Low life | 17 January 2019

We drove down from the hills to visit friends of friends with a house by the sea and on the journey I experienced all the usual mixed feelings of a trip to the coast. On departure: the not unsnobbish excitement at the prospect of a day out on the glamorous French Riviera. On arrival: the disenchantment with the traffic queuing in the cramped streets, the hideous, jerry-built apartment blocks, the boulder beaches, the dog shit, the prevailing chill of vulgar, insentient wealth.

Always the disenchantment brings to mind that passage in Cyril Connolly’s only novel, The Rock Pool (1936), which is set on the Côte d’Azur. The central character is called Naylor. Naylor has a hangover. After several days and nights of partying, this one is his worst yet. It is accompanied by a terrible disillusionment:

The intolerable melancholy, the dinginess, the corruption of that tainted inland sea overcame him. He felt the breath of wickedness and disillusion; how many civilisations had staled on that bright promontory! Sterile Phoenicians, commercial-minded Greeks, hysterical Russians, decayed English, drunken Americans, had mingled with the autochthonous gangsters — everything that was vulgar, acquisitive, and decadent in capitalism had united there, crooks, gigolos, gold-diggers and captains of industry through twenty-five centuries had sprayed their cupidity and bad taste over it.