Sheila Markham helping prepare a pair of travellers for their return to Palmyra. Dan Cruickshank and Don McCullin admire the first edition of The Ruins of Palmyra, 1757 (James Dawkins and Robert Wood) in the library of the Travellers Club [Photographer: Barnaby Rogerson]
‘The experience of quarantine is a recurrent theme in the Library’s collection of travel literature. Venice is thought to have been the first city to practise quarantine, in an effort to protect its trade and inhabitants from bubonic plague, spread from China along the Silk Road. Venetian quarantine legislation dates from 1448, and was quickly adopted in other Adriatic ports, and then throughout the continent. Britain took a more relaxed approach to the matter until its trade with the Ottoman Empire began to gain importance at the end of the sixteenth century. As part of their work, the consuls of the Levant Company were required to report outbreaks of plague in trading towns and ports. When the Company lost its charter in 1824, the consuls were employed by the Foreign Office to collect the same information, and to submit a quarterly report.’
Barnaby Rogerson on Michael Haag, fellow writer, traveller and publisher
Like us, Michael Haag first got into the travel book game by putting together guidebooks. His Cadogan guide to Egypt was first rate. Michael was both amused and world-weary at the same time and his eyes would flash open with passionate interest before glazing over like a lizard. He spoke with an odd, almost Damon-Runyan lisp, as if always delivering a stubby punch line.
When we were thinking of setting up in business, he invited us to supper in his basement flat in North London so that he could share his experience of running a small literary list. It was a memorable evening, for his Egyptian wife Loutfia played a hand drum between courses, his friend Justin told us horrifying stories about Vietnam and we drank a lot of red wine while trying to remain balanced on red leather pouffes. The core of his advice was to not get divorced, for in his case it had taken away the London family home the value of which upheld the large overdraft needed to support the outgoings of a small publisher. But Michael had paid off every last penny he owed to his printers by selling his publishing company to a businessman from Saudi Arabia who loved books but did not understand the need to sell them or open letters, let alone reply to them. With Michael’s advice we eventually got hold of one of the jewels in his list which was Ralph Bagnold’s Libyan Sands, after it had languished in legal limbo during the slow ossification of his old business. He also published T E Lawrence’s Crusader Castles and E M Forster’s guidebook to Alexandria, Pharos and Pharillon. I was mightily intrigued by both books, but in the end you realise that they hide more than they reveal. The only other books in his list that were really outstanding were Dilys Powell’s two Greek books: A Villa Ariadne and An Affair of the Heart. We admired them from afar for decades but have finally managed to add them to the Eland list.
Michael Haag on Ralph Bagnold, author of Libyan Sands
Born in 1896 into a military family of uncommon longevity, Ralph Bagnold was proud to point out that the three Bagnold generations spanned more than two centuries: his grandfather, born in 1786, pre-existed both the French Revolution and the formal creation of the United States of America, while his own desert explorations and research contributed to Nasa’s understanding of the landscape of Mars. Read more
Read MoreTravelling with Don McCullin
by Barnaby Rogerson
I have been lucky enough to travel with Don McCullin in both the Libyan and Algerian deserts looking for Roman ruins. Last year we decided to expand our horizons and drive through the Troad in north-west Turkey, and then hop over to have another look at the temple of Baalbeq in eastern Lebanon. We have had some wonderful successes in the past – like finding the Saharan frontier fort of Bou Njem at dawn – but there have also been some failures. On this latest trip, walking around the excavations of the Late Bronze Age city of Troy, talking excitedly to the director of the excavations about Hector and Achilles in the gathering dusk was a totally thrilling experience for me, but I noticed it did not have quite the same fascination for my travelling companion. His camera bag remained buckled up (always a bad sign) apart from one photograph of Hector, the excavation guard dog.
The next morning, I knocked lightly on the door of Don’s room to check he was up. It was dark, and we were hoping to catch the Roman statues in the site museum in the first light of dawn. The door immediately swung open, and Don appeared, bags packed, camera case to the fore. The shadow of a grin crept across his face as he met my glance. ‘Up at last I see,’ he said. ‘Only you could have slept through your mate making such a din.’ The mate he was referring to was the muezzin, calling the dawn prayer.
