Eric Ambler: An Interview

I met Ambler (1909 - 1998) in spring 1989; I wrote up our meeting for East-West. I'd already interviewed Anthony Powell; I hadn't yet done Thesiger or Pritchett. Had I bagged Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, and Muriel Spark, who were still alive at the time, I'd have had most of the writers who mattered in that British generation. (When I offered Ambler outtakes to the Paris Review, they sniffed, "Not literary enough." They must have been too busy admiring their own reflections in a mirror to read him.) I dined with Ambler at Wheeler's, an old London haunt near his townhouse flat, to which we walked very slowly and gingerly after lunch. It was a pleasure to read all his books.


His old friend Graham Greene named him “our greatest thriller writer”; a French critic claimed that “because of him, espionage isn’t a dirty profession, but a literary genre.” Even James Bond, in From Russia With Love, carefully unlocked his attaché case “and took out The Mask of Dimitrios by Eric Ambler....”

For more than a half-century, Eric Ambler has set the standard for other writers in his field. His eighteen novels are all in print. His concentrated realism, penetrating investigation into character, open-eyed political savvy have shaped the modern thriller.  Beneath his persuasive, transparent prose lie an exactitude of language and a seemingly effortless ability to grip the complex truths and deep history of a situation, a character, a country. As with all pioneers, a sense of danger hovers about his work. He established his fictional territory early on, and it remains his.

Though classified as “thrillers,” Ambler’s books lack the standard escapist contraptions of the genre. His settings are never romantic decor, his women are never mannequins, his pawn-takes-pawn plots never become conundrums. There is never any melodramatic hardware or gunplay, no political or personal judgments are passed. Though he is well-known for his power to keep a reader breathless, his books remain in memory as character portraits, and he was the first thriller writer whose entire œuvre (as one critic puts it) can be read as literature. In Ambler there is always a calm underlying the storm of events: the writer relentlessly and purposefully trying to get at the subtler truth.

Born in London in 1909, in his twenties Ambler studied engineering, toured briefly as a vaudeville comedian, then wrote copy at a London ad agency while trying to write plays. Soon he turned to novels, and quickly achieved critical and popular success. According to one critic, Ambler “infused warmth and political color into the spy story by using it to express a Left-Wing point of view....” To his early readers, used to thrillers set in a WWI atmosphere of derring-do, Ambler’s books were of another, subtler, more sober world. He increasingly became fond of the first-person voice, sometimes using multiple, contradictory narrators. To Ambler this technical feat seemed only “the better way to tell the story.”

By the beginning of the war he was recognized in Britain and America as the master of the genre. During the war he was made a lieutenant colonel in the British Army, in charge of all military training, morale, and education films. He worked with Carol Reed, Peter Ustinov, and David Niven in England, and with John Huston in Italy under fire. After the war, while going back to novels, Ambler was under contract as a screenwriter for the Rank Organization, writing films like A Night to Remember and The Cruel Sea.

His work divides easily into three periods. A desert-island collection might include Cause For Alarm and The Mask of Dimitrios (U.S. title: A Coffin for Dimitrios) from the first era, before the war, when he made his reputation; Judgment on Deltchev (’51), Passage of Arms (’59), The Night Comers (in the U.S.A., State of Siege) and A Kind of Anger (’64) from the second era, when he was also working as a screenwriter (he has written almost as many screenplays as novels); The Levanter (’72) and Doctor Frigo (’74) from the last period.

His settings are diverse, from the French Caribbean to East Africa, the Middle East to Malaysia, Italy to Indonesia, Germany to Turkey and the Balkans. He has, like every other writer, perpetual concerns: the uncertain, poor country in crisis; the traveller obsessed with frontiers, passports, permissions; the nervous lives and dangerous movements of refugees; the hunger for reputation.

These days, after many years in Switzerland, Ambler lives with his wife in London. Hard at work on a follow-up to a first volume of autobiography, Here Lies, he suggested we meet for a rare interview at a quiet French restaurant near his flat, not far from Harrod’s. He spoke with great pleasure of his half-century routine of “getting up and going straight to work in the next room—not a bad life.” What most came through was delight in his craft, a radiating intelligence, and the portly good humor of one who enjoys making dangerous remarks over a lunch of Dover sole.


AW    You said in Here Lies that after playwriting didn't work out, you were casting around. And the books you disliked most were thrillers. At that time you hadn't read Maugham’s Ashenden stories?

EA   Oh, yes, I read Ashenden. I read everything I could lay my hands on. I was really in touch.  I knew every new thought that came into anybody's mind. I worked at an advertising agency, so I didn't even have to buy. Every sort of journal or paper came into the office. I just used to raid it.

AW   When you were reading these thrillers in the early '30s, did you have a clear idea what you could do with the medium?

EA   No, I didn't. The first book I wrote, The Dark Frontier, started out as a parody. A parody of the sort of blood-and-thunder thriller. The “With one gigantic leap” plotting. It was done from several points of view. My attitude was: I despised William Le Queux’s stuff. Therefore I ought to be able, if I'm entitled to despise it, actually to create something better. But let me show you how I despise it first. I'm not going to condemn myself as a thriller writer, so I'll show you how funny I can be at the expense.

AW   In fact, it was the very first novel about the atomic bomb, written back in 1935. Did you realize this at the time?

EA   It didn't seem especially sensational. I regarded it (the bomb) in the same way as Hitchcock used to regard his Macguffins. He used to call them Macguffins. This secret plan, that imponderable—

AW  In the final version, does The Dark Frontier read as parody?

EA   It doesn't, because I changed my mind halfway through, and began to think, “Oh, you know this is not bad." (laughs) Those were the days before I could afford to rewrite a book. I was doing it at weekends and in between ads for Kellogg's Corn Flakes.

AW   You must've been conscious at some point that you were doing something quite new with this kind of book.

EA   That's the thing, you see. Nobody was saying you were doing something new, because nobody else was reading it. I thought I was. This is why I insist strongly on the importance of the word “author.” Because authorship is that sort of confidence—the confidence to waste your time. You may be wasting your time. And it's no good saying, "I've devoted my life!” To hell with that, nobody wants to read it. But if you want to do anything, if this is the way you want to earn a living, you’ve got to do something better. The better mouse trap. Nobody's paying you to do it. And there's nobody to blame if it doesn't work out. You're trying to enter a market. And if you can't, okay. Forget it.

AW   Let's talk about one of your most famous books, The Mask of Dimitrios (1939). Did the form, a masterful structure of succeeding flashbacks, come easily?

EA   I had great difficulty, I had to go back and do it over several times to get the loose ends to match. I went to America that January really to get away from Dimitrios, because I didn't know how to finish it. I’d never stopped in the middle of a book before, and thought. I'd always written them straight through, seven days a week, for months. I'd been scared of not delivering the next on time. Still a bad way.

AW   Your books don't appear once a year, they appear once every three years. You refer to yourself as an obsessional rewriter. When the point came when you could afford to, you wrote and rewrote and rewrote your books. What's this many, many drafts?

EA   Five or six. It takes time. This isn’t mot juste stuff. It’s: “Is any of it worthwhile? Are we just getting the book in shape? What’s new?”

AW   The really new things you brought to the “thriller”—besides settings like Istanbul, Belgrade, and the use of several narrators—were a whole new tone and world view. Part of this sense of reality in your books, even the early ones, comes because there are characters of every level culpability as in the Shakespeare play, but there's never any moral judgment or blame exerted by the author. Were you very aware that you were doing this or is this simply you by nature?

EA   It was me by cultivation. I was very careful not to make judgments, I was careful not to become pretentious. The mess that we have inherited—I'm talking about the Thirties. There was going to be another war. We knew it. Nobody was going to be to blame. Of course you could always blame the old men, but that was easy. We'd destroyed the Germans, so you couldn't reasonably blame them. We'd killed them at the Treaty of Versailles. Who could blame them? Indeed, Italy seemed much more menacing. The war had started for me when the Spanish Civil War started in 1936. I didn't go to Spanish Civil War, but later I always felt guilty about it. I thought I should have gone and died like Cornford or got a lousy disease like Orwell. That I should've suffered in some way.

AW   After the war, while writing film scripts, you waited a long time before writing Judgment on Deltchev.  I got the impression from your autobiography that the postwar world felt so different, you had to accustom yourself to it before writing another novel.

EA   There'd always been a war somewhere, war coming, war already started. I’d had World War One as a boy, and it seemed a more normal state to me than peace.  War simplifies the options. And also I'd been a fellow-traveler. But I felt that the god had failed. I came to that conclusion simply because I'd been through war and I'd seen, especially in southern Italy, how little relation far left ideals have for dealing with people at their ultimate stretch. People dying.

Italy at war had moved me very much. I detested fascism, or thought I did. It sounds very simplistic, I'm afraid, or very easy, but when I saw the railroad lines twisted about.... Germans had machines for twisting them up, just as they had machines for pulling down power lines. They had machines for making roads impassable. I'm talking about the Mezzo Giorno, southern Italy. The fascists, you see had done an enormous amount. The railroads and electric power had been taken to places that were still living in the early Middle Ages. All this had been destroyed for a thrupence. And they were being ravaged by French-Canadian troops.  Goons. This seemed to me to make nonsense of going around asking people if any of them was a communist. It was likely to make him mad. How stupid can politics get.

AW   I heard somewhere that S. J. Perelman spoke of knowing you.

EA   He was originally from New York, but I knew him in London. A lot of American writers came here after the war. Really, they came because the atmosphere was more congenial than under McCarthy. My first wife was an American, she had children by her first husband. I think if it hadn't been for McCarthy, we'd have gone to America. I was dead set on becoming an American citizen.

AW   You didn't like living in England?

EA   The Labour Government after the war was such a disaster, such a grubby thing, it almost made the war worth losing. The party was too much to take. You see, I’d been in the propaganda front line.  I’d made movies about America for British troops.

AW   It’s quite a stretch, to describe your books as "thrillers" or "spy stories." That doesn't really cover it.

EA   This has always been a great difficulty with my publishers. I say publishers—plural—because I've had a lot of English publishers, and different ones in other languages. The German language publisher, who’s in Zürich, is the most sensitive to this lack of category. They're not spy stories. I mean, that's just a load of crap.

