by Paul Theroux
ANTHONY TROLLOPE ON HOW HE WROTE THE WEST INDIES AND THE SPANISH MAIN: “PREPARATION … THERE WAS NONE”
Preparation, indeed, there was none. The descriptions and opinions came hot on the paper from their causes. I will not say that this is the best way of writing a book intended to give accurate information. But it is the best way of producing to the eye of the reader, and to his ear, that which the eye of the writer has seen and his ear heard.
— quoted in James Pope-Hennessy, Anthony Trollope (1971)
MARK TWAIN ON ROUGHING IT: “VARIEGATED VAGABONDIZING”
This book is merely a personal narrative, and not a pretentious history or a philosophical dissertation. It is a record of several years of variegated vagabondizing, and its object is rather to help the resting reader while away an idle hour than afflict him with metaphysics, or goad him with science. Still, there is information in the volume; information concerning an interesting episode in the history of the Far West, about which no books have been written by persons who were on the ground in person, and saw the happenings of the time with their own eyes. I allude to the rise, growth and culmination of the silver-mining fever in Nevada — a curious episode, in some respects; the only one, of its peculiar kind, that has occurred in the land; and the only one, indeed, that is likely to occur in it.
Yes, take it all around, there is quite a good deal of information in the book. I regret this very much; but really it could not be helped: information appears to stew out of me naturally, like the precious ottar of roses out of the otter. Sometimes it has seemed to me that I would give worlds if I could retain my facts; but it cannot be. The more I calk up the sources, and the tighter I get, the more I leak wisdom. Therefore, I can only claim indulgence at the hands of the reader, not justification.
— Roughing It (1872)
JOHN STEINBECK ON TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY: “ANT-HILL ACTIVITY”
It’s a formless, shapeless, aimless thing and it is even pointless. For this reason it may be the sharpest realism, because what I see around me is aimless and pointless — ant-hill activity.
— letter, July 1961, in Steinbeck: A Life in Letters (1975)
VALERIAN ALBANOV ON HIS ARCTIC DEATH MARCH: “I SEE THIS DIARY … THROUGH A VEIL”
Fog all day long, with that dull light that makes one’s eyes so terribly painful. At the moment mine hurt so much that I see this diary only as through a veil, and hot tears run down my cheeks. From time to time I have to stop writing and bury my head in my malitsa [a heavy, sacklike reindeer-hide sleeping bag]. Only in complete darkness does the pain gradually abate, allowing me to open my eyes again.
— In the Land of White Death (1917), first published in English in 2000, translated by Alison Anderson
APSLEY CHERRY-GARRARD: “I NEVER MEANT TO WRITE A BOOK”
When I went South I never meant to write a book: I rather despised those who did so as being of an inferior brand to those who did things and said nothing about them. But that they say nothing is too often due to the fact that they have nothing to say, or are too idle or too busy to learn how to say it. Everyone who has been through such an extraordinary experience has much to say if he has any faculty that way.
— Preface, The Worst Journey in the World (1922)
D. H. LAWRENCE: “MAKING LITTLE MARKS ON PAPER”
One says Mexico: one means, after all, one little town away South in the Republic: and in this little town, one rather crumbly adobe house built round two sides of a garden patio: and of this house, one spot on the deep shady veranda facing inwards to the trees, where there are an onyx table and three rocking chairs and one little wooden chair, a pot with carnations, and a person with a pen. We talk so grandly, in capital letters, of Morning in Mexico. All it amounts to is one little individual looking at a bit of sky and trees, then looking down at the page of his exercise book.
It is a pity we don’t always remember this. When books come out with grand titles, like The Future of America or The European Situation, it’s a pity we don’t immediately visualize a thin or fat person, in a chair or in a bed, dictating to a bob-haired stenographer or making little marks on paper with a fountain pen.
— Mornings in Mexico (1927)
HENRI MICHAUX: “HE IS SUDDENLY AFRAID”
Preface: A man who knows neither how to travel nor how to keep a journal has put together this travel journal. But at the moment of signing he is suddenly afraid. So he casts the first stone. Here.
