An Angle on the World

by Bill Barich

  Our butcher, too, is traditional and dresses in uniform, always in a fresh white apron, a tie, and a butcher’s hat. His meat is free-range, his eggs are organic, and he stocks a wide array of game—venison, partridge, pheasant, pigeons, and hare. Probably he is the barn’s gastronomic king, although he gets close competition from the Parisian-style fromagerie, where the cheeses are made in-house and the duck legs rest obscenely in a vat of killer confit.

  Given the amenities, it’s easy to understand why some people never stray from Highbury, but I am not among them. To my mind, the virtue of the location is that it affords access to so many north London districts where you rarely meet another American, much less another tourist; indeed, it isn’t possible to buy a picture postcard of Big Ben or Buckingham Palace anywhere in Islington, not that I’ve seen. Though I admire and appreciate the city’s landmarks, what I enjoy most is the ability to wander freely and get lost.

  Only on foot do you discover the subtle architectural variations that occur block-to-block, such as the changing color of the bricks as they go from rust to brown to gray. On foot, you sense a pattern in each neighborhood; the squares and churchyards adhere to a plan drawn up centuries ago. You’re also aware of the natural world, of the cawing crows and the dove’s coo. The blackbirds of fairytale are also around, distant relatives of the 24 unfortunates baked into a pie, as are the magpies that the English count for purposes of divination: “One for sorrow, Two for joy, Three for a wedding, Four for a boy.”

  I got lost in Dalston recently. It’s only a mile away, but my Highbury friends couldn’t tell me much about it except for Simon, who’s a cricket fan. He goes to a Dalston pub to watch the important test matches on TV, because the West Indians there are so informed and enthusiastic. (In fact, the library proved to be named in honor of C.L.R. James, whose cricket classic, Beyond a Boundary, transcends the genre of sporting literature.)

  So I was prepared for a Caribbean flavor, but what I encountered was something more polyglot and vital, a High Street alive with Turks, Cypriots, and Kurds, each with their own representative stores and cafés. I had baklava and a Turkish coffee, then turned down an alley devoted to Nigerian fabrics and food. All this was a mere prelude to the grand street market, where the various new Londoners bartered with Cockney traders in a rich mix of languages and a smattering of pidgin.

  Islington, too, has its street markets, most notably Chapel Market for produce, fish, clothing, and inexpensive household goods, and the antiques arcade at Camden Passage, where you can buy a 19th-century door knocker or magnifying glass. The most famous market in the city, obviously, is on Portobello Road at Notting Hill Gate, but the crowds have been huge since the Hollywood Effect set in. Hard as it may be to believe, some tourists expect to bump into Hugh Grant stocking shelves at the travel bookshop.

  I prefer the less trendy weekend market at Spitalfields in the East End, in the shadow of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, one of 50 constructed by edict after the Great Fire of 1666. Though it lacks the fashion element of Portobello Road, it has pretty much everything else you might want—wonderful bakers, barbecue pork sandwiches at the Arkansas Cafe, obscure music on vinyl, throw pillows bearing the image of Che Guevara, and the weirdest burritos you’ll ever eat.

  From Spitalfields you can drift over to Brick Lane, the red-hot center of the Bengali community. Here you can engage in a game of three-card monte, or listen to the guy who plays excellent stride piano on a battered upright outside a warehouse. Smoked haddock is for sale, along with little cups of jellied eel.

  On my first visit, I thought I’d have lunch at one of the many tandoori shops on the lane, but I wound up in a line of 30 at the Beigel Bake (open 24 hours every day) for a salt beef beigel, which bears only the slightest resemblance to the bagel as we know it. The item in question was smaller and spongier, and the salt beef was our corned beef. Sliced from the brisket in chunks, it was piled on a warm beigel and dotted with mustard—a simple yet altogether satisfying meal.

  The saltiness makes you thirsty, though, so you might move on to Whitechapel Road for a beer at the Blind Beggar, the pub where Ronnie Kray of the gangland Kray twins shot a rival in 1966 for calling him a “fat poof.” Kray went directly to prison and died there not long ago as a born-again Christian, although he asked his pastor to keep it a secret. “I don’t want anyone to think I’ve become a Christian,” he said, “just to get parole.” There is, apparently, honor among thieves.

