Diary

Julian Barnes
Towards the end of the first year of Anita Brookners deathtime, I was
remembering my meetings and conversations with her. What we talked about:
art, books, the literary world, France, friends in common. What we didnt talk
about: her early years, her personal life, politics (I never knew whether or how
she voted), or anything practical. No exchange of recipes. No mention of sport.
Anita, what do you think of Irelands chances in the Six Nations? was not a
question that ever came to my lips. I remember her telling me that she had just
finished a novel and so, for the moment, was doing exactly what I like. I said,
teasingly: Well, in your case that probably means rereading Proust. Her eyes
widened in alarm: How did you guess? On another occasion we discussed
Simenon. I had mainly read the Maigret stories; she had mainly read the romans
durs, which she greatly admired. I asked her to recommend one. She was, as in
everything, quite firm. Chez Krull. This conversation must have taken place
before 1999, as the Fnac sticker on the back of the copy I bought on my next trip
to Paris is priced in francs: 37.70, reduced from the publishers price of 39.90. I
remember taking the novel on a few holidays but never getting around to it.
Something about the title kept putting me off: that cosy French chez followed by a
harsher, doubly foreign surname. But I must have started it once, because there
was a boarding-card stub stuck in at the end of the first chapter. So, twenty years
on, it was time finally to follow Anitas advice.
That harsh, clashing title turns out to be part of the point. The novel is set in a small
French town in the north, towards Belgium; the time must be the late 1930s. The
original Krull, Cornelius, was German, but has spent four-fifths of his life in France,
and became naturalised before the First World War; he still barely speaks French
and is losing his German. A weaver, he had spent a peripatetic time before settling,
as a man does, for no apparent reason, in a hut among the reed-beds. He scratched
out an existence making baskets; largely mute, pipe-smoking, he still does, with a
hunchbacked and equally mute assistant. He married the illegitimate daughter of a
woman from the South who kept a bar on the canal, fathered by a passing man
from Alsace. The Krulls there are two daughters, Anna (30) and Elisabeth (17), and
one son, Joseph (25), born on either side of the Great War have expanded the bar
to include an picerie and a bargees chandlery. They live at the very edge of town,
near a lock, where the yellow trams turn round. The complex genealogy, legal
status and time-line are important. Despite several decades of scrupulously honest
existence Joseph has done his French military service the Krulls are still regarded
as outsiders: they confirm this themselves, when every Sunday they walk into town
to the Protestant temple. They survive mainly on the passing trade of bargees, who,
while scarcely enlightened, lack the prejudices of the town, and are happy to stock
up chez Krull before the next stage of their journey. The Krulls precarious existence
is contrasted with that of their only friends, another German immigrant family, the
Schoofs, who run a butter and cheese shop. They have assimilated better: only
French is spoken in the shop, and it seems that the town has decided partly from
the name that the Schoofs are in fact Dutch. On such nuances do lives and
livelihoods depend.

