Fresh Air Fiend

  OCTOBER 4

  London traits: lowered voices, lateness, pessimism, pallor, a look of fatigue, rumpled clothes, bad haircuts, the stillness of tube passengers. But this seems to me to be the least threatening city in the world; even on a good day, New York is a hellhole. Thirty thousand people dead in an Indian earthquake, but that is yesterday's news, now on an inside page, because today the headline concerns Russia: "500 Dead as Tanks Go In"—confrontation at the Russian parliament. I no longer live in a city, so I have forgotten how world news energizes city slickers.

  A sign of the times on an ornate Victorian public dustbin in Kensington: "Thank You for Keeping the Royal Borough Tidy—Sponsored by Coca-Cola." A journalist refers to a previous book of mine: "Written in your blue period." Another one compares my character Millroy with Wilhelm Reich: my man proposes a vegetarian diet, based on the Bible; Willy had his orgone box. "Established science finds it threatening." In the evening I give a talk at Waterstone's in Hampstead; it is a form of evangelizing, with alert attentive listeners, literary piety, just the thing for me with my book about a religious nut.

  OCTOBER 5

  No breakfast, a tuna fish sandwich for lunch, dinner with the Spanish ambassador, Señor Alberto Aza, who has just been Spain's ambassador to Mexico. The differences between Mexican bullfights and Spanish ones: Mexican bulls are smaller, Spanish ones braver, Mexican matadors often stick the banderillas into a bull's neck—this is regarded as a menial task in Spain, and so forth. Señor Aza was a low-level diplomat in Africa when I was a low-level schoolteacher there. That was in the nineteenth century, when Franco and Salazar were alive. Señor Aza: "They say that Galicians are so secretive that if you pass one on the stairway, you will not know whether he is going up or going down."

  I have been to Easter Island and New Guinea, but I have never been to Spain. Talking with him, I conceive the idea of going there, but starting in Gibraltar—grinning like a dog and wandering aimlessly along the Spanish coast.

  OCTOBER 6

  Nothing will irk me today, because Victoria Glendinning praises my novel in The Times. And a little glimpse of Waterloo International, which I had never seen before, gives me a thrill: you will soon be able to go from there, on a succession of trains, to Kowloon or Hanoi. On the other hand, round-trip airfare to Gibraltar is £149, probably cheaper than round-trip rail fare to Edinburgh. I head for Leadenhall Market. Business at the bookshop there has not been so brisk since that cowardly bombing by political scumbags in April displaced 100,000 office workers.

  Literary postscript: a woman visiting the shop says that a gigantic drunk who called me a "wanker" and tried physically to attack me while I was speaking at a literary dinner in Fremantle, Australia, was a friend of a friend. I wrote about this in The Happy Isles of Oceania. Everyone said I was exaggerating and slagging off the Aussies. This digger's name was Kester, and he was thwarted by a woman named Prue Dashfield. Interesting: a man would not have dared to try to stop him, but this woman did. I made a nervous joke of it, and when the drunk heard the applause from the corridor, he said, "Hear them? They agree with me! They wanted me to kill the wanker!"

  I am reading Tender Is the Night and find this: "Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane. Respect rather than fear. There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions, who will do anything."

  OCTOBER 7

  Toni Morrison has won the Nobel Prize. I met her once in Paris when we were on a literary panel with James Baldwin, and she laughed in a resonant rumbling way. Why hadn't Baldwin won it? Why hadn't Borges and James Joyce? "I see the Nobel committee is pissing on literature again," V. S. Naipaul once remarked to me.

  "Why is your book so grim?" a journalist asks me in an interview. She then reveals that she has only just started reading it. I tell her that Victoria G. called it "very funny" just yesterday. Next question: "Why do you always travel in a bad mood?" I challenge this: What book are you referring to? She collapses, confessing that she has never read anything I have written.

