Travel Blog

I met Jonathan Raban for the first time in 1993, when I found myself in Seattle doing a story for the Sun-Sentinel. It was not a memorable interview; he had a low opinion of newspaper travel writing, which was partly why he bristled at being called a travel writer. He had brought the notebook from his trip to cover the Mississippi floods, and I remember being struck by the finished quality of it – not just full sentences but full paragraphs – and his claim that he never looked at it while writing the story. He insisted that the best way to write about a trip was to forget it and then reconstruct it. I suspected my editor wouldn’t have agreed.

Then in 2011 he came to Miami to teach a course for the Florida Center for the Literary Arts – on writing first person – and I emailed him asking if he’d like to meet. To my surprise, an email arrived suggesting dinner. So on the appointed evening I drove down to the Marriott Biscayne Bay – overlooking Trinity Cathedral – to pick him up. (When I had told him over the phone that he was next door to the Episcopal cathedral, he had said: “I could use an Episcopal cathedral.”) This time I was struck by how frail he appeared. An old-fashioned plaid sportcoat hung on his thin frame and a faded pink baseball cap sat on his head. He gave a kind of half handshake, cupping the ends of my fingers and ignoring the palm.

As soon as he climbed into my Honda he said: “I am extremely indebted to you. Not just for tonight, but for putting me on your list of the 20 best travel books.” So that explained it: He had come across my list of the best travel books of the 20^th century, which had appeared in the Sun-Sentinel in 1999.

I told him that I read the first page of “Mississippi Water,” to every travel writing class I teach. He said he still remembered writing that page. I asked him how his class was going.

He said it was going well. He liked the mix of students – which included a public prosecutor and a woman from Haiti – though he said the writing varied widely. On the whole, he found them preferable to the MFA students he had taught last year at the University of Washington. “They were hip, in a literary way,” he said of the grad students, “but they weren’t very interesting writers.” One of his Miami students was writing a story a la The da Vinci Code but more literary and with “a sense of humor Dan Brown would kill for.” He wanted to steer her away from becoming the next Dan Brown, and have her create something of value, but the problem, he said, was that she wanted to make a lot of money.

I told him that, when I had taught at the same conference a few years earlier, I had asked Phillip Lopate if I could sit in on his memoir class. I was curious to see how a writer I admire teaches writing, since I had never taken a writing course.

“Good for you,” Raban said. “I never took one either.” And he had only recently started teaching them.

We parked on a residential street in Buena Vista, a short walk from Mandolin, a Greek-Turkish restaurant with a leafy garden in the back. From our table in the corner, we ordered dinner and a bottle of red wine.

I told Raban the story of how I had met Hania, and the role played by V.S. Pritchett – or at least his travel book Foreign Faces. He said that he had mentioned Pritchett in his class that afternoon and now mused pleasantly on the odds of V.S. Pritchett’s name being spoken twice in the same day in South Florida. I told him that I wrote to Pritchett after Hania and I got married, and was surprised when I got a note back. “I can’t imagine him not responding,” Raban said. “He had a remarkable sweetness.” He said that, once at a party, Pritchett was talking to him about short stories and told him that whenever he came up with an especially good line, he would give it to his least favorite character. Raban said that he then went back and reread some of his short stories, but that it was hard finding Pritchett’s least favorite characters because great lines were strewn about everywhere.

I told him of the advice I’d once read, though I couldn’t remember who had given it, that whenever you write a line that you think is great, cross it out. He had heard it too, though didn’t know who had said it either. He suggested perhaps Nabokov. I said that seemed unlikely to me, since Nabokov was delighted by all of his lines. “That’s precisely why he might say that,” Raban said.

Then I threw out my favorite line about writing, which is usually attributed to  André Gide: “I rewrite in order to be reread.” He hadn’t heard it, and liked it as well.

Our food arrived: lamb shank for Raban, steamed mussels for me. When the waitress picked up the bottle to replenish our glasses, Raban looked at her hopefully and said in an almost childlike voice, “Be generous.”

I expressed regret that he had forsaken travel writing – doing more fiction and political writing – and he corrected me. In fact, he said he was in the middle of a travel piece for The New York Times magazine, about driving the coast road from Seattle to Palo Alto, where his daughter would be attending Stanford in the fall. The road, he said, was his lifeline to the only thing that kept him in the U.S.

He didn’t seem discouraged by what I called ‘the decline of travel writing.’ “Bill Buford thought dirty realism was sexy,” he said. “Then he thought travel writing was sexy. These things go in cycles.” He made the point that Granta is still publishing a fair amount of travel writing. He said that in the forthcoming Granta anthology someone talks about the ‘travel writing that Granta invented.’ “Granta didn’t invent it,” he said with exasperation. “Travel writing has a long tradition, a mostly British tradition.”

He admired Colin Thubron, like everyone else. I mentioned a British woman I had recently met who complained that Thubron never wrote about himself.

“Thubron went to Eton,” Raban explained. “Etonians don’t do that. People like me do that.”