“Travel broadens the mind, but first you must have the mind.”
G.K.Chesterton

Travel writers lead romantic lives. They explore the world at other people’s expense, and they don’t even need to invent their material. They simply describe the places they visit. Anybody can do that.

You know as well as I do that the above paragraph is nonsense, but the romance persists. It would be a kindness to future travelers and travel writers to lay the myth to rest here and now.

There are several varieties or genres of travel writing. The most profitable type (for the writer) is essentially a branch of public relations. This is the stuff you read in brochures and glossy magazines, and also in newspaper travel supplements. Every destination is described as beautiful, welcoming, unspoiled, and so on, with digitally enhanced pictures. This is essentially a branch of fantasy fiction, as you soon discover if you actually travel to any of these places.

Secondly there’s what I call straight travel writing that gives the reader real, accurate, and unbiased information. This is quite rare. The “Rough Guides” series is the best example I know. Straight travel writing is enormously hard work, because it demands so much detailed on-the-spot research. Stamina, attention to detail, and an iron stomach are the basic job requirements.

Thirdly (in no particular order) comes “literary” travel writing of the kind practiced by Paul Theroux or Adam Gopnik. Books and essays of this type are usually great fun to read, and can be more eye-opening than any number of guidebooks. However the literary travel writer gives no information about hotels, ferries, restaurants and so on.

Fourthly, an increasingly popular genre is what might be called the “hair raising travel adventure.” The author deliberately sets out to do something idiotic, like climbing Everest on one leg, crossing the Sahara on a unicycle, or rowing the Atlantic in a bathtub. We don’t have any new frontiers, so these writers are doing the best they can to create some excitement. As my mother would say, they should have their heads examined.

Fifthly (I’m almost done!) we have “travel pornography,” of the type exemplified by Peter Mayle’s hugely successful A Year in Provence, and its many imitators. The pornography here is not sexual but cultural. These writers take a place and a culture and recycle it as an idealistic dream fantasy.

Finally we have travel writers who use humor and satire, from Mark Twain to Bill Bryson. I enjoy these a lot, but they are not the place to look for practical information.

Americans on the whole are not great travelers. Only 8% of citizens have a passport and (almost incredibly) only 12% of U.S. Senators. This may help to explain the resolute parochialism of American culture and politics. Foreign countries are experienced mostly at secondhand, through the media, or by young soldiers who have been sent to places off the regular tourist routes in order to teach their citizens the benefits of democracy. This set me thinking about the role of travel writers. If 92% of Americans and most of their representatives glimpse the world only through the eyes of travel writers and war correspondents, what do they see?

Obviously they see only a tiny part of the planet – the regions that are designated as safe enough for tourism or weak enough for military adventures. This leaves out just about the whole of the ordinary world that most people live in, and that can only be experienced by going there.

Most of my travels are fairly conventional, so I’ve not had the opportunity to write about exotic places and extreme experiences. But even conventional travel can be written about in very different ways.

For example, we were traveling in Europe a couple of years ago. On the final leg of our journey we abandoned the rented car and look a train ride from Nice, across northern Italy and to Milan. The city was new to me, although I had driven around the bypass several times. Before leaving home I had asked my Italian barber Milan, which was his birthplace. He said: “It’s like New York but full of Italians.” When I pointed out that New York is also full of Italians he said: “Then it’s like New York.” He was quite wrong. New York has no trams.

A travel writer might handle the transition between Nice and Milan something like this:

“The train from Nice sped along the Côte d’Azur, offering spectacular views of the sea and the mountains, before turning inland at Genoa to glide across the fertile plains of Lombardy and into Milan’s imposing Stazione Centrale.”

An honest non-fiction writer might describe the experience more like this:

“The train from Nice was cancelled. All trains were cancelled due to unspecified trouble in the tunnel at Menton. Buses were laid on to take us over the mountain to the station at Monaco. But there weren’t enough buses, and a great mass of passengers had to wait for an hour in the blazing sun. When we got on a bus the air conditioning was broken and the windows were jammed shut. Instead of stopping at Monaco as promised the bus driver (ignoring the loud complaints and threats of the passengers) continued right on into Italy and dumped us all out at the station of a miserable little town called Ventimiglia where we foreigners were mildly harassed by the local police (enjoying themselves enormously, the most fun day they had had in Ventimiglia for years) before being allowed on the train. All seat reservations had been cancelled in the confusion, so there was a huge scrum for seats. The train started two hours late and crawled very slowly towards Milan, stopping at every village and sheep station to take on more passengers, none of whom could find seats. There was no food or drink on the train, and the journey took five hours (not counting the wait in Nice and the bus ride). This traveling inferno finally arrived at Milan Central Station, which is more filthy, graffiti-encrusted, crowded, hot, and infested with bums, beggars and drug addicts than even a New Yorker could imagine.”