  In the evening to Broadcasting House. Another sign of the times: the BBC recently sacked all the underpaid men who used to show guests to the studio. You are now given a map on a piece of paper and asked to find your own way. I got lost. Then I found the studio. No one there except a man speaking about "conkers" into a mike. He leaves, and I sit alone amid litter in a tiny room. I dial a number on an old bakelite phone and am connected to Radio Scotland. An hour later I leave, not having seen another human being in the building. False economy is one of the most destructive English vices.

  OCTOBER 8

  Does anyone watch Sky TV? I am in the studio with Frank Delany, the Buck Mulligan of our time, Margaret Atwood, and Robert Waller, who is the most famous novelist in America at the moment. He is carrying a guitar, an ominous sign, a bit like William Burroughs fondling a pistol. You want to say, Get that goddamned thing away from him! Margaret, a Canadian, says, "I live in the only safe country in the world." I challenge this. New Zealand, Costa Rica, Eire, and Mongolia are much safer in my experience. I head for J. Walter Thompson to discuss the merits of Rolex watches with a copywriter named Charity-Charity, "because when I got married, I decided not to take the chap's name. I wanted my own name."

  To Cheltenham and the glorious countryside where I always wanted to live (and now how can I?). I am ten minutes late for my lecture. No one has panicked. I slide from the car to the podium. More evangelism and literary piety. Afterward, a man says, "You should read the poem by Gavin Ewart called 'American Fatties.'" I wish I could find it. Another man follows me out to the street and shyly asks, "Where did you get those wonderful shoes?" They're Mephistos, made in France, bought in Hong Kong.

  OCTOBER 9

  Cosmo Book Day, at Church House Westminster, where one of the Cosmopolitan covers announces, "Big Growth Areas! Fellatio on the Upswing!" A chat with Sue Townsend, whose husband, Colin, manufactures canoes. This book event is all young women with jobs, who buy and read books. It is a thousand times more interesting than a literary lunch, usually attended by elderly people wanting to kill time ("in self-defense," as De Vries remarked). I hear someone say of a friend, "Oh, she went to the College of Short Planks."

  In the evening to the South Bank, to hear baroque music. People in my face all week, but this is heaven. London music is what I miss most. Never mind, I am off to Gibraltar in the morning.

  Farewell to Britain: Look Thy Last on All Things Lovely

  LIVING IN BRITAIN, I used to believe that I would never get lost, nor would I ever find an unknown place in this peaceable but much-trampled kingdom. Yet people got lost all the time in the Welsh hills, or froze to death in the Lake District, or drowned off the coast, and many rural places had the look of wilderness, even if they weren't wild. And for all its tameness, Britain was difficult to leave and often hard to travel around. On a clear day the French coast was visible to the southeast, but Britain was not Europe. It was not America, either, and it was much more than England. It had edges; cold water lapped its shores. As time passed Britain seemed larger to me, not smaller, and some parts of it were almost unreachable, though in eighteen years I never lost the feeling that I was on an island.

  The breadth and subtlety of English literature, perhaps the greatest literature in the world, endows a foreign bookworm—which is what I was, and am—with a distinct sense of what Britain is like: the complex power of its monarchy, the labyrinthine nature of its cities, the grandeur and diversity of its coastline, the misleading folksiness of its villages, the almost Oriental nature of its manners and society. As for the beauty of its seasons, there is a whole library on the subject of English spring alone, but it helps to live through the darkness and uncertainty of an English winter to appreciate it.

  I cannot say that I went to visit Britain to indulge myself in verifying its literature. I left teaching in Singapore and headed for England because in 1971 a house in the English countryside could b
e rented for the equivalent of about ten U.S. dollars a week. I found a cottage in west Dorset, not far from the sea. As a self-employed writer, with a wife and two children, I could live in a lovely place without feeling any financial pressure. So, although it was bargain-hunting that sent me to that village, and not the work of Thomas Hardy, inevitably, among these deeply rooted people, I discovered the truth of Hardy's writing. His descriptions of the folk, the farms, the hills, the wildflowers, the villages, even the forms of cruelty, still held. It was my lesson. I resolved to be as faithful to what I experienced.

