Sunrise with Seamonsters

by Paul Theroux

  Graham had a little twitching nerve over his right eye. When he felt particularly unwell it would twitch incessantly, and I watched it with horror. It fascinated me, and I would find my eyes fixed upon it till I was almost unable to look anywhere else. I did not tell him about it, for I got to know it so well that I was able to gauge how he was feeling without having to ask him.

  The social details which Barbara gives about herself—the longing for the Savoy Grill, and smoked salmon and a manicure—fix that aspect of the book in a particular time and give it its privileged pre-war flavor. The trivial, after a time, becomes revealing and even necessary, which is why we put the hairpins and buttons of Roman matrons in museums. But more important than this are the two chief virtues of Land Benighted. The first is that it is an intimate portrait of Graham Greene as a young man in a foreign country. It is the quintessential Greene; the 'thirties' were a time for him of almost manic energy, when he still believed that "seediness has a very deep appeal" and wrote the books that made his name a resonant adjective. That Greene mood is the mood of Journey Without Maps. The other virtue, but it is unintentional, is that Land Benighted shows that however light-hearted a departure is, if the traveler is generous, observant, and dedicated to the trip, the traveler will be changed. From a rather scatty socialite at the beginning, Barbara Greene becomes hardy and courageous without ever being tempted into the role of memsahib. How easy it would have been for her to accept the traveling style of the missionary widow of Zorzor, who in Graham's book (where she appears as "Mrs Croup") "always travelled in a hammock specially made to carry her weight, with eighteen hammock-carriers. She drove them hard; a ten-hour trek was nothing to her." Indeed, it is at this very odd woman's house (pet cobra, black baby, Biblical pamphlets) that Barbara reflects:

  I was feeling most extraordinarily well. My feet had nearly healed and were getting beautifully hard. The long walks seemed to suit me, and although the heat was almost too much of a good thing, it now seemed to tire my mind only and not my body. I was getting used to being bitten all over by insects and just went on scratching automatically, thankful that although they bit every other part of my body, they never attacked my face.

  Barbara had agreed to go to Liberia because "It sounded fun." It wasn't fun. It was almost hell. But after weeks of it, she changed. Habitually she marched behind. Then Graham fell ill, and although he recovered he was still, in her words, "sub-normal." "He looked rather weak, and for the first time I was the one who was marching on ahead." It is an extraordinary reversal. She had come as a companion, to follow and take orders. But her health was better than Graham's towards the end—her spirits were certainly higher—and on the last lap it was she who set the pace. In the course of this reckless trip, she had grown up and even in a small way taken command. She never says so in the book, just as she never boasts of her good health; but it is clear from what she describes of the last part of the trip. She followed obediently, she nursed Graham through his illness, she made a careful record of the journey. It is no wonder that Graham dedicated his book to her.

  Barbara is too modest, too self-effacing, to make any claim for her book. It was not an adventure story, she said. It was not knowledgeable. The reader "will learn nothing new." In a delightful aside she says, "It was the little everyday things that pleased me most."

  One of these things was Graham's presence. How was she to know that in time he would be regarded as one of the greatest English writers ? Just as Graham avoids mentioning Barbara in his book, so Barbara never mentions that Graham is a writer, that she has read his books, or that he is making this difficult journey with the intention of writing a book about it. (He had already received, and spent, his advance of £350.) "I looked up to him," she says, but her role in this trip was every bit as important as Graham's, and just as literary. She is the witness, like the narrator of a novel who sometimes becomes part of the action. She did not know at the time that she was telling a Graham Greene story. In Freetown, Sierra Leone, she took out her diary and analyzed him.

