Roughly a quarter-century ago, travel writing as a genre first broke into the popular literary marketplace. At that time, where bookshops once reserved their shelves for travel guides -- Frommers and Let's Go among others -- new titles began to appear, titles of volumes that were less travel planning and more travel adventure: the particular adventure of one writer traveling abroad rather than an accumulated listing of suggested hotels, eateries, and seasonal activities. Before too long, the genre took off like a jet plane bound for shores across the sea.
But travel writing is by no means new. Perhaps the earliest example of the genre dates back more than seven centuries, to Marco Polo's Travels to China and his chronicled adventures in the court of Kublai Kahn. More recently, popular nineteenth century tales of exotic travel adventures were exemplified by Charles Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle and Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast. In Dana's case, his best-selling memoir of the California coast was, in part, a catalyst prompting the mass migration of would-be prospectors who rushed around the tip of Cape Horn to stake their claims in the gold fields of the Sierra Nevada.
Some might argue that travel writing predates Polo by at least a half dozen millennia. After all, if travel writing is, by definition, a memoir of travel through a distant land, might not the Exodus of the ancient Israelites qualify? What about Homer's account of Odysseus' Odyssey? Unlike Polo, Darwin or Dana, of course, these two examples are certainly less fact and more legend, much like Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. But must the scope of travel writing, as a genre, be thus limited? Clearly, many classical examples of fictional masterpieces capture the flair and finer elements of non-fiction travel writing. Consider Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Voltaire's Candide, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, or Melville's Moby Dick.
Quite a few early twentieth century authors were, by their nature, inveterate travelers, adapting their actual overseas adventures into marketable travel tales. Take, for example, Somerset Maugham and his short story "Mr Know-All," the ship-board account of gossipy British aristocrats on a post-war voyage from San Francisco to Yokohama. Maugham's characterizations are rich and vivid, strikingly sincere; and his focus on the intolerably loquacious yet ultimately redemptive Mr Kelada is as poignant and precise as anything found in any piece of modern non-fiction travel writing.
The overwhelming majority of Ernest Hemingway's novels and stories take place overseas, as does his posthumous memoir A Moveable Feast, painting a personal portrait of post-war Paris and its lost generation of American expatriates. Might Papa's memoir qualify as travel writing? Memoirs, generally classified as non-fiction, often present a dubious or apocryphal remembrance, a fuzzy form of history at best, a somewhat fictional non-fiction. Even Papa agrees: In his preface to Feast, he suggests that "[i]f the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction" (ix). What about Papa's other travel stories -- of a suffering cuckold on African safari in "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber"; of erstwhile lovers on a desolate Spanish train station, surrounded by "Hills Like White Elephants"; of a bored and lonely newlywed bride holed up in her Italian pension, wishing she had a "Cat in the Rain"? These are classic travel gems, travel tales par excellance. Might they be shelved as travel writing today? Probably not.
So what then, the question begs, does qualify as travel writing? For a current definition, we might turn to Jason Wilson, series editor of the Houghton Mifflin Company's popular Best American Travel Writing Series. According to Wilson, twenty-first century travel writing -- or, rather, the job of the twenty-first century travel writer "is the same [as] it was in the time of Heroditus or Marco Polo or James Boswell or Charles Darwin: to chart [some] new world in all its rich detail, then report back" (xiii). Though Wilson does not explicitly exclude fiction from the travel writing genre, by his choice of the verb report, he does imply that travel writing is, in effect, reporting, placing it into the realm of journalism and, thus, non-fiction. More specifically, in Wilson's view, the job of the journalist-cum- travel writer is to "report on particular things, small things, the specific ways in which people act and interact" (xii).
Each year, Wilson gleans through a few hundred periodicals, all of which publish non-fiction travel stories. He then culls what he considers the best one hundred, then forwards them on to the series' annual guest editor. For the 2000 edition of Best American Travel Writing, guest editor Bill Bryson determined the final selection of twenty-five stories. By his own admission, Bryson's finalists "represent[ed] risky travel to challenging places" (xxvi). This, Bryson implies, is not necessarily an essential component of travel writing, but only a measure of what he, as an individual reader, prefers and enjoys. Wilson, moreover, makes an additional observation about travel writing in general and Bryson's selections in particular: that travel writers are "keen observers who bring places to life by honing in on particular, human details. . .[that t]heir writing pulsates with true emotion -- love, desire, humor, fear, despair" (xv-xvi).
