Sunrise with Seamonsters

by Paul Theroux

  This is actually quite extraordinary. For that woman, travel is a sedentary activity. She has been carried across the world. She is the true armchair traveler.

  It is easy to laugh at her, but her kind of traveling is very popular. Travel nowadays is seen to be a form of repose: most people you see in travel posters are lying down in the sunshine, or sleeping in a lounge chair, or just sitting. In a sense, Abroad is where you don't have to do anything but loaf. I realize that a great confusion has arisen because we regard travel and a vacation as interchangeable. But really there is no connection at all between being alone in upcountry Honduras and, on the other hand, eating fish and chips in Spain. For a person with two weeks' vacation, travel—in its traditional sense—would be unthinkable; which is why parts of Spain have become Blackpool with sunshine—it's more restful that way. I don't blame people for craving that, but I do object when it is regarded as travel.

  The British-family-in-Majorca stereotype is often mocked. True, it may be described as a strange new sort of adventuring: travel as immobility. In this sort of travel you have an illusion of no movement at all and in a cultural sense (Watneys Red Barrel, the Express, chips, English food, English service, English-style hotels) no surprises at all. But the British are not the only people who do this. The Japanese now expect to find Japanese restaurants and Japanese courtesies in the countries they visit: it is comforting to go ten thousand miles and find that it is just like home—which accounts for the proliferation of McDonald's restaurants and Holiday Inns and the identical (and easily exported) national paraphernalia of travel.

  When a person says, in a foreign place, "I feel right at home here," he is making a statement about the nature of travel, not the texture of the place he's in. I found it extremely pleasant to have a cheeseburger and a beer at the Inter-Continental Hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan; but I would have been a fool for thinking that this in any way represented a kind of Afghan experience. A few hours later I was back in my own hotel seven miles distant, and it was a world away. I don't belittle this sort of travel, which I regard as Traveling As A Version Of Being At Home; but it is wrong to mistake it as the sort of travel that allows a person to make discoveries.

  Many people travel in order to feel at home, or to have an idealized experience of home: Spain is Home-plus-Sunshine; India is Home-plus-Servants; Africa is Home-plus-Elephants-and-Lions; Ecuador is Home-plus-Volcanoes. It is not possible for people to travel in large numbers and have it any other way. In order to process and package travelers in great numbers a system has to be arrived at. This system, in an orderly way, defeats the traditional methods of travel and has made true travel almost obsolete. In order for large numbers of Americans to visit Bangkok, Bangkok must become somewhat like America. The change in China, since the arrival of foreign travelers, has been enormous; and the result has been some very un-Chinese-looking hotels, food, buses, and so forth. It seemed to me in China that these holiday-makers would, in the end, bring about a different sort of cultural revolution. Certainly, travelers in China constitute a new class of people in a society that had striven to be classless.

  To a great extent, travel today is praised for its familiar, unshocking, homely and even immobile characteristics. But although you can get a bed on some airline flights to the Far East, and there is a toilet on long-distance buses, and bingo on Round-the-World cruises, it is the train that most gives the comforting illusion of Being Home.

  A train offers protection, freedom, privacy, stability. It is possible, on a train, to entertain the notion that you are standing perfectly still—it is the world that is moving. The apotheosis of this notion is the Dining Car:

  Dinner in the diner,

  Nothing could be finer,

  Than to have your ham-and-eggs

  in Carolina!

