The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

21. Writers and the Places They Never Visited

FOR A WRITER TO DESCRIBE A PLACE HE OR SHE has not bothered to visit is not only self-deluded but deeply insulting to the people living there and to those travelers who actually troubled to go there. Laziness, indifference, contempt, fear of the place, fear of travel, fear of being disillusioned, and the novelist's natural instinct to fantasize — all are factors in the decision of a writer to stay home and invent the exotic, as Saul Bellow did, conjuring up an Africa he had never seen while sitting in his book-lined study in Tivoli, New York, without ever having to swat a tsetse fly. Even so, you know a writer's mind, and especially his or her fantasies, from the fiction. You know what they think of themselves, and other people, and of the world.

The results of such leaps of imagination can be odd, and bad karma seems to blight the fiction of faked countries, because none of these works has remained popular or widely read. Kipling's imagined Mandalay is an exception, and seems to have displaced the real city. The writers cooking up a country tend to overdo it: look no further than Bellow's Henderson the Rain King or the Tarzan novels. Joseph Conrad, who piloted a river steamer up the Congo River, and afterward wrote Heart of Darkness, about a man piloting a river steamer up the Congo River, is subtle, understated, and powerful.

David Livingstone claimed to have been the first to put Lake Nyasa on the map in 1859, but this was accomplished in 1846 by a Portuguese trader, Candido de Costa Cardoso. In the search for the source of the Nile, the Welsh explorer John Petherick (1813–1882) produced a map of Bahr-el-Ghazal in 1858 and described his travels in his Egypt, the Soudan, and Central Africa three years later. But his fellow explorer John Speke publicly disputed the map and the book, claiming that Petherick had lied about his travels, had not been that far south or west, and had concocted both the map and the trip from hearsay. The Nile explorer Samuel Baker wrote in his diary, "Petherick's pretended journey published in England was entire fiction… Petherick is a gross impostor."

Even the traveler, looking closely, often gets things wrong. Richard Henry Dana's Hawaiians in Two Years Before the Mast (1840), after months of sailing, mistook the island of Nantucket for the whole of the United States, because it was all they saw: the mainland is not visible from the island.

Here is another instance of travelers' ignorance, from Mary Kingsley's Travels in West Africa (1897). She writes, "Watch again a gang of natives trying to get a log of timber down into the river from the bank… No idea of a lever, or anything of that sort — and remember that, unless under white supervision, the African has never made an even fourteenth-rate piece of cloth or pottery, or a machine, tool, picture, sculpture, and that he has never even risen to the level of picture-writing."

Never mind the masterpieces of Benin bronzes, the magnificent carvings of the Chokwe people, whom she would have known from her travels in Angola. A little research would have revealed the Amharic script of Abyssinia, two thousand years of Nok sculpture, the immense variety of African pottery, or ancient examples of terracotta statuary. Yet she seems not to have taken any notice even in the places she claimed to know well: Gabon with its Punu and Fang masks and carvings, or the masterpieces of carving — Bamileke and others, and indeed elaborate pots — from Cameroon.

Yet I am fascinated by imaginary landscapes, what Dr. Johnson called "romantick absurdities and incredible fictions," that are retailed as the real thing, especially landscapes I have seen. I do not recognize the fictional Africas, and Kafka's America is one of the weirdest countries of all. As for the outrageous George Psalmanazar — he fooled almost every reader (except Jonathan Swift) in early-eighteenth-century England with his book about Formosa.

George Psalmanazar's Travels in Formosa

THE AMAZING THING about this impostor of travel was the completeness and credibility of his book. Drawing on Dutch accounts, and fantasizing, he created a whole Formosan landscape and culture and made up an entire language of gobbledygook that even years later was taken by some scholars to be an actual Asiatic tongue. The book, published in London in 1704, was a huge success.

