Цитаты из книги Something to Declare

And then there was the formidable eccentricity of the food. Their butter was wanly unsalted, blood came out of their meat, and they would put anything, absolutely anything, into soup. They grew perfectly edible tomatoes and then doused them in foul vinaigrette; ditto lettuce, ditto carrots, ditto beetroot. Normally you could detect that foul vinaigrette had been slimed over the salad; but sometimes they fooled you by slurping it into the bottom of the bowl, so that when with hopeful heart you lifted a leaf from the top… Bread was good (but see butter); chips were good (but see meat); vegetables were unpredictable. Fruit was reliable—not much they could do to ruin that; indeed, they grew very large and juicy red apples you could positively look forward to. They liked onions far too much. They brushed their teeth with garlic paste. They camouflaged quite edible meat and fish with sauces of dubious origin and name. Then there was wine, which bore a close resemblance to vinaigrette; and coffee, which I hated.

Francophobia remains our first form of Europhobia, though not of xenophobia (ethnic minorities have edged out the French in that regard). The French are genuinely puzzled by the bile of our tabloid press, shocked that a country known for phlegm and decorous manners can also deal in such jeering contempt. It's not really you, I try to explain; it's just that you are more than yourselves, you have become the symbol of all that is foreign; everything, not just Frenchness, begins at Calais. Whereas you may look across your different frontiers and be offered a choice of four great civilizations, we in our offshore islands are surrounded by you on one side and fish on the other three. No wonder we feel about you more strongly, more obsessingly— whether as Francophile or Francophobe—than you feel about us.

Each time I give this explanation, I am less convinced by my words. Yes, they're sort of true; but it's also the case that the French are so … well, French, and therefore designed by God to seem as provokingly dissimilar from the British as possible. Catholic, Cartesian, Mediterranean; Machiavellian in politics, Jesuitical in argument, Casanovan in sex; relaxed about pleasure, and treating the arts as central to life, rather than some add-on, like a set of alloy wheels. What assemblage could be better targeted to enrage the puritanical lager-lunkhead blessed and prodded by our tabloid press, or even some posher patriots? In public life, the French are just as hypocritical as we are; the difference would seem to be that their hypocrisy pays lip-service to idealism, whereas ours pays lip-service to pragmatism.

Central for me in the development of the modern sensibility is the figure of Gustave Flaubert. “I wish he'd shut up about Flaubert,” Kingsley Amis, with pop-eyed truculence, once complained to a friend of mine. Fat chance: Flaubert, the writer's writer par excellence, the saint and martyr of literature, the perfector of realism, the creator of the modern novel with Madame Bovary, and then, a quarter of a century later, the assistant creator of the modernist novel with Bouvard et Pécuchet. According to Cyril Connolly, Bouvard et Pécuchet was Joyce's favourite novel (Richard Ellmann thought this probable, if lacking documentary proof). Not Shutting Up About Flaubert—see the second half of this book—remains a necessary pleasure. When the Times Literary Supplement sent me the fourth volume of his Correspondance for review in 1998, the semi-satirical comp-slip tucked into the book read, “Could we have a million words, please (by April 13, if possible)?”