Category: writers
Going to a house of worship to see Christopher Hitchens is a bit like going to a house of ill repute to see a bishop. So naturally I drove to Temple Judea in Coral Gables last night to catch the literary journalist.
And I saw something I'd never seen before: Hitchens smile. It was before he took the podium, while standing next to Dave Barry - who introduced him and then led him in conversation (noting, at one point, that both their mothers committed suicide).
Hitchens was his usual curmudgeonly self, complaining about horoscopes in the Washington Post ("astrology in a journal of record") and suggesting that Ayn Rand's novels "are more difficult to read than they were to write." He answered the first question about his (anti) religious views - the questioner surprisingly compared him to Malcolm Muggeridge - but when more came he brushed them aside with a phrase that became a mantra: "Wrong book."
Even talking about himself (he was plugging his new memoir) he gave the impression of not just a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders, but the rare individual with the mental capacity to accurately calculate that weight. At the same time, he was, occasionally, almost playful, and he ended the evening in a way that I imagine few evenings at the temple have ever ended: with a recitation of limericks.
One hundred and nine years ago today, V.S. Pritchett was born in Ipswich, England. Known as a master of the short story, Pritchett was also a great memoirist and travel writer. (Oh for the days when travel writing was an accepted part of a writer's life.)
Midnight Oil, his second memoir, is a coming-of-age cum travel story, as it describes his working in Paris, learning another language, the difficult but intensely rewarding process of becoming intimate with another culture.
He later traveled to Spain and - through his books Marching Spain and The Spanish Temper - became something of an authority on the country. But it was his book Foreign Faces - about a trip through the Iron Curtain countries in the early '60s - that started me on my life-long fascination with Eastern Europe.
The book ends with chapters on Turkey and Iran. Of Istanbul he writes: "One realizes there are two breeds in Turkey: those who carry and those who sit. No one sits quite so relaxedly, expertly, beatifically as a Turk; he sits with every inch of his body; his very face sits."
When I visited Istanbul in 1997, the men were still sitting, though now talking on cell phones while they did.
Yesterday, in case you missed it, was the birthday of Eric Newby (1919-2006), the last of the jaunty, gentleman travel writers.
A Brit, he traveled with a feeling of, not exactly entitlement, but rather security, that came with empire, and a self-deprecating sense of humor that befit an adventurer who began his career in the world of fashion.
His first adventure (a word that today is as overused as it is misused, though in Newby's life it had real meaning) came at the age of 19, when he got a job on the Finnish windjammer Moshulu as it sailed from Ireland to Australia around Cape Horn. His book about this experience, The Last Grain Race, beautifully and hilariously captures a dying world. Though the Moshulu lives, docked on the Delaware River in Philadelphia where it serves as a restaurant and bar.
He escaped from a prisoner of war camp in Italy during World War II and was helped by a young Slovenian woman who became his wife. This too he wrote about in Love and War in the Apennines.
His most famous book is A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, a characteristically understated title for an alternately gripping and Pythonesque account of a climbing expedition in Afghanistan. I carried the book with me last month as I walked Japan's Kiso Road, just to keep things in perspective.
Evelyn Waugh was born on this day in 1903 in London, England.
I discovered him in college, in a course on The Modern British Novel. We read Decline and Fall and A Handful of Dust. It took me a while to appreciate the humor, but I was immediately taken by his world and the language he used to create it: spare but at the same time elegant.
Of course, my professor never mentioned his travel writing. I came across it on my own, picking up a copy of When the Going Was Good in a Left Bank bookstore at the start of a post-graduate wanderjahr. It seemed a validation of my desire to become a travel writer.
Later I discovered more serious travel writers - Robert Byron, Norman Douglas, Freya Stark - but none of their books replaced Waugh's in my affections. Part of it was probably the circumstances in which I read it, but much of it was simply my admiration for the writing. There is a passage from "A Pleasure Cruise in 1929" - a description of the deserted Spanish-American Exposition in Seville - that I read to every travel writing class I teach as an example of how clear-eyed observation - piling one telling detail upon another - allows you to show instead of tell.
There are lines of Waugh's that occur to me on a regular basis. "I am almost deaf now," he wrote in his later years to Nancy Mitford. "Such a relief." Naturally, I am very fond of his "I prefer all but the very worst travel books to all but the very best novels." And every time I fly somewhere I am reminded of one of his fictional heroes sitting at an airport: "Scott-King was hungry, weary and dispirited for he was new to the amenities of modern travel."
Jan Morris, the doyenne of travel writers, turns 83 today (born 22 years to the day after Graham Greene).
I had the great pleasure of meeting Jan in Key West in 1991, when she was speaking at the annual literary conference. We had an interview scheduled after her panel, and I remember standing patiently off to the side while she graciously made herself available to her many fans. When she finally extricated herself, she apologized profusely for keeping me waiting. I have never met a famous person who was so considerate of the people around her. A few days later I ran into her as she was doing her power walk down Duval Street. She was then 65.
In all her years of travel - which began as James Morris, getting the scoop of Edmund Hillary's ascent of Mt. Everest - she never lost her tremendous capacity for delight and wonder. For all her sharpness as an observer and brilliance as a writer, she has, over the decades, made 'kindness' the central theme of both her work and her life.
In her last book, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, she wrote: "There are people everywhere who form a Fourth World, or a diaspora of their own. They are the lordly ones! They come in all colours. They can be Christians or Hindus or Muslims or Jews or pagans or atheists. They can be young or old, men or women, soldiers or pacifists, rich or poor. They may be patriots, but they are never chauvinists. They share with each other, across all the nations, common values of humour and understanding. When you are among them you know you will not be mocked or resented, because they will not care about your race, your faith, your sex or your nationality, and they suffer fools if not gladly, at least sympathetically. They laugh easily. They are easily grateful. They are never mean. They are not inhibited by fashion, public opinion or political correctness. They are exiles in their own communities because they are always in a minority, but they form a mighty nation, if they only knew it."
Yesterday I started writing a book proposal. It went well until I got to the part where I was supposed to list the audiences the book would appeal to and the reasons why. Everybody who likes to read? People who don't have cable?
I tried to imagine writers from the past similarly engaged. Freya Stark assuring her publisher that the sun-starved Brits will snap up every copy of her forthcoming A Winter in Arabia. Graham Greene confidently claiming that Journey Without Maps will appeal to "everyone who has ever dreamed of visiting Liberia."