For the young Paul Theroux, travel books were self-indulgent, predictable and dull. No one was capturing the truth about travelling. Then he boarded the Orient Express and began a journey that took him across Asia and into new writing territory.
had been travelling for more than 10 years - in Europe, Asia and Africa - and it had not occurred to me to write a travel book. I had always somewhat disliked travel books; they seemed self-indulgent, unfunny and rather selective. I suspected that the travel writer left a great deal out of the book and emphasised the bright surfaces. “Couleur locale has been responsible for many hasty appreciations,” Nabokov once wrote, “and local colour is not a fast colour.” I hated sightseeing, and yet that was what constituted the travel writer’s material: the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the Vatican, the paintings here, the mosaics there. In an age of mass tourism, everyone set off to see the same things, and that was what travel writing seemed to be. I am speaking of the early 1960s.
The travel book was a bore. It annoyed me that a traveller hid his or her moments of desperation or fear or lust. Or the time he or she screamed at the taxi driver, or mocked the folk dancers. And what did they eat, what books did they read to kill time, and what were the toilets like? I had done enough travelling to know that half of travel was delay or nuisance - buses breaking down, hotel clerks being rude, market peddlers being rapacious. The truth of travel was interesting and off-key, and few people ever wrote about it.
Most travel writing was about vacations and comforts, not real journeys and ordeals. So the very words “travel writing” were debased to the point where I hated to use them, but what else was there, and how could I reclaim them? Now and then one would meet the real thing in a book: Evelyn Waugh mistaken for his brother Alex in Labels; Naipaul’s explosions of bad temper in An Area of Darkness; the “I hate Mexicans” parts of Greene’s The Lawless Roads; or the human encounters, full of dialogue, in Anthony Trollope’s The West Indies and the Spanish Main. In these and other cases, something human happens and was recorded. That seemed to me the point of travel writing.
Some people say that the travel book is a type of novel, that it has elements of fiction in it, that it comes out of the imagination and is a sort of strange beast - half the prosy animal of non-fiction and half the fabulous monster of fiction, and there it stands, snorting and pawing the ground, challenging us to give it a name. There are, no doubt, books that fit this description: little trips that writers have worked up into epics and odysseys. You want to write a novel but you have no subject, no characters, no landscape. So you take a trip - a couple of months, not very expensive, not too dangerous - and you write it up, making it sound harrowing, dramatising yourself, because you are the hero of this - what? Quest for a book, perhaps.
This is not my line of work at all. And when I read such a book and I spot the fakery, the invention, the embroidery, I can read no further. Self-dramatisation is inevitable in any travel book - most travellers, however dreary and plonkingly pedestrian, see themselves as solitary and heroic adventurers. The odd thing is that the real heroes of travel seldom write about their journeys. Some time ago, I received a thick book detailing the travels of a young man through metropolitan France: “essential reading for Francophiles, Francophobes, gourmets, gourmands and any curious traveller in truly modern Gaul”. It is as though this overprivileged, well-trodden and easily seen country were terra incognita. There is a place for such books, catering to vacationers, but I would rather read of an adventure in a less accessible land.
So many travel books I had read and disliked had grown out of a traveller’s chasing around a city or a little country; Discovering Portugal, that kind of thing. It was not real travel, but a form of extended residence that I knew well from having lived in Malawi, Uganda and Singapore. I had come to rest in those places, I was working, I had a driver’s licence, I went shopping at the market or bazaar every Saturday. It had never occurred to me to write a travel book about any of it. Travel had to do with movement and truth, offering yourself to experience, and then reporting on it. Being alone, self-sufficient and anonymous were necessary to the trip. And choosing the right itinerary - the best route, the correct mode of travel - was the surest way, I felt, of gaining experience. It had to be total immersion, a long, deliberate trip through the hinterland rather than flying from one big city to another, which didn’t seem to me to be travel at all. The travel books I liked were oddities, not only Greene and Trollope, but Henry Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (across America, coast to coast by car) and Mark Twain’s Following the Equator (lecture tours around the world).
Trains seemed the happiest choice. You could do anything on a train; you could live your life and go long distances. There was little stress, there was sometimes comfort, and there was something romantic in the notion of boarding a train. I had grown up within earshot of the Boston and Maine, and the train whistles I heard as a youth were the music of enchantment. I knew that I could board a train in Medford, Massassachusetts and go anywhere in America. I wanted my book to be a series of long train journeys, but where to?
All this speculation took place in the autumn of 1972, when I was teaching for a semester at the University of Virginia. In those days, I began a new book as soon as I finished the one I was working on. My wife was in London with our two children. And she was working - indeed, earning a good living. But I still felt that I was the breadwinner and that I was not earning enough. Money is an awkward subject for most writers, but it was a crucial factor in my decision to write my first travel book - I simply needed the money. When I mentioned the possibility of such a book to my American editor she was delighted. She said, “We’ll even give you an advance for it.” (I hadn’t received an advance before.)
