In late October, a little over a week before I turned 35, I left for Europe for the first time. I had consciously avoided the classic "backpacking in Europe" post-collegiate thing, and had in fact spent a good chunk of my life up to that point scrupulously avoiding just about anything European whatsoever.

I suppose this could easily be chalked up to Ugly Americanism, or simple small-minded regionalism, but understand that I graduated from college with a liberal arts degree in the ‘80s. At that point, as I remember it, it was quite common for many of the people I knew to talk about moving to Europe—for good. "No more Reagan, no more Bush, no more madness," seemed to be the general credo although, like many credos I remember from my youth, I have no idea who might have actually said this, or anything remotely like it. "The Europeans are more politically active, they’re more progressive, the standard of education is higher, and" there always seems to be a meaningful pause here from my strawman, "they understand artists there." This seemed especially important to those of us graduating with a degree that had done nothing but make us, to badly paraphrase Fitzgerald, that most useless of things: well-rounded.

Nonetheless, I found the idea of abandoning America distasteful, ungrateful, and cowardly, even if understandably so. Flush on Plato, I felt that I owed certain obligations to the country that had raised and educated me, that if all the good people left America, it would be left to the worst, etc., etc. I had also gotten my degree in literature at a time when the shadow of the "lost generation" still hung heavy over the teaching curriculum, and it seemed a foregone conclusion that anyone wanting to write the great American novel would have to go to Europe—at the very least for a small visit but really more like an extended trip. A year in Paris, maybe, writing at a café overlooking the Champs Elysee or the dusty Rue D’Ilonse, noisy with the phlegmatic huffing of Citroens and the chatter of sharp-faced women with berets and baguettes, the whole place almost alluvially rich with creativity. But I was already set on zigging where it seemed to suggested to me I should zag; I wanted to write the great American novel in America, wherever that might be.

Also, for merely visiting Europe, that, I had concluded, was little more than just a chance to put oneself in a situation where one could seem exotic and desirable: in short, it seemed like a shamelessly desperate tactic to get laid, and a tactic that hypocritically managed to put on airs at the same time.

Although the style of this introduction might suggest otherwise, I like to think I’ve managed to burn off much of the angry Puritanism and boorishness (cautiously disguised, to myself at least, as anti-boorishness) that afflicted me when I was young. To be fair, at the time I worked in a bar infested with young European men, most of whom tried to scrabble inside with forged European driver’s licenses while shaking with barely controlled desire for young American women, and who would quickly, almost tearfully, compare me to a either Nazi, a Fascist, or a Stalinist simply because I wouldn’t let them in. And those who were let in, just as tremblingly desperate but either a few months older or probably just better forgers, frequently were received exactly as they might have hoped, and swaggered out hours later on the arms of drunkeningly fawning young women who begged them to whisper again words like "butter," "whiskey" and "accommodations." All of which I found head-shakingly sad and slightly infuriating, as if the sacramental cloth of knowledge and learning were being used to dress up base carnality and make it more acceptable. I told myself that it was the hypocrisy of it all that bothered me, and perhaps it was. I had spent enough time with friends drinking in whore-ridden bars of the Tenderloin, and felt there was a world where carnality could be honestly expressed, not dressed up, not disguised under euphemisms like "broadening one’s experience" or "meeting people from other cultures" or "seeing the world."

All of this was transference at its most insidious, of course. I was twenty, and insecure enough about my looks that all these complex tirades masked what would have been obvious to anyone had I shared them: I felt no one would go to bed with me without my breaking out exactly the same moves as the desperate European kids at the door. I felt quite strongly about foreigners using their air of otherness that somehow suggested knowledge and experience to bed women because I felt there was no other way for me to bed women. They were horning in on my turf, which I’m sure I resented even it was turf I wanted no part of. I didn’t want a woman to go to bed with me because she found me knowledgeable, I wanted her to go to bed with me because she couldn’t keep her hands off me. As I said (and will probably say several times more before this whole thing is done), I was twenty and insecure, and although I may only be nominally more secure now, I at least am old enough to know that sexual desire is far more complex and strange to be limited to mere physical comeliness (Thank God).

So I had no wish to go to Europe when I was young. I felt that there was only one reason to go (to get laid) and I didn't want to get laid on the terms that a trip to Europe seemed to entail. As for the rest of it, the history and the architecture and the oddness, I didn’t care much. I had books I had read and books I wanted to write, I had the dreams inside my head, and the arrogance that these dreams, these books, were all I needed. I also was inexperienced (arrogance’s twin) enough to not glean that my dreams had been cribbed mostly from other books, barely from life, and lacked not nearly enough vigor to sustain themselves on the page at least to my endlessly critical eye.

