The Travel Writing Tribe

Tim Hannigan, Tim Hannigan

• Publisher: Hurst Publishers
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781787384705
• eBook ISBN: 9781787386792
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

Where can travel writing go in the twenty-first century? Author and lifelong travel writing aficionado Tim Hannigan sets out in search of this most venerable of genres, hunting down its legendary practitioners and confronting its greatest controversies. Is it ever okay for travel writers to make things up, and just where does the frontier between fact and fiction lie? What actually is travel writing, and is it just a genre dominated by posh white men? What of travel writing’s queasy colonial connections?

Travelling from Monaco to Eton, from wintry Scotland to sun-scorched Greek hillsides, Hannigan swills beer with the indomitable Dervla Murphy, sips tea with the doyen of British explorers, delves into the diaries of Wilfred Thesiger and Patrick Leigh Fermor, and gains unexpected insights from Colin Thubron, Samanth Subramanian, Kapka Kassabova, William Dalrymple and many others. But along the way he realises how much is at stake: can his own love of travel writing survive this journey?

The Travel Writing Tribe tackles head on the fierce critical debates usually confined to strictly academic discussions of the genre. This highly original book compels readers and travellers of all kinds to think about travel writing in new ways.

PART ONE

THE QUEST(IONS)

1

THE LONG WHITE TRACK

This is what I remember:

A long white track through the fields. A cock pheasant, lumbering into flight on frenzied wings. At a field corner, an old barn, built of rusted iron sheets and flamboyantly collapsed, its roof-ridge warped like the spine of a Chinese dragon. And at the end of the track, the house: the house from the book.

It was an afternoon of absolute stillness in late April, with deep shadows in the curves of the countryside. To the west a thin streak of blue showed where the River Fal was creeping into southern Cornwall with the flooding tide. I had come to conduct an interview, a 1,200-word profile for a regional magazine: local author with a new book out; tell our readers what you love most about Cornwall! But he was a writer in the genre that was my abiding literary obsession, and I was excited at the prospect of talking to him.

He came to the door with a spaniel eddying around his feet: ‘Yes, yes, come in; we’ll get a drink and then we can go to my office…’ Philip Marsden. A travel writer. In the flesh.

* * *

I read my first travel books in my late teens, five of them in short succession, though I can’t recall in which order: Eric Newby’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush; Wilfred Thesiger’s Desert, Marsh and Mountain; Paul Theroux’s The Happy Isles of Oceania; Nick Danziger’s Danziger’s Travels; and Nicholas Crane’s Clear Waters Rising. It was like finding a way through the back of the wardrobe. This was what I had been looking for as a bookish boy who was also a surfer and kayaker and crosscountry runner. I had already dallied with Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad, but this was better still: books by writers who seemed to be hardy outdoorsmen (and they were all men, though I scarcely registered the fact at the time) but who were as scholarly as they were intrepid. With books like these I could gaze at lapis-blue tilework under vast Central Asian skies in the company of a guide who knew the difference between Seljuk and Timurid architecture, but who would, with the next breath, be setting out to cross an uncharted desert with little more than a leaky waterskin and a handful of dates. What was more, travel writing seemed to have both a busy present and a limitless past (I was eighteen, a trainee chef from the far west of Cornwall in the late 1990s, and Eric Newby and Wilfred Thesiger seemed to represent some distant classical epoch—though both men were, in fact, still alive and publishing at the time).

As Lonely Planet guidebooks and long-haul flights began to frame the geography of my winters, my fascination with travel writing grew. I didn’t realise as much at the time, but I was reading at the tail end of a remarkable, quarter-century-long commercial boom for the genre. The ‘travel’ section in the bookstore was bloated with new titles and reissued classics: William Dalrymple and Robert Byron, Sara Wheeler and Freya Stark. Soon the collection of travel books in my bedroom far outstripped the bank of novels on the shelf above. I had to hammer up new planks to make space for them. I took to lingering in the corners of second-hand bookshops, leafing through foxed pages and finding travellers from other eras: Peter Fleming and Ella Maillart, Peter Mayne and Fitzroy Maclean. And I took unconsciously to aping their pose and their prose in the diaries I scribbled as I rattled around the backpacker circuits of Asia.

It was a literary love affair, and an enduring one. But as love affairs are wont to do, it developed its distress points over the years. I began to notice comments in the review sections of the weekend papers about travel writing ‘falling out of commercial favour’, or, worse yet, becoming an ‘unfashionable genre’. I hurried back to the bookshops to check. At first there seemed little cause for concern. But then the dedicated sections really did begin to shrink, and before long the travel shelves in my local WHSmith had contracted to a mean three feet of guidebooks and celebrity jaunts. Even as a confirmed aficionado I could sometimes see why. As the chilling aftereffects of the ‘war on terror’ unfolded across what had once been prime travel writing territory, the globetrotting escapades of the 1950s, and even of the 1990s, began to look like unwitting elegies at best, and appalling self-indulgences at worst.

