The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

23. Classics of a Sense of Place

SOME TRAVEL BOOKS ARE LESS ABOUT TRAVEL (that is, a specific itinerary and perambulation) than about an intense experience of a particular place. It could be a wilderness area (Thoreau's Maine), a river (Moritz Thomsen's Amazon), an American state (John McPhee's Alaska), or part of a state (Jonathan Raban's "bad land" of eastern Montana) — or the whole of Wales (Jan Morris), the whole of Spain (Pritchett), or India for half a lifetime (Chaudhuri). Carlo Levi was banished to southern Italy, exiled in the hill town of Aliano in 1935, for his antifascist views. He rambled around the town for a year, tended the sick (he was a doctor), and later wrote with feeling about it, and he is buried there. That, too, was travel. He said it was like being on the moon. I think of this as both an inner and an outer journey: what is illuminated is the landscape and the people — the place rather than the traveler or the trip. In most of the following cases the writers are in residence.

The Maine Woods by Henry David Thoreau

IN 1846 IN Maine, only a matter of days from his home in Concord, Thoreau found the wild place he was looking for. In the chapter "Ktaadn" he defines the essence of wilderness. "It is difficult to conceive of a region uninhabited by man," he begins modestly. Then comes his hammer stroke:

Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man's garden, but the unhandselled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste-land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made forever and ever.

The book was published posthumously, and based on three pieces that Thoreau had written, about three fairly short trips to the hinterland of Maine. Thoreau made his last trip in 1857. He was forty then, and you can see by his prose style that he is a different sort of traveler: humbler, affronted by the changes he sees in the eleven years since his first visit, no longer a quoter of Milton, or a praiser of lumberjacks, or a hyperbolic observer of the mystical Indian. He is now a denouncer of the logging industry and a clear-sighted diarist. Native Americans fascinated Thoreau, and this third trip in Maine offered him his best opportunity to study them.

Once, when Joe had called again, and we were listening for moose, we heard come faintly echoing or creeping from far through the moss-clad aisles, a dull dry rushing sound, with a solid core to it, yet as if half-smothered under the grasp of the luxuriant and fungus-like forest, like the shutting of a door in some distant entry of the damp and shaggy wilderness. If we had not been there no mortal had heard it. When we asked Joe in a whisper what it was, he answered, "Tree fall."

Thoreau was assertively American, in a manner of conspicuous nonconformity inspired by Emerson. Thoreau's passion was for being local, and that included being a traveler in America — to show how to care about the country, what tone to use, what subjects to address. Along the way, in adopting and refining these postures, he became our first and subtlest environmentalist. In Maine his subjects were, as he listed them in a letter, "the Moose, the Pine Tree & the Indian." The last words he spoke on his deathbed were "Moose… Indian."

The Spanish Temper by V. S. Pritchett

AS A TRAVELER in Spain, who hiked a large portion of it and wrote about it in his first book, Marching Spain (1928); as a journalist in the 1920s; and as a passionate reader of Spanish writing, V. S. Pritchett was well equipped to sum up this sunny, old-fashioned, and enigmatic country and its people. He was unhappy about his youthful book and so he wrote The Spanish Temper (1954) when he was middle-aged. It is to me the ultimate book about Spain — not a big book but a wise, enlightened one, epigrammatic and perceptive. As a short story writer (his story "The Evils of Spain" could be read along with this book), Pritchett was a master of compression. When writing on Spanish food, Franco, bullfighting, Don Quixote, and the many different landscapes of Spain, he is always original and challenging.

Speaking about the Spanish Civil War, he recounts the gore and violence and the mass executions. "The barbarian is strong in the Spanish people," he writes and immediately afterward alludes to the bullfight:

The most damaging criticism of the Spanish taste for bullfighting is rather different: the bullfight suffers from the monotony of sacrifices, and it is one more example of the peculiar addiction to the repetitive and the monotonous in the Spanish nature. Many foreigners who have known Spain well have noted this taste for monotony. The drama of the bullfight lies within the drama of a foregone conclusion… The fate of the bull is certain.

