Written in 1995 for Gourmet magazine
Great cities seem almost unimaginable without great writers. We cannot stroll today's London without Dickens, but where is the ghost of Shakespeare in that labyrinth—especially since most of the city burned a half-century after his death, in the Great Fire of 1666? London made Shakespeare; he came to it as ambitious young Will fresh from the country, and retired as our greatest writer. London gave Will stages to fill and gifted players to write for; his career (alongside colleagues like Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe) fired the few decades of London's theatrical explosion which we take for granted today. Shakespeare's words are immortal, have entered the subconscious of the language, but can we still walk in his Elizabethan footsteps? With a new Globe Theater (begun in 1989) rising on the south bank of the Thames in his honor—a loving, meticulous replica complete at last—I decided to try.
Odd as it seems, Shakespeare's immortality had been almost taken for granted by Londoners for ages. It took an American actor, Sam Wanamaker (1919-93), to make rebuilding the Globe a lifetime goal. On visiting London in the 1950s, Wanamaker was dismayed to find no monument to Shakespeare's theater save a plaque near its original location—a moment's walk from the new Globe. This painstaking reconstruction became Wanamaker's dream and personal battle for four decades; it is now his testament.
The plan is an ambitious one: not only to reconstruct the Globe as accurately as possible, but to build an entire complex around it. This will include a never-built small indoor theater designed by Inigo Jones, the 17th century architectural genius. There'll be shops, a cafe and pub, and a museum. Best of all, the Jones theater will make plays feasible year-round.
Anyone imagining Shakespeare's London must first set aside the idea of a huge modern city. The Tower of London, St. Paul's, and the Globe Theater form a compact triangle which bounds nearly his whole London world. His first book, a poem, was published out of St. Paul's churchyard. Just across the river, the Tower crops up in his historical plays; a Globe audience would've had a sense of the real events happening nearby. This lone square mile really was London back then, with a population of about 200,000. Will came here from Warwickshire near the end of the 1580s, probably as a small-parts actor in a passing company. He spent virtually all of his professional life here, as poet, as actor, shareholder in a theater, and author of thirty-seven plays.
Sixteenth-century London was still medieval, built mainly from timbers. Houses were three crowded stories, stenches were powerful, streets were narrow; you could reach across and shake hands with your neighbor. With a hundred churches, bells were going off constantly. London Bridge, eighteen feet wide, was the only bridge on the Thames, with houses, a chapel, shops, and a palace. It lasted from 1157 until 1831 and survived the Great Fire, which wiped out four hundred streets, 13,000 wooden houses, and three-quarters of the city.
Will never had a permanent London residence; he was usually a lodger, or lived in theatrical digs. At one point he resided with a jeweller or wig-maker on Silver Street, and appeared as a character witness for his landlord's apprentice, who was in love with the man's daughter. In a sense it's remarkable Will survived as long as he did. Marlowe died at twenty-nine, knifed in a tavern brawl; Jonson went to prison for killing a man; London was beset by five plague outbreaks during Will's life, with 100,000 dead. His brother Edmund, an actor in his company, died of it in 1607—he'd kept a home near the theater, a common law wife and an illegitimate child. Shakespeare probably lived with him, and paid for the burial (an unmarked grave) at Southwark Cathedral.
A few Shakespeare associations are in the St. Paul's area, and I saw these before venturing south across the Thames. Across from the Chancery Lane tube stop stands the Staple Inn (1545), a half-timbered Tudor inn which Shakespeare must've known (it's also in Dickens' The Mystery of Edwin Drood). The simple black-and-white vertical stripes, the gables, the small leaded windows, render it a visitor from another age amid modern storefronts. Playhouse Yard, off Friar Street, is a tiny flagstoned back square with bare trees and 18th century gravestones. Originally Blackfriars, a house of Dominican fathers suppressed by Henry VIII, the building eventually became a theater—all that's left is a pile of grey stones in one corner. Here James I saw The Tempest at the time of his daughter's wedding, mirrored in the play by Miranda's.
A rare indoor theater, warm and well-lit, the Blackfriars differed radically from outdoor theaters like the Globe or the Rose. It was smaller, with an audience of maybe five hundred; much more expensive (top tickets cost two shillings); candles made night scenes realistic, and protection from all weathers gave sets a more important role. Scenery could slide on or off the elaborate stage. Music was more important too. An orchestra might play for an hour before a performance, and intermissions were filled by masques (musical entertainments). Will owned a house nearby, but it's unclear if he ever lived there.
More compelling, just in from the Thames, was the Middle Temple Hall. This Inn of Court (a private gentlemen's club for barristers) is where Twelfth Night was first performed (February 2, 1602) by the Lord Chamberlain's Company including Shakespeare. An enormous vaulted hall in dark wood and white stone, with a many-chambered ceiling, stained glass windows (one dated 1570), royal coats-of-arms, and portraits of Queens Elizabeth and Anne, it was the place most evocative of the Bard's era that I saw.
On crossing the river I found my way to the George Inn, near the Bridge tube stop. This late 16th century galleried inn (the last such surviving in London), rebuilt in 1677, now a pub, with Tudor galleries looking down onto an enclosed courtyard, suggests how English theater began outdoors, with the actors on a central platform and the spectators either seated or standing.
A few more blocks' walk brought me to Southwark Cathedral—probably the city's finest Gothic architecture after Westminster Abbey—and where Shakespeare doubtless worshipped since he was for several years an inhabitant of this parish. A fine stained-glass window portrays the famous "Seven Ages of Man" from As You Like It, along with assorted characters from the plays. Though most of the cathedral is from 1875, there's a dubiously restored patch of wood roof from 1400, much original stone interior wall, and displayed inside, a dozen wooden "roof bosses" elaborately carved—a golden pelican and the devil's moon-face, with tongue out.
Here, too, is the tomb of a father of English poetry, John Gower (d. 1408). As poet laureate to both Richard II and Henry IV, Gower was the first poet to write in English (not just Latin and French). Even by Shakespeare's day, the language as a vessel of literature was only about one-hundred-seventy years old.
Theater-wise, the age telescopes easily. In 1558 Elizabeth takes the throne; a year later the first acting company appears. In 1567 the first theater is created at Stepway by James Burbage, who in 1576 builds London's first playhouse, the Theatre at Shoreditch, followed a year later by the Curtain. (The Burbages acted in most of Will's plays; Richard Burbage was the first Hamlet, Othello, and Lear.)
In 1587 the Rose goes up, the first theater in Southwark—the area just across the Thames from St. Paul's—followed by the Swan in 1595.
After Burbage's death his two sons, plus five more of the Lord Chamberlain's Men including a now-successful Shakespeare, dismantle their home Theatre and use its timbers to build the Globe in 1599. Thus this single building's timbers held two different dawns of English theater.
By 1608, when performances at Blackfriars were re-allowed, the Globe had become so popular with actors and audience that from then on the company used indoor Blackfriars in winter and the Globe in summer. When the Globe burned down on 17 July 1613, after a spark onstage reached the thatch roof during Henry VIII, the company rebuilt it with a safer tiled roof and a more ornate interior. Along with all other London theaters, it was closed in 1642 and dismantled in 1644 under orders of Parliament.
The Globe ("this wooden O") was going up as Shakespeare was finishing Henry V. Soon after, Julius Caesar premiered there in 1599, followed by a decade of hits that made it London's most popular playhouse: As You Like It, Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, All's Well That Ends Well, Othello, Measure for Measure, Timon of Athens, King Lear, Macbeth, Pericles, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest (which also ran indoors at Blackfriars), and lastly Henry VIII in 1613. Three years later our man was dead, age fifty-two.
Puns about the Globe run through the plays, as in Jaques' famous "All the world's a stage" speech (As You Like It). Hamlet, which opened in late 1600, jokes about "this distracted globe."
Southwark was full of distractions; it was not, legally or psychologically, part of the City of London. The Globe, Swan, and Rose Theatres, due south across London Bridge, lay in the part of Southwark called Bankside, a suburb near a playgoing public but away from the city fathers—rather like London's Soho today, a place for leisure and pleasure. The disorder following several political plays had set city authorities against theaters. Plays meant crowds, therefore pickpockets, vice, politics, pestilence—plague was so common that playhouses were closed in 1594 for health reasons.
Bankside also was home to bordellos, cockfighting, and bear-baiting arenas—a bear chained to posts was attacked by mastiffs while a crowd ate, drank, cheered. This dank, dirty, illicit setting became the womb of Elizabethan theater; the overworked air of its motley taverns encouraged immortal beauty.
No construction plans remain of the original Globe. The new one is based on recent excavations at the original site which indicate twenty sides. Back then there weren't architects, only master carpenters, and the new Globe has meant a revival of old techniques. Each joint is individually fitted, held in place by pegs, using green oak that seasons as it wears: an Elizabethan pre-fab. A plaster of sand, lime, and cow-hair was applied in many coats, the biggest plastering job in Europe in two centuries. The main roof is thatch, of water, reed, and sedge. The first Globe's thatch had been long banned in London as a fire hazard, but this law wasn't enforced outside the City. As originally, the new Globe's exterior will be painted white.
Walking around the new Globe, it's easy to imagine oneself back in time. A flag flying, visible across the Thames, meant a performance that afternoon, from 2 till 4:30. (Never Sundays.) Beer and hazelnuts were served throughout. If you could afford a seat in the gallery you were well-covered; if you stood you got rained on. The area around the stage was raked so those standing ("groundlings") in back could see; the stage itself was raised to guard against patrons who got carried away during a battle scene and jumped down to join the battle, but wielding real swords. The stage was shaded for the actors' benefit; a squinting audience sat or stood in the sun.
The most expensive seats were in a gallery in the backstage wall, even though their view was of the actors' backs. Back then, it was more important to show your face than to see an actor's. Hearing the lines clearly was most important of all.
In Shakespeare's day ticket prices were simple. A penny allowed you to stand in the area around the stage. Two pennies got you a seat in a gallery. Three on up to six pence got you a cushioned, choicer seat. You paid on entering by one of the two doors. Each money-gatherer had a box, and took the money to an office backstage before the performance: hence the box office.
Scenery was rudimentary, resulting in a customary richness of language; audiences were used to conjuring fields, castles, cliffs, or wondrous isles. Costumes could, however, be fairly sumptuous—aristocrats' castoffs. Female roles were played by adolescent boys before their voices broke. Companies generally had less than two dozen members and most actors played several parts in a play. Productions changed frequently; one company put on 38 plays in a single season, 21 of which were entirely new.
Seats were probably a series of high steps, and an audience could be squeezed in without restrictions. The new Globe's seating will reduce by half the original, which could pack in about 3000 people: 2000 sitting, 1000 standing. The theater had three stories, and its stage roof was an engineering feat that ranked alongside London's major hall roofs of the period, because it sprang from just two "Herculean" pillars on the stage itself. Its ceiling was blue, with signs of the zodiac—in a superstitious age, most houses still kept images to guard against the evil eye.
It is tremendously moving to explore the rebuilt Globe, as if witnessing a rectification of a great wrong; surely this is where, though he belongs everywhere, Shakespeare most belongs.
For now sits Expectation
In the air . . . .
Shakespeare wrote in Henry V in 1599, while the first Globe was being built. Now, four hundred years later, having tirelessly honored his birthplace, we are at last rebuilding his home. As frustrating as the lack of biographical material is, it's perhaps appropriate that we should be sent back to the plays by all we don't know about the life. Entering our new Globe, we try to conjure Will's London; traipsing after a ghost, we find his fading footfalls, the vast humane richness of his words, an anagram in his name (William Shakespeare! We all make his praise!), then only wonder.
Friday, July 7, 1995
Saturday, January 28, 1995
Is That A Remote Control In Your Croissant?
For over a decade now I have been a frequent traveller and part-time resident overseas, and nothing has startled me more over the miles and years—in Paris, London, Amsterdam, Rome, even Delhi, Papeete, and Kuala Lumpur—than to see how crowded European and Asian television is with bad American programs. Say what you like about foreigners stepping on our toes in certain marketplaces; on the other side of the big water, life is not all Masterpiece Theater. On many a distant foreign strand, the Marines have landed once again, but this time with reruns and a vengeance.
It is a global phenomenon. People have joked for ages about the Japanese hunger for American jazz, baseball, and cowboy films; this hunger now includes The A-Team. In Morocco, children living in the ruins of three-hundred-year-old casbahs watch Spider-Man and Transformers just like children everywhere else. On Fiji and Rarotonga people rent weekly episodes, on video-cassette, of Knight Rider. A few years ago in Bahrain I saw on the Saudi channel (where a double execution had been broadcast live moments before) an episode of Dallas, dubbed into Arabic. J.R. as desert sheikh, ruthless head of his tribe: it makes sense.
The most well-travelled show is Baywatch, seen every week in 140 countries by nearly 20% of Earth’s population. So what if we can’t convince the world to buy our hatchbacks? At least we can still sell them the all-American beach gal; we must be doing something right.
This is an awfully bland candy we are hawking internationally, doing more than our fair share to homogenize the world into a boring place. Foreigners have long looked to movies as the best of U.S. culture: Hollywood has been arguably our most persuasive, popular ambassador in the 20th century. But Orson Welles or John Wayne are one thing, Hardcastle and McCormick another.
It is cold comfort to think that tastes most provincially American, like Johnny Carson, were for a long time not exported at all—Carson, anonymous, could enjoy an annual vacation, going unrecognized in the stands at Wimbledon every summer. Those days are long gone. Oprah (her diets, her subtle reportial style, her easy charm) is exported now all over the place, almost as well known on the Leidseplein as on Main Street.
To live abroad, in the middle of this American tsunami—a true imperialism—is different than catching it on a hotel set: you can watch the wave hit. In Holland, for example, nearly everyone under fifty speaks English; anyone under thirty-five is fluent. One major reason is undoubtedly that their most popular programs have long been ours, broadcast with Dutch subtitles. When I lived there in the mid-’80s, Magnum P.I., Twilight Zone, Webster, The Smurfs, The Muppets, Murder She Wrote, Simon & Simon, and The Love Boat dominated Nederlands TV.
