Driving Home Read online

  JONATHAN RABAN is the author, most recently, of novels Surveillance and Waxwings; his nonfiction includes Passage to Juneau and Bad Land. His honors include the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/West Creative Nonfiction Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, and the Governor’s Award of the State of Washington. He lives in Seattle.

  Also by Jonathan Raban

  Soft City

  Arabia

  Old Glory

  Foreign Land

  Coasting

  For Love and Money

  Hunting Mister Heartbreak

  The Oxford Book of the Sea (editor)

  Bad Land

  Passage to Juneau

  Waxwings

  My Holy War

  Surveillance

  PRAISE FOR

  Driving Home: An American Journey

  by Jonathan Raban

  “… Raban achieves the perfect blend of the historical, observational and personal for which so many strive.… I loved this book.”

  —Sara Wheeler, The Literary Review

  “Sampling some of everything, readers may gladly follow Raban for layers beneath the surfaces of his subjects, becoming immersed in such matters as the history of landscapes …, the perils and pleasures of sailing, and assessments of authors … At its best, a delight for literary-minded readers.”

  —Booklist

  “Raban is at his best when treating the people, landscapes and cultures through which he is passing as if they were works of art: holding up absurdities to patient inspection, digging into their histories, forcing the complacent and skeptical to acknowledge hidden beauties.… Phrase-making wit is much in evidence through these pages, and there is something refreshing about a first-rate writer whose stories are literate and sophisticated but never self-consciously ‘literary.’ … He knows how to capture the truth of a thing without saying it.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  “Raban knows the best essayist trusts in drift and digression and habitually adds a literary trill. He is an erudite but adaptable companion, tart and genial, promiscuous in experience yet reliable in temperament … He conjures with his new home, with the Pacific Northwest, with history, poetry, geography, catastrophe … subjects Raban circumnavigates with finesse, shrugging off the obvious and regularly landing us on a shore we can’t quite glimpse from here.”

  —Stacy Schiff, The New York Times Book Review

  “… Raban plots his course through his Americana scrapbook with historical vigour and intellectual flair.”

  —Metro

  “Raban opens the mind’s eye with ease.… This ‘American Journey’ is the work of a fine example of that rapidly disappearing species, the man of letters.”

  —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

  “It’s a quest that Raban approaches, in these essays, with the full force of his remarkable talent, infused with the profound intellectual ease and quiet authority that only a writer with so much steadying ballast of good work as Raban has could muster.… In 604 pages, not a dull moment. How does he do it?”

  —The Evening Standard

  “The essays collected in Driving Home do an excellent job of fleshing out the manifold conflicts—indeed violence—of the American landscape, but in the end, the dream of psychic renewal remains elusive, in large part because it is hard not to feel that the America of the past two decades, which Raban chronicles so carefully, no longer offers a sense of utopian possibility to the intelligent European mind, and Jonathan Raban is nothing if not an intelligent European mind.”

  —The Times Literary Supplement

  “… the elegance, wit, intensity—and research—behind Raban’s work demands that the reader follow the path towards Empsonian clarity.”

  —Oldie

  “Driving Home isn’t just a good read, it’s a bunch of good reads. It’s a book of important, smart work from a terrific writer who will both blow you away, and make you want to argue with him.”

  —Crosscut

  “Raban [here] showcases his craftsmanship as a writer and his bona fides as an intellectual. Every word is impeccably chosen, every metaphor meticulously selected … [His] virtues as a writer are virtually unrivaled when it comes to explaining our relationships with landscape and nature, and he’s unrivaled, period, when describe water in all its forms, be it a placid puddle or a storm-swirled sea.”

  —Columbia Journalism Review

  “The central work of Raban’s life must be described as an effort to determine what America is like … But along with that, the reader notes, big water draws from Raban a kind of genius for natural description.”

  —Thomas Powers, The New York Review of Books

  “His prevailing voice is one of reason, civilised discourse and elegant analogy. The rational lucidity, trimmed of overt passion or ferocity, makes the rare emotional outburst more potent.”

  —Herald Scotland

  “… Raban provides his own peculiar and precise critique of the land he now calls home, full of cultural and historical observation and littered with his own dry, droll humour. The result is a must-read for fans of the writer, and a fine, if full, aside for fans of the USA.”

  —Traveler

  “Here is another, and welcome, addition to a genre that is best described as the literature of American encounter … It’s hard to think of another writer who combines such a gift for the description of physical place with a deep, analytical intelligence.”

  —The National

  “Driving Home is a big book but it reads as if it’s a short, anecdotal history of the United States from 1990 to 2000, and if you have never read a book by Raban this is a good place to begin.”

  —The Spectator

  “Jonathan Raban writes about water in the way that Barry Lopez writes about snow or Wilfred Thesiger wrote about sand: it’s not always in the foreground of his observation, but you can sense his natural element in his whole way of seeing.… [Driving Home] is also an autobiography of sorts, a memoir of the years since Raban cast himself adrift from Britain and washed up in Seattle.”

