Fresh Air Fiend (15 page)

Returning to the hotel to prepare my lecture, I lie down and fall asleep. I am wakened by the telephone. Too late to prepare, but I am well rested so am clear-headed. If I had notes or a lecture prepared, I would feel dull and earnest. As it is, I feel bright and eager. The Kuplezaal is filled, about 450 people. Dutch audiences always do their homework: they buy and read your books, they ask good questions, and they are attentive. So after a forty-minute talk and a short break for coffee, I answer questions. The best is "Have you ever experienced evil?"

A short walk, and then dinner alone, which I spent writing a fax to the States.

My bedtime book is
The Aspern Papers
by Henry James. I read it twenty years ago, but am happy to return to it each night. One chapter a night before I sleep.

 

APRIL
12

After my first sound sleep I am interviewed by an Australian for the World Service of Radio Nederland. After the interview he tells me stories about Australia, and I tell him about my kayak trip to northern Queensland. He has been living here for twenty years, and like other aliens has taken root. He was part of the international sixties counterculture, which deeply affected Amsterdam even if it did not make much of an impression in provincial bourgeois Holland.

I am picked up and driven to Rotterdam to sign books. On the way I learn a curious fact: the Dutch have taken to using mountain bikes.
Mountain bikes in Holland?
This is an example of the Dutch susceptibility to fads, their eagerness to be part of world culture. Sometimes it is overdone—you have to know when to stop. And the American junk-food places all over Holland make me sad.

Rotterdam. Lots of book buyers at Donner's, "the biggest bookstore in the Western world" (so I am informed). I sign books. I eat a
broodje.
I return to Amsterdam, reflecting that I have spent five and a half hours going to Rotterdam to sign books. If I were the pope or Michael Jordan, I would understand the mechanism that requires a personal appearance. But I am a nearsighted writer who hates long car journeys as a passenger.

A photo session ("Put your hand to your cheek") and two more bookstores—signing, talking—and finally, at 8:15, the Concertgebouw,—Verdi's
Requiem.

There are nearly as many performers as spectators—a whole choir, a huge orchestra. It is beautifully, thrillingly performed. But just after the thunderous second
Dies Irae,
when the choir is singing

 

Lacrymosa dies illa,
Qua resurget ex favilla

 

a man in the choir suddenly collapses! There is drama: the choir and the quartet continue to sing the lugubrious verse as the man gasps for breath, and to the sad strains of the
Requiem,
he is carried out by four members of the choir and a man from the audience. Everyone present is a witness.

 

APRIL
13

I wake early, write in my notebook for the first time since I arrived—the beginning of a story. I feel at last settled enough to write. I ask the next interviewer to conduct the interview at the Yoshitoshi exhibition, at the Rijksmuseum. This turned out to be a pleasant conversation with a knowledgeable woman, as we were passing from one picture to another, looking at the Ukiyo-e prints, scenes of "the floating world." The Japanese these days are also susceptible to novelty. While they are buying modern furniture and pictures, they are selling their antiques and prints.

The Night Watch
is undergoing restoration—a lunatic threw acid on it. The fact that he was shrewd enough to throw acid makes me think he's not a lunatic.

Another interviewer: "The problem in Holland is not the young people. They spend one-point-three hours a week reading. Is that bad?"

I said, "Not necessarily. Their parents spend six hours reading
De Telegraaf.
Is that good?"

I am now preparing to leave Holland. I would like to stay longer in Amsterdam. And the fact is that it is only when I go home that I get culture shock.

OCTOBER
3, 1993

Arrived at 7
A.M.
after a ten-month absence, but really I have not lived in England for almost four years. And the last time I stayed in a London hotel was in 1971, at just this time of year. The lovely clouds, the wet pavement, the penetrating dampness, all bring back memories of that arrival, a little shivering family of four fresh from Singapore, without a job or a house or much money. Then eighteen years passed and everything happened, and now I feel like a ghost, slipping back into the country, to haunt and be haunted.

The view from the Stafford in St. James's is rosy. There is an article about me and my new novel,
Millroy the Magician,
in
The Sunday Times.
I sound absurd. I put this down to the young English journalist's discomfort with being frankly appreciative. He knows that if he is nice to me he will be accused of arse-creeping, and so his admiration is turned into sniping. But who cares? The article will be lining the bottom of your budgie's cage tomorrow, and so will this diary the editor at the
Guardian
asked me to write.

 

OCTOBER
4

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

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

 

OCTOBER
5

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

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

 

OCTOBER
6

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

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

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

 

OCTOBER
7

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

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

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

 

OCTOBER
8

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

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

 

OCTOBER
9

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

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

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

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

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