It was disconcerting to balance the televised British contribution (BBC Shakespeare, three plays a week) versus those more sobering U.S. offerings. Holland’s two channels went on the air in mid-afternoon and shut down at midnight—which may partially explain why the Dutch are avid readers. Dutch TV sets also received Belgium (Hotel) with only one channel, and West Germany (Dynasty) with three. The situation struck me as comically quaint; three of Europe’s most prosperous countries had as many channels put together as, say, Boston.
That has all changed. The new Germany has fifteen channels, but with that much time to fill, we still maintain our stranglehold. The unified people who gave us not only two world wars but also Goethe, Beethoven, and the foundations of modern philosophical thought now are being repaid with Matlock, Daktari, Dr. Quinn, Superman, Doogie Howser, Airwolf, the ubiquitous Baywatch (“Die Rettungschwimmer von Malibu”) and Sesamstrasse—one, at least, to be proud of. Our typical film offering, on Sunday night just before Kojak? Germans can choose Caddyshack or Raise the Titanic! It would be kinder and gentler to lower the Atlantic.
Very well, you might argue. It’s not our fault; they don’t have to buy this rubbish. Of course, neither do we. My objection is that by virtue of all these shows being ready-made, cheaply available for dubbing and distribution, the low common denominator of the U.S. public—the mud of the American creative unconscious—has now established itself as the terra infirma of the rest of the plugged-in world. It should stop us believing that (despite Monty Python and Masterpiece Theater) European TV is so much better. The fact is, most of their shows were our shows first.
This obvious truth didn’t penetrate my starving imagination until I actually moved overseas and settled, first in Amsterdam, then Paris. I remember that first year abroad: a highly informal poll among my Dutch friends showed that Hill St. Blues, Cheers, and The Bill Cosby Show were the most popular imports. (The Dutch still offer endless soccer matches and well-made documentaries of every sort to fill the interstices of time between U.S. shows). Miami Vice sauntered ashore on the continent without making much splash anywhere. Dutch women seemed immune to Don Johnson; as one blonde Amsterdammer told me, “He doesn’t shave, so what? Neither does my boyfriend, and Hans has better taste in clothes.”
Back then the show that, oddly, seemed to cut across all European frontiers in terms of popularity—the Baywatch, or even, if you will, the Don Quixote of its era—was Starsky & Hutch. In some indefinable way it seemed to sum up Americans for everybody else—“it’s the States, it’s not real anyway.” In Rome I knew an international welfare worker (a Brit, an Oxford graduate) who loved to take a long bath and then, wrapped in a towel, watch Starsky & Hutch with the sound turned up so loud he couldn’t hear that the United Nations was calling him on the phone. Clearly a show as innocuous and awful as Starsky & Hutch could be so popular all over Europe only because it seemed to offer the world, totally, America as it imagines itself.
For over the last couple of decades, a sea-change has taken place: popular culture, once overwhelmingly local, has become the same American soup warmed up everywhere. More than Rambo’s Hollywood, or the multinational rock world, it’s TV shows that have done this. The foreign obsession with all things American has settled into a condition less noticeable but more dangerous: an addiction.
The Germanic situation grips other countries. The Brits, with about twenty-five channels and the best TV programming in Europe, also still watch (among many others) Falcon Crest, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Time Tunnel, Happy Days, My Three Sons, Lassie, The Beverly Hillbillies, Hogan’s Heroes, Young and the Restless, thirtysomething, Death Valley Days, Buck Rogers, and (last and irrefutably least) not Troilus and Cressida, but Donny and Marie.
The Spanish, with eleven channels, like to come up with their own bad programs; from us they rely on Burke’s Law, Matlock, Get Smart (“El superagente 86”), L.A. Law (“La ley de Los Angeles”), Knight Rider (“El coche fantastico”), Roseanne, Santa Barbara, and, you guessed it, “Beavis y Butt-head”. Given twenty-three channels, the Italian love for opera involves mainly soaps (Paradise Beach, Santa Barbara, Dynasty, Dallas, Melrose Place) and crime (Perry Mason, Dragnet, Mannix, T.J. Hooker, the F.B.I.), with a dash of science fiction (Superman, The Love Boat). The Turks still follow Bonanza, Columbo, Zorro, and that ideal harem-girl, I Dream of Jeannie. All these countries overnight multiplied tenfold their original two or three channels, overwhelming an innocent population.
The French like to keep matters complex, contradictory, and French. With six regular channels and twenty-odd satellite and cable alternatives, they’re particular about which interlopers to admit. TNT isn’t allowed in “out of fear that the French love of all those old movies would take away business from the French channels,” as one longtime U.S. diplomat told me diplomatically.
Peace is only war with evening gloves on. BBC-1, highly popular, got thrown out while CNN was allowed to remain; it’s OK presumably for the French to learn American but not English. Only one channel, Canal Plus, shows films or series in the original language (subtitled not dubbed)—Fermez cette porte! And each network has a limit on how many foreign shows are permitted.
Even so, the French see NYPD Blue, Mission Impossible, Perry Mason, Tarzan, The Untouchables (“Les Incorruptibles”); Cannon, Chips, Streets of San Francisco, Twin Peaks, Moonlighting, and Highlander. There’s “Docteur Quinn,” “Deux Flics a Miami,” “Dans la chaleur de la nuit,” “Dream On” plus The A-Team (“Agence Tous Risques”) and every weekday, along with our usual lavish soap operas, Magnum and The Love Boat (“La Croisière S’Amuse”). And the French adore U.S. basketball; as my faithful diplomat put it, “The Froggies love to watch any game played by tall blacks whom Americans are still oppressing at $10 million a year.”
MTV and CNN have penetrated most everywhere. And everybody, but everybody, sees Baywatch. A leading London literary agent, a woman, told me, “After a hard day fighting for high prices for books I haven’t read, I love to come home, drink, and watch those California people dragging that red thing all over the beach.”
Many of these shows are nearly current. Stranger, throughout Europe, is to observe the ongoing phenomenon of the Sky Channel. This was for most of Western Europe their first equivalent of cable, so inexpensive (and with practically no alternatives) that virtually everyone subscribed. It continues to flourish, even as Nickelodeon, Bravo, The Children’s Channel, the Family Channel, AsiaNet, TLC, and many others appeared on the scene (depending on which country).
Based in England, like some mental ray-gun, Sky beams over to the continent twenty-four hours a day of sports (including NFL, NBA, & skateboard action), children’s cartoons, rock videos, and antique American reruns. When I moved to Amsterdam, the Sky broadcast only from mid-afternoon until one a.m.; Europe hadn’t yet learned the pleasures of all-day TV. Just enough of a bad thing, you say. Trash I thought I’d escaped forever—who remembers The Magician, with Bill Bixby? or The Millionaire?—had, thanks to Sky, been granted a second coming, a leasehold on the Old World.
So an eight-year-old Dutch friend of mine named Pieter could watch Lost In Space and Daniel Boone on weekends. Every night he watched Green Acres, The Brady Bunch, The Lucy Show, The Flying Nun, Dennis the Menace, and Wells Fargo. Like many of us, he first glimpsed Ronald Reagan on the prairie, hat in hand. Today an eight-year-old Sky fan gets Rin Tin Tin, Family Ties, Kung Fu, The Rifleman, Beverly Hills 90210, Melrose Place, Barney Miller, Night Court, Peyton Place, As the World Turns, and Knots Landing. Thus do dodos rise again as phoenixes.
What amazed me most back then was not that Pieter was being brought up on the same empty-headed dreck as many American children, assuring an aversion to something as demanding as reading a book on both sides of the Atlantic, but that these shows’ creaky black-and-white outdatedness seemed not to matter to him at all. I didn’t expect Pieter to experience the same frisson of recognition that I felt on seeing Will Robinson and Dr. Smith wandering across the identical bushy stretch of California soundstage desert that turns up light-years later beneath Mr. Spock’s boots. But I was surprised that to a boy weaned on the Star Wars series’ special effects, the Robot never seemed clunky or the wobbly spaceship laughable.
To Pieter, and to many European adults accustomed for years to watching these creaky relics, the United States exists in a Rod Serling time warp in which, to their eyes, shows made thirty years apart (Eisenhower to Bush, say) seem part of the same eternal American television landscape. In the way that the Alps or Paris exist as a myth to many Americans who haven’t visited—and even many who have—“TV America” has acquired an Oz-like allure.
Our cities are full of high-speed car chases, cheek by jowl with suburban homes run by sarcastic warm-hearted maids, sometimes non-Caucasian; the parents are happy together, in a brother-sister way; no one drinks, except in the most lavish settings; nonetheless, cocaine dealers, cowboys and cheap gunsels abound. And perhaps such a unified, diverse TV nation is correct. Sister Bertrille and Arnold Ziffel the Pig and Lucy and obese immobile detectives and sunstruck superstarlets all come from the same Never-Neverland, or at least carry similar passports.
And yet these shows, rendered into nostalgia by the dim glow of childhood (I watched them sometimes, and still read a lot) now make me angry, and even a bit ashamed. It embarrasses me to see foreign children passing their time on U.S. junk that seems more cut-rate and secondhand for being so old and mildewed. I have nothing against Star Trek, but it sends shivers up my spine to know Calcuttans follow its episodes as avidly as those of the Ramayana.
Perhaps I’m simply being grumpy; but seeing how popular all these old and new shows are worldwide has reduced my wonder at why, specifically, so many foreigners consider Americans not only naive but a bit stupid as well. Is it any wonder, when these shows are the daily image we send them of ourselves? The final wonder is not that when American television empties its garbage cans, it does so in, say, Europe’s direction; but that Europeans, like us, holler for more and more.
It is a global phenomenon. People have joked for ages about the Japanese hunger for American jazz, baseball, and cowboy films; this hunger now includes The A-Team. In Morocco, children living in the ruins of three-hundred-year-old casbahs watch Spider-Man and Transformers just like children everywhere else. On Fiji and Rarotonga people rent weekly episodes, on video-cassette, of Knight Rider. A few years ago in Bahrain I saw on the Saudi channel (where a double execution had been broadcast live moments before) an episode of Dallas, dubbed into Arabic. J.R. as desert sheikh, ruthless head of his tribe: it makes sense.
The most well-travelled show is Baywatch, seen every week in 140 countries by nearly 20% of Earth’s population. So what if we can’t convince the world to buy our hatchbacks? At least we can still sell them the all-American beach gal; we must be doing something right.
This is an awfully bland candy we are hawking internationally, doing more than our fair share to homogenize the world into a boring place. Foreigners have long looked to movies as the best of U.S. culture: Hollywood has been arguably our most persuasive, popular ambassador in the 20th century. But Orson Welles or John Wayne are one thing, Hardcastle and McCormick another.
It is cold comfort to think that tastes most provincially American, like Johnny Carson, were for a long time not exported at all—Carson, anonymous, could enjoy an annual vacation, going unrecognized in the stands at Wimbledon every summer. Those days are long gone. Oprah (her diets, her subtle reportial style, her easy charm) is exported now all over the place, almost as well known on the Leidseplein as on Main Street.
To live abroad, in the middle of this American tsunami—a true imperialism—is different than catching it on a hotel set: you can watch the wave hit. In Holland, for example, nearly everyone under fifty speaks English; anyone under thirty-five is fluent. One major reason is undoubtedly that their most popular programs have long been ours, broadcast with Dutch subtitles. When I lived there in the mid-’80s, Magnum P.I., Twilight Zone, Webster, The Smurfs, The Muppets, Murder She Wrote, Simon & Simon, and The Love Boat dominated Nederlands TV.
It was disconcerting to balance the televised British contribution (BBC Shakespeare, three plays a week) versus those more sobering U.S. offerings. Holland’s two channels went on the air in mid-afternoon and shut down at midnight—which may partially explain why the Dutch are avid readers. Dutch TV sets also received Belgium (Hotel) with only one channel, and West Germany (Dynasty) with three. The situation struck me as comically quaint; three of Europe’s most prosperous countries had as many channels put together as, say, Boston.
That has all changed. The new Germany has fifteen channels, but with that much time to fill, we still maintain our stranglehold. The unified people who gave us not only two world wars but also Goethe, Beethoven, and the foundations of modern philosophical thought now are being repaid with Matlock, Daktari, Dr. Quinn, Superman, Doogie Howser, Airwolf, the ubiquitous Baywatch (“Die Rettungschwimmer von Malibu”) and Sesamstrasse—one, at least, to be proud of. Our typical film offering, on Sunday night just before Kojak? Germans can choose Caddyshack or Raise the Titanic! It would be kinder and gentler to lower the Atlantic.
Very well, you might argue. It’s not our fault; they don’t have to buy this rubbish. Of course, neither do we. My objection is that by virtue of all these shows being ready-made, cheaply available for dubbing and distribution, the low common denominator of the U.S. public—the mud of the American creative unconscious—has now established itself as the terra infirma of the rest of the plugged-in world. It should stop us believing that (despite Monty Python and Masterpiece Theater) European TV is so much better. The fact is, most of their shows were our shows first.
This obvious truth didn’t penetrate my starving imagination until I actually moved overseas and settled, first in Amsterdam, then Paris. I remember that first year abroad: a highly informal poll among my Dutch friends showed that Hill St. Blues, Cheers, and The Bill Cosby Show were the most popular imports. (The Dutch still offer endless soccer matches and well-made documentaries of every sort to fill the interstices of time between U.S. shows). Miami Vice sauntered ashore on the continent without making much splash anywhere. Dutch women seemed immune to Don Johnson; as one blonde Amsterdammer told me, “He doesn’t shave, so what? Neither does my boyfriend, and Hans has better taste in clothes.”
