The World is a Book, Indeed: Writing, Reading, and Traveling

I am in the fourth grade and sitting at my desk in the classroom at the low-slung redbrick Nausauket School in Apponaug, Rhode Island. The school is just a few streets up from a sandy beach, small, on an inlet along the rocky coastline of bluer-than-blue Narragansett Bay. It is 1956.

At the end of each day—or at least a couple of days each week in Mrs. Blaise’s class and a half-hour before the final bell at three—we are told that it will be “art time.” It is an announcement that is surely appreciated by the couple of dozen or so kids, but for me is maybe beyond that—for me art time is even more appreciated than being let loose for recess in the big playground with its sparse patches of grass atop the worn hard dirt there behind the public elementary school, all the squealing and running around in the salt-fresh air for tag or who knows what kind of a new game kids can invent when simply given a standard large pink rubber ball. I love to draw, and I think that it is something I do well. Other kids can sing better than I when Mrs. Marley, the classroom-roving music teacher, shows up with her pitch pipe to lead us through songs from the red-bound American Singer (“Old Folks at Home,” “Oh! Susanna” and the like), a few of the girls with their fragile, airily melodic voices especially good at that; and other kids in my reading group called the Bluebirds can function aloud better than I with the syllables and sentences when we sit in little chairs arranged in a circle up front, granting that the Bluebirds is the most advanced group (no politically correct need to avoid blatant stratification in the 1950s, and the Bluebirds does contain the class’s best readers, far above the level of those in the second-tier Robins or the very lowly Owls). Nevertheless, while many students in the class are much better at other things, I seem to be the one who is able to draw. Why, just the autumn before, Mrs. Blaise—plump and of French-Canadian descent, too much rouge on her cheeks and always cheery—selected me to draw a picture of the new 1956 Plymouth Savoy she’d recently bought, so she could send it to her brother, a plumber, I think, somewhere in New Hampshire. She had parked the car she was very proud of on the street outside the long row of aluminum-framed classroom windows, and for a few sessions when it again came time for drawing late in the afternoon, I would look out the windows at the stubby, stripped-down basic coupe, though afforded some measure of verve with a two-tone-paint combination, aqua and black. I would study the bulge of the chrome bumpers, the slope of the roof, the little fins toward the taillights, first sketching a pencil outline and then gradually adding some colors as chosen from the green-and-orange box of worn Crayolas, whose fragrance alone could create a pleasant intoxication. I worked away for several sessions, until I was sure I had it exactly right—the car out there on the street, with a couple of small, peak-roofed Cape Cod–style white houses in back of it and the autumn maples fiery, was now—somehow magically, even dizzyingly—on the floppy sheet before me, for all intents and purposes existing there as significantly as it did in the rumored real world. But the picture of the Plymouth, a bona fide commission you might say, is well behind me by this point in the school year, and today I do what I often do. Come art time, a student whom Mrs. Blaise has dispatched to the supply closet in the back of the classroom passes out to each of us a large fresh manila sheet, and I, anticipating, have already lifted the wooden lid and taken from the desk’s brown-enameled metal bin the crayon box, once again that special waxy fragrance of it in the classroom’s steam-heated warmth enough to spark a general contentment even before I do get to work on a scene that, it seems, I have often chosen to depict lately.

I don’t know why, but during art time I keep drawing this one picture, over and over, of a round-top Middle Eastern building, maybe a small mosque, with a single palm tree beside it on the desert sands and a very lurid sunset above. I have no actual knowledge of where the idea originally came from, perhaps part of something that snagged in my mind from a TV show (black and white back then) or an encyclopedia illustration (usually black and white back then, too); or, most likely, it’s some combination of many of those impressions that I put together in such a way that I find even more satisfying than the quiet amazement of having transported the Plymouth Savoy from the street and onto the paper, because I sense that I am now going beyond that, feel a greater satisfaction in creating something out of nothing, what possibly doesn’t exist in reality but the so-rightness of it—that distant, imagined scene—makes it more significant than anything simply taken from reality.

We’d bring our drawings home to show our parents. And if my obsession with the one scene became what I myself tended to forget over the years, my mother would later look back in her family reminiscences, concerning various things in the past about each of us in the large family of kids, and repeatedly say to me, “You always kept drawing that one picture, do you remember that, Pete, over and over.”

I answered with maybe the only answer I could give, “I suppose I do, yes, I suppose I do remember it.”

When my mother died at age eighty, one of my adult sisters, by then a successful attorney who’d followed a career path similar to that of our father—a lawyer and judge—had a hard time coming to terms with my mother’s passing. Being the youngest, very much so and born quite late in life to my parents, my sister and my mother spent a lot of time together when the rest of us were soon off to college and eventually lives of our own; in her sadness she asked me not long after the burial, “Where does all that goodness go when somebody dies—it can’t just all disappear can it, float away as if it never had been in this world? I mean, where does it all go?”

Extremely saddened myself, I almost feel embarrassed now to say I also turned some of the mourning toward pitying myself, knowing that with my dear mother gone nobody else in the world would ever know the many things about me that my mother did, so, in a way, all such knowledge had certainly vanished as well. And, of course, nobody else would ever know that I kept drawing that one picture over and over—the little mosque-like building, the desert, the palm tree, and, most of all, the overdone sunset igniting the wide, wide sky behind it.

II.

It is 1965.

