At the age of seven or eight he knew he had to be a writer. They sat at marble desks, staring into the distance, holding a golden fountain pen from which golden words would soon flow. When the flags for his first book came out a good dozen years later, they smelled a little like old clothes, “as if the rags used to make paper had been torn from the bodies of homeless people”. He couldn’t be happier.
The vicar’s son Jonathan Raban was one of the British exiles who, like Graham Greene and Anthony Burgess, fled the country. After the fall of the Empire, travel was the last remaining adventure. Raban became an adventure writer, the freest author. With teaching assignments, radio plays, reviews and magazine contributions that were never printed but were highly paid, he built up a literary vendor’s tray and added up what he managed to do “out of passion, out of love or for the sake of money” and then set off again. He sails to Arabia and down the Mississippi in his own boat (“Mississippi. A Novel of a Journey”, 1981). In Brighton, Raban once met the American Paul Theroux, the two eyed each other suspiciously to see who could take which story from whom. Where Raban circumnavigates Britain (“Coasting, 1986), Theroux wanders along the coast line of England, Scotland and Wales.
Raban depicted surf and horizon as they were otherwise painted by William Turner
After all those years on the water, he was still scared of the sea, but he was drawn out again. On the way he is not alone at all. In England, Raban was friends with Philip Larkin and Robert Lowell, and the poets accompany him as food for the journey. From Seattle up north like the whalers and trappers once did, to Alaska, again just him and the boat and the sea. It’s a thousand miles, always along the coast, past fishing boats and pleasure boats, with the story of the early seafarers in mind and the father dying at home in England. With never-tiring enthusiasm, Raban describes the surf and horizon, as William Turner used to paint them, “a sea of white-speckled jade”. Months later, his wife awaits him at his destination. She has brought their daughter with her, who is sitting blissfully on a swing, and says to him: “I’m leaving you.”
In his “Passage to Juneau” (1999) he invokes the saint Herman Melville, who knew that the sea and meditation are forever connected. Even the poet cannot save him from melancholy. An affair he experienced while cruising down the Mississippi briefly gave him the illusion of down-to-earthness, but nothing could hold him. “Dinner was our Reno. The divorce was finalized before the bill came.” The weather forecast is favourable. “I’ll go on tomorrow.” On Tuesday, the poetic traveler Jonathan Raban finally left Seattle at the age of 80.