Fresh Air Fiend

by Paul Theroux

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Introduction: Being a Stranger

  Part One

  Memory and Creation: The View from Fifty

  The Object of Desire

  At the Sharp End: Being in the Peace Corps

  Five Travel Epiphanies

  Travel Writing: The Point of It

  Part Two

  Fresh Air Fiend

  The Awkward Question

  The Moving Target

  Dead Reckoning to Nantucket

  Paddling to Plymouth

  Fever Chart: Parasites I Have Known

  Part Three

  Diaries of Two Cities: Amsterdam and London

  Farewell to Britain: Look Thy Last on All Things Lovely

  Gravy Train: A Private Railway Car

  The Maine Woods: Camping in the Snow

  Trespassing in Florida

  Down the Zambezi

  The True Size of Cape Cod

  German Humor

  Part Four

  Down the Yangtze

  Chinese Miracles

  Ghost Stories: A Letter from Hong Kong on the Eve of the Hand-over

  Part Five

  Hawaii

  Connected in Palau

  Tasting the Pacific

  Palawan: Up and Down the Creek

  Christmas Island: Bombs and Birds

  Part Six

  My Own

  The Black House

  The Great Railway Bazaar

  The Old Patagonian Express

  The Making of The Mosquito Coast

  Kowloon Tong

  Other People's

  Thoreau's Cape Cod

  The Secret Agent: A Dangerous Londoner

  The Worst Journey in the World

  Racers to the Pole

  PrairyErth

  Looking for a Ship

  Part Seven

  Chatwin Revisited

  Greeneland

  V. S. Pritchett: The Foreigner as Traveler

  William Simpson: Artist and Traveler

  Rajat Neogy: An Indian in Uganda

  The Exile Moritz Thomsen

  Part Eight

  Unspeakable Rituals and Outlandish Beliefs

  Gilstrap, the Homesick Explorer

  The Return of Bingo Humpage

  Bibliography

  OTHER BOOKS BY PAUL THEROUX

  Footnotes

  First Mariner Books edition 2001

  Copyright © 2000 by Paul Theroux

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  Visit our Web site: www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Theroux, Paul.

  Fresh air fiend : travel writings, 1985–2000 / Paul Theroux.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references (p. ).

  ISBN 0-618-03406-4

  ISBN 0-618-12693-7 (pbk.)

  1. Theroux, Paul—Journeys. 2. Voyages and travels.

  I. Title

  PS3570.H4 F74 2000

  818'.5403—dc21 99-058521

  Printed in the United States of America

  Book design by Robert Overholtzer

  QUM 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  The author is grateful for permission to reprint "The View" from Collected Poems by Philip Larkin. Copyright © 1988, 1989 by the Estate of Philip Larkin. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

  A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.

  —Jorge Luis Borges, Epilogue, The Maker

  Introduction: Being a Stranger

  FOR LONG PERIODS of my life, living in places where I did not belong, I have been a perfect stranger. I asked myself whether my sense of otherness was the human condition. It certainly was my condition. As with most people, my outer life did not in the least resemble my inner life, but exotic places and circumstances intensified this difference. Sometimes my being a stranger was like the evocation of a dream state, at other times like a form of madness, and now and then it was just inconvenient. I might have gone home, except that a return home would have made me feel like a failure. I was not only far away, I was also out of touch. It sounds as though I am describing a metaphysical problem to which there was no solution—but no, all of this was a form of salvation.

  I was an outsider before I was a traveler; I was a traveler before I was a writer; I think one led to the other. I don't think I was ever a scholar or a student in the formal sense. When I mentioned this notion of being a stranger to my friend Oliver Sacks, he said, "In the Kabala the first act in the creation of the universe is exile." That makes sense to me.

  Exile is a large concept for which a smaller version, the one I chose, is expatriation. I simply went away. Raised in a large, talkative, teasing family of seven children, I yearned for space of my own. One of my pleasures was reading; reading was a refuge and an indulgence. But my greatest pleasure lay in leaving my crowded house and going for all-day hikes. In time these hikes turned into camping trips. Fortunately our house was at the edge of town, so I could go out the front door and after half a mile of walking be in the woods, attractively named the Mystic Fells. On my own, I had a clearer sense of who I was, and I had a serious curiosity about what I found in the woods. The taxonomy of the trees and flowers and birds was a new language I learned in this new world.

  When I went to Africa, a young man and unpublished, I became a mzungu, or white man, but the Chichewa word also implies a spirit, a ghost figure, almost a goblin, a being so marginal as to be barely human. I did not find it at all hard to accept this definition; I had always felt fairly marginal, with something to prove. So, speaking about myself as a traveler is the most logical way of speaking about myself as a writer.

  As for my apprenticeship as a writer, I am sure that my single-mind-edness was helped by my being out of touch. Both ideas—being a stranger, being out of touch—seem to me to be related. I believed myself a stranger wherever I was—even when I was younger and among my family at home—and for much of my life I have felt disconnected. You think of a writer as in touch and at the center of things, but I have found the opposite to be the case.