— Ecuador (1928)
FREYA STARK: “I TRAVELLED SINGLE-MINDEDLY FOR FUN”
I came to the conclusion that some more ascetic reason than mere enjoyment should be found if one wishes to travel in peace: to do things for fun smacks of levity, immorality almost, in our utilitarian world. And though personally I think the world is wrong, and I know that in my heart of hearts that it is a most excellent reason to do things merely because one likes the doing of them, I would advise all those who wish to see unwrinkled brows in passport offices to start out ready labelled as entomologists, anthropologists, or whatever other -ology they think suitable and propitious.
But as this book is intended for the Public, and is therefore necessarily truthful, I must admit that for my own part I travelled single-mindedly for fun.
— The Valleys of the Assassins (1934)
GERALD BRENAN: “THE GIRL WITH THE UNFORGETTABLE FACE”
All I have aimed at is to entertain a few armchair travellers, who may enjoy whiling away a rainy night in reading of how people live in remote mountain villages in the serene climate of the South Mediterranean. One flies over these villages in the air, one sees their strange names on the map, one may even, if one leaves the main road, bump past them in a car, but their life remains as mysterious as that of the girl with the unforgettable face one caught sight of for a moment through the window of a railway carriage. Here is a description of one of those villages.
— South from Granada (1957)
V. S. PRITCHETT: “STAMPING OUT HIS ANXIETIES WITH HIS HEAVY BOOTS”
How did writers and painters manage to live and keep their independence? … The thing to do was to write an original book of travel … I decided to take ship for Lisbon for economy’s sake and walk from Badajoz to Vigo, through a part of Spain that was little known and, in patches, was notorious for poverty …
I have described it all in Marching Spain — note the deliberately ungrammatical, protesting, affected title. Though I have a tenderness for the book and think some pages are rather good, I am glad it has been out of print for forty years … It has a touching but shocking first chapter of exhibitionist prose; but despite the baroque writing of the rest, the mistakes of fact, and the declamations, it is original and has vigour. It is the work of a young man worried almost to illness by lack of money and by the future for a lot of the time. As he tramped along he was doing his accounts and stamping out his anxieties with his heavy boots.
— Midnight Oil (1970)
PAUL BOWLES: “THE CONFLICT BETWEEN WRITER AND PLACE”
What is a travel book? For me it is the story of what happened to one person in a particular place, and nothing more than that; it does not contain hotel and highway information, lists of useful phrases, statistics, or hints as to what kind of clothing is to be needed by the intending visitor. It may be that such books form a category which is doomed to extinction. I hope not, because there is nothing I enjoy more than reading an accurate account by an intelligent writer of what happened to him away from home.
The subject matter of the best travel books is the conflict between writer and place. It is not important which of them carries the day, so long as the struggle is faithfully recorded. It takes a writer with a gift for describing a situation to do this well, which is perhaps the reason why so many of the travel books that remain in the memory have been produced by writers expert at the fashioning of novels. One rem
embers Evelyn Waugh’s indignation in Ethiopia, Graham Greene deadpanning through West Africa, Aldous Huxley letting Mexico get him down, Gide discovering his social conscience in the Congo, long after other equally accurate travel accounts have blurred and vanished. Given the novelistic skill of these particular writers it is perhaps perverse of me to prefer their few travel pieces to their novels, but I do.
— “The Challenge to Identity” (1958), published in Travels (2010)
6
How Long Did the Traveller Spend Travelling?
