by Paul Theroux
And people were talking, thinking out loud in the most un-Chinese way. In this interim period, while the British government was being ineffectual and the People's Republic was quietly maneuvering and it was business as usual in Hong Kong, its citizens were behaving somewhat out of character. Great events bring people together and make them talkative, the way a storm forecast starts people chattering, comparing what they know, which is usually very little. Their sense of being ignorant and vulnerable makes for intimacy.
I was not interviewing people: asking formal questions and taking notes would create self-consciousness and equivocation, on both my part and theirs. The way to the truth was the humbler route of anonymity, faceless me striking up a conversation with a stranger. I did it all the time in Hong Kong, and nearly always the person said: It's all right for rich people here, they can go anywhere, but I have to stay, and I am worried, I am afraid for my family, I don't know what will happen, the Chinese will not be like the British.
Shop clerks, taxi drivers, people at the herbalist's, women at the fresh-squeezed-juice stand, newspaper vendors, schoolchildren, the pimps in the karaoke lounges, the mama-sans in the girlie bars, the shoeshine boys, the camera dealers. They didn't know who I was.
I think it will be bad when the Chinese take over, they said. The Chinese are not clever. With the Chinese it is just money, money, money. Which was exactly what a woman from Beijing had said to me about these Hong Kong critics, adding, They are refugees. They live in the present, they are politically naive, and very few of them are interested in democracy.
It had been that way in Hong Kong for the past year, and if anything, people had become more garrulous as the wind had begun to rise. The Hong Kongers were worried; they giggled with nervousness. I had the feeling that on July 1, 1997, the day of the Hand-over, their voices would be stilled.
Looking ahead, I realized that what I'd seen would be gone. Not just the Union Jacks, the mail vans, and the old buildings—indeed, whole districts—but also this revealing talk, the apprehension, and all the maneuvering. In the Hong Kong Club the businessmen seemed hearty: many had grown rich on joint ventures with China. I wanted to capture those feelings, that landscape, before all was lost forever. The "Albion Cottage" of my novel exists on the Peak under another name—a friend of mine lives in it. After I finished Kowloon Tong I went back to Hong Kong and saw this friend and said, "By the way, I put your house in my novel." She laughed sadly and told me that she had just been asked to vacate it. It was on valuable land; it would be torn down soon after the Hand-over.
Other People's
Robinson Crusoe
ROBINSON CRUSOE, an adventure story of the ultimate castaway, is so established in most people's minds that even those who have not read it know some details of the novel: Shipwreck. Desert island. Goatskin jacket and funny hat. Hairy umbrella. Talking parrot. Shocking footprint. Man Friday. Cannibals. Rescue. The book is all so familiar as an apparently simple, wonderful tale of survival that it is easily read as a great yarn.
Crusoe is too human and accident-prone to be truly heroic—this may be another reason for his enduring appeal. But the setting is also a compelling feature of his story, for the island as a microcosm of the world has been used imaginatively in works as diverse as Shakespeare's The Tempest and Golding's Lord ofthe Flies. Crusoe is more stubborn than brave, and his first-person narrative, the more believable for being defiantly unliterary, can be appreciated as the account of a man's twenty-eight-year ordeal of loneliness, hunger, and physical threat, the tale of a man who ingeniously succeeds against the odds. Because it is all so assured and so filled with plausible episodes and peculiar wisdom, it helps to be reminded that it was written by a man of nearly sixty, who resembled his fictional creation in his need to scheme in order to survive. Defoe was a master of improvisation, and he had to be, for his life was a chronicle of ups and downs—which is a fair description of this novel.
Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) was, in the words of one critic, "a shrewd, shifty, ingenious man, much mistrusted and frequently imprisoned." He was jailed for debt as well as for his satirical writing, and his reverses included bankruptcy and the failure of get-rich-quick schemes, of which raising civet cats (their glands were used for perfume) for ready cash was just one. He was a journalist, publisher, poet, businessman, and sometime secret agent, whose novel—the first in the language—was a huge hit, running into many editions and being quickly pirated and imitated.
