The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

8. Fears, Neuroses, and Other Conditions

"MEN WHO GO LOOKING FOR THE SOURCE of a river are merely looking for the source of something missing in themselves, and never finding it," Sir Richard Burton wrote, shrewdly summing up the mental state of the explorer. The great travelers are all sorts, of course. A large number have been depressives or bipolar types capable of serious gloom: Livingstone sulked in his tent for days, Vancouver locked himself in his cabin, Speke shot himself, Scott sometimes wept, Nansen was suicidal and so was Meriwether Lewis. Most suffered from gout. But at their best they are curious, contented, patient, courageous, and paragons of self-sufficiency. Their passion is visiting the unknown.

In the pathology of travel, many journeyers who seem in pursuit of a goal are driven by demons, attempting to flee, often unsuccessfully, some condition of the mind. Burton also said, "Travelers, like poets, are mostly an angry race."

Tobias Smollett is one of the more uproarious travelers, full of opinions and generalizations. I often think that the ill or afflicted traveler sometimes has an advantage, which is summed up by a character speaking in Smollett's comic novel The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker: "People of experience and infirmity, my dear Letty, see with very different eyes from those that such as you and I make use of."

Tobias Smollett: Deep unhappiness, discontent, the epitome of the unhappy traveler. He traveled to the Continent not long after his young daughter died, and his grief shows in his rage. He also suffered from an intestinal disorder, which contributed to his death at the age of fifty.

There is one in every boat train that leaves Victoria, in every liner that leaves New York, in every bar of every hotel all over the world: the unhappy traveler. He is traveling not for pleasure but for pain, not to broaden the mind but, if possible, to narrow it; to release the buried terrors and hatreds of a lifetime; or, if these have already had a good airing at home, to open up colonies of rage abroad. We listen to these martyrs, quarrelling with hotel keepers, insulting cooks, torturing waiters and porters, the scourges of the reserved seat and viragos of the sleeping car. And when they return from their mortifications it is to insult the people and the places they have visited, to fight the battle over the bill or the central heating, again and again, with the zest so sore that we conclude that travel for them is a continuation of domestic misery by other means…

Of these Smollett is the only good example I can think of, and after 180 years, his rage still rings out.

— V. S. Pritchett, Complete Essays (1991)

Lady Hester Stanhope: Merely restless, melancholic, and frustrated before she left England in 1810. But in the Middle East, where she spent the rest of her life, she became a megalomaniac—"I am the Queen of them all" — power hungry, imperious, and with a violent temper. Her boast was that no one could slap a servant's face harder than she.

Francis Parkman: Parkman was a physical wreck, from his earliest expedition, for The Oregon Trail (1849), and increasingly thereafter, in his travels and his writing, suffering nervous ailments, lameness, partial blindness, and severe headaches. This might have contributed to the detachment and pessimism in his historical works.

Richard Henry Dana: His eyesight was so poor that he was unable to attend Harvard and instead went on the voyage that resulted in Two Years Before the Mast (1840).

David Livingstone: A manic depressive obsessed with his bowels. He believed that constipation was the cause of most maladies in tropical Africa — headaches, muscular weakness, distraction, and much else. His advice to a prospective traveler in Africa: "With the change of climate there is often a peculiar condition of the bowels which makes the individual imagine all manner of things in others. Now I earnestly and most respectfully recommend you to try a little aperient medicine occasionally" (quoted in Timothy Holmes, Journey to Livingstone, 1993).

Sir Richard Burton: His explosive temper and pugnacity earned him the nicknames "Ruffian Dick" and "Dirty Dick." He had a morbid aversion to darkness, so his wife, Isabel, said: "He hated darkness so much that he would never have the blind down lest he might lose a glimpse of light from twilight to dawn."

