(an excerpt)
Why is travel so exciting? Partly because it triggers the thrill of escape, from the constriction of the daily, the job, the boss, the parents. ‘A great part of the pleasure of travel,’ says Freud, ‘lies in the fulfillment of . . . early wishes to escape the family and especially the father.’ There is thus about travel almost the frisson of the unlawful. The escape is also from the traveler’s domestic identity, and among strangers a new sense of selfhood can be tried on, like a costume. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss notes that a traveler takes a journey not just in space and time (most travel being to places more ancient than the traveler’s home) but ‘in the social hierarchy as well’; and he has noticed repeatedly that upon arriving in a new place, he has suddenly become rich (travelers to Mexico, China, or India will know the feeling). The traveler’s escape, at least since the Industrial Age, has also been from the ugliness and racket of Western cities, and from factories, parking lots, boring turnpikes, and roadside squalor. Every travel poster constitutes an implicit satire on the modern scene, testifying to the universal longing to escape. The most ‘advanced’ societies prove the most loathsome, and as Nancy Mitford has said, North Americans very naturally want to get away from North America.”
But if travel offers the thrill of quasi-felonious escape, it also conveys the pleasure of learning new things, and as Aristotle observed over 2,300 years ago, not only philosophers but people in general like learning things, even if the learning comes disguised as ‘entertainment.’ It is as learners that explorers, tourists, and genuine travelers, otherwise so different in motives and behavior, come together. Explorers learn the contours of undiscovered shorelines and mountains, tourists learn exchange rates and where to go in Paris for the best hamburgers, and travelers learn . . . not just foreign customs and curious cuisines and unfamiliar beliefs and novel forms of government. They learn, if they are lucky, humility. Experiencing on their senses a world different from their own, they realize their provincialism and recognize their ignorance. ‘Traveling makes one modest,’ says Flaubert. ‘You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.’ Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience, and the best travelers — and travel-writers — seem to be those able to hold two or three inconsistent ideas in their minds at the same time, or able to regard themselves as at once serious persons and clowns.
But the irony of traveling can sometimes end in melancholy. Flaubert observes how sad it is to experience a foreign place that is wonderful and to know that you will never return to it. All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time. The melancolies du voyage— Flaubert’s term—are as much a part of travel (but never, significantly, of tourism) as its more obvious delights. When the ship carrying the young Evelyn Waugh was returning to England at the end of his first serious trip to the Mediterranean, he did something he found hard to understand. He was at a farewell party enjoying himself mightily, but “after a time,” he remembers in his first travel book Labels (1930),
I went out from the brightly lighted cabin on to the dark boat-deck. . . . I was carrying my champagne glass in my hand, and for no good reason that I can now think of, I threw it out over the side, watched it hover for a moment in the air as it lost momentum and was caught by the wind, then saw it flutter and tumble into the swirl of water. This gesture . . . has become oddly important to me. . . .
In addition, travel sharpens the senses. Abroad, one feels, sees, and hears things in an abnormal way. Thus D. H. Lawrence, one cold morning in Sardinia, all by himself, finds the simple experience of standing alone on a strange road “wonderful”:
Wonderful to go out on a frozen road. . . . Wonderful the bluish, cold air, and things standing up in cold distance. . . . I am so glad, on this lonely naked road, I don’t know what to do with myself. . . .
Lord Byron likewise, who held that “the great object of life is . . . to feel that we exist,” discovered that feeling in three things: gambling, battle, and travel, all of them “intemperate but keenly felt pursuits. . . whose principal attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment.” And the deeply romantic emotion of travel has been felt by Paul Bowles, always searching for a “magic place” which would yield its secrets and grant him “wisdom and ecstasy”—and even, he says, death. Which is to realize that travel—the word derives from travail—as a form of heightened experience is like normal experience in not being entirely joyous. Homesickness is one of the traveler’s ailments, and so is loneliness. Fear—of strangers, of being embarrassed, of threats to personal safety—is the traveler’s usual, if often unadmitted, companion. The sensitive traveler will also feel a degree of guilt at his alienation from ordinary people, at the unearned good fortune that has given him freedom while others labor at their unexciting daily obligations. If a little shame doesn’t mingle with the traveler’s pleasure, there is probably going to be insufficient ironic resonance in his perceptions.
