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.”
My friend David Beaty died yesterday in Miami. David was born in Brazil, grew up in Coconut Grove, and set state swimming records at Ransom Everglades. He headed off to The Lawrenceville School, and Columbia University, where he joined the swim team, studied English, and, one evening with friends, attended a party at the home of James Baldwin. After graduation he moved to the island of Patmos to become a writer; on a visit to Athens he entered a café and met the poet James Merrill. The mid ’70s found him in London working odd jobs, including one in the library of Time magazine. Years later he workshopped a story about this period, titled “The Man from Time,” in a class with Phillip Lopate, who handed it back to him untouched, saying it was “a little miracle of a piece.” (I was in the room when this happened.) It described, among other things, David bodily running into Graham Greene on the street and the author immediately checking his pockets. He briefly dated one of Evelyn Waugh’s daughters, who took him to a dinner at Kingsley Amis’s house. He also, for Time, interviewed Patrick Leigh Fermor, who not only signed his copy of A Time of Gifts but adorned it with a charming illustration. Back home, David bought a house in Coral Gables that quickly filled with books – piles of them rising on the living room floor – and Brazilian art. He swam laps in the pool of the nearby Biltmore Hotel and studied writing with Isaac Bashevis Singer at the University of Miami. One evening in the early 2000s he went to the Brazilian consul’s residence in Coconut Grove to attend a reception for Gilberto Gil that was all the more interesting because the consul was living in the house David had grown up in. At the age of 60, he walked the pilgrimage to Santiago in Spain – to express his gratitude for having lived that long – and sent dispatches home that I published on the Sun-Sentinel’s Travel blog. He worked for a while at Books & Books, where his gentle manner, vast reading, and colorful stories made him popular with his coworkers. His travels in his later years centered around writing seminars, first in St. Petersburg, Russia, then in Lisbon. He loved fiction (he was working on a series of short stories set in Greece) and had a special talent for noir (his story “Ghosts” appeared in The Best American Mystery Stories 2000) but I always thought he should write more memoir. Now a sweet man and an unfinished writer are gone.
Dervla Murphy died this week at the age of 90. She was part of a distinguished group of travel writers – Wilfred Thesiger, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Norman Lewis, Jan Morris – who became nonagenarians. It's as if their intense curiosity about the world made it hard for them to leave it.
I heard P.J. O’Rourke speak at Brown University in 1988. He had recently published Holidays in Hell, a collection of dispatches from the world's trouble spots. I had picked it up in a bookstore one day and turned doubtfully to the chapter on Poland. Then I stood in the aisle, awed and humbled, for the next thirty minutes. O’Rourke had dropped into Poland, without a word of Polish, and perfectly captured the spirit of the place, at least as a recalcitrant socialist state. He described things that for me, after two and a half years, had become commonplace but now, presented through his undulled eyes, appeared afresh in all their absurdity. He was funny of course, but with jokes that revealed truths while also provoking laughter. Which are the best kind.
The audience at Brown was made up partly of students who had found sections of the book insensitive and come to demonstrate their disapproval. They took up whole rows, many of them with white T-shirts over their blouses and long-sleeved shirts; a few carried signs.
O’Rourke walked onto the stage and, standing at the lectern, began his talk. He paid no attention to the protestors, who were impossible to miss, with their signs now raised. Not wanting to infringe on his right to speak, they didn’t heckle or harangue; they just sat quietly in pockets of shared hurt. Then, after about 15 minutes, they stood up, held hands, and, row by row, silently vacated the hall. When their exodus was about two-thirds complete, O’Rourke halted his presentation for the first time.
“They’re cute,” he said, looking out over the last of the retreating minions. “No, really, they are. In my day we would have burned the building down.”