ON WRITERS TRAVELLING LIGHT

LEAVING ON A JET PLANE...NOT SURE WHEN IF I'LL BE BACK AGAIN...

A writer friend came round yesterday and, it being 30 degrees outside, we stayed in and drank a couple of bottles of cold white. He was just back from California but would shortly leave for Venice. I’d spent time in both places, and reminiscing about them reminded me how much of the writer’s life is moving house.

Mercenaries, whether gunmen or writers, are travellers. The market dictates their lives. Researching; attending workshops or retreats; serving as guest lecturer or writer-in-residence: all of these encourage impermanence. Another peripatetic Australian, Clive James, used a literary metaphor to justify his move to Europe. “As Ahab cried when Moby Dick dragged him down for the last time, ‘I’m here because this is where the work is!’ ”

Courses on creative writing never explain the social cost of authorship. Getting an agent is nowhere near as difficult as finding a partner who’s prepared to pack up and move as one’s mood dictates. This came to mind reading Michael Elias’s witty new novel/story collection Bender’s L.A.

Bender’s wife wants a divorce – “because we’d be better off.”

“Why?”

“Because we came to Hollywood. Because I am unhappy here. I miss New York. I don’t like show business, or your Hollywood friends and their shitty politics. They only hate the Vietnam war because their kids might get drafted. I’m lost in a place I can’t leave.”

“But you can leave me.”

“It would be a start, Bender.”

I know this dialogue, or exchanges very like it, since I’ve spoken them, or had them spoken to me. In response, all one can do is shrug. Wanderlust comes with the territory.

Perhaps the urge to relocate even preceeds the need to write. Freya Stark, one of the first women to trek alone through Arabia and the Middle East, and to write about it, remembered setting out at age four with a toothbrush, a penny, and the determination to go to sea. “All through life,” she wrote, “the actual moment of emancipation still holds that delight, of the whole world coming to meet you like a wave.’’

My parents were just as alarmed when I displayed the same symptoms. What could Europe or America offer that Australia lacked? I had no answer – but, to find one, I needed to go there. Having arrived, of course, I soon felt again the urge to move. It’s not a popular lifestyle. “Is that what you do?” demanded someone in Los Angeles when I explained I was moving to Paris. “Come to a place, make friends, then leave?” Well, yes.

Freya Stark also said “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.” I know that special satisfaction in the anonymity of a hotel room or a borrowed space in someone else’s home; the sense of a neutral space which you’re free to fill with whatever you please. For the period of your sequestration, you are whoever you choose to be. Leonard Cohen used to check anonymously into obscure hotels, “laying low and letting the hunt go by.” More recently, Lee Child plugged into the same sense with his hero Jack Reacher, who regards anything beyond a toothbrush and a passport as insupportable encumbrances.

I came closest to this beatific state when, back in the ‘eighties, a Los Angeles courier service recruited me. Before electronics made paper obsolete, legal firms sometimes needed to ship documents in bulk between continents without risking them in the post. In return for assigning one’s luggage allowance to a load of files, they furnished a free return ticket to Europe or Australia. To step on a plane at LAX with no baggage never failed to remind me of Psalm 139: “If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea….” That elation, which Erica Jong experienced in the zipless fuck, I found in the luggage-less flight.

Is there a school that teaches these skills so essential to a writing career? If so, I’m available. I can be there on the next flight out of Charles de Gaulle. Don’t even need to pack…..