by Paul Theroux
Travel as a quest for solitude is a repeating theme in so many travellers’ narratives, and so powerful in the way it is evoked, I wished I’d included it under a subheading. I had been meaning to read the yachtsman Bernard Moitessier’s The Long Way (1973) but only got around to it after my Tao was finished. This single-handed voyage is the ultimate in solitary, self-examining ventures. Moitessier entered the Sunday Times race in 1968, to sail around the world non-stop, alone. (It was the race in which the English yachtsman Donald Crowhurst went mad and met his bizarre end.) Moitessier set off from Plymouth, England, in his yacht Joshua (named for the sailor Joshua Slocum) in August 1968; by February 1969 he’d rounded Cape Horn. Approaching the Cape of Good Hope a month later—and for the second time—Moitessier was disturbed by misgivings. What was the point? “Leaving from Plymouth and returning to Plymouth now seems like leaving from nowhere to go nowhere,” he reflected. The grand prize of £5,000 had lost any importance for him. So, instead of finishing the race, he kept sailing easterly, another 15,000 miles or more, until he reached Tahiti, where he moored his boat and lived aboard, musing happily on his solitude and writing his book, which celebrates the freedom of the seas.
“I really felt sick at the thought of getting back to Europe, back to the snake pit” (panier de crabes in the original), Moitessier writes. This avoidance and often hatred of civilization is a recurring theme in travellers’ tales. You come across it in Mark Twain, in Bruce Chatwin, in D. H. Lawrence, in Nikolai Przhevalsky.
The Russian Przhevalsky roamed all over central Asia from the 1860s to the late 1880s. An essential in his travelling bag was a stack of picture postcards of pretty actresses to hand out, to beguile natives and nomads. In his travels he encountered the rare, wild horse equus ferus przewaslkii, which bears his name. “People like Przhevalsky are especially precious because the sense of their life, their exploits, goals and moral physiognomy are intelligible even to a child,” Chekhov wrote in his 1888 obituary of the man he regarded as a hero.
“A sad, yearning feeling always comes over me as soon as the first bursts of joy on returning home have passed,” Przhevalsky wrote. “The further time flies amid ordinary life, the more this yearning grows, as if something unforgettable, precious, had been abandoned in the wilderness of Asia which could not be found in Europe … an exceptional bliss—freedom, which may be savage but is infringed by nothing, almost absolute.”1
Much of Przhevalsky’s travel was arduous, yet he was so vitalized by the hardship, some of his trips could be classified under an “Ordeal” heading and others under “The Perverse Pleasure of the Inhospitable.” A similarly like-minded and now equally obscure traveller is Elisha Kent Kane, whose Arctic Explorations in Search of Sir John Franklin (1857) is an exceedingly difficult book to find, though it was so popular in its time it “lay for a decade with the Bible on almost literally every parlour table in America.”2
Sir Francis Galton had high regard for Kane’s harrowing Arctic voyage, though Henry David Thoreau dismissed it to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had loaned him the book, saying, “Most of the [Arctic] phenomena noted might be observed in Concord.” Emerson found this typically Henry in its presumption and, after reading the two volumes, so do I.
Kane set off on the first American search to discover the fate of the men who never returned from the 1845 Sir John Franklin expedition in search the Northwest Passage. Kane’s expedition became an ordeal in Baffin Bay and in the northwest of Greenland, culminating in an eighty-two-day slog with his men through the ice to Upernarvik. He equalled the feat of Shackleton’s great boat journey at the opposite end of the earth. As Kane spent most of his two-year voyage fighting the elements, he rightly deserves a place in “Travel as an Ordeal.”
I mentioned that C. M. Doughty’s style in his Arabia Deserta was written under the influence of Chaucer and that he carried a copy of the Canterbury Tales in his saddlebag. The English novelist Henry Green has a different theory, which he set forth in a long appreciative essay, Apologia, published in 1941, that is entirely concerned with Doughty’s style. Green theorizes from the rise and fall of Doughty’s prose, the built-up and propulsive rhythm of his sentences, that it was inspired by his deep study and fluency in Arabic. Green (a meticulous if eccentric stylist himself) writes, “His style is constant throughout, seems to be habitual, but, on analysis of this last, is found to vary with his subject. He is often obscure. He is always magnificent.”
