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In Whereabouts: Notes on Being a Foreigner, poet and translator Alastair Reid archived accounts and recollections of his multi-cultural citizenships – as an itinerant immigrant who truly inhabited, and engaged the people of, his forty semi-permanent addresses.
Peripatetic Traveler
Reid wanted his readers to understand that the nomadic was his norm: “I had got used to the feeling of belonging nowhere, of being a foreigner by choice, entering a new country, a new language, in pursuit, almost, of anonymity and impermanence.”
He found that a new place brought about a re-beginning energy which sharpened his attention.
A “foreigner” – rather than a tourist, or an expatriate, or an exile
In Reid’s divvying up of the world, expats are abroad for “peripheral reasons” that have to do with involvements back home. “The foreigner’s involvement is where he is. He has no other home.”
Tourists and exiles are “connected by an elastic thread to somewhere else” – and “talk of going home.”
In Reid’s view, “tourists are to foreigners as occasional tipplers are to alcoholics – tourists take strangeness and alienation in small, exciting doses, and besides, they are well fortified against loneliness…. the places they visit expect and welcome them, put themselves out for their diversion…. The principal difference between tourists and foreigners is that tourists have a home to go to, and a date of departure.”
The foreigner, he came to realize, cannot take anything for granted. “The strangeness of a place propels one into life.” The foreigner has to “read” eyes and gestures; has to listen and observe, attentively, not offhandedly or intermittently; has to study actively but unobtrusively; has to educate himself in all that is unfamiliar.
Like tourists, foreigners visit cafés, but for the latter cafés are essential observation and listening posts.
For Reid, “to be a foreigner [was] not a question of domicile, but of temperament.”
Instead of holding on to first roots, Reid cultivated adaptability. He wrote of acquiring “a kind of windshield wiper attached to [his] attention – clearing each day of its antecedents.”
Writing, the most portable of occupations, was for him the always-available pretext for traveling.
Travel Logs
Reid could re-journey via the arrival and departure stamps of his old passports. Via those indications of comings and goings, he was able to summon recollections of sights, sounds, and smells from particular visits, lingerings, and settling-ins. Lingering over the stamps registering his many arrivals and departures, he came to these declarations:
Air travel: Plane trips “deceive us by allowing us to travel without a sense of movement.”
A sea voyage, to him, removed a passenger from contexts – the contexts (and accommodations) that are left behind and the ones that are to be occupied (if only briefly) at some destination port. Confined to a landless seascape, one would tend to fall into small temporary, artificial communities, “with the intimacy of desperation.”
Train travel allowed for meditation, whereas travel by car would be “too much a matter of the will” from which there would be little chance of absorbing conversation.
All those arrival and departure passport stamps confirmed and reconfirmed for him his desire and delight for fluidity. That flexibility suited him far more than trying to replace roots.
As he transplanted himself again and again, he was obliged (happily) to unpack languages left in storage. And, with a healthy curiosity, he found himself taking his “forgotten selves out of the closet and shaking the dust from them.” It is those selves – vintage and re-acquired – that we learn about, along with the settings and people who prompted Reid’s unpackings of mental and sensory travel satchels.
The writer as observer – the reader’s surrogate
Reid “discovered” that small events – well-observed – can be telling, in their telling: He likened the process to “picking at a loose thread in a piece of whole cloth – seemingly simple to disentangle but winding in eventually a great intricacy of warp and woof, threads that lead in unimagined directions.”
Memories are portable, and reportable
In the chapter titled “Hauntings,” Reid opened with this equation: “My memory had always been to me more duffel bag than filing cabinet, but, even so, I have been fairly sure that if I rummaged enough I could come up with what I needed.”
“I realize how much we all edit what has happened to us, how much we all make acceptable, recountable versions of past events. Mulling them over, as I have had to do, I find that sometimes the version and the grainy reality become separated: not contradictory but separated.”
