There's life in the old genre yet
Sara Wheeler
THE PICADOR BOOK OF JOURNEYS edited by Robyn Davidson Picador, £16.00, pp.477 ISBN 0330368621 WANDERLUST edited by Don George Macmillan, £10.00, pp.384 ISBN 0333905024 The death of old-fashioned travel writing is regularly predicted by observers bamboozled by shelves of books of the 'Up the Amazon on a Skateboard' variety. All the great journeys, the Cassandras argue, have been done. But as Robyn Davidson's robust anthology reveals, travel writing is a protean and remarkably resilient form that lurks behind many disguises.
Davidson has assembled a fine collection of 81 excerpts ranging in length from a single paragraph to 38 pages. Highlights include Laurence Sterne, with lustful indecision, alongside an apple-checked chambermaid in a Paris hotel room; Jean-Jacques Rousseau being seduced by a pair of Croats in an Alpine hospice for converts: and Doris Lessing's dad sleeping under the branchy arms of a boma in the baking shimmer that lies beyond Salisbury (Rhodesia. not Wiltshire). 'Frost,' Lessing junior remembers, 'crusted the edges of leaves in cold hollows.'
Many of the pieces are wistful, as fondly recalled landscapes come to embody lost youth, lost selves. Others are love songs, like Katherine Mansfield's longing missive to her husband (misspelled here as J. M. Murray), Stylistically, as well as thematically, the book covers continents. Gore Vidal's parched satire from a pup tent in the Gobi desert balances Apsley CherryGarrard's elegiac melancholy (the extract from his polar masterpiece The Worst Journey in the World is the longest in the book) and the frugal prose of David Livingstone as he recounts his discovery of Victoria Falls.
Davidson's interpretation of what constitutes a journey is so broad that it is hard to identify a unifying theme, except that of writers observing the world around them, which is really all writers can do. She selfconsciously avoids people traditionally labelled 'travel writers'. so the reader will not find Robert Byron, Paul Theroux or Eric Newby loitering here; they, one infers, are not quite literary enough to cut the mustard. So Fyodor and Gustave and Marcel queue up for attention, and all very well it is too, though I could have done without the expressions of distaste for the official travel writing 'genre' that Davidson parades in her introduction. This is literary snobbery of the Bruce Chatwin kind (when he won the Thomas Cook Travel Book of the Year award, he sent the cheque back). Everyone agrees that most contemporary travel writing is rubbish, but so are most new novels and poems.
This mean-spirited complaint notwithstanding, you'd have to have a heart of stone not to enjoy The Picador Book of Journeys. From the familiar (Auden in Iceland and Hunter S. Thompson in the Nevada desert with his stoned lawyer) to the exotic (the angular staccato of Senwosret I, writing two millennia BC), the anthology is a delight. Some of the pieces approach the sublime. V. S. Pritchett conjures up `Castille ... a landscape of hidden villages, suddenly come upon, like crocks of earthenware in the soil, crumbling in the summer heat'.
There is a shortage of the sublime in Wanderlust, a collection of travel pieces that have appeared on the Salon.com website. According to editor Don George, the book is 'dedicated to putting the romance and the passion back into travel writing.' While he has assembled an ostensibly pleasing mix of big names (Jan Morris. Isabel Allende, Carlos Fuentes) and unknowns. the quality of the prose is woefully hit-and-miss. Bill Barich, visiting Shelley's house Casa Magni on the Gulf of Spezia, concludes jauntily. 'Those British Romantics, they lived like hippies, strumming their guitars and fathering children out of wedlock. I'm all for them. Am I not slightly Byronic myself? I believe there might be a poem or two in me. if I can just get them out.' This last torment, at least, we are spared.
Most of the contributors are Americans harbouring a mannered, chocolate-boxy view of 'travel': you meet them on the road all the time (they're the ones complaining about the plumbing). Their observations are larded with pretentious bons mots of the kind that appear on tear-off calendars Jo travel is to trust again') and their themes range from the Memphis World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest ('the most prestigious pork barbecue competition in the world') to the difficulties of procuring tampons in foreign lands (Ladies, I think you'll agree: Tampax is the greatest invention of the twentieth century.') It's not really writing, is it? It's typing.
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