Unintentional Modernist poem
From Provence
Dear Friend,
I hope you’ve been well.
In my last letter two weeks ago, I wrote that I would be in Provence in the south of France last weekend, and that I intended to write unless I was consumed in a cloud of pastis and apricots. Accept my apologies, because that is exactly what happened, except the cloud was even bigger than I first anticipated.
I was in the south to celebrate the birthday of my friend Sophie, a New Yorker who has been living for a few months in Marseille, learning French at the Alliance Francaise. On my way down there, I spent one night and one day in Aix-en-Provence, one of France’s most famous towns, but one I had only very briefly passed through before on the way to a camping holiday.
My return there was inspired, in larger part, to discovering the writing of MFK Fisher. I only began reading her work this year and have been devouring it when I can ever since. First I read The Gastronomical Me, a collection of essays written during her time living in Dijon in her twenties, just after World War Two. It is set mostly in that town, with some description of the transatlantic cruise ships that took her back and forth between France and her native U.S.
After that, I read Map of Another Town, which takes the form of a series of essays on Aix-en-Provence, based on the author’s own subjective inner map of the place. This one is set at a later point in Fisher’s life, when she is widowed from her second husband (the great love of her life, for whom she left the Dijon husband). She is in early middle-age and is this time accompanied by her two pre-teen daughters.
I love the way she writes and the way she thinks. She writes often about the joys of eating out alone, travelling alone — being a woman out in the world alone. In my last letter, I wrote about the experience of being a woman in different spaces and how spaces can invite or un-invite us. I was really struck by the number of women who wrote back to that letter sharing they could relate to the feeling of being excluded, patronised, belittled.
In this regard, Fisher’s writing is a tonic, because — regardless of the reactions of others — she seems to conduct herself with a remarkably steely poise. She does what she wants, she goes where she wants and she thinks what she wants. Particularly remarkable when we consider she was writing in the Forties, Fifties, Sixties, Seventies.
MFK Fisher was often patronised and underestimated in her time. She used her initials, like many female authors, because she knew that not being immediately identifiable as a woman would give her a better chance of being listened to/read.
She was dismissed by many, as far as I can tell, ‘just’ a food writer, just a travel writer. Her response to this would-be insult was characteristically lively and eloquent.
"People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don't you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do. They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft.
"The easiest answer is to say that, like most humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it." - MFK Fisher
In any event, I am very Glad that Mary led me to Aix. I was not at all disappointed by the elegant main road Cours Mirabeau, by the city’s bubbling fountains, its grand museums housed in mansions.
I also enjoyed visiting Paul Cézanne’s studio, perched high on a hill to the north of Aix town. The tour was very interesting and I took a lot of notes on my phone. I was tickled, after the event, to discover that taken together they read like a Modernist poem. Below are the notes exactly as I wrote them:
Académie suisse
6am to noon on still life in custom atelier
Floorboards instead of tomettes for the Colour
Grey walls
Lunch downtown and then equipment afternoon outside
Hats coats and umbrellas
Bags and palettes and paint tubes
Invented in his lifetime
Foldable easels
20 kilo on the back over 60
Diabetes
Nature morte avec pommes
Breaking all the rules
Not realistic — uses several perspectives in one painting
Moving around, 3D
Proportion
Harmony more importantly than accuracy
Cylinder cone and sphere
Zola gave him apples as thank you for defending
Thinks 15 20 minutes before adding colour
Slow like an apple
150 sittings for a portrait
Bathers in this studio
No live models but reference paintings
Custom made wooden mannequin
Hole in the wall to check the natural light
Influence on Picasso
Bridge between Impressionism and modern art
Marvel Provence
50s aix not so interested in cezanne yet
Thirty-second book club
No prizes for guessing what I’ve been reading this week. I’ve been back with my friend Mary Fisher, reading A Considerable Town, a collection of her essays on Marseille, first published in 1978. Essay titles include: "Some of the Women”, “One of the Men” and “The Place Where I looked”.
My adventures in the south of France have continued into this week because I received a commission to write an article about the French Riviera, which has brought me back down here again. This time I’m in the more glam, spangly part of the coast (vs. Marseilles), which stretches approximately from Saint-Tropez to the Italian border. So far it’s been hot, sparkly, mad, bright and beautiful. I’m having a wonderful time. I will write more about it next week!
Thank you for reading this letter! And for your patience with the gap last week.
I hope you have a lovely week.
Yours,
Hannah
Beautiful Hannah! ( by the way, great peek at your excellent mani in your photo😂
Lovely reading as usual. I we t to Aix with Kate when she was a teenager and even then she was telling me all about the impressionist painters and the particular light that drew so many of them to the South of France. I remember Aix fondly as a very very hot town full of delightful fountains and gorgeous honey coloured buildings. And the ethereal but noisy Cicada singing away.
Its very very encouraging and exciting for women of my generation to be listened to, dare I say enjoyed as equal as Artists and writers.My husband Michael, asked me recently if I had a cooy of " The tenant Of Wildfell Hall" a favourite. Bronte story and profound social observation of the struggles of being a single mother in 18 th century.
I was so surprised as he had heard a long discussion on Radio 4 about it and really was interested in the whole Bronte clan and the experience of the struggles women had to be taken seriously in their era.
It was sad that , I felt the need to explain the depth of skill , intellect and Artistry it takes to write a novel. He told me that, as a male in a public school English literature was exclusively about Male writers. From Shakespeare to Graham Green and all in between. No boy would have been seen dead with a novel by Austen or Bro te sisters .. perhaps Virginia Woolf would be touched upon but as a passing nod to getting on with the serious stuff of Lytton Strachey .
The times they ARE a changing darling Hannah and about time.
Look forward very much to next weeks musings .xx
"...I received a commission to write an article about the French Riviera..."
Getting PAID to write an article about the French Riviera; on site?! Mon Dieu!! My dream since puberty.
"But if I must be alone, I refuse to be alone as if it were something weak and distasteful, like convalescence."
M.F.K. Fisher, The Art of Eating