Burton was also seriously lacking in social skills. "The fact was that though undeniably brilliant," his biographer Mary S. Lovell wrote in A Rage to Live, "Richard Burton had a blind spot in his social skills… He either lacked the patience, or he could not be bothered to pretend to like, or work with, people he did not like or respect, no matter what their station or influence. And to these individuals he gave deep offence without hesitation, frequently intentionally."

Captain George Vancouver: Fits of temper and depression, which may have been caused by tuberculosis or a thyroid condition. Prone to a paranoid melancholy, he was ashamed of his humble origins and had to suffer the contempt of snobbish senior officers. In Driving Home, Jonathan Raban convincingly argues that Vancouver "wrote his changing moods into the permanent nomenclature" of the Pacific Northwest coast. After a cheerful period in which he named Discovery Bay and Protection Island, Vancouver fell into "what now appears to have been clinical depression" in the spring of 1792, and saw the landscape as "dreary" and "dismal," and he applied names that reflected his low spirits — for example, the anchorage he named Desolation Sound.

Captain Robert Falcon Scott: Depressive, hypersensitive, lachrymose. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, on the Antarctic expedition, writes in The Worst Journey in the World: "[Scott] was sensitive, femininely sensitive, to a degree which might be considered a fault, and it will be clear that leadership to such a man may be almost a martyrdom… Temperamentally he was a weak man, and might easily have been an irritable autocrat. As it was he had moods and depressions which might last for weeks… He cried more easily than any man I have known."

Fridtjof Nansen: A great skier, Arctic explorer (he made the first crossing of Greenland, led the Fram expedition to the Arctic), oceanographer, zoologist (neuron theory), and diplomat, Nansen was a relentless womanizer and suffered from suicidal melancholia.

Jack London: Alcoholism from an early age (described in his "alcoholic memoir," John Barleycorn), as well as serious physical ailments, kidney disease, gastrointestinal problems, double fistula surgery. London was in pain during much of his travels for Cruise of the Snark and The People of the Abyss, and had frostbite while reporting the Russo-Japanese War. He took morphine and died from a morphine overdose at the age of forty.

William Burroughs: Drug addiction for the whole of his adult life did not stop him from traveling throughout the United States and Mexico, to Europe, Morocco, and elsewhere, including Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, where he searched for the ultimate hallucinogen, ayahuasca, a trip recounted in The Yage Letters.

Graham Greene: Manic depression, a horror of spiders, and an irrational fear of birds.

Dr. Samuel Johnson: Tourette's-like disease, depression, sloth. In Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, the account of a trip on which James Boswell spent three uninterrupted months traveling with Johnson, Boswell wrote, "He had a constitutional melancholy, the clouds of which darkened the brightness of his fancy, and gave a gloomy cast to his whole course of thinking." As for his physical ailments, "His head, and sometimes also his body, shook with a kind of motion like the effect of a palsy: he appeared to be frequently disturbed by cramps, or convulsive contractions, of the nature of that distemper called St. Vitus's dance." Johnson blamed his parents, telling Boswell that "we inherit dispositions from our parents. I inherited (said he) a vile melancholy from my father, which has made me mad all my life, at least not sober."

Henry Morton Stanley: "I was not sent into the world to be happy," Stanley wrote, "I was sent for special work." He succeeded in his exploration, fueled by his inferiority complex, his deep feelings of rejection, his illegitimacy, his masochism and manic attacks. He was tormented by identity confusion, pretending to be American, the son of a wealthy man named Stanley from New Orleans, but in fact he was Welsh, named John Rowlands, a pauper raised in a workhouse in Denbigh. He denied this his whole life, leading him to abandon writing his autobiography.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard: Extreme myopia, clinical depression. Nevertheless, he endured the rigors of the Antarctic for two years, and after serving in battle in World War I wrote his masterpiece, The Worst Journey in the World (1922). Later, he was nagged by the thought that he might have saved the life of Captain Scott, and suffered self-reproach. "It was not till long afterwards that the thought of what he might have done — and the fantasy of what others were thinking and saying about him — became a little cloud on the margin of his mind that grew till it covered his whole sky" (George Seaver, Foreword, Worst Journey, 1965).

