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a lucky life - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
PETER MAYLE DISCUSSES
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN
WRITING FICTION AND
NON-FICTION, TAKING
RISKS, THE ART OF
FORGERY AND PURE LUCK.
BY DON GEORGE | peter Mayle was in the Bay Area recently promoting his new novel, "Chasing Cezanne." Like his delightful nonfiction accounts of life in Provence, Mayle's new work -- about art forgers and foilers -- brims with generosity, good humor and a substantial dollop of joie de vivre. On the page, Mayle seems to be an effortless writer, and in person he seems to be an equally effortless conversationalist, who exudes a robust enjoyment of the world around him. We met at an appropriately Mediterranean-feeling restaurant in Marin County, the Lark Creek Inn, and before long his sunny conversation had transported me to southern France. At the very beginning of "Chasing Cezanne," your characters go to La Colombe d'Or in St. Paul de Vence, which is pretty much my favorite place on earth. It's not bad, is it? Sitting on the terrace of the Colombe d'Or overlooking the mountains and then toward Italy is very nice indeed. You can spend half the afternoon there. Then you just sort of totter downstairs and fall into the swimming pool. It's remarkable, isn't it, just this little hotel and restaurant in the south of France, where people like Picasso and Braque came to eat. Often they didn't have much money so they used to give the guy who owned that place paintings in lieu of payment -- so he amassed this wonderful collection of stuff, which he just stuck on the dining room walls. You know, there were no burglar alarms in the early days. Then he died. I think he only had a couple hundred dollars in the bank, but he had about $5 million worth of stuff on the walls of the restaurant. And they're still there. You walk to the bathroom and pass by a Picasso and a Matisse and a Leger. Do you think they're genuine? After reading your novel, I really wonder. Crooks being the way they are these days. I had no idea it was so easy to reproduce paintings. I'm sure if what you say in your book is true, then there are definitely people who make copies of their impressionist masterpieces, tuck the real thing away somewhere and hang the copy on the wall. Oh, absolutely. And 99 out of 100 people wouldn't know the difference. I certainly wouldn't. Even the owners who are used to seeing a Picasso or a Cezanne on the wall in a certain place, you walk past it every day, and if suddenly somebody shifts it and puts a very good fake there -- it's like wallpaper, you wouldn't stop and say, "Oh, there's a slight difference in the brushwork." You just don't look that closely at things that you're very used to. So I think it's a very feasible idea that people have perhaps had stuff lifted and they don't even know they've been robbed. Someone's estimated that there's $3 billion worth of missing art around the world. Where is it? Somebody's got to have it. In researching your novel, did you meet forgers? No. I couldn't get anybody to introduce me to any of them. It's not the sort of thing you have on your business card, is it? "Forging Our Specialty. You call, we deliver." But I know they exist. There was one very, very good forger who used to do Degas. I don't know if he's still alive but he had an auction of his work in London. He auctioned his forgeries? Right. He was selling them for 20,000 pounds. People knew they were buying a fake, but it was a beautiful fake. To all intents and purposes it was a Degas except that he got 20 grand instead of 3 and a half million. You seem to enjoy things so much -- whether it's the subject of forgeries or a great meal. And I think one of the secrets of your books' successes is that you enjoy your subject so much that the reader enjoys it too. I think the sort of writing that I do, if I don't enjoy it, I can hardly expect anyone else to enjoy it. If it doesn't amuse and entertain me, then how the hell can I expect it to amuse and entertain other people? Because my stuff is really light entertainment. That's what it is. It's not what you'd call serious literature. I think it gives people a laugh and maybe takes their mind off of their problems. I've had a lot of wonderful letters from people who have taken my books into hospital with them and they've been helped through their convalescence or something. And that's fine with me. I don't care if I never win the great literary prizes. I'd much, much rather have a few letters from people who say, "I really enjoyed your book." As a writer, what I always think when I read your work is that this is not nearly as easy as it feels. It flows so smoothly and so beautifully and then I stop and think, "Could I have written this, this well?" There's a lot of art in there. Well, there's a lot of work. I do everything two or three times. I don't want people to notice the author, particularly. I just want them to be caught up with the story or the description. What always irritates me as a reader is when these authors suddenly feel the urge to jump up and down and say, "Look at that sentence. That's a clever sentence. Aren't I a