Languedoc, France

The spring storms have blown away and real summer has arrived in the south of France. The Summer Solstice on July 21 is a big event here because it corresponds with the national (and international) Fête de la Musique. There were dozens of bands playing in town and in the village, plus Vivaldi in the cathedral and Mozart in the town hall – quite a cacophony. The village also had the annual solstice ceremony saute le feu where everyone is supposed to jump over a low bed of flaming branches in front of the church. It is a very ancient, pre-Christian Midsummer ritual, but not suitable for anyone my age with a bad back. Now the Solstice is history. This week we have the garlic festival, and the festival of storytelling. Coming up soon we have the Fête Votive when young bulls will be stampeded through the streets. Who told me life in the south of France would be peaceful?

The heat is beginning to seep into everything. It makes everyone lazy, but perhaps especially desk workers like writers. Who wants to sit at a computer, its keys slippery with sweat, when the sun is blazing outside? The siesta gets longer and longer, the return to work more and more reluctant.

Actually I believe that all this heat must be bad for the computer. I’ll switch it off.

Languages are hard to learn. Even our own language with its half million words, weird grammar, and odd pronunciations is full of traps and tricks that can catch you out, even if you have been speaking it for a lifetime. When we try to learn a new language we are thrust all the way back to early childhood. We gurgle inarticulately, we resort to sign language, and sometimes we cry. Without the command of words we feel helpless.

Some people have the gift of tongues; we call them polyglots. The great critic Edmund Wilson was admired, if not liked, for his ability to read and write fluently in at least seven languages. But most of us don’t have that gift. One language is enough. Judging by some inarticulate cell phone conversations I overhear, one language can be too much. We are, for the most part, a nation of monoglots, and semiglots.

It’s all the more embarrassing to visit those countries where multiple languages are taken for granted, which actually means most of the countries in the world. I’ve been to many places where I couldn’t understand a word anybody said: Russia, Hungary, Greece, Scotland. It’s humiliating. A recent encounter with the Flemish language in Belgium reinforced the point. Flemish, which is akin to Dutch, is one of those languages that looks as if you ought to understand it. Sometimes you can: a boat is a boot, a bus is a bus, and sorry is sorry. But hearing Flemish, let alone trying to speak it, is entirely another kettle of fish (or vis, as we say in Flanders).

What can you do? I’ve been learning French for fifty years with no very impressive result. French is one of the six thousand or so languages now spoken around the world. There’s not enough time for me to start on Flemish, let alone the other five thousand nine hundred and ninety eight. So when we travel we get by with a few essential phrases learned from a book: please, thank you, how much, where’s the bathroom, sorry officer we don’t have speed limits where I come from, and so on.

Just to complete the humiliation, the little phrase book is not necessary. We can simply speak in English, and usually be understood. Europe was a battlefield through all of recorded history. Today it’s full of young multilingual people who pay little attention to the old barriers and prejudices. Certain places, like the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries, are famous for the linguistic talents of their people. You may ride on a tour boat in Amsterdam and be impressed by how the guide switches effortlessly from Dutch to German to French to English. Then you think, well, that’s nothing special, that’s the guide’s job. But then you get on an ordinary bus in Denmark and find that the bus driver has almost equal skills.

How do they do it? These foreigners cheat of course. Their trick is called education. They sneakily introduce languages into the school curriculum at an early age, and keep teaching them all the way up through college. Very few children escape this regime without a working knowledge of at least one foreign language, and most graduates have two. English is always taught, and this is the downfall of the English speaking nations. We can stumble around the world in a cloud of ignorance, unable to read menus or the local newspaper, but without suffering any real inconvenience because English-speaking locals are always on hand to help. Why should we bother? So foreign language teaching in our schools and colleges has all but collapsed. Students don’t like the hard slog of learning them, and teachers are hard to find. The United States were united (more or less) by a single language, and teaching others seemed more or less pointless. But that unilingual society is unraveling as dozens of new languages become part of the American conversation. Also the government’s habit of launching wars all around the world suggests, at the very least, that linguistic training might become a useful weapon.

Some people believe that learning languages is the best antidote to intolerance, and some idealists still pursue the dream of universal peace through a universal language. The politics of language can be bitter, as we see in Belgium, Catalonia, and numerous other places. Perhaps, in the long run, the universal language will be English, as nature and Hollywood intended. Then we will all be in clear communication. Unfortunately some of the most murderous wars in history were fought between people who shared the same language and were in clear communication, so this may not be the answer to anything. In any case the ultimate universal language is just as likely to be Chinese, or Spanish, or Arabic. It will depend on who wins the wars of economic numbers and population numbers. I’ll wait and see. I don’t want to waste years studying the wrong language.