George Psalmanazar (or Psalmanaazaar) also managed to conceal his real identity under this outlandish name (perhaps a version of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser in 2 Kings): his birth name and birthplace are unknown. He was probably French, and he may have been born around 1689. For a while he claimed to be an Irish pilgrim. He also at various times said he was Japanese or Formosan. He claimed to worship the sun and the moon, and he slept sitting upright in a chair ("Formosan-style" he said), but he was more than the lovable eccentric who was later befriended by Dr. Johnson. "A great lover of penitents," Jeffrey Meyers writes in his biography Samuel Johnson: The Struggle, "Johnson reverenced Psalmanazar, who'd confessed his sins, reformed his character and become pious, endured prolonged hardship and — though an opium addict — died an exemplary Christian." But in his travel book, Psalmanazar played upon the anti-Jesuit animus current in the early eighteenth century; disparagements of Catholic missionaries are frequent in his book, something that would have found favor with the predominantly Catholic-hating English.

"The prevailing Reason for this my Undertaking was," he writes, "because the Jesuits I had found had imposed so many Stories, and such Gross Fallacies upon the Public, that they might the better excuse themselves from those base Actions, which brought upon them that fierce Persecution in Japan." The Japanese persecution of Catholics in the 1630s was a historical fact that was given a fictional retelling in Shusako Endo's 1966 masterpiece, Silence.

Psalmanazar's book is in two parts, the first, "An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, Giving an account of the Religion, Customs, & of the Inhabitants, Together with a Relation of what happen'd to the Author in his Travels; particularly his Conferences with the Jesuits, and others, in several Parts of Europe. Also the History and Reasons of his Conversion to Christianity, with his Objections against it (in defence of Paganism) and their Answers." The second part relates his travels: "An Account of the Travels of Mr. George Psalmanaazaar, a Native of the Isle Formosa, thro' several parts of Europe; with the reasons of his Conversion to the Christian Religion."

Discourses on religion aside, the book is highly readable, both for its narrative of abduction and its delineation of a colorful culture. George is taken, under protest, by Jesuits from his native land. He travels to the Philippines, then to Goa, then Gibraltar, where "very much indisposed by the change of Climates, Air and Diet," he needs to recuperate. Then on to Toulon, Marseille, and into Catholic Avignon and Lutheran Bonn and Calvinist Holland, where he becomes embroiled in theological arguments. He is ultimately converted to Christianity, becoming "a most faithful Member of the Church of England."

Having established his loyalty to his adopted country and rulers (William III, who ruled until 1702, when Queen Anne succeeded him), ingratiating himself with readers, he goes on to describe the island of Formosa, with occasional allusions to Japan. This country is "one of the most Pleasant and Excellent of the Asiatic Isles, whether we consider the convenient Situation, the healthful Air, the fruitful Soil, or the curious Springs and useful Rivers, and rich Mines of Gold and Silver wherewith it abounds."

He chronicles the history, the monarchy, how the island was invaded by the emperor of Tartary and subdued, the arrival of the Dutch and the English traders, mayhem, mutinies, government, the more colorful of the laws. "Every man may have as many Wives, as his estate is able to maintain," he says, because children are highly valued. Adultery is severely punished; a man may lawfully kill his wife if she is unfaithful. "But this Law does not extend to Foreigners, to whom the Natives are wont to offer Virgins or Whores, to be made use of at their Pleasure, with Impunity."

No mention is made of Buddhism, which flourished in Formosa except for the forty years when the Dutch tried to sideline it. Psalmanazar explains Formosan religion as sun and moon worship, and "idolatry" that requires the sacrifice of oxen, rams, and goats. If "their God is not appeased by other Sacrifices," infants are killed — their hearts cut out and burned in the thousands. Meticulous illustrations are included in the book, showing where these human sacrifices are performed, where priests cut babies' throats "and pluck out their Hearts."

