My Best Books

VS Naipaul is often blinkered but he still sees things in Africa that others miss, says Aminatta Forna

In 2001, when the Swedish Academy awarded Sir Vidia Naipaul the Nobel prize in literature, it described him as the heir to Joseph Conrad: “The annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do to human beings… the memory of what others have forgotten, the history of the vanquished.” There are plenty who would have begged to disagree, for Naipaul has regularly attracted criticism, from Edward Said among others, for his dismissive remarks on the cultures of his native Trinidad, on Islam, Pakistan and more.

The Masque of Africa is his latest – quite likely last – full-length work of non-fiction. It is a quest through the continent for the spirit of African belief, the belief systems that preceded the arrival of Christianity and Islam – which is very much in keeping with the legacy of Joseph Conrad, who is referenced several times in the book. Already this feels cliched and tiresome; one yearns for the day when an author from outside can approach Africa without invoking the “heart of darkness” mythology. In 1975, Chinua Achebe published an essay attacking Conrad’s best-known work as racist and already the novelist Robert Harris has described The Masque of Africa as “toxic”.

Naipaul’s journey across the continent takes him from Uganda, where he lived for a short while in the 1960s, to Nigeria, then to Gabon via the Ivory Coast and Ghana, and finally to South Africa. Along the way, he meets and talks to people about their beliefs. His sources are virtually all African rather than aid workers and expats (you’d be surprised how rare this is).

Naipaul discourses with teachers, writers, academics, pharmacists, kings, queens and chiefs, businessmen, friends of friends. That there exists an African intellectual class does not escape him. His sources navigate the complexities and conflicts of their own culture and are able to describe what they have lost with the passing of the old religions. They negotiate their cultural worlds, understand which rules can be broken and which cannot.

They can be playful, something more literal minded western writers often fail to grasp, for when it comes to Africa humour is the first casualty. Naipaul gets it. He is dry, often irked, sometimes enraged. He is quite rude. But he is also patient (not a trait often associated with him), engaged, funny, self-reflective and thoughtful.

In Uganda, Susan, a poet, has a love-hate relationship with her “Christian” name: “When a person or race comes and imposes on you, it takes away everything and it is a vicious thing to do. Much as I think the west and modernity is a good thing, it did take away our culture and civilisations.” Frantz Fanon said the same thing in Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth in the 1950s and early 60s. But there’s more. Habib, a wealthy businessman raised as a Muslim, was taught to despise the African religions, something that now angers him. “It was a tool to control our African mind. It is how the imperialists worked.” Naipaul is surprised to learn that Habib includes the Islamic world in that. It is a theme that recurs in country after country, as Naipaul notes competing mosques and evangelical churches. The battle for African minds and souls is still on.

His is a stately, chauffeured progress, though frequently upon rutted roads. Once, when Naipaul’s legs give out on the long walk to see the bones of ancestors in Gabon, helpful locals persuade him into a wheelbarrow. Naipaul finds the elderly wheelbarrow insufficient to the task and clambers out. He finds Africa a struggle. Journeys are almost always longer than he is told; he is kept waiting; diviners all demand to be paid; there is rubbish everywhere; the temperatures are intolerable.

It all begins well enough. In east Africa, he explores the ancient kingdom of Buganda, admires the straight roads. In the neighbouring kingdom of Toro, the (British-built) roads curve. He meets the Queen Mother of Toro, who is “full of bounce”. He retains his sense of humour in Nigeria, a place where many have been known to lose theirs. His hotel room is unsatisfactory: “The people at the desk began to send me zipping up and down, from floor to floor and room to unsuitable room. It began to seem that a gratuity was called for.”

He recounts all this in writing shorn of excess, sentences short to the point of abruptness, and he has a wicked way with syntax. After a farcical exit from Lagos airport, he is finally installed in a decent room when the phone rings: “The caller was impatient, on the brink of rage.” It is a driver still waiting at the airport to collect him.

In Nigeria, he hears spirit legends from the Oba of Lagos, meets the Ooni of Ife and the Oba of Osun, of whom he seeks permission to see the sacred groves. The Oba is accompanied by his wife, the power behind the throne, Naipaul is told. “She considered us one by one. And I felt she liked us.” Permission is granted; the grove takes Naipaul’s breath away.

By Ghana, though, Naipaul is beginning to have a hard time of it. The poor Ghanaians suffer his ire, perhaps because he discovers they eat cats in the south of the country; Naipaul is a big cat lover. His Ghanaian guide, Richmond (a cynical and somewhat self-loathing African), tells him they are killed by being dropped alive into boiling water. Naipaul doesn’t care for the Gaa, who make him nervous. He bolts from a meeting with the high priest.

Things go further downhill in Ivory Coast, where they eat cats too. He doesn’t take to the Ivorians at all – cat eaters, elephant killers, forest wreckers – though he does find beauty in the oft-mocked basilica built by the country’s first president, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, a replica of St Peter’s in Rome, only bigger. By Gabon, he has recovered some of his equilibrium, and it is here, in the forests, that he finds something akin to Africa’s true spirituality.

Where Naipaul does both Africa and himself a disservice is in failing to verify much of his information. Somehow, when it comes to Africa, rigour flies out of the window. Naipaul talks of rituals performed using human body parts. Neither Naipaul nor we know if any of this is true. I would treat it with scepticism, as sorcerers famously like to big themselves up by creating a culture of fear. If locals are turning to magic (which they may well be), it is perhaps because such beliefs the world over are the last resort of the poor, the disenfranchised and the dispossessed – in short, those with no other way to change their lives. It is only in South Africa, where the legacy of apartheid proves enduring and unavoidable, and where the sangoma’s hollow promises find ever more seekers willing to believe, that Naipaul comes close to this understanding.

In another section of the book, he takes at face value a story about the ritual killing of hundreds of people for the funeral of President Houphouët-Boigny. The source is “foreign (but well-placed)”. Here the old antennae should be twitching, for there is only one source less credible than a “witch doctor” and that’s the “old Africa hand” out to impress a new arrival. Such people exploit the eagerness of outsiders to believe Africans are capable of the very worst.

The Masque of Africa is a book for outsiders, for those who may never visit Africa or may know it only superficially. But it is also a book in which Africans themselves may find something to learn. Naipaul is a difficult, imperfect narrator who does not care to be liked, but he is an honest one and doesn’t dissemble. Somehow, by the end of it all, and despite his best efforts, I had grown to like him.

Aminatta Forna’s novels include The Memory of Love and Ancestor Stones.

The Israeli writer discusses his novel To the End of the Land, a memorial to his son who was killed while serving in the army, and why he remains an opponent of his country’s policy towards the Palestinians

In May 2003, David Grossman, one of Israel’s most celebrated novelists, began writing a new book. It was to be about what the Israelis euphemistically call “the Situation”, which was a little odd because, for the past decade, he’d carefully avoided writing about politics, in his stories, if not his journalism. It was not just that he’d long felt that almost anything he could say had already been said by one side or the other. There was the danger that such a story, even in his deft hands, would be creaky and polemical. Now, though, he felt suddenly that he couldn’t not write about it. Grossman’s eldest son, Yonatan, was six months from completing his military service and his younger son, Uri, was 18 months from beginning it. His feelings about this – in Israel, men serve three years – were so acute, it seemed they would push the pen over the paper for him.

The story came quickly. It would be about a middle-aged woman, Ora, whose son, Ofer, only just released from army service, has voluntarily returned to the frontline for an offensive against one of Israel’s many enemies. Ora, having moved from celebration to renewed fearfulness in a matter of hours, is in danger of losing her mind. She has no idea how she will get through the next weeks or months. Then, in a fit of magical thinking, it comes to her. She will mount a pre-emptive strike of her own. She will simply go away, absent herself from her home and her life. That way, she reasons, she will not be there when the army “notifiers” come to tell her of her son’s death. And if she is not there, perhaps he will not die. After all, how can a person be dead if his mother isn’t at home to receive the news of it?

Grossman started writing and as he did, he, too, indulged in a little magical thinking. He had the feeling – or perhaps it was just a fervent hope – that the novel would keep Uri safe. Every time Uri came home on leave, they would discuss the story, what was new in the characters’ lives. “What did you do to them this week?” Uri used to ask. He also fed his father useful military details. This went on for a long time and it seemed for a while as if the charm was working. But on 12 July 2006, following Hezbollah attacks on Israeli soldiers on patrol near the Lebanese border, war broke out. Over the course of the next 34 days, 165 Israelis (121 of them soldiers), an estimated 500 Hezbollah fighters and 1,191 Lebanese civilians were killed.

Grossman was terrified for his son, a tank commander, but he was not, at first, opposed to the war. Though a determined lefty as far as Palestine goes – he is against the occupation of Palestinian territories – he believed that Israel had a right to defend itself against Hezbollah which, unlike the majority of Palestinians, is committed solely to destroying Israel. As the weeks went on, however, he began to think that Israel should show more restraint. At the beginning of August, together with two other great Israeli writers, Amos Oz and AB Yehoshua, Grossman appeared at a press conference in Tel Aviv, demanding that the government negotiate a ceasefire. “We had a right to go to war,” he said. “But things got complicated… I believe that there is more than one course of action available.” He did not mention that his own son was on the frontline. It was not relevant. He would have felt exactly the same had Uri been safely at home.

The Israeli government eventually accepted a UN-brokered ceasefire which came into effect on 14 August. But this was too late for Grossman and his family. On 12 August, in the dying hours of the war, Uri, who was just 20 years old, was killed when his tank was hit by a rocket; he and his crew, who were killed with him, were trying to rescue soldiers from another tank. The notifiers came to Grossman’s house at 2.40am. He heard the voice over the intercom, and he knew what was coming. Between his bedroom and the front door, he decided: “That’s it – life’s over.” But the strange thing is, it was not. The Grossmans buried Uri; his father’s simple but piercing eulogy was reprinted in newspapers around the world, including the Observer; and then the family sat shiva (a period of mourning during which time a Jewish family receives visitors).