An honest non-fiction writer might also mention that Milan’s two major tourist attractions were effectively absent. The spectacular façade of the Duomo Cathedral (1386) was covered in plastic for cleaning, and the world-famous opera house, the Teatro Alla Scala, was closed for restoration. However s/he would also feel impelled to make positive comments on the superb public transportation system, the fine restaurants, and the friendly and helpful people of Milan.

Which experience would you prefer to read about? The second one is 100% true.

Over the years I’ve published a few travel pieces. But more often I have stalled, as you may have done, in the process of trying to translate my observations into the right language. The gap between real travel experience and the conventional style of travel writing is very hard to bridge. Humor is one way to do it. Mark Twain, in Innocents Abroad, told more unwelcome truths than most travelers of his own or any other time.

Modern travel writing is indeed a form of fiction, and most of those who read travel articles in magazines and newspapers probably understand that they are indulging a kind of dream, where everything is beautiful and every encounter is picturesque and satisfying. But fiction understood by its readers to be pure invention, and travel writing is sometimes less innocent.

Many freelances and full-time journalists who do this kind of work depend on travel companies to give them a free ride. Whenever I publish a travel piece, however small and obscure, I receive a bunch of offers from PR companies – five days in Iceland, a gastronomic tour of Burgundy, a week in sunny Kabul, and so on. These offers suggest that the PR company flacks never actually read anything that I wrote. My travel writings tend to be ironic and acerbic. No sane PR person would invite me on a tour that they wanted to promote. When I accept one of these offers (which happens rarely, and only after stating clearly in writing that I will tell the truth about the experience) I always feel guilty. My fellow hacks don’t see it that way. For them, it’s just a free ride and a joke.

The earth is an imperfect planet. It is a mess. The alien peoples of the world speak incomprehensible languages, eat peculiar foods, subscribe to bizarre religions, and march to a whole timpani section of different drummers. In short, they have no idea how to live properly. Their nations, unlike ours, are often chaotic and alarming. Even their TV schedules are not always completely reliable.

The job of the travel writer is to make these stressful foreign places seem interesting enough to justify the investment of thousands of dollars in travel costs. He or she must draw on a rather limited range of images, all of which have been used tens of thousands of times before. Commercial travel writers, like travel agents, have created a new language with its own unique resonances. Water is always “crystal clear,” restaurants are “vibrant,” anything built before 1950 is “olde worlde,” views are “breathtaking” or “big sky” or “unspoiled,” hotels are “romantic gems” or “fairytale hideaways.” It takes real skill to write like this without laughing. The travel writer’s tool kit of appealing and improbable clichés also includes the following:

• Beautiful weather (usually exaggerated and unreliable).
• Glorious golden beaches (rare, usually artificial).
• Fine and/or exotic restaurants (if you are very lucky).
• Exciting nightlife (you can probably do better at home unless you live in Iowa).
• Friendly natives (usually the biggest fiction of all).
• Interesting historic ruins (almost never interesting except to professional archeologists).
• High profile cultural credits (art, music etc., a lot of hard work).
• Natural wonders (waterfalls, mountains, lakes, deserts – just like we have at home).
• Amiable wildlife (possible glimpses of the vanishing rear ends of furry creatures).
• Unique sporting opportunities (hang gliding in the Himalayas, skateboarding through Baghdad etc. – ideal for the under-twelve crowd).

It is difficult for those of us not gifted with powerful imaginations to make the connection between these descriptions and the places we actually visit on the ground. The latter can be described, certainly, but not in language that any travel editor would publish.

But the essential dishonesty of travel writing is not so much its bizarre language as its intense selectivity. Even Paul Theroux, a serious and excellent travel writer, admitted in a British newspaper interview that even he leaves out the really bad parts – the disgusting illnesses, the interminable delays, and the predatory people he encounters on his travels. Travel writing is the art of choosing a few bright fragments out of the chaos of experience and reassembling them into a complete picture.

This is not a diatribe against traveling, or even against conventional travel writing. I love to travel, even though I feel guilty about the pollution and waste involved, because I have great curiosity about how other people live, and I need the escape from everyday life. My complaint is that inexperienced tourists often set out with unrealistic expectations, nurtured by books, magazine articles and TV programs, so they fail to get the most out of their trip while it is actually happening.

The crucial distinction here is between travelers (us) and tourists (them). Tourists expect what the travel writers have told them to expect. Travelers expect anything and everything.