Jonathan Raban on Eothen
Eothen is such an easygoing book, so funny, so crisp and vivid in its handling of people and places, that the reader may well not notice that it is also a very slippery book indeed. It seems so lightly and spontaneously done, this quizzical self-portrait of an Old Etonian swanning idly around the Middle East in the 1830s. Its determinedly inconsequential surface masks a degree of artistic guile for which Kinglake has never received full credit.
‘My excuse for the book is its truth,’ he announces in his Preface. One may let one’s eyebrow lift a fraction at that statement, since the preface itself is an elaborate, and highly purposeful, lie. Kinglake passes off Eothen as a hastily written letter (a ‘scrawl’) to a travelling friend. It was no such thing. The book took Kinglake a decade to write. It was revised and re-revised; its style of bright talk was the product of a long process of literary refinement. In the Preface, Kinglake rejoices in the book’s ‘studiously unpromising’ title and makes the assurance that it is ‘quite superficial in its character’. For an ironist, the worst of all fates is to be taken literally – and Kinglake, adored though he was by generations of Victorian and Edwardian readers, has usually been taken, or mistaken, at his word.
FIVE SWIMS
The joys of a travelling year, encapsulated around the memory of five swims.
Read MoreRose Baring on Nicolas Bouvier
SO IT GOES
Travels in the Aran Isles, Xian and places in between
NICOLAS BOUVIER
translated by Robyn Marsack
Publisher’s Foreword
Only twice have I read a travel book and immediately wanted to speak to the author. The first time it was Ogier de Busbecq’s Turkish Letters, and I was well aware that I would never get through to the sixteenth-century Habsburg ambassador to the court of Suleyman the Magnificent. The second time was when I finished The Way of the World by Nicolas Bouvier in 2006. It didn’t take long to discover that Bouvier had died in 1998, and I entered a period of mourning for this man I had never met.
Despite his brilliance, Bouvier had largely slipped back beneath the Anglophone waves. Tracking down and publishing the works which had been translated – The Way of the World, The Japanese Chronicles and The Scorpion-Fish – allowed me to spend time with his words if nothing else. I tried, and largely failed, to trace the field recordings he had made of music from Zagreb to Tokyo. I looked at the images he had collected from around the world, the photographs he began to take in Japan in the 1960s, the poetry he wrote. I watched, much more than once, the film made about him in 1993, Le hibou et la baleine, and other snippets on the internet. I still long to have met him, and feel quite envious of the translator of these stories, who did.
So It Goes is the final element of Eland’s homage to this exceptional chronicler of the world – a selection of his shorter pieces of travel writing, and an essay on the childhood which catapulted him into the world equipped with such fertile curiosity. It contains all the hallmarks of his particular genius: an acute, painterly eye for the details which escape many others, an ear attuned as much to the qualities of a wind or the soft exhalation of a carthorse as to the nuances of conversation, and a willingness to open himself totally to the experience of a place, even when it threatens to unhinge him.
The title, So It Goes, is a phrase which crops up like a mantra throughout the book. Bouvier borrowed it from Kurt Vonnegut, whose writing he hugely admired. In Slaughterhouse Five (1969), the phrase implies that even faced with the horrific destruction of war, no good will come of shirking the truth. Bouvier is as good as his word.
Hugh Thomson on Andrew Graham-Yooll
During the dark days of the military dictatorship in Argentina during the 1970s, there was only one newspaper in the country which dared publish the names of the ‘disappeared’ at all – let alone, as Andrew Graham-Yooll did as the news editor of the Buenos Aires Herald, every day on the front page.
He very nearly paid for this with his life. When I went to Buenos Aires to make a BBC film about him some twenty years later, with the generals long gone, his friends told me they had implored him to leave the country while he could. As it was, he and his wife Micaela only just got out in time as the men in the infamous black Ford Falcons came looking for him; ‘out of the back door and straight to the airport’, as he put it. But then he never wanted to go into exile, as he then had to in London before ‘those bastards’, as he always referred to them, were finally removed from power by a mixture of the Falklands War and economic incompetence.
Andrew was motivated by a passionate sense of the injustice of what was happening to his beloved Argentina, a country that as an Anglo-Argentine he felt had both adopted and fostered him …
Paul Theroux on Moritz Thomsen's The Saddest Pleasure
A travel book may be many things, and Moritz Thomsen’s The Saddest Pleasure seems to be most of them – not just a report of a journey, but a memoir, an autobiography, a confession, a foray into South American topography and history, a travel narrative, with observations of books, music, and life in general; in short, what the best travel books are, a summing up.