Anyway.

I got older and somehow managed to wrench out a good chunk of the stick that was caught up my ass. Although there is an equally mouthy essay lurking right around the corner about the nature of modern consumerism and how it drives us now to purchase experiences in order to feel unique, let’s just say that I eventually got around to picking up a certain appreciation for the idea of travel that I didn’t much have before. And so, when my roommates Dave and Molly moved to Barcelona to sublet an apartment and invited the other housemembers to come visit, I knew I would go. Not to write the great American novel, not to get laid, but merely to go.

Of course, just days before I left, I found out about Chris Baty’s NaNoWriMo, which sets as the goal the writing of a 50,000 word during the month of November—a crappy 50,000 word novel because it’s just a little too hard to write a good book. As they put it on their inspirng website, "Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality." Hopefully the preceding paragraphs, with their recounting of endless limiting rules I had for myself and its own tail-chasing prose will help give you a sense of how liberating this was for me. Despite all the many years I had spent trying to give myself precisely this permission, it wasn’t until Chris Baty and NaNoWriMo gave it to me that I was able to accept it. Although I worried about my ability to write at least 1700 words a day while in Europe, I was also hopeful. Thanks to the troika of my Palm pilot, the Palm portable keyboard, and the word processing program WordSmith, I had already been writing in the morning before work and frequently at lunch and the messy results had been very promising, at least for a quantity perspective: I was more than capable of writing 700 words in 20 minutes, and had once written 2000 words in 40. If I just got up a little earlier than Molly and Dave as we made our way through Europe, I could at least keep myself from getting too far behind on my wordcount that I could make it all up when I got back to America and write the Crappy American Novel in the time allotted.

Ironically, things turned out precisely the opposite: I ended writing so much in Europe that I came back way ahead of my wordcount, and it was life in America that threatened to slow me down. I was going to correct this misconception of mine with another: I was going to write that I would never have finished my novel if it hadn’t been for all the time I spent on trains travelling from one city to the next, if I hadn’t had all those hours in a passenger seat with nothing to do. But in fact, almost all of our train travel was done by the time I started writing my NaNovel on November 1.

I did write on those hours on the train, just nothing that was to literally end up in the novel. I wrote at least 1800 words almost every day the last week in October just to get my endurance up—the way a marathon runner preps for his event, I made it a point to prep for this. As I found myself the last few weeks antsy and restless under the weight of my decision not to look at my NaNovel until at least January 15 (more self-enforced rules!), I realized that there was nothing to prevent me from combing through the material I had written just before the NaNovel, maybe knocking it into shape, cleaning it up, maybe even writing a stuffy intro and posting it on the website. Sure? Why not?

And so here you have the "best" of the prep work, bits and pieces of meat cut from a very fatty whole. It’s over 7,000 words (just over 9,000 if you include this intro) or about one-seventh of the NaNo finish line and less than half of the total wordcount from that week. I still don’t know what I’m going to do with my NaNovel, but based on the ratio of this project, I will either have a lot of rewriting or a very, very small book. Certainly the NaNovel makes a very faint acknowledgment (almost an imperceptible nod) to such niceties as character, dialogue and plot, which the sections that follow certainly do not. I’m hard pressed, in fact, to say what exactly the following sections are. They closest resemble a travel diary, although that travel is largely internal. Perhaps that’s why I’ve provided such a lengthy introduction (although I may just be falling back on my internal NaNo rule of thumb: "there’s nothing wrong with it another thousands words won’t fix!") so as to keep things from seeming frustratingly quantum: knowing now my previous location, perhaps you will be able to appreciate more the shape of my trajectory, the internal arc that cast me, like a skipping stone over a pond, skittering from country to country (or, more honestly, from idea of country to idea of country) until I splashed and sank, finally, at Prague, where idea and reality had little choice but to be wed in the chambers of the imaginary sea, and where I finally, at the final conclusive curve of the road’s path, started, in my way, to begin.

--December 27, 2001

Next: October 23, 2001--In The Air

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All material on these pages (except the NaNoWriMo logo which is © by Chris Baty or NaNoWriMo or somebody) is ©2001 by Jeff Lester. With the exception of non-profit distribution, all other rights are reserved.