One of the tributes on the Vineyard Gazette website to Tony Horwitz, who died Monday two weeks shy of his 61st birthday, called him “one of the most astute and interesting storytellers of our time.” It is a description to which every travel writer, indeed every nonfiction writer, should aspire.
A couple of weeks ago I received an email from someone at The Steinbeck Review expressing interest in reviewing The Joys of Travel. I slipped a paperback copy into a padded envelope and drove it to the post office.
A few days later an email appeared telling me that the book had arrived and asking if it contained any Steinbeck references. (Odd time to ask, I thought.) I wrote back that the chapter on Movement includes a mention of Travels with Charley with, I added to prepare him, “a slight, joking dig at the author.” I didn’t say that I list the four great American road books – Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Henry Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, and John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley – and note that Kerouac’s approach is sometimes described as novelistic but it was Steinbeck who made up many of the encounters that he wrote about. (This was discovered a number of years ago by a journalist who had innocently set off to trace the great writer’s route.) “As someone who finds Travels with Charley depressingly short on dialogue,” I write in the book, “I almost wish he had fabricated more.”
Yesterday I got an email informing me that my book would not be reviewed because it doesn’t contain enough about Steinbeck.
Last Saturday at Books & Books Pico Iyer, after presenting his new book, Autumn Light, spoke critically of his first book, Video Night in Kathmandu, noting that he had written it quickly and claiming that, as a result, it didn’t have a lasting effect on readers. (I would disagree with that assessment.) But it is common for writers to dismiss their early efforts. Back at the bookstore last Thursday, I heard four young writers present their first novels and, during the question and answer period, I was tempted to ask them if they could imagine a time when they would look back with dismay at the book they had just read with such pleasure from.
A friend posted a photo of Michael Connelly’s Dark Sacred Night lying next to John Connolly’s A Game of Ghosts and wrote: “Connelly vs. Connolly. Who to read first?” I responded: Cyril.
Visiting LBJ's boyhood home in Johnson City, TX, I thought of the young man who would become president, but I also thought - while standing in the dining room - of how Robert Caro one evening borrowed the keys to the house from the National Park Service and sat LBJ's younger brother down at the table; then, sitting unseen behind him, frantically wrote down his recollections of the often volatile dinner conversations as they flowed freely from the previously reticent sibling.
With no thought to diversity, simply a desire to introduce my travel writing students to great writing, I read last night excerpts from books by Jan Morris, Richard Rodriguez, and Olga Tokarczuk.