Mostly About Stories

The Lush Language of Bruno Schulz

Bruno Schulz, a Polish Jew, wrote a few stories in the 1930s and then was killed by the Gestapo after Germany took over Poland. It is upon these few stories which his legacy rests. They are stories of a little village on the Austro-Hungarian borderlands, of a strange father and a stranger world, and are at times comedic, at times serious, at times deathly sad. What makes them special – for after all there are quite a few central-European writers bemoaning life in the provinces at that time – is the way that Schulz writes. His language is infused with a kind of imaginative intensity, and every image, sound, or thought, is described without a cliché in sight, so that they hang in the mind long after we have finished reading.

In his obsession with language and his life’s tragic trajectory, Schulz is not unlike Isaac Babel. In his treatment of strangeness and absurdity, he has something of Kafka about him (he translated The Trial into Polish). And in his interest in the imagination and spaces, forbidden and mysterious, he often reminded me of Borges. But as a writer, for better or worse, he is clearly unique, entirely himself.

Stories

The world that Schulz describes is seen through a child’s eyes and endowed with the full imaginative potential that each child brings to the world. The stories he tells are not plot-driven. Instead, they are closer to paintings – they make us drink our fill of a particular impression or mood. When things happen, it’s almost always an afterthought. Take the story “Birds”. The narrator’s father decides to house a hundred exotic birds in one room of their home after becoming interested in ornithology. When he needs still more entertainment, he decides to cross breed them, creating new and more bizarre specimens. In his obsession, the father begins to become bird-like himself. But one day the cleaner comes and throws the birds out. This is the essence of the story.

It lasts four or five pages. What sustains it is its language, more than the plot. A phrase like this – “The days hardened with cold and boredom like last year’s loaves of bread” – is enough to make us stop, pause, wonder. The story also contains its fair share of ideas, but unlike say in the case of Musil, the language in Schulz seems more important than what it might be trying to say. There is a condor who urinates in the same chamber pot as the narrator’s father, an image that brings to mind a certain Austrian psychoanalyst. Then there is the matter of the father’s own ornithological transformation – a demonstration of how our obsessions take hold of us. The story ends, however, after the birds have been driven out, with the father coming downstairs – “A moment later, my father came downstairs – a broken man, an exiled king who had lost his throne and his kingdom”. The image is too ridiculous to be wholly serious, and this light-heartedness means that Schulz never gets too bogged-down in the cleverness of ideas.

Character

Character also goes some way to sustaining a cold, hard, plotless universe. In “August” we meet some of the narrator’s relatives. Here’s an example:

“Emil, the eldest of the cousins, with a fair moustache in a face from which life seemed to have washed away all expression, was walking up and down the room, his hands in the pockets of his voluminous trousers.”

I love this description because of the trousers. It almost seems that they are more characterful than Emil himself. When Schulz applies his wondrous language to people, he can make truly memorable descriptions. Emil’s storytelling is described thus: “he told curious stories, which at some point would suddenly stop, disintegrate, and blow away.”

Of an aging man, Uncle Charles, Schulz excellently conveys a kind of paranoia through his description of Charles’ environment: “The rooms, empty and neglected, did not approve of him, the furniture and the walls watched him in silent criticism.”

But the figure who is most striking is easily the narrator’s father. Unlike Kafka’s father, the father of Schulz’s story is a person more to be pitied than feared: “We heard him talk to God, as if begging for something or fighting against someone who made insistent claims and issued orders”. He is at one point compared to an Old Testament prophet, but in the act of throwing a chamber pot from a window, so that the comparison is just as embarrassing to us as it is to the narrator. At one point the father turns into a crab, at another he appears to be in the process of transforming into a cockroach. In a tragic reinterpretation of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” the narrator, a child, begs his mother to tell him what has become of his father. She merely says that he is now a travelling salesman, and home rarely. But the truth is that like Gregor, he has become monstrous, a thing to be shunned. And this is not something that the narrator should discover.

