The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

9. Travelers Who Never Went Alone

I HAVE ALWAYS TRAVELED ALONE. WITH THE EXception of large-scale expeditions involving a crew or a team, every other kind of travel is diminished by the presence of others. The experience is shared — someone to help, buy tickets, make love to, pour out your heart to, help set up the tent, do the driving, whatever. Although they do not usually say so, many travelers have a companion. Such a person is a consolation, and inevitably a distraction. "Look at that camel in front of the Lexus, honey — hey, it's the old and the new!" ¶ A man who always travels alone, Jonathan Raban, has this to say on the subject: "Traveling with a companion, with a wife, with a girlfriend, always seems to me like birds in a glass dome, those Victorian glass things with stuffed birds inside. You are too much of a self-contained world for the rest of the world to be able to penetrate. You've got to go kind of naked into the world and make yourself vulnerable to it, in a way that you're never going to be sufficiently vulnerable if you're traveling with your nearest and dearest on your arm. You're never going to see anything; you're never going to meet anybody; you're never going to hear anything. Nothing is going to happen to you" (quoted in A Sense of Place, edited by Michael Shapiro, 2004). Raban has enlarged on this in his essay "Why Travel?" in his collection Driving Home (2010): "You are simply not lonely enough when you travel with companions… Spells of acute loneliness are an essential part of travel. Loneliness makes things happen."

Underlining this, Kipling wrote in "The Winners," a poem that serves as an epigraph to "The Story of the Gadsby" (1889):

What the moral? Who rides may read.

When the night is thick and the tracks are blind

A friend at a pinch is a friend, indeed,

But a fool to wait for the laggard behind.

Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne,

He travels the fastest who travels alone.

In an earlier echo of this, Thoreau was succinct on the subject in Walden: "The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready."

None of the following people agreed with this, and even Thoreau, who never traveled alone, did not follow his own advice.

Samuel Johnson and James Boswell

BOSWELL, WHOSE NAME is a byword for an amanuensis, traveled with Dr. Johnson to the Western Isles in the fall of 1773, and both men wrote books about the trip: Johnson's thoughtful Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland appeared in 1774, and Boswell's gossipy Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides in 1785, which, taken together, comprise a lively dialogue between two travelers, an inner and an outer journey. So toward the end of the trip, when his patience is wearing thin, Johnson remarks in his book, "The conversation of the Scots grows every day less unpleasing to the English; their peculiarities wear fast away." Around the same time, Boswell reports in his Journal how, after listening to a Scotsman talk ignorantly about the Church of England, Johnson says, "Sir, you know no more of our church than a Hottentot."

Henry David Thoreau and Friends

HE WALKED ACROSS Cape Cod with William Ellery Channing, who also boated with him down the Concord and Merrimack rivers; he traipsed and paddled through the Maine woods with his cousin George Thatcher and two Indian guides. He went from Concord, Massachusetts, to Staten Island, New York, alone, but then lived with a family there for two months, before becoming homesick and returning to Concord. He spent a week in Canada on a sort of package tour, on a train full of tourists going from Boston to Montreal (recounted in A Yankee in Canada).

And then there is Walden, the last word in solitude. Or is it all theoretical? Thoreau's cabin was only a mile and a half from his house in Concord, where his adoring mother waited, baking pies for him and doing his laundry; and throughout the Walden experience he went home most days. He had two chairs in the cabin, and as he says, he often went with a group of friends to pick huckleberries.

Sir Richard Burton, to Mecca with Mohammed

PART OF BURTON'S disguise to enter Mecca as the robed and bearded Afghan dervish "Mirza Abdullah" was to have an Arab servant and guide. This was the eighteen-year-old Mohammed El-Basyuni, who was headed to Mecca to see his mother. Burton liked his self-confidence, but the young man was watchful too. At the end of the trip Burton recounts that Mohammed suspected Burton might be an unbeliever. "'Now, I understand,' said the boy Mohammed to his fellow-servant, 'your master is a Sahib from India; he hath laughed at our beards.'"

But there might have been another cause for suspicion (so the Burton biographer Mary S. Lovell writes). It was rumored that Burton, instead of squatting, had stood up to pee, something a good Muslim would never do. And it was also rumored, because the argumentative Burton had many enemies, that he had killed Mohammed for knowing his secret.