  London, then—my London—is made up of such places and scenes. Any guidebook will lead you to the Tate Modern or Sir John Soane’s Museum (and both will be worth the time), but it’s what you discover in your accidental roaming that stays with you. Sunday is especially fine for exploring, since the city slows to a crawl as the English, bless them, still demand their day of rest.

  You might consult your tube map, ride to an unfamiliar stop, and walk until you begin to tire, then buy a paper and read it slowly over a pint at a pub—around 1 o’clock, say, when the pubs are quiet and conducive to meditation. Soon you’ll be hungry, so the trick is to locate a restaurant (there are hundreds) that does a traditional Sunday roast of beef or lamb. Don’t worry about the calories, order the mashed potatoes and the Yorkshire pudding. You might even indulge in a glass of red wine.

  Afterward, you’ll feel sleepy, and it’s best to return to the hotel for a long nap. In the evening, you’ll require only a light supper and a good book or a glance at the telly where, if you’re lucky, you might catch a darts match or a snooker tournament and know for certain you’re in England.

  San Francisco Examiner Magazine, 2001

  Reviews

  The World is My Home by James Michener

  In his new memoir, The World Is My Home, James Michener puts to rest the idea that there are no second acts in American lives. As the old saying goes, his life really began at 40, when, during World War II, he sat down in a Quonset hut on Espiritu Santo Island, lit a smoky lantern, and turned out the linked stories that became Tales of the South Pacific, which won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1947. This stroke of luck helped to transform him into James Michener, the best-selling phenomenon, and he has continued to live on the grand scale ever since, becoming in the process America’s “best-loved” writer.

  Michener’s reminiscing doesn’t have much in common with the usual literary fare. There are no drunken brawls, no brilliant seductions, no drugs, and precious little animosity. Vice for Michener consists of an addiction to the fine arts. When he discusses writing, he often does it with an eye toward the business end of things, offering cautionary advice to beginners. Above all, he comes across as a practical person, and his book has the flavor of another, pre-Elvis era, when issues of complexity could be mastered through grit, hard work, and positive thinking.

  In choosing to call The World Is My Home a memoir rather than an autobiography, Michener alerts us at the start that he will not be terribly revealing about himself. We must ferret out the salient facts from chapters that are arranged according to subject—Travel, People, Health, and so on. He jumps backward and forward in time, and while this allows him the leisure to dwell on his strongest concerns, it opens gaps in the narrative that leave a reader scratching his head over the missing parts of the puzzle.

  Michener had a difficult, scarring childhood. Orphaned at birth, he grew up in Pennsylvania, bouncing from one foster home to another. The homes were run by Mabel Michener, a caring, intelligent woman, who took in the wounded and the abandoned. Others in the Michener clan were not so kind and put it to young James that he was not a true Michener, and that gave him an independent spirit, as well as an emotional armoring, that molded his character. He became a Quaker and has always held the sturdy, unshakable values of the Pennsylvania Dutch.

  In his teens, Michener took to the road, hitchhiking around the country and developing a love of exploration and adventure that never left him. As a scholarship student at Swarthmore, he was a classic high achiever. He enjoyed painting, poetry, and mu
sic, especially opera, but he showed no predisposition toward writing. Eventually, he went to work in publishing, and as his 40th birthday approached he found himself about to be drafted into the Army. He enlisted in the Navy instead and was stationed in the South Pacific, where the life-changing episodes began.

  The chapters that deal with Polynesia are the stars of The World Is My Home. Michener’s recollections are sweetly nostalgic and have a simple human happiness that is sometimes missing elsewhere in the book. He fell into an island paradise that was far enough removed from the war theater to pose no serious threat, and he was soon gifted with a writer’s most precious possession—wonderful material. There were honky-tonks, colorful characters, a surpassingly beautiful landscape, and just enough weirdness around the edges to keep everybody on his toes.

