Greetings from Provence

During this extended stay-at-home I have been drawn  to earthy, vivid prose, as if the blossoming of the natural world and poetic descriptions of rural life offer a more effective counterweight to daily death tolls than do anguished domestic plot lines or homicidal psychological puzzles.

Top on the list is Blue Boy by Jean Giono  (It's been sitting around the house for years.) The author was a child of Provence, and his novels are set in villages where life is hard and the neighbors can be brutal, but the environment sings with a Homeric majesty, which Giono has a knack for describing in images that push audaciously beyond clichés into the realm of hallucination. I read two of his novels years ago—Harvest and Hill of Destiny—but Blue Boy is better. Or maybe I'm looking for something different in fiction than I once did.

Originally published in 1932, Blue Boy relates a series of incidents in the life in a Provencal village from the point of view of a boy living with his parents and attending school at the local convent. We might call it a "coming of age" story, although the narrator is more interested in describing the things going on all around him than in the emotional vicissitudes of his own adolescence. For example, here is how he describes a nun as seen by the narrator as they both hide under a bush.

Sister Dorothée would stretch out on the grass. She became a black world humped with mountains and hills, hollowed with dry and silent valleys, waterless, treeless, quite de­serted, and as if despised. All that was alive was the happy region of her face where her mouth was eating choco­late, where her lips finally made a moist sound, where be­neath a slanting ray of sunshine her cheek grew velvety with a blond down that seemed, in my intoxication from the fragrance, to undulate and wave like a vast sea of rip­ened grass.

And here is a description of the village as evening descends:

... the dirt from the hills was drying in great clods. A heap of gorse fagots was shriveling against the wall. It already smelled of fungus. At a stable door the chopped-up trunk of a fig tree had been dumped. A donkey brayed. A dog watched us go by. The sound of his collar could be heard as he raised his head. Strings of garlic rustled beneath the little projecting roofs over the doors. There was a light at only one window on the ground floor. I looked in as we passed. A woman was standing beside a bed, stirring a bowl of herb tea with a spoon.

The narrator reveres his father, a humble shoemaker who is also known throughout the region as a peacemaker and a saintly soul, albeit with revolutionary tendencies. From time to time people show up furtively at the door, in need of advice or refuge. The narrator watches it all unfold.

Among the quotidian experiences of which the story is built, the narrator describes the people living in the flats across the courtyard from his family's apartment, the fist-fights at the local bistro, the neighbors with whom he takes music lessons, the reactions of the villagers when one of the local women runs off with a itinerant shepherd, and the farm hand who commits suicide after being jilted at a dance. There are plenty of sheep, snakes,  and dramatic weather. The rendering takes on the larger-than-life imagery and the dramatic coloring of a painting by Henri Rousseau.   

On Sunday, at about ten o’clock, the sun was blazing so fiercely that the road, the walls, trees, and the sky began to quiver like white grease.

The narrator's discovery of women, far from being a matter of teen infatuation, beings very early, with three women from his mother's laundry business, all of whom are asked to walk him to the convent school at one time or another. Each has a different gait, a different smell, a different attitude toward the young lad, and he makes note of it all. He is also keenly aware of the young woman who lives across the courtyard, who takes a shower every afternoon behind a towel. 

But from early on in the book, he  reserves the bulk of his affection for the woman whose beautiful face he discovers peering out at him from amid the random patterns of fungus that have developed on the damp walls of the attic in the building where he lives. 

Her face was oval and slightly rounded. She was green, but the greenest part was in her eyes and all the color of her skin could be only a reflection, the luminous glow, or her gaze. At the place where her mouth was, the disease of the wall had eaten to the bricks, and it was blood-red like real flesh...the motion of her glance passed from me through my mind in spurts that I alone controlled, speeding toward the wind or toward the mystery of the thick walls, but, as I stood contemplating her, it was she who cast the stone into the still pool of my being.

The narrator admits to being aware of his intense attachment to visceral experience from an early age. He was chosen to recite an homage to the Virgin at a school ceremony, and advised to tell no one of the role he had been given.

There was no need to tell me to keep it a secret at home or to tell me not to speak of it to my father. It was enough for me to be near a mystery to become at once the personification of infant silence. Everything that touched the other world I felt I loved intimately like one’s native land, like a country where I once had lived and loved dearly and from which I was exiled, but which was still living within me with its weaving roads, its great rivers lying flat over the land like trees with long branches, and the swelling undulations of the shaggy hills whose every’ track I knew. I felt that I knew all this much better than grown persons ...

He credits his father with recognizing and nurturing this peculiar gift.

If I have such love for the memory of my father, if I can never separate myself from his image, if time cannot cut the thread, it is because in the experiences of every single day I realize all that he has done for me... He was the first to see, with his gray eyes, that sensuousness that made me touch a wall and imagine the roughness like porous skin ...  that sensuousness that made me like a drop of water pierced by the sun, pierced by the shapes and colors in the world, bearing in truth, like a drop of water, the form, the color, the sound, the sensa­tion, physically in my flesh... If one has the humility to call upon one’s instinct, upon the elemental, there is in sensuousness a kind of cosmic joy.

Writing in the 1950s, the American critic R. W. B. Lewis noted the striking contrast between Giono and his more famous French contemporaries:

[Giono] has always gone his private way, and it has been a way opposite to that of the representative literary figures of his time—opposite, for example, to that of Albert Camus. . . . [Giono’s] theme has been a sort of chaste paganism, a pastoral joy in nature, the good fellowship of honest folk, and in the sheer sensation of life. . . . And all this as deliberately remote as can be from the political belligerence and the metaphysical anguish of most of his distinguished contem­poraries.

True enough. But Giono is a country lad and a product of the First World War, and it would make more sense, perhaps, to compare him to writers in his own vein, such as the Norwegian Knut Hamsun, or even Hemingway, who has a similarly direct mode of expression though less interest in his surroundings and more meager poetic gifts. 

Such comparisons are illuminating as far as they go, but they fail to suggest how startling, and appealing, Giono's imagery can be. This is not the Provence of English expats like Peter Mayle, Lawrence Durrell, or Ford Madox Ford. Nor, I suspect, does it much resemble that of most Provençal peasants during the years between the two world wars. Henry Miller, who was a fan, described Giono's world as a "private terrestrial domain far closer to reality than books of history or geography."

The next day a storm swept up from the sea. At dawn it was already there, having passed over the plateau. From the east and the south it blew dark and damp like a cave; only a tiny blue window lighted the earth from the north, and toward it fled a whole family of falcons. The storm advanced. It rose higher, grew blacker, making no sound; on the contrary, it stifled all sounds, it laid a hush over the world.