Describing his expatriated compatriots washed up in Calais (which, as any Chinese schoolchild can tell you, a traveller must have gone through off the Channel packet in her way from 19th-century London to Paris), Charles Dickens writes, "He met new groups of his countrymen, who had all a straggling air of having one time overblown themselves, like certain uncomfortable kinds of flowers, and of being now mere weeds. They had all an air, too, of lounging out a limited round, day after day . . . ."
There is a tranquil air in San Miguel, as in Calais, of Dickensian expats trying to fill in the blanks - elderly gentlemen sporting stringy ponytails, one spotted astride a $30,000 Harley, another driving through El Centro in a red '66 Mustang, convertible top down, two accountants in search of a character. One gets the impression that this is a place in which the preprandial cocktail hour creeps daily nearer the diurnal meridian in continual small increments.
What prompted this turn of mind was a snatch of conversation I heard on the street earlier that day. A pair of Americans came out of the midtown Starbucks and passed me on the sidewalk, the man advising the woman in impeccable Texas English, "Well, you can't kill 'em all off in the first book." Setting aside the prospect that he was speaking in tongues or metaphor, it was one of those vignettes that invites the normally healthy imagination to fill in the blanks, much like those schoolroom exercises in which we were given a picture and asked to write a story about it. The context is easy to imagine.
Are any words more dreaded on the afternoon cocktail circuit than, "I'm working on my first novel"? An authoress manque, a writer of mysteries (he did imply both that this was her first novel and that it will not be her last), arrived in an exotic locale for inspiration, local color, the invention that novelty and diminished inhibitions bring with it. After all, why not? Hemingway sitting in the Clos des Lilas writing For Whom the Bell Tolls has probably inspired more legions of the quasi-talented, the nearly-inspirable, the average, to attempt something similar in whatever dusty outpost is still remote enough to have just one Starbucks. I was in college with a fellow my own age who had in a previous incarnation taken up boxing, a la Hemingway and Norman Mailer, and gone off to a garret apartment in Paris to write a novel. The novel never appeared so far as I know, but one of the neighbors ate his cat, thereby giving him a brief tale to tell. Where would a novelist be without the neighbors, after all?
For Whom the Bell Tolls is all well and good, more than recompense for all those dishes of cafe a la creme and Pernods and Lord knows what else Hemingway drank in the extended act of creation. But I foresee, in San Miguel, the unheralded and largely unwanted emergence of an amateur Mexican sleuth of mysterious but undoubtedly aristocratic extraction, with a stable of thoroughbreds, a garage full of Hispano-Suizas, Alfa-Romeos and other suitably hyphenated pre-war autos, a cellar full of Clos de Veugeots '28 and Hermitages '37 (each bottle rescued from the chateaux of ex-Vichy collaborateurs), a humidor full of pre-Revolucion vintage Habanas, a bespoken five-star chef in residence at the hacienda, a vintage mahogany Chris-Craft runabout berthed at the marina - in short, all of the appurtenances requisite to the man of taste who wears his wealth lightly and never as a burden.
I could go on. Were I to go on, I'd have to write the whole bloody thing up and there would be another first novel. . .
. . . more to follow.
Are any words more dreaded on the afternoon cocktail circuit than, "I'm working on my first novel"? An authoress manque, a writer of mysteries (he did imply both that this was her first novel and that it will not be her last), arrived in an exotic locale for inspiration, local color, the invention that novelty and diminished inhibitions bring with it. After all, why not? Hemingway sitting in the Clos des Lilas writing For Whom the Bell Tolls has probably inspired more legions of the quasi-talented, the nearly-inspirable, the average, to attempt something similar in whatever dusty outpost is still remote enough to have just one Starbucks. I was in college with a fellow my own age who had in a previous incarnation taken up boxing, a la Hemingway and Norman Mailer, and gone off to a garret apartment in Paris to write a novel. The novel never appeared so far as I know, but one of the neighbors ate his cat, thereby giving him a brief tale to tell. Where would a novelist be without the neighbors, after all?
For Whom the Bell Tolls is all well and good, more than recompense for all those dishes of cafe a la creme and Pernods and Lord knows what else Hemingway drank in the extended act of creation. But I foresee, in San Miguel, the unheralded and largely unwanted emergence of an amateur Mexican sleuth of mysterious but undoubtedly aristocratic extraction, with a stable of thoroughbreds, a garage full of Hispano-Suizas, Alfa-Romeos and other suitably hyphenated pre-war autos, a cellar full of Clos de Veugeots '28 and Hermitages '37 (each bottle rescued from the chateaux of ex-Vichy collaborateurs), a humidor full of pre-Revolucion vintage Habanas, a bespoken five-star chef in residence at the hacienda, a vintage mahogany Chris-Craft runabout berthed at the marina - in short, all of the appurtenances requisite to the man of taste who wears his wealth lightly and never as a burden.
I could go on. Were I to go on, I'd have to write the whole bloody thing up and there would be another first novel. . .
. . . more to follow.
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