Postscript: Anthony Bailey, 1933 - 2020

Anthony Bailey [Photo by Jessica (Bibby) Giesen]

I see in yesterday’s Times that Anthony Bailey died May 13, 2020 of coronavirus. Between 1949 and 1995, Bailey wrote eighty-six articles for The New Yorker – everything from reporting pieces, profiles and personal history to Talk stories, fiction, and poetry. Among his best pieces are “A Walk Along the Boyne” (June 2, 1980), “The Edge of the Forest” (June 27 & July 4, 1983), “A Good Little Vessel” (June 2, 1986), and “Outer Banks” (May 25, 1987).

Bailey was a superb describer. Here, for example, from “A Walk Along the Boyne,” is his depiction of the Russell Arms Hotel, in Navan, where he and Seamus Heaney stayed after their first day of hiking along the Boyne River:

The Russell Arms: staircases going this way and that; the feeling of being in two or three large Victorian houses knocked together in a period of expansion, and now, that moment passed, in old age propping one another up. In the bathroom I used, there were no light bulbs in the fixtures and no plug in the bath. Fortunately, daylight of a feeble sort persisted. I used the small plug from the washbasin and added my facecloth to stem the ebb from the tub. In my bedroom, one out of three lights worked. However, on the ground floor all was well set up and jovial. The bar was full of early arrivals for a meeting of the local association of Tipperary Men – exiles, it appeared, from that fair county, all of a hundred miles from Navan. Heaney arrived, still hobbling, but otherwise restored by hot water. We drank apértifs of Bushmills whiskey, from the North, and dined off sirloin from the South. We toasted the Boyne with several carafes of red Spanish plonk. Meanwhile, the river was running a hundred yards away, unseen, past the backs of the houses of Navan, which resolutely look the other way.

My favorite Bailey piece is “Outer Banks,” an account of a trip he took along North Carolina’s Outer Banks in 1985. It’s written in the first person, present tense – a combination I find irresistible. It tells what Bailey did, saw, heard, ate and felt, in detail after palpable detail, as he walks, drives, camps, and noses his way across the precarious Banks. Here’s a sample:

Then I turn left – north – along the beach. The tide is at half ebb, so I am able to stride easily on firm, damp sand at the water’s edge; higher on the beach, the sand is dry and loose, too soft for comfortable walking. Some people are sitting on porches, or in beach chairs in front of their cottages. A few fishermen are casting into the surf, and several youths on surfboards are floating some way out, waiting for the right wave. Toward the horizon, a small white blob is a solitary sportfishing boat. At the water’s edge, I pass a child swimming and being watched by his father, who gives me an affable nod. I make my turnaround point a structure called the Nags Head Fishing Pier. It is battered-looking, spindly-legged, and wobbly-kneed, yet a number of customers obviously feel secure enough to be angling from it; on the landward end, it has a bar, a luncheonette, and a fishing-tackle store. As I walk back, I observe driftwood; the black egg cases of skate, like dark pouches of ravioli or wonton, sealed as if with a twist at each end; all sorts of shells; and a plastic fork or two.

John Updike said of Bailey, “He writes as naturally as he walks, and he is the last great walker.” If you want to walk with him, just enter his work almost anywhere – this is the consolation he’s left us – and there you’ll find him, traveling about, looking around, seeing what there is to see.