Petra

Written in 1996 for Gourmet magazine

To journey in the Middle East is to tread the dust of ancient history; and in the classical world no other ruin has the reputation of Jordan’s Petra, that “rose-red city half as old as Time.” Forgotten for centuries save by a few scholars and bedouin tribes, it had been the wealthy capital of the Nabateans, who flourished around the time of Christ. On “rediscovery” in the early 19th century Petra became a metaphor: the legendary lost city of Arabia.

Having admired the Scotsman David Roberts’ lithographs from his daring 1839 visit, I’d long wanted to see Petra—hidden like a sandstone dream after a winding, narrow passage through rock. Even today, to reach it summons an ancient wonder.

I went later than I should have, in early June, when the south of Jordan is already too hot. Petra lies amid stupendous valleys reminiscent of the most dramatic American southwest: huge folded waves, hills, and gnarled fists of stone, seemingly impenetrable. To travel here is to trace Biblical events—first you cross the spring of Moses. Then past the new sand-colored town of Petra, nestled on switchback roads that descend. A few modern hotels, a ticket, a gate. You are walking a dusty road with thistly hillside rising on one side. Horses are chuffing; women pass, swathed in black.

The road winds through lunar outcroppings, many of which are tombs with gaping temple-entrances carved out. A red-headdressed bedouin on a white horse canters past; Petra has long been in bedouin hands and they still have the concessions, like providing visitors with horses, donkeys, or buggies. Then a canyon starts, and you enter the siq, the serpentine corridor of rock.

Though it goes on only about a mile, you might as well be moving back centuries. The time-travel sensation is increased by the remains of an ancient dam and diversionary tunnel the Nabateans cut to protect against flood—for the enclosed city’s perpetual enemy was onrushing water. The siq descends; rock walls tower on both sides with carved niches, missing their statues. Welcoming shade, complex outcroppings with occasional trees, bird calls, pools of light. Your footsteps crunch the sand as the shadows deepen, and a darting lizard seems disrespectful.

A paved Roman road and a water gully begin. More niches, a flowering oleander—then abruptly it rises before you, through a convenient cleft where the shadowy walls nearly meet: a fragmentary vision of civilization in a burst of light, a glimpse of elegant floral columns, a winged goddess carved on a facade. This moment will be remembered as one of the architectural epiphanies of your life.

A few steps more, you come out of the siq, and a temple known as the Treasury is revealed entire, a camel kneeling appropriately before it—that miraculous moment to which no photo can do justice, when everyone becomes an explorer discovering Petra (“the rock”) for the first time.

Like most names for Petra’s buildings, the Treasury—El Khazneh in Arabic—is misleading. Originally a cult-temple of a king, the formal perfection of its twenty columns and its high stone urn had bedouin convinced for many centuries that this was where Petra’s riches were still hidden; numerous bullet-marks on the urn are a result of potshots to remove the lid. The treasure, of course, is the building itself, to rival any in classical Greece.


The Nabateans were a desert trading people who, from the 6th century B.C. on, developed a genius for urbanism and commerce. They soon controlled the region’s spice trade, expanding until they were less middlemen than overlords; Petra made an ideal trading crossroads, protected by the siq. Natural diplomats whose language and culture were a truce of East and West, the Nabateans were known for a humane system of justice and prowess at water management. Myrrh and frankincense—resins collected from trees in southern Arabia—could reach Petra by camel caravan in a mere two weeks, and Mediterranean ports like Gaza a week later.

These long caravans paid escort taxes on entering Nabatean territory and were led swiftly across by cameleers. Each city acted as rest-stop (at Petra, caravans stayed outside the siq) and also as a clearing-house. Fresh camels and crews were provided, goods traded, local items like Dead Sea bitumen added to the merchandise.

Petrans were both merchants and bankers for the caravans, investing large sums over vast trade routes outside their territory, and this way the Nabateans could reach out to most of their known world, exchanging goods and ideas. They maintained trade representatives as far away as East Africa, Italy, and the Aegean; hence the cosmopolitanism evident in every carved rock, where Greek, Assyrian, Egyptian, and Roman architectural details jostle each other in a singularly Nabatean style.

In 106 A.D. the Nabateans fell under Roman rule, which was typically benevolent and constructive. As cities to the north rose in trading power Petra lost its importance, and in the 2nd century the Nabateans became more agricultural and moved their capital up to the Sinai to recapture commerce from the Arabian Gulf. Massive earthquakes every two centuries hurt Petra’s viability, and it was mostly abandoned in the 7th century.

For a thousand years bedouin tribes kept silent on its existence. Its name was familiar only to classical scholars until the courageous young Swiss explorer and linguist Johann Burckhardt, disguised as a Muslim student, entered in 1812. Soon all Europe learned of Petra.