In another place, at Guadix in southern Spain, he marvels at a panorama of rock and mountain:

It is a land for the connoisseur of landscape, for in no other European country is there such variety and originality. Here Nature has had vast Space, stupendous means, and no restraint of fancy. One might pass a lifetime gazing at the architecture of rock and its strange coloring, especially the coloring of iron, blue steel, violet and ochreous ores, metallic purples, and all the burned, vegetable pigments. These landscapes frighten by their scale and by the suggestion of furrowed age, geological madness, malevolence and grandeur.

The Matter of Wales by Jan Morris

A CULTURAL STUDY, a history, combining topography, language, national character, and travel, lovingly anatomized, Morris's 1984 book describes "not only a separate nation, but a distinctly separate and often vehement idea." Here is Morris's disquisition on Welsh rocks and stones:

The substance of Welsh nature is largely rock, for some four-fifths of the surface of Wales is hard upland, where the soil is so thin that stones seem always to be forcing their way restlessly through, and it feels as though a really heavy rain-storm would wash all the turf away. The softness of the valleys, the calm of the low farmlands are only subsidiary to the character of the country: the real thing, the dominant, is hard, bare, grey and stony.

This means that the truest Welsh places offer experiences as much tactile as visual, for everywhere there are stones that seem to invite your stroking, your rolling, your sitting upon or, if you happen to be a druid or a survivor from the Stone Age, your worshipping. There are thrilling clumps of jagged stones on hilltops, and stark solitary stones beside moorland roads, and stones gleaming perpetually with the splash of earth-dark streams, and stone walls which seem less like walls than masonry contour-lines, snaking away across the mountain elevations mile after mile as far as the eye can see.

The Saddest Pleasure by Moritz Thomsen

"IT HAS BEEN forty-five years since I took a trip whose object was pleasure," Moritz Thomsen writes before leaving his farm in the Ecuadorian coastal province of Esmeraldas (which he wrote about in The Farm on the River of Emeralds). He was an older Peace Corps volunteer — fifty when he joined — and a rare one: he never went home. He decided to travel down the Amazon, "because there is an emptiness in my life that needs to be filled with something fresh and moderately intense."

He makes rules for himself in the travel: "Dollar meals if I can find them; five dollar hotels, if they still exist. No guided tours, no visits to historical monuments or old churches. No taxis, no mixed drinks in fancy bars. No hanging around places where English might be spoken." He takes his time, floating from river to river, stopping at the Amazon ports of Manaus and Belém and finally reaching Bahia on the coast. After all the bad food and discomfort and illness, and his witnessing the distress and poverty and the fallen world that is Amazonia, he concludes, "There are no solutions anymore; the continent will never recover." In his oblique and humane and self-deprecating way, he is the ideal guide. Though he credits me as the source of his title (a line from my novel Picture Palace), the quotation is actually from Madame de Staël, in Corinne, ou l'Italie (1807): "Travel is one of the saddest pleasures of life."

Coming into the Country by John McPhee

FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1977, even thirty-odd years later this book about Alaska is still the best one ever written about that enormous piece of land and its tiny population. McPhee (b. 1931) was in the hinterland, paddling the rivers and streams, before trails were blazed and the road beside the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was open to the public. The book is part wilderness experience — McPhee traveling with a group of scientists and environmentalists — and part social experiment — his meeting new Alaskans and indigenous people, and examining the fantasies and contradictions. What is most impressive is how deeply McPhee penetrates to the heart of the country. Though he is always dour in manner, literal-minded, factual, resistant to any levity, allowing his narrative to sprawl, this is probably why the book has endured. McPhee's feet are always on the ground, even when faced by a grizzly bear (twelve pages of suspense and information).

Speaking of the provincialism of Alaska, he writes:

In Alaska, the conversation is Alaska. Alaskans, by and large, seem to know little and to say less about what is going on outside. They talk about their land, their bears, their fish, their rivers. They talk about subsistence hunting, forbidden hunting, and living in trespass. They have their own lexicon. A senior citizen is a pioneer, snow is termination dust, and the N.B.A. is the National Bank of Alaska. The names of Alaska are so beautiful they run like fountains all day in the mind. Mulchatna. Chilikadrotna. Unalaska. Unalak-leet. Kivalina. Kiska. Kodiak. Allakaket. The Aaniakchak Caldera. Nondalton. Anaktubvuk. Anchorage. Alaska is a foreign country significantly populated with Americans. Its languages extend to English. Its nature is its own.

