by Paul Theroux
I was in a shoemaker's shop at St Thomas [Jamaica], buying a pair of boots, when a negro entered quickly and in a loud voice said he wanted a pair of pumps. He was a labouring man fresh from his labour. He had on an old hat—what in Ireland men would call a caubeen; he was in his shirtsleeves, and was barefooted. As the only shopman was looking for my boots, he was not attended to at the moment.
"Want a pair of pumps—directerly," he roared out in a very dictatorial voice.
"Sit down for a moment," said the shopman, "and I will attend to you."
He did sit down, but did so in the oddest fashion. He dropped himself into a chair, and at the same moment rapidly raised his legs from the ground; and as he did so fastened his hands across them just below his knees, so as to keep his feet suspended from his arms. This he contrived to do in such a manner that the moment his body reached the chair his feet left the ground. I looked on in amazement, thinking he was mad.
"Give I a bit of carpet," he screamed out; still holding up his feet, but with much difficulty.
"Yes, yes," said the shopman, still searching for the boots.
"Give I a bit of carpet directerly," he again exclaimed. The seat of the chair was very narrow, and the back was straight, and the position was not easy, as my reader will ascertain if he attempt it. He was half-choked with anger and discomfort.
The shopman gave him the bit of carpet. Most men and women will remember that such bits of carpet are common in shoemakers' shops. They are supplied, I believe, in order that they who are delicate should not soil their stockings on the floor.
The gentleman in search of the pumps had seen that people of dignity were supplied with such luxuries, and resolved to have his value for his money; but as he had on neither shoes nor stockings, the little bit of carpet was hardly necessary for his material comfort.
Something human had happened, and Trollope saw it and recorded it. That, it seemed to me, was the point of travel writing.
The trip—the itinerary—was another essential, and so many travel books I read had grown out of a traveler's chasing around a city or a little country—Discovering Portugal, that kind of thing. It was not real travel, but rather a form of extended residence that I knew well from having lived in Malawi, Uganda, and Singapore. I had come to rest in those places, I was working, I had a driver's license, I went shopping every Saturday. It had never occurred to me to write a travel book about any of it. Travel had to do with movement and truth, with trying everything, offering yourself to experience and then reporting on it.
Choosing the right itinerary—the best route, the correct mode of travel—was the surest way, I felt, of gaining experience. It had to be total immersion, a long deliberate trip through the hinterland rather than flying from one big city to another, which didn't seem to me to be travel at all. The travel books I liked were oddities—not only Trollope and Naipaul, but Henry Miller's The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (America, coast to coast, by car) and Mark Twain's Following the Equator (a lecture tour around the world). I wanted my book to be a series of long train journeys, but where to?
All this speculation took place in the autumn of 1972, when I was teaching for a semester at the University of Virginia. I was writing The Black House and awaiting the publication of Saint Jack. In those days, I began a new book as soon as I finished the one I was working on. My wife was in London with our two children, and she was working—indeed, earning a good living. But I still felt I was the breadwinner and that I was not earning enough. My advance for Saint Jack was small, and I assumed I would not get much more for The Black House. Money is a rather clumsy subject, but it was a crucial factor in my decision to write my first travel book—simply, I needed the money. When I mentioned the possibility of such a book to my American editor, she was delighted. She said, "We'll give you an advance for it." I had never before received an advance. Normally, I wrote a book and submitted it and then was paid. I had never been given money up front for an unwritten book.
Often you begin to think clearly about your intentions only when someone asks you very specific questions. The travel book I vaguely contemplated had something to do with trains, but I had no idea where I wanted to go—only that it should be a long trip. I saw an equally long book, with lots of people and lots of dialogue and no sightseeing. But my editor's questioning prodded me, and I thought, Trains through Asia. I could start in London on the Orient Express. When I looked at this route, I saw that I could continue through Turkey, Iran, and Baluchistan, and after a short bus ride I could catch a train in Zahedan, go on to Pakistan, and more or less chug through Asia. My idea was to go to Vietnam, take the train to Hanoi, and then continue through China, Mongolia, and the Soviet Union. Much of this travel proved impractical or impossible. The Chinese embassy in 1972 hung up when I said I wanted a visa to ride trains through China (I had to wait fourteen years before I was able to take the trip I described in Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China). There was a war in Baluchistan, so I rerouted myself through Afghanistan. I decided to include Japan and the whole of the Trans-Siberian. I didn't mind where I went as long as it was in Asia and had a railway system and visas were available. I saw myself puffing along from country to country, simply changing trains.
I think of the circumstances surrounding The Great Railway Bazaar rather than the trip itself. I hated leaving my family behind in London; I had never taken such a deliberate trip before; I felt encumbered by an advance on royalties, modest as it was. My writer friends generally mocked the idea. I never got around to worrying about the trip itself, though I was beset by an obscure ache that was both mental and physical—the lingering anxiety that I was going to die. I had always felt that my exit would be made via an Appointment in Samarra, and that I would go a great distance and endure enormous discomfort in order to meet my death. If I chose to sit at home and eat and drink, it would never happen. I imagined it would be a silly accident, like that of the monk and mystic Thomas Merton, at last leaving his monastery in Kentucky after twenty-seven years and accidentally electrocuting himself on the frayed wires of a fan in Bangkok a week later.
