From the bottom of night
through the ravine
at the end of our street
go back, go back
faint shuffle of a train passing
slowly, not to wake anyone
go back to sleep, go back
a steady line of freight
moving through the South, men on board,
wives somewhere at home
in bed in another state
go back, go back to sleep
faint dreams of a train passing
slowly through the ravine of night
the country will survive
[1998]
Saturday, December 5, 1998
Thursday, August 20, 1998
Biarritz
Written in 1998 for Condé-Nast Traveler magazine
It is hard to get any rest in Biarritz, and there’s little point even trying. The shore itself is restless, an alternating sequence of long beaches and formidable bastions of rock that seemingly belong to different seascapes but characterize La Côte Basque in France’s southwest corner, near the Spanish frontier. The surf crashes day and night as if kneeling in homage to the stone resort of tan hotels, shops, and cafe-bars hovering above, linked by switchback lanes and hydrangea-encrusted staircases systematically curlicued around the coast’s idiosyncracies.
The town, a balmy version of Proust, has a kind of fickle grandeur. Its casino happily chewed up the continent’s great fortunes and eventually, like the habit of coming for a season to promenade and take the waters, sank out of fashion. But the Basques are survivors: Biarritz is chic again, energized with concerts and parties spilling onto the street until all hours, ready to surf after morning coffee. You will not get much sleep here.
I went for the week when July shifted to August, not knowing what to expect besides sunshine and cool breezes. There was Biarritz of the fabled name: the grand wedding-cake hotels, the majestic beach captured by Picasso in Les Baigneuses (1918) where a young Nabokov had met his first love amid the lavish, mildly louche “Monte Carlo of the Atlantic.” I wondered if any history was still alive from the days when society required you to make a splash at the casinos of Biarritz, Cannes, Deauville. All my French friends told me Biarritz had ascended in recent years, a balearic phoenix—for them it was riding a healthy wave of European youth.
There was no mystery why after my first sight of La Grande Plage, an expansive stretch of golden sand dotted at each end with dramatic boulders and islets that exaggerate the surf as if placed deliberately. At dawn no one’s on the beach; at eight-thirty (when it’s still hard to get café and a croissant) the surfers are already out. By ten it’s in full swing, with flags to signify which areas are for swimming and which for surfing or body-boarding.
Meanwhile the red, blue, green, or mustard white-striped umbrellas, with shade flaps down one side like a kepi, are being set up in important rows just below the art deco Casino. By noon one of the loveliest beaches in Europe is full of children scampering through the aftermath of crashing five-foot waves, the parents in up to their waists with that easy chattiness peculiar to French resorts; young men are paddling balls at each other, busy ignoring the demi-mini-bikinis attacking with bronzed flesh from all sides.
And the surfers put on the best show of all, all day long.
“Biarritz,” says Robert Rabagny, “is now the California of France.”
Rabagny looks Californian, with the deep tan and sun-streaked hair of a lifelong surfer. He took up the sport here over thirty years ago; indeed, most Europeans under fifty know the place not for its associations with Jean Cocteau, Pierre Loti, and Charlie Chaplin, but for having the biggest surf on the continent. Rabagny, who opened the very successful Le Surfing above the beach at Côte des Basques with its view of the Spanish mountains, is the major-domo of surf hereabouts. His restaurant-bar is not just the epicenter of the new Biarritz but also a surfing museum, its walls and ceiling lined with Hawaiian shirts and fifty boards dating back to 1949.
“In the ’60s and ’70s,” an architect who comes every year told me, “Biarritz lost its allure. Spots like St. Tropez on the Côte d’Azur became the places to go. But now they’re seen as crowded, ruined, artificial. Show-off places for the new money. Biarritz is much more discreet; an important gentleman from Paris can stay anonymous here. It’s old money—and now also the young, with not much money maybe but plenty of energy. And surfboards. Plus all France is mad for anything to do with surfing; the clothes, for example. So the fashion people are here non-stop—Karl Lagerfeld keeps a villa. At the same time the luxury era that Biarritz represents, the classic lifestyle, is chic again. So it’s got both French obsessions covered.”
Not just the French. Each summer Biarritz pulls in the athletic youth of Europe who come to swim, tan, and enjoy the scene. Rabagny (who surfs here year-round) runs the Biarritz Surf Festival every July, a week-long fête which is much more than an international competition.
“It’s a meeting of cultures, a celebration of the art of following the surf lifestyle. Many older grand masters come, like Fred Hemmings, Clyde Aikau, Greg Noll, Donald Takayama. We have tandem surfing—pairs on one board. For 2000 our theme will be young surfers. In 1999 it was Surf ‘n’ Rock. My dream was always to bring the Beach Boys here—I kept in contact with Brian Wilson. But, anyway, we have groups playing Sixties rock all week. It begins with a ceremony that’s an exchange of waters. Each person brings water from his continent, it’s mixed in a big bowl with the others, from Japan, from Hawaii, from Australia, from Tahiti, from America, you see? A man carries it on horseback into the sea. It’s enormously touching to start the week this way.
“There’s a huge European youth movement for surfing. The big boom began seven or eight years ago, and expanded around many things that come out of surfing, like skateboards and body boards and windsurfing and all the rest. I started the Surf Masters competition here at la Grande Plage twenty years ago. At the moment it’s the Spanish and the Italians who are coming up fastest as surfers in Europe, but it’s really everyone—Germans, Scandinavians, English, Dutch. Everyone. You know why? Because surfing isn’t expensive, and it means freedom. Before, Biarritz was only an expensive place. Now it’s also surfing, which anyone can afford.”
These surfers who filled the beaches and the clubs and bars every night were staying in inexpensive campsites on the town’s outskirts, or sleeping in vans. No wonder so much of the music in clubs was thirty years old. In many ways the young crowd here were seeking an innocent ’60s lifestyle. They only enlarged the spirit of the place; Biarritz still looked swank.
One morning on the beach by the Casino I watched a surf school get underway—for kids aged seven to twelve. In wet suits, they carried the short yellow and blue and red boards down to the water’s edge, laid them in the sand, and practiced getting smoothly upright from their bellies to their feet.
Along the casino’s esplanade a skateboarder was getting going, too.
I asked Patrice, the surfing school director, about the relation. At the airport the arriving skateboarders had seemed a parody of the blond guys dragging their big boards. He said, “Sure, there’s the whole similar problem of balance. But waves move, that’s what makes it so difficult! A sidewalk doesn’t move.”
I wondered whether there was any point in someone in his forties starting to surf. It turned out he’d started “late, at fourteen.” I personally didn’t feel ready to try what those eight-year-olds were eager for. He shrugged. “Maybe the inspiration is harder as you age. You won’t become a champion. But can you learn well, and enjoy it? Absolutely.”
Another who started late—at sixteen—was Emmanuelle Joly. Born in Biarritz, a long-legged, confident blonde, at twenty-eight she’s been French national champion twice and European champion twice. She’s also the only woman surfer in France who earns her living from the sport, and the only French surfer of either sex to ascend to the top circuit of professionals.
“Every year there are more and more surfers in Biarritz, more and more foreigners,” she says. “In France the mentality is different than somewhere like Hawaii. Here’s it’s not even considered a sport yet. But that’s changing. The young ones coming after us are very strong. Now there’s a whole generation of surfer parents. Our parents, in general, were afraid of the sea: we had to start ourselves. But to ride the waves, from the very beginning, for me was wonderful.”
Surfing was brought to Biarritz (and Europe) by an American screenwriter and director, Peter Viertel, at work here filming The Sun Also Rises in 1957. He saw the waves, missed California, and had someone make him a board. A group of a dozen or so locals who saw him took it up with evangelistic enthusiasm, calling themselves Les Tontons Surfeurs—“The Surf Daddies.” Half are still alive. I watched one, Claude Durcudoy, out on his long board at Côte des Basques, his white hair evident from a distance. For him the changes in the sport were not necessarily improvements—back then, he said, it was more about a group of friends. Now, with short boards, surfing was “more individualist, more competitive, more aggressive.” But like the young zooming beside him across the curling lips of the waves, he stayed out there for hours.
Viertel had changed the history of Biarritz. An ex-fishing port, it has in many ways been an invention of foreigners since the mid-19th century. When Eugénie, the Spanish wife of Napoleon III, fell in love with its echoes of her childhood, he built his princess an imperial vacation palace in 1855. Due to her, a resort of high architectural beauty grew up. Wealthy English and Russians (as well as the French haute société) came in droves. Biarritz still remains an Anglophile town, with avenues named for Queen Victoria and Edward VII.
The emblems of grand Biarritz were easy to find. There was a Russian Orthodox church, L’Église Alexandre Nevsky, with an exquisite blue dome (1892), and Arosteguy, the sumptuous “Grande Épicerie de Biarritz” from 1875. I took breakfast daily at a belle-époque pâtisserie, the Miremont, in a salon tiled with mirrors, and its blue-mosaic ’30s equivalent, the Café de la Grande Plage, right on the beach. The monumental art deco Casino and its large theater were recently restored, though only the outside is original. Its atrium of slot machines is always crowded, but not the sleek, smaller, faux-marble salon des jeux with its few roulette wheels and vingt-et-un tables.
“Très triste,” said a casino employee. “Very sad. But the slots bring in far more money, these days.”
And the town itself is a remarkably lucky situation of architectural preservation, now officially protected. A good deal of Biarritz was either built between 1860 and 1930 or looks like it was—tall shutters and balconies, carved stone heads and angular domes, an austere elegance amid palm trees.
Presiding over all that past is the Hôtel du Palais, built in 1905 on the site of the original imperial palace. It is a wonderful vanity to sit, borne by the inspiration of a couple of gin fizzes, beneath the eminent gaze of Napoleon III and the Princess Eugénie in the rotunda dining salon, amid the gleaming chandeliers hung like brilliant earrings, the urns of ferns and flowers, the gilded moldings, the elaborate candelabras on each table reflecting the room’s ghosts in enormous windows atop the background of unfurling surf. The Palais is a changeless image of wealthy France: stodgy, imperial, lavish, theatrical, and proper, its dining salon one of France’s most eminent. It was there I heard a father lean over to his son, brooding with distaste over a plate of peculiar crustaceans, and say, “Look, go ahead and try some. It’s just like escargots.”
The adjoining bar was also a good place to observe that French trademark, the romantic couple of different generations, each splendidly enjoying a contradictory sense of power. If you stay late you can watch the white-coated, epauletted waiters setting the tables for tomorrow’s breakfast after the other diners have gone, talking and joking through their gavotte of preparations, the white tablecloths levitating in their hands and billowing.
A lot of foreign sports enthusiasts were here to surf or watch surfers. For me an equal lure was cesta-punta, the Basque sport which many Americans know as jai-alai and which makes other team ball sports look timid. I had the good fortune to catch the finals of the world professional championships, for the sport is a uniquely Basque obsession. About two thousand spectators filled the town’s main fronton; I got a good seat the evening of the finals and sat transfixed by the fastest ball game on earth. Every Biarrot I spoke to had told me with delight, “You’ll love it, it’s so beautiful.” They didn’t say what a thrilling match it’d be, or even mention the rigorous athleticism. It was the beauty they noticed.
The Basques have several versions of the sport, using bare hands or a wooden racquet. The most spectacular uses a hard heavy ball slightly smaller than a tennis ball, and a cistera: the long woven basket, curved like an eagle’s beak, that turns a man’s right arm into a hyper-extended claw twice its normal length. A leather glove secures it, wound with a white bandage. Teams are two players, one forward, one back. Each team wears either red or white shirts, and always white helmets and chin guards, trousers, sneakers, and often elbow pads. They play on a hardwood court fifty-four meters long and about as wide as a tennis court, with three very high walls. A netting like a sheer veil separates the crowd from the court, making the fourth side.
The players neither walk nor look like athletes, yet they launch themselves impossibly through the air to snag the ball, landing in a crouch while spinning around so that, creating a nearly 360-degree arc with the woven claw, they can hurl the excitable ball from their basket at two hundred miles an hour so it caroms hard off the front wall, hugs the entire side wall, bounces off the back, then rebounds the entire length of the court toward the opposing player positioned up front. A point may go on for twenty such exchanges, team to team, as the crowd murmurs and gasps in French, Basque, and Spanish, and finally erupts at a death-defying save or a nasty-angled kill.
“The objective,” said the older man sitting next to me, who wiped his glasses after every other point, “is to put the ball as far back as possible. Because if we leave out a possibility of error—these men do not make many accidents or errors—they win most of their points up close, eh?”
He meant the putaways near the front wall, where they could achieve a double carom that bounced very low, then veered wildly and unplayably to the side. The sport was all anticipation and concentrated calm, for in the most furious point usually only one player out of four was moving at any moment. There was also a suitably ancient aspect to this sport invented by the people with the oldest language in Europe. Sometimes the men seemed like versions of Icarus, flying and falling, tumbling and hurling, but always getting up to fly again.
It was astonishingly beautiful—the powerful sight of a man running backward, whipping his body into a long curve to throw a ball at a wall behind him which he essentially does not see until the ball has left his basket. The players ranged from seventeen to thirty-four; some were from Spain, some local, but all were Basques, come back from around the world to compete. No wonder the crowd surged with such a current of Basque pride. If anyone else wanted to try cesta-punta, God help them.
After the two players from Miami won against the two from Dania, in northern Spain, I said to my neighbor, “It’s too bad so many of the best players end up leaving, no?”
He shrugged. “They’ve played here for years and years already, every week of the year. So we know them. It’s normal they should go to the U.S. to make their careers. Because Americans bet on the game, players earn a lot more there than here. But they come back for championships like this one, and if you look, you’ll see they all have Basque names.”
The French rate the Côte Basque high for its cuisine, and I’d heard rumors of an odd, ongoing convocation of “the big names.” The small Bar St. Pierre at first seems ordinary, until you notice the period red and white formica of the tables and of the bar itself, and the 1940s cone lamps set on the walls. Most of all, on any Friday morning for the last thirteen years, around 8:30, eight of the greatest chefs in this part of France are assembled around morning coffee, having done their market work at Les Halles a few steps away.
They are sober, well-put-together men, with the wide-eyed concentration of masters who stay up too late and get up too early, who work much too hard because they know they are at the top of their game—I counted as many Michelin stars as chefs. They each sipped a single espresso, stirring and nursing it for a half-hour, trading the news.
“—and the lady was running after him like a pigeon, warbling, ‘Monsieur Bocuse! Monsieur Bocuse! Sign my book!’”
“Incredible how these scoundrels talk about those herbs, it’s like they’re selling you contraband.”
“You know what I’m talking about, no? You were cooking in Paris for a while, right?”
“Twenty-three years.”
“See that lady? You know who she was? Her husband, for a belle époque, had the most beautiful cuisine in Biarritz. A small place, I’m talking about thirty years ago. Then he had a heart attack, poof.”
I asked Christian Parra, from the Auberge de la Galupe (two stars) how long it took to be a great chef. He said, “I don’t know yet. All your life. Then your restaurant closes. And you have to be a little crazy. I went to sleep at one-thirty, I’ve been up since six. And you must love people. Your clients and your colleagues. That’s why all the chefs are invited to this bar every Friday. Anyone who wants to come can come.”
Another morning in the Bar St. Pierre I met Bob Ausnit, a retired American who lives most of each year in Biarritz, the rest in Aspen. Over a late-morning aperitif, while skimming a Spanish newspaper, he told me about his life.
“I was born here in 1936,” he said. “My mother was Spanish, my father Rumanian. We had a beautiful villa by the lighthouse, but when the war began we had to leave. I’m half-Jewish, you see. We moved to Madrid. After the war we recovered the villa without any problem, but eventually my parents split up and I went to the States, to a boarding school I hated and then to Harvard. My mother sold the house in the ’50s, which broke my heart. I wound up in the film business and began returning, and about seven years ago I moved back. The weather’s reliable—we get about two beautiful days out of three, year-round. I like to stay through Christmas. September’s my favorite month. There’s a great deal of art always going on here, between the concerts and dance and everything else. You have to realize, when I was a boy this was the top resort in Europe. Coco Chanel kept a salon of seventy seamstresses for visiting ladies. This fad of spending the hot months, the summer, on the Côte d’Azur, is a recent idea. Back then the Riviera was for the winter. You came to Biarritz to cool off in the summer, you see? But this place has remained more discreet than the Riviera, luckily.”