Often you begin to think clearly about your intentions only when someone asks you very specific questions. I envisioned a long book with lots of people and dialogue and no sightseeing. But my editors’ questioning prodded me and I thought, Trains through Asia. I could start in London on the Orient Express. When I looked at this route, I saw that I could continue through Turkey, Iran and Baluchistan, and after a short bus ride I could catch a train in Zahedan, go on to Pakistan, and more or less chug through Asia. My idea was to go to Vietnam, take the train to Hanoi, then continue to China, Mongolia and the Soviet Union. Much of this travel proved impractical or impossible. The Chinese embassy hung up on me when I said I wanted to ride trains through China. In my innocence, I had not realised how the cultural revolution had disrupted the country, producing mayhem. (I had to wait 14 years before I was able to take the trip I described in Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China.) There was an uprising in Baluchistan, so I re-routed myself through Afghanistan. I decided to include Japan and the whole of the Trans-Siberian Express. I didn’t mind where I went as long as it was in Asia and had a railway system and visas were available. I saw myself puffing along from country to country, simply changing trains, looking out the window and now and then stopping.
I think of the circumstances surrounding The Great Railway Bazaar rather than the trip itself. I hated leaving my family behind in London; I had never taken such a deliberate trip before, gathering material for a book. I had lived in the United States for almost 10 years, but always as a working writer or teacher, a resident alien (as it said on my ID card), never a traveller. And I felt encumbered by my advance on royalties, modest as it was - $7,500, one-third on signature of the contract, one-third on submitting the manuscript, one-third on publication. My writer friends generally mocked the idea. I never got around to worrying about the trip itself, though I was beset by an obscure ache that was both mental and physical - the lingering anxiety that I was going to die. I had always felt that my exit would be made via an Appointment in Samarra - that I would go a great distance and endure enormous and pointless discomfort in order to meet my death. If I chose to sit at home and eat and drink, it would never happen. I imagined myself in a silly accident, like that of the monk, writer and poet Thomas Merton, at last leaving his monastery in Kentucky after 27 years and accidentally electrocuting himself on the frayed wires of an electric fan in Bangkok a week later.
I left London on September 19 1973. It was a grey day. I had spent the morning at my new publisher’s, and had gone from there to Victoria Station where my wife was waiting. She had been very angry at my going, leaving her with the children. But my answer had been: soldiers leave home, so did sailors and fishermen - they have to leave their families. Think of me that way - I’m not abandoning you, I’m working, pursuing a book.
Almost immediately, as the boat train headed to Folkestone, I felt I had made an absurd mistake. I hadn’t the slightest idea what I was doing. I became very gloomy, and to cheer myself up and convince myself that this was indeed work, I began to take voluminous notes. From the moment I left until the night I arrived back in London almost four months later - homesick most of the time - I filled one notebook after another. I wrote everything down - conversations, descriptions of people and places, details of trains, interesting trivia, even criticisms of the novels I happened to be reading. I still have some of those books, and on the blank back pages of the paperbacks of Joyce’s Exiles, Chekhov’s stories, Endo’s Silence and others I had scribbled insectile notes, which I amplified when I transferred them to my large notebooks. I always wrote in the past tense.
On returning home, I found that in my absence I had been replaced in my wife’s affections by another man. “I pretended you were dead,” she said. This was something horrible to me, especially in my fragile mental state at the end of this difficult trip. My wife tried to reassure me - she loved me again - but I was inconsolable, feeling angry and betrayed. I looked for refuge in my book and through the weird alchemy that turns misery to humour, much of what I wrote was comedy.
If I write a travel book it is about my trip, not yours or anyone else’s. Even if someone had come with me and written a book about the trip, it would be a different book. What I didn’t know at the time was that every trip has a historical dimension. Not long after my journey, many of the countries I had visited underwent political changes. The Shah was exiled, and Iran became very dangerous for foreign travellers; Afghanistan went to war with itself, the Soviet Union helping out; India and Pakistan restored their rail link. Laos shut its borders and did away with its monarchy. Vietnam unified and repaired its railway line, so now it is possible to travel from Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) to Hanoi. Many of the small trains I took were taken out of service. The Orient Express that plies the route from London to Venice today is for wealthy, comfort-seeking people who have sumptuous fantasies about travel bearing no relation to the real thing. However awful my old Orient Express was, at least all sorts of people took it, rich and poor, old and young, rattling back and forth from Europe to Asia. It was cheap and friendly, and like all great trains it was a world on wheels.
When I wrote Railway Bazaar, I was groping in the dark - although I was careful to disguise this; my self-assurance in the narrative was sheer bravado, a way of whistling to keep my spirits up. It was not at all like a novel; fiction required inspiration, intense imagining, invention, and a long period alone in a room. A travel book, I had discovered, was a deliberate act, like the act of travel itself. It took health and strength and confidence, optimism and deep curiosity and self-sufficiency; and it was a great help if one happened to be loved and trusted. When I finished a novel, I never knew whether I would be able to write another one. But I knew with delight when I finished this first travel book that I would be able to do it again.
