(gentle piano music) - Welcome, David.

- Thank you.

- Thank you for joining me in this afternoon, even though it's so sunny out there.

So, I wanted to pick up on a conversation that we had about travel.

And I mean, particularly, I was very interested in your time in Paris and what you did as poet in residence for Shakespeare and Co, right?

But I'd like to talk about travel in general.

Like, why is it that writers travel?

More specifically, why is it that American writers have traveled to France, and even more specifically to Paris?

Because I think from the very beginnings of the USA, Paris has been entangled with the cultural history of this country.

I mean, Benjamin Franklin spent 10 years there.

Jefferson spent more than 10 years there.

All the early writers that I can think of.

Hawthorne, Irving, they spent time in Paris.

And then, throughout the 19th century, you had people like Henry James who loved Paris.

And then 'cause after the first World War, you had the last generation of almost every major American writer went to Paris and spent time there.

Paris was very influential amongst African-American writers.

So many of them went there.

James Baldwin and Richard Wright died in France too, right?

And then there's the Beat Generation.

So, one might say that at the core of American cultural history is Paris.

That's almost like the other American cultural capital.

Right, so I'd like to ask, if we might focus on the generation after the first World War.

Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Scott Fitzgerald, you know?

Those writers, why did they go to Paris?

What lured them there?

What did Paris have that the USA didn't have?

- Yeah, listening to the litany of writers who traveled from the US to France, and Paris specifically, you remind me that they sort of started it, right?

The greatest book on American politics ever written was written by a Frenchman traveling in America.

- Right.

- So, the notion that you go somewhere else and see maybe more clearly by virtue of that perspective, it starts with an, I can think of a number of Europeans.

Charles Dickens has a fascinating book about traveling around the US.

- Trollope.

- Oscar Wilde.

- Yeah, Trollope did too.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- So, Europeans started going to the New World in the 18th, 19th centuries sometimes to see what we were doing, sometimes to look back over their shoulder and see from a different perspective what their life was like.

Some of the most fascinating reflections in Tocqueville's book are about, "Oh, what is European aristocracy look like, now that I'm here in a democracy?"

And I think he began to see aristocracy differently because of his time.

My sense is that something similar might have been happening for the American authors that you were talking about.

Many of them continued to write about America and American themes, but almost needed a distance to do that.

I think one of the earliest and most influential early sort of between the wars and after World War 2 writers to go to Paris was Gertrude Stein, who set up a salon there.

Championed artists like Picasso.

You know, she was going down to the market and buying Picassos for $50 so that he could eat.

And when other Americans, younger Americans came, they would find, Hemingway, she was an early editor of Hemingway's writings.

So, she gave them encouragement and support and created the foundation for American community.

And Stein's famous for having grown up in Oakland whereabout which she said there's no there there.

So, maybe that's why she went to Paris.

She was looking for a there.

- What does that mean?

- That there's no there there?

- Yeah.

- I think it means she wasn't looking closely enough.

But she was able to see what she couldn't see in Oakland when she got to Paris 'cause one of her most famous books is called "The Making of Americans."

And it's a 900 page novel about America.

But she wrote it in France.

It makes me think about not an American author, but Joyce, whose most famous novel about Ireland, "Dublin", was written in Paris.

Why did Joyce have to spend seven years writing a novel about one day in Dublin in Paris?

Why did she have to leave Dublin to do that?

Samuel Beckett, why did he write most of his books in Paris and France and in French.

- In French, yeah.

In French, and then translated them from French to English.

He translated most but not all of his own books.

I think he said somewhere that because his books were about an essential experience of alienation, he wanted to write in a language which wasn't his own to capture that feeling about being at home.

And I think there's something about not feeling at home in your surroundings that maybe forces you to turn to writing in a more intense way.

- So, whether it's Hemingway, Fitzgerald, any of the sort of lost generation writers who tend to write a lot about America.

You mentioned Baldwin.

Baldwin was writing a lot of American-based books.

In fact, just recently I finished reading provocatively titled, Baldwin's, maybe most famous novel, "Another Country" which starts in New York, moves to France, returns to New York.