There is still a social whirl here, primarily Parisians who come down to their villas during summer or, if they have children, more often—in the French school system children get two weeks’ vacation after every six weeks of school, then another two months in summer. This means the population of Biarritz doubles every six weeks for about ten days, then triples in July and August to about 110,000. Golf is extremely popular with a certain crowd; within thirty miles there are ten courses, including the second oldest in Europe. In France golf is a game for only the wealthy.
The word everyone used about Biarritz was “discreet” (to distinguish it from the Riviera) and one of the most discreet couples of all were M. Pierre and Mme. Genevieve Hebey: I was fortunate to be shown their home. Somewhere near their seventies, though neither looks it, they are often in Paris, where he is an eminent business lawyer. They are also often here. Frequent house guests have included Isabelle Adjani, Jacques Chirac, Catherine Deneuve, and Karl Lagerfeld, before he bought his own villa. Likewise their friend the publisher Daniel Filipachhi, introduced to them by their old friend Max Ernst, whose works hung everywhere. . . .
Their property was in Anglet, just outside Biarritz—two spacious, traditional white-walled Basque houses that were farms a hundred fifty years ago. Now their gardens of exploding flowers and quiet passageways adjoin the Duke of Spain’s. The Hebeys have, over several decades, filled the two houses with modern art and books and an unbelievable panorama of furnishings from the great designers in Europe of, say, 1890-1930. This autumn in Paris, for example, they would be auctioning off their collection of fifty-three Ruhlmanns.
M. Hebey was clear about what kept the old Biarritz alive. “Here there are no show-offs. For retired people it’s very safe, and people do things here—sports, the beach—they don’t just consume, unlike the Côte d’Azur. Another difference: there isn’t that awful heat. You can concentrate, which helps my writing. It’s a revitalizing climate. Everyone comes to see us and is seduced by the Côte Basque. I have never grown tired of it. Five minutes from Biarritz you’re in the country. In a half hour you’re in Spain. When Franco was in charge all the Spanish drove here to gamble, or see forbidden films. We come as often as we can. Lagerfeld came to stay with us and it was raining and after two days he said, That’s it, I’m buying a property, the rain here doesn’t bother me. In Biarritz famous people are accepted, they can walk around without problems. One day the postman opened our door and saw Catherine Deneuve in the kitchen, preparing the vegetables. He nearly fainted.”
There was another kind of social scene here, too, with plenty of bars open late. One of the trendiest was Le Caveau: a beautiful brunette in a skimpy outfit greeted me at the door, wearing a tank on her back that spritzed, via an obscene tube, a drink that tasted like “banana chewing gum.” This was how a young Dutch investment banker put it. He’d been here a week, surfing in front of the Casino. Now he and his friends were heading down for “a few days of culture” to the new Guggenheim museum just over the Spanish border in Bilbao.
The bar was sleek, post-modern deco, full of a very high proportion of attractive men and women. I mentioned this and he said, Well, of course, didn’t anyone tell you it was a gay bar? Well, no. And the disco underground? Gay, too, at least mid-week; on weekends it became much more heterosexual. He wished me better luck in a different kind of bar and I moved on.
The small Ventilo Caffe, on two levels, was the most branché (literally, plugged-in) spot, so dark you could barely make out the sparse ’60s and ’70s kitsch on the walls. The music was mostly French rap, which is less aggressive than American. Many of the crowd were Parisians, under forty, drinking hard and shouting; the surfers, who look healthy even after drinking all night, were elsewhere. I ended up in a conversation with a Parisienne who designed financial software and came down here every chance she got. She had no interest in surfing; she liked the Biarritz bar scene, the food, the Basque countryside, the beaches, and especially the African bouncer.
The place where all the different social strands meet, however, is outside town. The Blue Cargo—once a serene private house—activates a cliff above the beach of Ilbarritz from lunch until deep into the night, and in the evening its two lower levels, under billowing white tents, can get eight hundred celebrants a night. French society takes pride in being seen, and this is one of Biarritz’s top choices. The house itself is not so large: a bar decorated with an old Victorian-era street lamp and a gold record, African masks and whirling deco fans. The restaurant, which is superb, is one white-walled room open to the winds, with wood benches and tables, bas-reliefs of pelota players, post-modern lamps, local pimentos dangling in dark bunches, sculptures of swimsuited surfing babes, a Thirties tourist poster of La Côte Basque, and an enormous painting of men in a seaside tug-of-war.
I ate dinner there one night and was gone by eleven. It was still quiet. Another night I arrived at two, and under a white tent on the spit of sand above that glimmering beach several hundred people were dancing or at least drinking to the Rolling Stones; grey-haired bankers from Paris, surfers from Australia, Biarrots checking out the foreign men and women. It was a simple formula: a fine sound system, a bar, the beach, the breeze, plenty of space.
I remembered then what the mayor, Didier Borotra—much responsible for permanently protecting Biarritz’s architecture—had told me. “The constant party here is truly the Basque personality. It’s spontaneous, and maybe the most important part of our lives. In many ways Biarritz is not Basque, not even French, but in that way it is very Basque. We Biarrots love to drive to Spain for a party and come back the same evening, or the next morning. What pleases me most is that this town began by living off the sea. The beach attracted people here for years. And now, because of the surf, the sea is looking after Biarritz once more.”
It is hard to get any rest in Biarritz, and there’s little point even trying. The shore itself is restless, an alternating sequence of long beaches and formidable bastions of rock that seemingly belong to different seascapes but characterize La Côte Basque in France’s southwest corner, near the Spanish frontier. The surf crashes day and night as if kneeling in homage to the stone resort of tan hotels, shops, and cafe-bars hovering above, linked by switchback lanes and hydrangea-encrusted staircases systematically curlicued around the coast’s idiosyncracies.
The town, a balmy version of Proust, has a kind of fickle grandeur. Its casino happily chewed up the continent’s great fortunes and eventually, like the habit of coming for a season to promenade and take the waters, sank out of fashion. But the Basques are survivors: Biarritz is chic again, energized with concerts and parties spilling onto the street until all hours, ready to surf after morning coffee. You will not get much sleep here.
I went for the week when July shifted to August, not knowing what to expect besides sunshine and cool breezes. There was Biarritz of the fabled name: the grand wedding-cake hotels, the majestic beach captured by Picasso in Les Baigneuses (1918) where a young Nabokov had met his first love amid the lavish, mildly louche “Monte Carlo of the Atlantic.” I wondered if any history was still alive from the days when society required you to make a splash at the casinos of Biarritz, Cannes, Deauville. All my French friends told me Biarritz had ascended in recent years, a balearic phoenix—for them it was riding a healthy wave of European youth.
There was no mystery why after my first sight of La Grande Plage, an expansive stretch of golden sand dotted at each end with dramatic boulders and islets that exaggerate the surf as if placed deliberately. At dawn no one’s on the beach; at eight-thirty (when it’s still hard to get café and a croissant) the surfers are already out. By ten it’s in full swing, with flags to signify which areas are for swimming and which for surfing or body-boarding.
Meanwhile the red, blue, green, or mustard white-striped umbrellas, with shade flaps down one side like a kepi, are being set up in important rows just below the art deco Casino. By noon one of the loveliest beaches in Europe is full of children scampering through the aftermath of crashing five-foot waves, the parents in up to their waists with that easy chattiness peculiar to French resorts; young men are paddling balls at each other, busy ignoring the demi-mini-bikinis attacking with bronzed flesh from all sides.
And the surfers put on the best show of all, all day long.
“Biarritz,” says Robert Rabagny, “is now the California of France.”
Rabagny looks Californian, with the deep tan and sun-streaked hair of a lifelong surfer. He took up the sport here over thirty years ago; indeed, most Europeans under fifty know the place not for its associations with Jean Cocteau, Pierre Loti, and Charlie Chaplin, but for having the biggest surf on the continent. Rabagny, who opened the very successful Le Surfing above the beach at Côte des Basques with its view of the Spanish mountains, is the major-domo of surf hereabouts. His restaurant-bar is not just the epicenter of the new Biarritz but also a surfing museum, its walls and ceiling lined with Hawaiian shirts and fifty boards dating back to 1949.
“In the ’60s and ’70s,” an architect who comes every year told me, “Biarritz lost its allure. Spots like St. Tropez on the Côte d’Azur became the places to go. But now they’re seen as crowded, ruined, artificial. Show-off places for the new money. Biarritz is much more discreet; an important gentleman from Paris can stay anonymous here. It’s old money—and now also the young, with not much money maybe but plenty of energy. And surfboards. Plus all France is mad for anything to do with surfing; the clothes, for example. So the fashion people are here non-stop—Karl Lagerfeld keeps a villa. At the same time the luxury era that Biarritz represents, the classic lifestyle, is chic again. So it’s got both French obsessions covered.”
Not just the French. Each summer Biarritz pulls in the athletic youth of Europe who come to swim, tan, and enjoy the scene. Rabagny (who surfs here year-round) runs the Biarritz Surf Festival every July, a week-long fête which is much more than an international competition.
“It’s a meeting of cultures, a celebration of the art of following the surf lifestyle. Many older grand masters come, like Fred Hemmings, Clyde Aikau, Greg Noll, Donald Takayama. We have tandem surfing—pairs on one board. For 2000 our theme will be young surfers. In 1999 it was Surf ‘n’ Rock. My dream was always to bring the Beach Boys here—I kept in contact with Brian Wilson. But, anyway, we have groups playing Sixties rock all week. It begins with a ceremony that’s an exchange of waters. Each person brings water from his continent, it’s mixed in a big bowl with the others, from Japan, from Hawaii, from Australia, from Tahiti, from America, you see? A man carries it on horseback into the sea. It’s enormously touching to start the week this way.
“There’s a huge European youth movement for surfing. The big boom began seven or eight years ago, and expanded around many things that come out of surfing, like skateboards and body boards and windsurfing and all the rest. I started the Surf Masters competition here at la Grande Plage twenty years ago. At the moment it’s the Spanish and the Italians who are coming up fastest as surfers in Europe, but it’s really everyone—Germans, Scandinavians, English, Dutch. Everyone. You know why? Because surfing isn’t expensive, and it means freedom. Before, Biarritz was only an expensive place. Now it’s also surfing, which anyone can afford.”
These surfers who filled the beaches and the clubs and bars every night were staying in inexpensive campsites on the town’s outskirts, or sleeping in vans. No wonder so much of the music in clubs was thirty years old. In many ways the young crowd here were seeking an innocent ’60s lifestyle. They only enlarged the spirit of the place; Biarritz still looked swank.
One morning on the beach by the Casino I watched a surf school get underway—for kids aged seven to twelve. In wet suits, they carried the short yellow and blue and red boards down to the water’s edge, laid them in the sand, and practiced getting smoothly upright from their bellies to their feet.
Along the casino’s esplanade a skateboarder was getting going, too.
I asked Patrice, the surfing school director, about the relation. At the airport the arriving skateboarders had seemed a parody of the blond guys dragging their big boards. He said, “Sure, there’s the whole similar problem of balance. But waves move, that’s what makes it so difficult! A sidewalk doesn’t move.”
I wondered whether there was any point in someone in his forties starting to surf. It turned out he’d started “late, at fourteen.” I personally didn’t feel ready to try what those eight-year-olds were eager for. He shrugged. “Maybe the inspiration is harder as you age. You won’t become a champion. But can you learn well, and enjoy it? Absolutely.”
Another who started late—at sixteen—was Emmanuelle Joly. Born in Biarritz, a long-legged, confident blonde, at twenty-eight she’s been French national champion twice and European champion twice. She’s also the only woman surfer in France who earns her living from the sport, and the only French surfer of either sex to ascend to the top circuit of professionals.
“Every year there are more and more surfers in Biarritz, more and more foreigners,” she says. “In France the mentality is different than somewhere like Hawaii. Here’s it’s not even considered a sport yet. But that’s changing. The young ones coming after us are very strong. Now there’s a whole generation of surfer parents. Our parents, in general, were afraid of the sea: we had to start ourselves. But to ride the waves, from the very beginning, for me was wonderful.”
Surfing was brought to Biarritz (and Europe) by an American screenwriter and director, Peter Viertel, at work here filming The Sun Also Rises in 1957. He saw the waves, missed California, and had someone make him a board. A group of a dozen or so locals who saw him took it up with evangelistic enthusiasm, calling themselves Les Tontons Surfeurs—“The Surf Daddies.” Half are still alive. I watched one, Claude Durcudoy, out on his long board at Côte des Basques, his white hair evident from a distance. For him the changes in the sport were not necessarily improvements—back then, he said, it was more about a group of friends. Now, with short boards, surfing was “more individualist, more competitive, more aggressive.” But like the young zooming beside him across the curling lips of the waves, he stayed out there for hours.
Viertel had changed the history of Biarritz. An ex-fishing port, it has in many ways been an invention of foreigners since the mid-19th century. When Eugénie, the Spanish wife of Napoleon III, fell in love with its echoes of her childhood, he built his princess an imperial vacation palace in 1855. Due to her, a resort of high architectural beauty grew up. Wealthy English and Russians (as well as the French haute société) came in droves. Biarritz still remains an Anglophile town, with avenues named for Queen Victoria and Edward VII.
The emblems of grand Biarritz were easy to find. There was a Russian Orthodox church, L’Église Alexandre Nevsky, with an exquisite blue dome (1892), and Arosteguy, the sumptuous “Grande Épicerie de Biarritz” from 1875. I took breakfast daily at a belle-époque pâtisserie, the Miremont, in a salon tiled with mirrors, and its blue-mosaic ’30s equivalent, the Café de la Grande Plage, right on the beach. The monumental art deco Casino and its large theater were recently restored, though only the outside is original. Its atrium of slot machines is always crowded, but not the sleek, smaller, faux-marble salon des jeux with its few roulette wheels and vingt-et-un tables.
“Très triste,” said a casino employee. “Very sad. But the slots bring in far more money, these days.”
And the town itself is a remarkably lucky situation of architectural preservation, now officially protected. A good deal of Biarritz was either built between 1860 and 1930 or looks like it was—tall shutters and balconies, carved stone heads and angular domes, an austere elegance amid palm trees.
Presiding over all that past is the Hôtel du Palais, built in 1905 on the site of the original imperial palace. It is a wonderful vanity to sit, borne by the inspiration of a couple of gin fizzes, beneath the eminent gaze of Napoleon III and the Princess Eugénie in the rotunda dining salon, amid the gleaming chandeliers hung like brilliant earrings, the urns of ferns and flowers, the gilded moldings, the elaborate candelabras on each table reflecting the room’s ghosts in enormous windows atop the background of unfurling surf. The Palais is a changeless image of wealthy France: stodgy, imperial, lavish, theatrical, and proper, its dining salon one of France’s most eminent. It was there I heard a father lean over to his son, brooding with distaste over a plate of peculiar crustaceans, and say, “Look, go ahead and try some. It’s just like escargots.”
The adjoining bar was also a good place to observe that French trademark, the romantic couple of different generations, each splendidly enjoying a contradictory sense of power. If you stay late you can watch the white-coated, epauletted waiters setting the tables for tomorrow’s breakfast after the other diners have gone, talking and joking through their gavotte of preparations, the white tablecloths levitating in their hands and billowing.
A lot of foreign sports enthusiasts were here to surf or watch surfers. For me an equal lure was cesta-punta, the Basque sport which many Americans know as jai-alai and which makes other team ball sports look timid. I had the good fortune to catch the finals of the world professional championships, for the sport is a uniquely Basque obsession. About two thousand spectators filled the town’s main fronton; I got a good seat the evening of the finals and sat transfixed by the fastest ball game on earth. Every Biarrot I spoke to had told me with delight, “You’ll love it, it’s so beautiful.” They didn’t say what a thrilling match it’d be, or even mention the rigorous athleticism. It was the beauty they noticed.