One of the reasons for the success of this piece of fiction was that it was taken for fact. It is utterly, vulgarly modern in that sense. In the preface, Defoe, wearing the mask of editor, wrote, "The Editor believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it." Defoe (who took the view that fiction could be a low and subversive trick that encouraged mendacity) had hit upon an idea that persists to this day: if a book is said to be true, it is somehow more important and authentic. "A true story, based on actual events," runs the assertion in the made-for-TV movie. "It really happened!" the person says, urging you to read such and such a book. That was also what Defoe wanted people to say in 1719 when Robinson Crusoe was first published. And they did say it, and believed it.
The story is sensational—even today a story about such a castaway would be front-page news. But with time and rereading the adventure deepens in meaning, and the longer you live, the more impressive an achievement Robinson Crusoe becomes, turning from an amazing tale to a subtle study in innovation, a metaphor for human survival, and ultimately one of our own mythical tales, almost biblical in its morality: Robinson is as vivid and unambiguous a character as Job or Jonah, two people he specifically mentions.
Surely it is significant that the very first English novel is a desert-island story, of one man in the middle of nowhere, with almost nothing, who survives to create a whole world. In this sense, the novel is like an allegory of the history of humankind. The narrative emerges from chaos, with no society or props to speak of. A whole metaphor of creation is described in the book, which is as surprising in its action as in its intelligence. Its contradictions are the contradictions in the lives of many people; it embodies many of our discontents and dilemmas. No women figure in its drama; there is no passion, and though there is affection, there is hardly any love. But in its understated way the novel discusses just about everything else: materialism, isolation, arrogance, travel, friendship, imperialism, rebellious children, the relativity of wealth, the conundrum of power, the ironies of solitude, learning by doing; it is also about faith, atonement, and the passage of time. It is as practical as a pair of shoes. No sooner is the ordeal over than Crusoe is back, founding a colony and counting his money; and in the same way, the Crusoe idea continued, producing sequels and parodies, giving words to the language—"Crusoe" is a byword for castaway, as "Friday" is a synonym for helper.
Robinson begins life as a disobedient, hubristic, if clumsy, boy. He is given any amount of advice by his sententious father, the German immigrant to England Herr Kreutznaer, who anglicized his name to Crusoe. The name change, a nice touch in a book full of detail, is the more plausible for its being strange and even unnecessary. As it happens, Defoe also changed his own name, Frenchifying it, for his father's name was plain Mr. Foe. Daniel Defoe was anything but average, but he chose to write about a pretty ordinary, though arrogant, young man who (ignoring his father's Teutonic and pedestrian sermon on the safety of staying home) leaves home and finds himself involved in extraordinary events, beginning just days after his departure, when on his first voyage his ship sinks. Crusoe is not deterred, not even put off by a fairly prescient man who looks him in the eye and says that wherever he goes, he "will meet with nothing but Disasters and Disappointments."
Soon after, battling sea monsters, Crusoe is saved by his servant, Xury. Instead of rewarding him for his efforts, he sells Xury into slavery, and it is only when he is a harassed planter in Brazil that he regrets selling Xury, for he realizes that he could use a slave
to help him in his work. He thinks of Xury again in this way on the island. That crudely human logic is one of the most plausible aspects of the novel, and it frequently gives rise to Crusoe's refrain that he can't seem to do anything right. He even claims, at this early stage, that as a tobacco farmer in rural Brazil he is living "like a Man cast away upon some desolate Island, that had no body there but himself."
A few pages later, in one of Defoe's calculated ironies, Crusoe is shipwrecked during a slaving expedition, and he begins to understand the reality behind his desert-island hyperbole, as he becomes a real castaway on an island of real desolation. There is no question that Defoe intended to write a morality tale, but as a prolific writer—four hundred works bear his name—he was well enough acquainted with the public's taste to know that for his story to be believed it needed persuasive detail. Crusoe is not high-minded. He is a rebellious son who is attracted to the risky and the morally doubtful. He is inexperienced, not a Londoner but a young provincial, a Yorkshireman. That he is from a reasonably well-off family makes him seem out of touch and a bit innocent. He keeps reminding us how average he is in being incompetent ("I had never handled a tool in my life") and bungling ("I that was born to be my own destroyer"), and he is not at all religious until he finds a Bible among the tools and seeds and paraphernalia he had rescued from the smashed ship.
