Cocktails in the cabin
Andrew Martin is transported into a world of glamour through this imaginative evocation of 20th-century travel in true style
Travel The Journey Matters
Jonathan Glancey (Atlantic Books, £20)
TO this reader, The Journey Matters seems long overdue. For years, I have been frustrated by the short shrift given to journeys by novelists or memoirists. A typical sentence in an inter-war memoir might read: ‘My day on the Flying Scotsman was uneventful; indeed, I was deeply asleep after Durham, having overdone the lunchtime claret.’ Presumably these blasé authors simply assumed that steam trains with Louis Xv-style dining cars, cocktail bars and hairdressing salons would be around for ever, so could be taken for granted.
Jonathan Glancey’s book is a thoroughgoing, eloquent corrective to such complacency. He describes 20 journeys taken between 1932 and 2005. The first 15 are ones he ‘dreamed’ of making but never did; the latter five he has made. The journeys are not all on the epic scale. One is on the London Underground— on the Metropolitan Line to the sylvan Brill branch that brought the London Underground within 12 miles of Oxford. (The trip begins on one of two Pullman cars to run on the Underground, which served gin and tonics to City gents heading for Metroland homes and provided the only lavatories to exist on Underground trains).
What the journeys have in common, whether they involve sailing on the gigantic, fast SS Normandie from New York to Southampton in 1936 (it had a nightclub, a hospital, a 380-seat theatre and a shooting range) or driving a ‘lithe’ Jaguar Mark 2 along the Elan Valley in 1993, is that, unlike most modern journeys, they are not ‘homogenous’.
The author describes each trip in the first person, so in the case of the historical ones he has imagined himself back in time. He provides his fictional self with reasons to travel by giving him the persona of a Buchanesque troubleshooter on journalistic or governmental business, with a dash of trainspotter thrown in: a sort of debonair nerd.
This book is an eloquent corrective to complacency
When travelling on the streamlined Coronation train between Edinburgh and London in July 1938, ‘Glancey’ is aware that the train keeps up an average speed of 65½mph ‘with the really fast running made between York and London’. But he also appreciates being poured a glass of ’29 Margaux by the French lawyer sitting opposite him who, it turns out, is alarmingly pro-nazi. Accordingly, there is some tension as they jointly consume, shortly after departure from Newcastle, cantaloupe melon and grilled salmon with piquant sauce, then lamb cutlets chased by strawberries and cream—with the result that the Frenchman stalks off to the observation car to savour his post-prandial cigar alone.
The chapters carry appendices describing how each romantic transport mode succumbed to rationalisation. The note for Coronation adds that the Frenchman was based on Fernand de Brinon, executed after the Second World War for collaboration. In 1936, when our hero flies on board the LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin airship from Frankfurt to Rio de Janiero, one of his fellow passengers is Le Corbusier, who really did make that trip. The historical context is always nicely etched in, but what stands out is the experiential detail. On the Graf Zeppelin, the cabins are ‘lined in a bold and bright modern fabric patterned with summer and autumn leaves’. As an Imperial Airways flying boat leaves Southampton en route to Singapore one early morning in July 1939, the steward offers ‘tea, coffee, Oxo, Bovril, blankets, cigarettes and foot muffs.’
Two of the five journeys undertaken by the non-fictional Glancey are to Poland and China, in search of surviving steam-train services. In other words, he was travelling back in time. It seems this is where you must go to experience a journey with flavour and his detailed yet dreamlike evocations will take you there.
Biography The Man in the Red Coat
Julian Barnes (Jonathan Cape, £18.99)
THE MAN in question is the late-19th-century French doctor Samuel Jean Pozzi. The red coat—a floor-length garment of surpassing splendour—was worn by him when he was so mem-orably painted by John Singer Sargent in 1881.
It is fitting that Julian Barnes takes this portrait, which he first encountered at an exhibition in London in 2015, as his inspiration. From it, he conjures a portrait of his own: not in oils and not of an individual, but of an entire world at its most febrile and brilliant. Pozzi, described as ‘disgustingly handsome’ by one of his innumerable female admirers, was a fixture in the Paris of the Belle Epoque: an era we now think of as one of unruffled elegance and placidity, but that was, as the author makes clear, actually characterised by ‘neurotic, hysterical national anxiety, filled with political instability, crises and scandals’
The background alone would guarantee a good story, even without the stellar cast of leading and supporting players, who are introduced in a giddying roll call of talent, celebrity and sheer notoriety. Seemingly everybody who was anybody in art, literature, drama and high society flashes through, from Oscar Wilde and Henry James to Sarah Bernhardt (who dubbed Pozzi her ‘Doctor Dieu’) and Proust’s muse, the Comtesse de Greffulhe.
Some authors might feel swamped by the dazzling assemblage, whose lives crossed, diverged, then crossed again in a tangle of egos, enmities and love affairs. Mr Barnes does not. He marshals his protagonists with consummate skill, unravelling their complicated relationships with a blend of wry amusement and frank admiration. In chronicling the va-et-vient of a decadent milieu, he has produced one of the most original and entertaining books of the year. Martin Williams