by Paul Theroux
The most tedious travel book, in my opinion, is the one in which the author is being vague about having a wonderful time. All that jauntiness seems like boasting to me, and dishonest boasting too, since the writers must be hiding so much misery. We all know that a vast proportion of travel is accumulated nuisance; but if boredom or awfulness is handled with skill and concrete detail, it is funnier and truer than the sunniest prose.
Labels was written by a twenty-six-year-old who had just published a successful novel, Decline and Fall (and was about to publish Vile Bodies); who had decided, like the character in Saki, that “the art of public life lies in knowing when to stop, and then going a bit further.”
Here is Waugh on the French: “As a race, it is true, the French tend to have strong heads, weak stomachs, and a rooted abhorrence of hospitality.” Germans are “ugly.” Paris is “bogus.” Monte Carlo is “supremely artificial.” Waugh even manages to be rude about the pyramids (“less impressive when seen close”) and the Sphinx is “an ill proportioned composition of inconsiderable esthetic appeal.” Mallorca, Gibraltar, and Algiers are no better, though Waugh’s way of dismissing them is highly amusing. Waugh is no kinder to what he calls—and this has a certain resonance today—“the mongrel kingdom of the Jugoslavs.”
It is all eccentric opinion—Waugh is the last person who would say that his book had the weight of scholarship as its justification, or even the quest for adventure. “There is no track quite so soundly beaten as the Mediterranean seaboard,” he says, admitting that this will be the opposite of adventure, as it is the opposite of scholarship. At one point he begins to discuss Arab architecture and then he apologizes and offers a whole paragraph of “silly old me.”
Labels is never predictable. When travel writers make cruises the subject of books the theme is often that of the Ship of Fools on yet another pointless voyage. (Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that writers tend to be solitary if not downright antisocial.) Waugh avoids that, and is impartial, as mocking towards the English as he is towards the Maltese and the Algerians. In the narrative he develops a line in wine snobbery, too: “the wine of Crete is lowly esteemed,” “I do not believe that Algerian wine is really very nice,” Málaga is “very nasty,” and as for Manzanilla—“the inferior brands taste like the smell of evening newspapers.”
And so it goes, this parody of the Grand Tour, from Monte Carlo to Naples, from Haifa to Cairo, from Malta to Gibraltar, by way of Venice and Athens and Ragusa (Dubrovnik) and many other “labeled” cities that Waugh promptly relabels. The book has no more authority than the eccentricity of its author, who, on the verge of a divorce, was very unhappy at the time he wrote it. It is vindicated by its humor and its originality. Also, Waugh knew better than most people that there is a great deal of pleasure to be derived from a travel book in which the traveler is having a very bad time; even better if it is an ordeal.
I had not been lying to Mrs. Betty Levy. My idea was to find a way of going to Greece and Turkey, not to do a hatchet job on a shipload of cruise passengers, supine on the sundeck, reading Danielle Clancy and Clive Grisham, and their novels with alarming titles: A Clear and Present Client, Extreme Prejudice, Remorseful Storm Rising. They yawned and turned the pages. The big books were propped on their bellies. I was reading Gatsby, as you know.
The Seabourn Spirit was a moderate-sized ship of ten thousand tons. Its 180 passengers were accommodated not in cabins—the word was not used—but in two-room suites: double beds, bathtubs, a liquor cabinet, a television set, and not a porthole but a picture window through which you could see the Mediterranean. On various decks, there were a swimming pool, several Jacuzzis, an exercise room, a sauna room; a large marina unfolded from the stern, complete with two speedboats.
Tipping was forbidden on the Seabourn Spirit. You could eat whenever you liked, alone or with a group of people. You could host a dinner party at short notice and they would prepare a table for twelve. You could call room service and say, “Caviar for six and two bottles of champagne,” and it was there in your suite in ten minutes.
I had always thought you worked and saved to put your kids through college. I had now discovered that there were Americans who worked and saved to take vacation cruises on ships such as the Seabourn Spirit. A fourteen-day cruise for two in 1994 was about equal to what it cost the average student in the United States to attend a good private university for one academic year: that is, about $28,000.
