The Tao of Travel

Rebecca West in Yugoslavia: Three fairly short trips, about five months altogether. The first was on a British Council grant in the spring of 1936, but she was ill much of the time; then in spring 1937 for a few months, and a month in the early summer of 1938. The result was the 500,000-word Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), regarded as the apotheosis of travel writing and self-analysis. One of my favorite passages, from the Epilogue, shows that a travel book can include anything, including—as here—an analysis of the divided self:

Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations. Our bright natures fight in us with this yeasty darkness, and neither part is commonly quite victorious, for we are divided against ourselves and will not let either part be destroyed. This fight can be observed constantly in our personal lives. There is nothing rarer than a man who can be trusted never to throw away happiness, however eagerly he sometimes grasps it. In history we are as frequently interested in our own doom ... We ignore this suicidal strain in history because we are consistently bad artists when we paint ourselves, when we prettify our wills and pretend they are not parti-colored before the Lord.

Geoffrey Moorhouse in the Sahara: For The Fearful Void, four and a half months in 1972, traveling 3,600 miles, mainly on foot.

In an interview, Moorhouse said, "One reason I did this book is that all the books I've read about rough journeys, from Fuchs's Crossing of Antarctica to Thesiger's Arabian Sands, do tend to exclude the soft, weak, feeble, nasty sides we all have. They all seem to be bloody supermen. You think, Didn't they ever cry, or do something really shitty? As far as I can see, I'm a pretty ordinary bloke, and either they're very different from me, or they're excluding a part of themselves."

Bruce Chatwin: For In Patagonia (1977), four months, from mid-December 1974 to April 1975 (see Chapter 13, "It Is Solved by Walking").

Anton Chekhov in Sakhalin: Three and a half months in 1890, but the book, Sakhakin Island (translated by Brian Reeve), took him three years to write. He traveled from Moscow, by river steamer and horse-drawn coach, noting, "The Siberian highway is the longest, and, I should think, the ugliest road on earth." In an ingenious manner for a travel writer, to find out as much as he could about this remote penal settlement and this island of exile, he carried out his own detailed census, using a printed questionnaire.

"I am profoundly convinced that in fifty to a hundred years' time," he wrote, "they will regard the lifelong character of our penalties [exile, forced labor] with the same perplexity and sense of embarrassment with which we now look upon the slitting of nostrils or the amputation of fingers from the left hand."

And yet a hundred years after he wrote this, the Soviet government was exiling political prisoners to life sentences in the gulag and using them as forced labor. Russians on the outside were neither perplexed nor embarrassed, only afraid. I wrote about one of these prisons in Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, when I visited Perm 36. The prison was closed in 1992, a century after Chekhov's stay in Sakhalin.

The people who showed me around this prison in 2007, who knew it in its bad days, would have agreed with Chekhov's verdict in the Sakhalin settlement of Derbinskoye: "There were moments when it seemed to me that I was seeing the extreme and utmost degree of human degradation, lower than which it is simply impossible to go."

Ernest Hemingway in Africa: A little over three months, later writing The Green Hills of Africa. Hemingway reached Mombasa on December 6, 1933, and after his safari and travels upcountry, left there in early March 1934.

W. H. Auden in Iceland: Three summer months in 1936, resulting in Letters from Iceland (1937), which he wrote with the poet Louis MacNeice, who spent one month there, liked the horseback rides, but hated the dried fish: "The tougher kind tastes like toe-nails, and the softer kind like the skin off the soles of one's feet." Because the book is more a scrapbook than a travel narrative, it is a mixture of poetic styles and observations.