The day after the shiva ended, Grossman returned to his book. “I went back to it for an hour,” he says, surprise registering on his face even now. “Then I had to come back home. But the next day, I added 10 minutes, and the day after that, another ten. Yes, it was hard. I was going straight to the place that frightened me most. On the other hand, it was the only possible place for me.” The result – To the End of the Land – was published in Israel in 2008 and arrives here, in the most beautiful translation, this week. What can I tell you about this book? I’m not sure. Only that I loved it. And that it tears at your heart. And that when I heard someone comparing Grossman with Tolstoy, and his novel with War and Peace, I did not scoff.

It is blazing hot in Jerusalem and, as usual, the city is a knot: tight with anger, cinched with frustration. The traffic is so heavy, it takes a taxi 20 minutes or more to move a single kilometre, but walk to your destination, as I’ve just done, and your dress will be sopping wet, the straps of your sandals will have flayed your feet like whips. Forget the holy sites, the bearded priests and the shawled rabbis. On a day like today, the visitor seeks the blessing only air conditioning can bestow: cool, crisp and calming.

I meet Grossman in a coffee shop in Mishkenot Sha’ananim, a venerable Jewish neighbourhood just outside the Old City walls. The view from the window is of a pomegranate tree, the Hagia Maria Sion, formerly known as the Abbey of the Dormition, where the Virgin Mary is said to have fallen into eternal sleep and, following the curve of the next hill, the sombre grey line of the barrier that separates the citizens of Jerusalem from those of the West Bank.

The room is deliciously cold, (goosebumps are already rising on my shins), but the calm I feel, the sense of benediction, is all to do with Grossman. He once said that the effect of regular wars and prolonged uncertainty can be seen in the way Israelis drive (people are prone to honking their horns and yelling out of their windows). But you can no more imagine him going mad at an intersection than you can picture him inviting Binyamin Netanyahu out for beer and pizza.

Grossman radiates wisdom, modesty, kindness and, above all, a sort of stillness: contemplative and tender, but steely, too. This is not to say that the darkness is all behind him. He warns me that there are some things he cannot talk about, will perhaps never be able to talk about, and I cannot look at his heart-shaped face, his big, marsupial eyes, without worrying about manhandling him. Grief, inasmuch as I’m acquainted with it, makes a person feel, among many other things, like an over-ripe peach, prone to bruises and watery leaks.

For his own part, he likens it to exile. “The first feeling you have is one of exile,” he says. “You are being exiled from everything you know. You can take nothing for granted. You don’t recognise yourself. So, going back to the book, it was a solid point in my life. I felt like someone who had experienced an earthquake, whose house had been crushed, and who goes out and takes one brick and puts it on top of another brick. Writing a precise sentence, imagining, infusing life into characters and situations, I felt I was building my home again. It was a way of fighting against the gravity of grief.” The merest flicker of a flinch. “This used to be so hard to express… but now, when I talk about it, I feel able to say that it was a way of choosing life. It was so good that I was in the middle of this novel, rather than any other. A different book might suddenly have seemed irrelevant to me. But this one did not.”

Grossman’s heroine, Ora, whom the American novelist Paul Auster has already likened both to Tolstoy’s Emma, and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, decides to hike in Galilee for the duration of her country’s latest war. She takes with her an old love, Avram, a veteran of the Yom Kippur war and a former PoW. While they walk, they talk. She tells him about Ofer, describing her boy at every stage in his life, carefully bringing him to life (Avram has never met him). Slowly, an absence becomes a presence. The novel, then, works as kind of memorial: not only to Uri, to whom it is dedicated, but to Ofer, who may, or may not, be dead. After Grossman had finished writing it, he handed it to Yonatan, and to his wife, Machal (he also has a daughter, Ruti, but she was too young for this book at the time). “It wasn’t easy for them to read it,” he says. “I think it was only the second time they read it that they understood that it could be a source of comfort to us all. I’m not describing our family, but there are always moments [when the two collide]. And yes, when someone dies, they’re gone and yet they are still so present.”

Four months after Uri’s death, Grossman addressed a crowd of 100,000 Israelis who had gathered to mark the anniversary of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. His speech was beautifully controlled, but quietly furious. He denounced Ehud Olmert’s government for a failure of leadership, a failure which would ultimately damage the Jewish state, and he again argued that reaching out to the Palestinians was the only hope. “Of course I am grieving,” he said, anxious that Olmert and his cronies might dismiss his speech as the outpourings only of a bereft father. “But my pain is greater than my anger. I am in pain for this country and for what you and your friends are doing to it.”

I understand that he wants to separate his grief and his politics, but does he think, now, that his loss has changed some people’s opinions of him all the same? “Yes. There were people who stereotyped me, who considered me this naive leftist who would never send his own children into the army, who didn’t know what life was made of. I think those people were forced to realise that you can be very critical of Israel and yet still be an integral part of it; I speak as a reservist in the Israeli army myself.”

His novel provoked a strong reaction in Israel. “Some of my books in the past have aroused hatred [notably his collection of reportage, The Yellow Wind, a sympathetic account of life in the occupied territories]. Not this one. I think this one allowed people to give up on the need to be a fist, to remember the nuances, to ask themselves: what does it mean to be a human being in this situation? Our curse is that all of us become representatives; we congeal. But we need to feel our inner doubts, our contradictions.”

Was it horrible having to grieve in public? He must have feared that his son would be adopted as yet another symbol of the Situation. “I’m not sure it was horrible. One burden is at least taken away [when you are a public figure]: you don’t have to tell people what happened, because they know. We found our way. We’re very private people. We are a close family and we have a wonderful, devoted group of friends. What happens outside that… well, it depends how people approach me. Most approach me with tenderness and sensitivity. There has been a lot of warmth. But I made it clear from the beginning that I don’t ask for special privileges. I don’t want people to say: ah, because he suffered this, his opinions are this. My opinions are not my emotions. I spoke in Rabin Square, but I only do [public] things that I would have done before.

“I’m not a rational, cold person. On the contrary, so much of the politics is emotional here, and the two peoples involved are very emotional, so you must be attuned to emotions very precisely. But the bottom line must be logical. You must not surrender to the primal urges of revenge. I just do not see a better solution than the two-state solution. I’m more sad, and maybe desperate, but not in a way that paralyses me.” He pauses. “Maybe I cannot afford the luxury of despair. Maybe. Or maybe it’s a question of personality: I cannot collaborate with despair because it humiliates me to do so.”

All the same, he cannot feel hopeful at the prospect of more (American-brokered) talks. “I think our prime minister is the only person who can change our destiny for the better. He has a lot of credibility here. The question is: does he really believe in peace with the Palestinians? And I’m afraid that the answer is no. Even if he taught himself to utter the words ‘two-state solution’, he deeply mistrusts the Palestinians.”

David Grossman was born in Jerusalem in 1954; he is the elder of two brothers. His mother, Michaella, was born in Palestine; his father, Yitzhak, emigrated from Poland with his widowed mother at the age of nine. “My mother’s side of the family was religious and Zionist,” he says. “They were poor. My grandfather paved roads in the Galilee, and he used to buy and sell rugs; my grandmother was a manicurist. On my father’s side, well, there was this little sweet grandmother, so wrinkled, so tiny. She came after she was harassed on the street by a Polish policeman. This woman. She’d never before even left the little region where she’d been born. But she took her daughter and her son, and she took a bus, and a train, and a boat and she came to Palestine at the end of the war and cleaned rich people’s houses. And she wasn’t even religious!”

Grossman’s father was first a bus driver, then a librarian, and it was thanks to him that his small son – “a reading child” – was able to indulge his love of books. He grins. “He gave me many things, but what he mostly gave me was Sholem Aleichem.” Aleichem, who was born in Ukraine, is one of the greatest writers in Yiddish, though he is now best known as the man whose stories were the inspiration for Fiddler on the Roof. Grossman’s father, like many men of his generation, never spoke of what he had left behind. “Then, one day, he gave me a book by Sholem Aleichem, and he said, ‘This is how it used to be over there.’ Why do I remember it? Because the expression on his face was one I hadn’t seen before. It was the smile of a child. I started reading. The books are in archaic language and I struggled. But I kept going because I felt: this is the code for my father. I read them all. I devoured them. I inhaled them. I read them as a child today would read Harry Potter.

And I was sure that the shtetl continued to exist parallel to my life in Israel. Only when I was nine, and we were marking Holocaust Day at school, did it occur to me that this was not the case. I remember standing on the hot asphalt in my white shirt and my black trousers and I heard all these big words: victims, six million and so on. And I thought: they’re talking about the people in Sholem Aleichem. You see, the Holocaust belonged to the adults. When you entered a room, they would stop talking. Sometimes, you’d overhear something: he lost his first family in Treblinka. But what was Treblinka? Where had he lost them? Would he find them again? So, suddenly, to understand the immensity of the loss… all the people I’d read about, they’d vanished, just like that. I was really shocked!”

Grossman had an aunt who’d been in Auschwitz and her camp number was tattooed on her arm. “When I was a child, it haunted me. I put it in a novel. The character thought the number was like the code on a safe and that if he could only crack it, a new grandfather, warm and friendly, would jump out of his old grandfather. When I got married, my aunt covered her number with a sticking plaster, so as not to cast gloom over the day, and I must tell you that is still one of the strongest memories of my wedding. My heart flew out to her. I thought: how terrible it is that you feel you must be apologetic about what was done to you.”

