Back to the Classics #7

I read this book for the 2019 Back to the Classics Reading Challenge.

Classic from Africa, Asia, or Oceania. In 1979, I travelled with other college students to Japan on an exchange program that was to give me a course in life. Anyway, we had a multi-hour layover in Honolulu. We were met the by the relatives of one of our group, a Japanese-American guy. They provided a big picnic. I especially remember not only the pineapple (fresh, I discovered, is way better than canned – hey, I was young) but also the cheerful hosts. I’ve always had a fond memory of Hawaiians.

Six Months in the Sandwich Islands – Isabella Bird

This 1875 travel narrative was among the first of Bird's books, her first big project and success after The Englishwoman in America (1856). Based on letters to her sister Henrietta, her stories about her seven-month stay are written in an enthusiastic tone.

A good botanist, Bird was quite taken by lushness of the tropical forest and all its wonderful flora. She writes about flowers and ferns with a sparkle not often found in her other narratives. A good geologist, her stories of visiting volcanos Mount Loa and Mount Kilauea are exciting, even if a little long, as she herself admits. 

She’s also something of an anthropologist of the participant-observer school. Staying with friends at Puna, near the end of the book, she lollygags with friends, saying “I developed a capacity for doing nothing, which horrified me….” In another passages she says of the locals:

But the more I see of them the more impressed I am with their carelessness and love of pleasure, their lack of ambition and a sense of responsibility, and the time which they spend in doing nothing but talking and singing as they bask in the sun, though spasmodically and under excitement they are capable of tremendous exertions in canoeing, surf-riding, and lassoing cattle.

These letters, often in the present tense, give a nice “here and now” feeling to the book.

I’ve spent much time with Miss Bird on the road. See Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1879) and Among the Tibetans (1894). I would recommend those, however, only to readers with a strong or scholarly interest in the countries covered, old-time travel narratives or Victorian lady travelers. But I’d suggest Six Months in the Sandwich Islands to any serious reader into Hawaii or Oceania.

Classic Travel: The Station

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

The Station. Athos: Treasures and Men - Robert Byron

Robert Byron was born in England in 1905 into a family distantly related to Lord Byron. He attended Eton and Merton College, Oxford (left without a degree), and wrote several travel books, the most famous of which, The Road to Oxiana, shows up on many lists of best travel narratives. Byron had strong opinions and didn’t shrink from expressing them: “Isn't Robert simply killing,” wrote Nancy Mitford in a letter; “I love it when he talks about poetry & books, he seems to hate everything which ordinary people like!” 

Travel books were extremely popular between the wars. Every major British author of time released one: Peter Fleming, Aldous Huxley, Rebecca West, Evelyn Waugh, D.H. Lawrence, Graham Greene,  Auden, and Christopher Isherwood, to name only the best-known (see Paul Fussell’s overview of this great genre Abroad). The Station is basically a travel book, written when Byron was only 22 and released in 1928.

Age is key here because this is very much a young guy’s book. He’s passionately lyrical about the scenery so some passages; especially memorable is the ascent to the summit of Mount Athos, crowned by the Church of the Transfiguration.

We might, had we wished, have put out a hand to pluck the sky, have palmed away a cup of blue. For that broad illimitable space was now reality, possessing an interesting and unsuspecting texture. . .

His fervor to convince us non-experts to appreciate Byzantine buildings, decoration and other art is infectious and persuasive though sometimes the non-expert suspects specialists would quarrel with Byron’s assertions.

His language is often mannered, an unchecked fault of a youth bubbling over with knowledge and excitement about his topic. For instance, because his language is so pretentious and affected, he does not clearly explain the simple distinction of Idiorrhythmic and cenobitic monasticism.

He spares no cutting observation on range of topics. His faux outrage is pretty funny.

The food at lunch, though plentiful, was of a nastiness without precedent. Seeing me unable to swallow, Mark asked me why I did not eat the cheese. "Because I don't like it." "But it's delicious - just the same as we have in Scotland, called Crowdy." Thus the barbarians always reason. The veneer which they have acquired in the centres of the world falls off. Without a tremor they conjure up some filthy habit of their native fastnesses. And, not content with the very shame of the revelation, must needs elevate it to a standard for the universe. "Crowdy!" It has always been apparent to thinking people that some frightful custom, some orgiastic rite that would discredit the aborigines of Papua, has attended the childhood of those grim tribes among whom Albert and Victoria, in the guise of "Lord and Lady Churchill," were the Rosita Forbeses of their day. And now it is plain. "Crowdy!" These rancid, fretid curdles that I needs must eat "because we do in Scotland." Scotland? Where is Scotland?