Thomsen, the most modest of men, writes at one point, ‘though I have written a couple of books I have never thought of myself as a writer. I had written them in those predawn hours when the land still lay in darkness, or in days of heavy winter rains when the cattle huddled in the brush dumb with misery … I had always considered that all my passion was centered around farming.’ The books he refers to are Living Poor (1971), the best book I have yet read on the Peace Corps experience, and The Farm on the River of Emeralds (1978), which is a sort of sequel, and describes a maddening and exasperating series of reverses as part-owner in a farm (with an Ecuadorian) on the lush and muddy coast.
To my mind, this farmer is a writer to his fingertips, but he is an unusual man and his writing life has been anything but ordinary. Writing for him is a natural and instinctive act, like breathing. It is obvious from this book and his others that he loathes polite society and shuns the literary world (meeting João Ubaldo Ribiero in Bahia he is meeting a kindred spirit). He is no city slicker, he is not possessive or acquisitive; he mocks his physical feebleness, he jeers at his old age and his sense of failure. He wishes to write well and honestly, he is not interested in power. A great deal of foolishness or a little wickedness makes him angry. He always tells us exactly what he thinks, in his own voice. He is the least mannered of writers, and he would rather say something truthful in a clumsy way than lie elegantly.
I liked him the instant I met him, and even then, eleven or twelve years ago, he seemed rather aged, frail and gray-haired, wheezing in the thin air of Quito. I knew he was a good man and that he was tenaciously loyal and that he was a serious writer. He was in his middle sixties and had published his Peace Corps book, and he told me he was working on several others, including a memoir of his father. He hated his father, he said, and since literature is rich in such hatreds, I encouraged him in his memoir. He tantalized me with stories of his father’s odious behavior – the time he hanged his wife’s pet cat, the time he tied a dead chicken around a collie’s throat with barbed wire because the collie had been worrying the hens. I think I’ve got that right. His father was a poisonous snob and a liar, and he made poor Moritz’s life a misery. And clearly it went on for some time. We read in his travel book of how, at the age of forty-eight, Moritz was still being berated by this paranoid maniac for joining the ‘communistic’ Peace Corps. The only other person I have met in my life who hated his father as much was a German who told me that his father had been a member of the precursor of the SS, the SA – Sturmabteilung – and, long after the war was over, was still ranting. Indeed, Thomsen Senior and this Nazi would have got along like a house on fire.
I am happy to see this monster in the narrative. Whatever else travel is, it is also an occasion to dream and remember. You sit in an alien landscape and you remember all the people who have been awful to you. You have nightmares in strange beds. You remember episodes that you have not thought of for years and but for that noise from the street or that powerful odor of jasmine you might have forgotten. Details of Thomsen’s life emerge as he travels out of Ecuador, through Bogotà and around Brazil – his childhood dreams, his shaming memory of a shocking incident one long-ago Halloween, his years in the war (twenty-seven combat missions flown in a B-17 in 1943 alone), his father’s death and funeral, his disastrous farming ventures, and the outrages he witnessed in various coastal villages in Ecuador …
The Art of Travel Writing on the Slightly Foxed podcast
Listen to Barnaby Rogerson and Sara Wheeler on the latest Slightly Foxed podcast - ‘Leaving that place called home’ - Hazel, Jennie and host Philippa explore the art of travel writing with the acclaimed author, Sara Wheeler and Barnaby Rogerson - Eland’s publisher and editor. Buckle-up and join us on an audio adventure that takes in a coach trip around England, an Arctic sojourn, a hairy incident involving a Victorian lady and her trusty tweed skirt and a journey across Russia in the footprints of its literary greats, with nods to Bruce Chatwin, Isabella Bird, Norman Lewis, Martha Gellhorn and Patrick Leigh Fermor along the way. And to bring us back down to earth, there’s the usual round-up of news from the Slightly Foxed office and plenty of recommendations for reading off the beaten track.
