Paris in October tends to be my favourite place and time – though there are specific dangers to someone still on crutches, as I am, not least the special bike lanes. I approve of these but it can be hard trying to hop for safety at the sound of a tinkling bell as a pious two-wheeler comes zooming out of the sun. Golden leaves, picturesque as they are, can cause me a nasty skid. Even pregnant women have apparently less right to the pavement than a stern youngster on a Vélib’ .
Nonetheless, coming from Texas – where I live for much of the year – to Paris, I think anyone in the US who believes they have the “best healthcare in the world” should sample the French system. You can see a specialist here in the blink of an eye, appointments are arranged in an instant, doctors still visit and the rate of medical error is considerably lower.
The chances of real healthcare reform in the US do not look good. A Parisian banker friend observes, sadly: “My heart is conservative, but in the States I know I’d be called a communist.” He supports France’s health system but not its current president (the principled right here also despairs of Sarko’s nepotism and empire building). Like so many European conservatives, he is rooting for Obama.
The TGV speeds us to Switzerland and the pretty old spa town of Yverdon-les-Bains. On the station I’m met by a cheery wheelchair attendant who gets me into a car, and before long we’re at the science fiction museum Maison d’Ailleurs (House of Elsewhere). I’m to speak at the opening of the most spectacular exhibition of Mervyn Peake drawings to be shown on the continent, brought together by curator Patrick Gyger.
Peake, who died in 1968, is now best known for his “Titus Groan” series – Titus Groan, Gormenghast and Titus Alone – perhaps the greatest work of imagination in English of the 20th century, following in the tradition of Laurence Sterne, Thomas Love Peacock or Lewis Carroll. But early in his career he was perceived as a brilliant draughtsman and portraitist who wrote prose chiefly for children and poetry for adults. The drawings on display remind us of this earlier reputation – illustrations for Carroll’s Alice books and Peake’s own children’s books such as Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor or A Book of Nonsense, but also pictures for his novels, including the gentle parable Mr Pye, are present.
His Alice drawings remain, in my view, superior to all others, including Tenniel’s original wood engravings for the first edition of Alice in Wonderland, and his illustrations for Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and other classics are also arguably the best ever done. While I was familiar with many of the drawings I had never seen them so superbly displayed. NC Wyeth, Howard Pyle, Arthur Rackham and Heath Robinson have produced memorable illustrations for many of those books but none, I think, as stunning or as authoritative as Peake’s. My favourite single drawing is probably of Israel Hands’s fall from the topmast, which perfectly matches the power of Robert Louis Stevenson’s prose.
I was lucky enough to have been befriended by Peake and his wife Maeve but later witnessed his terrible collapse into Parkinsonism. His children and many of his grandchildren were present at the opening, some faces at once identifiable as his models, and even characters in Titus Groan are recognisable as versions of his nearest and dearest. Too often seen as a rather doomed figure, Peake is best remembered by friends and family for his ebullient drollery, present here at every turn . His Long John Silver is powerful but subtly sinister, in contrast to the comical crew Slaughterboard commands.
The book accompanying the exhibition is exquisitely produced with a long introduction in French and English by Peake’s biographer G Peter Winnington, and its reproductions are the closest to the originals I have seen. They rival those in the recent Mervyn Peake: The Man and His Art (Peter Owen) compiled by Sebastian Peake and Alison Eldred and edited by Winnington. There’s nothing better, however, than seeing the originals, and our pleasure was increased by spending so much time in the company of the Peake family, which did me quite as much good as any amount of even the very best French doctoring.
The trip back to Paris wasn’t quite as comfortable, vis-à-vis two large ladies returning from a communism conference in Dijon who weren’t strong on the equal distribution of space. But again, as we joined a depressingly long line for taxis at Gare de Lyon, I was gently hooked out of the queue by a station official who summoned a taxi and popped us in it without a murmur of complaint from any fellow travellers. Such an action might have caused a minor riot at an Amtrak terminus. A dozen voices would have risen to assert their rights to our cab.
Back to our place on Rue des Vinaigriers, near Canal St-Martin in a pleasant area convenient to the Eurostar terminal. The neighbourhood is still populaire– that is, mixed and cosmopolitan – arrested in its climb towards bobo gentrification by the crunch. We’re rather glad it has kept its character, adding only a couple of posh shops and an internet café to its mix of north African grocers and Vietnamese takeaways. Senegalese, Chinese, Indians and some Italians make up much of the population, resulting in an astonishing variety of great, relatively cheap restaurants.
In a couple of weeks I’ll be speaking at a private celebration of my friend JG Ballard’s life. Another unique talent. I’ve been privileged to know some of the most imaginative artists of our time. Like Peake, Ballard’s childhood was spent in China and his apparently dark vision was also full of perceptive wit. It will feel a bit hard to leave this sophisticated, cosmopolitan environment and return to Texas which, for all its many virtues, is not generally familiar with the rest of the world. Too frequently one has to explain, for instance, who Sarkozy is before continuing a conversation. President Obama would no doubt be enjoying an easier time should a larger proportion of his electorate be as casually well-educated as the French middle class.
I’ll be returning to an intellectual environment marked by its provincialism, preferring hearsay to information. I hope, however, that I won’t display the arrogance of most Europeans who think they know America mostly from her on-screen entertainment and who tend to mock American ignorance of the world. Everyone thinks they know “America” but few foreigners really do understand her in all her unique complexity. Obama is not only fighting powerful international vested interests spending billions to protect themselves from his reforms, he is trying to address that profoundly felt individualism that informs the mythology, if not the reality, of modern America.
Michael Moorcock’s latest book is ‘The Best of Michael Moorcock’ (Tachyon)