Because nothing seems to be excluded, the book has a convincing verisimilitude: superstitions, diseases, weapons, musical instruments, and the food of the islanders — roots that they make into bread, fruit, pigs, and "they eat serpents also." Formosans are not allowed to eat pigeons or turtles. They breed "Elephants, Rhinocerots [sic], Camels" to use as beasts of burden; and for their amusement, "Sea-Horses." In the countryside there are "Lyons, Boars, Wolves, Leopards, Apes, Tygers, Crocodiles."

Not everyone was taken in by George Psalmanazar's hoax. He was mocked even in his own time (he died in 1763), but the book remained popular, perhaps for the reason that travel books have always been popular, because the traveler (like Psalmanazar) claims to be an eyewitness to amazing sights. And the very barbarities in the book's details seemed to prove that it was a truthful account of a distant land.

Poe's Believable Landscapes

EDGAR ALLAN POE'S life was short, and not a traveling one, yet his fiction is full of foreign landscapes, among them believable Paris, Switzerland, Holland, and Norway, as well as nameless gothic moorlands, and even unearthly ones, such as the cold regions at the end of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. I read Poe as a teenager and was transported from my humdrum existence to his world of horror and mystery and freakishness.

Poe was born in Boston in 1809 to parents who were actors. His father had disappeared and his mother was dead by the time he was two years old. Adopted by the Allan family, from whom he got his middle name, he was taken abroad, and before he turned eleven he had seen Scotland and England. But after 1820 he merely shuttled from one American city to another — New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Richmond; and he was dead at forty. High-strung, quarrelsome, competitive, and alcoholic, Poe had an intensity and a belief in his own genius, which compelled his creation of real and imaginary worlds.

The gothic attracted him, as it attracts many, for its brooding landscape of crags and castles, haunted palaces, its "sense of insufferable gloom" and "shadowy fancies" ("The Fall of the House of Usher"), of moorland and howling wolves, plagues such as "the Red Death," crypts and catacombs ("A Cask of Amontillado"), and "gloomy gray hereditary halls" ("Berenice").

The gothic memory in "William Wilson" is emblematic: "My earliest recollections of a school-life, are connected with a large, rambling, Elizabethan house, in a misty-looking village of England, where were a vast number of gigantic and gnarled trees, and where all the houses were excessively ancient."

Or the lugubrious opening of "The Fall of the House of Usher": "During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher."

In his detective fiction, macabre stories, and even his early science fiction, Poe shows himself to be a reader of travel, history, and the arcane — the Red Death, the Spanish Inquisition ("the horrors at Toledo"), the devil in the belfry in the Dutch borough of Vondervotteimittiss; "The Assignation" takes place in a believable Venice.

Now and then there's a serious geographical lapse, as in "Silence — A Fable," which takes place in a "dreary region in Libya, by the borders of the river Zaire… yellow ghastly river… hippopotami." Elsewhere, his work is distinguished by its exactitude. Poe had never been to France, yet the French loved Poe in Baudelaire's translations. Detective Auguste Dupin appeared in "The Purloined Letter," "The Mystery of Marie Roget," and also in "Murders in the Rue Morgue," where he is here, walking with the narrator in Paris, part of a paragraph that is convincing in its precision:

You kept your eyes upon the ground — glancing, with a petulant expression, at the holes and ruts in the pavement (so that I saw you were still thinking of the stones), until we reached the little alley called Lamartine, which has been paved, by way of experiment, with the overlapping and riveted blocks. Here your countenance brightened up, and, perceiving your lips move, I could not doubt that you murmured the word "stereotomy," a term very affectedly applied to this species of pavement.

Some corpses are found to be horribly mutilated, and this leads to the Rue Morgue, "one of those miserable thoroughfares which intervene between the Rue Richelieu and the Rue St. Roch." It turns out that the murderer is an enraged orangutan with a razor, but Poe knows (as some other authors do not) that orangutans come from Borneo.