  His brain frightened me. It was sharp and clear and cruel. I admired him for being unsentimental, but "always remember to rely on yourself," I noted. "If you are in a sticky place he will be so interested in noting your reactions that he will probably forget to rescue you." For some reason he had a permanently shaky hand, so I hoped that we would not meet any wild beasts on this trip ... my cousin would undoubtedly miss anything he aimed at. Physically he did not look strong. He seemed somewhat vague and unpractical ... Apart from three or four people he was really fond of, I felt that the rest of humanity was to him like a heap of insects that he liked to examine ... He was always polite. He had a remarkable sense of humour and held few things too sacred to be laughed at. I suppose at that time I had a very conventional little mind, for I remember he was continually tearing down ideas I had always believed in, and I was left to build them up anew. It was stimulating and exciting, and I wrote down that he was the best kind of companion one could have for a trip of this kind. I was learning far more than he realized.

  Long after he took the trip, Graham wrote, "My cousin left all decisions to me and never criticized me when I made the wrong one ... Towards the end we would lapse into long silences, but they were infinitely preferable to raised voices."

  "Graham," Barbara writes in her book, "would sometimes become rather obstinate, hanging on to some small, unimportant point like a dog to a bone." And then, she adds, "But we never quarrelled, not once."

  They had put themselves into a situation in which people nearly always quarrel, or abandon each other, or worse. I once hiked for four days down the same sort of twelve-inch path through a tropical jungle. I had three male companions, and at the end of it vowed that I never wanted to see any of them again. The Greenes walked for many days. They succeeded because as Barbara says in one of her splendid passages she learned to defer; not to kowtow, but to know when to fall silent. The jungle is not really neutral: it is stubborn and it can drive intruders mad. Barbara discovered conflict-avoidance, though she never uses that pompous phrase. She stayed away from contentious subjects. She said, "I expect you're right, really." Soon, every subject was contentious, except the subject of food.

  The trip was Graham's idea. Barbara thought of herself as a passenger. But no jungle trek tolerates passengers. Barbara did as she was told, made useful friendships with the carriers, and following at the end of the long file observed Graham meticulously. In the beginning, he frightened her a little. She came to respect him, and then to admire him, and towards the end of the trip a kind of understanding was reached. They are like a man and wife in the best marriages, with a profound understanding of each other's strengths and weaknesses; passion is gone, but what has supplanted it—sympathy and trust—is far greater.

  Barbara judges Graham not by the way he treats her, but by his manner in dealing with the Africans. Graham did not take any of the advice he was given by the coastal colonials. He had been told to be harsh, to distrust, to shout. Instead, he "treated them exactly as if they were white men from our own country. He talked to them quite naturally and they liked him." This got results, "they did everything he wanted them to do." And it earned him Barbara's respect. When Barbara remarks, "he was like a benevolent father," it is like a woman speaking of her husband's love for their children. One must also add that these Africans were being required to venture into a place that was not just strange, but nightmarish: the journey held far greater terrors for them, for they believed in cannibals and devils and people who threw lightning bolts and who could walk through walls and who could kill them with a glance. These Africans had never been on such a trek. They were being led around the back of Liberia and down to the coast. All the paths were new to them, and frightening. It was not only the Greenes who were coming of age as discoverers.

  After entering French Guinea, at a very uncertain point in the journey, there is a near mutiny. Graham does not threaten. He is firm; he lectures the men; then he bluffs and turns his b
ack on them. The subtle tactic works better than whips. The men are sheepish; the journey continues. Later, there is a tribal dispute among the men. Graham, who had said, "There is only one thing to do here—get drunk," hears the men quarreling. With the calm and optimism of a little whisky, Graham goes out.

  He listened majestically for a few minutes. Then he gave his verdict firmly, prompted, I suppose, by the faithful Amadu, and lifting up his hand he said, "Palaver finished." Then (swaying, oh so slightly) he walked away. It was a superb performance. We were all astonished. The men had no more to say.