The interesting thing about tourists is that, in the end, it doesn’t seem to matter whether they enjoy their trip or not. Years ago, when I was much younger and even more foolish, I took on a summer job as a driver and guide for a company called Minitrek Expeditions, operating out of London. They offered what they humorously called “Adventure Holidays” in Greece, Turkey, parts of Eastern Europe and north Africa, using heavy-duty buses and stretched Land Rovers. These holidays appealed mostly to young people who were strong enough to survive the experience. The “adventure” was created by the fact that most of the driver/guides were, like me, complete amateurs. My own groups enjoyed an extra level of uncertainty because I was not good at reading maps. My tours might end up anywhere.

These trips were hard work. It’s no accident that the English word “travel” derives from the French “travail” (work). We camped, often in foul weather. We had so much sickness that I carried a box full of antibiotics and sulfa drugs, illegally purchased in what was then Yugoslavia. The vehicles often broke down. The passengers fell in love and fought with each other, usually at the same time, and found a common enemy in their driver/guide. The places where we stopped were often poverty-stricken and grim, and sometimes dangerous. Nobody could or did call it fun. But we always had plenty of customers, and even repeat customers.

After a particularly diabolical journey in the Sahara, I decided to run a little experiment. A week before the trip I had the victims (sorry, passengers) fill out a questionnaire about their expectations. Halfway through the trip those passengers who were still conscious and coherent filled out another questionnaire about how their expectations were being fulfilled. Two weeks after they returned home the survivors filled in a third questionnaire about their memories of the trip. This was repeated over several dozen trips to different places with different guides.

The result was an almost inverted perfect bell curve. Expectations started high, and plummeted down to zero in the middle of the experience. Two weeks afterwards, false memories were firmly in place. The travelers looked back on their adventures with nostalgia, and their memories were almost as rosy as their original hopes.

I published this finding as an article in a small weekly magazine, and tried to sell it to a wider audience. But nobody wanted to read it. Being funny about vacations (à la Chevy Chase) is fine. Telling the plain truth is almost sacrilegious. This was, admittedly, an extreme and unusual example, but my knowledge of the tourist industry is slightly broader than that. I’ve worked as a guide the northern Italian cultural boot camp circuit (Florence, Pisa, Sienna, Venice etc.), and also as a troubleshooter in the villa rental business in Cyprus and Turkey. None of my experiences have contradicted the impressions recorded above.

All vacations probably follow the same curving path from anticipation, down to experience, and up again to nostalgia, and experiences are less powerful than memories. To paraphrase something that Professor John Gagnon said about sex: “First there’s the expectation, then there’s the memory. But best of all is the expectation of the memory.”

This lets travel writers off the hook. The Technicolor fantasies they create may cause travelers to suffer a rude shock during the vacation itself, but they provide essential material for the re-creation of happy memories afterwards. Once tourists have recovered from the jet lag, stomach disorders and the credit card bills, they begin to imagine that they actually did enjoy the golden beaches, exotic restaurants, and unique cultural experiences that they read about before booking the trip.

The main lesson for tourists themselves is not to take detailed notes during the journey. Like any diary, these notes will make unwelcome reading afterwards. Tourists must allow the ever-inventive travel writers to stock their dreams and refurbish their memories, and not ask too many questions.

“Education has produced a vast population
able to read, but unable to distinguish what
is worth reading.”
G.M.Trevelyan

One weekend I was returning from work at the radio station in Connecticut to my home in Long Island, a journey that involves a ferry ride. It was early evening and the bar on the boat was completely empty. I perched on a stool and chatted to Maureen, the charming barmaid, until a smartly dressed pretty young woman came crashing through the doors, installed herself on the stool next to me, and demanded: “Where’s the television.” All four screens in the bar were blank. Maureen explained that the satellite link was down, and the young woman buried her face in her hands in real distress.

“There’s nothing to see,” she wailed, “And I didn’t bring any music.”

“You could watch the scenery,” I suggested. This is a particularly pretty ferry ride and it was not yet dark. She looked at me in amazement, so I gallantly passed over the front section of The New York Times, which I had been intending to read. She looked as if I’d given her a live toad.

“I don’t read,” she said, “Not since school.” And she slammed out of the bar.

I know this is an often-told tale, and I apologize for that. But it matters, at least to writers, that huge and growing numbers of educated middle class Americans simply do not read at all. It’s not that they don’t read Proust or Joyce: they read nothing. This is something we can all observe in public places. I travel on this same ferry every week and there may be as many as two hundred people in the main cabin. If I can count ten reading a book or a newspaper I consider it a good day for literacy. Most of the travelers simply stare into space, talk on their cell phones, or watch one of the several TV screens. The kids crowd around the video games in one corner.

The statistics are dramatic. These are from surveys and research conducted in 2003 and 2004. Similar changes have been documented in Europe.

