V. S. PRITCHETT
At Home and Abroad
Contents
Introduction
1 South America
2 Portugal
3 Down the Seine
4 Europe’s Mediterranean Coast
5 Guideless in the Pyrenees
6 Journey in Greece
7 The Secret People
8 The Irish Character
9 The Americans in My Mind
10 Across the Vast Land
11 London
12 The Island World
13 Thames River of History
14 The Appalachian Mountains
Introduction
When I look back on my life as a writer I see how much I owe to a sound pair of walking legs. My hopes of the freedom these would give me were almost extinguished at fifteen when I had to leave my decent London grammar school during the First World War and was dumped into the warehouse of the leather trade. I stuck it out for five years until I was caught by the postwar flu epidemic. My one talent was that I was good at French. I craved for France, and with twenty pounds in my pocket I went to Paris, got an office boy’s job in a photographic firm and then became a traveler in the glue and shellac trade. My legs took me all over Paris and at one supreme moment one Easter I made a vow—walkers in those days made heroic vows—to walk from Paris to Orléans and to cross the Loire. I was on “the open road.” I wrote an account of my trip and the Christian Science Monitor published it. I was a travel writer at last.
The editor asked for more travel sketches and then had a reckless idea. He was in trouble with his Irish readers at the time of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Civil war had broken out. He sent me, a green Englishman, to green Ireland to write not about politics but about how the Irish managed to live while the factions were fighting it out. I was paid twenty-five pounds for six articles. They succeeded. I became their Irish correspondent. For myself the reward was that I met the excellent short story writers O’Flaherty and Frank O’Connor, and even W. B. Yeats.
But news fades. Suddenly I was switched to the troubles in the Spain of Primo de Rivera. The censorship cut down the news, so I was left with time to travel through Spain for a year and a half. Spain changed my life and educated me at last. There I wrote my first book of travel, Marching Spain, somewhat in the heroic Bellocian style. I “marched” through the poorest and least-known region of the country, the one that runs along the Portuguese frontier to Vigo. Thirty years later I wrote a far more informative book about Spain, The Spanish Temper. The odd thing is that when I was a schoolboy I had written a preposterous prose poem on the Spanish Conquest of the Moors in Granada. I had cribbed the story from Washington Irving’s Life of Columbus.
Now I was a seasoned foot-slogger. I went briefly, for the first time, to the United States and there I was drawn by chance to walk among the “lost” poor whites of the Appalachians, long before it became a national park. Once more I was among the poor—people as “backward” but as noble as the lost people of the Portuguese-Spanish frontier. Incidentally, among them I came across a ninety-year-old man called Pritchett who said he had “fit” in the Civil War.
I settled down at last in London to become a short story writer, novelist and literary critic on The New Statesman—in short, a literary gent of the thirties. My most successful novel, Dead Man Leading, is the tale of a disastrous expedition up the Amazon. I had never seen the Amazon. I simply made a small model of the river, with string and matchsticks, on the lawn of my house. The ants in the grass served as my explorers. I had studied the diaries of a number of missionaries in that region in the British Museum. One or two real explorers praised the book when it appeared, and indeed when, after World War II, I did go to South America and “up the Amazon” to write a very long piece on that continent for the excellent American periodical Holiday Magazine, I was astonished by the accuracy of my invention. After my Spanish experience and my knowledge of Spanish exploration I was excited by the sight of those lands that had made the Spaniards rich, by the tale of their glories and their disasters. And I saw the supreme sights of the Pacific and the Andes. At any rate, I had graduated as a literary globetrotter.
1
South America
“If I were a young man,” a famous editor said to me in London years ago, “I would pack up and go to South America for life. That is the continent of thefuture” Years later, the splendid chance came. Last October I packed up and flew off, not indeed for life, but on a trip several months long which took me from Panama down the Pacific coast of the continent, over the Andes into the Argentine and up through Buenos Aires, Montevideo and into Rio de Janeiro and those lovely coastal towns of old Portuguese Brazil to the Amazon.
