I read the 1908 abridgment by Edward Garnett, the leading editor of the time. I confess I was not up to 1200 pages of the original travel classic. Because of language like this:
The desert day returning from
the east, warns the Beduin awake, who rises to his prayers; or it may be,
unwitting of the form, he will but murmur toward heaven the supplication of his
fearful human nature and say, "Ah Lord my God!" and, "Oh that
this day may be fortunate; give Thou that we see not the evil!" Of daily
food they have not half enough, and if any head of the cattle be taken! - how
may his household yet live? Bye and bye the herdsman is ready and his beasts
are driven far from his sight. No sweet chittering of birds greets the coming
of the desert life, besides man there is no voice in this waste drought. The
Beduins, that lay down in their cloaks upon the sandy mother-earth in the open
tents, hardly before the middle night, are already up and bestirring
themselves. In every coffee-sheykh's tent there is new fire blown in the
hearth, and he sets on his coffee pots, then snatching a coal in his fingers he
will lay it in his tobacco pipe.
Before I down-shifted, reading much more deliberately
than usual, I found the mannered and sophisticated language nearly
incomprehensible. It took me about 70 or 90 pages to navigate language that
would-be publishers called “hardly intelligible,” “too long and obscure,” and
“must be put into shape by some competent man.” After it was published, baffled
critics damned it as “unreadable.”
Okay, here’s background to one of the strangest books in
our native language. In 1876, at the age of 33, Doughty began his travels in
Arabia. For two years, he wandered the northwest desert, always being candid
that he was a Christian. The refusal to pose as a Muslim must have taken
considerable character, considering the prejudices of the isolated Beduins.
One theme is exploration. Doughty had an interest in
cartography, archeology, epigraphy, geology and hydrography. He collected data
that was later used by T.E. Lawrence and army engineers during the Arab Revolt.
He writes with needless yet endearing upper case letters: “Of surpassing
interest to those many minds, which seek after philosophic knowledge and
instruction, is the Story of the Earth, Her manifold living creatures, the
human generations, and Her ancient rocks.”
Another theme is conflict, of all kinds, at all levels.
Doughty has the sanctimonious opinions that we would expect from a Victorian
traveler. He labels Islam “hostile” and “barbarous.” Sometimes as he criticizes
the Beduw as an outsider, he reveals his Western biases, for instance, against
excessive corporal punishment. Sometimes he scolds irritable, inhospitable
antagonists with criticism from the inside: “It is not meet to treat a
stranger, tired and afflicted, so harshly!” and “We’ve eaten together! How can
you mistreat me so meanly?” But sometimes his criticism is based on lofty
disparagements of the human condition, such as the cutting observation that
even rustics have to have somebody to look down on: “The Fehjies eat the owl:
for which they are laughed to scorn by the Beduw, that are devourers of some
other vermin.”
Doughty’s outbursts of sarcasm, fury and exasperation
with so-called superstition, ignorance and hypocrisy are familiar responses to
readers who have been long-term expatriates. I lived for ten years abroad. I
understand the useless impatience that the foreigner feels when he thinks the
locals are behaving badly. It’s an unreasonable frustration that later makes
the foreigner shrug and smile at himself, mentally apologizing and hoping he
didn’t made too much of an ass of himself.
But then I’ve never been abroad in menacing situations
full of impending violence. In the second year, Doughty was often robbed and
cuffed around. During his stay in Kheybar, where the governor and villagers had
much less tolerance than his Beduw companions, locals roughed him up and
threatened his life. He was sucker-punched. He had knives waved in his face.
During the last encounter with a frenzied bully, he came close to being done in
with a sword. He escaped without grievous injury but a cautious sheriff sent
him to Jedda to be transported out of the country. So, I cut slack for
Doughty’s Euro-centrism, as I imagine that it’s not easy to be tolerant and
magnanimous toward the perps after one has been manhandled like an object.
Because of the emphatic, bombastic, “vaunted Elizabethan”
language, only we reading gluttons – readers who can read anything – need
apply. But it’s worth it for we readers that are seriously into classic travel
writing. After Arabia Deserta, Doughty
left travel writing for poetry. He wrote an epic – it seems too small a
word, epic - six-volume poem about the origins of
his nation. The work The Dawn of
Britain, was called “the worst poetry of the 19th century” by critic William
Blunt. I think I pass on that one.
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