At the Catholic college-preparatory boys school, a day operation, it is a Friday night and I am in the dining hall, connected by a corridor to the gymnasium where the weekly mixer dance, called a “canteen,” is being held. A bunch of us, all guys, are standing around with rotund Brother Robert in his Roman collar and black robe, the cloth shiny in spots from wear and the twin cords of its braided cincture belt dangling. I am wearing a tweed sport jacket, button-down shirt, and good challis tie, maybe chinos and loafers, more or less the same as what the rest of the guys are wearing. We are in that dining hall drinking Cokes and talking, laughing some, too, and this is what often happens at these Friday night dances at the school, where girls from nearby public high schools and also the girls schools as far away as Providence (and Providence with its skyline of old art deco skyscrapers right out of Metropolis and the huge, nearly dreamt white marble state capitol building on its rising hill, true, Providence sometimes can seem so far away from our provincial campus set right in the middle of woods alternating with the cornfields and pastures of a local farm). Earlier in the evening we did what we have been looking forward to doing all week, at least make an attempt to ask some of the girls to dance, the usual rush of the smell of crème rinse in freshly washed hair, also the flattened palm of a hand actually, and near miraculously, placed on the back of a thin blouse for the slow-dancing that is just about the only thing any of us are much good at, maybe the Beatles doing “This Boy” with its patented Lennon-McCartney nasal whine; we leave the fast-dancing to the few suaver guys among us who can, in fact, successfully perform that sort of thing. If the Friday night mixer dance always wraps up at eleven and with the playing of the old standard of “Goodnight, My Love,” we have well before that abandoned the low-lit gymnasium, and here in the otherwise empty dining hall we often end up like this, buying Cokes from the machine, spending time with one of the brothers from the contingent of them assigned to keep an eye on things for the dance. It’s something that we are much more comfortable with than having to deal with girls, about whom, being at a school of this kind and surrounded by only males all week, most of us know very little, including those few select fast-dancers among us, I’d say.

Early middle-aged, Brother Robert is balding in a pattern that comes about as close as you can get to naturally providing the look of a monk’s tonsure. He has a a bit of a speech impediment—probably due to the gap in his front teeth, an occasional tendency to lisp that you don’t notice after a while—and though some of the other guys when among themselves have had some fun in mimicking him, I think it is all good natured enough. Brother Robert is a concerned teacher and well-liked, somebody who obviously loves the subject he teaches, world history. He manages to make it come alive, always animated in class, albeit occasionally bordering on clownish, leading us through the story of the Greeks and the Romans that fall, sometimes veering off completely on a tangent for a week or so with something not on the subject—the life of Winston Churchill who died recently, the turbulent political situation in Africa this year—whatever really interests him and that he hopes will also interest us. Bobby Larkin is there (who will be ROTC at college and lose a leg in Vietnam), and Dick Martini is there (who once pitched a perfect school-league baseball game, got married early and had kids then divorced young and died before he was fifty of a sudden heart attack, apparently having had a serious drinking problem), and Jimmy Thompson is there (a sweet guy who loved literature and was my closest friend, whose father had a job as an everyday school bus driver, Jimmy attending our school with the help of a church scholarship, and for college he would also receive scholarship offers from top-notch places like Georgetown and Notre Dame, though I never kept track of what became of him in later life). We joke around with Brother Robert, some talk about sports, some talk about various classes. In the course of it I admit to myself a deep admiration for him and most all of the brothers, something I realize even at this age. The way the school works is that there is a cooperative angle to its operation, enforced by an odd means of discipline. Each of the brothers keeps deep in the side slash pocket of his cassock-like black robe a little pad with slips that are almost like parking tickets, printed—somewhat ironically—in the upbeat green and gold school sports team colors; the slips are handed out for any kind of classroom ill behavior or even tardiness. A lower level of infraction results in a “Misdemeanor,” for which the brother can check the box on the slip, and the higher, more serious level merits a full-fledged “Misconduct,” a box next to it, too, with a number of boxes below each for exactly what the offense was and at the bottom a line for a parent’s signature when brought home. For a Misdemeanor one has to work for an hour after school on the grounds, raking up leaves in fall, let’s say, or in winter shoveling snow from the school’s walkways and parking lot. It’s a repeated joke we have that whenever the brothers back in their separate residence on the school campus see the weather lady on the local late-night TV news indicate on her glass chart that another blizzard is about to blow down from Canada, the word goes out among them that there will be a lot of bad behavior in class the next day, even if there isn’t, to generate a lot of Misdemeanor slips in order to get the deep, boomerang-drifting accumulation completely cleared away that afternoon. The more serious Misconduct means that one shows up on Saturday morning to work for a full three hours, and the sole two times I have received one at the school I was dispatched with some other boys—who are also good students and who probably on the basis of that alone the brothers know they can trust—to work at the brothers’ residence. And what I saw then somehow saddened me. I don’t think I truly understood before how selfless the lives of these men are, those who day after day sit on a stool at a high desk in front of the dusty blackboard and lead us through the lyricism of Shelley and Keats or the abstract movements of the mathematical mind with the exponents and planes and parabolas of geometry and trigonometry. In the case of Brother Robert the subject is indeed the history of the dreamily distant larger world (all those little bright-colored puzzle pieces of countries on the old desk globe that one of my older sisters got for her tenth birthday, and how we as kids in the family would spend hours in the den just spinning the rattling thing on its titled axis with eyes scrunched shut and putting a finger out to make it stop and to see where or where, in fact, we had landed—the jungles of South America, the deserts of Africa, the crowded capitals of Europe, the endless blue of the endless oceans and seas—such a roulette-wheel randomness to the whole routine, mere chance and an early lesson in the way life itself worked), yes, a large world that Brother Robert was educating us in the history of, good Brother Robert. And when working at the brothers’ residence, I would take out the galvanized trash cans from the stark kitchen and see the remnants of the simple fare they survived on. I would push the dust mop along the halls and past the open doors of the little white-walled cubicles, each with a single bed and a cross above it, to maybe most heartbreakingly notice the one or two personal possessions they’d brought with them from the previous life before they entered the order’s novitiate when not much older than us—a pair of scuffed and very dated white bucks on the floor beside the bed, or an old well-oiled first baseman’s mitt wrapped around a dirty horsehide ball on the single small bookcase provided in each cubicle—and embarked on another life altogether, entirely selfless.

