Vienna Gay Parade

Sachertorte. Freud. Klimt. The Ferris wheel from The Third Man. Rachel Whiteread’s controversial monument to the murdered Jews. And snow globes- first patented in Vienna. These were my few fragments of knowledge of Vienna before visiting for the first time, discovering a piece of the European jigsaw I did not even realise was missing.

Our journey had its own particular theme. William Burroughs, the great 20^th century writer about whom my husband, Barry Miles, is writing a biography. The occasion was an exhibition of Burroughs’ work in the Kunsthalle, one of several museums and art galleries in the new Museum Quarter, arranged around a central square empty of traffic, with huge moulded plastic sofas, casual cafes, children’s pool and a playpen grown from bamboo. The perfect cultural hang-out – and like the famous Viennese coffee houses, accessible to all. Here it is clear how Vienna has blossomed as the capital of the liberated youth of Eastern Europe.

The Burroughs’ show is devoted to his cut-ups; pages of manuscript, fragments of text, photos, collages, films, his shotgun paintings and even a shotgun painted door, which now belongs to Damien Hirst. Positioned in the middle of the gallery floor it looked like a doorway to a wild and wayward universe. The whole show such an insight into a writer’s mind.

Burroughs’ great theme was escaping control systems. Any control system. Maybe some of that passion was inspired by his own period of time studying in Vienna, just before the Second World War, when fascism was on the march and anti-semitism in full spate. Despite being homosexual, and only 23, he married an older Jewish woman to help her escape to America.

We explored Vienna looking for Burroughs, and his life there provided a good frame for the city. The gay hotel he first stayed in was next door to Mozart’s house, now a fancy restaurant where we sampled Austrian fare- in particular the famous Tafelspitz- a dish of beef served with fresh grated horseradish and apple sauce.   Subsequently Burroughs lived not far from Bergasse 19, and in later years was  analysed by a Freud disciple, so we went to the Freud museum.  I had strange dreams after that…

His favourite bath-house was not far from the fairground. Back in the Twenties this was a popular gay pick-up ground- at least it was for Wittgenstein, as we were informed by our Austrian friend, Elisabeth, who is currently working on the Wittgenstein family archive. (She recommends his book for children  – only in Vienna I think…Wittgenstein for Kids.)  So we had to take a ride on the Reisenrad, the Ferris wheel famous for the scene in The Third Man. It was a slow and sedate ascension, and we gasped with horror at other terrifying options, raising passengers to dizzy heights and spinning them mercilessly. As it happened we coincided with the annual Gay Pride procession, a glorious rainbow anarchy against the bourgeois backdrop of Imperial Vienna.

A tour of a show about Klimt’s life in the Leopold museum, and a final glimpse of the Klimt Beethoven Frieze in the white and gold Secession building, showed Vienna at the heart of artistic freedom at the beginning of the 20^th century. Their motto, “For every time its art. For art its freedom.” We bought the snow globe.

The Burroughs’ show is on until October.

RB is a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund. She taught writing at Queen Mary College, London University from 2010-2012.  She tutors regular weeks for the Arvon Literary Foundation in travel and Life writing.  She is available for personal writing tuition, online or in person in France or London, depending on location. Send an email for further information.  I can assist with non-fiction travel or memoir writing, journalism or academic work.

Join her in September 2013 for Above the Clouds, a writing retreat in the Pyrenees. For more information go to www.francewritingretreat.com

Returning to Yorkshire recently, the names began to reverberate from distant memory; Hebden Bridge, Wensleydale, Ilkley Moor, Whitby, Bridlington. I could hear my father’s long Northern vowels again, and recall his ringing sermons. From Hell, Hull and Halifax…” was a great joke between Walter and his non-conformist buddies. But only now have I discovered that it was a 17^th century thieves’ litany – Hull because there was a notorious gaol there, and Halifax because of its famous gibbet, a precursor of the guillotine though with the curious distinction of being operated with a rope which all could grasp, a fair administration of rough justice. Very Yorkshire, perhaps. I went there on a trip with the British Guild of Travel Writers and anticipated the visit with curiosity, never having visited the county of my birth as a tourist. They used to call it “God’s own county,” and remain as proud of it as ever. But for me it was like visiting a different country, more foreign now than France. Industrial has become post-industrial with some noted successes, the 1853 gallery at Saltaire, a huge mill now home to David Hockney’s paintings, the Deep aquarium in Hull, the textile mills turned into luxurious eco-spas.