Imagination and Books

I wrote that Schulz shares with Borges a preoccupation with books and with magical spaces. In the longest story “Spring”, the narrator becomes engrossed in a stamp collection that comes to represent for him the key to understanding the world. In “The Book”, what appears to be an old catalogue is transfigured by the narrator’s nostalgia into being the source of all earthly joy. He looks everywhere for it, only to discover that the housemaid is using its pages for lighting fires. A paragraph like this, of which there are many similar examples, seems to make Schulz into a precursor to the great Argentine:

“An event may be small and insignificant in its origin, and yet, when drawn close to one’s eye, it may open in its centre an infinite and radiant perspective because a higher order of its being is trying to express itself in it and irradiates it violently”.

Schulz here is exploring the way that objects can be transformed by attention, and how they might disclose hidden meanings. Borges’s world too, is filled with magical objects – daggers, alephs, and the like. But what differentiates Schulz from Borges is that Schulz has more heart. The near destruction of the book for starting fires is a disaster, rather than a development in a story of ideas. The narrator’s emotions are felt by us, even though we retain a certain ironic distance (after all, we know that with age the narrator will realise that a catalogue is just a catalogue, and really not worth getting so excited about).

Magic Spaces

Beyond books, Schulz uses the imagination to transform his provincial town’s world into something far greater. One of my favourite stories is “Cinnamon Shops”, which sees the narrator go on a walk late at evening:

“It is exceedingly thoughtless to send a young boy out on an urgent and important errand into a night like that, because in its semi-obscurity the streets multiply, becoming confused and interchanged. There open up, deep inside a city, reflected streets, streets which are doubles, makebelieve streets. One’s imagination, bewitched and misled, creates illusory maps of the apparently familiar districts, maps in which streets have their proper places and usual names but are provided with new and fictitious configurations by the inexhaustible inventiveness of the night.”

With Schulz we never know when the real world ends and when the magical one begins. The narrator visits his school, but finds it transformed now that it is dark. He enters spaces he has never been before. He feels a certain anxiety, which Schulz conveys perfectly through his language:

“The profound stillness of these empty rooms was filled with the secret glances exchanged by mirrors and the panic of friezes running high along the walls and disappearing into the stucco of the white ceilings.”

Awe and wonderment are what makes these descriptions so compelling. Schulz has a particular talent for describing the sky, which always succeeds in making it ominous, or joyous, or frightening, as he desires.

Conclusion

His was a small oeuvre, but there’s no denying Schulz’s talent, which is why there are few valid reasons for avoiding him. Nevertheless, he is a writer who is better sampled in sips than gulps. My girlfriend, who bought me the collection, asked me to read the tales aloud to her. This was the right approach. Slowed down by my voice, the language could reach me with its full melodious complexity. I could not rush to find some plot – I could only enjoy what I had in front of me.

Schulz is a master of words. Even if his ideas are not as gripping as some other writers, or his plots as exciting, still he draws us in. Language, at least in his hands, is far more important than ideas or plots are in those of other writers, because Schulz uses language to transform the world. He reveals possibilities for vivid description which are obscured by the layers of cliché we normally read in books, and in doing so frees us from looking on the world as something finished, already described. Thanks to him we can see it as something magical once again.

The Joy of Ideas – Isaiah Berlin’s The Crooked Timber of Humanity

Whether or not we ultimately see the French Revolution as stemming from a disillusionment with the monarchy, bourgeois self-assertion, or hungry peasants, it is obvious enough that after the initial turmoil the leaders who came to share power and chop heads were motivated by ideas of what society should look like, and where it was heading. The Russian Revolution and the early Soviet Union too, for all their betrayals of pure Marxian and Marxist thought, nevertheless contained many actors who took their cues from ideology, and often added their own lines to the drama. Thinkers, both on the right and the left, have been driven by ideas, consciously or unconsciously. And passionately held belief is something that many of us admire and envy, whatever the belief’s content. It is one of the attractions of the fictions of Dostoevsky that his characters believe so passionately in ideas.