AW   I don't know if another book exists like Judgment on Deltchev, about a Balkan trial, or like The Intercom Conspiracy, about how one of the principal ways by which covert information is really passed on is a network of small journals that make the daily newspapers seem ludicrous. Or Passage of Arms, about the smuggling of some guns in Malaysia, all the way from ambushed revolutionaries to the final transaction, told via the people who handle them. Did these stories come to you so neatly?

EA   No, never. They came to me as ideas, as notions. There are some people in America, and a German director named Schlondorff, who’ve been trying for two years now to get a script of Passage of Arms. They’re eager to update it. Really, you don’t need to update it, because the situation’s exactly the same. You don’t even have to change the names very much. The last word I had from them was would I give them extra option time because of the Writers’ Strike. My reply was that it was a mistake on their part to suggest to a fully paid-up and indeed pensioned member of the Writers' Guild that he should scab. I was on the WG council at the time of the first strike in ’60. My agent in London was written a long lecture from a New York lawyer talking about how unfortunate it was that writers of my stature took adversarial positions. Adversarial! There’s the sweets trolley.

AW    How do you steep yourself so deeply in your books’ locations, and in your characters’ backgrounds? For example, with The Levanter, did you travel a lot in the Middle East?

EA   A little. Syria, no. Cyprus yes, when it was British, but briefly. Unavoidable transit difficulties. I went to Israel, just after the ’67 war. Under the publisher George Weidenfeld’s auspices, which was not a good thing to do. Because you get the high-level treatment. And the thing not to do is to get the high-level treatment. No one is going to talk to you, except in p.r. platitude terms. The best thing that happened to me in Israel was that Weidenfeld’s representative there, a very striking young man, contested the whole idea that I should be looking at Israel—me, a goy—with the idea of writing about it. He put me on the tours. I went everywhere in Israel by bus with American tourists, all excited Jewish people, all with an absolute belief—except they didn’t want to live there. I was probably the only non-Zionist on the bus. I’m still convinced the Israelis were really sending out the buses in the hope that the PLO would throw grenades at them.

AW   You must’ve done an extraordinary amount of research.

EA   Oh, yes. But you can read it all, if you know where to look, and what you want to read about. It’s really finding out what the questions are.

AW   You’ve been a great user of libraries.

EA   You bet. But also a great user of bars. In the Hotel Intercontinental that spring, on the Mount of Olives, I must have been the only non-Jew in the hotel as a guest; the whole staff was Palestinian Arab. They’d come to my room and say, ‘Would you please when it’s dark come to my village?’ I was handed a bundle of letters of introduction to Beirut. I could’ve stayed for months. Beautiful city, before it was messed about.

AW   You’re writing a second volume of autobiography?

EA   There’s very little about me in it. The main theme is that film—sound film, not television—has had its pretensions exploded. It’s a vehicle only, rather like opera. It’s still not a novel. You can say more on paper, simultaneously, in a shorter space, by flicks of words. Look, the day someone decides to make a movie of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, I’ll believe it then.

AW   Actually, someone tried, but it didn’t work very well.

EA   Of course it wouldn’t work.  Have you seen David Lean’s A Passage to India? David’s been fighting this battle all the time. He really believes that film is better than words. Did you notice the credits on the film? I can tell you what they are. They’re: “A David Lean Production, from the novel by E.M. Forster, produced by David Lean, edited and directed by David Lean, adapted by David Lean, screenplay by David Lean.” I mean, he can’t leave out E.M. Forster. But what he’s done is try and do what he did with the murder of Nancy in his version of Oliver Twist. He’s made images. Like the penis-like object coming up out of the lake. I don’t know what it means. Very confusing. And the scene in the cave when you really don’t know what the hell’s going on.

AW   Do you think movies should avoid great books?

EA   I’m not saying that, I’m simply saying that if you’re going to do A Passage to India—it was done very well on the stage, where these things are understood. When people said, “She’s imagining things,” they didn’t try to show her imagining things. The relationships were clearer. They’re clearest of all in the book. I think the thing that David’s done best was Lawrence of Arabia. Big screen. Vistas. Akkaba. O’Toole camping about in flowing robes, in blowing sand dunes. Okay. But it adds nothing. It’s like a book with pictures. Illustrated comics.

AW   Why are there so few good thriller movies? Why as a genre doesn’t it seem to translate well?

EA   Because it starts off as a thriller, doesn’t it, so what’s film got to add? It’s only got to add the cover illustration. You’re providing the lurid jacket for it. The images connected with thrillers are so cliché, they’re all cliché, every one. And many thrillers now are feeding off film. It’s a kind of feedback.

AW   The film Topkapi was adapted from your book The Light of Day, and Journey Into Fear was filmed in ’42, starring Orson Welles. And of course The Mask of Dimitrios was filmed about the same time. You’ve never expressed much satisfaction with films made from your books. Are there any books of yours that you felt could’ve been made into good movies?

EA   No. My regret is that I sold Dimitrios for so little. $3,000. Now—(laughs) My fault. I was in the army. I thought Warner Brothers were crazy to make it in the beginning. It was made on standing sets for $600,000, which was peanuts. Every one of the actors was under contract at Warner Brothers, and doing nothing else. The script was by a man named Frank Gruber, a writer of second-feature cowboy pictures. I’m surprised anything came out at all. I thought Sidney Greenstreet was very good, but then he was always very good. He was Irish. Real Irish from Ireland.

AW   Which of your screenplays were you most happy with?

EA   Oh, I suppose, The Purple Plain. The Cruel Sea mainly because I got an Academy Award nomination, which warms the cockles.

AW   You lived in California for ten years. Did you like it out there?

EA   I didn’t mind. I had a house burn down almost immediately. An interesting experience. My wife Joan was part of the Hitchcock outfit.

AW   I’ve heard that most of Hitchcock’s writers were amanuenses. You never worked with him—I take it you wouldn’t have made a good amanuensis.

EA   Oh, no. An amanuensis isn’t an arguer. The dreadful thing is you can be quite wrong, and yet be convinced.

AW   And you don’t find out until you see it on the screen?

EA   Well, you do. You know there’s something wrong in the script, and it’s possible that nobody sees it because you’ve got to start on the picture or forget the whole thing. Or you’ve got to start simply because the actor is there. And you’re contracted. You still know there’s something wrong. You may not know how to fix it. A picture may go ahead. The terrible thing is, the thing that you knew was wrong will only appear in the rough cut. And the first person to say it was wrong will be whoever it was before who denied it existed. Now you see it on the screen and there’s something the matter. It’s not totally unacceptable, but it’s wrong.

AW  Do you keep up with what goes on in the thriller field?

EA   I read reviews. I read one book about submarine warfare that I was told was very good indeed. But I can’t remember. I find it very difficult to read Jeffrey Archer. There comes to mind a remark of Oscar Levant’s about Doris Day: “Ha! I knew her before she was a virgin.” I feel that I knew Jeffrey Archer’s work was bad before everybody knew it was bad.

AW   Word came not too long ago of the passing of Kim Philby. Did you ever know him?

EA   I’m surprised the old boy lasted so long. He must have had terrible liver trouble. In his wife’s book, The Spy I Married or whatever it was, she quotes one of his letters, saying he’d read the new Ambler. At the time, that was A Kind of Anger. And he liked it. So I was on his reading list. That was our only acquaintance. I didn’t know any of those people. You see, I didn’t go to their schools or their universities. Wrong class.

AW   You once wrote a piece about “spy-spotting.” You mentioned Tangier, Istanbul, etc. Where should one go now to see spies?

EA   I suppose Bangkok—you can get into real danger there.

AW   After your autobiography, will you write another novel?

EA  I doubt it. I think I’m pretty much blown. Once you start to write about what you believe to be reality, you’re really on the skids.

Tikal

I wrote this for Travel & Leisure magazine in spring 1988, shortly after my mother's death. They published it a year later, as "Temples of Doom." Most of the photographs were by Macduff Everton, who later published his own excellent book on the Maya and became a good friend. We worked together on many assignments, in India, Mexico, Georgia, and Antigua (Guatemala). 


The past is never so remote as one imagines. The journey there was easy enough: a plane about my own age took me north from Guatemala City, deep into jungle to a town that was once a week’s trek from the ruins, beside a vast and oppressive lake. From there it was only an hour on a dilapidated schoolbus to a thatched lodge and a path. Soon I was walking slowly and sweatily through a complicated tropical forest. Above me monkeys went tumbling and tossing through the twined limbs of immortal trees; black-and-white toucans creaked in surprise, nodding their yellow beaks. Once there were gods in these jungles; once there were the Maya.

People come to Tikal, in the Peten of northern Guatemala, for different reasons. The Dutchman had come to pose sociological questions. The young American couple had seen all the Mexican ruins of the Yucatán Maya, as had the aging hippie, but he had spent two decades on them and the couple were spending two weeks. The German students wanted to climb the temples and stay up there all day, meditating out loud. The ornithologists from around the world had come because the ruins were a metropolis of rare jungle birds—not so different from Tikal’s original function as a central, sacred city. And the Belgian had come to complain; he had complained his way through the rest of Guatemala, undoubtedly he had complained all the way down Mexico, and seated in the shade, sweating and blinking at the remnants of one of the great mysterious civilizations of man, he complained about the food at his hotel on the lake. When its roof caught fire he stopped complaining.

Later the next day the group flew back to Guatemala City and the Dutchman Franz and I had Tikal nearly to ourselves, except for a few naturalists who camped out. Always the local workers were there, keeping the jungle from encroaching again or repairing a step pyramid. Their ancestors had built this place—a direct link which no modern Greek or Egyptian can claim. (Today probably 2 million identifiable Maya Indians inhabit the same territory of the Mexican Yucatán and northern Guatemala as always—one-fifth the Mayan population at its height.) And Tikal must be considered along with Pompeii, Palmyra, Machu Picchu, Pagan and Angkor Wat, as one of the great ruins of the world—the Maya’s greatest city.