The round clock on the wall in the dining hall where we have gathered is a functional office-style one, electric with bold black numerals, a red minute hand looping around and around. The clock now indicates it is nearly eleven and the dance is ending, as we finish the syrupy Cokes and Brother Robert (who knows what became of him, and so many left the religious order in the free-spirited later 1960s, who knows if he is even alive), he says to us—all in his world history class, his cheeks rosy, his lisp admittedly noticeable—“Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul.” Which really doesn’t make any sense to us. For him it’s probably a preview of Monday’s class, a pronouncement he most likely hopes will pique our interest. He repeats it, grinning his gap-toothed grin, with the unstated promise that we will find out all about it in class soon enough on Monday: “Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul, boys.”

I’ve always remembered that.

III.

In my reading recently I came upon this line, from the French anthropologist Lévi-Strauss:

“Journeys—those magic caskets filled with dreamlike promises.”

I copied it down, my fingers clicking away on the keys of my MacBook Pro computer, to add it to a file I keep of good quotes I come across while reading.

I stare at it even as I write it again now, here on the white screen of the Word page bordered by its royal blue, and try to figure out why it haunts me so. There is something about travel in the word “journeys,” and there is something about death in the word “caskets,” and there is, very hauntingly, something about the airy substance of what is commonly called life in the word “dreamlike,” especially when life for me lately, now considerably older, seems unsettling, as I frequently suspect that perhaps I have made a major mistake in the course of it, devoted altogether too much time to writing fiction—my short stories and novels and the imagined scenarios within—at the expense of so much else, the real; true, there is something about the insubstantiality of it all in the word “dreamlike” in the quote.

I keep staring at the quote.

IV.

I look at the quote some more, the computer screen glowing here in Austin, Texas, where I have lived and taught creative writing classes at the university for over thirty years. I repeat the line to myself, feeling that it’s like a nail puzzle, two shiny chrome-plated, flat-headed nails convolutedly hooked together, which you twist this way and that, gaze at and analyze, twist this way and that some more, until the entanglement in your hands might at last come undone, easily and unexpectedly, as softly and maybe revealingly as shed rose petals—and imagined rose petals at that—for me to realize at last something large, something I really should know in life.

But staring at the quote now, thinking about it, I don’t quite make the mind-jump, grasp the message, as close as I do come to it, and the words that in turn render the phrasing of the Lévi-Strauss quoted line on the computer screen simply remain there before me, just words:

“Journeys—those magic caskets filled with dreamlike promises.”

According to the English honors track at college, during the last year of study one is individually assigned to a tutor to oversee an undergraduate thesis. However, before that, in the second year and third year, there is so-called Sophomore Tutorial then Junior Tutorial. These are group sessions where several students meet once a week with an instructor and together concentrate on a single author, all of the writer’s oeuvre and locating it in a larger literary tradition. It seems Harvard adopted this tutorial system from the British universities, Oxford and Cambridge, and for my Sophomore Tutorial the author is William Butler Yeats.

It is 1967.

