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Chapter 18A
HAZARDS, PITFALLS AND DANGERS
Adjustment to Changes

Writing has it rewards, and as I mentioned, they are many. But writing also has its hazards, pitfalls and even dangers.

Writing is a lonely business, and it can be one of the hazards of writing. Sometimes I feel I might be losing my mind, or there are times I can’t escape from the character I am creating. When I sit down at my desk to write, I put myself into a shell. This is especially true if I am writing a book. I must isolate myself from my surroundings and create new imaginary ones. I must make this new world very real. I need to give life to those characters I mold; I must live their lives. It’s rather like method acting, that technique in which actors recreate real life’s emotional conditions. Writing becomes an attempt to create life-like, realistic situations. Some actors becomes so involved in their profession they can’t turn off, even when they are off stage or away from the camera. Writers are often the same. I find myself a writer twenty-four hours a day, even when I am sleeping. I wake in the middle of the night with new plots racing around in my head. Sometimes I have to get up and write them down. If I don’t, the next morning I am angry with myself. I can’t remember what they were. How could I let them go? They were brilliant.

When I am riding in a car, walking down the street, sitting in a barber chair, my mind is not my own. I am writing. I find I have to describe the world around me in words, the expression on that woman’s face sitting across from me on the bus. The conversation I hear, I try to find words to express the accent, the tone of voice. Then there are the sounds. A train rumbling over tracks. A woman with shoes with wooden heels walking on a hard surface floor. My mind is never my own. As I am always writing, I am always in a daze. How do I capture it all? It becomes a challenge. My mind is constantly at work-sketching, painting, drawing-all day long, all night long, even in my sleep. That is what writing is about. In Writers Lifeline, Ken Atchity, on the same subject, made the comment, “The ideas for stories that wrack my brain will not let me rest until I write them down and then and only then I am free-until another idea blossoms. The process begins again.”

Writing is a form of existentialism, that mental exercise which gives me the complete freedom to decide, but to which I am laden, like a weight, with the complete responsibility for the outcome of my decisions. The price paid, as I said, is aloneness. A writer is alone with his thoughts. It can be no other way. We hear the joke about the absent-minded professor. It’s not that way at all. The professor is deep in thought.

I like what Joyce Carol Oates had to say about this. She was incredibly prodigious with an output that never ceases to amaze me. She had the talent for creating characters that fit every walk of life. She said, “If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.”

Writers live in their own world which becomes difficult and sometimes impossible to share with others. That is one of the dangers of being a writer. We are fortunate only when our partner, wife or husband, understands this. If not, then we live alone in a world that Albert Camus, the French existentialist writer wrote about and which won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. According to Camus, the price a writer has to pay is aloneness.

When it comes to pitfall, travel writing creates them, and often they are unavoidable. To get published we must adhere to the rules, and that means writing what editors want. The idea of good travel writing, of course, is to promote travel. Fine. But what happens when I am visiting a place I don’t like? My solution is to write about only those places that I like and favor, and then I don’t have to fabricate and write lies. Critics often accuse me of only writing nice things about a destination, and it is true. What they don’t know is that I don’t write about those places I dislike.

One pitfall that is most difficult to avoid, if not impossible in our modem day, is that we have come to a total reliance on computers. What a pity. We can’t be without our computer. We are like Charlie Brown’s friend and Lucy’s brother, Linus, who can’t be without his blanket. Our computer fails and we fail. Typewriters didn’t crash. They didn’t need electricity to operate. They didn’t need updating. They weren’t linked to ready mail they call e-mail that you have to read every morning and spend the next hour or two answering. It was so rewarding when traveling abroad to go to a Poste Restante and find a letter waiting. These days you can stand at the summit of Mt. Everest, or someone can, and with a cell phone send an e-mail home to mom. How un-adventuresome. Wasn’t it far more exciting when we had to wait two days to find if the climbers reached the summit? How much thrill can that be standing on top of the world and having your mother telling you to be careful and make sure you bundle up. “Hi, mom, yes I’ll be careful. Yes, I’ll keep warm.”

What seems so odd is that computers and word processing may have simplified the writing process but they have not improved the output of writing. What the word processor means is that we just waste more time on nonsense things. We spend more time at the computer doing things other than actual writing. Fyodor Dostoevsky didn’t have a computer when he wrote the thousand-page plus Crime and Punishment. He had a pen that he dipped in ink. I had my Hermes, my typewriter that I lugged around the world with me, and I thought I was very sophisticated. It served me well.

We call our lifestyles today progress, a push-button, throwaway society. We may lament the past but there’s no going back. Only a fool would take up a quill and inkwell and sit down to compose a novel. We may like the old days but there are no time machines to take us there. We have advanced to an age where we are compelled to remain, and to survive we must adapt. This is the electronic age. Writer Robin Dannhrn fought progress for a long time. He felt that to write well, to get the feeling for writing, he had to use a pen. Not a ballpoint pen but a genuine ink pen. “I like to feel a pen in my fingers. I feel closer to my work,” he used to say. He wrote in long hand and then had a typist type out his copy. Maybe one or two changes were needed. When typists became harder to come by, he was forced to get a typewriter and to learn to type. Then he graduated to an electric typewriter. He was reluctant to tell me he was using an electric typewriter. And finally, after all these years, Robin bought a computer. He had to. Editors no longer want hard copy. He grumbles and moans and he gets frustrated when paragraphs disappear and all sorts of things happen. He was forced to join the modem age but he still laments the passing of pen and ink.

One writer that refused to give up the typewriter was Bernard Trink at the Bangkok Post. He had an old beat-up typewriter the size of a boxcar and every week he pounded out his Night Owl column, sitting there at his cluttered desk, with photos of half-naked Thai bar girls pasted on the walls. He had such a wide reading audience that the management had to put up with his idiosyncrasies. They feared if they did let him go they’d lose readers. Eventually, however, the management let Trink go, to the disappointment of his readers.

I find it interesting to scrutinize some of the old hand-written manuscripts by the old masters. The margins are filled with scribbling and notes that are hardly legible. I remember, when I worked in the office of Jefferson Caffery, the American Ambassador in Paris, seeing a typewritten letter on the ambassador’s desk from a writer. It was a personal message, and I can’t remember the subject matter, but I do remember all the cross outs and corrections. It looked like a chicken with muddy feet had walked across the letter. The letter was written and signed Ernest Hemingway.

I often think about Margaret Mitchell. She didn’t have a computer. Can we say her pitfall was that she wrote by hand? Hardly. And yet she had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937 for her immensely successful novel, Gone with the Wind, published the year before. The novel is one of the most popular books of all time, selling more copies, than any other hard-cover book, apart from the Bible, and is reputed to be still selling at 200,000 copies a year, An American film adaptation, released in 1939, became the highest-grossing film in the history of Hollywood, and received a record-breaking number of awards. Gone With the Wind was Mitchell’s only published novel. She was struck and killed by a speeding automobile in 1949. She was forty-eight years old. At her request, upon her death, the original manuscript (except for a few pages retained to validate her authorship) and all other writings were destroyed. Of course, we have to conclude, had she written on a computer her destroyed works could be recovered. These works included a novella in the Gothic style, a ghost story set in an old plantation home left vacant after the Civil War. According to the recollections of Lois Cole, a friend of Mitchell’s and a Macmillan employee, three people had read this tale (written before Gone With the Wind) and thought it was worth publishing by one of the bigger publishing houses. Cole suggested that Mitchell enter it in the Little, Brown novelette contest.

One pitfall that many writers fall into is to accept offers to join writer’s clubs and writers’ groups that offer quick ways to fame and fortune. I learned my lesson in the beginning when I joined one writers’ club, and for $49.95 a month, I communicated with others who were in the same boat as me. How marvelous to know I wasn’t alone. How inspiring. I corresponded with dozens of beginning writers like myself. We exchanged notes and ideas. We criticized each other’s work. We confessed our faults. We fed on each other’s weaknesses. Then one day it came to me, of the two or three thousand members, not one of them was a published writer. They were all wannabe writers. They were all dreamers wanting for someone else to whip them into shape. Did I need to spend $49.95 a month to tell me this? After the first month or two in the club I got to thinking, why do I want to communicate with writers like me who are struggling? When I checked the list of subscribers there wasn’t one named writer on the index. What sheer folly these clubs promise the inexperienced beginning writer. They provide, they say, a base for networking, invaluable writing resources update on the writing industry, writers’ local and overseas markets, worldwide jobs, freelance opportunities, and much more! Words, words, words. I must say, their word are impressive. The members, however, may not have been professional but the people who run these organization certainly are when it comes to giving advice for a price. One provider I noticed offered services to writers such as seminars and discussion groups. For the small sum of $500 I could join a writer’s seminar for a three-day weekend. Not a writer’s course but for a weekend. A hotel around the corner from the workshop offers a discount at $99 per night, single occupancy.

I did more homework. In one widely read and well-recommended writers’ guidebook there was a list of highly recommended proofreaders. I questioned a professional proofreader about this, a young lady who worked for a large publication firm in Los Angeles. I asked her why she didn’t list her name with the mentioned writers’ guidebook and earn a few extra dollars for herself. She said it was too costly. She explained she’d have to pay an exorbitant sum of money to have her name listed in the publication. Did I hear right? She would have to pay to be put on a recommended list! Does that mean the recommendations in the writers’ guide are there because they paid a bundle of money and not necessarily because they are good at the trade? We can call that a scam.

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Chapter 17
WRITERS’ REWARDS

Most people worry about losing their jobs. The higher up the cooperate ladder they climb, the worse it becomes. The farther they can fall. You hear people say: “What if I lose my job?” “What can I do if I am laid off?” “I’m too old to start another profession.” It’s a concern, and one that most people must face. What if they lose their jobs?

That is one of the rewards of writing. Writers don’t lose their jobs. They just change editors.

One of the toughest decisions I had to make in my life was to give up my government job in Washington to become a full-time writer. I knew once I made that decision there would be no turning back. I had to be honest with myself, and above all, sincere. I could not compromise the truth. No matter what else I had to do, I had to adhere to these principles for, without, I would be just a hack. I had to turn away and completely make a break. And I had to go as far away as possible, and to use the cliché, I had to “bum all my bridges behind me.” I decided on the South Pacific, and to get there, I took a bus from Washington to Mexico City, hitchhiked my way down through Central America and caught a freighter in Panama to the Pacific. When I climbed aboard that bus in Washington, one world ended and another began. I called it my rebirth. No longer could I make excuses. No longer could I blame others. It was totally up to me now. I had made up my mind. I would not burden myself with regrets. The die was cast. I was going to be a writer.

