As on most sunny afternoons, I am at a beach on the North Shore of the island of Oahu, sitting in a folding chair, writing on a clipboard, Ka‘ena Point in the distance, like an extended feline forepaw, and beyond that the Pacific Ocean, deep blue near the shore, whitish at the seam of the horizon. Ka‘ena Point is sacred in Hawaiian lore for being the place where the spirits of the dead depart, by jumping from a certain lava rock (the Leina a ka ’Uhane, or the “leaping place of souls”), to Po, which means “darkness,” but also “the realm of the gods.”
At my age, I am closing in on that rock. I will be eighty years old on April 10th, but otherwise all is well. I worked on a novel at my desk this morning (I guess it’s about half done); my last novel, “Under the Wave at Waimea,” is just out; I paddled my outrigger canoe offshore here yesterday; I will go for a swim when I finish this page.
This is a life that I am grateful for and could not have envisioned when I began to write seriously, about sixty years ago. All that I hoped for then was to make a modest living by writing so that I wouldn’t have to endure a real job or a boss. Writers seemed to me the ultimate free souls, answerable to no one, engaged in the act of creation, which I associated with defiance.
Coming of age at a time of forbidden books and strict censorship, when some writers were regarded as outlaws, I was greatly drawn to this apparent subversion. In my youth, Henry Miller’s novels “Tropic of Cancer” and “Tropic of Capricorn” were banned; so were D. H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” William S. Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch,” and Edmund Wilson’s “Memoirs of Hecate County.” “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” was a problem at the time of its publication, in 1885, and, by the way, it is still a problem. Because some books were viewed as vicious or vulgar, writers were suspect, potential corrupters, and consequently they were, to my mind, figures of transformative power. What fourteen-year-old boy does not wish, in his idle moments, to be associated with someone notorious? Thus began my secret life as a reader. From the beginning, reading for me was enchantment as well as rebellion, and an occasion for solitude, a snug refuge in a crowded household.
I published stories and poems in school magazines and newspapers, and, on graduation from university, instead of applying to medical school, for which I’d prepared, I went to Africa to teach school. This was British Nyasaland, in late 1963, which became the Republic of Malawi in July, 1964. Then to Uganda for four years, and after that to Singapore for three. I left in 1971, ditching salaried employment for good to find my way as a professional writer.
It was in Africa that I realized how small I was, how much I had yet to learn of the world. Living in the bush, I found something to care about that was not selfish or suburban. Meeting V. S. Naipaul, in Uganda, in 1966, was another turning point: he read my work in progress and encouraged me, often saying, “You’re going to be all right.” After thirty years, we fell out; I wrote a book about this complex friendship, and, eight years before he died, in 2018, we became friends again.
I never wanted to teach “creative writing” or be a writer-in-residence, burdened with students’ writing and required to go to staff meetings. My belief that fiction writing cannot be taught would make me unwelcome in most English departments. But encouragement is necessary to anyone in the arts—to any youthful ambition—so perhaps the value of a writing program is just that, encouragement.
I have been blessed in what I’ve lived through. I was the right, receptive age—in my twenties—in the violent but vitalizing nineteen-sixties. Looking back, I see that one of the processes to which I’ve borne witness is the evolution of identity—national, political, ethnic, personal, and sexual. When Nyasaland became Malawi, the change was called “self-determination”—a colonial territory becoming an independent republic. But, in Malawi and other formerly colonized countries, the self-determination went further, and societies split into tribes or separate nations—more specific identities, ever smaller, fiercer, fracturing groups. The Soviet Union collapsed, Yugoslavia was broken up into six nations, India divided into India and Pakistan, and East Pakistan became Bangladesh. Then there was racial identity, the civil-rights movement, gay identity, the “I insist on people who look like me” people, and, more recently, identities labelled with words that were new to me—transgender, cisgender, and nonbinary.
These identities have occasioned new readings of old writing, some inspired, some marred by the sort of narrow-minded disparagement that I witnessed as an early reader. The word “identity” appears in many university-course descriptions. I was at a lunch, as an invited guest, a few years ago in a university setting when I mentioned that “Heart of Darkness” was a favorite book of mine. A young Nigerian student across the table, an aspiring writer, howled, “I hate this book!” The teachers equivocated in discomfort, but one of them spoke up on behalf of the student, agreeing that it was a flawed book and that Conrad’s ethics were questionable. Another teacher there told me that she was teaching “Moby-Dick” as a travel book. I found myself staring wildly at my plate of quiche.
