An Appreciation of the French

When I was young and trying to be a "serious" writer, Ernest Hemingway's terse and hard-boiled style amounted to a true drug of the mind. But luckily that didn't last long, and I don't think anything in my early writing reflects his influence, which is strange, because I quite definitely remember the enormous stylistic pull of his short stories. That didn't extend to his novels. I think in them he largely dropped the ball, except in "The Old Man and the Sea." I thought that "Death and the Afternoon" which was not a novel, was by far the best of his longer works.

Ever since then, which was quite a long time ago, I have thought that the most stylishly written books that I have read are "Hadrian's Memoirs," by Marguerite Yourcenar, and "The Myth of Sisyphus," by Albert Camus. And both authors are French. What is the cause of this? The French literary tradition? The nature of the language? The chance of a pair of great translators? Or just my particular taste?

I am puzzled about this, because, until GW Bush came along and tried to browbeat them into joining his badly- considered incursion into Iraq, my appreciation for the French culture wasn't all that it should have been. I agreed with Steve Martin, the humorist, who said that when you visited them, "you would think that they would have the common decency to speak English." Plus I had heard that they were rude, and as evidence of that they took other people's unfinished laundry out of the public driers and stuck their own stuff in there. That struck me as being major league gall.

But I have nothing but praise for the way that the French steadfastly resisted the enormous pressure exerted on them to join in the gang-ravishing of the oldest civilization in the world, that of Iraq. I thought the numerous jeers at the French for their lack of success in war were especially misplaced. I wondered where the ignoramuses who engaged in this were when their history classes were in session. Through the ages, the French had kicked plenty of butt. Ask the English, and ask practically any country in Europe when Napoleon was around.

In fact the French were in so many massive altercations that eventually they, unlike the U.S., Germany, and other countries, came to their senses and thought it was better to let a decent number of their citizens see something wonderful called old age.

This probably started with the first of three large-scale German invasions of their country in less than a century, in 1870, and came to a head during the horrible blood-letting of the First World War, the majority of which was fought on French soil. And those who sneer at the half of France that had the collaborationist Vichy government in the Second World War conveniently forgot or more likely were ignorant of the fact that French partisans operated against the Nazis throughout the Occupation and were helpful in the final liberation of their country.

After WW2 the French inconveniently found themselves in the same sort of tail-wagging-the-dog settler situation in Algeria and also in Vietnam as the Israelis are now facing in Palestine. But the majority of Frenchmen merely let those dying gasp tragedies run their course, while they stayed home, drank good wine and ate good bread and cheese, and listened to those hypnotic French women scold them in that very expressive, beautiful language of theirs.