Jonathan Raban
Author whose work combined candid memoir and travelogue and who described himself as a ‘life-writer’ rather than a travel writer
JONATHAN RABAN, who has died aged 80, was an author who delighted in blurring the boundaries between genres, blending fact, fiction, travelogue, sociology, historical anecdote, reportage, memoir, confessional and literary criticism, and creating a style entirely his own. Although he also published three works of pure fiction, he preferred to undertake solitary journeys which he subsequently “shaped” into a narrative in the calm of his study.
For Raban considered himself a “life-writer” rather than simply a “travel writer”. He wrote “about place” but what he really sought was people and their sense of “dis-placement”.
His work was highly literate and far removed from the gimmicky travel writing prevalent towards the turn of the millennium. Rather, he was, in the words of one critic, “unwilling to let the genre relax its muscles”.
Dedicated to the point of obsession – he was a perpetual note-taker who concocted a dozen experimental similes each day – he was cold-hearted in his self-revelation. In Passage to Juneau (1999) he described with brutal honesty the intimate details of his father’s terminal illness and his wife greeting him with a request for a divorce as he docked.
Raban excavated his feelings and offered his observations in an elegant, precise, laconic prose. And through his muscular contemplation and writerly detachment he constructed a body of work marked by its intelligence and humour.
Jonathan Raban was born on June 14 1942 at Hempton, Norfolk, to Peter and Monica Raban. His father was an Anglican vicar and stern traditionalist who represented to his son “England... the Conservative Party in person, the Army in person, the church in person, the public school system in person”.
He was raised in draughty vicarages as “impoverished gentry living amongst the relics of wealth” and educated at King’s School, Worcester, the same public school where his father had been unhappy years before. There, as a sickly child, he found consolation in literature, realising that “you could hope beyond hope, love, pity, admire, even cry, all without shame.”
At Hull University, where he read English, he founded a “Library Committee” specifically to meet Philip Larkin, who otherwise avoided the students. Larkin became an eccentric friend who was happy to discuss novels and jazz but refused to talk about poetry.
After graduating, Raban lectured at the University of Aberystwyth before joining Malcolm Bradbury’s creative writing department at the University of East Anglia, where his students included Ian Mcewan and Rose Tremain. He also began a parallel career as a book reviewer. Despite being recommended to the New Statesman by Bradbury, he cheerfully dismembered an anthology edited by his head of faculty and impressed the literary editor Anthony Thwaite with the “superior sheen” of his work.
As his reputation increased so his output expanded. He wrote short fiction for Alan Ross’s London Magazine, plays for radio and literary criticism for The New York Review of Books and The Sunday Times. The latter so valued him that they tolerated the return – unreviewed – of half the books they commissioned, but the editor later described him as “the most troublesome reviewer... ever”.
After two years he left Norwich, having published The Technique of Modern Fiction, Mark Twain: Huckleberry Finn (both 1969) and The Society of the Poem (1971).
In London he met Robert Lowell, whom he taught to fish and who became his greatest influence. It was Lowell’s dictum “One life, one writing” that inspired him, though he admitted that such an approach “does hurt other people”. He also edited the American’s Poems: A Selection (1974).
His first nonacademic work was Soft City (1973), a meditation on the impersonality of cities. He illustrated how people used memory and association to create an environment they could handle. For even as the modern city triumphed as “an economic unit” it failed as a “spiritual republic”, and it was how people coped with that failure – rendering manageable and human something that was vast and shapeless and shifting – that interested him.
When Ian Hamilton started The New Review in 1974 Raban became a regular contributor, revelling in the “feeling of solidarity” and engaging in serious literary debate with writers of the calibre of John Mcgahern and Lorna Sage.
For all its discontents, he maintained a weather-beaten affection for the life of the literary hack, evoking its seductive pleasures in For Love and Money (1987). Nevertheless, by the late 1970s he was restless, and so, like the Naipauls, Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux, he decided to go travelling. Arabia Through the Looking Glass (1979) detailed his travels in the Middle East with typical perspicacity, though the author was conscious that “writing is all cause, cause, cause, where travelling is a long cascade of one damn contingency after another.” For Raban, good writing demanded “the long view, under a sky of unbroken blue” whereas “travelling requires one to submit to the fogginess of things, the minute-byminute experience of the world.” Old Glory (1981), which recounted a Huck Finn-style voyage down the Mississippi in a motor boat from Minneapolis to New Orleans, was the first work in which he felt he balanced the competing demands of narrative reality and literary “shape”.