Back then the show that, oddly, seemed to cut across all European frontiers in terms of popularity—the Baywatch, or even, if you will, the Don Quixote of its era—was Starsky & Hutch. In some indefinable way it seemed to sum up Americans for everybody else—“it’s the States, it’s not real anyway.” In Rome I knew an international welfare worker (a Brit, an Oxford graduate) who loved to take a long bath and then, wrapped in a towel, watch Starsky & Hutch with the sound turned up so loud he couldn’t hear that the United Nations was calling him on the phone. Clearly a show as innocuous and awful as Starsky & Hutch could be so popular all over Europe only because it seemed to offer the world, totally, America as it imagines itself.
For over the last couple of decades, a sea-change has taken place: popular culture, once overwhelmingly local, has become the same American soup warmed up everywhere. More than Rambo’s Hollywood, or the multinational rock world, it’s TV shows that have done this. The foreign obsession with all things American has settled into a condition less noticeable but more dangerous: an addiction.
The Germanic situation grips other countries. The Brits, with about twenty-five channels and the best TV programming in Europe, also still watch (among many others) Falcon Crest, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Time Tunnel, Happy Days, My Three Sons, Lassie, The Beverly Hillbillies, Hogan’s Heroes, Young and the Restless, thirtysomething, Death Valley Days, Buck Rogers, and (last and irrefutably least) not Troilus and Cressida, but Donny and Marie.
The Spanish, with eleven channels, like to come up with their own bad programs; from us they rely on Burke’s Law, Matlock, Get Smart (“El superagente 86”), L.A. Law (“La ley de Los Angeles”), Knight Rider (“El coche fantastico”), Roseanne, Santa Barbara, and, you guessed it, “Beavis y Butt-head”. Given twenty-three channels, the Italian love for opera involves mainly soaps (Paradise Beach, Santa Barbara, Dynasty, Dallas, Melrose Place) and crime (Perry Mason, Dragnet, Mannix, T.J. Hooker, the F.B.I.), with a dash of science fiction (Superman, The Love Boat). The Turks still follow Bonanza, Columbo, Zorro, and that ideal harem-girl, I Dream of Jeannie. All these countries overnight multiplied tenfold their original two or three channels, overwhelming an innocent population.
The French like to keep matters complex, contradictory, and French. With six regular channels and twenty-odd satellite and cable alternatives, they’re particular about which interlopers to admit. TNT isn’t allowed in “out of fear that the French love of all those old movies would take away business from the French channels,” as one longtime U.S. diplomat told me diplomatically.
Peace is only war with evening gloves on. BBC-1, highly popular, got thrown out while CNN was allowed to remain; it’s OK presumably for the French to learn American but not English. Only one channel, Canal Plus, shows films or series in the original language (subtitled not dubbed)—Fermez cette porte! And each network has a limit on how many foreign shows are permitted.
Even so, the French see NYPD Blue, Mission Impossible, Perry Mason, Tarzan, The Untouchables (“Les Incorruptibles”); Cannon, Chips, Streets of San Francisco, Twin Peaks, Moonlighting, and Highlander. There’s “Docteur Quinn,” “Deux Flics a Miami,” “Dans la chaleur de la nuit,” “Dream On” plus The A-Team (“Agence Tous Risques”) and every weekday, along with our usual lavish soap operas, Magnum and The Love Boat (“La Croisière S’Amuse”). And the French adore U.S. basketball; as my faithful diplomat put it, “The Froggies love to watch any game played by tall blacks whom Americans are still oppressing at $10 million a year.”
MTV and CNN have penetrated most everywhere. And everybody, but everybody, sees Baywatch. A leading London literary agent, a woman, told me, “After a hard day fighting for high prices for books I haven’t read, I love to come home, drink, and watch those California people dragging that red thing all over the beach.”
Many of these shows are nearly current. Stranger, throughout Europe, is to observe the ongoing phenomenon of the Sky Channel. This was for most of Western Europe their first equivalent of cable, so inexpensive (and with practically no alternatives) that virtually everyone subscribed. It continues to flourish, even as Nickelodeon, Bravo, The Children’s Channel, the Family Channel, AsiaNet, TLC, and many others appeared on the scene (depending on which country).
Based in England, like some mental ray-gun, Sky beams over to the continent twenty-four hours a day of sports (including NFL, NBA, & skateboard action), children’s cartoons, rock videos, and antique American reruns. When I moved to Amsterdam, the Sky broadcast only from mid-afternoon until one a.m.; Europe hadn’t yet learned the pleasures of all-day TV. Just enough of a bad thing, you say. Trash I thought I’d escaped forever—who remembers The Magician, with Bill Bixby? or The Millionaire?—had, thanks to Sky, been granted a second coming, a leasehold on the Old World.
So an eight-year-old Dutch friend of mine named Pieter could watch Lost In Space and Daniel Boone on weekends. Every night he watched Green Acres, The Brady Bunch, The Lucy Show, The Flying Nun, Dennis the Menace, and Wells Fargo. Like many of us, he first glimpsed Ronald Reagan on the prairie, hat in hand. Today an eight-year-old Sky fan gets Rin Tin Tin, Family Ties, Kung Fu, The Rifleman, Beverly Hills 90210, Melrose Place, Barney Miller, Night Court, Peyton Place, As the World Turns, and Knots Landing. Thus do dodos rise again as phoenixes.
What amazed me most back then was not that Pieter was being brought up on the same empty-headed dreck as many American children, assuring an aversion to something as demanding as reading a book on both sides of the Atlantic, but that these shows’ creaky black-and-white outdatedness seemed not to matter to him at all. I didn’t expect Pieter to experience the same frisson of recognition that I felt on seeing Will Robinson and Dr. Smith wandering across the identical bushy stretch of California soundstage desert that turns up light-years later beneath Mr. Spock’s boots. But I was surprised that to a boy weaned on the Star Wars series’ special effects, the Robot never seemed clunky or the wobbly spaceship laughable.
To Pieter, and to many European adults accustomed for years to watching these creaky relics, the United States exists in a Rod Serling time warp in which, to their eyes, shows made thirty years apart (Eisenhower to Bush, say) seem part of the same eternal American television landscape. In the way that the Alps or Paris exist as a myth to many Americans who haven’t visited—and even many who have—“TV America” has acquired an Oz-like allure.
Our cities are full of high-speed car chases, cheek by jowl with suburban homes run by sarcastic warm-hearted maids, sometimes non-Caucasian; the parents are happy together, in a brother-sister way; no one drinks, except in the most lavish settings; nonetheless, cocaine dealers, cowboys and cheap gunsels abound. And perhaps such a unified, diverse TV nation is correct. Sister Bertrille and Arnold Ziffel the Pig and Lucy and obese immobile detectives and sunstruck superstarlets all come from the same Never-Neverland, or at least carry similar passports.
And yet these shows, rendered into nostalgia by the dim glow of childhood (I watched them sometimes, and still read a lot) now make me angry, and even a bit ashamed. It embarrasses me to see foreign children passing their time on U.S. junk that seems more cut-rate and secondhand for being so old and mildewed. I have nothing against Star Trek, but it sends shivers up my spine to know Calcuttans follow its episodes as avidly as those of the Ramayana.
Perhaps I’m simply being grumpy; but seeing how popular all these old and new shows are worldwide has reduced my wonder at why, specifically, so many foreigners consider Americans not only naive but a bit stupid as well. Is it any wonder, when these shows are the daily image we send them of ourselves? The final wonder is not that when American television empties its garbage cans, it does so in, say, Europe’s direction; but that Europeans, like us, holler for more and more.
Thursday, December 1, 1994
The Bookshops of London
Written for Forbes-FYI in 1994
Only one city pats the reading man on the back and tells him he’s not crazy; only one holds the word sovereign over the image, esteems the well-said over the well-dressed, welcomes the foreign tongue as much as the local, the exotic foreign bloom alongside the hardy houseplant; can boast it was the home metropolis of infinite Shakespeare, of blind inglorious Milton, of our man Dickens, of Conrad, James, Eliot; only one, despite an inconvenient loss of Empire, remains the capital of our Mother Tongue, and if you can’t guess which one by now, better turn to the fashion feature and pray for rain, boyo, because babes still think men who read are sexy.
A busy man in London with an hour to spare and a few knicker (Brit. slang = ready money) in his pocket can, with the help of the strategem which follows, make a fair sally at some of the world’s best bookshops. And should gout, age, inertia, or an expedition to remote bargain-basement corners of the globe stay you from reaching Piccadilly Circus or Berkeley Square, you may also frequent most of these shops (which nearly all issue catalogues) by mail or fax.
MARCHPANE (16 Cecil Court, tel. 71-836-8661, fax 497-0567) You don’t have to have children to love this shop, but it helps if you were a kid once. Dealing exclusively in children’s and illustrated books, often in 19th and 20th century first editions, their window alone is nostalgia enough to warm an old soldier’s heart: thunder-and-lightning plasma lamp, Daleks from Doctor Who, Dan Dare’s Rocket Gun ("the safety model"—if they’d only guessed what was coming); also the Nuclear Merit Space Pilot Missile Gun complete with Two Safety Missiles featuring Secret Message Chambers, Solar Compass, Interplanetary Selector, & Velocity Control. Did I say this was a bookstore? The first edition of Alice In Wonderland, from 1866, will set you back about $4,000, but illustrated versions of the store’s favorite book can be had for a few dollars, as can original Arthur Rackham fairy-tale or E. H. Shepard Winnie-the-Pooh prints from the ’20s. Try tracing the history of boys aloft, from various editions of Peter Pan through The Great Airship (1914) to Baffling the Air Bandits (’30s) to The Boy’s Book of Jets (’50s).
BELL, BOOK & RADMALL (4 Cecil Court, 71-240-2161, fax 379-1062) is for many the modern literature first-edition bookshop of choice; fairly priced, low-key, unstuffy, yet with only top-quality copies. (A first edition is the first appearance of a book, before it gets reprinted.) Want an original of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), a distinguished blue volume with gold lettering above a London street scene? Or Brave New World (1932), with its art-deco dust jacket of oscillating halos of blue and white clouds around the globe as a blue-white airplane hovers above divided continents? Or On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963) with James Bond’s hand penciling in his coat-of arms? Happily, most of the shop’s 7,500 titles are in the $25-40 range, unlike the Niagara Falls of 20th c. literature, Joyce’s Ulysses, which might set you back about $8,000. (If they don’t have what you seek, try nearby Nigel Williams Books, downstairs at 22 Cecil Court, or Bertram Rota, 31 Long Acre, a few blocks away just by Covent Garden, tel. 71-836-0723, fax 497-9058).
MAGGS BROS. LTD. (50 Berkeley Sq., tel. 71-493-7160, fax 499-2007) An entire elegant house, three floors and a basement full of books, on one of London’s finest squares. A family business for nearly a century and a half, it will remind you that not all the good stuff is in museums yet. You might find on the ground floor, say, a print of Noël Coward by Max Beerbohm for $400; on the next floor, for $2,500, a full leaf from a 16th century Book of Hours, showing St. Apollonia, patron of dentists—or a similar volume complete for $33,000; or in the generous next room, a first edition of Dickens’ Pickwick Papers (1837, issued serialized, in "parts"), for around $5,800, or of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884, first published in U.K., for copyright reasons), at $1,400. Got one of each already? Upstairs, try a complete set of Cook’s Voyages, or even better, the actual journal of the commander of HMS Beagle, from Darwin’s expedition—yes, the captain who suicided partway (1828) through the voyage; a museum should snap it up for $12,000. Still unconvinced? Try a 1533 document signed by Henry VIII for the same price, or a 1797 letter written left-handed by Lord Nelson soon after he lost his right arm. ($4,000). Good handwriting, too; intelligence always tells.
Among the many qualities H.R.H. Prince Charles and I have in common—and which mutual friends often remark upon—is a preference for HATCHARD’S (187 Piccadilly, tel. 71-439-9921, fax 494-1313 or 287-2638) as our bookshop for "new" (meaning not pre-read) books. Yes, we prefer to do the reading ourselves, the Prince and I. We rarely choose to meet at Hatchard’s, though it remains—by sheer loveliness, ease, and weight of tradition—the choice general shop, bookseller to the Queen as well, outranking Waterstone’s, W.H. Smith, Books Etc., and that antique den of disorganization, Foyle’s. It will soon be two hundred years old; Wilberforce signed the Abolition of Slavery Bill in the store. Five superb floors and a staff who know what they’re doing: if Barnes & Noble were thus, I could believe in a Heaven for writers.
HEYWOOD HILL (10 Curzon Street, tel. 71-629-0647) Founded in 1936, the refined man’s ultimate neighborhood bookshop if you happen to live in Mayfair. Though not comparable to Hatchard’s in terms of quantity, a small pleasant place to while away a literary hour, crammed full of old and new surprises. Nancy Mitford worked here during the war; numerous celebrated loyalists since its inception make it a classic, and a model for what such a bookshop should be.
SOTHERAN’S (2 Sackville Street, tel. 71-439-6151, fax 434-2019), just off Piccadilly, established in London since 1815, has hands-down the most beautiful bookstore interior in the city. To call it a general antiquarian shop doesn’t do justice to the range, prestige, and imagination of its selection. You are as likely to find, say, a copy of Kipling owned by Wodehouse as a letter from Christopher Wren; a signed Samuel Beckett as a Piranesi print; a first edition of Sir Richard Burton’s Middle East travels as Hunter Thompson’s Las Vegas ones. Small wonder that this national treasure purchased Laurence Sterne’s and Charles Dickens’ personal libraries. Entire departments devoted to literature, architecture, natural history, naval & military history, travel, art, children’s, prints, theater, autograph letters, and all attendant bric-a-brac. Only a pleasure.