Early travelers and artists often took their time seeing the site; Petra now tends to get included as a single arduous day stop on a week tour of Jordan. But to allow Petra only a day is an injustice; not to see every individual monument (there are over 800) but to let memory absorb one of the man-made wonders of the world. It’s too overwhelming to take in hurriedly, and the Petra I describe in this article can be seen in one very active day only if you’re in great shape.

The difficulty of any visit to the deep past is completing the picture. The paradox here is that most of what survives are tombs of several types: much of Petra is a carved, palatial necropolis. A motif of columns around gaping dark tomb entrances gives an obsessional unity; still, one should imagine those temple-like tombs in a bustling city of the living, those valleys and hills covered with mud houses and stone villas, pre-earthquake.

After a wider second siq, with tombs on both sides, the cliffs open to reveal the grandeur of the city valley. First the huge, commanding amphitheater, the site of plays and the struggles of gladiators and animals. The amphitheater seated about 5,000 before an earthquake collapsed the stage and the backstage columns, and it’s worth going up an interior passage to come out like a spectator on the cheap high seats. (There’d have been cold drinks for sale on the way.) In another part of Petra a smaller theater was filled with water in the rainy season, so that mock naval battles could be enacted.

The valley broadens gradually, and to the east along one cliff-face a long array of Royal Tombs has been carved in a line like a majestic honor-guard. Here the size of the site takes hold and the distinctive local bedouin souvenirs, of sand in many colors dripped carefully into little bottles to make pretty images, seem appropriate, the many hues of Petran rock writ small. They bring to mind the visit of the artist and nonsense poet Edward Lear in 1855, who wrote that “All the cliffs are . . . in stripes.” His cook, Giorgio, put it more vividly: “Oh, Signore, we have come into a world where everything is made of chocolate, ham, curry-powder and salmon.”

The Royal Tombs convey the enormous scale of the city. The Palace Tomb with four massive columned Roman doors; the Corinthian Tomb, more eaten away but with a floral urn above; and the Urn Tomb itself, tremendously high, a colonnaded courtyard on its upper level, used as a Byzantine church in the 5th century. It is difficult to parse the magic of these grand edifices that flow with a precision and silken grace from the rock. Half-eaten by time, they are no less wonderful, and in contemplating them, incongruous details emerge—like raised geometric designs, with hints of art deco.

By the theater a sloping path climbs to the High Place of Sacrifice, the most well-preserved of the ancient world. (I suggest hiring a guide for this two-hour walk; it’s easy to take a wrong path.) Heading up the gorge the view back is spectacular, past whorled and mottled continents of otherworldly rock in rust and rose and cream, striated like marble cake. Eventually a worn processional path begins, its indentations the weathered steps of priests, up and around desert cliffs with pink oleander blossoms everywhere. Near the top are twin stone obelisks, representing the fertile male and female Nabatean deities. In typical fashion they weren’t brought here; Petrans simply carved the mountain out around them.

On the summit, after a bit of a scramble, is the High Place itself, a small sunken courtyard of stone with an altar and space for, presumably, only priests and honored guests. Here, before a vista of layered mountains and valleys, animals and sometimes humans were sacrificed for nearly ten centuries.

The descent follows a different route, via steps and paths both recent and ancient, by ravines and grottos. After many staircases there was suddenly a carved lion fifteen feet long, slender and sinewy. Once water had sluiced from its missing metallic head and run in cunning tunnels all the way to the city far below.

Extremely steep stairs lead down to elegant tombs which all resembled temples hewn out of rock, the most illustrious with three Roman soldiers on its facade. Across what was once a courtyard and portico—now bare rubble—is a funerary banquet hall hollowed from the cliff, with fluted columns along the interior walls and Petra’s most gorgeous patterns.

Beyond is the elaborate Renaissance Tomb, whose arch and six urns make it arguably the most sophisticated design in Petra. The way continues down Wadi Farasa (wadi means riverbed), finishing at the valley’s head after astounding views of giant temple-tombs shaped from a cliff and visible only from here. They add to the staggering immensity, the otherworldliness of a city not built but carved out of sandstone. At the valley’s head the impressive colonnaded main street ends in Roman paving stones and an arched temple, one of the few free-standing buildings that survive; it was originally dedicated to Dushara, the principal Nabatean deity, and later to Zeus and Aphrodite.


There are two museums in Petra, one by a little restaurant and the other in a tomb on the adjacent cliff-face. Both collections give a sense of the city’s daily life: small oil lamps, gold jewelry, bronze statuettes, terracotta figurines, coins, jars, gaily decorated bowls and pots, glass bottles, and larger statues of gods—some Egyptian, some Roman (Dionysus and Venus) and their Nabatean equivalents—along with enormous sculpted heads, winged angels, griffins, and gorgeous flowering pediments. Ceramic pipes attest to the Petran skill at supplying a metropolis of 20-30,000 with plenty of water via channels, aqueducts, and cisterns.