Isaiah Berlin is a historian of ideas, but to my mind his closest affinity is to the Russian novelists of the 19^th century, including his favourite Turgenev, and not to other historians. Berlin’s work is filled with a serious and excited engagement with ideas, good and bad, hopeful and hateful, so that we ourselves become aware of the sheer force which animates them as well as if we had seen someone slaughtering a pawnbroker with an axe over them or dissecting frogs. This is perhaps no surprise. Born in Riga in the Russian Empire in 1909, Berlin and his family moved to Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg) just in time to witness the Russian capital be torn apart, repeatedly, by revolutions coloured by ideological thought. He moved to the United Kingdom with his family shortly thereafter, studied at Oxford, and became one of the greatest thinkers of his time.

The Crooked Timber of Humanity, subtitled “Chapters in the History of Ideas”, is a collection of Berlin’s essays in which his principle concerns are on full display – the Enlightenment and Romanticism and both of their troubled legacies, and his own idea of “value pluralism”. At the centre of the collection is a magnificent, awe-inspiring essay on the Savoyard reactionary Joseph de Maistre. Besides de Maistre, other recurring figures in this collection include Kant, Herder, Machiavelli, Vico, Rousseau and Voltaire. Many of these thinkers will be familiar to us, at least in passing, but Berlin’s great strength – and the reason I adore him so much – is his ability to make their concerns appear fresh and relevant to our own age. In short, he makes us understand ideas from the inside – their excitement and their pleasure.

Rather than explore each of the essays in turn, here I will explore thoughts he develops throughout them, and why it’s exciting.

The Enlightenment Vision of the World and its Problems

These days the Enlightenment, the period in the late 17^th and 18^th centuries when clever philosophers, predominantly from France, tried to solve all human problems using reason, now has something of a bad name. Firstly, these eminently reasonable men (and they were, pretty much, all men), were often hypocrites. Kant, as is well known now, failed to apply his philosophy to the savages of the world, and was rather racist; Hume was no better. To my mind this charge, which Berlin does not bother addressing, is far less important than the one that out of their thought came the totalitarian systems of the earth. This is the view which Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote about in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Karl Popper, another influential mid-20^th thinker, called Plato, with the regimented society and clear social stratification of The Republic, one of the first totalitarian thinkers, and also had little love for the Enlightenment.

It is this view of the Enlightenment as a less-than-benign force that Berlin engages with. In The Crooked Timber of Humanity Berlin is keen to moderate criticism of both the Enlightenment and the Romanticism which followed. He explores how a combination of Enlightenment and Romantic ideas created the groundwork for modern totalitarianism, but need not necessarily lead to it.

Lost Unities – The Decline of Universalism

The Enlightenment was the last period of the world where dreaming of a utopia was in some way possible. It was an old idea that all genuine questions – about our place and goals upon the earth – could have only one valid answer. These answers could be found if we looked hard enough and knew how to do so. Finally, people believed that all the answers were compatible. People answered questions differently, whether due to religious or political thoughts, but nevertheless they were mistaken and simply missing the one Truth which could be found and should be propagated by those who found it. Believing all this makes a utopia – a place of stasis and conformity, possible. It allows for Hegel’s idea of progress, Marx’s idea of communism. It also allows for the rationalism of the French philosophes whose ideas came to justify the terrors of revolutionary France.

Killing people is of course a shame, but when you are building a perfect state, sometimes murder is necessary.

Enlightenment Smashers – Vico, Machiavelli, Herder

Berlin credits different thinkers with destroying these ideas and making way of Romanticism. Machiavelli realised that Classical and modern Christian societies had incompatible ideals. He showed that the honour and violence of Ancient Greece and Rome could not be combined with Christian ideals of meekness and piety. Both places, in short, had different ideas of perfection. Vico, meanwhile, who is something of a hero in The Crooked Timber of Humanity, understood that every culture has its own vision of reality, with its own value systems. He saw that through imagination – fantasia – it is possible for us to enter into another society’s view of the world, without adopting it as our own. Finally, Herder showed that each culture has its own centre of gravity, and would only suffer from taking its inspiration from others. Together these thinkers broke down the idea of universal Truth that had driven the French philosophes.

