Michèle Roberts – Friday 20 May 1949 – still living as of this post

Introduction

My favorite literary form is short fiction. I appreciate the skill in writing an effective piece within a limited number of pages or words. I have a number of short fiction anthologies, but few single author short fiction collections. At the 2001 Edinburgh International Festival, I bought several single-author collections of short stories, including Michèle Roberts’ Playing Sardines. She was on a panel with Elena Lappin and in my journal I wrote: “Michèle was more animated than Elena, but both were interesting women. Michèle comes to her writing from a feminist perspective and Elena from a Jewish one. They did readings from their latest works. Both of the excerpts had wit, though Michèle’s turned dark at the end. Both bring a sense of identity to their writings.” – personal journal, Friday 24 August 2001. Michèle signed my copy of Playing Sardines as follows: “dear Adrean with best wishes Michèle”.


Dedication in Playing Sardines

“In memoriam Lorna Sage”

Excerpt from Fluency in Playing Sardines

“It is odd, now that I think about it, that I have never considered Paris as a possible home. Yet I’m sure it could have been perfectly feasible. As a photographer I could have worked anywhere. My French is not as fluent as I’d like, but I speak well enough to get by. My French always improves, anyway, when I’m actually in France, surrounded by French sounds; soaked in them; saturated. Perhaps I’ve simply hung on to holiday cliché, a wornout dream of romance, wanted to keep Paris as my special Somewhere Else, my paradise, the golden city in which I experience life as intensively and ecstatically as though I were on acid. This visionary bliss is not designed to survive daily reality. If I lived in Paris then I’d have to become a tourist to somewhere else instead. London, probably.

I’ve carefully kept Paris as my place of pilgrimage by associating it with the pursuit of particular beloved artist or writer ghosts, tracking down their flats and studios and favourite cafés, or with epiphanies of various sorts: those four small Vuillards I discovered in the Musée d’Orsay last year, for example, on that June day smelling of hot dust, lime blossom and vanilla, that day when I wandered into the little gallery in the rue de Seine and met Pierre for the first time. I’ve gone to Paris with all my lovers, for doomed or magical or awkward weekends. Each different lover provided a different view of the city, different museums and art galleries for us to frequent, dawdling hand in hand or arm in arm, different cafés and bars for us to lounge in while we talked. And because I haven’t always had the courage of my convictions and desires, and so haven’t had all that many lovers, I cannot claim to know Paris very well. I need a map, a bus guide, a plan of the metro, to get me around. A few metro stations shine for ever with my lovers’ names superimposed on them, written up above the entrances to those labyrinthine underworlds in loops of stars.

I had assumed I was finished with Paris as a site of assignation. That I could return to it as just another destination and get to know it properly. No more secret passions. No more mad fantasies. I certainly never intended to fall in love again. All that was over and gone. The pain and suffering and loss – all finished. Now I would learn to love Paris as I loved London, with a modicum of calm. Now I’d visit Paris simply as a reasonable adult, as a professional photographer happily trawling the streets.”


Yesterday’s writer - Anaïs Nin
Tomorrow’s writer – Dorothy L. Sayers

Source: Roberts, Michèle, Playing Sardines. Virago, 2001. ISBN 1-86049-814-0. Excerpt: pages 61-62

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of Playing Sardines
Center: Michèle Roberts from the website michèleroberts.co.uk
Right: Signed title page of my personal copy of Playing Sardines