Read MoreGavin Maxwell by Douglas Botting
Douglas Botting was a trusted friend of Gavin Maxwell in the last 12 years of his life and a fellow explorer-traveller-writer, so was uniquely equipped to understand both the creative and destructive demons that drove him. He has written an empathetic study of a man, which reads like the most bizarre and eccentric adventure story. Here he relates encountering Maxwell for the first time.
The first time I met Gavin Maxwell – poet, painter, shark-hunter, naturalist, traveller, secret agent and aristocratic opter-out – was a shock. ‘Come round for a drink,’ he had said over the phone. ‘Say, about tea time? Take the bus up the King’s Road. Get off just before the World’s End and double back. The square is on your left, between the road and the river. Paultons Square. Number 9.’
I found the house without difficulty, a tall, narrow-fronted terrace house in a large, tree-filled square on the furthest frontier of fashionable Chelsea. There were two bell pushes by the front door: the lower one was labelled ‘G. Maxwell’, the upper one ‘K. Raine’. I pushed the lower one and waited. Nobody came, and after a minute or two I went back to the pavement and leaned over the railings to try and peer through the front window. Behind the net curtain I could make out nothing but a brightly lit glass fishtank standing waterless and fishless on the windowsill. Inside the tank I could see the outline of what I took to be a large stuffed lizard, a sort of dragon in miniature, about a foot and a half long, with a tawny coloured, scaly skin. As I stared transfixed at this Jurassic apparition I saw that it was not stuffed after all but very much alive, for suddenly a long tongue like a snake’s flickered out of its mouth, snatched at an insect that looked like a grasshopper, then just as suddenly retracted. My attention was instantly distracted from this startling reptile by a flash of iridescent wings and a frantic fluttering of brilliant electric-blue and green feathers in the upper window pane. Some kind of tropical bird, wings beating furiously like a humming bird, hovered momentarily behind the glass, then swooped away and was lost from view in the darkness of the room’s interior.
The People of Providence
I was first introduced to The People of Providence as I sat bewildered and exhausted, nursing my six-day-old first-born. A friend appeared with a birthing present, a 370-page book which I was told would enrich and change my life. Actually, quite a lot seemed to be altering in my life at that time, and I added it to the list. I had just made the decision to change my career from hospital doctor to GP and was open to new ideas about people and their lives. Once my baby allowed me to do anything for more than 15 minutes at a time, I began to dip into the book and was immediately hooked. Here was such a diversity of people talking openly about so many parts of their lives lived on an ordinary inner city housing estate. It was a complete revelation to me, coming from a hospital background with a rich and honourable tradition of trying to ‘Get it right for bed 17, a case of …’. Now I was being invited to think about how the person in bed 17 might have a whole other life.
Read MorePeter Goullart's Forgotten Kingdom
Peter Goullart spent nine years in the all but forgotten, ancient Nakhi Kingdom of South West China. He had a job entirely suited to his inquiring, gossipy temperament, for it was his mission to get to know all the local traders, merchants, inn-keepers and artisans so that he could report on which characters should be backed by a loan from the Co-Operative movement. In his company we get to hear about the the love affairs and the social rivalries of his neighbours, attend magnificent banquets, meet ancient dowagers and handsome warriors as well as catching the sound of the swiftly running mountain streams, the coarse ribaldry of the market ladies and the happy laughter emerging from out of the wineshops. For he remained fascinated by this complex society which believed simultaneously and sincerely in Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, in addition to their ancient religion of Animism and Shamanism.
Read MoreRaban Revisited
When you think of Hampshire, you think of chalk streams and downland, military and naval enterprise, sailing and King Alfred, and Winchester Cathedral. But its literary heritage does not leap to mind. And yet Hampshire has played a surprisingly important role in nurturing the book. For the English novel reached its earliest flowering through the genius of Jane Austen, who was born and lived most of her life here. The world that she depicts in her exquisite novels, and her scintillating and detailed understanding of the human psyche, were born of the county and of her observation of her Hampshire neighbours and friends. But her Hampshire is only part of the story . . .
Read MoreRose Baring on Antony Gray
Eland publisher, Rose Baring, celebrates the life of Antony Gray, our much loved typesetter, who has been invisible yet central to the visual beauty of the Eland list.