ULYSSES (40 Museum St., Bloomsbury, tel. & fax 71-831-1600) With its British Museum location, and a truly unmatched selection, this large 20th century first-edition shop is able to charge highly inflated prices—sometimes twice what you’d pay at the other fine first-edition shops in the city. There are, of course, book-buyers who feel reassured by buying from an exceedingly posh and somewhat standoffish shop. If price is really no object, call here first; otherwise try here last. The only deals, if you can call them that, are downstairs in the capacious basement.
DAVENPORT’S MAGIC SHOP (tel. 71-836-0408), hidden improbably in the subterranean shopping concourse of Charing Cross Railway Station, is more than a bookshop: the oldest family magic shop (since 1898) in the world. Among the multiplying rabbits and papier-maché lemons are volumes on Divination, Tarotmania, and Conjuring, masterpieces of mentalism, Houdini Research Diaries, and an astonishing array of juggling, classical gambling, ventriloquism, paper- and card-magic books. It’s also where the London Society of Magicians meets for regular lecture-demonstrations. "A wonderful illusion—a finger being cut in half. Have you seen it?" "Not for a week, old chap."
The finest travel bookshops are a bolo toss away from each other. R. & P. REMINGTON (18 Cecil Court, tel. 71-836-9771) don’t deal with new books, but rather with the alternative. Such as? Among the Matabele and Six Years in the Malay Jungle. Visits to Monasteries in the Levant. The Riddle of Hell’s Jungle is not about the same place as The Jungle in Sunlight and Shadow and neither involve Camp Fires in the Canadian Rockies. But on a bad day I feel I’ve spent Seventeen Years Among the Sea Dyak of Borneo. But never, thank God, as if on The Worst Journey In the World—a great book, by the way. THE TRAVELLER’S BOOKSHOP (25 Cecil Court, tel. 71-836-9132) has its antiquarian shelves, and a probably unmatched wall of old red Baedekers, and best of all, a basement of new travel chronicles, guidebooks, and maps that also functions as an ombudsman for the adventurous. A place to get your odder travel questions answered.
Also along Cecil Court are a number of other specialist shops that can be highly recommended. For dance, DANCE BOOKS (at #15, tel. 71-836-2314). For music, TRAVIS & EMERY (at #17, tel.71-240-2129). For theatrical prints, programs, posters, paraphernalia, try STAGE DOOR PRINTS (at #1, tel. 71-240-1683) or THE WITCH BALL (at #2, tel. 71-836-2922) or PLEASURES OF PAST TIMES (at #11, tel. 71-836-1142).
The used bookstores of the CHARING CROSS ROAD, starting at around the Leicester Square tube stop, make up a kind of Murder Mile for the secondhand-book addict. Their organization is only haphazard—for readers, not collectors. Though these few blocks aren’t as nourished with emporiums as five years ago, you can pass hours gazing at the pack-and-jam shelves: sometimes it is better to rummage hopefully than to arrive. QUINTO (at #48a) is less energetic than it was; HENRY PORDES (at #58), emphasizing the arts and literature, mostly used and choice remainders, has been good to me; THE CHARING CROSS ROAD BOOKSHOP (at #56) is the fishing boat with the largest net.
This stretch of road also includes SPORTSPAGES (at #94, tel. 71-240-9604, fax 836-0104), undoubtedly the finest sports bookstore in the UK, emphasis on what we call soccer and on what they call cricket. Of London’s many good art booksellers, SHIPLEY (at 70, tel. 71-836-4872, fax 379-4358) has broader interests and more depth than most.
Anyone after gardening books should, just near the Royal Gardens of Kew, seek out LLOYDS OF KEW (9 Mortlake Terrace, tel. 81-940-2512), a gorgeous, truly comprehensive shop. Call first; unusual hours.
MOTOR BOOKS (33 St. Martin’s Court, tel. 71-836-3800, fax 497-2539) has the best selection in Europe of new books and videos on motoring, railways, canals, aviation, army, and maritime. Really two linked stores, one devoted to Military, one to Transportation, there are shelves devoted to, say, Small Arms, the Great War, the Colonial Wars, the North American Wars, Afghanistan; illustrated books on insignia, medals, armor, and artillery. The other shop’s obsession is all cars, bicycles, motorcycles, with a whole room for railway spotters that includes, say, locomotive chassis model kits and books with titles like Steam Locomotives of the Baltimore & Ohio—An All-Time Roster. Also videos (Steaming East) so you don’t have to go anywhere; you can chug systematically around the world while lying abed and still drive everyone barmy with train timetables.
Only one city pats the reading man on the back and tells him he’s not crazy; only one holds the word sovereign over the image, esteems the well-said over the well-dressed, welcomes the foreign tongue as much as the local, the exotic foreign bloom alongside the hardy houseplant; can boast it was the home metropolis of infinite Shakespeare, of blind inglorious Milton, of our man Dickens, of Conrad, James, Eliot; only one, despite an inconvenient loss of Empire, remains the capital of our Mother Tongue, and if you can’t guess which one by now, better turn to the fashion feature and pray for rain, boyo, because babes still think men who read are sexy.
A busy man in London with an hour to spare and a few knicker (Brit. slang = ready money) in his pocket can, with the help of the strategem which follows, make a fair sally at some of the world’s best bookshops. And should gout, age, inertia, or an expedition to remote bargain-basement corners of the globe stay you from reaching Piccadilly Circus or Berkeley Square, you may also frequent most of these shops (which nearly all issue catalogues) by mail or fax.
MARCHPANE (16 Cecil Court, tel. 71-836-8661, fax 497-0567) You don’t have to have children to love this shop, but it helps if you were a kid once. Dealing exclusively in children’s and illustrated books, often in 19th and 20th century first editions, their window alone is nostalgia enough to warm an old soldier’s heart: thunder-and-lightning plasma lamp, Daleks from Doctor Who, Dan Dare’s Rocket Gun ("the safety model"—if they’d only guessed what was coming); also the Nuclear Merit Space Pilot Missile Gun complete with Two Safety Missiles featuring Secret Message Chambers, Solar Compass, Interplanetary Selector, & Velocity Control. Did I say this was a bookstore? The first edition of Alice In Wonderland, from 1866, will set you back about $4,000, but illustrated versions of the store’s favorite book can be had for a few dollars, as can original Arthur Rackham fairy-tale or E. H. Shepard Winnie-the-Pooh prints from the ’20s. Try tracing the history of boys aloft, from various editions of Peter Pan through The Great Airship (1914) to Baffling the Air Bandits (’30s) to The Boy’s Book of Jets (’50s).
BELL, BOOK & RADMALL (4 Cecil Court, 71-240-2161, fax 379-1062) is for many the modern literature first-edition bookshop of choice; fairly priced, low-key, unstuffy, yet with only top-quality copies. (A first edition is the first appearance of a book, before it gets reprinted.) Want an original of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), a distinguished blue volume with gold lettering above a London street scene? Or Brave New World (1932), with its art-deco dust jacket of oscillating halos of blue and white clouds around the globe as a blue-white airplane hovers above divided continents? Or On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963) with James Bond’s hand penciling in his coat-of arms? Happily, most of the shop’s 7,500 titles are in the $25-40 range, unlike the Niagara Falls of 20th c. literature, Joyce’s Ulysses, which might set you back about $8,000. (If they don’t have what you seek, try nearby Nigel Williams Books, downstairs at 22 Cecil Court, or Bertram Rota, 31 Long Acre, a few blocks away just by Covent Garden, tel. 71-836-0723, fax 497-9058).
MAGGS BROS. LTD. (50 Berkeley Sq., tel. 71-493-7160, fax 499-2007) An entire elegant house, three floors and a basement full of books, on one of London’s finest squares. A family business for nearly a century and a half, it will remind you that not all the good stuff is in museums yet. You might find on the ground floor, say, a print of Noël Coward by Max Beerbohm for $400; on the next floor, for $2,500, a full leaf from a 16th century Book of Hours, showing St. Apollonia, patron of dentists—or a similar volume complete for $33,000; or in the generous next room, a first edition of Dickens’ Pickwick Papers (1837, issued serialized, in "parts"), for around $5,800, or of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884, first published in U.K., for copyright reasons), at $1,400. Got one of each already? Upstairs, try a complete set of Cook’s Voyages, or even better, the actual journal of the commander of HMS Beagle, from Darwin’s expedition—yes, the captain who suicided partway (1828) through the voyage; a museum should snap it up for $12,000. Still unconvinced? Try a 1533 document signed by Henry VIII for the same price, or a 1797 letter written left-handed by Lord Nelson soon after he lost his right arm. ($4,000). Good handwriting, too; intelligence always tells.
Among the many qualities H.R.H. Prince Charles and I have in common—and which mutual friends often remark upon—is a preference for HATCHARD’S (187 Piccadilly, tel. 71-439-9921, fax 494-1313 or 287-2638) as our bookshop for "new" (meaning not pre-read) books. Yes, we prefer to do the reading ourselves, the Prince and I. We rarely choose to meet at Hatchard’s, though it remains—by sheer loveliness, ease, and weight of tradition—the choice general shop, bookseller to the Queen as well, outranking Waterstone’s, W.H. Smith, Books Etc., and that antique den of disorganization, Foyle’s. It will soon be two hundred years old; Wilberforce signed the Abolition of Slavery Bill in the store. Five superb floors and a staff who know what they’re doing: if Barnes & Noble were thus, I could believe in a Heaven for writers.
HEYWOOD HILL (10 Curzon Street, tel. 71-629-0647) Founded in 1936, the refined man’s ultimate neighborhood bookshop if you happen to live in Mayfair. Though not comparable to Hatchard’s in terms of quantity, a small pleasant place to while away a literary hour, crammed full of old and new surprises. Nancy Mitford worked here during the war; numerous celebrated loyalists since its inception make it a classic, and a model for what such a bookshop should be.
SOTHERAN’S (2 Sackville Street, tel. 71-439-6151, fax 434-2019), just off Piccadilly, established in London since 1815, has hands-down the most beautiful bookstore interior in the city. To call it a general antiquarian shop doesn’t do justice to the range, prestige, and imagination of its selection. You are as likely to find, say, a copy of Kipling owned by Wodehouse as a letter from Christopher Wren; a signed Samuel Beckett as a Piranesi print; a first edition of Sir Richard Burton’s Middle East travels as Hunter Thompson’s Las Vegas ones. Small wonder that this national treasure purchased Laurence Sterne’s and Charles Dickens’ personal libraries. Entire departments devoted to literature, architecture, natural history, naval & military history, travel, art, children’s, prints, theater, autograph letters, and all attendant bric-a-brac. Only a pleasure.
ULYSSES (40 Museum St., Bloomsbury, tel. & fax 71-831-1600) With its British Museum location, and a truly unmatched selection, this large 20th century first-edition shop is able to charge highly inflated prices—sometimes twice what you’d pay at the other fine first-edition shops in the city. There are, of course, book-buyers who feel reassured by buying from an exceedingly posh and somewhat standoffish shop. If price is really no object, call here first; otherwise try here last. The only deals, if you can call them that, are downstairs in the capacious basement.
DAVENPORT’S MAGIC SHOP (tel. 71-836-0408), hidden improbably in the subterranean shopping concourse of Charing Cross Railway Station, is more than a bookshop: the oldest family magic shop (since 1898) in the world. Among the multiplying rabbits and papier-maché lemons are volumes on Divination, Tarotmania, and Conjuring, masterpieces of mentalism, Houdini Research Diaries, and an astonishing array of juggling, classical gambling, ventriloquism, paper- and card-magic books. It’s also where the London Society of Magicians meets for regular lecture-demonstrations. "A wonderful illusion—a finger being cut in half. Have you seen it?" "Not for a week, old chap."
The finest travel bookshops are a bolo toss away from each other. R. & P. REMINGTON (18 Cecil Court, tel. 71-836-9771) don’t deal with new books, but rather with the alternative. Such as? Among the Matabele and Six Years in the Malay Jungle. Visits to Monasteries in the Levant. The Riddle of Hell’s Jungle is not about the same place as The Jungle in Sunlight and Shadow and neither involve Camp Fires in the Canadian Rockies. But on a bad day I feel I’ve spent Seventeen Years Among the Sea Dyak of Borneo. But never, thank God, as if on The Worst Journey In the World—a great book, by the way. THE TRAVELLER’S BOOKSHOP (25 Cecil Court, tel. 71-836-9132) has its antiquarian shelves, and a probably unmatched wall of old red Baedekers, and best of all, a basement of new travel chronicles, guidebooks, and maps that also functions as an ombudsman for the adventurous. A place to get your odder travel questions answered.
Also along Cecil Court are a number of other specialist shops that can be highly recommended. For dance, DANCE BOOKS (at #15, tel. 71-836-2314). For music, TRAVIS & EMERY (at #17, tel.71-240-2129). For theatrical prints, programs, posters, paraphernalia, try STAGE DOOR PRINTS (at #1, tel. 71-240-1683) or THE WITCH BALL (at #2, tel. 71-836-2922) or PLEASURES OF PAST TIMES (at #11, tel. 71-836-1142).
The used bookstores of the CHARING CROSS ROAD, starting at around the Leicester Square tube stop, make up a kind of Murder Mile for the secondhand-book addict. Their organization is only haphazard—for readers, not collectors. Though these few blocks aren’t as nourished with emporiums as five years ago, you can pass hours gazing at the pack-and-jam shelves: sometimes it is better to rummage hopefully than to arrive. QUINTO (at #48a) is less energetic than it was; HENRY PORDES (at #58), emphasizing the arts and literature, mostly used and choice remainders, has been good to me; THE CHARING CROSS ROAD BOOKSHOP (at #56) is the fishing boat with the largest net.
This stretch of road also includes SPORTSPAGES (at #94, tel. 71-240-9604, fax 836-0104), undoubtedly the finest sports bookstore in the UK, emphasis on what we call soccer and on what they call cricket. Of London’s many good art booksellers, SHIPLEY (at 70, tel. 71-836-4872, fax 379-4358) has broader interests and more depth than most.
