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I'm sorry, I'll read that again
Dec. 1st, 2022 05:17 pmD. departed from his most recent visit leaving behind him Edith Somerville and Martin Ross's In the vine country. One of the constants of our friendship is that we have very different tastes, often completely misjudge what the other will enjoy, and keep trying, anyway. So, Somerville and Ross? As in that classic of Victorian humour, The Irish RM, which I have not read but remember being ambivalent about the television version in the 1980s? Yes, that Somerville and Ross.
But D.'s edition was published by a specialist wine publisher (it's also available from Project Gutenberg) which was promising: I like old-fashioned travel writing, I'm interested in wine and I have visited (though I don't know it well) the area of France concerned ... How could it fail to be entertaining?
That's only half a rhetorical question. Somerville and Ross have a distinctive flavour: Irish (or is that Anglo-Irish?) ladies, called away from hunting to go to the Médoc, not for their expertise (they claim none) but for their wit and humour - and they oblige, they are resolutely witty, which can be wearing. Their comedy horror at the unhygienic practices of wine making (the peasants treading the grapes) is displayed at length, and the text is liberally sprinkled with "Irishisms", turns of phrase delivered as if they added some comedy value which was invisible to me... I was very conscious of enjoying reading their account of their travels more than I would have enjoyed travelling with them - but I did enjoy reading it.
Then right at the end, it startled me. In the final chapter, on the homeward journey, the cousins spend a day in Paris. They are familiar with the city, they feel at home, they revisit a hotel, a restaurant that they know of old,they make their way to the galleries in the Jardins du Luxembourg (now the Musée du Luxembourg):
I like the Alice reference, and I recognised that sense that it's hardly worth visiting the Eiffel Tower, its image is so inescapable.
But when the travellers got off the tram at the wrong stop, and "consequently had a long crawl through the empty Exhibition buildings and grounds", I thought again: the tower was built as part of the Exposition Universelle, held on the centenary of the French Revolution. It wasn't old and familiar, it was a new intrusion into a well-known townscape. Somerville and Ross visit it almost against their will not because it is hackneyed, a cliché, but because it is a novelty. How could they refuse to visit the tallest tower in the world, when they were so close, and they might not have another chance (it was intended as a temporary structure, to be demolished after 20 years)? Somerville and Ross's account of their visit to the tower is a lovely piece of writing anyway, a mixture of their trademark self-deprecatory humour (they are not keen to enter the life cage) and vivid description ("the girders that looked like all the propositions in Euclid run mad") but this shift of perspective makes it stand out from the rest of the book.
Not for the first time, the Eiffel Tower hogs the limelight. In the vine country as a whole is very much a case of if this is the sort of thing you like, you will like this. But that final chapter has a much wider appeal.
But D.'s edition was published by a specialist wine publisher (it's also available from Project Gutenberg) which was promising: I like old-fashioned travel writing, I'm interested in wine and I have visited (though I don't know it well) the area of France concerned ... How could it fail to be entertaining?
That's only half a rhetorical question. Somerville and Ross have a distinctive flavour: Irish (or is that Anglo-Irish?) ladies, called away from hunting to go to the Médoc, not for their expertise (they claim none) but for their wit and humour - and they oblige, they are resolutely witty, which can be wearing. Their comedy horror at the unhygienic practices of wine making (the peasants treading the grapes) is displayed at length, and the text is liberally sprinkled with "Irishisms", turns of phrase delivered as if they added some comedy value which was invisible to me... I was very conscious of enjoying reading their account of their travels more than I would have enjoyed travelling with them - but I did enjoy reading it.
Then right at the end, it startled me. In the final chapter, on the homeward journey, the cousins spend a day in Paris. They are familiar with the city, they feel at home, they revisit a hotel, a restaurant that they know of old,they make their way to the galleries in the Jardins du Luxembourg (now the Musée du Luxembourg):
When we got out into the gardens again, with their linked battalions of perambulators, and their thousand children courting sea-sickness on the zoological merry-go-rounds, the afternoon was still young. The tops of the tall horse-chestnuts were yellow in the sunshine, and above them, in the blue sky, the Eiffel Tower looked down on us, suggesting absurdly the elongated neck of Alice in Wonderland, when the pigeon accuses her of being a serpent. Its insistent challenge could no longer be resisted; in spite of the needle-cases, yard-measures, and paper-weights that had horridly familiarised us with its outlines, it was decidedly a thing to be done. People who would go to sleep if we talked to them about the vineyards, would wake to active contempt if they heard we had not been to the Eiffel Tower.
I like the Alice reference, and I recognised that sense that it's hardly worth visiting the Eiffel Tower, its image is so inescapable.
But when the travellers got off the tram at the wrong stop, and "consequently had a long crawl through the empty Exhibition buildings and grounds", I thought again: the tower was built as part of the Exposition Universelle, held on the centenary of the French Revolution. It wasn't old and familiar, it was a new intrusion into a well-known townscape. Somerville and Ross visit it almost against their will not because it is hackneyed, a cliché, but because it is a novelty. How could they refuse to visit the tallest tower in the world, when they were so close, and they might not have another chance (it was intended as a temporary structure, to be demolished after 20 years)? Somerville and Ross's account of their visit to the tower is a lovely piece of writing anyway, a mixture of their trademark self-deprecatory humour (they are not keen to enter the life cage) and vivid description ("the girders that looked like all the propositions in Euclid run mad") but this shift of perspective makes it stand out from the rest of the book.
Not for the first time, the Eiffel Tower hogs the limelight. In the vine country as a whole is very much a case of if this is the sort of thing you like, you will like this. But that final chapter has a much wider appeal.