Cousin Hans arrives from Germany on the first page, preceded by a letter from his
father. Hans regards himself as a pure Krull, and is everything the impure Krulls
are not: he is cynical, mendacious, scrounging and loud-mouthed. His first act, on
moving in, is brutally to seduce the underage Elisabeth. He borrows money from his
aunt and bullies the timid Joseph, who is studying for his medical exams. He goes to
see Pierre Schoof, breaks the shop rules by loudly talking German, and when
hustled into a back office, asks to borrow money: a large part of his fathers fortune,
he reveals, is tied up in Belgium, and he needs to wire 5000 francs immediately in
order to release it. (Nowadays, this scam arrives regularly into email inboxes, and
still works; its good to see the original, face-to-face version.) There is, of course, no
money in Belgium; Hans spends the loan freely in town, and never mentions
repayment. His behaviour alarms the French Krulls. He lies casually, and confesses
those lies just as casually; he also forged that letter of introduction from his father,
who died 15 years previously. But, worse than all this, he blatantly and deliberately
offends against the first law of the immigrant: do not draw attention to yourself. And
by drawing attention to himself, Hans Krull also draws attention to those impure
relatives of his who live beside the canal where the town runs out.
Simenon lays out with ruthless exactitude the way selfish, conscience-free greed
exploits modest, hospitable decency which is, I realise, just as I put it into those
words, a frequent Brooknerian theme. As is the wider notion that those, like Hans,
who take life less seriously than others are better equipped to survive it. But this is
Simenon, so there is less interiority and more violence: I cant remember the body
of a raped and murdered girl being fished out of a canal in Anitas work. Yet though
this is a roman dur, we are never far from Brooknerland: the world of the immigrant,
of navigating cautiously in a foreign country foreign, even if you have been born
and done your military service there. I can imagine Anita admiring Simenons grasp
of the restless dynamic between autochthon and immigrant, especially when
anything goes wrong. An outbreak of typhoid? Even though Joseph is a victim, he is
deemed the carrier. Virtue is turned into vice: if the immigrant doesnt work hard, he
is a scrounger; if he does, he is money-minded and avaricious. Simenon well
understands what spurs and then animates a rising swell of racist indignation. A
stone is thrown through the window, a picket is mounted by children, a drunken
woman establishes a false narrative, a doorstep is smeared with shit, a dead cat is
found hanging from the bell-pull, the words ASSASSINS and A MORT are daubed on
the shops blind. The police are only half-helpful: as one investigating officer says to
another, It smells of Kraut in here. The Krulls decide not inaccurately that Hans
is the bringer, or at least aggravator, of their misfortune, and attempt to pack him
back to Germany. But Hans declines the role of scapegoat, and so the novel moves
to a grim conclusion which, though emotionally logical, I doubt you would guess
(and which I shant give away).
Simon Leys, that wise Belgian Sinologist, critic and novelist, rightly notes, in The Hall
of Uselessness, Simenons ability to achieve unforgettable effects by ordinary
means. His language is poor and bare (like the language of the unconscious) It
would be difficult to make an anthology of his best pages: he does not have best
pages, he only has better novels, in which everything hangs together without a
single seam. What typically helps produce his unforgettable results is a tight unity
of place and time: in most of Simenons books, what might be happening in Paris,
let alone the outside world, is rarely a consideration. Chez Krull is a departure from
that norm: the outside world impinges forcefully. Borders are crossed (the novel
even ends in Italy); we hear of Hans in Belgium and Hans in Germany. What is his
stated reason for refusing to return there? It made my head jolt back. Because
there was talk of putting me in a concentration camp. The words camp de
concentration occur four times in the novel (in a different lie, Hanss long-dead
father has recently been put in one). I checked the date of the book: Simenon
finished it at La Rochelle on 27 July 1938. What was all that about most people
being ignorant of concentration camps until after the war? It is there in the popular
fiction of the day.