The impressions I have set down here are those of the rapid traveler who cannot “stay for an answer.” But years of living in Spain and Portugal had had a profound effect upon me: I was eager to see how their superb, nation -creating civilizations had transplanted. I wanted to see what the Spaniards and the Portuguese had done; how America and the Indian and Negro races they had mixed with had changed them. I believe in differences, and I have tried to set out how the Colombian differs from the Peruvian, the Chilean from the Argentine, the Argentine from the Uruguayan, and the remarkable Brazilians from all. I already knew a good deal of their history: I went to see its natural setting. That alone is stupendous. For anyone who lives by eye and ear, as I do, to use them in the exotic South American scene is a major pleasure of life. In the months I was there I flew a good ten thousand miles, saw men and women at their most primitive and most civilized, crossed from sea to sea, from mountain to jungle. Mine was, quite literally, a flying visit; but the impressions of the flying visit are sharp and indelible.
Colombia
By half past six it was dark and the red light at the tip of the plane’s wing began to wink. There was a great ragged continent of black cloud and across the sea there were mountains mixing with it. Then we saw a feeble pan of lights spread out and we were being tipped into Cartagena, Colombia. The moment of arrival in a new continent is momentous. I put away the brochures, the maps and the books—the inevitable Prescott, the indispensable Robert Herring—and, in full ignorance, prepared for the body blow of South America.
Like some hot black body, the tropical night flops down on the northerner. There were black faces, white suits, Negro voices that whispered hoarsely or Indians speaking in the Caribbean twitter, and every human being shamelessly scratching or swatting as the squadrons of insects flew in. Luggage arrived in the customhouse. Officials and porters gazed at it meltingly, reluctant to touch it, as if every suitcase were a private poem. One nervous traveler shouted, and the whole customhouse stopped whispering and scratching to stare at the loud man, as if they were seeing some new kind of bird. There were one or two pretty girls and they parted their very red lips. They had lost many of their front teeth. (In all the tropical part of South America, east and west, in the months ahead, I was to dread the moment when a girl opened her mouth.)
And then we were driving on a road full of potholes and flood water, outside the walls of Cartagena—the only walled port on the continent. The houses looked like painted bird cages at night with black birds in them, and the sea crashed under the lunatic coconut palms of the beach. That night in Cartagena we were given haddock, coconut and rice to eat. The heat turned to steam, the rain came down like bullets and ran in lilac lakes down the flooded streets. “I get restless when it rains,” the barman said. “I feel I want something and I don’t know what it is.” The people of Cartagena looked like that the next day, even the macaws in the garden of the hotel; until the sun suddenly came through and on the boil.
Cartagena sizzles at the top of the South American leg of mutton. T
he town is unique in the continent; it is more Caribbean than South American and more Mediterranean than Caribbean; it is an Algeciras towed out into the tropics. And there is a similar history of piracy, for here you are at the beginning of South American history and Spanish rule and in that corner where the Spanish stain is deepest. From here, through Colombia and Ecuador down to Peru, you are on the treasure route of Pizarro. No other part of South America is so Spanish. Cartagena was one of the best harbors in the north and it was one of the points from which the treasure ships sailed under convoy. Drake and all the pirates knew this. Drake captured the town and exacted a huge ransom. The French got something like five million dollars in one raid. So Cartagena built its wall forty feet thick, a pleasant promenade now for the Sunday parade, but not until the middle of the eighteenth century, when a last grand assault by the British was stingingly repelled, was Cartagena safe.
Now it is a gay and decent little town. “Not like Barranquilla down the coast,” the loyal waiter said—and on subjects like this, waiters are infallible. Barranquilla is the new modern port where Colombians ship their coffee. “The police make the people wear numbers on their clothes at the masked fiesta of Barranquilla, so they can pick out anyone who draws a knife or fires a revolver. Never trouble in Cartagena, but at Barranquilla and”—raising his eyes to the furry mountains—“in the interior mucho cuchillo,” plenty of knife work. The worst thing that happened to me in Cartagena was that a monkey stole my pipe.