The task of preparing and packing for a trip of several months is enough to persuade a person to give up foreign travel forever. Our whole lives must be narrowed down to the dimensions of one suitcase and one carry-on: summer clothes, winter clothes, in-between clothes, medications, files, laptop, and all the other things a modern couple cannot live without. Arrangements must be made for paying utility bills, caring for cats, mowing the lawn or clearing snow according to season, and sometimes both. Time always runs out before all this is done, but we have to go anyway. Napoleon’s army setting out on its catastrophic march to Moscow in 1812 was better prepared than we usually are as we begin one of these extended trips.

When a journey begins with air travel the discomforts are ten times multiplied. Everyone now understands that the airlines are engaged in a vast conspiracy to persuade us all to stay at home, or at least on the ground. This is good from the point of view of global warming, and no doubt we will all have to stay at home soon. But right now there aren’t many alternatives if you want to get from one continent to another. We could drive to Alaska and take a dog sled across the Bering Strait, then a train down through Russia, and come into Europe through the back door, so to speak. But it would take weeks, and it’s not very practical because we are cat people, and we don’t have any experience with huskies.

So we must start with the airlines and their increasingly ludicrous and humiliating “security” procedures. Once disentangled from the airline and the airport, often a major struggle in itself, there is always the question of hotels. In general, we love hotels as a relaxing home away from home. But unless we stay within the safe capsule of the big international chains, which are hideously expensive, every hotel is a lottery. Stars mean next to nothing, guide books are always out of date, and another curious conspiracy operates in the hotel industry. They have agreed amongst themselves that no hotel room should ever be quite perfect, so clients don’t get spoiled. The requirements for a good hotel room are simple: anyone could make the list. But in real life the list is always incomplete. One hotel gives you a coffee machine, but no hairdryer; another has a perfectly comfortable bed, but the pillows are stuffed with dried corn husks; one freezes you with air conditioning you can’t adjust; another tries to bake you alive. All hotel rooms without exception are missing at least one light bulb, and one essential bathroom item. Frills like wake-up calls, newspapers, Internet connections and room service are provided on the basis of a secret lottery run by the hotel management. You may get them, or you may not, but you will never get them all.

I miss the lost age of elegant travel, even though I never experienced it. I like to read about the writer Edith Wharton’s travels in Europe in the 1920s. She crossed the Atlantic on one of the great luxury ocean liners and, once in Europe, she was considered adventurous to travel by car. But the car had a chauffeur and a mechanic on board, and another car full of servants followed right behind. Another group of servants traveled ahead to set up her rooms at each grand hotel. No security checks, no lost baggage, and never any missing light bulbs. That’s the way to see the world.

Time travel, anyone?

Driving through the towns and villages of Languedoc in southern France, I’m strongly reminded how places create people. A town or village (like an organization or a job) imposes an identity and a set of expectations. A language imposes a whole perspective and way of life.

If language and culture are a single package (which they are) then language itself is the ultimate trap. The more you understand and participate in a language/culture, the more thoroughly you are locked in by it. Conversely, language allows you a form of escape if you are in a context where others are speaking and knowing differently. Teenagers develop their own language to disconnect from the adult world. They are “free” insofar as they are autistic.

In France, I have felt free in this way. Going out in the morning into the cold, dark, alien landscape of the village, seeing everything but understanding very little, can be strangely liberating.

Is this why so many creative people live abroad, because it provides a way of life they find congenial to their own disconnectedness, to their own need to have a perspective on everyone else’s perspective?

But the drastic jump into a foreign environment is not for everyone. There are easier ways of becoming disconnected, even within one’s own culture. The creative soul should live in the suburbs, the vast hinterlands of America which have no identity, and impose nothing. The suburbs will make you free.

The above rather curious commentary comes from a diary note from 2001, recently re-discovered. A diary can be a wonderful source of ideas for a writer, as long has s/he can figure out what the entries mean!

Recently I found a rather battered first edition of A Writer’s Notebook by W. Somerset Maugham. It is an episodic diary, full of acerbic reflections and descriptions, well worth reading and thinking about. Here are two of his entries from the year 1900, which just go to show how old some of our “modern” notions are.