After I made up my mind what direction I would go, I discovered that freedom from the nine-to-five, with no boss telling me what do, didn’t mean freedom from work. I would have to work harder than ever. And now, instead of one boss telling me what to do, I had as many as the publications I wrote for. The saving grace, however, was that not all of them would fire me, as long as I produced. I made sure I didn’t put all my eggs in one basket, so to speak. A writer need not ever be out of work. The world always needs writers.

Doors open to writers that wouldn’t normally open to the average person, the businessman or vagabond, the scholar or the bystander. The reason becomes quite obvious in a very short time. People, or most people, love to see their names in print, and they are aware writers can do this for them. On the other hand, there are those who perhaps fear the writer, for they might have something they don’t want known, and it’s these people who treat writers kindly, false as it may often be.

Indeed, one of the big rewards of writing is meeting people, people you wouldn’t normally meet. That could be bank presidents, Hollywood stars or even a hit man. True, I even interviewed a hit man.

I found it fascinating to be a writer for the Bangkok Post. I received my assignments from editors to interview new faces in town, everyone from Hollywood actors to entertainer and from noted authors to bureaucrats. It was most interesting for I knew if I met these same people on the street and said hello they would probably look the other way. But when I appeared in a hotel lounge with notebook and pencil in hand they mellowed. Some of these celebrities I found interesting; others not. Some completely threw me off guard, like novelist Han Suyin, author of Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing. At lunch at the Lord Jim at the Oriental Hotel, instead of me interviewing her, she interviewed me. She was fascinated with my living in Bangkok and had question after question to ask. When lunch was over and we parted, I thought, “What an interesting person she is.” It then came to me that I hardly knew anything more about her than I did before.

Writers’ rewards can be many if we want to take advantage of them. As I mentioned, authors get invited to parties and social functions not because they might have a storming personality or that they are interesting conversationalists. They get invited because they are authors. That’s it. Party givers like to have an artist or a writer hanging around. Artists and writers add color to a gathering. They don’t even have to say anything, which makes them even more interesting. Normally I don’t like parties but I have to remind myself that parties and social gatherings are what provide me with material to write about. Thomas Wolfe wrote some of his best prose from material he gathered at parties, parties that he disliked.

Then there is the supposition that writers ‘have power, another reward. But power in this case must be used wisely. When a writer has readers he then has influence. And influence can become power, positive or negative, depending upon how we use it.

We have all heard the saying that the pen is mightier than the sword. A writer can make or break a person. Take Bob Woodward as an example. Remember him? He was an investigative reporter for The Washington Post. While delving into a story, along with co-journalist Carl Bernstein, he helped uncover the Watergate scandal that led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation. President Nixon was out and Bob Woodward was in. Now with his name behind him, Woodward wrote twelve best-selling non-fiction books and has twice contributed reporting to efforts that collectively earned the Post and its National Reporting staff a Pulitzer Prize. Bob Woodward realized the power of the pen and he used it to his advantage.

Writers may not be aware of their power and influence. They can be that part that becomes greater than the whole. I don’t think Karl Marx fully realized the impact his writing would have on the world. He wrote and published (with Friedrich Engels) Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (1848), commonly known as The Communist Manifesto, the most celebrated pamphlet in the history of the socialist movement. He also was also the author of the movement’s most important book, Das Kapital. These writings and others by Marx and Engels form the basis of the body of thought and belief known as Marxism. Indeed, Marx and Engels used writing to air their grievances, proof that the pen can be as sharp as a knife and just as destructive.

Writers can create images and, if they are powerful enough, readers will believe them. I remember the marvelous promotion the Beatles had. I was teaching school in Washington when newspapers began running ads for what was to turn out to be the world’s most popular singers. The ad was so simple at first-four wigs and the words THE BEATLES. Those same wigs appeared time and time again, and I couldn’t help wondering what they represented. Before long, we were all booked. Who were the BEATLES? You didn’t have to ask.

In 1960, Dr. Benjamin Spock wrote a book called Child Care and changed the next generation of parenthood. It was translated into 42 languages and sold almost 50 million copies. His philosophy, as stated in Child Care, was that parents should not spank or discipline their children when they misbehave because their little personalities would be warped and we might damage their self-esteem. Children should be free to express themselves. (Dr. Spock’s son committed suicide). His writing is alleged to have created a generation of misfits and delinquents. We can ask ourselves why our children have no conscience, why they don’t know right from wrong, and why it doesn’t bother them to kill strangers, their classmates, and themselves. That is what the power of the pen can do.

Call it a reward, or perhaps the antithesis of a reward, an anathema perhaps, but a writer can shape the world. They can do this not only by their printed word but also from adaptations of their work, and this we call cinema.

Without the writer where would the cinema be? Actors get the credit, directors get the awards, the cameramen and the costume designers are lauded, but it’s the writer that is often the last on the list to be mentioned, if not forgotten all together. The scriptwriter is the one who will get the credit. And who, after all, is a scriptwriter but someone who feeds on writers.

Nevertheless, writers want to see their work made into movies. It’s their ultimate recognition, and it’s every writer’s dream, whether they want to admit it or not. For certain it’s these movies that have a profound influence on the public. Directors and producers look for good material and they turn to novels and short stories for that need. Somerset Maugham was one of the first writers to set the pattern. In 1928, his short story “Sadie Thompson” was adapted to the silent movie screen and starred Gloria Swanson and Lionel Barrymore. It was retitled as Rain. The following year, Hollywood took his short story “The Letter” and with stars like Jeanne Bagels and Herbert Marshall, it became a hit. Maugham couldn’t fail after that, especially after 1932 when Rain became the first sound movie to be made and starred Joan Crawford and Walter Huston. Others of his to follow were Of Human Bondage in 1934, The Painted Veil in 1934, The Vessel of Wrath in 1938, The Moon and Sixpence in 1942 and The Razors Edge in 1946.

The remake of Maugham’s movies continues to this day. The Letter appeared three times more, Of Human Bondage and The Razors Edge twice and only recently in 2006 The Painted Veil hit the big screen again. In the British movie industry, J. Arthur Rank applied an unusual technique to movie making by taking several of Maugham’s short stories and collectively turning them into movies. These were Quartet in 1948, Trio in 1950 and Enore in 1952. Maugham appeared as himself in the introductions.

Oftentimes, sadly, the public is not aware of who the authors are in movie hits. Being Julia, released in 2004 and starring Annette Bening was based on Maugham’s novel Theatre. And as I mentioned, there was The Painted Veil in 2006 that starred two top performers, Naomi Watts and Edward Norton. Maugham was hardly mentioned.

Ernest Hemingway died more than forty years ago and Hollywood continues to make movies from his books and short stories. It began in 1932 with adapting A Farewell to Arms to the silver screen. The movie starred Gary Cooper, Hemingway’s good friend. Cooper did Hemingway the honors again when For Whom the Bell Tolls was filmed with Cooper taking the lead role. His leading lady was Ingrid Bergman. The Old Man and the Sea was filmed three times: in 1958 with Spencer Tracy; in 1990 with Anthony Quinn; and in 1999 there was an animated version with the voices of Gordon Pinsent and Kevin Delaye. There were many others that became movies taken from Hemingway’s novels-To Have and Have Not, The Sun Also Rises and Islands in the Stream, and from his short stories-“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Killers.” Hollywood wasn’t short of big names to play Hemingway’s characters–Humphrey Bogart, Burt Lancaster, Gregory Peck, Rock Hudson, Tyrone Power, Lee Marvin and George C. Scott.

And no writer was more loved in Hollywood than James Michener. Michener’s book Hawaii was so big they had to break it down and take chapters for the film by the same name. The first film Hawaii was in 1966 and starred Max von Sydow and Julie Andrews. The movie focused only on the book’s third chapter, “From the Farm of Bitterness,” which covered the settlement of the island kingdom by the first American missionaries. A 1970 sequel, The Hawaiians, starring the late Charlton Heston, covered subsequent chapters, including the arrival of the Chinese and Japanese and the growth of the plantations.

The Bridges at Toko-Ri, a novel about a Korean War pilot assigned to bomb a group of heavily defended bridges, was made into a motion picture in 1953 by Paramount Pictures. It won the Special Effects Oscar at the 28th Academy Awards.

Centennial was made into a popular twelve-part television miniseries of the same name that aired on NBC from October 1978 through February 1979.

Sayonara is a 1957 film which tells the story of an American Air Force flier who was a fighter “Ace” during the Korean War. Directed by Joshua Logan it starred Marlon Brando. Michener handled very well the problems of racism and prejudice. Brando certainly got carried away with his role. He went back to America and took up the fight for the plight of the American Indians.

And certainly one of the most successful Broadway plays turned into a top run movie was the musical South Pacific with music by Rodgers and Hammerstein. The Broadway play and the movie came from Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific.

Now the million dollar question, how do books become movies? I recall some of those how-to-do books I read when I dreamed of becoming a writer. They told hungry authors how for $29.95 they could sell to the movies. The writers of these books applied every trick in the trade to dupe young writers into buying their books.

There is no clear-cut answer to this question. Imagine the countless books a movie producer receives each year. He hardly has the time, nor takes the time, to read but a few, if any at all. But film scripts do reach them. That’s obvious for there wouldn’t be movies if there hadn’t been scripts. Nevertheless, it takes a special skill to write a script, and even then it’s a gamble that it will ever be bought up. Writers have to ask themselves, do they want to spend months preparing a film script with the likelihood it may never be read?

Writers like to see their works become movies, if not for money for recognition. But it’s a sad tale when writers count on it. The late Mario Puzo had his opinion, both humorous and honest, on the subject of selling to the movies. Puzo certainly was a writer with movie experience, an author who wrote a number of bestselling novels, including The Godfather, Fools Die, and The Last Don. He warned aspiring scriptwriters that the only way to get a fair deal in Hollywood is to go into the studio with a mask and gun. Sounds harsh but it’s true. You need a gun to get them to listen. But don’t ever try it.

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Chapter 16
MAKING THE GRADE

Nothing is more disturbing than hearing someone who wants to be a writer say they don’t know what to write about. In other words, they want to write but don’t have anything to say. Something doesn’t sound right. I have the urge to write and that means I want to express myself. To express myself is to be heard. But how? By what means?