Bad Land by Jonathan Raban

"WHAT I FELT all the way was like a scale model of immigrants to America," Raban once said, describing this book. "It was the story of America written in one particular landscape." In the beginning of Bad Land (1996) he describes himself as an emigrant, "trying to find my own place in the landscape and history of the West." He chose an unlikely and pretty much unwritten-about place, the dry, flat expanses of eastern Montana. This is a book about a part of America that no American could have written: we don't have Raban's objectivity, his passion, or his sense of alienation. He is also widely read and intensely curious — curious in the way of an intelligent foreigner in America: "Bred to looking at a landscape as if it were a picture, to the posted scenic viewpoint, I was responding to the prairie like a shut-in taking his first walk across a blinding city square. It was all periphery and no center."

Travel, history, biography, and autobiography, this highly original portrait of prairie America, published in 1996, is also about the people who traveled there and who learned to adapt to the rigors of the weather, the stubborn soil, the great oceanlike emptiness that inspires Raban to view the landscape as an inland sea, in which the emigrants are like solitary voyagers. Intensely observant, curious to the point of nosiness, Raban gets to know them, examines their family histories, their dreams, the images that have been painted of the land, the photographs, the guidebooks, and he describes the journey itself — the emigrant train, filled with distinct individuals, whom we come to know, confronted by a new climate.

Dreadful though the cold could be, it was not the most destructive element in Montana's repertoire of violent weather. In summer, the air over the northern plains is turbulent: it moves in swirls and gyres, with fierce rip currents and whirlpool-like tornadoes. Here the northwesterly air stream, blowing from Alaska and the Arctic Circle, collides with warm southeasterlies blowing from the Gulf of Mexico and the southern U.S. interior. The exposed, treeless prairie, baking in the sun by day and cooling rapidly during the afternoons, intensifies the aerial commotion.

This is magnificent thunderstorm territory. The only time in my life when I have been seriously afraid of lightning was in eastern Montana on a dirt road miles from anywhere… The distant storm winked and winked again. Like photo-flashes going off in the face of some celebrity on the far side of a city square, these blips of white light seemed no business of mine, and I drove on… Closer now, the lightning flashes were like the skeletal inverted leaves of ferns, and when the thunder came I took it for some gastro-enteritic flare-up in the car engine — a blown gasket or a fractured piston…

Then the lightning shafts were stabbing, arbitrarily, at the bare ground, and much too close for comfort… A slight but audible interval opened up between the lightning strikes and the rockslides of thunder, and in the lee of the storm came hail, crackling against the windshield and sugaring the road. It lasted just a minute or two. Then the lost sun returned, the prairie was rinsed and green, tendrils of steam rose from the grass, and the dark thundercloud rolled away eastward into North Dakota.

The Traveller's Tree by Patrick Leigh Fermor

WHAT is IMPRESSIVE about this book is its completeness, its humane assessment of the Caribbean islands and their people, and its elegance — an evocative as well as droll appreciation of a vast area. The book is now sixty years old, and so it is also an album of pretty pictures about places that are different, some of them much changed, many of them no longer pretty at all. Haiti comes to mind. In Leigh Fermor's view, Haiti is old-fashioned and proud, lovable, beauteous, cultured, a bit severe — a far cry from the hellishly poor and devastated country of today, the victim of dictatorships, hurricanes, famine, disease, and most recently one of the worst earthquakes in human history.

So The Traveller's Tree is dated ("Negroes," "aerodrome," "luncheon"), but all the more valuable for that, because it is in the nature of a travel book, especially an expansive one like this, to serve as a history of a region, noting manners and customs, language and cuisine. He traveled in Trinidad in 1947–48, when V. S. Naipaul was a high school student, before Graham Greene went to Haiti, and around the time Ian Fleming became resident in Jamaica. For many travel writers, Patrick Leigh Fermor is everything a travel writer ought to be — urbane, well read, witty, forgiving, well traveled, and a meticulous observer. His writing is magical, his eye is unerring, and so is his ear — for human speech, for music, for the sound of the sea and birdsong, for the feel of a place. And his barbs tend to be elegant: "Hotel cooking in the island [Trinidad] is so appalling that a stretcher may profitably be ordered at the same time as dinner."