In 1967, when Israel won the Six Day war, Grossman was 13. He remembers it vividly and believes that the memory helps him to understand some of the resistance on the part of Israel to ending the occupation. “If you want to understand, you have to go there; you can’t deny it. The month before the war, I thought I was not going to live. I took the Arabs very seriously, just as I take them now. I heard a voice on their Hebrew propaganda station promising to come and kill us and to rape our mothers and to throw us into the sea. Then, the first night of the war, when Israel demolished their airforce, and it was clear we were going to win, there was this switch. To feel this miracle! To know we were strong and that after only six days we had become an empire.

“You could see how it changed the way people walked and talked. The arrogance of the talk! The sexual connotations that they used to describe what we did to them! I remember my first visit to a newly occupied place. It was two minutes away from here, in the Old City. I want to be very precise. I don’t want to beautify my actions. The Arab population was overwhelmed and they looked at us with a mixture of fear and asking for mercy. We walked in their streets and we felt like gods. For the first time in our 2,000-year history, we were the strong ones. It’s very hard to resist that. We indulged ourselves in all the feelings we had been deprived of.”

In 1971, Grossman began his national service. “I worked in intelligence and most of it I liked. I left home, I was independent. I felt I was doing something important, that I wasn’t doing anything against my principles.” He served in Sinai, where there is more sand than people, and although he was in the army when the Yom Kippur war broke out in 1973, he saw no action. Where did he stand politically by this time?

“It was a few more years before I started looking at reality, at the places where we are wrong, where we have gone towards the abyss. Only gradually did I start to formulate what was wrong, and what should be done; it wasn’t easy. It didn’t make me very popular among my close friends and family. It was a lot to do with my wife and her family [he and Machal, a psychologist, met while doing military service]. They acquainted me with other ways of seeing this reality.” So she agrees with you? Laughter. “No, I agree with her!” What about his children? “They are OK. They come with me every week to the demonstrations in Sheikh Jarrah [in east Jerusalem]. We are demonstrating against settlers taking over houses in Palestinian neighbourhoods, but it’s a kind of weekly reserve service against the occupation, too. Sometimes, it gets violent. Some weeks ago, we were beaten by the police.” How dare they beat David Grossman? He smiles. “I don’t know if they know me at all.”

After university, Grossman began working in radio, where he’d once been a child actor, eventually becoming an anchor on the Israeli equivalent of the Today programme. In 1988, however, he was sacked for refusing to bury the news that the Palestinian leadership had declared its own state and, for the first time, conceded Israel’s right to exist. “They were so nasty to me. It was a little scary. I found myself in the middle of this very public affair, my name on the front pages. It was talked about in the Knesset. But I learned a lot about how a big organisation can act against an individual, and it was also a blessing because I had to turn completely to writing.”

Had he always known he would be a writer?

“Yes. I knew it from a very young age. The first time I met my wife, this is what I told her. It was something physical, a piece of a jigsaw falling into place.” Since then, his work has been translated from the Hebrew in which he always writes into 30 languages and he has won numerous prizes. He is unstoppable. Since delivering To the End of the Land, he has written a children’s book, an opera for children and a handful of poems. “I feel poetry is more the language of grief than prose.”

I tell him that every time I travel to Israel, peace feels further away. He doesn’t disagree. “People who are born to war, programmed by war, their entire vocabulary is taken from war. Each step by the other side is regarded as a trick, or a trap, or a manipulation. It’s tragic and we might not have the power to redeem ourselves from it. This is why we desperately need help from the outside. Time and again, we choose warriors to lead us, but maybe by always choosing warriors, we doom ourselves always to be in wars. Neither side wants to do what will benefit the other. They will take out one eye only so long as the other side loses two. Israel stands at a crucial point in its history, each step possibly fatal. But the way forward is so psychologically demanding, so threatening, we are stuck.” He thinks the Israeli boarding of the Turkish boat bound for Gaza last May – nine activists were killed – was pure folly. “It was stupid. We had months to prepare. Why did we choose the belligerent way? Allow them in! Even if there had been terrorists onboard, it wouldn’t have changed anything. Just show some sympathy.”

Meanwhile, life in Israel grows somehow narrower. Grossman’s Arabic is almost as fluent as his superlative English, but it is harder and harder to maintain links with Palestinian friends, let alone to travel there. “I spoke three weeks ago to a dear friend, the writer Ahmad Harb…” He sighs. “Between us, there is the mutual disappointment of people who had a common dream and who saw it evaporate. But I know he continues to fight in his society exactly as he knows I do in mine. We are like two groups of miners digging from either side of a mountain; we know we will meet in the end.” The settlers? They are distorting an Israeli idealism he still holds dear. “The emotional investment we put into the occupation! As Gershon Sholem said, ‘All the blood goes to the wound.’ We are not taking care of ourselves. We are looking in the wrong direction. The settlement movement might really ruin us.”

Grossman longs for Israel to be more than just a shelter for the Jewish people; he wants it to be a home. “And it will not be a home unless we have peace with our neighbours. In a home, you’re comfortable, you breathe with both lungs. Here, we breathe with only one and we are suffocating. Believe me when I tell you that it is so much more important than being the dominator of this valley or that hill.” He thinks most “sane” Israelis know this. What needs to happen next is that, somehow, they must close the gap between what they know and what they do. Not that he regards peace as a Hollywood ending. “It will be difficult. If there is peace, there will have been heavy compromise and that means a lot of angry and vengeful fanatics on both sides. They will do anything they can to assassinate it. They will bomb themselves here and there. But the alternative is worse. If we have no peace, the circles of bloodshed will become even more violent and hateful.”

We have been talking for almost two hours. Grossman has a wedding to get to and there is the traffic to consider and… he shows me his palms, apologetically. “I’ve talked too much,” he says. I disagree. There is something powerfully sustaining in listening to him talk: it means he is still with us. He nods. “I would not have chosen this catastrophe,” he says. “But since it happened, I want to explore it. I feel I was thrown into no-man’s-land and the only way to allow my life to coexist with death is to write about it. When I write about it, I’m not a victim. It is strange and unexpected to discover this. The great temptation is not to expose yourself to these atrocities. But if you do that, you’ve lost the war. The language of war is narrow and functional. Writing is the opposite. You describe your reality in the highest resolution even when it’s a nightmare and in doing so, you live your own life, not a cliche others have formulated for you.” On that terrible night in 2006, he told himself, as he walked from the bedroom to the front door, that life was about to end. “That’s what I felt at that moment. But I was wrong. Life is different, but it’s not over.”

David Grossman will talk about his new novel on Thursday at the Friends House, Euston Road, London NW1, at 7pm. Tickets cost £15; go to jewishbookweek.com

In the third of our series asking writers about the books that formed their literary personalities, the Booker prize-winning novelist Penelope Lively explains why the myths of Troy and Greece were so vivid to her as a young girl growing up in Egypt. She also reveals why she could never have cut it as a historian, even though history writing – such as Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic – is one of her passions, and talks about the fascination with landscape that has informed so much of her fiction.

She also explains why she values short novels, idolises William Golding and admires Henry James’s skill at showing all the things Maisie doesn’t know.

Tales of Troy and Greece by Andrew Lang
Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas
The Making of the English Landscape by WG Hoskins
The Inheritors by William Golding
What Maisie Knew by Henry James
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

The author of LA Confidential and The Black Dahlia, whose latest book, Blood’s a Rover, is now out in paperback, is still driven by his tragic past

Authors who write about dark or disturbing subjects invariably draw the question: where does that come from? But no one who knows anything about him asks it of American crime writer James Ellroy. For the answer is as glaring and particular as one of his brutally staccato sentences.

Ellroy’s parents divorced when he was young and in 1958, when he was 10, his mother was murdered. The killer was never identified and the only arrest was Ellroy’s emotional development.

The following year, he became fixated with the murder of a young, wannabe actress named Elizabeth Short, a viciously sadistic sex assault known as the Black Dahlia case, which became the surrogate crime upon which he could let loose his damaged emotions and forbidden curiosity.

He spent his teens and twenties drunk, drugged and delinquent. He joined the army, was discharged, and became a homeless petty criminal, which led to prison. During his down-and-out years, he developed pneumonia and was hospitalised with a severe lung abscess. Eventually, in 1977, he joined Alcoholics Anonymous, became a golf caddy and began writing in earnest.

In an obvious sense, the whole of his subsequent career as a writer, which has produced such hard-boiled crime classics as The Black Dahlia, LA Confidential and American Tabloid, has been a protracted excursion into the recesses of an imagination forever contorted by the trauma of his childhood.

Ellroy’s novels are about America, Los Angeles, crime, corruption, vanity, voyeurism, the misleading allure of celebrity, the strained relationships between the sexes and many other matters, large and small.

But most of all they are about himself and his unending attempts to describe the enormous psychic hole left by the slaying of his mother. Almost every page is haunted by a sense of some unknowable darkness just beyond the narrator’s gaze or the writer’s reach.

Fourteen years ago, Ellroy wrote a chilling memoir-cum-cold-case investigation, My Dark Places, that examined in almost lurid detail the way that his mother’s murder had irrevocably shaped his life. He now thinks he presented his revelations “in a salaciously self-serving manner” and has published a further memoir that was originally serialised in Playboy magazine, “The Hilliker Curse” with the clarifying subtitle, “My Pursuit of Women”.

Hilliker was the maiden name of Ellroy’s mother, Jean, and the curse is the “fever dream” of guilt and sexual longing that the novelist believes is the legacy of her murder. When Ellroy’s parents split up, his father, who Ellroy claims was possessed of a 16in penis, took to spying on Jean. His father was a womaniser and bit-part player in Hollywood who, according to Ellroy, not always the most reliable narrator, was the sometime business manager of Rita Hayworth.

