As someone who takes the occasional nap, I was pleased to read in A.N. Wilson's memoir Confessions that V.S. Naipaul slept 15 hours a day.
Fran Lebowitz spoke at the Boca Festival of the Arts yesterday evening, answering questions posed by a host followed by questions posed by members of the audience. The former noted that Lebowitz sometimes takes her act abroad, and asked her what the rest of the world makes of us Americans. Lebowitz said that everyone in England asked her if we were going to have a Civil War. “No,” she told them, “we’re not that organized.”
After answering a question about what she was reading, she asked the host, “Are you still allowed to have books here?”
On her financial situation: “I have friends who say, ‘My father died and left me the house on the lake.’ Or ‘My father died and left me an apartment on West 63rd Street.’ My father died and left me my mother.”
She grew up in Morristown, NJ, and had a very happy childhood. Kids back then – the 1950s – were allowed to run wild. She also had a library card. At the beginning, she didn’t realize that people wrote books. She thought that books were like trees. When she learned the truth, she decided immediately she wanted to be a writer. “Writing a book is one of the greatest things a human being can do.” Later, she said, “To me, a book is the closest thing to a human being. I know people think a dog is but I don’t. When I see a book in the trash, I want to call 911. ‘There’s a book in the trash!’”
She never liked Andy Warhol. But he had a magazine, Interview, that she wanted to write for. One day in February, 1987, a friend called her with the news that Warhol had died. “I sat up in bed and thought: ‘I just sold all my Warhols. For nothing. I think that’s why he died.” Of his work, she said, “The more you look at it the less there is to see.”
She said that people don’t read correctly these days, and blamed Oprah Winfrey, who, she admitted (obligingly), was wonderful, and had made a lot of money for authors. “Though not for me.” But Winfrey had taught people to identify with characters. “People say they love a book because they see themselves in it. A book is not a mirror. It is a window. You need to make your world bigger, not smaller. Reading is an escape – an escape from the smallness of being one person.”
Most of the people who lined up to ask questions were millennials, with a few perhaps from Generations X and Z, though, like Lebowitz, I have a hard time distinguishing among the three.
When I heard that an explosive had been found in a passenger’s luggage my first thought was not: I bet it was at Lehigh Valley International Airport. The airport is situated at the edge of Pennsylvania Dutch country, in what John Updike once called “the soft doughy heart of America.” It is not a region one associates with terrorism. About the only time I’d see mention of the airport was when Updike wrote in the New Yorker about going home to visit his mother in Shillington, and I always thrilled to see the name in those august pages because it was the same airport I flew into to visit my mother in nearby Nazareth. I didn’t have much in common with the great writer, but we both used Lehigh Valley airport – formerly known as ABE, for Allentown, Bethlehem, Easton (city of my birth) – as the gateway for our filial returns.
I met Jonathan Raban for the first time in 1993, when I found myself in Seattle doing a story for the Sun-Sentinel. It was not a memorable interview; he had a low opinion of newspaper travel writing, which was partly why he bristled at being called a travel writer. He had brought the notebook from his trip to cover the Mississippi floods, and I remember being struck by the finished quality of it – not just full sentences but full paragraphs – and his claim that he never looked at it while writing the story. He insisted that the best way to write about a trip was to forget it and then reconstruct it. I suspected my editor wouldn’t have agreed.
Then in 2011 he came to Miami to teach a course for the Florida Center for the Literary Arts – on writing first person – and I emailed him asking if he’d like to meet. To my surprise, an email arrived suggesting dinner. So on the appointed evening I drove down to the Marriott Biscayne Bay – overlooking Trinity Cathedral – to pick him up. (When I had told him over the phone that he was next door to the Episcopal cathedral, he had said: “I could use an Episcopal cathedral.”) This time I was struck by how frail he appeared. An old-fashioned plaid sportcoat hung on his thin frame and a faded pink baseball cap sat on his head. He gave a kind of half handshake, cupping the ends of my fingers and ignoring the palm.
As soon as he climbed into my Honda he said: “I am extremely indebted to you. Not just for tonight, but for putting me on your list of the 20 best travel books.” So that explained it: He had come across my list of the best travel books of the 20th century, which had appeared in the Sun-Sentinel in 1999.