  Michener admits to being a bit of a Boy Scout, but the South Pacific seems to have loosened him up a little. In a distant, Victorian way, he describes the sexual dreamland in which many Americana GIs were living, invited by their hosts to take up residence with the most gorgeous young girls of the islands. So lubricious was the scene on Bora Bora that soldiers often didn’t want to return to the states. Michener makes Polynesia sound like the Playboy Mansion, but he plays his cards so close to the chest that it’s impossible to tell whether he was really only an observer, someone who liked to admire the naked bodies of the natives when they went skinny-dipping at twilight.

  Observation has always been central to Michener’s work. He has a vast curiosity, and his research and reporting provide the substance for his novels. Yet, by his account, he might never have written a word if he hadn’t almost died in a plane crash while landing at Tontouta Air Base. His brush with death gave him the willies, and during a long night of soul-searching he realized that he was dissatisfied with himself. “As the stars came out and I could see the low mountains I had escaped,” he says. “I swore: ‘I’m going to live the rest of my life as if I were a great man.’” It’s the as if that matters here, for Michener is essentially a modest soul. From that moment on, though, he would ask the best of himself.

  It takes an idealist to make such a vow, and Michener is idealistic to the core. He confesses that he would have made a good minister if he had more religion. But it was his fate to hole up in his Quonset hut and transcribe as accurately as possible his vision of the South Pacific. When the manuscript was finished, he submitted it anonymously to Macmillan, where he had gone back to work as an editor, and the company published it to scant critical praise and indifferent sales. The cheap, ugly dust jacket remains an object of scorn to Michener. On the basis of his reception, he had no intention of quitting his job, but then, out of the blue, he won the Pulitzer, and his transformation was complete.

  Well, not quite. Tales went on to sell many copies, but Michener earned his first megabucks from the Broadway adaptation, South Pacific, a Rodgers and Hammerstein collaboration. For a time after his success, he struggled with his identity as a writer until he hit on the sort of formulaic “big book” that has become his stock-in-trade. The formula allowed him to travel widely, and Random House provided him with a well-oiled editorial machine geared to getting his manuscripts in shape and between covers in a timely way. Michener views himself as an old-fashioned storyteller and claims not to be affected by critics—a claim his fellow writers might doubt. But there is no doubting another claim of his, that he has pleased a huge international audience.

  In a crucial sense, the ability to please readers is only half the battle of literature. To be “best-loved” at anything, you have to dance around the darkness. In The World Is My Home, it is the darkness that Michener avoids, seldom delving below the surface. He doesn’t seem comfortable with intimacy or emotions, and one suspects that this must go back to his earliest days as an orphan, when he had to steel himself against the world rather than embrace it. Although he has gone through two painful divorces, he mentions them only in passing. His current wife is barely alluded to, and we get so little information about their relationship that we wonder at the intensity of Michener’s privacy.

  His public adventures are much more fully recounted. We are offered glimpses of Michener as a liberal politician, as a goodwill ambassador for the United States, and as a fortune-teller whose prescience astounds the residents of Doylestown. He sprinkles the book with famous names, but there is seldom anything surprising in the anecdotes, and we must be content to learn that he has palled around with singer Ezio Pinza, Walter Cronkite, and Art Buchwald, and that he lobbied to get Robin Roberts, the old Phillies’ pitcher, into the Hall of Fame.

  The portrait Michener draws of himself shows us an honorable, driven, high-minded man who hangs onto his optimism at all costs. His generosity to universities and to other writers is well known, and he may have no peer as a knee-jerk liberal—to Michener, that’s a term of praise. Where his work will ultimately land is up to posterity, of course, but he has a right to be proud of his output, since writing one book, much less 34, demands respect. In contrast to most immensely popular novelists, he has picked themes and topics that are challenging and sometimes politically sensitive, and he has never indulged in the cheap shot.

