To the Ends of the Earth

The travel book was a bore. A bore wrote it and a bore read it—I could just imagine the sort of finger-wetting spud in carpet slippers who used his library card as bookmark, and called himself an armchair traveler. As for the writer, it annoyed me that a traveler would suppress his or her moments of desperation or fear or lust. Or the time he or she screamed at a taxi driver, or was picked up by a plausible local, or slept until noon. And what did they eat, what books did they read to kill time, and what were the toilets like? I had done enough traveling to know that half of travel was delay or nuisance—buses breaking down and hotel clerks being rude and market traders being rapacious. The truth of travel was unexpected and off-key, and few people ever wrote about it.

Now and then one would find this reality in a book—Evelyn Waugh being mistaken for his brother Alec in Labels, or the good intentions and bad temper in parts of Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness, a superbly structured book, deeply personal and imaginative and informative, but wayward, too. I saw it in the humor and the dialogue in Trollope’s The West Indies and the Spanish Main.

An unlikely source, Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark, vividly illustrates this sort of travel writing. One of the characters says, “A writer for instance talks about India which I have seen, and gushes about dancing girls, tiger hunts, fakirs, betel nuts, serpents: the Glamour of the Mysterious East. But what does it amount to? Nothing. Instead of visualizing India I merely get a bad toothache from all these Eastern delights. Now, there’s the other way, as for instance, the fellow who writes: ‘Before turning in, I put out my wet boots to dry and in the morning I found that a thick blue forest had grown on them (“Fungi, Madam,” he explained) …’ and at once India becomes alive for me. The rest is shop.”

When something human is recorded, good travel writing happens.

The trip—the itinerary—was another essential; and so many travel books I read had grown out of a traveler’s chasing around a city or a little country—Discovering Portugal, that kind of thing. It was not travel at all, but rather a form of extended residence that I knew well from having myself lived in Malawi and Uganda and Singapore and England. I had come to rest in those places, I was working, I had a local driver’s license, I went shopping every Saturday. It had never occurred to me to write a travel book about any of it. Travel had to do with movement and truth, with trying everything, offering yourself to experience and then reporting it. And I felt that television had put the sightseers out of business.

Choosing the right itinerary—the best route, the correct mode of travel—was the surest way, I felt, of gaining experience. It had to be total immersion, a long deliberate trip through the hinterland rather than flying from one big city to another, which didn’t seem to me to be travel at all. The travel books I liked were oddities—not simply Trollope and Naipaul but Henry Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (America, coast to coast, by car), or Mark Twain’s Following the Equator (a lecture tour around the world). I wanted my book to be a series of long train journeys, but where to?

All this speculation took place in the autumn of 1972, when I was teaching for a semester at the University of Virginia. I was working on a novel, The Black House, and awaiting the publication of Saint Jack. In those days I began a new book as soon as I finished the one I was working on. My wife, Anne, was in London with our two children, and she was working—indeed, earning a good living—but I still felt I was the breadwinner and that I was not earning enough. My British advance for Saint Jack came to about $500, and I assumed I would not get much more for The Black House. I kept thinking to myself, Now what?

Money is rather a clumsy subject, but it was a crucial factor in my decision to write my first travel book—simply, I needed the money. And when I mentioned the possibility of such a book to my American editor, she was delighted. She said, “We’ll give you an advance for it.” I had never before received an advance at this stage. Normally, I wrote a book and submitted it and then was paid; I had never asked for, nor been given, money or a contract on an unwritten book.