by Paul Theroux
The more I reflect on Robinson Crusoe the more convinced I become that it is confusing to deal with the exotic as a literary idea. It is all right to begin with a book—the concreteness of fiction is helpful to provoke thought; but after that the exotic asserts its ambiguity. I think its ambiguity ought to remain smoky and allusive: the image is half vapor anyway and cannot be fixed. And some of it is almost too unbearably detailed to be given fictional form. It seems quite appropriate that after dozing over Purchas His Pilgrimes, Coleridge woke and tried to describe his "Vision in a Dream", the city of Xanadu and Kubla Khan's Pleasure Dome. Similarly, his faltering is predictable, for he was stopped like a man dazzled by an overwhelming brilliance and on second thought put the blame on the person from Porlock (who had come to collect a debt: how much further could one be from the exotic than in confronting the plain fact of this intruder?). The exotic is really too beautiful or unlikely for words. It is worth mentioning that Samuel Purchas's book (1613) was partly based on Hakluyt's Voyages (also the source of some of Shakespeare's exoticism in The Tempest). But dreamers are not always readers, and they are seldom travelers.
No exotic dreams in fiction have ever compared with the visual dreams we see in paintings or photographs. Bosch in prose would be as unreadable as the most celebrated dream-fiction of all time, Finnegans Wake, a tumultuous obfuscation wherein Joyce's labors only demonstrate that the written word gives us little access to dreams. Language is a thicket: the unpronounceable merely confounds us and turns us away; the thwarted dream becomes nightmare. Defoe suggested a savage exotic, Coleridge wrote the prologue for a lush version, Elizabethan travelers reported on cities of gold and the dramatists they inspired made these cities idyllic; for Milton, the exotic was "the Golden Chersonese" of the Far East, for Kipling it was the stinks and stratagems of the bazaar. Some, like Pierre Loti, wrote about what they saw; others, like Robert Louis Stevenson, had a fantasy of the exotic long before they were able to witness it as travelers. Early in his life, Stevenson wrote:
I should like to rise and go
Where the golden apples grow;
Where below another sky
Parrot islands anchored lie.
"As an ailing youth in Heriot Row," James Pope Hennessy wrote of Stevenson in Edinburgh, "he had dreamed of an active life in exotic surroundings." It is like Fallen Man, marked with the sin of illness, yearning for a second chance to be Adam. For the last four years of his life, in Vailima, Samoa, Stevenson saw and understood what he had imagined so many years before. He had gone in search of the exotic. But some did not risk the journey. The vulgarity in the Tarzan books of Edgar Rice Burroughs (who never left the United States, but who fuelled his imagination on the work of Henry Morton Stanley) seems an accurate rendering of the jungly exotic because it is complete and, of course, because being wholly imaginary it confirms our stereotype of Africa. Yet the written word is somehow not enough. The exotic image is private and fantastic. It is so hard to share such a vision.
The challenge to fiction is an obvious truth: thought is pictorial. We don't dream gray pages of print; we see faces and landscapes, we are animated by the particularities of light, we think in pictures. And although the exotic is vivid in the reckonings of painters—the mental travelers like Blake, or else actual travelers who made careers for themselves by finding the exotic scenes they were to depict in their paintings, such as Zoffany and the Daniells—it was not until the invention of photography that it was possible to prove to the skeptics and reassure the dreamer that the travelers, the painters and poets had not been fancifully indulging themselves in a private vision.
Photography is alone among art forms in having a birthdate. After 1822, when the Frenchman Niepce made the first permanent photograph, the world was accessible to us in pictures. Almost from the first the exotic was considered an important subject for the camera. And no longer could the exotic be disputed as illusion or dismissed as fantasy.