  A passage that Graham himself chose for comparison with Barbara's book was the one in Journey Without Maps, beginning, "I remember nothing of the trek to Zigi's Town and very little of the succeeding days." He remembered nothing because he had a high fever, and for several days, Barbara thought he was going to die. She kept a close watch on him, what amounted to a vigil, and continued to make notes, which she elaborated in Chapter XII of her own book. The portions of each book are too long to quote here, but a reader would do well to compare them. In any case, the reader of Land Benighted ought also to be a reader of Journey Without Maps. Few journeys have been so well-recorded, and there are not many discrepancies and no contradictions between the two accounts. Because Graham does not mention Barbara very much, he does not say how much the style and shape of her hiking shorts irritated him. Barbara says they drove him nearly to distraction. But his slipping-down socks irritated her quite as much. As time passes, the socks bother her more and more. It is a measure of her patience that she never mentioned the socks to him. In Monrovia, Barbara says she is going to take her funny shorts back to England ("I could wear them in the country"), and Graham explodes, and "told me with all the wealth of phrase at his command exactly what I looked like in them. It was worse even than I imagined, and hurriedly and humbly I gave the shorts to Laminah."

  My favorite comparison between the two books concerns the prostitute they encountered in Zigi's Town.

  A young girl, an obvious little prostitute, hovered round and postured in front of Graham. She was a beautiful little creature, and I felt that at some time she had been down to the coast and that she had known white men. She was cute and intelligent, but over-optimistic, or she would have realized at once that my cousin was beyond noticing anything.

  It is rare, as I said, to have two travel books about the same trip; for the best trips, certainly, one is enough. We have one Eothen and one Arabia Deserta and one Waugh in Abyssinia. In the Greenes we have two Liberias. Graham did most of the leading and arranging, so we know the trip from the head of the column; Barbara mainly followed, she did little arranging, but her book is easy-going and her portraits of incidental characters are warmer and chattier. Graham could be severe, but of course the trip was making him ill. On the night Barbara expected Graham to die, she wrote in her diary, "Feeling very fit indeed. This weather agrees with me..." Graham wrote often about the rats that jumped and played in his hut and prevented him from sleeping—rats are villainous subsidiary characters in his book. Barbara writes, "The rats were fat and well fed, and apart from the noise they made, they left me in peace. For two or three nights they upset me and after that I grew so used to them that I ceased to notice them, and they bothered me no more."

  But what about the prostitute? Barbara had seen her, and she had seen Graham, unshaven, cadaverous, his eyes glazed with fever. He was "beyond noticing anything." Or was he? Was the novelist now so sick that he had turned into nothing more than a weary traveler anxious to be free of this dismal setting he had wished upon himself? In Barbara's book he had become at this point a stumbling wreck, fighting towards the coast and fearing the onset of the rains—single-minded, as the sick so often are. There is a parallel passage, about the prostitute in Journey Without Maps. Graham may have been ill, but he was alert:

  I noted, too, a sign that we were meeting the edge of civilization pushing up from the Coast. A young girl hung around all day posturing with her thighs and hips, suggestively, like a tart. Naked to the waist, she was conscious of her nakedness; she knew that breasts had a significance to the white man they didn't have to the native. There couldn't be any doubts that she had known whites before.

  Graham's glance told him all he needed to know; after all, he had promised his publisher that he would come back with a book. It is the one instance, where Barbara guesses wrong about her cousin. In other respects, she is uncommonly sensible, accurate, and perceptive. Graham lives in her book as he does in none other that I know. Barbara had no thought of writing about the trip until her father fell ill; she chose the opportunity to amuse him on his sickbed. She is extremely modest, but her dignity, bravery and loyalty can easily be discerned in her pages. We are very lucky to have this companion volume, and it is appropriate because no one can read it without reaching the conclusion that Barbara was the best of companions.