Exiled in the “blast-oven” suburbs of LA, the young Ellroy’s sympathies were with his father. One day, his mother asked him whom he wanted to live with, her or his father. His answer was his father and she hit him, drawing blood. He cursed her and wished her dead. Three months later, the wish was gruesomely realised. But according to Ellroy, it did not mark the beginning of his complicated and sometimes perverse yearning for women.

He has written about how he was “sex-crazed” before the death and has described his early forays into the peeping and stalking that he would return to with greater angst in later years. His characteristically unforgiving portrait of himself as an angry and frustrated teenager is a masterpiece of savage economy. He has described himself as “staggeringly uncool”, requiring “deep-pore cleansing and dermabrasion”.

This image of the psycho-nerd is one that Ellroy has developed into a well-rehearsed public persona, a vision of himself as the jilted outsider that is part raw confessional, part bravura act. In this way, he’s become American literature’s avenging anorak, the LA version of Travis Bickle, the alienated loner from Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.

One notable aspect of this quasi-fictional character is his politics, that odd combination of libertarian and authoritarian that seems peculiar to the heartland of the American right. A hippie-hating refusenik of the counterculture, he’s been known to call himself “the white knight of the far right”, but in this guise he’s more often a provocateur and prankster than a genuine polemicist.

In the past, he has expressed his support for gun control and opposition to the death penalty, two positions that in some states could have you hounded out of town as a pinko liberal, the political stripe Ellroy claims to loath. Last year, he told Rolling Stone magazine that he had voted for Obama, comparing the new president with Jack Kennedy. Obama was “deeper”, he said, whereas: “Kennedy was an appetite guy. He wanted pussy, hamburgers, booze.”

Ellroy is also an appetite guy, who always knows what he wants: more. But he is also a poet of thwarted appetites. He’s the loser who, during the era of free love, managed to “perv around after women, unsuccessfully”. Twice married, with no children, he doesn’t do conventional relationships. His emotional expertise lies in obsessions.

Earlier this year, in conversation with the British novelist David Peace, he said: “It’s the strangest thing. I am 61 years old. I’m very healthy. I am more obsessed with women than I’ve ever been… but I’m the guy with no place to go on Christmas and Easter and ends up getting, you know, some pitiful invitation.”

Throughout his twenties, he romanticised the other sex from afar, awarding muse-like qualities to strangers in the street. Simultaneously captivated and terrified by women, he turned his attention during his early sober period to prostitutes. His particular taste was for those older than himself – he thought they might be more grateful for his business and be more responsive (they weren’t) – and those who looked normal. “But,” he has noted, “no normal chick peddles her ass for gelt.”

Writing improved his confidence and success improved his strike rate. His past descriptions of some of his book readings sound like backstage scenes from Led Zeppelin’s pomp.

There’s always been a relentlessness to Ellroy’s style and it matches the persistence of his obsession. His motivation for writing his second memoir, he says, was realising that “my mother and I were not a murder story, we were a love story. And I was just thinking, what is the single-biggest fixation in my life, and it’s women. And it always has been”.

He has always been searching for the woman, the one who will somehow erase the past, calm his craziness, understand him, nurture him, fill the absence and yet remain the mysterious “Other”, as he calls her. It seemed, at least to him, that he found her in his second wife, writer and novelist, Helen Knode. Here, at last, was the vivacious release from his mother’s death spell.

He has written of their great love, happiness and shared passion for art manifestos. They moved to Connecticut, but Knode, an LA woman filled with fire, never settled in. Ellroy was nothing if not a controlling presence and would bait her left-leaning friends.

Their monogamous love desexualised his writing, he felt, removing the carnal mania that was the engine of his prose. Then it desexualised his marriage. According to Ellroy, Knode appeared to spend most of their cohabitation asking why they weren’t having sex.

In 2001, during a European book tour for The Cold Six Thousand, he had a nervous breakdown, frantically reading the Bible and believing himself to be riven with cancer. He and Knode moved back to California and Ellroy became increasingly belligerent and antisocial. The marriage stumbled hopelessly to divorce.

He is now with writer Erika Schickel, who left her husband and the father of her two daughters to be with Ellroy. Tellingly, Knode told Ellroy that Schickel bore a marked resemblance to his mother. Their friends have told them that the relationship is doomed.

Studying Ellroy’s life, one can see their point. As Ellroy says: “I always get what I want. I more often than not suffocate or discard what I want the most.”

There’s no doubt that Ellroy’s is a singular voice, but he has been investigating his psychic scars for a long time, and, for all the evidence he’s assembled, he doesn’t appear any the wiser. That may prove his blessing as a writer. As a lover, it’s almost certainly his curse.

Edinburgh international books festival: AS Byatt speaks to Charlotte Higgins about religion, reality, her hatred of diaries and why she wants someone to write a novel about the discourse of Facebook and Twitter

Photographer Murdo Macleod reads the faces of poets, novelists and other authors at the Edinburgh international book festival

This month’s Guardian book club takes Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger as its subject. Shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker prize and described by Hilary Mantel in her review for the Guardian as “gripping, confident, unnerving and supremely entertaining”, it is a ghost story set in the 1940s in the gently crumbling Hundreds Hall. It tells the story of the Hall’s inhabitants through the eyes of the narrator, stolid, socially clumsy Dr Faraday, who is forced alongside them to the confront the possibility that the Hall is inhabited by a malign and violent presence.

Listen to Professor John Mullan asking Waters about the genesis of her novel - and what really happens at the end of it.

On the eve of his new novel, Lights Out In Wonderland, being published, DBC Pierre says we are all in danger of following in the ‘dangerously blurred’ footsteps of his misspent youth

Leitrim is the least-populated county in Ireland, which may help explain why, on an overcast Monday afternoon in early August, the small town of Ballinamore is utterly deserted. I have arranged to meet DBC Pierre, Man Booker Prize-winning novelist and former drug-taking, hard-drinking, law-breaking tearaway, at 4pm in Prior’s Bar – “The home of good, old-fashioned Ballinamore hospitality!!” – at the top end of the main street. It is now 6pm and there is no sign of him.

By way of diversion, the photographer asks the teenage barmaid if she knows DBC Pierre. She looks blank. What, she asks, does he look like? A bit dishevelled, I say, with a strange accent and a fondness for a pint or two. “That’s not much help,” she says, “Half the fellas that come in here are like that. He’s in good company.”

Around Ballinamore, DBC Pierre – the initials stand for Dirty But Clean, a nickname he earned in his spectacularly misspent youth – is known by his real name, Peter Finlay. Or, simply “the writer fella from up the mountain”. He has been living in relative seclusion a few miles from here for almost nine years. When he won the Booker Prize in 2003 for Vernon God Little, the village was besieged by reporters for a week. He has since written three novels in the extraordinary peace and quiet of the Leitrim countryside: Ludmila’s Broken English, which came out in early 2006 to mixed reviews, an unnamed novel that he jettisoned last year for reasons still not entirely clear, and Lights Out In Wonderland, which will be published next month.

I have travelled from London to Leitrim to meet him but, thus far, my only contact has been two apologetic text messages, the first saying that his jeep had broken down “on an errand to Belfast”, the second assuring us he was on his way back in a rented car.

When he finally turns up around 6.30pm, he looks even more dishevelled than usual, having “belted down from Belfast” in under two hours. “I’m having a bitch of a day, ” he says, after ordering a restorative pint of Guinness and flopping down in a seat by the front window. “Things keep breaking down on me. Last week, it was the computer, now the bloody car. Weird shit like this happens every time I finish a novel. There’s a definite sense of winding down. Things tend to get a bit strange, a bit disconnected.”

Disconnection, one senses, is a not-unfamiliar state for DBC Pierre, whose nomadic lifestyle has led him to this rural Irish hinterland of drumlins, lakes and parochial towns close to the border with Northern Ireland. He lives on a “50-50 road” on a mountainside about five miles from Ballinamore. In really bad weather, he says, “you have a 50-50 chance of making it up without sliding sideways down the hillside”. In the fierce snowstorms that swept across Ireland in January, he was cut off for four weeks, the road impassable even in his four-wheel-drive Land Rover.

“That last winter was the very devil,” he says, shaking his head in wonder, his hybrid accent – part American, part Australian, part London-English and now part Leitrim-Irish – a thing of baffling cadences. “I’ve never witnessed cold weather so severe and so sustained. We had a massive ice storm at Easter, which is unheard of around here. It dropped six feet of snow on the mountain. It wasn’t Siberia, but it was pretty damn cold. It’s already entered local mythology.”

As if on cue, a man approaches and slaps Pierre on the shoulder. It turns out to be the owner of the bar. “How’s yourself?” he asks. “And how’s Jenny?” (Jenny is Peter’s partner, an Australian woman about whom he remains resolutely tight-lipped.) They talk for a minute about this and that, then the owner bids us farewell and another round arrives as if by magic. “They’re as good as gold here,” says Pierre, smiling. “I was here for two years before anyone knew I was a writer. And, in between them not knowing and knowing, they haven’t skipped a beat. They were fantastic then and continue to be so.”

The time he has spent in self-imposed exile in Leitrim has undoubtedly helped DBC Pierre stay on the straight-and-narrow, but it has also further fired up his already baroque imagination. Like Ludmila’s Broken English before it, Lights Out In Wonderland is a flawed book that never quite catches fire the way Vernon God Little did. Instead, it drags the reader along by the sheer energy of its prose, its surreal-to-the-point-of-implausible plot and several extravagant set pieces that, in the extremity of their vision, recall Ballard or Burroughs. In one such interlude, Smuts, one half of the novel’s dissolute double-act around which chaos swirls like a storm, has violent sex with a young girl in a fish tank containing an octopus. In the interests of decency, I will leave the rest to your imagination.

