The Scorpion-Fish

by Nicolas Bouvier

  The worst defeat of all is to forget,

  especially what has crushed you.

  — Louis-Ferdinand Céline

  Afterword

  Thierry Vernet in the Fiat Topolino in Turkey, 1953

  Nicolas Bouvier, traveller, collector of songs and of images, set out from his home in Geneva in 1953 in a tiny Fiat. He had arranged to meet his friend, the Swiss artist Thierry Vernet, in a bar in Belgrade. Then off they went, in their unreliable vehicle, across Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan into Pakistan, a marvellous voyage Bouvier recounted in The Way of the World (L’Usage du Monde, 1963). Its delayed sequel is Le poisson-scorpion.

  He was then twenty-four, a son of Protestant, bourgeois Geneva: his father, Auguste, was a librarian (his grandfather had been a scholar of languages and held the titular chair in French at the University of Geneva), and late in his career became director of the Bibliothèque de Genève. His mother, Antoinette, was the daughter of the composer Pierre Maurice. Her family’s property beside Lake Léman at Allaman was the site of holidays in Bouvier’s childhood, with its atmosphere somewhere ‘between Chekhov and Massenet’, as he described it. His parents married in their thirties, and rapidly had three children, of whom Nicolas was the youngest, born in 1929. He met Vernet in 1940, at college, and they were fast friends for the rest of their lives. He found the atmosphere around the Vernet table less constrained than at his own house, but the literary world came to the latter: his grandfather had entertained Tagore and Bergson, his father brought home writers who came to use the library’s resources, among them Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse and Marguerite Yourcenar.

  During the war years, of course, there was no question of travelling beyond the Swiss borders. Auguste was a mountain enthusiast and Nicolas climbed with him; the family took ski-ing holidays in the Valais. Freedom restored by 1946, Bouvier made for Florence; in 1948, he headed for Denmark and Finland via Brussels and Amsterdam. Vernet went to study in Paris and Bouvier visited him in the vacations from university, where he flourished after having been an average student at college. They travelled to Algiers in 1950, and the report of their voyage by Bouvier with illustrations by Vernet was published in the Genevan journal Le Courrier. They tested out the Fiat Topolino by driving round Spain, went to Austria in 1951, and the same year ‘discovered’ the Balkans, in particular its music. They pressed on to Greece, Smyrna and Istanbul, but began to plan a return to Yugoslavia. Back in Geneva, they had a few sessions with the Romanian ethno-musicologist Constantin Brailou, and decided to set off once Bouvier finished his final exams. The life others may have seen for him – as an academic, perhaps – was left behind in travels that had more in common with his fellow-spirits Robert Louis Stevenson, Henri Michaux, and Patrick Leigh Fermor, than with those who need a Rough Guide.

  Nicolas Bouvier en route for Asia

  The Way of the World, now regarded as a classic of travel-writing, ends with Bouvier – travelling alone - crossing into India. Asked why he stopped at that point, Bouvier replied that the border represented a break from the Muslim world of the voyage until then, which had much in common with the Judeo-Christian tradition, based on the male principle, and the arrival in a world that seemed predominantly Hindu, pantheist and essentially feminine. Moreover, he added practically, he was such a slow writer that if he had included India, Ceylon and Japan, it would have taken two thousand pages and fifty years to complete.

  The rhythm of the voyage had been to spend the winter holed up somewhere – such as the months in Tabriz when the freezing weather encouraged writing, painting and reflection – and the other seasons on the road. Bouvier had written 60 pages about the journey when he was living in Quetta, but they were thrown away (there is a visceral description of searching for them in a Pakistani rubbish-dump in The Way of the World); these pages he had to recreate from memory two years later, when he was living in Ceylon and was asked for a piece on Azerbaidjan by a literary magazine in Colombo.

  Bouvier on the beach in Ceylon

  Bouvier recounts in his interviews with Irene Lichtenstein-Fall (Routes et deroutes, 1992) that he had wanted to move from India to Burma and then across the border into Yunnan province, but the political situation in 1954 did not permit that. So he decided to join Vernet, who six months earlier had left for Ceylon and was living in Galle with his fiancée. His friends left two months after Bouvier’s arrival, worn out by the climate and the difficulties of making a living there. Bouvier had no intention of returning to Europe. He had a pleasant little room, Galle was a beautiful if ghost-ridden town, and anyway he could not move on, having succumbed to a triple attack of amoebiasis, malaria and jaundice. He said to his interviewer that he had not realised how debilitating the climate was, and had sunk into a state of ill-health and weakness that immobilised him until finally the seriousness of his condition made him tear himself away, after nine months in Ceylon – ‘That is, seven months too long’, he remarked drily.

  Bouvier’s next stop was Japan, and he was kept busy writing long pieces for Japanese journals on his travels round the country. He joked that had a Japanese woman been prepared to marry him on his first visit, he would simply have stayed there. He was happy to return in 1964 to spend a year in Kyoto and a year in Tokyo, with his Swiss wife, Eliane, and baby son Thomas; their second, Manuel, was born in Japan. He never wrote about the four months he spent in India, preferring to make a series of broadcasts with Indian music at their centre, and a few notes for his commentary. Bouvier’s books Japon (1967) and Chronique japonaise (1975), by contrast, evidence his extensive background reading and his partly ethnological purpose in writing them. He had started taking photographs, too: there was a complete immersion in Japanese ways and aesthetics, a different kind of travelling.