Baggage that wasn’t “baggage”
In the Royal Navy, during WWII (with voyages and sightings along the Mediterranean, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean coasts), he learned to live “portably.”
The recountings that marked the passages of his life as a writer were facilitated to some extent by his continually shedding worldly goods: With few tangible possessions, he had considerably more mental room to store observations and memories. He had created space for mental knapsacks, duffel and tote bags. With those portables, he could transport, from place to place, the neatly-folded and well-stowed recollections that had been stored away for a later, timely, retrieval and try on.
Stowaways
Reid’s recollections (mental revisits) clarified his re-positioned present and its presence. Whereabouts allows us to wonder if, by serial relocations, we might come to some bits of clarification.
In “Hauntings” the reader is assured that places can be touchstones to memory. Those memories can re-people past times – from which we might recover lost presences, forgotten encounters and situations, involvements and sensations; along with the particular sounds and the voices that gave special life to language.
Returning to past places may correct the memory or activate it, but, Reid maintained that, more often than not, such visits come with a mixture of anticipation, wonder, and regret; with the possibility of the gift of surprise.
Writing: recreating astonishment in words
“I have pursued my own chronology not so much to record it as to explore it. Remembering a particular house often brings back a predominant mood, a certain weather of the spirit. Sometimes, opening the door of a till-then-forgotten room brought on that involuntary shiver, that awed suspension.
“These sudden rememberings are gifts to writers… for much of writing is simply finding ways of recreating astonishments in words.”
“As I began to reel in my itinerant past I found that I was much less interested in recording it than in experiencing the sense it gave me of travelling in time, of making tangible a ghostly dimension; for an instance of remembering can, without warning, turn into a present moment, a total possession, a haunting.”
Passages from the past
“A backward look, besides, is usually disposed to give past time a shape, a pattern, a set of explanations. Memory can be an agile and cunning editor; but if we use it instead as an investigative reporter it often turns up conflicting evidence, for we arrive, as we age, at set of recountable versions (long and short) of our private time: a set of serviceable maps of the past to replace the yellowed photographs.”
Reid likened rummaging in the past to opening chests-of-drawers and steamer trunks in a personal memory attic.
Leaving Scotland – the hauntings of ancestors and antecedents
Reid became a foreigner not by necessity or accident, but by choice, in a way: Estrangement came naturally, by virtue of his temperament which had him come to terms with being a kind of stranger in his native Scotland.
Though “haunted by some Scottish landscapes and weather,” he felt distanced by “the wariness of its human climate.”
Going back, where home was
For Reid, returning to Scotland gave him a touchstone and barometer against which to gauge and assess the atmospheres he was discovering elsewhere.
Curious as one might be about one’s home-grown mental “wardrobe” and persona, Reid returned his thinking to the symbolic shelves and closets of Scotland: “When I go back, I am always trying on the country to see if it still fits, or fits better than it did. In one sense, the place is as comfortable to me as old clothes; in another, it is a suit that did not fit me easily from the beginning.”
The burial and retrieval of a time-capsule were recounted in the chapter “Digging up Scotland.” Metaphorical musings were sowed and harvested, along with the details of the literal excavation and unearthing of actual mementos.
In “Digging Up Scotland,” Reid struggled with a kind of you-can’t-go-home-again syndrome. For his own curiosity and litmus test, and for prospective readers, he did return. We come to understand that he wanted to deal with his unease. In the process, he sought to reconcile, and perhaps confirm his satisfaction – contentment – with his departures and relocations.
Global positioning
In the chapter titled “Hauntings,” we learn about Reid’s childhood and youth in Scotland.
The reader is treated to “tours” of his childhood in Whithorn (population 700), “a harmonious place, with no sides, no sharp edges…” which “looked much like a child’s drawing of a village.”
Then there was Selkirk (population 6,000), “a brisk town where parents were no longer accidentally accessible” and where Reid continued to be “struck book-deaf” in counter to the “ancient gloom” of Scotland.
