The Tao of Travel

by Paul Theroux

  Bronislaw Malinowski: The great pioneering anthropologist in the Trobriand Islands suffered from depression, anxiety, rage, and feelings of rejection. He was seen in his work as objective and wholly focused, and for him the Trobrianders were (as his title depicted them) Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). But in his intimate Diary in the Strict Sense of the Word, published more than forty years later, another Malinowski was revealed. “The natives still irritate me, particularly Ginger, whom I would willingly beat to death,” he wrote. “I understand all the German and Belgian atrocities.” Or: “Unpleasant clash with Ginger … I was enraged and punched him in the jaw once or twice.” Or: “I am in a world of lies here.” In his scholarly work he wrote about Trobrianders as great navigators, canoe builders, and gardeners. But he confided in the diary “my dislike of them, my longing for civilization,” and “the niggers were noisy … general aversion to niggers.”

  Edward Lear: As the last of twenty-one children, and raised by his much older sister Ann, Lear hardly knew his parents. He suffered frequent grand mal epileptic seizures from early in his life, frequent melancholia, and a depression he called “the morbids”.

  Jan Morris: Not a mental condition but a sex change, recounted in Conundrum (1974). James Morris climbed Everest and travelled and wrote about the United States, Oman, South Africa, Venice, Spain, and England. Then, after gender reassignment and surgery in 1972, the newly emergent Jan Morris continued to travel and write, about Wales, Hong Kong, Australia, and the great cities of the world. Rare among travellers, indeed among writers generally, for someone to write and travel as a man and then as a woman. After the operation, I believe her prose style became more breathless and bejewelled.

  9

  Travellers Who Never Went Alone

  I HAVE ALWAYS TRAVELLED ALONE. WITH THE EXception of large-scale expeditions involving a crew or a team, every other kind of travel is diminished by the presence of others. The experience is shared — someone to help, buy tickets, make love to, pour out your heart to, help set up the tent, do the driving, whatever. Although they do not usually say so, many travellers have a companion. Such a person is a consolation, and inevitably a distraction. “Look at that camel in front of the Lexus, honey — hey, it’s the old and the new!” ¶ A man who always travels alone, Jonathan Raban, has this to say on the subject: “Travelling with a companion, with a wife, with a girlfriend, always seems to me like birds in a glass dome, those Victorian glass things with stuff ed birds inside. You are too much of a self-contained world for the rest of the world to be able to penetrate. You’ve got to go kind of naked into the world and make yourself vulnerable to it, in a way that you’re never going to be sufficiently vulnerable if you’re travelling with your nearest and dearest on your arm. You’re never going to see anything; you’re never going to meet anybody; you’re never going to hear anything. Nothing is going to happen to you” (quoted in A Sense of Place, edited by Michael Shapiro, 2004). Raban has enlarged on this in his essay “Why Travel?” in his collection Driving Home (2010): “You are simply not lonely enough when you travel with companions … Spells of acute loneliness are an essential part of travel. Loneliness makes things happen.”

  Underlining this, Kipling wrote in “The Winners,” a poem that serves as an epigraph to “The Story of the Gadsby” (1889):

  What the moral? Who rides may read.

  When the night is thick and the tracks are blind

  A friend at a pinch is a friend, indeed,

  But a fool to wait for the laggard behind.

  Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne,

  He travels the fastest who travels alone.

  In an earlier echo of this, Thoreau was succinct on the subject in Walden: “The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.”

  None of the following people agreed with this, and even Thoreau, who never travelled alone, did not follow his own advice.

  Samuel Johnson and James Boswell

  BOSWELL, WHOSE NAME is a byword for an amanuensis, travelled with Dr. Johnson to the Western Isles in the fall of 1775, and both men wrote books about the trip: Johnson’s thoughtful Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland appeared in 1775, and Boswell’s gossipy Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides in 1785, which, taken together, comprise a lively travellers who never went alone dialogue between two travellers, an inner and an outer journey. So toward the end of the trip, when his patience is wearing thin, Johnson remarks in his book, “The conversation of the Scots grows every day less unpleasing to the English; their peculiarities wear fast away.” Around the same time, Boswell reports in his Journal how, after listening to a Scotsman talk ignorantly about the Church of England, Johnson says, “Sir, you know no more of our church than a Hottentot.”