In the last chapter, I talked about motive, but I made no mention of “mode”. Mode is the manner in which an artist expresses himself, be that of a poet, novelist, composer, lyricist, playwright, mythographer, journalist, technical writer, film scriptwriter, historian and, yes, travel writer. It all comes down to the use of words. An artist uses paints; a writer, words. Writers are wordsmiths. Without writers, we wouldn’t have civilizations. “Civilizations began with writing, and there was no civilization without writing,” Dr. Quigley at Georgetown University taught in his Development of Civilization class. Indeed, a writer’s output contributes to the cultural content of a society, meaning writers not only record happenings, but they also shape society. Anyone who does not agree can read Karl Marx or Martin Luther.

There is a cure for those who want to write but are in doubt as what to write about. The solution is to read the good writers. Read, read, read. Learn from writers, good writers, and ideas will come. Find a mentor. Such a person can make a big difference to the outcome of one’s life. When successful people tell their story, they always mention how important one or more individuals were in helping to fashion their success. Bill Clinton said meeting then President John Kennedy when he was just sixteen-years old led him to decide to pursue a life in politics. Would Tiger Woods be the legend he is today without the influence of his father, Earl Woods, who is credited with preparing Tiger to become a professional golfer? The influence of one person can make a gigantic difference in one’s future.

We have to admire writers like Henry David Thoreau. He never had the problem of what to write about. He could write paragraphs on tying shoelaces and make it interesting. His journal over a two-year period when he lived on Walden Pond is a masterpiece. He is thought of by many to have been a recluse, a loner. The truth is he did live alone on Walden Pond but it wasn’t in isolation. He went to Concord, the nearest town, almost every day, so his writing is not a book about living alone. It’s more about reflections on life. It’s about considering why one “is” what one is, and in doing so recognizes the beauty and mystery of nature in the world around us. It’s about being aware-not later or tomorrow but now, this minute. Thoreau writes at length about daily things in life, like what it costs him to farm, or having a glass of cider, or building a chimney. The writing style is conversational pen, and honest. He doesn’t try to get tricky with words; he just tells it like he sees it. It’s beautiful. For anyone who feels the importance of nature, or as he put it, “sees the Great Spirit in every leaf, tree and bug” then his writing will be cherished. He had a message for all writers: “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.”

Earlier I mentioned the young man I knew who wanted to be a writer and we often exchanged ideas about writing and writers. When I sold my first story on a mundane subject like technical writing, he criticized me and turned a cold shoulder. How could I prostitute my writing?

Yes, I wanted to write literature. I wanted to write great books. But how is literature written? Great books? They have to start from a humble beginning, as a child has to learn his ABCs before he can read or write. I wanted to write, anything, just to get started. I felt like a painter who likes to paint and experiment with many styles and techniques. I found writing this way. I didn’t intend to be a travel writer. It just happened. When I began traveling and visiting places seldom visited, people wanted to hear about where I had been. That by no admission excluded me from writing fiction (some reviewers say my travel writing is fiction anyway). To this day, I try my hand at everything. I do find news reporting the most difficult. To sit at a desk in a newspaper room and have deadlines tossed in front of me is the most difficult.

When successful writers like to talk about their writing, they do it in essays, biographies and nonfiction books. Norman Mailer wrote a best-selling novel in his early years, The Naked and the Dead, based on his personal experiences during World War II. It was hailed as one of the best American novels to come out of the war years and named one of the “100 best novels in English language” by the Modern Library.

In the following years, Mailer continued to work in the field of the novel. Barbary Shore (1951) was a surreal parable of Cold War leftist politics, set in a Brooklyn rooming house. His 1955 novel The Deer Park drew on his experiences working as a screenwriter in Hollywood in the early 1950s. It’s interesting to note, despite his credits, six publishers initially rejected The Deer Park. Mailer admitted that writing a best seller at a young age has its drawbacks. He was never able to achieve the same success yet his publishers demanded it from him. I too waited for his next epic novel but it never came. Instead he began to deviate from the novel and started defending “causes.”

In the mid-1950s, he became increasingly known for his counter-cultural essays. He was one of the founders of The Village Voice in 1955. In the book Advertisements for Myself (l959), including the essay “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster” (1957), Mailer examined violence, hysteria, sex, crime and confusion in American society, in both fictional and reportage forms. He has also been a frequent contributor of book reviews and long essays to The New York Review of Books since its founding issue in 1963.

Mailer wrote many works, some good and others not so good. In addition to his experimental fiction and nonfiction novels, Mailer had produced a play version of The Deer Park, and in the late 1960s directed a number of improvisational avant-garde films in a Warhol style, including Maidstone (1970), which includes a brutal brawl between Norman T. Kingsley, played by himself, and Rip Torn that may or may not have been planned. In 1987, he directed a film version of his novel Tough Guys Don’t Dance, starring Ryan O’Neal, which has become a minor classic. Thus, you might say Norman Mailer was a prolific writer, but he was never able to turn out “The Great American Novel” that he wanted so badly to do.

Somerset Maugham was primarily known as a novelist, but he was also a travel writer. His The Gentleman In The Parlour deals with a journey through Burma, Siam, Cambodia and Vietnam, and On A Chinese Screen is a series of very brief vignettes, which became notes for short stories that were never written. He published his own journals under the title A Writers Notebook, which only Maugham scholars and admirers find of interest.

J. D. Salinger is noted for his novel Catcher in the Rye (1951). It was his only novel; all the rest were collections of short stories written mostly for magazines and later published in book form. For example, “Franny and Zooey” is a 1961 pair of stories, published together under one cover. Both stories take place in November 1955. The stories originally appeared in The New Yorker magazine and were published in book form in September 1961.

One writer we can really learn from is Ayn Rand. Aside from her novels she wrote The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature, a non-fiction work, a collection of essays regarding the nature of writing. What she tells readers is that writers cannot produce a given work without infusing their own value judgments and personal philosophy. She claims that readers cannot come away without some sense of a philosophical message, colored by his or her own personal values. Authors may not even be aware of it.

Rand taught that language is a tool you had to learn. When you are writing, you should not be conscious of the words you are writing. She states you must rely upon stored knowledge, that which you have shaped in your mind before you sat down to write. What this means is you have to rely on your subconscious and then, and only then, you will find words for your thoughts. This is why I said earlier that one should not worry one’s self about grammar and spelling when composing. Concentrate on the idea and the words will flow freely. Rand said not to attempt to edit every sentence as you write. Write as it comes to you. Then, later, read it over and do your editing at that time.

Rand hits home when she tells us that good writing has to be objective. She wrote: “The non-objective writer has nothing to say. It’s our thoughts we want to communicate.” I follow Rand’s philosophy. I want to communicate with others, the fundamental purpose of my writing, thus I rely on an objective approach. When someone tells me they want to be non-objective, what they are saying is they don’t want to communicate.

When I have a story in mind that I want to write, I work it out it in abstract. I figure out the plot and then proceed to fill in the banks with facts. When I wrote my nonfiction novel For the Love of Siam, I did just that. I had an abstract thought in mind. The shipwrecked seaman in the time of King Narai who caught my attention was not, after careful research, guilty of treason as accused. A number of books have been written on the subject, all, or almost all, accused him of wrongdoing. But when I read more about him, I began to think differently. Research on the old Siamese capital of Ayutthaya was most difficult as the Burmese had sacked the city and razed it to the ground. Not a record was left. Nothing. But not all was lost. Foreign travelers and visitors left records-French, Dutch and Japanese. Many documents painted an entirely different picture of the Greek sailor. I felt I had to write what I considered to be the truth, from the abstract to known facts. It was fact that Ayutthaya was the greatest city in the world at that time but I had to begin with an abstract. The style I chose to write this story is in a nonfiction novel.

I follow the masters. I imitate them, but I do not copy them.

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Chapter 15
NEEDED, A MOTIVE?

What is my motive for wanting to write? I am often asked this question. Is it an axe I have to grind or the course of history I want to change? It’s none of these. I just like to write and portray the world as I see it, as an artist likes to paint to express life as he sees it. I wouldn’t be writing if I didn’t want to do this. That is my motivation.

But then, what is motive anyway? It’s a very much misused word. Teachers tell kids in school they lack motivation. The motivation teachers talk about refers to psychiatry and educational psychology and that has nothing to do with the motive for wanting to write.

I learned a long time ago not to concern myself with motive. I write because I have a story to tell, something to say. That, for me, is all that is important. Some things you can’t explain. And why should I? I don’t like to get preoccupied with concepts. They say all good writers have a motive. I question that, not the meaning of the word but the substance. I remember reading a critic’s comments about Ernest Hemingway. The critic was a university professor who was labeled as a Hemingway expert. He had spent a lifetime reading and studying Hemingway. He went into great lengths about Hemingway’s motives, his philosophy, his psychic make up. What was Ernest Hemingway’s motive? What did the author want to achieve with his writing? We don’t need a psychologist to answer that question. Hemingway was a man who loved life to its fullest, and he wrote about life as he knew it. That was his motive: to write a good story. Nothing hidden about that, nothing complex. If there was some esoteric meaning, some psychological reasons for writing what he did, it came not by design. I guess you can say we all have psychological reasons for doing what we do. Hemingway told a good story, and that was it. Leave it to the academicians to work it out. He was too busy writing to think about a motive.

I could say the same thing about Shakespeare. Old Will would tum over in his grave were he to learn that there are so many Shakespeare scholars out there analyzing him.

Some people find writing a stepping-stone to other things. They want to be heard. Politicians fall into that category. Some do it for fame, to become better known. Others might do it purely for money. An ex-president of the United States wants to make a few extra million dollars, so he writes a tell-all autobiography.

For others till, writing is a glamorous profession. And they are right. We are invited to talk shows and book signings. We are asked to appear as guests at public performances. We find we are invited to parties not because we have bubbling personalities but because the party hostess finds that writers and artists are added attractions to the parties. It doesn’t really matter what we write about. If we make the writers’ list, we find ourselves before an audience being asked our opinion of the war in the Middle East, gays in the military, abortion rights, and aliens in space. We are writers and we know all these things.

How many people have told me they wanted to be a writer, and when they learned what is involved, they gave up the idea? As I mentioned, one might not realize it, but the time spent learning to write might be equal to getting a law degree or to becoming a medical doctor. The untold truth is that the education of a writer, especially a travel writer, never ends.