The opening of his terrifying story "The Descent into the Maelstrom" is Poe's most impressive fictional representation of an actual landscape:

"We are now," [the old man] continued, in that particularizing manner which distinguished him—"we are now close upon the Norwegian coast — iwn the sixty-eighth degree of latitude — in the great province of Nordland — and in the dreary district of Lofoden. The mountain upon whose top we sit is Helseggen, the Cloudy. Now raise yourself up a little higher — hold on to the grass if you feel giddy — so — and look out, beyond the belt of vapor beneath us, into the sea."

I looked dizzily, and beheld a wide expanse of ocean, whose waters wore so inky a hue as to bring at once to my mind the Nubian geographer's account of the Mare Tenebrarum. A panorama more deplorably desolate no human imagination can conceive. To the right and left, as far as the eye could reach, there lay outstretched, like ramparts of the world, lines of horridly black and beetling cliff, whose character of gloom was but the more forcibly illustrated by the surf which reared high up against it, its white and ghastly crest, howling and shrieking for ever. Just opposite the promontory upon whose apex we were placed, and at a distance of some five or six miles out at sea, there was visible a small, bleak-looking island; or, more properly, its position was discernible through the wilderness of surge in which it was enveloped. About two miles nearer the land, arose another of smaller size, hideously craggy and barren, and encompassed at various intervals by a cluster of dark rocks.

The appearance of the ocean, in the space between the more distant island and the shore, had something very unusual about it. Although, at the time, so strong a gale was blowing landward that a brig in the remote offing lay to under a double-reefed trysail, and constantly plunged her whole hull out of sight, still there was here nothing like a regular swell, but only a short, quick, angry cross dashing of water in every direction — as well in the teeth of the wind as otherwise. Of foam there was little except in the immediate vicinity of the rocks.

This goes on for many more pages, with the revelation of the maelstrom, showing that Poe, a man who had hardly been anywhere — and certainly nowhere like this — was able to create a credible landscape out of his reading and his imagination.

Thomas Janvier, In the Sargasso Sea

JANVIER, WHO IS forgotten now, was born in 1849, educated in Philadelphia, lived in New York City, and traveled in Europe and Mexico. He wrote biography, history, and travel; he published a guidebook about Mexico and short stories set in France; and with one exception he wrote directly from experience, describing places he'd been — Provence and Mexico.

In the Sargasso Sea (1898) was recommended to me by the humorist S. J. Perelman, who told me that this depiction of a man struggling on a sea of weeds was like a version of living and writing in Hollywood. Perelman might have been introduced to the book by his friend Nathanael West, who mentions Janvier in his powerful Hollywood novel, The Day of the Locust. Todd, West's main character, gets a glimpse of the place where movie sets are disposed of.

He left the road and climbed across the spine of the hill to look down on the other side. From there he could see a ten-acre field of cockleburs, spotted with clumps of sunflowers and wild gum. In the center of the field was a gigantic pile of nets, flats and props. While he watched, a ten ton truck added another load to it. This was the final dumping ground. He thought of Janvier's "Sargasso Sea." Just as that imaginary body of water was a history of civilization in the form of a marine junkyard, the studio lot was one in the form of a dream dump.

The Sargasso Sea actually exists. It was first seen by Columbus, and described by Jules Verne (the Nautilus motored through it in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea). As a convergence of ocean currents, it is an elliptical "free-floating meadow of seaweed almost as large as a continent" (Encyclopedia Britannica), rotating slowly clockwise. Because it is adjacent to Bermuda it is part of the mystery associated with the Bermuda Triangle. A breeding place for eels, this sea within a sea is bordered by the Gulf Stream on the west. Its name is from the profusion of brown floating gulfweed (genus Sargassum) visible on its surface.

It was thought, mistakenly, that the Sargasso Sea trapped ships, and contributing to the vivid ship-swallowing myth, this is the conceit that Janvier uses to great effect in his novel.

