This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer. Richard Holmes

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      There is a goddess of Memory, Mnemosyne; but none of Forgetting. Yet there should be, as they are twin sisters, twin powers, and walk on either side of us, disputing for sovereignty over us and who we are, all the way until death.

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      For example, right now I am a sixty-nine-year-old biographer, and writing this at a tin table under an olive tree, on the banks of a tiny streamlet known as La Troubadore. In April La Troubadore gushes over a bed of shimmering white shingle, through the young vine fields, until it vaults into the River Droude, a minor tributary of the Gardon.

      Actually the Gardon is several rivers – Les Gardons – though no one can agree on quite how many. But they all flow out of the wild hills of the Hautes Cévennes, the two main branches emerging at Anduze and Alès (famed for its municipal fountains). Both are much subject to spring and autumnal flooding (la crue), and regularly carry off the cars and houses of the plain. They join forces further south, near Avignon, and as one mighty waterway sweep under the Pont du Gard, the noble Roman bridge built by the Emperor Augustus, with its fifty-three striding stone arches, one row balancing airily upon another, like some brilliant troupe of performing circus elephants, those creatures that never forget.

      Paradoxically, this famous Roman bridge is really an aqueduct, and the river beneath it never becomes the Gard. Indeed, there is no River Gard at all, except possibly, momentarily, at the point where it goes under the Pont du Gard. I have heard a local fisherman quote Heraclitus on this subtle question. Certainly, when it comes out the other side, the river is still Le Gardon, and flows on down to join the stately Rhône near Arles and Tarascon, and so out into the Mediterranean, untroubled by its many identities.

      Yet they change constantly. By August my sparkling young Troubadore is quite dry and silent. Its shingle is hot and dusty, like a line of white bones laid along a ditch. The cheerful Droude has dwindled to a fretful ghost, green and malodorous, skulking under the trees. Even the two muscular Gardons have fallen into a brown study, a long slack chain of slumbering rock pools, barely threaded together by a trickle of live water, marooning thousands of tiny distracted fish. So, it seems, are the seasons of Memory and Forgetting, forever alternating between flood and drought.

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      Here at my tin table, with the cicadas beating their jazzy Django Reinhardt sound, I am flooded with memories of the Cévennes of fifty summers ago. I arrived on the night train from Paris, with its dark creaking woodwork and circular windows, and the pink dawn coming up over Pont-Saint-Esprit and Orange. Getting out at Avignon, I was told that all the autocars were ‘en Grève’. I studied my map for some time to find this desirable place, Grève. Later it was explained to me that Grève was not a location, but a condition. To be en grève meant to be ‘on strike’. It now occurs to me that to be en grève could also be a state of mind.

      So I hitch-hiked instead to Uzès, getting a lift in the van from the Cave Co-operative. We drove past the cimitière, to the Mas Saint-Quentin, where Monsieur Hugues was ploughing between his vine rows with his grey horse called Mistral. He completed his row and came over to the side of the field, pushing his cap onto the back of his head, and shook my hand with a certain caution. ‘Un jeune Anglais, pardée!’ I stayed with his family in the mas for the next five months, and, in a series of long walks westwards, discovered the Cévennes.

      But just here memory falters, and runs dry. I see Monsieur Hugues so clearly at that moment at the field’s edge: the walnut-brown face, the outstretched arm, the shy glance from under the cap, the big old leather belt with the army buckle, and the red-check handkerchief pulled out to wipe his face. But red-check – was it? Or did that belong to the other farmer who, weeks later, I met in a high alpine field near Mont Lozère in the Cévennes, under a burning midday sun? The farmer who stopped his hay-making to give me an ice-cold swig of water from his canteen, tucked under the tractor seat, and wrapped in a damp cloth to keep it cool. A red-check cloth perhaps? Was it his?

      Or was it even the neckerchief that belongs to Monsieur Rolland, the farmer who lives across the track from us now, an eighty-year-old who adores his vines, his dog and his grandchildren, and shakes my hand across the stone wall, bringing us grapes? Whose red-check handkerchief, whose walnut-brown face, whose eternal shy kindness of the Midi, am I actually remembering? And was that horse that I used to groom in the evenings in the courtyard of the Mas Saint-Quentin, to the smell of roasting chicken and rosemary, really called Mistral?

      So here is Memory mixed with Forgetting, and maybe combined with what the neuroscientists call ‘confabulation’, or unconsciously making it up. Two sparrows dive down and brawl in the dust under the apricot tree. Little bursts of hot wind from the south scrape the big, heart-shaped leaves of the murier d’Espagne across the terrace. I listen to this drowsy orchestration of the leaves, the cicadas, the fountain, the tractor, the mid-afternoon bell from the village striking the Angelus. I fall asleep for a few moments while making these notes. I dream, something about rivers and flooding. But when I wake I cannot remember what it was. I find myself wondering if the rivers used to dry up like this fifty years ago, when I was young.

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      Later I discovered the answer in my battered copy of Napoléon Peyrat’s Pasteurs du Désert (1842). This was Robert Louis Stevenson’s favourite book about the Cévennes, which forms the haunting background to his Travels with a Donkey. Peyrat vividly recounts the history of the Camisard rebellion of 1702–05, and the memoirs of the visionary young soldier-prophets who came down from the hills to fight against their royalist oppressors on the plain. It was a Protestant insurrection against Catholic authority, but also a mountain people’s insurrection against the centralised power of the city and the plain.

      In the opening chapter of Volume Two there is a passage describing the dashing Camisard leader Jean Cavalier. It recounts his successful ambush of the King’s dragoons at the Pont de Ners, just five kilometres from my olive tree, where the Droude meets the Gardon below Anduze. Peyrat also makes a remarkable observation about the fluctuating state of the rivers, and what it might symbolise:

      In springtime during la crue, the Gardon often bursts its banks and sweeps like an inland sea towards the village of Boucarain. But in the growing heat of summer, all this mighty torrent shrinks back again to expose a huge dry plain of sand and pebbles. Its panting ardour expires upon the banks of shingle [grève, once again], until it is little more than a tiny pulse of water which the burning sun of the Midi soon dries up completely. So the Gardon is symbolic of the Cevenol revolt, as excessive in its triumphs as in its defeats. Moreover, the river would never countenance a bridge to be maintained at Ners. It would ruthlessly wash away each successive set of arches, as soon as they were built. Beside their eternally ruined stonework, a simple ferry boat, plying between one bank and the other, remained the most reliable method for travellers.

      So the Gardon had always fluctuated violently; and sometimes even become the River Lethe too.

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      Here is something one of my students at the University of East Anglia, Marisse Clarke, told me about forgotten memories. Marisse was completing her MA in Life-Writing, and working on a project to reconstruct the domestic history of pre-war Norfolk. It was a jump-back of sixty years or more to ‘the pre-fridge era’, as she called it. There was lots of written material, especially letters and diaries, in the Norwich archives, but she was interested in something more direct and intimate, an oral history. Her main source became groups of old-age pensioners, many of them women, who met once a week for ‘reminiscence sessions’. Initially they were shy, their memories were very scattered, and it was difficult to get more than a few well-worn tales. On subjects such as ‘Christmas’, Marisse suspected many memories were made up of ‘fanciful images’, unconsciously adapted from popular Christmas tales, films or Christmas cards (confabulation again).

      Then a colleague told her about the ‘memory boxes’ that had been taken along to other reminiscence sessions. A memory box typically consisted of a large suitcase containing