Travel

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Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire --

A recovering hippie recommended this book to me in the early 1970's. I didn't read it at the time, but remembered to do so 10 or 15 years later. I'm glad I did. Abbey himself is all over every page which is not entirely a good thing. But he writes like a dream, and so his personality is as fully portrayed as everything else. He must have thought being a jerk was something like being a hero. Anyhow, the book is his autobiography and meditation about life as a park ranger in the Arches National Forest in the Utah desert. It is episodic, rhapsodic, atheistic, and generally indescribable. I'm glad I read it and delighted I never met the man.

Norman Douglas, Siren Land --

Every now and then I read a book which slyly (and sometimes not so slyly) suggests that with the coming of Christianity the pagan gods simply went underground -- battening in some cases like those Japanese soldiers on a forgotten Pacific island, now and then taking a shot at a passing supertanker. This is more or less the opening conceit used by Douglas in Siren Land, his somewhat ethereal travelogue of Sorrento and environs. In fact, Douglas's elusive writing style is essential to make this approach work, since his intention is to emphasize that travel to this quarter of the world must be done with more in mind than simple geography.

In this respect, his opening chapter is something of a tour de force, combining the tincture of paganism (the idea of sirens) with their migration (travel) to this voluptuous corner of Italy. Douglas, incidentally, claims that this is not a travel book but that he is instead just "dreaming through the summer." I admit there is a dreamlike quality to his style, but he does rouse himself from time to time to condemn the deforestation and modern roads. Plus ca change. The book was first published in 1911.

He also expatiates on the disastrous Spanish Bourbon custody of the Kingdom of Naples (he sees it as the more or less permanent destruction of a culture) and also devotes an entire chapter to the defense of Tiberius and an attack on Tacitus. We are also given a Gibbonesque chapter (the reference is explicit) on the parallels between Saint Teresa and the local un-canonized Sister Serafina: too dry to be witty, much too witty to be dry.

Washington Irving, Tales of the Alhambra –

During his travels in Spain in the 1820s, Washington Irving briefly fell in with a Russian diplomat as he toured Andalusia. When they reached Granada, the diplomat was called back on business and Irving on his own was given a residence in the Alhambra by the local governor. The bulk of this volume constitutes his stories -- historical, contemporary, and legendary -- of this ancient Moorish palace and the surrounding territory. Most of the stories are local legends of Moorish gold, enchantment, and intrigue, rather like what I imagine the One Thousand and One Nights to be. A few others emerge from his ramblings about the countryside. Each tale is well told, in a certain archaic fashion, but none of them is so gripping as to be memorable beyond the reading and none of them penetrates deeply.

            Danube, Claudio Magris.

Subjective words —"melancholy," for example, and "asymmetry" —periodically recur in this book which, as much as anything else, is composed of the writer's idiosyncratic meditations about central Europe, provoked by the towns and locations he encounters as he moves down the great river. But like books of fiction which also require "the river" as an organizing principle, Danube, which is not fiction, has a wider purpose. It resembles both a Middle European literary vade mecum and a diary, possibly one written by a 20^th Century Montaigne, preserving a touch of the spontaneity and wit, though organized by the travelogue format.  

Fortunately, like Montaigne, Magris's purpose is not to deliver any sort of tendentious message. Rather, it shows his somewhat impulsive but pedagogical instinct to record his erudition as thoughts occur to him while he travels along his chosen route. During the weeks I was reading it (I too was traveling the Danube), when periodically asked by others what I thought of it, I would say something like "unusual," "challenging," and, inevitably, "erudite." There is no reason for me to change that, but I must say that by the end of the book, the erudition had become a bit tedious and heavy, like one of those jewel-encrusted robes that are too heavy to permit the queen her freedom of movement.

This does not make the author's reflections less genuine. An obvious intelligence has made him resourcefully curious. His reason for making the trip —virtually beside the point even from the first page — seems to have been an opportunity in the 1980s to participate in some vague way in organizing an exhibition about "hotels, history, and Utopia," a subject which is never again mentioned, except when a page later he reflects that "[i]t is in classifications that life flashes through so tantalizingly, in the registers that attempt to catalogue it and in so doing expose its irreducible residuum of mystery and enchantment." And then we are suddenly on a bench in the Black Forest contemplating the source of the Danube.

When Magris wrote Danube, the entire length of the river he traveled ran through Communist dominated lands. But although that atmosphere intermittently invades his book, his incidental judgments — he surely is a Socialist — are for the most part tentative, and not particularly intrusive. He admits a "Stalinist terror" and betrays a modest admiration of Tito[1]. Elsewhere he simply finds a "melancholy gaiety" in some "stark, grey, massive" housing blocks[2]. And although he allows that some worthwhile writers (Koestler, for example) spied "a god that failed" he adds that

"[t]those deserters from Stalinist Communism have taught us a great lesson, because they preserved the Marxist, unified, classic image of man, a faith in that universal-human which is sometimes ingenuously expressed in the narrative forms of the past. . . . The time has come when leaving the Communist Party no longer means losing the whole, and this could be a reason for not leaving it."