Coming from a large family—the third of seven children—I wanted to assert my own identity. I discovered that the only way to do this was by leaving home, going far away, and staying away. I acted on instinct. I didn’t know the word “individuation,” the process of separation by which one gains a sense of self. When I was in Uganda and my mother wrote to tell me (“It hurts me to say this”) that my first novel was “trash,” I was not downcast. I felt that her rejection had further liberated me. It was not until I was in my early seventies that I looked closely at my family and based a novel on its bizarre tribalism. But dealing with my rivalrous siblings, the pedantries and the cliques, the teasing and the treacheries, strengthened me and taught me to be an attentive listener, with a kind of watchfulness and negotiating skills that were invaluable to me as a traveller, especially in hostile places.
At the age of thirty, married, with two small children, I was living in Catford, a seedy area of southeastern London. I ultimately resided almost eighteen years in Britain, always aware that I was an alien there. I came to understand an insightful remark in Henry James’s “English Hours”: “We [Americans] seem loosely hung together at home as compared with the English, every man of whom is a tight fit in his place.” Although I’d published three novels set in Africa and one, “Saint Jack,” set in Singapore, as well as a book of short stories, I was struggling to make a living. Hard up and stumped for a subject, I decided to write a travel book.
The plan could not have been simpler: leave London by train and keep going, through Europe, the Middle East, Pakistan, India, and Southeast Asia, including Vietnam (which was still at war, but had working railway lines), then up and down Japan, and homeward on the Trans-Siberian Express. I plotted my itinerary on a map and set off. “Look me up,” an Indian traveller said to me, in Afghanistan. “I live in Kanpur, near Central station—you can find me in Railway Bazaar.”
The term “travel book” is hopeless. “Chronicle” is a truer word for it. I wrote ten more of them, and there are many places I still wish to go, and especially revisit, because returning to a place where I’ve lived or travelled in the past is the best way of witnessing the important forces at work in the world. I am appalled by much of what I’ve seen—great poverty in Africa, conflict in the United States and elsewhere, landscapes throughout the globe blighted by pollution or deranged by climate change, whole populations sitting in darkness or overlooked.
Those overlooked people, on back roads, in remote places, isolated and bewildered—from early on, I took them as my subject.
“The present, accurately seized, foretells the future,” Naipaul said. I have lived by those words, and others as well. Asked to name the worst things that men do, Nabokov said, “To cheat, to stink, to torture.” I take to heart Montaigne’s description of human contradiction, in his essay “Of Glory”: “These discourses are, in my opinion, very true and rational; but we are, I know not how, double in ourselves, which is the cause that what we believe we do not believe, and cannot disengage ourselves from what we condemn.” Volodin, the hero of Solzhenitsyn’s “In the First Circle,” says, “A great writer is, so to speak, a second government in his country. And for that reason no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.” My enduring motto is the Zen authority D. T. Suzuki’s definition of freedom: seeing things as they are.
My life has involved enormous upsets and reverses—many changes of address, as well as illness, wealth, and near-bankruptcy, the usual snakes and ladders that people endure—except that I have been privileged to write about them. In my attempts to use writerly discipline to give order to the shapeless existence of self-employment, I sometimes overdo it. But my dislike of conventional vacations for their routines of stifling idleness has been a survival strategy. Having left home early, I had to fend for myself, living by my wits. And, for anyone committed to it, writing is not work but a process of life, with maddening and sometimes rewarding interruptions. I was deported from Malawi on a political charge, after two years, and declared a prohibited immigrant. I was the target of a mob in Uganda. My decision to leave Singapore was not brave: my department head told me, with a smirk, that my contract would not be renewed; the university was done with hiring white foreigners. Later, there was a marital crisis and divorce, and always the perils and uncertainties of the road.
I think of the Maine lobster, Homarus americanus, a big, armored thing when fully grown—indeed, “a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” As the lobster matures, it bulks against its shell and needs to shed it, squeezing its whole gelatinous being through a small opening in its exoskeleton. Having molted, it is known as a “shedder,” a puny creature with flimsy claws that hunkers down while it grows another shell. This vulnerability occurs scores of times in a lobster’s life.
A shedder, having no defenses, has to be lucky to survive predators and the elements. Good luck has governed my life. I have been lucky in the friends that I have made, lucky in the risks that I have taken, lucky to have survived fevers and violence in Africa, lucky to have been published well in the years when it was much simpler and quicker to publish a book, especially in Britain. (I finished writing my novel “The Mosquito Coast” in April, 1981, and I had a hardback copy in my hand that September.) I was lucky to write in a bygone age of numerous bookstores and many magazines and newspapers. I began writing, at age seven, at the Washington School, in Medford, Massachusetts, using a steel-nibbed dip pen and a brimming inkwell, and have lived through the era of paper, mailed letters, and hot-lead type, the last gasp of Gutenberg. Then a new technology took over at the speed of light—digital printing and word processing. Have greater books emerged from these magnificent innovations? Many seem hastier to me, wordier, baggier. My method has not changed: still the first draft in longhand, to slow me down and make me concentrate, and then I copy it by hand, and finally I type it.