Less than half the American population reads for pleasure in their spare time – a decline of 10% in the past ten years.

The steepest decline in reading habits has been among children and young adults – a decline of almost 20% in the past ten years.

One in five of American adults now reads below fifth grade level.

Philosophers and sociologists have been mulling this change for more than forty years. We built our culture on print, and the popular use of books goes back more than four hundred years. This has changed quite recently. In the sixties the Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan argued that western civilization is sliding backwards from written culture to an oral/visual culture, where pictures and talk will be the only things that matter. He even predicted the “retribalization” of society. He approved of this change, claiming that reading is a divisive, elitist activity while video culture can be and is shared by everybody, including those who are illiterate.

The historian Daniel Boorstin focused on that last fact. In his book The Image he argued that losing literacy means losing freedom, because mass-manufactured images make it easy to manipulate vast numbers of people – not just in terms of advertising but in the very way they see and think about the world. Switch on the TV and run through all the channels you can find. Everything is the same, everybody looks the same and speaks the same and thinks the same and acts the same and consumes the same way. Go to the bookstore and look at the same number of books and I guarantee that you’ll find an outrageous, mind-boggling variety of characters, attitudes, lifestyles and philosophies. Print is still relatively decentralized compared to the TV/video/film industries. Four or five corporations now control almost everything we see and hear on the mass media.

The Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse took the argument one step further. In One Dimensional Man he argued that this process was already complete, and that almost nobody (except Professor Marcuse himself) could think outside the box devised by the mass media. We are already media zombies, like those depicted in the classic dystopias Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World.

The fatal weakness of image culture instantly becomes obvious whenever you see a movie made from a familiar novel. Choose your novel: Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, The Remains of the Day, The Old Man and the Sea, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Bonfire of the Vanities, Madame Bovary – it doesn’t matter. The movie will always be a thin caricature of the novel on which it was based. If you’ve read the book, the movie is always a disappointment. The only exceptions are the pure-action-with-no-thought novels, like Ian Fleming’s James Bond series. These translate to the screen brilliantly because they scarcely need to have ever existed as novels at all.

This is obviously a challenge for writers of all kinds. One response is to join the enemy and become a screenwriter, but that’s a tough profession to get into. If you are a parent or a teacher you can do something directly to educate a few young people about books, and many parents and teachers do work enormously hard at this. You can join your local branch of Literacy Volunteers of America. You can write curmudgeonly essays like this one saying: “In my young days things were different,” which is satisfying but futile, and probably not true anyway.

The trouble is – and here we come to the nub of the matter – that some of these images are so damned good. I’m a fan of the novels of Patrick O’Brian, so I went to see the first movie of his work – “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World” – with deep misgivings. I was right about one thing. The movie leaves out most of the important things in the book: its thoughtfulness, its deep emotionality, its complicated portrait of the masculine world. It’s an action movie pure and simple, but magnificently done, and totally captivating.

We have lived in the linear, logical, complicated, frustrating world of the printed word for almost half a millennium. Words are hard, but images are easy. Some pundits say that Gutenberg’s long party is over, and we have been pushed and pulled into the age of images that short-circuit the thought process and hit us with the force of pure emotion.

“I don’t read – not since school.”

Tell me it isn’t so.

“It is with books as with men: a very small
number play a great part, the rest are
lost in the multitude.”
Voltaire

There’s a character in the Peanuts cartoon strip called Pigpen – a little boy who attracts dirt like a magnet. I am a Pigpen for books. They come at me from all directions and they stick to me for decades.

This is not a complaint. I love my great unwieldy mass of books, although moving them from place to place over the years has left me with a bad back and an allergy to cardboard boxes. I have made fourteen major house moves in my lifetime so far. Each time I have sorted through my books and sold or dumped many of them. Mysteriously, I now have more books than ever. They fill every bookshelf in the house and in my office, and the overflow lurks in the basement.

Before our last move I said to myself: “This time I will really sort out those books.” There were volumes I hadn’t looked at since we last moved house seventeen years before. Obviously there was no point in keeping them any longer. There were hundreds of dull academic books from my former professorial life, relics of the past – away with them! Then were are all the paperbacks purchased to read on a plane, and never to be opened again – into the oubliette!

It sounded much easier than it was. Every book is a slice of the past – personal or professional. When I pick up a dusty old volume I can usually remember when and where I first read it, or who gave it to me, or what particular thing I learned from it. Going through one’s book collection is like conducting an archaeological dig of one’s own life.

My immediate practical goal was to reduce the number of books that must be moved to the new house by about half. Our new house has a room that is humorously called “The Library.” But this has fewer bookshelves than most of the un-named rooms in our old house. Something had to go.

