Fresh Air Fiend

by Paul Theroux

  On the subject of Vietnam, these Peace Corps bureaucrats were surprisingly hawkish and belligerent. Most of them believed Vietnam to be a necessary war. The volunteers were divided. This was an important issue to me, because I had joined the Peace Corps specifically to avoid being drafted, and I was dismayed to find so many of its officials advocating the bombing of Hanoi. As a meddlesome and contentious twenty-two-year-old, I made a point of asking everyone his views on Vietnam. I believed the war was monstrous from the very beginning, and I have not changed my views. What astonishes me today is how few people remember the ridiculous things they said about Vietnam in the sixties.

  No one now remembers how confused Kennedy's Vietnam policy was or how isolated the student movement was. I had been involved in student protests from 1959 until 1963, first against the ROTC, then against nuclear testing, and then against our involvement in Vietnam. How could I have been inspired by Kennedy to work in the Peace Corps? I had spent years picketing the White House, and in doing so had made myself very unpopular. When I applied to join the Peace Corps, this career as an agitator was held against me. It was all a diabolical plot, I felt. And there was the president with such style—money, power, glamour. He even had culture! And I didn't know the half of it, for somewhere Marilyn Monroe was dialing his number, and somewhere else a Mafia moll was painting her nails in expectation of the president's visit. I had to fight my feeling of distrust and alienation in order to join. There were many like me—anti-authoritarian, hating the dazzle and the equivocation. And when the news broke that the president had been shot—I was sitting through a lecture in Peace Corps training, something about land tenure in the Nyasaland Protectorate—we were all properly put in our place. More revisionism, more guilt, and I thought: Get me out of here.

  Nyasaland—soon to become the independent republic of Malawi—was the perfect country for a Peace Corps volunteer. It was both friendly and destitute; it was small and out-of-the-way. It had all of Africa's problems: poverty, ignorance, and disease. It had only a handful of university graduates. It had lepers, it had Mister Kurtzes, it had Horatio Alger stories by the score. It had a fascinating history that was bound up not only with early African exploration—Livingstone himself—but also with one of the first African rebellions, Chilembwe's uprising. It was the setting for Laurens van der Post's Venture to the Interior. The people were generous and obliging, and as they had not been persecuted or bullied, and had been ignored rather than exploited, they were not prickly and color conscious like the Kenyans and Zambians. There was a pleasant atmosphere of hope in the country—not much cynicism and plenty of good will. The prevailing feeling was that the education we were providing would lead to prosperity, honest government, and better health.

  An added thrill was that many British settlers were still in residence. Some of these were old-timers—wog bashers, as they sometimes called themselves—who remembered the place when it was even wilder and more wooded. They had little contact with Africans—the place had never been a colony in the strict sense, only a backwater—and they resented us. Most of us hated them and mocked them, and we had a special loathing for the few volunteers who began moving in settler society. These pompous creeps—so we said—went to gymkhanas and cocktail parties at the local club and dated the settler children when they returned from their Rhodesian boarding schools. We saw them as social climbers and traitors. It was not uncommon for a Peace Corps volunteer, in town for supplies, to approach a group of settlers in a bar and say something crudely provocative, such as "The queen's a whore" (Elizabeth's portrait always hung above the bottles behind the bar), and nearly always a fight would start. To Africans these antagonisms were very exciting.

  We had arrived in the country speaking Chinyanja fairly well, and we had plunged in—made friends, taught school, ran literacy programs, coached sports, and generally made ourselves useful. We were, as the English say, "at the sharp end," on our own and exposed, and doing the toughest jobs. The Africans were eager. Afterward it occurred to me that over the years of British rule the Africans had become sidelined, always seeing whites at a distance and wondering what the hell they were like. The Peace Corps volunteers were the first foreigners to offer them a drink. They were amazed that we were interested in them, and they repaid our interest with hospitality.

