Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) verged on–indeed, occasionally fell into–sentimentality in his work (Kidnapped, Treasure Island, The Master of Ballantrae. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), but without him my experience of reading, as a boy, would have been much poorer, and his verse always sang to me.

My House

My house, I say. But hark to the sunny doves  

That make my roof the arena of their loves,  

That gyre about the gable all day long  

And fill the chimneys with their murm...

Thoughts and memories of England dominate. And where there's England, there's Thomas Hardy. God willing, there'll always be both.

The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate

When Frost was spectre-gray,

And Winter's dregs made desolate

The weakening eye of day.

The tangled bine-stems scored the sky

Like strings of broken lyres,

And all mankind that haunted nigh

Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be

The Century's corpse outleant,

H...

By the time I’d been down and nearly out in London for four or five months I was rejected everywhere I applied for employment. Indeed, my lifelong talent for harvesting rejections in the face of all odds took wing during my year in London. Job hunting went from ludicrous to impossible. When I complained, my landlord pointed out that I dressed like an out-of-work 1920s-era socialist: baggy corduroys, faded tunic, and scuffed boots, and that this would inevitably dim my luster, except possi...

Boston Review, which has been my refuge, my soapbox, and my part-time employer for the past 10 years, will publish next month an essay of mine on Arthur Koestler–or, more precisely, an essay of mine on Michael Scammell's biography of Koestler, the reading of which reignited my interest in the great Anglo-Hungarian polymath, whom I revered during my youth. The Scammell bio has been widely reviewed–here, by Christopher Hitchens–and none of the reviewers has failed to observe that Koestl...

       My first London lodging was in an attic in the far suburb of Friern Barnet, an hour’s tube ride north of Charing Cross on the Northern Line. The attic was in a redbrick semidetached house rented by three young men from Scotland, of whom only one, some kind of economist or higher accountant, was willing to put me up, he being the only one I knew. The other two were hash-smoking pop musicians and ungenerous chaps of decidedly narrow disposition. I was, therefore, enjoined to secrecy,...

To compliment yesterday's portrait of the Nabokovs, here's one of Aleksandr and Natalya Solzhenitsyn outside the general store in Cavendish, Vermont, in the late '70s. This photo gives the lie to the story that AS never mingled with the locals; in fact, during his 18 years in Cavendish, he was frequently seen at the general store or the post office, and took part in at least one town meeting. But his English was shaky, which restricted his sociability. Later on, his sons, who grew up as Ame...

Shoplifting at Dracula’s, cont’d.

“Chairman Mao, WHO LED CHINA TO CHAOS AND GLORY, is Dead at 82.”

        So thunders The Thunderer. It is Wednesday, September 10, 1976. Imagine the calendar pages spinning backwards, as in a 1940s film noir. Your time machine deposits yo...

         Samuel Beckett lived much of his life among the intellectuals of Paris's Latin Quarter, almost all of whom were on the political left, and who for the most part assumed Beckett to be, too. Such is the myopia of the politically credulous. Not much effort would have been required to ascertain that in both his work and his life Beckett lived as if in a fortress, overlooking the world and apart from it. He observed, but did not emulate, those around him, and disdained their beliefs and...

             Back in Edinburgh for my final year, at first I avoided all pubs and spent a great deal of time in the university library and the National Library of Scotland, but instead of attending to my course books I was distracted by memories of a girl I'd met over the summer and disturbing reading like Gogol’s Nose and M. R. James’s ghost stories and the original London Times dispatches from Waterloo and other finds beyond measure, including Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood; I e...

There is only one admirable form of the imagination: the imagination that is so intense that it creates a new reality, that makes things happen.

 Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

         When I went home from Edinburgh to visit my mother it was to a different room in a different house, and even a different country; for her home was no longer in Switzerland, but across the border, in France. Subsequent to a series of rent hikes by greedy landlords, she and old Pete Toy had at last moved out of the "English" villa on Chemin Bonvent in Geneva, with its sheep field and ambivalent neighbors and purple mountains’ majesty, and into an o...

My great ambition is to write a funny book; but, as you know, it’s the most difficult thing of all.