  In the end, The World Is My Home most resembles a Horatio Alger story, in which all the traditional American virtues lead to a triumph on the grand scale. It is an entirely American document that could not have come into existence without being nurtured by the Puritan taproots of the country. Michener’s memoir is high-strung, entertaining, occasionally funny, and curiously touching in what it omits. We admire the passion and the energy he brings to the task, especially at the age of 85.

  Los Angeles Times, 1993

  James Thurber: His Life and Times by Harrison Kinney

  The obsession that led Harrison Kinney to write his epic new biography, James Thurber: His Life and Times, began when Kinney was a seventh-grader in Maine and stumbled on Thurber’s work at his local library. He seems to have been both awe-struck and star-struck by it. He went on to write a college thesis on Thurber, tracked down his hero at the New Yorker, landed a job there as a reporter under Harold Ross, the magazine’s legendary founding editor, and spent more than 40 years compiling the material that forms the substance of his exhaustive but ultimately winning book.

  In Kinney’s portrait, James Thurber comes across as a gifted, troubled, and often disagreeable man. Born in Columbus, Ohio, the town he made famous in his writing, he suffered a childhood mishap that marked him for life when an older brother accidentally blinded him in one eye with an arrow while they were playing a game. Thurber was shy by nature, and the accident increased his shyness and caused him to be clownish and awkward at times. He blamed his parents for not rushing him to a specialist and trying to save the damaged eye, and this perceived slight, Kinney writes, later became the focus for all his tumult and grief.

  In high school, Thurber fell in love with the English language, acquired a reputation as a wit and turned into an avid reader, but he still showed no sign of his enormous talent as a writer. He washed in and out of Ohio State University and began to think that journalism might be his metier. Of particular interest during this period were his relations with women. He idealized them and remained a virgin until he “stepped aside” while traveling in France at the age of 25. His sexual initiation seems to have been traumatic, Kinney writes, and induced in him a form of nervous breakdown.

  Within two years, Thurber was married and had embarked on what Kinney calls his “mockery of the female sex, developing a prejudice he would keep for a lifetime.” Thurber presents himself in print as a highbrow Archie Bunker. “A woman is a person who will advise you tragically, on any and all occasions, that she can’t take her hat off because her hair is a wreck,” he wrote at the time.

  To the good, he was also cultivating a prose style and learning from such masters as H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. He went to France once more, got a job with the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune and found a literary agent in Manhattan to circulate
his freelance pieces, starting down the road that would eventually lead to his triumphant career at the New Yorker.

  In this multimedia age, it’s hard to imagine how powerful the magazine was in its first incarnation. It set standards, spotted trends and served as an emblem of sophisticated urban life. It was especially valued for its beautifully written light humor. Thurber had a knack for that, but he didn’t break in easily. His submissions came back so fast, in fact, that he “began to believe the New Yorker must have a rejection machine.” But he soon understood what Ross wanted—short, sharp features done in the chatty tone of a personal letter—and he was hired as a staffer in February 1927 with the help of E. B. White, who became one of his champions and dearest friends.

  Ross had a genius for creating a psychological environment in which his maverick, brilliant, tormented and frequently drunken writers were allowed to flourish. Such key players as Thurber, Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley had the status of Broadway stars and comported themselves accordingly. Drink would contribute to the death of many of them, including Thurber.

  On the social background of the New Yorker, Kinney is very good indeed. He managed to interview virtually every important staff writer of the era, and his cross-cutting from one point of view to another provides a fresh look not only at Thurber but at the inner workings of the magazine. He is excellent, too, at tracing Thurber’s evolution into a first-rate humorist and recounting his successes.

  Among the most charming aspects of Thurber was his skill as a draftsman. The drawings reproduced here hold up wonderfully. He did them with a minimum of fuss on whatever surface happened to be handy—a menu, a scrap of paper, a restaurant wall. (The Smithsonian Institution has preserved a wall fragment from the New Yorker’s old offices with a Thurber drawing on it.) His artwork suggests a world glimpsed in outline, in fleeting glances, a world of the half-sighted, and he gets a remarkable amount of energy into a few minimal pencil strokes. He was a deeply insecure person, but the drawings give no indication of that. Instead, they have a deftness and surety that must have gratified him.