Anyone after gardening books should, just near the Royal Gardens of Kew, seek out LLOYDS OF KEW (9 Mortlake Terrace, tel. 81-940-2512), a gorgeous, truly comprehensive shop. Call first; unusual hours.
MOTOR BOOKS (33 St. Martin’s Court, tel. 71-836-3800, fax 497-2539) has the best selection in Europe of new books and videos on motoring, railways, canals, aviation, army, and maritime. Really two linked stores, one devoted to Military, one to Transportation, there are shelves devoted to, say, Small Arms, the Great War, the Colonial Wars, the North American Wars, Afghanistan; illustrated books on insignia, medals, armor, and artillery. The other shop’s obsession is all cars, bicycles, motorcycles, with a whole room for railway spotters that includes, say, locomotive chassis model kits and books with titles like Steam Locomotives of the Baltimore & Ohio—An All-Time Roster. Also videos (Steaming East) so you don’t have to go anywhere; you can chug systematically around the world while lying abed and still drive everyone barmy with train timetables.
Monday, October 10, 1994
In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles
I wrote this for the Boston Book Review in Fall 1994. Bowles died in 1999; I'd visited him in Tangier in 1986 and 1987. Both times he was lordly and welcoming and made fun of his own reputation.
IN TOUCH: THE LETTERS OF PAUL BOWLES
Edited by Jeffrey Miller
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
604 pages
This country can be very hard on its originals, and on none does the distrust fall more heavily than the expatriate. Those who flirt with voluntary exile but always come home, like Hemingway, are forgiven; those like Henry James or Ezra Pound or T.S. Eliot, who choose to stay abroad, remain deeply suspect as Americans even as they are glimpsed overseas growing immeasurably as artists.
At 83, permanently settled in Morocco, Paul Bowles is one of the great originals that our country has produced this century, in part because his deepest influences are so resolutely un-American. The usual simplification of his life runs thus: from being one of the most important American composers of the 30s, 40s, and 50s, he became one of the most important authors of the 60s and 70s. (If today his audience is largely literary, the backward-looking eye of the compact disc may gradually balance the situation.) Still, to many American readers Paul Bowles remains peripheral and semi-known, a “cult author," or worse still, an expatriate—that exotic foreign bloom. Who is he really, our white-haired man in Tangier with a traveller’s ease and a transparent, gentlemanly gaze?
Now this huge, incomparable volume of six decades of letters finally allows us a chance to set his work, both writing and music, in perspective against his life as one unbroken flow. Until now, apart from a good book about the expat life in Tangier, we've had only an uneven biography in English, a superb biography in French, and Bowles’ own autobiography, Without Stopping, which William Burroughs called “Without Telling.” But the present huge (600 pp.) book gives us much that the autobiography and the novels cannot: the larger personality of the private Bowles. For those not lucky enough to enjoy a few hours’ conversation with the man himself, they offer a reader the rich incessant sunlight of his company.
Bowles (born in New York December 30, 1910) is that American rarity: an artist who has chosen to live abroad and been able to soak up several distant cultures and turn them to deep creative use, not merely as "local color” but as an original homeland of the imagination. The extra-American influences are as prominent in his music, with its French and Central American intonations, as in his writing. Another similarity is his genius for the small forms.
Bowles’ most famous books—The Sheltering Sky, The Spider’s House, Let It Come Down, and The Delicate Prey—are set mostly in North Africa. The result has been a myth of “Paul Bowles, decadent in Tangier” that has much to do with popular notions of Morocco and a general tendency to confuse the writer and the work.
And indeed, the first impression in following his letters is of someone who had to stay abroad, ever on the move: from earliest travels to Paris as escapee from the U. of Virginia, to sojourns in 30s Morocco (where, sharing a house, he studied harmony with Aaron Copland), to Mexico, where many pieces were written; back to New York with his ex-wife, the writer Jane Bowles, composing for Orson Welles’ theater company and The Glass Menagerie; to an almost permanent move to Tangier, with forays to the small island he once owned on a shoestring in Ceylon. Over the decades he became one of the great North African travellers, with odysseys devoted to collecting an unequalled set of recordings of Moroccan music for the Library of Congress. He has also been a tireless translator, from Sartre's No Exit in 1944 to, currently, the works of Moroccan author Mohammed Mrabet and Rodrigo Rey Rosa, a Guatemalan.
One dominant theme in his writing is the intense sensations, and consequences, of experiencing people and cultures different from one’s own. Thus it is deeply pleasurable, in letter after letter, to encounter the delight such experiences have given Bowles since an early age. By twenty this refined, subtle sensibility seems nearly formed. Here he is meeting Jean Cocteau in Paris in 1931: “He rushed about the room with great speed for two hours and never sat down once… He still smokes opium every day and claims it does him a great deal of good. I daresay it does… the fact that it is considered harmful for most mortals would convince me of its efficaciousness for him." He meets Falla, Pound, and Gide; Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein become invaluable mentors. He meets Desnos, Revueltas, Dali; he meets everyone. “I can't believe you find a similarity between my letters and a seed catalog. Still, why not? Or a telephone directory." In Tangier, in later years, they all (Kerouac, Ginsberg, etc.) come looking for him.
He keeps travelling. In Touggourt, Algeria, he finds “mad people, leprous things like spiders which crawl about eating the grasshoppers others toss them." In Guatemala, "the water was full of brown mud that took a half hour to settle." Back in Tangier after the war, he notes, “I've never yet felt a part of any place I've been, and I never expect to.” His writer’s eye and composers ear are ever alert: in Ceylon the occasional small breeze is "as hot as the breath of a man with fever. And the birds in the shadeless trees around the bungalow don't sing: they cough, choke, gurgle, grunt, hammer, sputter, croak and yell, a welter of ridiculous noises that have no right to come out of the throats of birds. There's one at the moment which sounds exactly like the telegraph in a country station buzzing out its Morse code." In Bangkok the populace "paddles by in sampans to see what the farangs are up to and their neon-flooded hotels where electric organs whine and bump.”
Not surprisingly, Tangier is the return address for many of the letters, and a reader can follow its hold on Bowles across sixty years. “The wind howls and the countryside is the color of a lion." 1948 Tangier, with its international zone, "belongs to nobody" and the entire city “is one large black market." All Morocco's cities are "very beautiful indeed: one feels removed in time rather than in space. Europe before the Middle Ages must have been very much like most of Morocco… you're sometimes invited to lunch in a house built in the 10th or 11th century by the forebears of your host… very little has changed since then… an inexhaustible country."
Expatriates can never take their friends for granted: visits are too infrequent. Bowles, to judge by this book, was a devoted, generous correspondent. (He still has no telephone.) "Although I didn't see Tennessee very often," he notes after the playwright’s death, "I thought of him as one of my closest friends, and of course I still do think of him in that way. Whether people die or remain alive, it's the same: if we were friends, we are friends. Someone always has to die first, and most of my friends have died before me."
Most touching of all, through the letters like a haunting strain that grows more and more prominent, there is the gradual decline of his wife. A marriage like theirs inevitably generates a great deal of gossip, but any dip into this book makes it clear how much Bowles loved and still misses her. (Jane Bowles died in 1973.) He is customarily (and unfairly, I suspect) unforgiving in judging his behavior—seeing himself "a kind of idiot looking on approvingly, even collaborating, while Jane forged ahead with her self-destruction.”
And Bowles keeps working, year after year. To an editor he writes, "I doubt that I have ever been in a ‘relaxed,’ not to say ‘cerebral’ state for more than two minutes, without feeling the ever-present doubt, disbelief and vague angst that has kept me going. Only in action is there a possibility of belief, but what action can a writer engage in save writing—that is, what meaningful action?"
Possibly because of the atmosphere in some of his work, Bowles has a reputation (to this writer, inaccurate) of being cold, aloof. Yet this collection, taken as a whole, is one of the most intimate looks we've had at any great American artist. Those in search of bedroom gossip will not find much here; those seeking what Bowles thought throughout a long, productive, and wholly original life will find it vivid on every page. Here he is in Xauen, Morocco in 1951:
"The streets and walls look as if someone had poured tons of white cake-icing over them—resplendently white, and sometimes light blue, but by moonlight it all looks brilliantly, blindingly white… The main street is merely a long tunnel of green, being completely covered by ancient grapevines whose thick trunks twist up the walls of the little white buildings like great snakes before they become the vault of foliage and fruit that hides the sky. In the ruined Casbah there are palms, oranges and roses, storks and peacocks, and, of course, the inevitable fountains. And the town is drenched in the musky smell of fig trees in summer, and slightly spiced with jasmin. By day the cicadas scream, and at night it is three toads and insects that sound like dry leaves… Two weeks ago I heard the most incredible Berber music I had yet heard—a full evening of it, accompanied by dances of self-immolation and a good deal of blood-letting… One must stay on and on.”
IN TOUCH: THE LETTERS OF PAUL BOWLES
Edited by Jeffrey Miller
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
604 pages
This country can be very hard on its originals, and on none does the distrust fall more heavily than the expatriate. Those who flirt with voluntary exile but always come home, like Hemingway, are forgiven; those like Henry James or Ezra Pound or T.S. Eliot, who choose to stay abroad, remain deeply suspect as Americans even as they are glimpsed overseas growing immeasurably as artists.
At 83, permanently settled in Morocco, Paul Bowles is one of the great originals that our country has produced this century, in part because his deepest influences are so resolutely un-American. The usual simplification of his life runs thus: from being one of the most important American composers of the 30s, 40s, and 50s, he became one of the most important authors of the 60s and 70s. (If today his audience is largely literary, the backward-looking eye of the compact disc may gradually balance the situation.) Still, to many American readers Paul Bowles remains peripheral and semi-known, a “cult author," or worse still, an expatriate—that exotic foreign bloom. Who is he really, our white-haired man in Tangier with a traveller’s ease and a transparent, gentlemanly gaze?
Now this huge, incomparable volume of six decades of letters finally allows us a chance to set his work, both writing and music, in perspective against his life as one unbroken flow. Until now, apart from a good book about the expat life in Tangier, we've had only an uneven biography in English, a superb biography in French, and Bowles’ own autobiography, Without Stopping, which William Burroughs called “Without Telling.” But the present huge (600 pp.) book gives us much that the autobiography and the novels cannot: the larger personality of the private Bowles. For those not lucky enough to enjoy a few hours’ conversation with the man himself, they offer a reader the rich incessant sunlight of his company.
Bowles (born in New York December 30, 1910) is that American rarity: an artist who has chosen to live abroad and been able to soak up several distant cultures and turn them to deep creative use, not merely as "local color” but as an original homeland of the imagination. The extra-American influences are as prominent in his music, with its French and Central American intonations, as in his writing. Another similarity is his genius for the small forms.
Bowles’ most famous books—The Sheltering Sky, The Spider’s House, Let It Come Down, and The Delicate Prey—are set mostly in North Africa. The result has been a myth of “Paul Bowles, decadent in Tangier” that has much to do with popular notions of Morocco and a general tendency to confuse the writer and the work.
And indeed, the first impression in following his letters is of someone who had to stay abroad, ever on the move: from earliest travels to Paris as escapee from the U. of Virginia, to sojourns in 30s Morocco (where, sharing a house, he studied harmony with Aaron Copland), to Mexico, where many pieces were written; back to New York with his ex-wife, the writer Jane Bowles, composing for Orson Welles’ theater company and The Glass Menagerie; to an almost permanent move to Tangier, with forays to the small island he once owned on a shoestring in Ceylon. Over the decades he became one of the great North African travellers, with odysseys devoted to collecting an unequalled set of recordings of Moroccan music for the Library of Congress. He has also been a tireless translator, from Sartre's No Exit in 1944 to, currently, the works of Moroccan author Mohammed Mrabet and Rodrigo Rey Rosa, a Guatemalan.
One dominant theme in his writing is the intense sensations, and consequences, of experiencing people and cultures different from one’s own. Thus it is deeply pleasurable, in letter after letter, to encounter the delight such experiences have given Bowles since an early age. By twenty this refined, subtle sensibility seems nearly formed. Here he is meeting Jean Cocteau in Paris in 1931: “He rushed about the room with great speed for two hours and never sat down once… He still smokes opium every day and claims it does him a great deal of good. I daresay it does… the fact that it is considered harmful for most mortals would convince me of its efficaciousness for him." He meets Falla, Pound, and Gide; Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein become invaluable mentors. He meets Desnos, Revueltas, Dali; he meets everyone. “I can't believe you find a similarity between my letters and a seed catalog. Still, why not? Or a telephone directory." In Tangier, in later years, they all (Kerouac, Ginsberg, etc.) come looking for him.
He keeps travelling. In Touggourt, Algeria, he finds “mad people, leprous things like spiders which crawl about eating the grasshoppers others toss them." In Guatemala, "the water was full of brown mud that took a half hour to settle." Back in Tangier after the war, he notes, “I've never yet felt a part of any place I've been, and I never expect to.” His writer’s eye and composers ear are ever alert: in Ceylon the occasional small breeze is "as hot as the breath of a man with fever. And the birds in the shadeless trees around the bungalow don't sing: they cough, choke, gurgle, grunt, hammer, sputter, croak and yell, a welter of ridiculous noises that have no right to come out of the throats of birds. There's one at the moment which sounds exactly like the telegraph in a country station buzzing out its Morse code." In Bangkok the populace "paddles by in sampans to see what the farangs are up to and their neon-flooded hotels where electric organs whine and bump.”
Not surprisingly, Tangier is the return address for many of the letters, and a reader can follow its hold on Bowles across sixty years. “The wind howls and the countryside is the color of a lion." 1948 Tangier, with its international zone, "belongs to nobody" and the entire city “is one large black market." All Morocco's cities are "very beautiful indeed: one feels removed in time rather than in space. Europe before the Middle Ages must have been very much like most of Morocco… you're sometimes invited to lunch in a house built in the 10th or 11th century by the forebears of your host… very little has changed since then… an inexhaustible country."
