BEING THERE
Travel is like adultery: one is always tempted to be unfaithful to one’s own country. To have imagination is inevitably to be dissatis- fied with where you live. There is in men, as Peter Quennell said,
“a centrifugal tendency.” In our wanderlust, we are lovers looking for consummation.
Only while traveling can we appreciate age. At home, for Ameri- cans at least, everything must be young, new, but when we go abroad we are interested only in the old. We want to see what has been saved, defended against time.
The psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott had a patient who was afraid he didn’t have enough anxiety to keep him careful, to protect him against slipping into an infinite regression, like an endless dream.
When we travel, we put aside our defenses, our anxiety, and invite regression. We go backward instead of forward. As Baudelaire said, we cultivate our hysteria.
It is our best selves that travel, just as we dress in our best clothes.
Only our passport reminds us how ordinary we actually are. We go abroad to meet our foreign persona, that thrilling stranger born on the plane. We’re going to see in Europe everything we have elimi- nated or edited out of our own culture in the name of convenience:
religion, royalty, picturesqueness, otherness—and passion. We cling to the belief that other peoples are more passionate than we are.
There’s an impostor in each of us—why else would we put on dark glasses and try to speak and look like the natives of another
place? At home, we impersonate ourselves; when we’re abroad, we can try to be what we’ve always wanted to be. In spite of all the
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recent talk about roots, many of us are tired of our roots, which may be shallow anyway, and so we travel in search of rootlessness.
Traveling began when men grew curious. The influence of the church, the traditional pattern of life, the lack of money and leisure had all restrained curiosity until the seventeenth century, when un- der pressure of scientific discoveries, the physical world began to gape open. It was then that people began to travel in search of the profane.
Travel arrived together with sophistication, with the ability to see through or beyond one’s own culture, with the modern faculty of boredom. Something of the Crusades survive in the modern trav- eler—only his is a personal crusade, an impulse to go off and fight certain obscure battles of his own spirit.
Of course, one of the most common reasons for traveling is sim- ply to get away. Freud said that we travel to escape father and the family, and we might add the familiar. There is a recurrent desire to drop our lives, to simply walk out of them. Expatriates try to do this: they live in a kind of counterpoint “between operetta and quar- antine,” to borrow a phrase from Céline.
When we travel, we are on vacation—vacant, waiting to be filled.
The frenzied shopping of some travelers is an attempt to buy a new life. To get away to a strange place produces a luxurious feeling of disengagement, of irresponsible free association. One is an on- looker, impregnable. As Adrienne Rich’s traveler put it, “Her bar- gains with disaster were sealed in another country. Here she goes untouched.”
We travel in summer, when life comes out of doors, and so we see only summery people, nothing of their sad falls, their long, dark winters and cruel springs. The places we visit are gold-plated by the sun. The flowers and trees are like bouquets thrown to history.
And language—what a pleasure to leave our own language, with its clichés stuck in our teeth. How much better things sound in another tongue! It’s like having our ears cleaned out. So long as we don’t understand it too well, every other language is poetry.
Because we travel for so many reasons—some of them contradic- tory—travel writing is like a suitcase into which the writer tries to
cram everything. At its most interesting, it’s a continual tasting, the expression of a nostalgia for the particular. It’s a childish game of playing countries, as we used to play house.
Travel writing describes a tragic arc: it begins with a rising of the spirit and ends in a dying fall. The earliest travelers went to see marvels, to admire the wonderful diversity of the world—but the latest travelers are like visitors sitting at the bedside of dying cul- tures. Early travelers fell in love at first sight with foreign places—
but now we know only love at last sight, a kiss before dying, a breathing in of the last gasp. In some ancient societies, it used to be the custom for the son to inhale his father’s last breath, which contained his departing soul, and today’s travelers do something like this, too.
Travel writing has become a quintessentially modern thing, the present regretting the past. We travel like insurance appraisers, as- sessing the damage. Militantly opposed to any kind of ethnic dis- tinctions at home, we adore ethnicity abroad. Ironically, Americans need Europe more than Europeans do. To Parisians, for example, Paris is a place to live: for Americans, it’s a place to dream.
“I do not expect to see many travel books in the near future,”
Evelyn Waugh wrote in 1946. Like Claude Lévi-Strauss, he saw the world turning into a “monoculture,” the sense of place giving way to placelessness. What Waugh didn’t foresee was that travel books would change as novels and poetry have, that every slippage of cul- ture would provoke its peculiar literature. He underestimated the variousness of our reasons for traveling.
There have always been travelers who went to look for the worst, to find rationalizations for their anxiety or despair, to cover their disillusionment with labels, as steamer trunks used to be covered with them. Why else would Paul Theroux go to South America, which he so obviously detested? Shiva Naipaul’s worst fears were confirmed in Africa, just as his brother’s were in Asia. Graham Greene spent four months traveling in the Liberian jungle as a pri- vate penance.
John Krich’s Music in Every Room was subtitled “Around the
World in a Bad Mood.” Like many young travelers in the 1960s in India, the Middle East, and Africa, he went abroad not to overcome
difficulties as early travelers did, but to experience them. Some of us flee our affluent countries in search of poverty, which we see as the naked truth, as integrity. Poverty is more cozy than afHuence. It constitutes a kind of intimacy. Squalor is atmosphere.