So once a week I leave the suite of rooms in Quincy House along with another English major, a lanky, wise-cracking guy named Paul, who lives with his roommates in the suite next door. And this particular winter afternoon we start out along the crisscrossing, snow-shoveled walks. We weave our way through the quadrangles of the various Harvard Houses, the two of us bundled up in the cold, both with hats and a topcoat for him and parka for me, as worn over the standard suit-jacket-and-tie attire (required for all meals, even breakfast, in the dining halls at all-male undergraduate Harvard back then, so most everybody dresses that way throughout the day for classes); we continue past the busy, traffic-filled Square and then start up long Mount Auburn Street, heading to the apartment in a gray three-decker where our tutor lives. Our tutor recently finished her PhD at Harvard, and her husband is an instructor in the Government department. Their apartment off Mount Auburn has the comfortable simplicity typical of a young scholarly couple’s place (a few items of mismatching furniture, some throw rugs—a bright Mexican-blanket pattern—on the otherwise bare, honey-varnished floors, and the walls overflowing with books); the half-dozen of us are assembled in the front room, including a slight, dark-haired Radcliffe girl, lovely, shy, and very brilliant, who wears—rather out of character, it seems—a mini skirt and go-go boots along with a prim pink cable-knit cardigan over a cotton turtleneck, the only female. Despite her saying little, everybody always listens intently whenever she has something to contribute to our discussion analyzing the Irish poet’s work, the hardbound Macmillan Collected Poems edition open on each lap. The talk is led by our also somewhat fragile tutor, soft-voiced, who sits in a wing-back chair in the bay window of the three-decker; she is a bit indistinct there with the winter sunlight bright behind her and her long, loosely arranged hair golden, even incandescent, it seems. Toward the end of the session we share with the others our topic ideas for the major project of the semester, the Sophomore Essay, and then we mingle with one another as we take turns sitting with our tutor for a one-on-one talk to discuss individual progress—what reading we are doing for the essay and the status of work underway on a draft. My topic is not all that original, and it’s true that as a sophomore in college I am not much of a budding literary scholar. Already I am far more interested in taking creative writing classes, designated by not merely numbers but, for me, almost magical letters in the university’s thick course catalog—“English C” and “English N” and “English S”—admission to them determined by manuscript submission and not even counted toward the major and usually becoming an extra fifth class in a four-class schedule; I will go on to possibly hold some kind of Harvard record at the time for the number of them taken. I tell the tutor that my paper will involve, basically, Yeats’s two great thematically related poems from his later stage of life, “Sailing to Byzantium,” written in 1926, and “Byzantium,” written in 1930. The first is a song of approach and longing, the second a song of arrival and, surprisingly in old age, the enhancement of that artistic longing, which I try to explain to her, even if I am a twenty-year-old who knows little or nothing about the very concept of old age and how an old man could be, as Yeats famously pronounces, “but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick.” My ideas are indeed basic. Hearing them, the tutor politely nods, and I think she has long since come to accept that it will not be an eventual PhD and a career of literary scholarship for me. All my essays so far have been simplistically obvious and even hokey, one comparing the transcendence of the British Romantics to that found in the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” another on my firm belief in the survival of literature and the written word over the movies, very hokily titled “Pegasus and the Lion” (Pegasus, the mythological figure representing literature and poetic inspiration, and “Lion,” as in the MGM lion). Most in the group are better suited to this, especially the brilliant Radcliffe girl, who in the tutorial session is addressed as “Miss Hatch,” more than once dazzling the group with her whisperingly expressed meticulous research and keen scholarly insight. (I didn’t know her at all on campus outside of those Wednesday afternoon sessions in the gray clapboard three-decker, but a few years after graduation it really threw me when I saw her name listed in the obituaries of the glossy alumni magazine, far in back of the issue and once you got by the tiresomely upbeat feature articles and the ads for many luxury items—good scotch and gleaming BMWs, the things slick ad men in their cluelessness must picture all Harvard grads eager to buy; in the obituary’s fine print—or as I seem to remember the details—there was talk of her lifelong struggle with a chronic illness, something none of us were aware of at the time and which, it noted, brought her back to maybe California where she was from and where she died in her twenties, only her parents and siblings listed as survivors.) The tutorial session over and darkness having already fallen outside, we all tug on our heavy coats, and with my buddy Paul I head back along Mount Auburn Street. Gusting winter wind blows strong down the street now, there is an ammonia-sharp tinge to the cold air, a sure sign that more snow is on the way; we joke about how it’s a good thing that skinny Miss Hatch, as very lovely as she is, isn’t out here or she might literally get blown away. When a hulking, orange-and-white MBTA trolley bus passes us, the electric rod atop it suddenly emitting an extended flash of startling blue on the overhead wires, Paul in his topcoat and authentic wide-brim fedora repeats the old gag line he has used before there on Mount Auburn Street during the walks back from our tutor’s apartment; cowering some, he puts on a histrionically deep biblical voice and shields his eyes with one free hand, the other holding his green rubberized book bag: “I’ve seen the Light!”

I give a perfunctory laugh, but I am already thinking about my paper on the Yeats poems, buckling down to do more work on it that evening.

In the little maize-walled dorm bedroom, I sit before the Hermes manual typewriter, a dented aluminum contraption that’s set atop a copy of the Harvard Crimson newspaper for cushioning on the old oaken desk.

Outside the twelve-pane dormer window on this top floor of red-brick Quincy House it is snowing. (It’s a place I go back to often in my mind, that suite of rooms in Quincy where I pored over the Norton Anthology of English Literature for hours on end, wrote paper after paper for a seminar or lecture class there.) Now and then the old silver radiator clanks loudly, then the noise trails off in a long hiss and diminishing staccato, until everything is perfectly silent again. My three roommates are gone, probably off to study elsewhere. When the phone in the adjoining sitting room rings there on the little coffee table in front of the secondhand sofa, sagging and garish maroon (we bought it from the boozingly affable House custodian Louis, who surely has repeatedly salvaged the behemoth from past students’ rooms and then repeatedly resold it over the years), I let it ring and rattlingly ring. I tell myself that if it’s for one of my three roommates, the call will just mean my taking a message, so it might be better to let whoever it is try back later. And usually the only person who calls me in the evening during the week is my girlfriend out at Wellesley College. No doubt about it, I am crazy about her—honey-haired, willowy, and tall, so pretty; her perfectly round steel-rimmed glasses can sometimes magnify her blue eyes to make them look giant-size, almost weird like a Martian’s yet also in a such a very pretty way, if that makes any sense. And I always like the long phone sessions with her and the meandering chat about anything. Our relaxed conversations during the week can sometimes go on for an hour, each missing the other so, we say, plus considerable talk about books and art (she knows an awful lot about painting, has opened up my own world to the wonders of the Italian Renaissance and even French Postimpressionism, two of her favorite periods) or simply talk of what we have planned for the upcoming weekend when we will see each other again, at last. But I won’t answer the phone, and I know I shouldn’t take a break. Ever since the tutorial session earlier that afternoon I have been excited about writing this paper, the idea of Yeats in the sequence of his two poems first setting out for Byzantium—the golden kingdom of it by the sea, its “drowsy Emperor” and “the holy fire, perne in a gyre”—and then actually arriving there.