Books travel strangely through time, sometimes remaining just themselves,

sometimes picking up an extra charge and weight from the circumstances in which
they are read. I was reading Chez Krull not many months after the Brexit vote and
what appeared to be its immediate social repercussions: the wall-daubings, the
increase in racial abuse, the throwing of shit at foreign women, the arson of a halal
butcher, the licensed aggro of English patriots, the killing of a Pole in Harlow. Even
in my strongly Remain part of London, I noticed some of its effects: for instance, the
way Eastern European builders now lowered their voices rather than shouting at one
another in cheery Slavic accents. I am well into bus-pass age, but am largeish and
evidently white, and felt abashed when receiving nervous glances on pavements
from smaller, less white women. The world of Chez Krull is a common, shared one.
And some of those Polish builders might have come here from the same place (if for
more commercial reasons) as Brookners parents, back before the Hitler war, as
some used to call it.
Referendum Day fell strangely, smack between the birthday of my Francophile
father (22 June) and my Francophile mother (24 June), both long dead. That
evening, after the polls had closed, there were eight of us at supper; all had voted
Remain, while feeling little enthusiasm for those who had publicly argued our cause:
Cameron, Osborne and the Incredible Vanishing Man who was leading Labour. But
both campaigns had been rampantly mendacious, and built on the armature of fear.
Towards the end, I asked the table: If it all goes wrong, who will you hate the most:
Gove, Johnson, or Farage? Gove was beneath numerical notice; Johnson got seven
votes; I put my own marker against Farage. In the context of Brexit, Johnson seemed
to me just a chancer; Farage, on the other hand, had been poisoning the well for
years, with his fake man-in-pub chaff, his white paranoia and low-to-mid-level
racism (isnt it hard to hear English spoken on a train nowadays?). But of course
Nigel cant really be a racist, can he, because hes got a German wife? (Except that
shes now chucked him out for the Usual Reasons.) Without Farages covert and
overt endorsement, the smothered bonfire of xenophobia would not have burst into
open flame on 23 June. After the killing of Arkadiusz Jwik in Harlow, there was
television footage of a group of Polish mourners. They spoke quietly and decently
dont draw attention to yourself! but I was glad when a youngish Pole said: And
there is one other person responsible. I wont give his name. ( pause) Yes, I will. Its
Nigel Farage. A day or two after the referendum, Farage proudly announced that we
had got our independence back without a single bullet being fired. Yes apart from
the three fired into Jo Cox MP from the home-made gun of an English patriot.
Not that I didnt nearly vote for Johnson (at the dinner referendum, that is). For
years I had been vaguely in favour of him. He was sui generis (as he would
doubtless have put it himself), funny on Have I Got News for You, unpompous. He
hadnt done much as London mayor, except to rebrand Kens red bicycle project as
Boriss blue bicycle project, but he didnt seem an objectionable cheerleader for the
city. And he couldnt possibly be a racist either, could he, because hes more than a
bit Turkish himself? Then there was a slight family reason for cutting him some
slack. Whenever anyone slagged him off in my presence, I would say: Well, my
brother taught about twenty future MPs when he was at Oxford, and he told me that
Boris was the nicest as well as the cleverest of them. At the time, it felt like an
answer; no longer. My brother now lives in France, his British pension has fallen in
value by 10 per cent, and hes become a bargaining chip. Maybe his ex-pupil could
post him some cash.