And the last line of that novel is where he was when he finished writing it, and the date that he finished, and that was Istanbul.

So, in order to write about both New York and Paris, he had to go to Istanbul.

What is it about needing a certain distance from the thing you're writing about that allows you to see it more clearly?

That's intriguing to me.

- Right, so if it's about distance, if it's about in a way finding a new set of eyes to look at home through.

Why Paris and not say Istanbul or Tokyo, or even something like London?

- I suspect that at different times, it has been different places.

Shortly after I graduated from college, which is over 30 years ago, a lot of people in my generation were going to Prague.

And people were saying, "Oh, Prague is the Paris of the '90s."

Some of it frankly is rather mundane.

There have been times, now it's not one of them, when Paris was extremely attractive to American travelers 'cause it was inexpensive.

You could live a very good life in Paris.

Inexpensive apartment, wonderful food, great culture, museums.

Things that they didn't have on offering if you were say, TS Eliot working in a bank in the Midwest somewhere.

But I think as these places become creatures of the imagination, they become more expensive and harder to get.

And the very things that may have drawn a first generation of starving artists becomes more elusive and harder to find.

I know by the time I got there, I was really kind of riding on the coattails of a certain romanticism.

I was going 'cause other people had gone.

I was able to find ways to make end meet on $800 a month or so, or whatever I could earn teaching English lessons.

But it wasn't the same things that brought people there in the '30s and '40s, I suspect.

It was my imagination coupled with certain realities.

But I wanted to see something new.

Experience something different.

- Yeah.

What inspired you to go to Paris?

- Probably the writers that I loved the most.

Not all American writers.

Proust, I fell in love with Proust's novel early on and was fascinated by his descriptions of Paris and the streets.

What I remember, the first thing I did when I got to Paris is I wanted to go to the Champs-Elysees where Proust had played as a child.

It was nothing like, or I should say not Proust, well, probably Proust, but Proust's narrator, provocatively named Marcel played.

Now, it's a big street.

But it used to be a giant garden where young French kids played.

So, Victor Hugo, the descriptions of the Paris sewers had completely captured my imagination.

So, I would say it was both French.

Also, a lot of South American writers.

Julio Cort�zar wrote a fascinating book set in Paris, "Hopscotch."

So, I was kind of driven there by my literary imagination.

- So, for you it was a literary pilgrimage?

- Yeah.

Yeah.

- Yeah.

- I think that's a good way to put it.

- Yeah.

How long were you there?

- About nine months.

And I showed up with $2,000 in my pocket and started looking for a place to live and a job, and managed to be there for nine months before...

I was taking a break from graduate school.

So, eventually I knew I had to come back, finish that, write my dissertation.

But this was a real nice opportunity to take.

Again, to take a step back at some distance.

The irony for me about being in Paris is I had lived abroad several times before when I wanted to learn Spanish.

I moved to Spain for a year.

When I wanted to learn German, I moved to Germany for a year and I had a great time, and learned a lot of Spanish and a lot of German.

So when I thought, "Oh, the dissertation I wanted to write was gonna feature a number of French authors."

So, I thought, well, I should move to France and learned French.

And I had learned almost no French at all living in Paris.

It's not the city you go to to immerse yourself in the life of French people.

The French people who I was close to were my English students.

They wanted to speak English with me.

- You think that was true of the American writers who went to Paris?

'Cause I get the impression that they went around the same little international artistic circles.

- That's the impression I get as well.

- Yeah.

- A lot of the French artists were also not necessarily French.

They were a lot of from, they were from Romania.

They were from Hungaria.

Hungarian?

Hungary, - Hungary.

(both chuckling) - So, they were coming from their own places of exile.

And there was a kind of lingua franca, which was maybe not so much English as the art world.

People like Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball.

Marcel Duchamp was French.

But I always think of him as speaking in English 'cause he'd written a number of interviews in English.

He lived in New York for a long time.

- Yeah.

- He was a big part of what was the, what you might call the cross pollination of the art world between New York and Paris.

- Yeah.

The Russian �migr�s too.

- Sure.

Yeah.