Expatriates can never take their friends for granted: visits are too infrequent. Bowles, to judge by this book, was a devoted, generous correspondent. (He still has no telephone.) "Although I didn't see Tennessee very often," he notes after the playwright’s death, "I thought of him as one of my closest friends, and of course I still do think of him in that way. Whether people die or remain alive, it's the same: if we were friends, we are friends. Someone always has to die first, and most of my friends have died before me."
Most touching of all, through the letters like a haunting strain that grows more and more prominent, there is the gradual decline of his wife. A marriage like theirs inevitably generates a great deal of gossip, but any dip into this book makes it clear how much Bowles loved and still misses her. (Jane Bowles died in 1973.) He is customarily (and unfairly, I suspect) unforgiving in judging his behavior—seeing himself "a kind of idiot looking on approvingly, even collaborating, while Jane forged ahead with her self-destruction.”
And Bowles keeps working, year after year. To an editor he writes, "I doubt that I have ever been in a ‘relaxed,’ not to say ‘cerebral’ state for more than two minutes, without feeling the ever-present doubt, disbelief and vague angst that has kept me going. Only in action is there a possibility of belief, but what action can a writer engage in save writing—that is, what meaningful action?"
Possibly because of the atmosphere in some of his work, Bowles has a reputation (to this writer, inaccurate) of being cold, aloof. Yet this collection, taken as a whole, is one of the most intimate looks we've had at any great American artist. Those in search of bedroom gossip will not find much here; those seeking what Bowles thought throughout a long, productive, and wholly original life will find it vivid on every page. Here he is in Xauen, Morocco in 1951:
"The streets and walls look as if someone had poured tons of white cake-icing over them—resplendently white, and sometimes light blue, but by moonlight it all looks brilliantly, blindingly white… The main street is merely a long tunnel of green, being completely covered by ancient grapevines whose thick trunks twist up the walls of the little white buildings like great snakes before they become the vault of foliage and fruit that hides the sky. In the ruined Casbah there are palms, oranges and roses, storks and peacocks, and, of course, the inevitable fountains. And the town is drenched in the musky smell of fig trees in summer, and slightly spiced with jasmin. By day the cicadas scream, and at night it is three toads and insects that sound like dry leaves… Two weeks ago I heard the most incredible Berber music I had yet heard—a full evening of it, accompanied by dances of self-immolation and a good deal of blood-letting… One must stay on and on.”
Sunday, May 15, 1994
Baedeker Revisited
I wrote this for Forbes-FYI around 1994.
Born to serve a steam-and-railway age of travel, the 1100-odd Baedeker Guides issued in English, French, and German between 1832 and 1934 remain the most thorough, detailed, and useful series of travel handbooks ever written. Bound in red cloth, these out-of-print volumes the size of your hand—a museum ticket or pressed flower of a previous owner wedged, perhaps, into a foldout map—still turn up by the dozens in secondhand bookshops. Let other men waste their time on this year’s guidebooks with their up-to-the-minute information; I consult a century-old Baedeker.
That redoubtable publishing firm was founded by Karl Baedeker (1801-59) near Cologne as a kind of Germanic answer to the John Murray guides published in England at the time. More encyclopedic and less stylized and imperial, they were carried on by Baedeker’s sons, who moved the firm to Leipzig, where it flourished until its premises got destroyed during an air raid in WWII. The firm revived after the war, but its modern guides cannot equal their predecessors.
By the time of the first World War the founding Baedeker’s grandsons had expanded their list to 78 titles in three languages. These ranged from, say, Transylvania, the Azores, Constantinople, and India to Canada, Corsica, Russia, and the Black Forest. Sometimes the guides followed great rivers (The Rhine from Rotterdam to Constance, 1873) or mountain ranges (Tyrol and the Dolomites including the Bavarian Alps, 1927). Sometimes they sensibly and neatly divided countries into several volumes, like Italy, or lumped them together into one, like the United States, Mexico, Cuba, PortoRico, and Alaska. The French Riviera received its own volume.
The language was by turns declamatory (“Over all the movements of the pedestrian the weather holds sway”), philosophical (“The traveller’s ambition often exceeds his powers of endurance”), out-of-date (“The traveller is cautioned against sleeping in chalets”) or helpful (“Care must be taken... for should the overhanging masses of snow give way, the traveller would be precipitated to a depth of 3000-4000’.”) Those remarks are from an 1899 Guide to Switzerland.
On every page of every volume the author took it for granted his reader was an educated person who could follow every turn of phrase and allusion while sharing his assumptions and judgments. In three northern tongues, Baedeker cast a cold eye southward on all that seemed immoral, from the “disgracefully insolent” clowns in Egypt to the innkeepers in Naples: “The traveller is often tempted to doubt whether such a thing as honesty is known here.”
An old Baedeker can serve as a good barometer for how much the world has changed. A 1900 guide to Paris, with the Metro in its first stages, or to London with its underground only half finished, seems quaint today, but in countries where the attractions and the streetcar lines have changed little over the last century, Baedeker simply cannot be equalled. A visitor to Cairo need look no further than the 1929 Egypt and the Sudan. As Hans Koning put it, despite the “pseudoscientific racism... Baedeker’s completeness is baffling. I can only visualize squadrons of German professors swarming out over Egypt, sleeping in every bed, and sketching every pillar.”
Certain advice may make us uneasy. One section of the 1906 Palestine and Syria guide entitled Intercourse With Orientals warns: “Familiarity should always be avoided. True friendship is rare in the East....” But who can argue with the rest? “The custom of scattering small coins for the sake of amusement furnished by the consequent scramble is an insult to poverty that no right-minded traveller will offer.”
In an age where speed is taken for granted, these old guides remind us that tourism began as a leisurely, improving activity. Every Baedeker educates us and slows us down. Better than a time machine, not only do they offer us the world as it actually was; they show us, more miraculously, how much of that world still remains, and what our century has added, for better or worse.
Born to serve a steam-and-railway age of travel, the 1100-odd Baedeker Guides issued in English, French, and German between 1832 and 1934 remain the most thorough, detailed, and useful series of travel handbooks ever written. Bound in red cloth, these out-of-print volumes the size of your hand—a museum ticket or pressed flower of a previous owner wedged, perhaps, into a foldout map—still turn up by the dozens in secondhand bookshops. Let other men waste their time on this year’s guidebooks with their up-to-the-minute information; I consult a century-old Baedeker.
That redoubtable publishing firm was founded by Karl Baedeker (1801-59) near Cologne as a kind of Germanic answer to the John Murray guides published in England at the time. More encyclopedic and less stylized and imperial, they were carried on by Baedeker’s sons, who moved the firm to Leipzig, where it flourished until its premises got destroyed during an air raid in WWII. The firm revived after the war, but its modern guides cannot equal their predecessors.
By the time of the first World War the founding Baedeker’s grandsons had expanded their list to 78 titles in three languages. These ranged from, say, Transylvania, the Azores, Constantinople, and India to Canada, Corsica, Russia, and the Black Forest. Sometimes the guides followed great rivers (The Rhine from Rotterdam to Constance, 1873) or mountain ranges (Tyrol and the Dolomites including the Bavarian Alps, 1927). Sometimes they sensibly and neatly divided countries into several volumes, like Italy, or lumped them together into one, like the United States, Mexico, Cuba, PortoRico, and Alaska. The French Riviera received its own volume.
The language was by turns declamatory (“Over all the movements of the pedestrian the weather holds sway”), philosophical (“The traveller’s ambition often exceeds his powers of endurance”), out-of-date (“The traveller is cautioned against sleeping in chalets”) or helpful (“Care must be taken... for should the overhanging masses of snow give way, the traveller would be precipitated to a depth of 3000-4000’.”) Those remarks are from an 1899 Guide to Switzerland.
On every page of every volume the author took it for granted his reader was an educated person who could follow every turn of phrase and allusion while sharing his assumptions and judgments. In three northern tongues, Baedeker cast a cold eye southward on all that seemed immoral, from the “disgracefully insolent” clowns in Egypt to the innkeepers in Naples: “The traveller is often tempted to doubt whether such a thing as honesty is known here.”
An old Baedeker can serve as a good barometer for how much the world has changed. A 1900 guide to Paris, with the Metro in its first stages, or to London with its underground only half finished, seems quaint today, but in countries where the attractions and the streetcar lines have changed little over the last century, Baedeker simply cannot be equalled. A visitor to Cairo need look no further than the 1929 Egypt and the Sudan. As Hans Koning put it, despite the “pseudoscientific racism... Baedeker’s completeness is baffling. I can only visualize squadrons of German professors swarming out over Egypt, sleeping in every bed, and sketching every pillar.”
Certain advice may make us uneasy. One section of the 1906 Palestine and Syria guide entitled Intercourse With Orientals warns: “Familiarity should always be avoided. True friendship is rare in the East....” But who can argue with the rest? “The custom of scattering small coins for the sake of amusement furnished by the consequent scramble is an insult to poverty that no right-minded traveller will offer.”
In an age where speed is taken for granted, these old guides remind us that tourism began as a leisurely, improving activity. Every Baedeker educates us and slows us down. Better than a time machine, not only do they offer us the world as it actually was; they show us, more miraculously, how much of that world still remains, and what our century has added, for better or worse.
Sunday, May 8, 1994
Serendipity Books
I wrote this in spring 1994 for Forbes-FYI, who published it soon thereafter. When Peter Howard died in March 2011, Serendipity's million-plus books disappeared in fire sales to other booksellers.
It is often called the greatest bookstore in the United States; one of London’s leading antiquarian booksellers, no slouch himself, named it the finest in the English language. Serendipity Books, in Berkeley, California, has become the ideal of what a literary, secondhand bookstore can be, regarded with reverence and amazement by others in the field. Serendipity has set standards for knowing and acquiring not only books but the ephemera that accretes around writers. It differs from somewhere like the Strand in New York City just as a select warehouse differs from a jumbled attic.
As proprietor, creator, resident baseball fanatic, and ruling mind, Peter Howard has been in the book business for thirty years. Though Serendipity is a general bookstore, with stock under most subject headings, Howard specializes in literature of all sorts. This involves modern first (and later) editions of English and American Literature; fine printing; literary manuscripts and archives; little magazines; screenplays. He has entire shelves of Jack London, Steinbeck, Naipaul, Virginia Woolf; entire bookcases of Graham Greene, Nabokov, Henry Miller, C.S. Forester, Joyce Carol Oates. One enormous, well-organized room holds 35,000 volumes of poetry. An upstairs contains over 26,000 volumes of American fiction. You wander through one vast, high-ceilinged room after another, lose your way among the tightly-packed shelves, and sooner or later realize this is not a bookstore, but a national treasure.
“I’ve got 300,000 decent books in here,” says Howard. “Nobody, no single bookstore, can handle it all. You could just as easily fill this place with only fishing books, or with film books.”
No categorizing can give any indication of the treasures Howard has—or, with his three full-time assistants, can find for you. If you’re looking for Borges’ personal copy of a C.S. Lewis book, or rare editions in Russian of early Nabokov novels, or a few Christopher Isherwood or Jack Kerouac manuscripts, or an unfilmed Faulkner screenplay in typescript, or an obscure book of Picasso’s that comes with an original lithograph, turn to Serendipity.
In a profession known for its eccentrics Howard has a reputation as a Character, less for his appearance (like a genial Rasputin) than the brilliance of his occasional catalogues, which are equal parts good scholarship and salesmanship. He is current president of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America, and sees his profession as often misunderstood and misrepresented.
“Everyone who writes about the antiquarian book business emphasizes price rather than service. We serve customers by getting a book for them at the cheapest possible price. We serve libraries in the same way—we’ve sold to every institution in the country.”
He waives off questions about book collecting as investment only, the glamor of financial (as opposed to cultural) value—though feeding this desire keeps many antiquarian bookstores going.
“I despise price guides. They get the emphasis all wrong. Price is the last thing of importance. The first is: Why? Why buy it? Why is the book important? If the first reason is money, then reconsider. In any case, the most overpriced books are modern books, within the context of the prices of other centuries’ books.
“As an investment, collecting books is a ludicrous way for someone to attempt to increase their capital assets. And it can be expensive, depending on what you choose to collect. Most people don’t realize what the range of possibility is around the author. If you’re serious, really serious, about, say, John Steinbeck, then you’re into it for $1,000,000 over a lifetime. If a guy walks in and wants a complete set of F. Scott Fitzgerald first editions, in perfect dust jackets, immaculate condition, everything, we’ll get them within a year. It’s a matter of how much he wants them and how much money he has. They’re all out there and can be had, except possibly the first, This Side of Paradise, because too many people want it. A first edition of The Great Gatsby, in a perfect dust jacket, will set him back about $20,000. But if someone wants the book, really wants it, then it’s at the other end of the telephone, or soon will be. But this sort of thing represents only about 3% of what’s out there of interest.
“And why collect books simply by the numbers? Are you adding anything to the world? It’s an aesthetic act, the idea of a collection: completing the structure, adding to the culture. When people come in they have blinkers on. I try to take the blinkers off. I want to be trusted by my customers—I’ll share my knowledge with them. And I try to confront people about their reasons for collecting, but there’s no right or wrong. They inform me.
“I’ve wanted to do four catalogues a year. I end up doing a catalogue every four years. It’s an inefficient way to sell books.” Still, he is justly proud of them, and particularly of his 641-page Faulkner catalogue, the most complete bibliography ever assembled for the largest Faulkner collection ever. It ranges from English and foreign editions of his books to 19th century Mississippi maps, the writer’s last will and testament, and private letters. A typescript of Faulkner’s first book of poems is priced at $75,000.
He insists there are still great collections to be made. “The guy with the greatest Twain collection built it in the last 25 years. Preposterous! Everyone thought it too late to collect Twain.”
