Travel pains
Peter Conrad
Destination Disaster Paul Eddy, Elaine Potter and Bruce Page (Hart-Davis, MacGi bbon £4.95) A Night to Remember Walter Lord (Allen Lane £4.95) The Liners Terry Coleman (Allen Lane £5.95) Travel Posters Bevis Hillier (Phaidon £4.50)
Travel is travail. Etymologically, the word derives from a torturer's instrument for dislocating joints. Travel is expensive and protracted torture: a false romanticism has convinced us that tedium, intimidation and dysentery are an education for the spirit. Man the tourist is the saddest and most unaccommodated of creatures, suffering discomfort and braving danger in a pursuit of pleasure which is more like a dance of death. For not only is 'abroad' bloody, the modes of getting together are likely to be fatal—as is proclaimed by those pairs of clasped hands, detached from bodies, recovered from the crashed Turkish DC-I0 outside Paris two years ago, or by the bleared jewels and gilded mirrors slimed by sea-worms which Hardy imagined on the ocean bed after the loss of the Titanic.
The traveller's destination is death. The Sunday Times Insight team, which presents its report of the Turkish jumbo jet crash in Destination Disaster, has decided that 'the world's worst air disaster was no accident' but a technological inevitability, a foreseen and forewarned result of commercial and political tensions inside the aviation industry. Travel has become a matter of selfsufficient technical accomplishment. The machines do the travelling, and it is in their evolutionary interest to do it ever faster. Speed is of diminishing advantage to their harried human customers, since the time we gain from an accelerated journey is lost recuperating from the debilitation inflicted by that journey. The machine's destiny is to overcome nature, and we are conscripted to share reluctantly in its triumph. However, as Kipling points out, the inventions of engineering can always be made equal to the strains imposed on them, whereas
... the gods have no such feeling Of justice toward mankind.
Attempting to identify the fault which shattered the Turkish jet, Eddy. Potter and Page compare the plane to a human body: the machine is 'packed with delicate systems' as the body in its envelope of skin is 'packed with veins, nerves and arteries.' Hydraulics are a plane's bloodstream. But there is a difference: the body is sentient, which the slim clean taut wires admired by the writers are not. Aerodynamic virtuosity allows the plane to simulate life, but it is not alive and therefore has a charmed immortality : passengers are disposable, but the black box of flight information is indestructible. As the investigators found, blame can be placed nowhere because the culpable machine emerged from another machine which protected it. This second machine is the McDonnell Douglas Corporation, which blandly diffused responsibility and treated the falsification of manufacturing records as a technical failure, not a human misdemeanour. One gadget supplies another with an alibi: the rear cargo door was unsafe because it had received a stamp of approval without proper inspection. The cargo door, presumably, forgives the stamp, but neither forgives the 346 people who were deluded into trusting them. Kipling's machines warn that 'if you make a slip in handling us, you die.'
For Eddy, Potter and Page, the Titanic is an earlier case of such technological hubris: travelling at reckless speed, underequipped with life-boats, 'she demonstrated that mastery of the physical environment is held only by constant vigilance and constant humility'. As the DC-10's lunge from the sky asserts the machine's indifference to the human lives it carries as freight, so, in Hardy's view, the sinking of the Titanic was an affair between steel and ice, a convergence of sinister mates directed by a malign 'Immanent Will.' In Hardy's poem, ship and iceberg are phantoms mocking human life as they cleave towards the `intimate welding' of their unvital copulation. Collision is their union: they are 'twin halves of one august event,' and the 1,494 victims are guests at the ceremony who perish for the privilege of observing it.
Walter Lord's A Night to Remember, which is now reissued in an illustrated edition, concerns the passengers, but, as Hardy cruelly implied, they are hardly relevant. They were bystanders. This may be why they behaved with such gallant composure: the band continued to play hymns as the ship foundered, just as during one of the DC-10 near-disasters recalled by the Insight team a flight engineer hesitated to help passengers caught in the wrecked cabin floor because he'd lost his hat and remembered the airline's stipulation about correct dress for crew. Oddly, the human impulse at such moments is to imitate the punctilious deportment of machines. Lord has salvaged countless waterlogged anecdotes from the deep, but he doesn't reflect on the more general significance of the event. Like the Turkish DC-10, the Titanic stands for the calamity of a phase of culture. Submerging, the Titanic represents the decline of an inert, genteel society which changed into evening dress and queued up to die in strict conformity with the rules of class behaviour. Falling from the sky, the Turkish plane represents the disintegration at alarming speed of a technological society thrusting itself into the future. The Titanic upended itself with ponderous dignity, the DC-I0 hurtled to destruction with the randomness of one of Thomas Pynchon's rockets describing an `Ellipse of Uncertainty.' Terry Coleman's The Liners is also a work of nautical necrology, the inventory of a ships' graveyard. The Titanic is joined by the LIISilania, fitted out with watertight bulk' heads to withstand enemy attack but sunk by a single torpedo, the Normandie incinerated at a Manhattan pier, the Ile de France dismembered by MGM for a film about 3 sinking liner, the Queen Elizabeth converted into an aquatic university and burned in Hong Kong harbour, the France seized at Le Havre by a rebellious crew, and the Queen Mary anchored at Long Beach as a motel, wedding chapel and supermarket. The liners were as much images of their society as the Gothic railway stations of the nineteenth century or the airports which Brigid BroPhY has called modern cathedrals. Jules Verne thought Bruners Great Eastern a floating city (and Eddy, Potter and Page call the 741 a flying cathedral). Sinclair Lewis described his imaginary Ultima as a universal museurn of style, juxtaposing a Tudor smoking-roorn and a Roman swimming-pool. Giradoux saw in the Normandie a 'crystallisation of the French national will.' Aldous Huxley, perhaps more accurately, described the sante ship as a 'gilded, throbbing, overheated limbo.' The cruise ship is indeed an emblenl of the aching eternity which is limbo, adrift in an inane featureless waste. The ancient mariner knew it all. The history of travel is the history °f accidents. Bevis Hillier's introduction to his fine collection of Travel Posters begins with a series of ghoulish incidents, including the inauspicious death of Huskisson at the °Pelling of the the Liverpool-Manchester line. II; the novel, the railway has been an engine Od fearful retribution: Carker in DombeY all Son is churned to fragments by an •express which is 'the triumphant monster, Death'' Anna Karenina approaches suicide as ,a problem of technical calculation, and neatd inserts herself into the gap between tile wheels of the second railway truck while asking God to forgive her. Hopkins's shill' wrecks are redemptive acts of God: the Deutschland capsizes in a flurry of sprungd rhythm, the Eurydice drowns three hundee,, souls but preserves them fresh for heaverti.'' pity. The flier's art precariously balances bill and death: Yeats's airman knows he meet his fate among the clouds above..I best of Hillier's posters look like advertise" ments for certain death. The Night ScotsnlaArl steams ominously across the sky. Cunarder slices through a stormy ocean Or a black ship to hell. A funicular railway Os hovers over a crevasse, and a plane printssitt shadow on the runway of Geneva airPor
like an avenging angel. re
We no longer travel for health or pleas° but because, in our sedated world, it is the one experience which promises an inviet; ating danger, a heady confrontation Ow disaster. These four books mark out a Ile f field of study for us: the thanatologY ° tourism.
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