William Somerset Maugham: "Maugham was an unhappy child who evolved into a deeply melancholic man, 'violently pessimistic,' as he characterized himself and… in later life suffered frequently from nightmares" (Selina Hastings, The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, 2009).

Gertrude Bell: Depression, despair over her long epistolary dalliance with a married man, a soldier who remained with his wife and died heroically at Gallipoli in 1915. Bell, who had threatened suicide in letters to the soldier, died of an overdose of barbiturates, an apparent suicide, after a series of family tragedies. She was fifty-eight.

Henry James: An almost permanent state of constipation, which drove him from spa to spa in Europe in search of relief throughout his adult life.

Geoffrey Moorhouse: Fear of solitude, empty spaces, and the unknown. He also had agoraphobia, which he sought to conquer in a crossing of the Sahara from west to east, an ordeal he recounted in his book The Fearful Void (see Chapter 10, "Travel as an Ordeal").

Evelyn Waugh: Paranoia and persecution mania on a voyage to Ceylon, which resulted in his novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, an account of a man's paranoia and persecution mania.

Joshua Slocum: Subject to what he himself described as "mental lapses," one of which, when he was sixty-two, was the sexual assault of a twelve-year-old girl in New Jersey in 1906, for which he was arrested. He pleaded "no contest." Rape was not proven; it was assumed he exposed himself to her. After forty-two days in jail, he was released (see Chapter 14, "Travel Feats").

Freya Stark: At the age of thirteen, in a small town in Italy, where she was living with her single mother, her hair was caught in the flywheel of a weaving machine and she was seriously injured — a torn scalp, part of an ear ripped off. "A trauma of this order, both invasive and disfiguring, at an exquisitely vulnerable moment of adolescence, forever shaped her perception of herself. She was never able to overcome a dread that she might not be attractive to the opposite sex," one of her biographers, Jane Fletcher Geniesse, wrote (Passionate Nomad: The Life of Freya Stark). "Her parents' estrangement, her insecure childhood, and the injury that nearly killed her left Freya with a passion to conquer the fears and anxieties that plagued her and drove her to find personal validation through notable achievement." But Jonathan Raban, who traveled with her to the Euphrates in the 1970s, told me, "She had the kind of facial ugliness that eventually ages into monumental grandeur. Her intense egotism was a wonder to behold."

Bronislaw Malinowski: The great pioneering anthropologist in the Trobriand Islands suffered from depression, anxiety, rage, and feelings of rejection. He was seen in his work as objective and wholly focused, and for him the Trobrianders were (as his title depicted them) Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). But in his intimate Diary in the Strict Sense of the Word, published more than forty years later, another Malinowski was revealed. "The natives still irritate me, particularly Ginger, whom I would willingly beat to death," he wrote. "I understand all the German and Belgian atrocities." Or: "Unpleasant clash with Ginger… I was enraged and punched him in the jaw once or twice." Or: "I am in a world of lies here." In his scholarly work he wrote about Trobrianders as great navigators, canoe builders, and gardeners. But he confided in the diary "my dislike of them, my longing for civilization," and "the niggers were noisy… general aversion to niggers."

Edward Lear: As the last of twenty-one children, and raised by his much older sister Ann, Lear hardly knew his parents. He suffered frequent grand mal epileptic seizures from early in his life, frequent melancholia, and a depression he called "the morbids."

Jan Morris: Not a mental condition but a sex change, recounted in Conundrum (1974). James Morris climbed Everest and traveled and wrote about the United States, Oman, South Africa, Venice, Spain, and England. Then, after gender reassignment and surgery in 1972, the newly emergent Jan Morris continued to travel and write, about Wales, Hong Kong, Australia, and the great cities of the world. Rare among travelers, indeed among writers generally, for someone to write and travel as a man and then as a woman. After the operation, I believe her prose style became more breathless and bejeweled.