by Paul Theroux
He inspired the travels of Mary Kingsley, H. M. Stanley, Jack London, and many others, and perhaps the fiction of Saul Bellow, whose Henderson the Rain King seems to echo the account of Du Chaillu’s being made king of the Apingi in Gabon (see Chapter 21, “Writers and the Places They Never Visited”).
Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance Expedition: Almost three years, 1914–1917. One of the most moving parts of South (1920), Shackleton’s account of this heroic journey, is his sense that there was a mysterious fourth person with him on one of his marches:
When I look back at those days I have no doubts that Providence guided us, not only across those snow fields, but across the storm-white sea that separated Elephant Island from our landing-place on South Georgia. I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to me often that we were four, not three. I said nothing to my companions on the point, but afterwards Worsley said to me, “Boss, I had a curious feeling on the march that there was another person with us.” Crean confessed the same idea. One feels “the dearth of human words, the roughness of mortal speech” in trying to describe things intangible, but a record of our journeys would be incomplete without a reference to a subject very near to our hearts.
Without crediting it precisely, T. S. Eliot alludes to the phenomenon in a line of The Waste Land: “Who is the third who always walks beside you?” In a footnote Eliot writes that the line was “stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions (I forget which but I think one of Shackleton’s)”.
Tobias Smollett in France and Italy: Two years, 1763–1765.
When a book reviewer criticizes a travel book for being negative, I always think of Smollett, who forcibly spoke his mind, as in this observation of the French character:
If a Frenchman is admitted into your family, and distinguished by repeated marks of your friendship and regard, the first return he makes for your civilities is to make love to your wife, if she is handsome; if not, to your sister, or daughter, or niece. If he suffers a repulse from your wife, or attempts in vain to debauch your sister, or your daughter, or your niece, he will, rather than not play the traitor with his gallantry, make his addresses to your grandmother; and ten to one, but in one shape or another, he will find means to ruin the peace of a family, in which he has been so kindly entertained.
— Travels Through France and Italy (1766)
C. M. Doughty in Arabia Deserta: Twenty-one months, 1876 to 1878, and it took him ten years to write his masterpiece, Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888).
T. E. Lawrence in Arabia: For The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, one year, 1916 to 1917. He wrote the first version of the book in 1919, and lost it when he misplaced his briefcase at a railway station while changing trains. He wrote a second version in 1920, which he rewrote the following year. Eventually a much-shortened version was published in 1926.
This, like other great travel books, is not a travel book in any conventional sense. Subtitled “A Triumph”, it is the record of Lawrence’s involvement in the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Turks. But in the tradition of Doughty, whom Lawrence idolized, it describes the moods of the desert, the life of the Bedouin, and the subtleties of Islam, as well as military tactics. Lawrence’s own contradictory character is a subject, and he is unsparing with himself.
“I was very conscious of the bundled powers and entities within me; it was their character which hid. There was my craving to be liked — so strong and nervous that never could I open myself friendly to another … There was a craving to be famous; and a horror of being known to like being known. Contempt for my passion for distinction made me refuse every offered honour.” In this same section (“Myself”) he adds, “I liked the things underneath me and took my pleasures and adventures downward. There seemed a certainty in degradation, a final safety. Man could rise to any height, but there was an animal level beneath which he could not fall.”
Charles Dickens in Italy: Eleven months, to gather material for Pictures from Italy, 1844–45. He needed to get away from London because his sales of Martin Chuzzlewit were poor and casting a pall over his writing. He had been very discouraged by the negative, even hostile reviews of American Notes (1842). He witnessed a beheading in Rome and gave a detailed account of it, including this, the moment of truth:
[The condemned man] immediately kneeled down, below the knife. His neck fitting into a hole, made for the purpose, in a cross plank, was shut down, by another plank above; exactly like the pillory. Immediately below him was a leathern bag. And into it his head rolled instantly.
The executioner was holding it by the hair, and walking with it round the scaffold, showing it to the people, before one quite knew that the knife had fallen heavily, and with a rattling sound.
When it had travelled round the four sides of the scaffold, it was set upon a pole in front — a little patch of black and white, for the long street to stare at, and the flies to settle on. The eyes were turned upward, as if he had avoided the sight of the leathern bag, and looked to the crucifix. Every tinge and hue of life had left it in that instant. It was dull, cold, livid, wax.
André Gide in Africa: Ten months, 1925–26, for Travels in the Congo (1929), the English edition of which includes Voyage au Congo and Le Retour du Tchad.
Gide had travelled at the official invitation of the French government, and yet this did not restrain him from criticizing colonial policies, or reporting on the many abuses of power against the African subjects (whippings, beatings, arson, intimidation), or the French colonial officers’ taking advantage of Africans. It must be added that Gide, too, who fancied adolescent boys, indulged himself throughout the trip — and he was travelling with his much younger lover, Marc Allegret. Gide said to a friend that he was “very attracted, if I might dare to say, in a sensual way as well, by the Negro race”.