And so, preserved in the sun’s tropical amber, Cartagena is as Spanish as Quito in Ecuador and Cuzco in Peru. You see the same stone arcades in the squares, the same overhanging balconies of carved and prettily painted wood, the same low roofs with the wide eaves covered with red tiles, the same windows barred with wood. Even the bars of the windows of the fine Palace of the Inquisition are made of hardwood painted white. There are the same patios the Spaniards learned to build from the Moors, the same narrow streets to shut out the overwhelming sun.
The dome of the cathedral is checkered in white and cinnamon, the belfries of the churches are as white as starch; and inside, you meet the golden rococo altars and the fine neglected Spanish cloisters with their palms. Yet Cartagena is not Spain, for it is an Indian and mulatto town. All shops and offices and doorways open to the street to let the sticky air flow through. The fans spin on the ceilings. Men are asleep in the chairs of innumerable barbers, or, in their white shirts and trousers, sit drinking their twenty or thirty cups of black coffee a day in the cafés. There are fruit-juice stalls every few yards and there is every kind of tropical fruit in the market. Rows of mulatto girls sit at their sewing machines in the shops, black babies play naked round the shacks, and from the shrine on the burning green hill that dominates Cartagena you watch the vultures wheeling down and alighting with their strange double bounce upon the refuse. Taxi drivers talk Hemingway.
These tropical towns are all alike. The power of concentration has melted away in timeless distraction. At every door and window a figure stands in gentle lassitude. Nearly every woman, you would say, was pregnant and had a needle and cotton in her hand. She will not be in the act of sewing yet, but sometime in the next ten minutes, and not taking her eyes from the sight she is looking at, she will slowly begin to put the needle into the cloth. There it will remain a long time before she remembers to draw it through.
Groups of half-dressed men lounge in tropical desuetude over the balconies of the broken-down inn, gazing at the market, as if they were rags hung up to dry on a line. Three half-naked men, with a drum, a tambourine and a long whistle like a cane, tootle and knuckle their monotonous tune, hour after hour, and a listening crowd will close round as if hypnotized. In the booths of the market, if one person is buying, he leans on the counter and half a dozen lean with him in a silent, helpless gregariousness.
You can trace the centuries easily in Cartagena. There are the citadel and the churches, not as rich as those in Spain, simply because the treasure was sent home. There is the eighteenth-century fort; there is the desolate statuary of the shoddy nineteenth-century square commemorating the liberation from Spain, when all the South American republics fell into anarchy for two or three generations, lost Spanish craftsmanship and order and split up into family factions. There is the terrible shack town, half under water, a place of misery where the women are always sweeping and washing, but where there are always flowers and an oil lamp on the table. I thought of the poem of Neruda, the Chilean poet; in all their wretchedness, he observed, the poor of South America have their flowers. There is the Californian suburb, the new architecture and the luxury hotel where you can swim in the pool, listen to the Argentine and Mexican singers in the air-conditioned restaurant and go to the casino and, with proper South American passion, gamble until dawn. And you will meet the temperamental engineers of the foreign company that is finding what every South American republic prays for more than all the gold of Pizarro: oil. Oil wins half the battle for solvency. Colombia, like Venezuela and Peru, can stand on its own feet because it has oil.
The only way to get out of Cartagena, unless you have weeks on your hands, is to fly. This is true of almost all South American cities. Until the airplane came they lived in extraordinary isolation. Cartagena is a good place from which to survey the continent that lies before us. We shall have to form new ideas about size and population.