“Nothing in the book seems exaggerated to me,” says Pierre. “The way we live now is way more wild and extreme than anything a writer could make up.”

Lights Out In Wonderland is, he says, the final part of a loose trilogy that began with the spectacularly successful Vernon God Little. In that book, the eponymous 15-year-old hero is wrongly blamed for a Columbine-style massacre in a Texan high school and goes on the run, pursued by an increasingly hysterical media circus that simultaneously demonises and lionises him. (The novel was also alarmingly prescient, having been written before the Columbine high school murders.) The chair of the Booker judges, Professor John Carey, called it “a coruscating black comedy reflecting our alarm and fascination with modern America”.

The moment of DBC Pierre’s greatest triumph, though, was almost overshadowed by the controversy that attended it. Most of the £50,000 prize money went towards paying off some of the “lurid” debts Pierre had incurred in his drink and cocaine-fuelled wild years during the 1980s when, as he puts it, he was a “conniving bastard”, a “con man” and an “arsehole”. The most lurid tab was the 30,000 euros he owed to his friend, Robert Lenton, whom Pierre had apparently fleeced back in the mid-80s in a complex Spanish property deal that went spectacularly wrong. The week before the Booker prize ceremony, a relative of Lenton’s contacted the Booker organisers and the Guardian to reveal the author’s wayward past.

“Robert’s kids were angry, and rightly so,” Pierre says now. “And the press created a big stink when they got hold of the story, but, honestly, Robert was fine about it. In fact, when I rang him up after being shortlisted, he spent the entire time giving me therapy over the phone.”

Vernon God Little, then, was always going to be a hard act to follow. Ludmila’s Broken English never quite worked, either as a satire of so-called broken Britain or a dark reflection on a world where anything – including the child bride of the title – could be purchased online. It was inspired, he told an interviewer at the time, by “my disbelief at the way things are in the world and the amount of shit we swallow about how things are supposed to be”. This would appear to be his abiding theme.

When I ask him, though, if he thinks of himself as a satirist, his answer is, for once, uncategorical. “No. Not at all. In fact, I’m not sure where we live now can actually be satirised. Reality has surpassed satire. Nothing I write is exaggerated for satirical effect.”

Nevertheless, there are moments in all his books that skirt the line between the improbable and the implausible. In the new novel, characterisation and plot seem secondary to energy and the kind of extreme invention that has become his trademark. I am never quite sure if this is a deliberate formal ploy or a result of his imagination outstripping his craft. “I think the new book will take a kicking from the critics because of its form,” he says, frowning. “People still want naturalism, but naturalism is about credibility and credibility is not where we live right now. The tools that writers use to give their novels credibility and gravity are no longer employed in our culture. Things do not need to be connected the way they once were in the novel. Nowadays, we need things that shimmer on the surface and have tendrils that reach below so you can see to a certain depth.”

Regardless, I say, it is important, at least, for fiction to be plausible even if it stretches the bounds of credibility. “Well, all I can say to that is, as a writer, you have to sit down at the end of the day, night after night, and say to yourself, ‘How does real life feel? Would it move like that?’ Or, ‘Am I doing that to make people think it would move like that?’ In which case, it’s just a trick. Perhaps the devices that naturalism uses are simply outdated devices. As a writer you have to find ways to reflect the world you live in.”

Like the two novels that preceded it, Lights Out In Wonderland is about what Pierre calls “the ongoing fucked-upness of contemporary western culture”. In this instance, though, he has turned his powers of description not on the effects of drugs and alcohol, the usual signifiers of that fucked-upness, but on what he calls “the pornography of food and food writing”.

Fresh out of rehab, the book’s protagonist, Gabriel, embarks on a quest on behalf of his mentor, a chef called Smuts, to stage the ultimate foodie bacchanal. He crosses continents in search of sublime, sometimes life-threatening, menus created to appease the insatiable appetites of a clandestine global cabal of gourmands-cum-gluttons. The novel’s denouement features a banquet that comprises the most exotic and forbidden menu imaginable: giant panda paw with borlotti beans and baby root vegetables; confit of koala leg with lemon saffron chutney; caramelised milk-fed tiger cub.

“Those are real recipes, too,” says Pierre, proudly. “A chef I know called David Spanner worked them out – theoretically, of course – alongside some vets and zoologists. They diagnosed the musculature of panda claws and stuff like that. You should be able to eat all of those dishes and, indeed, prepare them if you could get the actual ingredients.”

In person, DBC Pierre does not quite live up to the reputation. He is soft-spoken and thoughtful to the point of guarded, not quite evasive but certainly elusive. He looks like he has lived a bit in his time, and has the blotchy pallor and generally down-at-heel demeanour of a man for who a meal is an annoying, but necessary, distraction between drinks. He admits to still feeling like an outsider in the Oxbridge-dominated world of British publishing.

“I read slowly and selectively, but I don’t consider myself well-read,” he says at one point. “I can’t compete on that level, nor do I want to. I’m not really part of the London literary world and, to a degree, I’ve actively resisted being part of it. I’d just be a fucking dilettante if I started going to all those Soho literary parties.”

When, in his late 30s, he sat down to write Vernon God Little, he could only do so, he says, “by committing to myself that I would never show it to anyone, then, forcing myself to reverse that committal when it was completed”. It was, he adds, “a very, very tough decision, not least because there was so much of myself – a self I no longer liked that much – in there”.

At a time when actual experience no longer counts for much in the creating of fiction, DBC Pierre is an exception, someone whose life has, if anything been even more colourful than the stories he writes. In this, at least, he resembles the literary lions of another age, the likes of Mailer, Kerouac or Bukowski, who wrote it having first lived it. One cannot imagine him discussing the art of the well-wrought story over dinner with Julian Barnes or Ian McEwan.

He was born plain Peter Finlay in 1961 to wealthy parents who lived in an old winery in southern Australia. His father, who piloted Lancaster bombers in the second world war and later became a celebrated professor of genetics, took up a research post in Mexico City when Pierre was an infant, and the family moved there to the wealthy Jardines del Pedregal district.

“My childhood still seems utterly surreal to me,” he says, shaking his head. “The neighbours on one side kept Bengal tigers as pets and their daughter received 13 cars among her many wedding presents. It was a place where anything could be bought and where the law was a very elastic concept. I think now, having done some therapy, that Mexico was where my troubles with reality began.”

When I ask him to elaborate on those troubles, he falls silent. Then, after a deep breath, he says: “I was brought up with a total belief in what I could do in a country where there was nothing that you could not buy. It was an almost heroic atmosphere of anything is possible through positive thinking. It is very easy, in the right circumstances and with no visible boundaries, to imagine that you are your potential. That leads to a place where things get blurred morally and emotionally. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently because, in a way, where I was living for so long is where we are all living now culturally. Reality TV and self-motivation books and all that crap, they are all just forms of self-projection. That is a dangerously blurred place in which to live.”

Though it is hard to pin him down on the details, life began to become dangerously blurred for Pierre at the age of 19 when his father died. Soon afterwards, the Mexican peso was devalued and the family fortune shrank dramatically. His mother moved to Spain and he seems to have had the run of the family mansion for a few years. He has said before that he once invited his equally rootless friends to a house party that lasted for several months. By his early 20s, having developed a serious cocaine habit and been diagnosed with “narcissistic personality disorder”, he was totally adrift and his reckless escapades were becoming increasingly desperate – and dangerous. In previous interviews, he has described being shot at by a sniper, getting arrested for hitting a cop, and being thrown in jail for smuggling luxury cars over the Mexican border from Texas. He seems weary of these wild tales now, though, and the bad-boy reputation that still shadows him.

When I ask him if he is pursued by regret and shame, he sighs: “A little bit. I feel sometimes like I am founded on those things and that regret and shame are almost institutionalised in me. It has certainly imposed a certain vigilance. I know where the temptations lie and that, for instance, there is much more danger for me in the metropolis. I’m aware of where my compulsions lie and there’s a bit of stepping back from that power socket. These days, I can go over to London and dip into the madness when I like, but my life is much steadier here.”

In the mid-80s, Pierre pitched up in Spain, where, following the Robert Lenton affair, his debts, and the cocaine habit that helped cause them, spiralled out of control. He fled first to Australia, where his sister, Deirdre, lived. There were a few more wild years before he checked into rehab in 1991 at the end of what he calls his “11-year bender”. His travels eventually took him to London. Still living in penury and haunted by his debts, he settled for a time in Balham, where he forced himself to submit to “a mundane routine of working, thinking and writing”. It wasn’t until 1999 that he began writing Vernon God Little. I ask him if it saved his life. He thinks for a long moment.

“I’ve answered that one before perhaps a bit too glibly, but, in a way, it did, yes. I’d hit a wall and went into therapy, the whole deal. Then, I’d been very poor for a fucking long time, 10 to 15 years of pure struggle. So, in a very real way, writing was really my last shot.”

He takes a long drink of Guinness and wipes his mouth on his sleeve, looking slightly uncomfortable at the turn the conversation has taken. “I’m sceptical of the whole redemption narrative shtick that people come out with,” he says. “For me, it was more a slow wising-up. A kind of reality check. I realised belatedly that the mundane rules apply and that is where you have to keep your attention. You work hard, you put a little money aside, you slowly get back on track. That’s the way it is. There’s no easy way through, but for a long time I convinced myself there was.”

I ask Pierre whether, even though his life is now steadier, he is not still, at heart, an outsider. He thinks about this for a long moment. “I feel so, and have felt so for a long time. And I also wonder how much I have put myself there. Is it self-created? A lot of the shit I have done, the way I have lived, has had as its result to be on the outside. What surprises me is that the things that are inherent in me are also inherent in the culture.