Book writers’ tales and travels had to compete with household chores, outdoor work calibrated to the seasons, churchgoings and other Sunday rituals, and the early fascinations with and respect for his father’s (parsonage) ministrations and his mother’s medical callings. There’s nothing of the dysfunction and pity-me angst that are served up in so many celebrity autobiographies.
With charm and appreciation for the past, we are given to understand why and how Reid sought a different presence in hope of a different kind of future. The oncoming of World War II and his travels in navy service confirmed his quest for separation from Scotland.
Years later, there was an edging back to the UK: For three years at the end of the 1960s, home was an old 80-foot Thames barge converted into a house-boat moored at Chelsea Reach in London.
Back in Scotland, briefly, there were the treats of being escorted through the singular aura of St. Andrews. But those appreciations are in contrast with the delights he would later discover, by chance, in Spain. There, a stone house in an un-mechanized village would become a domestic lure.
Words as conveyances: New words, the way into new worlds
“To enter another language is to assume much more than a vocabulary and a manner; it is to assume a whole implied way of being.” In Spain, as he took on work as a translator, Reid felt he was “growing another self, separate and differently articulate.”
Another language allowed for “another way of being.”
His work as a translator brought delight in finding words that might “properly contain” what he saw, heard, and felt.
And as a poet, he found he was able to bring to his prose “the same charged attention, and phrasing by ear,” that can make verse so lyrical and evocative. And thus Reid’s prose is evocative and lyrical.
“Living by writing,” he tells us, “I had an income over the years like a fever chart.”
But (along with translation work) there were other compensations that were truly meaningful: For him writing was “the endless business of looking for the right words and, sometimes, being lucky enough to find them.” And, there was an excuse to travel in search of stories and the words to relate them.
Very very often, in reporting on his travels, he found words that were just right. We readers are so very very lucky to partake of his finds.
Alastair Reid, the Translator
As a “foreigner,” Reid’s attention was further sharpened by discovering the energy of another language, which he “inhabited” so that it became less and less foreign.
For him, travel into another language offered a mixture of astonishment and the prospect of a revelatory alchemy.
Reid wanted us to appreciate how a translator enters into another’s imagination, delivered in another language. The translator must work at faithfully capturing the original’s moments and tones – making “the movement” of them happen in English.
He left us with revelation and insight: “A good translation is one in which a work appears to have been written and conceived in the language into which it is translated.”
Discovering new worlds by learning new words
In the Foreword to his memoir of itinerant residencies, Alastair Reid told us that by “stumbling” onto Spain, he had to “enter another language” and that, for him, meant “starting a new life, naming the world again from the beginning.”
As a foreigner, he found that his senses were sharpened – and with those extraordinary senses, and his evocative descriptions, Reid’s memoir shares places and acquaintances; all manner of atmospheres: indigenous sights and sounds, along with local histories and secrets.
His Whereabouts observations and perspectives were aided by registering them in Spanish as well as in English. He discovered that his trans-border trans-linguistic immersion enabled him to take leave of his native persona, and to “reappear” unencumbered.
“For a writer,” he explained, “it is an invaluable holiday to speak, in the course of the day, a language other than the one he writes in. When he comes to use his own language again, it seems washed and clean.”
By virtue of those “washed and cleaned” reflections, Reid’s Notes on Being a Foreigner gets us to think about what it means not to be understood, and what it takes to make ourselves understood.
Observations and evocations in his “Notes from a Spanish Village”
Summer 1974: There are no streets – each house looks out on a different village, a different-shaped mountain.
From his stone house, “there is no trace of the village," only a few distinct sounds: “the jangle of goat bells, or the bark of the dog on the adjoining farm.”
There are the refrains of the well, which loom loud in the attention: – “the rattling chain, the thud and plunge of the bucket, the creak of the wheel.”