  When people in London said "the North," they meant Manchester or Newcastle, but for me north always meant Scotland, because I had that feeling of being on an island. One of the many oddities of subdivided Britain is that one of the northernmost regions is called Sutherland—so it was for the Vikings, for whom it was south. When I took a train, I never had a notion of crossing into Wales, or into Cornwall or Scotland; it was just more stops and smaller stations. The tribal warfare of Britain, with its teasing and its injustices, its enduring aggression and its sense of grievance, is something I regarded with a detachment I had learned in observing the Baganda and the Acholi quarrel in Uganda.

  After a time we moved from Dorset to London, but I never lost the feeling that I was a castaway. As a foreigner, I was determined not to die in Britain and be buried in a gloomy churchyard under a blackish dripping yew tree. One day I would sail away. I never guessed that I would leave alone, feeling as portable and insignificant as when I arrived. I landed in Britain on November 4, 1971, and left on January 19, 1990. The years that these dates enclosed were among the happiest as well as the saddest I have ever known: joy bordering on rapture, misery at the very edge of despair.

  I knew I did not belong—no foreigner can in Britain—nor did I want to. Anyway, I quite enjoyed the experience of being at once alien and anonymous, like The Man Who Fell to Earth, a Martian who looks like everyone else. This condition seemed to me to epitomize the writer's dilemma. But on an island of such unselfconscious literacy and library-going, it seemed natural to be a writer. Because of a writer's peculiar attitude toward money, he is an oddity in the United States, but not in Britain.

  I was always a taxpayer but never a voter, so I had no sense of belonging, of supporting a political party, or even of being an English resident. My home was a house in south London, on this island of Britain. I often felt physically uncomfortable or socially constrained, and yet I was intellectually freer and better appreciated than I ever felt before or since. I was never entirely at home in Britain, but I never had a sense of being unwelcome. Seeing people on the street, I used to think: You are home and I am not. I constantly prayed: I don't want to die here.

  After eleven years in Britain I grew restless. To gather more experience to write about this island, I set off to circumambulate the coast—on foot and by train and bus and boat. When The Kingdom by the Sea appeared, with all its breezy generalities and affectionate mockery, the reviews were robust—British literary journalists practice harmless cruelty—yet the fuss meant my book was taken seriously, and so was I, because I still lived there. What American Anglomaniacs don't understand is that the British will listen to the opinions of almost anyone who lives on the island, but generally speaking, if a writer doesn't live in Britain, they will have no interest in his or her opinions. When I left the country, ceasing to be a resident, I lost my nitpicking license.

  One day I made a list of all the things I liked in Britain: bread, fish, clouds, beer, country pubs, clotted cream, flower gardens, apples, newspapers, woolen cloth, radio programs, parks, Indian restaurants, amateur dramatics, the Royal Mail, the trains, and the patience, modesty, and politeness of people.

  "Look thy last on all things lovely, / Every hour," I used to murmur to myself when I lived in Britain. I loved paddling the coastline of Wales in my kayak, cycling from London to Brighton, hiking the South Downs, listening to a symphony concert in the Royal Festival Hall, visiting one son at Oxford and the other at Cambridge. What luck, I thought. I have planted my family here and it has flourished.

  After I left, I looked back and saw that to a large extent England had made me, but not in the way I had imagined. I had resolved to be frugal, and living among frugal people I had not lost the habit. I saw how the difficult path had rewarded me. I began to cherish, and still do, times of adversity and disappointment and hardship. And I began to understand what hardship is. It is not, for example, the long, arduous road over the Tibetan plateau from Golmud to Lhasa, which I have traveled; it is the almost eighteen years I spent on the South Circular Road, which is almost indescribably depressing—and who's interested? Hardship can be a lively subject, but nuisance is something that no one wants to hear about.