“We seem to be very lost, adrift somehow from ourselves, from community. You feel that very much in London, politically, culturally. It’s become a kind of unreal place for me. There’s some kind of cultural limbo that we are living in that, I think, is to do with the death of communism and now the rapid decline of capitalism. I feel I’m writing at a time when old certainties – political, cultural, economic – are crumbling and we are not really sure what is coming on the horizon.”

These uncertainties are reflected in Pierre’s writing in an often oblique or hazy way, particularly in Lights Out In Wonderland. The idea of the “pornography of food” as a metaphor for the end times, he tells me, came to him while reading Petronius on the decline of Rome. “The writing is so modern. The climate of unease and complaint in those books feels incredibly familiar. The banquet was the perfect medium for the powerful to express their power and the sense they had of being above the law. It was a way to be grand. I feel that has certain parallels with what has been happening of late. Bankers, politicians’ expenses and all that. Eating out expensively is always a big factor in there, isn’t it? Money and food seem to assume an incredible importance as a culture declines. I really do think that is the case today, as it was back then. You just have to look at food writing, restaurant reviews in particular, to see that. It comes close to the pornographic at times, that kind of fetishising of food and its rituals.”

For all the cultural unease his writing taps into, Pierre seems to have finally found a measure of personal contentment in Leitrim. His days are now measured out by the slow, steady rhythms of rural life and the discipline of the writing life. There is not much trouble to get into around Ballinamore and that is part of the point of being there, of course, but I sense there is more to it than that. Perhaps he has discovered a sense of belonging, however tentative

At one point, I ask him how the locals reacted when the British and Irish media descended on Ballinamore in the wake of his Booker prize victory in 2003. Back then, his house had been besieged by photographers and buzzed by a helicopter. It must have seemed, at times, like an episode of Father Ted.

“It did, it really did,” he says, laughing. “It was all pretty strange. Joan, the local postmistress in Augnasheelin, who has now, sadly, passed on, had to set up a command centre in the post office. It was mad. Then, when I came back, the parish priest hosted a party and they presented me with a Leitrim crystal cup. It was like living in a movie. You feel like there is nowhere like that left in the world, but there is.”

Has he finally given up the rootless, nomadic life, then? Will he stay here among the farmers and shopkeepers of this quiet, rainy Irish county? “Who knows? My time here is broken up because I do so much travelling, but this is a good place to come back to, to leave everything behind and just let the ideas distil. The whole story of my life is about not belonging and trying to figure out how to deal with that. That’s why, for the time being, this is a very interesting place for me. And anyway,” he says, raising his glass, “I’m what they call an official blow-in now. Someone once asked Joan, God rest her, where I was from, was I Australian, American, Mexican or what? She told them, ‘He’s one of ours now.’ For the time being, that’s good enough for me.”

Seamus Heaney’s new collection brilliantly enacts the struggle between memory and loss, says Colm Tóibín

In the early 1990s Seamus Heaney began to contemplate how to deal with time passing and the death of family and friends. In a lecture, he contrasted Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade”, in which death comes as something dark and absolute and life seems a trembling, fearful preparation for extinction, with Yeats’s “The Cold Heaven”, which allowed a rich dialogue between the ideas of life as a cornucopia and life as an empty shell. Heaney saw poetry itself, no matter what its content or tone, standing against the dull thought of life as a great emptiness. “When a poem rhymes,” Heaney wrote, “when a form generates itself, when a metre provokes consciousness into new postures, it is already on the side of life. When a rhyme surprises and extends the fixed relations between words, that in itself protests against necessity. When language does more than enough, as it does in all achieved poetry, it opts for the condition of overlife, and rebels at limit.”

In his 1991 collection Seeing Things he included a poem, “Fosterling”, which seemed like a blueprint for how he himself might proceed, speaking of a “heaviness of being” producing “poetry / Sluggish in the doldrums of what happens”. And then writing of a change which had come: “Me waiting until I was nearly fifty / To credit marvels. Like the tree-clock of tin cans / The tinkers made. So long for air to brighten, / Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten.”

The blueprint, however, has turned out not to open the way for an easy lightness, or a tone of bright hope, in Heaney’s work, but for a struggle that his poems would enact and dramatise between the facts as Larkin presents them in “Aubade” and the idea, which Heaney proposes in his essay, that “the vision of reality which poetry offers should be transformative, more than just a printout of the given circumstances of its time and place”.

While his essay clearly comes down on one side, as does “Fosterling”, the poems themselves have been more hushed in the presence of mortality, more open to the idea of loss as something pure. His poems have offered consolation or transformation only because they contain tones and phrases that are perfectly tuned; they are true to memory and loss, and thus somehow, at times miraculously, they offer a vision of what is beyond them or above them.

In Human Chain, his best single volume for many years, and one that contains some of the best poems he has written, Heaney allows this struggle between the lacrimae rerum and the consolations of poetry to have a force which is satisfying because its result is so tentative and uncertain. Memory here can be filled with tones of regret and even undertones of anguish, but it also can appear with a sense of hard-won wonder. There is an active urge to capture the living breath of things, but he also allows sorrow into his poems.

He uses a poetic line which sometimes seems complete and whole in its rhythm, and at others is stopped short, held, left hanging. It is as though to allow the rhythm its full completion would be untrue to the shape of the experience that gave rise to the poem, untrue to the terms of the struggle between the pure possibility that language itself can offer and a knowledge of the sad fixtures which the grim business of loss can provide.

The verse structure Heaney seems most at home with here is the one most used in Seeing Things: it contains four stanzas of three lines per stanza, a sonnet without the couplet. This system offers a sort of looseness, a buoyancy, a refusal to close and conclude; it means that the endings of these poems can have a particular pathos, a holding of the breath, “gleaning the unsaid off the palpable”, as Heaney has it in his poem “The Harvest Bow”.

At times, despite his effort to be consoled, it is as though whatever is being remembered has taken all his heart for speech. This is most apparent in an elegy for the Irish singer David Hammond, which contains four of these three-line stanzas plus one extra line. It is the poem where the struggle between pure lament and the search for comfort in images seems most intense:

The door was open and the house was dark
Wherefore I called his name, although I knew
The answer this time would be silence

That kept me standing listening while it grew
Backwards and down and out into the street
Where as I’d entered (I remember now)

The streetlamps too were out.

If there is a presiding spirit haunting this book, it is Virgil’s Aeneid. In Stepping Stones, his book of interviews with Dennis O’Driscoll, Heaney mentions that “there’s one Virgilian journey that has indeed been a constant presence, and that is Aeneas’s venture into the underworld. The motifs in Book VI have been in my head for years – the golden bough, Charon’s barge, the quest to meet the shade of the father.”

Human Chain is a book of shades and memories, of things whispered, of journeys into the underworld, of elegies and translations, of echoes and silences. It conjures up the ghosts of three painters – Colin Middleton, Nancy Wynne-Jones, Derek Hill – who spent their lives working with Irish light and Irish weather. The three-part poem “Chanson d’Aventure”, describing a journey by ambulance after suffering a stroke, invokes with gentle reverence John Keats, who wrote in a late poem of “This living hand, now warm and capable / of earnest grasping”. Heaney describes:

my once capable

Warm hand, hand that I could not feel you lift
And lag in yours throughout that journey
When it lay flop-heavy as a bellpull

The most ambitious poem in the book is an ingenious and moving encounter with Book VI of the Aeneid, with a description of finding a used copy of the book in Belfast and taking it on Route 110 across Northern Ireland (”Cookstown via Toome and Magharafelt”). Slowly the poem moves into the underworld (”It was the age of ghosts”), where it meets, among others, Louis O’Neill, one of the murdered dead in the Troubles, who is the subject of Heaney’s earlier poem “Casualty” and wanders in a world of shady memory to emerge in a final poem about the birth of a first grandchild.

Sometimes, it seems, it is enough for Heaney that he remembers. Throughout his career there have been poems of simple evocation and description. His refusal to sum up or offer meaning is part of his tact, but his skill at playing with rhythm, pushing phrases and images as hard as they will go, offers the poems an undertone, a gravity, a space between the words that allows them to soar or shiver.

There is one poem, “Uncoupled” – a diptych in memory of his parents – that has all the placid beauty of a Dutch painting or a Schubert song. Both parts of the poem are structured in the customary four three-line stanzas, both beginning with the same three words “Who is this”, both offering a single ghostly image from memory, something hovering between what is lost and what has now been found.

The first part describes his mother carrying a tray of ashes from the house to the ash-pit; it offers a picture of immense, distant dignity, allowing the ashes to be “whitish dust and flakes still sparkling hot”, purely themselves, but with all the resonance that they can command besides. The second part is a picture of his father “not much higher than the cattle / Working his way towards me through the pen, / His ashplant in one hand”. The father is thus captured in an ordinary moment, but he is “Waving and calling something I cannot hear” because of

all the lowing and roaring, lorries revving
At the far end of the yard, the dealers

Shouting among themselves

but also, it is implied, because time has passed and death has intervened. In the last two lines – the last 20 words of the poem have each only one stark syllable – you watch Heaney struggling between the world of painful fact and something in his own imaginative spirit which insists that language used with sombre tact and care “opts for the condition of overlife and rebels at limit”:

So that his eyes leave mine and I know
The pain of loss before I know the term.

Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn is published by Penguin.