To our distant eye the Maya seem deeply paradoxical. They had the axle and wheel but made use of them only in toys; the circle was sacred. Nor had they invented metals. Yet they had a complex system of hieroglyphs, they were historically-minded, they had books, a game with a rubber ball, efficient reservoirs and probably sweat baths and chocolate as well; they used vaulted ceilings and created pottery, jade ornaments, cartoony paintings and sculpted bas-reliefs of great delicacy and vibrant color. Their sense of scale was enormous. And their calendar was nearly as accurate as ours, though each day had its omens and portentous meanings. Their cycles of the year (260 days and 365 days) are still in use throughout Central America. They were great observers and interpreters of the planets. Their pantheon included figures like the Fat God and the Nine Lords of the Night. Their gods might be human, or animal, or a combination—like a snake-footed god who rules a royal family. The Maya believed the world would end every 52 years, and their lives and ideas were shaped by this central perception of time as an expression of pure force.

From time’s inevitability and power they developed a culture of pain that included frequent human sacrifices, ritualized self-mutilation, and cannibalism. (The priests themselves went through tests of pain to attain and symbolize their rank.) The victim, often honored, was spread-eagled on a round stone table before the temple and his heart cut out or his head cut off with a stone knife. Blood was smeared on the standing stelae tablets as an offering. The choicest parts of his body, now blessed by the presence of a god, were distributed to the priests, the lesser parts to the witnessing nobles and rich—for the common masses never entered the sacred centers of a Maya city except as servants. Indeed, it is a privilege to enter what we think of as Tikal, for immediately one has seen more of it than most of its “inhabitants” ever did. Incense was burned daily to purify the atmosphere from the smell of blood and decomposing bodies.

There was no united Maya kingdom; only warlike city-states. Their languages were related but mutually incomprehensible. What we call the Classic Era lasted from about 250 to 900 A.D. During this Golden Age of trade, learning, and building they were one of the most advanced civilizations in the world. But an advanced astronomy and calculation of time was put constantly at the service of superstition. The Maya never went beyond this conception of the universe as a vessel of violence, with only sacrifice as a way to offset its inevitable destruction. When the world didn’t end the long wait began again, with frequent appeasements of the gods.

The Spanish destroyed all they could of the Maya culture, burning virtually all their written history, but it was already a fallen and shattered civilization long before the conquistadores arrived. And the Maya downfall—the great Maya question—continues to exert itself. We know little, really; it is hardly surprising that so many barnacles have fastened on these people to support bizarre theories. (Even today the Mormons fund archaeological projects at several Maya sites in hopes of proving the Maya were wandering Israelites.) All across Maya Mesoamerica, it happens at the same moment; the cities are abandoned one by one, all in a single century, about a thousand years ago and following five hundred years of high civilization. For some unknown reason or combination of reasons, the culture falls, the beliefs fail.

What seems likely is that the fertility of the people rose as the fertility of the overworked soil around the cities declined; famine, a high death rate, then, and a movement away from the cities. Possibly there were massacres of the nobility and priesthood. No records survive. The cities were abandoned (hundreds still lie buried beneath Peten and Yucatán forests). They had been built to glorify and defy the gods. In the end they lasted longer than the beliefs that built them—though the gods survive in transmuted form in the Indian religions of the territory, the sacred figures of jaguars or rain gods or a celestial serpent.

In the Central Acropolis I wandered through raised courtyard after raised courtyard, with massive fragmented stairways rising off into either air or other courts and “palaces” whose function is unclear. Often these ran to several rooms, often with sapodilla-wood beams firmly in place, narrow chambers that seemed to me more in character as administrative or public offices rather than apartments of priests or the wealthy. And then, along on a high open passage, I came out over the glory of the Plaza Mayor.

It is this first view of the plaza that imprints itself so strongly on the imagination. A breeze; before you, rising, the Temple of the Giant Jaguar, (Temple 1); opening, an enormous grassy plaza, a ball court, another massive temple pyramid rising steeply on your left, (Temple 2); facing, another complicated acropolis, all with stelae and sacrificial altars before them. The complexity, the restless many levels, the sheer power of the stone, the stairs and smaller pyramids ascending and descending in all directions, the vastness of contained space and time, is fantastic and overwhelming and, finally, rather empty.

It stuns because it amounts to a smidgeon. Within the six mapped miles of Tikal, the largest Mayan site yet discovered, are more than 3000 individual buildings—from the skyscraper temples right down to the thatched huts that housed most of the farming labor. At its height Tikal’s population might’ve been 40,000. Thus the Plaza Mayor is as if Rockefeller Center were all that remained of NY after our civilization fell.

I never made it all the way up Temple 1. There was a sign at the bottom saying in Spanish and English, “You climb at your own risk,” but as Franz pointed out, “I didn’t need to be told this.” (I should mention that I was about the only sissy.) Until very recently there was a chain set in the steps and running all the way up as a handgrip, but it was damaging the stone so it was taken out. I missed, naturally, the ornately carved lintel over the doorway of the ceremonial room at the top—a favorite spot for people to sit and watch the sunset over the ruins. The Temple is similar to the Egyptian pyramids in having held the tomb of an important warrior (Lord Cacao?) and two children sacrificed to accompany his death in battle.

Temple 2 was a good beginner’s temple with wide even steps and several levels of arrival. The sense of command from on high was extraordinary, and it was easy to imagine the priests intoning the rituals that involved the sense of each day’s individual destiny, good or bad, for the city and the people. What staggers is the insignificance of human life before the labor that built this, refusing to use the wheel. Tikal has a heaviness about it that is wearying. More even than the Egyptian monuments, it makes one feel small before the gods, and its lines smack constantly of ritual.

In late afternoon the Plaza Mayor became a fine and private place. The day cooled; the spider-monkeys began to screech and whimper from the nearby trees; the birds began to swoop possessively among the ruins, which took on a graininess as the bare sunlight calmed down. The acoustics were amazing—two people atop Temples 1 and 2 can have a conversation as if face to face and anyone below can hear them perfectly. It amplifies the monkey calls into great simian wars; no wonder the priests could address so easily the masses of believers below. Without the surrounding forest, their voices might have carried all the way down to the fields and farms of the common multitudes—and what a sight the jaguar priests must have been from far away, atop temples that were brightly painted in reds and blues and yellows.

And stone faces were everywhere. On the complex of the North Acropolis, shaded by little thatch huts erected by workmen, were two great grimacing masks. More astonishing was another mask at the end of a subterranean passage that you could only see with a flashlight and that the guides didn’t bother with. After two days I realized that a great wall by a stairway was in fact an even huger mask, but I had to see it from a distance. At one time most of the pyramids and temples had giant masks the size of two men in plastered and painted stucco. Then the city must have seemed a sequence of many faces, rulers and gods, watching always.

The guidebooks and maps were misleading in places. The East Plaza, so grandly described, is (save for a temple) mostly indecipherable forest now. The enormous South Acropolis is a massive hill in the jungle—a mezzanine of trees. When I walked around it I ran into several Guatemalan workers trying to bring down one peripheral tree with machetes.

But there was no disappointment about the Plaza of the Seven Temples, which rises majestically from thick jungle. The surfaces of the walls are surprisingly intact, for this plaza goes back centuries before Christ—one of Tikal’s earliest. The plaza itself was enormous, shaded by palm trees, with a triple ball court. Nearby rose two enormous pyramids, one with four staircases framed by remnants of huge masks, and together they made another plaza as impressive as the Plaza Mayor, but more serene and subtle.

When the Maya had built these gigantic constructions, they began with a core to which they simply added and added, using a kind of volunteer slave labor. Temple 4, the highest, is 250,000 cubic yards of building material, and took at least forty years to build. Heavily overgrown, wooden ladders have been laid end to end up its side, which isn’t very steep. As with all the temples, at the level before the true summit there is a kind of mini-plaza, with steps to an anteroom and small ceremonial chamber. At one time there were immense stone carvings around the doors and walls, but either the jungle or the early explorers have done away with these now, as on most of the temples.

The final stretch of Temple 4 was a naked metal ladder on the side of the pinnacle. (Those who don’t feel up to the ladder can content themselves that the view really isn’t much different.) The top was still spacious, with more steps and the stone wall rising ever higher; birds darted around its peak. The sense of giddiness was unnerving. Before me, past the lip of stone, the surrounding jungle stretched for miles into the lowland hills and mists. The soft light of afternoon lay on the pillars of Temples 1 and 2, thrusting above the trees like withered bookends, and on Temple 5, all alone. I was at the summit of the Mayan world—the highest man-made point in the hemisphere until the tall office buildings of the late 19th century. And 1000 years ago the jungle wasn’t here, enveloping the world—there were cultivated fields. Like lone skyscrapers these temples must have towered over the people who’d built them. They were a massive achievement designed to sate the gods and keep the commoners in their place far below.

More than anything, being up here reminded me what obsessed heros the early explorers were who hacked through the jungle, lived in Mayan ruins in great discomfort, cleared, studied, dug, sketched, and brought back as much as they could. Though Tikal was never really “discovered” because it was never really lost, the first Westerner to visit was a Swiss in 1877, who took the lintels from Temples 1 and 4 back to Basel. The great initial exploration was done by a young Britisher, Alfred Percival Maudslay, looking for adventure, and his photographs and maps of the early 1880s are one of the signal achievements in Mayan exploration. Though Maudslay’s men cleared away much of Tikal, the jungle inevitably grew back after he left, and until the U. of Pennsylvania’s massive project (1956-67) every archaeologist had to deal with the jungle anew. And even now the jungle continuously tries to take back Tikal.

Eaten by vegetation, Temple 5, (700 A.D.) has no helpful ladders or restored stairway. To me it was the easiest climb. I am traumatized by heights, and an honest hillside with plenty of roots and trees to hang onto is preferable to a steep uncertain staircase.

Temple 3 was the most difficult ascent, with precarious footholds and handholds of dry branches. It wasn’t dangerous, only steep, but there were moments it was necessary simply to stop, hang by the fingernails, and try to chart a farther few feet up. (An unusual and pleasant surprise was how easy it was to come down.) On top I was so staggered by having made it that I missed the faint but treasured carving on the wood lintel over the doorway.

Day after day I came back to that high view of the Plaza Mayor, to confirm its strength. For in the end one doesn’t know quite what to make of Tikal. Its titanic mass and territorial splendor, its grace of pure force, are balanced by the great absence one feels everywhere—like a theater after the actors have all gone home. Here one is less impressed by the supposed fragility of human things—for Tikal still stands—than by the actual fragility of entire cultures. Our temples, our pyramids outlast the beliefs that build them. Emptied of that living belief, they seem like a sport of nature—a joke that the jungle has left standing. For the great shock of Tikal is that the Maya have gone, and there is no one there but you.