I had come out from the wheel-house and was standing on the steamer's bridge — which rose right out of the water so that I looked down from it directly on the weed-laden sea. As far as my sight would carry through the soft golden haze I saw only weed-covered water, broken here and there by a bit of wreckage or by a little open space on which the pale sunshine gleamed. A very gentle swell was running, giving to the ocean the look of some strange sort of meadow with tall grass swaying evenly in an easy wind… So far as the world was concerned I was dead already — being fairly caught in the slow eddying current which was carrying my hulk steadily and hopelessly into the dense wreck-filled centre of the Sargasso Sea.

And later:

I had before me what I think must be the strangest sight that the world has in it for the eyes of man. For what I looked at was the host of wrecked ships, the dross of wave and tempest, which through four centuries — from the time when sailors first pushed out upon the great western ocean — has been gathering slowly, and still more slowly wasting, in the central fastnesses of the Sargasso Sea.

Janvier, a traveler, was widely read in his time, which was just a century ago. On his death, the appreciative New York Times obituary praised Janvier for his "suave irony, gentle aloofness," and went on, "His varied books of travel had the same combination of qualities — keen and close observation, with a curious sympathy of understanding and vividness of presentation."

Edgar Rice Burroughs: "I Can Write Better About Places I've Never Seen"

MANY PEOPLE, OF whom I am one, formed their first notions of Africa from the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, specifically the Tarzan books — and films and illustrated comics. Even knowing this was fantasy adventure, readers, young ones especially, felt an incomparable thrill. Burroughs never set foot in Africa, though he knew something about roughing it — he'd been a cowboy, a soldier in the Seventh Cavalry, and a gold miner in Idaho.

He was one of those American writers who was so full of speculative schemes (Twain was another) that they worked their way into his fiction. Burroughs had been a poor student, a failed businessman, and somewhat desperate as a writer when, at the age of thirty-six, he published Tarzan of the Apes as a serial in All-Story magazine. He'd been fascinated by the ethnographic exhibits (native dances, grass skirts, African warriors) and zoo animals he'd seen in Chicago at the World's Columbian Exhibition in 1893. He'd read Burton and Stanley on Africa, as well as H. Rider Haggard adventures and Kipling's Jungle Book. He was asked many times how he came up with the idea of Tarzan. He claimed he didn't know (though Tarzan's upbringing can be compared with Mowgli's in Kipling, and Kipling mentions Tarzan approvingly in his own autobiography, Something of Myself), but said that the character helped him escape from the humdrum life he was leading. "My mind, in relaxation, preferred to roam in scenes and situations I'd never known. I find that I can write better about places I've never seen than those I have."

In Tarzan of the Apes (1914), Tarzan is John Clayton, the son of Lord Greystoke, whose wife has died while living in a remote cabin in West Africa. The female ape Kala, grieving for her own dead baby, kills Lord Greystoke and abducts young Clayton, whom she calls Tarzan ("white skin" in ape language), raising him as her own. Jane Porter, another castaway, also turns up in this first novel, along with a cast of sinister opportunists. Tarzan is not sure who he is, but his skills and his strength have made him Lord of the Jungle. The book was such a hit with readers that a year later he wrote The Return of Tarzan (featuring his marriage to Jane), and altogether twenty-five Tarzan books, other stories with an African setting, as well as a number of westerns and works of science fiction.

After a prolific career as a writer of adventure stories, quite wealthy, living in Hawaii and feeling neglected, Burroughs, at the age of sixty-six, witnessed the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He immediately signed up as a war correspondent and traveled throughout the Pacific. He remained in Hawaii until the end of the war.

It is obvious that as he continued to write the Tarzan books he mugged up on Africa. The setting for the Tarzan stories appears to be the Gabon of Du Chaillu's Exploration and Adventures in Equatorial Africa. He would have found Swahili in Burton, since Tarzan's Waziri people use accurate Swahili words, such as Mulungu for God, askari for soldier, and shifta for bandit. Tarzan becomes their chief after their own chief dies battling Arab slave traders. A lovely African girl in Tarzan: The Lost Adventure is named Nyama. This is the Swahili word for meat, as well as a generic word for game (and a slang word in East Africa for a low woman). But in all the books Africans are primitive (Tarzan usually mocks them) and not to be compared with the apes, Tarzan's real family. Civilized man is worse than any other—"more brutal than the brutes." The great apes, the Mangani, who are Tarzan's extended family, have a whole language to themselves, which Burroughs invented or contrived from travel book glossaries. One can easily see that Tarzan is the creation of an armchair traveler, a devourer of travel books.