To another correspondent he wrote — and this is true of a great deal of other travellers’ experiences — “Everything that I expected to give me delight and which … persuaded me to undertake the journey has disappointed me — but out of that very disappointment … I have acquired an unexpected education.”
W. Somerset Maugham in Burma: For The Gentleman in the Parlour, twenty-three days to Keng Tung, a few weeks more in Bangkok, but the whole trip, around the world from London, door to door, took nine months in 1922 and 1923.
Edward Abbey: About nine months, for Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (1968). Not one season but two, in 1956 and 1957, “with adventures from in 1950, 1959 and 1965” (James Cahalan, Edward Abbey, 2001).
V. S. Naipaul in India: Nine months, for An Area of Darkness: An Experience of India, in which the Trinidad-born author, on his first-ever, 1962 trip to India, understands that he has no place in what he calls “the total Indian negation” and reasserts his feeling of “my own homelessness”. He is frequently angry in the book, sometimes enraged, a condition he analyses after losing his temper. “It was brutal; it was ludicrous; it was pointless and infantile. But the moment of anger is a moment of exalted, shrinking lucidity, from which recovery is slow and shattering.”
Richard Burton in Salt Lake City: About three weeks, though his entire North American trip took more than eight months. In Utah he wrote to a friend, “I’m travelling for my health which has suffered in Africa, enjoying the pure air of the prairies, and expecting to return in a state of renovation.” Burton had sailed for Canada in April 1860, and after travelling across the United States by stagecoach and on horseback, he arrived in Salt Lake City toward the end of August. He wanted to know about Mormonism, particularly the practice of keeping plural wives. To this end, he spent time with Brigham Young, who had forty-nine wives at the time Burton met him. Burton had studied the practice of polygamy on his first trip to Africa and reached the conclusion that in countries where children had value and were a form of wealth, polygamy made sense. But he wrote in The City of the Saints (1861)
that in the United States, “where the sexes are nearly equal, and where reproduction becomes a minor duty”, it was inadvisable. His main objection to polygamy was that it was unromantic, merely an “unimpassioned domestic attachment”. He went on, “Romance and reverence are transferred from Love and Liberty to Religion and the Church.”
Joseph Conrad in the Congo: Six months in 1890, including twenty-eight days on the Congo River. Eventually this one-month river trip (published after his death as Congo Diary) would form the basis of the brilliant and evocative novella Heart of Darkness, which he wrote eight years after returning from the Congo, describing it as “experience pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case”.
Rebecca West in Yugoslavia: Three fairly short trips, about five months altogether. The first was on a British Council grant in the spring of 1936, but she was ill much of the time; then in spring 1937 for a few months, and a month in the early summer of 1938. The result was the 500,000-word Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), regarded as the apotheosis of travel writing and self-analysis. One of my favourite passages, from the Epilogue, shows that a travel book can include anything, including — as here — an analysis of the divided self:
Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations. Our bright natures fight in us with this yeasty darkness, and neither part is commonly quite victorious, for we are divided against ourselves and will not let either part be destroyed. This fight can be observed constantly in our personal lives. There is nothing rarer than a man who can be trusted never to throw away happiness, however eagerly he sometimes grasps it. In history we are as frequently interested in our own doom … We ignore this suicidal strain in history because we are consistently bad artists when we paint ourselves, when we prettify our wills and pretend they are not parti-coloured before the Lord.
Geoffrey Moorhouse in the Sahara: For The Fearful Void, four and a half months in 1972, travelling 3,600 miles, mainly on foot.
In an interview, Moorhouse said, “One reason I did this book is that all the books I’ve read about rough journeys, from Fuchs’s Crossing of Antarctica to Thesiger’s Arabian Sands, do tend to exclude the soft, weak, feeble, nasty sides we all have. They all seem to be bloody supermen. You think, Didn’t they ever cry, or do something really shitty? As far as I can see, I’m a pretty ordinary bloke, and either they’re very different from me, or they’re excluding a part of themselves.”
Bruce Chatwin: For In Patagonia (1977), four months, from mid-December 1974 to April 1975 (see Chapter 13, “It Is Solved by Walking”).
Anton Chekhov in Sakhalin: Three and a half months in 1890, but the book, Sakhakin Island (translated by Brian Reeve), took him three years to write. He travelled from Moscow, by river steamer and horse-drawn coach, noting, “The Siberian highway is the longest, and, I should think, the ugliest road on earth.” In an ingenious manner for a travel writer, to find out as much as he could about this remote penal settlement and this island of exile, he carried out his own detailed census, using a printed questionnaire.
“I am profoundly convinced that in fifty to a hundred years’ time,” he wrote, “they will regard the lifelong character of our penalties [exile, forced labour] with the same perplexity and sense of embarrassment with which we now look upon the slitting of nostrils or the amputation of fingers from the left hand.”
And yet a hundred years after he wrote this, the Soviet government was exiling political prisoners to life sentences in the gulag and using them as forced labour. Russians on the outside were neither perplexed nor embarrassed, only afraid. I wrote about one of these prisons in Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, when I visited Perm 36. The prison was closed in 1992, a century after Chekhov’s stay in Sakhalin.
