Paul Theroux - The Tao of Travel - Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

Saul Bellow's Fairly Serious Fooling

BELLOW HAD NOT seen Africa before he wrote Henderson the Rain King (1959), his novel about the larger-than-life Eugene Henderson — war hero, pig farmer, ranter. Very tall and very strong and highly ingenious, Henderson describes himself as "a millionaire wanderer and wayfarer," and he adds, "A brutal and violent man driven into the world… A fellow whose heart said, I want, I want. "

This novel, Bellow's favorite, is his weakest, and perhaps because of that, his most revealing: slack writing is full of disclosure.

Bellow, henpecked, exasperated, in need of imaginative relief, felt cornered in an unhappy marriage when he conceived and wrote the book. The African setting, the freedom of Henderson to roam and rant, the transformation that fiction writing allows, were probably a consolation to Bellow. If he couldn't go to Africa and leave his miseries behind, at least he could fantasize about such an escape.

"I am just a traveler," Henderson says to King Dahfu. But to Chief Itelo he said, "Your Highness, I am really kind of on a quest." It seems to me that this is the crux of the matter: Bellow cannot imagine an Africa that is not full of marvels, odd customs, harems, wrestling matches, lion hunts, and the mystical rain ceremony that elevates Henderson to kingship among the Wariri, in the same way that Tarzan is elevated to chief of the similar-sounding Waziri in The Return of Tarzan.

In the imagined world of the nontraveling fiction writer there is usually a convergence of the grotesque and the stereotypical. A comparison of Henderson with Tarzan is not out of place. The difference is that Burroughs admitted he was writing pulp fiction, while the highly intelligent Bellow, self-conscious in this role as fabulist, often plays it for laughs. This novel — strained comedy, occasional farce, and sometimes outright clowning — is unconvincing to anyone who has lived in an African village, yet when Bellow won the Nobel Prize, Henderson was commended as his "most imaginative expedition."

Burton's First Footsteps in East Africa is invoked by Henderson. But the antiquated nature of the travel and Bellow's invented tribes make me think that (like Edgar Rice Burroughs) he was influenced more by Paul Du Chaillu's 1861 Exploration and Adventures in Equatorial Africa, in which Du Chaillu, an American of French descent, was made a king of the Apingi tribe in Gabon.

Du Chaillu wrote, "Remandji said, 'You are the spirit, whom we have never seen before. We are but poor people when we see you. You are of those whom we have often heard of, who come from nobody knows where, and whom we never hoped to see. You are our king and ruler; stay with us always. We love you and will do what you wish.' Whereupon ensued shouts and rejoicings; palm wine was introduced, and a general jollification took place, in the orthodox fashion at coronations. From this day, therefore, I may call myself Du Chaillu the First, King of the Apingi."

Henderson becomes the Rain King in a similar fashion. Challenged by an interviewer about the reality in his novel, Bellow replied, "Years ago, I studied African ethnography with the late Professor Herskovits. Later he scolded me for writing a book like Henderson. He said the subject was much too serious for such fooling. I felt that my fooling was fairly serious. Literalism, factualism, will smother the imagination altogether."

This seems to me a delusion on Bellow's part, yet another delusion of the nontraveling writer.

Arthur Waley: Not Madly Singing in the Mountains

DESPITE PUBLISHING MORE than twenty volumes of his translations from Chinese and Japanese, including The Way and the Power, Tao Te Ching, The Analects of Confucius, and Murasaki's Tale of Genji, Waley never traveled to China or Japan.

Waley claimed that he didn't want to risk being disappointed by seeing the real places so bewitchingly described in poetry and prose. Was this so? The Yale Sinologist Jonathan Spence wrote in the journal Renditions, "One can make all kinds of guesses concerning Waley's reasons for not going to Asia: that he didn't want to confuse the ideal with the real, or that he was interested in the ancient written languages and not the modern spoken ones, or that he simply could not afford the journey. Certainly we are safe in assuming that the trip would have been disconcerting."

Modern China would surely have disconcerted him. Waley was happier in his imagined Tang Dynasty. Here is one of his great translations, and a wonderful affirmation of nature, from the Tang poet Po Chu-i:

Madly Singing in the Mountains

There is no one among men that has not a special failing:

And my failing consists in writing verses.

I have broken away from the thousand ties of life:

But this infirmity still remains behind.

Each time that I look at a fine landscape,

Each time that I meet a loved friend,

I raise my voice and recite a stanza of poetry

And am glad as though a God had crossed my path.

Ever since the day I was banished to Hsun-yang

Half my time I have lived among hills.

And often, when I have finished a new poem,

Alone I climb the road to the Eastern Rock.

I lean my body on the banks of white stone:

I pull down with my hands a green cassia branch.

My mad singing startles the valleys and hills:

The apes and birds all come to peep.

Fearing to become a laughing-stock to the world,

I choose a place that is unfrequented by men.

V. S. Pritchett: A Lot of Verisimilitude, and a Howler

PRITCHETT WROTE DEAD Man Leading, a novel set in Brazil, in 1937, years before he finally traveled there. The novel describes the quest of some explorers who have been lost in the jungle. Pritchett said that he was inspired by the Fawcett expedition of 1925, which vanished (probably massacred) while searching for a lost city deep in the Mato Grosso.

One of the reasons Pritchett's book is persuasive is that he makes imagery so familiar. He speaks of the brown of a Brazilian river resembling strong tea, and a sky like a huge blue house; the forest is faint, like "a distant fence," and the jungle at another point is bedraggled and broken, "as if a lorry had crashed into it." There is a creek "like a sewage ditch" and a bad rainstorm making "the intolerable whine of machines" and a forest odor 'like the smell of spirits gone sour on the breath."

Much later, after he made a visit to Brazil, Pritchett concluded that he had invented the truth. But not entirely. One of the howlers in the book is the mention of "the gulping Lear-like laugh" of an orangutan. There are no orangutans in Brazil. They are found ten thousand miles away, in Borneo, and in any case they seldom make a sound.

A Truly Kafkaesque America

FRANZ KAFKA CANNOT be held accountable for the title of his novel Amerika. Left unfinished, it was published after his death by his friend and literary executor, Max Brod, who gave it this name. Kafka usually referred to it as Der Verschollene (The Missing Person or The Man Who Disappeared). The man in question went to America.

Though Kafka never got farther west from his home in Prague than France, in his letters to Brod he fantasized about traveling to distant places, among them South America, Spain, and the Azores. In affectionate letters he asked two women at the periphery of his life, Felice Bauer and Dora Diamant, to travel with him to Palestine, where he dreamed of abandoning writing, getting healthy, and landing a job as a waiter. This waiter fantasy occurred in 1923, the year before he died. Claiming that he suffered from "travel anxiety" (Reiseangst), Kafka did not go to any far-off places. His real fear was that by traveling — being away from his room, his desk, his books — he would put an end to his writing. His invented America is based on his reading, and he was said to have been influenced by Amerika Heute und Morgan (America Today and Tomorrow), by an itinerant Hungarian, Arthur Holitscher, who had traveled around the United States as a skeptical tourist. In this book, as in Kafka's Amerika, the misspelled name "Oklahama" occurs often.