Different paths in travel writing

Bill Bryson

My reading of the two travel books I've reviewed this week, The Rhine by Ben Coates and Neither Here Nor There by Bill Bryson, happened to partly coincide, so naturally I found myself comparing and contrasting the two authors and the two books. Coates followed the Rhine River from mouth to source, while Bryson stopped in virtually every country in Europe, yet their paths also partly coincided.

In some ways the approach in each book is similar. Each writer comments on people and places along the way, telling us something of the history and culture, as well as adding personal details about their own experiences. Each complains about the many tourists they encounter, although somewhat sheepishly since they recognize they are themselves tourists.

Ben Coates

Yet these are quite different books. Coates seems more interested in presenting information than entertainment, the opposite of Bryson's strategy. One could almost use The Rhine as a travel guide, as Coates tells us what might be worth looking for and looking at along the river. Bryson deals more in exaggeration and hyperbole, so that a reader doesn't know if a place is really to be avoided or if the author just had a bad day when he visited.

At times Coates writes as if Bryson were his model. He can make amusing commentary, though never up to Bryson standards. At his worst, the younger author says things like this, "I was pleased to note that Boniface did indeed have a bony face. I looked around for someone to tell this hilarious joke to, but sadly there was no one." Bryson is at his worst when his humor turns cruel and crude, which it frequently does.

I can recommend both books, The Rhine if you are actually planning to visit that part of the world, Neither Here Nor There if you need a laugh.

Bryson goes alone

Bill Bryson tours Europe alone in Neither Here Nor There (1992), and one can understand why after reading the book. His friend Stephen Katz made the grand tour of Europe with Bryson some two decades earlier, and Bryson is still ridiculing Katz in this book, so much so that it almost seems Katz remains at his side. As if eternal ridicule were not reason enough for not traveling with Bryson, listening to his complaints about and confrontations with people he meets along the way would be another.

Of course, reading about these complaints and confrontations is another matter. It is why Bill Bryson's travel books are so much fun.

His driver in northern Norway "drove as if we were in an arcade game." A certain bar "was like a funeral parlor with a beverage service."  After a visit to a German restaurant he writes, "It should have been written into the armistice treaty that the Germans would be required to lay down their accordions along with their arms." Cologne is " a dismal place." Bulgaria "isn't a country, it's a near-death experience."

At times the author is pleased with his service and delighted with places he visits. Somehow these passages just aren't as pleasurable to read. We like Bill Bryson best when he's unsettled, at least as long as we are not the tourist at his side. This may explain why whenever he travels, his wife seems to find a reason to stay at home.

Up (and down) the Rhine

Having taken a cruise halfway down the Rhine in August, I was intrigued when, just a few months later, The Rhine: Following Europe's Greatest River from Amsterdam to the Alps by Ben Coates was published. It's a book I would have loved to have read before my own excursion, but I probably would have found it less interesting then. Travel writing about places you've been always seems more compelling, for some reason.

My trip went in the opposite direction, and only from Basel to Trier, while Coates traveled upriver all the way to its source. Much of his trip he took by bicycle, which may seem an odd way to follow a river, especially when going uphill. Yet Coates was less interested in the river itself — there's not much here about how deep it is or what kinds of fish swim in it — than in what is found along the river and the significant role the Rhine has played in both peace and war over the centuries. A bicycle, among other forms of transportation, worked just fine for his purposes.

The author, an Englishman who now lives in The Netherlands, keeps coming back to World War II, for the river, in virtually every country it passes through, played a significant role in that war. By now most of those who remembered the war have died. ""By the early 2000s," he writes, "when I first started visiting Germany, it had finally become a normal country, where the young were not expected to account for the failings of their grandparents, and history was generally just that: history."

I noticed much the same thing when I was in Germany. Most of our tour guides were Germans, and the war came up frequently, as when guides discussed the destruction of cities by Allied bombing raids and how, in most cases, an effort was made to rebuild them in the same way they had looked before the war. They spoke of Hitler, the Nazis in general and the persecution of the Jews in negative terms, much as American or British guides might have done, but without a trace of guilt, even by association. The war was, as Coates observes, truly history.

