The Tao of Travel

by Paul Theroux

  Henri Michaux: Voyage to Great Garaban

  HENRI MICHAUX, WHO was born in Belgium in 1899 and lived most of his life in France, where he died in 1984, is an obscure figure at the fringes of surrealism, known for his poems, his odd short stories, his hectic journeys, his strange paintings and drawings, and most of all for his experiments with practically every drug known to man. He probably had more acid in his body than the average car battery. Hallucinatory experiences and drug dreams were his chosen recreation as well as his access to a higher consciousness and a heightening of his imagination.

  Because of the intensity of his vision, and his humour, it is hard to sort out his actual travels from his drug trips. He spent a decade on the move, from 1927 to 1937. His travels in China, Japan, and Malaysia in the thirties resulted in A Barbarian in Asia, little more than a travel diary. Ecuador, which appeared in France in 1968, is also diaristic but more personal and relentless — angry, impatient, cranky, highly readable, and still relevant. Michaux’s books are hard to find; he is obscure now as he was in his lifetime; in spite of his achievement, he never enjoyed any fame or material success, but he said he didn’t care.

  “There exists a banality of the visionary world,” he wrote in The Major Ordeals of the Mind, and the Countless Minor Ones, first published in French in 1966. (Michaux’s titles are superb.) This suggests to me that his imaginary travels are based more on his actual travels than on his drug trips. Even so, it is impossible to tell from some of his works whether he is describing a lived experience or a dream state.

  In three books, gathered under the one title Ailleurs (Elsewhere), he wrote about three imaginary countries. The works are Voyage to Great Garaban, In the Land of Magic, and Here Is Poddema. One of the pieces in his book Spaced, Displaced is called “Journey That Keeps at a Distance”, the sort of trip that is so full of frustrations, incomplete encounters, and half-baked impressions that it resembles that of the travel writer who arrives in a place and finds nothing to write about except frustration — one of the less readable sorts of travel books.

  Voyage to Great Garaban, first published in 1936, illustrates another feature of imaginary travels: the detailed sociology and anthropology of such places; the politics, the history. When a traveller invents a place, he or she usually describes more of the place and its people than if it were real. So the land of the Hacs, in Garaban, is described as a set of brutal spectacles, each with a number, and growing in violence. There is hand-to-hand combat (vicious street fighting, families battling in muddy swamps), animals attacking humans (an entertainment), and animal fights (“caterpillars that were ferocious, and demon canaries”). Some Hacs make an attempt to kill their king for the sole purpose of being arrested and condemned to death, and for the splendour of being executed in style — “Spectacle Number 30 which is called ‘Receiving one’s death in the Palace courtyard.’”

  Though the anonymous traveller doesn’t condemn these outrages, he flees the Hacs and moves on to the Emanglons. He describes the Emanglons as an anthropologist would, even using the heading “Manners and Customs”. We learn of their death rituals, the implications of sickness, their contempt for work and its danger (“After a few days of sustained labour an Emanglon will be unable to sleep”), their odour (“a complex perfume”), their tendency to weep for no reason, their aversion to flies: “Emanglons cannot endure living in the same room with a fly. In their eyes the cohabitation has something monstrous about it.”

  The Hivinizikis, the last group in Great Garaban, are manic, furiously rushing about, praying madly and prostrating themselves. Unbalanced, in a froth, they are “always outdoors. If you see someone inside, he doesn’t live there. No doubt about it, he’s visiting a friend.” Everything about the Hivinizikis is hectic — religion, politics, the theatre, all is rough-and-tumble.

  Michaux had travelled fairly widely in the world before he wrote his imaginary travels, so these tales are both satires of actual travel and comic fantasies. As a surrealist Michaux is keenly aware of the necessity for satire to be absurd; even when a narrative is not understood, it must bring a smile to the reader’s lips. In a scholarly introduction to Michaux’s Selected Writings (1944), Richard Ellmann quotes André Gide, a supporter of Michaux, saying that Michaux “excels in making us feel intuitively both the strangeness of natural things and the naturalness of strange things”.