The first triage was not too hard. I retained all the classics and near-classics, plus all the books with really nice bindings, plus all the books I had really liked, plus all the books I could imagine myself using for some future project.

Then there were the difficult cases: for example The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom’s 1987 diatribe against American education and in support of Plato. It was an influential book in its time. But it is 382 pages long, and I know the plot. On the other hand it is full of wisdom and rhetoric that I may be able to steal some day. My hand wavered between one pile and the other. Bloom ended up on the “save” pile. It’s an important book, it looks good on my shelves.

All these agonizing choices left a large heap of volumes that I had to admit I would never read or refer to every again under any circumstances, and in some cases had never read at all. I hated to admit it, but these were useless books.

What to do with this treasure trove of eclectic reading? It was an odd collection, ranging from the strictly academic to the highly popular and the merely bizarre. I started by trucking them over to the used and antique bookshop. The owner shook his head over my books, and bought only a few for his stock. My low-end tastes were not sufficiently commercial for his casual customers, and my high-end tastes were not sufficiently erudite for the more intellectual ones.

But I am constitutionally incapable of throwing books away, even when I know they are worthless. I was determined to find a good home for these hundreds of discarded volumes. After all, some writer had labored long and hard over each one. It would be an insult just to throw them in the garbage.

The popular paperbacks were easy to lose. I gave them to a big charity garage sale at the local university, and they vanished without a trace at 25c a copy.

The more serious books were harder to place. A lot of my research in the past was concerned with radical social movements – attempts by ordinary people to change their lives outside the framework of regular politics. So I had hundreds of books about socialism, anarchism feminism, civil rights and the counter culture. They are all out of date now – indeed social movements themselves seem to be a thing of the past in the new imperial age. So I threw them into the trunk of the car and took them to the public library in Riverhead, Long Island where they can be sold at bargain prices at the Yellow Barn. This is a real historic barn, alongside the library where surplus books are sold to benefit the Friends of the Library, of whom I happen to be one. Charity begins at home.

It was as I did this that I began to get a sense of mission, a feeling that my discarded books might still have a role to play in the human comedy. Many of them, both fiction and non-fiction, were not mainstream public library reading. They were full of radical ideas. Spreading these books through the community could be a subversive activity. Books always were subversive, which is why churches and governments down the ages have tried to ban them. Radicals with a pen – Jean Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Tom Paine – can cause any amount of trouble. The People’s Revolution, Class War in America and The Fire Next Time were just three of the titles polluting the bland reading habits of my Long Island neighbors. I like to imagine that my books have injected the stimulant of radical thought into the flabby arm of suburban conformity.

There’s more. Back in 1984 I wrote a book about radical feminism, and the books I used for that project were and are dynamite. They have titles like The Coming Matriarchy, The Battle of the Sexes, Women Rule, The Feminine Mystique and The New Feminist Revolution. These poisoned gifts were also cunningly inserted into the weekly book sale at the Yellow Barn, where the majority of the buyers are women.

There’s a group in France with a name that translates roughly as “The Book Crusaders.” When they buy a book they enjoy they leave it in a public place with a note, rather like those find on Gideon Bibles in American motels, explaining that this book has been left for your pleasure by the Book Crusaders. Sometimes the Crusader lurks in hiding, just to see who picks up their literary offering – a nun, or a gendarme? If I lived in France I’d join, and lurk with the rest of them.

Placing my books in the Yellow Barn is the best I can do on Long Island, and I hope it works. I rather like the idea of new-minted socialists, anarchists and radical feminists raging through the streets of Riverhead. I will naturally disclaim any legal responsibility. But I’m glad that I passed those books and those ideas on to a new generation of readers, who may or may not decide to change the world. That’s what books are for.

For writers of a certain age, the most nostalgic sound in the world is the irregular clatter of an old manual typewriter, being used by somebody who can’t type. I have a bunch of typewriters, fully-functioning antiques that provide a reassuring link to the past. My favorite machine is a Royal, manufactured about 1949. I got it in a garage sale ten years ago, and have used it every day since.

The reign of the manual typewriter was quite short. The first crude machines appeared in offices in the 1870s, and the first electric typewriters in 1935. By the 1980s, typewriters were history. For my generation, though, the clack of a typewriter was and is the very sound of romance. In movies or radio dramas, the appearance of a brilliant writer or a heroic journalist was always signaled by this very sound.

It was important that these characters couldn’t type. They were hacking out the words painfully, letter by letter, so that you could hear great writing being committed. There’s nothing romantic about high-speed typing. It’s true that generations of earlier writers composed in near-silence. Most of the great literature of the world emerged from under a scratching pen. When the typewriter appeared, most writers condemned it as a barbaric device that would probably usher in the end of civilization, and certainly the end of literature. But those of us who grew up with typewriters never missed the romance of the fountain pen. The clumsy machine was like a superior alter ego, turning our awkward phrases and spidery calligraphy into real writing.