                                                         Alberto Moravia

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

    Greater fame than Dracula's crowned the career of another eccentric Edinburgh retailer, Madame Doubtfire, owner of a used-clothing shop on Great King Street in the New Town that doubled or tripled as a bookstore and general junk depot. Madame D., real name Annabella Coutts, was one of Edinburgh’s star turns. Bill and I laughed at her on our way home from the pub and she cackled back at us like an enormous dotty hen. She inspired the local writer A...

         "Trouble is, Kevin’s seen his fair share of movie air disasters."

         And not much else; but that's about to change. Kevin is Kevin Quinn, the protagonist of James Hynes's new novel Next. Kevin's nothing special. He's not a bad fellow, but not particularly good, either. He's bored with his life in Ann Arbor, Michigan, so he's flown down to Austin for a one-day job interview, but arrives hours early. Meanwhile we wander with him around Texas's capital which, in...

Philip Hensher reminds us of literature's advantages over film, with Bleak House as case in point:

"It isn't, moreover, just a question of leaving out wonderful little corners of plot, or irresistible characters. It's really a matter of not doing a tenth of the things a book does. A book can switch into historical narration, dense description, authorial comment. It can, as Bleak House does, alternate between past tense and present tense–it's an extraordinarily sinister moment when Richar...

I’ve been enjoying the rueful, humorous, and melancholy writing of Richard Ford. I first read The Sportswriter, whose title, evocative to me of hollow heartiness, low levels of culture, and rampant provincialism, had put me off for years, until I reminded myself that you can write about anything as long as you do it well—and I discovered that Ford does it very well, and that the fact of the main character’s being a sportswriter is of no more importance than is Leopold Bloom’s being an...

Another insight from the sage Czech in exile.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    The novelist destroys the house of h...

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

            Dracula’s was where–in the form of several out-of-print volumes in a box–I first came upon that most eccentric of immortals, John Cowper Powys, “Old Earth Man,” Prester John of the Welsh Mountains. The mere mention of the mad old bugger’s name brings peace to my soul. I'm devoted to the man now, but back then, like most people, I’d never heard of him. He’s an acquired taste, and for a minority at that, but once sampled he...

            Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

         Dark and capacious as its namesake’s castle, Dracula's occupied two gloomy floors in a Georgian building across the street from Tariq’s Indo-Pak Restaurant and conveniently just down from the Meadow Bar, our local when on campus, and, less conveniently, the French Department, where most of the lectures I was supposed to attend (but usually didn’t) took place, finding myself distracted en route by Tariq’s or the M...

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

            At Edinburgh, like Boswell, we drank deep and now and then studied hard and even wrote a bit. We were indebted to politics, especially Scottish Nationalism and old-line Clydeside socialism, both primarily for romantic reasons—Rob Roy and The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists—but we were more receptive to culture and world affairs, so pub talk was relatively elevated when we were sober, and when we were drunk fights could and did b...

    Thanks to impending fiançailles between Victor, the Registrar at the University of Ulster (and fellow-member of the “Gaelic Club”) and Aisling, a young lady in the registrar’s office at the University of Edinburgh, as well as to some serious liquid bribery of Victor by me at the Harbour Bar and elsewhere, the formalities of transferring my files from one little-known brand-new institution of higher learning in the wilds of Ireland’s black North to one of the most august and an...

I am too firm in consciousness of the marvelous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural.

                                                                                                Joseph Conrad

Georges Haldas (b. 1917), a French-Swiss writer, has written more than sixty works of fiction, poetry, and criticism in his long life. His main subject has always been Geneva, his city (and once mine). I've read a number of his books, which are, unfortunately, unavailable in English, as far as I know. But if you can read French at all, you'll enjoy them. He brilliantly evokes the sounds and smells of the city: Boulevard des Philosophes; Chronique de la Rue Saint-Ours; La Légende des Cafés...

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

         So walking became my bond with the external, eternal, earth-redolent Ireland. But there was the other, the Ireland of people. Still the naïve outsider, when neither walking nor attending lectures I became an habitué of the few local bars of any distinction, less so now of the Harbour in Portrush, whose literary milieu was of no interest to my new, unliterary companions, and in some of these pubs I became so ill-advisedly outspoken, metamor...