It can be difficult enough to justify travel—to explain why we hold this expensive and unproductive pursuit in such high cultural esteem, even make it a personal aspiration. Travel writers labor under the burden of all the usual general objections to travel (one of the more notable: a wasteful, high-energy pastime in a carbon-conscious world) while fending off a few others aimed at specific aspects of their genre. Travel writing can be exploitative, exposing quiet corners of the world to a popularity that will alter them forever. Travel writing is self-indulgent: You pay (in theory) for your trip to Uzbekistan by getting all the rubes at home to read you talking about what a great time you had. I certainly look with loathing on all those glossy-magazine writers with their expense-comped hotel stays—why not me, Lord? It’s a question the reader might ask as well. And it does take a special kind of hubris to anoint the hated holiday-picture slide show of pre-Instagram days as its own dedicated art form.
With some of that same hubris, you could answer, “Well, the holiday-picture slide-show maker was not a good writer. I am. I can turn the banal into the beautiful.” Even if we allow this annoying but occasionally true argument to stand, that still gets us little further; style covers only so many sins. Why not apply these vaunted literary gifts that we’ve heard so much about, Miss Travel Writer, to a subject more worthy of them? Political analysis, hard reporting, that novel you always seem to be “working on”? Isn’t travel writing always a bit parasitic on the thing itself? Arts and book criticism might face the same charge of parasitism, but art and authorship are public performances, implicitly a conversation inviting a public response. Isn’t the point of travel the personal, the irreducibly singular and direct experience?
While you are trying to think of something to say to this, your imaginary interlocutor is preparing her knockout argument: Isn’t travel writing, whatever its virtues may have been, simply irrelevant? Flights are cheap. The Internet is cheaper. Nobody needs to see the world through anyone else’s eyes these days.
Why, then, in a moment that seems to mark its rapidly advancing obsolescence, produce travel writing?
But writers want to be read, and so the real question, which touches both writer and reader, is—Why read it?
I would say that travel writing’s unique virtues are tied up in the nature of travel. Travel writing, like travel, is all about the negotiation of partiality—how a partial and limited perspective can expand and communicate, while remaining incomplete.
The first hint of why we read travel writing is that the promise of travel is at least a little bit false. “Travel!” the youthful spirit of adventure (and the advertisements) command. “See the world!” And the first time you get on that plane, the first time you see the Atlantic beneath you, a sheet of rippling, changing light, you may feel as if it’s finally happening. You are seeing the world. But the problem with (and the delight of) the world is that the more you see of it, the more it turns out there is to see. Vistas complicate upon proximity. You start peeling back layers like an onion; you open doors that lead to other doors. You can’t see the world, because there is no single, complete, contained thing called “the world.” There are instead worlds upon worlds and within worlds, and it would take more lifetimes than you possess to explore them. Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, an account of her journey through the Balkans between the wars, is a lodestar of the travel genre—and, not coincidentally, an enormous weapon of a book, its bulk equally suited to propping open a door or braining an assailant.11xRebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia, 2 vols. (London, England: Macmillan, 1941). Reading West’s recapitulation of this village, that monastery, you get the feeling it could easily have been five times longer.
Travel is a way of acquiring lifetimes; travel writing, doubly so. In travel writing, as opposed to travel, you are not limited to your own eyes, your own mind, your own choices. Every choice, by nature, is privative of other possible choices. In reading travel writing, we enlist others, make them our proxies (and are, by the same token, enlisted by them as an ongoing, sustaining reflection of their own experience). We not only assimilate other lives; we also assimilate other perspectives by entering into them, submitting to be taken where they lead us, seeing as they see.
