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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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Chapter 11C
THE IMPORTANCE OF READING
Reading is Educating

I believe to a great extent that public relations, or call it publicity, is what create many writers. You have a good publicist and half the battle is won. How many good, unheard writers are out there and have never been read? That is the real tragedy. An artist at least has a visual he can hold up, the mirror lo his thoughts, and either you like what you see or you don’t. It’s much more difficult for the writer if it doesn’t do him good to hold up his book for all to see and ask if one likes it or not. I do not mean, however, that publicity is all that is needed to make a writer. The writer must have something to offer to begin with; he cannot be a hack hoping for recognition. Given the chance, it’s always possible the writer might be read without having done any publicizing but not likely, except for a handful of friends who might buy a copy. Nevertheless, that’s the rub, and I call it only by chance that they are read. Truman Capote fits into this category. Publicity created him.

Capote was not a prolific writer; compared to his contemporaries, he wrote little. But what he did write was well publicized, and much of that publicity came not from his written words but from the celebrated man-about-town that he was. Born in New Orleans, he was thought by some to be a Southern Gothic novelist. His novels, though very few, were Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), The Grass Harp (1951) and his nonfiction novel In Cold Blood (1966) that was made into a film the following year. His 1958 novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s was made into a movie and gave him both name and notoriety. Where credit is due, he did write short stories, “A Tree of Night” (1949) and two short stories that were adapted for television: “A Christmas Memory” (1956) and “The Thanksgiving Visitor” (1968). Capote knew how to cash in on publicity. Life played him up big when the magazine covered his million-dollar New York party which scores of Hollywood celebrities attended.

Not all writers have the need or the inclination to go out and seek publicity to sell their books. Hemingway never appeared on TV at a time when the blue tube was becoming popular. Nor did he do radio shows. You couldn’t hear him on Lux Radio Theatre, although actors like Orson Wells and James Stewart often portrayed his books on the air. Such appearances for him seemed totally out of character. For his Nobel Prize, he had someone else attend the ceremony and read his acceptance speech for him. I wondered about this, why he never went public at a time when television was becoming the vogue and talk shows were the latest thing. Hemingway would have made good copy, as they say in the media .. The reason, I believe after meeting him in Spain, was that he considered public appearances-television shows and radio talks-not his forte. He was a writer, not a performer, although he did fancy conversations in bars and restaurants with friends. He preferred not to be in the public limelight and let his publicists make a name for him. We know for a fact when F. Scott Fitzgerald pleaded with him to come to Hollywood and write for the movies he turned down Tinsel Town for his fishing boat and his finca in Cuba.

When my book At Home in Asia was reviewed, a critic noted that all but one of the dozen or so characters I wrote about had college educations. He inferred that I bad a chip on shoulder, that I myself didn’t have a college education, and wrote about rough and tumble types to illustrate that a college education is not important. That was not my point at all. At Home in Asia turned out the way it did without any conscious effort on my part to choose who had college degrees and who did not. I am not advocating that higher education is not necessary. My attending college did very little to advance my writing career, but it did force me to read books in a hurry-Ulysses by James Joyce, Animal Farm by George Orwell and The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams.

Gertrude Stein would have done well in television, but there were no blue tubes in Paris in her day. Still, without Steve Allan and Jack Parr parlaying her on the “Tonight Show” she did all right for herself. She advanced William James’ Principles of Psychology in his “stream of conscious thought” and changed literature forever. Many young writers became victims of this “stream of consciousness thought,” that literary technique which seeks to describe an individual’s point of view by giving the written equivalent of the character’s thought processes, a kind of interior monologue. For me, it was important to understand “stream of consciousness thought,” but not to emulate it. Too many beginning writers have attempted to use the style but end up with confused, unintelligible sentences. The style was part of the modernist movement preached by Stein to her close group of followers in Paris in the early 20s. James Joyce mastered it in his epic Ulysses. Ernest Hemingway followed Gertrude Stein’s advice and used it in nearly all his novels. Further examples of the development of this style, which are important reading, are Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote only a few novels compared to his contemporaries. But his The Great Gatsby is truly a masterpiece, a simple and straightforward tale. It’s a book I pick up from my shelf and begin reading pages at random. A book makes for good reading when you can do this, begin reading any page in a book, find it interesting and want to continue. The Great Gatsby can do that.

All good books have messages to tell-The Great Gatsby, An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser and The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. If I am going to read, I might as well read what is good and learn from what I read. There are no car chases or fire bomb explosions in these books nor in John Dos Passos’ USA Trilogy or Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg Ohio, but they are welcome reading nonetheless.

A writer from whom I learned a great deal was Thomas Wolfe. He is not to be confused with the flamboyant man in a white suit, Tom Wolfe. John Humphrey, the dean at a private school where I taught for a spell after college, turned me on to Thomas Wolfe. “You want to I learn to write, then read Thomas Wolfe,” he said and handed me You Can’t Go Home Again which he took down from the school library shelf. After I started reading the book I wondered how I had ever skipped reading his works. He taught me that to write I had to be observant, to keep my eyes open. Subject matter is not something in that far off city or over the horizon. It is everywhere around us, in the very same room in which we live. It is the duty of the writer to make that “something” obvious.

Wolfe wrote four mammoth, highly autobiographical novels which present a sweeping picture of American life. In 1929, under the rigorous editorial guidance of Maxwell Perkins, he published his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel. After the appearance of its sequel, Of Time and the River (1935), he broke with Perkins and signed a contract with Harper & Brothers. Wolfe died at thirty-eight, from complications following pneumonia. Harper & Brothers arranged, from the material left at his death, two novels-The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can’t Go Home Again (1940)-and a volume of stories and fragments, The Hills Beyond (1941). Wolfe’s other publications include From Death to Morning (1935), a collection of short stories; and The Story of a Novel (1936) a record of how he wrote his second book. I found inspiration in all his books.

Another author who had a great influence on me is Jack London, and he too, like Thomas Wolfe, died at a young age, forty-one, but he did manage to tum out fifty-five novels in less than twenty years. London was a self-made writer, and there’s no question about it-he wrote for money. He wanted a yacht to sail the South Sea, and he wanted a big house and the finest horse and carriage money could buy, and he got everything he wanted, by working hard at his writing. He had to tum out books to

pay for his toys, but one thing you cannot say about Jack London is that he was a hack writer. He put his full, ear• nest effort into his work. He labored over every word no matter how hard his creditors pounded on his door. He wrote from the heart.