I told him that I read the first page of “Mississippi Water,” to every travel writing class I teach. He said he still remembered writing that page. I asked him how his class was going.
He said it was going well. He liked the mix of students – which included a public prosecutor and a woman from Haiti – though he said the writing varied widely. On the whole, he found them preferable to the MFA students he had taught last year at the University of Washington. “They were hip, in a literary way,” he said of the grad students, “but they weren’t very interesting writers.” One of his Miami students was writing a story a la The da Vinci Code but more literary and with “a sense of humor Dan Brown would kill for.” He wanted to steer her away from becoming the next Dan Brown, and have her create something of value, but the problem, he said, was that she wanted to make a lot of money.
I told him that, when I had taught at the same conference a few years earlier, I had asked Phillip Lopate if I could sit in on his memoir class. I was curious to see how a writer I admire teaches writing, since I had never taken a writing course.
“Good for you,” Raban said. “I never took one either.” And he had only recently started teaching them.
We parked on a residential street in Buena Vista, a short walk from Mandolin, a Greek-Turkish restaurant with a leafy garden in the back. From our table in the corner, we ordered dinner and a bottle of red wine.
I told Raban the story of how I had met Hania, and the role played by V.S. Pritchett – or at least his travel book Foreign Faces. He said that he had mentioned Pritchett in his class that afternoon and now mused pleasantly on the odds of V.S. Pritchett’s name being spoken twice in the same day in South Florida. I told him that I wrote to Pritchett after Hania and I got married, and was surprised when I got a note back. “I can’t imagine him not responding,” Raban said. “He had a remarkable sweetness.” He said that, once at a party, Pritchett was talking to him about short stories and told him that whenever he came up with an especially good line, he would give it to his least favorite character. Raban said that he then went back and reread some of his short stories, but that it was hard finding Pritchett’s least favorite characters because great lines were strewn about everywhere.
I told him of the advice I’d once read, though I couldn’t remember who had given it, that whenever you write a line that you think is great, cross it out. He had heard it too, though didn’t know who had said it either. He suggested perhaps Nabokov. I said that seemed unlikely to me, since Nabokov was delighted by all of his lines. “That’s precisely why he might say that,” Raban said.
Then I threw out my favorite line about writing, which is usually attributed to André Gide: “I rewrite in order to be reread.” He hadn’t heard it, and liked it as well.
Our food arrived: lamb shank for Raban, steamed mussels for me. When the waitress picked up the bottle to replenish our glasses, Raban looked at her hopefully and said in an almost childlike voice, “Be generous.”
I expressed regret that he had forsaken travel writing – doing more fiction and political writing – and he corrected me. In fact, he said he was in the middle of a travel piece for The New York Times magazine, about driving the coast road from Seattle to Palo Alto, where his daughter would be attending Stanford in the fall. The road, he said, was his lifeline to the only thing that kept him in the U.S.
He didn’t seem discouraged by what I called ‘the decline of travel writing.’ “Bill Buford thought dirty realism was sexy,” he said. “Then he thought travel writing was sexy. These things go in cycles.” He made the point that Granta is still publishing a fair amount of travel writing. He said that in the forthcoming Granta anthology someone talks about the ‘travel writing that Granta invented.’ “Granta didn’t invent it,” he said with exasperation. “Travel writing has a long tradition, a mostly British tradition.”
He admired Colin Thubron, like everyone else. I mentioned a British woman I had recently met who complained that Thubron never wrote about himself.
“Thubron went to Eton,” Raban explained. “Etonians don’t do that. People like me do that.”