I left London on September 19, 1973. It was a gray day. I had a bad cold. My wife waved me goodbye. Almost immediately I felt I had made an absurd mistake. I hadn't the slightest idea what I was doing. I became very gloomy, and to cheer myself up and give myself the illusion that this was work, I began to take voluminous notes. From the time I left until the moment I arrived back in England four months later—homesick most of the time—I filled one notebook after another. I wrote everything down—conversations, descriptions of people and places, details of trains, interesting trivia, even criticism of the novels I happened to be reading. I still have some of those books, and on the blank back pages of paperbacks of Joyce's Exiles, Chekhov's stories, Endo's Silence, and others I had scribbled insectile notes, which I amplified when I transferred them to my large notebooks. I always wrote in the past tense.
In the manuscript I submitted to my publisher, there was a chapter about Afghanistan, which I was advised to leave out ("There are no trains in that chapter," my editor said), but I have since printed it in a collection of pieces, Sunrise with Seamonsters. My problem in writing the book was finding a form for it, a structure; I decided I would do it as a series of train journeys, and simply plunged in. I had never read a book quite like the one I was writing. This worried me as well as made me hopeful. The writing of the book took the same amount of time as the trip itself, four months.
That was 1974. The book is still in print and still sells well. Some people think it is the only book I have ever written, which annoys me, because I think the writing in The Old Patagonian Express is more fluent, and Riding the Iron Rooster is better informed. For example, in The Great Railway Bazaar my train passed through Nis, in Yugoslavia. I mentioned this, but I never bothered to find out anything about Nis. Years later, I consulted the Blue Guide and found that Nis was the birthplace of the emperor Constantine. Then I read on in the guide, "Though not a
pleasant place in itself, Nis has several interesting monuments," and was reminded why I had not lingered there. More recently, during the war in Kosovo, Nis was flattened by NATO bombs and discovered to be the scene of mass graves.
It was a satisfaction to me that my Railway Bazaar (I got the title from a street name in India) fared well. I did not know when I wrote it that every trip is unique. My travel book is about my trip, not yours or anyone else's. Even if someone had come with me and written a book about the trip, it would have been a different book. Another thing I did not know at the time was that every trip has a historical dimension. Not long after I traveled through these countries, they underwent political changes. The shah was exiled and Iran became very dangerous for foreign travelers; Afghanistan went to war with itself, the Soviet Union helping out; India and Pakistan restored their rail link. Laos shut its borders to foreigners and did away with its monarchy. Vietnam repaired its railway, so now it is possible to travel by train from Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) to Hanoi. Many of the individual trains I rode were taken out of service, most notably the Orient Express. The train that plies the route from London to Venice under that name today is for wealthy, comfort-seeking people who have selfish, sumptuous fantasies about travel bearing no relation to the real thing. However awful my old Orient Express was, at least all sorts of people took it, rich and poor, old and young, rattling back and forth from Europe to Asia. It was cheap and friendly, and like all great trains it was a world on wheels.
When I wrote Railway Bazaar I was groping in the dark—although I was careful to disguise this; my self-assurance in the narrative was sheer bravado, a way of whistling to keep my spirits up. I knew that I had taken over a venerable form, the travel book, and was writing it my own way, to suit myself and my peculiar trip and temperament. It was not at all like a novel: fiction required inspiration, intense imagining, and a long period alone in a room. A travel book, I had discovered, was a deliberate act, like the act of travel itself. It took health and strength and confidence, optimism and deep curiosity. When I finished a novel I never knew whether I would be able to write another one. But I knew when I finished this first travel book that I would be able to do it again.
The Old Patagonian Express
SOME PEOPLE SAY that the travel book is a type of novel, that it has elements of fiction it, that it comes out of the imagination and is a sort of strange beast—half the prosy animal of nonfiction and half the fabulous monster of fiction, and there it stands, snorting and pawing the ground, challenging us to give it a name. There are, no doubt, books that fit this description: little trips that writers have worked up into epics and odysseys. You want to write a novel, but you have no subject, no characters, no landscape. So you take a trip—a couple of months, not very expensive, not too dangerous—and you write it up, making it fairly harrowing and mocking, and dramatizing yourself, because you are the hero of this—what? Quest, perhaps, but full of liberties.
This is not my line of work at all. And when I read such a book and I spot the fakery, the invention, the embroidery, I can read no further. Self-dramatization is inevitable in any travel book—most travelers, however dreary and plonkingly pedestrian, see themselves as solitary and heroic adventurers. And the odd thing is that the real heroes of travel seldom write about their journeys.
I have just received a thick book detailing the travels of a young man through metropolitan France: "essential reading for Francophiles, Francophobes, gourmets, gourmands and any curious traveler in truly modern Gaul." It is as though this oversupplied, luxurious, and hackneyed place were terra incognita. Oh, I know, there's a great deal still to discover in this seemingly familiar old ingrate of a country, that sweet enemy, et cetera; but I for one would rather read of an adventure.