The Basques have several versions of the sport, using bare hands or a wooden racquet. The most spectacular uses a hard heavy ball slightly smaller than a tennis ball, and a cistera: the long woven basket, curved like an eagle’s beak, that turns a man’s right arm into a hyper-extended claw twice its normal length. A leather glove secures it, wound with a white bandage. Teams are two players, one forward, one back. Each team wears either red or white shirts, and always white helmets and chin guards, trousers, sneakers, and often elbow pads. They play on a hardwood court fifty-four meters long and about as wide as a tennis court, with three very high walls. A netting like a sheer veil separates the crowd from the court, making the fourth side.
The players neither walk nor look like athletes, yet they launch themselves impossibly through the air to snag the ball, landing in a crouch while spinning around so that, creating a nearly 360-degree arc with the woven claw, they can hurl the excitable ball from their basket at two hundred miles an hour so it caroms hard off the front wall, hugs the entire side wall, bounces off the back, then rebounds the entire length of the court toward the opposing player positioned up front. A point may go on for twenty such exchanges, team to team, as the crowd murmurs and gasps in French, Basque, and Spanish, and finally erupts at a death-defying save or a nasty-angled kill.
“The objective,” said the older man sitting next to me, who wiped his glasses after every other point, “is to put the ball as far back as possible. Because if we leave out a possibility of error—these men do not make many accidents or errors—they win most of their points up close, eh?”
He meant the putaways near the front wall, where they could achieve a double carom that bounced very low, then veered wildly and unplayably to the side. The sport was all anticipation and concentrated calm, for in the most furious point usually only one player out of four was moving at any moment. There was also a suitably ancient aspect to this sport invented by the people with the oldest language in Europe. Sometimes the men seemed like versions of Icarus, flying and falling, tumbling and hurling, but always getting up to fly again.
It was astonishingly beautiful—the powerful sight of a man running backward, whipping his body into a long curve to throw a ball at a wall behind him which he essentially does not see until the ball has left his basket. The players ranged from seventeen to thirty-four; some were from Spain, some local, but all were Basques, come back from around the world to compete. No wonder the crowd surged with such a current of Basque pride. If anyone else wanted to try cesta-punta, God help them.
After the two players from Miami won against the two from Dania, in northern Spain, I said to my neighbor, “It’s too bad so many of the best players end up leaving, no?”
He shrugged. “They’ve played here for years and years already, every week of the year. So we know them. It’s normal they should go to the U.S. to make their careers. Because Americans bet on the game, players earn a lot more there than here. But they come back for championships like this one, and if you look, you’ll see they all have Basque names.”
The French rate the Côte Basque high for its cuisine, and I’d heard rumors of an odd, ongoing convocation of “the big names.” The small Bar St. Pierre at first seems ordinary, until you notice the period red and white formica of the tables and of the bar itself, and the 1940s cone lamps set on the walls. Most of all, on any Friday morning for the last thirteen years, around 8:30, eight of the greatest chefs in this part of France are assembled around morning coffee, having done their market work at Les Halles a few steps away.
They are sober, well-put-together men, with the wide-eyed concentration of masters who stay up too late and get up too early, who work much too hard because they know they are at the top of their game—I counted as many Michelin stars as chefs. They each sipped a single espresso, stirring and nursing it for a half-hour, trading the news.
“—and the lady was running after him like a pigeon, warbling, ‘Monsieur Bocuse! Monsieur Bocuse! Sign my book!’”
“Incredible how these scoundrels talk about those herbs, it’s like they’re selling you contraband.”
“You know what I’m talking about, no? You were cooking in Paris for a while, right?”
“Twenty-three years.”
“See that lady? You know who she was? Her husband, for a belle époque, had the most beautiful cuisine in Biarritz. A small place, I’m talking about thirty years ago. Then he had a heart attack, poof.”
I asked Christian Parra, from the Auberge de la Galupe (two stars) how long it took to be a great chef. He said, “I don’t know yet. All your life. Then your restaurant closes. And you have to be a little crazy. I went to sleep at one-thirty, I’ve been up since six. And you must love people. Your clients and your colleagues. That’s why all the chefs are invited to this bar every Friday. Anyone who wants to come can come.”
Another morning in the Bar St. Pierre I met Bob Ausnit, a retired American who lives most of each year in Biarritz, the rest in Aspen. Over a late-morning aperitif, while skimming a Spanish newspaper, he told me about his life.
“I was born here in 1936,” he said. “My mother was Spanish, my father Rumanian. We had a beautiful villa by the lighthouse, but when the war began we had to leave. I’m half-Jewish, you see. We moved to Madrid. After the war we recovered the villa without any problem, but eventually my parents split up and I went to the States, to a boarding school I hated and then to Harvard. My mother sold the house in the ’50s, which broke my heart. I wound up in the film business and began returning, and about seven years ago I moved back. The weather’s reliable—we get about two beautiful days out of three, year-round. I like to stay through Christmas. September’s my favorite month. There’s a great deal of art always going on here, between the concerts and dance and everything else. You have to realize, when I was a boy this was the top resort in Europe. Coco Chanel kept a salon of seventy seamstresses for visiting ladies. This fad of spending the hot months, the summer, on the Côte d’Azur, is a recent idea. Back then the Riviera was for the winter. You came to Biarritz to cool off in the summer, you see? But this place has remained more discreet than the Riviera, luckily.”
There is still a social whirl here, primarily Parisians who come down to their villas during summer or, if they have children, more often—in the French school system children get two weeks’ vacation after every six weeks of school, then another two months in summer. This means the population of Biarritz doubles every six weeks for about ten days, then triples in July and August to about 110,000. Golf is extremely popular with a certain crowd; within thirty miles there are ten courses, including the second oldest in Europe. In France golf is a game for only the wealthy.
The word everyone used about Biarritz was “discreet” (to distinguish it from the Riviera) and one of the most discreet couples of all were M. Pierre and Mme. Genevieve Hebey: I was fortunate to be shown their home. Somewhere near their seventies, though neither looks it, they are often in Paris, where he is an eminent business lawyer. They are also often here. Frequent house guests have included Isabelle Adjani, Jacques Chirac, Catherine Deneuve, and Karl Lagerfeld, before he bought his own villa. Likewise their friend the publisher Daniel Filipachhi, introduced to them by their old friend Max Ernst, whose works hung everywhere. . . .
Their property was in Anglet, just outside Biarritz—two spacious, traditional white-walled Basque houses that were farms a hundred fifty years ago. Now their gardens of exploding flowers and quiet passageways adjoin the Duke of Spain’s. The Hebeys have, over several decades, filled the two houses with modern art and books and an unbelievable panorama of furnishings from the great designers in Europe of, say, 1890-1930. This autumn in Paris, for example, they would be auctioning off their collection of fifty-three Ruhlmanns.
M. Hebey was clear about what kept the old Biarritz alive. “Here there are no show-offs. For retired people it’s very safe, and people do things here—sports, the beach—they don’t just consume, unlike the Côte d’Azur. Another difference: there isn’t that awful heat. You can concentrate, which helps my writing. It’s a revitalizing climate. Everyone comes to see us and is seduced by the Côte Basque. I have never grown tired of it. Five minutes from Biarritz you’re in the country. In a half hour you’re in Spain. When Franco was in charge all the Spanish drove here to gamble, or see forbidden films. We come as often as we can. Lagerfeld came to stay with us and it was raining and after two days he said, That’s it, I’m buying a property, the rain here doesn’t bother me. In Biarritz famous people are accepted, they can walk around without problems. One day the postman opened our door and saw Catherine Deneuve in the kitchen, preparing the vegetables. He nearly fainted.”
There was another kind of social scene here, too, with plenty of bars open late. One of the trendiest was Le Caveau: a beautiful brunette in a skimpy outfit greeted me at the door, wearing a tank on her back that spritzed, via an obscene tube, a drink that tasted like “banana chewing gum.” This was how a young Dutch investment banker put it. He’d been here a week, surfing in front of the Casino. Now he and his friends were heading down for “a few days of culture” to the new Guggenheim museum just over the Spanish border in Bilbao.
The bar was sleek, post-modern deco, full of a very high proportion of attractive men and women. I mentioned this and he said, Well, of course, didn’t anyone tell you it was a gay bar? Well, no. And the disco underground? Gay, too, at least mid-week; on weekends it became much more heterosexual. He wished me better luck in a different kind of bar and I moved on.
The small Ventilo Caffe, on two levels, was the most branché (literally, plugged-in) spot, so dark you could barely make out the sparse ’60s and ’70s kitsch on the walls. The music was mostly French rap, which is less aggressive than American. Many of the crowd were Parisians, under forty, drinking hard and shouting; the surfers, who look healthy even after drinking all night, were elsewhere. I ended up in a conversation with a Parisienne who designed financial software and came down here every chance she got. She had no interest in surfing; she liked the Biarritz bar scene, the food, the Basque countryside, the beaches, and especially the African bouncer.
The place where all the different social strands meet, however, is outside town. The Blue Cargo—once a serene private house—activates a cliff above the beach of Ilbarritz from lunch until deep into the night, and in the evening its two lower levels, under billowing white tents, can get eight hundred celebrants a night. French society takes pride in being seen, and this is one of Biarritz’s top choices. The house itself is not so large: a bar decorated with an old Victorian-era street lamp and a gold record, African masks and whirling deco fans. The restaurant, which is superb, is one white-walled room open to the winds, with wood benches and tables, bas-reliefs of pelota players, post-modern lamps, local pimentos dangling in dark bunches, sculptures of swimsuited surfing babes, a Thirties tourist poster of La Côte Basque, and an enormous painting of men in a seaside tug-of-war.
I ate dinner there one night and was gone by eleven. It was still quiet. Another night I arrived at two, and under a white tent on the spit of sand above that glimmering beach several hundred people were dancing or at least drinking to the Rolling Stones; grey-haired bankers from Paris, surfers from Australia, Biarrots checking out the foreign men and women. It was a simple formula: a fine sound system, a bar, the beach, the breeze, plenty of space.
I remembered then what the mayor, Didier Borotra—much responsible for permanently protecting Biarritz’s architecture—had told me. “The constant party here is truly the Basque personality. It’s spontaneous, and maybe the most important part of our lives. In many ways Biarritz is not Basque, not even French, but in that way it is very Basque. We Biarrots love to drive to Spain for a party and come back the same evening, or the next morning. What pleases me most is that this town began by living off the sea. The beach attracted people here for years. And now, because of the surf, the sea is looking after Biarritz once more.”
Monday, June 15, 1998
Rio
Written in 1998 for Sky magazine
To anyone over thirty, Rio de Janeiro represents fantasy—a bossa-nova vision of tropical sea, eternal beach, and luxuriant mountains. Alone of the world's great cities, its chic status is wholly a product of the 20th century, aptly summed up in one Brazilian song of a girl, a man, a guitar, Ipanema. I went there fearing the worst: that Rio's physical glory would be no more, and that its severe, well-known poverty, with a corollary of street crime, made it a city impossible to enjoy and relax in. I was glad to be so wrong, to find Rio so much cleaner, greener, calmer, and more joyful than I expected, and to learn how much you could enjoy it even when the season wasn't carnaval.
Because so much of Rio life and culture revolves around its beaches, and the natural beauty of the place and its people, it’s easy for a visitor to overlook everything else. That said, if there is a more wondrous natural location for humans to live en masse, I do not know it. A succession of massive hills, crags, and upheavals, undulant and forested a thick green, stretch off into islets; ingenious landfill has completed the design. Water is everywhere. The colors are simple: blue sea, green mountains, and the white pillboxes of modern man that endlessly multiply. A giant interior lagoon gives the illusion that the entire city is a cutout laid on the sea, all lassoed by nearly fifty miles of beach.
Every great city has an energy of its own—and Rio’s does not resemble that of any other, for its denizens have a vibrant, unmatched genius for pleasure no matter what their circumstances. Beyond the outrageous splendor of the setting, you are first also struck by the glow and athleticism of the people. To say that cariocas (as Rio-dwellers are known) seem to spend all their free time at the beach misses the essential point, which is that they’re always doing something there, always in motion: playing volleyball, or sand soccer, or a horrendously difficult local specialty, foot-volleyball, which combines both. Walk along the hotel-lined Avenida Atlantica that follows the gentle arc of Copacabana Beach, and from dawn till past midnight you see men and women of all ages running, walking, doing yoga, exercising, or tossing a ball; kids are busy on their own bungee-swings and trampolines. The beach is Rio’s gym, its sports arena, and its savior—miraculous, that in a city of so much poverty there should be so many free pastimes granted by nature. No wonder the cariocas have such a finely developed sense of ironic humor.
The first thing every visitor should do is take the cable car up Sugarloaf, the higher of two adjacent peaks. It gives an immediate sense of how, edging up to a jungle like broccoli, the fortunate city has spread its many neighborhoods around the bays, beaches, and green pillars that stand like bodyguards for its bays. The cable car makes the ascent easy; for fourteen hours daily it carries you to Morro da Urca (705 feet) then up to Pao de Acucar (1,300 feet). Seen from miles away, the Christ statue on Corcovado peak pokes through the cloud layer, and Copacabana, the curving beach lined with big hotels that is Rio’s emblem, seems pristine amid the peace a vista imposes—especially at sunset, as the lights begin to twinkle and the view becomes surreal. That so many people are living amid such poetry lifts your heart.
The other essential expedition is up Corcovado, “The Hunchback,” by road or cogwheel train. From the granite mountain’s summit, at 2,300 feet, rises Christ the Redeemer, a hundred feet tall. The statue, a thousand graceful tons of him, floats into your gaze as you climb the sunlit steps; its genius is that first you see only his white-robed back, his outstretched arms; you cannot see his face until you reach the top and walk around the massive pedestal. This statue is with you constantly in Rio—tremendous arms embracing a swimming sky, his pose a gentle echo of crucifixion, turning his back on jungly hillsides to gather in his city of seven millions. He is a reminder of the Brazilian paradox: that as the largest Catholic country on earth, much of its cultural strength comes from the syncretism of its many other religions and beliefs.
Carnaval is the ultimate proof. Though it’s widely known as the time to be in Rio, there’s a lot to be said for visiting in the winter leading up to the great event instead. One reason is that the city’s youthful energy is increased because it’s the southern hemisphere’s summer—school holidays last from mid-December until after carnaval. Many cariocas say the New Year’s Eve celebrations are preferable and nearly as monumental. (This is the second largest open-air party in the world, after carnaval.) An enormous beach party stretches up the shore, with music, candles, and flowers thrown on the waves as offerings to Iemenja, goddess of the sea—a version of the Virgin Mary who’s Rio’s patron saint. Hovering over all are fireworks and laser displays off Sugarloaf and Corcovado.
For a winter visitor, the way to experience carnaval is to take part in a Rio samba “school”—though team or club is closer to the reality. Everyone in Brazil has loyalty to one samba school; each one here has about 4,000 cariocas. Each year, every samba school has its own colors and theme behind the inevitably graceful, incandescent dancing and singing, the legion of drummers and lavish costumes—its theme might be criticizing the government, or making an ecological statement, for example. When carnaval comes in mid-February, the sixteen samba schools (who’ve been practicing since August) compete by passing through the Sambodromo stadium.
An outsider can witness and take part in the samba schools’ rehearsals, usually Saturday but sometimes Friday and Sunday nights as well, starting around ten p.m. This will mean learning to undulate: cariocas like to see you joining in, not chickening out. (Three samba schools to try are Mangueira, Salgueiro, and Portela.)
Ultimately, the great idea and ideal Rio has given the world is of the beach as a place of physical as well as social chic. In most harbor cities the rich live on hillsides and the poor live below; in Rio the opposite is true, which testifies to the enduring allure of its sands. Physical beauty can also be a powerful class-crossing democratizer, and as a result Rio’s beaches have specific areas with the human display at its most competitive—based around seven women per man (the local legend goes), though contrary to repute the women rarely go topless. Rio has twenty-three beaches, stretching forty-five miles; a visitor should try several.