London had very little formal education and taught himself to write by emulating the masters. He tells it all in his semi-autobiographical novel, Martin Eden. As I mentioned previously, when I first read The Cruise of the Snark as a kid on the farm, I was enraptured. After I had built my schooner Third Sea and was in Hawaii planning my voyage to the South Seas, I had in mind to sail from Hawaii to the Marquesas which I did. London had influenced me and I didn’t even know it. This is what I meant when I said when you read a book it becomes a part of you.

For books about the sea, there is no master like Joseph Conrad. People like to compare him to Somerset Maugham. There is no comparison. Maugham was a master at vivifying those people he met on his travels, civil servants and district officers, snobs and high society socialites. But when it came to capturing the feeling of the sea, he fell short. Perhaps because when he sailed the seas, it was aboard ocean liners upon which he spent his leisure at the bar or else reclining in a deck chair. Conrad served as a seaman before the mast, and you can feel it when you read his seafaring books-Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, and certainly Lord Jim. In my opinion, Lord Jim is his finest novel. I never tire of re-reading it.

Another great master writer of the sea was Herman Melville. Like Conrad, he was a seaman who served before the mast. Imagine the impact his novel Moby Dick had on me when I read the book while laying on a cabin top aboard a trading schooner sailing the Pacific. Had a whale appeared, I would have been first to jump into a longboat and go after him with a harpoon in hand.

I hold two other Melville books to be equally as important as Moby Dick, especially for those interested in the history of the Pacific. One is his fictionalized travel narrative called Typee. It’s an account of his stay with cannibals in the Marquesas Islands. Another is his sequel to Typee, one titled Omoo, based on his adventures in the Polynesian Islands. It’s an excellent account of early Tahiti when the island was still in the hands of the British before the crown sold out to the French. Few people, I imagine, have read Omoo.

I enjoy most seeking out and delving into the works of forgotten writers of the South Pacific. One such writer was Louis Beck. He penned some wonderful short stories that are right up there with the classics. Another is Captain James Cook, not that he’s forgotten, but few people ever read Narrative of the Voyages Round the World in six volumes. Voyages are helpful for the writer interested in history. I use these well-worn books of mine for references. The writing is archaic but the descriptions of the islands and the people are excellent. If you want to know what the natives ate and how they dressed, or didn’t dress, two hundred years ago these are the books. Also from the pages of Narrative I found some reference which changed my entire thinking about the migration of the Pacific islanders. In the text, they appear a in significant references but they pack a wallop.

A writer of Pacific lore who truly captured my heart was Robert Dean Frisbie. An American, Frisbie moved to Puka Puka atoll in the remote Cook Islands in 1924 to become a storekeeper and to seek isolation from his post-World War I trauma. I often wonder what he might think of our civilization were he alive today. Nevertheless, his island Puka Puka is still very remote and difficult to reach, even in our modem day. Frisbie fell in love with an island girl, married her, and they had three children. His wife died while she was still in her teens and, refusing to abandon his children, he raised them alone. He turned to writing and immortalized Puka Puka in his books The Book of Puka Puka and The Island of Desire.

I learned about Frisbie when I read James Michener’s Return to Paradise. After reading about this incredible guy, I had to find his books. When I did, it was a great discovery. The Book of Puka Puka is one of my favorite books. Amazon.com has original copies for sale starting at $1,500. Frisbie’s daughter, Johnny Whiskey Frisbie, has written a delightful book about growing up in the islands with her father. It’s a book packed with emotion and feeling.

When I launched my schooner Third Sea and entered the Pacific, the two places I wanted to visit were Puka Puka and Suvarov. Puka Puka was where Frisbie fell in love with his island sweetheart, and Suvarov was the island to which he fled with his children after his young wife had died. It was here in Suvarov that Frisbie and his children survived a full-blown hurricane by tying themselves in the high branches of an Ironwood tree. In Return to Paradise, Michener tells how he met Frisbie on Tongareva. Frisbie was dying of consumption. Michener managed to get him to a hospital in American Samoa by arranging passage for him aboard a Navy PBY seaplane.

I made Tongareva an island stop on several of my voyages across the Pacific. Captain Andy Thompson, the trading boat skipper who carried Frisbie to Puka Puka, had a wooden frame house on Tongareva where he lived part of the year during the hurricane season. The island has a safe, well-protected lagoon from tropical storms, The islanders allowed me to enter Andy’s house, and still on shelves was Andy’s vast collection of books, many autographed by James Hall and James Nordoff. There was one, autographed, by Robert Dean Frisbie, The Book of Puka Puka. The tragedy was the next time I went to Tongareva, years later, I found all Andy’s books in ruin, eaten by white ants.

One writer whose books have truly captured the South Pacific is James Michener. During his lifetime his novels sold an estimated 75 million copies worldwide. He had but two literary awards. In 1948, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Tales of the South Pacific, and on January 10, 1977, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Gerald R. Ford. No Nobel, but his books on the South Pacific are some of the finest books ever written on the Pacific. I read his Return to Paradise and I realized no one can ever write an equal. I feel much the same when I read his Tales of the South Pacific, and see the movie South Pacific. I never tire of seeing the movie over and over. Michener captured the heart and very soul of the Pacific. Earlier, I mentioned his novel Hawaii. It is a masterpiece and is so well written that it documents the history of the Pacific islanders. It has been taken for gospel.

When it comes down to reading, I am reminded of Winston Churchill’s comment: “The most common form of diversion is reading. In that vast and varied field millions find their mental comfort.”

It is the duty of writers, indeed, to give people that comfort.