German Romanticism and its Legacy

In doing so, they opened up a space for German Romanticism, which was far more intellectual and philosophical than its English equivalent (both made for good poetry, tho). The Romantics focused on a cult of self, rather than the universal. In doing so they made utopias impossible, by encouraging us to see that we each have our own utopia, rather than sharing a common one. Rather than feeling and emotion, what the later Romantics were interested in was the idea of will. We each have our own inner ideal within us, and rather than make peace with the world we must do whatever we can to bring that inner ideal out into the open. The idea of being true to yourself was essentially born at this time.

At first, being true to yourself just meant being a starving artist in an attic. But it left the possibility open of a kind of solipsism, wherein your own vision of the world could grow so powerful that it denied the significance of other people. At this point one was no longer an artist of the pen, but an artist of man, shaping others to create one’s own world. It is this idea – of the disregard for others, of the sense that objective truth is impossible and violence the inevitable consequence of clashing ideas – that Berlin considers the most terrible legacy of Romanticism. It allowed for madmen to take Enlightenment ideas and ignore all criticism, creating rationalist monsters in the early Soviet Union, and terror in fascist Germany.

Neither the Enlightenment nor Romanticism need necessarily lead to totalitarian violence. Berlin, whose whole life consisted of a passionate and earnest engagement with these ideas, naturally was not willing to dismiss them completely. Instead, he makes it clear how Romanticism in particular also leaves open the possibility of humanism: “The maker of values is man himself, and may therefore not be slaughtered in the name of anything higher than himself, for there is nothing higher.” Abstract ideas have no value in themselves, and the worst thing is to get in the way of another’s will – out of such thoughts grew existentialism, a much more positive set of thoughts than those of either Adolf or Joseph.

Value Pluralism vs Relativism

Berlin’s main contribution to thought – he did not consider himself a philosopher – was the idea of value pluralism, which he built out of the ideas of Vico and Herder about the differences between cultures. Pluralism Berlin describes as “the conception that there are many different ends that men may seek and still be fully rational, fully men, capable of understanding each other and sympathising and deriving light from each other.” For example, those who value liberty above all else, and those who value equality above all else, will discover sooner or later that they cannot have a perfectly liberal and equal society – in other words, that their ultimate ideals are incompatible with each other, even though they are both recognisably good, and recognisably “rational”.

We can understand other cultures thanks to the imagination, or Vico’s fantasia, but we do not have to like them. As Berlin put it in one of the pieces included in the appendix to The Crooked Timber of Humanity, “I must be able to imagine myself in a situation in which I could myself pursue [their ideals], even though they may in fact repel me.” Literature, at its best, is in some way the proof of pluralism – we learn to see other ideals by their own internal light, even though we do not necessarily change our own views as a result.

How is this different to relativism? Berlin defines relativism as “a doctrine according to which the judgement of a man or a group, since it is the expression or statement of a taste, or emotional attitude or outlook, is simply what it is, with no objective correlate which determines its truth or falsehood.” In other words, relativism means that other cultures are unquestionable – we have no choice about whether we accept them or not, because there is too much distance suggested between our own values and those of the other group. Another way of looking at this is to suggest that with relativism, we may understand the values of other societies, but we cannot understand why they would be held. There is an insurmountable barrier between us and others, one that ultimately makes deprives us of a feeling of common humanity.

The Bad Guy: Joseph De Maistre

The majority of the pieces in The Crooked Timber of Humanity explore the ways that value pluralism works and the legacy of the Enlightenment and Romanticism; but by far the longest piece, on the Savoyard reactionary thinker Joseph de Maistre, is much more focused. Berlin’s goal here is to revaluate this thinker, dismissed by earlier historians as a simple conservative. Instead, Berlin argues that de Maistre speaks decidedly to our own time, as a prophet whose ideas in many ways suggest those of fascism. In other words, “Maistre may have spoken the language of the past, but the content of what he had to say presaged the future.”

Joseph de Maistre, Savoyard arch-reactionary. Agree or disagree as we may with his views, he comes across as a quite extraordinarily visceral thinker.