I was also reminded of my own trip when Coates observes "a large riverbank park contain(ing) dozens of brick-like white holiday caravans -- filled, no doubt, with Dutch families happily barbecuing imported Dutch food and spending as little money as possible." We saw many of these caravans along the river throughout Germany. A guide told us Germans knew the war was really over when the Dutch started spending summer weekends in Germany in their caravans along the Rhine.

Coates packs his book with information, as well as some personal commentary about his adventures along the way. One doesn't need to cruise the Rhine to enjoy the book, but it probably helps.

Wings from words

Vaddey Ratner

The father of the narrator of In the Shadow of the Banyan, the novel by Vaddey Ratner I reviewed here a few days ago, is a poet. That narrator remembers her life as a little girl in Cambodia during the brief, terrible reign of the Khmer Rouge, and many of her memories have to do with her beloved Papa, his poems and what is said to her about the importance of poetry, stories and words in general. I'd like to mention some of those passages today and add some comments of my own.

Poetry is like that, Papa said. It can come to you in an intake of breath, vanish again in the blink of an eye, and first all you have is

          A line weaving through your mind
          Like the tail of a child's kite
          Unfettered by reason or rhyme

Then, he said, comes the rest -- the kite, the story itself. A complete entity.

If that is true with poetry, and I can believe that it is, it is also true with the writing of fiction and, at times almost any kind of writing. Writing starts with an idea, often a fleeting wisp of an idea. Often a glimpse of an idea for a possible blog post comes to me while I am reading or listening to someone talk or even just thinking absentmindedly. That idea may disappear as quickly as it appeared. If I am lucky, and if the idea is any good, it may reappear later, perhaps in another form, perhaps with more complexity. Eventually may come "a complete entity."

Milk Mother said that stories are like footpaths of the gods. They lead us back and forth across time and space and connect us to the entire universe, to people and beings we never see but who we feel exist.

That strikes me as a pretty good description of the virtue of stories. They somehow connect us emotionally with other people, if not necessarily real people then at least possible people. We realize what we have in common with others, as well as how we differ.

He looked down into the well, and his blurred reflection said to mine, "I write because words give me wings."

Musicians, bakers, carpenters and others may find their wings in their own pursuits. For writers, however, words bring wings.

"We are all echoes of one another, Raami."

And this, from Raami's father, is an echo of the wisdom imparted by her Milk Mother above.

"Words, they are our rise and our fall, Raami. Perhaps this is why I prefer not to say too much."

Papa's words made his poetry beloved by his people. They also made him an enemy of the state as far as the Khmer Rouge was concerned. Most of the rest of us, whether we write or just talk, know this to be true as well. A timely quip. A choice bit of gossip. A comment to a reporter. A powerful sermon or lecture. A letter of complaint. An influential book, article or essay. Any of these can make us feel good about ourselves. Until they get us into trouble.

Typewriter love stories

While on a Viking cruise in Europe last summer my wife and I had the chance to watch the documentary film California Typewriter about a variety of people, including actor Tom Hanks, who remain in love with the typewriter in the computer age. The film gives some perspective to Uncommon Type, a collection of short stories by Hanks published in 2017, a year after the documentary was released.

Although the stories, most of them at any rate, are not about typewriters, a particular typewriter (Remington, Royal Desktop, Hermes 2000, Olympia, etc.) is mentioned in each. A photograph of that typewriter (perhaps from Hanks's own collection?) appears at the beginning of each tale.

These stories are a varied lot. One is a screenplay. Several take the form of a newspaper column. They represent different styles, different time periods (although all after the invention of the typewriter, of course) and different levels of seriousness. All are enjoyable, but the best may be those that actually work a typewriter into the plot. I loved "Christmas Eve 1953" about a disabled war veteran enjoying "the theater that was his family" on Christmas Eve. The children type their letters to Santa on a Remington and go to bed, while their father returns to the war in his mind. Even missing a leg, Virgil feels blessed.

Another gem, "These Are the Meditations of My Heart," tells of a woman who buys a toy typewriter on a whim, more as an act of charity than because of a need for a typewriter. This leads to an attempt to get the typewriter repaired and then to the purchase of a really good typewriter, that Hermes 2000. Then, inspired, she begins to write.

