The sky is dappled with small breaks of sun. The streets smell of piss.
On trying to write in Marseille
Marseille. The sky is dappled with small breaks of sun. The streets smell of piss. The people meander about looking reassuringly in character (read: French), free of obvious signs of need (hard to imagine them needing to piss – where does all this excess piss come from, then). The weather disorients my London habits, where the mix of wet air and lowering temperatures makes it feel cold all the damn time. And even when the sun doesn’t break through the grey fluff of low cloud here, the air still feels mild. This, I find, a relief – I guess that’s the point of going away.
Marseille is a city where the poor can have a public life. S. tells me that that’s part of what it means to be Marseillaise. Many of the most charming cities I’ve been to are like this: proletarians force their way into the life of a city and demand it as their right, through gestures of aggression, confidence, or indifference. Luckily, so far, no such hostility directed at me (that’s partly the benefit of being a walking, human tower).
S. takes me to his favourite Syrian restaurant on Saturday night. At first I am incensed that we’re the only people there. This feels characteristic of S.’s contempt for wanting to do the things that everyone is doing. We’re in a busy sociable city. Why can’t we just eat where everyone else is eating? He’s also late, which is very S. Anyway, it turns out my expectations of disappointment by S. are unnecessary. The Syrian restaurant is run by his friends who want to practice their English for the night. We eat well and we chat and have a great evening.
Then, a surprise is sprung on me. We are to carry heaps of books across town – down a hill, then up a hill. S. opened a community book shop here with a few friends during the pandemic, and an unintended consequence of that was that a landlord invited him and his partner to have first viewing on a reasonably-priced rented apartment. Anyone is invited to be Marseillaise if they care about the constitution of the place. That’s what it means to not be a tourist. I try not to feel contemptible about carrying the books. I guess I do my bit. Later, the flashes of contempt make me feel like a sour, alienated Brit.
Stepping out into the streets, a background hum of hairdryer-like moped engines rattles the sky. The city is jumbled up by this strange combination of noise and inactivity. Everyone smokes cigarettes, all the time. Right now, there are four people in my eyeline wearing denim shirts. No city built around any fantasy of capitalist productivity would contain within it so many denim shirts.
Outside the cafe where I’m currently sat, people nurse little demi-bières with a pace so slow I can imagine it would aggravate even the most moderate Brit. I’ve been here since Wednesday (Marseille, not outside the cafe). The plan was to write, work on the novel that I haven’t had time to look at since July. But all the horrid nature in the air has cursed me.
I picked up a weird throat thing at the beginning of last week and I’ve been feeling fatigued and annoyed about it ever since (no one needs the details – symptoms are a burden the healthy are pleased to be free from and that the sick tire of being forced to endure). Being ill on annual leave, I just feel like I’ve been cheated out of something: “Hello, yes I would like to speak to the manager of misfortune, I’ve got a complaint to make about the quality of my immune system.”
I’m staying in L.’s flat in Prefecture, just five minutes walk from Cours Julien. It’s a pleasingly European one floor flat which I am sharing with Skopa, the cat. Cats and I have not been best of friends ever since I was attacked by one at the age of about four , scratched down the forearm and mistrustful ever since. But Skopa is sweet and cute, more like a little puppy, constantly demanding attention, chasing things, rolling around on the floor. L said there’s one window in the second floor flat that he won’t try and jump out of. But, over the phone, I didn’t hear which one. So I spend my whole time chasing the cat away from the window for fear he’ll launch himself out of it.
L. is a filmmaker and his apartment is set up to edit — the beautiful colour photography and art books everywhere (Godard, Pedro Costa, Brueghel) make me jealous of the way visual artists can dip into the frame as a realm of inspiration. I guess writers keep hold of quotes in notebooks for the same purpose, but this seems less satisfying . And a massive Brecht poster on the backdoor with a small circle cut out for the peephole, an irony I’m sure Brecht would enjoy. No one has knocked on the door and so I’ve had no reason to indulge in the novelty of using the peephole.
The reason that I describe the flat first is because in the six days I’ve now been here it’s where I have spent the most time. That was always the plan. To take myself away from the distractions of London and just write. But writing has been the element of my trip that keeps managing to evade me, and thus the apartment feels like somewhere I am stuck. When the defined purpose of the trip is to write, fear of wasting time becomes an impediment to ‘getting better’. How annoying to get stuck between rest and work; so it goes when writing is the thing you do outside of your day job.
Anyway, enough of that moaning. On Friday I give up on trying to write and decide that the weekend can be given over to recovery. In the last three days I’ve swam in the med twice, eaten a delicious chocolate and pear tart, drank countless espresso coffees, and tried to disconnect from the sense of machinic routine that characterises my London life by just doing absolutely nothing, apart from be somewhere else.
A slow attempt to transition from the discipline of my day job, to the practice of routine of working on the novel, with a passage of doing nothing and enjoying it. How much mental energy it can take to break habits. It’s so strange that sometimes the work of disentangling takes a period of concentration and rest. I guess I must have shaken off some of my anxiety about writing while sick in sharing this piece. Now, on with the novel.
In case you missed it, a couple of weeks back I wrote a piece about the new season of Industry for Plinth Magazine.