The craze for the city as a glamorous destination dates from the Thirties, built around the dual glow of carnaval and the beach life. Over the years Rio has kept spreading at such speed that yesterday’s wild, untouched beach is today’s big development. The most famous stretch, the three miles of Copacabana hotels, turns a sharp corner to Ipanema and Leblon, with their richer and more residential feel. At Sao Conrado there’s small Pepino beach; next comes Barra di Tijuca, eleven clean miles that at the moment are sprouting the condominiums of choice, though part is a protected ecological zone. Beyond it, Recreio is a gorgeous empty beach, with a few coconut-water shacks and real estate getting more expensive by the minute; at the end, Prainha is the beach for surfistas. After it, near the Pontal museum, is Grumari, almost virginal, where I saw old men fishing with poles for anchovies. It’s out here the old Rio exists, if you go far enough: the long ribbons of sand, quiet mile after mile narrowing and widening.
To make finding friends easier there are numbered lifeguard stations along each beach (on Ipanema the primo meeting-point is near Lifeguard Station #9). The absolutely chic spot is on Barra beach between kiosk #1 and #2 and especially around the snack bar Pepe’s, famous for its fruit juices and health food. Named after a champion surfer and hang-glider, over the years Pepe’s has become a meeting-point for the young, hip, beautiful people. Rocky islets add to the view. Here the beach is wide, the bikinis narrow; fierce volleyball games are under way. Both the men exercising, and the women striding up and back, up and back, seem equally competitive.
Rio is a vast city of articulated neighborhoods; the one where I’d happily move is hilly Santa Teresa. All tiny mansions, cobblestones, labyrinthine lanes, walled gardens, wheezing trams, and almost no concrete, it should be explored on foot. Its epicenter is the Bar do Arnaudo (a restaurant as well), frequented by celebrity exile Ronnie Biggs, leader of England’s 1963 Great Train Robbery.
A profound pleasure of this country is its coffee—readily available at about $1 a pound in any supermarket—and to seek out Rio’s best cafes is an admirable project if you find yourself, as I did, falling asleep on the beach. One of the most popular modern salons, as intimate as a large walk-in closet, is in Ipanema: the Armazem do Café, with thirty types of coffee, plenty of Cuban cigars, books celebrating the national drink, and a vivid wall-mural of a coffee plantation, circa 1830. (Ask for a cafezinho, a “little coffee”). Not far away, en route to the beach, is the Garota da Ipanema (“The Girl from Ipanema”) Bar, where the song was written in 1962 by Antonio Carlos Jobim and his friend, lyricist Vinicius de Morais, sitting there watching her go by.
Apart from coffee, the best deal in Rio is the city’s virtual uniform, the swimsuit. To cariocas they mean even more than T-shirts do to North Americans, and as a result they are available everywhere in a million designs and at bargain rates. Brazil may be the only country in the world where bikinis are priced not by the chic of the design but by the centimeters of fabric, for they are remarkably skimpy and inexpensive. This is only good news, as long as it’s Brazilians wearing them.
The venerable cafes from Rio’s deep past are all downtown. The oldest is the modest Casa Cave, which occupies a busy corner and is easily overlooked. Founded in 1790, rebuilt in 1920, it’s somewhat time-worn. Nearby, the Confeitaria Colombo is the most famous surviving 19th century café—a grand art-nouveau salon, with marble walls, tiled floors, belle-epoque lamps, and a stained glass ceiling. Lunch is its busiest time; traditionally the street was full of fashion boutiques, and the cafe (founded 1894) was where Rio’s high society came to relax. One octogenarian, a former cabinet minister, has visited daily for over fifty years.
An even more lavish luncheon cafe is the Cafe de Theatre, from 1909, on one side of the Teatro Municipal—done up in grandiose Assyrian style, with winged bulls with bearded heads, Oriental hanging lamps, muscular columns, gorgeous tilework; on the outside are mosaics of opera scenes. The theater itself is a copy in granite, marble, and bronze, of the Paris Opera. It stands at one end of the Avenida Rio Branco, the city’s 1905 version of the Champs-Elysees; that era’s one-hundred-fifteen classical buildings have over the decades been reduced to ten, victims of the postwar concrete boom.
What does remain from the colonial centuries is wonderful. (The Portuguese arrived in 1502; Brazil became independent in 1822.) Rio’s wealth was built on gold, sugarcane, and coffee, and the most evocative patch of Old Rio’s prosperity is off Praza Quinza—the intimate Arco do Teles. A late-18th century tract of townhouses and cobbled lanes, it now has chic renovated bars with live music and modern art galleries.
Other real treasures, mostly churches, have survived. The most impressive is the stone-towered Sao Bento Monastery, from 1630. Its interior is full extraordinary Portuguese baroque: a teeming, scrolled universe of wriggling gilded figures, walls, and altars, carved from jacaranda wood, all lit by stained glass whose colors seem ethereal against the dark gold everywhere. Another treasure is the Gloria, a sparse white church (1714) with well-preserved tiles of angels playing harps and the imperial Portuguese crown. Delicate painted ceilings portray the small church amid flowers on Rio’s hills.
And below Corcovado is the Largo do Boticario, a small square named after the royal druggist who settled here in 1831. Architecturally the seven townhouses in the big-stoned courtyard, shaded by enormous trees, represent an eclectic 19th century style: latticework balconies, massive doors, elaborate ironwork, and pink, yellow, green, and blue colonial-era tiles showing large parrots, Maltese crosses, and Dutch windmills.
Rio’s profound European heritage is most evident at the city’s many museums, which visitors often skip. Downtown are the exhaustive National History Museum and the National Museum of Fine Arts, with a huge collection of Brazilian art from the last two centuries. The Museum of the Republic, with a courtyard of royal palms, was in the 1860s a coffee planter’s lavish mansion and then the presidents’ palace for six decades. After one committed suicide in 1954 it became a museum devoted to the country’s history, with a healthy dose of self-criticism.
The Museum of Modern Art boasts changing contemporary exhibitions and sculptures by Brancusi, Rodin, Leger, Lipchitz, Giacometti, Arp, and Moore. The best modern art museum is the Chacara do Ceu, an industrialist’s personal collection that includes Dali, Monet, Picasso, Degas, Modigliani, Braque, Matisse, and the Brazilian master Portinari.
There’s even a museum devoted wholly to Carmen Miranda, the Brazilian singer-dancer who made it big in Hollywood (“Bananas is my business!”) in the 1940s. Here she’s become a saint of carnaval culture, especially among Rio’s transvestites. The museum is full of her trademark blue, red, yellow, and green umbrellas, her jewelry, her elaborate embroidered and fishnet costumes, her high platform shoes and complex gargantuan headdresses.
Two museums over a half hour’s drive from Copacabana might accompany a day’s beach expedition. The first is the estate of Roberto Burle Marx (1909-1994), the country’s preeminent landscape architect, who designed the wavery tiled sidewalks that are a symbol of Rio. On a former plantation, with its winding cobbled road, Marx’s garden is an organized jungle. Here he planted 250 species of palm trees alone, and designed a house incorporating diverse European, Brazilian, and African elements—his trademark.
A few miles farther out is my favorite, the Casa do Pontal. It is a nuisance to get to but not to be missed: the world’s largest collection of Brazilian folk art, in a country house set between the sea and an ecological preserve. Among 5,000 sculptures by over two hundred artists from all regions of Brazil, the majority are amazing small painted clay figures—musicians, street sweepers, medical operations, farmers, a levitating magician, skeletons and robots copulating, wrestlers, fishermen with nets, a soccer team, billiards players, knife swallowers, and an entire circus scene in mid-performance. The most stunning is a mechanized panorama of carnaval, showing two samba schools in high gear, complete with headdresses, teams of drummers, pell-mell crowds.
Rio lives not just for its beaches but for its nightlife. For dancing, El Turf is an elegant annex of Rio’s racing club, turned into a high-tech disco within a classical shell. Each marble table has the innovation of a self-service tap for draft beer, with a meter tallied by the waiter when you’re ready to go. The mood is gentle, like a New York club full of dancing young Brazilians who, from the neck down, could not possibly be Anglo-Saxons.
The national genius for music ranges in this century from the classical composer Heitor Villa-Lobos to the many genres of popular music which seem to be everywhere in this city. The best known outside Brazil, of course, is the bossa nova, which so hypnotized the world in the 1960s. A reliable spot to hear first-rate bossa is Chiko’s—a sleek, elegant club with a jungle of tropical plants behind the piano. Another is the renovated Banco do Brasil Cultural Center downtown, with several concert spaces.
Best of all, though, is to visit one of the samba clubs—like the Casa da Mae Joana, where I heard some of the most beautiful music of my life one breezy midnight; or Sobrenatural, up in Santa Teresa just near the Bar de Arnaudo. Of the big dance-halls, I preferred Estudantina Musical. (These places often don’t get going till midnight.) A tiny spot where you can hear great samba at dinnertime and get a good pizza is the Butiquim do Martinho, set improbably in a huge shopping mall.
No matter where you are, though, no matter what instruments, the magic seems the same: the glorious melodies unfurl, the lyrics follow in their soft Portuguese diction. These songs will always be Rio, and evoke the era when Rio was an ideal to the rest of the world. The 1950s and ’60s were its time; to hear that music is to dwell in the eternal Rio, that majestic beach of the soul between verdant mountains— the city which the sea folds in an endless embrace as Christ the Redeemer looks down on the beautiful men and women dancing and blesses them with a loving melody that time cannot silence, a melody that will go on as long as these things matter.
To anyone over thirty, Rio de Janeiro represents fantasy—a bossa-nova vision of tropical sea, eternal beach, and luxuriant mountains. Alone of the world's great cities, its chic status is wholly a product of the 20th century, aptly summed up in one Brazilian song of a girl, a man, a guitar, Ipanema. I went there fearing the worst: that Rio's physical glory would be no more, and that its severe, well-known poverty, with a corollary of street crime, made it a city impossible to enjoy and relax in. I was glad to be so wrong, to find Rio so much cleaner, greener, calmer, and more joyful than I expected, and to learn how much you could enjoy it even when the season wasn't carnaval.
Because so much of Rio life and culture revolves around its beaches, and the natural beauty of the place and its people, it’s easy for a visitor to overlook everything else. That said, if there is a more wondrous natural location for humans to live en masse, I do not know it. A succession of massive hills, crags, and upheavals, undulant and forested a thick green, stretch off into islets; ingenious landfill has completed the design. Water is everywhere. The colors are simple: blue sea, green mountains, and the white pillboxes of modern man that endlessly multiply. A giant interior lagoon gives the illusion that the entire city is a cutout laid on the sea, all lassoed by nearly fifty miles of beach.
Every great city has an energy of its own—and Rio’s does not resemble that of any other, for its denizens have a vibrant, unmatched genius for pleasure no matter what their circumstances. Beyond the outrageous splendor of the setting, you are first also struck by the glow and athleticism of the people. To say that cariocas (as Rio-dwellers are known) seem to spend all their free time at the beach misses the essential point, which is that they’re always doing something there, always in motion: playing volleyball, or sand soccer, or a horrendously difficult local specialty, foot-volleyball, which combines both. Walk along the hotel-lined Avenida Atlantica that follows the gentle arc of Copacabana Beach, and from dawn till past midnight you see men and women of all ages running, walking, doing yoga, exercising, or tossing a ball; kids are busy on their own bungee-swings and trampolines. The beach is Rio’s gym, its sports arena, and its savior—miraculous, that in a city of so much poverty there should be so many free pastimes granted by nature. No wonder the cariocas have such a finely developed sense of ironic humor.
The first thing every visitor should do is take the cable car up Sugarloaf, the higher of two adjacent peaks. It gives an immediate sense of how, edging up to a jungle like broccoli, the fortunate city has spread its many neighborhoods around the bays, beaches, and green pillars that stand like bodyguards for its bays. The cable car makes the ascent easy; for fourteen hours daily it carries you to Morro da Urca (705 feet) then up to Pao de Acucar (1,300 feet). Seen from miles away, the Christ statue on Corcovado peak pokes through the cloud layer, and Copacabana, the curving beach lined with big hotels that is Rio’s emblem, seems pristine amid the peace a vista imposes—especially at sunset, as the lights begin to twinkle and the view becomes surreal. That so many people are living amid such poetry lifts your heart.
The other essential expedition is up Corcovado, “The Hunchback,” by road or cogwheel train. From the granite mountain’s summit, at 2,300 feet, rises Christ the Redeemer, a hundred feet tall. The statue, a thousand graceful tons of him, floats into your gaze as you climb the sunlit steps; its genius is that first you see only his white-robed back, his outstretched arms; you cannot see his face until you reach the top and walk around the massive pedestal. This statue is with you constantly in Rio—tremendous arms embracing a swimming sky, his pose a gentle echo of crucifixion, turning his back on jungly hillsides to gather in his city of seven millions. He is a reminder of the Brazilian paradox: that as the largest Catholic country on earth, much of its cultural strength comes from the syncretism of its many other religions and beliefs.
Carnaval is the ultimate proof. Though it’s widely known as the time to be in Rio, there’s a lot to be said for visiting in the winter leading up to the great event instead. One reason is that the city’s youthful energy is increased because it’s the southern hemisphere’s summer—school holidays last from mid-December until after carnaval. Many cariocas say the New Year’s Eve celebrations are preferable and nearly as monumental. (This is the second largest open-air party in the world, after carnaval.) An enormous beach party stretches up the shore, with music, candles, and flowers thrown on the waves as offerings to Iemenja, goddess of the sea—a version of the Virgin Mary who’s Rio’s patron saint. Hovering over all are fireworks and laser displays off Sugarloaf and Corcovado.
For a winter visitor, the way to experience carnaval is to take part in a Rio samba “school”—though team or club is closer to the reality. Everyone in Brazil has loyalty to one samba school; each one here has about 4,000 cariocas. Each year, every samba school has its own colors and theme behind the inevitably graceful, incandescent dancing and singing, the legion of drummers and lavish costumes—its theme might be criticizing the government, or making an ecological statement, for example. When carnaval comes in mid-February, the sixteen samba schools (who’ve been practicing since August) compete by passing through the Sambodromo stadium.
An outsider can witness and take part in the samba schools’ rehearsals, usually Saturday but sometimes Friday and Sunday nights as well, starting around ten p.m. This will mean learning to undulate: cariocas like to see you joining in, not chickening out. (Three samba schools to try are Mangueira, Salgueiro, and Portela.)
Ultimately, the great idea and ideal Rio has given the world is of the beach as a place of physical as well as social chic. In most harbor cities the rich live on hillsides and the poor live below; in Rio the opposite is true, which testifies to the enduring allure of its sands. Physical beauty can also be a powerful class-crossing democratizer, and as a result Rio’s beaches have specific areas with the human display at its most competitive—based around seven women per man (the local legend goes), though contrary to repute the women rarely go topless. Rio has twenty-three beaches, stretching forty-five miles; a visitor should try several.
The craze for the city as a glamorous destination dates from the Thirties, built around the dual glow of carnaval and the beach life. Over the years Rio has kept spreading at such speed that yesterday’s wild, untouched beach is today’s big development. The most famous stretch, the three miles of Copacabana hotels, turns a sharp corner to Ipanema and Leblon, with their richer and more residential feel. At Sao Conrado there’s small Pepino beach; next comes Barra di Tijuca, eleven clean miles that at the moment are sprouting the condominiums of choice, though part is a protected ecological zone. Beyond it, Recreio is a gorgeous empty beach, with a few coconut-water shacks and real estate getting more expensive by the minute; at the end, Prainha is the beach for surfistas. After it, near the Pontal museum, is Grumari, almost virginal, where I saw old men fishing with poles for anchovies. It’s out here the old Rio exists, if you go far enough: the long ribbons of sand, quiet mile after mile narrowing and widening.
To make finding friends easier there are numbered lifeguard stations along each beach (on Ipanema the primo meeting-point is near Lifeguard Station #9). The absolutely chic spot is on Barra beach between kiosk #1 and #2 and especially around the snack bar Pepe’s, famous for its fruit juices and health food. Named after a champion surfer and hang-glider, over the years Pepe’s has become a meeting-point for the young, hip, beautiful people. Rocky islets add to the view. Here the beach is wide, the bikinis narrow; fierce volleyball games are under way. Both the men exercising, and the women striding up and back, up and back, seem equally competitive.
Rio is a vast city of articulated neighborhoods; the one where I’d happily move is hilly Santa Teresa. All tiny mansions, cobblestones, labyrinthine lanes, walled gardens, wheezing trams, and almost no concrete, it should be explored on foot. Its epicenter is the Bar do Arnaudo (a restaurant as well), frequented by celebrity exile Ronnie Biggs, leader of England’s 1963 Great Train Robbery.
