About the only good that might come out of Florence is a story on hurricanes by David Sedaris.
I discovered V.S. Naipaul in the British Council library in Warsaw, Poland. The book, A House for Mr. Biswas, would have dazzled me anywhere, but reading lush descriptions of Trinidad in Cold War Warsaw ensured it was a novel I would never forget. The author, through his evocative writing and colorful characters, seemed to be a kind of Dickens of the Caribbean.
Returning to the States, I discovered his travel writing, beginning with The Middle Passage. Naipaul was part of that great British tradition of novelists who also wrote travel books, but he brought to it a new perspective: that of the colonized instead of the colonizer. This didn’t make him any softer on his subjects, as his books on India demonstrate. But wherever he went – including the American South – he brought his piercing intelligence and moral imagination.
When I became a travel editor in South Florida, Trinidad was the one place in the Caribbean I wanted to visit. Port-of-Spain’s Carnival gave me a pretext, and I went to observe it in 1995. On Ash Wednesday, I made the pilgrimage to the Naipaul house in St. James, and then the Queen’s Royal College that he and his brother Shiva had attended.
“Slabs of late afternoon sunlight filtered through tall jalousied windows; three plain chandeliers swayed high above a sea of wooden desks. Printed atop a side wall was the long list – going back to the turn of the century – of scholarship winners. Next to the year '1948' appeared the name 'V.S. Naipaul.' It glowered like an admonishment to work and learn and escape your small, ragamuffin world.”
Writers love bookstores. Really? All those tables without our books on them? All those magazines without our stories in them?
I'm off for a week (not to Russia, though I'll be watching the World Cup while I travel). Back here on the 25th.
Most writers prefer writing to speaking; a good number went into writing partly to avoid speaking. Writing is solitary work for solitary people. Also, while in the act of writing you’re in control, as you rarely are in life, which includes the ability to make revisions. With written words, you can take back what you said and change it to something different, without anyone ever knowing your first, flawed thought.
Over the years, though, I’ve gotten to enjoy public speaking, so much so that at readings I sometimes just talk. (“Never read at a reading,” Julian Barnes once advised a friend. “People would rather hear what you had for breakfast.”) Seemingly extemporaneous words – coming out now, here – sound more intimate to your audience than well-crafted ones that have been printed on a page. And talking, you can establish eye contact with people better than when your head’s in your book. Also, my most recent book, The Joys of Travel, lends itself to an entertaining summary in a way that an evocative work of fiction might not.
My one quirk with regard to public speaking is that I prefer to do it in front of strangers. An auditorium filled with people I’ve never seen before doesn’t rattle me the way a room populated with friends and acquaintances does. When you stand before a crowd of people who know you – your weaknesses and limitations – it’s harder to play the part of the august author.
So for my talk this past Friday, at an invitation-only event at Grind Coffee Project, I decided to intersperse my talk with readings. I wanted to have words written down that I could fall back on if my speech got shaky.
It was a difficult venue, a workspace crowded with people – friends – sitting and standing at various angles. There was no lectern to give me cover (and authority); I just staked out a spot in one corner of the room. And there was no microphone, so I had to speak in an unnaturally loud and carrying voice.
The first excerpt I read was about the joys of train travel (from the chapter on “movement”). I had chosen it, I said, because the coffeehouse sat along the FEC tracks. In fact, I noted that a Brightline train could come along at any moment.
I then spoke about the other joys of travel, reading excerpts about “novelty” and “emotional connection.” To end my presentation, I read the first page of one of the stories in the back – about an author giving readings – and as I launched into the last line a train whistle blew.
My nieces were staying in Surfside last week so after the Marlins game I drove over to meet them for dinner. Overestimating the traffic, I arrived early and went in search of the apartment building where Isaac Bashevis Singer had lived.
On the Internet I was able to find only the street – 95th – that had been named in his honor. I assumed the building was on it – but where? Probably the beach, but just to be sure, I turned left off of Collins, drove across Harding, and entered a neighborhood of single family houses. It didn’t seem the environs of a former New Yorker (and Varsovian). I asked a few people, but nobody had any idea. “We just moved here a few months ago,” one resident said. He added that someone at the shul should know.
I parked and walked into the Shul of Bal Harbour, which was wrapped in a pre-holiday quiet. The security guards couldn’t help me. A middle-aged woman appeared who seemed to have no knowledge of Singer. (She spoke with an accent that could have been Israeli.) Then a young man entered – in black suit, white shirt, black hat – and I asked him.
“Isaac Bashevis Singer,” he said, in the tone of someone stroking his beard. The man had a beard but he wasn’t stroking it. “He lived in New York.”
“But he moved here later in life,” I said. “He was the most famous resident of Surfside.”
“Well,” the man said intrigued, “let’s ask Mr. Googlemeyer.” And he reached into his pocket for his smartphone.
When I finished chuckling, I told him that I’d already gone to Mr. Googlemeyer, who had told me only about the street. This was news to the young man (the words "Isaac Bashevis Singer Boulevard" appear very small beneath the “95th Street”), who said that he was visiting from New York. Brooklyn.
As he searched, he inquired about my interest. I said that I was a writer, and that I had lived in Warsaw. He proceeded to tell me, in capsule form, about the rich and tragic history of the Jews in Poland, going as far back as the 15th century. I told him of the resurgence of interest in Jewish culture among young Poles – the Jewish festival in Krakow gets bigger every year – but he countered with the rabbi who declared, a number of years ago, that Jewish life has no future in Poland. Sad if true, I told him.
“Here it is,” he said, looking down at his phone again in victory. “Surfside Towers at 9511 Collins.” I thanked him for the information, and also for the history lesson, and walked across the street to the second building past the intersection. There on the wall outside the entrance was something one almost never sees in South Florida: a plaque marking the home of a great writer.