great writer?" You've mostly written nonfiction. Was it different for you writing fiction than writing nonfiction? No, not really, because I used nonfictional backgrounds. It was great fun actually. You don't have to worry about the constraints of facts. Many times as I was writing a nonfiction book, I thought to myself, "If only this was fiction, I would have ended the sequence differently. I would have had them do this and that and this, and then we could have had that." That's why I tried my hand at fiction in the first place, because I got a bit, not frustrated, but I could see the opportunities for fiction as I was writing nonfiction. The next book I'm planning now is a nonfiction work about parts of Provence that I haven't actually seen yet, or I haven't really done anything about. One of them, for instance, the Camargue, which I've never thoroughly explored, is a particularly fascinating area. The first American cowboys came from the Camargue. When the French had Louisiana, they brought over these guys called guardiens, who were the French cowboys. There's a lot of beef cattle and a lot of horses in the Camargue. I've never actually been there for any length of time, just driven through it. There's flamingos there, too, which is interesting. There are wild horses, there are bulls, they have a cuisine based on pieces of the bull. And I'm told there's a wonderful restaurant at the bottom of a lighthouse, which I intend to find. So there's maybe a dozen places like that, that I happen to find really interesting and that I haven't done anything about or seen. That's what I'm going to be doing next year.
Fifteen. I had a wonderful time for about 10 of those 15 years, and then I just got feelings. I was going through those emotions, looking back in time, considering the things that I'd done and all. If you have any sort of pretensions to be a writer, advertising is not a particularly gratifying way to write. Your stuff gets thrown away. So I always had this worm in the back of my mind. A worm of ambition. If I ever wanted to be a proper writer using grown-up words, bound in hardcover, that sort of thing ... And so I wrote a little book for my children. That was my first book. It was about the facts of life for children. That did well enough to encourage me to quit my job in advertising and embark on a 10-year period of intense poverty while I tried to learn to be a writer. Eventually it all worked out. But advertising was really useful training, because it trains you to organize your ideas. It trains you to present your ideas, which is quite important in publishing. It trains you to write clean, short, to-the-point prose rather than just wobble around indulging yourself. It trains you to meet deadlines. Rather like journalism, in fact. And so it's stood me in very good stead, I think. It's just such a joy to be able to write something longer than 28 seconds for a commercial. You had a 10-year hiatus between when you quit advertising and when you moved to France and wrote "A Year in Provence." Were you writing constantly during that time? Yes. Anything. I would do freelance stuff for agencies. I was doing leaflets. I was doing little books for children. I did a couple of books on advertising, another little book on the British licensing laws, which were ridiculous -- I like to think that the book helped to get them changed. I just loved the idea of being an independent individual. No bosses. No meetings. No schedule other than a self-imposed schedule. And that to me is the greatest luxury in the world. You know, you can keep your yachts and your racehorses and all that stuff -- let me wake up in the morning and decide what I want to do. How old were you when "A Year in Provence" actually came out? I was 49. So I was a kid. I suppose I was 52 before I really began to feel that I was going to be OK as a writer. But your disposition, I imagine, has never changed. It's my nature to be optimistic. Some would say foolhardy. Because I took a lot of risks, I think, personally and professionally. It would have been very easy to stay in advertising, where there was a lot of money -- and be very bored. I've been very lucky. I mean, luck plays a huge part in everybody's success and it certainly has in my case. I never intended to write "A Year in Provence." It came about by accident. Nobody thought it was going to do anything much -- nobody asked me to tour the first time. Not in England. Not in America. They just brought it out, and then word of mouth did the rest. That is incredible. It gives you faith in something. Well, I've been extremely lucky, as I say. Think of the number of worthy books that come out and just -- well, die. They die and they may be just as interesting, just as well-written, or more. And they come up against John Grisham and the competition -- and they vanish. So many good books vanish. I look back and think: Life has been very kind to me.
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People look at your career and your fantastic success and they don't realize how many years you worked before "A Year in Provence" came out. You labored in advertising for how many years?
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