“Every generation looks upon the generation that preceded it as more vigorous and more virtuous than itself. You will find the same wail that men are not what they were in the histories of Herodotus, in the writings of the late Roman republic, in Montaigne, and in the authors of our own day. The reason for this is that men hate change and are terrified of it. Habits change, not men.”

“It is wise to be skeptical with regard to the ideas of one’s period. Notions which to past centuries seemed so certain, so well proved, to us appear obviously and even ludicrously false. The grounds upon which we accept the prevalent theories of our own day seem so cogent and reasonable that we cannot bring ourselves to imagine that they are possibly as insecure as those others which we now know to have been erroneous. There may be no more truth in them than those hypotheses of the eighteenth century concerning the primitive perfection of man.”

Of the making of many books there is no end.
Ecclesiates

One recent summer we were wasting time in the English town of Rye, which is famous for its sellers of used and antique books. Half a dozen such establishments are scattered along its picturesque high street. One rainy day I decided to hit every used bookstore in town.

This is not my usual habit. Normally I avoid used bookstores because they make me feel inadequate. My former office was in the basement of an historic used bookstore, but I scarcely ever dared to go upstairs. There are so many tens of thousands, even millions of important and wonderful books that I should have read, that I haven’t read yet, and that I never will read.

But on that particular day in Rye I was feeling reckless. It was raining, I was bored, and a bookstore orgy seemed like just the thing to fill in the hours before lunch.

I started at the east end, the forbidding Land Gate, constructed in 1369 and somewhat battered by wicked French invaders in later centuries, but still impressive. Right beside this ancient monument was the Land Gate Book Shop, its door firmly closed but its window displaying an eclectic selection of Audubon prints, nineteenth century romantic poetry, and modern thrillers.

Just up the hill was The Book Worm, where I might have picked up a rare first edition of Trilby by Daphne du Maurier, or a leather bound set of the complete works of Edward Bulwer Lytton – a great but almost forgotten Victorian writer – at a knock-down price. I was almost seduced by a long out-of-print biography of the French composer César Franck. But self-control is built into an expedition like this. The modern economy-class air traveler can’t afford to accumulate books. They’re just too heavy.

Books are solid things. They don’t grow old. It’s the subject matter that ages. Today’s ephemeral celebrity biography or instant Iraq war analysis will be outdated and forgotten in a few months. Used bookstores preserve the good stuff, books that really tell us something about human nature, life and love – universal books. In these stores the literary connoisseur can discover marvelous, half-forgotten authors, biographers and poets, whose works are no less good to read for being in faded bindings without colored pictures; and they cost next to nothing. It’s the best bargain in the known universe.

But it’s not the undiscovered writers that make me feel guilty. It’s the sight of shelves and shelves of books by very famous authors whose works I know about, and should have read, and that are almost never read outside university literature departments – and sometimes not even there. Who has read all the works of Dickens for example, or Twain, or Poe? Who has read The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas, or Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson – two of the best adventure tales ever written? They sit on the shelves, waiting for readers who never come.

My tour took me into the dusty recesses of half a dozen old bookstores, including one called Chapter and Verse which had the Latin motto Cave librum unum habentem engraved on its glass door (in my schoolboy Latin this translated as “Beware of a house with only one book.”) I leafed through a well-worn 1802 edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in three volumes, but decided that it’s message was too contemporary for my taste. The first volume alone contains enough material on the collapse of democracy, Caesarism, and the illusions of empire to keep us thinking for quite a while. After a couple of hundred pages we might realize that we’ve been there, done that, and we don’t want to do it again.

The last stop on my bibliophilic walk through Rye was the Martello Towers Bookshop, its name commemorating the round stone towers built all along this coast in the early 1800s to guard against yet another invasion by the naughty French. They failed. Nowadays the French come pouring through the Channel Tunnel, and the streets of Rye are full of French tourists. Napoleon would have been delighted.

The Martello Towers Bookshop sells only the latest new books, and there are plenty of those. The prophet in Ecclesiastes grumbled: “Of the making of many books there is no end.” He should see us now. Quite apart from all the millions of historic books we’ve never read there are thousands of new ones appearing every week, a total of 175,000 last year in the United States alone. A new book of fiction is published every thirty minutes. So even if we ever catch up with the good books of the past, we will never in several lifetimes catch up with the good books of the present.