And there was more. In my first flush of infatuation with travel writing I had read the genre uncritically under its official designation: nonfiction. But by now I had heard the dark stories of fabrication, of invented encounters and counterfeit characters. Worse yet, I began, in my mid-twenties, to dip tentatively into the body of strictly academic literature that came under the designation of ‘travel writing studies’. This was a rather esoteric field, little known beyond the confines of the campuses. But it had its own journals and conferences; and it was worlds apart from the genre that was its object. I began to supplement Thesiger and Thubron and Theroux with a little of Mary Louise Pratt and Edward Said. If the earlier encounter with travel writing itself had been a magical passage through the wardrobe, then this was the discovery of something nasty in the woodshed—for as far as some of the scholars were concerned, travel writing had uncomfortable questions to answer.

Travel writing, both old and new, was hopelessly entangled with the history of European colonialism, their argument went. It was a genre that rolled along tracks laid down in an imperial epoch. It departed from traditional centres of power and travelled with scant real respect or regard for those through whose homelands it passed. Some of the more radical scholars seemed to suggest that the entire genre was irredeemable, its very exercise tantamount to an act of ideological violence, no matter how superficially sympathetic the writer. One of the most critical scholars, Debbie Lisle, had described her own first encounter with the genre, just a few years before my own, and with one of the very same books: Paul Theroux’s The Happy Isles of Oceania. But there was no beguilement here; Lisle found the book ‘boring, nasty and offensive in equal measure […] Intuitively, I knew this wasn’t just a bad book; there was something wrong with this book and something wrong with travel writing in general.’ It was, Lisle felt, a genre that ‘encourages a particularly conservative political outlook’.¹

I wasn’t entirely convinced. I loved travel writing, didn’t think of myself as sympathetic to conservative political outlooks; and I often found myself bristling defensively at such scholarly assaults. But I knew that there was something in the critique that couldn’t be dismissed out of hand. And that book collection on the much-extended set of shelves in my bedroom? It was certainly very male, and very white.

I kept reading, into my thirties, long beyond the first flush of youthful infatuation. I was still haunting the dusty corners of those secondhand bookshops—where titles from the 1980s and 1990s now seemed as much like artefacts from another age as those from the 1930s and 1950s. From time to time I would find myself grumbling with fellow aficionados about the relative dearth of decent new travel books, and worriedly wondering how a promising young travel writer might get started in an age of dwindling advances. But I read more critically, and as I did so I felt an occasional twinge of conscience—and not simply at the unsettling possibility that the writer might have made it all up. What if Debbie Lisle was right: what if there really was something wrong with travel writing?

People have been asking the melodramatic question, ‘Is travel writing dead?’ for the best part of a century. Evelyn Waugh was already answering in the affirmative in 1946—prematurely, as it happens:² Bruce Chatwin was six years old at the time; Paul Theroux was five. But when I heard the question now, I did sometimes find myself wondering. Could travel writing really survive—ethically as much as commercially—into the unfurling twenty-first century?

This all goes some way to explain why I was so delighted when a magazine editor asked me to interview Philip Marsden.

* * *

Philip Marsden was one of the young British travel writers who appeared at the close of the 1980s, a contemporary of the likes of William Dalrymple and Sara Wheeler. He started out writing about Ethiopia, but it was his second book, The Crossing Place, published in 1993, which properly marked him out. It was an account of a journey through the Middle East and into the Caucasus amongst the scattered Armenian people. It came with the sort of elegantly restrained prose, scholarly grasp of history and authorial self-effacement that had somehow become the unofficial last word in highbrow British travel writing. There was more of the same in the books that followed: The Spirit-Wrestlers (1998); The Chains of Heaven (2005); and also The Bronski House (1995), which tested the limits of the genre, combining first-person travel with a novelised memoir of a Polish family. He was one of the travel writers that reviewers always took seriously.

He lived with his wife Charlotte—also a writer—and their two children in an old farmhouse at the end of a long white track in Cornwall.

* * *

Marsden’s office was a neat little outbuilding at the edge of the fields, slate-roofed, built of local stone. Inside there were threadbare rugs and shelves laden with books. I glanced along them as we went in, and spotted Graham Greene and Colin Thubron, along with heavyweight tomes on Russian history. Robert Macfarlane and Kathleen Jamie were there too, and a hardback copy of Tim Winton’s Land’s Edge. A gap in the rear wall opened into a shadowy space filled with more books.

