William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

In September 1996 the case was pleaded before the Cour de Cassation. Now we had to wait for them to pronounce their judgement. French justice is slow but inexorable.

26 March 1997. My journal: “Fax from Anne Veil saying that we had won the final appeal against Balland-Copagest. MOMENTOUS DAY! Eleven years of litigation. I reckon I’ve spent £20,000 on legal fees and as far as I can tell I will receive an immediate payment of £23,000 from the escrow account. I wonder if it’s over. But surely they haven’t got a leg to stand on after all this?”

Well, they hadn’t. And it is a measure of my exhaustion that I had to resort to upper case and an exclamation mark to register my relief that it was all done and dusted. In March 1997 I was on the final stages of my seventh novel, Armadillo: when the whole business had begun in 1986 (“Hello, Will? Bad news, I’m afraid …”) I was halfway through my fourth, The New Confessions. Then, I was thirty-four years old; now I was forty-five. Had it all been worth it?

L’Affaire William Boyd v Balland-Copagest hadn’t dominated my life over the decade of its comings and goings to the various French courts that dealt with it (Le Tribunal de Grande Instance, La Cour d’Appel de Paris, La Cour de Cassation). It had rumbled away in the background, sometimes naggingly, sometimes quite unobtrusively. Totting up the figures now, I reckon that I was paid some 75 percent of what I was originally due after the great success of An Ice-Cream War —I was £15–16,000 short, in terms of unpaid royalties and I calculate that I had probably spent on the various lawyers — Heald Nickinson, Anne Veil and Maitre Piwnica — some £22,000 plus VAT. Let’s say the whole adventure of fighting the case cost me close to £40,000. Editions André Balland paid me approximately £40,000 of the £57,000 they owed me (before they declared themselves in financial difficulties) and eventually, eleven years later, I retrieved £23,000 from the escrow account. So I was more or less £23,000 ahead. If I hadn’t sued, if I hadn’t gone to law — it’s quite clear to me now — I would have received a small fraction of the money I was owed. I have absolutely no regrets about the course of action I took.

I am glad I decided to fight the Affaire William Boyd v Balland-Copagest as long as I did, even though my ardour, my zeal for the battle, waxed and waned (particularly when I had to sign cheques). But now that it’s over I look back on the decade it lasted with some satisfaction. For me it exemplifies a strange truth about the novelist’s life — indeed, a truth about any writer or artist’s life: namely, that however much we love what we do, however driven or obsessed we are with our calling, our vocation, we are wise never to forget the fundamental link between art and commerce. I was thrilled to have my first book published, and my second; I was hugely pleased to have it published in French and I was exhilarated when it became a bestseller. But novels are also commodities that are designed to be bought and sold and are not just objects of delight for the author. Dickens and Balzac knew that, Joyce and Chekhov knew that — but I don’t need to enlist eminent names to make the point: every author knows that. And every author knows, all too shrewdly, that if their novels sell many copies, then many people will make a great deal of money. Thus, for me, the Balland Affair is fundamentally about that commercial, money-driven, profit-motivated, commodity side of the writing life. In this particular case it went wrong, turned sour and was corrupted. But if I hadn’t contested the non-payment of my royalties, if I had, instead, walked away, deciding to cut my losses, I think I would have let myself down — not just as an individual but also as a writer. In the world of commerce we, the artists, must not easily yield our ground and I see my fight (with my stalwart allies) against Editions André Balland and then against Balland-Copagest as a small symbol of that tenacity. We are not just schmucks with Underwoods, as Sam Goldwyn described us. Well, not all the time.

And what of the other participants in the story? Anne Veil still practises law with her devastating, cool expertise. Christiane Besse is still my close friend and my translator. More surprisingly, perhaps, Editions André Balland continues to exist, flourishing in its modest way, publishing fiction and non-fiction from its offices in the rue St André des Arts on the Left Bank in Paris. For my part, all my novels and short story collections are in print in France, and selling well, including the three books I published all those years ago with Balland, all the books with my current and highly estimable publishers Le Seuil. As for André Balland himself, he’s abandoned the profession of publisher to become a novelist, and he’s found himself — wise man — a good and reliable maison d’édition —which happens to be the same as mine, in fact, Le Seuil. One of these days, I’m sure, I’ll bump in to him in the lobby of the old house on the rue Jacob where the Le Seuil offices are and we’ll shake hands, shrug our shoulders resignedly, exchange pleasantries and go our separate ways. But — I will know that I won.

2001

A Personal A-Z

A. Avant-Propos

A few facts: I am a Scot who was born and raised in West Africa. I went to school and university in Scotland. I first visited France in 1969 when I was seventeen. I studied at the University of Nice for an academic year in 1971. I moved to live in England (in Oxford) in 1975. I moved from there to live in London in 1983. In 1991 my wife and I bought a house in south-west France. We still live in London and we still live in our house in south-west France. Everything that follows about these two alien countries that I have come to know fairly well over the past few decades is irreducibly, unapologetically, subjective and personal. It seems to me that this is the only way to encompass such a monolithic and multifac-eted subject as the nature of the relationship between two nations. Generalizations about countries and their peoples are usually specious, tendentious or blandly stereotypical. The only observations of value are those that arise out of personal experience and since everyone’s experience is different it strikes me as best to present such observations as randomly as they come, but marshalled under some kind of overriding modus operandi — such as an alphabet. Out of such apparent haphazard-ness some sort of understanding, something meaningful — and possibly harmonious with others’ experiences — may emerge.

B. Brasseries and Bistros

In a nearby village close to our house in France there used to be a perfect bistro. It was called the “Café de France” and everything in it — the bar, the seats, the billiard table, the radio, the decor — was from the 1930s. Going in there for a drink or a meal was a form of time-travel. Then two years ago the owners retired, the cafe was sold and the dead hand of modernization took over. And so now we never go there: all the old furniture was thrown out — the old zinc bar too — and the place was smartened up and made more efficient. And in the process something valuable — a little emblem of France and Frenchness — was destroyed. I search constantly for the perfect brasserie and bistro in France and I have to say they are becoming very hard to find. Paradoxically, such establishments are more common in British cities, where you can find fashionably retro versions of a typical brasserie du coin. They are lovingly recreated but they inevitably remain ersatz and inauthentic. But they are intriguing symbols, nonetheless: a British version of une vie française that lives on in our dreams.