However, according to what I just read in the Yeats biography checked out of the undergraduate library, a sizable tome by Richard Ellman now set on the desk beside the typewriter, Yeats himself in his lifetime, of course, never did travel anywhere near that part of the world, which is something, a detail, I definitely like—his never having been there in reality but without question having more than been there in the poem.

I start typing again, continuing with the essay. The snow keeps falling, and I keep typing some more.

VI.

Journeys—those magic caskets filled with dreamlike promises.

VII.

I am having lunch with the young woman named Ilksen who has translated one of my books into Turkish. This is in Karaköy, a section of what’s known as the European Quarter in Istanbul. It is 2013, late autumn, and quite sunny and oddly warm for this time of the year, I’m told.

The lunch is wonderful. Up on a raised terrace, the restaurant is an open-air affair that juts out from the city’s sleek, industrial-looking modern art museum, recently converted from a former maritime warehouse, and our table is right beside the wide, blue Strait of Bosphorus. Passenger ferries crisscross the water, gulls squealing overhead; the undulating green hills and clusters of whitewashed houses of Asia itself lay across the way. We order the spicy seafood stew she recommended, ungarnished except for a baguette of warm, freshly aromatic French bread, and we talk more about the book. She not only seems to understand entirely what I am trying to do in my admittedly offbeat fiction (it is a collection of short stories she’s translated, which appeared in the U.S. several years before, with some good reviews though not much in the line of sales), but she’s also immediately engaging and a lot of fun, the two of us repeatedly laughing together at something said.

Coming to Istanbul for a couple of weeks was spur of the moment. I had a semester off from teaching, thanks to yet another appreciated university grant to work on my fiction (universities, despite my frequent complaints about certain questionable aspects of their operation, have been the life support of my writing career); I was planning to spend some of that time in Paris, anyway, just a few hours by jet from Istanbul, so a visit to Turkey could easily be worked into the trip. The publisher and I agreed that it would be good for publicity to have me visit when the book was issued in translation, though, in truth, now that I am here the book still hasn’t been released; a third supposedly firm publication date has come and gone. Actually, there has been a long series of delays and postponements regarding the project, which became more understandable after my meeting with the publisher and his staff in Istanbul. All of them bright, wide-eyed young people who undoubtedly love serious and even daring literature of the innovative kind, they are maybe a little too young and wide-eyed, seemingly short on practical business sense, their enterprise obviously suffering serious cash-flow problems. I haven’t had much of my work previously translated anywhere (only a couple of stories into Spanish and Portuguese, to be honest), and this isn’t any regular occurrence for me, my being anything but a recognized, world-lit type of author routinely jetting to other countries to talk about my writing. Still, in this case I received an email more than out of the proverbial blue one afternoon back in Austin saying the publishing house wished to acquire translation rights, and following some friendly back-and-forthing in a few more emails concerning terms, a contract was promptly signed. Then the slowdown began. At this point—after the meeting with the publisher a couple of days before, my detecting then his own business naiveté, a young guy in over his head with projects and having a lot to learn in life—I wonder if the book will ever appear. Which doesn’t bother me too much, because I am glad just to be in Istanbul. During my stay I have been avoiding, at least for the time being, the crowds of foreigners at the big-ticket tourist attractions clustered together in the historic Sultanahmet district, such as the opulent Topkapi Palace of the Ottoman sultans with its notorious Harem Quarters and the imposingly massive rise of the Hagia Sofia mosque beside it, originally built as a church in the sixth century by Roman Emperor Justinian, who ruled his storied empire from Constantinople. I’ve made a quick pass or two through the Grand Bazaar, but I know I need more time to explore its endless maze of stalls and shadowy aisles right out of One Thousand and One Nights. I assure myself that I will properly take in all the sights before I leave, and meanwhile I have set out every day from my small, family-run hotel called The Peninsula, by the sea there in Sultanahmet, and wandered for hours through the various lesser-known neighborhoods of the sprawling, always fascinating city. No, I am not really disappointed whatsoever about what seems to have happened with the translation, if only because, as said, the project has brought me here to a place where simply the idea of it has thoroughly intrigued me ever since I was young, now getting to see it for myself at last (there is something about long-ago Rhode Island, a smiling religious-order brother in his black robe repeating the words that made for almost a litany regarding the thumpingly incessant and fully overwhelming progression of history, an echoing paean to the power of time and inevitable large historical change: “Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul”); without question, the city is proving to be everything I expected, even more.

The translator Ilksen is not so accepting of the publisher’s multiple delays. Before I came to Istanbul she sent me a long email. She said how she’d spent over a year of her life on the translation, and she did so in circumstances that meant she had to sacrifice a good deal. It was time she should have been spending with her three-year-old autistic daughter, whom she often put in front of a television while she worked away, the two of them living in a small two-room flat. She had delivered the completed translation to the publisher a year earlier, exactly on time, had done the proofreading and correcting herself at the publisher’s request. While she hadn’t worked for this publisher before, she explained in the email that she accepted the job to begin with only because she wanted to embark on a translation assignment that truly interested her at last: “I love your work, I think I have seen through your brain cells working, I was there”—welcome praise, all right, but a spookily frightening proposition for me, considering that I myself seldom know if I have any chance whatsoever of seeing through my brain cells, well, working. But toward the end, her email turned angry, Ilksen quite heated up, as she went on to say that her initial optimism soon gave way to utter frustration with the publisher and his cockily cavalier attitude; not yet having paid her anything, he recently appeared to be dodging her completely:

“Unfortunately, there are no reply to my emails, nor to my calls. Seems like our work is tumbling in the oblivion. . . . Now that he doesn’t answer my calls, I want to tear off his throat with my teeth.”

