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.
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..
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.
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.
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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