How pleasant to be M. Larbaud

Which writer would you most like to have been?' asked one of my pupils at the City of London School. Negative answers were the easiest. Most of the big literary cheeses were out from the start. Who would have wanted to change places with Dante, for example, doomed to a life of exile, bitterness and amatory sorrows? Or to spend cork-lined Proustian nights in the company of asthma, insomnia and mashed potato? Even a long, materially prosperous and artistically watertight career such as Goethe's seems unenviable in the light of the great man's appalling smugness.

At this time of year when, sniffing the incipient spring, I start plotting birdlike migrations southward, I fancy it might have been nice to be Valery Larbaud. You know, the man whose name sounds like an irritating combination of Paul Valery and Arthur Rimbaud, the French novelist, poet and critic, born in Vichy in 1881, author of Fermina Marquez, that captivating yet poignant story of a Colombian girl who sets hearts a-flutter among pupils at a boys' boarding school, and creator of the fiction- al alter ego A. 0. Barnabooth, a name apparently made up after a visit to the Barnes branch of Boots the chemist.

Larbaud had several advantages, natural and material. He never needed to bother about money, he was one of the most eclec- tic and voracious readers of his generation, and he possessed a blotting-paper receptiv- ity to foreign languages, becoming fluent in Portuguese, for instance, by the simple process of sitting up all night of the Paris- Lisbon express to finish one of Eca de Queiroz's novels. Oh, and if you've never tried Eca — well, more of him another time.

He also, though an inveterate skirt- chaser, contrived to remain in what Shake- speare calls 'single blessedness', living much of his active life out of suitcases. Restlessness was a vitamin to his imagina- tion, and much of his best writing is taken up with the subject of getting away from France, a variant on the theme currently much canvassed by American campus literati under the label 'otherness'.

Out of his elegant nomadism Larbaud spun his most intricate fancies. Some were full-scale fictions, like the marvellous Beaute, mon beau souci, set in Chelsea and doubtless autobiographical since he was a passionate anglophile, in which a young Frenchman, enjoying a liaison with his landlady, falls disastrously in love with her daughter. Some, like Disque, the prattling monologue of an old trout from Dorking who has fetched up in Bergamo and longs to dance the tango, were mere scraps of overheard conversation from motel lobbies and train corridors. Others still were sketched on the backs of postcards, from Biar in southern Spain with its 100 fountains, from a deserted village in the Bourbonnais half eaten by the forest, or from the Wye valley, where he dreamed of a yellow ship and awoke to find it was Tintern Abbey.

An ultimate distillation of Larbaud's travel mania is the exquisite sheaf of verses published in 1908 as Les Poisies de A. 0. Barnabooth. An anorexic among slim volumes, it hangs around the fringes of memory for its sheer perversity. Essentially this is Ronsard meeting Bradshaw or MaHarald rewritten by Thomas Cook, a mixture of classic French poetic voices with the noise of foghorns and guards' whistles. The stately tread of the grand Gallic alexandrine gets harnessed to some very odd uses indeed. One wonders what Racine would have thought of lines like:

Au long de Brompton Road, Marylebone ou Holborn

or:

A Colombo ou a Nagasaki je (is les Baedek- ers De l'Espagne et de Portugal, ou de l'Autriche-Hongrie.

Everything along the journey, it seemed, was lying in wait for Larbaud to transmute into poetry. In Images the process is one of simple impressionist sketches, a young Russian woman giving a child a drink, two girls in Rotterdam saying an affectionate goodbye to one another — 'their trembling hands wanted, yet didn't want, to party, and their mouths drew away from each other only to kiss once more' — and a throng of Spanish urchins dancing under a eucalyptus tree. Some obscure notion con- vinces him that by reaching out to them he can conquer the world.

His ear was as sharp as his eye. There's a wonderful poem entitled Voix des Servantes, set against a deliberately vague background mingling the Mediterranean, South America and the French Caribbean islands, in which he celebrates the call of maids' deep-toned voices echoing through the house on a spring morning: O Servantes, chantez! voix brulantes, voix fibres!

Toutes les criadas de la maison, chantez! Amparo, Carmeta, Angustias, chantez! Et remplissez ce coeur qui vous &die ces larmes.

If I have to choose a Barnabooth favourite, it must probably be the threnody Larbaud addressed to a disused railway station at Cahors. The whole thing is in fact a subtle homage to all the classic `ubi suet' poems ever written about deserted places where human life once reverberated, yet this particular elegy isn't just a literary exercise.

The station, with its silent platforms, shuttered waiting-rooms and grass-grown tracks, is 'a double door opening on earth's enchanting immensity', not melancholy, grim or fraught with the memento mori spirit, but overtaken by a contemplative solitariness.

One poem, however, sums up all the rest in pure polyglot weirdness, written as it is in a macaronic mixture of all the languages Larbaud ever got his tongue round. It's called La Neige. See what you make of it:

Un ano mas und iam eccoti mit uns again, Pauvre et petit on the graves dos nossos ama- dos edredon E pure piously tapaudolos in their sleep Dal pallio glorios das virgens und infants. With the mind's eye ti sequo sobre l'europa estasa, On the vas Northern pianure dormida, nitida nix, Oder on lone Karpathian slopes donde, zapa- da, Nigorum brazilor albo disposa velo bist du. Doch in loco nullo more to colunt els meus pensaments Quam in Esquilino Monte, ove della nostra Roma Corona de platas ores, Dum alta iaces on the fields so duss kein Wege seve, Yel alma, d'ici detachee, su camin finds no ceo.

That nonesuch was written in 1934. A year later, while walking in his Parisian garden, Larbaud suffered a stroke which completely destroyed his powers of speech and made it impossible for him to write.

He lived on for another 20 years in silence, incapable of communicating with more than the odd shake of the head. Perhaps after all envy is only a tenth-rate emotion and writers are better off being themselves.

Jonathan Keates