William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

And nobody tried harder than Hemingway himself, as the publication of the posthumous novels reveals. Two hundred thousand words of unusable manuscript is no small price to pay. It is, in a backhanded way, a tribute to Hemingway’s own vanishing instinct as a writer that, even as he created them, he recognized that his fictional efforts were truly moribund and he kept them locked away from public view until his death and the family intervened. And yet, despite all the damaging evidence of the late work and the posthumous novels, Hemingway remains, in my opinion, one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, but his greatness resides almost entirely in his short fiction. His revolutionary short stories, written in the 1920s and 30s, blending tremendous complexity with radically new expression, rank him along with Chekhov, Joyce and Kipling as one of the great masters of the form. Paradoxically, the one service that publication of True at First Light might render is to furnish a metaphor or lasting image for the awful spectre of Hemingway’s decline as a writer. He writes that, “In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon, and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely perfect weed fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain. You have walked across that plain in the morning and you know that no such lake is there.” Hemingway’s real gift — his genius — was true at the first light of his writing career but by noon he was living a lie.

1999

It is 1959, you are a retired brigadier living in Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika. A friend of yours, a colonial officer, has offered to drive you up country to Morogoro. But when your friend arrives he is already accompanied by a stranger: a stout, elderly man named Evelyn Waugh. You have a long day’s journey ahead of you. In his book, published a year later, A Tourist in Africa, Waugh describes you as a man of “imperturbable geniality” and adds of his two travelling companions, “I don’t know if they enjoyed my company. I certainly enjoyed theirs.” I wonder… How one would love to know what the retired brigadier really thought.

I mention this tiny incident because one of the experiences of reading Waugh’s travel writing is that I constantly speculate what it must have been like actually to meet him while he was on the road, as it were. It strikes me that a day in a hot car driving through the African bush with Evelyn Waugh could well qualify as a minor circle of hell. He was not a tolerant or easy man, that much is clear, but he also had a weak grasp of how he himself was perceived. He was genuinely traumatized after a visit to the Caribbean to discover that his hosts thought him “a bore.” I remember once meeting Fitzroy Maclean — and there was little love lost between him and Waugh — and asking him what Waugh had been like when they knew each other during the war. Maclean said, with candour — and no axe to grind, as far as I could tell — that he had never, in his entire military career, met an officer so loathed by the men who served under him.

One of the reasons why one tries to imagine an encounter with Waugh on his trips abroad is that he seemed always to be travelling under duress of one sort or another. And such duress is not conducive to congeniality: there never appears to be any real enthusiasm for the journey or curiosity about the places and people he will discover. You are left with the impression that he was more or less permanently disgruntled, quick to complain, a moan always on his lips, the spectre of terrible boredom forever hovering at his shoulder.

As Nicholas Shakespeare makes clear in his excellent introduction to this omnibus, Waugh’s travel writing was, in the pure sense, hack work. Waugh wrote travel books for the money and, later in life, also undertook assignments to escape the severities of the English winter. Waugh was completely open about this: even in his first volume, Labels, he advertised the ulterior motives of the enterprise, and it is not surprising that his travel writing is redolent of the dutiful task and the looming deadline. It rarely shines.

Mind you, if one was to be honest, one would have to confess that as a genre travel writing — at book length — with a few notable exceptions, makes tedious reading. Shakespeare is all too well aware of Waugh’s shortcomings but makes the valid point that the seven travel books in this collection form a kind of covert autobiography. We receive opinions, discover attitudes and prejudices that are unadulterated by fiction: we are permitted a direct glimpse of the man. And it’s a good point to make, but Waugh, it seems to me, always adopted a mask when he wrote a travel book and the comments and reflections often appear on closer examination to be disingenuous or assumed. I’m not so sure we uncover the truth or learn much more about this difficult and hugely complex man.

I had read all these books before but thought it might be a useful exercise to reread the first and last of his travel writings— Labels (published 1930) and A Tourist in Africa (1960) — to see what differences there were between the young man, recently published and recently married, and the prematurely old, eminent writer, full of cafard and taedium vi-tae, looking at the world with a carefully cultivated jaundiced eye. Labels has always been the most interesting of Waugh’s travel books because it witnessed and was written as his first marriage collapsed. When you know the facts behind the book it appears almost as a fiction: Waugh, the narrator, looks on at himself and his wife Evelyn, thinly disguised as travelling companions, posing as a detached and disinterested observer. Little of the acute misery he was suffering as he wrote it is obviously present, except for the final paragraph, and it has, like all his travel books, an air of hoops being doggedly jumped through. The pages on Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona would challenge the most soporific guidebook.

In A Tourist in Africa Waugh, in his mid fifties, is now playing the part of the choleric, aged author. He can barely bestir himself to make any effort to engage our interest, spending pages, for example, summarizing books he has read on the voyage out to Mombasa. Occasionally you sense his spirits rise such as when, in Dar es Salaam, he comes across a man calling himself Bishop Homer A. Tomlinson, an American madman who was travelling the world crowning himself king of every country he found himself in. For a couple of pages the book turns into pure Waugh: the wholly relished black humour, the refusal to judge or comment, the clinical description of total absurdity. But such occasions are rare.

Even the fabled style slips. Labels is far more garrulous than mature Waugh, almost chatty, which is not surprising given the author’s age. A Tourist in Africa is interesting insofar as it shows the Augustan verities of his writing turning decadent: the matchless prose becoming slack and pompous: “For me a voyage is the time to read about the places for which I am bound and to study the bestsellers of the past year. I got through two books a day and never found myself without something readable.” Clichés (“breakneck speed”) and the use of the same adjective in the same line are sure signs of his lack of energy and interest, not even picked up at proof stage: “Over great areas the tsetse fly keeps man away. The great European settlement,” etc.

Waugh had little respect for his travel writing but Nicholas Shakespeare is right to claim that there are flashes of insight. Talking about Cecil Rhodes, Waugh contrasts the lives of the politician and the artist: the politician “fading into a mist of disappointment and controversy,” the artist “leaving a few objects of permanent value that were not there before him and would not have been there but for him.” This is very close to a personal credo, in fact: this was how Waugh saw himself and is both an exalted and humble definition of what a genuine artist hopes to achieve. Spontaneously addressing a school in Rhodesia he says he has been studying the wonders of the English language for over fifty years and every day still has recourse to a dictionary. There are nuggets of gold in these overworked seams but they are hard to find.