  Henry David Thoreau and Friends

  HE WALKED ACROSS Cape Cod with William Ellery Channing, who also boated with him down the Concord and Merrimack rivers; he traipsed and paddled through the Maine woods with his cousin George Thatcher and two Indian guides. He went from Concord, Massachusetts, to Staten Island, New York, alone, but then lived with a family there for two months, before becoming homesick and returning to Concord. He spent a week in Canada on a sort of package tour, on a train full of tourists going from Boston to Montreal (recounted in A Yankee in Canada).

  And then there is Walden, the last word in solitude. Or is it all theoretical? Thoreau’s cabin was only a mile and a half from his house in Concord, where his adoring mother waited, baking pies for him and doing his laundry; and throughout the Walden experience he went home most days. He had two chairs in the cabin, and as he says, he often went with a group of friends to pick huckleberries.

  Sir Richard Burton, to Mecca with Mohammed

  PART OF BURTON’S disguise to enter Mecca as the robed and bearded Afghan dervish “Mirza Abdullah” was to have an Arab servant and guide. This was the eighteen-year-old Mohammed El-Basyuni, who was headed to Mecca to see his mother. Burton liked his self-confidence, but the young man was watchful too. At the end of the trip Burton recounts that Mohammed suspected Burton might be an unbeliever. “‘Now, I understand,’ said the boy Mohammed to his fellow-servant, ‘your master is a Sahib from India; he hath laughed at our beards.’”

  But there might have been another cause for suspicion (so the Burton biographer Mary S. Lovell writes). It was rumoured that Burton, instead of squatting, had stood up to pee, something a good Muslim would never do. And it was also rumoured, because the argumentative Burton had many enemies, that he had killed Mohammed for knowing his secret.

  Though it had not happened, Burton so enjoyed his image as a hellraiser that he said he had indeed killed his travelling companion. “Oh, yes,” he would say. “Why not? Do you suppose one can live in these countries as one lives in Pall Mall and Piccadilly?”

  André Gide and His Lover

  FOR HIS TEN-MONTH trip through the Congo and Chad in 1925–26, the fifty-six-year-old Gide brought along his twenty-six-year-old lover, Marc Allegret, who had done most of the preparation for the journey. Though they had been lovers for almost ten years, they were anything but monogamous. “Throughout the trip,” writes Gide’s biographer Alan Sheridan (André Gide, 1998), “sexual companions of both sexes were freely, abundantly available and Marc discovered his penchant for adolescent girls.”

  Redmond O’Hanlon and His “Small Column”

  ONE OF THE greatest talkers, one of the most likeable of men, with a stomach for hard travel and a wonderful ear for dialogue (he is also an alert listener), O’Hanlon is anything but a loner. “Muko, at the head of our small column,” he writes of one of the marches described in Congo Journey (1996). “Small column” just about sums up the O’Hanlon manner of travel. He is never alone. His is not conventional travel, and hardly solitary, but more in the nature of an expedition, the misery shared by many disillusioned friends, martyrs to companionship.

&nb
sp; For the trip recounted in Into the Heart of Borneo (1983) he travelled with the poet James Fenton (the trip was Fenton’s idea), and the book profits greatly from Fenton’s wit. For his South American trip O’Hanlon asked Fenton whether he wished to go to the Amazon and visit the fierce Yanomami people. In the book itself, In Trouble Again (1988), Fenton is quoted as saying, “I would not come with you to High Wycombe.” And so O’Hanlon persuades Simon Stockton, a worldly-wise-guy Englishman who, halfway through the trip, maddened by the heat, the insects, the mud, and the hideous food, throws a wobbly and goes home.

