My Famous Evening
Page 13
I handed him my copy of The Secret Agent by Joseph
Conrad. An hour out to sea, he sat on a deck chair well away
from electric lights, opened the book, read a moment,
then handed me a ten-dollar bill. When we docked the
next morning in Yarmouth, I looked for him to get my
novel back, but he had “invisibly debarked.” [Conrad]
As it happened, I ran into him in front of his hotel in
Halifax a few days later. “I believe you still have my
book,” I said, then insisted on following him to his
hotel room, where he handed over the novel. “Gee, not
too generous, are you?” he said. “And right in front of
my wife and kids, too, eh?”
I never felt bad about it. Later, I noticed that he had
written his name on the inside cover, as if he’d made a
ten-dollar purchase.)
As I drove up a hill past a farmhouse, I saw a man
chopping wood by moonlight.
Suddenly I was homesick
for my living room wall, on which hangs
“Mabou (Chopping Wood)” by Robert Frank,
two vertical strips of 8-mm film.
The column on the left
depicts a man holding previous photographs
by Robert Frank
(photographs within the photograph)
upside down and tilted.
The column on the right
depicts a man chopping wood.
It is signed and dated, and also reads,
Life dances on …
Robert Frank has also photographed hospitals, soup kitchens, people, winter windows, and much more (and made films) in Nova Scotia; all of these tell his life and thought there. The landscape photographs contain, rather than merely evoke, the region around Mabou; the beaches, sea, sky, which hold on but keep moving. “What good is intelligence if you cannot discover a useful melancholy?” the Japanese author Ryunosuke Akutagawa wrote. Robert Frank’s landscape photographs instill in me a melancholy useful because it helps clarify the world, and equals late autumn.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Howard Norman has lived and traveled extensively in Atlantic Canada. His first two novels, The Northern Lights and The Bird Artist, were shortlisted for the National Book Award. His other novels are The Museum Guard and The Haunting of L. He received a Lannan Award in fiction and a Guggenheim fellowship. His work has been translated into many languages. A film of The Bird Artist is presently in production. Mr. Norman lives in Washington, D.C., and Vermont, and is writing a new novel set in England and Nova Scotia, What is Left the Daughter.
OTHER TITLES IN THE SERIES
JAN MORRIS A Writer’s House in Wales
OLIVER SACKS Oaxaca Journal
W. S. MERWIN The Mays of Ventadorn
WILLIAM KITTREDGE Southwestern Homelands
DAVID MAMET South of the Northeast Kingdom
GARRY WILLS Mr. Jefferson’s University
A. M. HOMES Los Angeles: People, Places, and the Castle on the Hill
JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN The Island: Martinique
FRANCINE PROSE Sicilian Odyssey
SUSANNA MOORE I Myself Have Seen It: The Myth of Hawai‘i
LOUISE ERDRICH Book and Islands in Ojibwe Country
KATHRYN HARRISON The Road to Santiago
ARIEL DORFMAN Desert Memories: Journeys Through the Chilean North
BARRY UNSWORTH Crete
UPCOMING AUTHORS
ANNA QUINDLEN on London
ROBERT HUGHES on Barcelona
JAMAICA KINCAID on Nepal
DIANE JOHNSON on Paris
PETER CAREY on Japan
GEOFFREY WOLFF on Maine
JON LEE ANDERSON on Andalucia
WILLIAM LEAST HEAT-MOON on Western Ireland
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC DIRECTIONS
Featuring works by some of the world’s most prominent and highly regarded literary figures, National Geographic Directions captures the spirit of travel and of place for which National Geographic is renowned, bringing fresh perspective and renewed excitement to the art of travel writing.