Someone left the May issue of Travel + Leisure in our lobby library. I picked it up and saw that it contained a story on Thessaloniki by an acclaimed novelist and short story writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker. Turning to the piece, I read the lede:
“The city of Thessaloniki, a busy Aegean seaport in the northeast of Greece, might not be high on most travelers’ must-see list, but I wanted very much to see it. Though the nation’s second-largest city has a rich and underrated cultural history, and the beaches of nearby Halkidiki are known to be spectacular, I was drawn by my family’s history.”
My first question was: How much money did Travel + Leisure spend to send this writer to Greece so it could get writing that resembles an entry in a guidebook? (Minus the two first-person interjections.) My second question was: Why do fiction writers think that they needn’t make an effort when writing travel, that travel writing is, by definition, a vacation, a time to take a break from creative thinking?
It wasn’t always so: Some of the greatest travel writing has been produced by novelists and short story writers: Mark Twain, D.H. Lawrence, Isak Dinesen, V.S. Naipaul, to name just four. In the mid-20th Century, the pages of Holiday were filled with evocative pieces by William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, V.S. Pritchett, Paul Bowles. Travel writing, free from the coming taint of PR, was seen as a worthy endeavor, and a valuable complement to fiction.
In the past, Travel + Leisure has sent the novelist Gary Shteyngart on trips, the results of which have frequently landed in The Best American Travel Writing anthologies. But he is a sparkling exception to the rule that most contemporary fiction writers take it easy when writing travel, viewing it as a frivolous, inferior genre not worthy of their talents. They’re in it only for the free - actually, paid - vacations. They get away with it because the glossy magazines no longer care about good writing, turning their focus now almost entirely to advertising – and survival. When they eventually perish, it’s going to be hard – even for freelance travel writers – to mourn their demise.
There’s been a stream of fine books by immigrants about their experiences in the U.S. (memoirs, novels, essays) but no corresponding flow of books by Americans about their experiences abroad. Yes, we’re a country of immigrants, not travelers. But the imbalance strikes me as the result of self-absorption – Enough about us. What do you think about us? – and laziness. We’re OK with the foreign when it comes to our shores, but – even as readers apparently – we’re not going to go out and discover it for ourselves.
Portugal has announced that it is going to reopen to tourists on June 6, which, interestingly, is the anniversary of D-Day.
For a travel writer who wasn't really traveling, it's kind of nice not to be asked, "So where's your next trip?"
For the moment, the coronavirus is lessening overtourism.