Jonathan Raban, who died Tuesday at the age of 80, was one of the people most responsible for travel writing’s late 20th century renaissance. Like Paul Theroux, who pretty much started the genre’s resurgence with The Great Railway Bazaar in 1975, he didn’t retreat from the scene, letting the locals and their environs speak for themselves; he became the main character in nonfictional picaresques. He took Evelyn Waugh’s first-person junkets to a higher, more plot-driven level. In Old Glory, published in 1981, he sailed the length of the Mississippi River, capturing memorable people and moments but also telling of his personal journey – an adult, solitary, immigrant Huck Finn whose downriver progress was momentarily halted by an affair in St. Louis. Like Theroux, he infused and enriched the travel book with elements from the novel, not the least of which were narrative arc and engaging protagonist. Readers could eagerly follow the tale of the author’s passage while, almost subliminally, learning about the lands he passed through,
Unlike Theroux, the Englishman Raban brought a foreign eye to familiar places, which was also a feature of some of the new travel writing. In a world that was increasingly being visited by tourists, he went where the tourists lived – in Old Glory, the small towns and prosaic cities along the Mississippi. In a subsequent book, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, he tried to recreate the immigrant experience, settling down in various places – Manhattan, Guntersville, Ala., the Florida Keys, Seattle – to study the cultures. And, with his sharp eye, wry humor, and well-stocked mind, he made his readers see them afresh. Driving through a city’s business district he noted the “plastic Alpine chalets of McDonald’s and Arby’s.” On a similar stretch in a later book, rather than repeat himself, he wrote about the “fast-food pagodas.”
But his analytical skills – aided by a formidable knowledge of history and culture, geography and religion – are what made his travel writing important. A piece he wrote for Granta magazine, on the Mississippi floods, began with this head-scratching sentence: “Flying to Minneapolis from the West, you see it as a theological problem.” He went on to describe the flat, orderly farms of Minnesota, “laid out in a ruled grid, as empty of surprises as a sheet of graph paper,” and then the river, that “sprawls unconformably across the checkerboard… Like John Calvin’s infamous bad temper, it presents itself as the wild beast in the heart of the heartland.” Interpreting a landscape, wresting out its meanings as opposed to simply describing its features, was another aspect of the new travel writing, and Raban did it with unparalleled brilliance and flair.
(Tomorrow I’ll write about my two meetings with the great writer.)
A friend gave us tickets to hear Kevin Nealon at the Miami Book Fair last night so at around 4:45 yesterday afternoon we took our seats in the auditorium of Building 1 of Miami Dade College. The program, which was scheduled to start at 5, began at 5:30, with no explanation about the delay. And it didn’t really begin then, as it was preceded by a talk from the president of the college, followed by one by the city commissioner, followed by one by Mitchell Kaplan, who concluded by introducing Dave Barry, who introduced the two speakers. Nealon was in conversation with Alan Zweibel, one of the original writers on Saturday Night Live.
So I was not in a great mood when the two men took the stage, but they quickly won me over. Nealon, at one point, noted the wrath he unleashes when somebody crosses him. “I send a text,” he said sternly. “In all caps.”
Zweibel would turn to a page of Nealon’s new book of caricatures and Nealon would tell of his memories of that person: Carrie Fisher, David Letterman (“he has really bushy eyebrows”), Buzz Aldrin. He met Aldrin on a beach in Mexico and asked him if, while walking on the moon, he ever worried about getting stuck there, that maybe when they got back to the module it wouldn’t start. Aldrin looked at him like he was crazy. “Sometimes,” he explained, “my car doesn’t start.”
There was a lot of talk, naturally, about Saturday Night Live. Nealon said that he rarely cracked a smile during a set; the one exception was the Chippendale’s sketch with Chris Farley and Patrick Swayze when, as one of the judges, he couldn’t keep from laughing. He said that Farley’s idol was John Belushi, then added that they both died at 33.
Norm McDonald was remembered fondly – “he never went to high school or college, but he was book smart” – as was Gary Shandling.
Toward the end, people in the audience were invited to ask questions. One man walked up to the microphone with a sweater tied around his neck, and Zweibel noted that Shandling always wondered if guys who wear their sweaters tied around their necks wear their underwear tied around their balls. I wished the guy would have stolen from another comedian, whose name I don’t recall, and said, “I don’t, but I do wear my socks tied around my ankles.”
Asked how comedy has changed, Zweibel complained that wokeness has made it a little too “antiseptic,” noting that two of the characters he created, Roseanne Roseannadanna and Samurai Futaba, would not fly today. (I’m not sure why the Gilda Radnor character would be seen as politically incorrect.)
On the subject of comedians who were clearly on another level, Nealon cited Robin Williams, and said how, after seeing him perform, he wanted to give up comedy. Zweibel mentioned Larry David. “The man can take a morsel,” he said, “and make a Seder.”