favre was published in 1933 by the Baconnier Frères. Recounting life in Algier’s Casbah, it is delicately illustrated by Charles Brouty, who also worked on other popular books concerning Algeria. The other banker is Norman Cameron’s 1940s translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, published by John Lehmann. Rimbaud himself published Une Saison en Enfer, an extended poem that later influenced the Surrealists.