Supply and demand – the brutal equation. Chain bookstores display new titles for two or three weeks, and then they’re gone. Most readers buy from the top end of the bestseller lists. Publishers are throwing the dice with increasing desperation.

I was struck by the thought, a horribly subversive and even wicked thought for a writer, that there are enough books already. We could spend the next hundred years reading our way through the used bookshops of the world, or even just the bookshops of Rye, and never exhaust the marvelous literary treasure house of the past two centuries. To save the drowning readers of the world I’m almost tempted to suggest a ten-year moratorium on all new books.

Or most new books.

Or, at least, other people’s new books.

We have all abandoned writing projects. As we get older they multiply, trailing in our wake like the tail of a comet – no way to go back and pick them up again.

So it was reassuring to read an essay on this very subject by Dan Kois called “Burn Before Reading” (New York Times Book Review, March 6, 2011). Mr. Kois had the clever idea of chasing down well-known authors who would admit to having abandoned at least one book in their careers. He found plenty of them, including names you would never expect like Michael Chabon, Harper Lee, Truman Capote and John Updike. So we are not alone. Even the best writers give up from time to time.

The only disappointment in the essay was that not many of the writers Kois interviewed could give a really coherent reason for giving up on a book project. Bad reviews by friends were mentioned fairly often, which just shows that you should never give work in progress to your friends.

My own unfinished projects are legion, and I’ve been thinking about what happened to them. The first was a huge book manuscript, written at the age of eighteen, in which I set out to explain what was wrong with all the religions of the world. I called it Imaginary Friends, which was not plagiarism because Alison Lurie’s much better book of that name was still ten years in the future. This project was abandoned, almost complete, when I met a young philosopher who convinced me that all my brilliant new arguments had been around for two hundred years, and that I needed to spend five more years reading in order to finish this book properly.

So I naturally turned to fiction. I found it was much easier not to finish a novel. I have at least two incomplete novels lurking in the dark past of my writing life: Suicide Note Update and Action Replay.

Suicide Note Update begins like this:

“Harmon’s fourth suicide note was, from a literary point of view, a considerable improvement on his first three. The suicide itself was not.”

The plot is obvious. My hero Harmon survives a large number of incompetent and increasingly bizarre suicide attempts, each of which is carefully documented in his ever more elaborate and self-consciously literary suicide notes. He finally discovers that life is really worth living, at which point he is run over by the 47th Street cross-town bus.

I like realism in fiction.

Action Replay begins like this:

“After all these years the heart tattooed on Lorna’s breast looked more like a mango.”

The plot is also obvious. My unnamed hero, on reaching his 65th year and feeling the nasty onrush of time’s wing’d chariot, decides to seek out and, if possible, go to bed with all the women he has ever loved in his life, including his ex-wives. It was a kind of picaresque/comic/tragic Viagra fantasy, which also involved a lot of exotic travel.

In retrospect I think it was the obviousness of the plots that defeated me. Knowing exactly where I was going I had no energy left to go there, although I got a lot of amusement out of the plotting stage.

Later, in a more serious but equally inefficient stage of life, I abandoned two successive non-fiction books, including an ambitious project designed to be published before the Year 2000 called Pre-Millenial Syndrome (yes, I know, too cute). What killed this last one was very simply that no agent would touch it.

I could make a longer list, but that’s enough. My many unfinished and abandoned projects don’t oppress me, and I have no fantasies about finishing them some day. Life is a one way street, and it’s important to know when to give up. Dan Kois’s essay tells me that I’m not the only one. Thanks Dan.

Journalists write because they have
nothing to say, and have something to
say because they write.

Karl Kraus

For almost ten years, week in and week out, I wrote a column in a regional edition of The New York Times on Sunday. The column was titled “Out of Order” and was intended to be a humorous, quirky view of suburban life. It began in 1993 with an essay about powerless suburban men trying to use macho power tools, and ended in 2003 with a column about powerless suburban men trying to defeat clever squirrels.

Some of the subjects I chose to write about were irresistible, like the summer camp for junior magicians or the Weird Book Club, a discussion group run by eccentric Jewish lawyers. Others were small adventures that I deliberately sought out: sailing as crew on a tall ship, taking a flying lesson, being a librarian for a day, auditioning unsuccessfully for parts in several local amateur dramatic productions, and spending several painful hours with a cheerful young sadist who called himself a “Personal Trainer.” Each eight-hundred word column was illustrated with a large black and white cartoon by Peter Vey.