Here, having just landed in a Haiti that is no more, Leigh Fermor is traveling up the main road toward Port-au-Prince in an old wagon. "These black and obsolete vehicles are drawn by horses on the point of death and driven by very old men." He goes on:

The cane-field and savannah turned into the outskirts of the capital. Thatched cabins straggled into the country under the palm trees, and multiplied into a suburb, through which the road ran in a straight, interminable line. For the first mile or so, the town consisted entirely of rum shops and barbers' saloons and harness makers. Hundreds of saddles were piled up in the sunlight. Bits and bridles and saddlebags hung in festoons. There were horses everywhere. Our equipage churned its way upstream through a current of horses and mules ridden by Negroes who straddled among bulky packages, all heading to their villages with their purchases for Christmas. One or two were singing Haitian meringues, and several were carrying game cocks under their arms, lovingly stroking their feathers as they trotted past. Old women, puffing their pipes, jogged along side-saddle. They had scarlet and blue kerchiefs tied round their heads in a fortuitous, rather piratical fashion, half covered by broad-brimmed straw hats against the sun. The sides of the road pullulated with country people chattering, drinking rum, playing cards and throwing dice under the trees. The air was thick with dust, and ringing with incomprehensible and deafening Creole. I felt I might like Haiti.

Italian Hours by Henry James

"VENICE WAS ONE of the greatest topographical love affairs of James's life," Leon Edel, his biographer, wrote. For Henry James, Venice was everything he wished for in a distant city — villas facing onto the canals, churches crammed with Renaissance masterpieces, great food, voluble people, and in his time not expensive. He called it "the repository of consolations." A number of his fictions are set in Venice, The Aspern Papers among them, and he wrote several of his novels there, notably The Portrait of a Lady, which is set in England and in Rome and Florence. Italian Hours (1909) sums up James's love of Italy, and particularly Venice, as in this dense and appreciative paragraph:

One may doubtless be very happy in Venice without reading at all — without criticizing or analyzing or thinking a strenuous thought. It is a city in which, I suspect, there is very little strenuous thinking, and yet it is a city in which there must be almost as much happiness as misery. The misery of Venice stands there for all the world to see; it is part of the spectacle — a thoroughgoing devotee of local colour might consistently say it is part of the pleasure. The Venetian people have little to call their own — little more than the bare privilege of leading their lives in the most beautiful of towns. Their habitations are decayed; their taxes heavy; their pockets light; their opportunities few. One receives an impression, however, that life presents itself to them with attractions not accounted for in this meager train of advantages, and that they are on better terms with it than many people who have made a better bargain. They lie in the sunshine; they dabble in the sea; they wear bright rags; they fall into attitudes and harmonies; they assist at an eternal conversazione. It is not easy to say that one would have them other than they are, and it certainly would make an immense difference should they be better fed. The number of persons in Venice who evidently never have enough to eat is painfully large; but it would be more painful if we did not equally perceive that the rich Venetian temperament may bloom upon a dog's allowance. Nature has been kind to it, and sunshine and leisure and conversation and beautiful views form the greater part of its sustenance. It takes a great deal to make a successful American, but to make a happy Venetian takes only a handful of quick sensibility. The Italian people have at once the good and the evil fortune to be conscious of few wants; so that if the civilization of a society is measured by the number of its needs, as seems to be the common opinion to-day, it is to be feared that the children of the lagoon would make but a poor figure in a set of comparative tables. Not their misery, doubtless, but the way they elude their misery, is what pleases the sentimental tourist, who is gratified by the sight of a beautiful race that lives by the aid of its imagination. The way to enjoy Venice is to follow the example of these people and make the most of simple pleasures. Almost all the pleasures of the place are simple; this may be maintained even under the imputation of ingenious paradox. There is no simpler pleasure than looking at a fine Titian, unless it be looking at a fine Tintoretto or strolling into St. Mark's, — abominable the way one falls into the habit, — and resting one's light-wearied eyes upon the windowless gloom; or than floating in a gondola or than hanging over a balcony or than taking one's coffee at Florian's. It is of such superficial pastimes that a Venetian day is composed, and the pleasure of the matter is in the emotions to which they minister. These are fortunately of the finest — otherwise Venice would be insufferably dull. Reading Ruskin is good; reading the old records is perhaps better; but the best thing of all is simply staying on. The only way to care for Venice as she deserves it is to give her a chance to touch you often — to linger and remain and return.

