The Tao of Travel

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.

— Remote People (1931)

22. Traveler's Bliss

BLISS IS RARE IN THE TRAVEL NARRATIVE, where the usual theme is hardship and sometimes horror. Our happiness in print in any case always seems boastful and improbable, quite far from the human condition. But now and then the traveler arrives at the Great Good Place, gives thanks for his luck, and shows the reader that the travail which gave the word "travel" its form can result in an epiphany, like Doughty's triple rainbow or Vikram Seth's sight of the Potala Palace. The first traveler is William Bartram, who spent four years among Native Americans in the South and, contradicting all the reports of pugnacity and savagery, found only hospitality, goodwill, and wisdom. He described the people who were later expelled from their native land to travel westward on the Trail of Tears.

The Good Manners of the Muscogulges of the Creek Nation