Is travel writing dead, killed by mass tourism and tourist guidebooks? According to Paul Fussell, whose book Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars revived scholarly interest in the travel genre, its heyday has long passed. As editor of The Norton Book of Travel, an anthology devoted largely to the glory days of travel writing–the last century and the first half of this one–Fussell laments that we are in the twilight of both travel and travel writing.
He may be delivering the eulogy while the patient is still breathing. In late 1987, the very time when his anthology appeared, two publishers began series of contemporary travel books. The Vintage Departures series has 11 titles in print, and the Atlantic Monthly Press Traveler series has 9. Both provide handsome paperback showcases for reprints of recent books by young writers who have the itch to travel, the sensibility to savor it, and the wit and verve to write about it.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Vikram Seth’s From Heaven Lake is a good example. Seth was an exchange student in China in 1981 when he decided to get back to his native New Delhi by hitchhiking through the deserts of western China into Tibet and Nepal. He wasn’t intending to write a book about the experience; he was just fascinated by Tibet (about which he knew almost nothing) and intrigued by the idea of traveling through China without the usual chaperones. Mostly, though, he did it as a lark, because he was young, and had the opportunity, and was willing to take a chance. (Compare this with the jadedness of the posttourist travel writers. Paul Theroux, at the beginning of A Kingdom by the Sea–which is about walking around the periphery of England–writes of searching for a reason to travel that isn’t just a gimmick for writing a book.)
At every town, more to divert himself than in any hope of success, Seth (who speaks Chinese fluently) tries to talk the local police into stamping “Tibet” on his travel pass as an approved destination. At one sleepy desert town, he surprises himself by getting what he wants. Seth takes a quick look at a map, sees that a few unpaved roads lead to Tibet, and conceives the “pleasant hallucination” of hitchhiking through the desert and over the Himalayas. And even though at the last minute he loses what would have been his traveling companion–a good-humored English student with a practical manner and a “sound core of madness,” ideal qualities on such an adventure–he goes ahead on his own.
Tom Miller’s The Panama Hat Trail has one of the classic structures for travel books. It’s a quest–in this case, to trace Panama hats back to their origin. That’s not as simple as it sounds. Panama hats aren’t made in Panama but in Ecuador. Americans on the way to the California gold rush discovered them in Panama as they made their way across the isthmus, but the hats even then came from Ecuador.
Miller is aware that his goal of tracing the Panama hat’s route “from the basement of the Third World to the penthouse of the First” has occasioned unanticipated twists and turns and unexpected pleasures. He’s aware that the hat has almost become secondary, the “pretext” for the journey, but ultimately the book is about the hats and the exploitation of the peasants who make them. Intellectual curiosity motivates Miller, and The Panama Hat Trail has a core of anger, of outrage at a system in which a hat considered a luxury in the States is woven by workers paid less than a dollar for labor and materials.
These are, in ascending order of importance and age, the boy Inghai, the young man Leon (swimmer, dancer, and prodigious lover), and Dana, reputed headhunter, chief of the tribe, and true leader of the expedition. “Dignified, intelligent, full of natural authority, at forty an old man in the eyes of his tribe, he was the law-giver and judge of conduct. . . . He regarded us with protective amusement. We were like the white men he had met in the war, Leon had informed us in hushed tones; we had stayed in his longhouse and behaved like guests he could trust, not offending against custom, well-mannered. James and I, in turn, decided that Tuai Rumah Dana, Lord of the House, a Beowulf, or, more accurately, a warrior-king out of Homer, was a great improvement on all our previous headmasters, deans and wardens.”