The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian by Nirad C. Chaudhuri

AT THE AGE of fifty, a scriptwriter for All-India Radio, not having published any book, Chaudhuri was possessed by a revelation. "It came in this manner," he wrote. "As I lay awake in the night of May 4–5, 1947, an idea suddenly flashed into my mind. Why, instead of merely regretting the work of history you cannot write, I asked myself, do you not write the history you have passed through and seen enacted before your eyes?" That enlightenment came three months before India's independence. He set about immediately, struggled with some chapters, then hit his stride; and the result is a masterpiece, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951) — a man in a particular place and time.

No better book has been written about India. That Chaudhuri was from the town of Kishorganj, in East Bengal, makes it all the more valuable. He was born in 1897, the year of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, and died in 1999, in England — a long life in which he was an eyewitness to the most dramatic changes in India. But the book is filled with the details of life — food, caste, religion (a shocking description of animal sacrifice at a Kali temple), life in the provinces and in the cities: Chaudhuri lived in both Calcutta and Delhi. Far from being a serene book, it is argumentative, critical, sometimes denunciatory, as Chaudhuri was in his subsequent books. But he was that rare bird, a traveler in his own country, with a feel for the people and the land and the seasons. Then, as now, East Bengal was famous for its rain and its floods.

If the picture on the river during the rainy season at Kishorganj was the Deluge and the Ark made homely, gregarious, and sociable, we were no less steeped in the spirit of water on land. Everything was wet to the marrow of the bone. Neither we nor our clothes were ever properly dry. When we were not slushy we were damp. The bark of the trees became so sodden that it seemed we could tear it up in handfuls like moss. We could not walk from the hut which was our bed- and living-room except on a line of bricks laid at intervals of about two feet or on a gangway made of bamboos, and the meals were more often than not held up by unseasonable showers. Little rills were running off the road, cutting miniature ravines in its side. Our servants were always wet, and their brown skins were always shining.

The tremendous drenching power of the rain was brought home to us by the dripping coming and going of our father and of our visitors, but above all by the sight of the birds. The ludicrously pitiable appearance of the crows in the rainy season is so notorious that the phrase "bedraggled crow" has become a figurative synonym in the Bengali language for an untidy and disheveled person…

But one of the most attractive and engaging sights of the season was to be seen in the inner courtyard of our house, when there was a heavy downpour. The rain came down in what looked like closely packed formations of enormously long pencils of glass and hit the bare ground. At first the pencils only pitted the sandy soil, but as soon as some water had collected all around they began to bounce off the surface of water and pop up and down in the form of minuscule puppets. Every square inch of ground seemed to receive one of the little things, and our water-logged yard was broken up into a pattern which was not only mobile but dizzily in motion. As we sat on the veranda, myriads of tiny watery marionettes, each with an expanding circlet of water at its feet, gave us such a dancing display as we had never dreamt of seeing in actual life.

Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi

THIS is ONE of those important books that, after I'd read it, compelled me to go and see the place for myself. I visited Aliano (Levi calls it Gagliano) in Lucania, in southern Italy, when I was on my around-the-shore-of-the-Mediterranean trip. It was a detour from the coast, but a memorable one. I wrote about it in The Pillars of Hercules. "He wasn't Italian," an old man told me in the town, speaking in Italian. "He was a foreigner — a Russian." I questioned this. " "'Breo," the man said. At first I didn't understand, and then I guessed at the word, Ebreo, a Jew. So everything Levi experienced in 1935, and wrote about in 1943, was still true in 1995: these people were remote, mentally and geographically, off the map in every sense.

The book describes the oddity of this educated Florentine among the peasants of a remote village in the deep south of Italy — a forgotten people, hardly Christian. Christ didn't get to Aliano, they explain to him; Christ stopped miles away, at Eboli. "We're not Christians," they say. They are superstitious, violent, passionate, mercurial, secretive, with a greater belief in dragons than in any saint.

I was struck by the peasants' build: they are short and swarthy with round heads, large eyes, and thin lips; their archaic faces do not stem from the Romans, Greeks, Etruscans, Normans, or any other invaders who have passed through their land, but recall the most ancient Italic types. They have led exactly the same life since the beginning of time, and History has swept over them without effect.