The Catholic novelist Andrew Greeley once said of himself: “I probably do not have an unpublished thought.” During those ten years I sometimes felt that I scarcely had an unpublished experience. People in the Post Office or the supermarket would stop me and say: “So your car broke down again,” or “Are the antibiotics fixing your problem?” We had no secrets, except those that were too dull to write about.

Having a newspaper column is a great privilege. We all love to bore our friends with our trivial anecdotes, silly jokes, and dumb opinions: I got to bore thousands of people with mine, year after year. Even though I often waxed satirical about semi-sacred aspects of our local suburban culture, such as golf and strip malls, the letters and e-mails I received were almost all positive. The tolerance (or the indifference) of my readers was astonishing.

The column ended not because I was fired, which was always possible, nor because I ran out of humorous subjects to write about in the American suburbs, which is impossible. It ended because of a kind of psychic exhaustion. I use the word “exhaustion” deliberately. I wasn’t just tired of the column, I was enervated by it. My editor was a very agreeable and talented young man, but he wanted me to write about funny experiences – which meant that I had to spent large chunks of my week searching for funny (and usually pointless) experiences, persuading people to let me join in their activities and write about them. At some point I thought: “I’m just too old for this.” It may have been when I was taking a Yoga class with twelve women, and was sitting in an excruciating position on the floor of a cold room.

The style of the column also got on my nerves. I had two editors during the ten years that the column ran, and both of them enjoyed a kind of sub-Dave Barry farcical style of humor. I can do it, but it’s not my style. So I never enjoyed the actual process of writing, and I was never proud of the result, although I must say that the column had a lot of enthusiastic readers, and a few passionate fans. When I began to feel real dread at the approach the deadline, I knew it was time to get out.

When I got off the treadmill, I found that a columnist needs deprogramming. I couldn’t stop collecting stories and writing them in my head. If anybody knows about a twelve-step program for this addiction, I’d like to hear about it. I kept obsessing about the columns I almost wrote, like my ride with the local biker gang that was frustrated at the last minute by what might be called “legal complications.”

I kept looking over the dozens of unused ideas still in the file, especially a big fat folder full of material about the famous Long Island landmark and symbol, The Big Duck of Flanders. The more I consider my unwritten column about The Big Duck, the more I’m convinced that it was my lost chord, my uncreated work of genius, my Proustian epic, now never to be seen in print. It’s tragic, really. Or perhaps it’s a sign that this particular assignment ended not a moment too soon.

My parents read a London newspaper called the Daily Mirror. This was an embarrassment, because the Mirror was a tabloid and not a quality paper. It was full of bathing beauties, murder stories and sports reports, and featured huge, shouting headlines. As a snobbish teenager I refused to read it, except for one columnist who went under the nom de plume “Cassandra.” His real name, I believe, was William Neil Connor.

Cassandra was an attack columnist. He said all the things that should not be said, and told all the truths that nobody wanted to hear. But he was always on the side of truth and justice, and I took him as a kind of role model. Later in life when I started writing newspaper columns myself the ghost of Cassandra was always in the back of my mind.

Somewhere along the way, but much too late, I looked up the name Cassandra. My sketchy classical education had failed to teach me that she was a Trojan princess who was punished by the god Apollo for refusing his advances. He put an unusual curse on the poor woman. She was doomed to become a prophetess whose prophecies would always be true but would never be believed.

So it seems that I myself had been doomed without knowing it. My early fascination with that column in the Daily Mirror must have warped my brain, and I have spent half a century churning out prophecies that are always true but never believed. I can’t quite figure out whether this is funny or tragic.

“It’s like having Alzheimer’s Disease.
You don’t know anybody, but they all know you.”
Tony Curtis

“You must know David Bouchier, he’s famous.” This introduction, delivered without much irony at a party, struck me like a thunderbolt. I had never been described as famous before. Even my wife sometimes forgets who I am, and my cats fail to recognize me for days at a time. But now, when it’s almost too late, I find myself the center of attention at social events. When I walk into a concert, people whisper and look around. When I give a lecture, the hall is filled. When I arrange a book-signing, people actually come and buy my books. There’s a catch, of course: this “fame” only reaches as far as the boundaries of Long Island, Connecticut, and a few other National Public Radio territories that carry my programs.

