Raw material in need of cooking
Philip Glazebrook
COUPS AND COCAINE: TWO JOURNEYS IN SOUTH AMERICA by Anthony Daniels
John Murray, f10.95
IOW
This book recounts in an able and straightforward narrative the experiences of Dr Daniels during two visits to South America made in the last five years. He set out with a bagful of books, and an unfo- cused curiosity as to the continent, and, as he reads and travels, we are given the results of his enquiries, the books filling in for us something of the confusion of South American political history, the curiositY, satisfying itself upon the incidents and encounters of the journeys. To this unex- ceptionable formula the book is eoirt" petently handled. The narrator emerges at San Francisco the same man who entered on his journey at Miami, his lofty tone and his contempt for almost everyone he meets undented by his experiences. It may be that I will be alone amongst Dr Daniels's readers in regretting that he did not attempt to do a little more with his material. It is my view that a personal narrative of travel, though kept in the c Topography shelf, is really a form 01 autobiographical writing, or should be such. I look less for light thrown upon the confusions of Bolivian politics, which en- capsulation does not clarify, than I look for light reflected from the Bolivian scene to illuminate the narrator's character. Thus' to my mind, secrecy and reticence are, misplaced in the author of a book 01 travels. But Dr Daniels takes pride in his closeness: 'Clara told me more of her life story, while I declined to tell her mine. We debated the virtues of candour and secre- cy: she taking the part of candour, I 01 secrecy.' I wish Clara had won the argil" ment. Surely it is the privilege the reader expects for his money, to be taken into the traveller's confidence? Besides, events re- lated through the buttoned lip have a disappointing flatness about them. Here is Dr Daniels left by his two friends at the. airport: 'We parted there, and I returned to the city, alone in a vast and alie1, t continent.' Yes, we know that was how it looked, but how did it feel? That is wha read a book of travels in hopes of dis- I covering. For the truth is that the outward events of other people's trips are rarely sufficient- ly interesting or amusing or significant in themselves to sustain a reader's interest. They need working on. They need to be related to a central idea or purpose in the traveller's mind, so that what happens may be made illustrative of his leitmotiv, rather than being recounted as a succession of unrelated incidents. Travel writing shares this with fiction, that its events are more or less interesting only as they are used to dramatise the author's ideas. Dr Daniels hints, for instance, at the dilemma in which `travellers' find themselves in a world of tourists: 'We felt guilty that, as travellers, we were sitting in comfort, seven miles high [above the Amazon], rather than hacking our way through the jungle' — but (as he remarks elsewhere) 'I prefer to end the day with a well-made gin and tonic.' Now, having heard him make this observa- tion, I should have wished him to have kept it in view. Then his subsequent veerings between luxury hotels and the back of pick-ups would have been illustra- tive of his dilemma, and might have led him to self-examination, even (who knows) to self-discovery. Again and again in the book I came upon an incident which I should have liked to have seen treated more thoughtfully, for its possible rever- berations amongst the author's ideas and Purposes. Waiting for a bus in Peru he and a friend, both doctors, notice a desperately ill Brazilian next to them in the line. 'We debated at length — it helped pass the time — whether as doctors we were obliged to offer him our help, though he had not asked for it.' I should like to know the arguments deployed in this curious debate, which might throw light into several cor- ners of the medical mind.
Dr Daniels's talent — what I found myself thinking of as his cold eye — is at its best when the incident to be described is itself exceptionally interesting. In La Paz he and two friends visit the four gringo inmates of the gaol. 'Boy', exclaims one of them on seeing the author enter, 'this is our lucky day.' Then follow ten graphic, unemotional pages which allow a terrible picture of that prison and its victims to form in our minds. Finally another inmate exclaims 'Boy, that was our lucky day', and we are again outside the walls. [Printed as `The Gringo Prisoners' in the Spectator 21 December 1985]. Where the event is so compelling, the unobtrusiveness of the narrator is proper; admirably, Dr Daniels confines himself to a laconic account framed between the two prisoners' pitiful exclamations at their luck. I am full of admiration for this reportage. But — and this is my point — the ordinary events of a journey are only the raw material of a travel book, and require working upon with much thought and imagination. In a Bolivian bus Dr Daniels sat next to a woman who commenced operations by telling him of her miner husband's hardship, went on to make him feel miser- able on account of his own wealth and idle wanderings, and wound up by accusing him in public of having stolen the keys to her house. A more reflective — or less secre- tive — traveller might have seen a source of self-illumination in this aggressive en- counter.
It may be that most readers would rather not be burdened with Purpose in a book of travels. Perhaps I can best sum up my disappointment with accounts of random trips which have not been shaped by art into Journeys, by pointing to the final page of each of the two sections of Dr Daniels' book. Each period of travel ends with the author re-emerging into the world he left behind him at Miami when he plunged into South America. In a restaurant in San Francisco in one case, and in a Peruvian resort hotel in the other, he overhears, and holds up to our ridicule, the bourgeois conversation of his fellow-guests. But it is surely an error for the traveller to suppose that he has changed the world by taking a trip through it: shouldn't he look instead for some beneficient change wrought in himself (increased charity perhaps) by the experience of travel?
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