I'm heading off tomorrow, driving to Georgia for the wedding of a friend, so I won't be writing for about a week. The wedding takes place Saturday, which is the birthday of James Fenton, who was born in Lincoln, England in 1949.
A great poet, Fenton also wrote an excellent travel book, All the Wrong Places: Adrift in the Politics of the Pacific Rim. Full of colorful characters and unique experiences (Fenton was present at the looting of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon), All the Wrong Places - published in 1988 - was an early indication of one of the paths the travel book (in the hands of people like Robert Kaplan and Jeffrey Tayler) was going to take. Toward politics, that is, not - unfortunately - toward poetry.
Yesterday I was finishing up my review of the Rybczynski memoir and happened to look at the dust jacket copy.
"His mother and father made separate escapes," I read, "reuniting against many odds on a ship bound for Scotland from Marseilles."
This was disconcerting, as I had written that his parents had reunited in the Atlantic coast town of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, where they then boarded a ship bound for England.
I reread the chapter and confirmed that my version was correct. The couple eventually moved to Scotland, but the ship they took to Great Britain landed in Plymouth. (I know what New York editors are thinking: England, Scotland, what's the difference?) Marseilles is mentioned once in the chapter, as the town the father stopped in while driving, wifeless, from Bucharest to Paris. (Marseilles, Saint-Jean-de-Luz - come on, they're both in France, and Marseilles is better known. And who really cares where the parents reunited? The main thing is they did.)
But the book is published by Scribner, which is not a shabby house. Perhaps I should contact them and offer my services as a dust jacket fact checker.
If you had seen me yesterday afternoon, sprawled on the chaise longue with a book, you would have thought I had thrown in the towel. And you would have been wrong.
The book, Witold Rybczynski's My Two Polish Grandfathers: And Other Essays on the Imaginative Life, had been sent to me to review. So, though I looked pretty listless, I was working. (You would have seen me taking notes.)
Though reading is an inseparable part of writing, writers often feel guilty reading. At least in the middle of the day, when we should be writing. But you can't write a review without reading the book (though some have tried).
So yesterday afternoon, in the quiet of the apartment. I read with a wonderful feeling of dutifulness, and an absence of self-reproach. I covered 100 pages, which means I can do the same thing today. If only I could make a living reviewing books (and never have to write the reviews).
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.
We arrived too late for the bandoneon concert - Argentina was the theme of this year's Art Deco Weekend - so we strolled a traffic-less Ocean Drive. Booths sold vintage clothing, jewelry, and eyeglasses, as well as gyros, arepas and funnel cakes. Diversity.
But for smoothies we had to go to Lincoln Road, where the normal sunny-Sunday-in-winter crowd made it feel like a festival. The Books & Books cafe was packed, while the books were in a new space behind the old store that we reached through a little breezeway. They had more room to breathe here, but I missed their presence on the street. It was as if they were something off-putting, unsightly, that needed to be hidden away in the back.
The night before, we'd had an academic couple over for dinner. The wife said that her students had a complaint about the novels she assigned: they loved them, but found them very hard to resell. She was a bit taken aback, and asked them if they didn't want to keep them, and perhaps read them again later in life? The thought apparently hadn't occurred to them or, if it had, they had found it absurd.