High browsing around Europe
Harry Eyres
Hamish Hamilton, f14.95
These two accounts of travels round Europe — both referred to rather ques- tionably by their publishers as Grand Tours — are separated by much more than the 37 years of history they straddle. While Hunter Davies travels in style, but in every other respect tries to be as un-grand as possible, Edmund Wilson explores the lower depths, yet retains an unbending intellectual hauteur. In terms of physiog- nomy, it is a matter of brows: Wilson, we learn from Jonathan Raban's very good introduction, appears in photographs of the period as 'high-browed', whereas the browline on Davies's waxwork-like visage pictured on the back cover of The Grand Tour looks dead central.
Wilson's post-war Europe is a scene of devastation. Crete in 1946 stands as a microcosm of the whole battered conti- nent: it is an island which has been 'blasted to bits, where people are hardly yet re- building but only beginning to pick things up'. Villages in Tuscany, far from being idyllic holiday retreats, are reduced to 'a barren expanse of dust'. Milan in May looks like 'a slice of Hell'. The desolation of landscape and city is an apt reflection of the atrocity so recently inflicted — in some parts still being inflicted — on their inhabi- tants. Few pages go by without some reference to acts of murderous human brutality: a single life carelessly exting- uished, the prostitute thrown out of the window of a Roman hotel by American soldiers, sticks in the memory for its insignificance, while report of grosser car- nage abounds — a tramload of Athenian women and children on their way to the beach gunned down for no reason by the Germans — and the more distant spectre of the gas chambers (Wilson does not travel further than England, Italy and Greece) looms over everything.
Wilson's reaction to these horrors is far from sensationalist. He is not so much interested in them for themselves — New Yorker war correspondent did not mean front-line reporter — as in analysing the effects of the war on the physical and moral state of Europe in the immediate aftermath of it. The analysis, though characteristical- ly powerful and lucid, is by no means over-abstract: it proceeds from acute observation of individual character and incident, drawn from a wide range of milieux — in the case of England, from the gaunt hungry women at a Labour meeting to the equivocal figure of Winston Chur- chill — to cogent generalisation about a whole culture. This can be most unflatter- ing, as it is with England, but the case against perfide Albion, unscrupulous in its foreign policy especially towards Greece, rent by a permanent geological fault of class division at home, can seldom have been so fully documented from so many different angles.
Other countries do not fare much better. The atmosphere in Rome, weighed down with useless relics of the past, pullulating with pimps and prostitutes making the most of temporarily inflated rates, is 'fetid and corrupt'. The price of the war is still being paid, not only in 'poisoned lives' in which respect for human life has all but vanished but also in the devaluation of the cultural stock of the past. There are, though, a few shining fragments to shore up against the ruins: one, poignant in its extreme fragility, is Leonardo's Last Sup- per, which, miraculously surviving in a `husk of four walls' even if only as a 'vague and incomplete phantom', still manages to exude 'peace and shining light'. The Parth- enon and Erechtheion, in a Greece whose `lean and bare' landscape strikes a chord in Wilson and draws from him some excellent description, have also retained their power to 'transform the world where they shine'. At its remarkable best, Wilson's prose can itself achieve such a transformation.
The world Wilson is referring to is a humdrum one of 'square houses and shops'. A sense of humdrumness hangs heavily over Hunter Davies's book of travels which mixes historical anecdote with his own 'experiences' despite its glos- sy, chocolate-box appearance. The Europe he traverses has long been patched up and made to look as good as new, but there are worrying signs that cultural values have not recovered as completely as fabric has been restored.
One of these, I regret to say, is the quality of Davies' thoughts. While travell- ing (quite gratuitously, one feels) on the revamped Orient Express, he reflects on `the real people, living their normal lives, asleep in their normal beds'. He would like to be real and normal too, but he is not going about it the right way travelling on this piece of mobile kitsch: all he succeeds in being is banal, but to be fair, he succeeds stunningly here. 'My two Japanese friends were talking away in Japanese', he remarks at one point.
Things improve marginally once he gets off the train (there should be a moratorium on travel books about train journeys) and starts looking at Italian towns. He likes Venice, you may be interested to hear, but finds Florence initially disappointing. He also opines that Titian's Venus of Urbino is 'nothing more than a page three girl', demonstrating once too often that reduc- tive debunking approach familiar to listen- ers to his Radio 4 book programme.
It goes on, occasionally rising to a moderately interesting level, as in the interviews with Sir Harold Acton and Muriel Spark (which he, wrongly, consid- ers a failure), and his meeting with an expatriate Scottish croupier in the de- cayed Belgian spa of Spa. Now there might have been the stuff of ITV adult drama, but Davies on his preplanned schedule could not stay around, he had to get back home to write this book, a preconceived, prepackaged, perhaps presold and prepaid product, which has been delivered still- born.
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