He survives by growing and maturing. But he does more than survive—he ends by ruling the island; by becoming, if not wise, then sensible; by acquiring power and using it with understanding. He progresses from being an almost-victim to being an almost-dictator. One of the most satisfying aspects of the novel is that in order to prevail over the natural obstacles of his island, Crusoe has to learn the rudiments of civilization. For this to happen, he must become acquainted with the paradox that his desert island is both a prison and a kingdom—he uses those very words. Early on, he calls himself a prisoner and describes his anguish. Later, he speaks of "the sixth year of my Reign, or my Captivity, which you please." After some time passes and his confidence grows, his hut is a "castle," and with the appearance (and conversion from cannibalism) of Friday, he thinks of himself as a ruler. At last, with his rescue of the Spaniards and Friday's father, he says, "My island was now peopled and I thought myself very rich in subjects; and it was a merry reflection which I frequently made, How like a King I looked." He thinks of himself as an absolute ruler, even a despot, but a benevolent one.
Whenever the subject of Robinson Crusoe comes up, the name Alexander Selkirk is mentioned. Selkirk (1676–1721), a Scotsman from the village of Largo, in Fifeshire, was a contemporary of Defoe's. He was a seaman and well-known for his pugnacity—notorious for his having thrown his father down a flight of stairs. During a voyage on a privateer in the Pacific, Selkirk quarreled with his captain and demanded to be put ashore on the remote (and deserted) island of Juan Fernandez, off the coast of Chile. There he remained for four years (1704–9). After his rescue and return to Britain, he became a popular hero. Details of his life as a castaway were published: his living off the land, his thatched-roof huts, his goatskin wardrobe. He said that he hankered for the tranquillity of his simple life on the island. The celebrated essayist Richard Steele interviewed Selkirk and used him as a living illustration of the maxim "He is happiest who confines his wants to natural necessities."
There is no evidence that Defoe ever met Selkirk, but as a journalist he obviously knew the story, and Selkirk was undoubtedly the inspiration for Robinson Crusoe. Although Selkirk was apostrophized as a simple-lifer, he was in effect no more than a survivor in extraordinary circumstances. The differences between Crusoe and Selkirk are more significant than the similarities. Selkirk's story is a fairly straightforward tale of survival on a barren island, while Crusoe's is at once a story of atonement and colonization; it is about becoming civilized—at least in eighteenth-century terms, when forcible conversion and slave trading were regarded as elements of civilization.
Selkirk was a pirate who remained a pirate. Crusoe, also an unruly son, is supremely disobedient; his experience on the island (at the mouth of the Orinoco) is both his punishment and his reward, as his island prison is transformed into his kingdom. Crusoe epitomizes perspective. The issue of survival is secondary to the whole debate circling around the matter of point of view, which is summed up in his stating that on the island, "I entertained different Notions of Things." Ambition, arrogance, and greed got him into this fix; rationalism gets him out of it. When he sees the futility of riches on the island, the meaning-lessness of money, the vanity of hoarding, and when he reaches the conclusion "that the good Things of this World are no farther good to us, that they are for our Use," he is on the way to salvation.
The odd thing is that Selkirk is usually represented as a kind of marvel, and of course he wasn't. He was just the singular fellow who returned to tell his tale of solitary survival. Crusoe insists that the reader see him as unexceptional, but as a vivid warning, a living example of the ills of man, beset by hubris and discontent: "I have been in all my Circumstances a Memento to those who are touched with the general Plague of Mankind."
Crusoe is only solitary for part of his ordeal. The dramatic and poignant appearance of the footprint and the serious meditation that follows is one of the episodes that lift this novel to another level of meaning. It also shows Defoe as someone who could speak in the plainest, most convincing way about tools and seeds and grape growing while at the same time being capable of the most profound rumination about the invasion of solitude and society and the definitions of space and time.