Among other things, this is one of the great studies of modern European peasant life, written by a highly intelligent and sympathetic alien, resident in a rural village. There is one toilet in the village, "and probably there was not another one within a radius of fifty miles." Werewolves lurk nearby, the villagers say. Unwritten but arcane laws govern the behavior of men and women. When Levi's sister visits, she is forbidden to live with him; no man can be left alone with a woman who is not his wife. Levi spends his time in the village painting, writing, and healing the sick.

Christ never came this far, nor did time, nor the individual soul, nor hope, nor the relation of cause to effect, nor reason, nor history. Christ never came, just as the Romans never came, content to garrison the highways without penetrating the mountains and forests, nor the Greeks… No one has come to this land except as an enemy, a conqueror, or a visitor devoid of understanding. The seasons pass today over the toil of the peasants, just as they did three thousand years before Christ; no message, human or divine, has reached this stubborn poverty.

Before he died in 1975, Levi gave instructions that he be buried in the cemetery of Aliano. And there he rests, in the dust among the pines.

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

THERE ARE TWO Moveable Feasts— the first one published in 1964, heavily edited and cobbled together by his widow, and fourth wife, Mary; the second, edited by his grandson Sean Hemingway, published in 2009, is truer to Ernest Hemingway's surviving manuscript (some pages are reproduced) and subtitled "The Restored Edition." It was the last book that Hemingway wrote; he committed suicide not long after finishing it. Both editions are worth reading. The first seems better structured and more organized — though this organization was imposed. The restored edition is longer, more ruminative, but kinder to various of the characters — Scott Fitzgerald especially, but also Hemingway's second wife, Pauline, who comes off badly in the 1964 edition.

The subject is Paris in the 1920s. Hemingway knew the city well — he arrived with wife Hadley late in 1921 and lived there off and on until 1928, when he left to take up residence in Key West with his new wife, Pauline. The themes of this memoir of Paris are being hard-up and happy, the love that Hemingway has for Hadley and his son, and his passion for writing. Being poor, hungry much of the time, Hemingway constantly reverts to the subject of food — flavors, aromas, simple food, good wine; the pleasures of eating and drinking. It is a book about physical sensation, and the intensity of such physicality in Paris.

"Then there was the bad weather," the book begins. "It would come in one day when the fall was over. You would have to shut the windows in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescarpe."

Streets are mentioned so often they become familiar, as do parks and churches and people's apartments. The book is filled with restaurants, bistros, and bars, and their specialties in food and drink. The result is that, reading A Moveable Feast, especially the fuller version, we are able to make a map of Paris in our imagination and to follow the comings and goings of Hemingway and the literary lions who stalk its pages — James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and others. Its fault and its virtue is that it is dated: Paris is no longer as Hemingway describes it, but this is a vivid portrait of the city as it looked and smelled and tasted in the twenties.

At one point, Hemingway, a close observer of the life of the city, takes on travel writers:

Travel writers wrote about the men fishing in the Seine as though they were crazy and never caught anything; but it was serious and productive fishing. Most of the fishermen were men who had small pensions, which they did not know then would become worthless with inflation, or keen fishermen who fished on their days or half-days off from work… I followed it closely and it was interesting and good to know about, and it always made me happy that there were men fishing in the city itself, having sound, serious fishing and taking a fewfritures home to their families.

With the fishermen and the lie on the river, the beautiful barges with their own life on board, the tugs with their smokestacks that folded back to pass under the bridges, pulling a tow of barges, the great plain trees on the stone banks of the river, the elms and sometimes the poplars, I knew that I could never be lonely along the river.

The End of the Game by Peter Beard

ALMOST FIFTY YEARS ago, Peter Beard went to Africa and found himself in a violated Eden. Africa possessed him as it does anyone who has wondered who we once were, as humans at our most heroic, thriving as hunters. The Africa he saw was the Africa that transformed me a few years later — and transformed many others. "Before the Congo I was a mere animal," Joseph Conrad wrote. Beard's landmark account of his awakening, The End of the Game (1965), with its unforgettable images, gives fresh meaning to the word "prescience," and it remains one of the classics of unambiguous warning about humans and animals occupying the same dramatic space: "The tragic paradox of the white man's encroachment. The deeper he went into Africa, the faster life flowed out of it, off the plains, and out of the bush and into the cities."