Most startling were the heads of winged lions, which were always delicate—whether in the earlier geometric style, or the realist style that followed the Roman invasion. Around both museums, stone tablets with animal and human figures in relief added a missing element to the site’s empty niches and broken torsos.

A nearby path meanders up to the largest and most impressive monument in Petra, known as Ed-Deir or “the Monastery.” No one coming down agreed as to how far away it was; in the end it took me under an hour, with rests to admire stone medusa heads and extraordinary views.

The path up is like a mountain equivalent of the siq. After many hundreds of worn steps and a couple of mildly steep moments, at 4,000 feet a pass leads through the usual scrub trees and boulders alongside a jumbled rock massif. I ambled into a kind of open courtyard past an abutment of rock, took a few steps, turned, and nearly fell to my knees.

Much wider and taller than the Treasury far below, the Monastery seems cataclysmic, carved to a deliberately inhuman scale—its muscular columns eerily smooth, its great urn towering over a doorway already four times the height of a man. It looms like a carved palace of justice eight stories high on a desert mountaintop, its softest colors revealed by the polished light of late afternoon.

Beside the Monastery a rough-hewn staircase traces a canny path up. I saw a daring young man make his way around, over, and emerge on the roof—then somehow clamber onto the lid of the urn, up the tulip handle, and then on top of that—while far below we all gasped and placed bets on whether he would jump or try a handstand. When I left he was still relaxing on the lid, admiring the view.

On my way down, I passed a bedouin goatherd playing a metal flute and singing to his flock. At the bottom, donkeys were braying to Arab music, the camels chewing and resting in the dirt as their owners lolled beneath canvas tents, enjoying a gentle peace at the end of the day.

A last sight of the Treasury, in lustrous light, just before the siq: here Petra ends in absolute glory, the decoration so ornate, so balanced and graceful—those human and mystical figures, the leaves and flowers on the columns. I stared at the bare rock beside it and thought: They started with only this. Art is not progressive; twenty centuries have not bettered their result, produced any structure more stately or more moving. That stone could be carved to such a softness and a classical formality, and with such freedom, seemed a miraculous statement of civilization.

 SIDEBAR: WADI RUM

Wadi Rum, the vast desert valley with dramatic mesas that provides the most memorable landscape shots of David Lean’s film Lawrence of Arabia, lies about an hour and a half by car south of Petra.  Inhabited since prehistoric times, for centuries it’s been the terrain of a semi-nomadic tribe, the Howeitat.  T.E.Lawrence, who wrote of Wadi Rum’s marvels (“vast and echoing and God-like”), was drawn to it again and again.

A visitor today begins at the Rest House at the conclusion of the Rum Highway, beside a modest village.  A Bedouin guide with a 4-wheel drive vehicle can be hired for a tour of Wadi Rum—three hours, say, in early morning or late afternoon.  Riding in the back of an open Toyota truck, we headed into the wadi (the Arabic word for a dried-up riverbed), which is mostly soft, pale red sand tufted with sparse grasses.  All around, monumental mountains like massive sentinels rise from the desert floor:  continents and honeycombs and fists and mushrooms and ridged pillars of rock.

In a mountain defile we examined Nabatean inscriptions, touching in their simplicity—stick figures holding hands, a camel with an arcing neck, two small drawn footprints.  Miles on, we made our way up a lone outcropping to a natural rock bridge with an astonishing view, miles and miles of strange immensity.  We stopped at a Bedouin tent for tea with a goatherd and his sons.

We passed a herd of camels feeding on scrub grass, wary at our noise, and got out.  Barefoot, we slowly climbed a dune of rose-red sand sliding underfoot, past a few brittle bushes, and stood above, in the quiet majesty of giant islands of rock around us.  The desert floor lay spread below.  Lawrence was still right: a mere glimpse of this place brings on premonitions of God. 

And summoned as if by our whim, two robed men on haughty camels appeared over a dune: the Royal Wadi Mounted Police, sometimes known as the Camel Corps.  They exchanged unhurried greetings with our guide as their camels chewed air, then they ambled on.

Had our guide seen the movie? we asked.  Oh, yes, he had a video of it at home—that pass to our right had been the famous long shot.  Could he be sure?  Why, of course: his father had been on hand during the filming.

The Lost Levantines of Istanbul

Written in 1996 for Boston magazine

Istanbul, perpetually schizophrenic, cannot make up its many minds about anything. Here, eyeing each other across the hurrying Bosphorus, Europe and Asia realize they have little in common save this inspiring city, whose skyline of minarets and floating domes can belong to none other. As the most powerful place in the world for over a thousand years, at one of the planet's crossroads, Istanbul remains energized even as its glories fade.

There are certain Boston echos. Both ex-capitals share a sense of power surrendered; both retain their stature as centers of learning, deriving energy from transient youth. Both carry a financial self-importance which slightly exaggerates the facts, but are of irreplaceable grandeur in each country's idea of itself, with all the historical vibrations of a place where Great Events occurred. Both are, despite an up-to-date veneer of stylishness, deeply old-fashioned and class-conscious. And each city suffers stresses that threaten its core identity.

