My Famous Evening

  I handed him my copy of The Secret Agent by Joseph

  Conrad. An hour out to sea, he sat on a deck chair well away

  from electric lights, opened the book, read a moment,

  then handed me a ten-dollar bill. When we docked the

  next morning in Yarmouth, I looked for him to get my

  novel back, but he had “invisibly debarked.” [Conrad]

  As it happened, I ran into him in front of his hotel in

  Halifax a few days later. “I believe you still have my

  book,” I said, then insisted on following him to his

  hotel room, where he handed over the novel. “Gee, not

  too generous, are you?” he said. “And right in front of

  my wife and kids, too, eh?”

  I never felt bad about it. Later, I noticed that he had

  written his name on the inside cover, as if he’d made a

  ten-dollar purchase.)

  As I drove up a hill past a farmhouse, I saw a man

  chopping wood by moonlight.

  Suddenly I was homesick

  for my living room wall, on which hangs

  “Mabou (Chopping Wood)” by Robert Frank,

  two vertical strips of 8-mm film.

  The column on the left

  depicts a man holding previous photographs

  by Robert Frank

  (photographs within the photograph)

  upside down and tilted.

  The column on the right

  depicts a man chopping wood.

  It is signed and dated, and also reads,

  Life dances on …

  Robert Frank has also photographed hospitals, soup kitchens, people, winter windows, and much more (and made films) in Nova Scotia; all of these tell his life and thought there. The landscape photographs contain, rather than merely evoke, the region around Mabou; the beaches, sea, sky, which hold on but keep moving. “What good is intelligence if you cannot discover a useful melancholy?” the Japanese author Ryunosuke Akutagawa wrote. Robert Frank’s landscape photographs instill in me a melancholy useful because it helps clarify the world, and equals late autumn.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Howard Norman has lived and traveled extensively in Atlantic Canada. His first two novels, The Northern Lights and The Bird Artist, were shortlisted for the National Book Award. His other novels are The Museum Guard and The Haunting of L. He received a Lannan Award in fiction and a Guggenheim fellowship. His work has been translated into many languages. A film of The Bird Artist is presently in production. Mr. Norman lives in Washington, D.C., and Vermont, and is writing a new novel set in England and Nova Scotia, What is Left the Daughter.

  OTHER TITLES IN THE SERIES

  JAN MORRIS A Writer’s House in Wales

  OLIVER SACKS Oaxaca Journal

  W. S. MERWIN The Mays of Ventadorn

  WILLIAM KITTREDGE Southwestern Homelands

  DAVID MAMET South of the Northeast Kingdom

  GARRY WILLS Mr. Jefferson’s University

  A. M. HOMES Los Angeles: People, Places, and the Castle on the Hill

  JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN The Island: Martinique

  FRANCINE PROSE Sicilian Odyssey

  SUSANNA MOORE I Myself Have Seen It: The Myth of Hawai‘i

  LOUISE ERDRICH Book and Islands in Ojibwe Country

  KATHRYN HARRISON The Road to Santiago

  ARIEL DORFMAN Desert Memories: Journeys Through the Chilean North

  BARRY UNSWORTH Crete

  UPCOMING AUTHORS

  ANNA QUINDLEN on London

  ROBERT HUGHES on Barcelona

  JAMAICA KINCAID on Nepal

  DIANE JOHNSON on Paris

  PETER CAREY on Japan

  GEOFFREY WOLFF on Maine

  JON LEE ANDERSON on Andalucia

  WILLIAM LEAST HEAT-MOON on Western Ireland

  NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC DIRECTIONS

  Featuring works by some of the world’s most prominent and highly regarded literary figures, National Geographic Directions captures the spirit of travel and of place for which National Geographic is renowned, bringing fresh perspective and renewed excitement to the art of travel writing.