It’s continuous. History becomes my bed partner. Facts are my quests. I read history text as one might read a novel. I study facts and events and learn statistics. I have to keep files and newspaper clippings. The greatest asset a travel writer can have is a file filled with news clippings. I have been clipping interesting bits of news from newspapers ever since I can remember. I file them away in categories. One day they may prove to be useful. “Where do you get all that information?” editors always ask me.

Keeping notes is vital. One cannot remember small details. I may have a mental picture, say of a train trip I made, but can I remember what the train sounded like as it rumbled over the tracks, or how fellow passenger were dressed. I had to write it down to help recall it. I can never forget my first impressions of Paris, the over-all picture, but what about small details? Sure, I remember the sounds, but would I have remembered the cracks in the pavement where I walked had I not made notes? Would I have remembered the detailed writing I saw on those colorful posters plastered on the pillars along the Revoli had I not jotted them down when I returned home that evening?

I never let motive enter my thoughts. Motive must come naturally. Ken Atchity, a past professor of literature and creative writing at UCLA for seventeen years, who turned literary agent in 1989, summed it up when he wrote: “Writers write to learn more about what they’re writing about. When they want to understand a subject, they write a book about it.” Is it not so, we learn from writing?

Stephen Crane was a writer who had a motive. He wanted to write about the horrors of the American Civil War. He is remembered for his single most important book, The Red Badge of Courage, published 1895. It’s an impressionistic novel about the meaning of courage, the portrait of a young soldier in the American Civil War. It is one of the most influential war stories ever written, and what makes it so remarkable is that Crane was born after the war and had never seen battle himself. He got his material by talking to veterans of the war. Stephen Crane wrote other books, not so well known: Prose & Poetry; Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and short stories like “The Black Riders & War Is Kind.” And with his track record of the Red Badge, it’s quite likely he would have written more great books but he died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-eight in Badenweiler, Germany on June 5, 1900. He had moved to England two years before and had befriended writers Joseph Conrad and Henry James. He could not have picked better literary company.

The Red Badge of Courage was made into a movie by John Huston in 1951 and starred Medal of Honor winner Audie Murphy. Again the book was turned into a made-for-television version starring Richard Thomas. It appeared in 1974.

I don’t confuse motive with theme. In novels and short stories the theme is the idea behind the story, or the message or lesson the author wants to convey in his work. Themes are generally explicit and seldom implied. Critics tell readers, as teachers do students, that all stories inherently embody some kind of outlook on life which can be taken as a theme whether or not the author is even aware of it. Does it matter? My point is, if one has a story to tell, then tell it. I forget about defining motives or determining the theme. I let the critics and teachers do that.

Whatever I do, I try not to be cute with my writing, and I don’t become confused with “constrained writing,” that literary technique in which the writer is bound by some condition that forbids certain things or imposes a pattern. Constraints might be important in poetry, which often requires the writer to use a particular verse form, but not in prose. Is constrained writing, or style if you wish, more important than thoughts or ideas? Hardly. Constrained writing is motivated more for its aesthetic concerns than anything else. It is no more than a word game. For example in lipograms, a letter, commonly e or o, is ruled out. In alliterative writing, every word must start with the same letter, and in acrostics the first letter of each word or line forms a word or sentence. Then there’s the limitation in punctuation which may imply that no commas are to be used, or there is e.e. cummings who wrote his name and much of his poetry in lower case and without periods. Imagine the toil the author of Gadsby went through to write this English-language novel consisting of 50,100 words, none of which contains the letter “e.” How would you like to read a novel written without a single verb? In 2004 Michael Thaler did that in his novel The Train from Nowhere.

And finally, you might want to be another Theodor Geisel, also known as Dr. Seuss. He wrote the well-known children’s book Green Eggs and Ham using only fifty different words. He did it resulting from a fifty dollar bet with Bennett Cerf, publisher and co-founder of Random House.

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Chapter 14B
TRAVELING WITH TRAVEL WRITERS
Lots of Reading

Reading and studying must be a continuous effort to do good writing. Writer must know their history and pass it on accurately to the reader. That doesn’t mean to be heavy handed. If we start reading an article telling in cold facts about the history of a place, the chances are we will not read beyond the first paragraph. To avoid this, I make a list of all the historical facts I find interesting, facts that I feel that others might find interesting too. Then I interweave this information into my text. Thus I can educate readers without them realizing they are getting a history lesson.

Sometimes, of course, I have to do my research after I return home. I may have heard a rumor or gathered an odd piece of information that warrants an investigation. When I follow up, I can be shocked at what I find. For instance, I was on a Greyhound bus traveling from Seattle to San Francisco. I had the seat behind the driver. Knowing I was a writer, he occasionally passed bits of information on to me. We were leaving Oregon nearing the California border when he said, “Japanese aircraft bombed this place during World War II.”

I didn’t want to argue with him but the Japanese had never bombed the U.S. mainland. They had launched a series of ill-directed high-altitude balloon bombs destined for the North American continent, and all but one fell harmlessly. A Japanese submarine had shelled Fort Stevens in Oregon, and another sub fired twenty-five rounds at a California coastal oil refinery, but the mainland had never been bombed by air.

There was something else, however, the bus diver said that aroused my curiosity. He mentioned that the local newspaper in Brookings ran a story about the incident. Was there some truth to the bombing? The seed was planted in my mind.

Two years passed, and this time I was motoring up the coast. When I reached Brookings I remembered the bus driver’s tale and went to the newspaper. “That’s right,” the editor said, “one of those war secrets; would probably still be hush-hush had not the Japanese pilot been through here last Memorial Day on a peace mission.” I could hardly believe it. The newspaper carried a photograph of an elderly Japanese gentleman. The caption read that Nobuo Fujita, seventy-eight, was appearing in Brookings “nearly forty-eight years after he flew the only successful bombing mission against the U.S. mainland.” I had to read it once more to make sure I was reading right.

I was really hooked now. I had to meet the pilot. I was flying back from San Francisco to Bangkok with a stopover in Tokyo. The newspaper editor gave me the Japanese pilot’s address. In Tokyo I boarded a train and made a two-hour train trip to his village. I spent two afternoons with this incredible man. He revealed to me his remarkable story. He did indeed bomb the U.S. coast from a small Zero-type reconnaissance seaplane launched from a submarine. The plane was kept in a sealed deck hangar and had to be assembled before it could be launched; it had to be taken apart again and stored before the submarine could submerge. The method was primitive but it worked. Once assembled, the plane was catapulted with compressed air from a ramp on the deck. The plane’s top speed was barely one-hundred-and-fifty mph, and its only armament was one machine gun. But it did carry two seventy-six kilogram incendiary bombs.

Here was an incredible story. I wrote it up for the Bangkok Post and the media around the world picked it up. Hundreds of letters and e-mails followed.

I missed out on a bigger story, however, and that was to learn more intimate facts about the pilot and his private life. It would have made a great and interesting book, the war through the eyes of a Japanese pilot. I had learned that after Pearl Harbor, Fujita flew reconnaissance missions over Sydney and Melbourne in Australia, Wellington and Auckland in New Zealand and other Pacific ports which included Suva in the Fiji Islands and Noumea in New Caledonia. He admitted he and his observer were in constant fear of discovery, but they had never been spotted or attacked.

My conversations with Captain Fujita had been limited. His English wasn’t that good, and we could only talk about general things. I wanted to know details, how the aircraft was stored aboard the tiny submarine, the methods of propulsion used to launch the plane and so much more. On my next visit, I arranged for an interpreter to join us. But I was too late. When I phoned Captain Fujita’s home from Tokyo, I learned he had died a few weeks before. His story was lost forever.

Many other interesting leads took me to exciting places. I visited with shamans and soothsayers in Malaysia and witch doctors in Indonesia. I followed a sixteen-year old Filipina to witness her being nailed to a cross in the Philippines. I interviewed pirates in the Sulu Sea and deep-sea divers in Borneo. The reward of being a travel writer is meeting strange and fascinating people. They do exist but you must seek them out. I follow the simplest tip, the most innocuous rumor. It may lead to a dead end but sometimes I hit pay dirt.

Travel writing has taught me to be open-minded and tolerant of other cultures and religions. I learned a long time ago that I am little more than an observer in these far-off places. I am there to visit, nothing else, and my objective is to learn something about the people who live there. I am neither to teach them nor to lecture them. They have their customs, habits, religion and way of life and it is not my duty to alter or change their way of thinking. I leave that task to others whom, I hope, are more qualified than I am.

Unfortunately, there are times I divulge secrets passed on to me. It’s not always intentional. I tell people if they don’t want it to be known what they have to tell me, then don’t tell me. Sometimes they tell me anyway. Of course, being a good juicy yarn, it’s hard not to pass it on to readers. Bill Mathers is one of those people, a treasure diver with many good stories to tell, except with him, he said he had no objection to my writing about him, and so I did. I wrote a chapter about him and his diving adventures Asian Portraits, later republished under the title The Strange Disappearance of Jim Thompson and Other Stories. Bill regretted he ever told me that I could write about him. It almost cost him his life and nearly led to his execution. It so happened that Bill owned a beautiful schooner called So Fong. He used the vessel for diving expeditions. On one of his expeditions, he found himself into serious trouble with the authorities, and what I had written about him wasn’t much help for him. In fact, it was my writing that almost sent him to the gallows. It was most unfortunate.

Bill was sailing So Fong with a crew of four from Singapore to Hong Kong when, supposedly, he was in Vietnamese waters and apprehended by the Vietnamese navy. So Fong was taken into custody and confiscated. The crew, after a long delay, was released but Bill sent to prison. The charge were spying. In the closet in his cabin he kept his old U.S. Navy uniform. He had charts of Vietnamese water . It looked grim for Bill Mathers. Also found aboard was my book Asian Portraits. It had a chapter on Bill and his escapades as a diver. For nine months Bill was kept in solitary confinement without having any word from the outside world. He was told of the charges against him and was twice taken from his confinement to be executed. Then, without telling him what they were doing, they escorted him to a waiting Air France plane, and he flew to Bangkok.