Though it had not happened, Burton so enjoyed his image as a hell-raiser that he said he had indeed killed his traveling companion. "Oh, yes," he would say. "Why not? Do you suppose one can live in these countries as one lives in Pall Mall and Piccadilly?"

André Gide and His Lover

FOR HIS TEN-MONTH trip through the Congo and Chad in 1925-26, the fifty-six-year-old Gide brought along his twenty-six-year-old lover, Marc Allegret, who had done most of the preparation for the journey. Though they had been lovers for almost ten years, they were anything but monogamous. "Throughout the trip," writes Gide's biographer Alan Sheriden (André Gide, 1999), "sexual companions of both sexes were freely, abundantly available and Marc discovered his penchant for adolescent girls."

Redmond O'Hanlon and His "Small Column"

ONE OF THE greatest talkers, one of the most likeable of men, with a stomach for hard travel and a wonderful ear for dialogue (he is also an alert listener), O'Hanlon is anything but a loner. "Muko, at the head of our small column," he writes of one of the marches described in No Mercy (1996). "Small column" just about sums up the O'Hanlon manner of travel. He is never alone. His is not conventional travel, and hardly solitary, but more in the nature of an expedition, the misery shared by many disillusioned friends, martyrs to companionship.

For the trip recounted in Into the Heart of Borneo (1983) he traveled with the poet James Fenton (the trip was Fenton's idea), and the book profits greatly from Fenton's wit. For his South American trip O'Hanlon asked Fenton whether he wished to go to the Amazon and visit the fierce Yanomami people. In the book itself, In Trouble Again (1988), Fenton is quoted as saying, "I would not come with you to High Wycombe." And so O'Hanlon persuades Simon Stockton, a worldly-wise-guy Englishman who, halfway through the trip, maddened by the heat, the insects, the mud, and the hideous food, throws a wobbly and goes home.

On the No Mercy quest to find a monstrous creature, perhaps a living dinosaur, Mokélé-mbembé, said to haunt a lake in a remote part of the Congolese jungle, O'Hanlon takes an American, Lary Schaefer, who sticks it out for most of the way but finally succumbs and heads home. These departures leave O'Hanlon with the guides and the bearers.

He thrives on conflict, adversity — much of the adversity in the form of insects. He suffers bad bouts of malaria and even a sort of dementia in places, and never fails to anatomize his ailments: "My penis had turned green. To the touch it felt like a hanging cluster of grapes. Swollen tapir ticks as big as the top of a thumb were feeding all down its stem. 'Keep calm,' I repeated out loud, and then I scrabbled at them" (In Trouble Again). And: "Ants, red-brown ants, about a quarter of an inch long, were running in manic bursts down my shirt-front, swinging left and right, conferring with their fellows, climbing over the hairs on my arms… a bagful of ants fastened on my genitals" (No Mercy).

Gusto is O'Hanlon's watchword, though his hearty tone masks a scientific mind, a deep seriousness, and (so he says) a depressive spirit. Perhaps his fear of gloom is another reason why he travels with others. His books are often compared with those of Victorian adventurers, but in fact they are distinctly modern, sometimes hallucinatory, and depending almost entirely for their effect on dialogue. O'Hanlon uses his traveling companions and local guides as foils, for humor, and to extend the narrative.

V. S. Naipaul and His Women

IN THE PROLOGUE to An Area of Darkness, Naipaul mentions difficulties on his arrival in India — paperwork, red tape, and heat — and then says, "My companion fainted." In the U.S. edition of the book, this was changed to "My wife fainted." Patricia Naipaul accompanied him throughout his travels in India, as well as for the three months he was resident in Kashmir, but she is mentioned only that one time. In A Turn in the South, Naipaul's mistress went with him and did all the driving and most of the arranging of hotels, as his biographer reported. This mistress also went with Naipaul on his Among the Believers tour through the Muslim world, though halfway through the Beyond Belief sequel she was replaced by Nadira Khannum Alvi, who later became his wife and uncredited traveling companion.

John McPhee, His Fellow Paddlers, and His Wife

IN SOME OF his travels, McPhee seems to be on his own — in Looking for a Ship (1990) he is the only landlubber on board. But halfway through Coming into the Country, about his travels throughout Alaska, he mentions his "increasing sense of entrapment," and then parenthetically, "(my wife was with me)." The earlier part of the book is full of his traveling companions, four or five of them.