Read MoreViva Mexico by Charles Flandrau
Taken from Nicholas Shakespeare’s epilogue to Viva Mexico by Charles Flandrau
THE echoed sob of history. Coming to the final paragraph of Viva Mexico! one reader – a commuter from Pittsburgh – was stung to his own tears. “It was just so good that I had to have a good cry about it.” He was crying for pleasure, but the life of the author can also provoke a lachrymose response.
For most of it Charles Flandrau sought the same obscurity that his reputation has received since. If there was anything foppish about him, it was located in his fear of failure. “America’s most reprehensible loafer,” was the verdict of the New York Times when contemplating the modesty of Flandrau’s output. “His greatest book was the one he never wrote,” was the judgement of the Saint Paul Daily News. Flandrau’s view of himself was as stringent. “I always think that everything I have written is rotten.” Once, at New York’s Harvard Club – named after the university which had so unfit him for life – he was accosted by a tipsy alumni.
“Are you the Flandrau who wrote a lousy book?”
“I am a Flandrau who wrote five lousy books.”
About one of them, Viva Mexico!, he was wrong. Over eighty years on, despite numerous challenges, it remains where the critic Alexander Woollcott placed it when he applied the words “the best travel book written by an American”.
Charles Macomb Flandrau was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota in 1871, in a house which became the bar of the Metropolitan Hotel. His father was a wealthy lawyer whose happiest eleven years had been spent as an Indian agent. In New Ulm’s Main Street, Colonel Flandrau situated a barrel of whisky laced with strychnine. He had marked it poison in several languages – except Dakotan. He meant the barrel for the Indians, but worrying that illiterate soldiers might get there first, he dumped it. He didn’t get on with his son.
Through Writers’ Eyes: Hampshire
When you think of Hampshire, you think of chalk streams and downland, military and naval enterprise, sailing and King Alfred, and Winchester Cathedral. But its literary heritage does not leap to mind. And yet Hampshire has played a surprisingly important role in nurturing the book. For the English novel reached its earliest flowering through the genius of Jane Austen, who was born and lived most of her life here. The world that she depicts in her exquisite novels, and her scintillating and detailed understanding of the human psyche, were born of the county and of her observation of her Hampshire neighbours and friends. But her Hampshire is only part of the story . . .
Read MoreFalling in Love with Books
Rose Baring and Barnaby Rogerson, the husband and wife team who run Eland were set identical questions by Georgia de Chamberet at The BookBlast® Diary - enjoy the answers!
Are (were) your parents great readers? Tell us a bit about yourself.
ROSE: No, but there were books around. I was quite a lonely child and books were a marvellous escape and provided adventure, friends and role models – Noel Streatfield, E. Nesbit, Johanna Spyri, L. L. Montgomery, Louisa M. Alcott and Lucy M. Boston. Just remembering makes me want to get back under the sheets and counterpane with a pile of them.
BARNABY: No, I can remember them both being rather concerned that I was reading “yet another book” instead of riding a pony, or playing with the dogs. There were many books in the tiny, dark Tudor cottage in which I was brought up, but they were mostly all inherited. They included a vast shelf of bound Punch magazines and a full set of Jorrocks. At a young age I used my pocket money to acquire the Ladybird history books but before the age of seven I had graduated to Jackdaws – fascinating folders of facsimile historic documents and maps.
Travels in a Dervish Cloak
Spellbound by his grandmother’s Anglo-Indian heritage and the exuberant annual visits of her friend the Begum, Isambard Wilkinson became enthralled by Pakistan as an intrepid teenager, eventually working there as a foreign correspondent during the War on Terror. Seeking the land behind the headlines, Bard sets out to discover the essence of a country convulsed by Islamist violence. What of the old, mystical Pakistan has survived and what has been destroyed? We meet charismatic tribal chieftains making their last stand, hereditary saints blessing prostitutes, gangster bosses in violent slums and ecstatic Muslim pilgrims.
Read MoreA Square of Sky
During the Second World War Janina David was smuggled out of the Warsaw ghetto, hidden in a convent and raised by Catholic nuns. Recently, Janina was delighted to have succeeded in getting the nuns recognised by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations. To commemorate this achievement, and to remind ourselves of the trauma of war and exile, we revisited this moving description of Janina’s return, alone, to her native town in Poland back in the early 1960s. Both of Janina’s parents were killed by the Nazis in the extermination camps.
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