  Miguel de Unamuno: “Mecanópolis”

  YOU COULD PUT this short story, written in 1913, down to science fiction or speculative fiction were it not for the fact that the author says he was directly inspired by the satire of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon. Unamuno (1864–1936), who depicts the same horror of technology in this intense and compressed tale, was a distinguished philosopher and the author of a work on man’s ambiguous relationship with God, The Tragic Sense of Life.

  “There sprang to mind the memory of a traveller’s tale told me by an explorer friend who had been to Mechanopolis, the city of machines,” begins Unamuno’s story (translated by Patricia Hart).

  Lost in the desert, dying from thirst and weakness, the traveller “began sucking at the nearly black blood that was oozing from his fingers raw from clawing about in the arid soil”. He sees something in the distance. A mirage? No, an oasis. He recovers, sleeps, and when he wakes discovers a railway station with an empty train at the platform — no engineer, no other passengers. He gets in, the train departs, and later deposits him at a fabulous city. No people can been seen in the city, nor any life. “Not one dog crossed the street, nor one swallow the sky.” But there are streetcars and automobiles, which stop at a given signal. He goes to a museum, which is full of paintings but sterile in mood, and then to a concert hall “where the instruments played themselves.”

  That he is the only person in the city is a news item in the Mecha­nopolis Echo: “Yesterday afternoon — and we do not know how it came about — a man arrived at our city, a man of the sort there used to be out there. We predict unhappy days for him.”

  Among the machines, without any human company, the traveller begins to go mad. This too is an item in the daily paper. “But all of a sudden a terrible idea struck me: what if those machines had souls, mechanical souls, and it were the machines themselves that felt sorry for me?”

  In a panic, he attempts suicide by leaping in front of a streetcar, and he awakes at the oasis where he started out. He finds some Bedouins and celebrates his deliverance. “There was not one machine anywhere around us.

  “And since then I have conceived a veritable hatred toward what we call progress, and even toward culture, and I am looking for a corner where I shall find a peer, a man like myself, who cries and laughs, as I cry and laugh, and where there is not a single machine and the days flow with the sweet, crystalline tameness of a street lost in a forest primeval.”

  This remarkable piece of fiction about an imaginary journey combines the rejection of technology that Samuel Butler satirized, the over-civilized life that Richard Burton deplored, the horror of a dehumanized urban world that Thoreau condemned, and the wish to find an unspoiled people in a remote place — an Edenic place of happy humans.

  Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities

  MOST OF CALVINO’s fictions could be included under the heading “Imaginary Journeys”. But Invisible Cities is the most appropriate for an anthology of travel, since the narrator is Marco Polo — a variant Marco Polo, in an extended audience with a variant Kublai Khan — Khan in old age, impatient, combative, at the end of his rule. Marco Polo seems to be spinning out his description of the cities in the manner of Scheherazade, filling the time and diverting the fading emperor.

  Dense, playful, paradoxical, and whimsical, the book has inspired a great deal of analysis and some pompous criticism. In general, Calvino’s reputation suffers at the hands of his many well-wishers’ special pleading. Much of his work is based on elaborate jokes, and the label of magical realism — which is often no more than whimsy writ large — is unhel
pful. The structural flaw in the book is that it is a rather formless disquisition and a dialogue, not a narrative of discovery.

  But as a set of imaginary journeys to strange cities, it is vastly enjoyable — and it must be enjoyed rather than analysed or probed, or it will fall apart. The cities have themes — the cities representing memory, desire, signs, eyes; thin cities, trading cities, hidden cities; cities and the dead; continuous cities. Though the book is short, the 164 chapters keep repeating the cities’ themes, with variations. Much could be made of the fact that all the cities, more than fifty of them, have women’s names — Dorothea, Zenobia, Sophronia, Trude, and so forth. And perhaps these names stand for the siren song that the traveller hears, the romance of far-off places.