On the whole, the village was marked by “a sturdy quiet.” We are asked to imagine that “the silence is such that we would be careful about breaking it.” In such a silence, Reid felt that other worlds receded.
In years past, visitors and wayward tourists to his off-the-beaten-path village were unsettled with a disquiet: For those visitors, the ringing of telephones was a natural sound. They would grow anxious in the absence of such beckonings.
Also in years past, villagers were pedestrians. And, by hand, in manual fashion that was not disdained as manual labor, they accomplished what needed to be done.
On each of his returns, over the course of twenty-some years, Reid shouldered open the door to the house that had stone walls at least two-feet-thick.
Each re-entry brought on “a whole dormant identity” which settled upon him like a self he had left there, “like the old work-coat hanging on its wooden peg.”
He explained: “Time spent in the village always serves to unencumber me, to a point where the days seem wondrously long, gifts of time, where the weather simplifies existence to a vocabulary of elemental acts, like drawing water or making a fire…”
“The urgencies I have created for myself elsewhere seem trivial.”
Belongings and belonging
As a colleague of Reid’s at The New Yorker, but more importantly as a friend, I was always fascinated by his ability to do without things. He had the capacity to shed belongings and to hold onto friendships.
In his writings, Alastair mentally reacquired a portfolio of leaseholds: Via notebook and typewriter recollections, he regained hold of and held on to rented places.
By contrast, I needed to own places where I could hold on to things, tangible possessions: I still have the eight-inch metal replica of a spiffy bicycle (fully-geared, with rotating-pedals and rotating wheels) 1960s vintage, which Alastair gave me in appreciation for a miniscule favor I did for his son who was then a student at Yale; I still have the sterling silver spoon he gave me and my wife on the birth of our son. He had read several poems as part of our wedding ceremony.
Still in the family is the large parchment depicting his poem about bread and the large parchment embossed with his poem “Weathering” – both inscribed with a pencil that delivered friendship phrasing with warmth and simple elegance. I still have his inscribed books.
A Legacy of Observation and Reflection, in a Collection of Recollections
What I have passed along – to dozens and dozens of students – is the two-column recollection of Alastair’s that was published in The New Yorker, in the late Summer of 1999.
The recollection opens with a paragraph that summed up Alastair’s fascination with relocation – and its rewards:
“I have spent a good part of my life living in remote places, and almost always they have served up adventures in the form of small happenings that suddenly raise enormous questions, happenings that still rumble in my mind.”
That paragraph – that paragraph alone – can serve as a prompt for anyone who cares to write – or, in the case of students, are obliged to write – something that is not trite, hackneyed or banal; something that is revelatory and insightful, without being pompous or pretentious. A lesson there.
The particular “rumble” that Alastair recalled came about following “a string of shoeless Winters” he spent in a most remote province of the Domincan Republic, that was “beyond the reach of telephone, electricity, and running water.” Every week or so, he would journey from that remove to retrieve mail and newspapers that were being held for him in a distant town. In one cluster, were mail-order catalogs of leisure, indulgence, and conspicuous consumption that had followed him as reminders of what he had managed to resist all his life.
In one catalog, a double-page spread advertised a rowing machine. This contraption caught the attention of several fishermen who brought him fresh catch in return for his obtaining better gear for them from the gran mundo.
Initially, the fishermen thought that the machine was a dream come true – it could take over their back-breaking should-straining hand-blistering ordeals. Almost every day, to eke out a sparse living, they had to pull heavy bulky oars for hours, in weather and against currents that could be unforgiving. Incredulous, they learned that people who could buy any kind of fish they wanted, day after day, would spend a fortune for “a torture machine.” With disbelief and frowns, the fishermen asked, “What is exercise?”
Presumably, New Yorker readers were charmed by the piece. Most of my students grasped the paradox; some, the irony.
For me, it was and still is one of Alastair’s lasting gifts.