It was a Smith-Corona portable that inspired me to write back in the late 1950s. Now I am content to use a computer. I make too many mistakes for a typewriter, but still this particular story, and to a lesser extent all the stories in the book, resonates with me.

I'm betting Hanks wrote them all on a typewriter.

Light in the darkness

Light blinked across the inky surface. A cluster of fireflies, I thought. Always somewhere there was light, and, though transient, it flashed all the more brilliantly because of the surrounding dark.

Vaddey Ratner, In the Shadow of the Banyan

With that powerful image near the end of In the Shadow of the Banyan (2012), first-time novelist Vaddey Ratner suggests the hope within little Raami and her once-delicate mother that allows them to survive those years in which the Khmer Rouge destroy Cambodia in their mindless quest to create a perfect country.

In her autobiographical novel, Ratner tells of  an elite family in Phnom Penh as the rebels take over the country. Seven-year-old Raami's father is both a prince and a poet. Her family has always had servants to do their work. They are exactly the kind of people the Khmer Rouge wants to purge. She, her parents, little sister and the entire extended family are sent to a rural area and put to work, mostly in rice fields. Little Raami, although crippled by polio, must work, as well. Despite promises by "the organization," the provided food is woefully inadequate. Raami eats insects when she can catch them.

Gradually the family is separated. She will never learn what happens to her father. Some people are killed. Others die from hunger or disease. Those with the guns, most of them little more than children, don't seem to care.

For all its terror and suffering, this is a beautiful novel full of beautiful language, beautiful metaphors and beautiful ideas. It took Ratner half a lifetime to write this story of her early life, most of it true. She must have despaired of ever getting it all down on paper. Yet hope stayed alive, a light in the darkness.

Planners and plungers

The writers of fiction seem to fall into two categories. The first group might be called the careful planners, writers who sketch out the architecture of a plot before the first draft begins. The second group comprises the plungers. They see ahead, but just enough to keep going.

Roy Peter Clark, The Art of X-Ray Reading

Roy Peter Clark

From what I've heard authors say in talks and interviews and what I've read about them in books and magazines, I think Roy Peter Clark's distinction between planners and plungers rings true. Some writers do have plots worked out in their minds, if not outlined on paper, before beginning chapter one. Others have only a vague notion of where they are going with a story, or even who the characters will be and how they fit into the plot, when they begin writing. They just wait and see where the story takes them. They let their characters reveal who they are and may be as surprised as their readers to discover how it all comes out.

Movie directors seem to be divided in the same way. Some, like Billy Wilder, start with a script and expect actors to follow it without variation or, like the Coen brothers, storyboard each scene ahead of time. Other directors, Christopher Guest being a notable example, simply set a framework, turn their actors loose and their cameras on, and wait until they get to the editing room to make their movie. Some continue revising their screenplay right up to the end of shooting.

In both literature and film, planners and plungers have created masterpieces, as well as flops. So no method works best for everyone.

Yet I'm wondering if there might not be a third group. At a Writers in Paradise evening last Saturday night in St. Petersburg, short story writer Pam Houston was interviewed by novelist Andre Dubus II. She said, "Half of what I do as a writer is pay attention to the world." She makes lot of notes about what she observes, she said. Then she "waits for something to vibrate." Whatever it is, she builds a story around it, then lets it reveal what it means later as she writes.

This isn't exactly plunging, for there can be years between observation and story. But it isn't exactly planning either, for like plungers Houston can be surprised about what her story is about. Perhaps we might call her a ponderer. She lets things simmer on the back burner of her mind. Sometimes a story comes out. Sometimes not.

Kurt Vonnegut was a prisoner of war in Dresden when the Allies destroyed the city in one bombing raid. He knew he had to write about the experience but had to wait more than 20 years before he knew how to it. The result: Slaughterhouse-Five. He, too, was a ponderer.

Just yesterday I finished reading In the Shadow of the Banyan by Vaddey Ratner. I'll have more to say about the novel later. For now consider that Ratner writes about her own experience as a little girl in Cambodia in the mid-1970s when the Khmer Rouge rebels took over the country and virtually destroyed it, causing the deaths of more than a million people. She thought at first her book would be a memoir, then decided fiction would be the best way to tell her truth. That's about 45 years of pondering and mulling.