  In other words, why go all the way to Carolina if you can't enjoy the comforts of home? The French literary critic, Roland Barthes, wrote an essay in which he advanced the view that what Thomas Cook offered in the Wagon-Restaurant was "not so much food as a philosophy". The Dining Car offered a "mirage of solidity"—"starched linen, massive flatware", napkins, tablecloths, flowers, baskets—to convey the illusion that there are vast cupboards, gardens, washing facilities—everything associated with these props—somewhere on the train. The journey, Barthes says, is "sublimated". When it is not like eating at home it is like eating out, a special occasion; but it has the effect of removing from the traveler's mind any notion that he is on the move. Eating on a train, Barthes describes as a very orderly but strange experience:

  The traveller is subjected to a fatal rhythm of consumption whose unit is the wave... none (of the waves) can begin until the last is exhausted, the meal is merely a series of discontinuous takes: we ingest, we wait, like ruminants in their stalls, passively fed according to a series of mouthfuls which sweating keepers busily and fairly distribute down a long service corridor. There are thirteen waves: the aperitifs, the drink orders, the uncorking of the bottles, the five courses, the second bread ... coffee, liqueurs, the bill, payment. The process is an inflexible one...

  Barthes calls this the "décor of leisure". He is of course talking about a French dining car, with its five courses and wine, but a version of this—the "waves" of service—operates on most long-distance flights. What is impressive is the spectacle of service, and by eating "we participate in a transported immobility". The person who in China says, "I never walk anywhere" has managed a most modern triumph over the inconvenience of travel.

  This strikes me as being a very ambitious kind of passivity: Eating-While-Traveling, Sleeping-While-Traveling, Making-Money (or Doing-Business)-While Traveling, and—as I said earlier—Traveling-to-China-or-Peru-Without-Leaving-America. This is a powerful simultaneity. (And you might also say that the train's future is assured precisely because it allows such passivity. It is totally sedentary travel at its most comfortable.)

  I am not sneering at these odd forms of travel, or these homely recreations. I am calling attention to the phenomenon because it is so far from the traditional notion of travel as going away. And it is very important to understand what is happening to travel and tourism, and to all. the present-day versions of the Grand Tour, because only by examining them can one see why people get on donkeys and ride across Ethiopia, or hitchhike to India, or go slowly down the Ganges, or simply disappear in Brazil. The interest in travel today, which is passionate, arises out of the fact that there is a form of travel prevalent that is now very easy—people want to find an antidote for the immobility that mass tourism has produced; people want to believe that somewhere, somehow, it is still very dangerous, bizarre, anxiety-making and exotic to travel, that one can still make discoveries in a glorious solitary way. Mock-travel has produced a huge interest in clumsy, old-fashioned travel, with its disgusting food and miseries and long nights. It has also given rise to a lively interest in travel literature, and the affirmation that the world is still large and strange and, thank God, full of empty places that are nothing like home.

  An English Visitor

  [1976]

  Like Cock Jarvis in the novel he was unable to finish, Joyce Cary was for much of his life "A Conrad character, in a Kipling role". His instinct was wholly democratic, but he knew too much about Africa to chuck his job and dismiss the Empire as a racket. He had gone to Nigeria to work, and as a diligent DC he took his road-building, map-making and legal reform seriously. He had power, he had subjects. Quite different from the prowling journalist that Kipling was in India, or the ideological escapee that Orwell was in the Burmese police force, Cary had joined the Colonial Service to prove to his prospective father-in-law that he could take responsibility. Then he was inspired by a sense of mission. Africa provided him with the education he lacked; it was an impossible place—it made him a writer.

  His formal education hadn't helped him much. After Clifton and early sorrows (the deaths of both his mother and stepmother), he had a spell in Paris in 1906 and finally a bumpy ride throu
gh Oxford, where he finished abysmally with a Fourth Class degree. Literary life for him at the time was his friendship with John Middleton Murry, whose own problems—a prostitute-mistress, poverty relieved by cadging Cary's money, gonorrhea—only intensified Cary's timidity. Meeting and falling in love with Gerty Ogilvie made him purposeful; a sojourn with the Red Cross in Montenegro encouraged in him a taste for adventure, which the dangers of the Cameroons Campaign intensified, but it was not until his home leave in 1916 and his marriage to Gerty that he began to write in earnest. Gerty became pregnant on the honeymoon, but Cary left her soon after for Nigeria, and from then until 1919 he remained in Africa, his occasional leaves enlarging his family and making Gerty more frantic. He was industriously occupied in the colony, with his people and his writing, and though life for Gerty (living with her parents in England, raising her children alone) could not have been more difficult, it is clear that Cary left Africa with reluctance and only after Gerty had issued an ultimatum.

