Stuck at the Pole? It beats being at home with the wife
AS I read this vast, compendious and glorious volume, I realised that I am a traveller no longer. I’m a person who sits at home and reads about foreign countries.
It’s much cheaper than going there, of course, and easier to organise. You can imagine being there, you can immerse yourself in the travels of others, but when you open your eyes, you’re still sitting in your armchair with a cup of tea. If there’s a simpler recipe for happiness, I don’t know what it is.
This book is subtitled 365 Days Of Travel Writing In Diaries, Journals And Letters, and that’s pretty much it. Look up March 20, for example, and there’s an excerpt from a letter by Anton Chekhov to his sister, written in 1891 while on a visit to Vienna.
‘The dinners are good. There is no vodka; they drink beer and fairly good wine. There is one thing that is nasty: they make you pay for bread. When they bring the bill they ask, Wie viel brodchen? — that is, how many rolls have you devoured? And you have to pay for every little roll.’
Maybe he thought of writing a play about it. The Three Bread Rolls. Or maybe not.
On the same day in 1932, the indefatigable adventurer Freya Stark wrote to her mother from Basra. She talks of the ‘brown emptiness of South Mesopotamia, the river winding in the curliest curls imaginable . . .
‘The desert has its extraordinary fascination quite inexplicable — the emptiness and the thin buoyant air.’ And there you are in your mind’s eye, just for a moment. It’s a good moment.
Many of the usual suspects are here: Robert Byron, Wilfred Thesiger, Bruce Chatwin, Dervla Murphy, Evelyn Waugh. But several others are not, and this is because Elborough and Rennison have included only entries that can be precisely dated.
This self-imposed limitation has compelled them to look beyond the Golden Age of Travel Writing, both to journals and diaries written long before, and after.
Michael Palin and Alan Bennett are here, as are bloggers, vloggers (short for video bloggers) and gap yearists. The entries for one day in August come from 1784 and 1843, the next day’s from 2007 and 2009.
With no entry more than a page, and a few far shorter, the book gains from its giddy variety. You can never guess what is coming next.
For February 29, for instance, we have Charles Darwin visiting the Brazilian rainforest in 1832. ‘A most paradoxical mixture of sound and silence pervades the shady parts of the wood. ‘The noise from the insects is so loud that it may be heard even in a vessel anchored several hundred yards from the shore; yet within the recesses of the forest a universal silence appears to reign.
‘To a person fond of natural history, such a day as this brings with it a deeper pleasure than he can ever hope to experience again.’ And on the same page, Ernest Shackleton in Antarctica in 1916: ‘On Leap Year day, February 29, we held a special celebration, more to cheer the men up than for anything else. Some of the cynics of the party held that it was to celebrate their escape from woman’s wiles for another four years.
‘The last of our cocoa was used today. Henceforth water, with an occasional drink of weak milk, is to be our only beverage.’
Give me woman’s wiles and an unlimited supply of cocoa every time.
Some entries are wonderfully teasing in their brevity. This is George Buckham in 1870: ‘Another rainy day. Mr D.B. St John and I strolled through Naples on foot, and spent three or four hours gazing into the shop windows. Pocket picked twice — first of a scarf, and secondly of a pair of gloves.’
SO THAT’S it. Maybe because I have compiled books a little like this myself, I can’t help imagining the enormous amount of reading necessary to produce this splendid, inconsequential little squib. But it was worth it.
A book like this stands or falls on the taste, judgment and diligence of its compilers. They score highly on all three.
Nor have they concentrated solely on writing that celebrates travel, travellers and foreign lands. Some of it is really quite bad-tempered.
Here’s Elizabeth Smart, writing in 1937: ‘Sailing on the Ranpura. How I hate the sea and the interminable, long, dull days. The cold, the food, the insufferable passengers who never smile… Barren, sterile, and stale is the smell of the ship. I have met two people in two days whom I would like to kill.’
Anyone who hasn’t felt like that hasn’t gone anywhere.