Bruce Chatwin and Friends

CHATWIN, AS HIS letters show, was compulsively gregarious. His apparently solitary travels, for In Patagonia and The Songlines, were often made with a friend or a guide; other trips were made with a male lover or with his wife, Elizabeth. I once mentioned to him that in recounting travel experiences one had to come clean. Chatwin replied with a shrieking laugh, "I don't believe in coming clean!"

Colin McPhee and Jane

IN A House in Bali (1947), his enthusiastic account of living on that island, McPhee is a musicologist bewitched by Balinese music. He builds a house, makes friends, and studies the music. Many of his friends seem to be Balinese boys. In one passage, McPhee is swept into a turbulent stream. He is spotted by some boys onshore:

It was then that I noticed that one of the more boisterous [boys] threw himself into the water, swam to a boulder and jumped over to where I was struggling. He knew by heart every shallow and hollow in the river bed, for he quickly led me ashore… When we reached land, this naked dripping youngster and I stood facing one another. He was perhaps eight, unfed and skimpy, with eyes too large for his face… I offered him a cigarette, but he suddenly took fright and was off into the water before I could say a word.

The boy's name is Sampih. He becomes important to the narrative and to McPhee's life in Bali. McPhee adopts him and mentors him, though he does not mention that the whole time he spent there he was with his wife, Jane Belo, a lesbian, and an anthropologist, the author of a definitive study of hypnotic states in Bali (Trance in Bali), and that it was she who funded his trip.

Eric Newby and Wanda

IN A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, Newby traveled with Hugh Carless. In Slowly Down the Ganges, The Big Red Train Ride, and Through Ireland in Low Gear, he took his wife, Wanda, and in these three books he continually describes her expostulating in her Slovenian accent, "Horrick, vye you are saying zat to me?" But he is often funny and has a sharp eye for detail.

Rudyard Kipling and Carrie

WIDELY TRAVELED, NEVER alone. Known for his jingoism and his bombast, Kipling was, in fact, an enigmatic and melancholy figure. He was marked by his lonely childhood, spent in a cruel household ("the House of Desolation," he called it) in England, away from his parents in India (from the ages of five to eleven; see his story "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep"). He never mentions his wife, Carrie, who was American, a Vermonter, but she was always at his side. Much of his work is based on travel, especially in India, South Africa, and the United States, and his book of travel pieces, From Sea to Sea (1899), is superb.

Graham Greene and Companions

BEGINNING WITH HIS first travel book, Journey Without Maps, his long walk through the hinterland of Liberia, which he took (leaving his wife and children at home) with his cousin Barbara, Greene always had a traveling companion or a driver or a lover on board. He could not cook, drive a car, or use a typewriter, so he was helpless alone. Greene seemed to require the mateyness of another person — his friend Michael Meyer, who traveled with him through the Pacific, or later in his life the priest Father Duran, who appears in Monsignor Quixote. Greene claimed to be manic depressive, sometimes suicidal, and lonely. He had numerous love affairs, many of them passionate. He remained married to the same woman, Vivien Greene, the whole of his life, but never went anywhere with her.

D. H. Lawrence and Frieda

LAWRENCE ALWAYS TRAVELED with his wife, Frieda von Richthofen (her cousin was the Red Baron), beginning with their elopement in 1912, two months after they met (she was then married to Ernest Weekly, a French professor). Although they quarreled constantly, they lived in and traveled through Italy, the United States, Mexico, and Australia — and he wrote books based on his travels in all these places, notably Mornings in Mexico and Sea and Sardinia, sometimes mentioning Frieda, usually not.

Somerset Maugham and Lover

ON HIS LONGEST trips — to China, which yielded On a Chinese Screen, and to Southeast Asia, which resulted in The Gentleman in the Parlour — Maugham traveled with his lover, Gerald Haxton, though he does not disclose the fact, largely because he was married to Syrie, who resented his two-timing her with this young American drunkard, and because at the time he was traveling, the 1920s and 1930s, homosexuality was a crime in Britain. But Maugham had a terrible stammer, and he needed someone to converse with locals and bring back colorful stories and dialogue for his books. "Master Hacky" was just the man to help. Also Maugham loved him deeply. After Haxton died, Maugham traveled with Alan Searle, a greedy young Londoner who had sent him fan letters and became his lover and literary executor.

