Tag Archives: travel writing

What’s To Become of Travel Writing?

Books, Travel, , ,

William Dalrymple cuts loose on the subject of travel writing in the Guardian

There I was wondering what on earth I could write about for my 200th POST, when my Blackberry blinked and buzzed and delivered up this article from last Friday’s [September 4, 2009] Guardian newspaper.  William Dalrymple’s thoughts on travel literature deserve a reading because he is one of the greats of travel writing himself. But what he wrote in the Guardian also deserves a lot of discussion.

Here are some of the statements in his piece.

It wasn’t just that publishers were not as receptive as they had once been to the genre, nor that the big bookshops had contracted their literary travel writing sections from prominent shelves at the front to little annexes at the back, usually lost under a great phalanx of Lonely Planet guidebooks. More seriously, and certainly more irreversibly, most of the great travel writers were either dead or dying.

Oh, please. Of course the travel writers of a former age are dying, but new writers constantly appear to take their place. And as for mediocre travel writing, from Victorian times through the 1940’s just about everyone who graduated college in England traveled and wrote about it. Early bloggers?

He does acknowledge some fine newer writers, but does not believe they are in the same league as Eric Newby, William Thesiger, and Norman Lewis, who passed away in the last few years. I also lament the loss of these writers, and know that my own personal favorite, Patrick Leigh Fermor is in his nineties and feeble, but that does not mean travel writing is dead.

First he sympathizes with the academic view that travel writers from the West have patronized the East.

But the attitudes of today’s travel writers are hardly those of the Brideshead generation, and as Colin Thubron has pointed out, it is ridiculously simplistic to see all attempts at studying, observing and empathising with another culture necessarily “as an act of domination”.

Then he says it isn’t so.

Also, travellers tend by their very natures to be rebels and outcasts and misfits: far from being an act of cultural imperialism, setting out alone and vulnerable on the road is often an expression of rejection of home and an embrace of the other.

Is this true? or a sweeping generalization?

…is there really any point to the genre in the age of the internet, when you can instantly gather reliable knowledge about anywhere in the globe?

Ahh, all writers of any genre better hang it up, then because Wikipedia and Google can do it for us.

Dalrymple has lived in India for some time (gone native, as they would have said during the Raj) and so, surprise, surprise, he finds a batch of writers with ties to India to be among the best travel writers today. AND, more surprise, he thinks that settling in to live in one foreign culture for an extended period will yield the best writing.

He ends on a much more upbeat note with a quote from William Thubron

A good travel writer can give you the warp and weft of everyday life, the generalities of people’s existence that are rarely reflected in journalism, and hardly touched on by any other discipline. Despite the internet and the revolution in communications, there is still no substitute.

This article contains fascinating details from Dalrymple’s life in India and recollections of some of the late travel writers.  I look forward to reading his new book, to be published next month, and would not even mind if the Bloomsbury publisher sent me an ARC [Advanced Review Copy] (hint!), but I have very mixed feelings about the contradictory and self-serving arguments used in this article. (And according to the comment section in the Guardian, one of the new writers he praised is his niece. Is that playing fair?)

[This article stimulated many comments and a rousing conversation about the health of travel writing.  Travel writing, by the way, is a form that is still alive as I write this note nine years later!]

Visiting Winnie the Pooh

Books, Travel, , , , , ,
Destination: England
Book: Literary Trips, Vol. II, Victoria Brooks, Ed.

In Which I Have to Choose a Favorite Book

Given the opportunity to read about the haunts of writers like T. E. Lawrence, Tennessee Williams, Ayn Rand, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, the Beats of San Francisco and more famous authors, I turned immediately to…The Hundred Acre Wood.

Winnie-the-Pooh
Winnie-the-Pooh

What can I say? The thought of visiting the little piece of England that was the home of Christopher Robin, and A.A. Milne‘s inspiration for   Winnie-the-Pooh books was irresistible to a lifelong Pooh fan. Who knew that Ashdown Forest is preserved as a national protected area? And that Poohsticks bridge still exists? I loved the way that Yvonne Jeffrey Hope who wrote the essay, played with the style of the books in her piece.

When it begins to rain, she says:

In a distinctly Winnie-the-Poohish way, I began to wonder if striding over Ashdown Forest on a blustery October day was really such a good idea.  I wasn’t concerned about coming across Hostile Animals, such as Woozles or possibly Jagulars, but I did have an idea that I was in danger of becoming rather late for lunch.

Pooh fans will know that lunch, like all meals and even snack times, is Not To Be Missed, and I was, after all, in Pooh territory.

It all made me want to scurrying over to the Children’s Books section of my own library and re-read my favorite House at Pooh Corner and Now We Are Six for the teen-hundredth time.

You can take tiny bites of Literary Trips, a collection of essays about famous literary figures and the places they inhabited. No need to try to gulp it all down at once.  I admit that I have not read all the way through Literary Trips yet, but I did not stop reading because I became bored. Far from it. After Pooh, I leafed back to read about the San Francisco beats, the authors of New Orleans,  Paul Bowles’ Tangier… I’m saving some for a tasty snack later on.

Literary Trips, Following in the Footsteps of Fame (2000), edited by Victoria Brooks starts out with a bang–an introduction by Paul Bowles– and continues throughout to exceed expectations. Literary Trips, Volume Two (2001) continues in the same vein.

An outstanding group of travel writers, mostly Canadian, wrote the entries here. Literary Trips II (2001) was introduced by Arthur C. Clarke in 2002–the year of his famous science fiction classic.

The essays that make up the book give you more biography of the authors than the guidebook approach one generally gets in reading pieces on visiting literary places.  The first book covers 30 authors and 23 different locales.  The destinations are as diverse as Tonga and Minnesota.  Although the data on the destination, hotels, etc., that the editor presents in condensed form at the end of each essay will not help because it is outdated, you can always Google. These two books (Volumes I and II) are now permanent fixtures in my Traveler’s Library–inspiring me to read more words of the authors featured and visit the lands that inspired them to write.

[The books were self published by a company that is called Victoria Books, Great Escapes.com Publishing. Great Escapes is a web site that seems to be moribund, with no new entries since about 2002. ]