As a train drudge and a ferry passenger, I had bumped and shuttled from Gibraltar to Albania, thinking of the coast of this sea as overdeveloped or sludgy or victimized by war or stupidity. As a cruise passenger I saw the Mediterranean as much bluer, the coast much tidier, and from the deck of the Seabourn Spirit, Nice had great charm and even its shingly beach looked peaceful. Nice was not the overcrowded seaside resort of retirees and dog merds that I had passed through on a jingling train so many months before. It was no longer the site of my one-star hotel and my long rained-upon walks. It was merely a backdrop, twinkling as I drank my complimentary glass of champagne. Night fell, the mist put the town out of focus and made it a Matisse, with yellow blobby lights reflected in the water. We glided out of the Old Port, south to Italy.
Down in my suite the phone was ringing.
“Ja, Mr. Theroux, this is Jörg the chef, calling from the kitchen.”
“Yes?”
“I hear you are a vegetarian,” Jorg said. “I can tell you that we just had some nice salmon flown in from Norway. Was there anything special you wanted me to make for you?”
It seemed an auspicious start, and the next day, gliding along a perfectly flat sea that was blue and unwrinkled under a blue and cloudless sky, a slight breeze, Italy showing as a low smoky shoreline to the east, we passed between Elba and Corsica. The captain made an announcement to this effect; some people looked up and squinted past the rail, then returned to their reading.
There was a lecture in the lounge given by the Seabourn Spirit’s own onboard academic. I went to the lecture that first day and, along with the rest of the listeners—about thirty of us—made notes. The subject was “Mediterranean Civilizations.”
—Greece was resource-poor, and overpopulated. They needed to colonize all over the Mediterranean to get resources.
—But there was never a place called Greece. Just city-states.
—The Minoans were peaceful and progressive.
—The Myceneans were mercenaries.
—Spartans sent their children to military school at the age of seven. They never came home after a defeat. Better to die.
—The Romans did not practice moderation.
—Cleopatra was not Egyptian. She was the daughter of a Macedonian general.
—The Athenians were gentle and democratic. They woke up. They had no breakfast. They ate one meal—porridge. They wore a sort of diaper, and a sheet. They went to the forum and talked. It was not a life of luxury.
At this mention of porridge, a huge man sitting behind me said to his wife, “Are you as hungry as I am?”
“The male passengers on this ship are so big,” a woman said to me that first lunchtime, “I thought they must all be members of a team of some kind.”
The white ship growled south bathed in full sunshine on the glittering sea, following the low shore of Italy that was never more than a long narrow stripe at the horizon, like the edge of a desert, a streak of glowing dust.
Our progress was following one of the oldest routes in the Mediterranean. “Coasting was the rule” in the Mediterranean, Fernand Braudel wrote in The Structures of Everyday Life. It was rare for any ship to risk the open sea, even as late as the seventeenth century, because the fear of the unknown was so great. “The courage required for such an unwonted feat has been forgotten.” Mediterranean sailors usually went from one port to the next, along the coast, and it was a brave sailor of the high seas who ventured out of the sight of land, from Mallorca to Sicily, or Rhodes to Alexandria. “The procession of coasting vess
els steered by the line of the shore, to which they were constantly drawn, as if by a magnet.”
But our ship steered parallel to the coast for the pleasure of seeing it, and hovering, as a reminder of where we were.
The clear day of unobstructed sun became a blazing late afternoon, the western sky and sea alight, and at last in a reddening amphitheater of light, a buttery sunset.
An invitation had been clipped to my door: Did I wish to join the First Officer and his guests for dinner?
There were ten people, and the subject at my end of the table was what we did for a living.
Millie Hardnett said that her husband had made his fortune in specialty foods—canned fruit, jars of peaches in wine, exotic syrups—and after selling his business to a food conglomerate they now spent their time cruising.
Twisting his dinner roll apart, Max Hardnett asked me, “Someone told me you were a writer, Paul. Have you published anything under your own name?”