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Chapter 11B
THE IMPORTANCE OF READING
Learning Never Stops

In Paris, I had another wakening. My education was slow and painful. From security guard I was assigned to be the orderly for Ambassador Jefferson Caffery. From this experience, years later, I wrote a novel The Tower & The River. Although it was fiction some of it was based on my acquaintance with the ambassador. During lulls in the business day, when life for Ambassador Caffery became boring, he would call me into his office and have his secretary bring us coffee, which she wasn’t too happy doing. Nevertheless, she did as ordered. I was the ambassador’s kind of sounding board. He wanted to know what was happening around Paris. He wanted to know where I hung out at night and on weekends, the bars I visited, the restaurants where I ate. He wanted to know about the people I met, the women I dated. I realized he was living vicariously through me. I told him about a Paris he was no longer a part of, nor could ever be again. Aside from being his orderly, I served as his bodyguard when he traveled. We made frequent trips around France. One such trip was a visit to the American Consulate in Cannes. With time to spare, the ambassador wanted to visit the old medieval castle at Aigues-Mortes, We went by embassy car. While there, we had dinner in a dusty restaurant in the basement of the castle. The pleased management, happy to have the American Ambassador dine in their restaurant, brought some very fine and rare bottles of Cognac from the wine cellar. Unfortunately in those years I didn’t have what you might call an “educated palate” and, like a good Marine, drank imply to be sociable. Beer and whisky were the same. Wine was either for winos or snobs. But this time with the ambassador, I held my own, drinking like a connoisseur. On about our fifth glass of Cognac, the ambassador looked at me and said, “Stephens, are you happy with your work?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “This is an honor.”

He looked at me eye-to-eye directly across the table.

“Hogwash,” he said, and I was speechless for a moment. He then continued, and what he now had to say really baffled me: “Would you not like to be me?”

What could I say? I was a sergeant in the US Marines, and he was the American ambassador to France, hardly equal peers. I smiled. Maybe he just had too many Cognacs. He continued: “The only thing that separates you from me is education.” He said little more after that, but he did have something in mind.

When we returned to Paris, Ambassador Caffery relieved me of most of my duties so that I could go to school. I took classes at the Sorbonne-French history and literature. Fortunately, in those days, there were so many GI’s going to school on the “GI Bill,” wearing their old field jackets with division patches on the sleeves and still wearing their clodhopper military boots, many classes were held in English. When I returned to America after my tour of duty in Paris, Ambassador Caffery got me an appointment to the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He went on to be the U.S. Ambassador to Greece. Ironic, but again, this was another missed opportunity on my part. I did little to learn who this man was. Not so long ago a biographer, Kevin McCarthy, contacted me asking information about Jefferson Caffery. Kevin was writing a biography about Ambassador Caffery. Only when Kevin passed on bits of information to me did I realize what a great illustrious man Jefferson Caffery had been. Things that I had forgotten about him came back when the writer began probing me for information. I began to recall the ambassador explaining to me about the beauty of French architecture, and he would actually have the chauffeur stop the car to point out a particular facade on a building which he found interesting. Then there were the interesting anecdotes, like when he was a student in Paris in 1908, before automobiles, and to get around he had to travel by horse and carriage. Carriage drivers had to stop often, as required by law, to pick up their horse’s droppings. How much he could have told me had I listened.

At Georgetown, required reading were the classics like The Education of Henry Adams and George Orwell’s 1984. But my serious reading came after I graduated. I frown when I hear a college student saying he or she can’t wait until they graduate, when their studies will come to an end. What foolish thinking. Real studies, I learned, begin after college. I got through Georgetown in a record breaking two-and-a-half years by going to both day and night school. But my education was only beginning. College taught me what I had yet to learn. For a while after graduating, I took a job teaching at a junior college, which I enjoyed as the school had a great library with shelves of books from floor to ceiling.

I could do a lot of on-the-job reading. But as much as I liked my teaching job, I had been groomed for a career in the Foreign Service, and I was compelled to quit teaching and take up a government job in Washington. With my experience in China and my working with the American ambassador in Paris, I was assigned to the National Security Agency. This was not what I wanted in life-working behind closed doors, sealed off from the world, bound to a badge hanging on a chain around my neck. It was a prison badge with a mug shot and even a number like a condemned man gets when he goes to prison. More than losing my freedom, my desire to write burned strong, and it grew stronger every day. I had to break free, to get away. My wife agreed to a divorce, and I went to Tahiti to live and become a writer. I made sure there would be no turning back. I burned every bridge behind me. Tahiti was about as far away as I could get.

That was before Tahiti had an airport. Those who did arrive by air back then did so by flying boat, those wonderful old China Clippers, but not everyone could afford the fare. The other choice was to travel by freighter or by deck passage on a cargo boat. Having little money, I took a bus down through Central America to Panama and there boarded a Messagerie Maritime ship for passage across the Pacific to Tahiti. What a grand feeling. Here was the South Seas at last. Here was Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, Nordoff and Hall, all coming alive. I no longer had a prison badge, nor like Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, an albatross around my neck. Now all I had to do was write, and read, read what I wanted to read, and read for as long as I wanted to read. I carried my Hermes typewriter, a camera, and for my reading pleasure, one hundred paperback books, all classics. To cut down weight, I tore off their covers.

As mentioned, a long time ago, I made the discovery that everything I wanted to know I could find in books. When I was a kid, I wanted to raise rabbits. I found a book in the library on raising rabbits, with everything from the size of a cage that was needed to rabbits’ mating habits. I found books on how to make bows and arrows, how to build an adobe house and how to skin an opossum without destroying the skin.

When I began building my schooner, a mammoth endeavor, the vessel being more than seventy-feet long it was books that got me through it. People would ask, rather sarcastically, “What do you know about building boats?”

My answer was simple-“I can read.”

Everything I needed to know was there somewhere in print. All I had to do was find it. Even information about such obscure and complicated things like dolphin strikers, whisker booms and futtock shrouds was available in books. Indeed, had I wanted to build a rocket to the moon, the information was there somewhere in books.

The reading has never stopped. When I built my schooner Third Sea I set up a library aboard with five hundred books, all references, histories and, of course, the classics from Stevenson to London. On one of my later Pacific crossings I signed aboard my nephew, Robert Stedman, as first mate. Robert had sailed the Pacific with me on a previous voyage, and now when he wrote to me and said he was dissatisfied with college, tired of debts and bills, tired of working for Saks Fifth Avenue in the men’s department selling neckties and shirts to get him through college, I cabled him stating that I needed a good first mate for the voyage from Hawaii to Tahiti and across the Pacific to Singapore. I didn’t have to ask him twice. He joined me aboard Third Sea a few days later in Honolulu, after selling his car and everything else he could sell, and after bidding his girlfriend goodbye. In the next nine months he read eighty-six books in the ship’s library, more than he ever would have read in college and even in graduate school. He got into the reading habit and now goes through a book or two a week. After the voyage, he turned to photography and writing and has a design studio in Singapore. He wrote a wonderful introduction to my book The Last Voyage, The Story of Schooner Third Sea.