I did find that comical, and understandably strange, too, so I didn’t know what to expect when I met her this morning at eleven. The agreed-on spot was Taksim Square and the vainglorious bronze group sculpture of the founder of modern Turkey, the nationally revered Mustafa Kehmal Atatürk, gazing out on the city as surrounded by an entourage of his fellow 1922 revolutionaries; they bucked the dividing-up of the country by Europeans after World War I and eventually called for abolishment of the Ottoman royal line, which in the final century of rule by the increasingly self-indulgent sultans had fallen into both personal decadence and complete administrative torpor. Any preconceptions I might have had after that email evanesced as soon as I saw approaching me in the sunshine a smiling young woman with short-cut auburn hair, walking with almost a girlish skip. She wore a coordinated autumn outfit of muted browns and oranges that could have been right out of a spread in an American women’s magazine featuring what’s new in back-to-campus fashion—a tweed skirt and striped wool stockings, a sort of Tyrolean jacket over a sweater, and, perfectly, a little peaked tweed cap, her animated, melodic voice itself matching the general high spirits the coordinated attire suggested.

As we talk now at the restaurant, the waiter in his black trousers and very proper white shirt comes by to ask if we would like anything else. We assure him the seafood stew was excellent, and Ilksen tells him in Turkish that we will have a coffee for me and a tea for her. With the discussion of my book and her many questions about my writing out of the way, we have comfortably slipped into talking of larger matters in life. I explain how I never married, not wishing to be tied down and well beyond doing anything permanent on that front at this stage, and she speaks more about how she went through a couple of years of total hopelessness, her only child being diagnosed with autism and at about the same time her husband suffering a stroke while not even forty. Her life collapsed around her, she says, until she just stepped back from everything, told herself that she had two choices—either wallow in self-pity or take control the best she could of the situation and decide to get organized, do something about it. I tell her that in America we would say, “You now have a game plan.”

“That is it exactly!” she says. “Yes, I get for myself a game plan!”

She says that she has recently moved here from Ankara because she had pursued any lead she could on how she might help her daughter. There was a nationwide lottery for openings in a new education program in Istanbul for autistic children, an experimental school jointly run by the Turkish government and researchers from Princeton University. She entered the child’s name, said a prayer to the universal deity she subscribes to—basically the benevolence of the universe hovering somewhere above us, which is what she wants to believe all religion essentially amounts to, including the Islam in which she was nominally raised in Ankara—and her daughter won a spot, half miraculously, but also half because she, hopeful Ilksen, knew it simply had to happen. She packed up everything and came to Istanbul, where she rents the cramped inexpensive flat and where her daughter attends the school.

Her husband is back to work at his post in Ankara, she explains, a position with a Turkish government agency, but now assigned to a desk job rather than a field one due to his disability from the stroke; he comes to visit them once a month. Her daughter is making amazing progress and is almost proving to be a prodigy, in a way, startling the teachers with her perception of colors and a rapid development in her understanding of language and numbers as well. When she speaks of her daughter, smiling, it is with such an intensity of motherly love.

The waiter brings the coffee and the tea.

Low waves lap against the seawall below the restaurant’s raised terrace, the ferries out there on the Bosphorus continue to crisscross the blue water (motherly love, and where does all the goodness go, oh, where does all the goodness go?); atop Seraglio Point, its wooded cliff jutting up Gibraltar-like, the delicate silhouette of Topkapi Palace is visible in the distance (a poet once dreamed of sailing to Byzantium, he refused to believe that an aged man is but a paltry thing, because there may be something beyond and even trumping that, a visionary golden empire of the creative imagination indeed). And as we sit there at the restaurant and talk some more, the entire scene is softened by a thin, sun-charged haze on this warm and sea-fragrant November day.

I say to her:

“So the game plan is working.”

She appears excited about just the thought of that, confirming it to herself and saying in her jangling, musical voice:

“Yes, and you are right, Peter, the game plan, it works well now.”

VIII.

I am walking alone.

I think it is still 2013, after I have parted with the translator Ilksen at the Karaköy streetcar platform.

We leisurely strolled some together after lunch. Eventually she headed off on a streetcar to pick up her autistic daughter at the child’s school, and I said that I thought I might walk around for a while, gradually work my way across the long Galata Bridge and to my hotel on the other side of the Golden Horn in Sultanahmet.