Here was the evidence: from Samoa, the matai's daughter, in her virgin's head-dress, bare-breasted and pigeon-toed before a hibiscus hedge, modestly clutching at her coconut leaf skirt; or from India, the nautch girls in stiff clothes and bangles and nose-jewels, very tiny and serious and young, not voluptuous but bearing a resemblance to painted and written reports; the fakir knotted on his mat, his legs twisted in two arches behind his head and his serene chalk-white face; the homely grandeur of the Zulu woman delousing her preoccupied husband with patient concentration; the pudgy Turkish girls in a vaguely vicious room; the Indians with flutes who seem wilfully to ignore the upright cobras they have charmed (and to the right, one supine snake—perhaps tone-deaf—making for the camera); a dwarf witch from Darjeeling with coins on her palms, the heavily bandaged corpse on a ghat awaiting combustion, a family group of head-hunters posed like picnickers, a donkey cart of shrouded women and children pausing in an Arabian street for their strangeness to be verified; camels and elephants, and landscapes—deserted beaches and steppes, the emblematic palms, water mirroring wilderness, flowers so strange they had yet to be named.
What is it that is so persuasive about these photographs? Like all photographs, however fudged or posed, they have the undiscriminating truthfulness which the human eye lacks; and where there are flaws the truth is even more emphatic. In some cases they are distortions of the exotic dream, rougher, bruised-looking or plainly dirty; but many are like the dream made flesh and have an uncanny exactitude. These are representations of a complete world that is utterly different from that inhabited by people in whose dreams this exoticism was prefigured. This is the world in a dew-drop, trembling on a very odd leaf. Look a bit closer: there is a demure girl waiting for you, petals crisply starched on branches, flower blobs on a bush, white sand and squirts of sunshine through cloud, cool damp hollows in hillocks, men in furry boots and snakes rising tamely out of baskets; it is not always sweet-scented, for there is a decrepit cliff, an overworked child, a loaf of buffalo dung or black hides stretched on a flyblown frame. We believe because, however bizarre the photographic subject, it is the bizarreness we require—it is the confirmation we need. These photographs of the exotic enlarge the meaning of the word and go on to furnish our dreams with a greater magnificence.
Each picture is an invitation to the exotic and seems to repeat in its strangeness that this is a world that awaits discovery. It holds out the promise—something the Playboy pin-up does in a crude posture—that you can enter this picture. Because it is a photograph, it is an affirmation of truth (even though we know that photographs are capable of cheating and trickery); and because it is exotic it beckons.
If the exotic is partly illusion, the illusion of what is not there is compensated by something that is there that we did not expect. Fifteen years ago, I went to Africa, where I was to remain for five years. The land of mud and smoke and low forest, of undersized people in rags, and odors of decay, was a surprise to me, but no less strange than the hot brightly-lit place I dreamed of years before I left home. Africa was cold. There was snow on the Equator: a further shock. I had not seen photographs that had prepared me for this. But very soon, frost was included in my notion of the exotic, and I cannot think of Africa now without smelling the wood smoke of a burning blue-gum log or seeing a humpy meadow covered with white frost and a darker solitary track of foot-marks—narrow as bird-prints, because the walker through that frosty meadow had no shoes. I was incapable of imagining the Giant Lobelia, the heights of the Ituri Forest, the Ngorogoro Crater; nor was I quite prepared for the Africans themselves. I wrote and wrote, disillusionment gave way to wonder. You had to see it to believe it.
Robert Louis Stevenson sailed the Pacific looking for the perfect island "where golden apples grow". He rejected Hawaii, he rejected Tahiti, he wasn't entranced by Australia. Then he happened upon Samoa and decided to stay. He did not live, as they say, fa'asamoa, "Samoa-style". He built a grand house with an enormous veranda. He extended the house and added servants. He emptied his Edinburgh house and shipped the c
ontents—marble busts, ormolu clocks and all—to Samoa. He brought out his aged mother as well. He was one of the best, and best-known, writers of his time—his most popular writing was behind him (he had written Treasure Island in Braemar and Davos, "Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" in Bournemouth). He had a vast public, and people believed what he wrote. But in this house, which was almost Crusoe-like in the way it recreated an old bourgeois style of life on an exotic island, Tusitala ("The Writer of Tales", Stevenson's Samoan title), had one valued possession: a large square-headed plate camera on a gangling tripod. Stevenson even had a cameraman, Joe Strong, the husband of his stepdaughter. After Joe became burdensome as a drunkard and a spendthrift (and he had a Samoan mistress in Apia) and was expelled from Paradise, Stevenson took over the camera and supervised the rest of the picture-taking himself from then on.
