Every so often, some strange alchemy forges an unbreakable bond between a writer and a place. It’s impossible, for instance, to separate Stephen King from Maine, and vice versa. But when you start looking for examples, they begin to tumble off the bookshelves: L.M. Montgomery documented Prince Edward Island throughout her career as a novelist; even the Dana Stabenow books that aren’t set in Alaska feel informed by her life as an Alaskan; and on the day that Armistead Maupin moved to San Francisco, both his and the city’s fortunes changed for the better.
I would argue that Jonathan Raban and Seattle share that mysterious bond — the magic of a writer finding their ideal place in the world. This is not to diminish Raban’s talent — he would have been a world-class writer no matter where he decided to make his home. His keen observational eye, wry sense of humor, and brilliant ability to prize apart the nonsense and find the tiny seed of truth at the heart of any situation were unique among his peers.
But it’s impossible to read “Driving Home: An American Journey,” Raban’s wide-ranging essay collection published by Seattle’s own Sasquatch Books, and not recognize it as a love story between a gruff Englishman and the verdant beauty of the Pacific Northwest.
In the pieces collected in “Driving Home,” Raban tells this origin story over and over again: “In the spring of 1990 I packed up as much of my life in London as would fit into a suitcase and four large plywood boxes and flew to Seattle to set up house,” Raban writes in the titular essay that opens the book. “It was a selfish and irregular move. I had ‘met someone’ and liked what I’d seen of the Pacific Northwest during a two-month stay there the previous autumn.”
Raban retells this story several times throughout the book, and soon enough the fact that he moved to the city in pursuit of love disappears. The city becomes the love he’s pursuing. “I came to live in Seattle in 1990, when I was forty-seven. It was late — very late — in the day for a new start,” he writes about halfway through the book. He gushes over Seattle’s bridges, the Locks, the libraries. A box of old photographs helps him feel more connected with the city: “Having no ancestors of my own in the Pacific Northwest,” he explains, “I bought some at a Queen Anne yard sale. They came in a job lot in a Red Delicious Washington Apple box and cost me $15.00.”
In those early days, Raban is almost goofy for Seattle, and that wide-eyed, awe-struck wonder looks good on him. This is a writer who does not suffer fools gladly — Raban’s nonfiction narrative engines practically glide forward on a road made from the bodies of people he has laid low with a droll aside. But something about Seattle’s can-do spirit, in conjunction with the holy depths of green surrounding the city for miles in every direction, inspired a charming optimism in Raban — a vitality that his writing was missing.
When Raban suffered a stroke just three days shy of his 69th birthday in June of 2011, paralyzing the left side of his body, many assumed that he’d never publish another book. But Raban defied our expectations again, and again: Not only did he live to the age of 80, passing away on Jan. 17 of this year, but his obituaries included the announcement of one final new book. Raban’s editor at Alfred A. Knopf, John Freeman, disclosed that Raban had spent the last decade writing and editing a memoir using voice dictation software, and the completed book, “Father and Son,” was to be published in the fall of 2023.
“Father and Son” braids the narrative of Raban’s recovery from his stroke with the story of his father’s travels as a soldier in World War II, before and after Raban’s birth. Though he had to learn a whole new way of writing after his stroke, shifting from typing to speaking, the language in the book is 100% Raban’s, which is to say that “Father and Son” is a worthy addition to his shelf’s worth of books.
In the opening of the book, Raban’s beloved Seattle shrinks to the size of a room at Swedish Hospital’s Edmonds campus, where he takes stock of his capabilities and chafes at the nurses who ask him if he needs to “go potty,” lecturing them about the perils of “infantilization.” His thoughts turn inward, toward his origins.
The stroke was likely caused by Raban’s lifelong smoking habit, but he can’t bring himself to regret his choices. “The people I liked best among my immediate contemporaries (those born in England during the Second World War, or just before or just after it) were all smokers, and there were more dead friends than living ones in my address book,” Raban writes. “That book, its spine long broken, pages out of order, held together with a rubber band, cried out to be replaced. But I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of it.”
And so he heads into the past, writing his father’s story using his parents’ love letters as primary texts and corroborating with a host of secondary sources. Peter Raban saw history at Dunkirk and Anzio during the war, and his experiences shaped his son Jonathan into the singular man he became.
One classically Rabanesque passage comes midway through “Father and Son,” when a doctor refers to Raban as “the one who used to be a writer.” “’Used to be’ went off in my head with the force of a grenade. I tried to respond to the remark as if it were a joke,” Raban writes. “’I very much hope that I’m still a writer.’ I looked him between the eyes and said, ‘I very much hope that I’ll write about this — about you — when I get out of the rehab ward. You’ll make what they call “good copy,” you know?’”
Indeed he did! Your heart can’t help but break for Raban in that moment, when he’s forced to come to terms with the idea that he might no longer be able to do the one thing that he has always considered central to his identity. And your heart can’t help but swell to watch Raban swagger and rise to the challenge — to write one more time, haters be damned.
Though impeccably researched, I must admit that the narrative of Raban’s father interested me much less than “Father and Son’s” account of Raban’s stroke and recovery, his tentative journeys out of the rehab ward and back into the wilds of the Pacific Northwest and the waterfront of Seattle.
In a life filled with adventure and travel, those gentle excursions to restaurants and cabins that Raban makes around Seattle at the end of “Father and Son” with his beloved daughter Julia — herself a Seattelite through and through — are among his greatest adventures. The city that he adopted almost by chance comforted him in his convalescence and inspired him to write his final chapter.
Unlike so many of his peers in that battered address book who died sudden, brutish deaths, Raban was granted the grace to spend another full decade enjoying his chosen home, and the time to admire his life in full, on his own terms.
