This is going to be a monster of a post... I totally understand if you want to skip or skim.

But I've long had an interest in travel writing, and when I couldn't get access to new books over the summer, and happened upon Gutenberg, I downloaded a few vintage pieces of the travel genre, which have proved very thought-provoking.

1.
R F Johnston, 1908, From Pekin to Mandalay

For the most part, this is a how-to book, written for those who want to follow Johnston's route: "Granted health, strength, a first-rate digestion, and an average fund of cheerfulness, there is no reason whatever why any of my readers ... should not forthwith pack up his hand-bag -- he should take little else -- and follow in my steps with a light heart."

So, although there is rich detail about the topography, and about the religion and ethnicity (or "race" in the parlance of the time) of the people among whom he travels, there is little "human interest". We don't learn much about characters or relationships or food or furnishings, for example.

I picture Johnston as craggy-jawed, lean, and long-legged, effortlessly striding up the steep slopes, leaving his companions huffing and puffing behind him. He started off with a sedan chair as part of his equipment, but used it only "when entering and leaving large towns" (presumably pedestrians had just as lowly a status in Asia then as they do now...), so eventually he abandoned it. (Below is a Chinese sedan chair, but it's actually a bridal one, so it's a bit of a cheat really.)



He likes his own company (indeed is rather scathing about "wireless telegraphy" and other such communicative nuisances), and heartily sympathizes with the Chinese scholar who, when offered a boon in reward for his piety, asks "for the coarsest clothes and food, just enough for my daily wants, and ... freedom to wander at my will over mountain and fell and woodland stream, free from all worldly cares, till my life's end". (The scholar's request is turned down, on the grounds that the granting of such a boon equates to "the highest happiness of the beings that dwell in heaven", and so is above the scholar's station.)

Physically, Johnston is a tolerant traveller, although he does have a few scathing things to say about Chinese inns, and warns: "For several reasons a camp-bed is to Europeans an indispensable part of even the most modest travelling equipment." When dozens of films were ruined in a mishap while crossing a troublesome river, he keeps a stiff upper lip.

Intellectually, he's a bit of a mixed bag. He's way more snarky about Chinese and Tibetan Buddhism than I feel is quite polite, and indeed he's pretty hard on the Tibetans in general ("the most ignorant and superstitious of any semi-civilised race in Asia" -- ouch...).



But he does his level best to explode the colonial stereotype of the "lazy Burman", and challenges contemporary views of development in a way that is very clear-sighted (if rather unfair to his working-class compatriots):

"Are we quite sure that we always know what we mean when we speak of progress and civilisation? That there is a terribly sad and ugly side to the development of civilisation in Western countries -- a sadness and ugliness chiefly noticeable in the great industrial centres -- is a dreary fact which no Englishman is so likely to realise to the full as he who revisits his native country after a prolonged absence in the East ... [I]t is difficult to refrain from giving utterance to a feeling of wonder that so much of the energy and activity of the imperial British race should be devoted to social and political rivalries and the accumulation of material wealth, and that modern English life should be so strongly tainted with the vulgarity and brutality that come of sordid ideals... Englishmen consider themselves the apostles of liberty throughout the world. The Burman, if asked to give his candid opinion after a year's experience of English life, would probably say that the position of the vast majority of Englishmen was not much better than that of chained slaves."







He's also keen to challenge stereotypes about the Chinese:

"In the course of more than nine years' residence in China I have travelled in ten provinces, and have never had cause for a single serious complaint against any class or any individual."

He goes on to qualify this good opinion a little. He clearly has no brief for the "intolerable arrogance of the Chinese Court", and warns that a visit to Shanghai or Hong Kong will not reveal the best side of the nation.

But he also identifies "unreasonable arrogance" in the British treatment of the Chinese, and he rails against "the Englishman at home, who in a spirit of misdirected generosity aims at conferring on the Asiatic all the political and other 'blessings' (if indeed they are such, even in England) that he himself enjoys, oblivious of the fact that under Asiatic conditions the blessings may turn into curses".

Unlike many of his contemporaries (and unlike, sadly, many of ours) he is able to take a step back and understand the reasons for outbreaks of violence against those who have subjected China to insult and injustice.

And he correctly diagnoses the source of the cultural misunderstanding that led to that injustice (while at the same time pinpointing an attitude that still afflicts plenty of travel writing):

"When we began to have relations with Eastern countries we found that somehow or other we could not make Oriental culture and civilisation quite fit in with our preconceived notions of those things. We regarded the East -- especially China -- with a kind of mingled contempt and amusement. Even to this day superficial writers cannot deny themselves the pleasure of dwelling on what to their minds are the oddities and absurdities of Chinese life: and so we have humorous descriptions from their pens of how everything in China is distorted and 'upside down' -- the writers forgetting that some of the salient features of our own civilisation must be quite ridiculous when looked at from the Chinese standpoint. But the truth is, of course, that neither Europe nor China has any right to regard the other as a subject for caricature. The time has come when we should realise that Europe and North America are not 'the world'...; that we people of the West have a monopoly neither in virtue nor in culture..."

