‘Which of your experiences best epitomizes the essence of traveling?’ To be in a small boat at four in the morning in an ocean, any ocean, but particularly in the South Pacific, and to know that you are on a proper heading for a tropical island, and to watch as light from the still-hidden sun begins to filter into the eastern sky. And then, because you are in the part of the earth where, because of the bulge near the equator, the sun rises and sets with a tremendous crash, to see it suddenly explode into red brilliance, big enough to devour the world. And then to see ahead, its crest inflamed by the sun, the dim outline of the island you have been seeking, and to watch it slowly, magically rise from the sea until it becomes whole, a home for people, a resting place for birds.
One of the treasures of travel, one of the reasons we journey to distant places, is to intensify our appreciations of the familiar things we’ve known since childhood. Once when traveling on Lago di Garda, biggest of the lakes in northern Italy, a learned Englishman—a professor at Oxford, I believe—joined me at the railing and said: ‘That lovely dot of land at the end of the spit is called Sirmione today. It’s the famous Sirmio of Catullus, who hurried here after his duties in distant Rome. He wrote a charming poem about his travels to that spot:
Sweetest of sweets to me that pastime seems
When the mind lays down its burden, when the pain
Of travel o’er, our own cot we regain
And nestle on the pillow of our dreams.
The poem expressed my own views on travel so precisely that I asked: ‘Who translated it?’ and the Englishman replied: ‘From its archaic manner I’d say some undistinguished poet about 1840. The Latin original is compact and unrhymed, you know, but our fellow’s stuck in a lot of extra words to achieve meter and rhyme.’ Even so, I asked if he could write it down for me, and he did. I have recited the poem so constantly over the past sixty years that I almost think of it as my own.
‘What is the most rewarding airplane flight you’ve taken?’ A dead heat between two incomparables. Once on a clear, frosty day in winter when snow was everywhere in the high country, I flew with perfect visibility along the entire west–east rampart of the Himalayas, hour after hour above brutal Nanga Parbat, Annapurna, the lesser mountains of Kashmir, the ranges behind which Tibet lay hidden, mighty K-2 and then Everest itself, gigantic in snowy sunlight. There were the rivers, too, gracing the mountains like chains of glittering diamonds: ones with the magical names—Thelum, Chenab, Sutlej—connected with the Indus in Pakistan, the crowded Ganges; the incredible tangle of the world’s least-known major river, the mighty Brahmaputra; and even a glimpse of the sprawling Mekong. That was a day of sheer grandeur, and never had Asia paraded itself with such a display of raw power: those gigantic mountains, those rivers whose floods could devastate large portions of a continent. But equally impressive in the way that one perfect pearl can excite more than a handful of diamonds was the Alaskan flight I often took from Anchorage to Juneau along the face of the great mountains there that rise directly out of the sea rather than from high tablelands as the Himalayas do. Here one sees the wildness of nature, the mysterious glaciers that emerge in darkness and die in silence, never reaching the ocean nor even seen by man except from a plane. I have cherished both these flights.
‘Which country was the most memorable?’ Without question, Afghanistan, and I believe that most foreigners who worked there in the postwar period of 1945–60 would say the same, for in those years the minute European and American communities living in Kabul or working on the building of the huge dam on the Helmand River experienced a civilization that had no parallel at the time. In this major capital there was no hotel, no public restaurant the Europeans could patronize or would want to, no newspaper, no radio, no cinema and no social function in the indigenous community to which they would be welcomed. It was the most primitive living any of us had ever experienced, and we resolved the problem by resorting to certain stratagems. We entertained one another seven days a week by taking turns hosting lunch and dinner. One never ate alone and one never went out except to friends’ houses. On Friday nights we gathered to read plays from scripts that secretaries in the various embassies had typed in multiple copies. We went on picnics in the glorious mountains nearby. We took trips to see the gigantic statues of Buddhist saints carved on the rocky walls of the Vale of Bamian, one of the beauty spots of Asia. And I joined a caravan that headed across the great desert Dasht-i-Margo to visit Herat, where I met a rug merchant of whom I shall speak later. I organized another caravan far to the north to visit the ruins of ancient Balkh, where Alexander the Great in 328 B.C. met and married the beautiful Afghan girl Roxana, making her queen of the known world. Afghanistan, primitive, murderous, is a corner of the world loved by all who knew her then.
‘What is most memorable?’ I recall with greatest affection and longing those days when I was a young man stepping off a plane after a difficult work trip in some deprived Asian country and heading to one of the hotels I frequented; the Peninsula in Hong Kong, the Raffles in Singapore, the Oriental in Bangkok or the sprawling Hôtel des Indes in Djakarta, there to meet in the lounge my colleagues from around the world. Strangers would gather to tell their stories or listen, excursions would be arranged and I would once again feel the pulse of Asia and the wonder at being able to lead such a life. We were careful never to boast about what we had done. In the Foreign Correspondents Club in Tokyo, where we headquartered, there were three helmets hanging on the wall, and if anyone started boasting someone would quietly rise, put on one of the helmets and say: ‘Do tell us about the incoming enemy fire,’ and the bragging would stop. Once at the end of a long trip into the very heart of Asia I said thoughtlessly: ‘The other day as I was coming out of the Khyber Pass,’ and this time my listeners not only put on their helmets, they groaned.