The people who showed me around this prison in 2007, who knew it in its bad days, would have agreed with Chekhov’s verdict in the Sakhalin settlement of Derbinskoye: “There were moments when it seemed to me that I was seeing the extreme and utmost degree of human degradation, lower than which it is simply impossible to go.”
Ernest Hemingway in Africa: A little over three months, later writing The Green Hills of Africa. Hemingway reached Mombasa on December 6, 1933, and after his safari and travels up-country, left there in early March 1934.
W. H. Auden in Iceland: Three summer months in 1936, resulting in Letters from Iceland (1937), which he wrote with the poet Louis MacNeice, who spent one month there, liked the horseback rides, but hated the dried fish: “The tougher kind tastes like toe-nails, and the softer kind like the skin off the soles of one’s feet.” Because the book is more a scrapbook than a travel narrative, it is a mixture of poetic styles and observations.
William Least Heat-Moon: Three months (March–June 1978), 13,000 miles, on the back roads of America for Blue Highways. Before he set off he had an epiphany: “That night, as I lay wondering whether I would get sleep or explosion, I got the idea instead. A man who couldn’t make things go right could at least go. He could quit trying to get out of the way of life. Chuck routine. Live the real jeopardy of circumstance. It was a question of dignity.”
John Steinbeck, travelling with Charley: Three months in 1960.
D. H. Lawrence in Australia: Three months in 1922. He did not write a travel book but within a few weeks of arriving began a novel, Kangaroo, set in Australia, and finished it by the time he left.
Rockwell Kent’s Greenland voyage: Three months in 1929, for N by E (1930). Nearing the coast of Greenland, his boat sank:
The three men stand there looking at it all: at the mountains, at the smoking waterfall, at the dark green lake with the wind puffs silvering its plain, at the flowers that fringe the pebbly shore and star the banks. At last one of them speaks.
“It’s all right,” he says, “that we should pay for beautiful things. And being here in this spot, now, is worth travelling a thousand miles for, and all that that has cost us. Maybe we have lived only to be here now.”
Jean Cocteau: For Mon Premier Voyage, his trip around the world, eighty days in 1934. He had taken up the challenge of the Paris-Soir newspaper to duplicate the Jules Verne trip, and he succeeded, though unlike Verne’s, his book is thin, patchy, and thrown together.
Bruce Chatwin in the Australian Outback: Nine weeks, for The Songlines, though he rattled around Sydney and Brisbane for four months.
George Gissing: For his travel book On the Ionian Sea (1901), two months in 1897. The book, well observed and diligent, is about the neglected south of Italy. But poor Gissing was a tormented man, with a weakness for drunken prostitutes, whom he tried to save — in the case of Nell, by stealing (and doing time for it) to support her. A key to his need for travel was a remark he made of himself: “I carry a desert with me.”
Shiva Naipaul in Africa: For North of South: An African Journey, two months. At the end of this provocative book, published in 1979, Shiva Naipaul (brother of V. S.) concludes that the states of independent black East and Central Africa are just as miserable and unjust as (then white-dominated) South Africa.
Eric Newby in Nuristan: For the trip recorded in A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958), one month to get there and one month of hiking.
Toward the end of the trip, Newby and Hugh Carless encountered the explorer Wilfred Thesiger sauntering down a path on rope-soled shoes with some local guides. That evening, over a chicken dinner, Thesiger held court in the fading light.
“England’s going to pot,” said Thesiger, as Hugh and I lay smoking the interpreter’s king-size cigarettes, the first for a fortnight. “Look at this shirt, I’ve only had it three years, now it’s splitting. Sa
me with tailors; Gull and Croke made me a pair of whipcord trousers to go to the Atlas Mountains. Sixteen guineas — wore a hole in them in a fortnight. Bought half a dozen shotguns to give to my headmen, well-known make, twenty guineas apiece, absolute rubbish.”
He began to tell me about his Arabs.
“I give them powders for worms and that sort of thing.” I asked him about surgery. “I take off fingers and there’s a lot of surgery to be done; they’re frightened of their own doctors because they’re not clean.”
“Do you do it? Cutting off fingers?”
“Hundreds of them,” he said dreamily, for it was very late. “Lord, yes. Why, the other day I took out an eye. I enjoyed that.
“Let’s turn in,” he said.
The ground was like iron with sharp rocks sticking up out of it. We started to blow up our airbeds. “God, you must be a couple of pansies,” said Thesiger.
Peter Matthiessen in Nepal: For The Snow Leopard, two months in 1973 (see Chapter 13, “It Is Solved by Walking”).
Jack London slumming in London, 1902: Seven weeks after arriving in England, Jack London had not only lived in, wandered around, and made notes about the poverty-stricken East End of London, but had also finished his account of the experience, The People of the Abyss (1903), a book of travel, socialist polemic, and farce, with a profusion of Cockney accents. London approached the experience as a travel writer rather than a muckraker, writing in his preface, “I went down into the underworld of London with an attitude of mind which I may best liken to that of the explorer.”