  —The Observer

  “The true Raban touch here is that he brings his deep reading of American history to play, and manages to interweave his personal journey with essays on the explorers Lewis and Clark, who made a similar journey at the request of President Jefferson. It takes a passionate history buff to note how many of America’s virtues and vices have been present since independence and before, and a skilled raconteur to make us feel that passion. It’s a fine ride.”

  —The Sunday Times

  “The master of the margins, Raban is an inspired observer and a natural writer. He has always understood the US, and since he left his native England to settle in Seattle he has never lost his understanding of the US or his outsider’s fascination with it. Six hundred pages of pleasure, including Last Call of the Wild.”

  —Irish Times

  “Raban writes with characteristic ease and insight … [describing], among other things, his attempts to get to know his adopted home and its warring tribes.”

  —The New Yorker

  “A sterling collection.… An incomparable travel writer, in this book Raban supplies myriad observations about his adopted home, but also on the larger American landscape, riffing on the West, urban architecture, national political trends, the dot-com economy, and most sublimely, about nature.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “Full of ideas that move through the language with the grace of a well-captained sailboat.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Raban’s essays read like excavation projects, bringing to the surface that which lies deep beneath, and which has been built over and on time and again.… It may not be what we expected, but it is home nonetheless, an
d Driving Home draws us nearer.”

  —Bookslut

  “With his characteristic curiosity and his insatiable desire to drink as deeply as he can from the wells of landscape or literature, Raban once again vividly captures the experience of trying to make a home in a place that he continues to find fascinating, bizarre, ugly, beautiful, repellent, and generous.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Copyright © 2010, 2013 by Jonathan Raban

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form, or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  This page–this page constitute an extension of this copyright page.

  Published by Sasquatch Books

  Published by arrangement with Pantheon Books.

  Cover images by © Ocean Photography/Veer

  Cover design by Anna Goldstein

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Raban, Jonathan.

  Driving home : an American journey / Jonathan Raban.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: London : Picador, 2010; New York : Pantheon Books, 2011.

  1. Raban, Jonathan—Travel—United States. 2. Raban, Jonathan—

  Homes and haunts—United States. 3. Raban, Jonathan—Knowledge—

  United States. 4. Authors, English—20th century—Travel—United

  States. 5. Authors, English—20th century—Homes and haunts—United

  States. 6. United States—Description and travel. I. Title.

  PR6068.A22Z375 2011 828’.91408—dc22 2010054090

  eISBN: 978-1-57061-884-0

  Sasquatch Books

  1904 Third Avenue, Suite 710

  Seattle WA, 98101

  206-467-4300

  www.sasquatchbooks.com

  [email protected]

  v3.1

  For Julia Raban,

  a Pacific Northwest native

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Praise

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction: Readings

  Driving Home

  Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi

  Philip Larkin

  I’m in Heaven

  Mississippi Water

  On the Waterfront

  Julia’s City

  Why Travel?

  The Waves

  Walden-on-Sea

  Last Call of the Wild

  Seagoing

  Homesteading

  Keeping a Notebook

  Julia and Hawaii

  The Turbulent Deep

  White Warfare

  The Unsettling of Seattle

  The Last Harpoon

  Battleground of the Eye

  The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst

  Gipsy Moth Circles the World

  Too Close to Nature?

  A Tragic Grandeur

  Surveillance Society

  September 11: The Price We’ve Paid

  Guantánamo Bay

  A Postregional City

  Indian Country

  The Curse of the Sublime

  Good News in Bad Times

  I’m for Obama

  Going, Going, Gone

  An Englishman in America

  Second Nature

  Cyber City

  An American in England

  Cut, Kill, Dig, Drill

  Election Night 2008

  The Golden Trumpet

  Metronaturals

  American Pastoral

  At the Tea Party

  Letting Go

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction: Readings

  MY MOTHER taught me to read in the summer of 1945, between VE Day and VJ Day, when I was turning three. Time lay on her hands: my father, a major in the Territorials, was away in Palestine, battling Irgun and the Stern Gang in the latter days of the British Mandate, and wasn’t due to be demobilized from the army until the end of the year; and I was a pushover for her deck of homemade flash cards and a game I found more fun than our previous sessions of Animal Snap. In the cluttered, narrow-windowed living room of our house in the village of Hempton Green in Norfolk, my mother and I progressed from letters to words to sentences, stopping the game at intervals to listen to the BBC news crackling from the wireless, its fretwork grille sawn to represent an inappropriately Japanese-style rising sun. By the time we reached sentences and the cards had given way to headlines from the day’s Times, Japan had surrendered to the Allies and the wireless was reporting that our troops in the Far East were fighting “pockets of gorillas”—an idea that excited me much more than anything in my father’s letters home from Transjordan. Gorilla warfare was something that any three-year-old could warm to in his imagination: I sought out colored pictures of gorillas to feed my understanding of the conflict, and it was years before I realized that I was the victim of a deceiving homophone—an early case of the linguistic misunderstanding to which I’ve been prone all my life.