Perspicacious stuff indeed.





2.
Mark Twain, 1869, The Innocents Abroad

What a mixed bag this was. I've always enjoyed Mark Twain, but as a travel writer, well, not so much...

True, I enjoyed reliving some of my own long-ago experiences of Italy through his eyes: the roof of Milan Cathedral, the utter sublimity of Venice, the vast quantity of tunnels that allow only tantalizing glimpses of Italy's mountain scenery.

And he has a wonderful turn of phrase at times: "Gray lizards, those heirs of ruin, of sepulchres and desolation, glided in and out among the rocks... Where prosperity has reigned, and fallen... there this reptile makes his home, and mocks at human vanity. His coat is the color of ashes: and ashes are the symbol of hopes that have perished, of aspirations that came to nought, of loves that are buried. If he could speak, he would say, Build temples: I will lord it in their ruins; build palaces: I will inhabit them... and you, who stand here and moralize over me: I will crawl over your corpse at the last."


(Disclaimer: This is a lizard from a later trip, but so much more what Twain had in mind, I think, than the one I showed originally.)

By the shores of Lake Galilee, he records that "even the most unimpressible" must yield to the charms of the night-time: "In the lapping of the waves upon the beach, he hears the dip of ghostly oars; in the secret noises of the night he hears spirit voices; in the soft sweep of the breeze, the rush of invisible wings."

And Twain is laugh-out-loud funny at times. Particularly with his stories of the party's mounts: "Blucher could do nothing at all with his donkey"; "no donkeys ever existed that were as hard to navigate as these, I think, or that had so many vile, exasperating instincts"; "those horses were the hardest lot I ever did come across... this creature has scared at every thing he has seen to-day, except a haystack"; "the horse... only looked like he wanted to lean up against something and think".

Luckily, the worst our Moroccan pack-mules ever did was sit on the oranges. But Nigel's Mongolian horse had a bit of a leaning disposition.





He also has a sharp eye for the "Old Travelers": "I love them for their witless platitudes, for their supernatural ability to bore, for their delightful asinine vanity, for their luxuriant fertility of imagination, for their startling, their brilliant, their overwhelming mendacity!"

And he's very droll, for example, in his speculations about the origins of the ancient oyster shells and crockery to be found on the top of a hill in Smyrna: "It is painful -- it is even humiliating -- but I am reduced at last to one slender theory: that the oysters climbed up there of their own accord."

But Twain is anything but a tolerant traveller. Stopping by a well in Palestine, he is aware of the picturesque qualities of the scene. But he is unprepared for the less than picturesque qualities of reality: "Here was a grand Oriental picture which I had worshiped a thousand times in soft, rich steel engravings! But in the engraving there was no desolation; no dirt; no rags..." He concludes: "Oriental scenes look best in steel engravings."

Tongue-in-cheek? Maybe. Have I ever thought such things? Yes. Would I commit them to writing? No. And not because of a desire for political correctness either. Irritations are momentary. Once you write them, you make them permanent. Out of a transient venting of steam, you create an edict. Orient = dirt and nuisance. It's like preserving a scab. It served its purpose, but should be left to just drop off.

The best moments are not found in steel engravings. The best moments are the real moments, the everyday life -- often messy, smelly, and exhausting, but often totally enchanting -- that you happen upon between the "sights". Below are such instances from Oman, Morocco, and Tunisia.









Towards the end of the book, Twain pronounces: "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness". Is this ironic? I have to ask, because the book abounds in judgmental views. True, he admires the French ("all is clockwork, all is order"); and is awed by Ephesus ("we speak of Apollo and Diana -- they were born here...; of the great god Pan -- he dwelt in the caves of this hill of Coressus..."). He obviously revelled in an informal audience with the Russian emperor.

But he has truly terrible things to say about the Azoreans, the Turks, and the Damascenes. Meanwhile, "Arab men are often fine looking, but Arab women are not"; Tangier is "full of interest for one day, but after that ... a weary prison"; Greece is "a bleak, unsmiling desert"; Palestine's scenery is "dismal". And so on.

The group has a consistently bad relationship with their local guides. Could this have anything to do, we wonder, with the fact that they never bother to learn the guides' names, and call them all Ferguson?

Cumulatively, this gets very hard to take.

Consciously or not, Twain expresses the ordering and regulating qualities of the "tourist gaze", which views objects through a filter of prior assessment: "We went to see the Cathedral of Notre Dame. We had heard of it before. It surprises me sometimes to think how much we do know and how intelligent we are. We recognized the brown old Gothic pile in a moment; it was like the pictures."



Yet he also sees the necessity of reassessing accepted wisdom. On Palestine, for example, he notes that he will have to "studiously and faithfully unlearn a great many things I have somehow absorbed concerning Palestine", adjusting it in his head to be the much smaller place that it is.

And he is aware that not all his travel companions are able to do that. Some, for example, "found a Presbyterian Palestine, and they had already made up their minds to find no other... Our pilgrims have brought their verdicts with them... The pilgrims will tell of Palestine, when they get home, not as it appeared to them, but as it appeared to Thompson and Robinson and Grimes."