Saul Bellow's Fairly Serious Fooling

BELLOW HAD NOT seen Africa before he wrote Henderson the Rain King (1959), his novel about the larger-than-life Eugene Henderson — war hero, pig farmer, ranter. Very tall and very strong and highly ingenious, Henderson describes himself as "a millionaire wanderer and wayfarer," and he adds, "A brutal and violent man driven into the world… A fellow whose heart said, I want, I want."

This novel, Bellow's favorite, is his weakest, and perhaps because of that, his most revealing: slack writing is full of disclosure.

Bellow, henpecked, exasperated, in need of imaginative relief, felt cornered in an unhappy marriage when he conceived and wrote the book. The African setting, the freedom of Henderson to roam and rant, the transformation that fiction writing allows, were probably a consolation to Bellow. If he couldn't go to Africa and leave his miseries behind, at least he could fantasize about such an escape.

"I am just a traveler," Henderson says to King Dahfu. But to Chief Itelo he said, "Your Highness, I am really kind of on a quest." It seems to me that this is the crux of the matter: Bellow cannot imagine an Africa that is not full of marvels, odd customs, harems, wrestling matches, lion hunts, and the mystical rain ceremony that elevates Henderson to kingship among the Wariri, in the same way that Tarzan is elevated to chief of the similar-sounding Waziri in The Return of Tarzan.

In the imagined world of the nontraveling fiction writer there is usually a convergence of the grotesque and the stereotypical. A comparison of Henderson with Tarzan is not out of place. The difference is that Burroughs admitted he was writing pulp fiction, while the highly intelligent Bellow, self-conscious in this role as fabulist, often plays it for laughs. This novel — strained comedy, occasional farce, and sometimes outright clowning — is unconvincing to anyone who has lived in an African village, yet when Bellow won the Nobel Prize, Henderson was commended as his "most imaginative expedition."

Burton's First Footsteps in East Africa is invoked by Henderson. But the antiquated nature of the travel and Bellow's invented tribes make me think that (like Edgar Rice Burroughs) he was influenced more by Paul Du Chaillu's 1861 Exploration and Adventures in Equatorial Africa, in which Du Chaillu, an American of French descent, was made a king of the Apingi tribe in Gabon.

Du Chaillu wrote, "Remandji said, 'You are the spirit, whom we have never seen before. We are but poor people when we see you. You are of those whom we have often heard of, who come from nobody knows where, and whom we never hoped to see. You are our king and ruler; stay with us always. We love you and will do what you wish.' Whereupon ensued shouts and rejoicings; palm wine was introduced, and a general jollification took place, in the orthodox fashion at coronations. From this day, therefore, I may call myself Du Chaillu the First, King of the Apingi."

Henderson becomes the Rain King in a similar fashion. Challenged by an interviewer about the reality in his novel, Bellow replied, "Years ago, I studied African ethnography with the late Professor Herskovits. Later he scolded me for writing a book like Henderson. He said the subject was much too serious for such fooling. I felt that my fooling was fairly serious. Literalism, factualism, will smother the imagination altogether."

This seems to me a delusion on Bellow's part, yet another delusion of the nontraveling writer.

Arthur Waley: Not Madly Singing in the Mountains

DESPITE PUBLISHING MORE than twenty volumes of his translations from Chinese and Japanese, including The Way and the Power, Tao Te Ching, The Analects of Confucius, and Murasaki's Tale of Genji, Waley never traveled to China or Japan.