What looks like prescience was dumb luck and an instinct that Hawaiians call mana‘o—gut feeling—but it worked for me. And “Don’t do it!”—whether warning me against writing on a certain subject, or travelling to a particular place, or trying something for the first time—has always served as a provocation for me to take the plunge.
I have been lucky in my children, who make me proud, lucky at last to find a woman I love and a sunny place to live. My wife guided me here, to the island where she was born, and her love is active and supportive, making it possible for me to thrive. She is shrewd in her advice, a passionate gatekeeper of my privacy.
I am past the age of contemplating my autobiography. I will never write it. I could say, like many other writers, that my life is in my books. V. S. Pritchett, in “Midnight Oil,” the second volume of his autobiography, speaks of how “the professional writer who spends his time becoming other people and places, real or imaginary, finds he has written his life away and has become almost nothing.” He goes on, “The true autobiography of this egotist is exposed in all its intimate foliage in his work.”
I used to believe that. But lately I have been rereading Samuel Beckett—a salutary activity for a senior, because Beckett is masterly at describing elderly decay and confusion, diminished capacity, and “worsening,” in his three related novels of old age, “Molloy,” “Malone Dies,” and “The Unnamable.” I am also working my way through the Grove Centenary edition of his complete works. Do those four thick volumes expose Beckett in all his intimate foliage?
Biographies of Beckett suggest not. You would not know from his work that Beckett was an excellent athlete—cricketer, golfer, swimmer, with a strong forehand in tennis. He loved watching rugby. In his twenties, he was intensively psychoanalyzed. For years, he lived on a stipend from his mother. He took holidays in Tunisia and Morocco. He romanced a number of lovely women—in fact, he had an affair on the go with a young English rose when, at the age of fifty-five, he married his French fiancée. (The love triangle in his later drama “Play” does not do this situation justice.) He loved to gamble, he played billiards, and, though his work is full of Descartes and Dante, he was a dedicated reader of detective novels—Agatha Christie and many others. Yes, there is a detective in “Molloy,” and Camier, in “Mercier and Camier,” is a private investigator, but he solves no crimes.
Beckett’s essence is in his work, and it is bleak. His life was even grimmer at times—deprivation, the war, his courage in the French resistance, being stabbed by a pimp on a Paris street. But, in many respects, he was more Irish bloke than existentialist, his life much happier and more various and satisfying than you’d guess from his writing, which, by the way (and to his sorrow), his mother denounced as trash.
What about me—the foliage of my life that I have not elaborated in my books? I rejected religion at an early age; Hell and Heaven and the Almighty do not figure in my work. Graham Greene was one of my early literary heroes, yet his sense of sin and his harping on damnation seem to me unhelpful superstitions that weaken some of his books to the point of absurdity. As an Eagle Scout, I learned to use a real gun and, practicing marksmanship (but not hunting), I have owned high-powered guns my whole life. I am an enthusiastic gardener, but there are no gardeners in my work. I like to cook but seldom write about food. For the past fifty years, I have shown Jonathan Raban my work in progress, and he regularly shares his with me. In the crash of 1987, I lost my investment savings, and understood that the stock market is a casino—a largely crooked one, dominated by insiders. When I had saved money again, I speculated in land and, over the years, built six houses in various places, selling some of them. I have never written about that—who wants to read about real estate? I have never been to Montana, Iceland, Scandinavia, Cuba, or Venezuela. I hate rap music. I am detached and restless listening to opera. Long live rock and roll. I mess about in small boats. I watch football and baseball. I suffer from gout. I sleep soundly. I stopped smoking forty years ago and still miss it. I have not finished “Nostromo” yet.
“Live all you can,” Lambert Strether says in “The Ambassadors.” I’ve done my best, and so the gloom of “the life unlived” in the work (and life) of Henry James is not a mood that I share. I have seized every chance that I’ve been offered, and some I’ve snatched; many of my choices were reckless, some of them colossal blunders, resulting in a different kind of regret—the regret of excess, of having been a greedy fool.
I am a cautious traveller, but prefer to travel alone whenever writing is involved. On arriving anywhere in the world, I immediately ask myself, “When it’s time to leave, how will I get out of here?” My fears are easily stated: I have been menaced by boys with guns on various occasions and have developed a distinct aversion to armed youths. I feel suffocated in tunnels and caves. Having been attacked and bitten by dogs, I shrink whenever one barks at me, no matter how small it may be, yet snakes and bats and spiders don’t bother me. I avoid big crowds and am afraid of the mindlessness of mobs. I find city life nasty and confining; I had my fill of it in London. I need the clean air and elbow room of country living. New Yorkers often describe the joy they feel on crossing the bridge to Manhattan by car—their rapture at seeing the city’s skyline. My feeling is the opposite: the pleasure on leaving New York by road, squirming out of its traffic, crossing the bridge and continuing on to leafy Connecticut, then pressing farther, north from Boston, and vanishing among the spruce trees in Maine.
