TRAVEL BOOKS
Round and about
PATRICK ANDERSON
Travel books, guides, accounts of sojourns abroad accumulate on one's table. Where much is good one has to pick and choose amongst the highly individual and the briskly plain, the practically useful and the imaginatively stimulating, the journey that was heroic in itself and the journey that had some specialist aim in view.
Let me start by acknowledging the heroism of teenager Miss Wendy Myers (Seven League Boots, Hodder and Stoughton 35s) who bounced cheerfully all over the world but who cannot yet, alas, turn her experiences into acute observation expressively written, and also of Mr Albert Lisi (Round Trip From Poptun, John Baker 36s) whose stylistic simplicity does indeed convey something of the hardships he encountered in search of Mayan temples on a river in Guatemala. Let me give a passing bow to professional descriptions of Southern Italy: Mr H. V. Morton's ex- pectedly civilised but cosy amble (A Traveller in Southern Italy, Methuen 45s), and Mr Peter Gunn's lucid if rather old- fashioned guide (The Companion Guide to Southern Italy, Collins 45s).
Then there are two Spanish journeys, Mr J. M. Scott's on foot along the Pyrenees, which will be most useful to those follow- ing his tracks (From Sea to Ocean, Bles 30s), and Mr Alastair Boyd's more interesting, thoughtful and people-saturated trek on horseback round the Sierras near his Ronda home (The Road from Ronda, Collins 42s). The Far East, too, has produced a pair of stimulating books: Mr Pope-Hennessy's short, snappish attack on colonialism in Hong Kong (Half-Crown Colony, Cape 36s) and Miss Nancy Phelan's well written, highly observant description of travels in Japan, with the emphasis on Zen mona- steries (Pillow of Grass, Macmillan 50s). It seems unfair not to say more—but there it is; this time I am unashamedly out for literary personalities and the 'highly individual'.
Mr James Kirkup and Mr Laurie Lee are both poets. As such they take their travelling idiosyncratically, measuring it in terms of their personal experience and bringing to it a selective, image-making eye. Although they write in very different circumstances—Mr Kirkup (Streets of Asia, Dent 42s) exploring contemporary South- East Asia from a long-established tempera- mental commitment to Japan, Mr Lee (As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, Deutsch 30s) reconstructing in an auto- biography a youthful hike from the Cots- wolds to Spain and the beginnings of the civil war—they are both, so to speak, pro- fessional sensitives, and one feels they could go on spinning their imaginative webs almost independently of the sights they see and the adventures they encounter. Neither's personality is put at risk by his travels; Mr Kirkup has a demure, at times irritatingly coy, sense of his settled emotional position while Mr Lee allows his youthful self even less tension, and least of all the tension of thought.
Mr Kirkup's personal geography is erotic; at his most poetic he wanders through a world of sensations never quite as sensational as himself; his strategy is to be gently outrageous, his tactics to reveal with the shifting of a sleeve or the lifting of a hem the efflorescence of his own flesh. Nevertheless he is also an informative, high-spirited reporter. His wish is to catch life 'at street level'; he confesses to an almost mystical exhilaration as he steps out into a new city whether it be Macao or some place in Formosa, Cambodia, Thai- land or Korea. The inner security which enables him to expose himself, often half- jokingly, becomes a startlingly relaxed good humour when he turns to journalism: bar girls are 'darlings', the Chinese 'dears', the Thais 'loves' and insects become `beasties'; even his chapter headings grow reminiscent of a travel feature in a woman's magazine, `Food and Fun', 'Fancy Free'. It's all a bit of a game, in fact. But this game is pleasurable. I enjoy watching Mr Kirkup guzzling his lollipops and seaslugs, drink- ing his three favourite aperitifs at one sit- ting, searching for colour film and curios, reporting on bookshops and temples, and then gliding off once again into the enigmatic moonlight.
Mr Lee is a writer out of The Weekend Book by way of Dylan Thomas. The cunningly chosen title of his previous auto- biography, Cider with Rosie, caught exactly the bucolic Georgian bounce. But the wanderings of a young man, with or with- out violin, present different problems from the eternity of childhood and the nostalgia it understandably attracts: one has some reason to expect a quickening intelligence, a rasp of inner conflict, a commitment to other people, much lively self-assertion, some embarrassment and despair, and perhaps also a sense of development. Mr Lee, however, who might have done better by detaching his youthful self into a novel where he could have taken on an indepen- dent existence, has preferred to keep him tied to his apron-strings, a passive and bewildered dreamer floating from inn to inn and girl to girl amongst all sorts of picturesque and eccentric characters who do not involve him deeply, although at the end of the book he returns to Spain to fight on the republican side.
But the narrow time-scale, the detailed accounts of scene and incident are novelistic and, at that pitch of intensity, the whole thing must be created or re-created rather than actually remembered, with the boy's sensitivity constantly embroidered into
the sophisticated author's style: 'He can; his grumbles and miseries like a gutter; candle from one group of drinkers another . . . the huge stained-glass windo [of Segovia Cathedral] like hazed dr% sa . themums in the amber distances of height'. Certainly this picaresque adven:u is sensuously written. Southampton to Lo don, Vigo to Zamora, Valladolid, Semi Madrid, Toledo and the sea, Mr Lee never at a loss for exquisite images—son .!! times, indeed, for an image too many. T living facts fall asleep like drunken bees the petals closing crisply about the' Incident after incident achieves this N. perfection of response only to wither f lack of sustaining and unifying water an soil. To my mind little but the portrait Roy Campbell in Toledo and the way I civil war came to a village near Mal, breaks through what is ultimately conjuror's dexterity.
Mr Gerald Durrell had the inestintab advantage of spending five boyhood on Corfu. He returns to this scene Birds, Beasts and Relatives (Collins 3(1 weaving together affectionate caricatures his family, the incursions of eccentric gues and his own adventures as a natural' amongst the olive-groves, myrtle shrubberie marshes and bays of that paradisal islaii The result is a bit uneven. The family seen with their stilted would-be funny dialoi. carry a hint of strain, the encounters ‘+' oddballs are often exceedingly slight b Mr Durrell writes beautifully about h toads, crabs, scorpions and their setting His peasants, too, come alive and there is really riveting village childbirth.
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