But it was in the enduring landscape that I felt once again at home; the elemental beauty of the moors, rushing waters, undulating valleys stitched with rugged stone walls and scattered with hardy black-faced Wensleydale sheep. Most of all the wild skies moving with clouds above. I grew up with plenty of sky.

In the end it was the artists and writers we encountered that made sense of it all. Of course, that’s what they are for. One of our first visits after the splendours of York, the great Minster, the medieval streets and walls, was to the Yorkshire Sculpture park. There among the massive Henry Moores which looked so solidly embedded in the landscape and Andy Goldsworthy’s sculptural sheep fold, we saw the Deer Shelter skyspace, a permanent installation by James Turrell. Inside the 19^th century brick shelter he has created an interior space with a square cut out for the sky. That is it. You watch the sky. It may change. You may change. It was only afterwards I discovered that he was a Quaker. His grandmother had explained their philosophy thus; “go inside to greet the light.” Turrell is also a keen air pilot – apparently he and his celestial chums call the rest of us, “ground-pounders.”

Driving through the Yorkshire Wolds towards Hull, through scenes recently painted by Hockney as he travelled between Bridlington, where his mother was ill and Wetherby where his old friend, Jonathan Silver, was dying, he found solace in the trees, silhouetted along the horizon of the hills, or flanking the roadsides in a narrowing perspective that foxed our photographers. Hockney said that returning to Yorkshire had been a revelation, “It led me back to the land. I realized you could [only] paint the landscape, because you can’t photograph the landscape – you can’t get space in it.” The trees, he said were a metaphor for him of the tension between the life force and gravity.

We saw the birthplace of Ted Hughes at Mythomwold, a humble house of soot blackened York stone, and I returned again to Birthday Letters, the book of poems published after his death which explores his relationship with Sylvia Plath with such sensitivity and pain that he must have carried somewhere within him always. And we saw Plath’s grave too in the graveyard of Heptonstall. Why was she buried there, this tormented American, on top of the Yorkshire moors? The name Hughes on the gravestone is fixed in bronze to prevent the Plath pilgrims chiselling it off.

But of course it was the Brontes that did it for me. I felt most in harmony with place and past at Haworth, bleak and grim as it is. Best visited in wind and rain and quite out of season. Jane Eyre was the first grown-up novel I read, aged maybe 10, and it so captured my imagination. The Brontes were all about imagination, they had nothing else, stuck in that cold, remote parsonage between village and wilderness. In front of them the church and always the graveyard, the inevitably of death which came all too soon to all of them, then behind the house the wide scape of empty moorland and sky. Liberty was always Emily’s watchword.

And then another memory of my father rises up, of him suddenly stopping on a moorland walk, and pointing to the heavens. “Wait, listen to the skylark!” And we would strain to hear what he heard soaring high in the sky above us.

Click here for the sound of trumpets. Only joking. I can barely remember how to upload a photo let alone design in musical accompaniment. Anyway I am very proud to announce two awards. Two! The British Guild of Travel Writers- a very prestigious organisation, naturellement- voted my new book, Love and War in the Pyrenees, the best narrative travel book of 2008. Thanks, guys. It is hugely appreciated. You slave away alone for years, with some feedback from readers which is very very welcome, but appreciation from one’s peers is sweetest of all. And my article The Cheats’ Guide to the Pyrenees, which was published in The Observer in June, was runner-up for Newspaper article of the year in the French Tourist Office annual awards for 2008. 

I recently went on a press trip to the Champagne-Ardennes region of France, a combination of champagne and cemeteries which was better than it sounds. The champagne was excellent, a welcome respite after the various war sites we visited, from both First and Second World Wars. The entire region has been a battlefront for centuries and the scars are deep. We saw an entire German military camp in the process of being reconstructed,and several deeping moving memorials.

Most fascinating was the new Charles de Gaulle Memorial Museum in Colombey-les-deux Eglises, due to be opened October 10^th. From the June 18^th call to Resistance in 1940 to the final caricatures grafitti-ed on the streets of Paris in 1968, de Gaulle is undoubtedly the most famous Frenchman of the 20^th century. Every town in France has its avenue Charles de Gaulle and now he has his own museum, a rare phenomenon for any famous individual other than artists. The Mémorial is in Colombey-les-deux-Eglises, a small village in Haute Marne, one of the smallest departments of France. Here in Eastern France is where de Gaulle lived for much of his life. He didn’t come from there, he came from Lille further north; he chose Colombey. An army man, married with four children, including a youngest daughter with Down’s syndrome, he sought a modest retreat from the world. The house he bought in 1934, La Boisserie, still belongs to the family. You can visit though, stroll through the gardens, and see the splendid library and bureau de Gaulle designed for himself with three windows and a view stretching 62 kilometres distant.