- Diaghilev, all the composers, right?

So, if Paris was at that time, you know, I'm thinking the 1920s, 1930s kind of international cosmopolitan center for the arts in general where you could find a community that would be supportive of and interested in new work, adventurous work.

Did that play any part in attracting the American writers or were they looking for something French?

- That's a good question, and I'm not sure.

I know for example, if we think again, not of the American writers, but Joyce.

Joyce who got taken up by Sylvia Beach, who helped him publish "Ulysses."

He was looking for a place where there would be more tolerance for his own artistic experimentation.

But he was really working within an English speaking community there.

There were a lot.

Eugene Jolas, I think his name was was organizing literary circles and readings.

And I mean, you asked about how did I end up there?

I was lucky enough to find both a place to live and some work at the Shakespeare and Company bookstore, which was being run by a guy named George Whitman, who claimed that he had inherited the store from Sylvia Beach.

He also claimed that he was a great, great grandson of Walt Whitman.

I don't think either of those were probably true.

But he wanted to create a kind of romantic myth around the bookstore, which was not located where Sylvia Beach's bookstore was.

- So, an American myth?

- Yeah, an American myth.

- Yeah.

- But he had friends.

He was very good friends with Lawrence Ferlinghetti who had opened City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco.

George Whitman wasn't one of the Beat writers himself, but he knew Beat writers.

He was from that generation and he wanted there to be that sense of an American expat literary community.

And that was sort of my job there, was finding writers.

English speaking, English writing writers living in Paris, and organize readings that would happen at the bookstore and publicizing those and attracting people to come and participate in a community that he really wanted to see flourishing.

But it still felt to me very much like it was a homage to an earlier time.

- Yeah.

- I didn't think the most interesting writing happening in the English language in the late '90s was still happening in Paris.

It was sort of running on a strong legacy of history, but it wasn't where the cutting edge things were happening the way they had been for the writers- - Yeah.

- We were talking about earlier.

- Yeah.

I'm struck by the memory of how easy it was to travel when we were young.

I mean, we would just go, right?

We'd save up a little bit of money and then we'd just go.

I had friends who would work their passage across the Atlantic or across the Pacific even.

They would go up to docks and they would walk up from ship to ship and ask them, "Do you need a hand?"

They'd get on, they'd be hired, and they'd go to Hong Kong, right?

But it was, in those days, it was so easy for us to go.

We wouldn't have to have anything set up beforehand.

We'd just go present ourselves and try to get a job.

Right.

- I was, I wonder to what extent travel like that has become impossible today because of technology?

The first trip I took all by myself alone, I graduated from high school, I was, you know, 18 or so.

And I had bought a car very early 'cause I lived out in rural Oregon, which I think was another big incentive to travel.

Growing up in rural Oregon where you really had to live through your imagination.

We had one good movie theater.

We had two radio stations.

I grew up in a house without a television, had access to the public library, and that was it.

That was all the culture I was gonna get.

So, I was so eager to discover the world beyond Oregon.

And I remember buying a car on my 15th birthday, selling it right after I graduated from high school, taking that money and going to Europe.

And I've managed to sort of just kick around doing odd jobs and things for about nine months.

Started in Europe, traveled through Turkey.

At the time, there was some political turmoil in Iran.

This was during Carter's presidency.

We had those hostages.

So, I had to fly over Iran into Pakistan, and then traveled from Pakistan all through India for about three or four months and ended the trip in Nepal.

But that entire 9 or 10 months that I was away, no phone, never picked up a phone.

There was no such thing as email or personal computer.

So, every communication I had was in writing.

I wrote letters every day.

I mean, you have all day.

You get up in the morning, what're you gonna do?

So, I just wrote.

I wrote to my high school girlfriend, I wrote to my parents, I wrote to my sister, I wrote to friends who had gone off to college after high school.

And now you would text or send an email or check in.

So, to have completely unplugged from everyone I knew in the world for 10 months, have no contact whatsoever except for the letters I wrote was, I don't think we live in a world where that would be possible anymore.

- Yeah.