He sat in a creaking office chair by the window with light and bird-song coming in through the open doorway: a tall man in a crumpled blue shirt a couple of sizes too big. He was in his mid-fifties, but could easily have been a decade younger. The youthfulness wasn’t simply down to his crop of thick dark hair or his boyish complexion; it was his energy. He fidgeted as he sat, sipping from a glass water flask of the kind that people carry on Chinese trains. His accent was clipped, but he spoke with an unfettered enthusiasm. He said ‘exactly’ a lot.

Marsden was brought up in a village in the Mendips, but Cornwall had been a constant presence throughout his life. His maternal grandfather had owned a cottage in St Mawes—a place for family holidays across the generations. Later, after a degree in anthropology and a stint working at the Spectator, he came to the cottage alone each winter to work on books about Ethiopia, Russia and the Middle East. And then, married and with a family on the way, he had moved permanently to Cornwall.

I asked which writers he had taken as models, penning his own early travel books in the St Mawes cottage while the winter westerlies whipped across Falmouth Bay.

‘To begin with,’ he said, ‘there was that generation, the 1980s generation—you know, the generation above me; Thubron, Chatwin, Theroux, Redmond O’Hanlon…’ He paused with a sheepish smile—‘All blokes!’—then went on: ‘Particularly Thubron and Chatwin, in different ways; they were the big formative influences…’

Thubron and Chatwin. Something struck me here. ‘Radically different in their… sort of…’ I wasn’t quite sure how to put it; ‘… their approach to…’

‘To the truth?’ he grinned.

‘That’s the word I was dancing around!’

‘You’re right. But In Patagonia just opened my eyes to what a travel narrative could do. It articulated that sense of moving through a landscape. It just flowed with that lovely sense of movement, of one thing leading on to another—like all good stories and all good journeys. He made a lot of it up, of course, but it just showed what you could do with the travel form, and I loved that.’

In the early years of a new century, Marsden had seemed for a while to be drifting away from travel writing. There was a novel, The Main Cages (2002), and forays into narrative history with The Barefoot Emperor (2007) and The Levelling Sea (2011). This might have made perfect commercial sense: many of his fellow ‘Class of 1990’ travel writers were beginning to step sideways into other fields as the genre slipped from the forefront of literary fashion. But then came the book that had prompted my magazine assignment: Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place (2014). It might have been about a walk through Cornwall rather than an expedition to some far-flung land, but it was, unmistakably, a travel book in the proper sense. There was the narrative of a journey—on foot, down the tapering length of the peninsula from Bodmin Moor to the end of the land. There were the forays into history and biography, the unplanned human encounters, and the wrestling with a ‘bigger theme’—in this case the idea of a ‘sense of place’. All of the requisite ingredients of what we might call the ‘classical travel book’ were here.

‘Exactly!’ he said. ‘That’s right; you’re absolutely right! And it is a classic travel book in its form. It’s interesting that Rob—Robert Macfarlane—says that he’s a travel writer too…’

Robert Macfarlane: a name that would come up again and again during the encounters on the journey which—though I didn’t yet know it—would result from this clear Cornish afternoon. It was a name always spoken with respect and admiration, but also with an occasional puzzlement as older writers tried to figure out why their own travel writing tradition had given way to a slew of books about domestic explorations—the so-called ‘new nature writing’ of which Macfarlane was the figurehead. Marsden’s own most recent book had itself ended up filed in amongst the myriad accounts of meadows and badgers and birds. I asked if he had any idea why this publishing industry shift had occurred.

He twisted in his chair and half-turned to the window for a moment. ‘It’s after the idea that one thinks about these things. The first part—why did travel writing die?—I think it has something to do with the hype of the 1980s, a reaction against it. Also, a lot more people began to travel independently. With such a glut of books, some of the freshness was lost. As to the other part of your question… I find that as a writer you just write the book that needs writing—you can’t choose where bookshops end up putting it. But I think that there is something common to travel writing and nature writing. Much of it comes down to the use of the first person. It can smack of self-indulgence to a lot of people—I’m mean, I’m shy about the first person. But I’ve learnt that, actually, it’s not about me. The ‘I’ is not the writer—it’s just a figure wandering through a landscape.

‘I love that thing that travel writing does, and in a way nature writing does too, of taking the reader on—I know it sounds trite—a voyage of discovery. It’s all about the process of finding out about the world, of uncovering connections. The writer is learning about something and is filled with the thrill and urgency of that discovery. You just tell that story, and that can be a wonderful thing for a reader to share.

‘This is a fundamental difference between academic writing and travel writing. In a travel narrative, you don’t start off as an expert saying, “This is how it is.” You’re saying, “This is what I found.”’

* * *

We talked...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Part One: The Quest(ions)
• Part Two: The Travel Writing Tribe
• Part Three: Across the Border
• Epilogue: The Death of the Author
• Afterword: Travel Writing in the Age of COVID-19
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Index