I love going to libraries. I like to browse about, taking down book from the shelves, contemplating their contents before I even open their covers. What mystery, what store of knowledge do these books hold? Here on these shelves is all the wisdom of the human race, preserved forever in the written word. I scan the authors-historians, poets, philosophers, saints, scags, scientists, all whose thoughts dominate mind and spirit. I think of all the wonderful tales that these books have revealed to us, and all the wonderful tales there are yet to tell. As I stand in the library, looking up at the rows of books on shelves, I know I cannot read them all, that is for certain, and so I put them back on the shelves. Perhaps I don’t know what is in them, but I at least know where they are. I don’t get the same feeling when I look at a computer as I do when I look at a shelf of books in a library.

When it comes to reading, the question is what to read. What authors make the best teachers? I know some people who read voluminously, which we might think is admirable, but that’s not necessarily so. If these people read trash, then they have nothing to gain. Why read junk when there is so much good stuff available? Why read Valley of the Dolls when it could be The Great Gatsby? When getting into the reading habit, it’s just as easy to read good books, the great books, as it is to read dime novels.

Good reading training begins with short stories. Much can be gleaned from short stories. For a start, consider O. Henry. He was a prolific American short-story writer, a master of surprise endings. O. Henry was the pen name for William Sydney Porter. He was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, but he wrote mostly about New York City and life in the big city. One another marvelous short story writer that should not be by passed is Guy de Maupassant, a French author who is generally considered the greatest French short story writer of all time. Try to think up a plot for a short story with a surprising end in and you will probably find it comes from one of these two authors.

l will venture to say one of the greatest short stories ever written was “The Lottery” by American author Shirley Jackson. It’s been voted as one of the Twenty Great American Short Stories in the Library of American Literary Classics. “The Lottery” is a dark, unforgettable tale of the unthinking and murderous customs of a small New England town. Shirley Jackson is also the author of several American gothic novels such as We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House. Her atmospheric stories explore themes of psychological turmoil, isolation, and the inequity of fate.

At a very young age, I discovered William Saroyan. I liked his writing, and I liked the man for what he stood for. He wrote novels, plays, essays, short stories, biographies, everything. He is most famous for The Daring Young Man On The Flying Trapeze, The Human Comedy and The Time Of Your Life. I especially liked his short story about a boy who had never driven a car in his life but who took on the task of chauffeuring a car for a rich Cibawa Indian. For those who want to study dialogue, Saroyan is the author. Through dialogue alone he could move a story. In some stories, he ended each line of dialogue with “he said” or “she said.” He never used adjectives, only nouns and verbs. He was a master of style.

William Saroyan was more than a writer. He should serve as an inspiration to aspiring writers everywhere. He decided at the age of fifteen to become a writer, and he taught himself to write. He began by reading, and he learned to write entirely on his own. A few of his early short articles were published in The Overland Monthly. Many of his stories were based on his childhood experiences among the Armenian-American fruit growers of the San Joaquin Valley of central California, or else they dealt with the rootlessness of the immigrant. The short story collection My Name is Aram, an international best-seller, was about a young boy, Aram Garoghlanian, and the colorful characters of his immigrant family. Written years ago, I find it appropriate for today’s readers.

As a writer, Saroyan made his breakthrough in Story magazine with The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze. The protagonist is a young, starving writer who tries to survive in a Depression-ridden society.

Among Saroyan’s best-known plays is The Time of Your Life, set in a waterfront saloon in San Francisco. It won a Pulitzer Prize. Saroyan refused the honor on the grounds that commerce should not judge the arts, but he accepted the New York Drama Critics Circle award. In 1948, the play was adapted into a film starring James Cagney.

Saroyan also published essays and memoirs in which he depicted the people he had met on travels in the Soviet Union and Europe, such as the playwright George Bernard Shaw, the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, and Charlie Chaplin. During World War II Saroyan joined the U.S. Army. He was stationed in Astoria, Queens, but he spent much of his time at the Lombardy Hotel in Manhattan, far from Army personnel. In 1942, he was posted to London as a part of a film unit and narrowly avoided a court martial when his novel, The Adventures of Wesley Jackson (1946) turned out to be pacifist. “Everybody has got to die,” he had said, “but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.” Of all forms of writing-novels, essays, poetry, biographies, histories, short stories-I like writing short stories the best. There is more truth that I can write in short stories than I can in novels and certainly in biographies. Plots run wild though a writer’s mind continuously, or at least mine, and most of them come from real life experiences, I had no sooner completed Tales From the Pacific Rim, tales which I had begun gathering for ten years, than I began plotting my next collection from my every day thoughts. Sometimes I feel like Walter Mitty. Remember him, Walter Mitty, the fictional character in James Thurber’s short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”? Walter goes through life in deep thought, to the annoyance of his wife, with his vivid fantasies. He imagines himself a wartime pilot, an emergency-room surgeon, and a devil-may-care killer. Unfortunately, the character’s name has come into more general use to refer to an ineffectual dreamer, and I hope I haven’t slipped into the same category. Nevertheless, dreaming is what creates writing. And I repeat, without dreaming, we wouldn’t have writing.

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Chapter 11A
THE IMPORTANCE OF READING
Start Early at Home

I had a sister four years older than me, and she was a genius. She could talk to animals. She had regular conversations with them, and she had them give answers to all the questions that I, an eight-year old wide-eyed boy, had to ask. Aside from being able to talk to animals, I marveled that she knew how to speak French and Spanish and she could communicate with witches and elves. She read to me every day, and I listened to her, and I believed her. What a marvelous advantage to have an older sister, or brother, who reads to you and turns you on to books and the mysteries of the written word.

At a very young age I found that a book is like food. You read it, you devour it, and it becomes part of your body. The contents become you, flesh, ‘bones and cells. It affects you in more than one way. It becomes part of every pore in your body. You can’t shake what you read. You can read something else, however, that may conflict with what you read earlier, something you wholly believed, but nevertheless that original thought remains there forever. As a kid, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ books did that to me. I read his Tarzan of the Apes, and I was hooked. The story became real to me, and no one could say it wasn’t so. After reading the first book in the series, I devoured every one that followed-The Return of Tarzan, The Beasts of Tarzan, Tarzan the Untamed, Tarzan and The Forbidden City, The Son of Tarzan and a dozen more. I tried to imagine the life of a boy growing up in the jungle, with only apes and wild beasts for friends to guide him. I built tree houses and made swings of vines. But I was discovering that Edgar Rice Burroughs’ books were more than fantasy. They were a study of anthropology, of human nature. Edgar Rice Burrough has stayed with me all my life.

