Rescued by a book

As a writer, I’ve had my share of dreams and fantasies. I’ve long since abandoned many of them—Pulitzer Prize, MacArthur Award and various other honors in a galaxy far, far away.

But then there are dreams and fantasies that may be highly unlikely, but not necessarily impossible. One of those is to tell my literary heroes (living, of course) how much their writing has meant to me. And to hear back from them.

Sometimes, they can even rescue you. Which is what happened to me. It was Laurence Wylie who did the rescuing. You may not know who he is. He wrote a wonderful book called Village in the Vaucluse about living in the South of France in the early 1950s in the hill village of Roussillon.

To anyone who has not spent much time in a small village in Provence, Wylie’s Village in the Vaucluse may seem strange, or anachronistic, or both. If you have been only to cities in the South of France, the little village in the hills of Provence Wylie describes where he spent a year in 1950 with his family will probably seem something out of the 19th century to you.

He’s writing about the Roussillon of just a few years after World War II, a place with little indoor plumbing, only two phones, a once-weekly bus service to Avignon and, to be sure, no tourists to speak of. The village even had a blacksmith. It’s not the Roussillon of today, which does indeed have tourists—and gourmet restaurants, indoor plumbing, boutiques, and many more cafés than the solitary establishment Wylie used to frequent daily.

So, is this simply history, a description of a year spent in a tiny French community seventy-five years ago that, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists?

No.

If you know village life in Provence at all, you know Village in the Vaucluse is truth. Save for those few insignificant details, like indoor plumbing, Laurence Wylie’s account of living for a year in the ochre-hued Roussillon—which he dubbed Peyrane to protect the villagers’ privacy—reflects the villagers of Provence and their character as much as when it was first published so many years ago.

General area of the Vaucluse in France

Above all, the book is a story of people’s lives. No one is a caricature in this book. Everyone is real. Everyone is memorable, too, because Wylie did his best to get inside their skin and walk in their shoes.

When you get beyond the burnished modernity of guidebook Provence, you can still find many small villages where you will encounter the direct descendants of Wylie’s Peyrane.

Yes, the houses have television now, most everyone has a car, and the kids have iPhones, but if you listen closely, you’ll hear clear echoes of Wylie’s villagers. And if you stop and live in this village or one like it for any length of time, you might swear you’ve actually stepped into Wylie’s book and that your village is his twin.

So, how did Wylie’s book rescue me?

When I was living in my village in the late 1980s, I didn’t understand why, after several months of residing there, the villagers were so aloof and unforthcoming. Why did they shun my overtures? Why did they reply to my greetings and questions with the skimpiest of answers? I was perplexed and unhappy. One day I found Village in the Vaucluse in the library of the house. My American landlord had a copy, and she had told me to read it. I’d never heard of it.

After three or four chapters, I was flung out of my doldrums. I now knew that my situation was not unique. I saw my own villagers in Wylie’s Roussillon of forty years earlier. This was the Provençal character I was dealing with, and it obviously extended far beyond my own village and beyond my own point in time. So many of the things he describes in his book mirrored my own experience.

Nothing real had changed. The longer I stayed in my little village—which is on the other side of the Rhone, by the way, some 100 miles west of Roussillon—the more reaffirmations I got from Village in the Vaucluse. What Wylie was able to capture was not just a way of living, but a character of a people. Life was much easier after I read his book.

When my own book about living in a French village was published, one of the first things I did was to send Laurence Wylie a copy in care of his publisher. Along with it, I sent a letter explaining how he had rescued me and how his book would live forever because it was true. I had no idea if he was even alive at that point. It was forty years after Village in the Vaucluse had been published, after all.

Then, one wonderful day, I received a handwritten letter from Laurence Wylie.

This, in part, is what he wrote:

“Your letter was important to me because it helped me shove aside a sort of feeling that at 83 my life is sort of dwindling without my having made a difference by living. Your letter made me feel that I had done something, so I thank you.”

That was beyond great expectations.

Two years later, he was gone.

But not his book. Not Village in the Vaucluse. It continues to have a healthy life, still in print, in its third edition, still selling. That’s great news. No book about Provence deserves it more. No author, either.