When I was a travel editor, writing a bi-weekly column, one of the ideas I kept in my back pocket was a column imagining a chance meeting, in some foreign backwater, between Anthony Bourdain and Rick Steves. The two most famous American travelers presented an interesting contrast in styles, not unlike Goofus and Gallant, and I thought an invented conversation between them might make for an amusing column.
I was reminded of that unwritten column while reading Ann Patchett’s essay in Sunday’s New York Times. It was about email, and like many of the Patchett essays I’ve read, it illuminated her enviable life: a highly successful author – one of email’s benefits, she says, is that it brings her unexpected writing assignments – surrounded by love. She loves her neighbors, she writes, and she loves her sister, who loves her back; she enjoys “the warmth of husband and dog.” She is blessed, as not that many writers – or, for that matter, people – are, and she is appreciative of her blessings.
So l like to imagine a meeting, at some secluded writers’ retreat, between Ann Patchett and Annie Ernaux.
In the same column, David Hare said that he was applying for French citizenship - his wife is French - and that it required taking a test to gauge his knowledge of the language. He responded that they might think him arrogant, but the last time he had sat down to take a test was in 1968 and he could not bring himself to do it again. The consular officer replied: “Don’t worry, a certain arrogance isn’t a bad qualification for French citizenship.”
A standard question in the New York Times Book Review’s weekly author interview is: “You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?”
Most writers play along; a few dodge the question by claiming they don’t cook or like to socialize. Yesterday, Joy Williams wrote: “This is not a time for dinner parties! Serene consumption, self-treasuring and holding forth will not heal our stricken earth.” She went on for another couple sentences.
Now I’m awaiting the writer who, when asked by the Times which three writers they’d invite to a literary dinner party, responds, “Not Joy Williams.”
I’m off to Poland tonight – will be back here the middle of August.
There’s a fashion on social media now for authors to film themselves eagerly opening the just arrived box containing their new books. I'm not a fan of the self-congratulatory display (I’d dislike it even more if I were still searching for a publisher), and I also question the emotion. I’m familiar with the thrill of seeing one’s new book for the first time, but for me it’s coupled with the dread of opening that book and finding a typo. Often, I don’t open it. I let it sit around, sometimes for days. Eventually I crack the spine, bravely glance at a few pages, then a few more. So my cartoon shows a man looking at his smartphone and saying to his wife: “Instead of a video of an author opening a box of his new books I’d like to see a video of an author opening his new book and finding a typo.” The expression of surprise would be much more authentic.
For St. Patrick’s Day, Books & Books posted a quote from Oscar Wilde: “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
These lines also appear in my memoir, along with the ones that precede them, which I discovered in the British Council library in Warsaw, Poland, in 1978. “With the abolition of private property, then,” Wilde wrote in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, “we shall have true, beautiful, healthy individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live.”
When I finished, I put the book back and headed out into the drab, unhappy streets of Warsaw.
Got home last night from the Key West Literary Seminar. It was my third time at the annual seminar – the first was in 1991 – and I invariably thought of the writers I saw, in some cases met (I covered that first one for the Sun-Sentinel), who are no longer with us: Peter Matthiessen, William Styron, Barry Lopez. Walking past St. Paul’s Episcopal Church I remembered the morning I ran into Jan Morris doing her power walk down Duval Street.
The writers at this year’s seminar were younger, for the most part, far from the realm of literary lions. (One had published only one book, another peppered her sentences with the word “like.”) Dave Barry, a rare elder statesman, walked to the lectern and said: “Hello. I’m Dave Barry. If you don’t know who I am, I’m a famous author.”
It was a funny line that also said something about the position writers hold in contemporary society. (A 20-something volunteer from Miami told me she’d never heard of Dave Barry – but her mother had. Though she was a fan of Campbell McGrath.) When Styron’s picture appeared on the cover of Time magazine, most Americans knew who he was. Should Lauren Groff’s visage ever appear on that cover, the majority of readers will be clueless. But then most Americans no longer see Time.