The world was waiting for the bearded, much shaken man when he stepped down from the plane at Don Mueang Airport in Bangkok. A press conference followed. He was convinced, he said, he had been held in prison for what I had been written about him in Asian Portraits. I felt like crawling under my seat, vowing I would give up writing forever. Bill later learned what the charges were and, in fact, his father had sent a copy of Asian Portraits to the Vietnamese authorities to show that his son was an innocent diver searching for archaeological wrecks. Not long after his ordeal Bill set off on another expedition, with another salvage boat, and we heard it was to find a Manila galley off Saipan in the South Pacific. It was a Portuguese wreck, or perhaps it was Dutch. Bill never told me. He said he would see me when he got back. His story did appear in National Geographic. He found the wreck, and it was Portuguese. Bill is on another adventure, but he won’t tell me what it is.

Travel writers are sometimes accused of falsehoods on matters with which they had nothing to do. It happened to me when I wrote about a junk shop on Rope Walk Lane in Penang. It was a decrepit place when I saw it, stacked high with junk that soiled your hands and clothes when you rummaged around. But what treasure you could find in the rubble. It made a good story and I wrote about the shop in a travel column for the Bangkok Post. The next time I went to Penang, I stopped at Rope Walk and found the owner had my newspaper story framed and hanging on the wall. I did more photos, upgraded the story and did another feature for a glossy magazine. It was awhile later that I was severely criticized for my story. I was accused of exaggerating and writing about conditions that didn’t exist. I couldn’t understand why until the next time I went to Rope Walk. The owners had cleaned up the store with items for sale neatly displayed on shelves. Many even had the prices on them. My articles were behind glass frames on one wall. It wasn’t even remotely the same place as when I first saw the junk shop and wrote about it. That is the fate of a travel writer. You find a neat little restaurant you like. It’s never crowded, and there is always a table. Then see what happens when you write about the place and it gets known. You have to wait in line the next time you go. What to do! In conclusion, I don’t write history; I write about history. There is a difference.

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Chapter 14A
HISTORY WITHOUT TOIL
Work on Quality Contents

The most interesting aspect of traveling, for me, is to delve into the history of those places that I visit, to uncover the past. It has to do with discovery. There’s a bit of Indiana Jones in all of us.

The fact is there is no limit to how deep I can dig. But on the other hand, I don’t like to have history forced upon me. I like history without toil. Tour guides usually do that, throw history at you. Maybe I wouldn’t mind so much but often tour guides are not always well versed in history. They sound like they are but they are not. They are programmed and can be misleading. It’s mostly textbook stuff they hand out, stuff they had to master to get their licenses. They are like tape recording machines on fast talk. And if they are government tour guides, I can be certain I am being fed propaganda. When this happens, I find it best to let the guides ramble on and never question them. And they can lead me to a gift shop or jewelry store but I don’t have to spend money so that they can get a commission. In fact, I don’t even have to get out of the bus. A travel writer, or any tourist actually, is not there to argue with locals about their traditions and culture. We are there to listen. What I like to do is read up on a place and study it as much as I can before going there. When I do this I don’t have to thumb through a guidebook to find out information about a site while the others in my group have gone and left me standing there. I then have to run to catch up with them.

When I write a piece I like to let history come naturally. History should not be burdensome for the reader. It should be subtle. I try to apply this not only to travel articles but to just about everything I write-short stories, novels, essay, biographies. But to inject history into a story, I have to know my history and that means being as accurate as I can. Most important, I have to like that place I am writing about if I want to be sincere.

I received a letter from one young lady who wanted to be a writer, except, she said, she didn’t like to travel. A travel writer who doesn’t like to travel! It might sound odd, but I have been in the travel writing business long enough to find there are travel writers who don’t like to travel. They are worn out, and it shows in their work. It does happen, the same as it does to seamen and politicians. I often think about Robin Lee Graham, the youngest yachtsman to have solo circumnavigated the globe aboard his twenty-four foot sailboat Dove. He was sixteen years old when he began and twenty-one when he finished. He did this incredible feat to please his father and to make the press happy. After he completed the voyage, he tied Dove to a dock in San Diego and moved to a farm in Montana, as far away from the sea as he could get. He never returned to the sea. Traveling can do that to some writers.

There is much more to travel writing than traveling. I call it learning. I never stop learning when I travel. I don’t mean learning about the craft of writing; I mean learning about the world in which we live. Sometimes I feel like the archaeologist sitting on a mount of dirt with a tiny shovel and a small soft- haired brush dusting a dried-out bone trying to discover the truth. But unlike the anthropologist, I find the getting there is more important than arriving. One such image remains vivid in my mind. I was a young Marine working at the Naval Attaché in Paris, bored with my mundane job, when an archaeologist and his team came to the embassy en route to Africa. They were dressed in their khakis, their safari hats and boots, and they were headed to a dig in Libya in North Africa. They really looked their parts. How I wished I could go with them. It got worse when the leader said if l could get the time off I could go with them. I put in for a leave but before it was approved the expedition left for Africa. I was heart broken. About a month later, my leave was approved. I had three weeks. I wasn’t a rich man; in fact I hardly had any money at all. I decided to go anyway. I bought a third class train ticket to southern France, crossed the border into Spain and hitchhiked to Algeciras where I could hop a cargo ferry across the Mediterranean to Cueta. The last few miles in Spain, I actually joined a gypsy caravan when I couldn’t find a bus. It was much the same hopping and skipping across North Africa to Libya. Finally, I found the expedition; they were at their dig, with shovels and brushes, dust covered, doing their thing. The director asked me to sit down. They were happy to see me. They gave me a glass of tepid water from a canvas bag hanging on a tripod in the sun. They sat around me and wanted to know how I managed to get there to Libya and how I ever found them. I told them about my trip, the gypsies, the leaking cargo boat that almost sank, about finding refuge with a band of Bedouins one night when I couldn’t find an inn and other happenings. They all listened with interest, and then the leader said, “Whoa, what an adventure. I’d like to do that one day.” I realized then, at that very moment, that the getting there is the important thing. I found this to be true one other time, after I had succeeded in completing the longest, record-breaking motor trip around the world, and arrived in New City. I was parked in front of the Library on Fifth Avenue, surrounded by the press, being interviewed while photographs snapped away taking pictures. It didn’t take long and the interview ended. Everyone, the press, the photographers, the curious bystanders, they all left and I was alone. What happens now, I thought. I didn’t have to wonder long. “Get that thing out of here,” a policeman shouted pointing to my vehicle. I felt like crying.

Travel writers often find themselves questioned by the critics when they visit a place for a few days and then from their pen comes a long, in-depth piece about that destination. Critics ask what give writers the right to tell about a place they hardly know. What the critics may not know is that the writer did his homework. A good travel writer will come up with facts that even residents are unaware of. More often than not, local people don’t know their own history. I thought about this when I was at the beautiful ancient ruins at Angkor Wat. I had taken my lunch and was sitting on the steps at Bayon Temple when a group of Cambodian workers sauntered by, also during their lunch break. One of them spoke reasonable English. This was my chance to ask him some questions about the ruins. I would have been better off asking him what was the color of the planet Mars. He knew nothing about the history of Angkor except it was ancient and the people who once lived there walked off and left the place. But he could tell me all about computers and the advantages of ending e-mail.

I find this to be true at most of places I visit. People who live there aren’t well versed. I remember one night sitting on temple steps on Bali, waiting for a Ketchak dance, better known as the “monkey dance,” to begin, and was exchanging stories with some inquisitive villagers. The moon was beginning to rise, and I thought this would be a good chance to tell them about the American astronauts who had landed on the moon a few weeks before. It was a top news story echoed around the world. As soon as I mentioned the moon, everyone became highly excited. I had to stop in my story and ask them, through the man who was doing the interpreting, what was wrong. He answered, “They all want to know if you have a moon in America too.” What could I possibly tell them?

When I visit Angkor Wat in Cambodia or Borobudur on Java, I know I can’t talk to the natives who live there to find out about their history. They simply won’t know. I have to find what I want to know in history books. I can reasonably question the inhabitants on daily matters, how they feel about certain issues, but I don’t expect them to know the answers to the questions I need to put down in my writing.

It’s a fact, generally, people who live in an area know less about it than the visitors who come to see the place. For instance, I lived in Washington, D.C. for many years while attending Georgetown University. Yes, I went to the National Museum, once or twice, and I went to the Corcoran Art gallery, and I climbed the 564 steps to the top of the Washington Monument. But when it came down to facts, I knew very little about the city other than how to get around. Thousands upon thousands of tourists arrived each day by the plane, bus, Amtrak, private cars and yes, even bicycles. I never gave much thought to these hordes of tourists. They led their own lives and I had mine. The twain never mixed. It wasn’t until years later, long after I left Washington and became a writer, that I was given an assignment from a major travel magazine to write a feature on the tourist sites of Washington. The editor who gave the assignment had learned that I once lived in the city and therefore I must know more about the city than the average visitor. How wrong the editor was. I knew practically nothing about the tourist trail in Washington. I had to visit the city as a tourist to find out. I was absolutely astounded after finding out how much there was to see and do. How odd! When I lived in Washington I did none of this. Those tourists who came to town knew more about the city than I did.

Expat writers living abroad, having to do research, find it is not so easy. In Bangkok, for example, text and reference books in libraries are in Thai script. Thus I travel to Singapore often, where the libraries are stocked with English language books. And most important, The Straits Times newspaper is on microfilm and dates back to the last century. I can find more original sources of information in Singapore than I can any place else in Asia. The Internet, or course, is useful, but when I go to a search engine I find straight facts and sometimes facts are not enough. At The Straits Times I click on a date in history and what I discover is amazing. For instance, when I read the ads that appeared fifty years ago, I learn that smoking is good for me. It’s healthy to start off the day with a cigarette . That’s what the cigarette ads said back then. I can compare looking at The Straits Times to watching a Turner Classic Movie. The old movies, without car crashes and vivid sex scenes, show me how people dressed and h w they acted thirty or forty years ago. Today’s movies can teach me very little.

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Chapter 13B
TRAVELING WITH TRAVEL WRITERS
The Good Ones

As Robin said, you don’t have to be romantic to be a travel writer but it sure helps. Robin has an enthusiasm for travel that is infectious. He was born in England in 1938 when the British Empire was at its highest peak, when one-third of the globe and half of its population were under the crown. As a youth, he lived vicariously from books he read about the Empire, the Boer War and the Northwest Frontier. He could quote Rudyard Kipling by heart-“Yes, Din! Din! Din! Though I’ve belted you and flayed you, By the livin’ Gawd that made you, You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!”