The old Galata neighborhood is a nest of shops along cramped streets steeply sloping down toward the harbor. I sit for a while on a bench in the small circular park that surrounds the conical stone Galata Tower there, constructed in Medieval times by the Genoese; once merchant traders with impressively far-ranging influence, they managed to control and oversee this sector of the city for two centuries. It’s a good spot to rest for a bit and make some notes, and I tug off my fleece jacket—the afternoon is so warm—and begin doing just that. The notebook is of the sort I’ve celebrated in my writing often—I swear by them. It has a black marbleized cover and looks like a miniature “composition book,” or a small parody of the usual larger ones, and I’ve already filled several such notebooks on this trip. They come in packs of four at the dollar store in Austin, the covers green or blue or red or black; the color-coding makes it easy to keep them in order, and throughout the trip I have been scribbling notes on what I have been experiencing here in Istanbul in all my walking, in all my meeting with people as well. Sometimes my notes are just random observations that come to mind—how so many people in Istanbul seem to be wearing expensive New Balance running shoes with the oversize N on the side, but when I looked at a pile of them in a sales stall while finally spending more time in the massive arcade of the Grand Bazaar the other day, I saw they are all cheap Chinese knock-offs; or how on the television evening news that I watch at the small hotel, there appears to be a set policy among the stations to devote a major bulk of the coverage to the current head of state, Recep Tayyip Erdo˘gan, probably an enforced government code and always with the intent of attempting to make the scraggly, rather nondescript man look very statesmanlike while speaking at any number of staged events, this despite the fact that his former glowing image in the West as a progressive has been irreparably damaged by his dispatching brutal police in riot gear, powerful water-cannon trucks backing them up, to violently quell the street protests in Gezi Park up by Taksim Square the summer before—yes, sometimes the notes are random, but sometimes they are more calculated and with ideas for short stories set in Istanbul that keep coming to me while I explore the city—characters I might use in them, sequences in the narratives beginning to build in my mind even if they maybe never will actually build on the page. When a pack of high school kids in uniforms go squealing by—young and happy, pigeons scattering in the splashed sunshine before them; classes must have just let out for the day—I glance up, then go back to the notes. I am trying to get down as much as possible of the dialogue that transpired between Ilksen and me at the museum restaurant (as a kid sitting at my grade-school desk I looked out the window to see Mrs. Blaise’s Plymouth Savoy, then looked at the finished drawing on the manila sheet before me, satisfied that what was there was now here), and I suspect already that I might use our talk in an essay like the one you are currently reading.

After a half-hour or so, it’s turning cooler. There’s the sound of atonal ships’ horns from the harbor below, a pleasantly nautical music, and a tour group has arrived at the little park, a guide fussily gathering them around him so he can begin his lecture on the history of the tower. I stand, slip the notebook and Bic into my back pocket, pick up the jacket from the bench and pull it on.

I start down the steep stone steps leading back toward the Galata Bridge and Sultanahmet. At one time a pontoon bridge to allow for tides, it now rests on permanent supports, and the frilled blue iron railings make for a series of—most appropriately—ornate arabesques; bell-clanking, red-and-white trolleys rattle on tracks right down the center of the bridge, the fishermen all along the railings who rent long poles adjust their their many silvery lines dangling. I suppose that with my stay here coming to a close, I am already projecting where I will be this time next week, in Paris. I will see the close friends I have there from my few times teaching on exchange at Paris universities, and I know there will be, as always, much good talk about books and authors with those friends.

By the Eminönü ferry docks, there’s a buildup of heavy traffic where two wide city streets merge at an angle. I soon concede that to attempt to cross certainly isn’t wise at this time of day, rush hour. Yellow taxis and grumbling, soot-spewing trucks clog the lanes, and to venture any farther into that as a pedestrian could be risky, even futile. So when I spot a nearby set of old iron stairs for an overhead walkway to the other side, I head that way and start climbing, somewhat worn out, understandably, at end of what has been a very long day for me.

The walkway arches high above the stalled traffic. I’m the only one crossing who stops and takes everything in from the lofty vantage point—and what a show there is to take in. Out on the calm, flat Sea of Marmara scattered freighters are anchored and waiting to enter the harbor, completely motionless, almost as if dozing. The sun is setting, and it ignites the big autumn sky there above the central dome and six slim minarets of Istanbul’s handsome Blue Mosque in Sultanahmet in shades that maybe can only be described by the sort of colors that are usually altogether too much to use in any writing, enough to invite valid charges of patent indulgence, especially when it comes to the matter of a sunset; nevertheless, in this case they do seem justified—melon and lavender and a rich, very brilliant vermilion, let’s say.

And it is then I realize that here in Istanbul, where I somehow am at the moment (am I here?), I as an older man have unexpectedly stumbled onto the very scene I often drew as a child (there might not be the desert and the shaggy palm tree, but the fact that perhaps I have at last found in reality the essential subject of the picture seems true, the sunset above a domed mosque in the East), and I remember that my mother and I were the only people in the world who would ever have the knowledge of my drawing the one picture over and over; but that is OK, because she is very much in my mind now, alive as ever, her gentle laughter, her unflagging hopes for us children in the family; she had been a school librarian before marriage to my father, a young attorney just starting out on his practice as well as a political career then in the Depression and a true believer in Roosevelt and his New Deal, she instilled in all of us children early on a love of books and reading, an excitement about words, and it is a gift for which I have always been deeply grateful, I tell myself again even now in Istanbul as I think of her (am I actually here, I mean, am I? are any of us actually here in this life or anywhere else? is there any chance of ever getting anywhere near the whole idea of our being alive yet given so little time on this sweet planet to savor the veritable and airily continuing wonder it ceaselessly serves up?). I look down at the thick, stop-and-go traffic below, knowing I was wise to have used the walkway, and descend the rusted iron stairs on the other side.

Walking, I think more about my mother, my father, too.