Even ruins have changed. Instead of the classical ruins of an- tiquity, we now have places that are merely “ruined.” And there are travelers who take a positive delight in them, who love awfulness, or offalness, for its own sake. For them, awfulness is the contem- porary equivalent of the exotic. It’s a negative sublime, a swoon or ecstasy of spoliation.
In Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue, Paul Bowles
wakes up in a remote North African village that he had entered at night to discover that his hotel window looks out on a series of slit trenches that serve as the communal toilet. You can feel him pounc- ing on the image, for travel writing is also a reliving and revising of our early toilet training. Our nostalgie de la boue may be no more than that, a fond memory of the time when everything was permit- ted. Like a child catching bugs, the young Flaubert says that he particularly enjoyed in Egyptian brothels the bittersweet smell of crushed lice mixed with incense.
Bowles said that a country loses interest for him when it no longer has a traditional life of its own and survives only as an at- traction for tourists. But this kind of survival breeds a new culture of entrepreneurs and improvisers that has furnished the travel writer with a different kind of local character.
D. H. Lawrence was one of the last of the great romantic travel- ers. When his Twilight in Italy was published in 1916, a reviewer complained that Lawrence tried to see more than he really saw, “he preferred the easier course of discovering the Infinite.” But as Paul Fussell says in Abroad, what Lawrence saw in things and places was the infinite. Lawrence traveled as if he was gathering material for a generalization so great that he was never able to formulate it.
He was one of the first to feel Torschlusspanik, the fear of the closing of the door, the end of culture, Nietzsche’s stare into the abyss, which stares back. Travel writing is full of elegies for disap-
pearing cultures, books like Norman Lewis’s Voices of the Old Sea, Barbara Norman’s Requiem for a Spanish Village, or Honor Tracy’s Winter in Castille. As Jules Laforgue, one of the fathers of modern poetry, said, “How picturesque they are, the missed trains!”
As other countries offer fewer exotic phenomena, the travel writer is forced to find the exotic in himself—and the picturesque as well.
The centrifugal tendency turns centripetal, and modern travel books may be about the absence of things just as the classic books are about their presence. In Journey to Kars, Philip Glazebrook seems to have visited several unappealing villages in Turkey simply for the irony of being there. (Irony is the contemporary traveler’s drip-dry shirt.) One of the things a severely sophisticated traveler like Glaze- brook seeks is a place where he himself can stand out in absolute relief.
There are travelers who specialize in resisting the foreign, culture- mockers like Peter Fleming and Eric Newby. In a poem in her Ques- tions of Travel, Elizabeth Bishop asks, “Have we room for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?” In another poem, she says, “There are too many waterfalls here,” expressing a modern traveler’s distrust of gaudy otherness. We can expect minimalist travel books, the kind that Samuel Beckett might write. If it hasn’t already, travel writing may eventually succumb to a dreadful sense of déja vu, a feeling Freud associates with the return of repressed material in the form of the uncanny.
In North of South, Shiva Naipaul tried to see emergent countries as they see themselves. When a government official in one place told him that they had a revolutionary plan for agricultural reform, Nai- paul expressed a desire to see it in action. But you can’t see the revolution, the official said—you can only see planting. In a tiny African town, Naipaul met a man who had bankrupted himself to buy a large hall, complete with a hundred chairs and a stage where members of the Humanist Club, of which he was the president, would come to read their poems and put on their plays. How many members does the club have? Naipaul asked, looking around the depressed town. None as yet, the president said, but they will come.
Here we see another new turn in travel writing, one that records not the realities of other countries, but their illusions.
In Freud’s theory of the primal scene, the young child is trau- matized by witnessing the intercourse of his parents. Something like this used to happen to Americans when they went to Europe for the first time. The cultural and historical passion of older countries used to stun the traveler, filling him with sadness, envy, fear, and love. But now in the American tourist we can also see what the inverse can do—how lost and furious the child becomes when the parents do not make love, when other countries no longer have any passionate internal life.
Henri Michaux’s Barbarian in Asia, which was published in 1932, opens with an astonishing line: “Imagine a city exclusively com- posed of ecclesiastics.” But now there is little astonishment or naive traveling. As sameness spreads over entire continents, travel writing moves from literary anthropology to ontology—pure being—or to what Raymond Queneau called “ontalgia,” a pain in the joints of being. In Susan Sontag’s story, “Unguided Tour,” her traveler says,
“T don’t want to satisfy my desire; I want to exasperate it.”
Perhaps in the future we shall have to travel like James Holman, who, after being invalided out of the British navy because he had gone blind, set out in 1819 to see the world. Traveling mostly alone, speaking no foreign languages, using only public transport, Holman got as far as Siberia and returned home to publish in several thick volumes all that he had experienced. He rarely felt, he said, that he had missed anything through being blind. (At one point, he met a deaf man and they traveled together.)
Since he could not see, people often invited Holman to squeeze things as a way of perceiving them—and this is what today’s traveler has to do. He has to squeeze the places he visits, until they yield something, anything.