Istanbul is changing radically. A milion peasants from the Anatolian heartland arrive every year looking for non-existent work, while a city designed for horse cart and trolley is force-fed more cars than it can handle. And even as a fundamentalist movement is on the rise—I saw female joggers swathed in black, head to foot—a Brahmin class, once powerful, is disappearing.

They are called Levantines. Though the term usually means anyone from the eastern Mediterranean, here it refers to a particular class of Istanbullus—Europeans who immigrated in the 19th century, in the waning Ottoman Empire. Most were Italian, French, British; some were Russians fleeing revolution.

The first Levantine I met was actually called Mr. Levante—an old Italian Jew who'd run the Orient Express office here for decades. With his fin-de-siècle gestures and a colonial, almost courtly manner, he was a gentleman through and through. Like many Levantines, while maintaining his foreign nationality he'd been a citizen of the Turkish Republic (begun by Ataturk in 1923) and before that of the Ottoman Empire. Nearly ninety, impeccably tailored and fluent in at least four languages, he still resolutely swam from Europe to Asia several times a year with his chauffeur (a mile across the Bosphorus at the narrowest point), despite the risk of being run down by Russian oil tankers and freighters headed up to the Black Sea.

I remember him waving his hand in exasperation one morning at the jam of belching cars along the Bosphorus up in Bebek, a fancy suburb—home to diplomats, successful businessmen, and the odd Levantine family who'd hung on in style. "Do you believe it?" he asked. "Not long ago the water was clean enough for me to swim here every day, without fail. When I was already an old man there were sheep grazing these hills, and perhaps two cars. Now there are no sheep, only thousands of automobiles."

We were speaking French, though his English was excellent—Mr. Levante's generation of older Levantines had always spoken French among themselves. Still, as worldly as they seemed (for there was no mistaking them for foreign tourists on Istanbul's better streets), they had a stale and provincial if colorful air too. It was as if, knowing they'd never leave, they just didn't get out much anymore. Born here, well-educated before the war either in Europe or a Europeanized Istanbul University, they'd all remained Christian or Jew, and never converted to Islam.

The Levantines were not simply arrivistes and refugees; they had actually impelled the growth of the large Belle Epoque part of the city, known as Beyoglu, where indeed few Muslims ever lived until the 1960s. Across the Golden Horn from Stamboul, the oldest part of the city (once ancient Byzantium, later home to the sultans), for centuries Beyoglu was the modern, purely European third of Constantinople. Architecturally modeled on Paris, it was the natural locale of foreign embassies and fashionable hotels, the commercial and cultural center of the city.

Here an entire society of 19th century European merchants set up shop, bringing a finished, definitive way of life that rapidly seduced the Turkish upper class. As a genteel, vigorous Turkish gentleman of eighty-seven recalled, reliving that patrician city, "In those days we all spoke French, we carried walking sticks, we dressed as elegantly as gentlemen in Paris, not the drab clothes you see today. And the beautiful Constantinople women! Well, that has not changed. But those were more decorous times."

Leap two generations: Turkey, led by the secularist Ataturk, risen for two decades from Ottoman ashes, has managed to stay neutral during WWII. These transplanted Europeans—or their children's children—remain a highly visible, respected class. Nominally Turkish, the Levantines also resolutely keep up the old nationalities of their grandparents and still find the city airy, manageable, and green. Ankara, the newly-built and landlocked capital, lags far behind Constantinople, now renamed Istanbul.

Over the next decades, though, the city changed inexorably. Some Levantines stayed wealthy, through their parents' banks or import and shipping companies. Their children mostly emigrated—either to France after the Istanbul riots against minorities in the 1950s, or else to the States, for English was now becoming the preferred language over French. Poor or affluent, all Levantines were careful the children maintained at least two passports.

And by ten years ago Levantine society was collapsing. As a veteran Turkish journalist pointed out, "Until well after the war the Levantines were happy. 'Sweet-water Europeans' we called them, because they liked the good life. Like fish who can't live in salt water, eh? Then suddenly the Anatolian peasants began to flood the city, and it was like when the Nile floods its banks. When the water recedes nothing is left and you start over. That's what happened to these Levantines. Their city, their whole world, got swept away."

Once the heart of a cosmopolitan city, now they were simply stranded, with fond memories of a more amusing place that had changed irreversibly around them. How could surviving profoundly lonely teas at the French consulate compare to bygone afternoons at the Cafe du Luxembourg or soirees at the Pera Palace ballroom? And where were the spies? Gone forever, with the walking-canes?

There are still survivors. On a sloping lane in Beyoglu, past the abandoned Spanish Embassy, past the Italian Consulate where Casanova spent the summer of 1744 without a conquest, I met a finely-made white-haired man standing in a narrow doorway. In polished French he said, "Come in, come in, sir. I am resting at the moment. I am a furniture maker, you see." His manner seemed more a diplomat's. He ushered me into a grotto of shadows and sun shafts. "Vladimir. And you . . .? I have worked here for thirty-six years."

