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.”
Sunday we went down to Art Miami and saw, among other works, those of the 10-year-old boy who became something of a star last week. His paintings were interesting and looked not at all out of place, yet I kept thinking of a story I'd read about James Thurber. After his drawings began appearing in The New Yorker, mothers started submitting their children's work. Thurber sent them a standard reply: "Your son can certainly draw as well as I can. The only trouble is he hasn't been through as much."
In the New Yorker profile of Colm Tóibín, which I just read, this being the time of year when I try to get through old issues, the author D.T. Max tells the story that after The Blackwater Lightship was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the author returned to Dublin and, finding the fridge in his house empty, went out to by some groceries. As he headed down the street, he was serenaded by the honking of car horns and the flashing of headlights – a public acknowledgment of his literary achievement.
Yesterday at Bookwise, the excellent secondhand bookstore in Boca Raton, I bought a copy of Just Enough Liebling: Classic Work by the Legendary New Yorker Writer. I had not gotten it when it came out in 2004 because I had a lot of Liebling already, but reading it in bed last night I realized that there is no such thing as too much Liebling.