  The wise observations, travellers’ truths, relieve the repetitious narrative: “The more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there; and he retraced the stages of his journeys, and he came to know the port from which he had set sail, and the familiar places of his youth.” Another: “Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.” This is ingenious and strikes me as true.

  In another city, Adelma, Marco sees a vegetable vendor and recognizes his grandmother, and thinks: “You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask.” That is an accurate expression of the traveller’s imagination, and a polite way of illustrating Sir Richard Burton in Arabia seeing Maula Ali, “a burly savage, in whom I detected a ridiculous resemblance to the Rev. Charles Delafosse, an old and well-remembered schoolmaster”.

  It is misleading, I think, to look for echoes of Borges in Calvino’s work. Borges creates new worlds, yet many of Calvino’s cities, for all their exoticism, seem quite familiar. Here is the city of Chloe: “In Chloe, a great city, the people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversation, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping.” How is this city different from Chicago or Paris?

  Other cities are purely satirical — cities where fashion is an obsession; cities that do not begin or end (“Only the name of the airport changes”); cities where memories are traded.

  What does it add up to? Certainly it is a critique of travellers’ tales and reminiscences about cities, litanies that are no more than variations on a theme. And perhaps these cities, apparently hermetic and separate and far-flung, are the same city, observed or remembered according to a particular mood.

  The book — seeming more of a puzzle than it actually is — also tells us a great deal about how we live in cities, how we adapt to new cities, how even the most terrifying cities can be habitable. My own feeling (and it seems to be Calvino’s too) is that city dwellers invent the cities they live in. The great cities are just too big to be comprehended as a whole, so they are invisible, or imaginary, existing mainly in the mind. A New Yorker lives in his or her version of New York, creating a city that is familiar and unthreatening, not the enormous, multilayered, and towering place but a particular set of friends, houses, shops, restaurants, theatres, and, crucially, a complex network of routes — streets, trains, and neighbourhoods that are safe and supportive. In his book of apparently extravagant fables, Calvino shows us how we accommodate ourselves to the real world.

  Jan Morris: Last Letters from Hav

  HAVING TAKEN NUMEROUS journeys across the world — one of the most widely travelled of living writers — Jan Morris invented a country, gave it a history, art, religion, and literature, and was so scrupulous in her details that people earnestly asked her afterward where exactly it was and how they might visit.

  The imaginary country of Hav seems to be in the eastern Mediterranean, and has not only a highly diverse population of Muslims and Christians, but also an ancient indigenous population, of troglodytes possibly of Celtic origin, who named Hav, their word (and the Welsh word) for summer. The troglodytes are called the Kretev, “thought to be etymologically related to the Welsh crwydwyr, wanderers.”

  One of the annual festivals is the Roof Race, where contestants leap from roof to roof across Hav.

  Many distinguished visitors to Hav recorded their impressions: Chekhov, Lady Hester Stanhope, Ibn Battuta, and Marco Polo — the greatest and most literate of travellers. But also we learn that later visitors included Noël Coward, Coco Chanel, Thomas Mann, Winston Churchill, James Joyce, and Sir Richard Burton. Marco Polo remarked on Hav as “a place of strange buildings and rites, not like other places”. The elaborate architecture is described, with quotations from Alexander Kinglake, Mark Twain, D. H. Lawrence, and others.

  The narrator says, midway through the book, “The meaning of Hav is easy.”

  In terms of politics, art, war, and climate, Hav is the essence of the Mediterranean, a cultural confusion, layer upon layer, Greek, Turk, Italian, the great glittering talkative mass of conquerors and imperialists and evangelists — and writers: Edward Lear, James Joyce, Richard Burton, T. E. Lawrence.

  “But then the advantage of going native in Hav is that nobody knows what native is … you can take your choice!”

  In this believable book, Jan Morris, the writer who has been everywhere, has created out of her travels and her reading a sunny, polyglot nation that is claimed by many nationalities, but in its very complexity is a fragility. It is, incidentally, also a way of showing how the somewhat despised Kretevs — those ancestors of the Welsh, of whose nation Jan Morris is a proud member — have been overwhelmed. Though the book is partly a satire on the multicultural Mediterranean, it is also a capriccio — one of the few successful ones I know in fiction — good-hearted, learned, and enlightening.