Rebecca West and Henry

PROBABLY NO TRAVEL book is fuller of the expressions "My husband said…" or "My husband told me…" than Black Lamb and Gray Falcon (1941), Rebecca West's account of her various trips through Yugoslavia, and since it is a book of some 1,200 pages, the words "my husband" appear numerous times. He was a banker, named Henry Andrews, and full of theories and explanations, which she approvingly recounts in the book.

John Steinbeck and Elaine

STEINBECK TRAVELED WITH his dog in Travels with Charley, as he said, but (though he never mentioned them) he had many conjugal visits en route: his wife, Elaine, met him every few weeks on the road to cheer him up. We know this from the letters that were published after his death; for example, on October 10, 1960: "I'm glad you came out and it was a good time, wasn't it? It took the blankness off a lot" (Life in Letters). This "blankness" he speaks of is never disclosed in the jolly book.

Patrick Leigh-Fermor and Friends

AS A YOUNG man he traveled alone, walking across Europe from Holland to Turkey in 1933, a trip he described many years later in two books, A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986). He is justly famous for having written one of the most evocative books about the Caribbean, The Traveler's Tree (1950) (see Chapter 23, "Classics of a Sense of Place"). He makes no bones about traveling in a group, and in fact has a felicitous way of describing this: "My companions, from beginning to end, were two friends: Joan, who's English, and Costa, who is Greek. Both of them, whittled now to shadows, are constantly present in the following pages."

Edward Abbey and Family

A GREAT HERO of loners and wanderers, high-plains drifters and monkey-wrenchers (eco-saboteurs), Abbey, a contradictory soul, craved the company of others, usually fellow boozers. But he had a way of pretending to have been solitary, being selective in the retelling of his experiences. In Desert Solitaire, where he celebrates solitude and his lonely communing with nature in southern Utah, he does not mention that for one five-month period he was living in a trailer with his third wife, Rita, and young son. Whole chapters of the book, such as "The Moon-Eyed Horse," "very likely never happened at all," his biographer, James Cahalan, wrote.

Wilfred Thesiger and Friends

OFTEN THOUGHT OF as the solitary nomad of the Empty Quarter, Thesiger could not bear to be alone. In his Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer, Alexander Maitland writes, "As for Thesiger's pursuit of 'the peace that comes with solitude,' by his own admission he found solitude unbearable. His friend John Verney [a painter] described him as someone who 'hates being left alone for more than a minute. He may travel in remote parts of the world, but always accompanied by a crowd of tribesmen, porters or whatever and has probably spent fewer hours in total solitude than, like most painters, I'm accustomed to spend in a week. By solitude, Thesiger appears to have meant something like the 'clean' space of desert undefiled by modern communications or modern transport, and the harmonious traditional life he found among the tribes who lived there." In later life Thesiger lived with an African family in northern Kenya. They demanded money, cars, and radios, and he paid up, not minding that he was being fleeced as long as they kept him company.

Jean Cocteau, Passepartout, and Charlie Chaplin

PART STUNT, PART challenge by Paris-Soir, but primarily a literary opportunity, Cocteau (1889–1963) claimed that he could travel at least as well as Phileas Fogg and make it around the world in eighty days. He set off in March 1946, accompanied by his lover and part-time secretary Marcel Khill, whom he called Passepartout in the book Mon Premier Voyage (1937). He had met Khill in 1932, when Cocteau was forty-three and Khill twenty (though he looked fifteen, Cocteau said). The book was translated as My Journey Round the World. In an introduction to a new edition, the actor and writer Simon Callow wrote: "[Khill] and Cocteau met at the house of a Toulon naval officer… who had 'discovered' him working on a chain gang; he was dispensing opium, thus uniting in his person two of Cocteau's keenest appetites."

The book, a breathless diary, was dedicated to André Gide. In the course of traveling through Malaya, Cocteau puns in French on the name Kuala Lumpur, calling it "Kuala l'impure," but it is clear that he is too bored, fatigued, and preoccupied to care much about the places he is breezing through, mere glimpses of Egypt, India, Burma, Malaya, and Singapore, with slapdash diary entries.

And then, on a ship from Hong Kong, the tone of the book rises to a new register: "Charlie Chaplin is on board. It is a staggering piece of news. Later on, Chaplin was to say, 'The real function of a person's work is to make it possible for friends like ourselves to cut out preliminaries. We have always known each other.'" Cocteau had never met Chaplin before, but he is dazzled, and after this encounter the book catches fire — not as a travel book but as the account of a new friendship between two stage-struck and bedazzled celebrities, both highly creative and eccentric — and libidinous (Chaplin was traveling with Paulette Goddard). It so happened that Chaplin and Cocteau were exactly the same age, born in 1889 and forty-seven at that point. Chaplin had just made Modern Times, and as a composer (he wrote the song "Smile," for example) he was just as versatile as Cocteau.