The book Tarzan of the Apes may sound simple, even juvenile, but as a young lad, it fired up my mind and got me thinking. Still, I had to hide the fact from my peers that I was reading Tarzan. Many looked upon Tarzan as a comic book hero. But for me, he took on a real meaning. Could a boy raised by apes ever learn to walk on two feet? Even more uncertain, although he could talk with the apes, could he talk like a human being? Tarzan could. How did this happen? We have to understand his background. The ship that carried Tarzan’s mother and father was shipwrecked on the coast of Africa. His father was Lord Greystoke, and his wife was expecting a child, thus they were carrying children’s books and learners. Lord Greystoke and his wife were the sole survivors, and they were able to salvage much of their belongs. As castaways, Lord Greystoke built a cabin at the edge of the jungle. It was there that Tarzan was born. But his mother died in childbirth, and great apes that came upon the site killed his father. The apes carried the infant boy off into the jungle and raised him. When he was still a boy swinging through the trees be discovered his dead parent’s cabin and by studying the pictures in the books he taught himself to read and write. Was this possible, especially when he couldn’t talk? It was all so intriguing, and great food for thought. Today, I can’t look at a tree without thinking about a child swinging through its branches who could read and write but not talk.

Learning how to write without having read books would be like wanting to be a jockey in the Kentucky Derby and not knowing how to ride a horse or joining the high school swim team and not knowing how to swim. Wanting to write without reading is the same; they go hand in hand. A student can have the best teachers in the world, and study at the finest university, but unless he or she reads, it’s pointless to continue dreaming.

My sister kept the fire for reading burning even after I left home. When I was in the Marines serving overseas in the Pacific, she sent me books to read about the Pacific by Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London. When she learned I was on my way to China, she sent appropriate ones, Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth and several of the works of a Chinese writer/scholar named Lin Yutang. By getting me to read Lin Yutang, my sister developed my interest in philosophy. Lin Yutang, as did Pearl Buck, opened doors for me, and when I arrived in China with the Marines, I knew something about the country, the people, their habits and customs and their religion.

Books can do everything. I was always interested in sailing, even long before I ever saw the sea. In the libraries I found books on sailing. I read one book about three brothers who had a schooner and sailed the South Seas, and I longed to do the same. I vowed that I would one day, and then when I read Jack London’s Cruise of the Snark, I knew it was possible. London taught himself to sail. I could do the same. And later in life I did. These were wild ideas for a kid on a farm far from the sea, but without ideas, hopes and dreams, what do we have? Take away a man’s dreams and he becomes like an albatross without wings, a life without goals.

My reading in earnest began in Paris. After I returned to the States from China, and fearing the outside world, I signed up for another hitch in the Marines. The Marine Corps made a mistake, however. Instead of assigning me to a naval base or sending me to shipboard for duty, they shipped me to Paris as a security guard. Take the farm boy to Paris and things will happen. For me, it was my growing up period, my awakening. I went there as a young Marine, fresh from the battlefields of the Pacific. I was innocent. I always wanted to be a writer, that was true, but I had no idea where to begin. Like I said, I wanted to join the swim team, but I couldn’t swim. My education was limited, a ninth grade high school dropout. Now, like a miraculous flower opening up, Paris’ doors of learning opened up to me. It was exposure to the arts and the people who created them that did it. My awakening came when I met an old Marine Corps buddy from boot camp. His name was Van Beverly, and he was studying painting. A rough, tough former Marine studying to be an artist! Was he serious? He was most serious. He introduced me to the student world on the Left Bank. I saw what art meant to students who were serious. The lack of money was no hindrance to them, and I envied them.

Paris after the war was a great place to grow up. The unfortunate tragedy, and it didn’t became apparent until years later, was that I didn’t realize at the time how much was slipping through my fingers. I remember going into Harry’s New York bar one evening with another Marine from the embassy, Jack Walters. There was a bearded guy sitting at a table at the back of the bar. “Who’s he?” I asked.

“Oh, he’s some writer I suppose,” Jack replied.

The bartender spoke up. “He’s Ernest Hemingway. You don’t know him?”

“Yea, I heard the name,” Jack said, lying.

Andy, Harry’s son and bartender, pointed out other characters in the bar. Sitting in a booth in a comer was a Frenchman with thick glasses. “And who’s he?” we asked.

“Jean Paul Sartre, a philosopher and literary genius,” Andy answered.

And there were others, so many more, and I had the chance of meeting them but I didn’t.

As the years passed, and I got to know Andy better, we often joked about those days. And later, in Spain, I did get to meet Hemingway.

As I think back now, there was all this exposure I had in Paris, and I took little advantage of it. There was another writer, however, who didn’t pass up the opportunity of living in Paris. He, too, was a former Marine who had fought in the Pacific. His name was Art Buchwald. He was kind of loud and boisterous but a likeable sort of guy. It was fun being around him. You knew when he was coming through the door at Harry’s Bar even before you looked. He entered with a bang, a grin on his face and a joke ready to be told. He was the kind of guy that when he told a joke, you laughed even before he had finished it.

That was a long time ago, when the world was much different. Parisians then rode to their offices on bicycles, and they had yet to patch up the bullet holes in the Hotel de Crillon next to the American Embassy on the Place de la Concorde. The year was 1949, and the war was over, and we were all part of the grand experience of living in Paris, living in a nameless era between the Lost Generation (Paris in the ’20s) and the Beat Generation (Greenwich Village and Haight-Ashbury in the ’60s.)

I had met Art earlier that year at a dinner party at the home of Leonard Thornton, the district manager of TWA in Paris. Art was a humorist even then and kept everyone at dinner laughing with his antics. I have to admit, I envied him, for he had already launched his writing career in Paris with the Night Owl column while I only had hopes of becoming a writer. The difference was Art knew what he wanted, and went after it. At seventeen, Art had run away to join the Marine Corps and spent three-and-a-half years in the Pacific during World War II, attaining the rank of sergeant. After his discharge he entered the University of Southern California but dropped out in 1948 and went to France, where he landed a job as a correspondent for Variety just as his money was running out. A year later, when I met him, he began writing a column on speculation for The Paris Herald Tribune called “Paris After Dark.” It was an overnight success, and the Tribune hired him full time. Art Buchwald had made it, and we were all thrilled.

