Trevanian's desk/Question and Answer Session - part III

Q:It seems clear that out of all the places you've been that Albany deeply imprinted itself on your soul. Why do you think that is so? Is Albany one of those last great places in your life experience?

A: The slums of Albany were certainly a potent and yeasty place for a sensitive kid to grow up in. Yes, I guess you could say that Albany imprinted itself on me deeply; but so did my splendid, mercurial, feisty mother, and so did the radio that I consumed so greedily throughout those golden years of broadcasting, and so were the books that were both aspirin and cure for despondency.

I have been told that Albany is now trying to preserve some of this emotional patina...indeed, I believe the school were I met learning for the first time from the crazy Miss Cox has been converted into a condominium. How do I feel about that? I'm not sure.

What was the Albany of the 30s like? It was ale, not beer; it was wool and corduroy, not silk and linen; it was Royal Crown Cola, not Coke; it was baked tunafish dish, not beef casserole; it was apples, not pears; it was sad and lovely...like a rainy night and the fading sound of an train whistle far down in the valley. It wasn't jazz or swing, it was the blues. (As a matter of fact, one of the working titles for the book was Those Pearl Street Blues.)

Other great places in my life have been the Basque Pyrenees, where I have lived for many years in a little house alone on a hillside looking across to the mountains. (Mendiburu means 'house on the crest of the hill' in Basque.) And there's Paris, where I met the woman of my life and wrote the second worst novel ever penned (I did the absolute worst the year before, in London).

A: Alas, yes, it’s coming to Europe as well and it’s a great pity. A lot of excellent new writers will never get read. This is hardest on the story-tellers of America, because writers of attractively-packaged fact and history are still doing fairly well, although even these readerships are dwindling, captured by the internet and by the electronic games that consume so much of the time of the kinds of kids who used to read history and science.

The shadow of ‘literary globalization’ is falling across all of western Europe, and will hit the English-writing countries first, as English is the language of commerce, and therefore it’s the foreign language of preference for the teeming populations whose five hundred word vocabularies limit them to language on a comic book level. Hence Barbara Cartland is still the most popular English language writer in India. And I’ve heard there is a similar dumbing-down impulse at home, where a series of children’s books by a very canny English writer is the most popular read on American campuses.

Trevanian