The republic of Colombia is the size of Texas and California combined, but two thirds of it lies in the wilderness and jungle of the upper Orinoco and Amazon and is scarcely inhabited. The population of 12 million lives on the tableland between the Andes or in the narrow tropical plain on the coast. Only 2.5 million of these people are “white”; most of the rest are mixed white and Indian.
If we look beyond Colombia, from this beginning, we have to imagine a continent which is more than twice the size of the United States and nearly twice the size of Europe. Brazil alone is larger than the United States. To the European, all the Americas, north, south and central, seem empty lands; even in Uruguay, where it is most thickly populated. South America has only thirty-five persons to the square mile, seventeen is nearer the average; and in Bolivia, the South American Tibet, the density is only eight. In the United States the density is fifty-three; in underpopulated France two hundred two! We shall have the impression of traveling to a string of distant cities, with little but geography between them. There are a few motor roads, but it is rather startling if they connect one place with another. There are few railways. Before I left London I heard a British manufacturer scheming to send machinery overland from Belém, up the Amazon to La Paz. “The country hasn’t even been explored,” said the scornful Bolivian consul. Those machines would have just sunk into the forest.
So, we shall be flying in all kinds of aircraft, from the superb international planes, the “mixed”—goods and passengers—and the scores of little private and company planes that hop out of some twentieth-century capital into the camps of primitive man. Up the Amazon there will be more danger from poisoned arrows than from engine trouble; in the Andes we could simply be lost altogether. We shall look out of the windows of our luxury hotel at a president’s palace or a mulatto shack town, at a handsome park or Indians trotting barefoot to market.
But, more than anything else, more than life or a collection of civilizations, we shall be flying over Nature in its most primitive masses. Where else can we fly, day after day, for almost four thousand miles if we like, down one of the highest, longest and most turbulent mountain chains in the world—the cordillera of the Andes—with their unnumbered volcanoes and always, somewhere, an earthquake? And, beside them, observe a desert like the two-thousand-odd miles of withered and glaring sand dune that runs from Peru south into Chile? There is the great billiard table of the Argentine pampas; there are the thousands of miles of wilderness and scrub, and then the unbelievable jungle of the Amazon water system, more than thirty-three hundred miles across the country and immensely deep.
In that flight we s
hall be in a green mid-Atlantic—a limitless pan of crinkled green, stewing like kale beneath us, featureless except where the palm top stars it or where there is a steamlike puff from a tree in silver leaf. And, as we move from mass to mass, we shall be caught like flies in molasses at the tropical sea level; then, suddenly, shot on to a tableland where the ground floor is ten thousand feet up. We shall cross peaks at twenty thousand and come down short of breath and with hammers going in our heads. In the morning it will be summer; in the afternoon midwinter. We shall know all the world’s climates from day to day. After sweltering in Cartagena, I was soon shuddering in the cold drizzle of Bogotá.
And the people? It is too early for us to say yet, but we ought to be clear about what to call them. It is dangerous to call them Latin Americans, for they come from Spanish, Portuguese and Indian or Negro stock, in many but not all of the republics; and the Spanish and Portuguese are not pure Latins. Their culture is a modification of the Latin by the African—Africa of the Arab in Spain, Africa of Arab and Negro in Portugal; and in both those countries, for many centuries, the Arab was the conqueror, the ruler and man of learning, the superior of the white southern European. And phrases like Latin America or Ibero-America leave out the American Indian who in Mexico and Peru created the only Indian urban civilization in the Americas. The South American Indian was massacred but not exterminated; he exists in his millions. He is not dying off in reservations. Bolivia is over 80 percent Indian or mestizo and there the politically conscious Indian miner has marched armed into La Paz and claimed his country.
To the American from the United States—the North American, as these people call him, for they regard themselves as the only true Americans—South America is at a stage comparable to the United States of frontier days. To Europeans, it is a crude Europe—imitated, parodied, transposed. They see only two unifying forces: the Roman Catholic faith, and language—the Spanish or the Portuguese.
At Home and Abroad Page 1