He points out that new areas are always developing. Recent Serendipity catalogues detail collections of Viet Nam war literature (over 400 items), fiction and poetry related to the petroleum industry (nearly 600 items), and American fiction of the 1960s (over 2100 items). And today, he adds, there are more small presses, more fine presses, and more desktop publishing of fine books than ever before.
“What people are willing to buy has vastly expanded. All the barriers are being broken down between what people previously thought to collect. For example, baseball has been co-opted by book people. Screenplays form the largest single body of unpublished material by excellent writers. Both Faulkner and McMurtry, to name only two, produced some forty-odd screenplays each. They just weren’t at hand twenty years ago, but now they are.
“All through the 60s and 70s increasing numbers of people went into the so-called ‘antiquarian’ business—selling books you couldn’t get currently from the publisher. Many were academics like myself, seeking an alternative lifestyle. We all sensed there hadn’t been any increase in the book business. And then at some point suddenly everyone was interested in buying books. Why? For all the reasons. Boredom with television. Because they liked the books. Because they suspected that books might hold their financial worth. Books are objects of aesthetics and value, seen against the volatility of international currencies. On the other hand, there’s so much secret knowledge required.
“I’m seeking books at every waking minute—but I’m not as aggressive as some people. I don’t have trouble getting books in the door. The cost is less than you might think, and people send me books to sell for them. I’m constantly trying to replace stock. The physical effort, of administration and research, is enormous. But we deal in books because they carry so much emotional baggage. They’re transportable and have all the freight inside, plus they’re the only conductor of that freight. Books are our cultures, far more than, say, stamps or coins. Books are perfect.”
It is often called the greatest bookstore in the United States; one of London’s leading antiquarian booksellers, no slouch himself, named it the finest in the English language. Serendipity Books, in Berkeley, California, has become the ideal of what a literary, secondhand bookstore can be, regarded with reverence and amazement by others in the field. Serendipity has set standards for knowing and acquiring not only books but the ephemera that accretes around writers. It differs from somewhere like the Strand in New York City just as a select warehouse differs from a jumbled attic.
As proprietor, creator, resident baseball fanatic, and ruling mind, Peter Howard has been in the book business for thirty years. Though Serendipity is a general bookstore, with stock under most subject headings, Howard specializes in literature of all sorts. This involves modern first (and later) editions of English and American Literature; fine printing; literary manuscripts and archives; little magazines; screenplays. He has entire shelves of Jack London, Steinbeck, Naipaul, Virginia Woolf; entire bookcases of Graham Greene, Nabokov, Henry Miller, C.S. Forester, Joyce Carol Oates. One enormous, well-organized room holds 35,000 volumes of poetry. An upstairs contains over 26,000 volumes of American fiction. You wander through one vast, high-ceilinged room after another, lose your way among the tightly-packed shelves, and sooner or later realize this is not a bookstore, but a national treasure.
“I’ve got 300,000 decent books in here,” says Howard. “Nobody, no single bookstore, can handle it all. You could just as easily fill this place with only fishing books, or with film books.”
No categorizing can give any indication of the treasures Howard has—or, with his three full-time assistants, can find for you. If you’re looking for Borges’ personal copy of a C.S. Lewis book, or rare editions in Russian of early Nabokov novels, or a few Christopher Isherwood or Jack Kerouac manuscripts, or an unfilmed Faulkner screenplay in typescript, or an obscure book of Picasso’s that comes with an original lithograph, turn to Serendipity.
In a profession known for its eccentrics Howard has a reputation as a Character, less for his appearance (like a genial Rasputin) than the brilliance of his occasional catalogues, which are equal parts good scholarship and salesmanship. He is current president of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America, and sees his profession as often misunderstood and misrepresented.
“Everyone who writes about the antiquarian book business emphasizes price rather than service. We serve customers by getting a book for them at the cheapest possible price. We serve libraries in the same way—we’ve sold to every institution in the country.”
He waives off questions about book collecting as investment only, the glamor of financial (as opposed to cultural) value—though feeding this desire keeps many antiquarian bookstores going.
“I despise price guides. They get the emphasis all wrong. Price is the last thing of importance. The first is: Why? Why buy it? Why is the book important? If the first reason is money, then reconsider. In any case, the most overpriced books are modern books, within the context of the prices of other centuries’ books.
“As an investment, collecting books is a ludicrous way for someone to attempt to increase their capital assets. And it can be expensive, depending on what you choose to collect. Most people don’t realize what the range of possibility is around the author. If you’re serious, really serious, about, say, John Steinbeck, then you’re into it for $1,000,000 over a lifetime. If a guy walks in and wants a complete set of F. Scott Fitzgerald first editions, in perfect dust jackets, immaculate condition, everything, we’ll get them within a year. It’s a matter of how much he wants them and how much money he has. They’re all out there and can be had, except possibly the first, This Side of Paradise, because too many people want it. A first edition of The Great Gatsby, in a perfect dust jacket, will set him back about $20,000. But if someone wants the book, really wants it, then it’s at the other end of the telephone, or soon will be. But this sort of thing represents only about 3% of what’s out there of interest.
“And why collect books simply by the numbers? Are you adding anything to the world? It’s an aesthetic act, the idea of a collection: completing the structure, adding to the culture. When people come in they have blinkers on. I try to take the blinkers off. I want to be trusted by my customers—I’ll share my knowledge with them. And I try to confront people about their reasons for collecting, but there’s no right or wrong. They inform me.
“I’ve wanted to do four catalogues a year. I end up doing a catalogue every four years. It’s an inefficient way to sell books.” Still, he is justly proud of them, and particularly of his 641-page Faulkner catalogue, the most complete bibliography ever assembled for the largest Faulkner collection ever. It ranges from English and foreign editions of his books to 19th century Mississippi maps, the writer’s last will and testament, and private letters. A typescript of Faulkner’s first book of poems is priced at $75,000.
He insists there are still great collections to be made. “The guy with the greatest Twain collection built it in the last 25 years. Preposterous! Everyone thought it too late to collect Twain.”
He points out that new areas are always developing. Recent Serendipity catalogues detail collections of Viet Nam war literature (over 400 items), fiction and poetry related to the petroleum industry (nearly 600 items), and American fiction of the 1960s (over 2100 items). And today, he adds, there are more small presses, more fine presses, and more desktop publishing of fine books than ever before.
“What people are willing to buy has vastly expanded. All the barriers are being broken down between what people previously thought to collect. For example, baseball has been co-opted by book people. Screenplays form the largest single body of unpublished material by excellent writers. Both Faulkner and McMurtry, to name only two, produced some forty-odd screenplays each. They just weren’t at hand twenty years ago, but now they are.
“All through the 60s and 70s increasing numbers of people went into the so-called ‘antiquarian’ business—selling books you couldn’t get currently from the publisher. Many were academics like myself, seeking an alternative lifestyle. We all sensed there hadn’t been any increase in the book business. And then at some point suddenly everyone was interested in buying books. Why? For all the reasons. Boredom with television. Because they liked the books. Because they suspected that books might hold their financial worth. Books are objects of aesthetics and value, seen against the volatility of international currencies. On the other hand, there’s so much secret knowledge required.
“I’m seeking books at every waking minute—but I’m not as aggressive as some people. I don’t have trouble getting books in the door. The cost is less than you might think, and people send me books to sell for them. I’m constantly trying to replace stock. The physical effort, of administration and research, is enormous. But we deal in books because they carry so much emotional baggage. They’re transportable and have all the freight inside, plus they’re the only conductor of that freight. Books are our cultures, far more than, say, stamps or coins. Books are perfect.”
Monday, January 17, 1994
How To Be An Expat
Written in 1994 for Esquire, re-written in 1998 for G.Q.
Most of us have a yen to live abroad sometime in our lives—to savor the romance of feeling at home in a foreign country. Everyone has his own version of the Expatriate Fantasy, but the idea is usually that being overseas can make you, in unexpected ways, into a free man. (Just ask Ronnie Biggs, mastermind of the Great Train Robbery, who's lived happily in Brazil, outside the reach of British law, for decades.)
Maybe you get sent for three years to open the firm's new branch in Hong Kong, Rio, or Paris, and expect to be well compensated for making the move. Maybe you make a personal vow to grab your paintbrush or laptop and try to match Hemingway's bells, bulls, and balls in a Madrid cafe. Maybe you set enough aside in your twenties to take the plunge—to go native and withdraw from the millennial chaos on a beach in Bora-Bora or Belize. Or maybe you're trying to drop from sight of the Feds, like the crooked New York stockbroker who died and eventually turned up running a video rental shack by the Caribbean under an assumed name. No matter where or how, a good deal of the same thumbnail rules apply.
This How-To is culled from the personal expertise of expat businessmen, spies, artists, diplomats, journalists, surfers, consultants, con men, veteran retirees as well as foreigners—to help the Innocent Abroad avoid becoming the Ugly American, no matter how long you stay away.
Before You Go Abroad:
1. First, prepare yourself for a new luxury—learn to really enjoy diarrhea. It's absolutely everywhere except for that tiny slice of civilization called Western Europe. In the "developing" world, some forms of diarrhea verge on a religious experience.
2. If you can't master another language, consider marrying a foreigner. Just be sure to choose your foreign spouse wisely. If she's Iranian, for example, you instantly become an Iranian citizen too. In sickness and in health.
3. If you have a blonde wife or daughter, don't go to the Middle East. What you fear most is true: every single male wants them as sex slaves.
4. Take out plenty of airmail magazine subscriptions—a surprisingly efficient way to ease the pangs of homesickness.
5. 71% of all expats turn out to be alcoholic. That probably means you. This percentage is even higher in hot climates.
6. If you're moving somewhere poor, get over your politically correct ideas about servants before you arrive. Saves time.
Once You Get There:
7. Learn the local currency as quickly as possible. The sooner you can stop converting ("438 rupees, that makes $9.25 to cab it back to Delhi,") and think in terms of how many days a local family can survive on the money, the closer you'll be to your new home.
8. Don't ask for reliable advice from your "friendly" U.S. consulate or embassy. Consular officers don't like Americans abroad; they wish we'd all stay home. As they're mostly dorks who wish they were political officers instead (i.e. possible future ambassadors), their advice is dubious at best.
Still, let's say your tooth hurts and you just arrived in Caracas. If you're forced to go to a consulate for advice, ask a foreign employee (a local who works for the consulate, known as FSNs in governmentese) which dentists are lethal and which trustworthy. The locals are usually smarter and more honest than the consular officers—it's much more prestigious for them to work there than it is for your fellow Yank.
9. Expect your salary to go down in buying power, unless you end up with a cushy relocation package. Life overseas usually costs more. The poorer the country, the more bribes you have to lay out to get the water heater fixed.
Americans often have a philosophical problem with bribery. It does have one advantage, however. When a transaction's done (say, you drop $200 to get your trunks through customs) it then truly is finished. There's none of the tyranny we have here of people owing each other "favors" and the consequent worries about repaying them.
10. Make friends with someone in the Interior Ministry—those folks who confirm your work permit, boot you out if it's not in order, or bug your phone if they don't like you. They make very helpful and informative dinner guests, but keep them separate from anyone you know on the U.S. Embassy staff.
11. Be careful whom you have sex with. If you're in Europe, enjoy the dessert trolley. Odd as it may seem, most foreigners (outside of Southeast Asia) are statistically safer partners than Americans, who per capita are highly infected.
Don't even think about sex in Africa (truly unbeatable odds) or in the Middle East, where only four eyewitnesses are required in court to prove unlawful fornication.
12. Don't wear school ties or graduation rings overseas. They look even geekier abroad than they do here. And resist telling those priceless college anecdotes. No one over there cares.
13. Tax attorneys abroad invariably cost more and know less than in the States. Your tough luck, you're screwed.
14. Gird your loins for underwear shock. In France, Italy, and Spain especially. Undergarments, particularly women's, cost many times what they do here. The first time you slide French underwear off a woman you'll undoubtedly note the superior workmanship. If you paid you may note the price; $150 for a brassiere isn't uncommon. Still, there are compensations.
15. Resist the temptation to place your children in U.S. schools overseas. One joy of living abroad is that your kids will avoid an American education. Likewise, never send kids to an English boarding school. The playing fields of Eton are filled with weeds nowadays.
French and German schools are found nearly everywhere, and your children will come away speaking a foreign language plus the language of the country you're in, and also be able to speak, read, and write English better than most of their peers back home. Unfortunately, your children may develop nasty French and German habits (respect for their elders, for example).
16. The climate overseas is always more extreme than they tell you. You'll never be as comfortable as here. Most Europeans still don't understand heating, and many Brits don't even know what a thermostat is. You'll find yourself spending a lot of time next to the pre-war towel heaters in the bathroom.
17. People overseas—even in Europe—may stink. Often they think it's sexy. Not surprisingly, these people also disapprove of air-conditioning. (A French magazine recently sold millions with this headline: "Surprise Survey! The French wash!") Actually, the French are among the cleanest.
18. Never repair your shoes overseas unless you're in Turkey, Italy, or Hong Kong. Otherwise it's incredibly expensive and dangerous. More than one American lies doddering and drooling in a foreign jail cell for beating to death a local shoemaker who transformed his loafers from size 10 to size 7.
19. If you consider yourself a sensitive American who never says an unkind word based on race, gender, and political or sexual orientation, grow up. Foreigners love to trash their fellow man. Remember: outside the USA, everyone openly hates everyone else. Be careful about expressing any compassion for humanity until you're totally certain about the religious, family, and tribal backgrounds of your hosts.
20. Conversely, become adept at denouncing the States right at the beginning of every dinner party. Foreigners really love to hear an American criticize his homeland. If you do so early enough in the evening, there's every chance that by the time you get to after-dinner drinks, they'll start to trash their own countries, and you can really join in. If not, be patient. It may require a few dinner parties before you have the deep pleasure of excoriating your hosts.