  Summertime on the Cape

  [1981]

  When I've had it up to here with people telling me that what The Guardian needs is a good comparability study and that, in flood, south Dorset is no worse than Chittagong, and the petrol price is finally bottoming-out, and the Common Market isn't as boring as Canada, and that all you need to appear on television is a speech impediment, and that the aristocrat who disemboweled that schoolgirl (his plea: "But she had the body of a nine-year-old!") ought to have his Red Rover pass endorsed, and wittering on about some gloomy comedian's coronary, and shop assistants replying, "If you don't see it, we don't have it" to every question, including the way to the toilet, and that licensing hours have nothing to do with the fact that most publicans are drunk by 2.30, and that the Royal Family are overworked and underpaid, and that Park Lane is like the Gaza Strip, and dogturds are preferable to cyclists in public parks, and beginning with every sentence, "You Yanks—" and saying that funny old England is changeless, then I figure it's high time I took myself away on a good vacation.

  The point is that England is not changeless, and I sometimes think it is no place for children. Though I suppose if children grow up among the geriatric, the frantic and the scheming they will end up knowing a thing or two about survival, even if they do sing the wrong words to "My Country 'Tis of Thee."

  Most people go away for a vacation; I go home. And I consider myself lucky that I don't have to live at home, that I am for most of the year on this narrow island. England has the strictness and estranging quality of school. It is an old-fashioned place in which unpredictable suffering is part of the process of enlightenment. It keeps me hard at work because I find there is absolutely nothing else to do in England but work. But the summer is different. Ever since I was an ashen-faced tot, I have regarded the summer as a three-month period during which one swam, fished, read comic books, ate junk food and harmlessly misbehaved. In Massachusetts the sun comes out at the end of May and keeps shining until the first week in September. No one talks about the weather. There is no talk of weather in places that have a reliable climate. Once I recall staying in London in August. I spent nearly the whole month in Clapham on a roadside with a dozen crones in overcoats, waiting for a 49 bus.

  There is no bore like a vacation bore, but I think it is worth mentioning why I happen to like this handle-shaped piece of geography, swinging from the crankcase of the Bay State. It is largely a return to childhood, to a setting I understand and one which I associate with optimism. Americans still believe that all problems have solutions and that one deserves to live happily and uncrowded; they believe in the sanctity of space and can be surprisingly generous. This is very soothing.

  The really serious traveler is the healthy intrepid person who, with a free month at last, and some money, and badly in need of a break, picks himself up and goes home. The casual traveler is another species entirely. For him, the journey is a form of neurosis that provokes him to leave at a moment's notice—and he may never return. But the rest of us, for whom travel is the experience of There-and-Back, are capable of the longest journeys precisely bec
ause we have homes to return to. And when early summer drops its clammy hand on London, and the English start crossing the Channel, and the idea of travel is in everyone's mind, I pack my bags and go back to Massachusetts.

  "Pack my bags" is merely a metaphor for pulling myself together. I don't need to carry any bags home. I have a house on Cape Cod. My closets there have enough clothes in them; my tennis racket is there, my bathing suit, my other sneakers, my second-best razor, my pajamas. I am better equipped in East Sandwich than I am in London. I have an electric can-opener at my Cape Cod house, and a jeep, and a sailboat. I also have things like toothbrushes there. This allows me to go home empty-handed.

  But traveling light like this can raise problems at Customs. Customs Officers in Boston often demand to know why I am entering the USA after a prolonged period abroad, carrying nothing but a book and my passport.

  "Is this all you have?"

  "Yes, sir."

  If your entire luggage consists of one book, they take a great interest in the book. Last year it was Johnson's Dictionary, and the Customs Official actually began leafing through it, as if looking for clues to the meaning of my mission.

  "You mean, this is all you have?"

  "Yes, sir."

  On one occasion, the officer said, "I think you'd better step over here and do some explaining." I was carrying an apple and a banana. I had no suitcase. He confiscated the apple, but let me keep the banana.

  It is roughly an hour from Boston to Cape Cod, but once I have crossed the Sagamore Bridge everything is different. It is then that summer begins. A person who is tired of London is not necessarily tired of life; it might be that he just can't find a parking place, or is sick of being overcharged. But anyone who grows tired of Cape Cod needs his head examined, because for purely homely summer fun there is nowhere in the world that I know that can touch it.