When he came to Asia he lived his dreams of youth. After working for Thai Airways for several years, he became a freelance travel writer, to travel and to write about his adventures. Adventure became his business. One day he would dive beneath the murky waters of a jungle lake in Malaysia to look for a lost city; the next month he’d hitchhike his way aboard a smuggler’s boat going from the southern Philippines across the pirate-infested Sulu Sea to Borneo; he would explore lost ruins in Laos and was even taken captive for a while by Pathet Lao guerrillas. He drove an open Mini Moke alone from Singapore to London; he visited forbidden Buddhist monasteries in far-off Bhutan, trekked the high Himalayas with a pack on his back; sailed the South Seas as crew aboard a trading schooner; restored a ruined stone farm house in Spain; and did a thousand other things a young man coming from London might dream about but never did. Robin did all these things, and much more. He lived his dreams and that made him fun to travel with. He traveled not only to every corner of Asia, from Japan to Bhutan but also across the Pacific to Tahiti and as far as Mexico. He was able to do this by becoming a travel writer.

To fully understand what it was like to travel with Robin, I have to tell about one of our many trips together. This is taken in part from the chapter I wrote on him in At Home in Asia. We had gone to Kathmandu in Nepal to do a story for the airlines. Our mission completed, rather than fly back to Bangkok, we decided to travel overland down into India over the Raj Path, the very first road to Nepal. It had been opened to the public but a few years before and in places, the most threatening places, it had yet to be completed.

Along with seventy-two other passengers, we crowded into the bus with forty-eight seats. The unpaved, dusty mountain road twisted and turned and snaked back upon itself, looking down upon sheer drops. Heavily loaded trucks and over-packed buses, with ferocious Sikh drivers, thundered madly downhill at reckless speeds.

Miraculously, we reached the hot humid plains of India. Dust-covered and weary, we had to walk, toting all our luggage across the border from Nepal into India where we boarded the Calcutta Mail Train for Calcutta. Our carriage, with doors that opened to the outside, had seats for six, and we had to fight off hordes of people who wanted to squeeze into our compartment at each stop. A group of unruly students massed outside our door. “Open up! Open up!” they demanded, pounding on the door and waving their fists. “Let us in!”

Robin would hear none of this. While the Indian passengers in the compartment slithered into the background, Robin stood to his full height, brushed down his shirt and in a very loud voice-and in his proper Queen’s English he cried, “What is the meaning of this!” The student jumped back. “Behave yourselves,” he said boldly, then turned and sat down. The students backed off. To the Indians in the compartment, he said, “That’s all we need, a little discipline.” He was in every sense of the word the British Raj incarnated.

Soon we were rolling across an endless, barren Indian land cape, with Robin saying over and over, “God, I love this country.” In a second-hand bookstore in Kathmandu, Robin had found a copy of John Masters’ Night Runners of Bengal, about the Indian mutiny of 1857 in which Indian sepoys revolted and laid siege to Lucknow. Aboard the Calcutta Mail, he began reading the book and became so absorbed he couldn’t put it down. “You have to read this,” he said and began tearing out the pages he had already read, handing them to me one at a time. Soon I too was reliving the glorious days of the British Raj. We were traveling the same rail line, perhaps aboard the same carriage the empire builders had built and used. When I looked out the window, the view certainly had to be the same-the vast dusty plains of India.

We reached Calcutta with thoughts of Night Runners of Bengal still with us, and had hardly dropped our bags in the old colonial Great Eastern Hotel when Robin dragged me off again. “Where to?” I asked.

“St. John’s Church,” he answered.

“What are you talking about? We come to Calcutta to go to a church?” I protested.

“No,” he replied, “to go witness history.”

On this trip with Robin I learned that story material doesn’t have to come from history textbooks. It can be from church walls and cemetery gravestones.

The church we went to was St. John’s, a former British garrison church. It’s a tall white Gothic building that was consecrated in 1847, ten years before the Indian Mutiny. Rows of punkah fans hang from a wooden ceiling, and the stalls and pews are made of heavy dark wood. Stained-glass windows cast an eerie light into the interior. The sound of an organ filtered through the halls and seemed to permeate the very walls, where, when our eyes adjusted to the dimness, we saw row upon row of commemorative tablets memorializing the British killed during the Mutiny and various other frontier battles. It was to these tablets that Robin led me, and slowly, in his deep resounding voice, he read. “Sacred to the memory of Henrietta, aged thirty years, the beloved wife of Captain R.P. Anderson, Twenty-fifth Regiment Bengal Native Infantry, who departed this life on the seventeenth August 1857 during the sad and disastrous siege of Lucknow. Also to the memory of Hilda Mary, aged seven months, who died three days later.”

Another, for George Thomas Gowan who “fell on the evening of nineteenth June 1857 at the bead of his gallant regiment, the Fifth Royal Lancers.”

We left St. John’s, with a feeling of despair, walked across the Maidan and approached the Victoria Memorial, a massive domed building of white marble from Rajasthan, inaugurated in 1921 by the Prince of Wales. In front of the monument stands the statue of Queen Victoria, Lord Curzon and other gallant figures of the Raj.

But Robin didn’t stop to admire the statues; instead he led me to the top of the main stairway landing; and here in a side gallery appeared a painting by Lady Butler- “The Remnant of an Army.” It portrays Dr. Bryden, the sole survivor of sixteen thousand of the British Forces, arriving exhausted at the gate of Jellalabad on July 13, 1842, during the First Afghan War. That evening we went to Mantons, the Calcutta branch of the famous British gun smith and manufacturer. When I think of the trouble today the world is having in Afghanistan, I think of that painting by Lady Butler.

There were other memorable trips, like riding a bus across Laos. Finding it too stuffy inside the overcrowded bus, we climbed up on the roof and sat in the wind and dust. Robin sat cross-legged atop the bus sang out in his baritone voice arias from “The Barber of Seville” while he pounded out the rhythm on the tin roof, no doubt to the annoyance of those below. But sometimes our travels got dicey. We were leaving Luang Prabang and wanted to take a river trip along the mighty Mekong River. We found a ferryboat going downriver and bought passage.

The ferry was required to stop at various checkpoints along the way. While the captain waited with the bow nosed into the shore, a young boy with the boat’s papers ran up the bank where armed soldiers waited. At villages, passengers disembarked and others came aboard. The garrison at one village was celebrating and all the soldiers were drunk. They fired rifles and pistols into the air. We were beginning to become unnerved.

Soon there were more checkpoints and more soldiers with automatic rifles. We came to one checkpoint which appeared different from others we had seen. We drew closer. Soldiers came down from the bank with rifles at port arms. Even their uniforms differed. They wore black. Then I noticed their rifles were not M16s; they were AK-47s. We had unwillingly arrived at a Pathet Lao outpost. A patrol of soldiers swarmed aboard.

Our lives now rested in the hands of a half dozen boy soldiers. Their leader couldn’t have been more than seventeen or eighteen years old. Seeing that Robin and I were foreigners, he instructed us to sit in the open at the bow. We then continued down river.

We discovered that the Pathet Lao had overrun the checkpoint that very morning. They were now traveling to villages along the way in an attempt to convince government forces to surrender. With both Robin and me positioned on the bow in plain view, they could avert possible gunfights. We stopped at several villages while the young officer went ashore. He would talk with the people for a few minutes and then return.

As we came chugging around one bend in the river, the boy leader began waving and pointing toward the beach. He instructed the boat captain to head toward the shore.

It was a sandy, desolate area without person or building in sight. This was it, we thought. No more new sunrises for us; no more horizons to conquer. But to our surprise, instead of ordering us ashore as we thought they would, the soldiers themselves disembarked. They waved goodbye, and when Robin motioned that he would like to take their picture, they stood at rigid attention. The boat continued downriver to its destination, and from there we traveled overland to Vientiane.

I often wonder, when someone tells me they’d like to be a travel writer, if this is the life they would like to lead.

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Chapter 13A
TRAVELING WITH TRAVEL WRITERS
The Challenging Ones

Traveling with travel writers is as bad as traveling with photographers. My wife can testify to that. “Can’t we just go someplace without you wanting to write about it.” I do feel sorry for her and give in, sometimes.

“Okay, no writing,” I agree.

But after being married to me for so long, she becomes the culprit. We see something interesting and she is the one who says, “Hey, that would make a good story.” She then begins working out an outline and a theme in her mind. Sometimes she even begins scribbling notes on the edge of the road map as we drive along.

But the scenario gets quite involved and complicated when one travel writer travels with other travel writers. I have to look at the facts. I am after a story, and so is the guy I am traveling with, that is, if he is a travel writer. Imagine, then, being on a press tour with twenty other journalists who are all looking for stories. What you have is twenty journalists competing. That’s not a very pleasant thought.

The idea behind press tours is sound. It’s common for government tourism offices, hotels, tour and transportation companies, parks, resorts, and airlines to arrange press tours and invite journalists. They all want to promote their products or services and that’s the best way to do it, by inviting travel writers on press tours. It’s much cheaper and more credible for readers than advertising. A good public relations officer is worth his keep when he knows how to cater to travel writers. Take for example the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok. The hotel is well known as being among the very best hotels in the world. Credit is given to its general manager Kurt Wachtveitl who took over the reins when the hotel had but a hundred rooms. That was forty years ago. What you won’t hear is that sitting in the public relations office was a very young Thai girl, Pornsri Luphaiboon, who had her own philosophy about publicity. Before Pornsri retired a few years ago, after four decades of service, I questioned her about her contribution to the overwhelming success of the Oriental. She responded without hesitation and said, “You must let the international writers do the promoting. If journalists find they are happy with the hotel, the service you provide, then they will say nice things about you.” And that she did. There wasn’t a journalist around the world who didn’t have anything but nice things to say about Pornsri and about the hotel.

Some press tours are lavish and costly, especially when government tourism offices get involved. They will go to extremes to organize an itinerary to please the media, hoping that their investment will bring more tourists to their doorsteps. The concept is fine, but there is a problem. The media often treat these offers as bonus prizes for their employees. It doesn’t matter that those whom they choose to send are not writers or journalists. Many press tours tum up with deadwood, with people who have nothing to contribute. It’s almost like Foreign Correspondents Clubs that I mentioned. FCCs have more business people in their membership than they do writers and journalists. Businessmen tum Foreign Correspondent Clubs into business opportunities.

Serious reporters who do manage to get a seat on a press tour often find themselves sitting next to people who are not writers and who care nothing about sights and history. I find being a part of such a tour is unproductive. More than once I had been on a press tour and, finding my traveling companions intolerable, I concluded I was wasting my time and left, with the excuse that I was needed immediately back at the office.