  In addition to my teaching, I collaborated with a man at the Ministry of Education on writing two English textbooks, to replace the miserable ones that had been written for schools in Ghana many years before. Foundation Secondary English (Book One and Book Two) is still being used in Malawi twenty years after it appeared, and I am still receiving royalties on it.

  We were pestered by Israeli soldiers who had been taken on to train our students to become single-minded cadets in a goon squad, but apart from them the school ran well. I planted trees, and we put a road through. I was proud of the place; I liked my students, and I enjoyed working with my colleagues. The country affected me as no other country has, before or since. I felt I belonged there. I was having a good time as well as doing something worthwhile—what could have been better?

  Now and then I remembered that I was in the Peace Corps. I disliked the idea that I was with an outfit, and I rejected the suggestion that I was an American official working abroad. I had never been easy with the concept of the Peace Corps as an example to spineless Marxists, and the implications of fresh-faced youngsters wooing Third Worlders away from communism. I knew that American officialdom used us to deflect criticism of Vietnam and more robust and spread-eagled diplomacy.

  I wanted the Peace Corps to be something vague and unorganized, and to a large extent it was. Consequently we were left alone. I was glad to be able to call my soul my own. The Peace Corps was only proprietorial when it suited them, and generally speaking they took an interest in volunteers only when an official visitor arrived in the country. Then we were visited or invited to parties. "You're doing wonderful work ... They're saying great things about you." But I didn't want attention. I didn't want help. I wanted to be self-sufficient. Anyway, most of our jobs were too simple to require any backup, and we seldom wrote reports.

  We were not trusted by the embassy personnel or the State Department hacks—all those whispering middle-aged aunties who couldn't speak the language. We felt embassy people were overpaid and ignorant, always being fussed over by spoiled African servants. We were, we felt, independent spirits—English teachers, health workers, answerable only to our students and patients. I regarded the Peace Corps as a sort of sponsoring group and myself as an individual who had only the most tenuous link with it.

  I had met many Peace Corps officials, and it seemed that the higher you went in the organization, the less you knew, the less you accomplished. The officials were ambitious and political, and it often seemed that they hardly knew us and had little idea of what we were doing. I think I am typical in believing that the Peace Corps trained us brilliantly and then did little more except send us into the bush. After all, we were supposed to use our initiative. And I think we were never more effective as volunteers than when we were convinced that we were operating alone, at the sharp end, putting our own ideas into practice, far from the bureaucrats.

  Because we were on our own, the Peace Corps officials regarded our situation as delicate. They did not want us to be too visible, too friendly, or too involved. Keep a low profile was the advice we were always offered. I did not follow it, so eventually I got the boot. I was insulted when I was sent out of the country. It seemed like the act of an absent parent, someone I hardly knew asserting his authority over me.

  That is why I do not associate my years in the Peace Corps with group photographs, horseplay, heart-to-heart talks with the rep, images of President Kennedy showing me the way, softball games with the other volunteers, and the hands-across-the-sea camaraderie you see on posters. Not "the dream, the vision," but something far more interesting.

  It was to me most of all the reality of being far from home and yet feeling completely at
home. It was the slight sense of danger, the smell of wood smoke from burning blue gums, hearing the Beatles for the first time in a bar in the town of Limbe. In the States there was a sort of revolution in progress, but it had started partly as a result of the first Peace Corps group that had gone to Nepal. Those volunteers returning from Katmandu had blazed the hippie trail.

  In Malawi we had all of that, too—good people, wilderness, music, ganja, dusty roads, hard-working students, and a feeling of liberation. Things were on the move, it seemed. In Malawi I saw my first hyena, smoked my first hashish, witnessed my first murder, caught my first dose of gonorrhea. One of my neighbors, an African teacher, had two wives. My gardener had a gardener. Another neighbor and friend was Sir Martin Roseveare, who liked the bush. He was principal at the nearby teachers' college, and he died only in 1985, in Malawi, at the age of eighty-six. (He'd been knighted in 1946 for designing a fraud-proof ration book.) With two servants, I moved into an African township, where I lived in a semi-slum, in a two-room hut—cold running water, cracks in the walls, tin roof, music blasting all day from the other huts; shrieks, dogs, chickens. It was just the thing. The experience greatly shaped my life.