  I asked Jan once what was going through her head as she was writing it. She said, “I wrote Last Letters from Hav because I had come to realize that I had never scratched more than the surface of any place or period I’d ever written about, and it was intended to be an allegory of civic and historical complexity — though nobody ever read it that way.”

  17

  Everything Is Edible Somewhere

  “YOU MUST HAVE EATEN SOME WEIRD STUFF,” I am frequently told. I quite liked fufu (mashed yams) in Nigeria, and snake and turtle in China; I drew the line at owlet, because I felt sorry for those vexed-looking birds roosting in a cage, waiting to be chosen for a meal. One night I bought one at a restaurant, at the chef’s suggestion. And I set it free, much to his consternation. Cow’s tendon in soup, looking like shreds of Tupperware, was not tasty. (“If it has four legs and is not a chair, has wings and is not an airplane, or swims and is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it,” Prince Philip once said, and was booed.) I ate some sparrows in Burma and reported on them in The Great Railway Bazaar. Alligator tail on the Zambezi was fairly common, served in stew or as steaks. “Carrion and garbage of every kind can be eaten without the stomach rejecting it,” Francis Galton wrote in the chapter “Revolting Food That May Save the Lives of Starving Men” in The Art of Travel. “Life can certainly be maintained on a revolting diet.”

  I was prepared for a life of travel food by the cold lumpy oatmeal my mother served me on winter mornings. “You can’t go to school until you finish it!” Tears of disgust sprang to my eyes as I sat, repelled by the sight, and I retched when I tried to swallow even a little bit. My Italian grandmother, who immigrated to America when she was a small girl, served us familiar-looking greens in salad, and when we asked about these slightly bitter leaves, she admitted that they were dandelions (soffione) she had dug up tha
t morning. Many hard-up Italians in America foraged for dandelions.

  “Objectively, nothing’s more disgusting than eating milk or cheese,” my son Marcel said to me one day when we were discussing this subject. Most Chinese agree, but nearly all are physically unable to digest the stuff, being lactose intolerant. (Many Chinese believe that the so-called white race has an odd cheesy smell.) The writer and traveller Ted Hoagland told me, “My exotic foods include bobcat, porcupine liver, and squirrel, but muskrat was the best.” And my travelling friend Larry Millman has eaten dogs from Greenland to Micronesia, and remarked on the varieties of canine cuisine.

  Sir John Mandeville’s Travels is full of strange meals; the book was hugely popular for the culinary oddities it described. Given that Mandeville probably did not exist, and that his book was probably plagiarized, embellished with mostly outrageous lies and self-serving distortions, hardly mattered to a reading public eager for details of weird meals. Herman Melville must have been keenly aware of this fascination for exotic food when he included “The Whale as a Dish” as a chapter in Moby-Dick. In it, Ishmael discusses the cooking and eating of whale meat, as well as strips of fried blubber (“fritters”) and the sperm whale’s brains. As an aside, he adds that the whale is “a noble dish, were there not so much of him; but when you come to sit down before a meat-pie nearly one hundred feet long, it takes away your appetite”.

  The Japanese have gone to enormous lengths to continue killing whales so that they can dine on whale sashimi. Kujira (whale) is thinly sliced and served raw. The meat is marbled, looks like beef, has a briny, somewhat fishy taste, and can be tough. In order to go on hunting whales the Japanese have bribed Third World countries with development aid, to get them on their side, and have hidden behind their own indigenous people, the Ainu, who are otherwise despised for being primitive. The slaughter and eating of bottle-nosed dolphins is another Japanese pleasure. When this was revealed in a prize-winning documentary, The Cove, released in 2009, the mayor of the fishing village of Taiji, offended by the way his village was portrayed in the dolphin massacre, issued a statement saying that it was “important to respect and understand regional food cultures, which are based on traditions with long histories”.