AN INTENSE TRAVEL EXPERIENCE IS NOT always a long one. D. H. Lawrence spent ten days with his wife in Sardinia and wrote a lengthy book about it. Kipling was ashore a few hours in Rangoon and never went to Mandalay, the subject of his famous poem. Ibn Battuta travelled all over the Muslim world of the fourteenth century, rambling for twenty-nine years, and Marco Polo was twenty-six years in China. Is a long trip necessary to the vividness of the experience? ¶ I am always curious to know how long the traveller spent on the road. Sometimes the length of the journey is plain in the title. Ninety-two Days, Evelyn Waugh’s 1932 book about his travels in Guiana and Brazil, says it all, and so does Isabella Bird’s Six Months in the Sandwich Islands, and Heinrich Harrer’s Seven Years in Tibet. But usually the length of the trip is not immediately apparent and has to be worked out from internal evidence — the mention of a date or a month, the passing of the seasons, or the research of a biographer.
The paradox of the passage of a traveller’s time, and its meaning, was summed up beautifully by Doris Lessing in the first volume of her autobiography:
Once I was making a mental list of all the places I had lived in, having moved about so much, and soon concluded that the commonsense or factual approach leads to nothing but error. You may live in a place for months, even years, and it does not touch you, but a weekend or a night in another, and you feel as if your whole being has been sprayed with an equivalent of a cosmic wind.
— Under My Skin (1994)
Here are some notable sojourns, from the longest to the shortest:
Sir John Mandeville: Thirty-four years (1322–1356) travelling in Europe, Asia, and Africa. But Mandeville may not have existed, or if he did exist, as an English knight, he probably never left England. Although his Travels is full of incident and amazing sights, it is undoubtedly a massive example of literary cannibalism from the work of others: plagiarism, invention, legends, boasts, and tall tales culled from the works of travellers, borrowers, romancers, and other plagiarists.
Ibn Battuta: Twenty-nine years altogether (1325–1354). He went on the haj to Mecca in 1325 and kept going in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. He was the only known medieval traveller who visited the countries of every Muslim ruler of his time, as well as such infidel places as Constantinople, Ceylon, and China. He described both Khan-Baliq (Beijing) and Timbuktu. Known in the Muslim world (and in particular his native Morocco), he came to prominence in English-speaking countries only after a translation of part of his Travels appeared in 1829. Called the greatest traveller the world has ever seen, Ibn Battuta’s journeying has been estimated at about 75,000 miles.
He mistook the Niger for the Nile, but nevertheless received an enlightenment one day in 1352:
I saw a crocodile in this part of the Nile [Niger], close to the bank; it looked just like a small boat. One day I went down to the river to satisfy a need, and lo, one of the blacks came and stood between me and the river. I was amazed at such lack of manners and decency on his part, and spoke of it to someone or other. He answered, “His purpose in doing that was solely to protect you from the crocodile, buy placing himself between you and it.”
Marco Polo: Twenty-six years in total (1271–1297), seventeen of them in the service of Kublai Khan. In spite of this, Marco seems not to have noticed — certainly he never mentions — that the Chinese drink tea, use printing, and that they’d built the Great Wall.
“Marco Polo was not merely a traveller,” Laurence Bergreen writes in Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu, “he was a participant in the history of his times.” Bergreen identifies the reality behind some of the marvels (the humanlike “monkeys” in Sumatra were Pygmies, the dark unicorn a rhino, and so forth) and makes a case for Marco’s omitting any mention of the Great Wall: “It was constructed during the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), long after Marco Polo’s day.”
Marco does mention Buddhism and describes Buddha, calling him by his Mongol title, “Burkhan”, the equivalent of “Enlightened”. Nicknamed Il Milione for his reputation as a recounter of marvels (see Chapter 20, “Imaginary People”), he dictated his book to a well-known writer of romances, Rustichello (of Pisa), in 1298 while in prison for two years in Genoa. Rustichello may have overegged some of the events and descriptions, but the Travels (the first printed version appeared in Nuremberg in 1477) is still an astonishing eyewitness account of the then-known world and was regarded in Europe for centuries as a geography of Asia. Columbus carried an annotated copy with him on his voyages, which persuaded him in the Caribbean that he had reached the offshore islands of India, which is how the Indies got its name and why the natives of the hemisphere are known as Indians.