I was seeking an adventure when I took the trip that became The Old Patagonian Express. I wanted to leave my front door in Medford, Massachusetts, and head for Patagonia, and to do so without leaving the ground. I wished to travel from the cozy, homely place where I was born to the distant and outlandish—so I thought—area in the southern part of South America. I wanted to make a connection between the known and the unknown and yet remain in the Western Hemisphere. It would not be the circular journey I had described in The Great Railway Bazaar, but rather a linear trip, from Here to Way Over There.
It had always bothered me, when reading of an expedition, that the preliminaries were dispensed with. I describe these near the beginning of The Old Patagonian Express, in the chapter that starts, "Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography to oblivion." In my first travel book I had simply gone away, launched myself into the East. In my next one I felt I was consciously experimenting with space and time. My object was to take the train that everyone took to work, and then to keep going, changing trains, to the end of the line—and this I took to be a tiny station, called Esquel, in the middle of Patagonia.
I was altogether more deliberate with this travel book than I had been with my first. For one thing, I was determined to speak the language. My inability to speak Hindi, Japanese, Farsi, Urdu, among others, had made my first book somewhat facetious, I thought; it was so easy, so cheap, to mock. I did not want to be that ignorant again. So I listened to Spanish-language tapes. I wanted to understand what was going on. One of the popular notions of travel books is that they are usually about the traveler. I wanted to get beyond this petty egotism and try to understand the places I was passing through. I knew something of the politics but very little about the geographical features of these countries. One of my aims was to characterize each place, so that afterward anyone who read the book would have a clear idea of El Salvador or Costa Rica or Peru, so that they would not be merely a formless and indistinguishable heap of banana republics.
I was not aiming to turn the book into a novel. I was just finishing my novel Picture Palace when I planned the trip. This was the summer of 1977. I set off about six months later, on a freezing February afternoon, leaving my old home in Medford, taking the train to Boston, then another train from Boston to Chicago, and so on. The skies were almost black, full of the storm clouds that were shortly to dump one of the worst blizzards in living memory on the Northeast. I read about this snow in steamy Mexico. How easy it had been to get there, and I continued to rattle south on progressively more geriatric trains.
Having written a previous travel book, and knowing some of my strengths and weaknesses, I had a general idea of the sort of travel I wished to do. More than anything, I wanted to meet unusual people, and give them life. I saw the book as a series of portraits, of landscapes and faces. I have always regarded the best writing as visual, and in Picture Palace I had deliberately written about a photographer; most of her pronouncements on photography were my own views on writing. I wanted the Patagonia book to be full of faces and voices, with a distinct foreground and background.
I was lucky in the people I met. The Panama Canal was in the news: President Carter had convened a conference to hand the canal back to the Panamanians. The Zonians—delightful name—were furious at what they took to be Carter's treachery. I found a reasonable man to discuss these matters and more—Mr. Reiss, the head mortician in the Gorgas Mortuary. There were others: the woman in Veracruz looking for her lover, Mr. Thornberry, in Costa Rica; the Irish priest who had started a family in Ecuador; Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires. (Borges told me that he was working on a story about a man called Thorpe. Years later, I found that character in the Borges story "Shakespeare's Memory.") I tried to make portraits of the towns and cities as well. That can be seen in, for example, the description that begins, "Guatemala City, an extremely horizontal place, is like a city on its back." I looked closely, listened hard, sniffed around, and wrote everything down.
My friend Bruce Chatwin had told me that he wrote In Patagonia afterheread The Great Railway Bazaar. I had always wondered how he had traveled to Patagonia—he had left that out. He had written about being there, but I wanted to write about getting there. T
his thought was always in my mind, and it made me meticulous about my own trip. I knew that as soon as I got to Patagonia I would just look around and then go home. Mine was to be the ultimate book about getting there.
In spite of myself, I was distracted by what I saw. I am a novelist and could not ignore the possibilities that were being offered to me in the form of suggestive characters and dramatic landscapes, and yet I knew I had to put them in my travel book. Once they were there, they were fixed forever; I could not haul them out again and give them fictional form.
What struck me was how dense the jungle was, so near the United States. I had just been in wintry New England, and now, a few weeks later, I was in a place that looked like a ragged version of paradise—no roads, no factories, no houses, no missionaries even. A person could come here and start all over again, build his own town, make his own world. I felt this strongly in Costa Rica.
We were at the shore and traveling alongside a palmy beach. This was the Mosquito Coast, which extends from Puerto Barrios in Guatemala to Colon in Panama. It is wild and looks the perfect setting for the story of castaways. What few villages and ports lie along it are derelict; they declined when shipping did, and returned to jungle. Massive waves were rolling towards us, the white foam vivid in the twilight; they broke just below the coconut palms near the track. At this time of day, nightfall, the sea is the last thing to darken; it seems to hold the light that is slipping from the sky; and the trees are black. So in the light of this luminous sea and the pale still-blue eastern sky, and to the splashings of the breakers, the train racketed on towards Limón.