De Maistre was for most of his life a diplomat for the Savoyard king, and his most productive years were while he was in Saint Petersburg during the age of Napoleon. He was popular in Russia, and Tolstoy even mentions him in War and Peace. His ideas were reactionary, rather than conservative. Where the likes of Burke tried to explain conservatism through appeals to sunlit uplands, peace and prosperity, Maistre’s approach was almost the opposite – he saw humanity as irredeemable, a creature that needed the violence of the executioner to keep it in check. Reaction, for de Maistre, was about saving humanity, rather than about protecting some historic ideal of playing cricket on the village green.

In practice, this meant doing everything he could against Reason and its followers. He protected irrationalism, kings and queens, by suggesting that only what is irrational can lie beyond question. Indeed, to begin questioning is already to fall foul of the Enlightenment – one must never question. He hated intellectuals, he hated the free traffic of ideas, he thought that suffering was the key to salvation, and that only a strong state and strong elites can keep our evil urges in check. De Maistre is quoted a few times by Berlin, and he comes across as the most extraordinary thinker – I feel a shiver go down my spine just reading even the shortest of excerpts. He is frightening, like Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor is frightening, because he has beliefs that he believes with all his heart and yet which to most people are complete anathema.

Here’s a taste:

“Over all these numerous races of animals man is placed, and his destructive hand spares nothing that lives. He kills to obtain food, he kills to clothe himself, he kills to adorn himself, he kills to attack, he kills to defend himself, he kills to instruct himself, he kills to amuse himself, he kills to kill. Proud and terrible king, he wants everything, and nothing resists him.”

“Don’t you hear the earth shouting its demand for blood? The blood of animals is not enough, nor even the blood of guilty men spilt by the sword of the laws.”

“In this way, from mite to man, the great law of the violent destruction of living creatures is ceaselessly fulfilled. The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar on which all living things must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death.”

All this makes one giddy. It is so violent, so horrible, and yet it fills one with a kind of awe. For Berlin, de Maistre is one of the history of ideas’ great villains, but he is a player in the drama. And we can all learn something from him. He believed that we do not know what we truly want, that ideas are often disappointing, and that the urge for self-sacrifice, for self-immolation, is just as strong as the desire for shelter or food or warmth. This is not the man of the French philosophes, but then again, as de Maistre says, “as for man, I declare that I have never met him in my life; if he exists, he is unknown to me.”

However much we may wish for ourselves, on the whole, to be rational beings, de Maistre offers a necessary dose of reality, and even if his suggestions of our terrible fallenness and the need for God and authority go far beyond what most of us like or want, still he has value. Otherwise we may end up just as foolish, just as idealistic, and just as dangerous as the Enlightenment, for all its light, turned out to be.

Conclusion

Berlin is exciting because he makes ideas feel real. He can transform a little Savoyard reactionary into a frightening, exhilarating, monster of a thinker, and he can do this with every thinker in the book. This is not because he tells us little titbits from their lives, but because he builds their ideas into something that we must engage with and evaluate for ourselves. Where do we stand on matters of the Enlightenment or Romanticism? However much we may think that they are ancient history, Berlin shows in The Crooked Timber of Humanity that their debates continue to be played out in our own era.

More importantly, in his idea of value pluralism, he advocates for a way of looking at the world which is moderate without losing the ability to judge. We can see what is good and bad in our opponents, without establishing such a distance between us and them as to make dialogue impossible. In our own age, when dialogue feels increasingly pointless, and actors increasingly hidden within the shroud of their own bad faith, Berlin provides a message of cautious hope, a guide to how to approach politics, and one that is hard not to like.

I have also read Berlin’s Russian Thinkers, available as Penguin Classic, and that is another work that I would recommend heartily. Berlin turns various thinkers, most of whom we would never have heard of otherwise, into living, breathing, arguing human beings. For anyone interested in 19^th century Russian literature or history, the book is a must-read. As for this one, it’s pretty good too. Read it, think on it.