21. In many countries, people seem to have a sixth sense about which cars belong to Americans and can thus be scratched, bumped, and wrecked with impunity. When you go for repairs, you'll learn why French auto mechanics look as prosperous as surgeons. One solution: own the car there, but insure it here.
22. Master the art of changing money. Be wary of the fellow in Egypt, Italy, or all Asia who can count phony bills off the bottom of a wad of cash quicker than any card sharp. Do not, however, automatically distrust the so-called black market. In some countries the banking has simply moved onto the streets. For example, in Latin America the funny guys standing on the corner with briefcases full of money almost never cheat you.
23. Unless you're homosexual, don't learn Japanese in bed. The men and women speak significantly different dialects, the women's being quieter, more deferential. Many a Westerner who's enjoyed a Japanese girlfriend long enough to learn the lingo ends up, it seems, being seen afterward as (in Japanese terms) a poofter.
24. Learn to enjoy soccer ("football"). And if you don't already know what an after-dinner drink is, find out fast.
Going Native—The Final Frontier
25. Choose a country with a high standard of living. Sounds obvious? Not to all the ex-hippies stranded in India, still trying to earn enough to leave. You'll become much less popular with the locals if you end up as poor as they.
26. No matter what crimes you've committed, don't ever give up your citizenship, even if you have to hide that U.S. Passport under a reed mattress. Think of it as a ripcord you might have to pull on very short notice one day. The USA is like your long-lost cousins at Thanksgiving: they have to let you in. (At the same time, watch out for those extradition treaties.)
27. Never, never, never hit the locals. The Marines—unlike the British Army of yesteryear or the French Foreign Legion of today—won't come to your rescue.
28. Accept the fact that your friends back home a) will be very jealous of you, not imagining how difficult it is to get your water heater fixed, and b) if they do keep in touch with you, will be forever promising to come visit you in several months' time, and c) they will never, ever, come.
29. If you must hide big money, hide it somewhere handy (preferably several somewheres) so you can flee fast and far on short notice. Don't make the mistake of spending quickly or ostentatiously; go for the long haul; don't be greedy. If living abroad helps you decrease your worries and increase your daily pleasures, that's plenty. Don't play millionaire among peasants.
30. A small local income, no matter how incidental, ties you in a friendly way to neighbors so long as it doesn't take work away from them. Do not resent paying modest taxes if the country has a good national health service (you're better off than here). Get a strong local lawyer a.s.a.p. Don't dream of buying a house till you've lived there through all four seasons—if the place actually has seasons.
31. Going native doesn't mean you have to dress native. Even Gauguin probably looked absurd in a sarong. Anyone who's been to Guatemala and seen gringos in Mayan weavings should beware their mistake—not realizing what really goes together. Most expats who "dress native" and think they blend in never imagine they look as absurd as a man strolling around in a woman's blue jean skirt under a dinner jacket.
32. A good way to judge the future of a country—when deciding if you want to hang out there for a decade or two—is by the state of its poor. There really is such a thing as clean, safe, and community-minded slums (say, Istanbul's or Tahiti's). On the other hand, a society with filthy, dangerous, every-man-for-himself slums (like Los Angeles) probably has a bleak future.
33. To go native usually means to eat native. Get ready to enjoy goat thighs washed down by corn beer fermented with old women's saliva—the enzymes act as a yeast, in case you wondered.
34. Don’t automatically trust most the locals who speak English best.
35. Remember what Dante wrote about exile: "Other men's bread is salty, other men's stairs are steep." Be careful you don't become a man without a country while trying to be a citizen of the world; there's a crucial difference. If you live abroad, embrace the experience fully, like a lover with whom you share few responsibilities, and see how much you can learn before you break up. Who knows? The affair might last a lifetime.
Don't expect your stay-at-home friends to understand. Sadly, you'll have less and less in common as the years pass. And when you do visit them, never forget the advice of an expert raconteur: There is no bore like the travel bore.
Most of us have a yen to live abroad sometime in our lives—to savor the romance of feeling at home in a foreign country. Everyone has his own version of the Expatriate Fantasy, but the idea is usually that being overseas can make you, in unexpected ways, into a free man. (Just ask Ronnie Biggs, mastermind of the Great Train Robbery, who's lived happily in Brazil, outside the reach of British law, for decades.)
Maybe you get sent for three years to open the firm's new branch in Hong Kong, Rio, or Paris, and expect to be well compensated for making the move. Maybe you make a personal vow to grab your paintbrush or laptop and try to match Hemingway's bells, bulls, and balls in a Madrid cafe. Maybe you set enough aside in your twenties to take the plunge—to go native and withdraw from the millennial chaos on a beach in Bora-Bora or Belize. Or maybe you're trying to drop from sight of the Feds, like the crooked New York stockbroker who died and eventually turned up running a video rental shack by the Caribbean under an assumed name. No matter where or how, a good deal of the same thumbnail rules apply.
This How-To is culled from the personal expertise of expat businessmen, spies, artists, diplomats, journalists, surfers, consultants, con men, veteran retirees as well as foreigners—to help the Innocent Abroad avoid becoming the Ugly American, no matter how long you stay away.
Before You Go Abroad:
1. First, prepare yourself for a new luxury—learn to really enjoy diarrhea. It's absolutely everywhere except for that tiny slice of civilization called Western Europe. In the "developing" world, some forms of diarrhea verge on a religious experience.
2. If you can't master another language, consider marrying a foreigner. Just be sure to choose your foreign spouse wisely. If she's Iranian, for example, you instantly become an Iranian citizen too. In sickness and in health.
3. If you have a blonde wife or daughter, don't go to the Middle East. What you fear most is true: every single male wants them as sex slaves.
4. Take out plenty of airmail magazine subscriptions—a surprisingly efficient way to ease the pangs of homesickness.
5. 71% of all expats turn out to be alcoholic. That probably means you. This percentage is even higher in hot climates.
6. If you're moving somewhere poor, get over your politically correct ideas about servants before you arrive. Saves time.
Once You Get There:
7. Learn the local currency as quickly as possible. The sooner you can stop converting ("438 rupees, that makes $9.25 to cab it back to Delhi,") and think in terms of how many days a local family can survive on the money, the closer you'll be to your new home.
8. Don't ask for reliable advice from your "friendly" U.S. consulate or embassy. Consular officers don't like Americans abroad; they wish we'd all stay home. As they're mostly dorks who wish they were political officers instead (i.e. possible future ambassadors), their advice is dubious at best.
Still, let's say your tooth hurts and you just arrived in Caracas. If you're forced to go to a consulate for advice, ask a foreign employee (a local who works for the consulate, known as FSNs in governmentese) which dentists are lethal and which trustworthy. The locals are usually smarter and more honest than the consular officers—it's much more prestigious for them to work there than it is for your fellow Yank.
9. Expect your salary to go down in buying power, unless you end up with a cushy relocation package. Life overseas usually costs more. The poorer the country, the more bribes you have to lay out to get the water heater fixed.
Americans often have a philosophical problem with bribery. It does have one advantage, however. When a transaction's done (say, you drop $200 to get your trunks through customs) it then truly is finished. There's none of the tyranny we have here of people owing each other "favors" and the consequent worries about repaying them.
10. Make friends with someone in the Interior Ministry—those folks who confirm your work permit, boot you out if it's not in order, or bug your phone if they don't like you. They make very helpful and informative dinner guests, but keep them separate from anyone you know on the U.S. Embassy staff.
11. Be careful whom you have sex with. If you're in Europe, enjoy the dessert trolley. Odd as it may seem, most foreigners (outside of Southeast Asia) are statistically safer partners than Americans, who per capita are highly infected.
Don't even think about sex in Africa (truly unbeatable odds) or in the Middle East, where only four eyewitnesses are required in court to prove unlawful fornication.
12. Don't wear school ties or graduation rings overseas. They look even geekier abroad than they do here. And resist telling those priceless college anecdotes. No one over there cares.
13. Tax attorneys abroad invariably cost more and know less than in the States. Your tough luck, you're screwed.
14. Gird your loins for underwear shock. In France, Italy, and Spain especially. Undergarments, particularly women's, cost many times what they do here. The first time you slide French underwear off a woman you'll undoubtedly note the superior workmanship. If you paid you may note the price; $150 for a brassiere isn't uncommon. Still, there are compensations.
15. Resist the temptation to place your children in U.S. schools overseas. One joy of living abroad is that your kids will avoid an American education. Likewise, never send kids to an English boarding school. The playing fields of Eton are filled with weeds nowadays.
French and German schools are found nearly everywhere, and your children will come away speaking a foreign language plus the language of the country you're in, and also be able to speak, read, and write English better than most of their peers back home. Unfortunately, your children may develop nasty French and German habits (respect for their elders, for example).
16. The climate overseas is always more extreme than they tell you. You'll never be as comfortable as here. Most Europeans still don't understand heating, and many Brits don't even know what a thermostat is. You'll find yourself spending a lot of time next to the pre-war towel heaters in the bathroom.
17. People overseas—even in Europe—may stink. Often they think it's sexy. Not surprisingly, these people also disapprove of air-conditioning. (A French magazine recently sold millions with this headline: "Surprise Survey! The French wash!") Actually, the French are among the cleanest.
18. Never repair your shoes overseas unless you're in Turkey, Italy, or Hong Kong. Otherwise it's incredibly expensive and dangerous. More than one American lies doddering and drooling in a foreign jail cell for beating to death a local shoemaker who transformed his loafers from size 10 to size 7.
19. If you consider yourself a sensitive American who never says an unkind word based on race, gender, and political or sexual orientation, grow up. Foreigners love to trash their fellow man. Remember: outside the USA, everyone openly hates everyone else. Be careful about expressing any compassion for humanity until you're totally certain about the religious, family, and tribal backgrounds of your hosts.
20. Conversely, become adept at denouncing the States right at the beginning of every dinner party. Foreigners really love to hear an American criticize his homeland. If you do so early enough in the evening, there's every chance that by the time you get to after-dinner drinks, they'll start to trash their own countries, and you can really join in. If not, be patient. It may require a few dinner parties before you have the deep pleasure of excoriating your hosts.
21. In many countries, people seem to have a sixth sense about which cars belong to Americans and can thus be scratched, bumped, and wrecked with impunity. When you go for repairs, you'll learn why French auto mechanics look as prosperous as surgeons. One solution: own the car there, but insure it here.
22. Master the art of changing money. Be wary of the fellow in Egypt, Italy, or all Asia who can count phony bills off the bottom of a wad of cash quicker than any card sharp. Do not, however, automatically distrust the so-called black market. In some countries the banking has simply moved onto the streets. For example, in Latin America the funny guys standing on the corner with briefcases full of money almost never cheat you.
23. Unless you're homosexual, don't learn Japanese in bed. The men and women speak significantly different dialects, the women's being quieter, more deferential. Many a Westerner who's enjoyed a Japanese girlfriend long enough to learn the lingo ends up, it seems, being seen afterward as (in Japanese terms) a poofter.
24. Learn to enjoy soccer ("football"). And if you don't already know what an after-dinner drink is, find out fast.
Going Native—The Final Frontier
25. Choose a country with a high standard of living. Sounds obvious? Not to all the ex-hippies stranded in India, still trying to earn enough to leave. You'll become much less popular with the locals if you end up as poor as they.
26. No matter what crimes you've committed, don't ever give up your citizenship, even if you have to hide that U.S. Passport under a reed mattress. Think of it as a ripcord you might have to pull on very short notice one day. The USA is like your long-lost cousins at Thanksgiving: they have to let you in. (At the same time, watch out for those extradition treaties.)
27. Never, never, never hit the locals. The Marines—unlike the British Army of yesteryear or the French Foreign Legion of today—won't come to your rescue.
28. Accept the fact that your friends back home a) will be very jealous of you, not imagining how difficult it is to get your water heater fixed, and b) if they do keep in touch with you, will be forever promising to come visit you in several months' time, and c) they will never, ever, come.
29. If you must hide big money, hide it somewhere handy (preferably several somewheres) so you can flee fast and far on short notice. Don't make the mistake of spending quickly or ostentatiously; go for the long haul; don't be greedy. If living abroad helps you decrease your worries and increase your daily pleasures, that's plenty. Don't play millionaire among peasants.
30. A small local income, no matter how incidental, ties you in a friendly way to neighbors so long as it doesn't take work away from them. Do not resent paying modest taxes if the country has a good national health service (you're better off than here). Get a strong local lawyer a.s.a.p. Don't dream of buying a house till you've lived there through all four seasons—if the place actually has seasons.
31. Going native doesn't mean you have to dress native. Even Gauguin probably looked absurd in a sarong. Anyone who's been to Guatemala and seen gringos in Mayan weavings should beware their mistake—not realizing what really goes together. Most expats who "dress native" and think they blend in never imagine they look as absurd as a man strolling around in a woman's blue jean skirt under a dinner jacket.
32. A good way to judge the future of a country—when deciding if you want to hang out there for a decade or two—is by the state of its poor. There really is such a thing as clean, safe, and community-minded slums (say, Istanbul's or Tahiti's). On the other hand, a society with filthy, dangerous, every-man-for-himself slums (like Los Angeles) probably has a bleak future.
33. To go native usually means to eat native. Get ready to enjoy goat thighs washed down by corn beer fermented with old women's saliva—the enzymes act as a yeast, in case you wondered.
34. Don’t automatically trust most the locals who speak English best.
35. Remember what Dante wrote about exile: "Other men's bread is salty, other men's stairs are steep." Be careful you don't become a man without a country while trying to be a citizen of the world; there's a crucial difference. If you live abroad, embrace the experience fully, like a lover with whom you share few responsibilities, and see how much you can learn before you break up. Who knows? The affair might last a lifetime.
Don't expect your stay-at-home friends to understand. Sadly, you'll have less and less in common as the years pass. And when you do visit them, never forget the advice of an expert raconteur: There is no bore like the travel bore.
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