  He had to let a lot of water run under the bridge before returning to Ceylon’s ‘negative enchantment’. In Routes et deroutes he talks about writing The Scorpion-Fish almost in a trance in 1979, fuelled by whisky and music (especially Debussy, who shares the book’s dedication). It was truly ‘writing as exorcism’, something that had to be done, a painful analysis of what he regarded as a defeat, a slow loss of control over himself.

  The ending of The Scorpion-Fish corresponds exactly to what I lived through. At the beginning it seems to be a very literary report - with this book the form is particularly important - and it ends as a tropical tale. Afterwards, I wondered whether I should perhaps have written a novel for once. It ends in fiction: people float away, appear, disappear. We are in a world of zombies, and I was indeed there. […] Those characters existed. I was in and out of the Tamil spice-shop all the time, and I certainly met the Jesuit who had been dead for six years. And both times he was a tutelary, kindly presence. I can’t say more about it than that.

  The book was published in Switzerland in 1981 and the next year by Gallimard in Paris. His previous work had gone almost unnoticed in France, but Le Poisson-Scorpion attracted admiring reviews and the Prix des Critiques for 1982.

  The next decade is characterised by his biographer François Laut (in Nicolas Bouvier: L’oeil qui écrit, 2008) as deepening Bouvier’s melancholy, at the same time as the writer gained increasing recognition in France and further abroad. His health was not good but he worked hard nevertheless, producing a collection of essays under the title Journal d’Aran et d’autres lieux, a collection of poems, Le Dehors et le dedans, as well as several substantial art books; travelling with Eliane, with a group to China, and as a lecturer to the USA and as far as New Zealand. Thierry Vernet was lost to cancer in 1993, when Bouvier was far away in New York.

  I was fortunate enough to meet Bouvier twice in those years, in Glasgow (on his way to report on the whisky distilleries of Islay, and to encounter the fierce island midges), and in Geneva when I was translating L’Usage du Monde. He was a man of great courtesy, learning and charm; in his Pompeii-red study in Cologny, a glass of wine always at his elbow, usually smoking, he batted back suggestions and interpretations, so pleased to see his words
re-emerging in English. It was ‘a language I adore’, he wrote to Michael Schmidt in 1983 when Carcanet Press proposed publishing Le Poisson-Scorpion, ‘the language of Forster, of Conrad, of Orwell’s Burmese Days, of Bruce Chatwin etc. I have asked to be able to glance over the translation not out of suspicion but out of pure greediness and as regards a nuance here and there…’. He was ‘stupefied’ to discover that his reference to Lefroy on insects was something I had pursued with a descendant; he thought perhaps he had invented the name. I have kept his handful of letters, written in a very distinctive, angular hand, black ink on paper of his own design.

  The last years – Bouvier died, also of cancer, in 1998 – were spent between the house in Cologny where he had lived for forty years (‘all travellers need a dry dock’) and his office in Carouge. His biographer presents them as the two aspects at the heart of his attachment to Geneva: Cologny, the countrified place where his parents had also lived, where his children grew up, the enlightened bourgeois life; Carouge where he had his studio-office, the company of friends who were artists, designers, film-makers, and the bistrots he frequented. One side was Protestant and academic, the other free-thinking and bohemian.

  ‘My sedentary life […] is just as important as the rest,’ he said to his interviewer in 1992. ‘It is as happy as my travelling life. Anyway, my travelling life, for various reasons of age and health, has become more comfortable and bourgeois. There’s no more sleeping out under the stars, that won’t ever happen again, I know. There are some things you must know how to bid farewell.’

  Robyn Marsack

  Glasgow, 30 January 2014

  61 Exmouth Market, London EC1R 4QL

  Email: info@travelbooks.co.uk

  Eland was started in 1982 to revive great travel books which had fallen out of print. Although the list soon diversified into biography and fiction, all the titles are chosen for their interest in spirit of place.

  One of our readers explained that for him reading an Eland was like listening to an experienced anthropologist at the bar – she’s let her hair down and is telling all the stories that were just too good to go into the textbook. These are books for travellers, and for those who are content to travel in their own minds. They open out our understanding of other cultures, interpret the unknown and reveal different environments as well as celebrating the humour and occasional horrors of travel. We take immense trouble to select only the most readable books and many readers collect the entire series.

  Extracts from each and every one of our books can be read on our website, at www.travelbooks.co.uk. If you would like a free copy of our catalogue, please order it from the website, email us or send a postcard.

  Copyright

  First published in Frenh as Le Poisson-Scorpion in 1981

  First published in Great Britain by Carcanet Press Ltd in 1987

  First published by Eland Publishing Limited

  61 Exmouth Market, London EC1R 4QL in 2014

  This ebook edition first published in 2014

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © Editions GALLIMARD (Paris) 1982, 1996

  Translation and Afterword © Robyn Marsack 1987, 2014

  The right of Nicolas Bouvier to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–1–78060–047–5

  Cover Image: Scorpaena porcus, black scorpionfish, watercolour painting by Sydney Parkinson made during Captain James Cook’s first voyage to explore the southern continent (1768–71), by courtesy of Mary Evans/Natural History Museum