I asked about his flawless French. "I went to a French lycée here when I was a boy. That of Saint Benoit. I speak Greek also—my wife is Greek, but from Istanbul. I speak Russian too— my parents were both Russes Blancs, they fled here back in 1917. Naturally, since I was born here I also speak Turkish. And because here my neighbors are the Italian government, I speak a practical Italian. I learned it on this street."

To move fluidly from language to language and culture to culture was in his blood.

He presented me to his six cats, pointed out the delicate workmanship of his cabinets, and offered me water for the uphill climb. He seemed much of the history of Beyoglu, in human form.

"Less than one hundred Levantine families left now," an antiquarian bookseller who specialized in liquidating their libraries told me. A few kept the Brahmin profile high: one Levantine daughter married the heir to one of Turkey's largest fortunes last year, and a son went into administrative work for the royal family of Jordan. Breeding paid—but most Levantines had died off, and their children and grandchildren were long gone. In the antique shops of Beyoglu you could buy up their abandoned furniture and bric-a-brac. "Kids here no longer look to Paris for inspiration," a Frenchwoman at the consulate remarked. "They're transfixed by America, by whatever looks newest." At least in the Grand Bazaar, the shopkeepers—shifting fluently from English to Italian to French to German to Dutch to Polish to Spanish in search of a sale—remember.

The Flashman Papers

Written in 1995 for Forbes FYI magazine

“When all other trusts fail, turn to Flashman.”—Abraham Lincoln

Boys read different books than girls do: this is why there are soldiers, and freebooters, and pirates, and empires. It is why Sherlock Holmes and James Bond and Tarzan have nothing to fear from posterity, for every man has deep within him a shadow self dreaming of impossibly heroic lives he might have led.

All the same, at the end of this weary century what we need is a hero we can believe in, a hero worse than most of us: a cad, a liar, a bounder, a coward, a lecher, a bully, a cheat, a rogue with no illusions about fighting on the side of the angels; a man who survives to fool everyone except himself, whose many faults excuse our own. And naturally, he should always get the girls.

Any scoundrel should be allowed to introduce himself:

“For a well-decorated hero I’ve done a deal of surrendering in my time—which is doubtless why I remain a well-decorated hero . . . if there’s one thing I’ve learned . . . it’s that the foeman is generally as glad to accept your surrender as you are to give it. Mind you, he may turn spiteful later, when he’s got you snug and helpless (I often do), but that’s a risk you must run . . . .”

In 1969 a novel appeared in England to great accolades—P. G. Wodehouse remarked, “If ever there was a time when I felt that watcher-of-the-skies-when-a-new-planet stuff, it was when I read the first Flashman.” The novel, by a Scots newspaperman named George MacDonald Fraser, purported to be the first packet from a recently discovered trunk of oilskin-wrapped memoirs of a Victorian military hero, Sir Harry Flashman (1822-1915). British critics recognized Flashman as a brilliant literary conceit, for the character appeared as a boy in Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857). He’s the drunken bully who’s expelled from Rugby, rendering the rest of the work dull by his absence.

Flashman begins where Hughes left off, but the brute tells the tale himself. In swift order (1839-42) our man Flashy has seduced his father’s mistress, joined the cavalry, been the target of a shotgun marriage, cheated in a duel, learned Hindustani from an Indian slave-girl, ridden alongside the toughest warrior-horsemen in Central Asia, and come through the First Afghan Wars as the hero of the fearful siege of Jallalabad, the only white man left breathing in the rubble—through his own relentless survival instinct (he calls it cowardice).

What made it all intoxicating was not just the humor, or the vivid prose and period slang, but the tone—praising and damning the British Empire while being pelted with its medals. And likewise condemning its finest leaders as incompetent while sparing no foreign barbarians either.

On our own drowsy shores the novel was taken by many at face value; a gleeful New York Times article pointed out how credulous reviewers—a third out of some thirty-odd—read it as authentic autobiography. (“The most important discovery since the Boswell papers,” said one.) Flashman was born, and now, a quarter century later, with the tenth volume in bookstores (Flashman And The Angel Of The Lord, 1858-9, in which Flash winds up quaking beside John Brown at Harper’s Ferry), the saga is far from over.

The novels are theoretically memoirs, written in Flashman’s old age. In fact they are history with the gloves off, as Fraser—an unsentimental ex-soldier with a scholar’s exhaustive sweep, a journalist’s nose for detail, and a superb comic instinct—roams through the confused pageant of the previous century on a blood-and-female-festooned Grand Tour. “Win gloriously—and the clever dicks forget all about the rickety ambulances that never came, and the rations that were rotten, and the boots that didn’t fit, and the generals who’d have been better employed hawking bedpans. . . .” Flashman is never running too fast to analyze what went wrong on a battlefield, to belittle a superior, or to show an amazed regard for the true heroes he meets, who frighten him.