  Britain is beautiful, but Britain can also be bleak—not ugly or picturesquely dangerous, but with stretches of enormous monotony that seemed to nibble at my soul. The heart-sinking housing estates by the motorway in Huddersfield; the look of my children's pale faces among all the others in the schoolyard of their primary school; the crowded bus stops, sadder for being orderly; the bleakness of certain reaches of the Thames at low tide; and nothing I have seen is bleaker than a drizzly winter afternoon in Catford—brown sky, gray bricks, black street. But I never regarded that time as failure. It was reality, an opportunity, and my discomfort made me look more closely and gave me something to write about. Then I moved on and closed the book on it.

  Gravy Train: A Private Railway Car

  I WAS SITTING in the sunshine in the last car of a train heading west, feeling utterly baffled, and thinking, I have never been here before. It was not just the place (early morning in the middle of Colorado); it was also my state of mind (blissful). I was grateful for my good fortune. To think that riding a train, something I had done for pleasure all my traveling life, had been improved upon. In the past, what had mattered most in any long train journey through an interesting landscape was the motion, the privacy, the solitude, the grandeur. Food and comfort, I had discovered, are seldom available on the best trips: there is something about the most beautiful places having the most awful trains. But this was something else.

  My chair was on the rear observation platform of a private railway car called "Los Angeles," formerly part of the Southern Pacific Railway. My feet were braced against a brass rail, and the morning sunshine was full on my face. I had woken in Fort Morgan, and after a stroll in Denver had reboarded to have breakfast with family and friends in the private dining room of this car: orange juice, home-baked blueberry coffee cake and muffins, scrambled eggs and fresh juice and coffee. Then the morning paper in the private lounge, and finally settling myself in the open air on this little brass porch as we started our climb through the foothills of the Rockies. An hour out of Denver it was epic grandeur, moving past frozen creeks, pines, and rubbly hills, destination San Francisco. I was very happy.

  From this position on a train, eye contact is possible, and as we passed through Pinecliffe, in Gilpin County, a woman stopped at the level crossing, stuck her head out of her car, and waved at me, making my day.

  "Anything I can get you?" This was George, the steward, holding the rear door open. "Coffee? Cookies? More juice? Hot chocolate?"

  There were four armchairs and a big sofa in the parlor just inside, and off the corridor, four bedrooms, two with double beds, and hot showers. Farther along, the dining room and the gourmet kitchen, and beyond that a big long Amtrak train, the California Zephyr, pulling us on its usual route from Chicago to San Francisco, via Denver and Salt Lake City.

  As for the rest, I was ignorant. Happiness has no questions; bliss is not a state of inquiry. Whatever squirrelly anxieties I possessed had vanished a long way back, probably soon after we boarded in Chicago, or else at Galesburg. Bliss had definitely taken hold as we crossed the Mississippi, because I remember standing right here on the rear platform and gawking at it, the chunks of ice gleaming in the lights of Burlington, Iowa, on the distant riverbank, the
clattering of the bridge, the sense that I was in the night air, hearing and seeing the water, and smelling it too, this damp winter night, the marshy muddiness of the great river.

  We had left Chicago the previous afternoon in fog so thick that airline passengers had turned O'Hare into a gigantic dormitory, and departing flights were so thoroughly canceled that there was a slumber party at each gate. The fog was news, so I was excited just slipping out of it. I glanced from time to time at the Amtrak route guide, which gave helpful information. We passed Princeton, Illinois ("Pig Capital of the World"), and Galesburg (associated with Carl Sandburg, and the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and "Popcorn was invented in Galesburg by Olmstead Ferris"), then through Monmouth (birthplace of Wyatt Earp). But all I saw were dark houses, dim lights, and the vast midwestern sky, and here and there a small nameless town, not noticed by the guide, and a filling station on a side road, or a bowling alley, or the local diner filled with eaters.

  It is easy to understand the envy of the traveler for the settled people he or she sees, snug in their houses, at home. But I could not have been snugger here in the private railway car. Thinking of the days that stretched ahead, all of them on rails, I was put in mind of Russia, of long journeys through forests and prairies, past little wooden houses half buried in the snow, with smoking chimneys. It was like that, the size of the landscape, the snow, the darkness, and the starry night over Iowa.