The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

11. English Travelers on Escaping England

MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN ABOUT ENGLISH travelers. Why so many? Why do they tend to seek out tropical regions, or the Costa del Sol, or anywhere but England? Even a short residence in England is enough to convince anyone that it is the class system that drives the English to places where class doesn't matter (as long as you're a bwana or a sahib). And for those who have status, it is the dreary climate that does the rest, sending the English looking for better weather. Generally, the history of English travel is the history of people in search of sunshine. D. H. Lawrence was unequivocal, and so was Robert Louis Stevenson, but the rest tend not to admit it.

At the beginning of her Travels in West Africa (1897), Mary Kingsley summed up the hypocrisy of such travelers: "If you were to take many of the men [in Africa] who most energetically assert that they wish they were home in England, 'and see if they would ever come to the etc., etc., place again,' and if you were to bring them home, and let them stay there a little while, I am pretty sure that — in the absence of attractions other than those of merely being home in England, notwithstanding its glorious joys of omnibuses, underground railways, and evening newspapers — these same men, in terms varying with individual cases, will be found sneaking back apologetically to the [African] Coast."

Here are seven travelers who made no bones about it.

Lady Hester Stanhope: Toward the end of her life, in her house in Djoun (in present-day Lebanon, where she lived for twenty-three years), she was visited by the English painter William Bartlett, who wrote, "She conducted us to an arbor in the gardens, quite English in appearance. I made this observation, when she replied, 'Oh, don't say so; I hate everything English'" (James C. Simmons, Passionate Pilgrims, 1987).

D. H. Lawrence: From wartime Sussex, April 30, 1915: "How dark my soul is! I stumble and grope and don't get much further. I suppose it must be so. All the beauty and light of the days seems [sic] like a [sic] iridescence on a very black flood… I wish I were going to Thibet — or Kamschatka — or Tahiti — to the Ultima ultima ultima Thule. I feel sometimes, I shall go mad, because there is nowhere to go, no 'new world.' One of these days, unless I watch myself, I shall be departing in some rash fashion, to some foolish place" (Letters, vol. 2, 1913–1916, edited by George Zytaruk and James Boulton, 1981).

T. E. Lawrence: "We export two chief kinds of Englishmen," he wrote in the Introduction to Doughty's Travels in Arabia Deserta,

who in foreign parts divide themselves into two opposed classes. Some feel deeply the influence of native people, and try to adjust themselves to its atmosphere and spirit. To fit themselves modestly into the picture they suppress all in them that would be discordant with local habits and colours. They imitate the native, and so avoid friction in their daily life. However, they cannot avoid the consequences of imitation, a hollow, worthless thing. They are like the people but not of the people, and their half-perceptible differences give them a sham influence often greater than their merit. They urge the people among whom they live into strange, unnatural courses by imitating them so well that they are imitated back again.

The other class of Englishmen is the larger class. In the same circumstances of exile they reinforce their character by memories of the life they have left. In reaction against foreign surroundings they take refuge in the England that was theirs. They assert their aloofness, their immunity, the more vividly for their loneliness and weakness. They impress the peoples among whom they live by reaction, by giving them an ensample of the complete Englishman, the foreigner intact.

Doughty is a great member of the second, the cleaner class.

And T. E. Lawrence was a member of the first, the gone-native class.

W. Somerset Maugham: "To me England has been a country where I had obligations that I did not want to fulfill and responsibilities that irked me. I have never felt entirely myself till I had put at least the Channel between my native country and me" (The Summing Up, 1938).

W. H. Auden: "England is terribly provincial — it's all this family business. I know exactly why Guy Burgess went to Moscow. It wasn't enough to be queer and a drunk. He had to revolt still more to break away from it all. That's just what I've done by becoming an American citizen… I also find criticism in England very provincial. In the literary world in England, you have to know who's married to whom, and who's slept with whom and who hasn't. It's a tiny jungle. America's so much larger. Critics may live in New York, but the writers don't" (quoted in Charles Osborne, W. H. Auden, 1980).

GeraldBrenan: "It will naturally be asked how I came to make my home in such a remote spot" — the tiny village of Yegen, in the Sierra Nevada of Andalusia, Spain, in 1920. "The shortest explanation would be that I was rebelling against English middle-class life… The England I knew was petrified by class feeling and by rigid conventions, as well as, in my case, poisoned by memories of my public school, so that as soon as the war was over and I was out of uniform I set off to discover new and more breathable atmospheres" (South from Granada, 1957).

Bruce Chatwin: "I've decided to leave England. As Richard Burton said: 'The only country in which I do not feel at home'" (Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin, edited by Elizabeth Chatwin and Nicholas Shakespeare, 2010).