Wilfred Thesiger: Visions of a Nomad

I met Wilfred Thesiger (1910 - 2003) on one of his rare visits to London. The 1987 meeting was arranged by Ralph Izzard, a friend from Bahrain. We met at Thesiger's bachelor flat on Tite Street. The profile was written for Conde-Nast Traveler for March 1988. I remember the date clearly because I first saw the magazine in a grocery store the week my mother died (February 1, 1988). Who'd have guessed that one of the century's greatest explorers was also one of its greatest prose stylists? In appearance he reminded me of Sherlock Holmes. When he died, one of his Arabian traveling companions from the desert remembered him thus: "He was loyal, and generous, and afraid of nothing."


At seventy-seven, Wilfred Thesiger wasn’t going to be in London for very long. Having just published an autobiography, The Life of My Choice, that covers his early years in Abyssinia, he was on his way back to northern Kenya, where he lives with the Samburu tribe. Elusive as ever, he spends as little time as possible in London; he has never felt the great cities of Europe had much to offer him. Very tall, in whipcord condition, with a creased craggy face like a greyhound, he looks indestructible, yet his journeys have left the mark of great gentleness and peace on him: this is the man who wandered the Empty Quarter of Arabia with the bedu for five years (as no other outsider before or since) and lived with the reed-dwellers of the Iraqi marshes for nine. He has the penetrating gaze of a man who always found people “more important to me than places,” journeying perpetually in search of “stillness, the stillness of a world that never heard an engine.”

Thesiger has enjoyed and endured one of the most extraordinary, original lives of our century, largely spent travelling through difficult, beautiful terrain among little-known and often dangerous tribes. He is a standard against which all travellers and explorers must measure themselves. No man has dared more, seen more, or so completely opened himself to experiences outside his culture. What Thesiger saw was mostly unknown before him and vanished afterward, sometimes from war, usually from the intrusion of the modern world upon that stillness. His few books, written only after great pressure from publishers who knew of his journeys, stand well outside and above the body of “travel literature.” For along with their profound knowledge of alien peoples and lands, they must be read as great creative journeys of the soul. No other man could have made them.

Thesiger's childhood uniquely prepared him for such a life. He was born in 1910 in Addis Ababa, Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) where his father was the chief representative of the British government. His family was political and military; his uncle was Viceroy of India at the time. At the age of six he witnessed the rebellion culminating in the victory of Ras Tafari, later to become Haile Selassie, and saw a blood-drenched army pour in on horse and on foot after battle, resplendent in lion-mane headdresses and cloaks and shirts of velvet and silk, carrying spears, shields, swords, rifles, and waving banners of red, gold and green in a triumphant procession.

“Few other Europeans have seen the like,” he wrote in The Life of My Choice. “I believe that day implanted in me a life-long craving for barbaric splendor, for savagery and colour and the throb of drums, and that it gave me a lasting veneration for long-established custom and ritual, from which would derive later a deep-seated resentment of Western innovations in other lands, and a distaste for the drab uniformity of the modern world.”

When he was nine, Thesiger’s family returned to England. He was sent to a boarding school in Sussex; inevitably he had little in common with his schoolmates. He fared better at Eton, and at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read history and excelled at boxing. His childhood of hunting and treks had bred an innate toughness. He dreamed incessantly of returning to Abyssinia.

He had gone back only once since his father’s death, at the invitation of Haile Selassie for the 1930 Coronation. Having finished Oxford, Thesiger in 1933 planned an expedition into Danakil country to find the end of the Awash River. All previous expeditions had failed or been wiped out by the Danakil. “All that mattered to these people,” Thesiger recalls, “was to kill; how they did so had little significance. Among the Danakil a man’s standing in his tribe depended to a very large extent on the number of men or boys, however young, that he had killed and castrated. In time I learnt to tell at a glance, from the decorations he wore, how often a man had killed.”

Thesiger’s expedition did not lose a man. He secured tribesmen from village to village who could ensure safe passage. His meeting with the ruthless Sultan in a moonlit forest glade, surrounded by 400 loin-clothed warriors, was another epiphany that would make a “normal” life impossible. Thesiger was just learning, however, the comradeship that would prove so important on his later Arabian journeys, “the very differences between us binding me more closely to them.” On this expedition, “I still had a sense of racial superiority, acquired in my childhood, which set me apart from the men who followed me.”

The six years before the war Thesiger spent with the Political Service in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, where he served in a remote province under an exceptional District Commissioner, Guy Moore. In the Sudan he grew proficient in Arabic, learned to love riding camels and the hardships of desert travel, and became an expert shot. On leave he journeyed extensively in Syria, Egypt, Palestine, Morocco, Libya, and the nearly unknown Tibesti region of French Equatorial Africa; he got to know tribes like the Nuba, the Tibbu, the Nuer, the Bani Hussain, the Dinka, the Zaghawa, the Bedayi. Moore, recalls Thesiger, “taught me to travel light and to regard not as servants but as companions the men who accompanied me.”

In the war Thesiger fought with special British forces in North Africa and the Middle East. He was longing for his old way of life: “I was in the desert but insulated from it by the jeep in which I travelled.” When the war ended he was offered a job with the Desert Locust Unit; they were looking for someone to collect information about the possibility of an outbreak along the Empty Quarter of Arabia. They needed a desert traveller more than an entomologist. Thesiger saw this as a great opportunity, his chance at “the ultimate challenge of Arabian exploration.” It would occupy his next five years.

The Empty Quarter, the Rub al’ Khali, is a half million square miles of desert within the greater Arabian desert. At that time it was probably the most unknown territory on earth. Lying partially within Saudi Arabia and mainly within Oman (then ruled by a xenophobic sultan) it was known only to the bedu who chose to wander its unmappable dunes. No plane had ever flown over it; not even its fringes were approachable by jeep. It could be traversed only by camel. Only two Europeans had ever crossed it, Bertram Thomas and St. John Philby in the early 1930s.

It couldn’t possibly be done alone. “Many tribes lived around the Empty Quarter. Only the Rashid and the Awamir... were at home in the Sands.” Thesiger’s companions, the Rashid, “were small deft men, alert and watchful. Their bodies were lean and hard, tempered in the furnace of the desert and trained to unbelievable endurance.” Among them were two young men, bin Kabina and bin Ghabaisha, who stayed with Thesiger for all his journeys.

Each year between 1945 and 1950 Thesiger wandered with the Rashid in the Empty Quarter; twice they crossed it completely. On these journeys of extraordinary hardship—coaxing unwilling camels up steep ranges of streaming dunes, trying to find the way through an undulating landscape—water was severely rationed. “It was continuous thirst,” remembers Thesiger. “Sometimes it was twelve days from one well to the next. Sometimes there was no food for several days. You had a little coffee before you started in the morning, then all day you got thirstier and thirstier in the heat, a continuous nagging craving that burned. In the evening you were given your pint of water, that was all.”

Thesiger was determined to measure up to the life these Rashid led. In his classic record of those years, Arabian Sands (1959), he wrote, “Anxious to prove their equal, I wanted no concessions and was irritated when pressed to ride while they still walked, or when they suggested I was thirsty and needed a drink. Because I was their companion on the road they would fight even against their own tribesman in my defence, and would expect me to do the same.”

In Arabian Sands Thesiger describes unforgettably his years in that harsh land: the unbroken chains of dunes, the starvation, the thirst, the gossip of the bedu, their skill at reading the sparsest of tracks or shifting landmarks, the continuous threat of other tribes that would take offence at Thesiger’s infidel presence. It is a book of overwhelming beauty, and deep love for his comrades. “I shall always remember how often I was humbled by my illiterate companions, who possessed in so much greater measure generosity, courage, endurance, patience, good temper and light-hearted gallantry. Among no other people have I felt the same sense of personal inferiority.”

The friendships with bin Kabina and bin Ghabaisha, whom he watched grow from boys into men, were among the very closest of his life. When pressure from different tribes and governments (including the British) prevented further journeys, that era of his life was over. “I knew how it felt to go into exile.” The traditional life he had seen, disrupted by oil and oil money, was soon to disappear forever into what he has since called “The Arabian Nightmare.”

He says today, “The bedu had such self-respect and nobility because of the hardness and the harshness of their lives. No one would describe the British as a ‘noble race’—you’ve only got to read the papers. The same is true of Americans. But among the bedu the standard was extemely high, because of the pressure of public opinion. If a Rashid, for example, did something that was deplorable, a year later you’d hear about it on the Omani border. The desert was a sounding-board.”

Seeking somewhere else to travel, almost by chance Thesiger visited the marshes of southern Iraq. They were to be his home for much of the next eight years. “A delightful and unexpected world,” he wrote in The Marsh Arabs (1964):  “narrow waterways winding through the tufted reeds, duck circling above still lagoons, the crying of geese, a village of reed houses clustered on the water, a hum of voices, and the incessant passage of canoes; dark dripping buffaloes, the sun crimson through the smoke of burning reed-beds, a boy’s voice singing in the dark....” It was a stillness, a world of water rather than sand, that could follow the Empty Quarter.

Living in the Marshes, Thesiger was on the move almost constantly, poled along in a canoe by a team of young men. Throughout the marsh villages Thesiger acted as an impromptu doctor, bringing the latest antibiotics each year from London, for the Madan tribesmen were riddled with innumerable diseases that were the easy result of living on water.

His life in the Marshes ended abruptly with the Civil War of 1959. (The present war with Iran has devastated the Marshes irrevocably.) Then he began to visit Kenya. “I’d have gone on in the desert,” he says today, in the Chelsea flat that has been London headquarters since 1942. “I’d have liked to go on living in the Marshes. But these places closed off and I went looking for somewhere else.” One by one, the places Thesiger knew so well—Arabia, the Marshes, Persia, the Sudan, Afghanistan—have been closed off or ruined by “the chaos of the world.” For him, the greatest tragedy has been the Marxist state of Ethiopia.

In the Iraq years, to avoid the oppressive summer heat, Thesiger travelled extensively in Persia, in Morocco’s High Atlas, in Iraqi Kurdistan; he explored little-known Nuristan, Hazarajat, Swat, Chitral, and Hunza regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan; later he travelled by donkey through Masai country and fought with Royalist forces in the Yemen.

