Prosaic heirs of an armchair Odysseus
Philip Marsden
THE WAY TO XANADU by Caroline Alexander Weidenfeld, f15.99, pp. 194 Kubla Khan, as every schoolchild is told, is a jumble of exotic images scribbled down by Coleridge after a laudanum- soaked nap in 1797. It is a short and erratic poem, took 20 years to publish and was described at one time by its author, with whom William Hazlitt readily agreed, as being of little poetic merit.
Why, then, in 1927, did John Livingston Lowes dedicate a whole book to digging up the roots of its images? Why is Kubla Khan, as Richard Holmes claims, 'endowed with more bibliographical sources than any other poem in the English language'? And why did the unflinching Caroline Alexan- der travel to four continents to visit the places associated with it?
In a brief preface, she tries to tell us. For her, it has something to do with a 'visceral conviction of the poem's greatness'. She admits that she 'would not be travelling through the exotic landscape of Coleridge's vision' but believes, in a travel-brochure phrase, that it will be 'the single most romantic journey of a lifetime'.
Her first destination is Xanadu itself. Now known as Shangdu, in north-eastern China, the Khan's old city is little more than a few bumps on the ground. (In the recent BBC series, Storm from the East, these mythical ruins were brought to life again with some fetching 3-D computer graphics — which is, I suppose, a kind of rough poetic justice.) The image of Xanadu, culled from Marco Polo and Purchas, provided Coleridge with much of the opening sec- tion of Kubla Khan, the innocent rhythmic first stanza. Then with the 'deep romantic chasm', the poem darkens and those extraordinary lines begin to twist and palpi- tate down the page, a strange balance between snakey primordial horror and graphic sexual imagery. For this, Caroline Alexander takes us to Florida.
Coleridge drew on the descriptions of the naturalist William Bartram for his `mighty fountain' and his river 'meandering with a mazy motion'. These same Florida swamps also gave Hollywood a setting for the first Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films. Alexander herself was brought up here,
and she manages to recreate something of the humidity, the epiphytic lushness of the place.
For 'the cave of ice', she is back in Asia, at the Amarnath Cave in Kashmir. Here at a certain stage of the moon (so it is believed), a stalacmite of ice, a giant frozen lingam, swells from the cavern floor. Thou- sands of Hindu pilgrims trek each year through the hills to see it. This is the book's most vivid sequence of travel. The pilgrims and the Himalayas and the muddy camps are brought alive — by walking. Too often, elsewhere in the book, Alexander is in a hired jeep or four-wheel drive. Kubla Khan, after all, was written after Coleridge had taken a 24-mile walk along the Somerset coast.
In Ethiopia, Caroline Alexander tracks down the last of the poem's probable refer- ences. Two of them come from James Bruce's thundering memoir of his years at the 18th-century Gondarene court. There is the incident, which Lowes had picked up, of the execution of the shum, the local gov- ernor, for allowing a certain branch to flick the shawl from the king's face as he rode past (`Beware! Beware! /His flashing eyes, his floating hair!').
Apart from Xanadu, only three specific place-names crop up in Kubla Khan: Abyssinia (the Abyssinian Maid and her dulcimer), Mount Abora, and Paradise. Mount Abora is Mount Amara (changed by Coleridge, Alexander suggests convinc- ingly, in the interests of euphony). The Amharic version of Mount Amara is Gishen Mariam and it is here that Caroline Alexander's quest ends. Few other places on earth can claim quite such a mythology as the summit of Gishen Mariam. Flat, cruciform and entirely surrounded by cliffs, it is now the home of a semi-monastic Ethiopian community. It is also the place where part of the True Cross was buried, Ethiopian princes were imprisoned (giving Johnson the idea for Rasselas), the world's greatest library was housed and, along with a dozen other places around the globe, the site of Earthly Paradise.
Alexander spends a few hours there, takes some photographs in a church, talks to some children and drives back to Dessie.
And that's the problem: what to do once she gets there, once she reaches these mythical places? All through her book Alexander is admirably candid about the gap between her own travels and the swirling flights and impossible landscape of Coleridge's imagination. Her subtext is a criticism of her chosen form — the limita- tions of earthly travel accounts. She takes the sad story of James Bruce as a caution- ary tale, of what can happen if a travelogue becomes too fantastic. Bruce's descriptions of Ethiopia had proved too rich for 18th- century London society, who called him a liar and laughed him out of town. He died in Scotland and only posterity proved his account accurate — if a little florid and omissive.
Alexander uses this to justify her more pedestrian details — finding a car, flying, getting visas. She debunks the 'romantic' attitude to travel literature. Yet without it we would never have had Kubla Khan. 'Can one's experience of a country', she asks rhetorically, 'be tailored to the exigencies of one's own romantic quest?' Well, yes. Literal accounts make for poor reading. Fabrication is one thing (and many do not flinch at it), but selection, or a little Bruceian indulgence, is quite legiti- mate. In its scholarly detective work, The Way to Xanadu is much more than literal; Caroline Alexander's descriptions are strong, her research fastidious, her writing provocative. But her visits to these exotic places pale — as she herself admits — beside the verse itself.
And in the end we are left not with these sites, nor with the myriad sources that Lowes dug out, but with Coleridge himself, wide-eyed and feverish, hunched over his manuscript in an Exmoor farmhouse, scrib- bling down the vanishing details of his vision before the knock came on the door, and the person from Porlock — that most famous of writers' excuses — dragged him down from his brief ecstasy of composition.
Philip Marsden's latest book, The Crossing Place: A Journey among the Armenians is published this month by HarperCollins.
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