Rosita Forbes was an explorer and travel writer, by the way.

He’s painfully honest and skeptical with people he meets, questioning them closely when they don’t make any sense:

Gripped by a vinous pentecost, I launched into speech: "We bathe every day, Father Stephen. Are there sharks here ?" "Sharks? They abound." "Have you seen them?" "I? No, I haven't seen them. But there are quantities." "But if you haven't seen them, how do you know?" "How do I know? They ate a deacon two hundred and fifty years ago. A lamb was set as a bait; they caught the shark, and there he was inside." Having long arranged, in case of natural and accessible death, to be buried in a mackintosh and manure the garden, I was appalled by this prospect of leaving my vile body, not even digested, in the stomach of a fish. And resolved, in the contemplative silence that followed, never to bathe again.

Waugh’s Vile Bodies came out in 1930 – I wonder if the expression was current then.

And anybody who’s lived overseas will connect with stories of odd requests from the locals. It really is best to be blunt.

A day or two later he began again: "A few years ago a man died here who had a number of English medals." (Greeks frequently obtained them in the war.) "Medals?" I replied, not wholly understanding the word. "Yes, medals," he repeated, drawing imaginary ribbons on his chest. "When you return to England, will you send me some?" "Send you medals? But how, and for what reason?" "Why not? Can't you go to the Foreign Office in London, and have them sent to me?" "But why? You have done nothing." "No, but I will. I will do great things. I love England." "You must do them first. Besides, the Foreign Office does not distribute medals." "The Foreign Office does not distribute medals? Who does?" "The King." "Have you visited the King?" "No. " "I visited our Kings three times." Pause. "But when you get back, you will send me those medals?" "No." Silence. Each gazes at the sea, breathing hard. "What can I do to be famous? I do want to be famous."

Later in the 1930s, as an in-your-face kind of guy with decided enthusiasms, dislikes and prejudices, at dinner parties he’d ask Nazi sympathizers if they were in German pay.

Unlike Evelyn Waugh whooping for Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia, Byron the staunch individualist hated fascism and appeasement. In a letter he wrote “I am going to have Warmonger put on my passport. These people are so grotesque, if we go to war it will be like fighting an enormous zoo.”

During World War II, with his cover as a foreign correspondent for a London newspaper, he was dispatched on an intelligence mission to the Middle East. The ship he was on was torpedoed and sunk off the northwest coast of Scotland. His body was never found.

April Fool’s Day

The Travels of Sir John Mandeville

This strange book has been called the first travel narrative. In fact, scholars believe it to be a compilation of materials from various medieval sources. One acerbic critic said that the farthest point Mandeville reached was the nearest library.

The writer calls himself Sir John Mandeville. He claims to be a knight who traveled the Holy Land and North Africa. He confidently asserts that he advised a sultan and otherwise hobnobbed with the Great Khan. He describes bizarre creatures and weird human animal hybrids.

The reader is a dupe who looks to this short classic for genuine history or geography. The attraction of this book is the writer’s style and wit in stitching together information from various sources as a record of his own journey. With deadpan humor he implies that non-Christians aren’t half bad and that Europe may not have the market cornered in scholarship and civilization. The writer is matter-of-fact as he simultaneously tells stretchers himself and warns us against believing things he hasn’t seen with his own eyes. He’s comically skeptical. He’s engaging.

His hoaxing appeals to us readers who like putting on spouses, siblings, parents and friends. I know of a kid who tied a rubber band around his tongue when he noticed that doing so made his speech sound weird. He then went to his mother, garbling, “Ma, I don’t feel so good, My head hurts.” Thinking he was having a stroke, the mother held the little prankster to her breast, saying “Oh, honey, we’ll get help. Don’t worry.” The poor woman still tells this story on the embarrassed son who has no recall of such an incident. Anyway, if you find pranks like this and tall tales amusing, you the kind of hoaxer and trickster who will like this book.