  A variation of this concept was once a great topic in colleges. When I was a student it was the obsessive subject—the alienated hero or anti-hero, the drifter, epitomized by the figure of the casual and detached murderer Meursault in Camus's L'Étranger, or Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, or the trapped and ineffectual Josef K. in Kafka's The Trial, who is a total stranger to the process that is for no apparent reason blaming and victimizing him. There seemed to me something freakish about these men and something formulaic about their predicament. I found these characters and this discussion less persuasive because the characters seemed like stock figures in a morality play. I could not identify with

  I, a stranger and afraid

  In a world I nevermade.

  I have been much more affected when an apparently whole, rounded character described a sense of loss or deep isolation. It is no surprise when the hero of a postwar French novel is said to be alienated, but how much more powerful when the anguish is that of someone instantly recognizable, like Nicole Diver in Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night, or Peyton Loftis in William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness, or the "whiskey priest" in Greene's
The Power and the Glory. It is almost a shock when one of the great serene masters of the novel speaks of alienation, as these three men have done—Fitzgerald on alcohol in The Crack-Up, Greene on manic-depression in A Sort of Life, and Styron on suicidal depression in Darkness Visible. Even Henry James, the intensely sociable and inexhaustible dinner guest, experienced several breakdowns and many depressions. Jorge Luis Borges wrote, "I speak in a poem of the ancient food of heroes: humiliation, unhappiness, discord. Those things are given to us to transform, so that we may make from the miserable circumstances of our lives things that are eternal, or aspire to be so."

  There are few more explicit descriptions of the pain of isolation than that confided by James in a letter to a friend, who had asked mildly, using a travel metaphor, what had been his point of departure—what "port" had he set out from to become a writer. James replied: "The port from which I set out was, I think, that of the essential loneliness of my life—and it seems to be the port also, in sooth, to which my course again finally directs itself! This loneliness (since I mention it!)—what is it still but the deepest thing about one? Deeper, about me, at any rate, than anything else; deeper than my 'genius,' deeper than my 'discipline,' deeper than my pride, deeper, above all, than the deep counterminings of art."

  The English writer V. S. Pritchett spoke about this condition of otherness in his autobiography, how it was not until he began to travel far from his home in south London that he began to understand himself and his literary vocation. He said that he found distant places so congenial that he became an outsider at home. Travel had transformed him into a stranger. He wrote, "I became a foreigner. For myself, that is what a writer is—a man living on the other side of a frontier."

  For various reasons, it is now not so easy to be a foreigner (I am using the word in a general sense). Yet it was very easy for me less than forty years ago, when I was an impressionable teenager and amateur emigrant. Then, a person could simply disappear by traveling; even a trip to Europe involved a sort of obscurity. A trip to Africa or South America could be a vanishing into silence and darkness.

  The idea of disappearance appealed to me. For about ten years, the whole decade of my twenties, I was utterly out of touch. I went to central Africa in 1963 and stayed for five years, and then instead of heading home I went to Singapore, from which I emerged late in 1971. At that point I buried myself and my family in the depths of the English countryside, nowhere near a village. During this entire period, living frugally, I did not own a telephone, and the few calls I made were all in the nature of emergencies—reporting births and deaths, summoning doctors, all on borrowed phones. This decade of being off the phone, which is the most extreme condition of being cut off, was formative for me, one of the best things that could have happened in my passage to becoming a writer, because it forced on me a narrow sort of life from which there was no turning back. I was isolated and enlightened. I learned to cope, I read more, I wrote more, I had no TV, I thought in a more concentrated way, I lived in one place, and I studied patience.

  "Connected" is the triumphant cry these days. Connection has made people arrogant, impatient, hasty, and presumptuous. I am old enough to have witnessed the rise of the telephone, the apotheosis of TV and the videocassette, the cellular phone, the pager, the fax machine, and email. I don't doubt that instant communication has been good for business, even for the publishing business, but it has done nothing for literature, and might even have harmed it. In many ways connection has been disastrous. We have confused information (of which there is too much) with ideas (of which there are too few). I found out much more about the world and myself by being unconnected.

  And what does connection really mean? What can the archivist—relishing detail, boasting of the information age—possibly do about all those private phone calls, e-mails, and electronic messages. Lost! A president is impeached, and in spite of all the phone calls and all the investigations, almost the only evidence that exists of his assignations are a few cheap gifts, a signed photograph, and obscure stains. So much for the age of information. My detractors may say, "You can print e-mails," but who commits that yackety-yak to paper?

  As for the video revolution, the eminent Pacific archaeologist Yoshihiko Sinoto told me that the most rapid deterioration he had ever seen in human culture took place when videocassette players, powered by generators, became available in the outlying islands of the Cook group in the Pacific. Now villagers were watching Rambo movies and pornography, with disastrous results to the fragile society. Last year I was in Brazil. A woman in Rio mentioned that she was flying to Manaus, on the Amazon, to meet her husband, who worked there. She was eager to go, she said, because Titanic was showing at an Amazonian theater. Four months later I was in Palawan, a somewhat remote island in the Philippines, and walking along a beach I heard a Filipino boy humming the Titanic theme, "My Heart Will Go On."

