Dear Jonathan

We almost met a dozen years ago in a Starbucks in Seattle, and all I remember now is that the moment passed as briefly as an un-held thought.

I had the advantage of already knowing who you were, and that you had uprooted from England to to the Washington west coast. You hadn’t got the faintest clue who I was.

Up until that point, I had read not only every book that you had ever written, but just about every essay and article, too. To say that I was obsessive about your writing would be to say that mammals are obsessive about the oxygen they breathe. For a time, you were the whole reason I read books at all, your words somewhere high up within my hierarchy of daily needs.

Looking back at it, I can absolutely recall the day I finished Passage to Juneau, your unpicking of a life in flux, set against the inlets and channels of north-west America. I remember rationing out the final pages to avoid finishing it, and of realising for the first time that blindingly obvious truth that you can only read something for the first time once. That, next time, both it and you have changed, like that legendary river, and the man crossing it. I remember the agony of the last page and when, having finished it, I just lay on my bed and stared at the cover for about half an hour. I remember the quiet desolation of knowing that I was not living the full life I needed to, and of understanding that it was because I wasn’t courageous enough, not because I had been denied the chance. Even then, I remember watching people theoretically young enough to be my own children getting five-way bidding wars on their book proposals, and knowing that, for me at least, the ship had sailed.

But what I most remember is this. That sometime over the next few days, I made myself a solemn promise that one day I, too, would write a book. I knew that it was fanciful to imagine that I could earn my crust as a writer, but an ache so deep inside me that at times I mistook it for a chest pain quietly argued that, at some point, I had at least to try.

Obviously, there were others besides you, George Orwell for one, but they were mainly writers of fiction which, whilst I enjoyed reading it, I had the humility to know that I could never write.

I used to go to Seattle quite often for work, maybe twice a year for a decade, and I was well aware in the back of my mind that you lived there, and that there was a vanishingly small chance that I would see you out there on its steep streets, or down at the harbour. Thinking back now, I don’t think I really wanted to see you, because I guess you had become to me more the words that you wrote than the human being who produced them.

But a decade later meet you I did. It was one of those wet and foggy Seattle mornings, and we were sitting at adjacent tables in some coffee bar, whilst I think you were waiting for a friend. I knew the face from a dozen back covers, and I knew there wasn’t the slightest chance that I was mistaken. I was getting up to leave, with half my insides telling me just to man up and go and say ‘hello’, and half saying: ‘Leave it. How would you like it if a stranger came up to you and demanded your time?’. That turned out to be the louder of the two voices.

So I just picked up my rucksack and walked past your table towards the door. You looked up and, momentarily, we locked eyes. I think I smiled faintly, and that you acknowledged it with an imperceptible nod. I never broke stride. After that, I just carried on walking out into the street, into the cries of the gulls, and the shouts of the stall holders of Pike Place Market. It was enough.

It still is enough. These days, another dozen years on, I write for a living in a way that I never dared to dream I might. If I do it for long enough, I will perhaps become more skilful, and lose the last of my self-consciousness. Without knowing you at all, and without even articulating the thought to myself until this week, you taught me the only important lesson that a writer can ever learn: be honest, and simply try to be as good as you can.

Thank you.

Jonathan Raban 14th June 1942- 17 January 2023. RIP