Now, with his name behind him, it was fun doing the haunts of Paris while he gathered bits and pieces for his column. There wasn’t a dive we didn’t know nor a jazz joint that passed our scrutiny. Then in 1951, Art started another column, “Mostly About People,” that featured interviews with celebrities in Paris. He was moving up the ladder. The next year, Paris Herald Tribune introduced him to U.S. readers through yet another column, “Europe’s Lighter Side.”

Paris in those day was good training ground for writers and artists, and Art was a part of it all. I regret I didn’t take more advantage of the times. The city was a magnet for Picasso, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Orwell, Hemingway and many more of the illuminati. As I mentioned, at Harry’s you could find Ernest Hemingway sitting on a stool and, if you found a seat next to him, he took the time to chat with you. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir sat in a corner, more standoff, but James Jones at the bar willingly talked about his latest chapter in From Here to Eternity. They all became Art Buchwald’s fraternity and they knew him by first name.

Art returned to the United States in 1962, and our two worlds parted. I put my writing on hold and started college. I met Art once at a party in Washington, D.C. at the home of the Travel Editor of the Washington Post, but that was the last time. But I could never forget him. He arrived in Washington at the height of the Kennedy administration, set himself up in an office two blocks from the White House and began a long career lampooning Washington’s elite.

Buchwald was a humorist to the end. He died of kidney failure at home, surrounded by family, nearly a year after he stunned them by rejecting medical treatments aimed at keeping him alive. He had been told by his doctors that his end was near. One would have to admit, he made the most of every last minute of his life. Instead of dying, he resumed his twice-weekly column and wrote Too Soon to Say Goodbye, a book about the experience. He worked book-signing parties in Washington and New York from his wheelchair.

Art lived another year and was eighty-one when he died. Paris, and certainly Washington, will never be the same without him. He was an inspiration for anyone who wants to write. We thought he was crazy when he gave up Paris, where he was known and respected, to move to Washington to start a new, uncertain career. But he knew what he wanted, and he went for it.

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Chapter 10C
The Price of Plagiarism

The price writers pay for deceiving and plagiarizing, and they pay sooner or later, is heavy. Kaavya Viswanathan knows. A teenage author, she made the best-selling list with her book How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, published by Little, Brown and Co, which signed her to a hefty two-book deal. Viswanathan’s book tells the story of Opal, a hard-driving teen who earns all A’s in high school but gets rejected from Harvard because she lacked social life, an INY League college prerequisite. The book was on the stands when Harvard Crimson reported Viswanathan’s book had similarities, citing seven passages, with Sloppy Firsts, a novel that Random House had published, written by Megan McCafferty, a former editor at Cosmopolitan and the author of two other novels.

When confronted with her misdeed, the seventeen year-old author created a plagiarizing storm when she admitted she had borrowed ‘language’ for her best-selling book, but that it was “unintentional and unconscious,” according to the New York Times. She said she had read books by Megan McCafferty who writes youth-oriented literature and is quite popular in high schools.

Vanessa Juarez of Entertainment Weekly posed the question: don’t publishers check facts? She called her article “Joining the Liar’s Club,” and she was writing about Margaret B Jones, the latest memoirist to be ousted as a fraud. In Love and Consequences Jones claimed to be a half-white, half-Native American girl who grew up in South Central LA running drugs for the Bloods. Her real name is Margaret Seltzer, and she went to an elite private school in North Hollywood. When Vanessa began querying publishers, Riverhead Books, the publisher of In Love and Consequences, declined to comment, but noted in a press release that it “relies on authors to tell us the truth.”

As a rule in the publishing business, all nonfiction authors sign contracts vouching their books are accurate, and books flagged as potentially libelous get legal vetting. But there’s more to it than said. Little, Brown and Company Editor-in-chief Geoff Shandler claims, “No publisher has the financial resources to mount a massive investigation of every single book before publication.” But another top industry executive says of Seltzer,: “Publishers, regardless still, have the responsibility for what they print.”

I am beginning to wonder about the public fascination for memoirs. Is it not the same for the popular TV reality shows. Both, it seems, allow us to peek into other people’s lives for the sole purpose of being entertained.

So why do writers steal? Other than being just plain lazy, we may have a deadline to keep and the pressure is on. We become desperate. Our editor is waiting. It happens. We snitch a story, or parts of one, which someone else had written and pass it on as yours. There is no excuse, but it happens. Let me confess what happened to me. As I said, it can happen to any of us.

I had just begun writing for Thai Airways as their travel correspondent, It was my first assignment and an important one. The airline was opening an international route to Bali. The management sent me ahead to write a series of six promotional stories on the island. I had to travel overland across Java and then take a ferry across a narrow and turbulent strait to reach Bali. It was a tough trip, but I was there when the first Thai Airways jet liner landed. It was an exciting moment. The airstrip then was quite short, and to insure a jet would stop in time, the pilot popped a parachute out the stern to bring the plane to a halt. I couldn’t write about that of course, but I did write about the culture, the arts, the music, the dance and anything else that would tell the public about this hardly known island. After a month, I returned to Bangkok, quite pleased with my results. “But you didn’t write anything about stone carving. Stone carving is very important ” the assistant to the assistant director in advertising said’. No one had told me I should write about stone carving, but I learned way back then you don’t argue with the one giving the assignments.

“Never mind,” I said. “I have the material, and I’ll write about it.”

But I didn’t have the material. I had to do something.

I began my research and uncovered a travel article about Bali with a few paragraphs the author wrote on the art of stone carving. Not much, just a couple of paragraphs. Who would ever know? So I borrowed. I wrote how the stones of Bali are soft and easily malleable, and I told how these pieces of art were made. It was a good piece.

Bali became a big commercial hit for Thai Airways, and the management ran my six stories on the arts of Bali in media around the world. I never expected them to have the worldwide exposure they did. Everyone was reading about Bali, and I was the expert. More assignments came, including stories on stone carving. I cringed at the thought of what might happen had I been caught. But a year passed, quietly, and then the next, and it was forgotten, or so I thought.