When Johnson covered Brussels for the Daily Telegraph, he was part of a decades-
long press campaign, whose main features were straight bananas, unelected
bureaucrats (does no one ever wonder about Britains unelected bureaucrats?) and
high-end expenses (while our MPs merely put in for duck-houses, moat-clearance
and jumbo TV sets). And as anti-Zionism may often disguise anti-Semitism, so
Europhobia proves a handy disguise for wider xenophobia. But of course it wasnt
just the press. Few prime ministers in the years since Edward Heath signed us into
the EEC have found it either natural or politically expedient to enthuse about
Europe. I grew tired of hearing Major and then Blair insisting that we were at the
heart of Europe when we hadnt joined the euro or signed up to the Schengen
Agreement. Politicians never tried to sell Europe to the British people as anything
other than an advantageous commercial joint venture. Ours has been an entirely
pragmatic membership, never an idealistic one. We never bought into Europe as
a grand projet, or even an expression of fraternity. All this makes it hard for many
here to imagine that idealism about the EU still has breath and life within Europe.
After the Brexit vote, many of my European friends expressed disbelief and
astonishment. It seemed to them that we had run mad in the noonday sun.
Before 1973, De Gaulle twice blocked Britains admittance to the Community. Oh,
we said to ourselves, thats just because he didnt like the way he was treated in
London during the war (when Churchill declared that the heaviest cross he had to
bear was the Cross of Lorraine). Some of De Gaulles reasons were indeed personal
and historical going back as far as the humiliating Fashoda Incident of 1898. But
his expression of them was precise. The British, he said, should not be allowed to
join Europe because they were not communautaire not community-minded. And
now, decades on, we can see that he was right. We have been very unsatisfactory
Europeans, the rude boys farting in the corner. Give us this exemption, that opt-out,
we want our money back. In 2011, I went to the European Parliament for the first
and only time; I was chairing the European Book Prize. It was a time when the
European project was under great strain, and there was fear the euro might
collapse. Even I, as an outsider, could smell the deep anxiety. At dinner I was put
next to a high German politician whose name I didnt catch. He was lucid and
perceptive about the current dangers. At one point I asked him: Through all this
crisis, over the past two or three years, can you think of anything the British have
done or said which has been of any help or use to Europe? He considered the
question for a while, and eventually shook his head, more in sadness than anything
else. No, he answered. I later discovered his identity: Martin Schulz, now running
against Angela Merkel. As he put it back in October, when president of the European
Parliament: I refuse to imagine a Europe where lorries and hedge funds are free to
cross borders but citizens are not.
Liam Fox resigned on 14 October 2011, four days before I won the Booker Prize.
There was probably no causal connection, but it meant that my publisher could buy
me the original of a Peter Brookes cartoon which appeared in the Times. It shows a
House of Commons green bench, deserted apart from two figures. Fox, eyes staring
and face aghast, is reading out his resignation speech, while next to him a colleague
hides his face behind a book: it is, appropriately and gratifyingly, The Sense of an
Ending. The cause of Foxs resignation seemed to me utterly career-terminating; and
it struck me as odd as it usually does when ministers resign that if their
duplicitous actions deem them unworthy of representing their country, why, why,
are they still deemed worthy of representing their constituents? Does the electorate
deserve some lower level of trust? But then the days of ministers
resigning, really resigning (Profumo, Carrington) seem to be gone. Arse sticks to
seat like never before. Look at Boris Johnson: sacked by the Times for fabricating a
quote, sacked by a Conservative party leader for lying, openly lying in the
referendum (the NHS pledge, the zillion Turkish immigrants on their way here),
and he ends up as foreign secretary. True, Sir Henry Wotton famously defined an
ambassador as an honest gentleman sent to lie abroad for the good of his country,
but that hardly implies that the man in overall charge of Her Majestys ambassadors
should trade so often in professional porkies. I remember talking to a Tory insider
when Cameron and Johnson were first seen as rivals for the leadership. Boris thinks
Davids a lightweight, and David thinks Boris is a loose cannon, said my source.
And the trouble is theyre both right. Now Johnson, Fox and David Davis, another
whose career seemed well washed up, are in charge of our Euro negotiations. On
the eve of the referendum, Johnson claimed that Europes plan for us was like
Hitlers (Gove also used the Nazi analogy). Along with John Redwood he of the
velveteen disdain (Thats a very BBC question, he tells Kirsty Wark patronisingly)
Johnson has been a big proponent of the prosecco and cheese argument: that the
Italians and the French will be so scared of losing the British market for these
staples, they will be obliged to cut us a deal. Johnson claimed that the British drank
300 million litres of prosecco a year. Unfortunately, the entire production of
prosecco last year came to 450 million litres, of which UK sales were 35 million.
Now, puffed up with promotion, but still idle about fact, he seems as lightweight as
he is loose. And that ruffled Etonian charm doesnt work so well outside Anglo-
Saxon countries. As Guy Verhofstadt and Wolfgang Schuble put it, in weary
disbelief, after their first official encounter with him: We are both accustomed to
having a high degree of respect for foreign ministers.

Hans Krull doesnt allude to the Nazis, or to the general political situation in
Germany; but he does talk about the Jews. It is worth quoting the exchange at
length. Joseph is complaining to Hans that every time something bad happens in the
town, the Krulls get the blame just because were foreigners. Hans, like a man
who is the repository of truth and has no doubts about it, insists that Joseph is
wrong: Its not because youre foreigners Its because you arent foreign enough
or else that you are too foreign.

Joseph is baffled: We arent foreign enough?

