Fellow aficionado Lesley and I headed south on a backed-up 101 earlier this week in pursuit of one of today's most beloved literary luminaries, the bearded, bespectacled, corduroy-jacketed most affable, Anglophiled of Americans, Bill Bryson.
The last time Lesley and I were in an audience of Bryson fans was at Book Passage for his Short History of Nearly Everything release tour, back in 2003. It was standing room only at the back of the Book Passage, but that substantial crowd probably equated to no more than a couple hundred readerly folk.
I'd first heard Bryson read in person at Copperfields in Montgomery Village up in Santa Rosa, around 10 or 11 years ago, on my birthday. I recall that quite clearly, as, unless I had spun him a yarn, I had him sign my copy of his In a Sunburned Country "Happy Birthday".
Although popular here in the states, the type of middle-aged intellectual-cult following that turned out to hear him by the hundreds at a Dominican College Public Lecture, in well-heeled Marin County this week was way beyond the type of dedicated rank and file of Bryson's early readership.
Seated on the upper balcony at Domincan's classy, wood-paneled Angelico Concert Hall amidst a crowd of cashmere-clad lawyers and well-traveled types periodically checking muted iphones for updates from the childminders (so fascinating watching people try to pay undivided attention these days), we might have been at worship at the hearth of Dickens himself, so rapt we were with Bryson's fast-paced accounts of the background to his chosen passages from his various best selling books.
Notes from a Small Island served as my introduction to the author who, reportedly, despite not having actually succumbed to having become a British Citizen, has a better understanding than anyone I've ever read of being a dual national British American or American Brit, or whatever way around one considers oneself according to country of birth and which side of the pond is currently home.
Born in Des Moines, Iowa in 1951, the son of newspaper people (his Mom wrote home decor articles and his dad was a sports writer), Bryson fortuitously dropped out of university and backpacked around Europe for the first time in 1972. The following year he went back across the pond for more travels, landed a job in the UK, married a nice English nurse and brought his new bride back with him to the States to finish his degree.
Two years later, the Brysons were back in the north of Britain, where he began working as a journalist, later as chief copy editor of the business section of The Times and deputy national news editor of the business section of The Independent.
Three kids later, and before the couple's fourth child was born, Bryson bravely ditched the newspapers in pursuit of his own, now considerably brilliant career as a maverick non-fiction author.
Claiming before his adoring audience at Dominican this week that he couldn't ever consider writing a novel due to his 'lack of imagination', it's important to note here, that the boy who was 'a hopeless case' in grade school science class was awarded the Royal Society's Aventis Prize in 2004 for A Short History of Nearly Everything, as the year's best science book. Not only is he one of the world's most exuberant and smartly entertaining educator on the sorts of travel, cultural, linguistic, scientific and historical facts no one else would ever dream of writing books about, the honorary OBE (Order of the British Empire holder) for Literature has found time in his best-selling writer's schedule to become Chancellor at Durham University in the North of England, a Commissioner for English Heritage and President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England.
All this despite the fact that the Bryson's decamped back to New England in 1995 for a few years of the 'quintessential American home town' experience for their family. It was during this time that he wrote Notes from a Big Country. Missing the pubs and great, British television broadcasting, the Bryson's packed up their house and headed back over the Atlantic once more, in 2005, this time, settling in East Anglia, in a Victorian rectory in Norfolk where he most recently wrote the excellent, award winning At Home.
Prefixing her shot with the microphone with a statement that she wasn't 'a stalker', one woman in the audience at Dominican this week caused a sea of bushy eyebrows (excluding the botoxed) to raise in unison throughout the auditorium as she went on to confess that she and her friend had tried to track down the rectory on a recent visit to England, to: "Ask a few questions". Massively admired though he is, it's somehow hard to picture even Bryson's most ardent readers fanatically rapping at his country door.
I'm still waiting for Bryson's 1998 A Walk in The Woods to be made into a film. Whatever happened to talk of a bearded Russell Crowe in corduroy? Hands down favorite of many a fan.
Tracking back to the Bryson factor, he's the sort of sensible, sane, intelligent, articulate stand-out, internationally-conscious individual that we'd all really rather like to see run the country, or even, in a pinch, the world.
Yet, when asked what he thought of the 'pickings' for upcoming political campaigns here in the U.S. he most politely refrained from comment, except to say that he's sad to see Americans in general stoop to such blatant nastiness in national politics.
Similarly, when asked if he'd consider writing his next book on the subject of the economy and how we got to where we are, he simply replied: "Goodness, no, I would never write a book about that, I wouldn't know where to start." Too bad - the movers and shakers in Marin on an October Monday evening would have voted for Bryson in a hot second.
For a list & outline of Bryson's books click here.
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