Bill Bryson: “When I was first in the UK you couldn’t even get mayo.” Photo / Getty Images
With five books in the Sunday Times Top 100, the author of Notes from a Small Island talks about being an adopted Brit, how his wife made his career and why we should all cheer up a bit.
Eighteen months ago, in these pages, Bill Bryson gave his last interview. He had been tempted, briefly, out of retirement to write a (short) Audible script about Christmas, but that was it. As soon as the recorder stopped, he was off to garden, potter and play on the floor with his 12 grandchildren while he still had the knees to get up again afterwards. After a lifetime of wandering, he had settled at last in a home with a big garden in Hampshire.
So what you’re reading now is something of an apparition. Bryson, 72, has granted us another last interview, but in special circumstances. For a large part of the 1990s Bryson was top of the Sunday Times bestseller list. Of the five Bryson books to feature in the top 100 bestsellers of the past five decades, it is Notes from a Small Island, his 1995 love letter to and gentle mickey-take of Great Britain, that takes top billing. It was a bestseller for longer than any other book published in the 1990s — and this last-last interview is a celebration of it.
Where, then, to meet? Bryson lives with Cynthia, a retired nurse and his wife of 49 years, in Hampshire, so a pint in the shires seemed like the obvious option. But no, we meet in London. “If the weather is good, we can go for a walk in the park,” he’d suggested. Of course, the weather isn’t good and we settle instead at the London Library. This is where authors come to research and retired authors come to take an afternoon nap “under a copy of The Spectator”, but Bryson has spent the day in the basement stacks, researching Homo floresiensis.
“Why?” is my first question.
“I agreed to come out of retirement for a year or so to update A Short History of Nearly Everything,” he says. “It’s more than 20 years old now and it’s embarrassingly out of date but it’s still selling. I just thought I should do it while I’m not too decrepit.”
Twenty years ago no one knew about Homo floresiensis, “these little people who somehow made it from Africa to an obscure Indonesian island about a million years ago”. Their discovery means that Bryson’s whole chapter on early man needs a rewrite. This is the trouble with human progress.
So not retired but semi-retired — happy to garden but also clearly delighted to have a reason to stay awake at the library. “But it’s only an interruption,” he says. “And it’s not really writing, it’s an exercise in correcting. I don’t have the energy levels I used to. I read stuff that I wrote when I was in my thirties and I just think, how did I do that? I can barely write a postcard now.”
Bryson is certainly not decrepit, but his ginger beard is now Santa white — he claims to go unrecognised in the street — and his sense of mortality is never far from the conversation, not least because he has lived longer than any other Bryson male. His elder brother, Michael, a distinguished sports reporter on the Des Moines Register and Tribune like their father, was just 60 when he died in 2012. “All the males in my line were big smokers,” he adds.
In the publishing fairytale that is Notes from a Small Island several things needed to happen in a particular order. First, Bryson had to chuck in his regular income as a sub-editor, first at The Times and then The Independent, to focus on writing. For this he has his wife, Cynthia, a now retired nurse, to thank.
One summer in the early Nineties they booked a holiday cottage in the Yorkshire Dales. Like all middle-aged fathers of four, Bryson spent that week imagining a grass-is-greener life beyond the M25. Back at his desk the next Monday, he had a call from Cynthia to say she’d put their London home on the market. It was sold the next day and within weeks they’d moved to a run-down house in the Dales. “There was water running down the inside of the walls but it was idyllic,” Bryson says. “What I particularly remember from those days is just the joy of not having to go to work. It was challenging, but at the same time I think I’ve never been happier.”
Released from the nine to five, Bryson wrote a couple of books and a lot of bill-paying magazine articles. Then the next fortuitous thing happened. The couple decided to move back to the US to give their children an experience of living in another country — “they are half-American, after all, and I wanted them to learn about baseball”. After 20 years in the UK, Bryson would take one last trip around the country and his new publisher, Transworld, would give him a reported £300,000 ($636,000) to write about it.
The third essential ingredient is, of course, Bryson’s combination of humour and affection for the UK. Was that affection genuine or just a cynical ploy to sell us his books?
“It was all completely sincere,” he says. “When I first came here in 1973 I got off the ferry at Dover late at night. It was foggy and there was that seaside smell you get in Britain. I grew up a thousand miles from the sea, so that was the first time I experienced that kind of air and that feel and I just really liked it. My impressionable years had been just at a time when there were all those movies coming out of Britain and the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Swinging London. And here I was experiencing it. Look, a double-decker bus. Look, a black cab. It was all just like, wow. It felt like a place I could settle in.”
Bryson was packing boxes in the Dales when his publisher called to say the resulting book had topped our bestseller list. “It was fantastic,” he says. “I’d been pretty lucky so far but nothing stratospheric. Then this just kind of shot everything to another level.”
Literary fame came with trappings — keys to cities, honorary degrees, Robert Redford’s portrayal of him in the film adaptation of A Walk in the Woods, an OBE. In 2005, a decade after he’d described Durham as “the perfect little city” with “the best cathedral on Planet Earth”, he succeeded Peter Ustinov as chancellor of its university. He is yet to receive anything from Bradford, which he called “palpably forlorn”, but he has now sold more than 18 million books worldwide. It must have been life-changing. “Everyone wants to know what it’s like to be famous,” he says. “I didn’t dislike it but it wasn’t something I really fed off. I’m not like JD Salinger or anything but I would rather just be left alone.”
Bryson’s writing can err on the nostalgic — I wonder where his fondness for postwar America and 1990s Britain leaves us now. Is he still an optimist? “There’s plenty to be depressed about,” he says. “But I don’t think that’s just a British phenomenon. I think it’s the world we live in today. In fact I think the UK has really got better at most things.”
He starts giving examples: the food (“when I was first here you couldn’t even get mayonnaise”), the NHS (“I’m not denying the negatives, but the level of treatment is pretty high”), the worldliness. He even thinks our politicians aren’t all bad. “There were an awful lot of people that I was very glad were chucked out at the election, but even if you look at the most horrible politicians here, they’re a whole higher grade than what you get in America. You’d have to search pretty hard to find anyone here who would be so stupid that they would shoot their pet dog and then boast about it.”
Bryson will not be moving back to the US again — if he goes anywhere it will be Italy or France. “Or maybe Scandinavia.” But for now he remains a committed Anglophile and we waste the rest of the afternoon discussing the weather. “It’s been so gloomy,” he says, “but then the sun comes out and I just think, God, this is beautiful.”
And he really won’t be writing any more books? “I have several that are never going to get written, but I do the research on them. I don’t want to sit at a computer and write, but if, say, we go to Paris, I like to have a reason. Not because I really, really want to see where Cézanne was buried, for example, but just because that would give you a route for the day.”
I suspect we’ll be interviewing him again in a couple of years.
Written by: Matt Rudd
© The Times of London
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