Cross Channel by Julian Barnes

Author:Julian Barnes [Barnes, Julian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-55544-1
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

GNOSSIENNE

LET ME MAKE IT CLEAR that I never attend literary conferences. I know that they’re held in art deco hotels close to legendary museums; that sessions on the future of the novel are conducted with Kameradschaft, brio and bonhomie; that the impromptu friendships always endure; and that after the work is done you may savour hard liquor, soft drugs and a fair slither of sex. Taxi-drivers in Frankfurt are said to dislike the annual Book Fair because literary folk, instead of being shuttled to prostitutes like respectable members of other convening professions, prefer to stay in their hotels and fuck one another. I also know that literary conferences are held in mafia-built blocks whose air-conditioning throbs with typhoid, tetanus and diphtheria; that the organisers are international snobs seeking local tax write-offs; that delegates covet the free air-ticket and the chance to bore their rivals in several different languages simultaneously; that in the presumed democracy of art everyone acknowledges and consequently resents their place in the true hierarchy; and that not a single novelist, poet, essayist or even journalist has ever left that mafia hotel a better writer than he or she entered it. I know all this, as I say, because I have never attended a single literary conference.

My replies are sent on postcards free of my own address: ‘Sorry, no’; ‘Don’t do conferences’; ‘Regret travelling elsewhere in the world’; and so on. The opening line of my reply to French invitations was not perfected for some years. Eventually it became: ‘Je regrette que je ne suis conférencier ni de témperament ni d’aptitude…’ I was rather pleased with this: if I pleaded mere incapacity it might be read as modesty, and if I pleaded temperamental unsuitability alone, conditions might be improved until it would be too difficult for me to refuse. This way I had rendered myself invulnerable to any comeback.

It was the sheer amateurishness of the invitation to Marrant that made me read it twice. Perhaps I don’t mean amateurish; more old-fashioned, as if it came from a vanished world. There was no municipal seal, no promise of five-star accommodation, no menu-list for S&M devotees of literary theory. The paper was unheaded, and though the signature looked original, the text above it had that faded, blurry, purply look of the Roneo machine or pre-war carbon paper. Some of the letters on the original typewriter (clearly an old manual, with sticky-up keys for a single-finger operator to peck at) were cracked. I noted all this; but what I most noted - what made me wonder briefly if I might for once have the temperament and the aptitude - was the sentence which stood by itself above the signature. The main text explained that the conference would take place in a certain small village in the Massif Central on a particular day in October. My presence would be welcome but a reply was not expected; I merely had to arrive by one of the three trains listed overleaf. Then came the

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