He is conscious, too, of the softening power of tourist memory: "Our experiences in Europe have taught us that in time this fatigue will be forgotten; the heat will be forgotten; the thirst, the tiresome volubility of the guide, the persecutions of the beggars -- and then, all that will be left will be pleasant memories of Jerusalem, memories we shall call up with always increasing interest as the years go by."

The intermediate stage -- between present touristic suffering and future fond memories -- is post-hoc reflection: "We do not think, in the holy places; we think in bed, afterwards, when the glare, and the noise, and the confusion are gone, and in fancy we revisit alone, the solemn monuments of the past, and summon the phantom pageants of an age that has passed away." This sentiment is repeated after a tourist outing in Egypt. Surrounded by clamour, he asks: "Why try to call up the traditions of vanished Egyptian grandeur...? Why try to think at all? The thing was impossible. One must bring his meditations cut and dried, or else cut and dry them afterward."

And yet Twain's account has an endearingly self-deprecatory quality, too. "We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language," he quips, having earlier given us a flavour of the execrable French served up by the group. He is also able to see the ridiculousness of tourists, laughing heartily at "this fantastic mob of green-spectacled Yanks, with their flapping elbows and bobbing umbrellas". I must admit I often find tourists ridiculous: dressed either in what looks like combat gear, or as if they've just come back from performing in the circus.

So, for me, Twain is a host of contradictions. Funny, yet annoying. Aware, yet insouciant. Anti-imperialist, yet steeped in the attitudes from which imperialism grew. An enigma.

3.
Georges Sand, 1841, Un hiver a Majorque





Finally, Georges Sand. Another novelist for whom ordinarily I have nothing but respect. And another novelist who turns into a bit of a whinger when it comes to travelling...

She's impressed by Majorca's mountain scenery (and the above pictures are not Majorca, which I've never visited, but rather the area of Spain around Alicante, but based on her description there are similarities).

Having eventually found accommodation (no mean feat by all accounts), she is able to congratulate the family for having succeeded, "even in Majorca, even in an abandoned Carthusian monastery, even battling with the trickiest peasants in the world, in creating a sense of well-being".

But she doesn't think much of the rest of her Majorcan experience.

Admittedly, it's tough travelling with an invalid whose illness strikes profound fear into the hearts of the locals -- locals who, to boot, are scandalized by the foreigners' irregular relationships and lack of church attendance.

But she doesn't have much of a good word to say for these locals. Far from joining the travellers who enlarge upon "the happiness of these southern peoples, whose faces and picturesque costumes appear to them on Sundays in the bright rays of the sun, and whose absence of ideas and lack of foresight are understood to represent the ideal serenity of the peasant life", Sand maintains that "there is nothing in the world as sad and as poor as the peasant who knows only how to pray, sing, and work, and who never thinks".

The Majorcans, in Sand's eyes, smell of rancid oil and garlic, are so fearful of people that look "foreign" that they will turn off the path to avoid them, shamelessly exploit their guests, and lack intellectual life, such that "their homes have a dead, hollow quality that has no comparison in our society, and which means that Majorcans have more resemblance with Africans than with they do with Europeans" (the ultimate insult, apparently).

On the subject of "why we travel", Sand is quite interesting.

She "wanted to travel". Even more, she acknowledges "the need to travel". Why? "Because we do not feel genuinely at ease anywhere these days, and of all the guises that the ideal can assume (or if you do not like the word ideal, then the feeling that there is something better), travel is one of the sunniest and most deceptive... We all travel, as soon as we have a little leisure and a little money. Or rather we flee, since it's less a question of travelling than of leaving... Who among us do not have some pain to distract themselves from or some yoke to shrug off? None... Whether they feel themselves alive or wasting away, they are possessed with the fever of the wandering Jew."

She is not against people-movement, she says, but regards it as a second-best. "I want to imagine the human race as happier, and therefore calmer and more enlightened, with two lives: one sedentary, for domestic happiness, civic duties, studious meditations, philosophical contemplation; the other active, for that kind of loyal exchange that would replace the shameful traffic that we call commerce, for the inspirations of art, scientific research, and especially the propagation of ideas. It seems to me, in a word, that the normal goal of travel is the need for contact, relations, and sympathetic exchange with other people, and that there ought not to be pleasure where there is not duty. And it seems to me, in contrast, that most of us travel with the purpose of experiencing mystery and isolation, because our personal impressions, whether sweet or painful, have been offended, as it were, by the society of our fellow-humans."

In the introduction, she avers: "Alas, my nicest, sweetest travels have taken place by my fireside, my feet in the hot cinders and my elbows propped up on the worn-out arms of my grandmother's armchair." Which is sad.

I will close with Hannibal, who is reputed to have been born in Majorca. The name Hannibal always evokes the enterprising shepherd who accosted us during a wander round the ruins of Carthage. "Hannibal", he said, pointing at an underground, columned area in the collection of ruins. "Yes," we said. "Hannibal," he repeated, following up this display of erudition with: "Two dinars, please."