A profound pleasure of this country is its coffee—readily available at about $1 a pound in any supermarket—and to seek out Rio’s best cafes is an admirable project if you find yourself, as I did, falling asleep on the beach. One of the most popular modern salons, as intimate as a large walk-in closet, is in Ipanema: the Armazem do Café, with thirty types of coffee, plenty of Cuban cigars, books celebrating the national drink, and a vivid wall-mural of a coffee plantation, circa 1830. (Ask for a cafezinho, a “little coffee”). Not far away, en route to the beach, is the Garota da Ipanema (“The Girl from Ipanema”) Bar, where the song was written in 1962 by Antonio Carlos Jobim and his friend, lyricist Vinicius de Morais, sitting there watching her go by.
Apart from coffee, the best deal in Rio is the city’s virtual uniform, the swimsuit. To cariocas they mean even more than T-shirts do to North Americans, and as a result they are available everywhere in a million designs and at bargain rates. Brazil may be the only country in the world where bikinis are priced not by the chic of the design but by the centimeters of fabric, for they are remarkably skimpy and inexpensive. This is only good news, as long as it’s Brazilians wearing them.
The venerable cafes from Rio’s deep past are all downtown. The oldest is the modest Casa Cave, which occupies a busy corner and is easily overlooked. Founded in 1790, rebuilt in 1920, it’s somewhat time-worn. Nearby, the Confeitaria Colombo is the most famous surviving 19th century café—a grand art-nouveau salon, with marble walls, tiled floors, belle-epoque lamps, and a stained glass ceiling. Lunch is its busiest time; traditionally the street was full of fashion boutiques, and the cafe (founded 1894) was where Rio’s high society came to relax. One octogenarian, a former cabinet minister, has visited daily for over fifty years.
An even more lavish luncheon cafe is the Cafe de Theatre, from 1909, on one side of the Teatro Municipal—done up in grandiose Assyrian style, with winged bulls with bearded heads, Oriental hanging lamps, muscular columns, gorgeous tilework; on the outside are mosaics of opera scenes. The theater itself is a copy in granite, marble, and bronze, of the Paris Opera. It stands at one end of the Avenida Rio Branco, the city’s 1905 version of the Champs-Elysees; that era’s one-hundred-fifteen classical buildings have over the decades been reduced to ten, victims of the postwar concrete boom.
What does remain from the colonial centuries is wonderful. (The Portuguese arrived in 1502; Brazil became independent in 1822.) Rio’s wealth was built on gold, sugarcane, and coffee, and the most evocative patch of Old Rio’s prosperity is off Praza Quinza—the intimate Arco do Teles. A late-18th century tract of townhouses and cobbled lanes, it now has chic renovated bars with live music and modern art galleries.
Other real treasures, mostly churches, have survived. The most impressive is the stone-towered Sao Bento Monastery, from 1630. Its interior is full extraordinary Portuguese baroque: a teeming, scrolled universe of wriggling gilded figures, walls, and altars, carved from jacaranda wood, all lit by stained glass whose colors seem ethereal against the dark gold everywhere. Another treasure is the Gloria, a sparse white church (1714) with well-preserved tiles of angels playing harps and the imperial Portuguese crown. Delicate painted ceilings portray the small church amid flowers on Rio’s hills.
And below Corcovado is the Largo do Boticario, a small square named after the royal druggist who settled here in 1831. Architecturally the seven townhouses in the big-stoned courtyard, shaded by enormous trees, represent an eclectic 19th century style: latticework balconies, massive doors, elaborate ironwork, and pink, yellow, green, and blue colonial-era tiles showing large parrots, Maltese crosses, and Dutch windmills.
Rio’s profound European heritage is most evident at the city’s many museums, which visitors often skip. Downtown are the exhaustive National History Museum and the National Museum of Fine Arts, with a huge collection of Brazilian art from the last two centuries. The Museum of the Republic, with a courtyard of royal palms, was in the 1860s a coffee planter’s lavish mansion and then the presidents’ palace for six decades. After one committed suicide in 1954 it became a museum devoted to the country’s history, with a healthy dose of self-criticism.
The Museum of Modern Art boasts changing contemporary exhibitions and sculptures by Brancusi, Rodin, Leger, Lipchitz, Giacometti, Arp, and Moore. The best modern art museum is the Chacara do Ceu, an industrialist’s personal collection that includes Dali, Monet, Picasso, Degas, Modigliani, Braque, Matisse, and the Brazilian master Portinari.
There’s even a museum devoted wholly to Carmen Miranda, the Brazilian singer-dancer who made it big in Hollywood (“Bananas is my business!”) in the 1940s. Here she’s become a saint of carnaval culture, especially among Rio’s transvestites. The museum is full of her trademark blue, red, yellow, and green umbrellas, her jewelry, her elaborate embroidered and fishnet costumes, her high platform shoes and complex gargantuan headdresses.
Two museums over a half hour’s drive from Copacabana might accompany a day’s beach expedition. The first is the estate of Roberto Burle Marx (1909-1994), the country’s preeminent landscape architect, who designed the wavery tiled sidewalks that are a symbol of Rio. On a former plantation, with its winding cobbled road, Marx’s garden is an organized jungle. Here he planted 250 species of palm trees alone, and designed a house incorporating diverse European, Brazilian, and African elements—his trademark.
A few miles farther out is my favorite, the Casa do Pontal. It is a nuisance to get to but not to be missed: the world’s largest collection of Brazilian folk art, in a country house set between the sea and an ecological preserve. Among 5,000 sculptures by over two hundred artists from all regions of Brazil, the majority are amazing small painted clay figures—musicians, street sweepers, medical operations, farmers, a levitating magician, skeletons and robots copulating, wrestlers, fishermen with nets, a soccer team, billiards players, knife swallowers, and an entire circus scene in mid-performance. The most stunning is a mechanized panorama of carnaval, showing two samba schools in high gear, complete with headdresses, teams of drummers, pell-mell crowds.
Rio lives not just for its beaches but for its nightlife. For dancing, El Turf is an elegant annex of Rio’s racing club, turned into a high-tech disco within a classical shell. Each marble table has the innovation of a self-service tap for draft beer, with a meter tallied by the waiter when you’re ready to go. The mood is gentle, like a New York club full of dancing young Brazilians who, from the neck down, could not possibly be Anglo-Saxons.
The national genius for music ranges in this century from the classical composer Heitor Villa-Lobos to the many genres of popular music which seem to be everywhere in this city. The best known outside Brazil, of course, is the bossa nova, which so hypnotized the world in the 1960s. A reliable spot to hear first-rate bossa is Chiko’s—a sleek, elegant club with a jungle of tropical plants behind the piano. Another is the renovated Banco do Brasil Cultural Center downtown, with several concert spaces.
Best of all, though, is to visit one of the samba clubs—like the Casa da Mae Joana, where I heard some of the most beautiful music of my life one breezy midnight; or Sobrenatural, up in Santa Teresa just near the Bar de Arnaudo. Of the big dance-halls, I preferred Estudantina Musical. (These places often don’t get going till midnight.) A tiny spot where you can hear great samba at dinnertime and get a good pizza is the Butiquim do Martinho, set improbably in a huge shopping mall.
No matter where you are, though, no matter what instruments, the magic seems the same: the glorious melodies unfurl, the lyrics follow in their soft Portuguese diction. These songs will always be Rio, and evoke the era when Rio was an ideal to the rest of the world. The 1950s and ’60s were its time; to hear that music is to dwell in the eternal Rio, that majestic beach of the soul between verdant mountains— the city which the sea folds in an endless embrace as Christ the Redeemer looks down on the beautiful men and women dancing and blesses them with a loving melody that time cannot silence, a melody that will go on as long as these things matter.
Thursday, January 15, 1998
Ronald Wright's A SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE
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Sunday, December 7, 1997
Cape Ann
Written in 1997 for the New York Times Magazine
Anyone who lives on Cape Ann, Massachusetts, and actually leaves from time to time, gets used to explaining the map and the world in this way: No, we’re the other cape. North of Boston. That’s right, the small one . . . . And after a few years (to those of us who aren’t natives) this becomes a method of assessing one’s allegiance, because everybody who lives here eventually realizes that we are really inhabiting an island, linked to the big mainland only on sufferance and by a couple of mere bridges which emphasize the disconnection each time they let us on and off.
Cape Ann is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean on three sides and poked into by salt rivers on the fourth. It is a floating world complete unto itself. Though its corpus is all jagged granite, marsh, and moors, its psychology is that of an island drifting seaward, snagged only tenuously alongside the continent by steel and concrete, feeding for centuries off the fish of the sea. The people are islanders in mind and personality, insular through and through, with all the obsessions, satisfactions, faiths, frustrations, and pleasures of islanders. We know our cape in detail and claim you can never truly know more than a smidgin of it. We go to Boston, 38 miles away, as reluctantly as possible. We begrudgingly call ourselves the other cape, then snicker inwardly when strangers think they have misheard the name—and we are quietly relieved.
Socially, Cape Ann is two towns that are quite distinct; in shape it might be a liquefied clock by Dalí. Between five and seven there is Gloucester, once the busiest fishing port in the country, ever unsure how to deal with a depleted profession. Even today the small city mostly resembles the Edward Hopper paintings that caught its hilly, vagrant harbor light, its forlorn cemeteries and rail yard, its glowing clapboard-lined streets. It can still boast a fleet of lobstermen, and for half the year whale-watch boats go out to sport alongside the agile humpbacks, while at least one schooner under full sail plies the great embrace of Gloucester’s harbor.
Rockport, at two o’clock, is a strenuously picturesque boomtown, its summer streets lined with tourist flypaper and endless, self-parodying art galleries selling paintings of what you see when you turn around. Those streets in winter are barely recognizable, blocked with snow and devoid of human life, with a few boats rocking in a muttering and senile sea. This is maybe a Gloucesterite being envious of the town’s summer lucre: in fact Rockport has a superb setting, with grand oceanic vistas, seaside inns, Twin Lights (the only double lighthouses in the world), and the cunning to keep day tripper money visiting the motley shops year after year. If much of it seems immeasurably more bogus than when I was a kid—except for a wonderfully rickety art movie-house, upstairs in an old meeting hall—many of us are grateful that Rockport’s hullabaloo is confined to one season, and that its dread of liquor until very recently kept it a dry town which sent visitors to Gloucester restaurants in search of a drink.
There is more to Cape Ann than these rivals. There are the satellite communities of Magnolia, with its gray castle built in a Gothic-medieval hodgepodge by the millionaire inventor John Hammond; and of Essex, with a shipbuilding museum on the river by idyllic marshes where an industry once flourished, and a long honor-guard of clam shacks and antique shops, each waiting for its inventive millionaire. Both are “up the line” or “over the bridge”—meaning off-cape. Beaches of grandeur stretch within easy reach: Wingaersheek, Crane (in Ipswich), Singing Beach (in Manchester-by-the-Sea, formerly mere Manchester). Still, the only way to get to know Cape Ann is to drive all the way around it, on the shore road (127). This takes less than an hour.
You follow the coast through a litany of brief villages, and personalized coves which look as if the inflatable sea-monster that appears on 19th century maps has taken big bites out of the shore. Goose Cove, Bay View, Lobster Cove, the Mill, Halibut Point, Annisquam, Pigeon Cove, Riverdale, Plum Cove, Lanesville, Bass Rocks, Folly Cove: many have their own idiosyncratic beaches and perhaps a tiny post office, a softball field, a few old barns hidden in trees, a futuristic home dominating a point, a variety store amid a strip of stalwart houses huddled together, an art gallery shut tight, lanes heading down to the glittering water, offshoot roads leading you astray. Though these villages have no validity to the census takers, their limits and their personalities are quite real to their denizens.
One tributary of 127 worth pursuing is along Gloucester’s East Main Street to Rocky Neck. The Neck, which gazes out on wooden houses standing precariously above Smith’s Cove, can be a mini-Rockport in the summer, with waterside restaurant-bars where you can try the fried piece of cod which passeth all under-standing. But the view of fishing boats is an eternal image of the town, and the switchback lanes are shaded and lovely. From the Neck the road becomes Eastern Point Boulevard, and just past Niles Beach it leads down Eastern Point to the cape’s largest mansions and most majestic views. A little farther on is the so-called Back Shore, with its big fair-weather hotels gazing over the rocks, and eventually the stunning sweep of Good Harbor Beach.
Settled in 1623, Cape Ann was early on a fishing center, but in the last two centuries its other lifeblood was granite. (Stone for Union Station in Washington, D.C. came from here.) Today the abandoned rock quarries behind Lanesville and Rockport are fresh water swimming-canyons in the summer, access permitting. The huge stone walls that one sees everywhere belong to another age, as does a fishing fleet that historically numbered 350 boats and is now a few dozen and going down—the once-teeming banks overfished, the rooted way of life tottering. The lobstermen and clamdiggers will keep on, Gloucester’s frozen fish factories will survive on catch from all over the world, but whether fishing itself will be successfully replaced by light industry or, as a cynical friend says, by “cuteness and overdevelopment,” is an open question.
Visitors all see the harbor and the remnants of the fleet, and the famous fisherman’s statue along the boulevard—the man at the wheel staring out across the enormous arc of the harbor, past Ten Pound Island. (He was recently joined by a nearby statue of the fisherman’s wife.) Yet no site is more moving in this regard than the Gloucester City Hall, an 1870 Victorian edifice which resembles a French mairie. Within are vibrant WPA murals, a marble Winged Victory gracing the prow of a dory, a tin-roofed auditorium upstairs where Buffalo Bill and P.T. Barnum held forth. And, all around, reminders:
A Shipwrecked Sailor,
Buried on this coast,
Bids you set sail.
Full many a gallant ship,
When we were lost,
Weathered the gale.
So reads a carved wooden bas-relief of waves. Lining the walls of a dark staircase are more sobering plaques, the death toll of men who perished at sea from 1874 to 1978. (At the end of the 19th century, the fleet routinely lost fifteen boats and a hundred men a year.) The names make clear Gloucester’s immigrant influx. Largely Yankee and Irish before the Civil War, they were soon joined by Nova Scotians. Next came Portuguese, and Italians early in the 20th century; each successful generation whose sons could quit fishing thus made room for another immigrant group. The Italians helped bring in gas-powered boats that would gradually replace the large fleet of sailing schooners.
Much of Gloucester’s appeal lies in the fact that it has one of everything, in that small-town way which is in fact highly efficient. On two blocks of Main Street, for example, there is a school of art for children; a higgledy-piggledy antiques store whose treasures regularly surprise the proprietor; a bistro to equal any in the state; a thriving Mexican restaurant; fine vintage clothing, record, and photo shops; a health food emporium, an Army-Navy store, a barber shop with a whirling tricolor pole; several fishermen’s bars whose shadows remain a respite from the glare of daylight; and a genuine caffé whose pastries rival any in Sicily. There’s the added warmth of an unexpectedly superb local library, a bookstore defending its terrain against the internet, and one prodigal used bookshop. (A few miles away, little Lanesville has arguably the very best in the country specializing in nautical works.) There is also an active local symphony, a strong jazz scene built around the late, inspirational trumpeter Herb Pomeroy, and a busy repertory theater, the creation of Israel Horovitz—who often writes plays set here.
At Halloween one sees the mordant humor of the Gloucesterite writ large. For at least a month you find mock-corpses everywhere—lynched from tree limbs, upended in trash barrels, flung over hedges, pinioned on roofs. These murdered scarecrow dummies are more ghoulish than any pumpkin grin, with echoes of a pagan respect for and mockery of death. When the Vietnam Moving Memorial came to town a decade ago, half of Gloucester turned out to see it; the list of locals who gave their lives in that war was astonishingly long. This is not only a deep-bred patriotism. The equivalent toll of lost fishermen over the decades reminds you that people here are not afraid of punishing labor, nor are they afraid to die.
Every exceptional locale has its singular wisdom. I like to believe that T.S. Eliot, whose boyhood summers here were absorbed into his imagery, was invoking Cape Ann in Ash Wednesday:
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks . . . .
The bestseller and film about a storm that swallowed one of Gloucester’s vessels a few years back generated nationwide interest in its fishing heritage and its bars. With luck this glimmering fame may provide something more lasting than a few perfect T-shirts. It would be providential if Gloucester could find more in the mythos of, say, Kipling’s Captains Courageous than just a name for a restaurant; if it could make more fitting use of its past. God knows the place has suffered enough.
Cape Ann has magnetized American painters for a hundred and fifty years. John Sloan complained to Van Wyck Brooks early in the century that “. . . there was an artist’s shadow beside every cow in Gloucester, and the cows themselves were dying from eating paint-rags.” Those today who turn the sausage-crank of harbor and seascapes are battening off a strong tradition of painters who saw more than the standard lighthouse, pier, fisherman’s shack. The list of regulars in the first half of this century includes Maxfield Parrish, Milton Avery, Childe Hassam, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, Stuart Davis, Maurice Prendergast. Unlike many scenic spots, Cape Ann drew them back steadily, season after season. The coast and the town views that so attracted them survive intact; streets whose charged geometries Hopper caught are still virtually identical except for the cars.
These modern luminaries were in turn feeding on the example of Winslow Homer, who visited twice and put his artistic blessing on the cape, and native son Fitz Henry Lane, now one of the most prized 19th century American painters. Beyond the precise realism and romantic hues of Lane’s wide-angle harbor views, his work is imbued with a deep mysticism, a reverential glow for the place that awakened him as an artist.
You can find work by most of them at the Cape Ann Historical Association, a Gloucester museum that is an ideal starting-point for any visitor. It has a diorama of the 19th century waterfront, with a fish packing house, schooners, piers, a smoke house, and a marine railway. There is also the boat of Howard Blackburn, the town’s most celebrated schooner captain. Blackburn managed two single-handed Atlantic crossings after having lost his fingers to frostbite in a shipwreck years before; no wonder Main Street’s largest tavern used to be named after him. (Winslow Homer stayed upstairs.) In 1901 Blackburn set the record for a solo crossing, 39 days Gloucester-Lisbon, in this actual “Gloucester sloop”—a standard turn-of-the-century vessel. A local fisherman, Alfred Johnson, had been the first to sail the Atlantic solo, in 1876.
Cape Ann has also drawn writers (this is a somewhat personal subject), who find it a good place to work with few distractions, no pretenses, an inspiring prospect of the sea, and rock slabs that conveniently turn into trampolines you can bounce ideas off. Kipling’s novel is the great evocation of local hard labor, which remains strangely absent from many painters’ work—though it is crucial to Horovitz’s plays. An ongoing poetic tradition includes Charles Olson (constructing a Cape Ann cosmology) and Eliot, who in The Dry Salvages speaks of Gloucester’s magnificent Portuguese church, Our Lady of Good Voyage:
Lady, whose shrine stands on the promontory,
Pray for all those who are in ships, those
Whose business has to do with fish. . .
Repeat a prayer also on behalf of
Women who have seen their sons or husbands
Setting forth, and not returning. . .
Also pray for those who were in ships, and
Ended their voyage on the sand, in the sea’s lips
Or in the dark throat which will not reject them
Or wherever cannot reach them the sound of the sea bell’s
Perpetual angelus.
Naturally, many people move here to get away from the warp and woof of the world —not just the requisite artisans and backyard philosophers, but venture capitalists and commercial filmmakers too. They are often attracted not simply by the physical beauty, which has a distinct personality, but by the pagan sense of Cape Ann as a place of mysterious power generated somewhere deep in the earth. Outsiders dismiss this as island malarkey, and maybe it is—but then again, they don’t live here.
The source of this mysticism is not simply the ocean. Its geographical heart is the vast wooded area known as Dogtown, the cape’s central ice-age tract, crisscrossed with rocky foot (now mountain bike) trails. Dogtown is crucial to the psychology of the Cape Anner: it is our barbaric hinterland, our Amazon basin, on which all our houses are turning their backs to gaze seaward. Dogtown reminds us that an ancient untamed chaos—the wild, unknowable New England woods—is lurking right behind us.
Summer here is the season that brings the visitors. As a friend of mine puts it, “Cape Ann is ten weeks.” He means July through mid-September, because May and June can easily be dismal. Still, soon enough the magic begins, and there comes the steady clatter of shutters taken down, lawns mowed viciously, weekenders trundling about the back roads; the ceremony of unheated houses being opened and sailboats made ready and launched. For those freshly arrived there is sometimes a new bakery to try, and always the antique and junk shops to plunder—that stampede of white elephants. We year-rounders regard the summer residents with a fishy glance, but it is rejuvenating to have fresh faces to unsettle us, to shatter the claustrophobia of a long winter that was followed by bitter spring rains and mud.
Autumn is the happy reverse: the summer people are leaving and we’ll soon have the place to ourselves again. It is, we like to tell each other, the best time. This isn’t true, because the summers here are pure glory, with a thunderous beach light that invades our houses and drives out the grayness of the rocks and details the coast and brings out the excited blue of the sea. Yet the satisfaction of autumn is feeling the edge of a summer that will soon be imaginary linger, just before the sky turns to gunpowder and the leaves to sudden flame; of watching the year’s warmth hover in place for a few more weeks before it all changes.
Anyone who lives on Cape Ann, Massachusetts, and actually leaves from time to time, gets used to explaining the map and the world in this way: No, we’re the other cape. North of Boston. That’s right, the small one . . . . And after a few years (to those of us who aren’t natives) this becomes a method of assessing one’s allegiance, because everybody who lives here eventually realizes that we are really inhabiting an island, linked to the big mainland only on sufferance and by a couple of mere bridges which emphasize the disconnection each time they let us on and off.
Cape Ann is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean on three sides and poked into by salt rivers on the fourth. It is a floating world complete unto itself. Though its corpus is all jagged granite, marsh, and moors, its psychology is that of an island drifting seaward, snagged only tenuously alongside the continent by steel and concrete, feeding for centuries off the fish of the sea. The people are islanders in mind and personality, insular through and through, with all the obsessions, satisfactions, faiths, frustrations, and pleasures of islanders. We know our cape in detail and claim you can never truly know more than a smidgin of it. We go to Boston, 38 miles away, as reluctantly as possible. We begrudgingly call ourselves the other cape, then snicker inwardly when strangers think they have misheard the name—and we are quietly relieved.
Socially, Cape Ann is two towns that are quite distinct; in shape it might be a liquefied clock by Dalí. Between five and seven there is Gloucester, once the busiest fishing port in the country, ever unsure how to deal with a depleted profession. Even today the small city mostly resembles the Edward Hopper paintings that caught its hilly, vagrant harbor light, its forlorn cemeteries and rail yard, its glowing clapboard-lined streets. It can still boast a fleet of lobstermen, and for half the year whale-watch boats go out to sport alongside the agile humpbacks, while at least one schooner under full sail plies the great embrace of Gloucester’s harbor.
Rockport, at two o’clock, is a strenuously picturesque boomtown, its summer streets lined with tourist flypaper and endless, self-parodying art galleries selling paintings of what you see when you turn around. Those streets in winter are barely recognizable, blocked with snow and devoid of human life, with a few boats rocking in a muttering and senile sea. This is maybe a Gloucesterite being envious of the town’s summer lucre: in fact Rockport has a superb setting, with grand oceanic vistas, seaside inns, Twin Lights (the only double lighthouses in the world), and the cunning to keep day tripper money visiting the motley shops year after year. If much of it seems immeasurably more bogus than when I was a kid—except for a wonderfully rickety art movie-house, upstairs in an old meeting hall—many of us are grateful that Rockport’s hullabaloo is confined to one season, and that its dread of liquor until very recently kept it a dry town which sent visitors to Gloucester restaurants in search of a drink.
There is more to Cape Ann than these rivals. There are the satellite communities of Magnolia, with its gray castle built in a Gothic-medieval hodgepodge by the millionaire inventor John Hammond; and of Essex, with a shipbuilding museum on the river by idyllic marshes where an industry once flourished, and a long honor-guard of clam shacks and antique shops, each waiting for its inventive millionaire. Both are “up the line” or “over the bridge”—meaning off-cape. Beaches of grandeur stretch within easy reach: Wingaersheek, Crane (in Ipswich), Singing Beach (in Manchester-by-the-Sea, formerly mere Manchester). Still, the only way to get to know Cape Ann is to drive all the way around it, on the shore road (127). This takes less than an hour.
You follow the coast through a litany of brief villages, and personalized coves which look as if the inflatable sea-monster that appears on 19th century maps has taken big bites out of the shore. Goose Cove, Bay View, Lobster Cove, the Mill, Halibut Point, Annisquam, Pigeon Cove, Riverdale, Plum Cove, Lanesville, Bass Rocks, Folly Cove: many have their own idiosyncratic beaches and perhaps a tiny post office, a softball field, a few old barns hidden in trees, a futuristic home dominating a point, a variety store amid a strip of stalwart houses huddled together, an art gallery shut tight, lanes heading down to the glittering water, offshoot roads leading you astray. Though these villages have no validity to the census takers, their limits and their personalities are quite real to their denizens.
One tributary of 127 worth pursuing is along Gloucester’s East Main Street to Rocky Neck. The Neck, which gazes out on wooden houses standing precariously above Smith’s Cove, can be a mini-Rockport in the summer, with waterside restaurant-bars where you can try the fried piece of cod which passeth all under-standing. But the view of fishing boats is an eternal image of the town, and the switchback lanes are shaded and lovely. From the Neck the road becomes Eastern Point Boulevard, and just past Niles Beach it leads down Eastern Point to the cape’s largest mansions and most majestic views. A little farther on is the so-called Back Shore, with its big fair-weather hotels gazing over the rocks, and eventually the stunning sweep of Good Harbor Beach.
Settled in 1623, Cape Ann was early on a fishing center, but in the last two centuries its other lifeblood was granite. (Stone for Union Station in Washington, D.C. came from here.) Today the abandoned rock quarries behind Lanesville and Rockport are fresh water swimming-canyons in the summer, access permitting. The huge stone walls that one sees everywhere belong to another age, as does a fishing fleet that historically numbered 350 boats and is now a few dozen and going down—the once-teeming banks overfished, the rooted way of life tottering. The lobstermen and clamdiggers will keep on, Gloucester’s frozen fish factories will survive on catch from all over the world, but whether fishing itself will be successfully replaced by light industry or, as a cynical friend says, by “cuteness and overdevelopment,” is an open question.
Visitors all see the harbor and the remnants of the fleet, and the famous fisherman’s statue along the boulevard—the man at the wheel staring out across the enormous arc of the harbor, past Ten Pound Island. (He was recently joined by a nearby statue of the fisherman’s wife.) Yet no site is more moving in this regard than the Gloucester City Hall, an 1870 Victorian edifice which resembles a French mairie. Within are vibrant WPA murals, a marble Winged Victory gracing the prow of a dory, a tin-roofed auditorium upstairs where Buffalo Bill and P.T. Barnum held forth. And, all around, reminders:
A Shipwrecked Sailor,
Buried on this coast,
Bids you set sail.
Full many a gallant ship,
When we were lost,
Weathered the gale.
So reads a carved wooden bas-relief of waves. Lining the walls of a dark staircase are more sobering plaques, the death toll of men who perished at sea from 1874 to 1978. (At the end of the 19th century, the fleet routinely lost fifteen boats and a hundred men a year.) The names make clear Gloucester’s immigrant influx. Largely Yankee and Irish before the Civil War, they were soon joined by Nova Scotians. Next came Portuguese, and Italians early in the 20th century; each successful generation whose sons could quit fishing thus made room for another immigrant group. The Italians helped bring in gas-powered boats that would gradually replace the large fleet of sailing schooners.
Much of Gloucester’s appeal lies in the fact that it has one of everything, in that small-town way which is in fact highly efficient. On two blocks of Main Street, for example, there is a school of art for children; a higgledy-piggledy antiques store whose treasures regularly surprise the proprietor; a bistro to equal any in the state; a thriving Mexican restaurant; fine vintage clothing, record, and photo shops; a health food emporium, an Army-Navy store, a barber shop with a whirling tricolor pole; several fishermen’s bars whose shadows remain a respite from the glare of daylight; and a genuine caffé whose pastries rival any in Sicily. There’s the added warmth of an unexpectedly superb local library, a bookstore defending its terrain against the internet, and one prodigal used bookshop. (A few miles away, little Lanesville has arguably the very best in the country specializing in nautical works.) There is also an active local symphony, a strong jazz scene built around the late, inspirational trumpeter Herb Pomeroy, and a busy repertory theater, the creation of Israel Horovitz—who often writes plays set here.
At Halloween one sees the mordant humor of the Gloucesterite writ large. For at least a month you find mock-corpses everywhere—lynched from tree limbs, upended in trash barrels, flung over hedges, pinioned on roofs. These murdered scarecrow dummies are more ghoulish than any pumpkin grin, with echoes of a pagan respect for and mockery of death. When the Vietnam Moving Memorial came to town a decade ago, half of Gloucester turned out to see it; the list of locals who gave their lives in that war was astonishingly long. This is not only a deep-bred patriotism. The equivalent toll of lost fishermen over the decades reminds you that people here are not afraid of punishing labor, nor are they afraid to die.
Every exceptional locale has its singular wisdom. I like to believe that T.S. Eliot, whose boyhood summers here were absorbed into his imagery, was invoking Cape Ann in Ash Wednesday:
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks . . . .
The bestseller and film about a storm that swallowed one of Gloucester’s vessels a few years back generated nationwide interest in its fishing heritage and its bars. With luck this glimmering fame may provide something more lasting than a few perfect T-shirts. It would be providential if Gloucester could find more in the mythos of, say, Kipling’s Captains Courageous than just a name for a restaurant; if it could make more fitting use of its past. God knows the place has suffered enough.
Cape Ann has magnetized American painters for a hundred and fifty years. John Sloan complained to Van Wyck Brooks early in the century that “. . . there was an artist’s shadow beside every cow in Gloucester, and the cows themselves were dying from eating paint-rags.” Those today who turn the sausage-crank of harbor and seascapes are battening off a strong tradition of painters who saw more than the standard lighthouse, pier, fisherman’s shack. The list of regulars in the first half of this century includes Maxfield Parrish, Milton Avery, Childe Hassam, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, Stuart Davis, Maurice Prendergast. Unlike many scenic spots, Cape Ann drew them back steadily, season after season. The coast and the town views that so attracted them survive intact; streets whose charged geometries Hopper caught are still virtually identical except for the cars.
These modern luminaries were in turn feeding on the example of Winslow Homer, who visited twice and put his artistic blessing on the cape, and native son Fitz Henry Lane, now one of the most prized 19th century American painters. Beyond the precise realism and romantic hues of Lane’s wide-angle harbor views, his work is imbued with a deep mysticism, a reverential glow for the place that awakened him as an artist.
You can find work by most of them at the Cape Ann Historical Association, a Gloucester museum that is an ideal starting-point for any visitor. It has a diorama of the 19th century waterfront, with a fish packing house, schooners, piers, a smoke house, and a marine railway. There is also the boat of Howard Blackburn, the town’s most celebrated schooner captain. Blackburn managed two single-handed Atlantic crossings after having lost his fingers to frostbite in a shipwreck years before; no wonder Main Street’s largest tavern used to be named after him. (Winslow Homer stayed upstairs.) In 1901 Blackburn set the record for a solo crossing, 39 days Gloucester-Lisbon, in this actual “Gloucester sloop”—a standard turn-of-the-century vessel. A local fisherman, Alfred Johnson, had been the first to sail the Atlantic solo, in 1876.
Cape Ann has also drawn writers (this is a somewhat personal subject), who find it a good place to work with few distractions, no pretenses, an inspiring prospect of the sea, and rock slabs that conveniently turn into trampolines you can bounce ideas off. Kipling’s novel is the great evocation of local hard labor, which remains strangely absent from many painters’ work—though it is crucial to Horovitz’s plays. An ongoing poetic tradition includes Charles Olson (constructing a Cape Ann cosmology) and Eliot, who in The Dry Salvages speaks of Gloucester’s magnificent Portuguese church, Our Lady of Good Voyage:
Lady, whose shrine stands on the promontory,
Pray for all those who are in ships, those
Whose business has to do with fish. . .