Grape Picking in Burgundy

I am now at that point of my life where I and my friends have mostly all finished university and are now settling into whichever stream will carry us to our retirement. Unsurprisingly, most people are working in The City, whether as lawyers or bankers or some other nebulous financial profession. A few braver and probably more admirable souls are pursuing careers in academia. And others are merely flailing about, looking for something solid to hold on to. It is true to say that we have not graduated at a particularly good time.

Of all my friends, however, it is Sophie for whom I have the most respect. She decided to work on a vineyard in Burgundy rather than engage in any kind of rat-race. Hard, physical labour, an outdoor environment – she knew, as Wittgenstein did, that these are often the surest paths towards a happy, long, and restful sleep. She went against pressures, social and otherwise, in pursuing this, and in doing so rather showed the rest of us up by demonstrating that whatever one’s educational background, however well-bred one is, still the ultimate barrier to us working in a similar field is only our own cowardice.

I was visiting Sophie last week, just before the year’s grape picking began. That was the plan, at any rate. But the start of the harvest is unpredictable, and in the week before I arrived, I learned, rather concerningly, that instead of spending three days relaxing with an old friend, I would have to be on the fields with her, toiling away. Well, I thought, at least it will be an experience. And indeed it was.

Prejudices

Though I grew up on a farm, I never really participated in its operations, and though I live in the countryside now, I still look on those who live from the land with uncomprehending admiration. Like most people without experience of actual farm labour, I had a somewhat idealised view of things. Rather than rely on what little I remembered from our hard life in Scotland, my main inspiration was Tolstoy’s Levin, out on the fields in Anna Karenina. I believed that work outside is tough but rewarding, an opportunity to fall into a community where everyone looks out for everyone else, and that on the fields God lurks underneath each unturned stone. At the same time, however, I retained a certain cynicism. I thought that farmers were boring and bigoted, and that I was probably wrong to like the idea of the work. In short, I believed while constantly doubting what I believed.

What was surprising was that my suspicions, or rather my hopes, about the work, were far closer to reality than my cynicism was.

People

The farm we were working on was only about ten hectares, or twenty-five acres, and it was family run. Unlike other vineyards, or indeed most fruit picking jobs (as I understand it), the work here was rather light. Many of the pickers were regulars, people who came year after year. So long as the work was done, the pace was not overly important. We had a long lunch break each day, and a good number of rests during the day too. Although we were bussed about in vans, there was little else to connect us with the horror stories one reads of about migrant fruit pickers.

There were about twenty-five of us to begin with, and that number grew slightly once the weekend came around. I was the only Englishman; there were about seven or eight Poles; the rest were all French, though not necessarily from Burgundy. Except for the Poles, who spoke English, everyone else spoke French. For me, someone who hasn’t studied French in about seven years, and who has never really spoken the language, having to speak French was something I really should have anticipated. What I could not have predicted, however, was how easily I found myself speaking it.

Everyone knows the stereotype of the English or American abroad who refuses even to attempt to speak the local language. The French with me certainly knew it. It was partly because of that that I found it so easy to speak – I knew that even trying would stand me in good stead. And then, I think, and just as important, there was the matter of perfectionism. Precisely because I was out of practice, precisely because I had not studied French at university, I did not give a damn how I sounded – I just wanted to speak. And so my words were wrong, my speech a bizarre blend of French and English and occasionally any other available language too, and to top it all off, I apparently spoke with a Russian accent. But I was speaking, and as the days went by, I was speaking more and more, complex sentences even. The words were coming back to me, dug up from whatever deep recesses of my mind that they had hidden themselves. I even managed to learn a few new words too.

I would not have had so much success with the French if the people there were not so friendly. Almost without exception everyone was willing to talk to me, in one or multiple languages. And I met a random, but loveable, bunch of people. One man, in his fifties, with a sailor’s faded tattoos, a squashed nose, and a cigarette permanently poking out of his mouth, seemed unable to pick without removing his shirt, revealing a gigantic belly that rolled over the top of his disarmingly short shorts. A young guy in his late teens, who had previously been an apprentice at the vineyard, wore a different pair of football tracksuits each day, could not speak any English whatsoever, but got incredibly excited every time I said the word “whisky” for him. He would come up to me, ramble away in French for a minute, enjoying the look of dismay on my face, and then start to laugh. His good nature was infectious. I felt rather better when one of the other Frenchmen told me that this fellow spoke with the local dialect and that none of them understood most of what he said either.