‘Did any one trip exert an unexpected influence on you?’ I was from the start an impressionable person, and I think I traveled in order to be changed from what I was, so it all led to alteration, whether for good or ill it is not for me to judge. But I suppose those boyhood trips established my lifelong pattern of wanting to be free and of seeking new vistas, experiences and friendships. There was one adventurous trip that had a more lasting influence than I realized at the time, and that was when I sailed across the Minch of Scotland to the Outer Hebrides and entered a Celtic fairyland.
The famous islands start at the north with the fairly big island of Lewis with Harris, where the highly regarded tweed is woven, and then a remarkable trio: North Uist, South Uist, with Benbecula in the middle. Then comes little Eriskay of the lovely music and finally Barra, with a string of uninhabited islets drifting down to the big lighthouse at the far tip.
Time having passed these remote islands by, the people lived in small stone cottages topped by thatched roofs, wore dark, heavy clothing made from cloth they wove themselves, talked mainly in Gaelic, a musical tongue, and subsisted on catches from the sea and grains imported from the mainland. Because their open fires burned peat instead of coal, everything about them had a clean, smoky odor as if just fumigated by some protective agent. They were a sturdy lot, not overly tall, not overly friendly, and fiendishly devious, which enabled them, when a stranger was in their midst, to joke about him in Gaelic while staring at him almost benevolently. If they accepted him, they did so with great warmth, inviting him to participate in the ceilidhs (pronounced key-lee) they held during the long winter nights. A ceilidh is an informal gathering of singers and storytellers who pass the night hours in someone’s kitchen, seated about the peat fire while the storms from the North Atlantic howl outside. It can develop, as one inspired soloist after another introduces his or her favorite song of the islands, into a form of fellowship that has no equal. The folk songs of the Hebrides are chants of great emotional power and haunting beauty, and during the time I spent in the islands I learned most of them, an artistic treasure that has never tarnished.
But the special wonder of the Hebrides was the island
of Benbecula, for it was linked to its two neighboring Uists in a unique way: at high tide it was a proper island with substantial waves cutting it off from the Uists, but at low tide it was connected to the Uists by broad exposed causeways, and carts or automobiles could move easily and safely from one island to the other, while many people walked to visit with friends on the neighboring islands. So on Benbecula the question always was ‘When’s the next tide?’ and travelers were careful to gauge departures so that they were assured of enough time to reach the next island safely. Each year some careless or inebriated walker would start to cross too late and, caught by the implacable inrushing tides, be swept to his death.
In my travels I experienced two episodes of exquisite tension: one was walking from Quetta in Pakistan to Kandahar in Afghanistan without a visa for either country; the other, crossing in the dead of night from North Uist to Benbecula with a bright moon and the Atlantic Ocean waiting to reclaim the sandy road on which I walked—in the far distance a lone light shone to mark the way to safety on the middle island.
That winter in the Hebrides was tremendously important to me. On Barra I came to know everyone living on the island, and day after day I would walk to one corner of the island or another, halting whenever a low stone house hugging the ground seemed inviting and visiting with the occupants, taking tea with them or even stopping for the night and perhaps singing the old songs with them. Or I would go out with the peat gatherers and help as they cut soggy squares of that amazing fuel, a compact tangle of roots while still immersed in its swampy bog, an admirable slow-burning fuel when dried in the sun. And always, whatever I was doing, increasing my knowledge of island life in the midst of the turbulent Atlantic. Even while I was undergoing this splendid adventure I appreciated that it was something special, for I was sharing in a primitive way of life that forced me to reexamine all my values and cleanse my mind of fixed attitudes.
It was there in the Hebrides that I invented a new word to describe the change that had overtaken me, nesomaniac, one who is mad about islands—neso, in Greek, meaning island. I would become perhaps the only man in the world who had lived somewhat close to the inhabitants in both the old Hebrides in the Atlantic and the new Hebrides in the Pacific. I would also be probably the only one who ever spent an Easter on Christmas Island and a Christmas on Easter Island, and I would become so possessed by islands that I would do intensive work in the Hawaiian Islands and other parts of Polynesia, the islands of Melanesia, the Aleutian Islands near the Arctic Circle and the lovely islands of the Caribbean. I was attuned to islands; I knew at first hand what life was like on the lonely atolls and the storm-swept islands that Joseph Conrad, Pierre Loti, Somerset Maugham, Alec Waugh, Jack London and Robert Louis Stevenson had loved. At times, working in big cities far from nature, I have been sick with nesomania, and I think the reason is this: On the islands one has both the time and the inclination to communicate with the stars and the trees and the waves drifting ashore, one lives more intensely.