Hans explains further:

Or too foreign. You arent open enough about it. Youre ashamed to be foreign. Just like youre
ashamed to be Protestant. You move in here and want to be just like everyone else. You imitate
them cack-handedly, but you know itll never work. And they sense that. I bet that on the 14th of
July you fly more flags than everyone else and on Corpus Christi you scatter rose petals in the
street. People resent that more than if you did nothing, if you just simply lowered your blinds.

Joseph objects: But if we were more aggressive, that would make it worse.

Hans replies:

Its not a question of being aggressive, just sure of yourselves. Like when the Jews go and live
somewhere else. Theyre not ashamed of their names, or their noses. Theyre not ashamed of
their business sense, or their greed. Thats how it is and not otherwise. So much the worse for
other people and what they think. They live among themselves and dont care if kids pull faces at
them in the street.

Simenon signed off the novel four months before Kristallnacht; and Hans is hardly
being set up as a repository of any truth other than his own. But Josephs bafflement
reflects the insoluble dilemma of the immigrant: damned if you do (try to be like
them), damned if you dont, and equally damned if you take up some midway
position. Here in Britain today, there is a dismal clarity to the official position. You
save children from a burning house you get chucked out; you care for your British
husband and British children for decades, but also spend time abroad caring for
your relatives you get chucked out; you misplace a comma while filling up an 85-
page form, or fail to come up with a historic gas bill you get chucked out. Some,
either fearful or disgusted, are already chucking themselves out in order to keep
their families together.

But this is not exactly a change of policy: the Home Office under Theresa May had a
routine policy of appealing, all the way to the top, in any immigration case that
went against them. Now it is as if the Brexit vote has given them permission to
purify the country except when there is popular outcry and mass petition in a
particular case. And what is the Brexiteers vision of our future, purified nation? It
seems to be a mixture of Merrie England, Toytown and Singapore. Outward-looking
in the sense of open for business, which tends to mean up for sale. Inward-
looking in other senses. Morally depleted by cutting ourselves off from Europe and
sheltering beneath Trumps fragrant armpit. What might we end up as? Perhaps a
kind of Bigger Belgium with quasi-American values also, as Belgium might be, torn
into separate nations again. Do we seriously think that those who voted for Brexit
are going to be better off under this state-shrinking government? (I cant recall the
slogan Poorer but Happier being used.) That the NHS will be properly funded? That
the increasing numbers on zero-hours will not be exploited further? That the old
winners will be the new, even bigger winners? Do we seriously believe that Mrs May
will construct a country that works for everyone? To the pieties of our current
political elite, I much prefer the old Portuguese proverb: If shit were valuable, the
poor would be born without arses.

Back in the run-up to the referendum, English patriots, in the guise of football
supporters at the European Championship, marched round Marseille chanting: Fuck
Off Europe, Were All Voting Out. Similarly, Mrs May doesnt like too much
cosmopolitanism: If you believe youre a citizen of the world, she contends, youre
a citizen of nowhere. Simon Leys, who was born Pierre Ryckmans in Belgium and
proceeded via Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong to Australia, where he lived from
1970 until his death in 2014, understood both the paradox of parochialism and the
danger of national culture. That paradox had been well expressed by Borges: The
writer who was born in a big country is always in danger of believing that the
culture of his native country encompasses all his needs. Paradoxically, he therefore
runs the risk of becoming provincial.

Leys elaborated on this: just as Goethe lived in Weimar then a town somewhat
smaller than Queanbeyan but kept up not just with the English and French literary
scenes, but with the latest Chinese novels as well, so cosmopolitanism is more
easily achieved in a provincial setting, whereas life in a metropolis can insidiously
result in a form of provincialism. He concludes:

Culture is born out of exchanges and thrives on differences. In this sense, national culture is a
self-contradiction, and multiculturalism a pleonasm. The death of culture lies in self-centredness,
self-sufficiency and isolation. (Here, for instance, the first concern it seems should not be to
create an Australian culture, but a cultured Australia.)