Repeat a prayer also on behalf of
Women who have seen their sons or husbands
Setting forth, and not returning. . .
Also pray for those who were in ships, and
Ended their voyage on the sand, in the sea’s lips
Or in the dark throat which will not reject them
Or wherever cannot reach them the sound of the sea bell’s
Perpetual angelus.
Naturally, many people move here to get away from the warp and woof of the world —not just the requisite artisans and backyard philosophers, but venture capitalists and commercial filmmakers too. They are often attracted not simply by the physical beauty, which has a distinct personality, but by the pagan sense of Cape Ann as a place of mysterious power generated somewhere deep in the earth. Outsiders dismiss this as island malarkey, and maybe it is—but then again, they don’t live here.
The source of this mysticism is not simply the ocean. Its geographical heart is the vast wooded area known as Dogtown, the cape’s central ice-age tract, crisscrossed with rocky foot (now mountain bike) trails. Dogtown is crucial to the psychology of the Cape Anner: it is our barbaric hinterland, our Amazon basin, on which all our houses are turning their backs to gaze seaward. Dogtown reminds us that an ancient untamed chaos—the wild, unknowable New England woods—is lurking right behind us.
Summer here is the season that brings the visitors. As a friend of mine puts it, “Cape Ann is ten weeks.” He means July through mid-September, because May and June can easily be dismal. Still, soon enough the magic begins, and there comes the steady clatter of shutters taken down, lawns mowed viciously, weekenders trundling about the back roads; the ceremony of unheated houses being opened and sailboats made ready and launched. For those freshly arrived there is sometimes a new bakery to try, and always the antique and junk shops to plunder—that stampede of white elephants. We year-rounders regard the summer residents with a fishy glance, but it is rejuvenating to have fresh faces to unsettle us, to shatter the claustrophobia of a long winter that was followed by bitter spring rains and mud.
Autumn is the happy reverse: the summer people are leaving and we’ll soon have the place to ourselves again. It is, we like to tell each other, the best time. This isn’t true, because the summers here are pure glory, with a thunderous beach light that invades our houses and drives out the grayness of the rocks and details the coast and brings out the excited blue of the sea. Yet the satisfaction of autumn is feeling the edge of a summer that will soon be imaginary linger, just before the sky turns to gunpowder and the leaves to sudden flame; of watching the year’s warmth hover in place for a few more weeks before it all changes.
Thursday, August 14, 1997
A Childhood in Nassau
Written in 1997 for Sky magazine
For a writer, childhood is the treasure chest; one has the rest of life to share out by the fistful the amazing, gleaming pirate’s hoard buried many layers deep in the imagination.
When I was a boy growing up in the Bahamas, I used to get up mornings at dawn and go out on our little second-story terrace to look over the jumbled town of Nassau and, beyond its quiet streets, the gradually awakening ocean. Nothing meant more to me then than the startling sight, two mornings a week, of the ocean liners from Miami edging over the horizon, plumed with pipe-swirls of smoke. I would watch each slow ship slip across the water towards me and make the prim turn into harbor and sound its horn, waking everyone on that side of the island. I learned to count on ships’ funnels; I learned geography from watching boats unload their different cargoes.
We didn’t live in Nassau year-round—that would’ve been too good to be true. My mother was a ballet teacher, a Londoner based improbably in Georgia; my father, an American journalist, was perpetually abroad. Soon after I was born in 1957 it made sense for my mother to escape Southern heat every year and assuage her homesickness by bringing us to a guest house in Nassau for the whole summer.
In those bright days Nassau was small, elegant, sophisticated, and intimate (we had the same taxi-driver year after year). Most shops closed Friday afternoons; there was only one casino, run like a private Mayfair gaming club. The town of uneven streets was suffused with the fragrance of oleander and poinciana. Even the architecture had a languor: low, balconied, pink, yellow and lavender buildings in wood or stucco, all shutters, jalousies, and fruit trees in high-walled gardens. Those walls’ modern counterparts, just coming in, were discreet “offshore” banks for the nervous big money of Europe, worried about tax laws and the nuclear threat. Nassau was inexorably British (the Bahamas remained a crown colony until 1973), in ways that are difficult to describe now without sounding like an exercise in nostalgia for Empire.
This was undoubtedly because I saw the place through my mother’s eyes—determined that I would not be brought up wholly American, and delighted at being able to get the latest English novels at the Island Bookshop, or pharmaceuticals and chocolates unavailable in the States, or catch up on London theater gossip in chance conversations on the beach.
Nassau was also very safe. At age five I was allowed to walk around by myself. I’d go down to the Prince George Wharf to gaze at boys my age diving for tossed shillings and the cruise ships disgorging passengers where the fringed horse-buggies awaited them patiently. Here, too, local sloops would be unloading fruit, vegetables and fish, while the mail-boats got ready to “tie loose” for the Out Islands. What is now the Straw Market was then the city marketplace for produce and fish; the straw work was done by Bahamian women sewing away outside under umbrellas (“Can I sell you something, darling?”). The “native” paintings and sculptures, often of real finesse, were mostly done by Haitians.
The only danger for a child alone was that I might get lost, in which case any Nassavian would’ve pointed me back to our guest house. Like my Bahamian playmates I’d mastered a greeting popular then among local men which I was sure would distinguish me from an average tourist brat. It was done by an upright forefinger held around eye-level, flipped forward in a brief gesture with a mix of studied casualness and a hint of the Bogartian toughness copied around the Caribbean then.
Our guest house, the Ocean Spray, was on Bay Street up from a cream-yellow queen called the British Colonial Hotel—ramparts on an imperial scale, flags of visitor countries, and the slowest service in the islands. The little Ocean Spray stood across from what was then a private beach owned by the hotel, a beach divided by a wall too high to see across. One side was for hotel guests, or anyone who paid a beach fee. The other side was public, for Bahamians—who from their side could come up the private side only as far as the tide-mark. This was not quite a color law; that would’ve been too precise for Nassau. It made for a curious counterpoint within my racial education, since in Georgia all my friends were white, and in Nassau they were all black.
I can still see that beach, its sugary expanse punctuated by two coconut palms growing from a common base. It looked across to the western tip of Paradise Island, with its lighthouse set like a candle marking the entrance to Nassau harbor. We’d spend most days there; occasionally there’d be a commotion, as when some Italian sailors caught a shark in the shallows and heroically hauled it in. At day’s end we had only to cross the street to be home. The guest house was run by a family of Syrian emigres called Moses. The daughter, my babysitter, ceaselessly gyrated and shrieked to Elvis Presley records; the mother made wonderful stuffed grape-leaves—they kept vines out back.
I had my own passions, of course. One was mangos, which I resisted trying (they looked too ugly) for years, until my mother persuaded me one hot July afternoon. A plot formed immediately; I feigned sleep that night, waited till she was in bed, then got up stealthily and in darkness assaulted the other mangos ripening on the table. My punishment was being sick for days—little boys shouldn’t consume three mangos singlehanded. Equally addictive were caneps, a sour fruit the size of a large marble that pops out of a green skin into your mouth and refreshes you instantly.
I learned to read there the summer I was four. My favorite haunt quickly became the library, a domed octagonal 18th century building in a little park just behind the main colonial square and post office. Originally the town prison, the bookshelves were in what had been the cells. This added greatly to the lurid allure of books about former Nassau colleagues like Blackbeard—any boy feels an instinctive kinship with pirates.
Another treat, high tea outdoors, often followed a library visit. Nearby soared one of the grandest hotels in the Caribbean, the Royal Victoria, a lovely balconied 19th century wooden manse like a tropical Tara, built for rum-runners and surrounded by glorious, cathedral-like botanical gardens. At the center was a huge banyan tree whose arms cradled a stage where a band played calypsos from tea-time on. Years later it closed, fell into ruin and was recently razed. It would’ve made a great movie set.
Nassau was a calypso town then. Today calypso seems, outside of Trinidad, like a nostalgia-ridden word, conjuring up a phony 1950s Caribbean with all the allure of stale suntan oil. But the music began as an authentic local expression of musicality and wit, and if the Bahamian version (“goombay”) was less sardonic and more melodic than those farther south, this is significant too. A look at a faded 1965 tourist guide reminds me that there were a good dozen fine calypso clubs in Nassau: Dirty Dick’s and Blackbeard’s, the Big Bamboo, the Drumbeat, the Junkanoo. Listen:
When Papa beats his Goombay Drum
From miles around the people come
To hear the rumble of his jungle drum . . .
He beats the rhythm that can give them heat
From swaying hips down to their dancing feet
Recreation, culmination, agitation, great sensation!
When Papa beats upon the Goombay drum . . . .
The greatest Bahamian drummer—he still has his own nightclub—was Peanuts Taylor. Singers? I remember mostly men: Vince Martin, Richie Delamore, and a Haitian, André Toussaint. My favorite was always a grinning toothless man named George Symonette, the tallest man in Nassau, now deceased, with the face of a walrus; he played piano in church on Sundays and calypso till all hours the other days. A few old recordings, long out-of-print, are around again on cassette, with his out-of-tune piano and that delicate croak of a voice. He used to plop me beside him on a piano bench and muse those gentle rhymes that were Nassau, like the one about the king who became Governor-General of the Bahamas:
It was love, love, love alone
Caused King Edward to leave the throne.
I glimpse it all with the vibrancy of a repeated dream, for it was in Nassau with my mother, in childhood, I first had that most adult of sensations—of knowing I was happy, knowing why, and storing it all up against a time when perhaps that would not be as inevitable. So that thirty years on, I have only to hum one of those calypsos, and there my Nassau is again. As she is, too.
For a writer, childhood is the treasure chest; one has the rest of life to share out by the fistful the amazing, gleaming pirate’s hoard buried many layers deep in the imagination.
When I was a boy growing up in the Bahamas, I used to get up mornings at dawn and go out on our little second-story terrace to look over the jumbled town of Nassau and, beyond its quiet streets, the gradually awakening ocean. Nothing meant more to me then than the startling sight, two mornings a week, of the ocean liners from Miami edging over the horizon, plumed with pipe-swirls of smoke. I would watch each slow ship slip across the water towards me and make the prim turn into harbor and sound its horn, waking everyone on that side of the island. I learned to count on ships’ funnels; I learned geography from watching boats unload their different cargoes.
We didn’t live in Nassau year-round—that would’ve been too good to be true. My mother was a ballet teacher, a Londoner based improbably in Georgia; my father, an American journalist, was perpetually abroad. Soon after I was born in 1957 it made sense for my mother to escape Southern heat every year and assuage her homesickness by bringing us to a guest house in Nassau for the whole summer.
In those bright days Nassau was small, elegant, sophisticated, and intimate (we had the same taxi-driver year after year). Most shops closed Friday afternoons; there was only one casino, run like a private Mayfair gaming club. The town of uneven streets was suffused with the fragrance of oleander and poinciana. Even the architecture had a languor: low, balconied, pink, yellow and lavender buildings in wood or stucco, all shutters, jalousies, and fruit trees in high-walled gardens. Those walls’ modern counterparts, just coming in, were discreet “offshore” banks for the nervous big money of Europe, worried about tax laws and the nuclear threat. Nassau was inexorably British (the Bahamas remained a crown colony until 1973), in ways that are difficult to describe now without sounding like an exercise in nostalgia for Empire.
This was undoubtedly because I saw the place through my mother’s eyes—determined that I would not be brought up wholly American, and delighted at being able to get the latest English novels at the Island Bookshop, or pharmaceuticals and chocolates unavailable in the States, or catch up on London theater gossip in chance conversations on the beach.
Nassau was also very safe. At age five I was allowed to walk around by myself. I’d go down to the Prince George Wharf to gaze at boys my age diving for tossed shillings and the cruise ships disgorging passengers where the fringed horse-buggies awaited them patiently. Here, too, local sloops would be unloading fruit, vegetables and fish, while the mail-boats got ready to “tie loose” for the Out Islands. What is now the Straw Market was then the city marketplace for produce and fish; the straw work was done by Bahamian women sewing away outside under umbrellas (“Can I sell you something, darling?”). The “native” paintings and sculptures, often of real finesse, were mostly done by Haitians.
The only danger for a child alone was that I might get lost, in which case any Nassavian would’ve pointed me back to our guest house. Like my Bahamian playmates I’d mastered a greeting popular then among local men which I was sure would distinguish me from an average tourist brat. It was done by an upright forefinger held around eye-level, flipped forward in a brief gesture with a mix of studied casualness and a hint of the Bogartian toughness copied around the Caribbean then.
Our guest house, the Ocean Spray, was on Bay Street up from a cream-yellow queen called the British Colonial Hotel—ramparts on an imperial scale, flags of visitor countries, and the slowest service in the islands. The little Ocean Spray stood across from what was then a private beach owned by the hotel, a beach divided by a wall too high to see across. One side was for hotel guests, or anyone who paid a beach fee. The other side was public, for Bahamians—who from their side could come up the private side only as far as the tide-mark. This was not quite a color law; that would’ve been too precise for Nassau. It made for a curious counterpoint within my racial education, since in Georgia all my friends were white, and in Nassau they were all black.
I can still see that beach, its sugary expanse punctuated by two coconut palms growing from a common base. It looked across to the western tip of Paradise Island, with its lighthouse set like a candle marking the entrance to Nassau harbor. We’d spend most days there; occasionally there’d be a commotion, as when some Italian sailors caught a shark in the shallows and heroically hauled it in. At day’s end we had only to cross the street to be home. The guest house was run by a family of Syrian emigres called Moses. The daughter, my babysitter, ceaselessly gyrated and shrieked to Elvis Presley records; the mother made wonderful stuffed grape-leaves—they kept vines out back.
I had my own passions, of course. One was mangos, which I resisted trying (they looked too ugly) for years, until my mother persuaded me one hot July afternoon. A plot formed immediately; I feigned sleep that night, waited till she was in bed, then got up stealthily and in darkness assaulted the other mangos ripening on the table. My punishment was being sick for days—little boys shouldn’t consume three mangos singlehanded. Equally addictive were caneps, a sour fruit the size of a large marble that pops out of a green skin into your mouth and refreshes you instantly.
I learned to read there the summer I was four. My favorite haunt quickly became the library, a domed octagonal 18th century building in a little park just behind the main colonial square and post office. Originally the town prison, the bookshelves were in what had been the cells. This added greatly to the lurid allure of books about former Nassau colleagues like Blackbeard—any boy feels an instinctive kinship with pirates.
Another treat, high tea outdoors, often followed a library visit. Nearby soared one of the grandest hotels in the Caribbean, the Royal Victoria, a lovely balconied 19th century wooden manse like a tropical Tara, built for rum-runners and surrounded by glorious, cathedral-like botanical gardens. At the center was a huge banyan tree whose arms cradled a stage where a band played calypsos from tea-time on. Years later it closed, fell into ruin and was recently razed. It would’ve made a great movie set.
Nassau was a calypso town then. Today calypso seems, outside of Trinidad, like a nostalgia-ridden word, conjuring up a phony 1950s Caribbean with all the allure of stale suntan oil. But the music began as an authentic local expression of musicality and wit, and if the Bahamian version (“goombay”) was less sardonic and more melodic than those farther south, this is significant too. A look at a faded 1965 tourist guide reminds me that there were a good dozen fine calypso clubs in Nassau: Dirty Dick’s and Blackbeard’s, the Big Bamboo, the Drumbeat, the Junkanoo. Listen:
When Papa beats his Goombay Drum
From miles around the people come
To hear the rumble of his jungle drum . . .
He beats the rhythm that can give them heat
From swaying hips down to their dancing feet
Recreation, culmination, agitation, great sensation!
When Papa beats upon the Goombay drum . . . .
The greatest Bahamian drummer—he still has his own nightclub—was Peanuts Taylor. Singers? I remember mostly men: Vince Martin, Richie Delamore, and a Haitian, André Toussaint. My favorite was always a grinning toothless man named George Symonette, the tallest man in Nassau, now deceased, with the face of a walrus; he played piano in church on Sundays and calypso till all hours the other days. A few old recordings, long out-of-print, are around again on cassette, with his out-of-tune piano and that delicate croak of a voice. He used to plop me beside him on a piano bench and muse those gentle rhymes that were Nassau, like the one about the king who became Governor-General of the Bahamas:
It was love, love, love alone
Caused King Edward to leave the throne.
