Sunday in Saint Germain

All day it has rained, and I have been stuck in my hotel room in Saint Germain-en-Laye. Saint Germain is west of Paris, nearly an hour by Metro and RER from the Gare du Nord. Here Louis XIV and his predecessors held court before Versailles was built; and here James II, the last Stuart King of England, lived out his exile and died in 1701; Queen Victoria came to pay her respects at his tomb in the parish church, and I wonder if young Claude Debussy came out to watch her, for he was born here in 1862. I wanted to walk one more time in the Château’s grounds, for I expect this will be the last Sunday I shall ever spend in Saint Germain; but now, thanks to the rain, I’ve missed my chance.

For the past ten years I have spent a week here each June, based at the Lycée International de Saint Germain-en-Laye.  As ‘Monsieur L’Inspecteur de Cambridge’, I have overseen the Language and Literature exams of students from all over France who take the British version of the Option International du Baccalauréat (the OIB, definitely not to be confused with the IB). It’s a job I have greatly enjoyed, especially because it has given me the chance to work with teachers, Anglophone and Francophone, British and American as well as French, who are all committed to an unusual educational project that is bicultural as well as bilingual.

The OIB has brought me to France four or five times every year, and taken me right across the country: from Strasbourg to Rouen, to Lyon, Grenoble and Aix-en-Provence. And of course to Paris itself: to the Ministry of Education, to the rather grim Maison des Examens in Arceuil; to schools, to the American University and, only last week, to the Institut d’études avancées. Twice a year I have helped to run conferences for teachers: two days each autumn in Sèvres, at the Centre international d’études pédagogique (CIEP) and two days each spring, I have come to St Germain, and run training days for teachers at the Château d’Hennemont. This building has some history: though it’s a 19^th century folly on a scale that renders the word ‘folly’ simply inadequate, it was the Paris headquarters of (successively) the Gestapo and Eisenhower’s SHAFE.

In such settings, my lectures and workshops on teaching literature (poetry particularly) have doubtless seemed tame enough, but I have found my role as Cambridge Inspector absorbing and rewarding. I have made many friends through the OIB and am stepping down now only because I believe you should never outstay your welcome; and, anyway, if you haven’t made your mark in ten years you’re never going to. Still, I would have liked to explore Saint Germain one last time – but all day it has rained.

‘All day It Has Rained’ is the title of a poem by Alun Lewis, a Welsh poet remembered today, if at all, for the poems he wrote during the Second World War (he died in Burma in 1944):

All day it has rained, and we on the edge of the moors


Have sprawled in our bell-tents, moody and dull as boors,


Groundsheets and blankets spread on the muddy ground


And from the first grey wakening we have found


No refuge from the skirmishing fine rain ….

It’s not so much the unheroic couplets as the sprawling lines and unpredictable stresses that count here. It is almost as though the poet – a soldier in training, under canvas, wet and listless  – is writing up his diary: ‘I saw a fox’, he notes, ‘And wrote about it in a scribbled letter home.’ For the squaddies, the boredom and discomfort of their present existence makes both their past life (‘real’ life, if you like) and the actual war seem equally trivial, equally distant: ‘We talked of girls,’ Lewis records, ‘and dropping bombs on Rome’. His poem is a succession of ‘ands’ – one damned thing after another, in no particular order – as he contemplates a day in which nothing happens, jotting down thoughts as they come to him

                                    … the quiet dead, and the loud celebrities

                        Exhorting us to slaughter, and the herded refugees …

He, too, out on the moors, is herded like sheep – like lambs to slaughter, in a certain sense.  Here, the ambiguity of ‘to slaughter’ reminds me of Edmund Blunden’s poem ‘Can you Remember?’ …

… where we went and whence we came

To be killed, or kill.

But Alun Lewis is thinking of a different poet and of another country. He recalls a day when he himself, accompanied by a ‘shaggy patient dog’, went walking in the footsteps of his hero, Edward Thomas. It was a private pilgrimage …

To the Shoulder o' Mutton where Edward Thomas brooded long


On death and beauty – till a bullet stopped his song.  

It doesn’t matter that actually Thomas was killed by the blast of a shell; it may not matter that it would later be Lewis himself whose song was stopped by a bullet, in Burma. What counts is the aftershock to the reader when this apparently random collection of rainy-day memories comes to an abrupt end with the death of a poet.  War does cause abrupt ends. But it’s a reminder, too, that Thomas’s ‘song’, his poetry, did not end, being read and valued today more highly than ever. Alun Lewis has played his part in ensuring this is so: back in the 1940s, Edward Thomas was neither widely read nor known. W.H. Auden was right to declare (in ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’) that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’. But he was right, too, that  ‘it survives’: good poetry matters for what it is, not for what it does. Verse that sets out to make things happen is propaganda, not poetry.

I should have liked, very much, to share ‘All Day It Has Rained’ with my friends in the OIB; but, as with my farewell visit to the Château of Saint Germain-en-Laye, the moment has passed.

Adrian Barlow

[illustrations: The Château of St Germain-en-Laye (not on a rainy day!); spiral staircase in the Château d’Hennemont. Photos © the author.

I have occasionally written about my discussions of poetry with colleagues in the OIB:

The Singer and the Song

Heaney and the Conversation of Poetry