Xuanzang: Seventeen years (629–645). This Tang Dynasty monk, scholar, translator, and indefatigable traveller (his name is also rendered Hsüan-tsang), was twenty-seven when he set off on his journey to the West (the title of the Ming Dynasty novel that dramatized his travels), resulting in The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions. This incomparable record of travel contains a precise account of distances, landscapes, commerce, and the numerous cultures, beliefs, and peoples along the Silk Road, to the edge of Persia, to what is now Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal. Xuanzang’s journey of thousands of miles is so well documented it enabled archaeologists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to find and excavate these ancient sites (see Chapter 13, “It Is Solved by Walking”).
Lafcadio Hearn in Japan: The last fourteen years of his life, from 1890 to 1904. Hearn had travelled before this to the West Indies and elsewhere, and though he was not travelling the whole time he was in Japan, he lived as an alien, collecting grievances and insights into Japanese life, under his new name, Koizumi Yakumo.
William Bartram: Four years, 1773 to 1777, for his pioneering travels in the American South. There he botanized, gathered specimens, and studied the lives and habits of Native Americans for his groundbreaking and influential study of 1791, Travels Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws. Containing an Account of the Soil and Natural Productions of Those Regions; Together with Observations on the Manners of the Indians, often called simply Bartram’s Travels, a book read and praised by the Romantic poets Coleridge and Wordsworth.
Fanny Trollope in America: Almost four years (1827–1831). During that time she was in and out of the Nashoba settlement, an institution for the education of slaves who were hoping to be emancipated, but “one glance sufficed to convince me that every idea I had formed of the place was as far as possible from the truth. Desolation was the only feeling.” She removed herself upriver to Cincinnati (“Porkopolis” — pigs in the street), where she put on “theatricals”, and then built and opened a “bazaar,” renting space to stallholders to sell “fancy goods”. When this business failed, she did what many desperate people have done in search of solvency: she wrote a travel book, The Domestic Manners of Americans (“six hundred pages of griffonage” — scribblings), most of it trashing Americans as overfamiliar slobs and hypocrites who did nothing but spit. There is so much spitting in Domestic Manners, she could have called it Great Expectorations.
Yet this clearsighted book (greatly admired by Mark Twain) is not an account of city-haunting and sightseeing in America but a work “describing faithfully the daily aspect of ordinary life”. She went on to write many more books, including
a number of novels, and though her son Anthony (whom, at age twelve, she left in England) complained in his Autobiography that she was “much from home or too busy to be bothered”, Fanny remained an inspiration to him and showed him the way to be a novelist and traveller. We would not have Anthony Trollope’s great novels or his masterpiece of travel, The West Indies and the Spanish Main, were it not for his mother’s bold example.
Fanny’s conclusion about Americans: “I do not like them. I do not like their principles, I do not like their manners, I do not like their opinions.”
Henry Morton Stanley crossing Africa: Three years, 1874 to 1877, for Through the Dark Continent. He travelled from east to west, Zanzibar to the heart of Africa and down the Congo River to Matadi and the Atlantic Ocean. A few years later he crossed Africa from west to east, a two-year trip.
Paul Du Chaillu in West Africa: Three years. Born in New Orleans (this is disputed; it might have been Paris) in 1835, he spent part of his youth in West Africa, where his father was a trader. He set off in 1855, when he was twenty years old. “I travelled — always on foot, and unaccompanied by other white men — about 8,000 miles. I shot, stuffed, and brought home over 2,000 birds, of which more than 60 are new species, and I killed upwards of 1,000 quadrupeds, of which 200 were stuffed and brought home, with more than 60 hitherto unknown to science. I suffered fifty attacks of the African fever, taking, to cure myself, more than fourteen ounces of quinine. Of famine, long-continued exposures to the heavy tropical rains, and attacks of ferocious ants and venomous flies, it is not worth while to speak.” He travelled in and around Gabon and halfway up the Ogowe (or Ogooue) River, 300 miles into the African interior, where he confirmed the existence of several species of gorilla (Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa, 1861). On a later trip, for another book, he encountered various bands of Pygmies (The Country of the Dwarfs, 1871).
