American writer Gertrude Stein once said, "Everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really."

Stein grew up in Oakland, moved to Paris, met Alice B. Toklas, and turned their home into a literary salon. Later, Woody Allen made fun of her.

So many writers have more than one home, and I don't know how they do it.

There's the home of their childhood, usually long gone by the time they get around to writing about it.

There's the home they inhabit where they take in food and talk to others. There's the home in which they write. This other home may be miles away both literally and metaphorically.

Publishers in their publicity like to casually mention this author lives bi-coastally, or bi-continently, dividing her time between Long Island and Ibiza, as if it's the most common thing to do.

What a life.

Bi-cultural residency looks great on book jackets. Perhaps it's not always quite true. Hard to tell, and most authors are not telling.

English author John Biggins currently is living in Olsztyn, Poland. Not as romantic, perhaps, as living in Paris, but it's a living, teaching English to Polish medical students.

As I wrote last week, Biggins is the author of four startingly intelligent historical novels starring Otto Prohaska, a naval lieutenant in "the most deliciously, gloriously useless fleet the world has ever seen -- the Imperial, Royal and Cataleptic Navy of the imperishable, petrified, landlocked Austro-Hungarian Monarchy."

We've exchanged letters. Among other things, Mr Biggins reports he is asked if he plans to continue his Prohaska novels.

He says,

"Not the least poignant thing for me about the Prohaska novels was that so many of the fans who wrote to me were elderly German and Austrian Jews who had survived by taking refuge in Britain and the USA and were now, in the last years of their lives, trying to make some sense of the culture which had made them what they were then turned round and tried to murder them. The lingering sense of puzzlement and hurt was quite palpable.

"...Living here in present-Poland, former-East Prussia I have come to realise just how little I like the culture of Mitteleuropa, which the Prohaska books were an attempt to purge from my system after my first sojourn in these regions.

"...I fear that the whole panjandrum of wall-to-wall self-pity, competing brands of fatuous nationalism, perverted tribal honour and vicious, mutually exclusive mythologies which we saw so graphically on display in the Balkans in the mid-1990s is endemic to this region, and from what I can see of it is just waiting to explode again somewhere or other.

"There was a gay-rights parade in Poznan the Saturday before last - banned by the authorities in direct contravention of the European Human Rights Treaty to which Poland is a signatory - and the marchers were greeted by the assembled mob of Catholic-nationalist counter-demonstrators with cries of 'Jews to the Gas Chamber!', which gives you a truly chilling insight into what pass for thought processes in this part of the world.

"Communism kept the lid on it for a few decades: membership of the European Union currently imposes some restraints. But it all feels rather like picnicking on a dormant volcano - and here... you're very conscious of the instability of the ground under your feet: not fifty miles from the Russian border, and the truth having come out recently about the massacres which took place here in January 1945 when the Red Army arrived in town.

"East Prussia is a melancholy place to live at the best of times - all those dark sinister forests and silent lakes concealing you'd rather not know what - and the consciousness of the wholesale ethnic cleansing which took place here within living memory makes all the present inhabitants seem insecure and slightly guilty, as if someone might come along any day and tip them out in their turn. Suffice it to say anyway that I've had enough of chronicling the psyche of the Land of Ÿpfelstrudel and Crematoria and would like to go on to write about somewhere else next time."

Aired Sunday January 22, 2006 at 10:55 am and Monday January 23, 2006 at 8:40 am

NOTES:

From Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac for February 3, 2004: It's the birthday of writer Gertrude Stein, born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (1874). When she was 30 years old she moved to Paris, and lived there for almost the rest of her life. She once said, "America is my country and Paris is my hometown." She covered the walls of her house in Paris with paintings by Cézanne, Picasso, Renoir, Gauguin, and others. Her house became known as "The Salon", and writers and artists came from all over to get advice and encouragement from her. Ernest Hemingway once said, "Gertrude was always right."

She would hold dinner parties and then stay up afterwards to work on her own novels and essays. But she wasn't very well known as a writer until she published her autobiography, which she called The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in 1933. It was serialized in The Atlantic Monthly and became a huge bestseller in the United States. Stein became a household name, and the next year she returned to America for the first time in over 30 years, to go on a lecture tour.

Stein said, "Everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really."

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/programs/2004/02/02/

A short biography of Gertrude Stein: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/stein-bio.html

Woody Allen (from an early stand-up routine "The Lost Generation"):

"I mentioned before that I was in Europe. It's not the first time that I was in Europe, I was in Europe many years ago with Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway had just written his first novel, and Gertrude Stein and I read it, and we said that is was a good novel, but not a great one, and that it needed some work, but it could be a fine book. And we laughed over it. Hemingway punched me in the mouth.

"That winter Picasso lived on the Rue d'Barque, and he had just painted a picture of a naked dental hygenist in the middle of the Gobi Desert. Gertrude Stein said it was a good picture, but not a great one, and I said it could be a fine picture. We laughed over it and Hemingway punched me in the mouth.

"Francis Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald came home from their wild new years eve party. It was April. Scott had just written Great Expectations, and Gertrude Stein and I read it, and we said it was a good book, but there was no need to have written it, 'cause Charles Dickens had already written it. We laughed over it, and Hemingway punched me in the mouth.

"That winter we went to Spain to see Manolete fight, and he was... looked to be eighteen, and Gertrude Stein said no, he was nineteen, but that he only looked eighteen, and I said sometimes a boy of eighteen will look nineteen, whereas other times a nineteen year old can easily look eighteen. That's the way it is with a true Spaniard. We laughed over that and Gertrude Stein punched me in the mouth.

"Good night."

As quoted on a Danish website: http://www.ibras.dk/comedy/allen.htm#Lost