Don Watson
Don Watson is one of Readings’ best-loved (and bestselling) authors, with titles like
Recollections of a Bleeding Heart
and
.
For his latest book,
American Journeys,
he spent some months travelling around America, mostly by train, recording what he saw and heard. Mark Rubbo spoke to him about the book. Jo Case occasionally butted in with a question of her own.
American Journeys
Thank you. The process was – as usual – persistence fed by fear of failure, UNTIL it came easily.
Your Quarterly Essay, ‘Rabbit Syndrome’, published in 2001, looked at the way the Australian imagination has been influenced by America;
I suppose it did. The specific cause, however, was taking a train from Chicago to LA at the end of the Death Sentence book tour. I realised then how much I liked the place. Forget words like ‘intrigued’, ‘fascinated’, ‘alarmed’ and ‘revolted’, I like the place, or at least I like being there and always have. I find it reviving. That’s at the heart of the book - why, despite the outrageousness, do I like it? In that, it does have something in common with Rabbit Syndrome, which also tried to uncover the truth of our attraction.
How did you decide your itinerary and how long you stayed in any place?
I began in New Orleans because rain washed out the train to Maine and, while I was waiting for them to fix the track, a friend found someone down there working as a volunteer doctor among victims of Katrina. Thereafter, my progress was determined by Amtrak’s routes and timetable, and later by my ability to endure the highways and cheap motels. I did not stay long in any place. It takes a long time to get around the US and even cheap motels cost money. I missed many obvious places – including some of Wayne Carey’s favourites, like Las Vegas and Miami – but I did see Big Spring, Texas and Dayton, Tennessee and I wish I’d had time to stay for a while. A definitive book or a book about the extremes was not the object of the exercise: it was to experience a sort of arbitrary scraping of the hide - I suppose I travelled a bit like a flea or a tick.
Was there any particular place, incident or person that affected you most?
From several dozen – there was the wife of an absent rodeo rider in a two horse town on the Rio Grande who served espresso coffee and hand-filled cannoli to lonely travellers. That was a melancholy hour.
Your portrait of America is very much a patchwork of overheard conversations and encounters with fellow passengers, taxi drivers and passers-by. I’m sure you could have had access to the cultural and political hierarchy. Did you plan this approach from the outset, or did it happen organically? Do you think your random sample of Americans is representative?
It was planned – organically. The hierarchy’s various views are known or can be easily discovered. I think it is impossible to come up with a sample that represents the nation – just watching the primaries suggests that much – so I decided to take the sort of sample that a flea might take of a horse, or a borer of an oak tree. I saw and heard what I saw and heard – that’s the science of it.
The America you write about is quite different to the metropolitan America reflected in
I don’t know that there is a ‘real’ America – is it Howard Stern’s or Garrison Keilor’s? Real or not, a lot of America is UNworldly – or provincial, if you like – and I was interested in exploring this part of it. I didn’t mean to bypass the ‘worldly’ part and I don’t think I do entirely, but worldliness is not what makes the US the US.
You wouldn’t call your America a jolly place; you start in New Orleans devastated by Katrina and an ineffective president and the issues of race and religious extremism seem pervasive. Did you find things to smile at, to be optimistic about?
I hope so. Iraq and Katrina precipitated a kind of moral crisis in 2005, and race and religion have been at the core of things for a long time. The problems are inescapable, if only because the media noise about them is so loud and pervasive. I think the book expresses a good deal more optimism than Cormac McCarthy, to name but one. People who hate America will not find much to comfort in it - I hope.
In quoting that other famous traveller, de Tocqueville, ‘human societies, like individuals, amount to something only in liberty’. You said this summed up the drama of American life. What did you mean by that?
That liberty or freedom is the dominant idea of the nation, the people and the society. The idea is not so strong in this country. The fair go, for instance, has nothing much to do with liberty – it’s essentially a levelling, collectivist idea. The drama of American life is individualist. There’s lot of hokum attached to it, but we’re not always talking about reality when we talk about national identity or self-perception – again, the fair go is a case in point.
Were you surprised at the extent to which religion seems to dominate in America? It’s one of those things (like the prevalence of obesity) I often assume is a bit exaggerated – but your first-hand observations seem to reflect the opposite, that is even more prevalent than I imagined.
I suppose it depends where you go and how you travel. The poor, who used to be spavined, can now be recognised by the fat they carry. The poor also find comfort in religion, but so do middle-class people. A lot of the religion is of the kind that is easily mocked, but the more telling thing is not the fundamentalism of people like the president or the loonies of the mega-churches, but the extent to which Americans are in general religious people.
You write: ‘The America of my most vivid anti-American phase was the America of my first national adult heroes. That paradox, greatly modified though it is, animates me still.’ Can you elaborate on this?
It might be easier to read the book. Think of it this way: racists like Wallace and crooks like Nixon co-existed with men like Martin Luther King, Thurgood Marshall, Bobby Kennedy in his last year.
You write that Katrina is an intrinsically American story. How so?
In all kinds of ways: race, religion, class, culture, music, overcoming nature, the private sector versus the public.
You are withering about the ubiquity of car culture and how it has transformed America. How do you think it has changed the country?
In the design of cities, towns, suburbs and malls. In the food that the people eat and the way they eat it. In the shape of the economy, the corruption of the political system, the direction of foreign and military policy. In cultural stereotypes and the expression of what it is to be American.
How do you think that democracy and religion are linked in America?
They are not so much linked as inseparable; they were, after all, joined at birth.
You describe America’s South as ‘like a tumour’ on the Union after the civil war. Why? Do you still see it that way?
For the obvious reason that the country was left with a Gettysburg address AND institutionalised terror, discrimination and persecution of about one in eight of its people. Of course, it is better now than it was before the Civil Rights Bill and better for the investment in new industries. A black middle class has emerged in some parts. But the South still feels different and the social statistics tend to bear out the feeling.
American Journeys
All three. I was trying to see the threads that held the images together - threads of history and myth mainly.
It will be interesting to see what Americans think of your view of their country. Have you thought about this or shown it to any Americans?
Three Americans have read the manuscript – none of them Cormac McCarthy. One from Oregon, one from LA and one from New York. Learned folk all of them. Their enthusiasm startled me. They are a very polite people of course, and one has to take account of this.
Your next project is about the Australian bush. After finishing
It’s impossible to escape comparisons. The landscapes are different in profound ways and so were the frontiers, so were the immigrants, the raisons d'etre, the political institutions. Just about everything. It would take a whole suite of conferences to number them.
Finally, after your journey, what’s your tip for the upcoming election?
I think Hillary. And after Hillary, Jeb. And after Jeb, Chelsea.