Read it an edition in modern English, such as the edition published by Penguin Classics, translated by W.R.D. Moseley.

Mount TBR #6

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2016. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

From the Sahara to Samarkand: Selected Travel Writings of Rosita Forbes 1919-1937

Between the wars was the golden age of travel writing. Freya Stark, English travel writer, and Ella Maillart, Swiss journalist, are the two women best-remembered nowadays for their narratives of journeys in the Middle East and Central Asia. Forgotten, however, is Rosita Forbes, but this collection of her best pieces will remedy that.

Forbes wrote for magazines so in plain language she gets across the thrill of accomplishing of difficult feats such as finding the way where roads don’t exist and local guides aren’t used to be 20 miles away from their native village. In the typical English way, she gets through travel ordeals with humor. However, without bragging, she also conveys that overcoming harrowing experiences takes bravery, intelligence, and the stoic’s ability to keep a cool head when faced with situations in the desert that are utterly out of one’s control. The feeling the reader gets from her tales is that she never hesitated even when safety and caution might have been bywords.

Also like other travel writers like Peter Fleming, she carries her knowledge of  geography and history  lightly. She deftly weaves expositions about the local cultures and current events with stories of travel. She has sincere pro-imperialist views and she doesn’t kid herself about objective about, say, the British in Iraq. In fact, she admired anybody that thought and felt independently.

Strongly recommended.

Good Travel Books

1. Paris to the Moon - Adam Gopnik: contemporary and smart and well written but kind of fluffy

2. Eurydice Street: A Place in Athens - Sofka Zinovieff: follows her spouse to live in Greece. Very good more as an expatriate memoir but works as travel too.

3. Irish Journal - Heinrich Boll: early 1950s trip to Emerald isle before it became a destination. Worth reading

4. Journey to the Vanished City - Tudor Parfitt. To southern Africa investigating claims of  Black Jews

5. Looking for the Lost - Alan Booth: Classic accounts of walks in rural Japan in the early 1990s

5. Pagan Holidays - Tony Perrottet: Travels around the Med in footsteps of ancient tourists. Light on the level of a Discovery Channel doc, a big disappointment

6. From Heaven Lake - Vikram Seth: Travel journals so unpolished but a unique trip and it’s nice not to read a UK or US travel writer for once.

7. The Sea and The Jungle - H.M. Tomlinson: Classic between the wars travel writing. Tramp steamer up a river in Brazil Highly literary. Amazing.

8. Colossus of Maroussi - Henry Miller: Class Account of trip to Greece in 1939. Readable only if you like Miller.

9. I Have Seen the World Begin - Carsten Jensen: A Dane travels in SE Asia. Very readable and interesting though some of the anthropology and sociology is dubious.

10. Tracks - Robyn Davidson: doughty Australian woman hoofs in the Australian desert accompanied by four camels. If you like travel writing by women, this is a must.

From Heaven Lake

From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet  - Vikram Seth, 1983

Seth studied in China from 1980 to 1982. As a poor foreign student, he couldn’t afford plane tickets home to Calcutta. During the summer of 1981, he obtained an internal visa to enter Tibet, a rare document in those days. So he hitchhiked his way through Sinkiang and Tibet on his way to visit his family in India. Because he travelled overland by truck and on foot and was able to talk to people that he met on the road in Mandarin Chinese, he had experiences that are well worth reading about. His use of the present tense gives a feeling of immediacy, even 30 years after the trip.

Although he does not include much about the history of Tibetan-Han Chinese relations, he does have informal conversations with Tibetans about this sensitive topic. They tell him terrible stories of destruction of priceless cultural properties during the Cultural Revolution and human rights abuses in the years following that turmoil. It’s really unusual and refreshing to read a travel book by somebody who is not an American, a Briton, or an Australian. Seth speculates as to why India and China are strangers to each other, with the only major influence of one on the other was Buddhism and that was a long time ago.

Whether this is worth reading depends on the purpose of the reader. Readers that are looking for a book that delves into historical or philosophical questions a la Black Lamb and Grey Falcon will be disappointed. But it’s interesting for readers who love to read travel narratives or about Eastern cultures without going into the details of long-winded pedantry.