Discoveries

BACK in 1962, John Hanson Mitchell was a 20-year-old student at the Sorbonne in Paris, but his real education and that of his friends “took place in cafes ... where we gathered each day to argue over literature, art and politics as if we knew what we were talking about.” Of his aspirations, he explains with a certain humility that “[l]ike many young Americans in Paris in that era, I had in mind that I would somehow be miraculously transformed into a writer in Europe.”

In the spring, Mitchell traveled with friends to the island of Corsica, where they stayed in a small, unassuming auberge called the Rose Cafe. The friends, being restless types, moved on after a few days, but Mitchell, who had been put up in a one-room stone cottage perched high above a cove behind the little restaurant, took a job there, cleaning fish, sweeping up and doing dishes. This not only kept him safe (or so he hoped) from the Vietnam War draft but also filled him with stories and memories that are still pungent and vivid nearly five decades later.

The “sharp resinous smell of laurel rose and thyme, of arbutus, broom, and eglantine” permeates the pages of this small sliver of a memoir. Mitchell tells us that “when you approach from the sea and the wind is right, you can smell the island before you actually see it.” He also conjures up the smell of the maquis, the island’s “scrubby thickets of small trees and shrubs,” and the sight of “ambiguous peaks” in the distance -- and the whole “rose-red island where blue-green valleys swept down to the sea, and sea rolled out to the wide azure sky.”

This is the writing of someone fully alive. Mitchell studied the characters who worked in or simply passed through the Rose Cafe -- the members of the old Corsican underground, “with their long-distance eyes”; the young woman whose “tiny silver crucifix” hung above her cleavage “like a talisman, as if to warn off ill-intentioned suitors”; “the man they called le Baron,” a local figure with “a deeply tanned face and silvery hair that he combed back over his ears like wings” and a mysterious past.

He even celebrates the dirty dishes coming into the cafe’s kitchen, where he washed them in a copper tub, “one load after another like wounded soldiers from the front.” He describes a haunted evening when a pensive Cuban named Mendoza sang a cante jondo, “the ‘deep song’ of gypsy tradition -- slow and sad and all in a minor key.... For the rest of that evening no one seemed happy anymore. Some dark dream out of the European sleep had been remembered.”

Mitchell spends his days swimming, sleeping, observing the passing parade and doing odd jobs. He plays brisca -- the local card game -- and boules, and he also learns a bit of cooking: bouillabaisse, squid stew, sea urchin salad and braised wild boar. He relishes the strange cheeses; the aperitifs made from island chestnuts; the wines, made from the native Corsican grape known as sciaccarellu; the unsettling, crazy-making winds. He writes a little about the history of the island, the tradition of revenge, the vendettas lasting hundreds and hundreds of years, the mazzeri, or Corsican zombies, that wander on the maquis at night.

Any sort of life that this young man from Englewood, N.J., may have reveled in after his splendid half-year in Corsica must have been infused with these memories; they certainly seem to have made a writer out of him. Mitchell’s metaphors remind a reader how rich and dimensional a metaphor can be when it emerges organically from deep within the thing observed.

The presence of wars -- those that raged both before and during his Corsican sojourn -- push and pull, not unlike the tides that surround the island, on the regulars at the Rose Cafe: Magda, from Poland; Herr Komandante, a food lover from Germany; le Baron, who is rumored to have played a nefarious role in the Vichy government.

“Characters such as those that once frequented the Rose Cafe hardly exist anymore in Europe,” Mitchell writes. “Language, social mores, attitudes, seemingly eternal fixed customs and beliefs have all changed dramatically.” And yet, “[t]he mountains and hills endure, the maquis continues to exhale its scented breath, and the dream of the place that was is well remembered.”