The Pillars of Hercules

In 1928, Evelyn Waugh was offered a free cruise of a similar sort, through the Mediterranean on a Norwegian ship, the Stella Polaris. Waugh’s agent got free tickets for Waugh and his wife on the understanding that Waugh “would write it up in a travel book.” The account of his cruise, Labels: A Mediterranean Journal, published in 1930, was one of the most celebrated travel books of the thirties, regarded by many people—though not by me—as the heyday of the travel narrative. (I think that travel books have had many heydays.)

Waugh “had no interest in foreign travel,” Humphrey Carpenter wrote in The Brideshead Generation. “He would have agreed with John Betjeman’s remark to Edward James: ‘Isn’t abroad awful?’ ” Yet Waugh gave the Mediterranean mixed reviews, and admitted to a frank infatuation with Corfu. Labels, the result of the free tickets, was full of snap judgments and obnoxious opinions that helped make his reputation, and because of its hearty snobberies the narrative became the model for a certain kind of travel book that was much boosted recently by a crowd of pedants who believed that there was a time in the past when the going was good. It is actually a strange book.

But then a travel book is a very strange thing, there are few good excuses for writing one—all of them personal—and, these days, there are as many different travel books as there are travelers. The fairest way of judging travel books is by their truth and their wit. You can have quite a good time reading a harrowing book like The Worst Journey in the World, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, without any further thought of traveling to Antarctica. It is less a matter of geography than of your own taste. And some of the best and most enjoyable travel books are studies in snap judgments. In the end, all that matters is that the facts are generally true, so that a historian, some Fernand Braudel of the future, will be able to use your book as a source for, say, the condition of Albania in 1994 (“… stolen cars … bad roads … poor diets … lived in bunkers … Hoxha graffiti still legible on some walls …”). Historians are on firm ground with primary sources, diaries and travelers’ tales.

The most tedious travel book, in my opinion, is the one in which the author is being vague about having a wonderful time. All that jauntiness seems like boasting to me, and dishonest boasting too, since the writers must be hiding so much misery. We all know that a vast proportion of travel is accumulated nuisance; but if boredom or awfulness is handled with skill and concrete detail, it is funnier and truer than the sunniest prose.

Labels was written by a twenty-six-year-old who had just published a successful novel, Decline and Fall (and was about to publish Vile Bodies); who had decided, like the character in Saki, that “the art of public life lies in knowing when to stop, and then going a bit further.”

Here is Waugh on the French: “As a race, it is true, the French tend to have strong heads, weak stomachs, and a rooted abhorrence of hospitality.” Germans are “ugly.” Paris is “bogus.” Monte Carlo is “supremely artificial.” Waugh even manages to be rude about the pyramids (“less impressive when seen close”) and the Sphinx is “an ill proportioned composition of inconsiderable esthetic appeal.” Mallorca, Gibraltar, and Algiers are no better, though Waugh’s way of dismissing them is highly amusing. Waugh is no kinder to what he calls—and this has a certain resonance today—“the mongrel kingdom of the Jugoslavs.”

It is all eccentric opinion—Waugh is the last person who would say that his book had the weight of scholarship as its justification, or even the quest for adventure. “There is no track quite so soundly beaten as the Mediterranean seaboard,” he says, admitting that this will be the opposite of adventure, as it is the opposite of scholarship. At one point he begins to discuss Arab architecture and then he apologizes and offers a whole paragraph of “silly old me.”

Labels is never predictable. When travel writers make cruises the subject of books the theme is often that of the Ship of Fools on yet another pointless voyage. (Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that writers tend to be solitary if not downright antisocial.) Waugh avoids that, and is impartial, as mocking towards the English as he is towards the Maltese and the Algerians. In the narrative he develops a line in wine snobbery, too: “the wine of Crete is lowly esteemed,” “I do not believe that Algerian wine is really very nice,” Málaga is “very nasty,” and as for Manzanilla—“the inferior brands taste like the smell of evening newspapers.”