Terra Incognita: On First Reading ‘L’Invitation au Voyage’

Abstract

Autumn term, 1962, a South London (Boys’) Grammar School: the Cuban Missile Crisis had just come to an end, but Planet Earth had not, which meant that I would, after all, be taking my A-levels in English, German, and French. C’est la vie.

French O-level had been taught – or rather, enforced – by an elderly irascible Scot, who kept a cane in his drawer, and never gave the slightest hint that French words could be combined to make French poems, which could in their turn be delicious, haunting – or even seductive. Grammar, dictation, and repetition were all.

Whereas Mr. B – our A-level master, much younger but nevertheless somewhat meticulous, and a little desiccated and ascetic in manner (he would have made a credible monk), revelled in his sonorous readings of Verlaine and Baudelaire – ‘de la musique avant toute chose’.