To Thesiger, travel by car is like taking a plane. “All the journeys of importance to me have been done in the local manner: on camels, on foot with porters, or mules, or horses, whatever, to have close contact with the people. Today if you wanted to explore the Sahara, it would be idiotic to go on a camel. A camel journey today is a stunt—you can perfectly well go in a Land Rover. I can foresee a time when you won’t require porters on Everest because there’ll be helicopters to lower you to the tents and tea shops. There’s nowhere I really want to go now, at my age. If I were a young man I’d feel very frustrated. The life I’ve described in my books absolutely no longer exists. I think I realized back when I was fourteen that the car and the aeroplane were going to wreck my world, make it smaller and destroy its diversity. You can hardly find a village in Kenya today without tourists carrying cameras.”

Thesiger owns nothing in Kenya. Earlier he lived among the Turkhana; now he lives alternately with several Samburu families whose houses he helped build, and with a young Samburu whom Thesiger regards as his son. But there will be no Kenya book. “Plenty’s been written about Kenya,” he says. Instead there will be a large book of his photographs, Visions of a Nomad. (In 1979 he published Desert, Marsh and Mountain which contained many photographs, excerpts from the two books on Arabia, and accounts of his mountain travels. This was entitled in the States, against Thesiger’s wishes, The Last Nomad.)

“I never anticipated being a writer,” he says. “I never kept a journal with the view to writing anything but papers for the Geographical Society. To write Arabian Sands I went to Denmark. I didn’t know anyone there, that was the whole point. I took a bedsitter for a winter and wrote it, ten years after the journeys.”

He denies the legends that have sprung up around him—eating dirt to prepare for difficult journeys, etc. “Sheer rubbish. I’ve always simply eaten what the locals eat. I’ve never dropped sterilized tablets in water, if the water that came to hand was filthy I drank it through a straw. I was fortunate never to get ill.”

He still travels light. “I used to find a great satisfaction when I was with the bedu in the desert or on trek in the Sudan to own nothing that wouldn’t go in my saddlebags. It gave me a freedom which otherwise I wouldn’t have possessed. Inevitably as you acquire more and more possessions you lose your freedom. There’s very little in this flat I’ve collected while I’ve been abroad. I’ve got a fairly valuable library, I suppose. This is the other side of my nature. I’ve lived easily in two worlds. In London I could put on my dark suit and go off to the Travellers’ Club and I was leading the life here. In Mukalla, in Oman, staying with the District Commissioner, I could put on Arab robes in the morning and go off with the bedu. I don’t think the lives really conflicted with each other. I tried to keep them apart. At first when I came back here from Arabia I used to feel a shadowy figure at my side, it could’ve been bin Kabina or bin Ghabaisha, watching all that was going on with a good deal of disapproval. I have no feeling that the two worlds relate. The lessons learnt in one aren’t translatable to the other. After all, how much relationship, living in London, does one have with one’s neighbors, with the people in the street? None. In Arabia or Kenya you’d have close contact with all of them. They’re just different worlds with different skills.”

No brief essay can do justice to Thesiger’s life, nor excerpts to the stark beauty of his prose. He counts as his achievements to have won his companions’ confidence, “and, in so many of my travels, to have been there just in time.” His flat could belong to a well-to-do bachelor lawyer with a reading interest in the East. The only mementos a visitor spies hang hidden by a hall bookcase: the silver khanjah dagger that is the mark of manhood in Oman, the leather back support worn when riding a camel.

The rest is visible in his open gaze, which never wavers: the look of a man who has constantly challenged himself, friendly because there is no hint of disguise. As he once wrote of Arabia’s Empty Quarter, “No man can live there and emerge unchanged. He will carry, however faint, the imprint of the desert, the brand which marks the nomad; and he will have within him, weak or insistent according to his nature, the yearning to return. For that cruel land can cast a spell no temperate clime can match.”

The Ardèche

Written for Travel & Leisure, 1987.

The most unknown countries are the ones everybody knows. Every inch of France has been meticulously mapped, but how many people know the Ardèche, dead center in the south? I told people I was wondering whether to go for several days, and they corrected my pronunciation drastically—these were my fellow countrymen—surely I meant somewhere else entirely? Ah, you must be talking about the Ardennes. Their conviction decided me. I’d read that the Ardèche, with Romanesque churches as stark as its gorges, and grey villages among green Herculean mountains, was one of France’s most beautiful regions. If no one but the French had heard of it, that meant I was getting somewhere.

The new Très Grande Vitesse (Very Great Speed) trains telescope half of France in two hours. Then the road takes over. From Lyon south the factories drop away, the woods resume, the stony hills rise wild. I followed a smaller road; the Ardèche began. Decaying villages with double-tiled roofs knotted the enormous hillsides, bearded with barbarous pines. It was early September, and still hot. In the sprawling vineyards by the road the men were barechested, checking the grapes for the coming harvest.

The Ardèche is naturally argumentative. The Romans passed through, the Reformation passed through, the Revolution soldered the divisions between Catholic and Protestant. The country is mostly rock: haughty mountains made fertile by extremes of climate. The peaks are snowbound for five months, eerie with mists and rain for three. For the long summer the Mediterranean heat comes up across the southern plains and helps the vineyards, the chestnut trees that were famous in Crusader times, and the Roman cypresses. There is the usual dissent between the landlocked highlanders gazinng inward and the Latinized southerners looking across the plains to the coast. The arguments are mostly ancient ones. The denizens have the superstitions of people born a century late, and the prosperity of the coal mines and the silk industry seems almost a story. But the people keep their privacy in a landscape of austere beauty, and the markets, once vast trade fairs, go on.

I planned a circuit of three days, starting at Lamastre in the north (good wine country), making my way southwest via the old spa town of Vals-Les-Bains as far as Les Vans with its castle-hotel. Then follow the great gorge of the Ardèche river down to the plains: then north via the road in the east to see the gargoyles in Bourg St.-Andeol. Like Robert Louis Stevenson in Travels With A Donkey, the route and the towns were my flimsy excuses. It was the countryside, and the peace of summer’s end, that I was after.

Lamastre’s town square looked as if it were expecting a coach-and-horses with news of the Corsican Bonaparte. After lunch, a brass band with brilliant golden instruments and proper white uniforms—stockings, pantaloons, berets—collected in the sunlight around a sour-faced statue of an unforgettable counselor general. An afternoon parade; the burps and buzzing of the band getting their horns warmed up; a hot blue porcelain sky.

I said to one young cornet-man, “Who are you? The Army?”

 He looked like he didn’t know, himself. “I think we are. Just a minute, I’ll check.” He turned to a tuba player. “Hey, Henri, are we the Army?”

Blaaaat.

A clarinetist had fallen asleep at the café. Someone went to wake him.

“I think we’re called a fanfare. Yep, that’s it.”

When the parade started, several local clowns followed exaggeratedly behind, left-righting it as the band flowed around the slant narrow streets past the fruitseller’s and the baker’s and the candlestick-maker’s.

At Ponton there was a white wooden cross by the road and an irregular pile of stones waiting to be rearranged into the original wall. I stole three peaches from somebody’s orchard; his stone barn looked on resignedly. A wind bent the tall grass and the cicadas began winding their watches.

According to my detailed map Les Nourries, like so many of these villages, simply didn’t exist. Three men stood scratching their bald heads outside a little tabac. They were digesting the view: the passes fanned out to form steep valleys combed with cultivation—perhaps they were jealous of all that growth. Massive dark mountains shouldered behind. A pair of telephone lines crossed the valley, but otherwise it couldn’t have changed much in a century, just the odd non-existent villages dwindling below.

Now rounded stone walls started to hedge the falling road. La Chaise was deserted, all its red shutters firmly boarded-up, one emphatically toothless old man dozing in the shade with his mouth open. A natty fisherman, rod in hand, was making his way down to a creek with cracked bluffs. Somebody’s lambs bleated at him. Every village had laundry flapping and women in flopped hats seated, gossiping, outside tiny bistros. The men had narrow genial faces, they all wore caps. They also seemed doubtful of everything, as men who live among toppling stone walls might tend to be.

“Beautiful view,” I offered.

“Is it?”

Another just shrugged.

Every village’s entrance had a crucifix, and after a dozen I realized that each cross was a distinct clue to its village’s character. The only hamlets with people chatting had carnival-colored, circus crucifixes. Most villages looked virtually uninhabited, and the more empty the lanes, the more somber Jesus seemed. One was a kind of castiron sculpture, a forerunner of Postmodernism, by a wrecked barn full of hay.

But the cloistered hamlets held unexpected eccentricities. An auberge where I stopped for coffee because of a white pony nearby had an interior done up as if it were in Arizona—a Wild West mural of wagon wheels and ghost towns. It wasn’t for American tourists, since there were none. Why?

“I like cowboys,” said the owner.

The villages were like austere versions of Yorkshire, with smaller inns and better food, and the modest smell of woodsmoke as the day cooled and fires were started in hearths.In Andraigues, glued to the side of a hill, the square was called the Place de la Resistance. The old men were still talking about the war.Outside Lo Podello, probably the most famous café-restaurant in the region, the locals were playing at boules by an industrial-strength sculpture of Don Quixote and a fountain with a naked baby. The town was still full of the summer’s chic Paris theater crowd, but locals didn’t seem to mind.

A young dark-haired stonemason watching the game said to me, “People are completely different than in the southern Ardèche. They’re like a different race up here. The country’s harder, more savage. There’s not much to do, as you can see, and life is slow. These old men are here every day, all afternoon, back and forth across the square. They exercise the ground, but that’s  all they exercise. Down south it’s even warmer, the country’s milder, the people are more open, there seems more to do, more places. Here there’s no more work, so all the young people have left for Lyon or Marseille. In July and August you see campers here, especially near the gorges, mostly Dutch and Germans. But now that it’s September— ” The stonemason paused. “It’s still hot, and it’s just the old people waiting for the young peopleto come home.”

So it was all a question of employment; but it made the land seem even more aged, these oldtimers wandering along the roads—as if the youngsters were off at a war, and their parents and grandparents, veterans of the last two, had not yet given up hope for a happy return.

Vals-Les-Bains broke my brooding. It was a cheerful spa town of parks and gazebos where people still came for the waters and went for walks along the esplanade and took snapshots. A splendid sprawling hotel with a great veranda had belle-époque chandeliers; supposedly there was a casino somewhere in the town.