The "chapters" in Danube, though numbered and even given titles, are often remarkably short, sometimes only a paragraph in length. One of the longer efforts, is "The Little Baroness Who Did Not Like Wagner." This is the writer's telling of the incident at Mayerling. Most of the details I had not previously known and I believe that additional details have continued to be revealed since Danube was published. As Magris tells it, the story was sad, but not grand.

"That tragedy is the poor, touching story of one of those misunderstandings which, on account of some banal but ruinous hitch, send life off the rails and hurl it into the melodrama of destruction."

And yet his sympathy for the girl is secondary to his contempt for what he sees as a sterile Romantic "concern for respectability" in the continuing public treatment of the event.

 The book moves smartly from one specific location to the next approximate point of interest, retailing anecdotes and forgotten history. In my view the author's thoughts, specific histories, and impressions of the towns and cities of the more populated upper Danube which provide the first half of the book are somehow more detailed, deeper, and intriguing than the more frequent personality sketches he furnishes after Budapest has been left behind. Perhaps this was because the farther he travels, he may have felt the need to stray from the river for inspiration. Some stopping points become almost a half-day's drive away. The ancient German and Austrian villages and towns which crowded the banks at almost every bend in the river start to thin out south of Budapest. The population seems smaller. Magris's observations and anecdotes remain interesting and idiosyncratic, but overall they are now somehow longer and less poignant. He finds the land "vague and "formless."[3]

A casual reader might be intimidated or even repelled by the author's intensely allusive and academic style. There are some overwritten paragraphs just too precious for us mortal men. But overall I came to view the book as a brief but lively inventory of cultural details which a perceptive visitor would cherish. And this leads me to confess that most of what I have written here has so far avoided the most conspicuous element of Danube. More than anything else, it is an exposition, criticism, contemplation, and celebration of Central European literature, particularly of its poetry and of its poets who are probably largely unknown in the west — and certainly unknown to me[4]. Authors who were unfamiliar to me, at least, are given serious attention. We encounter names like Grillparzer, Elias Canetti, George Cosbuc, Vasco Popa, Holderlin, etc., etc.

A final note. Even in America, where it has no meaning, the word "peasant" is familiar. Magris certainly uses it from time to time. Indeed, on my trip our guides would frequently use the word —most often when we were repeatedly told in Romania that Ceausescau deliberately — but apparently unsuccessfully — for political and economic reasons moved "the peasants" to urban areas where they would supposedly forswear their cultural background and integrate. But nothing in Danube gave me any clearer idea of what a peasant is or who these people are. These days, they appear to be more or less confined to eastern European and perhaps they differ from country to county. But their cultural influence, if there is any, never occurs to Magris. It is "German culture," he says, "side by side with Jewish culture, has been the unifying factor and germ of civilization in central Europe." "Thanks to these keen, tenacious virtues the Germans have been the Romans of Mitteleuropa, and created a single civilization out of a melting pot of diverse races." Elsewhere he remarks on "the enormous assimilating and cohering force of Slav civilization, which sometimes, at its beginnings, seems to have delegated the guidance of its expansion to other peoples. . . ." The peasants, whose dwellings we saw everywhere, get no such recognition. 

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[1] He compares Tito to Franz Joseph "because of his awareness of inheriting a supra-national Danubian legacy and leadership."

[2] Personally I missed the gaiety, but even 35 years after Magris's visit I shared this observation: "Building works are . . .  going on everywhere in Eastern European countries, always energetic but never finished. One returns to a place after a year, and there are the bricks, the tools, the rubble, the beams, all the signs of a provisional state of affairs." In Serbia —and particularly Bulgaria and Romania — this scene was presented every five miles or so when I traveled by coach: the unfinished building, the materials stacked on the adjacent ground, and a man or two sitting on a bench smoking.

[3] But there is an extended and affectionate contemplation of Bulgaria touching on not only Cavalli, but the painter Bojadjiev, and the handsome city of Ruse (which I regrettably missed).

[4] His criticism is normally meted out in a single sentence or perhaps a dependent clause. But at least once Magris angrily liberates himself in recounting a conversation about Dostoyevsky between Malraux and Gorky reported by a third party. It was "downright obtuseness" he concludes. "Never has a reader of Dostoyevsky," he writes, "however simple and unprepared he was, however rotten the translation or botched the edition, given utterance to such idiocies. . . . . No one has ever understood literature less than they did."