Travel Blog

David and I met for dinner at Books & Books last night before the reading by Richard Greene, editor of Graham Greene: A Life in Letters. David was the perfect companion as he had once run into the great novelist - literally and quite forcefully - on a street in London. David has a wonderful essay about becoming a writer that is framed by a drole and perceptive account of this collision. Philip Lopate in a workshop called it "a little miracle of a piece," but he has been unable to get it published.

Tonight David talked of the '60s, and his student days at Columbia. As an English major, his teachers had included Lionel Trilling - "He always looked weary. He had these big bags under his eyes." - and Edward Said. "He taught the novel - from Dickens to Wolfe. We eventually realized that every novel we read was about the futility of marriage. And then, later, he got a divorce."

He talked of going downtown to see Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis; walking into the West End Bar and finding Allen Ginsberg. One night he went to a party at James Baldwin's apartment - the novelist standing at the top of the stairs, the collar of his jacket up, and greeting everyone with "How ya doin' man?" I've urged David to write a book-length memoir, his life has been so interesting. But of course it's missing the mandatory element for publishers of abuse and/or addiction.

Then the reading began. Micthell spoke a bit loudly, explaining that the previous night 400 people had descended on the store to hear Artie Lange (what did I tell you?) and one of them had stolen the microphone. About 50 had assembled to hear about Greene.

Mitchell introduced Bernard Diederich, a local, rather Hemingwayesque, man who had been a newspaper correspondent in Haiti and a good friend and correspondent of Greene. (After the reading, he told us that Greene - the great world traveler - spoke no foreign languages, with the exception of very elementary French.) He in turn introduced the letters editor (who is unrelated to the novelist).

The editor's take on Greene was that he was much kinder and more generous than his reputation suggests. He turned his Russian royalties over to two widows whose writer husbands had died in the Gulag. He wrote 2,000 letters a year - using a fountain pen at the beginning of his career and a dictaphone toward the end. Apparently if you wrote a letter to him, he would write a letter back.

In the question period, someone inevitably mentioned the decline of letter writing, and the presumed disappearance of collected letters. To the statement that no one saves their e-mail, Greene said: "I do. I print it out." He talked of how Bellow had worried that the novel was going to die, and noted that it hasn't. "You just trust human beings to keep at it," he said. "To do something that's worth doing."

I didn't ask him about blogging.