The sunshine and simplicity of life, the golden mythology of troubadours and courtly love; for Ford, writes Julian Barnes, Provence meant civilisation – not least because there a hard-up writer was given due respect

Most francophiles, beside their general attachment to French customs and culture, have an additional fondness for a region or city that speaks particularly to them: for landscapists it might be Burgundy, for monument-sniffers the Loire, for solitarists and hikers the Massif Central. Those who want to be reminded of a certain kind of England go for the Dordogne, where the Daily Mail is readily available. Many simply choose Paris, which may seem to sum everything up, and where – unlike in London – most people still have regional attachments as strong as their metropolitan ones. Ford Madox Ford lived in Paris off and on throughout the 1920s – editing the Transatlantic Review, living with the Australian painter Stella Bowen, having his affair with Jean Rhys, knowing Pound and Joyce and Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and having the 18-year-old Basil Bunting as his office boy.

He enjoyed a full literary and social life in the (largely non-French) bohemia of Montparnasse. He once went up in a lift with Rhys and James Joyce: despite his poor eyesight, Joyce managed to notice that Rhys’s dress was undone at the back, and hooked her up. And yet Ford, who once wrote a book called New York Is Not America, also knew that Paris was Not France. For him the real France was a region that official “France” – northern, bureaucratic, centralising – had long ago conquered and attempted both to dismantle and to strip of its language: Provence.

His passionate attachment to the region came from his father, Francis Hueffer, the music critic of the Times, who published a book on the troubadours and wrote Provençal poetry. Hueffer knew Frédéric Mistral (1830-1914), the poet at the heart of the revival of Provençal, who in 1854 had set up the Félibrige movement with seven fellow-poets, and an academy to codify the language (the result being the great dictionary known as Trésor du Félibrige). According to Ford, his father played chess with Mistral and was received into the Félibrige. Also according to Ford, the only two things his father taught him were “a very little Provençal” and rudimentary chess. The phrase “according to Ford” needs to be tacitly applied to much that he wrote of an autobiographical nature (and there were eight such volumes), since he had a great contempt for fact and a countervailing belief in the “absolute accuracy” of impressions. Pound told Hemingway that Ford “only lied when he was very tired”; but, if so, Ford must have been tired a lot of the time. His lies grew perhaps ever more extravagant with time. According to Ford, the great chef Escoffier once said to him, “I could learn cooking from you”, and Henry James came to him, with tears in his eyes, asking for help with a plot. In A Mirror to France (1924), Ford writes of having attended Dreyfus’s second trial at Rennes in 1899, and explains that “it was in the changing lights and shadows of that courthouse” that he first “began to have a sense of the profound cleavage that was to come between opposing schools of French thought”. In fact, all that time he was busy on the Kentish coast collaborating with Conrad (nor is it remotely plausible that a French military court would have allowed him to be present). Faced with Ford’s multitudinous fabrications, his biographer Max Saunders rightly concludes that it is a question of “asking less whether what Ford says is true, and more what it means”.

Ford’s love of Provence can, however, be accorded the status of both a major fact and a lifelong impression. For some years he and Stella Bowen would head south by the overnight train from the Gare de Lyon. The rich and fashionable (including Florence Dowell in The Good Soldier) would take the famous Train Bleu, a privately run, first-class-only operation, whose passengers might dine beforehand at the restaurant of the same name, high up, overlooking the tracks – for a long time the ritziest station brasserie in the world. Ford and Bowen would travel second-class on the humbler 9.40. Nowadays the TGV from the Gare de Lyon will get you to Avignon in three hours or less; then the city was reached after 10½ hours, at about eight in the morning, with the “urgent muddy Rhône” beside you and the first streaks of light in the sky. But there are advantages to slow travel, to the sense of changing landscape, to dozing off and waking up, as Bowen put it, “amongst the pale olives, the dark cypresses, the grey rocks and the flat-roofed, flat-faced houses which in spite of their poverty and austerity seem to hold promise of a sweeter life within their dry old walls”.

Quite where Provence began was another of Ford’s variable facts. Sometimes he said it was at Lyon, at other times Valence or Montélimar. Perhaps it depended on when the train jogged him awake. The shape of it was always a triangle, with the Rhône wandering down the middle: a narrow one like a slice of brie if Provence began at Lyon, a fatter, more equilateral one if it began lower down. The Rhône also divided what Ford thought of as the “true Provence” of the east bank – where are found the three A-list cities, Arles, Avignon and Aix, plus Ford’s favourite town, Tarascon – from “the sort of quasi-Provence that contains Montpellier, Béziers, Carcassonne and Perpignan” on the other side. This reflects the old division between the Empire or east bank and the Royaume or west. Thus, according to Ford, the most famous southern writer of the 19th century, Alphonse Daudet, “was not a true Provençal”, since he came from Nîmes, which, “with all its charms” – the Maison Carré, the bullfights and “one memorable eating place” – “is not true Provence”.

Ford and Bowen were first invited south to stay in the “magical” yet at the same time “quite ordinary little villa” of Harold Monro, founder of the Poetry Bookshop, in the winter of 1922-23. Next they tried Tarascon, from where he wrote: “Life is so relatively cheap in France . . . that I shouldn’t wonder if we settled down here for good. Besides, the French make much of me – which at my age is inspiring.” After a brief diversion into the wilder Ardèche, the Spanish cubist Juan Gris and his wife Josette suggested Toulon, then as now a navy town and therefore cheap. Bowen and Ford were similar, according to her, in that each was “a rolling stone with domestic instincts and a steady longing for a house, a garden and a view”. If they found this anywhere, they did so at Cap Brun outside Toulon, where they spent two winters, and whither Ford returned with Bowen’s successor after they had parted company. In her admirably sane, generous and unFordianly trustworthy memoir, Drawn from Life, Bowen analyses the spell Provence cast on them: “It is something to do with the light, I suppose, and the airiness and bareness and frugality of life in the Midi, which induces a simplicity of thought, and a kind of whittling to the bone whatever may be the matter in hand. Sunlight reflected from red-tiled floors on to whitewashed walls, closed shutters and open windows and an air so soft that you live equally in and out of doors, suggest an experience so sweetly simple that you wonder that life ever appeared the tangled, hustling and distracting piece of nonsense you once thought it. Your mind relaxes, your thoughts spread out and take their shape, phobias disappear, and if passions become quicker, they also lose their power of deadly strangulation. Reason wins. And you are released from the necessity of owning things. There is no need to be cosy. A pot of flowers, a strip of fabric on the wall, and your room is furnished. Your comforts are the light and warmth provided by nature, and your ornaments are the orange trees outside.”

Life was cheap, and the more so because Ford was an enthusiastic kitchen gardener. He claimed to have studied under the great Professor Gressent in Paris, which is deeply improbable; though he at least read him, learning that “three hoeings are worth two coatings of dung”. He was also unscientifically superstitious, sowing seed only when the moon was waxing, never planting on a Friday or on the 13th, but always on the 9th, 18th or 27th. He cultivated those Mediterranean items – aubergines, garlic, peppers – later introduced to the British by Elizabeth David. Bowen attests to Ford’s culinary skills, even if he “reduced the kitchen to the completest chaos”.

He also took to the local wine. The delicate Gris said: “He absorbs a terrifying quantity of alcohol. I never thought one could drink so much.” (Ford, who was a great layer-down of the law, assured Joyce in a letter: “The primary responsibility of a wine is to be red.”) Meanwhile, Bowen discovered a small shop in Toulon selling nothing but different kinds of olive oil, to be tasted from a row of taps on a piece of bread – this at a time when the British were still pouring the stuff not into their mouths but into their waxed-up ears. And Ford liked the way he was treated in France simply for being a writer. Bowen describes the pleasure he felt on receiving a letter that began “Cher et illustre Maître”. According to Ford, when they moved into their house in Toulon, their landlord, a retired naval quartermaster, was so delighted to have a poet for a tenant that he drove 150 miles to fetch him a root of asphodel – because asphodels grew on the Elysian Fields, and every poet must have “that fabulous herb” in his garden. If only Ford hadn’t specified “150 miles”, we might be more inclined to believe him.

“There are in this world only two earthly Paradises . . . Provence . . . and the Reading Room of the British Museum.” Provence was not only itself, but also the absence of the north, where most human vices accumulated. The north meant aggression, the gothic, the “sadically mad cruelties of the Northern Middle Ages” and the “Northern tortures of ennui and indigestion”. Ford was a great believer in diet and digestion as controllers of human behaviour (Conrad agreed, maintaining that the “ill-cooked food” of Native Americans caused “raging dyspepsia” and hence their “unreasonable violence”). South good, north bad: Ford was convinced that no one could be “completely whole either physically or mentally” without “a reasonable amount of garlic” in their diet, and was equally obsessed with the malign effect of brussels sprouts, an item of particular northern mischief. Provence was a place of good thoughts and moral actions, “for there the apple will not flourish and the Brussels sprout will not grow at all”. The north was also full of excessive meat-eating, which caused not just indigestion but lunacy: “Any alienist will tell you that the first thing he does with a homicidal maniac after he gets him into an asylum is to deliver, with immense purges, his stomach from bull-beef and Brussels sprouts.”

Another of Ford’s charmingly bonkers theories was about the grapefruit. The English translators of the Bible had been misguided in writing that Eve was tempted by an apple. The word they should have used was shaddock, another name for the pomelo. In Provence, grapefruit grow abundantly, but are scorned by the inhabitants, who might occasionally use a little of the zest in cooking, but would routinely throw the fruit to the pigs. Since Provençals have never eaten of the grapefruit, therefore they have never fallen, therefore they live in Paradise, QED.