They meet often on the ship, drink together, talk often (with Khill translating for Cocteau), appraise Honolulu and San Francisco together, and when Cocteau arrives in Los Angeles, Chaplin puts him in touch with the film world's luminaries, and Cocteau is soon dropping the names King Vidor, Marlene Dietrich, and Gary Cooper. Cocteau won the bet, arriving back in Paris in eighty days. My Journey is a patchy and unsatisfying book, but a glimpse into the hectic life of this ball of fire.

Claude Lévi-Strauss and Wife

AUTHOR OF Tristes Tropiques, one of the great books of travel in the (at the time) hardly known parts of Brazil in the 1930s, Lévi-Strauss studied remote and isolated people. And for 362 pages of this book, one is astonished by his serenity, his resourcefulness, and his capacity to deal with the rigors of jungle travel. And then, on page 363, discussing an infectious eye disease, which caused temporary blindness among the Nambikwara people, he writes, "The disease spread to our group; the first person to catch it was my wife who had taken part in all my expeditions so far." Dina Dreyfus Lévi-Strauss had been with him every step of the way.

Travel Wisdom of Sir Francis Galton

The eminent Victorian Galton (1822–1911) had a consuming interest in everything on earth. His bestseller The Art of Travel (1855) was just one of his many books. A noted scientist ("polymath" is usually attached to his name), he was an inventor, a meteorologist, and an early student of anthropology, psychology, fingerprinting, and human intelligence. His wrote extensively on the subject of heredity, and it is probably his association with the pseudoscience of eugenics (he coined the word) that dimmed his reputation and made him seem a dangerous crank. ¶ As his book shows, Galton was widely read in the travel literature of his time, citing Mungo Park, Livingstone, Burton, Speke, and Samuel Baker on African exploration; Elisha Kane on the Arctic; Leichhardt on Australia; and Dana's Two Years Before the Mast. He mentions his cousin Charles Darwin when discussing the use of animal bones as fuel when firewood is scarce. Along with this extensive reading, in his twenties and early thirties he traveled all over — to Egypt, Turkey, down the Nile, through the Middle East, and just before writing this book, he ranged over what is now Namibia, making maps of the interior. ¶ The Art of Travel is exhaustive on the subject of old-fashioned exploration, and full of tips, such as this: "It is a great mistake to suppose that savages will give their labour or cattle in return for anything that is bright or new: they have their real wants and their fashions as much as we have." The book is also useful as a reference and collection of curiosa, such as how to bivouac on snow and how to patch a water bag. Always scrupulous with details, Galton advises on the best way to roll up shirtsleeves so they won't fall down: "the sleeves must be rolled up inwards, towards the arm, and not the reverse way."

***

Qualifications for a Traveller. — If you have health, a great craving for adventure, at least a moderate fortune, and can set your heart on a definite object, which old travellers do not think impracticable, then — travel by all means. If, in addition to these qualifications, you have scientific taste and knowledge, I believe that no career, in time of peace, can offer to you more advantages than that of a traveller. If you have not independent means, you may still turn travelling to excellent account; for experience shows it often leads to promotion, nay, some men support themselves by travel. They explore pasture land in Australia, they hunt for ivory in Africa, they collect specimens of natural history for sale, or they wander as artists.

***

Powerful men do not necessarily make the most eminent travellers; it is rather those who take the most interest in their work that succeed the best; as a huntsman says, "it is the nose that gives speed to the hound."

Tedious journeys are apt to make companions irritable one to another; but under hard circumstances, a traveller does his duty best who doubles his kindliness of manner to those about him, and takes harsh words gently, and without retort. He should make it a point of duty to do so. It is at those times very superfluous to show too much punctiliousness about keeping up one's dignity, and so forth; since the difficulty lies not in taking up quarrels, but in avoiding them.

***

Advantages of Travel. — It is no slight advantage to a young man, to have the opportunity for distinction which travel affords. If he plans his journey among scenes and places likely to interest the stay-at-home public, he will probably achieve a reputation that might well be envied by wiser men who have not had his opportunities.