The changing face of Marianne
Sebastian Faulks
PARIS AND ELSEWHERE: SELECTED WRITINGS by Richard Cobb, edited and introduced by David Gilmour John Murray, £20, pp. 276 Although his books of French history are individual to the point of idiosyncrasy, Richard Cobb never wrote a' personal account of his life in France. Those of his many admirers who wanted something like a French memoir have therefore had to piece together the autobiographical pas- sages in his writing — prefaces, essays and book reviews — as best they could. The memoirs Cobb did write, of his English childhood, were not the same thing at all. They appeared (to this reader, though admittedly not to others) rather ordinary. Cobb seemed only half committed to them; these English scenes lacked the ingredient — the country — that truly engaged him.
David Gilmour has now put together the best pieces of Cobb's personal writing about France to form a memoir by other means. The result is as charming and impressive as one would expect; this is not Cobb for the scholar of the Revolution, but Cobb for the general francophile.
Cobb first visited France in 1935 and spent as much of the next 20 years there as Hitler permitted. Even after he had returned to teach in Britain, he kept a room in the rue de Tournon in Paris, though this arrangement was bizarre, and his early life there provides a story that Colette or Maupassant would have been proud to have written. For those of us who believed that our first visits to France in the 1960s or 1970s allowed us to glimpse this wonderful country as it once might have been, it is shocking to discover that even in 1935 Cobb felt he was a witness to something that was already dead or dying.
What he laments particularly is the change of urban routine caused by bad planning, and the loss of the dignity, variety and indi- viduality in the life of the small man that this entailed. He is, as you would expect, caustic about Pompidou's absurd monu- ment to himself, about the destruction of Les Hanes and about Le Corbusier (`Con- sider his 40-year campaign against the beauty and variety of Paris. How he hates the place!'); but for Cobb the problem real- ly goes back to Haussmann's redesign of the capital for Napoleon III.
Cobb's France is essentially an urban one, and his cities are mapped on foot.
Only when he has mastered the geography of people's daily routes will he allow him- self the platform of a bus or a Metro car- riage on a raised track for his further scrutiny. Everywhere he looks, the old diversity, the old richness is being stolen from him by pointless change; however hard he observes and records, the magnifi- cent organism of the city is somehow slip- ping through his fingers. This is agonising for him, because centripetal Paris within its bordering gates does seem at least theoreti- cally containable in a way that the sprawl of London could never be.
In some ways, Cobb's wish to describe and hold on to this human drama seems less historical than artistic. His characteri- sation of the two brothers with whom he lodged in the rue de Tournon is masterly; its comic appreciation of the kinks of their psychology is deepened by his scholar's knowledge of their country's recent past.
Yet later, when in a chapter on the Ixelles district of Greater Brussels, he casts his observations in the form of 'the framework of a novel that has not been written', he seems to have no idea of how to dramatise them. In fact, in this essay, as occasionally elsewhere, the closeness of his social and geographical scrutiny has a paradoxical effect: a loss of focus. This would have been a novel of minute descriptions with no foreground.
It is a condition of growing older that you believe that changes, particularly in architecture, place and habit, are for the worse. It is a tribute to Richard Cobb's scholarship and eloquence that he will con- vince almost any reader to share his convic- tion that an extraordinary culture has all but vanished. One can only be grateful to the writers and film-makers he admires, particularly Colette, Simenon, Rene Clair and Raymond Queneau, for what they pre- served of it; and to Cobb himself, of course, for his irreplaceable Anglo-French contribution. It is a shame that he never wrote his own French memoir, but I feel sure that David Gilmour's selection would have met with his approval.
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