Three years after the articles appeared, Thai Airways opened the first flight to Kathmandu, and travel writers from around the world were invited. A big reception was held at the Dusit Thani Hotel on the comer of Silom Road in Bangkok. Everyone of importance was there-Thai Airways management from the home office, magazine editors, the press, radio and TV. And there was someone else. I had never met him, but when his name was mentioned, I immediately remembered-the writer from whom I had “borrowed” my stone cutting story.

I tried to avoid him, moving around from one group to another, trying to avoid even his stare. But my meeting with him was inevitable. It happened when the Public Relations Director at Thai Airways, Mrs. Chittdee, saw me standing in the background and called me over. With her were a few writers, including Mr. X from Los Angeles Times. Mrs. Chittdee introduced me to everyone. I knew I was as good as dead when my name was mentioned. I saw the look on Mr. X’s face suddenly change. I was in for trouble. My writing career was over, finished, ended because of one miserable story on stone carving on Bali. And sure enough, Mr. X said, “I want to talk to you.” Perhaps I was saved. He was sparing me from public disgrace. We excused ourselves from Mrs. Chittdee and the others and headed to a far, secluded comer of the conference hall. I was preparing in my mind what I would tell him. I would make a clean confession and appeal to his sympathy. He spoke first, before I could begin.

“Look,” he began, “I wanted to talk to you. I have felt baldly about this for a long time.”

He felt badly. What was he talking about, that he felt badly? I was the one who felt terrible. I was about to interrupt him, but it was most fortunate that I didn’t.

“I am sorry, for you see, I was rather in a hurry, and I had to borrow some of your writing.” I wanted to say ‘my writing’ but I held out. He continued. “I had to get the copy in, and I used your work on stone carving on Bali and I have never done that before, I feel terrible.”

I couldn’t believe it. He had stolen the text from some place he couldn’t remember and, when he saw my story in print, he thought it was mine. He asked if I would forgive him.

“Don’t worry, I said. “I won’t tell a soul.” And I never did, until now that is.

Plagiarism can be a little more complicated than meet the eye. What happens when you steal from yourself? It happened to me. An in-flight magazine in Hong Kong wanted a story on the Hill Stations in Malaysia. The editor was rushed and asked how soon could I get a story in. A week later, he had my story, and a few days after that came a letter accusing me of plagiarism. The editor was really nasty. He didn’t want me to ever write for him again. What had gone wrong?

When publisher Hans Hoefer began his new series of Insight Guides, his first guide on Bali was highly successful. He asked me to write the second guide on Malaysia. I never realized how difficult and time-consuming writing guides to a country could be. Hans and I covered every mile of road in Malaysia, every beach and resort, and we even traveled deep into the Jungle on expeditions with the game department. One section I covered was on the Hill Stations. I did a great deal of research, even into source material written by the Englishmen-Fraser and Maxwell-who founded two of the stations. I spent long hours crafting the script, and I was rather proud of the writing when it was completed.

Now back to the in-flight magazine in Hong Kong. When I sat down to write the article for the editor on the Hill Stations of Malaysia, the words flowed from my typewriter. They came naturally and easily. When we write history and anecdotes from the past, they do not change. History is constant. In doing the piece for the Hong Kong editor, I checked with some of the new hotels and accommodations and restaurants from the Tourist office in Bangkok, entered them into the text and sent the story off with all my historical background included. The editor sent the script back to me, and accused me of palatalizing. Am I guilty or not? Can a writer steal from himself? That was years ago, and I have never been invited to write for the magazine again.

But what happens when others steal from you?

When I wrote Malaysia, the second guidebook in the series, I spent hours on the text about the Malay jungle. I made up catch phrases like “the jungles of Africa and South America are adolescent in comparison to the Malay jungle.” Since then, I have seen that phrase in print, taken by other writers, a dozen or more times. What is disheartening is when someone reads the section on the jungle in the guidebook I had written, and they say “Oh, I read that somewhere before.” Do I tell them it is mine? Hardly. They wouldn’t believe it anyway-just our grapes they’d say.

Something else that is disheartening is when someone calls your writing a work of fiction when it is not. Editor Tony Waltham at the Bangkok Post began a section called “Sunday Magazine” and commissioned me to write a weekly piece for the magazine on any subject I wanted. Those are fun stories to do, and I put a lot of effort and time into them. Much of what I wrote was far out. I wrote about living in a haunted house in Delaware on the American East Coast, about how not to fire a cannon (I actually fired a real antique cannon for the story), and about an interview I did with a genuine pirate chieftain. There were stories about my meeting with a witch doctor in the Philippines, and other pieces about movie actors and actresses I had met and wrote about over the years-Marlon Brando, Burt Lancaster, James Mason, Mary Martin, and Bea Arthur, to mention a few. One day when I took my story in to Bangkok Post, Tony was off for the day, so I gave it to one of the sub editors to give to Tony. I made a casual remark when I handed it to him: “This sounds more like fiction than anything.” He looked up at me, and in a sober voice said, “Isn’t all the stuff you write fiction?” That came as a mighty hard blow, especially after I labored so hard to present stories as they really happened. I discovered, after that, many readers thought I was turning out fiction. I cringe at the thought of what readers might think after they read my collection of short stories in Tales From the Pacific Rim. I found I could tell the truth better when I wrote it as fiction.

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Chapter 10B
When and How Discovered

Let’s look at the facts. We read books that have been recommended based on the message they have to tell. We rely on the publishers, not necessarily book critics, to define the category that a book falls within and also the authenticity of the work.

Like everybody else, I go to the bookstore. I see a book I like. If it says memoir, I know here may be some names and dates changed, but I don’t expect it to be fiction, portrayed by the imagination of the author. I don’t like to be cheated. And with Frey the public was cheated. Winfrey hailed Frey’s graphic and coarse book as “like nothing you’ve ever read before.” She stayed up late at night reading it. In emotional filmed testimonials, employees of Winfrey’s show lauded the book as revelatory, with some choking back tears. Said damp-eyed Winfrey, “I’m crying ’cause we all loved the book so much.”

Frey’s deception was a masterpiece. His runaway hit sold more than three and a half million copies and, thanks to Winfrey, had made it to the top of the list of The New York Times nonfiction paperback bestsellers for fifteen weeks. Next to the latest Harry Potter title, Nielsen Book Scan reported, Frey’s book sold more copies in the U.S. in 2005-1.77 million-than any other title, with the majority of that total coming after Winfrey’s selection.