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‘Did any of your trips produce ugly or regrettable results?’ When I studied at St. Andrews in Scotland I lived in one of the most delightful small towns in Europe. Perched on the edge of the North Sea, graced by a cathedral that had stood in dreamlike ruins for centuries, rich in narrow streets, ancient gateways, city walls and magnificent vistas over the sea to the east, rolling lands west and south, it merits the joyous cry Andrew Lang the Scottish scholar gave when he was a student there:
St. Andrews by the Northern Sea,
That is a haunted town to me.
As I surrendered to its spell I became aware that our university had a branch in the city of Dundee twelve miles away, across the Firth of Tay. It was a medical school, and Scottish lads who told me of it warned: ‘It’s a grubby industrial town, Dundee. You wouldn’t like it, and its medical school should be abolished. Filled with American Jews.’ This seemed so improbable that I journeyed to Dundee and sought out the medical school, thinking that I ought to know it if it formed part of my university, and I found that what the Scottish students had said was true: Dundee was a smaller version of Glasgow with all the latter’s grubbiness but little of its charm.* It did have a medical school, and it was filled with American Jews, handsome, bright young men in their mid-twenties, who slaved at their medical books and rarely came across the Tay to the lovelier part of the university where I studied.
One of the rewards of travel to foreign lands for a young person is that she or he can sometimes catch an oblique view of the homeland, and in Dundee Medical School I caught a glimpse of an American scandal that shattered me and still makes me writhe. Let’s call him Isidore Cohen, and let’s say he came from Brooklyn. He speaks for the thousands of young men like him who crowded the four Scottish medical schools in those days—Edinburgh, Glasgow, St. Andrews, Aberdeen—and he told me: ‘Yes, all the Americans on this hall are Jewish. We wanted to be doctors, had straight A averages in high school. Our fathers and uncles were doctors and we always supposed that we’d be, too, if we kept our grades high. But when it came time to enroll in a medical school in the States, we found that no university would have us. I mean no one, not even the ones with wretched medical schools. We were Jews and forbidden to study medicine. Oh, each medical school allowed two or three to enroll, especially if our parents had made big cash contributions to the school, but thousands of us could find no spot anywhere that would accept us. Sometime around 1925 word circulated that the Scottish medical schools, some of the most rigorous in the world, needed scholars, and would accept Jews. Of course, when the depression followed they begged us to come over, and here we are.’ In 1931–32 I met scores of them, outcasts at home but welcomed in Scotland. Their parents had paid taxes for years and had been good citizens, but their sons were denied equality in education, one of the outrages of those days, one that sickened me.
In later years, when I traveled through the States I tried to follow the careers of these New York men who had sought refuge in Scotland, and I found they had become famous doctors and researchers, deans of medical schools, chief surgeons in major hospitals and professors who instructed the new generation of American doctors. If you subtracted from recent American medical history the contributions of those Jews trained in Scotland, our health-care system would be in worse condition than it is.
What did I learn in my travels? In whatever foreign country I visited I met dreamers who longed to reach America and its promise of an enriched life so I knew we had a country rich in opportunity, but I also met those brilliant Jews already in America who had been denied that promise. In the institutions of higher education in which I have worked I have labored to bring blacks and Hispanics, Orientals and the penniless into the system, because in Dundee I saw how terribly wrong it is to deprive those not in the mainstream of the education to which, in a country such as ours, they are entitled.
I had always supposed that as I grew older and more infirm my desire to travel would wane, but that has not happened. In my eighty-second year and beset by health problems that nearly crippled me, I found myself eager to take certain trips: a voyage in a small ship completely around South America to research a similar one made by a pirate in the 1660s; three tours of the complete Caribbean basin and its islands; an extended visit to the magical city of Cartagena to inspect its famous walls; a jaunt to London as an honorary mascot of the Miami Dolphins as the football team played an exhibition game against the San Francisco Forty-niners; an emotional trip to Warsaw to meet with writers I had known there twenty years earlier; a delightful visit to Japan to meet, decades later, the members of a girls’ theatrical company about whom I had written a novel, Sayonara, which became a well-regarded motion picture; a nostalgic trip in a small sailboat back to Tahiti and the Marquesas of Gauguin; and a most moving trip to Rome to visit the Pope, whom I had known when he was a cardinal in Cracow.
There were tempting invitations from foreign governments that for one reason or another I had to decline. I was asked by Ch
ina to take up residence and write about its recent history; by Russia to participate in a master symposium on space; by Korea to observe the changes in the country in whose mountains I had climbed during the war there; by Turkey to write about their Sephardic Jews. And there were equally tantalizing trips that various organizations wanted me to make: to New Zealand to help launch a production of South Pacific; to Australia to visit the outback; to Afghanistan to inspect the war camps; to Buenos Aires for a cultural session. And there were three meetings arranged by our government relating to commissions on which I had served in Munich, Portugal and Israel.
I do not cite these many offers of travel opportunities as a sign of my importance. What I wish to emphasize is that they do attest to one thing: if one displays an obvious sense of identification with the countries he visits, he will be welcomed back, and the older one grows the more treasured the friendships will become.
The World Is My Home: A Memoir Page 19