the Conversation with the Cabdriver

I have one last grouse about travel writing before I pass on to something more interesting.

There is a sin of travel writing that I do not think I have ever seen on a blog, but have been irritated by when encountering it between hard covers.  It is the telling conversation with an English-speaking local, often one connected with the travel industry, such as a waiter or tour guide, but in its paradigm form may be thought of as the Conversation with the Cab Driver.  In this trope the writer describes a conversation with a local whose only apparent qualification is that he speaks English, wherein his source explains in detail some local problem or situation, which the writer passes on uncritically to the reader, and then inquires no further into the matter, even if only the slightest research before he got there would have revealed that this was only one view of the matter, and a particularly partisan one at that.

This is not due diligence on a writer’s part.  It is laziness.  It is journalism of the sort that leads its readers baffled as to why the articulate liberals interviewed in the square before the revolution don’t look at all like the people who wound up in power after the revolution.

If a travel writer tells me about his conversation with a cab driver, I suspect he didn’t do much on the trip.  A cab driver can be a very interesting person to talk to  --  after all, it’s part of what they do to generate a tip  --  but it’s not the window into a place we were hoping for and it suggests that the writer, our agent in this enterprise, has been derelict in his duties and is not earning his pay, let alone a tip.

If our traveler goes to Morocco I might want to hear the gossip in the souk, but I would not want to pass off the political analysis of the cabdriver on the way in from the airport as the unchallenged truth about anything.

I once had an interesting conversation with a Moroccan cab driver.  We talked about Ibn Batutta.  It was during a cab ride from Boston to Cambridge.

Travel writing, bloggery & poetic prose

I wonder if it is entirely accurate to criticize travel blogs as poorly written, as Theroux does.  True, some are indifferently written, but with others there is nothing in particular wrong in their expression, and a precious few are a pleasure to read.  Is it perhaps a better complaint that, beyond the value of any specific advice they give on current travel, they are otherwise just not very interesting?  It is true, of course, that good writing is hard work, but then so, too, may be finding enough interesting to write about.

You may have been months in the jungle, but you probably spent no more than a minute or two wrestling the crocodile.  If you hold off writing about your trip until you get home, you can showcase the incident rather better than if it is buried in the daily narrative of heat and mud and insects, dangerous food and unreliable transport and the quotidian bother of travel.

Which brings up the question of whether there may be something wrong with the concept of travel blogging, at least as a form of literature.  Think of the great journeys we have read about: how often they were day after day of unchanging ocean or desert or snow or jungle; the food monotonous; the companions mute.  Sunrise and sunset: another day.  It may have been an epic journey, the account of which could become a monument of travel literature, but it is not going to make arresting blogging.

I found what I think a very good piece of travel writing in, of all places, Poetry Magazine. “Everyone Is an Immigrant:Poetry and reportage in Lampedusa”, by Eliza Griswold.
   
The author is a poet who traveled with an Italian-speaking friend to the island of Lampedusa, once the domain of the aristocratic Giuseppi di Lampedusa, author of the novel The Leopard.  The island, lying between Sicily and North Africa, has been overrun by wave upon wave of African immigrants fleeing the various wars and distempers of their region and descending disruptively upon what had once been a slightly out-of-the-way tourist destination.

The writer is inquisitive and resourceful and fills her notebook with scenes and conversations and reflections and scraps of poetry, her own and others, and in the end comes to this:

I am not going to write an article about this trip. I am going to write only this notebook, because I don’t think that what I’ve seen here, the story I’ve been able to gather with the refugees at such a distance, is a matter of news. What I’ve seen is a complicated set piece, a drama, which I’ve watched only as a member of the audience sat before the false proscenium.

She offers no helpful advice to the traveler, but much that is vastly satisfying to a traveler’s soul, which is the sort of thing that I want to read.  I have said that I think the best sort of writing is poetic prose and this is a fair specimen of what I had in mind.

And would that other, professional journalists were as mindful as our poet that they had seen only as an audience to an on-going drama, in progress before they arrived and of which they had witnessed no more than a few scenes, and be similarly circumspect in their summary of plot and commentary on the action.

good travel writing

What does good travel writing look like?  I think it looks very much like this:

    “I come suddenly into a foreign city, just as the lamps take light along the water, with some notes in my head . . . I try out the language with the taxi driver, to see if it’s still there; and later, I walk to a restaurant which is lurking around a corner in my memory.  Nothing, of course, has changed; but cities flow on like water, and, like water, they close behind any departure.”
                                                                  -- Alastair Reid, Passwords (1964)

Reid is a poet and I think the best writing is poetic prose.

Paul Theroux does not like travel blogs

Paul Theroux, probably the best-known travel writer working today, is a famous grouch and he does not like travel blogs.  He told an interviewer in last May’s Atlantic  --  who had suggested there might be a certain bloggish quality about his recent book  --  that he loathes travel blogs.  He finds them hasty, chatty and particular.  “Blogs look to me illiterate . . ., like someone babbling. To me, writing is a considered act . . . something which is a great labor of thought and consideration. A blog doesn't seem to have any literary merit at all.”  Not surprisingly, he does not write a blog.

In all fairness, one must admit the man has something there, plain-spoken as he may present it.  And I know it can be answered that a blog isn’t literature: it’s blogging.  But in which case one needs to have some reason that anyone else would want to read it.  If you have just found a lost city or been raised up as a god by an undiscovered tribe, then the raw data feed could be interesting, but for most of us we need some art to make our more quotidian adventures of interest to others.

It takes effort to make something worth reading.  It is not enough just to have taken the same train. 

And if you want to know what Theroux thinks good travel writing looks like, see his new book, The Tao of Travel, a commonplace book of the great travel writing.

this may appear to be a travel blog

I intended this to be primarily a blog about writing.  It may appear to be a travel blog, but only because I am writing primarily about travel, albeit travel broadly understood.

I have several cartons of travel journals accumulated from my trips and I am using this opportunity to see if there is anything of value buried away in their pages.   And since I suspect that some of it may be amusing without being publishable, I am using this blog to share these.  As Evelyn Waugh said, we do not value our friends because they amuse us, but because we are able to amuse them.  I think this a better reason than that given by Lytton Strachey for writing letters: that their fundamental purpose was to express the personality of the writer, though there is certainly some of that, too.

And the absence of illustration on this site does not reflect any stern doctrinal position on the superiority of word over image, but only that my scanner blinks and smiles foolishly at me, as if it had no idea what I was asking it to do.  I suppose I really ought get a new one if I intend to be amusing.

what we bring with us

I am writing these stories from old travel journals and do not attempt to be timely or even particularly helpful, as I think the trick of travel is not where you go or what you see or how thriftily you do these things, but the attitude you bring with you.  This is why one of my fondest-remembered trips could be a week spent in late February in southeastern Iowa, where I wandered through the villages of the Amana and visited the site of the Skunk River War and the Great Wapallo County Gold Rush and found wonders at every hand.

I do now and then look something up on line, to check a spelling or see if a place is still there, or how it may have changed.  This is why I give so few names: there’s no sense in having people go off looking for a wonderful little place that isn’t there anymore.  The point of my stories is what I did with what I found: your story will be what you do with what you find.  None of us will have been there and done that, as “there” and “that” are constantly changing, and each of us bring our own baggage and so for every one of us it will be different.