  On the Congo Journey quest to find a monstrous creature, perhaps a living dinosaur, Mokélé-mbembé, said to haunt a lake in a remote part of the Congolese jungle, O’Hanlon takes an American, Lary Shaffer, who sticks it out for most of the way but finally succumbs and heads home. These departures leave O’Hanlon with the guides and the bearers.

  He thrives on conflict, adversity — much of the adversity in the form of insects. He suff ers bad bouts of malaria and even a sort of dementia in places, and never fails to anatomize his ailments: “My penis had turned green. To the touch it felt like a hanging cluster of grapes. Swollen tapir ticks as big as the top of a thumb were feeding all down its stem. ‘Keep calm,’ I repeated out loud, and then I scrabbled at them” (In Trouble Again). And: “Ants, red-brown ants, about a quarter of an inch long, were running in manic bursts down my shirt-front, swinging left and right, conferring with their fellows, climbing over the hairs on my arms … a bagful of ants fastened on my genitals” (Congo Journey).

  Gusto is O’Hanlon’s watchword, though his hearty tone masks a scientific mind, a deep seriousness, and (so he says) a depressive spirit. Perhaps his fear of gloom is another reason why he travels with others. His books are often compared with those of Victorian adventurers, but in fact they are distinctly modern, sometimes hallucinatory, and depending almost entirely for their effect on dialogue. O’Hanlon uses his travelling companions and local guides as foils, for humour, and to extend the narrative.

  V. S. Naipaul and His Women

  IN THE PROLOGUE to An Area of Darkness, Naipaul mentions difficulties on his arrival in India — paperwork, red tape, and heat — and then says, “My companion fainted.” In the U.S. edition of the book, this was changed to “My wife fainted.” Patricia Naipaul accompanied him throughout his travels in India, as well as for the three months he was resident in Kashmir, but she is mentioned only that one time. In A Turn in the South, Naipaul’s mistress went with him and did all the driving and most of the arranging of hotels, as his biographer reported. This mistress also went with Naipaul on his Among the Believers tour through the Muslim world, though halfway through the Beyond Belief sequel she was replaced by Nadira Khannum Alvi, who later became his wife and uncredited travelling companion.

  John McPhee, His Fellow Paddlers, and His Wife

  IN SOME OF his travels, McPhee seems to be on his own — in Looking for a Ship (1990) he is the only landlubber on board. But halfway through Coming into the Country, about his travels throughout Alaska, he mentions his “increasing sense of entrapment”, and then parenthetically, “(my wife was with me)”. The earlier part of the book is full of his travelling companions, four or five of them.

  Bruce Chatwin and Friends

  CHATWIN, AS HIS letters show, was compulsively gregarious. His apparently solitary travels, for In Patagonia and The Songlines, were often made with a friend or a guide; other trips were made with a male lover or with his wife, Elizabeth. I once mentioned to him that in recounting travel experiences one had to come clean. Chatwin replied with a shrieking laugh, “I don’t believe in coming clean!”

  Colin McPhee and Jane

  IN A House in Bali (1947), his enthusiastic account of living on that island, McPhee is a musicologist bewitched by Balinese music. He builds a house, makes friends, and studies the music. Many of his friends seem to be Balinese boys. In one passage, McPhee is swept into a turbulent stream. He is spotted by some boys onshore:

  It was then that I noticed that one of the more boisterous [boys] threw himself into the water, swam to a boulder and jumped over to where I was struggling. He knew by heart every shallow and hollow in the river bed, for he quickly led me ashore … When we reached land, this naked dripping youngster and I stood facing one another. He was perhaps eight, unfed and skimpy, with eyes too large for his face … I off ered him a cigarette, but he suddenly took fright and was off into the water before I could say a word.