  Cary's characters are usually in impossible positions. They are innocents, life's misfits, who can't bear the betrayal of infidelity and yet force themselves to make allowances for it. Isn't love justifiable waywardness, not cheating? Cock Jarvis loves his wife as much as he loves Thompson, the man cuckolding him, but a million words of the novel did not lead Cary any closer to answering that question. Nina Nimmo, in A Prisoner of Grace, respects her husband Chester but feels a physical attraction for the muscular scoundrel Jim Latter. The disastrous liaison is concluded in Not Honour More, where Jim gives his version. As Cary's trilogies show, there are at least three sides to every story, and the wheedling wife-beating Gully Jimson of Herself Surprised is markedly unlike Jimson the painter in The Horse's Mouth, harassed by apocalypse and made a buffoon by fame. Sara Monday progresses from lover to lover, and though she has cooking on the brain (as Nina has "a brackety mind"), she becomes the victim of her own generous morality, trying to be all things to all men: wife, mistress, servant, punch-bag—and mother (she mentions her children so casually and infrequently one supects the novelist of forgetting he'd lumbered her with them). The sympathetic colonial officer that Cary was—an Englishman in Nigeria, whose compassion could not be mistaken for weakness, writer and ruler—was in a cleft stick; the evacuee Charley Brown in Charley is My Darling is as much among savages and suffering estrangement and social dislocation as Mr Johnson in Fada.

  Cary began writing seriously in 1916; his writing sprawled, he started novels, abandoned them, wrote stories and developed a habit of writing what he called "a big scene" and then inventing a plot for it to make it a novel. It must have made writing difficult (and I would have thought robbed him of writing's chief pleasure: imaginative discovery); it makes some of his books lop-sided; and when Graham Greene described Cary's method to me he was chuckling rather sadly and shaking his head. On leaving Nigeria, Cary burnt most of his manuscripts. And he could: he had published a number of stories in the Saturday Evening Post, but that success (he was paid very well for them) did not sustain him for very long. The Post lost interest in his stories almost as soon as he took up residence in England. He continued to write, with very small reward, and it was not until 1932 that his first novel, Aissa Saved (begun in 1928), was published. M. M. Mahood's Cary's Africa (1964) is an illuminating guide to the African novels, but even her highly intelligent appraisal of Aissa does not persuade me that this book is anything but a muddle.

  The greatly undervalued Cary novel, and certainly one of his best, is An American Visitor, which appeared the year after Aissa. Bewsher (Cary's names are always superb: Bonser, Preedy, the Clenches, the Beeders, Lepper, Mr Carrot) bears some resemblance to Cock Jarvis in his preoccupations with his people and the colonial routine; but in this novel Cary produces a likeable contradiction: a type of person that does not emerge convincingly in fiction with an African setting until thirty years later. American, female, an anarchist who enjoys whiffs of the pastoral, Marie Hasluck is the embodiment of the antagonistic vision that colonial officers hated. Cary shows how this woman's idealism is to be tested from the very first page: alluding to Marie, an old African says that whites "have set their hearts on the vanities of this world", and he is interrupted by another African "with a remark that everybody knew where Hasluck had placed her heart; and he added a suggestion so obscene and droll that even the old mallam laughed". By degrees, Marie sees herself to be naive, a softie, and her distrust of Africans and her disappointment reconcile her to Bewsher, whom she eventually marries. She recognizes how wrong she's been:

  She gazed across the uneven floor, in waves of light and shadow which trembled in the flicker of the yellow lamp flames, and saw Obai and Uli walking hand in hand across the residency compound in Kunama, two of the most beautiful men she had ever seen, of the noblest carriage, the frankest look. They had been her Greeks of the fifth century, moving in friendship, over the bright worn pavements of the Agora and discussing Plato's last discourse. But Obai and Uli had been talking about Bewsher (the first time she had heard his name) and probably they had been talking nonsense, like their Greek prototypes.

