To See the World
POETRY, predicted Matthew Arnold, will even- tually take the place of much of what now passes as religion. The odd thing is that he should not have prophesied a poetry of geography—indeed that one has still, on the whole, to appear. You would have expected the withering of belief in other worlds to produce a flowering of human concentration on this one: that the decline of metaphysical religion should lead to a pantheistic cult of our own Planet—the kind of emotion which in the six- teenth century led to the 'great voyages of discovery, making them as much an expression of Renaissance humanism as Michelangelo's David or Rubens's allegories. But travel- writing remains, for the most part, one of the least inspired or inspiring shoots of literature: a labyrinth of dutiful boredoms or narcissist Posturings, of national egos forcing themselves on alien landscapes or stropping their sensibili- ties on the Parthenon.
So it is useful to have the harvest winnowed by the Darwinian test of paperback survival. People on trains, it seems, find their own motion sufficient without loading up in advance at station bookstalls with volumes of vicarious
restlessness. The few travel-books which achieve soft-backed format tend to be good ones: not perhaps the noble celebrations of our own earth one would like to see (it is hard to think of a recent book except Wilfred Thesiger's Arabian Sands which has claimed for the experience of places the same kind of importance as knowledge of history, or experi- ence of love or art) but works at least which have stood a kind of test as literature.
One which has becoffie a small classic of picaresque comedy is Eric Newby's A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (Grey Arrow, 6s.). Mr. Newby shook off in 1956 the silken fetters of a job as a Mayfair couture. salesman to join a friend in an assault 'on Mir Samir, a neglected peak on the borders of Nuristan, a north- eastern province of Afghanistan brought into the bosom of Islam only in the 1890s and only by force. Partly the book is an exercise in the humours of off-hand English stoicism in the face of Oriental unpredictability, crumbling rock faces, unspeakable food and resulting dysentery; but through this medium it also manages to convey the real delight of wild places and magnificent scenes, turning from what threatens to be an essay in English imperviousness to one in that rarer emotion, English xenophilia.
An earlier, famous example of the same kind is Bruce Lockhart's British Agent (Four Square, 3s. 6d.). At first sight, its pleasures seem the insular ones of a Buchan thriller: like his com- patriot, Mr. Lockhart tended to notice cruelty to horses more quickly than cruelty to humans, as well as who was Jewish and who was not. The very names of the cities he travelled through—Christiania, St. Petersburg—to take up a consular appointment in Moscow in 1912 conjure up the age of Richard Hannay, and the city he found at the end of the journey was one of vanished romance: at his first Moscow dinner the naval officer on his right was called to the telephone between courses, given his conge by his married mistress and shot himself in an anteroom. All this was swept away in 1917, but it launched a life-long love-affair with Russia itself, the land no revolution could change.
Dilys Powell's An Affair of the Heart (Penguin, 3s. 6d.) records, more ecstatically, a similar in- volvement with Greece. It, too, was ruptured by revolution, during the divisions which tore the peninsula when the Germans left, but the in- effable Hellenic light and hospitality won Miss Powell back. She writes of both glowinglyobut one tires of the sense that land and people are being turned to purely private, emotional uses. It's a relief to turn to the self-effacing Baedeker prose of Jasper More's The Land of Italy, the best buy in Batsford's handsome new five-shilling series; even more to Dr. Pevsner's latest monu- ment, to the monuments of Northamptonshire (Penguin, 15s.), whose reserved, laborious scholarship speaks his affection and respect for his adopted country more vividly than any purpled effusion.
RONALD BRYDEN
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