My first typewriter came into my life quite unexpectedly when I was fourteen. It was donated by my mother’s employer, the benevolent proprietor of a chain of London pubs, who had heard that I wanted to be a writer and made this gift, presumably out of sympathy. It was an Underwood, manufactured some time in the late 1920s, and retired after a long, hard life in the office, but built like a tank.

For years I wrote everything on it and its more streamlined successors: reports, letters, stories, books, theses. My first wife god bless her was a great believer in hard work. In the evenings, she liked to hear the sound of typing from my room. But sometimes I preferred to relax, read, or take a nap. So I recorded a cassette tape of an energetic typing session, which ran for an hour and a half, and I played that every evening until she caught me. That trick would never work with a computer.

I never learned to type properly. As a very young journalist, I found that good typing was not admired – it was not, as we would now say, cool. Journalists were not supposed to be stenographers, we just got it down with two flying index fingers helped by the occasional thumb on the space bar and adventurous stabs with the other digits. On a good day, before the pubs opened, I could manage sixty words a minute. Not all those words were in the Oxford English dictionary, of course.

Considered simply as a writing machine, the manual typewriter has many advantages over the computer. It allows us to pause and think, for hours if necessary, in absolute silence, without humming at us or suddenly flashing up a screen saver as a guilty reminder of idleness. A manual typewriter, like a good friend, knows the value of silence. It slows us down and, in those long pauses, grammar and spelling, structure and style can be considered. They must be considered, because it’s so tedious to fix mistakes. When we are ready to start work again there’s a palpable sense of drama and action. The burst of noise says: something’s happening.

A manual typewriter is more or less cat-proof. I’ve had alarming things happen to my computer because of cats walking over the keyboard or playing with the mouse. And. although I can’t prove this, I swear that nobody could write such nonsense on a manual typewriter as is routinely churned out on word processors. Somewhere along the way, I lost the original Underwood, but I found its twin in another garage sale. Five other manual typewriters are lurking in the basement. When Armageddon finally comes on December 21 this year I’m sure that the old Underwood will survive. I like to think that it will be the only machine on the planet in a condition to take down my comments on the interesting period immediately afterwards.

“The ideal view for daily writing,
hour on hour, is the blank brick wall of a
cold storage warehouse. Failing this, a stretch
of sky will do, cloudless if possible.”
Edna Ferber

Writing should be the ultimately portable activity. The stereotype of the author, reinforced by numerous advertisements for writing courses, is of the creative spirit freed from the constraints of time and space. One writing school that advertised for years in Writers’ Digest used a picture of a woman half-reclining on a beach with her laptop, gazing into space. She was obviously just about to produce a great novel or poem, regardless of sun glare blotting out the screen, sand getting into the keyboard, and all the other distractions that a beach offers.

I envy people who can write anywhere. I’ve met a few of them, and they are very annoying. It doesn’t matter where they are – on a train rumbling through Turkey, on a Boeing 747 flying over the North Pole, at a counter top in somebody else’s kitchen, or at a truck stop diner in Iowa – they can always produce a yellow pad or a laptop and start writing.

This gives them an enormous competitive advantage over people like me, who can only write in one place. The geographically promiscuous writer is inevitably more productive, because no potential writing time is wasted.

This may be a problem that nobody else shares, but I suspect that they do. I can and do take notes anywhere, but I can only concentrate on writing in the familiar place where I always write.

The room I call my study is very pleasant. It overlooks the garden and some woods. The shutters create slanting bars of sunshine, so I can imagine that I’m writing on a tropical island like Graham Greene. All my stuff is conveniently arranged. I even have two desks, although one of them is always covered with cats. But, after we moved into this new house, I found myself mute in this nice room, completely unable to write for about two weeks. The same thing has happened before. Rooms that I wrote in for years became almost an essential part of my equipment. When I had to leave them it was like death or divorce. It induced a kind of mental paralysis.

Now my new study is familiar, and I think I can see why familiarity is so essential, at least for me. It’s a question of blanking out everything else, of reducing distractions to the absolute minimum. When I have my space properly organized the routine stuff becomes automatic. My shelves of general reference books and music reference books are on the left. Other books of current interest – a changing selection – are on the right. Filing cabinets are behind. The computer is on one desk, and the typewriter and the cats are on the other. Recording gear and CD players are on a cabinet that also holds stationery. When I need a stapler or a paper clip or a notebook my hand knows exactly where to find it. My favorite pictures are on the walls. The bird feeders are clearly visible from the windows. Order has been achieved. There are no distractions. I can write. If this sounds like a bad case of obsessive-compulsive disorder then I plead guilty. But I think it makes some psychological sense.