Homage to Mrs Robinson
[1977]
She stood alone and completely calm on the empty railway platform, her long coat tugged by the train's draft. The first thing he noticed in the over-bright lights of the station were the lustrous bones in her face. Boarding the train she looked straight ahead and carried a small suitcase. Then she disappeared. Once the train pulled out on its journey to Ventimiglia he walked the length of it and didn't see her; he could only conclude that she was in one of the First-Class sleepers.
He saw her an hour later in the dining car and was stunned again by her composure, that odor of jasmine that reached him two tables away. Though she faced him—he could not help staring—she didn't appear to see him: she looked through him as she finished her meal and lit her cigarette and guillotined the flame with the lid of her lighter. Her eyes went to the window and watched with pitying interest the feebly lighted countryside. She crossed her legs and something ripped inside him.
She was forty, perhaps more, but make-up works—her lipstick was so neatly done, the highlights in her hair so convincing, and the languid glamor of her movements so studied she awoke in him his earliest sexual memory and she was ageless. More tempting even than her slender grace, her pretty mouth pursed on her cigarette and the movements of her breasts—with just a hint of weight they trembled over the table—more tempting than the hunger he saw in her bones was the fact that she had not looked him in the eye. She was perfect, private, impenetrable; she hadn't smiled, and yet she wasn't sad. She was a lioness in repose. She had lived in the world—he hadn't.
He considered offering her a drink, but hesitated. Being older, she had it in her power to make a fool of him. He decided to risk everything: the dining car emptied; he joined her, sitting next to her at her table. Then she smiled, unmistakably her victory, and before he could think of anything to say ("How far are you going?" he had ridiculously rehearsed), she said, "Where do you Americans get such splendid boots?"
"How did you know I was American?" he said. He had registered her British accent, the cool enthusiasm that was almost theatrical.
She ignored his question and went on, "I'd love to buy some for my son. He's just started university."
Son eighteen; she got married at about twenty-four; a little arithmetic: she was about forty-two. He said, "You could probably get them here, but things in France are so expensive."
"France," she said, mimicking his accent. "You make it rhyme with pants."
"What's wrong with that?" he said. "I like pants."
She smiled and touched at her throat and said, "At least we have that in common."
It was then that he went for her with his hand, reaching under the table and placing it just above her knee where the hem emphasized the division between the heat of her leg and the coolness of her dress. If she had been younger it would have meant nothing, but she was old enough to understand that his hand there was both an appeal and an invitation. She did not react, she was still speaking about her son, and he moved his hand up her thigh and let it rest there, burning.
Without interrupting herself she gently lifted his hand from her leg and glanced around. The car was totally empty now, only one waiter lingered.
The boy wondered if he had made a blunder. He began to apologize.
"Listen," said the woman. "We haven't got much time. I'm only going as far as Cannes. I'm in the next coach, room fifty-two. Give me ten minutes." And she got up and left.
He did as he had been told, and when he knocked she opened the door a crack before letting him in. She wore a robe and when she kissed him and pressed herself against him it loosened and fell open. He caressed her, but she drew away and said, "Aren't you going to take those clothes off?"
The train rocked slowly southward; he was sprawled on the berth and could see the lights of passing stations in her hair—her head was against his stomach. No, no, she had said a moment ago, let me do it, and so he lay with his feet braced on the jolting wall while she knelt and worked on him with her feathery mouth and her hands. His orgasm trembled and teased him, rising and stopping, like fluid heating in a pipe; her tongue snaked and she became frantic with greed until at last and furiously the spurts came in five spasms that she controlled with her lips and he heard in the darkness the sound of her gulping it down.
