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)
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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)
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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)
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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
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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.