BOOKS
Ever so slightly interesting
Peter Levi
THE PILLARS OF HERCULES by Paul Theroux Hamish Hamilton, 117.50, pp. 522 Paul Theroux is that American who had the startling idea of taking a train from Panama to Patagonia, and writing a book about it. I remember reading the book at the time, and enjoying it, but nothing much happened in it. He remains devoted to trains and still more horrible buses, and has now been round the Mediterranean, criss- crossing it like a spider's web and leaving out many of the corners, but dropping in somehow on most of the countries. The resulting book is 522 pages long, and I suffered much from it. I could not decide whether he was the most crashing bore I had encountered in years, or an innocent train-spotter in a bobble hat, or afflicted with a melancholy madness like bad breath, or just an American of a particular genera- tion.
The flow of his writing style works rather well, and bored as the reader may be by the subject-matter of most of his excursions, one is hooked as by the ancient mariner. It is said that to be a really crashing bore you have to be ever so slightly interesting, and it is surely equally true that we never really take against a person without some shadow of attraction, some flicker of enchantment. Paul Theroux must be long out of school by now but he has all the prejudices of the pimpliest American adolescent. He is pas- sionately anti-English, but he lived here for 18 years, so I suppose he has the right. He is nastier than necessary about Benidorm and so on, but what he really hates in Spain is bull-fighting. He does not think much of the Catholic church either. He is violent against ruins and against churches, and knowing, though without depth, about modern writers. He detests the Greeks, and claims that they welcomed the regime of the Colonels.
This may be a kind of snobbery, because he does his plucky best to like the Turks. He takes the curious view that Arabs smell. In fact he does not really like the people of any country much, nor does architecture excite him, and museums bore him. He is homesick for New England. At Reggio he does not visit the two bronze warriors, and at Metaponto he observes no temple. He is a voyeur of the third-class tourist, and once or twice on1ong sea journeys where a crazy Belgian is bitten in the balls by a dog or another chance companion is worried when the Israeli border police take Paul off for questioning, something human is communi- cated. About the pornography of the whole world he is a great and unusual expert, but he is at his dullest on this frequently recurring subject.
Sometimes he knows of a writer and goes to see his hero, though Carlo Levi had escaped the visitation by being dead, and his 80-year-old Egyptian and Paul Bowles in Tangier are both deep in the shadows. The Paul Bowles piece is brilliantly writ- ten and observant, and I was pleased to read about him, but it was a relief that the other American `literary' heroes of Tangier were dead or had moved on, because what a bunch. Paul Theroux maintains that Scott Fitzgerald invented the Riviera, and he sus- pects a strong influence of Gertrude Stein in Hemingway going to Spain. It is certainly true that travelled Americans nowadays all seem to know the word cochones, which must be Hemingway's influence. The true relationship between a writer and a place is a subtler matter, and it is worrying that this book ignores Laurence Durrell in the south of France, but chooses to quote him about Alexandria where, as the Semaine Egypt& enne pointed out at the time, he is wildly inaccurate. He has his elderly lovers leap from a boulevard to the beach but if they had tried it at that place they would have skewered themselves on beach huts or bro- ken their necks on a concrete promenade.
In the Camargue the flamingoes come to `You and that bloody chameleon! Why can't we use a fly-spray like everyone else?' him as a great surprise; but they have been there a long time, maybe centuries, and I thought all tourists knew about them. Still, what I did not know and am grateful to be told is that Maugham's Villa Mauresque was built for the chaplain to Leopold of the Belgians, to hover near his master and pre- vent his dying in mortal sin, a fate that might easily otherwise have overtaken him.
In Italy there are no such details: Theroux doffs his hat to Joyce and Svevo in Trieste, and for half a page you think the book will get better, but neither at Trieste nor at Rjeka nor at Dubrovnik does he have the faintest ability to convey even as much as one may know already. Indeed, the queer thing about his Yugoslav adven- ture is that, in spite of catastrophe, that sullen-seeming country is apparently exact- ly as it always was, even to the sweet old man sweeping leaves under the trees at Rjeka.
The people who have altered are the Albanians, who are like the prisoners of Belsen, liberated without being let out, still crazy with suspicion and fear, and mostly ignored in the West. Some do get out, of course. There are a lot of them in Greece now, where they are settling down well enough but Paul Theroux knows nothing about that. It is hard to know what he does know about. And yet he shows enterprise, he is persistent, and if he were 18 you would feel he would learn one day. I do not think you learn much about the Mediter- ranean by just wandering around it, partic- ularly if your ignorance is buttressed by such massive prejudices. Physical seediness is his expertise, but it deserves a better voyeur.
One sign of grace is that although he refers more than once to the Odyssey, and is belligerently defensive about using a ter- rible American verse translation, he is impressed to meet a Turk who has read it in Greek. And certain sentences or phrases are good in the way that only an authentic writer ever is good.
They did not have that soulless appearance of apprehension and abandonment that tourist towns take on in the winter: the empty streets, the wind-swept beach, the promises on signs and posters, the hollow-eyed hotels.
At best, he is the poet of what people of mean intelligence tell him on buses. A large motorcycle with a passenger passes two young men idling. 'Ole moto. Che cido."What a machine. What a behind'. You have to give up a good deal to be a convincing reporter of that kind of thing. Perhaps he is a thwarted thriller-writer, with all the background and none of the plot.
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