Described as having “an ingenuous freshness” by John Updike, the book won the Heinemann Award and the Thomas Cook Travel Award and was so successful that Raban briefly became a tax exile on the Isle of Man.
Foreign Land (1985), his first novel, explored the disappointment of an expat returning to England after 40 years in Africa to find his homeland aggressive and unwelcoming. His response, much like the author’s, was to set sail, to be at home on the high seas, alone with his ghosts.
Raban seemed drawn to foreign-ness even when writing about England. He liked to feel “an angle between myself and the society I’m living in”. Coasting (1986) described the same round-britain sailing trip as Foreign Land. He had put up a notice in the Royal Fowey Yacht Club saying: “Complete novice needs to learn how to sail around Great Britain in three weeks” and “within hours a retired naval commander turned up and said ‘I think I’m your man.’”
Presenting himself as a cheerful incompetent, he overcame his amateurism and examined his life by revisiting places that had coloured his past. In Hull he met Larkin, who exclaimed when he saw Raban’s “narrative vehicle”, a 30ft ketch: “That’s it? In that?”
But it was more than that. Although he confessed he was “not a natural sailor, but a timid, weedy, cerebral type, never more out of my element than when I’m at sea”, he was hooked, not only on the sea but on any environment in which people were displaced. Having always felt an outsider – “not of the upper middle class, but we had visiting rights” – he was drawn to seas and prairies, to emptiness, and to any unusual landscape where he could ask: “How do people fit in?”
In 1990 he left his second wife, emigrated to America and published Hunting Mister Heartbreak. The book, which won the Thomas Cook Award, recounted his personal search for the soul of the continent. An exploration of emigration, it described his attempts to settle successively in New York, Guntersville in Alabama, Seattle and Key West, allowing him to luxuriate in the cultural and linguistic diversity he encountered.
Remarried, and living in Seattle, he wrote Badland: An American Romance (1996). Interweaving past and present, the book told the stories of families who travelled west to settle the “dry lands” of Montana, poor agricultural land on to which they were seduced by a government bending to the lobbying of the railroad barons. With its melancholy tales of economic migrancy, disappointment and invisible strings pulled in the east, Badland was an early 20th-century story with a 21st-century resonance.
Passage To Juneau (1999) was an account of sailing the Inside Passage, an archipelago stretching from Seattle to Alaska. Framed by the death of his father and the unexpected breakdown of his marriage, this was not a journey on which the incompetent sailor needed to seek out chaos. Although the work incorporated his usual mix of erudition, literary criticism and forensic observation, it was the unblinking professionalism with which he described the collapse of his marriage that startled readers.
His second novel, Waxwings (2003), was set in Seattle in late 1999. A tale of dotcom excess, marriage breakdown and the relationship between a professor and an immigrant, a thinker and a doer – “the yin and yang of a pretty impressive American” – he considered it a historical novel because the characters did not realise that the world was about to change forever.
His third novel, Surveillance (2006), was a darkly comic tale that examined the American urban landscape during the paranoid fall-out following the attacks of September 11 2001, with its “spreading rash of concrete barriers, barbed wire, magnetometers, spycams’’ – and the human sense of stolen privacy.
His last book, Driving Home: An American Scrapbook (2011), was a collection of essays, criticism and commentary covering his two decades as an Englishman in America and ranging from politics to the joys of sailing and the concept of wilderness. Raban had recently completed a memoir, Father and Son, which is due for publication this year.
In Seattle, with its “frog-spawn gray… moist, gauzy air”, the prematurely bald, cap-wearing author worked hard to retain his Englishness. He avoided American writers for fear of acquiring their inflections, maintained his sonorous, educated vowels, wore Jermyn Street shirts, delighted in irony and revelled in his status as a “resident alien”. But he appreciated the appearance of authors “on the fag-end of book tours” when he indulged his appetite for fine wine, literary talk and poetry recital.
He married Bridget Johnson in 1964. The marriage was dissolved in the mid-1970s. He married Caroline Cuthbert, an art curator, in 1985; the marriage ended in 1990. In 1992 he married Jean Lenihan, a journalist; they had one daughter. They separated in 1997, the moment minutely recorded in