Boris Johnson suavely assures both us and Johnny Foreigner out there, that we are
leaving the European Union, but we are not leaving Europe. Well, it depends what
that means. And also what Europe decides. But I would rather listen to the young
female bassoonist whom I ran into as I was coming out of the polling station on
Referendum Day. She had played in period orchestras all over Europe; we talked
about music and literature, and she told me how Mahler and Shostakovich wrote for
the bassoon. When she mentioned enjoying a short story of mine, I replied soppy-
stern that I hoped she understood that none of my readers was allowed to vote
for Brexit. God, no, she said. All the musicians she knew had had their lives
enriched by being in the European Union and the interchanges it had made
possible; they were shitting themselves that the vote might go the wrong way.

Like many Remainers, I feel complicated emotions about Brexit, as I did about the
Iraq war. Those of us who were against the war wanted Bush and Blair and the MPs
who voted for it to have their faces rubbed in their own folly, to be proved
massively, damagingly wrong, to enjoy vast hubris; while at the same time we
hoped that this would not involve too many British soldiers or innocent civilians (or
innocent Iraqi soldiers) getting killed; we also hoped that the coalition had a victory
strategy, and that the wider regional consequences would not be too disastrous.
(And look how all that turned out.) Similarly, I now hope that as seems likely the
smug confidence of the leading Brexiteers, and their arrogantly aggressive pre-
negotiation attitudes will run up against European reality, and be well punished.
That Europe will make us stump up all we owe, that a hard Brexit will ensue, that
the European Union will make us wait as long as Canada had to wait for a trade
deal, that Trump will make us a humiliatingly America-First offer. That those parts of
Left Behind Britain who voted to quit the EU will discover that the bright new future
without all those Poles and Romanians and Bulgarians means that they will now
have to pick strawberries, grade potatoes and care for the demented, and that,
capitalism being what it is, the wages wont be any higher. That the good folk of
Cornwall and Ebbw Vale, who overwhelmingly voted Leave despite major EU funding
both past and promised, and whose councillors immediately petitioned central
government to match those lost foreign handouts, will be told that, unfortunately,
the money has run out. And so on. But I also wish that somehow my country comes
out of it all without too much collateral damage. The Iraq war is not an encouraging
parallel.

And another thing. Can we please get over the solemn-voiced mantra of The People
Have Spoken? The People were asked a question by an over-confident political elite,
allowed a monosyllabic reply, whereupon a slightly different version of the same
elite chooses to interpret that monosyllable in a way that fits its own political and
internal-party interests. As for the much invoked Will of the People, there was
obviously no common will. And the Will of the People leads all too easily to
Enemies of the People, that Stalinist phrase now embraced by the Daily Mail,
the Pravda of the right. The Mail, which gave its readers thirty pages of more
important news and comment before deigning to report the conviction of Jo Coxs
murderer, and which has itself now been delisted as a source of reliable information
by Wikipedia. That squalid headline resulted in extra security being required for the
judiciary. But at least its English judges being protected by English policeman
against English patriots. So thats all right then.
The day after the vote, I was walking in my local park when a man cycled towards
me straight over a NO CYCLING sign. I gave him a routine, unthinking glare, to which
he responded with a shout of Oi, Flaubert, where are you now? A rare North
London cry of Brexiteering triumphalism. The following day, the English rugby team
beat the Wallabies in Australia to register a 3-0 series victory. An Australian
newspaper headlined the result: Now Another Continent Hates You As Well. We
shouldnt underestimate this reaction to our current national trajectory. We have our
sentimental vision of how others see us: as correct, humorous, eccentric, polite,
tolerant, phlegmatic and so on trs British. But historically, they have equally if
not more often thought of us as cold, arrogant, violent, self-interested, racist and
hypocritical. A French woman who has lived in England for thirty years told me in
the days after the referendum that she was thinking of moving back to France. And
though she is the gentlest of persons, and not at all interested in politics, she
added: Now people will hate you again. Note the again. We may be in for
some jours durs.