The review in yesterday’s New York Times Book Review of Sara Wheeler’s new biography of Jan Morris noted that the great travel writer was “a terribly flawed human being,” “a narcissist and a snob” who “could be cruel.”
All probably true, but she could also be kind – kindness being a quality she prized above all others. I interviewed her after her panel at the Key West Literary Seminar in 1991 and she apologized profusely for keeping me waiting while she graciously fielded questions from a pack of admirers. One Sunday afternoon in 1994, while I was reading about Vietnam before my first trip to Asia, the phone rang; it was Jan, apologizing again, this time for not doing more to promote my first book, which she had just reread and found much better than on the first reading. I told her I was headed to Vietnam, and she said it was a country she had never visited. It thrilled me that I would be traveling somewhere Jan Morris had never been. (Though her specialty was the British, not the French, empire.) When my second book came out, she kindly gave it a blurb. We emailed occasionally over the years, short messages about a new travel book, or an upcoming trip; I reviewed her book Contact!, a small, overlooked masterpiece, and got a warm note of gratitude. Often she would close her emails with an invitation to visit her in Wales, which I assumed was a nicety and never took her up on. Idiot. Wheeler contacted me while she was researching her biography, and I sent her the meager Morris-Swick e-correspondence, but there was nothing in it that was worth putting in the biography. Which was a shame, as it would have been an honor to find my name connected to Jan’s.
A remarkable story yesterday on the next-to-last page of the New York Times Book Review. To illustrate how book reviews “are an engine that helps keep the culture running,” David Streitfeld, a Times reporter and former Washington Post Book World columnist, told about a little-known literary connection.
In the ’70s, Larry McMurtry wrote reviews for Book World. Then in 1978 he was fired by the new editor, Michael Dirda, who “was acting on orders from management. McMurtry returned to his hometown in Texas, where he worked on a “stalled manuscript” that would become Lonesome Dove.
Years later, Annie Proulx published a novel, Accordion Crimes, that was panned by most critics but praised by Dirda. His encouraging words convinced her to continue with a story she had been struggling with, a story that became “Brokeback Mountain.” After appearing in The New Yorker, it was made into a film, the script for which was written by McMurtry and his writing partner Diana Ossana.
Final note: At the beginning of the piece, Streitfeld tells of interviewing Jeff Bezos “when he was the crown prince of the dot.com crowd” and finding one book in his office, a science-fiction novel.
Every week the New York Times Book Review interviews a writer – or, sometimes, a person from another profession who’s written a book – about their reading habits. These latter interviews can be somewhat embarrassing. Yesterday the interview subject was Sam Heughan, an actor who has written five books. One of the questions, which I have rarely seen posed, was: “Do you have a favorite travel writer?”
Heughan said “Anthony Bourdain,” which was fine. Bourdain was a good writer and an excellent host of a travel show. But then he followed it with “was the greatest.” I am tempted to write to the Times for Heughan’s address so I can send him works by Robert Byron, Rebecca West, Norman Douglas, Freya Stark, Kate Simon, M.F.K Fisher (since he’s apparently a foodie), Patrick Leigh Fermor, Norman Lewis, Jan Morris, Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux, Jonathan Raban and Colin Thubron.
I read recently that the ratio of words written by Kafka versus the words written about Kafka is approximately 1 to 10,000,000. It seems a good indication of a great writer when more words are written about than by.
I heard Godwin speak in the main auditorium on Saturday, where he was paired with George Packer, the journalist who used to write for the New Yorker and now writes for the Atlantic. Despite the highly credentialed panel, led by a superb moderator – the novelist John Burnham Schwartz – the place was less than half full. There was the same disappointing turnout in the morning for Geoff Dyer, the brilliant writer on a myriad of subjects who most recently wrote a memoir. Do South Floridians have a bias against nonfiction? (Though Packer’s new book is a novel.) Or do they not like male writers?
The crowds came at 3 pm to hear the novelists Susan Choi, Kiran Desai, and Gish Jen. Then it was hard to find an empty seat, and where there was one, it was usually between two women. Though for the Q&A, only men made their way to the microphone.
John Updike and John Cheever shared a number of similarities: Both spent their careers publishing in the New Yorker and both focused on the everyday lives of middle-class Americans. They were both celebrated as brilliant chroniclers of suburbia. And each man produced a child who became a writer: David Updike and Susan Cheever.
And while both men’s marriages were marked by infidelity, they both possessed a religious faith – and a dutiful explanation for it. Updike, a regular church-goer, once said that not to believe in a higher power would have seemed “ungrateful.” Cheever, according to this weekend’s Wall Street Journal (in a review of a new book by his daughter), was a practicing Anglican who said: “There has to be someone to thank for the party.”