FROM EARLY ADOLESCENCE, I never doubted that my writerly life would lead me into a romantic European exile. I was right. Here I am! Just like Goethe, just like Henry James: standing on the edge of Lake Como, staring a mile across the water at the wall of pine-speckled, auburn-colored Alps that rears up behind a row of villas, gardens, and sailboats. Okay, not standing, exactly, more like stooped over and pecking nearsightedly at my laptop. And maybe a week doesn’t count as an exile. But it’s enough to bring a rush of writerly thoughts to mind. Unfortunately, they’re all shit-in-the-shuttered-chateau thoughts. By these I mean the ones Philip Larkin evoked in his most burningly jealous poem, which describes his own writerly routine. Larkin scratched out poems in hours stolen from his job as a university librarian. This was not the writing life as he’d imagined it in his youthful fantasies, which dogged him well into middle age. This was literature as lived by: The shit in the shuttered chateau Who does his five hundred words Then parts out the rest of the day Between bathing and booze and birds. The bathing and booze and birds must be across the lake, where the novelists live. This is the conference part of the lake, where writers of my sort get to discuss the “European-American Security Landscape after September 11” and related topics. But don’t think I’m jealous. Just substitute “working lunch” for bathing and “roundtable discussion” for booze, and it’s the same literary life. We journalists are artists, too. But of course we’re not. This was something Rilke understood when, in his “Letters to a Young Poet,” he wrote to congratulate his correspondent for having enlisted in the army: “Art too is just a way of living,” Rilke wrote, “and however one lives, one can, without knowing, prepare for it; in everything real one is closer to it, more its neighbor, than in the unreal half-artistic professions, which, while they pretend to be close to art, in practice deny and attack the existence of all art–as, for example, all of journalism does and almost all criticism and three quarters of what is called (and wants to be called) literature.” I believe I committed that passage to memory before I became a journalist. There’s no arguing with Rilke. If that guy thinks you’re poetic, you can take it to the bank. And, to follow his reckoning that one is more poetic in “everything real,” it’s the arms-control specialists and the union-hall political hacks at this conference who are the real poets, not us novelists manques gazing goofily across the lake, pretending we’re F. Scott Fitzgerald. If political journalists don’t suffer “real writer”-envy, they ought to. You wonder how they (we) live with them- (our-)selves. Political journalists all belong to one of two types. Some are political junkies who want to be politicians and have all the necessary insight to do so, but lack the God-given pizzazz–so they take a job that allows them to be in the presence of politicians. They’re like the kid who knows exactly how to slam-dunk, but happens to be 5’2″–and so becomes the trainer on the high school basketball team. Then there are the better kind, my kind, in fact: those born denizens of the shuttered chateau, who would abide there today but for some petty piece of bad luck (slobbering inarticulacy, say, or abject laziness). We’re different. We’re more like . . . well, we’re like the other trainer on the high school basketball team. This brings me close to admitting that political journalists all belong to one type: failures. Most learn to make a virtue of necessity–I’ve heard even ballet critics dismiss any attempt to treat them as writers with a scornful, “Nah. Ah’m jessa beat reporter.” But as long as reporting consists largely of trying to find a comfortable spot in a hotel room without a chair, and spending an hour working up the nerve to call some local political hack who doesn’t want to talk to you, the shuttered chateau will probably continue to beckon. For me, at least, it looks like help is on the way. At the conference a European delegate told me stories of how Western aid workers in the mid-1990s provoked resentment in the Balkans. One “development facilitator” in Bosnia was a bossy American girl of 24, whose job “qualifications” consisted of her having worked for two years after college in an “interracial high school.” She got not only $120,000 a year but also a driver (a Bosnian former surgeon), a cook (a Bosnian former fashion designer), and a gardener (a Bosnian former dentist). Is that a great setup for a novel or what? And suddenly, it’s evident what all this research, all this “reporting,” has been for. Right now, I’m just worried about getting the novel finished. I figure the film will take care of itself. As will the chateau. I already have it picked out. It’s the one over there on the left, behind those yachts. –Christopher Caldwell