  When I think about those years, I don't think much about the Peace Corps, though Malawi is always on my mind. I do not believe that Africa is a very different place for having played host to the Peace Corps—in fact, Africa is in a much worse state than it was twenty years ago. But America is quite a different place for having had so many returned Peace Corps volunteers, and when they began joining the State Department and working in the embassies, these institutions were the better for it, and had a better-informed and less truculent tone.

  I still do not understand who had been running the show back then, or what they did, or even what the Peace Corps actually was, apart from an enlightened excuse for sending us to poor countries. Those countries remain poor. We were the ones who were enriched, and sometimes I think that we reminded those people—as if they needed such a thing—that they were left out. We stayed awhile, and then we left them. And yet, I would do it again. At an uncertain time in my life I joined. And up to a point—they gave me a lot of rope—the Peace Corps allowed me to be myself. I realized that it was much better to be neglected than manipulated, and I had learned that you make your own life.

  Five Travel Epiphanies

  I WAS IN PALERMO and had spent the last of my money on a ticket to New York aboard the Queen Frederica. This was in September 1963; I was going into Peace Corps training for Africa. The farewell party my Italian friends gave me on the night of departure went on so long that when we got to the port, a Sicilian band was playing "Anchors Aweigh" and the Queen Frederica had just left the quayside. In that moment I lost all my vitality.

  My friends bought me an air ticket to Naples, so that I could catch the ship there the next day. Just before I boarded the plane, an airline official said I had not paid my departure tax. I told him I had no money. A man behind me in a brown suit and brown Borsalino said, "Here, you need some money?" and handed me twenty dollars.

  That solved the problem. I said, "I'd like to pay you back."

  The man shrugged. He said, "I'll probably see you again. The world's a small place."

  For three days in August 1970, I had been on a small cargo vessel, the MV Keningau, which sailed from Singapore to North Borneo. I was going there to climb Mount Kinabalu. While aboard, I read and played cards, always the same game, with a Malay planter and a Eurasian woman who was traveling with her two children. The ship had an open steerage deck, where about a hundred passengers slept in hammocks.

  It was the monsoon season. I cursed the rain, the heat, the ridiculous card games. One day, the Malay said, "The wife of one of my men had a baby last night." He explained that his rubber tappers were in steerage and that some had wives.

  I said I wanted to see the baby. He took me below, and seeing that newborn, and the mother and father so radiant with pride, transformed the trip. Because the baby had been born on the ship, everything was changed for me and had a different meaning: the rain, the heat, the other people, even the card games and the book I was reading.

  The coast of Wales around St. David's Head has very swift currents and sudden fogs. Four of us were paddling sea kayaks out to Ramsey Island. On our return to shore we found ourselves in fog so dense we could not see land. We were spun around by eddies and whirlpools.

  "Where's north?" I asked the man who had the compass.

  "Over there," he said, tapping it. Then he smacked it and said, "There," and hit it harder and said, "I don't know, this thing's broken."

  Darkness was falling, the April day was cold, we were tired, and we could not see anything except the cold black chop of St. George's Channel.

  "Listen," someone said. "I think I hear Horse Rock." The current rushing against Horse Rock was a distinct sound. But he was wrong—it was the wind.

  We kept together. Fear slowed my movements, and I felt quite sure that we had no hope of getting back tonight—perhaps ever. The cold and my fatigue were like premonitions of death. We went on paddling. A long time passed. We searched; no one spoke. This is what dying is like, I thought.

  I strained my eyes to see and had a vision, a glimpse of cloud high up that was like a headland. When I looked harder, willing it to be land, it blackened. It was a great dark rock. I yelped, and we made for shore as though reborn.