But Provence meant far more to Ford than easy living and sound diet: beneath its surface pleasures lay a mythic and historical substructure. Provence was where the great trade route, having run from China to Venice and Genoa and along the northern shore of the Mediterranean, turned north at Marseille. Then it went to Paris and down the Seine to the English Channel, and along the south coast of England to the Scilly Isles, “where it ended abruptly”. It brought the flow of civilisation with it – or, at least, the display goods of civilisation – and, for Ford, “Provence is the only region on the Great Trade Route fit for the habitation of a proper man.” Of all the towns and cities, he loved Tarascon “the best in the world”; it was where Good King René held his court, and where, according to Ford, you couldn’t sleep for the noise of the nightingales. King René also had a court at Aix-en-Provence, but Ford didn’t like the city – “birthplace of Cézanne though it be, and though it be the gravest and most stately 18th-century town that you will find anywhere”. The problem was that Aix contained the Parlement, the intermediary through which successive French kings ruled: from there “the lawyers of the Parlement . . . fixed on Provence the gadfly yoke of armies of functionaries that have ever since bled and crippled not Provence alone but all the country of the Lilies”.

What does civilisation, as embodied by Provence, consist of? In A Mirror to France, Ford gave his answer: “Chivalric generosity, frugality, pure thought and the arts are the first requisites of a Civilisation – and the only requisites of a Civilisation; and such traces of chivalric generosity, frugality, pure thought and the arts as our prewar, European civilisation of white races could exhibit came to us from the district of Southern France on the shores of the Mediterranean, where flourished the Counts of Toulouse, olive trees, the mistral, the Romance Tradition, Bertran de Born, the Courts of Love, and the only really amiable Heresy of which I know.”

The period covered runs roughly from the 12th to the 15th centuries. The “amiable” heresy was Albigensianism, whose piety and virtue (and Manichean doctrine) brought its destruction in a papal crusade, led with immense cruelty by the English Simon de Montfort from 1209-18. The troubadours – of whom Bertran de Born (c1140-c1215) was one of the most famous – and their Courts of Love continued up to the end of the 13th century, though their influence was much curtailed when Provence west of the Rhone was ceded to Louis XI in 1229. Avignon prospered between 1309 and 1408 as the seat of seven popes and two anti-popes, while King René (1409-80) presided over the final efflorescence of Provençal culture, after which the region east of the Rhone was in turn ceded to the French king. This whole period came in later centuries to represent a kind of Merrie France – tournaments, chivalry and courtly love, with wise rulers overseeing peace and human contentment.

According to Ford, the first piece of French literature he read as a schoolboy was a rapturous description by Daudet of life in Avignon under the popes: processions, pilgrimages, streets strewn with flowers, the sound of bells at all hours, “the tic-tac of the lace bobbins, and the rustle of the shuttles weaving the cloth of the gold chasubles, the little hammers of the goldsmiths tapping the altar-cruets” and “the undersound of tambourines coming from the Bridge”: “For, in our country, when the people is glad, there must be dancing . . . And since, in those days, the streets of the city were too narrow for the farandole, fifes and tambourines kept to the Bridge of Avignon, in the fresh breezes of the Rhône, and day and night was dancing . . . Ah, happy days, happy city! The pikes that did not cut; the state prisons where wine lay cooling! . . . Never famine, never wars . . . That was how the Popes of the Comtat knew how to govern their people; that is why their people has so much regretted them!”

Ford is more idiosyncratic and textured than Daudet in his appreciation of the south. Provence was not just a lost golden land; despite conquest, it was tenacious and invasive. The extermination of the language had been decreed under Louis XI, François I and Louis XIV, but Provençal continued to be spoken for centuries, and was there waiting to be revived and made official by the Félibrige. And though France was “the first Mass Product in the way of modern nations”, Provence, despite being crushed and subsumed, had the revenge of the defeated: it infiltrated the dominant culture. The virtues and values of Provence spread up through the remnants of the great trade route, so that France was civilised to the extent that she submitted to this reverse takeover. And Provence was not just a region but also a state of mind – indulgent, fantastical, credulous – and this element fed into those harsh and pragmatic owners up in the north.

Ford’s historical and travel writing is vivid, often tendentious and always personal. His nostalgia becomes blatantly solipsistic, for instance, when he looks at the rewards and public standing of the troubadour poets. He himself was perpetually impoverished: in 1907 he set what must be some kind of record by publishing six books and applying to the Royal Literary Fund for financial assistance. How different it was back in the 12th century: “The Troubadour appears as taking the place of the Hollywood star – but of the Hollywood star who should not be only performer but the extraordinarily skilful author and composer of the piece . . . As writer and performer, Peire Vidal was the equal of the highest in the land and the terror of noble husbands though but the son of small tradespeople.”

This was a key feature of troubadour art for Ford: it was “essentially both democratic and aristocratic” – by which he meant that the troubadours might be of humble origin and yet address their love songs to aristocratic women. But he also meant that this was how all the arts should be: “democratic” inasmuch as anyone could make them, and anyone could enjoy them, but made by a process that was “aristocratic’” in the sense of being highly skilled, difficult and rare.

Ford described himself as a “sentimental Tory” who liked “pomp, banners, divine rights, unreasonable ceremonies and ceremoniousness”. He presented himself as a rather old-fashioned English officer and gentleman. His grandfather had “insisted characteristically that although one must know French with accuracy one must speak it with a marked English accent to show that one is an English gentleman. I still do.” (But this being Ford, there is a contradictory explanation provided by Bowen: his French sounded English because he never moved his lips enough.)

The honourable, chivalric man, trying to do his best in a modern world that fails to recognise his virtues, is a recurrent figure in Ford’s work. And there is a quietly insistent chivalric element underlying his greatest novel, The Good Soldier. The two couples at the heart of this story of destructive passion, the Ashburnhams and the Dowells, meet for the first time in the hotel restaurant of a German spa town. They find a table to suit them; it is round; Florence Dowell quotes Malory: “And so the whole round table is begun.” She and her husband have visited Provence, “where even the saddest stories are gay”, and Dowell, the narrator, tells the story of Peire Vidal. The good soldier of the title, Edward Ashburnham, is presented as an absolute English gentleman, forever on a “feudal” quest to help others; his ward, Nancy Rufford, who is in love with him, specifically links him to three chivalric figures of different cultures – Lohengrin, the Chevalier Bayard and El Cid. Dowell, who is in love with Nancy, explains himself in the novel’s famous, high-Romantic line, “I just wanted to marry her as some people want to go to Carcassonne.” And at the end of the book, after the great emotional “smash” is over, Dowell revisits Provence: “I have seen again for a glimpse, from a swift train, Beaucaire with the beautiful white tower, Tarascon with the square castle, the great Rhône, the immense stretches of the Crau. I have rushed through all Provence – and all Provence no longer matters.”

It no longer matters because its high-hearted truths have been shown to be deluded. Ford may have loved Provence and its golden mythology, but he was also a modern novelist, guided by the emotional truthfulness of Flaubert and Maupassant. He knew that “the saddest stories” in his day were rarely gay, but just very sad, if not murderously violent, and that any gaiety around was likely to come from misunderstanding and self-deception. He also knew that the human heart was “defective”. So, as the novel unfolds, Ashburnham, for all the homoerotic worship Dowell accords him, is revealed to be no Lohengrin but the opposite – or rather, both at the same time: while generous and sentimental, he is also a sex-pest with a conviction for assaulting a girl on a train, a liar, a near-bankrupt and a squalid blackmail victim. He may even (depending on one’s reading of certain powerful hints) have conceived an incestuous passion for his own daughter. Nowadays, he would probably have found himself on the sex offender register. Ford, for all his convincing self-presentation as a moth-eaten old gent – EM Forster snootily called him “a fly-blown man of letters”, Paul Nash “Silenus in tweeds” – understood the modern world, and the reality that opposed its lingering myths. After all, in 1913, two years before The Good Soldier was published, he had visited Carcassonne, towards which Dowell and others feel such a romantic impulsion. And what had Ford discovered there? Snow and rabies.

Ford’s Provence was an ideal lost world, one of the cradles of civilisation, and a reference point in his fiction. But the region contained more than just the past and present: it also suggested a possible future. In Provence (1935), Ford at one point asks to be regarded not as a moralist or historian, but “simply as prophet”. Civilisation is “staggering to its end”, and he wants to show “what will happen to it if it does not take Provence of the XIIIth century for its model”. Ford had seen service as a transport officer in the first world war, where he was gassed; and he spent his last 20 years (before his death in 1939) watching the grim chest-beating of nations and ideologies across Europe. He loathed empty-headed nationalism, violence, transnational standardisation, mechanisation and most of the doings of financiers. He was also a writer, and thus a citizen not of any one country but of the world, and he wondered how that world might emerge from the great smash that was coming, and avoid further smashes. How might the human brute be tamed? Not by bigger groupings, by signing up to yet more overarching -ologies, or by exterminating languages and individualism. Perhaps, he thought, we should become local again, live in smaller communities, learn to avoid the hysterical clamourings of gangs and groups.

This was the sort of life he imagined – and had found – in Provence. In The Great Trade Route (1937), he wrote: “I live in Provence, but I can’t become a Provençal because that, as things go, would be to become French, and I don’t want to become French for reasons that would take too long to tell . . . No, I want to belong to a nation of Small Producers, with some local, but no national feeling at all. Without boundaries, or armed forces, or customs, or government. That would never want me to kill anyone out of a group feeling. Something like being a Provençal. I might want to insult someone from the Gard if he said he could grow better marrows than we in the Var. But that would be as far as even local feeling would go.”

Voltaire’s advice about cultivating one’s garden was always moral as well as practical; nor was it a counsel of quietism. As human beings recklessly use up the world’s resources and despoil the planet, as the folly of globalisation becomes more apparent, as we head towards what could be the biggest smash of all, the wisdom and the way of living that Ford Madox Ford – literature’s good soldier – found in Provence are perhaps even more worth attending to.

• Ford Madox Ford and France, a two-part programme with Julian Barnes and Hermione Lee, begins at 11.30am on 24 August.