  Nothing I can say in protest against the proliferation of the creepier manifestations of popular culture will change the continuous innovation in electronic media, which seems more and more to me like a cross between toy making and chemical warfare. Having lived through the whole electronic revolution, I know that much of what I have seen is not progress but folie de grandeur. It is misleading, creating the illusion of knowledge, which is in fact a profound ignorance. Obviously advances in communication are traveling so fast that you can accurately characterize people as writing at the speed of light throughout the world.

  But of course not the whole world. The most aberrant aspect of the delusional concept of globalization is the smug belief that the world is connected and that everyone and every place is instantly accessible. This is merely a harmful conceit. The colorful advertisement for cellular phones or computers showing Chinese speaking to Zulus, and Italians speaking to Tongans, is inaccurate, not to say mendacious. There are still places on earth that are inaccessible, because of their geography or their politics or their religion. Parts of China are off the map, and for that matter parts of Italy are too—there are villages in the hinterland of Basilicata, in southern Italy, that are as isolated as they have ever been.

  For the past ten years, since the disputed and disallowed election of 1991, the entire Republic of Algeria has been a no-go area where between eighty and one hundred thousand people have been massacred. Algeria—a sunny Mediterranean country, the most dangerous place in the world, with the worst human rights record on earth—is right next to jolly Morocco and colorful Tunisia, the haunts of package tourists and rug collectors. This bizarre proximity highlights the paradox, which is an old one, that close by there are areas of the world that are still forbidden, or terra incognita, where no outsider dares to venture. In spite of all our connectedness we have little idea of what passes for daily life in Algeria.

  Distant and arduous travel is not always required to find a no-go area. For many years Northern Ireland was a patchwork of town and neighborhood strongholds, based on interpretations of Christianity. If you were the wrong sort of Christian, you might be killed. There are New Yorkers who think nothing of traveling to Tierra del Fuego but who would not set foot in certain parts of New York City. I am not saying all these places are equally dangerous, only that they are perceived to be so.

  And while millions of people in the world are accessible, millions are not—many live in closed cultures, the sort of hermetic existence that has not changed for centuries. For well over forty years travelers were forbidden to enter Albania, and Albanians were forbidden to leave. This isolation ended ten years ago, and because the confinement had been involuntary, Albanians have found it hard to adjust—have "decompensated," to use the clinical term—and have suffered a decade of chaos and a sort of political dementia, which has in part fueled the Kosovo conflict. I was in Albania a few years ago. It was a glimpse of the past for me and, by the way, a place without telephonic connection to the outside world.

  There are lots of such places. Zambians in their capital, Lusaka, find it much easier to communicate with, s
ay, people in Los Angeles—just pick up the phone or log on to the Internet—than with the Lozi people, in Zambia's own Western Province, who live without electricity and telephones and in some cases without roads. Life goes on for the Lozis, and though they suffer drought and disease, their lives are in many ways richer, more coherent, for their isolation. The hinterlands of the world still exist, neglected if not inviolate, and thank God for them. But it is only a matter of time before they are violated, with predictable results. I have witnessed this in a number of countries. When I first traveled in Sicily in 1963, Uganda in 1966, Afghanistan in 1973, Honduras in 1979, the upper Yangtze in 1980, and Albania in 1993, I felt in each place that I was off the map. After me came a deluge—soldiers, tourists, developers, or the complex cannibalism of civil war—and the inhabitants of those places have been profoundly changed, if not corrupted in new and uninteresting ways, as though turned into gigantic dwarfs.

  Anyone with money for a ticket can fly to any other big city in the world—an American airport is a gateway to Vladivostok and Ouagadougou. My reaction to this is: big deal. Cities did nothing for me. It was the hinterlands that made me.

  In Africa as a mzungu, I was a stranger among the People, which is what "Bantu" means. I was not a person but rather a sort of marginal spiritlike being, and what I spoke was unintelligible to most of them. That was a good lesson. Until then, I had not known that most people in the world believe that they are the People, and their language is the Word, and strangers are not fully human—at least not human in the way the People are—nor is a stranger's language anything but the gabbling of incoherent and inspissated felicities.

  I should have known this purely on the basis of Native American terminology. "Bantu" meaning "the People" has its counterpart throughout the world's cultures. The name of virtually every Native American nation or tribe or band—Inuit, Navaho, and so on—translates as "the People," the implication being that they are human and the stranger is not. For example, the earliest people in what is now Michigan called themselves Anishinabe, "the First People." Strangers named them the Chippewa, which was corrupted to Ojibway, a variation of "those who make pictographs"—because of the elegantly engraved birchbark scrolls they produced.