  We were driving in western Kenya under the high African sky, my wife beside me, our two boys in the back seat. Years before, not far from here, I had met this pretty English woman and married her. Our elder son had been born in Kampala, the younger one in Singapore. We were driving toward Eldoret. Sixteen years ago, as a soon-to-be-married couple, we had spent a night there.

  The boys were idly quarreling and fooling, laughing, distracting me. My wife was saying, "Are you sure this is the right road?" She had been traveling for three months alone in southern Africa. We were in an old rental car. Cattle dotted the hills, sheltering under the thorn trees. We were just a family on a trip, far away.

  But we were traveling toward Eldoret, into the past; and deeper in Africa, into the future. We were together, the sun slanting into our eyes, everything on earth was green, and I thought: I never want this trip to end.

  Just before Independence Day in 1964, when Nyasaland became Malawi, the minister of education, Masauko Chipembere, planted a tree at the school where I was teaching in the south of the country. Soon after this, he conspired to depose the prime minister, Dr. Hastings Banda. But Chipembere himself was driven out.

  Time passed, and when I'd heard Chipembere had died in Los Angeles ("in exile," as a CIA pensioner), I thought of the little tree he had shoveled into the ground. Twenty-five years after I left the school, I traveled back to Malawi. Two things struck me about the country: most of the trees had been cut down—for fuel—and no one rode bicycles anymore. Most buildings were decrepit, too. Dr. Banda was still in power.

  It took me a week to get to my old school. It was larger now, but ruinous, with broken windows and splintered desks. The students seemed unpleasant. The headmaster was rude to me. The library had no books. The tree was big and green, almost forty feet high.

  Travel Writing: The Point of It

  I USED TO HAVE some sympathy with the bewildered browser in a bookstore who, seeing the stacks of travel books, asked, "What are they for?" Until recently I felt that was a fair question. The travel book had always seemed to me a somewhat insufficient form. Why write about this or that country? What's the occasion? What's the point? So often such journeys appeared little more than excuses for authors in search of material—rather suspicious outings, I always thought.

  Travel books are hardly a form at all. They come in every shape and size, ranging from bloodlessly factual guides (Discovering Turkey)to stunt and ordeal books (Skiing Down Everest; Survive! 116 Days in a Rubber Dinghy), from what I think of as the human sacrifice ones to the highly imaginative works of someone like Bruce Chatwin, who
was never quite sure whether he was writing travel books or novels. Not that he cared much—the question of genre nearly always produced his loudest and most desperate laugh, as though he were being tickled in the ribs by a complete stranger.

  An unlikely source, Nabokov's novel Laughter in the Dark, contains a passage that amply illustrates a justification for Chatwin's sort of travel writing. One of the characters says:

  A writer for instance talks about India which I have seen, and gushes about dancing girls, tiger hunts, fakirs, betel nuts, serpents: the Glamour of the Mysterious East. But what does it amount to? Nothing. Instead of visualizing India I merely get a bad toothache from all these Eastern delights. Now, there's the other way, as for instance, the fellow who writes: 'Before turning in I put out my wet boots to dry and in the morning I found that a thick blue forest had grown on them ("Fungi, Madam," he explained)...' and at once India becomes alive for me. The rest is shop.

  In seven long travel books and an assortment of shorter ones, I have been, figuratively speaking, putting my wet boots out to dry and describing what the morning brings. I've taken people as I've found them. When I described Iran in 1974 as backward, unreliable, dusty, and fundamentalist—a wilderness of mud houses and scrimmaging mullahs—I was set upon in New York by a shrieking woman named Mrs. Javits, who ran the shah's publicity machine in the United States. She had convinced herself, but she was unable to persuade me, that Iran was a showcase of Western democracy and modernity. The passage of time has revealed an Iran—bloodstained, ringing with the cries of vindictive clergymen—that I more easily recognize.