As part of the Welcome our Guest Writer series, this piece appeared, along with the first chapter of French Sally, in the inaugural issue of the Unbound Press Literary Journal. The brief was to write about myself whilst explaining the background to the novel.
Back in March 2006, I went to the University to teach my first year business and language class. The main entrance was barricaded with chairs. They were removed two months later, after a nationwide campaign which saw up to three million demonstrators in the streets and three quarters of France’s universities closed. Students were protesting about a change in the labour laws. President Chirac first gave his ‘firm support’ to Prime Minister Villepin, then wavered, then caved in. Five months previously, France was waking to a daily count of torched schools and cars as the outcast youth of the suburbs, victims of police harassment and racism, expressed, in their own way, their discontent. Arnaud Monteburg, a rising figure in the Socialist Party, has been talking of the need for a Sixth Republic. Could Marianne be about to mutate? My own opinion is that, much as she dislikes the process, she should give it some serious thought. Dig into French democracy, and you’ll find something rotten at the core. Hardly surprising, when the President’s allowed to get away with so much…
Capturing the French political mindset was one of the aims I had in mind when embarking upon a novel twenty or more years ago. Marianne figures prominently in it, as does President Roland Tetard – any resemblance to French Presidents past or present being entirely fortuitous. But there were other aims too, and a host of other characters, and when the book was finished, French Sally ran to over 600 pages. To write a book of that length calls, no doubt, for a hefty dollop of insouciance; it certainly requires patience. It became a hobby woven into the fabric of normal life: sentences added like matchsticks to a model in the garden shed. Squeezed into weekends and holidays, my family good-naturedly humouring this potty pastime, French Sally advanced as and when it could. Do I share its hero’s opinion that the President of France is ‘a megalomaniac bastard’? Well, that depends – which one are we talking about? As for Marianne, when you work in a university, you get a good opportunity to observe her: generous, contradictory, chaotic. France is a tantalizing blend of stubbornness and seduction. Take the French relationship with English – I mean the English language that I teach. There’s pride at stake here, old rivalries that smoulder. ‘English? You’ll never manage without it,’ says one official discourse, while another, no less official, protests, ‘English? It’s threatening our national identity!’ The ideal would be this: French individuals fluent in English when it’s needed, but no English heard outside of school.
Unemployment may be high in France, but a native speaker of English would have to deploy some ingenuity to stay out of work for long. It starts insidiously – private lessons. You have other career plans, but they’re all a bit vague, so you get drawn in. My first pupil was a young girl who stitched her mouth shut in a sulk for a whole hour. ‘She can be a bit awkward,’ conceded her father, but he seemed quite confident that sulking next to an anglophone would make all the difference. Next step up is the private school – to meet the language needs of business people, native speakers are much in demand. These days many of them have TEFL training – when I worked in Paris, my native speaker status was qualification enough. Sometimes a teaching method was imposed, sometimes you could improvise. The general swing was away from meaningless drills towards more authentic communication. When I debated this issue with a proponent of the drill approach, he proudly claimed he’d spent a whole holiday with some colleagues speaking nothing but sentences from the textbook. I found this scary and sought employment elsewhere.
For half a dozen years, elsewhere was a restaurant-café-theatre, fulfilment of a hankering born in my student days. Then a threat of demolition, first issued back in 1928, became real: the bulldozers moved in. The experience provided the initial spark for French Sally: you wake up one morning and find a letter telling you the plot has changed – you’re no longer needed. Fortunately we were offered a better deal than the characters in the novel, but I still had to find myself a future. ‘Take the agrégation,’ suggested my wife. I glanced at her dubiously. This was a different matter from breezing into an interview and saying, ‘Hello, I’m British.’ It involved returning to studies. Furthermore, the reward for passing would be teaching in a lycée to thirty adolescents who might not actually want to be there. But job security won the day, so I did. My time in the lycée was brief. No doubt I was full of naïve exuberance, but it wasn’t the classroom that got me down but the staffroom. A palpable atmosphere of gloom had settled there over the years. I applied for a post in higher education, then did a PhD. Perhaps with my first sulking pupil in mind, I investigated the second language lexicon of students who appeared to have benefited little from seven years of school English. Currently I run the university language centre, where self-access learning is promoted. The students, thankfully, don’t sulk – they may go shouting in the streets once in a while, but on the whole they appreciate the chance to explore new ways of learning.
To fully master a language, though, means years of living where it’s spoken. And even then – thirty years I’ve been living here and I’ll never get the hang of those genders! In such a long time, one undergoes a subtle change of identity. When I go back to Britain now, I look through eyes that are different. I left before Margaret Thatcher was first elected, and settled in a country to which her name is anathema. In debates about ‘le modèle anglo-saxon’, I find myself torn. I see globalization marching ever on, driven by claims about its innumerable benefits, a process so ineluctable that to resist means you already belong to the past, yet I cannot help admiring French obstinacy. France was once a country that set people free – it gave rise to the Terror, but it also gave rise to Marianne. And she surely hasn’t said her last word.
Writing French Sally, I didn’t give much thought to publication, or rather I’d decided to cross that bridge when I came to it. When I did get there, it wasn’t quite the hop and skip that I’d hoped. More like the Pont d’Avignon – it takes you so far then abruptly drops you in the water. After a while, I thought, ‘All those years putting matchsticks together. Oh, well.’ Then an exploration of Internet outlets put me in touch with Charlie Taylor, who responded to the manuscript with enthusiasm. Hence the invitation to provide the first in this series for the Unbound Press literary journal. It comes along with sincere thanks for the opportunity.
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