Different ways of experiencing travel

Recently I read three books in succession about cruises. I started with An Inquisitive Eye edited by Robert White, then read The Cruise of the Vanadis by Edith Wharton, and finally read Beyond the Mexique Bay by Aldous Huxley. I planned this sequence because I am interested in different ways of experiencing travel, especially in replacing air travel (less journeys per lifetime, but experiencing more in the course of a journey).

Air travel is an homogenised experience. There are variations in airlines, but you basically get the same sort of hurtling disorientation, de-humanised processing, and plastic environment. This sense of going somewhere and finding yourself where you began is not a TS Eliott metaphor but a reflection of how “samey” the world is becoming – enhanced if after your plastic journey you stay at a plastic hotel no different from a Premier Inn or a Travelodge.

So at the moment I am interested in people who travel on the surface and see new things…

Inquisitive Eye is the journal of Sybil Hall, an elderly rich American woman who travels with her husband around the world in 1935 (Pacific islands, New Zealand, Australia, Africa and Europe). She is not a literary writer, but is able to construct sentences that convey her interest in the things she was seeing. Although obviously able to afford first class wherever she went, it was surprising how much of the time first class wasn’t available, and they had to make the best of things.

The book amazed me with the accounts of how a very complex system of international travel and trade operated without much of the mechanization and computerization we take for granted. Huge numbers of people were employed making the world work. Things appeared to be much more sustainable and in balance.

Also it was interesting to see a world described where America was not yet a global superpower. Australia in the 1930s was very rough and ready, Africa mysterious, Europe ridiculously over-civilised. A fascinating book.

There is a picture in the book of the author and her husband and daughter standing outside the Burlinghame Country Club in California in 1956. There is a lot of information in this picture if you look hard enough. These people (as wealth-holders, as consumers, as voters, as opinion-formers, as nay-sayers, as self-obsessives) are representative of the class that by 1956 had changed the world, and subsequently stood close to the apex of human society (where, generally, they still stand).

Cruise of the Vanadis is a journal of Edith Wharton’s travels through the Mediterranean in a private yacht in 1888. The journey is supposed to have provided material for her novel The House of Mirth. Edith Wharton’s style is superlative, even in an unpublished and apparently private work such as this, and it is easy to see why she is the best writer America has ever produced.

Edith Wharton displays great classical learning in this journal, but she is not a specialist – just someone who was very well educated. She knew how the Mediterranean countries fit together and how their cultures relate one to another. Her journey through the Greek islands reminded me of Cavafy’s Ithaca.

Last and best was Aldous Huxley’s Beyond the Mexique Bay, a journey he made in 1933. Tatty old paperback – I forget where I picked it up. But so full of insights and ideas it had me scribbling in the margins and turning down corners.

Interesting that they had a problem with celebrity culture in the 1930s – Huxley calls these “front-page people” and mocks their infantile behaviour. In his study of the Copan ruins he mentions a sculptured head and torso of the a maize god which is held by the British Museum, so that I immediately resolved to go and see it. He also writes so favourably about Guatemalan coffee that I have been trying to find it (without success) in the supermarkets.