Wilson stresses the essential importance of reporting the truth about a particular place, the truth in all its particular details. This, of course, the reporting of truth, has always been the basic standard of quality non-fiction. But Wilson here seems less concerned with the truth of specific, verifiable facts -- dates, for instance, and quantified statistics -- and more interested in recounting the empirical evidence of exposed human emotions. This, oddly enough, the quest to capture in words the slippery state of human affairs, has always been the basic standard of quality fiction. Wilson, it appears, wants it both ways: travel writing not necessarily as non-fiction, but rather as (non)fiction.
Bryson, in his introduction to the 2000 series, says: "Write a book or essay that might otherwise be catalogued under memoir, humor, anthropology, or natural history, and as long as you leave the property at some point, you can call it travel writing" (xix). Might this observation be somewhat relaxed to also include those earlier examples by Hemingway and Maugham -- those short fictions based on fact? After all, many of Bryson's twenty-five finalists, though perhaps officially catalogued as essays, read like pure fiction. Their structure, tone, and characterizations are almost too perfect, too contrived: less like life, with its often dull vicissitudes, and more like drama, with the crafted twists and witty turns typified of a master raconteur.
One fine example is Alden Jones' bittersweet tale of her love and desperate desire for coffee in "Lard Is Good for You." While teaching at a school in rural Costa Rica, Jones writes, she lives with a local family on their coffee and vegetable farm. An incorrigible cafetera hopelessly hooked on java, Jones is rather surprised to learn that her hosts do not indulge in coffee, preferring instead agua dulce, a sweet tea derived from sugar cane. Surprised as she is, she's shocked to discover that, after rice and beans, the main staple in the Costa Rican diet is lard. Everything is cooked with lard, by recommendation of the government, in order to provide some fat in the diet. Jones is horrified one afternoon when her host brings in from the field a satchel full of fresh-cut broccoli; while she would be happy to eat the broccoli raw, the family fries it up in a mix of lard and scrambled eggs, turning it into an unappetizing goo.
Eventually, Jones makes a friend of Ana, the mother of one of her first grade students. Graciously, Ana invites Jones over for coffee; and while they sip the sugary blend, they nibble on crackers slathered with lard. Ana, separated now for over a year, confesses that she desperately misses her two-timing husband. Ana shows Jones her photo album, pausing over pictures of her mustached marido, admitting that he had physically abused both her and their six-year-old boy. One day, during class, Jones hears the Red Cross ambulance racing past the school, a generally unusual and foreboding sound. In the back row of the class, Ana's young son sits "quietly, obediently," unaware "that down the road, his twenty-nine-year-old father was having a [fatal] heart attack," the result of arteries clogged with lard (118).
Another of Bryson's finalists, P.J. O'Rourke's "Weird Karma," chronicles the humorous (mis)ad- ventures of a Land Rover press tour across the Indian subcontinent. With his characteristic sardonic wit, O'Rourke reports in vivid detail how Indians misuse their sixteen-hundred-year-old, sixteen-hundred-mile highway -- how families lay out "charpoy beds and have a nap [while] the kids run around unsupervised"; how "farmers dry grain on the macadam"; how a blacksmith sets up shop on a bridge, his wife "working the bellows" while he "smok[es] a hookah and contemplat[es] his anvil." Additionally, O'Rourke recalls "several cows gobbling cardboard boxes and chewing plastic bags," realizing at last that there "may be reasons beyond sanctity that the Indians don't eat [beef]" (146).
O'Rourke's critical eye is most amusingly anecdotal when comparing and contrasting the custom procedures along the Pakistani-Indian frontier:
Getting out of Pakistan was a normal Third World procedure. A customs official explained the entire system of Pakistani tariff regulation and passport control by rubbing his thumb against his forefinger.
"Fifty dollars," he said. I opened my wallet, foolishly revealing two fifty-dollar bills. "One hundred dollars," he said.
Things were very different on the Indian side. The rules concerning the entry of two Land Rovers and a trailerful of spare parts into the country occupy a book large enough to contain the collected works of Stephen King and the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary. (148)
Similarly, the typically argumentative discourse of Calcuttan shipping agents is captured by O'Rourke's fine ear for dialogue:
Not that they disagreed with one another.
"We will go to get them [at the hotel] at 9:30 in the morning," one said.
"Oh, no, no, no, no," said another. "It must be nine-thirty in the morning."
