Travels with the Flea by Jim Perrin

Author:Jim Perrin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781906476441
Publisher: Neil Wilson Publishing
Published: 2011-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

So we broke a barrier, and gossiped on: about Seattle pressmen and frontier attitudes; about those he considered the great unreads among English prose writers – Belloc, Richard Aldington, Edmund Gosse, whose Father and Son echoes throughout Raban’s own work, throughout his own life; about his admiration for Penelope FitzGerald’s and Richard Holmes’ capacity and gift for bringing the past alive; about his recollection of the latter delivering in measured academic tones, bald head gleaming, a perfect extempore lecture on Shelley; about the more assured place of the miscellaneous prose writer in America and the way his own writing escapes categorisation here, as he does himself, though the downside of that appreciation is the latitude it gives to the dreadful churchiness – he, a son of the manse, speaks the word with venom – of so much American prose. How, he cries, can anyone pretend admiration or allow a place in the canon to the unreadable – his voice rises almost to a screech – John Muir? He reveals a combative insecurity when I presume to agree with his own assessment of Hunting Mister Heartbreak as his least successful book (a debatable fact, incidentally, that makes it neither uninteresting nor bad). He tells impish-verging-on-the-ungenerous anecdotes about writers whose authority and reputation are assured: Peter Matthiessen complacent about his zen mastery of bonefish casting in Florida; Jan Morris not quite bringing off the grande dame in a Cairo hotel. He reminisces about university teaching in Aberystwyth and East Anglia, winces at the memory of playing snooker at his club with Jack Longland and sharing with him equally dire and unhappy memories separated by 40 years of King’s School, Worcester. He responds, when I ask him why he so dislikes England – a fair conclusion to be drawn from his writing – that he doesn’t, only Margaret Thatcher and her legacy. Its ‘tiresome banality,’ I quote? ‘Did I say that?’ and he moves on to quiz further about Blair’s Britain, of which he hears from his friends Amis and McEwan when they fetch up in Seattle on reading tours. There is a lot of talk of sailing, which is his crucial version of freedom and control and for which activity Seattle is perfectly provided. There are many of those facts on various themes with which his writing is so prodigally supplied. And as his writing has a default mode to metaphors of sailing and a complex personal agenda around his father (‘My father was no sailor – he didn’t have good sea-legs!’), so too does a default, explanatory and anchoring topic obtain in his conversation, mellow its customary acerbity and elicit a glow.

It’s Julia, his six-year-old daughter, custody of whom he shares, three-and-a-half days each week, with his estranged American wife. I meet Julia a couple of days later, when he invites me to his house on the canal side of Queen Anne Hill for dinner of not-quite-unfrozen lasagne and elaborate salad. Jonathan dotes, Julia rules. She comes in at one point,

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