Virginia Woolf, in a much-quoted sentence, wrote: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

My responses to that are: what does being a woman have to do with it, and what does fiction have to do with it? We all need money and a room of our own if we are to write anything.

At least, I have a nice room.

Last week I started on the somewhat daunting task of reading The Autobiography of Mark Twain. This work has been assembled over many years by the Mark Twain Project, and is not so much an autobiography as a cleverly edited collection of notes and fragments that Mr. Clemens left behind when he died in 1910.

Mark Twain is a model for any writer, and it is particularly interesting that he left instructions that none of his autobiographical material was to be published until one hundred years after his death. He argued that this was the only way a man could tell the whole truth without embarassing himself or hurting other people.

How right he was, and how little we care to admit it! Your secret personal writings can be as searingly honest as you like, but when you write (knowingly) for publication the veil of self-censorship comes sweeping down, and most of the really interesting stuff gets left out. This is the vast hidden reservoir of what the French call “le non dit” or the unsaid.

It’s not just embarassing personal matters that activate the self-protective instinct. A seasoned writer (what in the bad old days we called “a hack”) knows very well what his audience doesn’t want to hear, and more important what his editor doesn’t want to hear. The mental scissors are always at work, snipping away those undesirable thoughts. In America, I find, there are three taboo areas: religion, patriotism and (interestingly) sports. These are dangerous themes for any writer with a sense of humor. Politics, thank goodness, is wide open. But Mark Twain, bless him, cared nothing for any of these sensibitities, which is why we should still read him today.

Millions of writers all over the world will be making their New Year’s resolutions right now or (if you read this any time after January 7) contemplating the futility of their good intentions.
It’s not just writers of course, but everybody. But in my very personal experience writers tend to have a limited repertoire of resolutions, and on this day it may be worth examining three of them.

1. “I will finish my novel. “ This a bad joke, of course. All writers have boxes of unfinished novels. It’s part of the definition of being a writer. If the novels are any good they would have been or will be finished; if not, not.

2. “I will work much harder at my writing.” Usually this means starting at 5 am like Kurt Vonnegut of Anthony Trollope, or making a massive concentrated effort to finish each project, like Simenon. This sort of work style is based on the discipline and the habits of a lifetime. If you haven’t done it yet, you won’t start doing it tomorrow.

3. “I will branch out and try something completely new.” Yes, essayists want to be novelists, people who write magazine articles dream about being poets, everybody has fantasies about writing memoirs or screenplays. The grass is always greener on the other side of the literary fence, especially if it looks more artistic, fashionable, or trendy. Beware of getting what you wish or, even worse, discovering that it is not at all what you wish.

Everybody can and should try everything, of course – especially in writing where the stakes are not high and there’s no chance of sustaining a physical injury by being adventurous. But I always suspect the short-term, emotionally-charged language of “resolutions” at this time of year. Resolutions are too intense, and failure hurts too much.

Add the phrase “One of these days…” to any of the resolutions above and you will have the recipe for a perfectly happy year in 2012. One of these days, anything can happen.

Being an essayist may have been fashionable in the eighteenth century, but today it feels like the literary equivalent of playing the lute or weaving on the hand loom – an archaic pastime for nostalgic dilettantes. The action is elsewhere, in fiction. So why not write fiction?

Believe me I’ve tried, starting when I was a mere teenager. Over the years I have even published about a dozen short stories, although my two novels remain nothing more than hopeful fragments. You can read about these in my book Writer at Work, in the chapter called “The Perpetual Novel.”

Once again I have been enlightened by one of Arthur Krystal’s excellent essays, “Why I’m not a novelist.” The fiction block, he argues, is the result of a lack of concern for other people – not necessarily a lack of empathy but a lack of deep curiosity about other lives and experiences.

That’s the answer. Anyone can invent plots and characters, but only a certain type of writer can enter into the emotional lives of those characters and make them come alive. I love reading fiction, and right now I’m re-reading the sea stories of Patrick O’Brian, whose main characters seem sometimes more real to me than people I actually know.

Sometimes the simplest and least welcome answer is the one you need to hear

Every time I do any kind of public speaking I’m struck by the difference between the words that we write and the words that we say. I first learned this almost forty years ago when I first began teaching, but it still comes as a surprise. Things that are easy to write may be difficult or almost impossible to speak out loud. The most obvious example is the contrast between a love letter (easy, a piece of cake) and a verbal declaration of love face to face (terrifying, virtually out of the question).

