There is a moment in Frank Kermode’s memoir Not Entitled in which he runs into the novelist William Golding, who asks if he’s been keeping up his Greek. When he confesses he hasn’t, Golding asks, “But what will you do when you retire if you can’t read Homer?”
Hania needed to buy a card and since Jezebel and Grand Central Stationery are closed on Sunday we went to Barnes & Noble. As she searched, I wandered over to the Travel section and found two paperback copies of The Joys of Travel, which the store had not carried for months. They were easy to find because they had been shelved with the cover facing outwards. Also, since the store carries so few travel essays and narratives, books by authors whose names begin with S are at gut rather than ankle level.
Back home I read an article in the New York Times Business section about the new chief executive of Barnes & Noble, James Daunt. He is a Brit whose first bookstore was a travel bookstore, or at least a store where books were organized according to country. (Not sure where that would have left The Joys of Travel.) As head of Waterstone’s, Britain’s largest chain bookstore, he had given store managers tremendous autonomy, allowing them to order and display the books that they thought their customers would want, a selection that included, one would think, books by local authors. I wasn’t sure if Daunt's philosophy was already in effect at B&N, or if the employees of the Ft. Lauderdale store were proactively responding to it. Or if the appearance of my book was just a fluke. This last scenario is the most appealing for it would seem to suggest a nationwide fluke.
For me, the highlight of the French Open was watching Andrea Petkovic, during Tennis Channel's "Bag Check," pull out rackets, pens, a notebook, and a paperback copy of The Adventures of Augie March.
Back at Paul’s, I took my lemonade to a table outside and opened my book, Jenny Offill’s novel Dept. of Speculation. I have never seen anyone reading a book at Sawgrass Mills, and while I didn’t feel superior, I did sit there reveling in my originality.
A couple of weeks ago I received an email from someone at The Steinbeck Review expressing interest in reviewing The Joys of Travel. I slipped a paperback copy into a padded envelope and drove it to the post office.
A few days later an email appeared telling me that the book had arrived and asking if it contained any Steinbeck references. (Odd time to ask, I thought.) I wrote back that the chapter on Movement includes a mention of Travels with Charley with, I added to prepare him, “a slight, joking dig at the author.” I didn’t say that I list the four great American road books – Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Henry Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, and John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley – and note that Kerouac’s approach is sometimes described as novelistic but it was Steinbeck who made up many of the encounters that he wrote about. (This was discovered a number of years ago by a journalist who had innocently set off to trace the great writer’s route.) “As someone who finds Travels with Charley depressingly short on dialogue,” I write in the book, “I almost wish he had fabricated more.”
Yesterday I got an email informing me that my book would not be reviewed because it doesn’t contain enough about Steinbeck.
At book signings, it’s best to stand at the back of the line – that’s where the author’s friends, colleagues, and most dedicated readers congregate. For Pico Iyer at Books & Books Saturday morning, this group included his former editor at Time magazine, a schoolteacher carrying the letter he’d received from the author some twenty years earlier praising the story he’d published in the Sun-Sentinel on traveling to the Philippines in search of a wife, and a tall man dragging a bag filled with books.
Randall was a book collector and jazz guitarist, professor emeritus from the Frost School of Music. He had gotten hooked on travel writing, he said, after reading Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar.
I mentioned that I was a travel writer and Randall asked if I’d ever heard of Anthony Daniels. I said I had his book on Central America. “Sweet Waist of America,” he said, politely refraining from mentioning that the book covered only Guatemala. “He sometimes writes under another name,” I said. “Theodore Dalrymple,” Randall replied, quickly triaging my second memory lapse. (In my defense, the English writer, who is also a psychiatrist, rarely comes up in everyday conversation.) Randall informed me that Daniels wrote one book, a satire about Tanzania under the rule of Julius Nyerere, using the pen name Thursday Msigwa.
His favorite travel writer, he said, was Norman Lewis. I told him that Pico had visited Lewis, and written a delightful profile of him, a few years before he died. This seemed to be the sole fragment of travel writing to have escaped Randall’s notice. We moved on to my favorites: Patrick Leigh Fermor and Colin Thubron. Rarely had waiting in line been so enjoyable.