All he truly wants is to be safe in England, spending his wife’s money drinking or wenching. But after Afghanistan, his military superiors and the English public regard him as a valiant hero and send him once more into the breach. Amid an unexpected liaison with Lola Montez he is kidnapped to Germany by Otto von Bismarck, there to impersonate an imprisoned prince (Royal Flash, 1842-3 & 1847-8). With customary misfortune he soon finds himself first chief of staff to the White Raja, Brooke of Sarawak, and then gets sold as slave, “military adviser and chief stud to a black she-devil”—Queen Ranavalona of Madagascar (Flashman’s Lady, 1842-5). In the Punjab he’s caught spying in the First Sikh War (Flashman And The Mountain Of Light, 1845-6) but manages to charm a nymphomaniacal Maharani and pocket the Koh-i-Noor diamond.

He is by turns a reluctant slaver in West Africa—shanghaied by a Latin-quoting, failed classics scholar across the Middle Passage—and a fugitive abolitionist agent in the U.S. (Flash For Freedom, 1848-9). He escorts a bordello by wagon across the Great Plains as a Forty-Niner and years later ends up as the sole “fleeing survivor” alongside Custer at the Little Big Horn (Flashman And The Redskins, 1849-50 & 1875-6).

Sent against his protestations to the Crimea, Flash becomes “unwilling leader of the Light Brigade” (Flashman At The Charge, 1854-5), farting so loudly his frightened horse plunges him in the wrong direction, straight at the guns. In India he’s a hapless hero in the Mutiny (Flashman In The Great Game, 1856-8). In China it’s the 1860 Taiping Rebellion (Flashman And The Dragon, 1860), running guns and opium and servicing difficult Oriental maidens. Poor Flash! His only hope is to reach home unscathed.

Much of his time is spent escaping perilous women. “There’s a test which I apply to all my old flames, when I think back . . . if she’d been mine to sell, how long would I have kept her?” His geographically diverse list includes Lily Langtry, Duchess Irma of Russia, Takes-Away-Clouds-Woman of the Apaches, Ko Dali’s daughter the Silk One, Mrs. Mandeville the Mad Dwarf, and the dancing-girl Narreeman. There’s Yehonala Tzu-hsi, concubine of the Manchoo Emperor; the Indian mutineer Lakshmibai; and Lola Montez, la grande horizontale. (“An empress, a queen, and the greatest courtesan of her time; I dare say I’m just a snob.”)

He does the deed in a remarkable array of locales: in a Chinese oven, during a battle with Borneo pirates, on furs in a sleigh escaping pursuit on the Russian steppe. He never questions his magnetism to women (“I could see she fancied me; black or white, savage or duchess, they’re all alike”), but Fraser’s deftest irony is that Flashman’s feather-brained, golden-haired, beloved wife Elspeth is probably—certainly—happily cheating on him too. No wonder: he’s rarely home.

One of Fraser's cunning strokes is that the more of a poltroon Flashman seems, the more trustworthy and persuasive a narrator he becomes, since only an honest man would present himself so very unflatteringly. “This story will be completely truthful; I am breaking the habit of eighty years . . . I can look at the picture above my desk, of the young officer . . . it is the portrait of a scoundrel, a liar, a cheat, a thief, a coward—and, oh yes, a toady . . . But I am concerned with facts, and since many of them are discreditable to me, you can rest assured they are true.” A man with no illusions about himself, no humbug, no apologies, no excuses: it may be Flashman’s only real virtue.

And Flashman does gain wisdom. “There’s nothing so cheering as surviving a peril in which companions have perished . . . There is great pleasure in catastrophe that doesn’t touch you, and anyone who says there isn’t is a liar.” He sees firsthand how “the course of history is as often settled by someone’s having a belly-ache, or not sleeping well, or a sailor getting drunk, or some aristocratic harlot waggling her backside.” He learns how to look brave (“head up, jaw firm, eyes steady, bowels dissolving”). Ever open-minded, he knows “the heathen creeds, for all their nonsensical mumbo-jumbo, were as good as any for keeping the rabble in order, and what else is religion for?” He never forgets his place among “those to whom I could be rude with impunity—servants, tarts, bagmen, shopkeepers, and foreigners”—at least until he’s at their mercy as a cowering prisoner.

The novels are, in a sense, Bulldog Drummond turned topsy-turvy: the bulldog as fraidy-cat. Flash is the antithesis of 007 or Horatio Hornblower, ever stalwart and brave for England. (Ever terrified, Flashy does share one talent of the traditional British champion—a gift for foreign tongues and native disguise.) If he has a literary predecessor, it is probably Falstaff. As Fraser told me, “The Hornblowers, which I admire, were simply a product of the Thirties and Forties, while Flashman’s a product of the Swinging Sixties.”