The new museum nestles into the hillside opposite the village and Le Boisserie. The hill is already dominated by a vast marble cross of Lorraine- which de Gaulle himself predicted would be built there after his death. The cross, with its distinctive double arms, was originally brought back from the Crusades, and was chosen by the Free French in London as the symbol of Resistance. Like the CND symbol, its graphic simplicity ensured its recognition and survival.

The museum, funded by the Fondation Charles de Gaulle and the Conseil General of Haute Marne with additional finance from national and European sources, has cost 20m euros. It was designed by architects Jacques Millet and Jean-Côme Chilou, also responsible for the Memorial Museum of Caen, and obeys modern architectural trends; almost a third is tucked into the mountain side, part of it with an eco-conscious grass roof. Thus the place retains its character and is not eclipsed by the building. A grand staircase leads up to the cross and a broad terrace offers an almost 180 degree view of the countryside. This is de Gaulle’s France, an unchanging landscape of gentle valleys and forests, a green and beautiful country worth fighting for. “He mirrored the landscape and the landscape mirrored him.,” says one of the homilies write large on vast glass panels as you enter.

The museum design itself is state of the art with lots of fancy lighting, music, photographs, films and recordings to listen to, a reconstructed First World War trench, even a cobblestone floor for the 1968 Evénements finale, after which de Gaulle bowed out. It is not all about de Gaulle, it is the world through de Gaulle and I found it a fascinating journey through the 20^th century. And it does work. The First World War, de Gaulle’s writing subsequently about army strategy and his prescient analysis that tanks were needed and not the Maginot Line, to the Fall of France which resulted, the Occupation and the Resistance are all movingly evoked. The historical perspective is up to date treating honestly with delicate subjects like the French treatment of the Jews. The relevant text describes the progress of Petain’s Vichy government from “dishonest compromise, equivocation and dishonourable actions, leading to alignment with Nazi wishes.”

De Gaulle’s role is honoured of course, his arrogance and prickly relationships with other leaders left largely unexplored, but happily the ensemble falls short of hagiography. His triumphal return to Paris in 1944 is celebrated, though the text concedes that after that, as de Gaulle would have calculated, the allies could no longer dispute his legitimacy.

Most of all the Museum celebrates the achievement of Europe, the first stages of reconciliation between France and Germany. All the texts are in German, French and English. And though it is a unstinting tribute to one patriotic Frenchman what endured for me was a moving sense of the deep necessity for European unity, The museumm will be officially inaugurated by President Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. 50 years after the first meeting between de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer on the steps of Le Boisserie. Highly recommended!

Sadly the espadrille factory had closed down when we were last there, unable to compete with Chinese imports, but this time I was thrilled to find that two young women had re-opened it, and were making both traditional espadrilles, and a range of colourful modern versions.  Bon courage!

The last days of summer. Everyone seems to have left. The rentrée is upon us, the shops full of school satchels and pens. My son has bought himself a new French agenda, diary, out of habit, though now he will be going to an English school. The difference will be interesting. I am sure.

But truly this is the best time of the year in the Pyrenees, end of August beginning of September. A golden time. Grapes ripening, Haystacks in the fields. People chopping logs. Mostly the air is still, the sun warm and you can still swim. We don’t have a pool- and I realised after many years at Corbiac how glad I was since I would have spent most of my time supervising other people’s children. What a responsibility. Not to mention the cleaning. (Oh for a pool boy!) But I love swimming. I have been very fortunate to be able to stay in my friend Martha’s house while ours was being renovated, and she has installed a swimming pond, with water-lilies, surrounded by plants and trees. It is a sublime place to swim, incredibly tranquil, a green swim. But I love to swim in the sea too, a blue swim, a swim for pure pleasure. I like to lie in the waves, to be massaged by the sea. There is also an excellent pool in Prades, nice and big for proper long exercise swims. Sadly it closes at the end of this week, la rentrée again, though there are weeks more of sun, warm enough to swim outside.