I stopped a dignified elderly gentleman with a cane and cravate and asked him if he’d come here for the waters.

“I live here, monsieur.”

“For the waters?”

“The waters have been here since time immemorial. I have lived here all my life. I have never tried the waters.”

Good enough, I thought; and neither did I.

Aubenas was fortified, its ramparts looking out over the beetling crevasses. Now the houses changed, began to resemble villas in the more southern light, some of them moss-eaten and abandoned (not expensive, either). The mountains grew jumbled and black with the sunset, and when I drove through Joyeuse a floodlit boules tournament was in play, the town congregated past nightfall.

I was using the Château Le Scipionnet as a base for my journey, near the market town of Les Vans. A converted castle set in great trees by a river—with a gleaming, black-turreted château standing enormously, almost unbelievably, on the other side—Le Scipionnet looked as if its decor had been attentively preserved from the turn of the century. On its lawn was a swimming pool, and a sunstruck terrace above of white stone where you took fresh croissants each morning. Nearby were apple orchards and tennis courts. Attentively run by a couple named Dupouy, it seemed a proper setting for M. Hercule Poirot.

Indeed, there was a festival des voyantes for the weekend—a convention of spiritualists and palm-readers and the rest. They were really more like a traveling orchestra than a convention, mostly women “on tour” throughout the region, visited by eager locals all day and well into the evening in one of the château’s sitting-rooms. The Dupouys were dubious. “It’s cheaper than going to a psychiatrist, I suppose,” said Jean. One night there was to be a demonstration by the pool; we all kept waiting for phantoms to appear, but twilight brought only mists drifting around the château across the valley. And at dinner the mediums ate duck like everybody else.

In the morning, that château’s towers trembled in the sunlight, past a lilting stone bridge and seamed fields.

I wanted to devote a whole day to slowly threading the gorges of the Ardèche River, on the advice of the Dupouys. To the west of the Ardèche lie the slightly more famous Gorges Du Tarn. “But there you’re down below,” said Jean. “Here in the Ardèche gorges you’re on the heights, so you don’t feel cornered, and you can see everything.”

The road east to Ruoms ran beneath walls of cliff, carved in identical blocks so perfect they looked like the remains of ancient battlements. Their ragged heights were tufted with splotches of trees and their sides overgrown: they could’ve been the ruins of a race of castle-building giants with pretensions to imperialism. They marched along the valley. At one point, amid all this wildness, I had to halt for a traffic light set in the rock—a carved primitive tunnel so narrow that cars can only pass through in a single line.

Ruoms had a funny beachside feel (canoes, rubber dinghies, swimsuit stores) and a huge wine-bottling plant. Then a shallow river, barely a stream over pebbles, began furrowing its way among glistening trees. Prehistoric caves lined the cliffs; the river widened. Tents appeared, campers bearing canoes on their heads toward the river, fishermen. Le Font d’Arc was a chunky natural bridge muscularly arching across the meandering river by a sandy beach with bathers.

Then the road began to rise, and the gorges plunged. Always the little river remained in sight, a blue vein of life way below. The cliffs were by turns swarthy with brush, or scarred bare. On the heights the whole place took on a soaring desolation. I wanted to come back with more time on my hands to spend days paddling around on the river, to see the gorges from down there as well. There’s a special poetry to river gorges: a sense of slow, self-made miracle that cliffs have reconciled themselves to being shaped and ordered by mere water. Nature goes out of the way to conceal many of its important happenings, but a river gorge makes it clear there has been a great event, and no traveler can look on one without feeling an ancient wonder.

It was a Saturday, and I barely caught the market back in Les Vans—woven fabrics, carved olive-wood items, goat cheeses, dolls. It was over by two, and an hour later some of the merchants were sipping wine in the gardens of Le Scipionnet, waiting to have their destinies foretold and their handwriting analyzed. I thought of learning about my own—it was only fifty francs—but what would someone see in the crystal ball? “You will soon set off on a long journey.” I knew that already, so instead I went swimming in the sunlight while the rest of France got rained out.

The next day I threaded my way east again, but north of the gorges. The Romanesque church in Bourg St.-Andeol looked as if it might’ve been inspired architecturally by them. It loomed and muttered and swayed and from certain angles didn’t make sense, a fantastical thing. It had been begun in the 9th century and often rebuilt and added to thereafter. Victor Hugo, passing through in 1839, called the octagonal tower “one of the most beautiful of the Byzantine style that I have ever seen” though it didn’t look much like Constantinople to me. It was striking nonetheless, with a weathervane atop the bell and fanged gargoyles leaping off the stone pillars.

Just outside Les Baraques I met two old gents sitting on a stone wall by the road. One had a thatch of white hair and a kind idiotic smile; the other wore a heavy beret, a blue suit over a worn shirt, and a questioning expression. He was thumping a long stick on the ground. These were plainsmen, so I thought they might be open to conversation.

The smiling man kept silent; the other talked, punctuating every phrase with thwacks of his cane. In five minutes he told me the story of the French involvement in Algeria, how he’d met his wife there (she was of Moroccan blood, her family lived in the States, perhaps I knew—), his retirement from the gendarmerie a few miles up the road.

“Look at me. Thwack. I’m retired. Seventy-three. Do I look a day over sixty-two? Thwack. My friend here’s handicapped, poor gent, keeps smiling and listening but doesn’t say much. Lives over that way. I’ve got the house just behind you, across this field. Thwack. Lost my wife two years ago, what can you say about it? I’m still alive. Got an apartment in Viviers, too. When I get tired of the house, I’ll move. Thwack. I’m still alive. Now, when De Gaulle—”

I excused myself, saying I was expected back at the Hotel du Midi in Lamastre for dinner. My friend hadn’t heard of it (his accent was soft and drawly, the equivalent of Georgia perhaps). I got the sense the average Ardèchois is slightly suspicious of converted châteaus or fine restaurants in the countryside, places where your manners might be put on exhibit.

So I drove on through late afternoon, heading north at an in-between season. Soon I joined a familiar road. It grew cool; the region would in a month slide rapidly toward winter. Already the honeyed light carried a kind of nostalgia. On the cliffs the churches stood out in darkening silhouette, in some there were late services. The valleys deepened and a cataclysmic sunset transformed the sky into a heaven entirely of fire. As darkness settled the road led to Lyon and its factories, and a train, and the wicked lights of Paris.

James Bond's Island

I visited Jamaica in June 1987, and soon write this for my excellent editor at East-West, Bill McCoy, one of the three fine magazine editors I encountered. (The other two were Chris Hunt of Travel & Leisure, and Kevin Buckley of Geo and Playboy.) East-West ran this piece the following year. Not surprisingly, Goldeneye is now a boutique hotel. Eric Ambler, the great British thriller author, wrote me that he "never stayed there, but heard it was damned uncomfortable."


The road to the beautiful little banana port of Oracabessa, along Jamaica’s north coast, takes one swiftly away from the tourist colonies of Montego Bay and Ocho Rios. The fruit-stands by the roadside proliferate; dripping fish are for sale soon after their demise. The road breaks and expands and contracts in the jungle vegetation, the Blue Mountains steaming just inland. Oracabessa is part gimcrack shacks, part ramshackle Victoriana. There are no tourists, no foreigners in this tiny Caribbean village.

It was in this unlikely setting, deep in the heart of the Jamaica only Jamaicans know, that Ian Fleming—once commander in British naval intelligence, later foreign manager for a London-based chain of newspapers—decided to build a house shortly after the war. It was here, then, that James Bond was born.

“The shadows crept from behind the house and marched across the lawn and enveloped him. The Undertaker’s Wind that blows at night from the centre of the island, clattered softly in the tops of the palm trees. The frogs began to tinkle among the shrubs. The fireflies, the ‘blink-a-blinks’, as Quarrel called them, came out and began flashing their sexual morse. For a moment the melancholy of the tropical dusk caught at Bond’s heart.”

It is safe to say that, without Jamaica, there would’ve been no agent 007. When Ian Fleming built his simple house Goldeneye near Oracabessa in 1945, he was hardly a writer. After a respectable war career (in which his duties resembled M.’s rather than Bond’s) he settled down to the world of journalism, with the proviso that he be given two months’ leave each winter.

Fleming had passed through Jamaica during the war with a millionaire friend who owned property and, despite the seasonal monsoon, fell hard for the island. “I’ve made up my mind,” he announced. “I’m going to live the rest of my life in Jamaica.” He was to spend every winter there until his death, from 1946 to 1964.

The island’s dream-quality was to prove crucial in the incubation of the Bond thrillers. “I suppose it is the peace and silence and cut-offness from the madding world that urges people to create here,” he wrote years later. “Would these books have been born if I had not been living in the gorgeous vacuum of a Jamaican holiday? I doubt it.” It was only on his seventh sojourn, just before his marriage, that Fleming first conjured his secret agent, this man of action who was a vicarious dream-self.

As the late poet and critic Phillip Larkin has pointed out, Bond “was his creator in a way that Tarzan or Sherlock Holmes... clearly weren’t theirs. It was Fleming who smoked seventy cigarettes a day, wore dark blue Sea Island cotton shirts and loved scrambled eggs and double portions of orange juice for breakfast; Bond was a kind of doppleganger sent out to enact what Fleming himself never achieved….”

Of Scot ancestry, Fleming had been an energetic athlete on the playing fields of Eton, not a shining student. Soon outshone by his elder brother Peter, the explorer who wrote one of the great travel books of the Thirties, Brazilian Adventure, there was already a reputation for girls and cars by the time he left Eton. After a term he dismissed himself from Sandhurst.

Like most writers in the process of forming there was a good deal of the actor in him. For a year in the Austrian Tyrol, then Geneva and Munich, he skied and played at being a young intellectual on the way to a career in the Foreign Office. But he failed the exam. It was as a young Reuters correspondent that he traveled to Moscow and the seeds of “Smersh” got sown. By 1933 he was back in London, a junior partner in one of the better brokerage houses, where he remained until the war.

All this time he was known for his philandering ways; he was far less protective toward women than Bond. His brother’s success, his past as something of a black sheep still followed him about. But as John Pearson puts it in his extremely perceptive biography, The Life of Ian Fleming, “the trouble lay deeper even than this. It lay in that solitary dream world which he had constructed… in this world of unreality he could never risk revealing himself to another human being. Ultimately there was no relief from the interminable ego.” Until the war came, that is; for after the war he built Goldeneye.

