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

The fictional result is surreal. In the first sonorous paragraph, the hero, Karl Rossmann, sails into New York harbor and sees the Statue of Liberty, "as if in a burst of sunlight. The arm with the sword now reached aloft, and about her figure blew the free winds." The sword instead of the torch is perhaps deliberate.

After the shock of a chaotic, unrecognizable New York City and an interlude with his uncle Edward Jakob, Karl spends some time with a wealthy Mr. Poll under at a labyrinthine mansion outside the city. Not much countryside is described, yet we don't expect daffodils and shady glens from Kafka. We expect anxiety dreams, and predictably the narrative becomes like an anxiety dream, even to Uncle Jakob's suddenly sending Karl away, for no apparent reason. Karl looks for a job, hooks up with two tramps, and hits the road. Just outside the city they look back and see a bridge: "The bridge connecting New York to Boston hung delicately over the Hudson and trembled if one narrowed one's eyes. It appeared to bear no traffic, and a long smooth lifeless strip of water stretched underneath."

Karl becomes an elevator operator at the Occidental Hotel, in a large, Middle European-seeming city, and eventually reconnects with the two tramps, who are living with, and looking after, a very fat diva-prostitute named Brunelda (one of their tasks is to bathe her). The novel remained incomplete but is full of tantalizing fragments, including a brothel named Enterprise No. 25 and the Nature Theater of Oklahama. In every sense, this America, the morbid dream of a tubercular genius in a room in Prague, is Kafkaesque.

Travel Wisdom of Evelyn Waugh

Evelyn Waugh knew better than most people that there is a great deal of pleasure to be derived from a travel book in which the traveler is having a bad time — even better if it is an ordeal. Travel gave him fame as a young man, and though he said (see below) he did not travel to collect material, his fiction was enriched by his travel, from Black Mischief at the beginning of his career to The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold near the end. Many theorists of travel have claimed that Waugh's travel writing represents the high-water mark of the genre; this is demonstrably untrue, yet Waugh's travel is personal and opinionated, with episodes of high comedy. It is surprising that a man who cared for comfort and high society risked deep discomfort and low company in Africa and South America, but that he was a much hardier, more diligent, and fairer-minded traveler than he let on.

One does not travel, any more than one falls in love, to collect material. It is simply part of one's life. For myself, and many better than I, there is a fascination in distant and barbarous places, and particularly in the borderlands of conflicting cultures and states of development, where ideas, uprooted from their traditions, become oddly changed in transplantation. It is here that I find the experiences vivid enough to demand translation into literary form.

— Ninety-two Days (1934)

***

To have traveled a lot, to have spent, as I have done, the first twelve years of adult life on the move, is to this extent a disadvantage. At the age of thirty-five one needs to go to the moon, or some such place, to recapture the excitement with which one first landed at Calais.

— When the Going Was Good (1947)

***

I do not think I shall ever forget the sight of Etna at sunset; the mountain almost invisible in a blur of pastel grey, glowing on the top and then repeating its shape, as though reflected, in a wisp of grey smoke with the whole horizon behind radiant with pink light, fading gently into a grey pastel sky. Nothing I have seen in Art or Nature was quite so revolting.

— Labels (1930)

***

My own traveling days are over, nor do I expect to see many travel books in the near future. When I was a reviewer, they used, I remember, to appear in batches of four or five a week, cram-full of charm and wit and enlarged Leica snapshots. There is no room for tourists in a world of "displaced persons." Never again, I suppose, shall we land on foreign soil with letter of credit and passport (itself the first faint shadow of the great cloud that envelopes us) and feel the world wide open before us.

— When the Going Was Good

***

When we have been home from abroad for a week or two, and time after time, in answer to our friends' polite inquiries, we have retold our experiences, letting phrase engender phrase, until we have quite made a good story of it all; when the unusual people we have encountered have, in retrospect, become fabulous and fantastic, and all the checks and uncertainties of travel had become very serious dangers; when the minor annoyances assume heroic proportions and have become, at the luncheon-table, barely endurable privations; even before that, when in the later stages of our journey we reread in our diaries the somewhat bald chronicle of the preceding months — how very little attention do we pay, among all these false frights and bogies, to the stark horrors of boredom.

— Remote People (1931)

BLISS IS RARE IN THE TRAVEL NARRATIVE, where the usual theme is hardship and sometimes horror. Our happiness in print in any case always seems boastful and improbable, quite far from the human condition. But now and then the traveler arrives at the Great Good Place, gives thanks for his luck, and shows the reader that the travail which gave the word "travel" its form can result in an epiphany, like Doughty's triple rainbow or Vikram Seth's sight of the Potala Palace. The first traveler is William Bartram, who spent four years among Native Americans in the South and, contradicting all the reports of pugnacity and savagery, found only hospitality, goodwill, and wisdom. He described the people who were later expelled from their native land to travel westward on the Trail of Tears.

The Good Manners of the Muscogulges of the Creek Nation

A [Muscogulge] man goes forth on business or avocations, he calls in at another town, if he wants victuals, rest or social conversation, he confidently approaches the door of the first house he chooses, saying, "I am come." The good man or woman replies, "You are; it's well." Immediately victuals and drink are ready; he eats and drinks a little, then smokes Tobacco, and converses either of private matters, public talks or the news of the town. He rises and says, "I go." The other answers, "You do!" He then proceeds again, and steps in at the next habitation he likes, or repairs to the public square, where are people always conversing by day, or dancing all night, or to some more private assembly, as he likes; he needs no one to introduce him, any more than the black-bird or the thrush, when he repairs to the fruitful groves, to regale on their luxuries, and entertain the fond female with evening songs.

It is astonishing, though a fact, as well as a sharp reproof to the white people, if they will allow themselves liberty to reflect and form a just estimate, and I must own elevates these people to the first rank among mankind.

— William Bartram, Travels Through North and South Carolina (1791)

C. M. Doughty Sees a Triple Rainbow in Arabia

Late in the afternoon there fell great drops from the lowering skies; then a driving rain fell suddenly, shrill and seething, upon the harsh gravel soil, and so heavily that in a few moments all the plain land was a streaming plash…

After half an hour the worst was past, and we mounted again. Little birds, before unseen, flitted cheerfully chittering over the wet wilderness. The low sun looked forth, and then appeared a blissful and surpassing spectacle! A triple rainbow painted in the air before us. Over two equal bows a third was reared upon the feet of the first; and like to it in the order of hues. — These were the celestial arches of the sun's building, a peace in heaven after the battle of the elements in the desert-land of Arabia