This is why we like to read travel writing—even if, perhaps especially if—we have ample opportunity to travel ourselves. If there is a falsity, an incompleteness, in travel’s promise that we can “see the world,” it is because what makes up “the world”—or, more accurately, these fractal, beckoning, ineffable worlds—is not a mere extension in space or aggregate of geographic formations. It is the encounter with other minds. Not other minds in an abstract way, not a kind of cosmic chatroom, but other minds in communication, in a relationship of reciprocal formation with their geographic and physical contexts. This is why, for the most part, when we talk about “travel,” it is the populated world to which we are referring. And this is even truer of travel to remote places where adventure beckons, where the people who have coaxed a form of love and care out of these bewitching, rebuffing landscapes are often the only door by which you can enter, both physically and emotionally (too often to their detriment and exploitation).
Sometimes it really is the Northern Lights alone we seek, or to be touched by animal minds—the bugling of the elk or the song of the whale. But the more we seek this ultrararefied, unmediated contact with the physical world, the less, in my experience, we must travel, in a conventional sense, to find it. To meet my silver-gray Atlantic face to face, I neither need nor particularly want to swim the fjords of Norway. A little over an hour’s drive from my home, I can disappear into the back creeks of New Jersey’s salt marshes to be companionably alone on the revolving tide—to see the wind racing through the high golden marsh grasses and pushing ripples across the bay, to see the blue crab moving cannily and the osprey diving. I am never so happy as I am in the bays, listening to and learning from a world both more and less than human, becoming something both more and less than human myself.
But the more you give yourself to this kind of encounter—to the time and stillness it requires—the more you find that you become, paradoxically, one of the people whom travelers seek out. (Lots of old watermen who once worked the waters of Delaware Bay now make their living as guides.) The more you eschew the world as seen through other minds, the more you become one of the minds through which others want to see the world—the more you become one of the doors into a secret world, the marker of its territory.
You can react to that in all kinds of ways—with generosity, with grumpiness, with guardedness, sifting out the pure of heart—but to deny the role entirely is an impossible attempt to get away from yourself as a human altogether. You are human. Your presence and your vision have taken wind and water and made a world. And humans love the world and all the worlds within it, and the other minds that make them.
Travel writing, then, is not merely a parasitic exercise feeding on destinations of travel, or a consolation prize for those unable to make the journey. If overexposure can make the most enchanting landscapes seems boring, the irreducibility of a particular mind’s contact with them can make the most clichéd tourist hot spot a new gift, a new wonder. And travel writing is a form of that exchange, squared: the contact between a place, its inhabitants, and the traveler—and now, the reader.
Many Londons, Many Kashmirs
When we travel, we look at others who are looking at a place in a different way than we are, and we look at the place with them in it, and try to see it through their eyes, all at once. Once the importance of other minds to travel becomes clear—and once we understand our multilayered encounter with these other minds—one of the more significant objections to travel writing dissolves. It is true that just as cheap air travel has democratized the experience of travel, so has the growing universality of telecommunications democratized travel writing. So you no longer have to listen to the Honorable Lieutenant Colonel Thornchilde St. John of the Third Irish-Killing Brigade recall his campaign subduing the natives in order to travel to Kashmir in your armchair. A young Kashmiri with an Internet connection and a command of English can tell you about it herself, in her own words.
This is a good thing. It is good not only for reasons of justice and the social order, the end of the explicit colonialist project and the exploitation and domination it involved. It is good for the artistry of travel writing. The worst of the brute colonial mode promulgated an impoverished lie; it enshrined one perspective, one traveler, one type of exchange, as the medium through which the world could be known. Whatever worlds the Honorable Lieutenant Colonel Whatshisname couldn’t see did not officially exist. But that is no reason to limit ourselves or to view all travel writing as merely a reenactment of that mode.
To look at a place through the eyes of someone who calls it home is a beautiful and enlightening privilege, one that should always have an honored and cultivated place in belles-lettres. To look at it through the eyes of a stranger is simply a different type of privilege and a different type of exercise. There is no one authoritative voice on Kashmir or London because there is no one exclusively real and unmediated Kashmir or London. There are multiple Londons and Kashmirs and multiple people who make these places, all talking at once, and all talking to and through each other. And the urge to anoint a single voice that renders all others obsolete or inadmissible is perhaps a sign that the great globalization of movement and communication, for all its good, may have its own pinching, squeezing, flattening currents to swim against. It may make it too easy, too helpfully simplifying, to establish an officially designated authenticity, doled out, perhaps, by the remaining travel experts, who for reasons solely of good taste and proper procedure find that they no longer have to comp anyone’s travel expenses; who have explicitly abandoned the power-laden task of choosing which encounters with and visions of a place will be publicized in favor of a humble deference to its inhabitants, yet who implicitly and unaccountably retain the more serious power of designating which inhabitants’ voices are officially representative and authentic.
