Language Lounge
A Monthly Column for Word Lovers
Paper Wanderlust
All the misfortunes of men come from one thing only: their not knowing how to remain at peace in a room at home.
-- Pascal, Pensées
We were browsing through the VT magazine a couple of weeks ago and were delighted to come across the list of top travel books that the editors had helpfully placed under "Dog Eared": good travel writing is among our favorite genres, and it's a rare evening when we're not ready to curl up on the pillows of our wanderlust in a corner of the Lounge with a book that takes us where we haven't been before. We didn't see three of our own favorite travel titles among the treasured 30 and so we wanted to take the opportunity this month to alert gentle readers to them, on the theory that one good tip deserves another (or more precisely, that 30 good tips deserve three more).
Good travel writing is in many ways superior to actual travel; you get the benefit of fascinating or exotic experience without hassle, expense, hefty carbon footprint, and inevitable nasty surprises. A good travel writer is often superior to an actual travel companion: you get refined sensibility, creative perception, and thoughtfully digested experience without belches, snores, and adventitious prima donna outbursts. But the really great thing about travel writing is that it is a portrait, drawn only with words, of a place you can never go yourself: places changes irrevocably.
Our first great travel book chronicles the journey of a man who never reached his destination -- owing to his being kidnapped a couple of hours short of it. In 1897, Scottish statesman, author, and adventurer Robert Cunninghame-Graham, disguised as a Turkish sheikh, set out to visit the North African city of Taroudant, because he'd been told no Westerner had ever reached it. His account of the journey is told in Mogreb-El-Acksa, a title that doesn't exactly leap off the shelf at you: it's his nonce transliteration of a term that is now more often spelled Maghreb-al-Aqsa, an Arabic epithet for the country that is Morocco to us. Rough translation: "westernmost place where the sun sets." Joseph Conrad remarked that reading the book provided "a continuous feeling of delight; the persuasion that we have got hold of a good thing." Here's a sample, from the point in the narrative where the author's charade is discovered and he is detained at the pleasure of a local chieftain:
We plunged into a wood, crossed a flooded stream, rode through a field of standing corn, and, crossing the maidan before the castle, came to a horse-shoe arch. Assembled before the entrance was a crowd of armed retainers, loafers, herdsmen, travellers, and all the riff-raff who, in Morocco, haunt the dwellings of rich men. Boys, and more boys, oxen, and goats, and horses, all pressed into the gateway and the dark winding passage, to escape the storm. Loud rose the cry of "Christians, sons of dogs." I thought, in the dark passage, that the occasion seemed quite favourable for some believer to strike a quiet blow for Allah's sake.
Our second travel classic concerns a journey in which the traveler was successful in reaching her destination, though her doing so is entirely incidental to the delight of reading the account. Visit to Don Octavio is English writer Sybille Bedford's journal of a year traveling in Mexico, shortly after World War II. She does spend a few days at the rural villa of Don Otavio, but it is just one of her many adventures. You know you're in for a treat from the very first page, when the author starts out from New York City and has a short conversation with a Mexican who has made some advance arrangements for her:
"Your rooms are on Isabel la Catholica," said Guillermo.
"How kind of you," I said.
"Pensión Hernandez."
"What is it like?"
"The manager is very unkind. He would not let me have my clothes when I was arrested. But you will have no trouble... Friends will look after you."
"What friends?"
"Friends. Very sweet and useful." His louche fly's eyes swept the floor. "Don't mention my name at the Pensión."
Guillermo has no more of a part to play in the journey, yet how perfectly he is captured in just a few lines! Louche has few synonyms in English, and none really exact: it's the only word that works here and she has found it. The book continues, delightfully and often hilariously, for another 250 pages.
Our third travel classic is the story of a man who spent three years at his destination and was transformed by it -- to the degree that he ended up spending most of the rest of his life there. Living Poor is Moritz Thomsen's account of his years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador in the 1960s. Peace Corps writing is itself a genre now; there are many good memoirs of the experience, but this is one of the earliest and no one has equaled the quality of the writing since:
Ecuador is cut into two parts by the equator; and since the sun, within narrow variations, always slices directly through the middle of things, the days and nights are equal, there are no seasons, and the spectacular sunsets are short and violent. The first few times watching the sun rush screaming into the ocean, about 50 percent faster than it does in, say, Seattle, you are totally amazed. You have the crazy feeling that the celestial watch has broken down and that your life is passing at double speed.
These days Peace Corps volunteers blog from Botswana and, for all we know, podcast from Plovdiv. Your cousin visiting the Great Wall of China can probably get her pictures of it up on the web on the same day she visits. This, our technologically shrink-wrapped world, is the real reason that there will always be a place for great travel writing: it's about the only place now that you can actually get dépaysé as the French say, out of your element -- and happily, without leaving the comfort of your armchair.
You'll find a short life of Robert Cunninghame-Graham on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cunninghame-Graham
Sybille Bedford died a year ago this month in London. Her Daily Telegraph obituary is a good summary of her life:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/news/2006/02/21/db2101.xml
Salon ran an interesting piece some years ago on Moritz Thomsen by another writer who met him shortly before Thomsen's death in the late 1990s:
http://www.salon.com/wlust/feature/1998/07/14feature.html
There's an excellent article by James Morris about the folly of modern travel in the current Wilson Quarterly, which supplied us with the Pascal quote we begin with.
