A bourgeois fleeing up the Amazon

Philip Glazebrook

THE SADDEST PLEASURE: A JOURNEY ON TWO RIVERS by Moritz Thomsen Sumach Press/Century, f12.99, pp.2 76 The author of this discursive and engrossing book of South American travels succeeds in interesting the reader as much in his life as in his journey. A kind of inti- mate candour carries you along with him, amusing you with observations and confes- sions, beguiling you with a mixture of nar- rative and reflection, and (at least in my case) rousing you to score and underline his text in exasperation at its illogicalities and self-deceptions.

The book's framework is the journey taken by a 63-year-old American ousted from his jungle farm in Ecuador where,

after years of effort, I had made some kind of truce with the simplest and truest kind of life; I had fled out of the bourgeois in the only way I could, by embracing poverty.

He travels to Brazil's east coast and then takes a boat up the Amazon towards Man- aus. He has left Ecuador because he no longer has a function — incorrigibly bour- geois, he equates 'function' with 'identity' — without a farm, and the journey breaks off, short of Manaus, as soon as he accepts an alternative 'function-identity', that of 'writer'. It is, in short, a journey through limbo, the observations and reflections of a disembodied soul between two incarna- tions. The narrative of the journey is writ- ten in the present tense, and conveys the sense of this lightweight, identity-less psyche pushing through its difficulties in a medium denser than air. Everything is alarming on the gauntlet run from one self- hood to another. Every threat, every thought, is put under the microscope of self-examination. The traveller creeps through a world made hazardous by the projections of his own short-comings.

Whilst the physical journey unfolds minute by painful minute in present time, so a piecemeal and subjective account of Mr Thomsen's past life is allowed to emerge and transfer itself into the reader's mind as background. This account of his past is written in the perfect tense, allowing events-as-history to be arranged and manipulated in accordance with the author's polemical intention (conscious or unconscious) in constructing his apologia pro vita sua. In the present tense, in the course of his journey, we are shown a vul- nerable creature stumbling through a men- acing landscape, and we are shown it with merciless frankness: self-justification comes from the selection and presentation of past events in childhood and youth.

Born into the affluent American middle class in 1915, Moritz Thomsen first saw the world from a cruise-ship in the Thirties. He flew bombing missions over Germany, farmed unsuccessfully, joined the Peace Corps in his forties, and finally again farmed unsuccessfully, this time in Ecuador, until his native partner threw him out. It does not amount to much. It is life as an open wound, nursed and agonised over, yet kept open because contemplation of the damage to himself nas become the most familiar occupation of the victim's solitary life. Blame for the damage is load- ed onto the author's father. Spoken of only with hatred and contempt, to his father and his like — to bourgeois America — all the ills of the world are attributed. The reader, on the other hand, if he is not quite swept off his feet by sympathy for the author's wound, may begin to wonder. Mr Thomsen execrates his father for not giving him all the money he wants and then, when it has occurred to him that this is a despicably bourgeois want, castigates his father for having instilled the despicable wants of the bourgeoisie into him. Denied paternal cash, he joins the Peace Corps, Satan's troops in his father's eyes, leaving it on the day of his father's death to hasten home and see if his father's will, in which the money is left to charity, can be upset in his favour. Finding it cannot be broken, he buys the Ecuador jungle farm in partner- ship with a native who is very soon treating him just as he has treated his own father as a tiresome pest only useful as a source of money.

Since he went to Ecuador with the Peace Corps primarily to irritate his father, it is not surprising that Mr Thomsen's relation- ship with the natives is an appalling, though burningly honest, `Sixtyish muddle of duti- ful admiration mixed with sentimental affection, and of hatred mixed with fear.' It seemed to me that his general pronounce- ments on the matter ('blacks are a people who have been unable to build defences against evil') reflect his confusion, whilst his individual relationships reflect his hon- esty, and are therefore full of interest.

`Ugh! Young people are so wrinkly and ugly.' There is his farm neighbour,

Socrates and his whole drunken gang mortal- ly threatened by our arrival and the new order we proposed to lay over that 700 acres that we had bought,

and the gang's moronic pistolero by whom Thomsen expected to be murdered every night of his life. And what can we make of Mr Thomsen inviting the ill-dressed coun- try boys to dine at Quito's French restau- rant, at one moment with the idea of impressing them with European civilisa- tion, at another to disgust them with bour- geois excess? The young fellows, ignoring his motives, eat themselves sick.

Exactly how deep into the author's char- acter I was able to see, or whether I was led by the nose to reach the conclusions he intended (about himself or about his rela- tions with the Ecuadorians or with his father) I cannot tell. The book is cunningly constructed. Though naive, Mr Thomsen is not the simpleton he sometimes shows us. But, at the book's climax, when he shud- deringly accepts his new identity-function and becomes a 'writer', I found no sign that he did not genuinely overlook the fact that in this incarnation too, the 'writer' who has written a couple of unknown books will need as much propping up with father's middle-class money as ever the 'farmer' did. Or has he finally come to terms with being incorrigibly bourgeois?

This book is written with great skill. The language is sharp and amusing, people and incidents vividly lit. Here are two American girls at a bus station:

You want to end up canning peas in North Platte? You want to end up in a log cabin like Joe and Ida worrying about if you can afford guitar lessons?

Or a hotelier in Bahia:

These niggers just don't give a damn. We could be sitting here up to our asses in dust and they'd be out there in the kitchen hum- ming and dancing.

Nor are these just throwaway lines: they catch attitudes and pinpoint ideas which are central to the book.

Another line in the book which sounds like a wisecrack — 'My efforts to be the hero of my own life had in the end cost everyone too much' — is, in truth, a rueful summing up. The view out of which Mr Thomsen cannot shake himself, however violently he tries, is a view of the world as a proving-ground for the weaponry of self- development. Life's journey is an ego trip. Again and again he returns to the 'worst' action of his life, which was to throw an egg at an old lady who had opened her door to his knock one Thanksgiving night and had called a welcome into the dark. The egg flew from his hand and broke on her head. He has agonised ever since. But it is notice- able that it is over his own moral lapse the open wound in himself — that he grieves and speculates. All the while it is the old lady who winds up with egg on her face.