Waley claimed that he didn't want to risk being disappointed by seeing the real places so bewitchingly described in poetry and prose. Was this so? The Yale Sinologist Jonathan Spence wrote in the journal Renditions, "One can make all kinds of guesses concerning Waley's reasons for not going to Asia: that he didn't want to confuse the ideal with the real, or that he was interested in the ancient written languages and not the modern spoken ones, or that he simply could not afford the journey. Certainly we are safe in assuming that the trip would have been disconcerting."

Modern China would surely have disconcerted him. Waley was happier in his imagined Tang Dynasty. Here is one of his great translations, and a wonderful affirmation of nature, from the Tang poet Po Chu-i:

Madly Singing in the Mountains

There is no one among men that has not a special failing:

And my failing consists in writing verses.

I have broken away from the thousand ties of life:

But this infirmity still remains behind.

Each time that I look at a fine landscape,

Each time that I meet a loved friend,

I raise my voice and recite a stanza of poetry

And am glad as though a God had crossed my path.

Ever since the day I was banished to Hsun-yang

Half my time I have lived among hills.

And often, when I have finished a new poem,

Alone I climb the road to the Eastern Rock.

I lean my body on the banks of white stone:

I pull down with my hands a green cassia branch.

My mad singing startles the valleys and hills:

The apes and birds all come to peep.

Fearing to become a laughing-stock to the world,

I choose a place that is unfrequented by men.

V. S. Pritchett: A Lot of Verisimilitude, and a Howler

PRITCHETT WROTE DEAD Man Leading, a novel set in Brazil, in 1937, years before he finally traveled there. The novel describes the quest of some explorers who have been lost in the jungle. Pritchett said that he was inspired by the Fawcett expedition of 1925, which vanished (probably massacred) while searching for a lost city deep in the Mato Grosso.

One of the reasons Pritchett's book is persuasive is that he makes imagery so familiar. He speaks of the brown of a Brazilian river resembling strong tea, and a sky like a huge blue house; the forest is faint, like "a distant fence," and the jungle at another point is bedraggled and broken, "as if a lorry had crashed into it." There is a creek "like a sewage ditch" and a bad rainstorm making "the intolerable whine of machines" and a forest odor 'like the smell of spirits gone sour on the breath."

Much later, after he made a visit to Brazil, Pritchett concluded that he had invented the truth. But not entirely. One of the howlers in the book is the mention of "the gulping Lear-like laugh" of an orangutan. There are no orangutans in Brazil. They are found ten thousand miles away, in Borneo, and in any case they seldom make a sound.

A Truly Kafkaesque America

FRANZ KAFKA CANNOT be held accountable for the title of his novel Amerika. Left unfinished, it was published after his death by his friend and literary executor, Max Brod, who gave it this name. Kafka usually referred to it as Der Verschollene (The Missing Person or The Man Who Disappeared). The man in question went to America.

Though Kafka never got farther west from his home in Prague than France, in his letters to Brod he fantasized about traveling to distant places, among them South America, Spain, and the Azores. In affectionate letters he asked two women at the periphery of his life, Felice Bauer and Dora Diamant, to travel with him to Palestine, where he dreamed of abandoning writing, getting healthy, and landing a job as a waiter. This waiter fantasy occurred in 1923, the year before he died. Claiming that he suffered from "travel anxiety" (Reiseangst), Kafka did not go to any far-off places. His real fear was that by traveling — being away from his room, his desk, his books — he would put an end to his writing. His invented America is based on his reading, and he was said to have been influenced by Amerika Heute und Morgan (America Today and Tomorrow), by an itinerant Hungarian, Arthur Holitscher, who had traveled around the United States as a skeptical tourist. In this book, as in Kafka's Amerika, the misspelled name "Oklahama" occurs often.

The fictional result is surreal. In the first sonorous paragraph, the hero, Karl Rossmann, sails into New York harbor and sees the Statue of Liberty, "as if in a burst of sunlight. The arm with the sword now reached aloft, and about her figure blew the free winds." The sword instead of the torch is perhaps deliberate.

