Peter Matthiessen turns 82 today. One of the founders of The Paris Review, Matthiessen has written eloquently of the Everglades and the Himalayas, two seemingly opposite regions. Colin Thubron once wrote that one of the things that makes great travel writing such a rare event is the fact that the physical strength required for rugged travel is seldom combined in one person with the sensitivity necessary for observation and reflection. That the soul of the adventurer is rarely joined with that of the artist. Matthiessen has proved to be the unusual exception, as this passage from The Snow Leopard demonstrates:
"We walk on in mud and gloom and cold. At the mountain village called Sibang, to the beat of tom-toms, a buffalo is slowly killed for Durga Puja and its fresh blood drunk, while children stand in a circle in the rain. These mountain children have the big bellies of malnutrition, and though they seem no less content than the children of the valleys, they are quiet and do not sing out to us; one of the blood drinkers has the loveliest face of any child that I have ever seen."
Edmund Wilson was born on this day in Red Bank, N.J., in 1895. An English major, I didn't discover Wilson until I got out of college, and he was one of those finds that make you grateful to be done with school. Books like Classics and Commercials and The Bit Between My Teeth were like survey courses in world literature and culture, taught by a man of impressive learning and daunting scope.
He even wrote travel books (oh for the days when our most esteemed man of letters also wrote travel): Upstate, about that part of New York where he had a house; Red, Black, Blond and Olive, an account of trips to the American Southwest, Haiti, Soviet Russia and Israel; and Europe Without Baedeker, reports from his journey around England and the Continent just at the conclusion of World War II. These books took travel seriously (as Wilson took everything), seeing it as a valuable means for studying cultures and societies. And Wilson was alert to everything, from the shoes worn by Roman women - "the only attractive footwear that I have seen since I came to Europe" - to the anti-Americanism practiced by the Brits, while they, at the same time, consumed our popular culture. (Not much has changed.) "Our Hollywood stars are already their stars, our best-sellers their best-sellers. To an American, these signs of Americanization seem mostly stale and depressing. The British feed themselves on our banality without catching our excitement and gusto. Many of them now chew gum."
I'm heading off tomorrow, driving to Georgia for the wedding of a friend, so I won't be writing for about a week. The wedding takes place Saturday, which is the birthday of James Fenton, who was born in Lincoln, England in 1949.
A great poet, Fenton also wrote an excellent travel book, All the Wrong Places: Adrift in the Politics of the Pacific Rim. Full of colorful characters and unique experiences (Fenton was present at the looting of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon), All the Wrong Places - published in 1988 - was an early indication of one of the paths the travel book (in the hands of people like Robert Kaplan and Jeffrey Tayler) was going to take. Toward politics, that is, not - unfortunately - toward poetry.
Isak Dinesen was born on this day in 1885 in Rungsted, Denmark. "I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills," she wrote at the beginning of her travel classic Out of Africa.
My favorite quote of Dinesen's I read not in a book but on a T-shirt. I was in Bonaire, having breakfast at a place full of divers. (Which in Bonaire could have been any place.) A young man walked by with a plate of eggs and as he passed I made out the writing on his back: "The cure for anything is salt water - tears, sweat or the sea - Isak Dinesen." You never know where you're going to find literature. I not only put the quote in my story, I used part of it as my title: "The Cure for Anything."
Paul Theroux, who singlehandedly brought the travel book to prominence with the publication in 1975 of The Great Railway Bazaar, turns 68 today.
He has sometimes disparaged the genre through which he made his name, saying that he does his travel writing with his "left hand." A lefty, I asked him about this when I interviewed him in the mid-90s. "Have you ever written fiction?" he asked. "I've tried," I said. "See," he replied.
He's also been criticized for being a crank, even by himself. In an interview about his most recent book - retracing the route of The Great Railway Bazaar - he described the young man who took that first train journey as a "young punk." The tone of haughty criticism was, I always thought, borrowed from British writers like Evelyn Waugh and the make-believe-Brit V.S. Naipaul (Theroux lived for many years in London, where he befriended Naipaul) and it struck me as unseemly for an American. But at the same time it was an understandable reaction to most travel writing, which was - and in many places remains - unbearably rosy. In person, Theroux is a charming and engaging subject - one of the few people I've interviewed who asked me questions.
He is also, now, a kind of throwback, the last of that long line of authors - Trollope, Dickens, Twain, Lawrence, Huxley, Pritchett, Waugh, Durrell, Naipaul - who, as a matter of course, wrote travel books between their bouts with fiction.
The slow departure of novelists from the travel writing game has hurt its prestige, while in reality it's been an indication of the genre's increasing sophistication. Travel books have become more specialized (Peter Hessler), analytical (Pico Iyer), and political (Jeffrey Taylor, Robert Kaplan). Theroux may be one of the last writers to set off on a journey with no specific purpose ("No one's ever accused me of traveling with a theme" he boasted in one of his books) and no particular expertise. He is the last of the immensely talented amateurs.
Yesterday was the birthday of Jack Kerouac. I didn't forget it; I just put it off one day (which Kerouac would surely understand). A few years ago I drove up to see the famous scroll of On the Road in Orlando - the first city to show it, as Kerouac was living there, with his mother in a back porch apartment, when the book made its splash. Rereading it before the trip, I was struck again by his boyish enthusiasm for life, and his ability to capture, in a way that hadn't been done before, the glorious intoxication of travel.
Today is the birthday of Janet Flanner, longtime Paris correspondent for the New Yorker. I can still remember picking up the magazine and seeing "Letter from Paris" in the table of contents, and under it a name so fittingly similar to flaneur, the urban animal who strolls the boulevards taking in and feeding on the carnival all around.