I glimpse it all with the vibrancy of a repeated dream, for it was in Nassau with my mother, in childhood, I first had that most adult of sensations—of knowing I was happy, knowing why, and storing it all up against a time when perhaps that would not be as inevitable. So that thirty years on, I have only to hum one of those calypsos, and there my Nassau is again. As she is, too.
Tuesday, August 12, 1997
TRAVELERS' TALES
Written, at bargain-basement rates, for a cruise-line magazine that got inserted in ships’ cabins for several months. They did their best not to pay me. Had they given me more space, my list would’ve been ten times as long.
The travel narrative is probably the oldest form of story-telling—dating back to some early hunter who persuaded his fellow men that over behind that weird rock there was something remarkable, well worth going to see or even to eat. The point of travel is to satisfy a hunger; and whether leaving home feeds the imagination or fills a more prosaic need, the person who brings back the news and views and perfumes of faraway lands is part of an honorable tradition.
A great travel book is an intimate encounter not only with foreign places but with a total stranger—the author. First, there's always the question of: How much is he making up? As a travel writer for magazines (and lately, of a book) for many years, I can vouch for the accuracy of most of my colleagues. The way all travel writers do lie is what they leave out: the days when nothing happened, or the trip to the bazaar that was a bore, or the conversations with foreigners who had nothing new to say.
A good travel book is partly a fib, because it gives to messy, sprawling reality the neat, compelling shape of a good novel—by leaving out the daily meaninglessness. Yet a great travel book doesn't make me want to go anywhere; instead it makes me feel I don't have to, because reading already took me there.
What makes a travel book great? It lets me not only see a place but also hear the way foreigners speak and grasp how they think. It surprises me on every other page. Such a book not only assesses the past of a place, but predicts the future as well.
The following five are among my favorites.
THE INNOCENTS ABROAD (Mark Twain)
Back in 1867 the Grand Tour was Europe and the Holy Land, which for an American meant success and enlightenment. A young writer pseudonamed Twain was sent by his San Francisco newspaper on a Grand Tour package cruise for nearly a year. His serialized report still remains one of the funniest, most savage, and cleverest accounts of a journey—and fellow passengers—ever written.
Though the itinerary (New York-Spain-France-Italy-Greece-Constantinople-Jerusalem-Damascus-Egypt-Gibraltar-Bermuda-NY) and the price ($1250, all-inclusive) belong to another century, this is the first modern travel book. The ironic wit, the casual yet packed language, the sense of a frank narrator, and most of all the dialogue are closer in tone to, say, Paul Theroux than to any of Twain's erstwhile predecessors. Here he is on the delights and disappointments of Constantinople, before it became Istanbul:
"When I think how I have been swindled by books of Oriental travel, I want a tourist for breakfast. . . Mosques are plenty, churches are plenty, graveyards are plenty, but morals and whiskey are scarce. The Koran does not permit Mohammedans to drink. Their natural instincts do not permit them to be moral. They say the Sultan has eight hundred wives. This almost amounts to bigamy. It makes our cheeks burn with shame to see such a thing permitted here in Turkey. We do not mind it so much in Salt Lake, however."
THE TRAVELLER'S TREE (Patrick Leigh Fermor)
The quarter-century following the Second World War were the boom years in the Caribbean, when the archipelago became chic and affordable for Americans and Europeans, when it changed the most, and when its hot style—from calypso to the ideal of a tropical beach— seemed to permeate popular culture. The finest travel book to deal with its motley history, moods, and peoples—for there are many Caribbeans—was written by a British high school dropout turned war hero, who had captured a German general in Greece behind enemy lines and turned to writing in peacetime.
Though Fermor's book appeared in 1950, and the islands it describes have altered irrevocably, anybody who visits Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Barbados, Trinidad, Jamaica, Cuba, Dominica, Grenada, St. Kitts, St. Lucia, and several others should know it. Fermor can range easily from the obscene lyrics of a popular song to a dense, allusive description of a voodoo rite or a rain forest, to citing a monk's 18th century journal, to simply sitting in a tiny harbor and setting down what happens. A century from now, this book will be the best record of what that flourishing, fervent Caribbean was, because Fermor stayed fascinated by it all, and especially by the unexpected encounter:
"A young Haitian of extraordinary beauty was standing at the bottom of my bed when I awoke. His shoulders and arms were draped with snake skins. Observing without a word that my eyes had opened, he spread all these treasures across the bedclothes and placed a little stuffed alligator on my breast. Many of the skins had beautiful markings, and one, which, judging by its breadth, must have sheathed an enormous brute, was over seven feet long. But our finances were in such a bad state that I had to refuse them."
ARABIAN SANDS (Wilfred Thesiger)
Wilfred Thesiger—the last British nomad, now nearly ninety—has enjoyed and endured one of the most extraordinary lives of our century, largely spent in difficult, beautiful terrain among little-known and often dangerous tribes. He has set a standard by which all other travelers and explorers can measure themselves. From Abyssinia to the Sudan, Kurdistan to Iraq, Chitral to Hunza, no man has dared more, seen more, or so completely opened himself to experiences outside his culture. What Thesiger saw was almost unknown before him and vanished afterward—like his years in the marshes of southern Iraq, recounted in The Marsh Arabs. His few books stand well outside and above the body of travel literature. They read as great creative journeys of the soul.
His masterpiece, Arabian Sands, details his years spent in the Empty Quarter, the vast desert within a desert spread across Oman and Saudi Arabia. It was then (post–WWII) known only to the bedu who chose to wander its unmappable dunes. No plane had ever flown over it; it could be traversed only by camel. Thesiger explored it for five years, taken in by a bedu tribe, and a decade later wrote a classic account of those years and journeys.
"Their bodies were lean and hard, tempered in the furnace of the desert and trained to unbelievable endurance," he says of his companions. "It was continuous thirst. Sometimes it was twelve days from one well to the next. Sometimes there was no food for several days. . . 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."
ON FIJI ISLANDS (Ronald Wright)
No region has spawned more books of travel than the South Pacific, going back to the voyages of Cook and continuing through the neglected Robert Dean Frisbie. In our own era the fashion has been for the foolhardy effort that tries to swallow the giant ocean and its many societies in one vast gulp; the result has been a lot of third-rate books. One master who knew better is Ronald Wright, author of Cut Stones and Crossroads, Time Among the Maya, and Stolen Continents (which traces the invasion of the New World from the viewpoints of several Native American cultures).
Paradise has a way of stifling, not igniting, even the best writers, but Wright is so knowledgeable and unpretentious, with so much humor and clear-eyed skepticism, and an effortless way of putting characters before the reader, that Fiji ceases to be merely another beautiful set of islands but instead emerges in many-minded depth. All Wright's astringent portraits of history, of island arguments and gossip and intramural warfare, of daring exploration in great sailing-canoes, and of cannibalism, emerge with a calm, deft touch and much perspective. As he puts it:
"More than one writer has used the metaphor of a leaky roof to characterize Fijian society under the assault of the modern world. . . Impending ruin has most often turned out to be change; and change has not yet proved ruinous. Bau, once the terror of the archipelago, is now the shrine of Fijian identity. If the shrine appears slightly neglected, it is worth remembering that the ancient Fijians often neglected the houses of their gods whenever they felt secure."
THE GREAT RAILWAY BAZAAR (Paul Theroux)
Every once in a while a book comes along which defines a genre. When Theroux's masterpiece appeared in 1975, subtitled By Train Through Asia, he was not quite 34, with ten books to his credit, most of them novels. His route, from London on the Orient Express through Europe, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Burma, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, Japan, and back on the Trans-Siberian Railway, played to his diverse strengths as a writer. ("All travel is circular," he remarks. "The Grand Tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home.")
His book is full of unforgettable character sketches, taut glimpses of landscape, and tart social observation; of personal opinion delivered with enormous humor, all in a prose at once musical, flexible, and full of great jokes. The passage of nearly a quarter-century has made the book seem even wiser than it did then, for most of Theroux's political predictions have come true, and he saw certain risky countries right after they opened up or right before they closed down. His writing is so superb it looks easy, but this book will not be bettered anytime soon—and I cannot think of any more fitting last words than Theroux's first:
"Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it. Those whistles sing bewitchment: railways are irresistible bazaars, snaking along perfectly level no matter what the landscape, improving your mood with speed, and never upsetting your drink. . .Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues. . . I sought trains; I found passengers."
The travel narrative is probably the oldest form of story-telling—dating back to some early hunter who persuaded his fellow men that over behind that weird rock there was something remarkable, well worth going to see or even to eat. The point of travel is to satisfy a hunger; and whether leaving home feeds the imagination or fills a more prosaic need, the person who brings back the news and views and perfumes of faraway lands is part of an honorable tradition.
A great travel book is an intimate encounter not only with foreign places but with a total stranger—the author. First, there's always the question of: How much is he making up? As a travel writer for magazines (and lately, of a book) for many years, I can vouch for the accuracy of most of my colleagues. The way all travel writers do lie is what they leave out: the days when nothing happened, or the trip to the bazaar that was a bore, or the conversations with foreigners who had nothing new to say.
A good travel book is partly a fib, because it gives to messy, sprawling reality the neat, compelling shape of a good novel—by leaving out the daily meaninglessness. Yet a great travel book doesn't make me want to go anywhere; instead it makes me feel I don't have to, because reading already took me there.
What makes a travel book great? It lets me not only see a place but also hear the way foreigners speak and grasp how they think. It surprises me on every other page. Such a book not only assesses the past of a place, but predicts the future as well.
The following five are among my favorites.
* * *
THE INNOCENTS ABROAD (Mark Twain)
Back in 1867 the Grand Tour was Europe and the Holy Land, which for an American meant success and enlightenment. A young writer pseudonamed Twain was sent by his San Francisco newspaper on a Grand Tour package cruise for nearly a year. His serialized report still remains one of the funniest, most savage, and cleverest accounts of a journey—and fellow passengers—ever written.
Though the itinerary (New York-Spain-France-Italy-Greece-Constantinople-Jerusalem-Damascus-Egypt-Gibraltar-Bermuda-NY) and the price ($1250, all-inclusive) belong to another century, this is the first modern travel book. The ironic wit, the casual yet packed language, the sense of a frank narrator, and most of all the dialogue are closer in tone to, say, Paul Theroux than to any of Twain's erstwhile predecessors. Here he is on the delights and disappointments of Constantinople, before it became Istanbul:
"When I think how I have been swindled by books of Oriental travel, I want a tourist for breakfast. . . Mosques are plenty, churches are plenty, graveyards are plenty, but morals and whiskey are scarce. The Koran does not permit Mohammedans to drink. Their natural instincts do not permit them to be moral. They say the Sultan has eight hundred wives. This almost amounts to bigamy. It makes our cheeks burn with shame to see such a thing permitted here in Turkey. We do not mind it so much in Salt Lake, however."
THE TRAVELLER'S TREE (Patrick Leigh Fermor)
The quarter-century following the Second World War were the boom years in the Caribbean, when the archipelago became chic and affordable for Americans and Europeans, when it changed the most, and when its hot style—from calypso to the ideal of a tropical beach— seemed to permeate popular culture. The finest travel book to deal with its motley history, moods, and peoples—for there are many Caribbeans—was written by a British high school dropout turned war hero, who had captured a German general in Greece behind enemy lines and turned to writing in peacetime.
Though Fermor's book appeared in 1950, and the islands it describes have altered irrevocably, anybody who visits Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Barbados, Trinidad, Jamaica, Cuba, Dominica, Grenada, St. Kitts, St. Lucia, and several others should know it. Fermor can range easily from the obscene lyrics of a popular song to a dense, allusive description of a voodoo rite or a rain forest, to citing a monk's 18th century journal, to simply sitting in a tiny harbor and setting down what happens. A century from now, this book will be the best record of what that flourishing, fervent Caribbean was, because Fermor stayed fascinated by it all, and especially by the unexpected encounter:
"A young Haitian of extraordinary beauty was standing at the bottom of my bed when I awoke. His shoulders and arms were draped with snake skins. Observing without a word that my eyes had opened, he spread all these treasures across the bedclothes and placed a little stuffed alligator on my breast. Many of the skins had beautiful markings, and one, which, judging by its breadth, must have sheathed an enormous brute, was over seven feet long. But our finances were in such a bad state that I had to refuse them."
ARABIAN SANDS (Wilfred Thesiger)
Wilfred Thesiger—the last British nomad, now nearly ninety—has enjoyed and endured one of the most extraordinary lives of our century, largely spent in difficult, beautiful terrain among little-known and often dangerous tribes. He has set a standard by which all other travelers and explorers can measure themselves. From Abyssinia to the Sudan, Kurdistan to Iraq, Chitral to Hunza, no man has dared more, seen more, or so completely opened himself to experiences outside his culture. What Thesiger saw was almost unknown before him and vanished afterward—like his years in the marshes of southern Iraq, recounted in The Marsh Arabs. His few books stand well outside and above the body of travel literature. They read as great creative journeys of the soul.
His masterpiece, Arabian Sands, details his years spent in the Empty Quarter, the vast desert within a desert spread across Oman and Saudi Arabia. It was then (post–WWII) known only to the bedu who chose to wander its unmappable dunes. No plane had ever flown over it; it could be traversed only by camel. Thesiger explored it for five years, taken in by a bedu tribe, and a decade later wrote a classic account of those years and journeys.
"Their bodies were lean and hard, tempered in the furnace of the desert and trained to unbelievable endurance," he says of his companions. "It was continuous thirst. Sometimes it was twelve days from one well to the next. Sometimes there was no food for several days. . . 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."
ON FIJI ISLANDS (Ronald Wright)
No region has spawned more books of travel than the South Pacific, going back to the voyages of Cook and continuing through the neglected Robert Dean Frisbie. In our own era the fashion has been for the foolhardy effort that tries to swallow the giant ocean and its many societies in one vast gulp; the result has been a lot of third-rate books. One master who knew better is Ronald Wright, author of Cut Stones and Crossroads, Time Among the Maya, and Stolen Continents (which traces the invasion of the New World from the viewpoints of several Native American cultures).
Paradise has a way of stifling, not igniting, even the best writers, but Wright is so knowledgeable and unpretentious, with so much humor and clear-eyed skepticism, and an effortless way of putting characters before the reader, that Fiji ceases to be merely another beautiful set of islands but instead emerges in many-minded depth. All Wright's astringent portraits of history, of island arguments and gossip and intramural warfare, of daring exploration in great sailing-canoes, and of cannibalism, emerge with a calm, deft touch and much perspective. As he puts it:
"More than one writer has used the metaphor of a leaky roof to characterize Fijian society under the assault of the modern world. . . Impending ruin has most often turned out to be change; and change has not yet proved ruinous. Bau, once the terror of the archipelago, is now the shrine of Fijian identity. If the shrine appears slightly neglected, it is worth remembering that the ancient Fijians often neglected the houses of their gods whenever they felt secure."
THE GREAT RAILWAY BAZAAR (Paul Theroux)
Every once in a while a book comes along which defines a genre. When Theroux's masterpiece appeared in 1975, subtitled By Train Through Asia, he was not quite 34, with ten books to his credit, most of them novels. His route, from London on the Orient Express through Europe, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Burma, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, Japan, and back on the Trans-Siberian Railway, played to his diverse strengths as a writer. ("All travel is circular," he remarks. "The Grand Tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home.")
His book is full of unforgettable character sketches, taut glimpses of landscape, and tart social observation; of personal opinion delivered with enormous humor, all in a prose at once musical, flexible, and full of great jokes. The passage of nearly a quarter-century has made the book seem even wiser than it did then, for most of Theroux's political predictions have come true, and he saw certain risky countries right after they opened up or right before they closed down. His writing is so superb it looks easy, but this book will not be bettered anytime soon—and I cannot think of any more fitting last words than Theroux's first:
"Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it. Those whistles sing bewitchment: railways are irresistible bazaars, snaking along perfectly level no matter what the landscape, improving your mood with speed, and never upsetting your drink. . .Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues. . . I sought trains; I found passengers."
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