As you describe it, you know, many American writers must feel as if they're in some kind of backwood or province, and they have a myth of Paris, right?

A city, a myth that has been built up over probably about 150 years, right?

Paris is not that old as a cultural capital.

It's not like Rome or Florence.

So, this myth has been built up about Paris.

And the myth is connected to art, to writing, maybe to music.

And on the other side, I'm thinking the French, the Parisians maybe also have a myth about Americans, right?

So, there's a mutually cozy relationship based on romanticization.

- Yes.

Yeah.

- Yeah.

- I mean, I'm jumping around a bit, but I'm thinking of the Wim Wenders movie, "Kings of the Road" and the European fascination with the American sense of space and the desert space particularly.

We have so much space.

And for the European imagination, that's fascinating.

When I got to Paris, it wasn't vast space.

It was these intensely sort of labyrinth inroads and places where a car could barely fit through.

I think the fascinating thing about the myth of Paris is how much of it is purely imaginary and how much of it is actually real.

And a lot of it is real.

Paris is stunningly beautiful, and the myth feeds because whether it's 1930 or 1990, looking at Notre Dame at 4:00 in the morning when you've been out all night on the river, and it's foggy, and you look through and you see the cathedral through the trees across the Seine is, that isn't made up.

The beauty of Paris is real.

The museums are real, the music is real.

So, I can remember going to a Frank Zappa concert on a houseboat on the river.

That sort of thing wasn't happening in rural Oregon.

I can remember staying out all night, drinking a cheap $2 bottle of wine with a loaf of bread and some cheese on the river with a group of people.

Those sorts of opportunities.

Those are the things that keep the myth alive and give it a kind of real tangibility.

- Yeah.

- It's such a beautiful city.

- And that isn't an artifice of history.

That's still the case.

- Yeah, I mean, you're saying that the myth is real.

- Right?

- It's both real and not real.

- Yeah.

- A myth that's not real at all can't survive.

- Yeah.

- But a myth that has enough grounding in reality just keeps renewing itself for each generation in different ways.

- Yeah, but see if you're there, and if many of these American writers are there, and most of their friends are expats, and they move around the expat circles, right?

And they don't work in Paris necessarily.

They don't have many Parisian friends.

They don't go for dinner at Parisian homes like this.

Then in many ways, I think, wouldn't it be true to say that they're living the myth?

- Yeah.

- Right?

And and you're saying it's a livable myth, but it's not a myth.

- It's a livable myth if you're young and you're willing to walk up six flights of stairs to spend the night on a cot in a floor with a bathroom down the hall.

If you cannot put up with those hardships, but sort of revel in them because you feel like you're somehow dipping into history, then it's livable.

But livable and sustainable might be different things.

- Yeah.

- What I did at 30, probably not what I'm gonna do at 60.

- Yeah, I mean, if you'd been there for 10 years, maybe the myth would've changed, right?

- Sure.

- So, it might be different for writers who stay there for a couple of years than for writers who stay there for more than 10 years.

- Well, you mentioned James Baldwin.

- Yeah.

- Who's a perfect example of that.

The reasons he went to Paris, I think were political and social and artistic, and he found freedoms in Paris that America wouldn't afford him.

But he lived there a long time.

And the longer he was there, the more the burning feeling that he had to come back to America.

That the work he wanted to do had to be done in America and about America.

But he spent enough time there that the myth became his daily life.

And his daily life started to, he started thinking about Harlem and about New York, and about a different kind of life he had to live.

So, I think there is a big difference.

Fitzgerald never spent a lot of time in Paris.

He would dip in, live a kind of romantic myth for a year or so, or just a few months, visit his friends and then go back.

So, there's very different ways to be an expat.

When I think about so many of the Europeans who came to America, especially the Jewish intellectuals in the '30s and '40s, they weren't necessarily here because they wanted to be.

The ones who ended up in California.

To go from Germany to California for people like Thomas Mann or Theodore Adorno was not a romantic myth.

It was a dire necessity.

- Yeah.

But I'm thinking, say if you go from, if an American goes from wherever they are in spacious America to Paris, right?

So, that to the Parisians, there's something mythical about the American, right?