"How can you talk like this?" said a third, stamping his foot. "The time for us to be there is nine-thirty in the morning."(155)
With the keen sense of a classic storyteller, O'Rourke piles up these bureaucratic conflicts like obstacles in a protagonist's path, all which lead to his ultimate conclusion: Regardless of the fact that India produces "five million university graduates a year," at any given moment "you might look up from your newspaper and see a man walking along wearing a bucket upside down over his head" (157).
Where Alden Jones writes convincingly of human love and desire, where P.J. O'Rourke pinpoints the humor in human folly, Mark Ross, in his seminal essay "The Last Safari," completes Wilson's emotional pentad by bringing to life the unexpected fear and despair of a pleasure trip gone horribly wrong. Ross, a seasoned safari guide, wakes one morning outside Uganda's Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, prepared to lead some forty-odd tourists on a trek to observe a troop of rare mountain gorillas; suddenly, when machine guns fire, they find themselves taken hostage by a ragtag platoon of rebel guerillas.
Ross, a twenty-year African resident, is all too familiar with the rumored behavior of such natives, how they "disable their enemies by severing their hamstrings or Achilles tendons[, how they] leave their victims to suffer, then return to kill them hours later" (192). With this in mind, Ross and a dozen others are forced on a barefoot march up a "trail that leads precipitously up toward the Congo
border[, where h]uge trees rise around [them] on steep valley hills, their tops still patchy with mist" (194).
Throughout the day, the guerillas terrify the tourists, interrogating them in broken English, hazing them with threats of violence. Ross' two middle-aged clients, newlyweds from Portland, Oregon, falter along the trail. Susan has a hard time breathing and, feigning a heart condition, is allowed to return to camp. Rob, her husband, is catatonic; later, when he can walk no farther, the tourists are marched past him as he is "kept behind," surrounded by machete-toting rebels. Ross, guilt-ridden, looks back "in panic" to where Rob "is sitting like a child, his legs drawn up, his arms wrapped around them," his eyes downcast and defeated (198).
After a Swiss woman and her homosexual companion are nearly raped by a rebel -- saved only by Ross' bravado -- the marchers, reaching the Congo border, are finally released. Ross, racing back to base camp, happens upon a horrifying sight: "It's Susan . . . lying on her right side, covered in blood, with her left arm thrust stiffly into the air" (202). Later, Ross learns of Rob's fate -- "found hacked to death in the Congo, miles from where [they] had left him crouched on the hill" (203).
While Jones, O'Rourke, and Ross' essays officially qualify as travel writing per the discriminating standards set by Wilson and Bryson, they also, in fact, share the same literary qualities inherent in all fine fiction, including that of Hemingway and Maugham -- not to mention Homer, Swift, Voltaire, DeFoe, and Melville. Ultimately, all fine writing, regardless of its subjectively assigned genre, might be classified as travel writing -- provided, of course, its content effortlessly takes the reader on a journey, a journey away from reality, to an abstract place where ink and paper are the only true monuments to the elevated world of human emotion.
Works Cited
Bryson, Bill. Introduction. The Best American
Travel Writing 2000. Ed. Bryson. Boston:
Houghton, 2000. xix-xxvii.
Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. New
York: Scribners, 1964.
---. "Cat in the Rain." The Short Stories. First
Scribner Paperback Fiction Edition. New
York: Scribners, 1995. 167-170.
---. "Hills Like White Elephants." The Short
Stories. First Scribner Paperback Fiction
Edition. New York: Scribners, 1995. 273-278.
---. "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber."
The Short Stories. First Scribner Paperback
Fiction Edition. New York: Scribners, 1995.
3-37.
Jones, Alden. "Lard Is Good for You." The Best
American Travel Writing 2000. Ed. Bill
Bryson. Boston: Houghton, 2000. 107-119.
Maugham, W. Somerset. "Mr Know-All."
Collected Short Stories, Volume One. New
York: Penguin, 1984. 317-322.
O'Rourke, P.J. "Weird Karma." The Best
American Travel Writing 2000. Ed. Bill
Bryson. Boston: Houghton, 2000. 145-157.
Ross, Mark. "The Last Safari." The Best
American Travel Writing 2000. Ed. Bill
Bryson. Boston: Houghton, 2000. 189-204.
Wilson, Jason. "Foreward: Why Travel Stories
Matter." The Best American Travel Writing
2000. Ed. Bill Bryson. Boston: Houghton,
2000. xi-xvii.