One of my enthusiasms in travel has been studying the art of the places I’ve been. I’ve collected watercolors by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English travellers in India—the Daniells, Edward Lear, William Simpson, George Chinnery, and others. Watercolors are fragile and easily fade; I’ve sold most of them. In Africa, I coveted the masks and fetish objects that I saw used in traditional ceremonies in the nineteen-sixties. Later, after missionaries demonized this art, the objects were discarded, and I began collecting, favoring the Baga, Baule, Makonde, and Chokwe artisans. Travelling in India, I picked up ritual bronzes and reverse-glass paintings, and after a sojourn in Cambodia I sold the Indian material and looked for Khmer pieces that I could afford. In my years in the Pacific, I have become acquainted with the art of various cultures; bone-cracking clubs, wooden bowls, and canoe paraphernalia (splashboards, bailers, paddles) are the artistic achievements on most islands. The art of Gandhara—Greece refashions Asia—is to me humane and moving. I treasure a Gandharan Buddha I found—the enlightened one depicted as a Kushan prince—and a Khmer Ganesh, in the Koh Ker style, and a gilded Tibetan statue, Mahakala and his consort, in a tantric embrace known as yab-yum. But I have never written about any of these art objects, and the gifted painters I’ve described—Kenneth Noland, Mick Rooney, Ashley Bickerton, Marshall Arisman, Michael Adams, and Francisco Toledo—were my friends.
I was lucky to have known my four grandparents, all of them born in the early eighteen-eighties. My paternal grandmother, Eva Brousseau, born in rural Ontario, was part Native American; her husband, Eugene Theroux, was a tenth-generation native of Quebec, a laconic and loving man who spoke fluent French but was unable to read or write. My mother’s father, Alessandro Dittami, was born near Ferrara, Italy; his invented-by-the-orphanage name (which means “speak to me”) marks him as a foundling. He suffered all his life from the childhood trauma of being passed from family to family, but he ended up wealthy and respected in Medford, Massachusetts. He married my grandmother, Angelina Calesa, when she was sixteen, with the understanding that he would also look after her fretful mother, who’d been abandoned by her husband, Francesco Calesa; hating the squalor of New York City, in 1901, he’d fled back to Italy to end his days in salubrious Chiavari, on the Italian Riviera. None of these grandparents had a formal education. Born to hardship, they were frugal and severe, resourceful in their survival skills. Only one of them, Grandma Angelina, made it into her eighties. But she suffered at the end so badly that she cried out from her hospital bed, “They should give me rat poison!”
It is not the big number—eighty—that shocks me (though I sometimes gulp when I utter it), but, rather, the banal image of an implacable hourglass, most of its sand heaped at the bottom, the last negligible pinch of grains sifting down, unstoppable, a finite amount, less each time I look. I tell myself that, at this point in my life, my age has no meaning. My routines have hardly changed. I have been writing one book after another since about 1963, thirty-two of fiction, twenty nonfiction, and a play about Rudyard Kipling’s disastrous four years in Vermont.
When I look at my face in the shaving mirror these days, I seem to be staring at my aged father. I barely recognize places that were once familiar, fields that are now subdivisions, dunes now covered with bungalows. I miss the empty roads of the past, and the sleeping cars on slow trains—all of it old-fogy-ish, I know, because I snort in agreement with the sentiment expressed by William Burroughs when asked in the nineteen-fifties if he was hungry: “What I want for dinner is a bass fished in Lake Huron in 1920.”
I started this at the beach; I am finishing it here. Many years ago, this was a wide and sandy beach, and my favorite place to write was in front of the old seawall, out of the wind. The sand there began to disappear about fifteen years ago, clawed away by surf, and that stretch no longer exists. The lumps of exposed lava rock and sharp coral are lapped by waves that have begun to undermine the wall, which will collapse soon. Many of the palm trees, their fat roots undercut, have fallen into the sea, and the beach is now crowded, and stonier, in places bleak and gravelly—the visible effects of time passing and a reminder that I am doomed, too. But, in a life of dramatic and unexpected change, what keeps me vital is my longing to see what will happen next in the world and, when this lockdown ends, to travel again.
One afternoon, a man of about thirty in a bomber jacket approached me, limping, on the beach, looking surprised. He said, “You! I used to see you here writing years ago, when I was stationed at Schofield. I was deployed to Afghanistan, Bronco Brigade, doing counter-insurgency. I caught a bullet bad and got shipped home and discharged, and now I’m on disability. I thought I’d come up here, like I used to. And you’re still here, in that chair!”
I said, “I’m not finished,” and he laughed.
A magnificent blur in the distance, the sun always setting behind it, Ka‘ena Point beckons. But, in the meantime, I have much more to write: “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