  The reverie continues, the present corrects the past ("The golden age of Greece. Galleys full of agonised rowers bleeding under the whip—chained to battered leaking ships...") and then the whole folly of colonized Africa is revealed:

  But the voyage was over. They would soon reach harbour. No, of course, there weren't any harbours for the spirit, no rest. The slaves were chained, the captains, prisoners of the ship. And some day Bewsher would crack his whip for the last time. They would throw his old carcase into the sea, Gore would lie drowned among the rats, and she, if she did not die before, would toil on across the black waves—to nowhere—the ship itself, the ship of the whole earth, was rotting under their feet, at last it would open up in space like a burst basket.

  Cary's understanding of Marie is profound; the novel is violent, but it is also one of his funniest, and violence and comedy are combined with insight in the chapter he gives to the Africans palavering about how to take power by killing Bewsher.

  For many years Cary was praised quietly, but it was a long time before he made real money—it came, as it had in 1919, from America, when in 1944 the Book of the Month Club chose The Horse's Mouth as their Main Selection. He continued to work as he always had, writing several books at a time, trying to think of a superstructure for his big scenes. After the death of his wife in 1949 he worked even harder, began another trilogy (published posthumously as The Captive and the Free) and still puzzled over Cock Jarvis.

  It was in these last years that he wrote most of the pieces which were published under the title Selected Essays. His name was made, and it is obvious that the ideas for the pieces arose from magazine editors who wanted him as a contributor. One can imagine the editorial requests ("Can you give us a few thousand words on your favourite sport?"—he chose polo; "How about someone for our Great Writers Rediscovered series?"—he chose Surtees). He did a workmanlike piece for Holiday on Westminster Abbey and a sensible piece on America—by now he was on the lecture circuit—for the Saturday Review. He wrote about writing and about novelists of the past whom he particularly liked—Tolstoy, Defoe, Anatole France. He gave interviews, his chatty Paris Review conversation, and a rather ghoulish one for what could only have been an intrusive reporter for Coronet: Cary was sixty-eight and very ill, and the interview, called "A Great Author Faces Up to Death," reads like an obituary. The best pieces are reminiscences of his childhood in "Barney Magonagel" and "Cromwell House," and of his years in Nigeria, "Africa Yesterday: One Ruler's Burden" and the poignant "Christmas in Africa". But Cary was no essayist. These are plain unsubtle responses to straightforward requests for copy and have little of the illustration, the imagery or the humor of his novels. He had practised novel-writing for too long to take the magazine market seriously.

  "I have more unfinished novels than published ones," he wrote for a BBC broadcast. Two of the unfinished novels have now been published, but these
frayed ends of his fiction have taught me more about writing than any number of masterpieces. It is the imperfect that is most instructive, and since Cary is never false it hardly matters that Preedy's sermon is interrupted, that Jimson is two people, Sara three and Jarvis a mass of fragments. Like Edwin Drood, St Ives and Weir of Hermiston, their fascination is inexhaustible because they are incomplete. Whenever I am idle I choose a Cary novel in the way I might seek a friend's company, and it is not long before I am encouraged, inspired to write. It is a relief to me that Michael Joseph has kept Cary's novels in print and, more, that I have half a dozen still to read.

  Discovering Dingle

  [1976]

  The nearest thing to writing a novel is traveling in a strange country. Travel is a creative act—not simply loafing and inviting your soul, but feeding the imagination, accounting for each fresh wonder, memorizing and moving on. The discoveries the traveler makes in broad daylight—the curious problems of the eye he solves—resemble those that thrill and sustain a novelist in his solitude. It is fatal to know too much at the outset: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is overcertain of his plot. And the best landscapes, apparently dense or featureless, hold surprises if they are studied patiently, in the kind of discomfort one can savor afterward. Only a fool blames his bad vacation on the rain.