An Ethos of Partiality
As the name might suggest, golden ages exist because of the abundance of money, or at least a perception of such abundance—in the case of travel writers, private incomes on which to travel, outlets and publishing houses willing to pay, or a public ready to buy. But it is no accident that out of the golden age of travel writing in Anglophone letters, many of my favorite works were composed at the tail end of the collapsing British Empire. These make up a richly opinionated set of works, shot through simultaneously with a quiet strain of good-humored humility that I like to think is borne of a major era’s ending. It is a sense that the writer’s own perspective is both integral to her project and highly contingent and partial.
When, for example, the explorer Freya Stark writes about the pleasures and vicissitudes of journeying through rural Anatolia in the era after World War II but before the ubiquity of paved roads, she is writing as an Englishwoman of a particular time and economic station. Her interactions are limited and shaped by this fact, sometimes in mildly comic ways. Describing an ill-fated customs stop in Alexander’s Path (1958), she writes,
By this time an obliging engineer had climbed out from the back and advised that if I had some little scrap of paper given at the frontier, all would be well. I had, and handed it. It was what was wanted, and the fault was mine for not knowing all about it. The soldiers became filled with kindness. They tried in a pathetic way to help me pack. They had done their destruction with no malice—no official sadism—merely an anxiety to Do Right—an awful thing in Men of Action uninfluenced by Words! I spurned them, and worked on by myself moaning “zahme, zahme, sorrow, sorrow,” as I did so: but when all was over and the luggage tied on to the roof again, we were reconciled. It was their work and their duty, said they. It was hard and disagreeable for them to have to do, said I. We shook hands and parted and the engineer at the back expressed his enthusiasm at the army’s condescension: “but it was your politeness,” he said, “that won them over.” I felt I had been British enough for one morning, and let it go.22xFreya Stark, Alexander’s Path: From Caria to Cilicia (New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1958), 9.
This ethos of partiality, with its implied willingness to trust the reader, and other voices, to fill in the gaps, allows for a venturesome lightness in meditation. It produces a willingness to describe and think about the world without needing to check yourself against a comprehensive literature review, or to proceed with the kind of qualified trepidation appropriate to someone adjudicating the final say.
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon begins with a long disquisition on the end of the Hapsburg world and the void it left—a void West will explore in great intricacy in her travels. While her account is obviously informed by copious reading, she offers little in the way of citation, in the sense of grounding judgment in a previously accepted authority. Her source is herself, her authority her own impressions of having lived through the churn of the early twentieth century. Similarly, in Alexander’s Path, Stark at several different points offers her estimation of rural Turkish gender norms by comparing them both with her experiences of the Arab world and with the mores of her home country:
Protected like idols, [the harem women] breathe security and move with enviable safety in a walled world, with anything but submission in their seclusion. They are set apart, yet they remain individual and are not destroyed. But the Turks have a middle-class Victorian attitude to their harim [sic] and expect it to be there to serve them, with a constant feeling that women are not complete entities in themselves. The peasants make them work more heavily than they do in Arabia, and civilization, which requires feminine time and attention, seems to suffer and decline where women work very hard.33xIbid., 45.
Later, Stark revisits the theme:
On my latest visit, a man and a woman were strolling arm-in-arm on the esplanade in front of the hotel; the officers brought their wives in to eat at the lokanta, and the younger ones came in bareheaded. All this was new. But Muzzafer [a woman Stark met in Antalya] kept to the older rules; and though she took her husband’s arm in the discreet darkness of evening, she would first make herself respectable with a pair of tired stockings, and the ugly universal coat, and a kerchief knotted beneath the chin, until her regal presence achieved that defeated female air which makes the provincial city crowd of Turkey as depressing as a combustion engine with its spark removed.44xIbid., 72.