After the shock of a chaotic, unrecognizable New York City and an interlude with his uncle Edward Jakob, Karl spends some time with a wealthy Mr. Poll under at a labyrinthine mansion outside the city. Not much countryside is described, yet we don't expect daffodils and shady glens from Kafka. We expect anxiety dreams, and predictably the narrative becomes like an anxiety dream, even to Uncle Jakob's suddenly sending Karl away, for no apparent reason. Karl looks for a job, hooks up with two tramps, and hits the road. Just outside the city they look back and see a bridge: "The bridge connecting New York to Boston hung delicately over the Hudson and trembled if one narrowed one's eyes. It appeared to bear no traffic, and a long smooth lifeless strip of water stretched underneath."

Karl becomes an elevator operator at the Occidental Hotel, in a large, Middle European-seeming city, and eventually reconnects with the two tramps, who are living with, and looking after, a very fat diva-prostitute named Brunelda (one of their tasks is to bathe her). The novel remained incomplete but is full of tantalizing fragments, including a brothel named Enterprise No. 25 and the Nature Theater of Oklahama. In every sense, this America, the morbid dream of a tubercular genius in a room in Prague, is Kafkaesque.

Travel Wisdom of Evelyn Waugh

Evelyn Waugh knew better than most people that there is a great deal of pleasure to be derived from a travel book in which the traveler is having a bad time — even better if it is an ordeal. Travel gave him fame as a young man, and though he said (see below) he did not travel to collect material, his fiction was enriched by his travel, from Black Mischief at the beginning of his career to The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold near the end. Many theorists of travel have claimed that Waugh's travel writing represents the high-water mark of the genre; this is demonstrably untrue, yet Waugh's travel is personal and opinionated, with episodes of high comedy. It is surprising that a man who cared for comfort and high society risked deep discomfort and low company in Africa and South America, but that he was a much hardier, more diligent, and fairer-minded traveler than he let on.

One does not travel, any more than one falls in love, to collect material. It is simply part of one's life. For myself, and many better than I, there is a fascination in distant and barbarous places, and particularly in the borderlands of conflicting cultures and states of development, where ideas, uprooted from their traditions, become oddly changed in transplantation. It is here that I find the experiences vivid enough to demand translation into literary form.

— Ninety-two Days (1934)

***

To have traveled a lot, to have spent, as I have done, the first twelve years of adult life on the move, is to this extent a disadvantage. At the age of thirty-five one needs to go to the moon, or some such place, to recapture the excitement with which one first landed at Calais.

— When the Going Was Good (1947)

***

I do not think I shall ever forget the sight of Etna at sunset; the mountain almost invisible in a blur of pastel grey, glowing on the top and then repeating its shape, as though reflected, in a wisp of grey smoke with the whole horizon behind radiant with pink light, fading gently into a grey pastel sky. Nothing I have seen in Art or Nature was quite so revolting.

— Labels (1930)

***

My own traveling days are over, nor do I expect to see many travel books in the near future. When I was a reviewer, they used, I remember, to appear in batches of four or five a week, cram-full of charm and wit and enlarged Leica snapshots. There is no room for tourists in a world of "displaced persons." Never again, I suppose, shall we land on foreign soil with letter of credit and passport (itself the first faint shadow of the great cloud that envelopes us) and feel the world wide open before us.

— When the Going Was Good

***

When we have been home from abroad for a week or two, and time after time, in answer to our friends' polite inquiries, we have retold our experiences, letting phrase engender phrase, until we have quite made a good story of it all; when the unusual people we have encountered have, in retrospect, become fabulous and fantastic, and all the checks and uncertainties of travel had become very serious dangers; when the minor annoyances assume heroic proportions and have become, at the luncheon-table, barely endurable privations; even before that, when in the later stages of our journey we reread in our diaries the somewhat bald chronicle of the preceding months — how very little attention do we pay, among all these false frights and bogies, to the stark horrors of boredom.

— Remote People (1931)