Each lunch we were served by an enormous woman who had turned herself into such a wobbler that she could only walk with the aid of a stick – she was aided in her cooking by an equally large husband. The food they produced, however, was always filling, and delivered in generous helpings. I met a Bhutanese-Frenchman who had trained as a monk and seemed to spend all day drinking, and lots of pleasant young Poles, picking just because it was a bit of fun. The only person who ever bothered me was a mister T, the tractor driver, who was about my age. On my first day I looked up to see the Frenchman storming down my row towards me, shouting and gesticulating wildly in his finest French. I thought perhaps I had left something down by the tractor, but it turned out – after everyone else had stopped picking and several volunteer translators had jumped to my aid – that I had been picking particularly awfully, and that mister T (whose role had nothing to do with this) was very displeased. When he had finished berating me, he noticed that the rest of the field was glaring at him, and he backed down somewhat. Unsurprisingly, after that he did not bother me further. And for my part I tried to pick a little better.

Property

Perhaps the people who I liked best were the owners of the vineyard. The boss, P-, was only twenty-nine, and he still shared some responsibilities with his father. The vineyard is run very much as a family affair. Without teamwork, the whole thing would fall apart. This is because of French inheritance law, which is among the strictest I have come across. Nobody can be disinherited, and property must be equally divided among the children. In practice, this means that France has a high rate of inheritance-related murders. It also means that major wine-producers, including major champagne brands like Taittinger, have suffered due to the enforced division of their lands. This vineyard has already been divided by a generation or two, and that means that some of the land belongs to people who don’t work there or have any real connection to the place – instead they simply rent it back to their family, as generously or stingily as they wish.

P, his father, his uncle, his sister, and his girlfriend – these were the family. Responsibilities are divided and so far, order and financial stability has been preserved. How many more generations it can last, however, is hard to say.

P himself was an interesting character, though I did not speak to him much. He is well-educated, tall, bespectacled, and was always trudging around in shorts and big brown wellington boots. There is something of a low-budget Harry Potter cosplay about him. But what is most striking is how out of place he is here, with his reading and his interests. He is quiet, bashful even, and slow to express an opinion. Whether he is a good leader is not my place to say, but certainly he is an atypical vineyard boss. I would like to write a story about him, one of those classical tales of one being forced, not entirely against one’s will, into fulfilling a duty that nevertheless takes one away from the place where one would really be able to flourish. P’s girlfriend was also lovely, an extraordinarily friendly woman who was an artist and seemed to carry the sun around in her chest. While we were picking she would always be suggesting silly games to play, like naming every writer beginning with each letter of the alphabet, and such like. Whenever P was with her, suddenly his reservations disappeared, and he too seemed to shine with a kind of light. He smiled, he played, he ran about with their dogs. There is a story there.

Picking

Each morning I woke up at sixish, and we started work on the fields at seven thirty. Grape picking can be automated, but currently the robots aren’t quite so good as the people. We are able to better identify things like rot and unripe grapes while we are picking, but it’s hard to say how long we’ll hold onto our advantage. It almost doesn’t matter, anyway, because fewer and fewer young people are getting involved with their local vineyards, and this means that automation will become a necessity in a few years, whatever happens with the technology.

The process of grape picking is simple. You are given some secateurs and told to gather your grapes in a bucket. People with large backpack-buckets go up and down collecting the contents of your bucket, once it’s filled, and take the grapes to the tractor, where they will be sorted a second time, and taken back to base. You can cut your grapes in different ways. If you have good core strength you can squat at each vine, or else you can kneel – the Poles all came with knee protection, as if they were actually going roller-skating. Finally, if you are lazy like me, you can sit on the ground, and slide crablike down your row. This is very slow, but less painful. And given work only ends at five-thirty, it’s best to avoid what pain you can.