Stark is not merely clucking in the voice of narrow English chauvinism that reacts to all differences in custom in undifferentiated horror. Indeed, her most withering criticism of Turkish mores is the parallel she draws with those of Victorian England. She is, in these passages, generous and critical, playful and reflective, egalitarian and judgmental. She feels that she has something to say, something to offer, because she is using the powers of observation and judgment that we all share, that render us all vulnerable to each other. She is entitled, like all of us, to consider the varying shapes of the good society, what differences can obtain, what is common to each. She is, to the best of her ability, calling it like she sees it.
But nowhere does her perception of the faults of rural Anatolian society dull or override her sensitivity to its excellences. More importantly, nowhere is there a sense that Stark would be affronted by a memoir by some other author titled, say, Turkish Womanhood After the Second World War, portraying Stark’s subject in a different light. It would be something to set beside her own account on the bookshelf. It would help illuminate for the reader precisely where the gaps lay in her own vision, would illuminate Alexander’s Path as an object of cultural evaluation. But unlike an experimental research hypothesis, a policy brief, or a piece of factual reporting, Stark’s book could exist in conversation with a significant challenger, without being rendered obsolete by it. Freya Stark saw what she saw. In her conclusions, she might be right, she might be wrong, she might be both. But no one sees everything.
There are, of course, bad versions of this type of writing—ones marred not only by a partial perspective but also by falsification and deceit—that are not only critical but arrantly discourteous, or worse, predatory, toward their subjects. If Alexander’s Path is, in many instances, a model for humane, reflective, critical partiality in travel writing, it may be in part because Stark was trying to trace Alexander the Great’s footsteps through his first Anatolian campaign, meditating on his breathtaking vision of an empire that would be the unifier of common humanity within and the guarantor of honorable exchange across cultural differences. Travel brings you into contact with other minds, other worlds, not only across space and culture, but across time. Travel writing is no different—with the added layer that you find yourself in contact with the relics of another world not only in the given physical location (in this case, Alexander’s Turkey) but in the medium of the encounter. You look at Alexander and his route through Stark’s eyes; you look at Stark looking at Alexander. Her memoir, too, is the relic of a vanished world.
What’s at Stake?
Good travel writers need to be at ease in their partiality; good travel writing will make you both more aware of your partiality and multidirectional in space and time. Ironically, it will enlarge your partiality by incorporating the partiality of others. Good travel writing is a symptom of superfluous abundance: of leisure, of disposable income, of an economy that can afford to devote some of its horsepower to the production of beautiful trifles, of a society that has time and energy to cultivate a reading public. God forbid I ever imply that writing about travel (like writing about books, food, architecture, music, celebrity memoir) need be justified by some higher social purpose.
Nevertheless, I do not think it would be terrible if, at this particular time, a medium whose whole virtue is in the negotiation of partiality were to experience a resurgence. We live in a cultural moment of desperate anxiety for the authoritative view wherever we can find it. We must have the expert consensus, the relevant social science, the necessary qualifications. We want data-driven insights. We want restaurants that rate at least 4.5 stars. We want to see our enemies—Taylor Swift fans, Republicans, Democrats, gun owners, vegans—not disagreed with, not even defeated, but diagnosed. We want things revealed, exposed, clarified, and settled: “How X Happened” and “Inside the Crazy World of Y.” We want someone to tell us What’s the Matter With Kansas. When editors send out their pitch guides, the two most common requests are for The Stakes—why is this important?—and The Angle—why are you the one qualified to write it? And sure, they get a lot of pitches. But would it be so bad if there were a renewed interest in writing whose only stake and angle was “Here’s What I Saw. Here’s What I Thought About It. Bet You a Dollar I Can Make You Care”? I don’t think it would be so bad at all.
But I would say that. I’m a travel writer. I’m partial.