There are a number of reasons for this. The spoken word carries a load of meaning and emotion that the written word can never match. Speech and hearing are instinctively human, while writing and reading are mere techniques. When we speak we get an instant reaction from our audience, whether it is two hundred people or one. A live audience responds in a way that a computer keyboard does not, and you as a speaker may be diverted and even derailed by their responses. Also, when we speak, we hear the awful inadequacies of our own words. That’s why one of the best pieces of advice for writers is: “Read it out loud.”

Public speaking is a good exercise for writers, as well as being a potential source of income (always welcome). Reading your own works and talking about them is a great way to expand your audience, and your understanding of how other people react to your ideas.

Arthur Krystal, whose new book of essays I mentioned in the previous post,* has many interesting things to say about writers as speakers. With vivid examples, from Hazlitt to Nabokov, he shows how incompetent even very good writers can be when they have to express themselves in speech and in public. The tongue tied “famous writer” at the dinner table is a stereotype that has some truth in it, at least in my experience. Krystal argues that this is because writers are mostly solitary and unsociable creatures (or they would never get anything done), and also because the process of writing is entirely different from the process of speaking. Writing is slow, calculated, and constantly edited. Speech is fast, almost instinctive, and spontaneous.

Radio (my main work at the moment) occupies an interesting middle ground between public speaking and writing, and allows us to avoid most of these problems. The performer is invisible, but his or her words are carried by the voice which can be and usually is carefully scripted. Good radio performers, and voice actors who read recorded books, can have tremendous impact, perhaps even greater than in a face-to-face situation. Sometimes I think that the invisible speaker is the best communicator of all – but we must come out into the daylight sometimes.

The best technique for preparing a public speech is well known, and it works. First write the whole thing out in full, so you can judge its completeness, its logic, and its length. This version will be almost literally unspeakable – stilted and awkward when you read it out loud. Then take the full version and make a series of brief notes cover the main points, and speak only from the notes. The effect is like magic. Your speech will suddenly flow naturally and expressively, and everyone will acclaim you as a great speaker. The ghastly effect of reading a speech from a text can be heard by listening to any politician and almost any preacher. “If you don’t know what you want to say,” as a critic once admonished me, “then shut up and don’t say it.”

* * *

*Except When I Write by Arthur Krystal. He is a well-known essayist and critic (New Yorker, Harpers, etc.) and has collected together twelve of his best essays and critical reviews from 2005 to 2009.

Here’s a book worth reading – Except When I Write by Arthur Krystal. He is a well-known essayist and critic (New Yorker, Harpers, etc.) and has collected together twelve of his best essays and critical reviews from 2005 to 2009.

The first essay alone is worth the price – “When Writers Speak.” In it Krystal offers a quotation that Edgar Allan Poe attributed to Montaigne.

“People talk about thinking, but for my part I never think except when I sit down to write.”

This mild but disturbing aperçu brought me up short. It had the same effect on Krystal, and perhaps on you. How true it is – at least for my mental habit. Most of the time I live and talk on automatic pilot, using the same stock repertoire of actions and phrases that I’ve been using all my life. Thought is not necessary, unless I try to solve a crossword or puzzle out some new outrage committed by my computer.
It’s the same for most of us. Yesterday I took a two-hour train trip to and from New York, during which I was surrounded by people who talked loudly and incessantly to each other or (more often) to some disembodied entity hiding inside a cell phone. I must have been an unwilling listener to eight or ten conversations on that train, and none of them made any sense whatsoever. They were (to use a good old-fashioned word) just blather, empty words, ungrammatical stream of consciousness noise. No communication was taking place, except the kind of communication that occurs when one monkey chatters to another – a kind of verbal grooming or exchange of recognition signals.

It was depressing to realize that I often do exactly the same thing. Faced with a social situation, or an unexpected phone call or an encounter in the post office, I can blather as well as anyone. Not a single thought enters my head while I am doing it.

But when I sit down to write, as Montaigne said, I begin to think. The rusty gears of my brain grind into action and (as has often been pointed out to me by my nearest and dearest) I disappear into a state of abstraction where I don’t want to talk to anybody. This is exactly why writing is so hard. It’s not the writing it’s the thinking that produces keyboard avoidance and writer’s block.

The reverse side of this phenomenon, as Krystal points out, is that writers are often poor speakers. Our literary skills don’t always translate into verbal skills, perhaps because the thinking part of our brains is reserved for or used up by the first.

As someone who works in radio, where speech and writing (and, occasionally, thought) come together, I found Krystal’s speculations fascinating. But you have to read the whole of Krystal’s essay – if I describe it in any more detail here I will probably be guilty of copyright infringement. The rest of his book is excellent too, especially if you are interested in Hazlitt, Poe, Barzun, or Scott Fitzgerald (some of his favorite subjects). His essays are models of complex yet completely friendly writing, and they must have required a lot of thought.