Travel Blog

Yesterday was the birthday of Cyril Connolly (born 1903); tomorrow is the birthday of H.L. Mencken (1880) - two great essayists, critics, magazine founders and bon vivants whom I didn't discover until after I'd left college. Many of my favorite writers were not taught to English majors.

Upon graduation I moved to Washington, DC, and started playing tennis at the public courts near Sidwell Friends School. One Sunday my friend Jack brought to the courts a book that had just arrived to the library where he worked: The Evening Colonnade by Cyril Connolly. He showed it to me rather like a jeweler presenting a precious stone. I was about to leave Washington to study French in Aix-en-Provence, and turning to page 20 I read: "'There is the first time we go abroad,' I wrote in Enemies of Promise, 'and the first time we go to Provence.'"

The year in France gave me a good working knowledge of French as well as a new-found fascination with America. (Saul Bellow wrote of how he got the idea for The Adventures of Augie March while living in Paris.) Back home, I bought a copy of H.L. Mencken's The American Language in a used bookshop in Philadelphia and read it like a novel, stopping occasionally to sketch caricatures in pencil in the margins. (I was also a big fan of Max Beerbohm, another writer not taught in college.) From there I moved on to Mencken's essays, memoirs and even short stories, like "A Girl from Red Lion, Pa." I was delighted to discover that he had often made the spring pilgrimage to Bethlehem - not far from my hometown of Phillipsburg - to hear the celebrated Bach choir.

So some of you can already guess what I'm going to do tomorrow: I'm going to forgive a sinner and wink at a homely girl.