I was seeking adventure when I took the trip that became The Old Patagonian Express. I wanted to leave my front door in Medford and head south to Patagonia without leaving the ground. I wished to travel from this cosy homely place where I was born, to the distant and outlandish - so I thought - area in the southern part of South America. I wanted to make a connection between the known and the unknown and yet remain in the western hemisphere. It would not be the circular journey I described in The Great Railway Bazaar, but rather a linear trip, from Here to Way Over There.
It had always bothered me, when reading of an expedition, that the preliminaries were dispensed with. I describe these near the beginning of The Old Patagonian Express, in the chapter that starts: “Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography to oblivion.” In my first travel book, I had simply gone away, launched myself into the east. In my next one I felt I was consciously experimenting with space and time. My object was to take the train that everyone took to work, and then to keep going, changing trains, to the end of the line - and this I took to be a tiny Argentine station called Esquel, in the middle of Patagonia.
I was altogether more deliberate with this travel book than I had been with my first. For one thing, I was determined to speak the language. My inability to speak Hindi, Japanese, Farsi, Urdu and Malay, among others, had made my first book somewhat facetious, I thought. It was so easy to mock language blunders. I did not want to be that ignorant again. So I listened to Spanish language tapes. I wanted to understand what was going on. One of the popular notions of travel books is that they are usually about the traveller - I wanted to get beyond the egocentric and try to understand the places I was passing through.
I knew something about the politics, but very little about the geographical features of these countries. One of my aims was to characterise each place, so that afterwards anyone who read the book would have a clear idea of El Salvador or Costa Rica or Peru, instead of a formless and indistinguishable sprawl of banana republics.
I was lucky in the people I met. The Panama Canal was in the news; President Carter had convened a conference to hand the canal back to the Panamanians. The Zonians were furious at what they took to be Carter’s treachery. I found a reasonable man to discuss these matters and more - Mr Reiss, the head mortician in the Gorgas mortuary. There were others: the woman in Vera Cruz looking for her lover, Mr Thornberry in Costa Rica; the Irish priest who had started a family in Ecuador; Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires. (Borges told me he was working on a story about a man called Thorpe. Years later I found that character in a story called “Shakespeare’s Memory”.)
My friend Bruce Chatwin had told me that he took the trip he wrote up as In Patagonia after he’d read The Great Railway Bazaar. I had always wondered how he had travelled to Patagonia - he had left that out of his narrative. He had written about being there, but I wanted to write about getting there. This thought was always in my mind, and it made me meticulous about my own trip. I knew that as soon as I got to Patagonia I would just look around and then go home. Mine was to be the ultimate book about getting there.
In spite of myself, I was distracted by what I saw. As a novelist, I could not ignore the possibilities that were being offered to me in the form of suggestive characters and dramatic landscapes, and yet I knew I had to put them in my travel book. Once they were there, they were fixed for ever; I could not haul them out again and give them fictional form. What struck me was how dense the jungle was, so near to the United States. I had just been in wintry New England, and now, a few weeks later, I was in places that looked like ragged versions of Paradise - no roads, no factories, no houses, no missionaries even. A person could come here and start all over again, build his own town, make his own world. I felt this strongly in Costa Rica, where I wrote:
We were at the shore and travelling alongside a palmy beach. This was the Mosquito Coast, which extends from Puerto Barrios in Guatemala to Colon in Panama. It is wild and looks the perfect setting for a story of castaways. What few villages and ports lie along it are derelict; they declined when shipping did and returned to jungle. Massive waves were rolling towards us, the white foam vivid in the twilight; they broke just below the coconut palms near the track. At nightfall, the sea is the last thing to darken; it seems to hold the light that is slipping from the sky; and the trees are black. So in the light of this luminous sea and the pale still-blue eastern sky, and to the splashings of the breakers, the train racketed on towards Limon.
I reached Patagonia, then returned to London and wrote the book. I regretted not visiting Nicaragua - I was advised not to, because of the guerrilla war that had overwhelmed the country; I regretted that I had to fly from Panama to Barranquilla, and from Guayaquil to Lima. I dislike planes, and when I’m in one - suffering the deafening drone and the chilly airlessness that is peculiar to planes - I always suspect that the land we are overflying is rich and wonderful and that I am missing it all.
Air travel is very simple and annoying and always a cause of anxiety. It is like being at the dentist’s; even the chairs are like dentists’ chairs. Overland travel is slow and a great deal more trouble, but it is uncomfortable in a way that is completely human and often reassuring. The mood of The Old Patagonian Express, which is at times sombre, was the result of my knowing Spanish. It was easy for me to be light-hearted when I travelled to write The Great Railway Bazaar. I had little idea of what people were saying in Japanese and Hindi. But speaking to people in their own language - hearing their timid turns of phrase, or the violence of their anger, or the idioms of their hopelessness - could be distressing. I was to have a similar experience eight years later, travelling in China and hearing people worrying in Chinese.
As you read travel books, you should be able to see the people and places, to hear them, to smell them. Some of it is painful, but travel - its very motion - ought to suggest hope. Despair is the armchair; its indifference and glazed, incurious eyes. I think travellers are essentially optimists, or else they would never go anywhere. A travel book ought to reflect that optimism.
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