  The boy’s name is Sampih. He becomes important to the narrative and to McPhee’s life in Bali. McPhee adopts him and mentors him, though he does not mention that the whole time he spent there he was with his wife, Jane Belo, a lesbian, and an anthropologist, the author of a definitive study of hypnotic states in Bali (Trance in Bali), and that it was she who funded his trip.

  Eric Newby and Wanda

  IN A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, Newby travelled with Hugh Carless. In Slowly Down the Ganges, The Big Red Train Ride, and Through Ireland in Low Gear, he took his wife, Wanda, and in these three books he continually describes her expostulating in her Slovenian accent, “Horrick, vye you are saying zat to me?” But he is often funny and has a sharp eye for detail.

  Rudyard Kipling and Carrie

  WIDELY TRAVELLED, NEVER alone. Known for his jingoism and his bombast, Kipling was, in fact, an enigmatic and melancholy figure. He was marked by his lonely childhood, spent in a cruel household (“the House of Desolation”, he called it) in England, away from his parents in India (from the ages of five to eleven; see his story “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep”). He never mentions his wife, Carrie, who was American, a Vermonter, but she was always at his side. Much of his work is based on travel, especially in India, South Africa, and the United States, and his book of travel pieces, From Sea to Sea (1899), is superb.

  Graham Greene and Companions

  BEGINNING WITH HIS first travel book, Journey Without Maps, his long walk through the hinterland of Liberia, which he took (leaving his wife and children at home) with his cousin Barbara, Greene always had a travelling companion or a driver or a lover on board. He could not cook, drive a car, or use a typewriter, so he was helpless alone. Greene seemed to require the mateyness of another person — his friend Michael Meyer, who travelled with him through the Pacific, or later in his life the priest Father Duran, who appears in Monsignor Quixote. Greene claimed to be manic depressive, sometimes suicidal, and lonely. He had numerous love aff airs, many of them passionate. He remained married to the same woman, Vivien Greene, the whole of his life, but never went anywhere with her.

  D. H. Lawrence and Frieda

  LAWRENCE ALWAYS TRAVELLED with his wife, Frieda von Richthofen (her cousin was the Red Baron), beginning with their elopement in 1912, two months after they met (she was then married to Ernest Weekley, a French professor). Although they quarrelled constantly, they lived in and travelled through Italy, the United States, Mexico, and Australia — and he wrote books based on his travels in all these places, notably Mornings in Mexico and Sea and Sardinia, sometimes mentioning Frieda, usually not.

  Somerset Maugham and Lover

  ON HIS LONGEST trips — to China, which yielded On a Chinese Screen, and to South-East Asia, which resulted in The Gentleman in the Parlour — Maugham travelled with his lover, Gerald Haxton, though he does not disclose the fact, largely because he was married to Syrie, who resented his two-timing her with this young American drunkard, and because at the time he was travelling, the 1920s and 1930s, homosexuality was a crime in Britain. But Maugham had a terrible stammer, and he needed someone to converse with locals and bring back colourful stories and dialogue for his books. “Master Hacky” was just the man to help. Also Maugham loved him deeply. After Haxton died, Maugham travelled with Alan Searle, a greedy young Londoner who had sent him fan letters and became his lover and literary executor.

  Rebecca West and Henry

  PROB
ABLY NO TRAVEL book is fuller of the expressions “My husband said …” or “My husband told me …” than Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), Rebecca West’s account of her various trips through Yugoslavia, and since it is a book of some 1,200 pages, the words “my husband” appear numerous times. He was a banker, named Henry Andrews, and full of theories and explanations, which she approvingly recounts in the book.

  John Steinbeck and Elaine

  STEINBECK TRAVELLED with his dog in Travels with Charley, as he said, but (though he never mentioned them) he had many conjugal visits en route: his wife, Elaine, met him every few weeks on the road to cheer him up. We know this from the letters that were published after his death; for example, on October 10, 1960: “I’m glad you came out and it was a good time, wasn’t it? It took the blankness off a lot” (Life in Letters). This “blankness” he speaks of is never disclosed in the jolly book.