We were cutting red grapes, at least while I was there. These grapes are easier to spot than white grapes, but they can still pose a challenge. You sometimes have to tear down masses of leaves to get to the grapes, giving the whole thing a rather adventurous feel, as though you are actually travelling through the Amazon jungle, but it means that it’s easy to miss a bunch or two. Sometimes the vines are diseased or have something else wrong with them and their leaves turn red, which makes it much harder to find the grapes underneath.

The grapes themselves can have issues too. Ideally, they are slightly glassy, translucent, like marbles. But when only half-ripe they can be almost matte, and a deep bluey-red. This year was not a good year for the harvest. We had to pick many bunches that were not wholly ready. And those that we picked also had major issues with rot, so that after picking each bunch we often had to stand there scraping the puffs of white dust out from the centre of the grapes. This took as much time as the picking, sometimes more. But if too much rot gets into the vats, the resultant wine can have its taste completely spoilt.

I was a slow worker. Except for one of the Polish girls, for whom it was also the first time, I was the slowest. But I did my best to make up for it by being diligent. It was a strange experience, working in a family business like this. I knew exactly who I was working for, and this made me redouble my efforts even when my strength was flagging. I wanted these people to succeed. I remember the despair in P’s uncle’s eyes as he sat there, sorting the rotten grapes. They could all see that everything was going wrong, and I didn’t want to make it any worse for them.

On the final day, it was raining. Heavily. We went out onto the fields late and returned after only an hour. It was hellish in the rain. I do not think that a comparison to the battlefields of the First World War is entirely out of the question, to the fields of mud of the Somme. My boots were caked in a toecap of mud. My clothes were wet and sticky with the stuff. In the darkness and the rain the grapes were almost impossible to make out. They seemed to live a kind of ghostly, phantom existence, forever hiding just out of reach behind another clump of leaves. My basket accumulated bunches incredibly slowly. A general hopelessness ruled the day. And though I was wearing a raincoat, it felt as if the rain was seeping through it into my bones. We all worked slowly then. And I was very glad when it was over.

Pride

Grape picking is generally not done in the rain because it is inefficient and ineffective. The other two days I worked the sun had shone and everything was golden. And it is those days that I will remember best, for those days are the days that I worked properly. However much he was an idiot for idolising peasants, I do not think that Tolstoy was wrong for valuing physical labour like this. For a couple of days I went to bed exhausted and slept well. My body ached, but in a good way – as though it were thanking me for using it the way it was supposed to be used after so long spent sitting in chairs and walking around cities. I felt part of a collective, I felt welcomed, I spoke French. These are all extraordinary things. I am sure that if I had stayed longer my body would have collapsed and I would have ended up sitting in the middle of a row, my bucket on my head, in tears. But I would not blame the work for that. I would only blame myself for not starting to work sooner.

Labouring alongside others draws us closer to them. Language proved no barrier, nor did education, nor class, nor anything else. I came across a common humanity, one that we always suspect the existence of, but don’t always see. I came across real work too – work in which one feels a relinquishing of the self, and even some of that magic force which takes hold of Levin while he’s out on the fields. While I was working I thought a lot about a particular quote of Whitman’s, one that to me reflects the reality of work as I experienced it:

Blacksmiths with grimed and hairy chests environ the anvil,
Each has his main-sledge, they are all out, there is a great heat in the fire.
From the cinder-strew’d threshold I follow their movements,
The lithe sheer of their waists plays even with their massive arms,
Overhand the hammers swing, overhand so slow, overhand so sure,
They do not hasten, each man hits in his place.
Walt Whitman, from Song of Myself section 12

Each man hits his place. I was dreadfully slow with my picking. But I was there; I took part; I felt a part of something greater than myself, and something valuable too. The pain I felt on falling asleep and on waking, the aches and sores – these I will forget. But the pride of working will go with me forever. I certainly do not think that we need to work on the fields every day of our lives. Life is not so simple as that. But spending a week or two of each year out there, working, sweating, burning – after having a taste of it, I cannot find anything to say against it. This is real life.

And next year, if my silly office job allows me to take the time off, I will experience it again.