Airlines are notorious for filling their planes on their augural fights to new destinations with company executives, their families and often friends of company executives, leaving little or no room left for the press, the real purpose in publicizing an augural flight.

One journalist I know who has more experience with press tours than most is Robin Dannhorn. Robin started his writing career as public relations consultant for Thai Airways International. Robin today is a very accomplished writer and a romantic. He appeared in a chapter in my book At Home in Asia. I asked him for his comments on press tours.

“During my travel writing activities over several decades,” he wrote, “I was involved in many press trips. Usually arranged by national tourism organizations, airlines, or hotel chains, these ranged from the frankly boring to the wonderfully rewarding. Some trips were a waste of time because the press group had to attend too many official receptions, given by local chambers of commerce, or trade associations in the host country, or when too much time was taken up with hotel inspections (to make sponsors happy).

“Press groups usually consist of professionals, who are keen to learn more about any destination on which they can write and sell stories, which is especially important for freelancers. Travel journalists tend to be polite and tolerant of the boring activities and appreciate all the interesting or unusual places and events they experience. The only exceptions to the ‘politeness towards hosts’ rule were some of the “Queen Bee” travel editors of top, usually American, magazines I have known who could be very demanding and jealous over such issues as someone else getting a better view from their hotel room. Sometimes they refused to join a bus tour, demanding a private car, or required to be upgraded to a suite. Of course they had to fly first class, while the rest of us were just happy to be included, even in economy.”

Robin went on to comment that some press trips are simple and adventurous, while others can be very luxurious, with the best of everything supplied. One such tour he joined was sponsored Belgium and the Champagne region of France. They stayed in five-star hotels and enjoyed truly gourmet meals. It was a large group, with some top writers, including one of the most famous, James Michener. It wasn’t Robin’s first meeting with Michener, however. He had interviewed Michener when the author was staying at the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok.

In Robin’s own words he describes traveling with Michener: “He was charming and a totally professional traveler, although he did have the reputation for refusing to pay for even the smallest element on any sponsored trip. During the European tour I had the opportunity to sit next to him on bus rides and at banquets. He taught me a lot about travel and writing and was generous with his time and advice for someone as unimportant as myself. He seemed interested in who I was and what I was doing with my professional life. He even offered to write an introduction for a book I was considering writing at that time, a book which, with his endorsement, would have boosted sales considerably.”

Robin continued: “One particular event involving Michener I remember well. Our group was being shown around the main square of Brussels. While the rest of us were admiring the impressive frontages of the square’s historic buildings, I noticed that Michener was not with us. Then I spotted him, down a side street where he was examining with interest the backs of those same buildings. That was a good lesson for me – look behind the obvious while traveling.”

Robin concluded that most rewarding press trips, for him, involved visits to remote destinations, or unique festivals. Among the more memorable sponsored trips were the Pushkar Camel Fair in the remote desert of Rajasthan, the King’s Barge Procession on Bangkok’s Chao Phraya River and the gruesome spectacle of Thaipusam, in Malaysia, where devotees spike their cheeks with steel rods. He remembered so well touring northern Pakistan, the Khyber Pass and almost inaccessible foothills of the Karakorums-a trip on which he was the only participant, with a Pathan guide who was well known in the region and could take him to places which might otherwise have been insecure for a foreign traveler.

Robin made several sponsored cruises aboard the four-mast barquentines Star Flyer and Star Clipper and sailed among the Greek Islands, around the Mediterranean and to remote islands of the Andaman Sea. He is a good example of what makes one travel writer stand out from the next. One voyage he remembers in particular, a sea journey aboard Royal Clipper, the largest sailing ship ever built, in which he sailed from Tower Bridge on London’s River Thames down through the Bay of Biscay to Cannes. But it wasn’t a cruise. It was a ten-day pre-delivery voyage shared with some 600 workers who frantically had to get the ship finished for her inaugural Mediterranean cruises with paying passengers. As the only writer aboard Robin was able to sell several stories including a ten-page feature published in a leading yachting magazine. Robin admitted he felt that he was following in the keel wakes of so many great sea heroes: Drake, Raleigh, Anson, Nelson, Cook and the rest who had sailed before him down London’s river to create and protect an empire. The rout included such historic locations, the English Channel Ushant, Cape Trafalgar, Gibraltar, all famed in naval history. “You do not have to be a romantic to be a travel writer,” Robin wrote, “but a strong imagination does help. As a travel correspondent for Thai Airways, I worked closely with Robin over the years, beginning in the late 1960s when he was working as a public relations consultant with the airline. His job required him to organize press trips among them to then still unspoiled Bali and Nepal which the airline was just opening up for tourism. “They were great trip”, he said. “All the writers were enthusiastic and productive for Thai Airways as sponsor, gaining massive editorial coverage worldwide. We also arranged several tours to India and took Thai cultural and fashion groups around European cities.”

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Chapter 12B
TRAVELING WITH PHOTOGRAPHERS
Lessons Learned

One of the most daring writer/photographers I ever worked with was John Everingham. During the war in Vietnam, John was a war photographer who spent much of his time in Laos. When the war began, he wanted to join up, but the recruiting officer in Sydney told him he was too young and to come back when he was old enough. So he went to Vietnam on his own to see what war was all about. From Vietnam, he traveled to Laos. Being Australian, the communist Pathet Lao government permitted him to stay. He found a flat in Vientiane and in time fell in love with a Laotian girl, but when he wanted to take her out of the country he found it was impossible. Laotians could not leave the country. So he decided to smuggle her out by putting her in scuba gear and swimming her underwater beneath the Mekong River to Thailand. There was a problem: she couldn’t swim. Not only could she not swim, but also, she was terrified of water. Somehow, after several attempts, John succeeded in doing the impossible and got her safely to Thailand, only to be arrested by the Thai authorities for illegal entry. John was saved when Hollywood heard about his incredible plight and bought up the movie rights to his story. Fox filmed the movie with Michael Landon playing his role, and also starred Pricilla Presley. Fox messed it up so badly John refuses to see it. I wrote about John and his daring swim in At Home in Asia.

They say you get to know a person best when you travel with him. That was certainly my experience with John Everingham. I had joined him on an assignment on the Australian Outback. We were invited by the Australian government to photograph and write promotional stories. Everything we needed was provided-four-wheel drive vehicles, camping equipment, guides and cooks, and even a helicopter for aerial shots. John asked if I’d like to accompany him on a helicopter jaunt. Certainly, I didn’t mind, but I should have noted this wouldn’t be an ordinary flight when John requested that the pilot take the doors off the helicopter so he could get better shots, which the pilot did. When John had the pilot lean the aircraft far over to one side so that he could get the right angle, and with only a seat belt separating me from the ground below, I knew it was a mistake to trust a photographer. I vowed no more helicopter trips with John. But still, I didn’t learn. Next we went into the bush in Kakadu where John saw a shot he wanted out in a marsh. He rushed forth, wading in water up to his waist. He paid no attention, even after I warned him about the sign that said:

NO WADING; BEWARE OF CROCODILES

John has a successful art studio in Bangkok and is a successful publisher of several fine magazines-Phuket Magazine, Tropical Homes, Southeast Asia Yachting-but still does his thing with his camera. Everyone in Bangkok was quite surprised when John was commissioned by National Geographic to photograph his Australia, and to write the text as well. Very seldom do the editors of National Geographic have a person do both, write and photograph. But this time it was different, and for a good reason. John’s forefather arrived in Sydney aboard the very first ship carrying prisoners and exiles from London.

I found I have to choose carefully the photographer I had to travel with. Photographers will go to any extreme to get a photograph, and you may end up in trouble with them, as I did with Willy Metter. Willy was Swiss and I met him in a camera shop in Jerez de la Frontera in Spain. He gave me his name card and said if I ever needed a photographer, he was available. He added he’d go anywhere. He sure did, and it cost him his life.

Willy was true to his promise; he’d go anywhere. He joined me on a Jeep trip across the Soviet Union and he signed up as photographer on my Trans World Record Expedition. He didn’t make it all the way around the world, as he couldn’t get along with the others in the expedition, but I did other travels with him throughout Southeast Asia-e-when I could get no one else to go with me. One such trip was in Sarawak on Borneo.

I had a magazine assignment and Willy joined me as photographer. It was not an easy trip. We had to hire Dyak tribesmen in long boats to take us up the Balleh River, a tributary of the Rejang, deep into the interior. Having passed the last longhouse on the river, we had to carry all of our supplies with us. Willy was so demanding with the native porters that one morning we got up to find they had deserted us. We had to make our own way out of the jungle, leaving behind most of our supplies, that which we couldn’t carry.

Willy found his end in Cambodia. He was in Phnom Penh at the wrong time. Unfortunately he had the idea that he was Swiss, from a neutral country, and no harm could befall him. He was wrong. We heard later he was bound with his hands behind his back and executed. Being Swiss didn’t help him.

That said, the fact remains, there are times when I don’t want to travel with a photographer. Fine. But what’s the alternative? The only other choice I have is to take my own pictures. If it’s a simple travel piece or a destination story, with all the modern digital cameras available these days, it’s easy to do. If it’s a glossy picture layout for a top magazine, that’s something else. That takes real skill.

When I do interviews, taking photos can be quite difficult. Interviewing a person takes concentration. I must give the person interviewed my full attention. It is disconcerting to be asking a person questions and at the same time wondering what angle would be best for a photograph. I find it best to concentrate on the interview and take photographs afterwards, when the tension is over.

It’s difficult to be both, writer and photographer. It’s like being a one-man band. It’s fascinating to watch and to listen to a one-man band, but you can be certain the music you hear is not going to be Heifitz or Mendelssohn. Editors for some reason don’t think of writers as photographers or that photographers can write. National Geographic with John Everingham was an exception. I may hear an editor say he likes my story, and in the next breath he asks if I have photographs. No photographs, no story.

When I asked Peter Stackpole his advice on taking photographs, he advised me to take as many photographs as I could and never to be spare on film. My concern back then, of course, was the expense of taking extra film and film developing costs. With the new digital cameras, that is no longer a concern. However, I still like to use a film camera, and I try not to economize on film. Actually, film is the least of one’s expenses when traveling. Twenty years ago, that was hard advice to give to beginning photographers. For National Geographic, when on assignment, Mike Yamashita shoots several hundred rolls of film. When I was working with Hans Hoefer for Insight Guides, Hans shot so much film he found it cheaper to open his own film-developing laboratory in Singapore.