The natural comparison is with the Patrick O’Brian novels, set like Hornblower around the Napoleonic Wars, and which have of late become a marketing phenomenon. The approach is entirely different, though. With Flashman you learn a lot about events, participating center stage with him in major battles or political intrigues. The battles in O’Brian, however, are peripheral to the history of the time, nor are they the real matter of the books; instead you're learning the state of medical arts, the social mores on land and sea, the flora and fauna, how people talked, the music they liked. They’re written in a more formal way, with no real comedy but rather a parlor wit, and the sexuality is very understated and offstage.

Apart from their obvious quality, part of O’Brian’s mass appeal may be that his books allow people to feel comfortably well-educated. They're delightful but serious-minded—adult Hornblower, less lively perhaps but a definite follow-on to him. (Flashman's a follow-on to no one.) O’Brian is benefitting from our unusually nostalgic era, in which the mores of another time seem more satisfying than our own; his books have echoes of a search for heroes and family values. Fraser’s Flashman simply doesn’t fit comfortably into any of this and, exploding the myths of that nostalgic past on every page, is knottier to deal with.

Here is Flashman on Scud East, a junior classmate he bullied at Rugby whom he later sees murdered in the Indian Mutiny. It is a revealing event: Flash calls Scud one of Rugby’s “sturdy fools, manly little chaps . . . full of virtue, the kind that schoolmasters love. Yes, he was a fool then, and a fool twenty years later, when he died in the dust at Cawnpore with a Sepoy’s bayonet in his back. Honest Scud East; that was all his gallant goodness did for him.” Later Flashman adds, “I’d hated the little bastard, man and boy, for his smug manly piety—but you don’t see a child you’ve known all your life die every day. Maybe that was why I wept . . . I felt it all the more sincerely for knowing that I was still alive myself.” We are a long way from Holmes and Hornblower here: the jingoistic historical fantasy of England is finished.

One strong echo is of Fraser himself. In 1992 he published his own war memoirs, Quartered Safe Out Here, from his guerrilla experiences in Burma in 1945 at age nineteen. Historian John Keegan called it “one of the great personal memoirs of World War II”. The similarity of Fraser’s voice and tone to Flash’s is evident. In it, almost as a statement of purpose, Fraser writes, “You cannot, you must not, judge the past by the present; you must try to see it in its own terms and values, if you are to have any inkling of it.”

After Burma, Fraser trained as an officer in India and earned a commission, serving in North Africa and Palestine until 1947—a time he chronicled in a fine series of comic novels about the unrepentant McAuslan, the dirtiest soldier in the world. “I nearly stayed in,” he says, “but decided I wasn’t a peacetime soldier.” He became a reporter for a small newspaper in northern England, married a reporter on a rival paper, and went to the Glasgow Herald in 1953. After sixteen years as deputy editor, he quit just after the first Flashman debuted, to great success (“written in a few weeks, turned down by every publisher for three years”).

“I was always telling stories,” he says. “I used to tell bedtime stories to my parents rather than the other way around. But it’s like that in the Highlands. Everyone’s telling stories.” He began the second Flashman just before the first appeared. “I didn’t envisage more than three or four. Now they’ve been translated into every language in Western Europe except Greek.” In Who’s Who, as a recreation he lists “talking to my wife.”

Apart from ten Flashmans and the Burma memoir, Fraser has written seven other books, mostly fiction; among them is The Hollywood History Of The World, a survey of the cinema’s accuracy in presenting the past. Fraser has been a genre screenwriter, too—he did one Bond film, (Octopussy), Force 10 From Navarone, and fine versions of The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers with Oliver Reed, Michael York, and Faye Dunaway.

As the memoirs’ "editor" (a nice conceit), Fraser finds Flashy remarkably accurate, with rare slips of detail; the “editor’s” copious footnotes and appendices at the end of each meticulously-researched volume add greatly to the illusion. (This naturally makes his hero seem even more reliable.) Fraser, who has lived on the Isle of Man since the first Flashman was published, originally did most of his research at Trinity College in Dublin. "They were very enlightened librarians who just turned me loose and said help yourself. But about twelve years ago I joined the London Library, founded by Thomas Carlyle. They have a remarkable collection, and they'll actually send books to you. I get the facts, consider the course of a campaign, and try to fit Flashman into it. History itself does the work. The difficulty in dealing with a 19th century character is it takes so long to get him from point a to point b. For example, with the most recent book I was faced with the difficulty of getting Flashman from India at the end of the Mutiny to the States in time for Harper’s Ferry.”

One of the books’ pleasures is this opinionated witness bringing his era’s large personalities to life with flesh-and-blood candor. They’re all here: “cocky little” Disraeli “well into greasy middle age.” Congressman Lincoln had “the makings of as big a scoundrel as I am myself, but his appetites were different.” G. B. Shaw advances “the fatuous opinion that mental anguish was worse than physical.” The incomprehensible barbarians also come to life: Goolab Singh, Yakub Beg, Hsien Feng. Flashman even teaches the young Crazy Horse how to wink.