For Frey, the bubble burst when a website called “The Smoking Gun” announced his best-selling nonfiction memoir is filled with fabrications, falsehoods and other fakery. The Smoking Gun is a website which posts obscure or unreported legal documents, arrest records, and police mug shots on a routine basis. The intent is to bring to the public information which is damning and shocking.

I believe if you can’t tell the story faithfully, don’t tell it at all. We are bound by the rules of nonfiction, the first of which is: Tell the truth. When readers learn a work of nonfiction is partly fictional, they become angry. But a good writer can turn this situation around. When readers hear a work of fiction is autobiographical-that it has nonfiction elements-they get excited. They ask endless questions, demanding to know which parts of the novel are “real.” When Somerset Maugham published his collection of short stories, East Meets West on Southeast Asia, people tried to read themselves into the plots. With Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the author’s followers are still trying to discern who was who in the novel.

I found myself in a difficult predicament when I wrote Take China, The Last of the China Marines. The book is ninety-five percent factual, but I embellished parts of the ending to dramatize it. I had to call the book a novel which actually hurt sales. By calling my work nonfiction (which, strictly speaking, it is), I would be lying to readers when some sections were not factual. I also thought it best to change some names. A few readers, who in the beginning wanted to remain anonymous when they passed on information to me, came back and asked, “Why did you change my name?” It was too late. I went to my notebook and looked up lines from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam that I marked down years ago:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

It’s true, once you put something down in writing, it’s there forever. The truth will come out, eventually. It always does. How dreadful to be found out to be a fraud.

Frey’s memoir isn’t the first bit of fiction passed off as truth. Remember Jack Kelley at USA Today. Kelley was a long-time USA Today correspondent and nominee for the Pulitzer Prize. Then the truth became known that he had long been fabricating stories, going so far as to write up scripts so associates could pretend to be sources. I saw some of this happening when I was a war correspondent in Vietnam for the Bangkok World. I met reporters who never left the bars in Saigon. They got their information from the men in the field who came to Saigon for R&R. At least their source was generally accurate. At least they never claimed they were with the grunts in the field-Kelley did. Investigators sifted through stacks of hotel records to determine if Kelley was in the locations he claimed to be-Cuba, Israel, and Jordan. The scandal led to the resignations of several key staff at the newspaper, including editor Karen Jurgensen in April 2004.

An honest non-fiction writer holds to the belief that anything purporting to be non-fiction should be true. When he must change small details-such as names-he lets readers know. He spends hours interviewing people on both sides of the stories. He double-checks statistics. Such writers want to be right because they know trust is what carries readers along.

While James Frey may have hedged on the truth, writer Clifford Irving created what is perhaps the biggest literary hoax ever conceived, the unauthorized biography of Howard Hughes. Billionaire tycoon, aviator, playboy, eccentric and Hollywood legend Howard Hughes, who had turned hermit, was the subject of great intrigue in America and the world throughout most of his life. In his later years, during the late 1960s to mid-1970s, the mystery surrounding him intensified when he became a recluse and hid himself from the outside world for more than a decade.

The public, understandably, was hungry for information concerning Howard Hughes. Realizing what an opportunity this was, Clifford Irving set out to do what no one else had done, write his biography. He convinced his publisher, McGraw-Hill, that Howard Hughes commissioned him to write his biography. He said he would write the book based on interviews conducted with Howard. Clifford hopefully believed Howard Hughes was too ill to come forward and repudiate the book. Howard had not been seen publicly since 1958 and, as far as they knew, he could have even been dead. Clifford forged letters and legal documents allegedly written by Howard in order to make the deal appear even more genuine. He had obtained actual handwriting samples from various sources, which he used as a model for his own letter. McGraw-Hill executives were impressed. An agreement was signed, using a forged signature made by Clifford. The contract stated an advance of $500,000 would be paid, of which $100,000 would be paid up front. Clifford was to receive a total of $100,000, whereas the remaining $400,000 was allotted to Howard.

On top of that, Time-Life Magazine offered $250,000 for serial rights to the manuscript, and Dell Publishing Company offered a further $400,000 for paperback rights. But Howard Hughes wasn’t ill, or crazy, or dead, as some suspected. He was very much alive, and very much annoyed. On January 7, 1972, he spoke to the press via the telephone. It was the first time he spoke publicly in fourteen years. He announced his biography was a hoax.

The next day, Howard’s attorney, Chester Davis, filed suit against McGraw-Hill, Life, Clifford Irving and Dell Publishing Company, citing they had violated Howard’s right to publish his own autobiography. Howard had been pushed too far. He demanded his privacy, and he was not about to let Clifford or those who supported him interfere with his basic human rights.

In the meantime, Swiss police investigated a suspicious bank account under the name H.R. Hughes. Within a short period of time, over $750,000 passed through the private account only to be whittled away down to approximately $150. Clifford stood trial and was given a two-and-a-half-year jail sentence of which he served fourteen months. He is still writing books today. But it’s still not over as far as the public is concerned. Miramax Films has released The Hoax starring Richard Gere who plays Clifford Irving. I guess the saying applies when it comes to movies-”Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”

Editors are responsible for what their publications print. But even with big publishers, they can sometimes go astray. In April 1983, the popular West German magazine Stern made a shocking announcement that it was about to publish Adolf Hitler’s diaries. The magazine claimed sixty two handwritten volumes of secret diaries written by the founder of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler, had been discovered in East Germany. According to Charles Hamilton’s book, The Hitler Diaries, the volumes were reported to be one of the most significant historical discoveries in recent history.

The “priceless” diaries were said to have been discovered several years earlier by an East German who had learned the artifacts were in the possession of farmers living in the village of Boernersdorf. Apparently, they were rescued from a downed Nazi plane which had crashed and burned in April 1945. The documents were reported to have survived the inferno because they were supposedly protected in a metal-lined container. Following their discovery, it was stated the documents were kept in a secret location, then eventually smuggled out of the country and kept secured until they were publicly revealed to the world years later.

Historical accounts further supported the sensational story, which were based on the memoirs of Hitler’s chief SS pilot, Lt. General Hans Baur. Baur claimed the plane, piloted by Major Friedrich A. Gundlfinger was carrying Hitler’s private archives when it was shot down en route from Berlin in April 1945. The evidence was enough for some to believe the diaries were indeed genuine artifacts. However, time proved the manuscripts instead were one of the biggest hoaxes of the century. The price to be paid was that Stern magazine lost its credibility.

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