Travel writing is a surprisingly divisive topic: I have quite a few literary friends who look down on the genre as a self-indulgent exercise, the product of privileged men and women (though usually men) writing overconfidently about other people’s cultures. But I’ve always loved a well-written travel book, from the classics of Robert Byron and Patrick Leigh Fermor to the more contemporary accounts of Paul Theroux and William Dalrymple. Whatever one thinks of the politics of writing about the other (that I think is a blog post for a future time), these travel writers capture the worlds they visit in such detailed and lyrical prose, using dialogue and description to immerse readers into a setting as well as any fiction writer—but they also intersperse these depictions with insightful passages of history, political analysis, art criticism, and (occasionally) personal reflection, and thus create a rare kind of literary mixture I haven’t really found in any other genre.
It’s not an easy thing to do. I once tried to write a travel book and failed. At twenty two, I’d taken a three month post-college trip across Europe, mostly to visit old buildings and art museums, and a few years later, I thought of writing about the trip as kind of twenty-first century middle-class Grand Tour, inverting the traditional stereotype by having a non-white traveler traveling through Europe. But unlike my favorite travel books, there was nothing particularly compelling about my journey, no conflict or tension, no sense of danger or adventure. It was a depiction of ease and only mild discomfort, high speed trains, online ticketing, hostel maps, the occasional overpriced pizza, hipster travelers talking to each other in English. Even satire couldn’t make it interesting.
By contrast, the best travel books are about people attempting relatively difficult journeys. In In Xanadu, published 1989, William Dalrymple retraces the route of Marco Polo, going from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem to Kublai Khan’s famed summer capital in Mongolia. In Patrick Leigh Fermor’s trilogy of travel books that begins with A Time of Gifts (1977), the author recounts his 1933 journey on foot across continental Europe, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. And in Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana, my favorite travel book of all time (written with an enviable swagger, each sentence dashed off with a seemingly improvisational panache—ex: “We went to the Lido this morning, and the Doge’s Palace looked more beautiful from a speed-boat than it ever did from a gondola.”), the author travels for ten months in 1933 through the Middle East, in order to visit the region’s architectural treasures. In each of these books, the struggles of traveling take up a large part of the narrative, as each author has to contend with inadequate transportation networks and various linguistic barriers. By contrast, there was no such struggle in my journey through Europe—everyone spoke English and the trains were always on time, and the worst thing I experienced was getting fined by a ticket inspector in Italy because I didn’t write the date of my journey on my EU Rail Pass.
And it is, I think, the presence of struggle that gives these travel books their artistic power—because through contrast it makes the moments of ecstasy and wonder these authors experience so much more emotionally satisfying. I saw plenty of wonderful art on my trip through Europe, but I looked at none of it with the thrilling satisfaction of Dalrymple and his traveling companion as they stood before the ruins of Kublai Khan’s Xanadu and recited the words of Coleridge’s poem, or with the bliss Fermor felt as he and his friends raced a train through the hills of Romania, while ruined fortresses and villages came into view before them, or with the profound aesthetic wonder of Byron as he stood in the Safavid Sheikh Luftullah mosque in Isfahan:
I have never encountered splendour of this kind before. Other interiors came into my mind as I stopped there, to compare it with: Versailles, or the porcelain rooms at Schonbrunn, or the Doge’s Palace, or St. Peter’s. All are rich; but none so rich. Their richness is three-dimensional; it is attended by all the effort of shadow. In the Mosque of Sheikh Luftullah, it is a richness of light and surface, of pattern and colour only. The architectural form is unimportant. It is not smothered, as in rococo; it is simply the instrument of a spectacle, as earth is the instrument of a garden.
Ultimately, though, I believe these travel books are most compelling because they describe now-vanished worlds. As Dalrymple recently noted, “In Xanadu is a record of a world and a time that no longer exists.” The Middle East he traveled through has been utterly changed by war, and it’s hard not to feel sad when reading his depictions of Syria and think of the images of bombed-out cities. The Middle East of Robert Byron, too, is long gone. Fermor’s books, meanwhile, are consciously written as a depiction of a vanished world, memories of a pre-war continent recalled from the vantage of 1977. Thus, I’d argue that travel writing at its core works because it inevitably becomes a lament—these writers describe the worlds they travel through with detail and sensitivity, and in doing so preserve a particular experience that years later becomes an account of history, particularly if the world they saw suffered some awful cataclysm, as often happened throughout the twentieth century. And so, while I sincerely hope it never happens, it’s possible that some time in the future, after the twenty-first century brings whatever horror it has in store (an increasingly frightening possibility given the resurgence of extreme right-wing ideologies), even my own account of taking high speed trains through Austria and eating prix fixe meals in Barcelona and wandering the halls of art museums in Basel will take on its own melancholy emotional resonance.