There is a characteristically fine description of the house in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s classic book on the West Indies, The Traveller’s Tree, published in 1950. It must have made the ambitious homeowner (and designer) proud: “Here, on a headland, Ian Fleming has built a house called Goldeneye that might serve as a model for new houses in the tropics. Trees surround it on all sides except the sea, which it almost overhangs. Great windows capture every breeze, to cool, even on the hottest day, the large white rooms. The windows that look towards the sea are glassless but equipped with outside shutters against rain: enormous quadrilaterals surrounded by dark wooden frames which enclose a prospect of sea and cloud and sky, and tame the elements, as it were, into an overhanging fresco of which one could never tire.”

In these years Fleming had considerable work done on the property, originally the overgrown site of a donkey racetrack. He had part of the garden just before the blue-trimmed white house sunken-in, and stone steps cut down to the little horseshoe of private, cliff-held beach. Goldeneye became a modest fantasy, masculine in its plain creature comforts; it lacked only a wife.

It is significant that when Fleming’s shell finally cracked it was for another man’s wife, Lady Ann Rothermere, formerly Lady O’Neill, née Charteris. (For a time Fleming was nicknamed “Lady Rothermere’s Fan” in journalism circles.) And possibly to ward off the nerves brought on by her scandalous divorce and their impending marriage, in the winter of 1952 at Goldeneye, Fleming first sent forth James Bond. He got the name from “the cover of one of my Jamaican bibles, Birds of the West Indies, by James Bond, an ornithological classic.”

Fleming followed a writing regime inspired by the place itself, and nearly impossible elsewhere—certainly in sleeting London going to a newspaper office the other ten months of the year. As Violet, his housekeeper, described it to a recent visitor, Fleming would rise at eight, breakfast, stare at the sea until nine from his sunken garden, then go inside and write until twelve-thirty at the red bulletwood desk backed, curiously, with a mirror, that dominates a corner of the master bedroom. The long windows look spaciously out on the garden and the sea, but he wrote “with the jalousies closed….so I would not be distracted by the birds and the flowers and the sunshine outside until I had completed my daily stint.”

He would bathe on his beach until one, lunch, then nap until four; take the standard bath of the Englishman in the tropics; then write until six-thirty, when it was time for the first drink of the evening. These evenings were clearly Fleming’s favorite part of the Jamaican day, most lovingly described in the books.

As Larkin puts it, “The ease with which Bond appeared (Fleming, forty-three, never having written a novel before, sat down and wrote Casino Royale in eight weeks) suggests the tapping of deep imaginative springs.” In fact Fleming had only limited personal experience to draw upon. He was energetic about turning to others for professional advice about the specifics of guns, cars, places. But he gave it all a sheen of deep realism, as if he’d lived it all himself. It is this instinct, the famous mania for detail (“shaken not stirred”) so easily parodied, that keeps the books alive. In part it arose from the sensual life that the writer’s paradise of Goldeneye allowed.

Fleming was to follow this daily routine for twelve more Bond books. Five have Jamaican settings, and they make clear Fleming’s deep love and knowledge of the island: the affectionate descriptions of real locations, the birds and flowers, the locals who were part of his life at Oracabessa. “I first learned about the bottom of the sea from the reefs around my property... and I learned about living amongst, and appreciating, coloured people....” By the second book, Live and Let Die (written 1953), Fleming turned to Jamaica for plot inspiration, a search for the lost gold of the pirate Henry Morgan that leads to an invented Isle of Surprise along the coast by Oracabessa.

Though Fleming was a veteran clubman in London, and wrote knowledgeably of the colonial life in Kingston, he spent most of his holidays sequestered at his house, preferring the company of neighbors like Noël Coward. He often rented or loaned out Goldeneye when he was away. The Visitors’ book reads like a Who’s Who of contemporary English letters: Coward, Fermor, Peter Quennell, Evelyn Waugh, Truman Capote, Graham Greene, Stephen Spender, Cecil Beaton. After the 1956 Suez crisis, the Prime Minister Anthony Eden and his wife convalesced there.

One of Fleming’s paradoxes as a writer is that generally his characters are cardboard dummies, humorless Bond included; the women are all the same, each “a bird with one wing down.” After the vivid action scenes, it is the landscapes that, always, quicken to life. And, curiously, the background characters are vivid.

Perhaps the best of these, introduced in Live and Let Die and killed in Doctor No, is Quarrel, the Cayman Islander who acts as a sort of Man Friday for Bond on Jamaica. Fleming based Quarrel on an Oracabessan named Aubyn Cousins, whose father had previously owned Goldeneye’s property. In his bachelor years Fleming often snorkelled with Cousins on Goldeneye’s teeming reef; Cousins was particularly able at lassoing sharks. Undoubtedly Bond’s education undersea by the faithful Quarrel echoes Fleming’s by Cousins.

“He spoke exactly but without expertise,” Fleming writes in Live and Let Die, “using Jamaican language in which plants ‘strive’ or ‘quail,’ moths are ‘bats,’ and ‘love’ is used instead of ‘like.’ As he talked, he would raise his hand in greeting to the people on the road, and they would wave back and shout his name.”

The book is notable also for a brief description of Negril before the tourist developers came in. It would be scarcely recognizable now, as “...five miles of white sand sloping easily into the breakers and, behind, the palm trees marching in graceful disarray to the horizon. Under them the grey canoes were pulled up beside the pink mounds of discarded conch shells, and among them smoke rose from the palm thatch cabins of the fishermen in the shade between the swamplands and the sea.” Like all writers, Fleming wrote best about what he knew best, and in the Jamaican settings he didn’t have to rely on anyone else’s expertise or depth.

Doctor No begins with the Queen’s Club, “cool and quiet and withdrawn from the hot, vulgar sprawl of Kingston.” The book is unusual in its portrayal of Jamaica’s powerful Chinese community, rarely recognized in most local fiction. For the background of the girl, Honeychile Rider, Fleming turned to the vague histories of the many ruins of “great houses”—plantation mansions—that tumble along the coast. He was careful to work in a measure of contempt, on Bond’s part of course, for the workings of the British government on the island.

But after the first five thrillers Fleming was already starting “to run out of puff.” This was partly the old Fleming ennui and partly ill health; Bond’s smoking and drinking justified his creator’s bad habits. The short stories “For Your Eyes Only” and “Octopussy”—in books of the same names—have Jamaican locales (especially the latter, which is full of Goldeneye’s atmosphere). It was in his twelfth book, barely completed before his death from a massive coronary in 1964, that Fleming best portrayed his beloved second home.

Most of The Man With the Golden Gun takes place along Jamaica’s south coast, rarely visited by tourists and almost never in fiction. “It is a long hundred-and-twenty-mile hack over very mixed road surfaces from Kingston to Savannah La Mar,” wrote Fleming, and indeed it still is, though it takes you past some of the prettiest little forgotten townships on the island. The seedy bar/bordello in Sav’ La Mar where Bond made Scaramanga’s acquaintance may be found today, spruced up as a medical clinic. Fleming called the address “3 1/2 Love Lane,” but it is now officially Norman Lane. Though a lignum vitae tree still blossoms in the garden (across the lane squats a new police station), no one remembers the house as the Dreamland Café.

By Fleming’s death, film-Bond had inevitably caught up to book-Bond. Fleming had a hand in the first film, Dr. No, made largely in Jamaica—at the old Palisadoes Airport, Queen’s Club, and Government House (Kingston); at Morgan’s Harbour (Bond meets Quarrel); on Kinsale Street (Strangways). The mangrove swamps of Falmouth were used as Dr. No’s territory, and the film crew’s hotel, the Sans Souci, became the mountain cottage where Sean Connery seduced Miss Taro. It was on the beach of the private estate appropriately-named Laughing Waters, near Ocho Rios, that Ursula Andress did her impersonation of Botticelli’s Venus.

Goldeneye today, with its gate crowned by carved pineapples, is virtually unchanged since Fleming’s era. The curved desk still commands a corner of the master bedroom, the Doctor’s Wind and the Undertaker’s Wind graze the lawn, the path descends to the little beach. The mahogany furniture with seashell handles, the furnishings of great restraint, are as Fleming had them, preserved by the current owner, a record and film producer who rents the house by the week. The staff is still presided over by Fleming’s housekeeper, Violet Cummings, who fondly remembers ‘the Commander.” (Anyone wishing to rent Goldeneye should get in touch with the owner’s U.S. rep, Barbara Cuddy, at 212-535-4515.) I called, and it is a fax machine.

Often today the popular myth of a writer’s life overshadows his work. But the Bond myth has provided a worldwide role model for the man of action for twenty-five years now, thanks to the films. And in a sense Bond has erased Fleming. To visit Goldeneye, to imagine all that fuss starting at this unimportant lovely place, brings on a nostalgia for the simpler time when Anne Fleming could write of leaning over the cliff railing after sunset to watch “the spray of the reef or the high bright stars” and that “Ian remains longer than any of us,” having done his requisite 2,000 words that day.

Neither Fleming (never a businessman) nor his heirs would receive much of the big payoff, the film-money. But Bond has entered the realm of Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes, of creations far larger than their creator; he is everywhere. In a recent Bulgarian bestseller, a bloc baddie bests Bond.

And not everyone has forgotten where it all started. Not too long ago, in a small Jamaican town, I heard the Kingston radio station play through a scratchy 60s record of themes from several of the films, anonymously souped-up for big band. The announcer referred to 007 as “our own.” Fleming may be gone, but Jamaica will always be James Bond’s island.

Sanctuary: A Great Writer's Hometown

I visited Mississippi in January 1987, so I must've written this soon afterward. Travel & Leisure didn't publish it until September 1989, with atmospheric black-and-white photographs by Alen MacWeeney, who was not there at the same time as I was. (This delay is normal in magazines.)

William Faulkner spent most of his life in the small university town of Oxford, Mississippi, which became the center of his imaginative life and the seat of his many-storied Yoknapatawpha County.  It fed Faulkner as London fed Dickens and as India nourished Kipling.  Intimate with local families in which ruin, pride and at times violence flourished, he saw in this remote corner of the South all the material he needed to create, in fiction, a personal territory and language.  And despite changes in the town since Faulkner’s death in 1962 (when it had already embarked on the decharacterizing route of much of the South), Oxford still carries the atmosphere of the author and his work.