“My husband sold his company to Sara Lee,” the woman to my left said.
This was Mary Fuller, whose husband had founded Fuller Brush. And another fact: Sara Lee was a real person, a middle-aged woman whose father had named the cheesecake, the company, and everything else after her. She had a last name, but no one could remember it.
Her companion, Sappho, said to me, “Alfred wrote a book, too. You say you’re a writer? You should read it.”
A Foot in the Door, by Alfred Fuller, described (according to his widow) how he had grown tired of being a poor farmer in Nova Scotia and took a hint from his brother, who worked for a brush company, and decided to sell brushes door-to-door. What’s that? You mean I don’t have the brush you require? Well, describe it to me and I will supply it to you. Alfred was open to customers’ suggestions and created brushes to fill their needs. Bottle brushes, wide brooms, whisks and dust mops. This was pioneering salesmanship and soon Alfred had teams of men out there, ringing doorbells and hustling for commissions.
“It was a real Horatio Alger story,” she said.
“What do you think about that?” Sappho asked me.
“I met Arthur Murray once in Honolulu,” I said. Why was I telling her this? He was another famous name on a business. “I even know someone who danced with him. Arthur Murray taught her to dance in a hurry.”
“Alfred thought up the idea of direct selling,” Mary Fuller said. “It’s not popular now because of crime.”
She was ninety-one and kept to her wheelchair but she was not at all frail, and she had a good appetite. At times, surveying the table, she looked like a sea lion, monumental and slow in the way she turned her head. She kept her good health, she said, by visiting mineral baths in places like Budapest and Baden-Baden. She mumbled but she was lucid. She spent each summer in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia.
“How did you meet Alfred?” I asked.
“He courted me in New York,” she said. “He was very determined. When he wanted something he got it. That’s why he was so successful in business, too. My mother called him ‘The Steam Roller.’ ”
She went on a cruise every year, she said. This simple assertion brought forth a torrent of cruise memories from the rest of the table.
“This is our sixth cruise in three years—”
“We were up the Amazon—”
“So were we. I wanted to go into the jungle in a canoe, but instead we shopped in Manaus—”
“I went to Antarctica. In the summer of course. Penguins—”
“We cruised China. That was special—”
“Down the Yangtze—”
“Vietnam on the Princess—”
In the morning we were anchored off Sorrento, high steep cliffs and pretty palms and dark junipers, the carved porches and stucco walls of hotels and villas. At the Hotel Vittoria Excelsior it was possible to see the suite where Caruso had stayed. Across the bay was Mount Vesuvius, Naples in its shadow, smothered in a cloud of dust.
This was a different Italy from the one I had seen in the winter. I had been traveling second-class on trains, among working people and students; in my Italy of cheap hotels and pizzas I often lingered to watch people arguing, or goosing each other, or making obscure gestures. I seldom saw a ruin or a museum. But this Seabourn Italy was the Grand Tour of the Italy of colorful boatmen and expensive taxis and day trips. It was the coast of castles and villas, but there was no need to go ashore: you could sit under the awnings and simply admire Italy, its glorious seaside. Just look at it, and then doze and let the ship sail you to a new coast. After all, the Mediterranean shore was much prettier viewed at a distance.
Some Seabourn passengers bought ceramics in Sorrento, and lace, and leather goods. Others, of whom I was one, went on the Pompeii tour.
Pompeii was a Roman seaside resort which was buried, along with Herculaneum, in A.D. 79, mummifying many of the inhabitants and wrapping in ashes of Vesuvius, and preserving for posterity, Roman frivolity and ingenuity, the passions as well as the day-to-day life of these people, some resident and some on holiday. Many of our images of Roman decadence, the salacious postcards of big penises and scenes of buggery that are sold in Naples, originate in Pompeii. An illustrated booklet, Forbidden Pompeii, in five languages, was stacked in every souvenir shop. The site itself, just a glorified ground plan, all that remained of Pompeii, was in an industrial area, full of garages and factories and auto repair shops, in a suburb of Naples.