Just as tourism is not travel, the guidebook is not the travel book. The guidebook is to be carried along and to be consulted frequently for practical information. How many rials are you allowed to bring in? How expensive is that nice-looking hotel over there? The travel book, on the other hand, is seldom consulted during a trip. Rather, it is read either before or after, and at home, and perhaps most often by a reader who will never take the journey at all. Guidebooks belong to the world of journalism, and they date; travel books belong to literature, and they last. Guidebooks are not autobiographical but travel books are, and if the personality they reveal is too commonplace and un-eccentric, they will not be very readable. Norman Douglas, both a notable eccentric and a notable traveler, knows what he’s talking about when he says that
the reader of a good travel book is entitled not only to an exterior voyage, to descriptions of scenery and so forth, but to an interior, a sentimental or temperamental voyage, which takes place side by side with that outer one; . . . the ideal book of this kind offers us, indeed, a triple opportunity of exploration—abroad, into the author’s brain, and into our own. The writer should therefore possess a brain worth exploring; some philosophy of life . . . and the courage to proclaim it and put it to the test; he must be naïf and profound, both child and sage.
And the ideal travel writer is consumed not just with a will to know. He is also moved by a powerful will to teach. Inside every good travel writer there is a pedagogue—often a highly moral pedagogue—struggling to get out.
But the pedagogic impulse is not sufficient to make a great travel writer. Neither are acute senses, powerful curiosity, physical and intellectual stamina, and a lively historical, political, and social imagination. A commitment to language and to literary artifice must also be there, and the impulse to write must equal the impulse to travel. T. E. Lawrence once asked Charles Doughty why he’d gone on the laborious journey he wrote about in Arabia Deserta (1888). Doughty replied that he had traveled in order “to redeem the English language from the slough into which it had fallen since the time of Spenser.” In the heyday of travel writing, in the nineteenth century, excesses even crept in. Then, so many people were making books out of moving around and noticing things and then writing about them that William Makepeace Thackeray devised the term “the letterpress landscape” to suggest the way a given sight might look to a lettered observer. Which was the object of interest, the scene itself or its description in scores of travel books? Was the landscape the attraction, or the language used to memorialize it?
The autobiographical narrative at the heart of a travel book will use many of the devices of fiction, which is why a travel diary, whose sequential entries are innocent of what’s coming next, is less interesting than a full-fledged travel book, which can create suspense and generate irony by devices of concealment and foreshadowing. The ancient geographer Strabo was convinced that anyone telling about his travels must be a liar, and in a sense he was right, for if a traveler doesn’t visit his narrative with the spirit and techniques of fiction, no one will want to hear it. Even if a travel account does not, like the works of Sir John Mandeville and Marco Polo, trade largely in wonders, it will still resemble the literary form of the romance by containing more than a mere novel’s share of anomalies and scandals and surprises and incredibilities. Travel romances differ from the more overtly fictional ones not in delivering fewer wonders but in being careful to locate their wonders within an actual, verifiable, and often famous topography.
Successful travel writing mediates between two poles: the individual physical things it describes, on the one hand, and the larger theme that it is “about,” on the other. That is, the particular and the universal. A travel book will make the reader aware of a lot of things—ships, planes, trains, donkeys, sore feet, hotels, bizarre customs and odd people, un-familiar weather, curious architecture, risky food. At the same time, a travel book will reach in the opposite direction and deal with these data so as to suggest that they are not wholly inert and discrete but are elements of a much larger meaning, a meaning metaphysical, political, psychological, artistic, or religious—but always, somehow, ethical. Stendhal seems to be hinting at something similar when he observes that “It is not enough for a landscape to be interesting in itself. Eventually there must be a moral and historic interest.” (A reason, perhaps, why the National Parks are less interesting to the real traveler than, say, the D-Day beaches of Normandy.) The travel book is about two things at once. As the critic Samuel Hynes points out, it is “a dual-plane work with a strong realistic surface, which is yet a parable.” And the parable most often takes the form of a metaphor of understanding, and under-standing by a process of intellectual kinesis, of the mind in motion.
I am aware that everyone’s favorite travel piece is not included in this book, and I am sorry. There is so much good travel writing that a library couldn’t contain it all, and this is merely one book of selections. Separating out the best requires draconic standards. I have tried to choose people who are not just admirable travelers, sensitive, indefatigable, and if possible, ironic and even funny when appropriate, but admirable writers as well, equally interested in traveling and making lively sentences out of it. And I hope no one will take the amount of space accorded each writer as an indication of his or her value. Some writers write short, some long, and it is this fact, together with the exigencies of natural divisions, that has determined the length of the selections.
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