It is hard to say why the books (all ten in print) haven’t quite achieved bestseller-dom here, as they have in Britain—though Fraser’s U.S. audience is extremely avid and loyal. (A disappointing 1975 film, Royal Flash, with a screenplay by Fraser, starring Malcolm McDowell, has yet to appear here on video.) It may be that we have neither the British historical sense nor their self-scrutiny, though we have no shortage of famous scoundrels. Or it may be that 19th-century India, China, and Central Asia simply aren’t our favorite cup of java.

Still, I know one prominent historian who counts Flashman’s misadventures with the Sioux and Apaches as the single finest historical novel of the Wild West. Here’s how Flash puts it, having been scalped: “You see, it’s been the great illusion of our civilization that when the poor heathen saw our steamships and elections and drains and bottled beer, he’d realize what a benighted ass he’d been and come into the fold. But he don’t. Oh, he’ll take what he fancies, and can use (cheap booze and rifles, for example) but not on that account will he think we’re better. He knows different . . . And it doesn’t help when the two sides regard each other respectively as greedy, brutal white thieves and beastly, treacherous red vermin. I’m not saying either was wrong.”

What gives the books more torque than the very finest genre writing they apparently resemble? It’s partly that beneath that inspired voice roving the 19th century, beneath the ribald humor, the books remain remarkably even-handed and difficult to place politically. Fraser is a severe critic of empire as well as an admirer; Flashman has no illusions about so-called civilized Englishmen being any better morally than wild Apaches or Tajiks or mutinous Indian Sepoys. And as novels of war they are unromantic, probably because Fraser’s own hand-to-hand battle experience resembled a 19th-century conflict.

Thus Flashman has no patience with the preachiness that surrounds war. With him there can be no soapbox illusions or sham moralizing. It’s no surprise that Fraser calls the Victorians “mere amateurs in hypocrisy compared to our own brainwashed, sanctimonious, self-censoring and terrified generation.” He adds, “One review from the States pointed out that Flashman is politically incorrect—absolutely true, I’m glad to say. It astonishes me that people there are banning Huckleberry Finn—haven’t they got the sense to see Twain was writing truthfully and critically about his own time? It’s equally bad in this country—this tendency to refuse to recognize the past for what it was. Fortunately Flashman’s had a very intelligent American readership who don’t confuse the present and the past.”

If the books weren’t so well written—Fraser (b. 1925) handles action as well as Stevenson or Graham Greene—the Literary Establishment could dismiss them as mere entertainments. But there is something deeper, a peculiarly autumnal feeling as the old charlatan ranges back in memory across a world long gone. Here is Flashman recalling the destruction of the Summer Palace of the Empress of China (with whom he’s had a love affair) by British soldiers set loose at the end of the Taiping Rebellion:

“I’m a bad man. I've done most wickedness, and I'd do it again, for the pleasure it gave me . . . and I don’t feel regret enough to keep me awake at nights. I guess, if drink and the devil were in me, I could ruin a Summer Palace in my own way . . . breaking windows and heaving vases downstairs for the joy of hearing ’em smash, and stuffing my pockets with whatever I could lay my hands on . . . But I couldn’t do it as it was done that day—methodically . . . It burned for almost a week, with a vast pillar of smoke. . . like some great brooding genie from a bottle . . . Pekin was a city in twilight, its people awestricken to silence . . . with the Summer Palace in flames they couldn’t doubt the truth—the barbarians had won, the Son of Heaven had been humbled to the dust, and there was the funeral pyre to prove it. . . .”

“But didn’t a tear mist my eye, or a lump rise in my throat; didn’t I turn away at last with a manly sob? Well, no . . . it was a shame so many pretty things were spoiled—but I'm no great admirer of objets d’art, myself . . . But even you, Flashman, surely to God, must have been moved at the destruction of so much beauty, in a spot where you had spent so many idyllic hours? Well, again, no. You see, I don’t live there; I’m here, in Berkeley Square, and when I want to visit the Summer Palace, I can close my eyes, and there it is, and so is she.”

And what next? Fraser promises more Flashmans, and at age seventy he seems to be going strong. He has completed a novelette, Flashman And The Tiger, which takes place in South Africa and England and may grow into a book; there should also be a volume recounting Flashman’s role in the Civil War, purportedly fighting for both sides.

Meanwhile, some readers refuse to accept that Flashman wasn’t an actual person—or at least go along with Fraser’s game. “Often people write me to say they’re descendants of his—so I write back and congratulate them. And a few correspondents even claim that Flashman borrowed $50 from their grandfather and would I . . .? Then I reply that I simply can’t assume his debts.”

[George MacDonald Fraser died in 2008.]

Shakespeare's London

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.

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.

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 <sup>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.

　</sup>

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.”