The countryside has not changed much.  All the backgrounds of Faulkner’s land-rooted fiction are here:  the thick woods, the fields punctuated by worn shacks, the Delta and the river.  Oxford, like many small Southern towns, is governed by a courthouse square from which wide avenues and their tributary streets emanate.  The square is still the heart of the town, of the commerce of daily life: low buildings that in Faulkner’s day had balconies and a central tiny park.  Faulkner described it memorably in Requiem for a Nun:

“...a Square, the courthouse in its grove the center; quadrangular around it, the stores...school and church and tavern and bank and jail each in its ordered place....  But above all, the courthouse: the center, the focus, the hub; sitting looming in the center of the county’s circumference...musing, brooding, symbolic and ponderable, tall as cloud, solid as rock, dominating all....”

Founded in 1837 in Chickasaw Indian territory, Oxford was soon incorporated as the county seat.  The name was chosen to encourage the state legislature to establish the University of Mississippi there, and Ole Miss went on to become famous for its belles and its football team.  The Union Army burned the town totally in 1864.  Up until the war it had been a boomtown in cotton country, which accounts for its sense of grace, order, and prosperity.

It is impossible to account for Faulkner.  Born in New Albany, Mississippi, in 1897, he began school at eight in Oxford and left high school to work odd jobs (in one stint as bookkeeper at his grandfather’s bank).  During World War I he joined Canada’s Royal Flying Corps, then returned to study briefly at Ole Miss.  His writing, with its idiosyncratic punctuation, was blessed by being entirely self-taught and unformed by academic staleness.

A succession of jobs followed, until Sherwood Anderson, in New Orleans, promised to help get Faulkner’s first novel published if the young man would promise not to make him read it.  Back in Oxford, Faulkner kept at the odd jobs:  he was a house painter, the university’s post-master, deckhand on a shrimp trawler, boiler fireman and, for most of his life, a farmer.  By the time he was forty, he had written Sartoris (1929), The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936).

From the 1930s to mid-1950s he visited Hollywood annually, writing such screenplays as To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, and hurrying back to Oxford as soon as he’d made enough to keep the farm running.  It is often forgotten that he wrote the script, for example, of Land of the Pharaohs  (with Joan Collins, 1955) five years after he won the Nobel Prize.  Hollywood worsened Faulkner’s depressive moods and bouts of heavy drinking; the heart attack that killed him in 1962 came at a Mississippi sanatorium where he’d gone to dry out.

Oxford’s mayor, John Leslie, knew Faulkner from the 1940s.  Since politicians, especially local ones, are usually shrewd judges of character, even from afar, I asked what sort of fellow Faulkner had seemed.

“He was often in a kind of daze,” said Leslie.  “His post-office box was near mine, so we’d run into each other when the mail came.  I kept to a rule that if he spoke first I’d talk to him.  Sometimes he’d walk past without noticing.  You could generally see there was something going on in his mind.  He wasn’t a large man; he was very graceful the way a moderate or slightly small man can be.

“I don’t know how many times I saw him in the square, leaning back against a building, propped up on one leg, just listening to people’s conversation.  He could spend hours that way.  In those days you saw horses and wagons filling the square.  He liked particularly to listen to—or talk with—blacks.  He was fascinated by their conversation; he had a look when you could tell he was following several conversations at once.  I never saw him taking notes, though.  I guess he remembered all he needed.”

“How did you meet him?”  I asked.

“It really was through my brother,” Leslie explained.  “This would’ve been in the 1940s.  At that time Intruder in the Dust had just been published.  My brother, who studied at Duke—the first American university where you read Faulkner’s books—knew his work and admired it greatly.  That was during a lull in his reputation, so my brother was a bit of a rarity.  I thought I’d try to get Faulkner to autograph a copy of Intruder so I could give it as a present.  I was a student here at Ole Miss at the time.

“Sure enough, there was Faulkner leaning up against the department store, one foot on the wall.  (To be truthful, sometimes I wasn’t too sure it was Bill and not his brother, who looked an awful lot like him.)  But I went up to him with my copy of the book and I explained what I wanted.  Faulkner looked me over and said, ‘Well, I’ve got an agreement with the publisher that I sign a number of books for him and that’s all.’  I guess he thought the value of his signed books would go up if he didn’t sign too many.  Or maybe he couldn’t be bothered.

“Anyway, I thanked him and turned away, a little disappointed, and he gave a little laugh and said, ‘Come on, of course I’ll sign that book for you.’  And he did, and put the date right there, in his tiny hen-scratch handwriting.

“He was a funny man.  I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but Mississippians are among the craziest people you can find anywhere.  They’ll shoot at anything that moves.  Faulkner had trouble with people in his woods—he had more than thirty acres there.  Full of squirrels and people trying to shoot them.  One of the funniest things that Bill ever wrote was that notice in the Oxford Eagle.”

This was the paid advertisement, published October 15, 1959, which reads:

NOTICE

       The posted woods on my property inside the city limits of Oxford contain
       several tame squirrels.  Any hunter who feels himself too lacking in woodcraft
       and marksmanship to approach a dangerous wild squirrel might feel safe with
       these.  These woods are a part of the pasture used by my horses and milk cow; also,
       the late arrival will find them already full of other hunters.  He is kindly
       requested not to shoot either of these.  
                                                              William Faulkner


“Another time,” Leslie went on, “there was all sorts of trouble with a minister in Memphis who was trying to keep people from drinking beer and seeing films like The Outlaw, which had Jane Russell in it.  This kind of thing—censorship of any kind, I suppose—made Faulkner hopping mad.  He had a whole hilarious pamphlet printed up defending the right to drink beer.  And in the novels Sanctuary and The Reivers, his last book, he gave the minister’s name to the head of a Memphis bordello.  So Faulkner had the last laugh.

“I think Faulkner had real money problems nearly all the time.  Once he had a bill at a local store and he sent the owner a handwritten letter that said essentially, ‘One day this piece of paper will be worth much more than I owe you.’  He had to take out an ad in the Eagle saying he wasn’t responsible for charges incurred at local stores by his wife.  I believe he had as many as nineteen people living off him at one time or another, and he had to go out to Hollywood periodically and write films to pay his debts.”

My next stop, just off the square, was the former office of Phil Stone, the lawyer who had befriended Faulkner, lending him books and encouraging his writing.  Most of Faulkner’s first half-dozen books were typed and retyped by Stone’s secretary until they filled half a filing cabinet.  (The Snopes trilogy is dedicated to Stone.)

I was welcomed into the modest shaded brick building by Tom Freeland, a young lawyer who was a fund of stories about Faulkner and Stone and the people who come in search of a writer’s mystique.  “Shoney’s, the burger place out on the highway, produces these stories all the time.  I had a lady from New York come  in the other day to look at Phil Stone’s office, and she said her waitress had never met Faulkner.  She said, 'A writer?  Does he live around here?'  So he’s not as famous as all that, maybe.”

He also told me about a visit from Gabriel García Márquez, who'd gone unrecognized.

At the Ole Miss library, I wandered through an exhibit of Faulkneriania—first and foreign editions of his books, many awards, including the Nobel Prize—enough to make you conclude that Faulkner’s time of relative obscurity in this country wasn’t, as obscurity goes, all that considerable: even if most of his work wasn’t in print here at this low ebb; around World War II, his books were still being published.  But America is hard on its originals, and one looks at the size of the achievement and wonders:  How many more books if he hadn’t had to go to Hollywood?

On the way out to Rowan Oak, the Faulkner home (a ten-minute walk along South Lamar Boulevard from the square), I slipped in a detour to the enormous house on Buchanan Avenue at 13th Street that was the model for the Compson place in The Sound and the Fury.  Understandably,  it gives an overwhelming sense of déjà vu, for no writer bettered Faulkner at conveying a sense of place, once he’d realized that his “little postage stamp of native soil” was worth writing about.

On Old Taylor Road I walked down a path to the great house, aloof at the end of a colonnade of cedar trees, magisterial with its white columns and classic antebellum grace.  When Faulkner bought the house it was in great disrepair; he added brick galleries and a stable.  Inside, Rowan Oak has a comfortable pipe-smoke feel to it, like the home of a country doctor with an interest in riding and reading.  The rooms have fireplaces, and there is a modest library, which contains mostly Great Books, Cervantes and Shakespeare and such.

The downstairs office, which Faulkner built in 1950, remains as it was:  the old Underwood portable typewriter sitting in its case on a small table by the room’s only window, which looks out on a stable and back lawn and woods—a good empty view for a writer.  On one side of the typewriter a lamp, on the other an ashtray.  Here is a day bed, a  half-filled bookcase, and pencilled carefully across the walls, day by day, the plan for A Fable (1956 Pulitzer Prize).

With characteristic independence, he approached each novel as if it were a technical problem no one had ever solved before, and found experimental solutions on which two later generations of writers have fed.  No one can read his books without feeling that the mansion of the novel form is having its wall pushed outward and several extravagant wings added by a master carpenter, while a number of resisting old doors are being firmly kicked in.

He wrote unsentimentally about blacks, and time has made his achievement in this regard even greater.  Faulkner was among the very first to use blacks as characters rather than caricatures.  Though Faulkner’s experimentalism is always cited as the reason he was more popular abroad than at home, the reason might be more a social than a literary judgment.

Most delightful of all is his humor—to which no essay can ever do justice—in “Spotted Horses,” say, or The Reivers.  His best books tend to be the most widely read, which is all any writer can hope from posterity.  They are so persuasive that they constitute a serious problem for the novelist who wishes to write about the South—an act that no one wants to follow.  As Flannery O’Connor put it, “Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.”

Whatever occasional reservations one may have about Faulkner’s writing, his books are difficult to forget, and they have a grip, an imaginative pressure in the mind, that only the greatest writers achieve.  And—such is the force of Faulkner’s personality—in his books the rough spots can come to seem less like faults than like the mark of a lovingly handmade thing.  In an age of minimalist dandies whose sentences regard themselves endlessly in a succession of mirrors, Faulkner’s writing, even at its moments of metaphysical groping, carries enormous force and sober poetry.  Like the country that produced him, it is always vivid, eccentric and full of beautiful contrarieties.  Like Faulkner, it goes quite contentedly its own way.