Author found publishing gold with memoir
Peter Mayle, author: b June 14, 1939, Brighton, England; m (1) Pamela, (2) Nicola, (3) Jennie; 3s, 2d, d January 18, 2018, Lourmarin, France, aged 78.
Peter Mayle transformed his fumbling adjustment to life in the south of France into the best-selling A Year in Provence and other books, sending thousands of people to the Mediterranean in search of the sun, food and wine.
Mayle had been an advertising executive in New York and his native England before he and his wife bought a ramshackle stone house in Provence in 1986. ‘‘We saw it one afternoon and had mentally moved in by dinner,’’ he wrote in A Year in Provence.
A comical cast of local tradesmen came and went, working only when in the mood, as Mayle’s 200-year-old farmhouse remained uninhabitable. ‘‘Every time I sat in one room and tried to work on the novel,’’ he told the New York Times in 1991, ‘‘the builder would come in and say, ‘We’re knocking a hole in that wall, so you’ll have to go somewhere else’.’’
Mayle made little progress on the novel he hoped to write, writing letters to his agent describing his frustrations. The agent suggested he shelve the novel and write about life in Provence. Soon enough, Mayle developed a growing admiration for the Mediterranean pace of life, built around visits to the town cafe, where timetables were ignored in favour of conversation, crusty bread and a bottle of wine.
He wrote A Year in Provence as a chronicle of a calendar year, beginning with a New Year’s Day lunch and ending with a Christmas feast – in Mayle’s new home, renovated at long last.
Published in Britain in 1989 and in the US a year later, it was expected to sell only a few thousand copies. But the book caught on through word of mouth, as readers were charmed by Mayle’s evocation of a rural world where the only thing that seemed to matter was the quality of life.
Practically every page throbbed with mouth-watering descriptions of the local food and wine.
A local restaurant owner ‘‘rhapsodized over the menu: foie gras, lobster mousse, beef en croute, salad dressed in virgin oil, hand-picked cheeses, desserts of miraculous lightness, digestifs. It was a gastronomic aria which he performed at each table, kissing the tips of his fingers so often that he must have blistered his lips.’’
More than 5 million copies of A Year in Provence were sold worldwide.
A second bestseller, Toujours Provence, followed in 1991.A British TV series was based on A Year in Provence, and soon hordes of visitors were arriving in southern France, crowding the streets, knocking on Mayle’s door and casting shadows over the idyllic life he had described.
‘‘These visitors have become pests,’’ he said in 1993. ‘‘We cannot take it anymore and we want to be out of here by the end of the summer.’’
There was an inevitable backlash from local residents and British expatriates, who accused Mayle of ruining their Provencal paradise. ‘‘What did you learn from this book?’’ a French neighbour told The Post in 1994. ‘‘That we eat a lot, that we drink a lot, that everything happens slowly.’’
Mayle moved to Amagansett, on New York’s Long Island, for several years, writing novels and other books evoking the life of Provence. He returned to France in the late 1990s, settling several miles from his original house but careful not to reveal the exact location.
Peter Gareth Mayle was born in 1939, in Brighton, England. His father worked for British foreign service. Mayle left school at 16 and by his early 20s was working in New York for a firm led by British advertising tycoon David Ogilvy. After considerable success, Mayle set out on his own in the 1970s to write books, specialising at first in children’s titles, often on such sensitive subjects as sex, divorce and death.
His humorous children’s guide to reproduction, Where Did I Come From?, sold more than 2 million copies. He also published several books in the Wicked Willie series, featuring a talking cartoon penis.
Mayle eventually published the novel he first set out to write in Provence, Hotel Pastis (1993), along with several others, including A Good Year, about an Englishman who enters the wine business, and a series of mystery novels.
In 2006, Mayle described the kind of life he learned to lead in Provence after a high-pressure career in advertising. ‘‘I don’t want to do 50 pushups before breakfast,’’ he said. ‘‘Instead, I want to enjoy the things that one can enjoy at my age: friendship, food and drink, the beauties of nature. The only thing I want from tomorrow is that it should be as good as today.’’
– Washington Post