Many magazines still like film. If I am on a trip and on a tight budget, I cut expenses but I don’t cut down on film. I try getting a cheaper room, or eat less.

One doesn’t have to be an Eddie Adams, who was awarded Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography, to get good pictures. Kate Ingold, the daughter of my book publisher in California, is a good example. She was coming to Bangkok and wanted to take the train to Singapore. To oblige my editor I offered to be her guide and chaperon. She was keen on photography. She had a fancy new camera that was fully automatic and she snapped at everything. I mean everything, that which moved and that which didn’t. She just aimed and snapped. Sometimes she didn’t even aim. It was most annoying when h didn’t care if there were things cluttering up her foreground. I wanted to tell her, to give her some advice, but I thought better of it. I didn’t want my publisher to get upset with me. Let her waste her film. In Singapore she had the film developed. It was remarkable. Every photo she took was good. I mean everyone. She got shots I never imagined would tum out. I realized at that moment I had been wrong; she had an eye for a good picture. After that experience I refrain from telling people what to shoot and what not to shoot.

During the war in Vietnam, I took on the assignment of war correspondent for the Bangkok World and made a dozen or more trips to the war zones. I met many very good and courageous war photographers. They had to be to get the photos editors wanted. While journalists could sit in the bars and clubhouses on hotel rooftops in Saigon and interview soldiers and Marines back from the field photographers had to show their mettle and follow these GIs into the fight. They had no other choice. Kurt Rolfes was one. He could take pictures under the most unusual circumstances, like when being fired upon. He has one photograph which shows a close-up shot of him stroking his handlebar moustache with one hand and holding up his telephoto lens in the other. The lens has a hole in it that stopped the bullet that was aimed for him. Later, after the war, I made a number of trips with Kurt into the Malay rain forests. Like Kate, he snapped photos quick and fast. Milt Machlin, the editor of Argosy, told me when Kurt sent in his photos for publication: he always had a difficult decision to make. It was not which photo to choose; it was which photo to reject. Milt said every one of Kurt’s photos was suitable for publication.

Not all photographers are difficult to work with. Robert Stedman is fun traveling with. He is a keen observer of the environment and very knowledgeable about the areas in which we travel. But more than anything, he is a teacher. He discusses the photos as he takes them. I can’t help learning about light and shadows, and what makes a good photo. Working with him in his studio in Singapore is an experience. Robert is one of the highest paid photographers in Asia yet he will tum down an assignment simply to make a trip that interests him, with little or no monetary rewards.

I try not to interfere with photographers when I travel with them. To do this I have to keep focused on my own mission, and that is to write. It helps when I remind myself what editors want, and it’s editors who buy my work.

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Chapter 12A
TRAVELING WITH PHOTOGRAPHERS
The Good and the Bad

The one thing I don’t like about travel writing is the need to take pictures. That doesn’t mean I dislike taking pictures, for I do. I have on file more than one hundred thousand photographs I have taken over the years. No, it’s the combining of the two, writing and photographing that is troublesome and annoying. For certain, travel writers need photographs. Editors of most publications want photographs to go along with the articles. There’s hardly a travel story which isn’t illustrated. What to do?

Those writers who are not photographers have a real problem. It means they have to take a photographer along with them when they are on an assignment. Often the editor will assign a photographer. I prefer giving an editor my text and let him send a photographer out to take the photos. It’s understood then that the editor pays the photographer for his or her work. No problem there. But problems do arise when it comes to sharing payments with photographers. It can become ugly. The question is: who is worth what? How do we determine who gets paid and for what? Split it down the middle? Sounds fair, but it’s not, not from the writer’s point of view.

I am one who queries editors first to get assignments. I do the groundwork, all the research and finally burn the midnight oil writing the articles. The photographer gets his briefing from me, shoots the pictures, gives them to the editor, and then asks what’s taking me so long to write the story. This is a complaint between writers and photographers that never ceases to end.

The most difficult photographers to work with are beginners. I don’t know why but they are usually prima donnas, know-it-all, you can’t tell me. They hate taking orders. Professionals are much easier to work with. When I got that assignment from Argosy to do a story on Quinn’s Bar in Tahiti, I thought I might be able to do the photographs on my own, but in the end I failed to give the editor what he wanted. He then gave the photography assignment to Peter Stackpole. Peter was one of the original photographers for Life when the magazine first went into print 1935. Who could be more professional than Peter Stackpole? When he arrived in Tahiti, I was anxiously waiting for him. He had but twenty-four hours. “Not much time,” I said. l was, naturally, concerned. I had spent several days trying to get photos and hadn’t succeeded. I had learned that to take photos of boisterous drinkers in a dimly lit bar is far from easy.

“More than enough time,” Peter assured me. We sat in Viama’s Street Cafe waiting for Quinn’s to fill up, and I was getting more and more nervous by the minute. Finally the time came. He handed me a remote strobe flash with instructions to keep at a distance but always keep it pointed to wherever he was aiming his camera. I was sure the rowdy gang of carousers in Quinn’s would douse us with beer, or worse yet, hit me over the head with a Hinano beer bottle and smash Peter’s cameras. Taking photos in any bar is hard enough to do but in Quinn’s it was close to impossible. But Peter was no neophyte. He knew what he was doing. He shot one roll of film, took it out of his camera and handed to me. “Send this to the editor,” he said calmly. “He’s waiting.”

“You mean that’s all! Aren’t you going to shoot more?” I pleaded.

“What for,” he said, a statement not a question. ”Now let’s buy some Hinano beer and dance with some of these lovely vahines.” We drank buckets of Hinano and danced with every vahine who was willing to dance, and the next day, Peter left Tahiti. I posted the roll of film and waited. What an agonizing wait. Two weeks, later Milt Machlin, the editor of Argosy, wrote back and said the photos were fine. The photos were fine! Was that all? Not great, nor superb, just fine? Months later when I got to talk to Milt in person, be said every photo that Peter took was useable. That is what is meant by confidence, and it comes with experience.

Another fine photographer I worked with was Mike Yamashita, a Japanese American I came to know quite well. His is a story of determination that applies to writing as well as to photography. Aside from being a top-notch photographer, he has written some very fine books.

Mike wanted to be a photographer and figured the best place to start was Southeast Asia. At the time I was outfitting my schooner in a small klong south of Bangkok, preparing for a voyage to Singapore and then across the Pacific to Tahiti. Mike heard I was a writer and thought I might be able to give him some leads. He appeared at the dock one afternoon, with his heavy camera bag slung over one shoulder. I invited him aboard.

Under the awning on the aft deck, we had coffee, and Mike told me his story. He was part of the system-married to a prim and proper young Japanese lady with a father who wanted him to enter the family business. But Mike’s only interest was photography. His father went along with him, thinking after a few months Mile would come back to the fold. He gave his son a year to prove himself. Against the wishes of his wife, Mike gave up his job and fancy apartment and set out to be a photographer. His wife was not happy. That was when he came to Bangkok.

Mike was convincing, and I signed him on as a crew-member to Singapore. In the meantime, I had a few writing magazine assignments, and Mike offered to take the photographs. He sold one of his first photographs to one English-language magazine in Bangkok for 300 baht, the equivalent of US$12. It wasn’t something he could write home about, but he was proud of his first sale.

Mike labored all day with us on the schooner and, at night, be worked at his photography. He studied books and magazines on photography. He cleaned and re-cleaned his cameras and fiddled with lenses and filters. I believe be even took his cameras to bed with him. Mike worked harder than anyone on the schooner. He was keen on painting the decks and keeping the rigging neat. When I asked him why all the effort, he simply said a neat ship makes for better pictures.

When we arrived in Singapore, I had an invitation from the Chief Game Warden of Malaysia to join him and his rangers on an expedition in search of the last of the one-horned rhino. When Mike beard he wanted to go too. The warden agreed and we spent a month in the jungle, tracking the rhino. Mike adjusted to rugged jungle life quickly and came back with some remarkable photos.

Mike was quick to take advantage of every opportunity that presented itself. We were on a flight from Honolulu to Bangkok when the B-747 developed engine trouble and we bad to return to Honolulu. While passengers began to panic, Mike took down his camera bag from the rack above and began assembling his Nikon underwater camera. “Just in case,” he said calmly.

Mike’s assignments became longer and more difficult. His marriage ended and there was no keeping him back now. And what exciting assignments he bad. Every time he passed through Bangkok, we had dinner together. He had remarried, and has a grand house in New Jersey and an apartment in New York City. Over the years, I visited him both at his home and at his apartment. He always has some exciting tales to tell, about things like covering the Hong Kong handover, Indonesian fires, U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, Vermont’s four seasons, South China Sea, New Zealand’s South Island, sailing a square rigger, Tuscany in Italy and many more.

In his travels, Mike became interested in the travels of Marco Polo. Having done more than a dozen assignments for National Geographic, he convinced the editors to let him follow the trail of Marco Polo from Europe to Asia. Mike spent two years following the great 13th-century explorer’s route from Italy to China, a trip that took him across the deserts and mountains of Iraq and Iran, into the war zone in Afghanistan, across the Pair mountains and along the rim of the vast Taklimakan desert; and on to Shangdu, immortalized in Coleridge’s poem “Xanadu”, returning by way of Sumatra, Sri Lanka and southern India. National Geographic did run his story, but not in one issue, in three consecutive issues.

Mike turned his Marco Polo adventure into a book which became an instant success, and sold 250,000 copies in the first print run. The route Mike followed from the Persian Gulf to the extreme tip of Asia was, in a certain sense, more difficult today than it was in the 13th century. But then neither wars nor hostile borders, neither B-747’s losing their engines nor wild rhinos charging in the jungles could hinder Michael Yamashita.

What is the key to Michael Yamashita’s success? We can find the answer in one word-determination. Mike was determined. And he was happy to sell his first photograph for $12. Mike makes good copy and I wrote about him in my book Return to Adventure Southeast Asia.

Most photographers, even professionals, are difficult to travel with. I always end up carrying their extra cameras and tripods and help them set up reflectors. If it isn’t this, I have to sit in the car to watch things as they dash off to get a picture. If we are traveling by car, we will forever come upon a scene he can’t possibly pass up. We skid to a stop and it will be a half hour before we continue. Once or twice I don’t mind, but once or twice for a photograph is never enough.

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