“He was an untrained archeologist,” Green writes. “One of the merits of his book is that he finds almost nothing, certainly nothing of any value … There are no petty discoveries in his travels, no objets trouvés. The answer must be that he had such a quality in him that he had to get away. And once he was well into the country he could not get out.”3
In “Travellers Who Never Went Alone” I alluded to Lévi-Strauss’s revelation, towards the end of Tristes Tropiques, that his wife Dina was with him on his expedition. Only when I read Patrick Wilcken’s biography, Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (2010) did I discover that for his travel Lévi-Strauss had mounted the equivalent of a Victorian expedition, of thirty men or more. “Much of the time Lévi-Strauss’s entourage would outnumber the natives he was trying to study.” He spent eight months in Rondonia, Brazil, of which two were spent in the town of Cuiaba getting ready. These months comprized almost of the whole of the travel he took in his lifetime. This is not a quibble, only an astonished remark, because he went on to write many books, including his masterful Tristes Tropiques. One of the gems of description in travel literature is Lévi-Strauss’s seven-page, minute-by-minute analysis of a glorious sunset off the coast of Brazil.
George Orwell is quoted only once in the Tao, dismissing Henry Miller. But in my rereading The Road to Wigan Pier I found an illuminating digression. Orwell reflecting on modernity writes, “ … so long as the machine is there, one is under an obligation to use it.”
He goes on: “One sees a good illustration of this in the matter of travel. Everyone who has travelled by primitive methods in an undeveloped country knows that the difference between that kind of travel and modern travel in trains, cars, etc., is the difference between life and death. The nomad who walks or rides, with his baggage stowed on a camel or an ox-cart, may suffer every kind of discomfort, but at least he is living while he is travelling; whereas for the passenger in an express train or a luxury liner his journey is an interregnum, a kind of temporary death. And yet so long as the railways exist, one has got to travel by train—or by car or aeroplane. Here am I, forty miles from London. When I want to go up to London why do I not pack my luggage on to a mule and set out on foot, making two days of it? Because, with the Green Line buses whizzing past me every ten minutes, such a journey would be intolerably irksome. In order that one may enjoy primitive methods of travel, it is necessary that no other method should be available. No human being ever wants to do anything in a more cumbrous way than is necessary.”
Orwell’s modern incarnation, as a novelist, social critic, essayist and committed contrarian is William T. Vollmann, who lives in a reclusive way in California but travels widely. Vollmann has a singular ability to find ways of travelling in the United States and being able to write about it with penetration and originality. He rides the rails as a hobo, he hangs around bars and slums, he buttonholes the poor and asks blunt questions. His books sprawl, mainly because he is uncompromizing, detail-minded and exhaustive. In Poor People (2007), Riding Toward Everywhere (2008) and Imperial (2009) he represents the future of one kind of travel book, in the Orwell tradition of Wigan Pier and Down and Out in Paris and London, exploring the lower depths. Vollmann’s books are illuminating feats of travel and research and wide reading.
Lastly, corrections and additions. The fact that Conrad, gouty his whole writing life, believed his gout to be the result of his 1890 Congo journey, rightly belongs among the ailments in my chapter “Fears, Neuroses, and Other Conditions.”
The usually scrupulous V. S. Pritchett committed the howler of placing an orang-utan in Brazil in his novel Dead Man Leading, What is it about orang-utans? Perhaps the influence of the versatile ape in Poe. As the sailor in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” tells Dupin, “He had lately made a voyage to the Indian Archipelago. A party, of which he formed one, landed at Borneo, and passed into the interior on an excursion of pleasure. Himself and a companion had captured the Ourang-Outang.” That is accurate. But Jules Verne includes an orang-utan on Lincoln Island, in The Mysterious Island, which is set in the South Pacific – ready made for “Writers and the Places They Never Visited.”
I rashly claimed that Sir Richard Burton was the last non-Muslim to enter Mecca in disguise. I subsequently discovered that, in 1909, A. J. B. Wavell (of the English military family) got to Mecca speaking Swahili (he was at the time a farmer in Kenya) and dressed as a Zanzibari penitent. He wrote about it in A Modern Pilgrim in Mecca (1912).
Acknowledgements
FOR SUGGESTIONS, IMPROVEMENTS, and moral support, I would like to thank Jin Auh, Larry Cooper, Roger Ebert, Patrick French, Forrest Furman, Harvey Golden, Ted Hoagland, Pico Iyer, Tim Jeal, Joel Martin, Geoffrey Moorhouse, Jan Morris, Dervla Murphy, Jeffrey Meyers, Simon Prosser, Jonathan Raban, Mort Rosenblum, Oliver Sacks, Andrea Schulz, Nicholas Shakespeare, Alexander Theroux, Joseph Theroux, Louis Theroux, Marcel Theroux, Juliet Walker, and Andrew Wylie. And special thanks, with love, to my wife, Sheila.