  I squandered my mother’s gift of so much time and patience. Proud of my new skill, I showed it off to anyone who’d listen—my grandmother, an indulgent aunt, an illiterate woman called Mrs. Atherton who was my mother’s “daily,” and, most unwisely, to my few contemporaries in the village, who beat me up for my intolerable conceit. But the capacity to read brought with it no corresponding advance in intellectual curiosity. I rested lazily on my laurels, taking as long as anyone else of my age to venture beyond the conventional diet of Beatrix Potter, Winnie the Pooh, The Wind in the Willows, and Enid Blyton’s Famous Five. By the early 1950s, I was tearing at speed through the middlebrow best sellers of the time: John Creasey, Nevil Shute, the wartime adventures of British officers who’d escaped, or tried to, from German POW camps, like The Wooden Horse and The Colditz Story, along with a stream of books about fishing. The nearest I came to reading “literature” for pleasure, aside from an early passion for Huckleberry Finn, was my discovery, at eleven or twelve, of H. E. Bates, whose Fair Stood the Wind for France, The Jacaranda Tree, and Love for Lydia seemed to me unsurpassably fine in their emotional eloquence and the transporting power of their natural descriptions. For a long time, I couldn’t imagine the existence of a greater novelist than Bates.

  In adolescence, my reading predictably widened in its range, but it hardly deepened. Joyce, Hardy, Dickens, Camus, George Eliot, Hemingway, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, D. H. Lawrence, Scott Fitzgerald, Keats, Byron, Auden, Pound, T. S. Eliot … At sixteen I was a chain-reader, on a steady three library books a day when not in school, but my style of reading remained much as it was in my Enid Blyton period. I sucked and sucked at books for the precious juice of vicarious experience they contained, and as soon as they were finished, I discarded them like squeezed-out grapefruit skins. In the course of twenty-four hours, I might be Nick Adams, Paul Morel, and sitting in one of the dives on 52nd Street, uncertain and afraid, as the clever hopes expired of a low dishonest decade—but these were less acts of serious reading than experiments in identity, made by somebody who very much feared that he lacked one of his own and hoped that he might find a suitable off-the-peg identity in a book.

  As it turned out, I eventually found one on a bus—a green double-decker owned by the Hants and Dorset company. On my first summer vacation from university, in 1961, I got a temporary job as a conductor, ringing the bell and issuing tickets on various routes through the New Forest between Bournemouth and Southampton. I was kitted out with a serge uniform to which age had given a bluebottle sheen, a heavy silver ticket machine to wear around my neck, and a blackened leather satchel to hold the predecimal small change of halfpennies, pennies, threepenny bits, sixpences, shillings, and half crowns.

  Except in the early mornings and late afternoons, business was generally slow. Often, I was second-in-command of an empty bus, sprawled on the tr
iple back seat, with ample time to read. My favorite run was the 2 p.m. back-country route from Lymington to Southampton, by way of East End, East Boldre, Beaulieu, Dibden Purlieu, Hythe, Marchwood, Eling, and Millbrook, on which the only passengers might be two or three elderly women from Lymington and a couple of gypsies from an encampment near Hatchet Gate. The jolting bus ambled along the B-roads, resting at intervals at deserted stops, and made a sleepy epic of the round-trip, which was little more than forty miles. I begrudged even the very few passengers we picked up on these slow trawls through the Hampshire countryside, because they interrupted my reading of William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, in its blue-barred Peregrine paperback edition, which lived for weeks inside the leather satchel, becoming steadily more grimy from the stash of greasily fingered old coins whose company it kept.

  The book was a revelation to me. It made me learn to read all over again. Looking at the book now still brings back the old-bus smell of cigarettes, fish and chips, sweat, Polo mints, and ineffectual disinfectant, and the excitement with which I first heard Empson’s voice speaking from the page. It was a voice utterly unlike that of any of the literary critics whom I’d begun to read in my freshman year as an English student (F. R. Leavis, L. C. Knights, A. C. Bradley, E. M. W. Tillyard): plain spoken, peppery, disputatious; here talking in cheerful, offhand slang, there rising to lyrical and unforgettable descriptions of passages he most admired. In almost every paragraph was a joke or an arresting surprise.

  Briskly disposing of the woolly idea of poetry as the beauty of Pure Sound, Empson made me giggle when he quoted Virgil’s line in the sixth book of the Aeneid, “Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore,” as “the stock line to try on the dog,”* but went on to make a subtle analysis of its sound, before dismissing the general theory as bunkum: