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Tuesday, October 28, 2014

A Writing Retreat by Rail, From Paris to the Côte d’Azur

Taking in the view as the TGV train heads south from Paris; a viaduct in Provence and the Esterel Massif on the Mediterranean, as seen from the train window; and Gare de Lyon in Paris.


The TGV train raced south from Paris in a streak of silver and blue to the French Riviera at 200 miles an hour. That’s the optimum rate for most literary emergencies since it’s impossible to bolt in frustration.
My train ticket was punched for St.-Raphaël, a popular summer resort with miles of sandy beaches by the edge of the Mediterranean and long a refuge for blocked writers seeking sunshine and inspiration.
But the destination was not as important as this journey. I intended to ride this train off the grid for almost the next five hours with a mission: to liberate a book proposal that I have resolutely avoided finishing. I thought of this quest as writing the rails — with an iPad instead of a hobo’s bindle and bedroll. Train window as muse. Mind in fast forward.
The idea to transform seat 16B into a writer’s studio was inspired by an Amtrak offer in the United States for a writer’s residency program on its long-distance treks. The whimsical notion reaped a bonanza of free publicity on social networks and attracted 16,000 applications for 24 slots for scribes who were picked in September to ride in a roomette with a view.
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The TGV in Nice. Credit Emli Bendixen for The New York Times
Their railroad garrets are equipped with a bed, desk, maid service and meal delivery. But there is no equivalent offer in France, where the national train service follows a different literary approach. In some regions, it is experimenting with digital bookstores with titles available for free downloads to computers or tablets. And in September, train employees distributed 120,000 books to commuters that were written by winners of its annual crime novel competition. In turn, the titles are promoted online with a slogan calling readers aboard: “Books love trains. Make a voyage hand in hand.”
And so I struck out on my own on the TGV Paris-Nice line for the price of a $200 round-trip ticket. My makeshift atelier in second class offered a rival window view of a rolling Impressionist painting: a blur of wheat fields and stone farmhouses, drying bales of hay and early sun that shifts from dark to blazing light.
I’m a daily habitué of trains, and I think of Europe’s network of lines as my second home. I’ve rumbled to Brussels, made dashes to London and lingered on the ride to Zurich, where the cars are a refuge for upper-middle-class cash smugglers emptying Swiss bank accounts and suspicious customs inspectors.
But as a constant commuter, I have never found anything else that compares with the express to the Côte d’Azur. It is a mystical ride of golden light and bright blue sea that frees dormant ideas in what feels like an altered state of train dreaming.
Cultural history is full of moments when writers and artists resolved intellectual problems by musing on the rails. At the lowest point in his career, facing a business disaster, Walt Disney doodled his first Mickey Mouse on a train from New York to Hollywood. Stuck on a stalled line, between Manchester and London, J. K. Rowling dreamed up Harry Potter.
So on this line, hurtling toward the French Riviera, I expected to be transported — not just by the train, but by southern France’s luminous light. Journeys start in the gray gloom of morning in the sprawling Art Nouveau station of the Gare de Lyon with its clock tower looming over a gritty neighborhood in the southeast of Paris.
At the midway point, two hours into the ride, typically there is a startling moment of clarity to cheer any despondent writer. Overcast skies give way to the pure clear sunlight of Provence. Then the melting landscapes shift to fields of bowed sunflowers. The sudden glow creates a mood-bending chemical effect. You feel a prickling under the skin, a dazzling in the head. It is always a moment to meditate on the freedom of trains and the art of slow travel — to board a carriage with trepidation about whether inspiration will strike..
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To Paris

The Côte d’Azur and its sunlight, reliably bright almost 300 days a year, has long been a siren for artists and writers — and train passengers — like Matisse, Picasso, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Graham Greene. “It is hot, the sun is shining, the windows of my bedroom are wide open — and those of my soul,” Anton Chekhov wrote while living in Nice and finishing “The Three Sisters.”
Back in the 1950s, a locomotive steamed along the same southeast corridor as this bullet train. It carried the name Le Mistral, for the cold wind that gathers strength in the Mediterranean and blows northwest to freshen the sky of clouds and free the light. By the 1960s, it billed itself as the “Aristocrat of Travel” — the fastest train in the world, with luxuries like onboard hair salons and rolling bookstores.
The trains grew speedier when the TGV replaced the Mistral in 1982. But the modern lines still offer the same basic therapy — a tableau of light and blue tones of turquoise, cobalt and azure as the train roars along the viaducts toward Cannes, Antibes and Nice. The view of the sheer drop from the jagged cliffs to the Mediterranean below invariably provokes a sea change in mood.
And I sorely needed that altered state. A year earlier, I had fashioned an outline for the long dormant book proposal but then ignored it. The idea remained, defiantly, a work-in-regress. But I knew the solution when I spotted an antique Remington typewriter displayed earlier this year at a Paris exhibition of the original passenger cars from the Orient Express train line.
Inside the Golden Arrow salon car, paneled with Cuban mahogany and Lalique nymphets, one table was set in homage to the writer Graham Greene. A yellowing copy of “Stamboul Train” lay flat next to the Remington, a package of English stationery paper, a silver cigarette lighter and a half-filled bottle of Old Lady’s dry gin.
It was Graham Greene himself — a resident of the French Riviera — who publicly reveled in the literary freedom of train travel, out of reach from distracting letters and telegrams. “I enjoy very much the passing scene,” he told an interviewer in 1968. “In a sense something might happen at any point, but one is safe in the compartment all the same.”
I took the advice: flash forward to 7:45 a.m. Paris-Nice TGV. I settled into a cushioned seat by the window, thinking of my own family’s love affair with trains and the basic writing lesson they knew better than me. There is no better way to craft a book than to toil like a railroad worker, every day, all day.
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Homes and vineyards in Provence, as seen from the train. Credit Emli Bendixen for The New York Times
My great-uncle on my mother’s side was a Minnesota train conductor on the Dan Patch line, named for a 20th-century harness race horse, which thundered between the Twin Cities and Northfield. My grandfather worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad in California, stocking dining cars with thick, green-striped coffee mugs that were indestructible.
I wished for that mug now in my own rolling writer’s studio, but no matter. All I needed was a steady foldout table. Best of all, in my compartment, mobile telephone reception was spotty and Internet access nonexistent. I unpacked a crusty baguette and Camembert cheese. I was ready; I possessed the kind of glorious semi-isolation that writers crave — minus the maid service.
Today, aboard the TGV, speed mostly triumphs luxury. But France’s national operator, the SNCF, is trying to reclaim some of its old grandeur — creating new units to improve train food quality and to restart the Orient Express line in the next five years.
I tend to prefer a jumbled hush of sounds while I write. If you need an idea, all you have to do is look up and study people for walk-on roles. In my cabin car, most of the passengers — a mix of families, young couples, Chinese tourists and French students absorbed in headphones — quickly dozed off, rocked by train rhythms.
Many writers, like John le Carré, credit trains for shaking out the words. While an MI5 officer, he exploited a 90-minute daily commute from Buckingham to London to write his debut novel, “Call for the Dead.” “The line has since been electrified,” Mr. le Carré once told an interviewer for The Paris Review, “which is a great loss to literature.”
And there was something physical about the visual stimulation of a fast-moving train that seemed to open my mind. I set up my keyboard, fixed my eyes on the screen and my window view. Words formed with the rush of cities like Toulon and Aix-en-Provence, melting into others. Paragraphs rolled into pages.
Staring out the window, I indulged in some train dreaming. I caught fleeting glimpses of Avignon, the ancient retreat of popes on the Rhone River and Draguignan, a town dating back to the Middle Ages and dominated by a clock tower. I saw olive groves, the red mountains of the Esterel Massif and a five-second tour of St.-Cyr-sur-Mer, a town famed for its Bandol vineyards and a gilded replica of the Statue of Liberty. One day I promised myself to return for a real tour. But mostly I savored the voyage where anything seemed possible. A new friend. An afternoon nap. A debate in fractured languages over who was the real ticket holder for a window seat. The mystery of missing property.
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A view from Nice. Credit Emli Bendixen for The New York Times
Obviously, I could have taken a discount jet flight for about the same price of $200 to Nice. But I would have missed all of this, including my seatmate, a middle-aged woman curled in her seat, seriously absorbed in a book called “Billie” with a cover of a scampering donkey.
It was about then that the intercom sputtered with our first train mystery. A sonorous voice delivered an urgent public service announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, we are looking for a missing pair of eyeglasses. Please inform us if you find them.”
Not exactly an Agatha Christie moment, but enough to break my reverie. We had almost reached the St.-Raphaël stop with my writing project still not in final form. But I had written a 20-page proposal with an outline of chapters for a nonfiction book that explores a fast-emerging new field of genetic science. The St.-Raphaël stop arrived just in time to let the project grow cold to edit with a clear mind on the return trip.
I counted on more inspiration from this seaside resort town. From the train station, it’s a short walk to St.-Raphaël’s tree-lined promenade along the Mediterranean and boulevards with pastel belle epoque villas built by wealthy tourists who came here by train in the late 19th century. The train transformed the fishing hamlet into a resort and brought politicians and artists and writers, including F. Scott Fitzgerald and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the author of “The Little Prince.”
Most recently, St.-Raphaël’s red rock coves and dark sandy beaches played a bit part in Woody Allen’s retro French Riviera romantic comedy, “Magic in the Moonlight.” The scene was shot in an inlet facing the Île d’Or, a private island that inspired “The Black Island” in the Tintin comic book adventure series. And aside from being a cultural muse, the town still preserves Provençal traditions, in February celebrating the Viva Mimosa festival, honoring the local shrub that blooms with vivid yellow flowers in winter, a symbol of renewal.
After my train arrived there at 12:58, I gave myself a writer’s break to stroll along the gray-and-cream-tiled Promenade des Bains for lunch by the Old Port where every dawn, fishermen unload their catch for the daily market to the cry of gulls. Across from the promenade, chalkboard menus in graceful handwriting advertised mussels in several different broths — basil, curry and white wine. I savored the steam rising from a black kettle of mussels with a glass of Provençal rosé, frites and a fresh baguette. By the Mediterranean, a carousel and its hand-painted horses with blue and green saddles spun mostly riderless in endless circles to giddy music and the toll of bells from the nearby Basilica of Notre Dame de la Victoire.
It was getting late and soon it would be time to board the return train to Paris. I was ready now for the next cycle: rewriting.
But for a few moments I lingered, studying the play of turquoise water and blue night. There is always time for a writer to procrastinate on the French Riviera.
Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the direction that the Mistral wind blows. It blows northwest into the Mediterranean, not northeast.

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