I never planned to be almost famous on Long Island, or anywhere else. Twenty years ago, when I had achieved the age of discretion, and at least the superficial appearance of respectability (I bought a suit in 1983), my path towards the grave seemed smooth and predictable. I would teach my courses at the university, turn out articles and books that nobody would ever read, collect my pension, and fade away into a decent oblivion. I quite enjoyed writing obscure books that were respectfully reviewed and went nowhere. One of them was listed by Choice Magazine among the ten best non-fiction books of long-ago 1984. It sold fewer than 2,000 copies. Nobody could accuse me of self-promotion.

But marriage and Murphy’s Law tore me away from this safe destiny and brought me to Long Island. This is a suburb of New York, built on the terminal moraine of an ancient glacier that extends a hundred miles eastwards from the city. Three million people have built their homes on this particular sandbank. Because of the peculiar elongated geography of the place, we spend most of our lives in our cars, moving slowly through the glutinous traffic from one shopping mall to the next.

The great English comic writer P.G.Wodehouse came to live here in 1959, in the pretty village of Remsenburg, a few miles from our present Long Island home. He loved his suburban retreat, which was informally known as Blandings Castle, and stayed there for sixteen years, turning out his apparently inexhaustible series of Edwardian comedies. “Wodehouse has found his niche,” he said.

Long Island is a perfect place for a writer, because it offers no distractions of any kind. The last even faintly interesting event was the Battle of Long Island in 1776, when the local militias were routed by the British army in a single day. The Island subsequently became a rest and recreation area for British troops during the War of Independence, although it is hard to imagine what they did for recreation.

My original plan (self-help note: “ original plans” are always a waste of time) was to pursue the noble calling of higher education in America. I saw myself, with fatal hubris, as a missionary, bringing civilization to this semi-barbaric landscape of expressways and nail boutiques. As an undistinguished newcomer to the university faculty, I was assigned to teach a multi-ethnic class of three hundred “students” in a bizarre course called Sex and Gender. The students, who had more sex by the age of fifteen than I have had in my entire life, were not impressed by my expertise in this subject. They were undisciplined, obnoxious, and functionally illiterate. I was given one graduate student as a teaching assistant to help me with this mob. She was intelligent and highly literate, but unfortunately only in Korean.

My blood pressure shot up, and I soon joined the growing ranks of defeated educators who live like refugees around the fringes of every college campus. I did what all teachers must do when we hit rock bottom: I went back to my former occupation and started writing columns for newspapers. For a while I wrote regularly for the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, although I had never been to Atlanta. The columns were gently ironic at first, using a simpleminded version of the Socratic method to zap all the obvious targets. (“But tell me Crito, in all seriousness, how ignorance comes to be celebrated in the Temple of Knowledge…..”)

The material for a foreign columnist was rich: ghastly pagan festivals like Halloween, the great plastic necropolis called Florida, the many varieties of religious hysteria, and the suburban wilderness of Long Island itself. I kept clear of American politics, which are beyond the reach of irony. The amazing thing was that readers loved it. “Hit us some more,” they said, and eventually the local edition of the New York Times adopted my little satire as a weekly feature. Then it went on to the local stations of National Public Radio, as a Monday Morning wake-up call, and I was nakedly revealed as a foreigner by my accent. But the fan mail continued to come in.

I must give Americans due credit. Under a weekly barrage of cruel satire about their beliefs and lifestyles – from a foreigner at that, and for year after relentless year – their only response has been to be absolutely charming to me, and claim me as a local celebrity. Nobody has offered to shoot me (well, just one person made the suggestion, but didn’t follow through), and e-mails run at least twenty to one on the positive side.

American public radio is a ramshackle but creative organization. So, in spite of my superficial knowledge of classical music I was able to add a quirky music program to my repertoire. This allowed me to assault the wealthy suburbanites of Long Island and Connecticut with five hours of good music, interspersed with bad music criticism and scurrilous commentary, every Sunday afternoon.

Radio creates a strange, elusive identity for the person behind the microphone, at the same time intimate and remote. I’ve lost count of the times that women (mostly women) have called the radio station to say that they love me, and occasionally to propose marriage or other arrangements. I know that their interest would never survive a real meeting, but it’s fun just the same – like having a whole host of imaginary friends and phantom lovers.

It had never occurred to me that radio might have this effect. Television yes – it creates instant fame. That’s why idiotic “Reality TV” shows are so popular. They make their victims into instant ephemeral celebrities. The fatuous equation between fame and happiness guarantees a steady flow of people ready and willing to be humiliated.