And so, especially in the '30s they would welcome the American as exotic.

Maybe a noble savage or something, right?

As an innocent.

And so, they welcome the American.

So, the American would be taken into this expat community as a myth, as part of a mythical reality.

And the American would live in a mythical reality, right?

The Paris of the books.

The Paris of the old Daguerreotype photos, right?

That's the Paris that you want.

That's the Paris that you see that communicates culture and what, serenity of some ways, you know?

Old.

- Yeah, the Paris of Eugene Atget's- - Yeah, yeah.

- Photographs of that.

- So, but then if you're in the myth and you never quite get grounded.

Let's say you never, you don't marry a Parisian who has to live in Paris and you don't have to work there.

Then, one striking thing about that way of being an expat, that way of travel is that the myth is like a tube that connects you back to your own country, right?

You can just slide back down the tube.

It's easy to get back, right?

So, if you're thinking of seeing home through the eyes of your new place in a way, then one of the keys to that is that it's easy to go and it's easy to get back, right?

So, you always know where you are.

You're located in some mythical frame.

Whereas the other kind of travel that you've described to me when you took your trip to the East.

I wonder if we can talk about that now.

That seems to be without the same kind of mythical frame 'cause you had, you took a circuitous route.

Tell us about that.

What inspired you and how did you get out there?

- Yeah, I mean, again, it has its roots in growing up as a kind of bookish kid in rural Oregon where I had, I lived a lot of my life through books and through reading.

And I think this is something you and I have touched on before.

I stumbled on Somerset Maugham's novel, "The Razor's Edge", which had been made into a movie starring Bill Murray which for a kid in the '80s, he was like my comic hero.

And so, I saw this movie where he's not playing a comic role.

It's a serious, dramatic role.

And I had read the novel and I just became fascinated with India.

But I had no idea how I'd get there.

- Can you say what the novel is about for those who haven't read it?

- Sure.

So, "The Razor's Edge" is about a young, very privileged American young man right before World War I who wants to volunteer, ends up going to World War I, he becomes an ambulance driver.

And he just sees horrific death and it shocks him out of his sense of privilege.

And so he ends up actually not in India, but in England.

And he's working, I think, in a mine.

And just trying to like root himself in a kind of working sense sensibility, which that didn't exercise much romanticism for me.

I grew up in a working class sensibility, especially in rural Oregon.

But he meets him a guy who lends him a copy of the Upanishads He falls in love with the book and he decides to go, he'll go to India.

And so, the second half of the book is, or about, I'd say the middle of the book is his spiritual journey through India.

- Right, and the title comes from the Upanishads?

- Exactly.

- It comes from the Katha Upanishad, yeah.

- Is It the Katha Upanishad?

- It's the Katha Upanishad.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- So, again, for me, 18, 19 years old, the first thing I did was see if there was a copy of Upanishads in the Eugene Public Library.

And there wasn't.

There was at the University Library, but I couldn't check it out.

So, I remember have to sit at the library table and read it there because I didn't have a library card 'cause I wasn't a student.

But I made it to India and started reading these books.

The Dhammapada, The Buddhist Discourses, the Dadaocheng which has nothing to do with India except for I was able to get one of those penguin classics editions of it.

- Now you just, so you just took off for India?

- Well, I started in Europe, and I made my way gradually east from Europe through Turkey.

My goal had been to travel overland all the way.

- Train?

- Train or bus.

Yeah, mostly buses.

Like again, the romantic image of riding on the roof of a bus in India, like, that's a real thing.

It's probably still today.

- Right.

You did it and you survived.

- It's not so romantic.

It's like, oh, there's no room inside.

So, you gotta be on the roof whether you want to or not.

The image of hiring someone to push you onto a train because there isn't enough room.

But you can hire like this big, burly guy who shoves you in and that's how you get your seat.

But again, for me it was very tied to things I had read and to a certain relationship to reading that I was trying to cultivate.

Which for me goes back to where you started as how do we think about the relationship between travel and writing?

And how does travel create a space and a distance, which makes a kind of writing possible.

Obviously, write traveling.

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