I’m squashed into the back corner of a Pret a Manger on Piccadilly with Britain’s bestselling non-fiction author, having escaped our early-morning photo shoot in search of a cup of coffee. Or at least, I think Bill Bryson is Britain’s bestselling non-fiction author – I’ve seen the statistic on his own website, in several newspaper profiles and in his honorary degree citation from King’s – but, with self-deprecation that proves to be characteristic, Bryson begs to differ.
“Well, apparently it’s not true,” he stutters, waving an apologetic hand. “I mean, it is true, but you have to sort of exclude people like Jamie Oliver. I’m the bestselling writer of paper books that don’t have recipes. Or something.” So persuasive is his grin that you might almost forget the 300,000 sales of A Short History of Nearly Everything, or that Notes from a Small Island was chosen by Radio 4 as the best book ever written about the British Isles. “Lots of people can claim these things in lots of different ways,” Bryson adds helpfully after a moment’s thought. “I’m sure The Highway Code sells more copies every year than me.”
Bryson is 61 now, with a cloud of russet beard shading to grey and an Iowa accent thinned by decades in Britain, but he’s a vigorous presence with an infectious giggle that surfaces irrepressibly in almost every sentence he speaks. We’ve been firmly instructed by his publishers to keep the focus of our interview on his new book One Summer, but he’s a bit mystified by the stipulation. “As far as I’m concerned there are no parameters,” he says. “Why would there be? It’s not as though I’m going through some painful divorce or something that I can’t talk about.” He gives a joyous giggle. “My life is so boring that there are no secrets in it at all!”
So, leaving aside his acerbic views on British urban sprawl and the long-promised Robert Redford film of his travelogue A Walk in the Woods (“When it happens,” he says, “I trust someone will let me know”), we plunge into the new book. One Summer is a potted history of certain aspects of American life during the summer of 1927, a period that turns out to have rather more significance than Bryson’s unshowy title suggests. In May that year, the young aviator Charles Lindbergh became the first man to fly the Atlantic solo, instantly becoming, Bryson writes, “so famous that crowds would form around any building that contains him and waiters would fight over a corn-cob left on his dinner plate”. Later in the summer, the baseball player Babe Ruth, by then a media celebrity “bigger than the President”, in the words of one sports writer, scored 60 home runs in a season, breaking his own record.
These were the two poles from which Bryson began his research. “Initially I had it in mind to do a dual biography of Lindbergh and Ruth,” he says. “It was going to be my secret way into being allowed to write a baseball book. I’d always been fascinated by the fact that although the two things were happening at the same time, they’re almost never written about as though they did. But as I was doing the research, I found there were all these other things going on.”
There were indeed. The clean-up from the Mississippi River floods – the most destructive in American history – propelled future president Herbert Hoover onto the national stage. The Danish-American sculptor Gutzon Borglum began work on the Mount Rushmore sculptures. In Hollywood, Al Jolson began shooting The Jazz Singer, the first film to feature recorded dialogue. “These things were absolutely simultaneous,” Bryson says. “It wasn’t that they were happening around that time. They were actually all happening in the summer of 1927.”
Though the book circles around these major events, it also makes detours into less well-known aspects of American history. Bryson seems particularly delighted by the grisly life-insurance killing known as the Sash Weight Murder, whose events inspired the film Double Indemnity, and by the car manufacturer Henry Ford’s plan to build the disastrous prefab city of Fordlandia in the Brazilian jungle. And he presents a roll-call of unlikely characters, from the psychopathic school bomber Andrew Kehoe to the erstwhile Channel swimmer Gertrude Ederle, from the pose-striking Fascist airman Francesco de Pinedo to the flamboyant sports writer Richards Vidmer. “I resisted some pressure to give it a subheading like 'The Year that Changed the World,’” Bryson says. “You know, there are just too many books called things like 'How Cotton Changed the Universe’ or whatever. But my feeling was, this is just a really good story. I wanted it to unfold for the reader the way it did for me.”
Readers of Bryson’s lacerating early travelogues may be surprised by the genial, reflective tone of One Summer. As a Brit by adoption who has lived in this country for most of his adult life, he has been one of the country’s most scathing writers about modern America. Has he mellowed? “I think I have as I’ve got older,” he admits. “But I’ve also been harder on America than on other countries. The thing about America is that it’s incredibly rich. It could take all this money and do anything – build a fair, just society with healthcare for all, that kind of thing – and it doesn’t. In a sense, America has, during my lifetime, engaged in long campaigns to make everything as ugly as possible. I just find that heartbreaking and disappointing, and that’s always brought out the cynic in me. I find it very easy to be malevolent.”
But his cynicism about his mother country is matched by a deep love of his adopted one. Although he stepped down last year as president of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, handing over what he describes as “a pretty thankless role” to Andrew Motion, he’s been living in rural Norfolk for the past decade and bristles with irritation when our talk turns to the countryside. Have things got worse under the coalition government? “I have to say, I’m no fan of the Tories but it was no better under Labour,” he says. “Nobody in politics really likes the countryside or understands it, and almost all of them see it as an underutilised resource. They see land sitting there that’d be much better if it had buildings on it, if it would somehow generate income, taxes, and economic activity.”
What about social housing, I ask – but he is there before me. “They say social housing, but not one of them gives a s---. If they really cared about social housing they’d build f---ing social housing! They never do. It’s really a cover, I think.” He takes a deep breath and grins without mirth. “That’s perhaps just a little bit cynical of me. People think the English countryside is somehow immutable, that you can neglect it and it’ll still be glorious. In fact it is very much a man-made object, and you have to maintain it just as you maintain old churches and old buildings. If that’s what you want, you have to pay for it.”
He’s considered writing about the topic, but anyone expecting a book-length polemic may be disappointed. “I’ve always been fascinated by questions like, how many mice are there in Britain?” he says, suddenly delighted. “I’d quite like to know how many pigeons there are. And when you start looking into these things, it always turns out that somewhere there’s a guy whose whole life is studying woodlarks, or who’s Professor of Woodpigeon Science at the University of Central Lancashire or something.”
How on earth does one go about finding these people, I ask: is there an overworked research assistant somewhere, half-buried under a heap of academic journals? Bryson smiles at the suggestion: he may or may not be Britain’s bestselling non-fiction writer, but he’s almost certainly its most modest. “No, I do all the research myself,” he says, getting ready to nip round the corner to the London Library and do some more. “It’s just stumbling around or asking.”