Later—she hadn't spoken a word—she began again on him with her fingers and then mounted him. She moaned and cried out so acutely, finally uttering wild little shrieks that afterward his clearest memory was of having to stifle her sobs of pleasure and make love to her with his hand over her mouth.
This is of course fantasy: there was no woman, there was no dining car, there was only The Blue Train and the boy. But the encounter is plausible (more plausible now than when Tea and Sympathy was considered shocking), because you have seen that woman traveling alone and idly wished yourself upon her. If the woman had been younger she wouldn't be alone or would have asked for more, pretended to be sullen, demanded high spirits; her moves, from the beginning, would have been more obvious. The older woman makes no decisive moves except the last and she knows, if she is attractive, that you are hers for the taking. So she is seldom disappointed and never humiliated. She is not looking for flattery, and is certainly not husband-hunting; she has met you a hundred times before.
No apologies, no explanations. She knows the essential things about concealment and more than anyone in the world this woman has a heightened awareness of time: as the boy sees maturity in a sexual encounter—proof of his manhood, another statistic to relish—the older woman is granted a reprieve and in that encounter has outwitted her age. For her it is a private, a mutual compliment. In the classic situation she does not want to see you afterward. The preliminaries, the half-truths, the confidences—all these are dispensed with. There isn't time; she will come straight to the point.
And, unlike many of her younger counterparts, she does not want to be caught. She doesn't need witnesses. For someone younger, sex is not an end in itself but a means to another end—the image is intentional: job, money, marriage, power, domination. And so, if they never know this older woman and only deal with the twenty-year-old and her tough twinkle, most men grow up believing in sex as a favor they've been granted—sex as strategy or currency. Therefore, the act itself is a threat. The sexual power-seeker literally has you by the balls and can invent, in the only act of equality the human animal performs, a gross inequality. There is a dangerous bravado in the sexual publicity the younger woman seeks. If sex grants power she must be seen to be sexy—and involve you—before she can be acknowledged powerful. The older woman isn't really interested in power: her age has liberated her from that deception.
But this is all theory. There are better reasons for preferring an older woman, not the least of which is that a woman between the ages of thirty and fifty, sexually, is alight—her manner might be cool but her body blazes. At her age she could know every trick in the book and, if it weren't for her pride—which inspires respect and annoyance in the same degree—she could probably make a fortune as a hooker. One has to meet her in real life. Literature has very few older women who are convincingly seductive; within the co
nventions of the novel it is hard to establish such a character. Maybe Madame Bovary, possibly that woman in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, perhaps Madame de Vionnet in James's The Ambassadors; but who else? One or two of Byron's ladies in Don Juan, no one in Dickens, Melville, Conrad or Dreiser. The older woman has not been well-served by fiction writers, though Stephen Vizinczey's In Praise of Older Women is a worthy contribution, and so is Brian Moore's recent The Doctor's Wife.
The movies and plays have succeeded where the novels have failed. The films that spring to mind are Sunset Boulevard, Bergman's Frenzy (1945), This Sporting Life, Nothing But the Best, Sweet Bird of Youth, The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone (also a novel, but better as a film), A Cold Wind in August, The Last Picture Show, Room at the Top and the brilliant Fassbinder film Fear Eats the Soul (1973). I think of Anne Bancroft in The Graduate or Deborah Kerr in The Gypsy Moths. Each is the older woman to perfection. Mrs Robinson is resourceful, responsive, independent, and a knock-out—was there anyone who saw that movie who did not regret the fact that the hero went off with the daughter and not with the mother? There is no doubt that masculine wisdom begins when a man prefers the mother to the daughter, though I suppose it is only normal to want them both. In Lolita Humbert Humbert marries the mother so that he can get the daughter; but that was many years ago, and he was a pedophile. Our pointless defloration mania or at least our fixation with a snug fit, has made many a misguided man a pedophile, inevitably a power-seeker (which is why Nabokov turns the tables and makes Lolita a pain in the neck).