My local fame spread, helped by the New York Times column. It seems that Long Island has a rich (in every sense) population of disconnected souls, who just want to hear a different voice no matter what it says. They mistake my accent for something classy. I almost hesitate to write this in case my British friends read it and laugh themselves into a heart attack. Professor Higgins would instantly detect the edgy sound of east London under the thin veneer of Oxbridge.

Fame is almost entirely based on repetition and familiarity. How often do you see someone’s byline, or his/her name on a book? How often do you hear them mentioned, or hear their voice on radio, or see them on TV? From this point of view, the highly productive, regularly published writer is likely to achieve a degree of fame, no matter what the quality of his/her output.

It worked for me. Invitations to speak poured in, plus lunches, TV appearances (a big mistake, because they bring face-recognition as well as name-recognition), graduation addresses, and even theatrical gigs with the local symphony orchestras. I became a regular performer on the rubber chicken circuit. Rotary clubs, literary circles and libraries found me both cheap and amusing. I spoke at business dinners, non-profit fundraisers, and retirement communities. Some of these events are so bizarre that they are actually memorable. I got to preach to the Unitarians one Sunday morning (my text, taken from Krishnamurti, was “Truth is a liquid, not a solid) and performed the recitative part of Abraham Lincoln in Aaron Copland’s patriotic celebration, “Lincoln Portrait.” No satirist could ask for more.

These public events are hard work. There’s always an Ancient Mariner type, who stoppeth one of me, and holds me in a corner for interminable minutes. There are always the greatest fans, whose enthusiasm is charming but embarrassing. My personality is all wrong for this. I envy the politician’s instinct to plunge joyfully into a crowd of supporters. When I see a crowd of supporters my instinct is to run the other way.

One of my loyal but critical students from Iowa wrote: “The occupational hazard of your kind of writing is that readers soon think they know you.” She shares this experience from writing a newspaper column herself. It’s a very mixed blessing. Public recognition, however local, raises the dreaded “Who am I?” question. And who wants to think about that? Am I the enthusiastic public speaker, or the person who would rather hide with a typewriter in a deep hole in the ground? It’s best not to know.

There’s a vast difference between local and national celebrity. You could write a few articles or columns for a national magazine, and almost never meet anyone who knew your name. But a local column or broadcast on a regular schedule has a much more dramatic impact on your name recognition – but only within your circulation area.

The real and practical appeal of national fame for a writer is that it will provide a platform. Several times in previous chapters I have mentioned this fairly recent phenomenon. Agents and publishers are immediately interested in a writer with a platform – meaning ready-made name recognition. The source of the recognition scarcely matters. It could be a career in show business or a career in crime. The main thing is that potential readers already know your name.

It’s hard for ordinary writers to break into this celebrity culture. It’s galling to see semi-literate sportsmen and popular singers posing as the authors of books that have been written for them by somebody else, and that immediately hit the bestseller lists.

But writers who hope to become famous should think hard about it, because it may happen. If you love the attention of strangers then even the smallest amount of fame will make you very happy. If not, then it’s never too late to start writing under a pseudonym.

In my brief career as a minor local celebrity, I discovered first-hand what all major celebrities know. People react to one with an odd mixture of deference, familiarity and resentment. There’s nothing personal in it, but it’s quite unlike a normal human interaction. In everyday life, the potential for embarrassment is enormous. Strangers peer curiously into my shopping basket at the local supermarket, and I’ve taken to driving several miles to a pharmacy where nobody knows who I am. Whenever I go out, I feel I must shave and take a shower, which I resent extremely. It must be hell to be really famous. Years ago I had a lady friend who appeared in a daily TV soap opera called Crossroads. She was very famous in that small world, and we couldn’t even go into a pub without being harassed by her pathetic fans.

Andy Warhol remarked that, in the future, everybody would be famous for fifteen minutes. That’s about enough. Fran Lebowitz said an even better thing: the right amount of fame is just enough to get you the best table in a restaurant, but not so much that you get interrupted during the meal.

So I can live with my modest level of local fame – just enough to get us the table beside the fireplace in the local French restaurant, enough to be greeted by friendly strangers in unexpected places, enough to have my name sometimes recognized by the local politicians and media people, and supermarket checkout clerks. But it’s reassuring to know that all I have to do to become a total nonentity is to leave Long Island and travel to my alternative home in an unfashionable corner of the south of France. “There goes that crazy Englishman,” say the villagers. I never stop to argue with them.