Not long ago, someone asked me in what age and place I would most like to have been born. I found this a surprisingly difficult question to answer, not because it was meaningless—its meaning is sufficiently clear—but because it was so complex.
First, to answer properly, I would require sufficient knowledge of various times and places which I simply do not have. It would be all very well for me to choose, say, Hiroshige’s Japan on the grounds that it was, in his depiction, so aesthetically refined and pleasing, but he failed to depict the famines and civil upheavals of his time.
What of Vermeer’s or Pieter de Hooch’s Delft, so beautiful, so civilized, so calm (at least until the explosion of 1654 that destroyed a large part of the city)? Would I be born there with any knowledge of my present comforts and amenities? If so, I would probably find life there—so rich, clean and tidy by comparison with other cities of the time—intolerable.
In choosing a place and time in which to be born, do I have to hide behind John Rawls’s veil of ignorance, according to which I do not know in what stratum of society I will be born? If I do not know whether I am to be an aristocrat or a peasant, I have to assume that I am more likely to be a peasant than an aristocrat, and I have never been one for back-breaking labor. A place that is beautiful may yet be a hell for those who live in it.
When I look back on my own life and times, which I know better than any others, I have little of which to complain. I have never gone hungry (except by choice), have never been oppressed or persecuted, have never been the object of serious injustice, and I have always been allowed to go my own way without let or hindrance. Insofar as I have had cause to be miserable, I myself was the cause. I don’t think I could really have asked for more. All in all, I would choose to have been born at the time and in the place I was born.
And yet, at the same time, I cannot say that I have led the best possible life or that I did not miss many opportunities that presented themselves to me. I willfully declined them: and I can’t help thinking of a line from Marguerite Duras’s book, L’Amant: Very early in my life, it was too late.
You don’t realize until maturity, at least if you are like me, that time is not on a spool that can be wound backwards at will. Every moment that is ill-spent is too late. Too-lateness is the common condition of mankind.
There is another sense in which I have always been too late, even much too late. Every time that I have stayed in a hotel famed for its literary associations, I have arrived years, often after many years or decades, after its apogee. This is so much a pattern that it might not be a coincidence.
For example, I stayed in the Olofsson in Port-au-Prince, now, alas, destroyed by arson in the gang violence that has enveloped the country, many years after Graham Greene made it famous in the 1960s. Haiti was relatively calm in the days of my stay there, though not exactly flourishing. On our way to Cap Haitien in the north, my wife and I stopped at a deserted beach café to which a shiny black Mercedes drew up. An elegantly dressed man got out and sat in the café. He asked us very politely who we were and what we were doing.
“We are tourists,” we replied.
“You are not tourists,” he replied. “You are heroes.”
He was the Minister of Tourism in the then-government.
Haiti is one of those countries that you leave, but that never quite leaves you.
I stayed in the Hotel Francia in Oaxaca more than half a century after D.H. Lawrence stayed there and wrote his irrationalist, almost proto-fascist, novel, The Plumed Serpent. I think the hotel had changed less between his time and mine than between my time and the present. It was then charmingly fly-blown and run-down when I stayed, in a fashion increasingly rare. There is rarely anything charming or romantic in modern decay or dilapidation.
It was the same at the Pera Palace in Istanbul, where Hemingway stayed and Agatha Christie wrote Murder on the Orient Express. In my day, it was reassuringly run-down and faded, yet to undergo the glossy refurbishment that economic success brings with it and that destroys the charm of genteel decay.
I was much too late even for the ghosts of Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham in the Peninsula in Singapore and the Oriental in Bangkok, which had become merely luxurious in the modern fashion, that is to say without any special atmosphere.
La Louisiane in the rue de Seine in Paris had also become ordinary, a simple two-star hotel delightfully free of television screens by the time I stayed there regularly, but Sartre and de Beauvoir had lived there decades earlier, in the days when it was still possible to live cheaply in small hotels. Two other Nobel prize-winners had stayed there also, Hemingway (again) and Albert Camus.
Will hotels ever again be known for their literary associations? I suspect not. Literature doesn’t have the prestige that it once did, and the bohemian life has become impossible for two reasons.
The first is a change in the price-structure of modern life. Such is the inflated value of real estate that someone like Jean Rhys, author of The Wide Sargasso Sea, among other novels, could not have lived on next to nothing in a variety of cheap hotels in central Paris, nor subsisted from meals in cheap cafés. This was a precarious life, but free with a type of freedom almost unknown today.
The second reason bohemianism is impossible nowadays is that, in a sense, everyone is bohemian: There is no longer any bourgeois propriety or inhibition to revolt against. And where everyone is bohemian, no one is.
I would love to have been a bohemian, but very early in my life it was too late.
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