Yesterday was the birthday of Cyril Connolly (born 1903); tomorrow is the birthday of H.L. Mencken (1880) - two great essayists, critics, magazine founders and bon vivants whom I didn't discover until after I'd left college. Many of my favorite writers were not taught to English majors.
Upon graduation I moved to Washington, DC, and started playing tennis at the public courts near Sidwell Friends School. One Sunday my friend Jack brought to the courts a book that had just arrived to the library where he worked: The Evening Colonnade by Cyril Connolly. He showed it to me rather like a jeweler presenting a precious stone. I was about to leave Washington to study French in Aix-en-Provence, and turning to page 20 I read: "'There is the first time we go abroad,' I wrote in Enemies of Promise, 'and the first time we go to Provence.'"
The year in France gave me a good working knowledge of French as well as a new-found fascination with America. (Saul Bellow wrote of how he got the idea for The Adventures of Augie March while living in Paris.) Back home, I bought a copy of H.L. Mencken's The American Language in a used bookshop in Philadelphia and read it like a novel, stopping occasionally to sketch caricatures in pencil in the margins. (I was also a big fan of Max Beerbohm, another writer not taught in college.) From there I moved on to Mencken's essays, memoirs and even short stories, like "A Girl from Red Lion, Pa." I was delighted to discover that he had often made the spring pilgrimage to Bethlehem - not far from my hometown of Phillipsburg - to hear the celebrated Bach choir.
So some of you can already guess what I'm going to do tomorrow: I'm going to forgive a sinner and wink at a homely girl.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born on this day in 1749 in Frankfurt-am-Main.
A few years ago, on the tiny South Pacific island of Aitutaki, I had lunch with a German. Who else? It seems wherever I go I run into Germans. My limited German vocabulary is almost, but not quite, limited to words having to do with travel: wanderlust, wanderjahr, reisefieber. Leave it to the Germans to come up with a word for the heightened excitement you feel before a journey.
My luncheon companion, sitting opposite me on a picnic bench next to a turquoise lagoon, was in his mid-60s, traveling with his wife and two adult daughters. Every year the family took a trip somewhere, usually to a place not on most non-Germans' itineraries. I asked him what it is that makes the Germans such avid travelers.
"I think Goethe," he said. The great writer's journal of his trip to Italy had, he believed, shown Germans the value of going out into the world.
In Italian Journey, Goethe not only described a foreign country - its landscapes, churches, people, customs - he addressed the internal benefits of displacement: "Human individuality," he wrote, "is a strange thing: it is only during the last year, when I have had to depend solely on myself and at the same time be in daily contact with complete strangers, that I have really come to know my own."
V.S. Naipaul turns 77 today. I discovered him in Poland in 1982, when I checked A House for Mr. Biswas out of the British Institute library. For several weeks, the drab streets of Warsaw filled with the colors and sounds of Port-of-Spain.
I was taken by the cast of characters - Naipaul seemed a kind of Dickens of the tropics - and the rich language he used to describe them. (I began making a list of new words to add to the much lengthier one in Polish.)
When I returned to the States, I read more of his fiction - discovering him to be more of a modern-day Conrad - and his numerous travel books. An aspiring travel writer, I was encouraged that he was continuing the mostly British tradition - exemplified by Trollope, Lawrence, Huxley, Greene, Waugh, Orwell, Durrell - of great novelists who not only also wrote travel but took the genre seriously. Later, when I became a travel editor, I visited in Charleston one of the people he wrote about in A Turn in the South, and then, years later, met another at a book festival in Nashville.
I have never met Naipaul, and after reading Theroux's memoir of their friendship, I don't really care to. But I will always admire his writing, and be grateful for his elevation of the literature of travel.
I arrived home to find the longest form rejection I've ever received. I actually thought: Do I really want to write for a publication that takes three paragraphs to say "Not for us"?
Beneath the illegible signature were the typed words: Editorial Assistant. So it didn't come from the editor I'd contacted, but rather a lowly assistant, who doesn't have the audacity to tell his or her bosses that prolixity in the form of form rejections is not appreciated by the recipients. As soon as we see the words "Dear writer," we know what's coming. We don't need to read that "there is no graceful way to respond to a query with a form letter" (especially when what we sent was a finished article). We know that magazines receive a "great number of submissions" and we don't believe they give a hoot what kind of success we have with our "query [article] elsewhere." And the fact that they keep calling our articles "queries" makes us doubt that our submissions were given "careful consideration by a member of [their] editorial staff."
Writers are among the least gullible and most rejected people in the world. And the longer the rejection, the greater our skepticism.
I heard Frank McCourt speak at the Literaturhaus in Munich in 2006. He reminisced about his first visit to the city, as a U.S. serviceman in the years following the war. He said that there had been an absence of young German men and a large supply of young German women. He remembered the beer and the women.
A few years ago I read a piece he wrote about our national pastime. He said that he had never understood the game, or rather its fascination, until one day, during the World Series, when he looked up at the TV while sitting in a bar. The camera zoomed in on the pitcher's eyes as he stared toward home. It was then, he wrote, seeing that look of fierce, intense concentration, that he understood baseball.
Speaking of which, when Barack Obama leaves the White House, and Americans begin to assess his presidency, historians start to write their books, I hope it will be remembered (as the N.Y. Times Sports section reported yesterday) that before the All-Star game he visited the locker rooms of not just the players but also the umpires.
There will be a lot of talk this weekend about the first moon landing, and none of it, I'm guessing, will include Vladimir Nabokov.
The Russian novelist was one of a number of writers that Life magazine contacted, before the launch of Apollo 11, and asked for suggestions on what the first man on the moon should say.
Nabokov, with his impeccable grasp of American idioms (and tendencies), replied: "I want a lump in his throat to obstruct the wisecrack."