Bainbridge is part of Seattle, but Bremerton is out there somewhere. Bremerton is Seattle's Jersey. Only there ain't no bridge or tunnel to Bremerton.
I wonder whether there is some kind of continuity between modern Seattle culture and the original culture. I think Tom Robbins said that the Indians used to have longhouses to get out of the rain, and what were they to do but devise the greatest legendary culture, according to Claude Levi-Strauss. So what do we do? Put screens at the end of longhouses and watch movies. Are we following in footsteps of people we don't remember?
Rick Dahms
Raban at anchor on Queen Anne Hill.
Details
Upcoming Raban
7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 16—Town Hall, presented with Elliott Bay Book Co. Seattle Congressman Jim McDermott introduces Jonathan Raban (schedule permitting). $5 at the door only.
7 p.m. Friday, Dec. 9—University Book Store, Seattle. Free.
6:30 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 10—Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park. Free.
7 p.m. Monday, Dec. 12—Seattle Central Public Library. Free.
6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 13—Queen Anne Books. Free.
For details, updates, and other author appearances, see Readings & Events, p. 70, or check listings online at seattleweekly.com.
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I think that the one power that comes instantly to mind is that Indian villages faced on the water. And you regarded the nature that lay in back of you, the woods, as being full of danger, and you looked at the water as being kind of this street, with which you traded with other villages, using water as a town square. That, I think, has survived. And looking to trade by water is essentially how Seattle makes its money.
Seattle has a rich cultural past, but not much literary tradition. Why set a novel here?
I don't think particular places each need their own literary tradition. The tradition's in the language, surely, not the place. I've always been interested in the tradition of the city novel, from Dickens and Thackeray to Bellow and Martin Amis and many others. Doesn't Bellow's Chicago owe quite a bit to Dickens' London? Trying to write about Seattle, I find the shades at my elbow aren't local ones like Richard Hugo, whose work I much admire (who doesn't?) so much as the writers I've been reading all my life—Thackeray, Dickens, Evelyn Waugh, Bellow, Malamud (whose The Assistant is a great city novel, and whose short stories set in Brooklyn knock my socks off). James' Washington Square, Trollope's London novels in the Palliser series. . . . I think these are as much a part of Seattle's literary tradition, our English-language literary tradition, as any book with Pike Place Market in it.
If you're a regional writer, where's your region?
Where's my region? I think many of us carry a sense of our own displacement with us as if it were a region. Being not from here is a way of being as distinct as being from Aberdeen, Wash., or Oxford, Miss., or Lower Grimsdike, Yorks. It's partly why I liked living in London and like living in Seattle—both cities in which most people aren't from there. I can never give a straight answer to the question of where I come from in England. I have to mumble something about how my parents moved around a lot (they did), and how I spent many more years in London than I did anywhere else, nearly always in the company of other people who "came from" elsewhere. And so it is here—one or two people I know are lifelong locals, but most are migrant birds like me. Perhaps I have a slight edge on my friends in being Brit to boot—a further degree of elsewhereness.
I wonder if your only real home is your boat, wherever it may be. Are you perhaps the anti–Philip Larkin? There's a great scene in Coasting, your memoir about sailing around England, where you reunite with Larkin, your college mentor. After some drinking, you attempted to coax the 230-pound refusenik poet laureate, whom you once called a "shifting liquid cargo," onto your boat. But besides wisely sizing up the odds that you would be able to save him if he fell off the boat's ladder, he was aggressively rambling-averse and perversely rooted. He clung to his local habitation. Aren't you the opposite? I'll bet you couldn't feel at home unless your boat was ever ready to free you from it.
Do you know his poem "The Importance of Elsewhere"? He was a migrant—Coventry, Oxford, Leicester, Belfast, Hull. I wouldn't quite call Hull his local habitation. It was a temporary perch that accident solidified into permanence, of a sort. . . . Certainly, I'm a lot more physically and constitutionally mobile than Larkin was and have never remotely shared his famous loathing of "abroad." I like abroad in both its senses—being on the move and being in a country foreign to me. In the intro to My Holy War, I wrote something about America never being more foreign to me than it is now—something that makes it sort of more attractive to me, not less, if I'm honest. It's true that I used to see my boat as a sort of private floating state, but not any more. An occasional means of temporary escape is all. A vacation vehicle in which to potter around the Gulf Islands. . . .
[Later, Raban got to thinking about that line he used about Larkin's "temporary perch that accident solidified into permanence, of a sort." He e-mailed me: "I realise now that I was describing my Seattle. . . . "]
tappelo@seattleweekly.com