Crusoe had lamented his solitude earlier, but no sooner has he conquered it and prevailed over his isolation than he has to reckon with the complexities of human company. The footprint is the beginning of this test of his understanding and the end of his Eden. What follows is like an allegory of the Ascent of Man, for he has to cope with cannibalism, aggression, warfare, and the competitive instinct. By overcoming these obstacles, Crusoe grows stronger. And yet, though he is a hero in a literary sense, he is not heroic in his deeds. His most persuasive quality is his humanity; he is the congenital bumbler who is challenged by circumstances to become competent. And one might add that though the Bible strengthens him, he does not become visibly religious until Friday appears, and then he is sanctimonious.
If Robinson Crusoe were a story about holding out against the odds, then everything would hinge on Crusoe's rescue. But this is not the case. By mastering himself, Crusoe masters the island and makes a world of it. He progresses in an almost evolutionary sense from a lowly creature precariously clinging to life at the edge of the island, to being the dominant species on it; he moves from castaway to colonizer. At the end, Crusoe is both, as he says, a king and a "Generalissimo." Defoe's point is that Crusoe need not be rescued, which is emphasized by the fact that no sooner has he been scooped up and told his story than he returns to the island and prospers. It is a success story, of fall and rise. It is also a narrative of purification, with downright details as well as something approaching the spiritual. Not surprisingly, this novel has been in print and popular for almost three hundred years.
Thoreau's Cape Cod
WE ARE CONSTANTLY told how normal and honorable Thoreau was, yet it seems that we would get much further in understanding him if we began by conceding that he was an odd fish, full of peculiar conceits. He was a loner, and like many loners he was capable of a kind of horrid humor. I think Henry James was mistaken when he described Thoreau as "imperfect, unfinished, inartistic; he was worse than provincial—he was parochial." But the judgment contains some truth. Thoreau himself said he was possessed of a "crooked genius."
With his irritating self-assurance, no sooner has Thoreau intimated that he is down-to-earth and interested only in the habits of wood-chucks than he begins to quote Homer, in Greek, and sometimes at great length (eight Homeric excursions in his little Cape Cod book, for example). He frequently talks of country matters in a way that makes him sound pedantic. Few o
f his jokes are truly witty. He affects not to like other people or human settlements and can, in saying so, sound misogynistic. He is surprising; he can also be swiftly persuasive.
Some of these qualities characterize Cape Cod and are what makes it such an unusual and interesting book. It is unusual even by Thoreau's standards, because it is good-natured about the bleakest of subjects, only glancingly about the Cape (its real subject is the sea), and contains more reverie than actual experience. It appeals to me especially for its location, my own home ground, which is very near Thoreau's. That is one of the most difficult of all travel subjects, the journey near home—Concord is only about sixty-five miles from the Cape. It was a form Thoreau excelled at; Walden is another example. Few travel writers have managed this well. Its spirit is summed up in Thoreau's deliberate pronouncement, "I have traveled a good deal in Concord."
Given its modest intention, it is surprising that so much criticism has been leveled against Cape Cod. This seems especially cruel since the book is hardly known to the general reader of Thoreau's work. I would guess that many people who have read Walden, and know that Thoreau made pencils for a living, and that he influenced Mahatma Gandhi in his essay on civil disobedience, and that his dying words were "Moose ... Indian," are unaware of the existence of Cape Cod.
All the criticism of the book is posthumous, since the chapters that comprise it were articles that were collected only after Thoreau's death (of tuberculosis, at the fairly early age of forty-five). Henry James was out of sympathy, and dismissive—but what did James know of the outdoors? James Russell Lowell simply reached the wrong conclusions: "Thoreau had no humor, and this implies that he was a sorry logician." Those who knew Thoreau—except for Ellery Channing, his boon companion—found the man a difficult friend and his trips somewhat mystifying. Although cautiously appreciative, Emerson found Thoreau aggressive, and in his essay on the man explained it in a forthright way: "There was something military in his nature not to be subdued."