East Africa is not a pretty place in the usual sense of that twinkling word. The elemental and powerful landscape, ranging around the Rift Valley, is one of the earth's monuments to vulcanism, showing as great plains, steep escarpments, and deep lakes. The Africa Beard saw, even then, in the almost undetectable early stages of corruption, was teeming with animals, thinly populated, hardly urbanized, and self-sufficient. Years later, the pressures of human population on animal life and the land itself became apparent in an Africa faltering and fragile, as though after the Fall. Beard's improvisational safari to the edge of Somalia in 1960 was a piece of unrepeatable history. He understood very early that the "harmonies and balances" in East Africa had been deranged, and this dramatic crease in the greenest continent was on the wane.

Mingling personal history with African history, Beard vividly evoked the building of the Mombasa-Nairobi Railway. "A railroad through the Pleistocene," Teddy Roosevelt called it in his African Game Trails, playing up the primitive. Roosevelt, a sort of evil twin to the biblical Noah, hunted down and killed two (and sometimes as many as eighteen) of every species of animal that could be found from the Kenyan coast to the swamps of southern Sudan (total bag, 512 creatures). He wrote, "The land teems with beasts of the chase, infinite in number."

"Infinite" is the kind of hyperbole that affects many deluded travelers in Africa. The powerful message of The End of the Game was that the animals were finite, that urbanization was a creeping blight, that a free-for-all was imminent. Most of what Beard predicted came to pass, but even he could not have imagined what an abomination the cities of East Africa became — sprawling, dense with slums, so crime-ridden as to be almost uninhabitable.

The End of the Game is less a wildlife book than a book about human delusion, as important now as it was when it first appeared. Rare among visitors to Africa, Beard went simply to learn and grow. Because he was essentially an observer, patient and keen-sighted, not a ranter, with no agenda, he was able to see a process at work that many had missed, in the convergence of people and animals. One of his book's great virtues, and its lasting value, is that it takes no notice of politics. It is single-mindedly concerned with the living and the dead, predators and prey. Beard was true to what he saw — and the truth of it has made it prophetic.

The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald

IN 1992, AS he tells us on the first page of his book, W. G. Sebald, a German teacher-writer living in England, decided to strap on his rucksack and circumambulate the flat, featureless, not very large county of Suffolk. The result was The Rings of Saturn, a ruminative work full of free association and arcane lore, with the subtext "Not a lot of people know this!" Sebald claims that the book was "prose fiction" (Chatwin made the same claim about his Songlines) and inspired by Sir Thomas Browne's Urn Burial, but though this is self-serving, the stitched-together anecdotes do have a point, perhaps unintentional, but forceful nevertheless.

To write about what one sees in Suffolk would be a work of topography or social history, but rambling describes what Sebald does — on foot and on the page. What do we find in Lowestoft? Not much. Joseph Conrad had a seafaring connection to Lowestoft, and from this slender link Sebald develops a whole historical reverie that involves Conrad, King Leopold of Belgium, the hellish Congo, Roger Casement, and Casement's sensational diaries. This is pretty much the structure of the book, except that a bigoted note occurs when he speaks of the Congo and Belgians, whom Germans (though Sebald doesn't say why) particularly abominate. "And, indeed, to this day one sees in Belgium a distinctive ugliness, dating from the time when the Congo colony was exploited."

Does he mean a metaphorical ugliness? No. "At all events, I well recall that on my first visit to Brussels in December 1964 I encountered more hunchbacks and lunatics than normally in a whole year. One evening in a bar in Rhode St Genèse I even watched a deformed billiard player who was racked with spastic contortions." And so forth.

He comes to Dunwich. Dunwich hardly exists, most of it having been overwhelmed by the sea. And so what Sebald provides is nothing less than the history of the town, the name of every sunken church, the monastery, and a detailed account of the storms that reduced Dunwich to a pathetic settlement.

But here is the point: the native of a place seldom sees what the alien sees, seldom remarks on what he or she takes for granted. Sebald describes how the passengers in the first train he takes, from Norfolk to Lowestoft, are so silent "that not a word might have passed their lips in the whole of their lives." This is empty hyperbole. English people, and in particular the provincial English, seldom yammer on public transport. Without saying so, the German is comparing the English to Germans. Still, the originality of the book arises from the remarks that only a foreigner would make, and such observations, even when they are misapprehensions and distortions, have value.