-.1.r ilia source of perpetual astonishment to me how few
of the
you certainl,y_won't sell. And what _does that matter ? 7 - 'people who write travel-books 'appear .to enjoy the 'journeya But I own that talkitalk about Prose in Itself and Poetry' which they chionible. "•The train 'crawled. - There was in Itself bores me very soon. Criticism is the art of con- nothing to do brit olose'one's eyes and tell oneself, This, to?, veying to others the power of enjoying with discrimination. will pass," lanients Misi Mannin2 Grin and bear it. One Of such criticism Mr. Pearsall Smith gave the world an commends her ability to grin, but where was the necessity to excellent example in his book, On Reading' Shakespeerre, and bear it ? Miss Manikin repeatedly reminds us that she is hell- in this volenne there is a very pretty specimen of the same 'bent for Samarkand:and desPerately anxious to avoid expul- tactful handling of what is always an uncomfortable thethe. Sion from that city ; but she expels herself within two days What are we to do with those misgivings which :Sometimes of arriving there. One admires her enterprise ; one is glad come -to shake our literary attachments ? I knew a .lady that she has her memories "of El Registan and Gni-Fink and whose whole life was less happy than it deserved- tckbe, because Elizabeth quoted-to Darcy that vulgar proverb,:,", Keep your breath to cool your porridge." Mr. Pearsall Smith'i remedy is to visit Mansfield Park again, and he has had the good fortune to visit it in bricks and mortar as well as in print. But his
,. a
r fine glamorous title for her book: But •-stie exaggerates— $1l. got>d Keith— the difficulties preseutect--1.37:0-jwiery. e MoscoVr-Samarra-Teistikent railway is not "the route everyone mho has ever gene to Samarkand has gone." Miss Rosita Forbes reached San-arkand from the Afghan frontier ; fidelities are not easily sapped : neither Pater nor Carlyle nor the writer went there two years ago,, travelling, like Miss able in every country." A party thus constituted ought to be able to bluff its way round the Soviet Union blindfold ; for her own sake, one continually wishes that Miss Mannin had been less the New Woman and more the Old Soldier.
But she is a good jOurnalist, and she has been well advised to leave the major issues out of the picture and to concentrate on the incidents of travel ; to cut the cackle and- get to. th bed-bugs. The result is a picaresque narrative of delay l'and discomfort. Leningrad (which she eccentrically Calls' "the centre of the industrial life of the U.S.S.R.") is frisk and reminds her of Dublin. Moscow is Americanised and little "Y-S/POSr? RIT hfrglEtomatstic4.11st#-.4 "=The Lavra at ,Kiev•gets three stars. -By way7ef Kharkov -and Rostov she and her companion, travelling as the guests of Voks, drop down to the Caucasus, • visiting the German settlement of Gnitden- burg en rctee. They are unduly appalled by the Geor- gian Military Highway, _ and duly delighted by Tiflis, which is cosmopolitan and r. outwardly un-Soviet. Thence to Baku and fourth-class across the Caspian, sleeping on a crowded deck. From Krasnovodsk they rattle off across the Kara Kurn on the last lap to Samarkand ; Miss Mannin thinks little of the dining car, but if she had made the journey a year earlier she would have found no dining car at all. At last they reach Samarkand, hungry and exhausted, and embark on- a rather pointless game of hide-and-seek. The whole thing is based on their reluctance to go_ to the Intourist hot:1„,where they would have had to show their insufficient potted ; but the worst that could have happened to them would have been to be sent back to Moscow after the usual enquiries had been made, and these would have taken at -least'.-the two or three days they permitted themselves in Samarkand. One cannot but feel that the whole expedition should have paid more attention to bluff and lesi to bugbears. • But Mannin 'is extremely readable, and her tirade's on the subjects' of sanitation and procrastination build true- and vivid- picture of the conditions of travel. :he is unreliable on the Central Asian peoples '(" the Sarts," for instance, are not a separate race-Inta generic term : like " dagoes "); in the matter of RtisSian terms used, if "Keehm "- is - a good transliteration, " Sovehoz " is not ; while " tout mite," " vous-avez," and _" Aufweidersehn" are fairly good ants, but not bulls. Miss Mannin is gravely handi- • capped by not kaowing any NacIlrihen did ‘11 the negotiating and diplomacy and .might,. perhaps have ccntributed some interesting footnotes to- this book. But in a chilly " Author's Note " Miss Mannin records that her companion " is-not tobe associated " with-the book, apparently because it conflicts with her political sympathies. Miss Nachshen's sketches, which were to have: been the illustrations, are also lost to us, Miss. Mannin haying refused permission for the artist Jo add two or three chapters expressing her own point of view. This seems, on the surface, a pity ; but perhapS
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