PERMISSIONS AND CREDITS
The author is grateful for permission to reproduce excerpts from the following works:
The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian by Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Pan Macmillan, London. Copyright © Nirad C. Chaudhuri, 1999. Reprinted by permission of Pan Macmillan UK.
Bad Land: An American Romance by Jonathan Raban, copyright © 1996 by Jonathan Raban. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West, copyright 1940, 1941, renewed © 1968, 1969 by Rebecca West. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Excerpts from Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt, translated by Francis Steegmuller. Copyright © Francis Steegmuller, 1972. Reprinted with permission of McIntosh & Otis, Inc. All rights reserved.
“Happiness”, translated by Stephen Kessler, copyright © 1999 by Maria Kodama; translation copyright © 1999 by Stephen Kessler, from Selected Poems by Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Alexander Coleman. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., and of Stephen Kessler.
In Trouble Again, copyright © 1988 by Redmond O’Hanlon. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
“Madly Singing in the Mountains” by Po Chu-i. From Chinese Poems, Arthur Waley, translator. George Allen & Unwin, London, 1946. Copyright by permission of the Arthur Waley Estate.
Shishmaref Day School Cookbook recipes are reprinted by kind permission of the Shishmaref School, Shishmaref, Alaska.
The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen, copyright © 1978 by Peter Matthiessen. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
South from Granada: A Sojourn in Southern Spain by Gerald Brenan. Published in America by Farrar, Straus & Cudahy and Kodansha International. Copyright © 1957, 1985 by Gerald Brenan. Used by permission of the author’s estate and his agent, Robin Straus Agency, Inc.
Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue by Paul Bowles. Copyright © 1957, 1963 by Paul Bowles. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
The Travels of Marco Polo, translated with an introduction by Ronald Lathem (Penguin Classics, 1958). Copyright © Ronald Lathem, 1958. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.
Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss. English translation copyright © 1973 by Jonathan Cape, Ltd. Originally published in French as Tristes Tropiques, copyright © 1955 by Librairie Plon. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., for Librairie Plon.
The Valleys of the Assassins by Dame Freya Stark, Modern Library edition, Random House. Excerpts are reprinted by permission of John Murray Publishing.
“Water is taught by thirst” is reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
The following excerpts are reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, all rights reserved:
Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town by Paul Theroux. Copyright © 2003 by Paul Theroux.
Fresh Air Fiend: Travel Writings, 1985–2000 by Paul Theroux. Copyright © 2000 by Paul Theroux.
Ghost Train to the Eastern Star by Paul Theroux. Copyright © 2008 by Paul Theroux.
The Old Patagonian Express by Paul Theroux. Copyright © 1979 by Cape Cod Scriveners Co.
The following images were found through commons.wikimedia.org:
Bowles: Mt. Meredith Romani looking north-west, 1920, AWM B02979.
Fielding: Departure from Lisbon for Brazil, the East Indies and America, engraving, c. 1592, by Theodor de Bry (Flemish, 1528–1598), illustration in America Tertia Pars. Location: Service Historique de la Marine, Vincennes.
Johnson: Illustrations de Voyage autour du monde. Auteur: George Anson. Éditeur: Henri-Albert Gosse et Compagnie (Genève), 1750.
Lévi-Strauss: Llamas traversing the Andes laden with silver. Exploration of the Valley of Amazon, vol. 2, by Lieutenant Lardner Gibbon, USN (1853).
Stark: Prise d’Alamût (1256). Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France. Département des Manuscrits. Division orientale. Author: Sayf al-Vâhidî. Hérât. Afghanistan. Date: 1430.
Stevenson: Robert Louis Stevenson’s birthday fete in Samoa. Image from Talofa, Samoa: A Summer Sail to an Enchanted Isle (1896) by Charles S. Greene. San Francisco News Co.
Waugh: The Temple of Soleb, Ethiopia (1862?), Francis Frith. New York Public Library Digital Gallery. Image ID: 76483.
The following image was found through gutenberg.org:
Galton: From The Art of Travel, or Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries by Francis Galton (5th edn.). Published in Great Britain by John Murray, London, 1872.
HAMISH HAMILTON
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ISBN: 978-0-241-14465-7
AFTERWORD
1 The Dream of Lhasa: The Life of Nikolay Przhevalsky, by Donald Rayfield, London 1976.