And I think of French friends in Paris. Claude, the retired Saul Bellow scholar married to the beautiful opera singer Lisa and an intellectual figure as dashing, and a little crazy, as any character right out of a Saul Bellow novel; and Vanessa, undeniably brilliant, a literature professor at prestigious École Normale Supérieure and already a full professor—a level in academia that’s rare and tough as all hell to achieve in France—while still only in her thirties, who a couple of years back lent me her Vélib’ bicycle-share card during the summer when I lived and wrote in Paris, taking long rides throughout the city on those bikes in such sultry July and August evenings; and the other Claude, younger, a Stephen Crane scholar and his gracious wife Laure, a concerned social worker, they’re raising two happy little kids in the ramshackle neighborhood where they’ve bought an apartment to fix up in the far reaches of the Eighteenth Arrondissement, atop a fast-food place for halal fried chicken, no less, boom boxes blaring French rap music in that always vibrant African quarter of Paris—because, yes, this time next week I will be in Paris again, and, as I assure myself now, how lucky I am to have good friends like that for such enjoyable literary conversation in another country.

I pass the red-brick Sirkeci train station—once the elegant terminus for the legendary Orient Express and lately more or less abandoned, undergoing an extensive rehab project after a recent fire—and eventually I am back in Sultanahmet, where the little yellow Hotel Peninsula sits on a short, lumpily cobbled dead-end street. I think that maybe I will buy a beer and a bag of those good seasoned peanuts at the small corner store there, to take to my room in the hotel and relax with while doing some reading before dinner, an Orhan Pamuk book. I didn’t have much luck with the pile of Pamuk’s novels I checked out of the library before the trip—intriguing themes and philosophical concepts but the narration slow-going and never making the ultimate metaphysical leaps their premises initially promise, the writing sometimes uneven and overall lacking much depth in characterization, particularly evident when it comes to women—but I have brought with me a copy of his book of reminiscences about growing up in Istanbul. (And I might not be alone in my response, I know. Nobel Prize winner Pamuk could have been the last thing both the young publisher and the translator Ilksen wanted to talk about when I met with them; each asked me almost as soon as we first shook hands to please not start discussing Pamuk’s work. They both said they were growing tired of the constant mention of the writer and foreigners’ fascination with him, and each frankly confirmed that there might even be an unofficial consensus among literati in Turkey that not only have there been other Turks in the past more suitable for this highest international literary award—most notably the socially committed and powerfully lyrical world-class poet Nâzim Hikmet, who, after political imprisonment in Turkey for sixteen years, died in exile in the old USSR in 1963—but also, for Ilksen and the publisher, Pamuk might be but a routinely able talent from a moneyed, economically privileged class, somebody with well-honed promotional skills and serving up somewhat predictable fare aimed specifically at the tastes of a Western audience of The New Yorker magazine middlebrow variety, Nobel Laureate or not. But such criticism aside, I did pack in my small suitcase a paperback copy of the book about growing up in Istanbul, Istanbul: Memories and the City, a meanderingly meditative document in the form of a series of brief, several-page personal essays interspersed with vintage photos, and I do, in fact, find the essays entirely engaging and a valuable introduction to Istanbul, really solid, admirable work). And walking along, I tell myself that I will read some more from the Pamuk memoir once back at the hotel.

Akbiyik Caddesi is a narrow pedestrian street and the main thoroughfare in ancient Sultanahmet. Entering it, I try to look straight ahead as I pass the many absurdly overpriced and not very good restaurants, where the smarmy sidewalk touts are already trying hard to lure into them the packs of dazed tourists—mostly German and British in this off-season—until I do see the lit Efes beer sign glowing blue and white in front of the little corner store.

The first time I went there to buy an end-of-the-day beer to sip while stretched out on the bed and doing some reading at the hotel before dinner, the friendly guy at the counter asked me with the scant English he had where in America I was from. Obviously recognizing me as an American right off, he was just curious, I knew, and fortunately on this trip there has been no need for me to explain, or attempt to vocally defend, my nationality, as has happened during other travel in Muslim countries. I automatically answered “Texas.” I don’t often say that, never having felt genuinely at home in over three decades of residence in the state, where I’ve ended up living that long only because of my job. Usually I respond to such a question with “Boston” or “Massachusetts,” aware that seldom if ever does anybody abroad even know where small Rhode Island is.

Stocky, mustached, wearing a sweater and jeans, the guy nodded. He put my tall can of Efes beer into a plastic sack and spoke the word aloud himself, grinning toothily wide beneath the mustache, as if he relished the sound of it: “Texas.” He paused, next made a pistol gesture with his hand, forefinger out for a barrel and thumb upright for the cocked hammer on a six-shooter. “Texas cowboy,” he then said, looking right at me, still nodding. In the couple of times I’ve been back since that day he remembers me, does the same thing, the pantomime of the quick-drawn pistol pointed at me along with the wide white grin and the slow pronouncement: “Texas cowboy.”

I wonder if he will do it again this evening when I enter.

IX.

Then I get a little scared to think that maybe the mustached guy wearing jeans and a bulky sweater in a cubbyhole corner market in faraway Istanbul never did do that, the odd pantomime, and maybe I have imagined or only dreamt he did it.

And, you know, here in Istanbul right now I decide that I like that idea, not being sure which it was, dream or reality, and it’s sort of what has happened to me an awful lot, repeatedly, in a long life of near incessant travel—which is to say journeying, as Lévi-Strauss would have it—where I constantly am beyond amazed by the dazzling and appreciated ongoing marvel of it all.

—The Literary Review, 2015