It had been plundered long ago. Even its so-called excavation—which was recent: the mid-eighteenth century—had been just a form of looting and treasure seeking. It had no studious or archaeological intention. No one cared to investigate the Roman way of life or the organization of ancient households. Some bits of pottery that were unearthed influenced Josiah Wedgwood’s so-called “Etruscan” pottery designs as well as creating fashions in some English furniture designs. But that was all. Digging up Pompeii was a quest for trinkets and corpses.
Sometimes the digging was ritualized. General Grant stopped in Pompeii in 1877 on his triumphant trip around the world. To honor his visit, the Italian authorities dug up a ruined house for the general. This sort of excavation was “one of the special compliments paid to visitors of renown.” General Grant was given a chair and he sat and smoked a cigar while the workers began shoveling. A loaf of bread (baked in A.D. 79) was unearthed. Then some bronze ornaments. The Italians were disappointed and ashamed. They had hoped to find a human body. They eagerly offered to excavate another house in anticipation of perhaps finding a corpse or some old jewelry for General Grant. The general said he was hungry. A man in his party suggested going to a nearby restaurant, and he joked, “To excavate a beefsteak!”
Our guide was Riccardo. That was another aspect of this new cruiseship Italy. Instead of the buttonholed strangers I had depended on before, I now had a guide showing me around. They were just as friendly but oddly irrelevant. Riccardo was a good-humored Neapolitan who had recently moved to Sorrento.
“Eight meters of volcanic ashes,” Riccardo said. “Four square miles of city, where twenty-five thousand people—”
Like the history lecture yesterday, the tour was anecdotal, filled with meaningless numbers and generalizations, but from this bouncy little Figaro they were like a salesman’s obliging patter. “Big wine shop!” he said, as we walked down one of Pompeii’s paved streets. “See wagon ruts in the road? These are stepping-stones. See graffiti? Notice this is a bakery—just like the bakery oven we have today for pizza and bread.”
We went through the Forum, we saw a toilet. “They called it a Vespasian, because he was the emperor who taxed the people for each peepee.”
“I didn’t realize there’d be all this walking,” Mr. Mouser said.
Riccardo said, “I will show you a brothel. A real one!”
We hurried after him, turning corners. Then Riccardo paused and said, “You see that big phallus on the wall?”
It looked like a peg on a coatrack. To tease him I said, “You think that’s a big one?”
> “I think maybe normal,” Riccardo said.
“In America we would call that a small dick.” Out of delicacy I said this in Italian, using the word cazzo, enunciating it—not grunting catz, the way I heard Italians doing in Boston when I was growing up.
“That word is a little vulgar,” Riccardo said in Italian.
“What word would you use?”
“‘Dick,” he said. Cazzo. “But I don’t raise my voice, eh?”
James Joyce believed that Italians were obsessed with their private parts. “When I walk into the bank in the morning,” he wrote, “I wait for someone to announce something about his cazzo, culo, or coglioni. This usually happens before quarter to nine.”
The Pompeii brothel—a so-called Lupenare, a house of the she-wolf—was filled with shuffling Japanese, young and old, men and women, giggling at the lurid frescoes depicting coitus, marveling at the pallets of stone—the shelves on which the act of love was performed; snapping pictures of the cubicles.
“Now I will show you the house of the bachelor brothers,” Riccardo said. “They lived a bisexual life. We know this from frescoes and statues.”
One of the statues of Priapus, a small figure clasping a torpedo between his thighs, was in a side room. Thirty Japanese filed past it. I waited at the exit listening to the flashbulbs and the shrieks and giggles of the women, who emerged with their hands over their mouths, because an open mouth is considered rude in Japan. The Japanese men were silent, and they looked rueful as they shuffled out of the room. Not very long ago, women tourists were forbidden to enter that room.
In an unvisited corner of the same house there was a fresco showing the infant Hercules strangling snakes, and I thought again of the Pillars of Hercules, and how this god, the patron of human toil, was a suitable model for me in my journey.
“What do you think?” Riccardo asked me as we strolled along.