Travel Writing

One hates writing descriptions that are to be found in every book of travels”, wrote Horace Walpole to his friend Richard West in 1740, “but we have seen something today that I am sure you never read of, and perhaps never heard of.” Walpole could have spared the self-effacement. That “something” was a certain “subterranean” town called Herculaneum. Three centuries on, not all aspiring travel writers can be so fortunate, stuck as we are on a downsized globe upon which every backwater has apparently been canoed, crag scaled and desert scuffed. Aside from genuine discovery, today’s wandering chronicler is left with two chief recourses: gimmickry (hitch-hike around Ireland with a fridge) or originality in self-expression. Fortunately, there remain enough of these to go round for the genre to prosper and sometimes there is even room for both.

Evelyn Waugh had similar concerns eighty years ago when he wrote his first book of travels. He called it Labels, “for the reason that all the places I visited on this trip are already fully labelled”. This didn’t, however, prevent him from producing a droll and perspicacious piece of prose, now handsomely reissued, without introduction or adornment, as part of the new Penguin Classics hardback Waugh library.

Part of the liveliness in Labels comes from its fictive freedom: the book is notorious as Waugh’s account of his Mediterranean honeymoon in which he maintains a stiff pretence of bachelorhood. Another aspect of the book’s enduring appeal comes from the author’s refusal to be seduced by preordained notions of impressiveness, what Duncan Fallowell in his new travel book, How To Disappear, calls Waugh’s “horror of the banal”. Had Walpole stayed on a decade to witness the rediscovery of Pompeii, one would have suspected a rather more generous appraisal than that of his successor (“the most interesting thing I saw was the plaster cast of the suffocated dog”) but, then, Walpole would have had fewer genuine concerns about retreading old ground. Waugh dismissed even the eagerly anticipated pornographic frescoes as “mere scribbles, no better than D. H. Lawrence’s”, and it is precisely this urbane jadedness that makes Labels so entertaining, whether its author is condemning the architecture of the Sphinx (“an ill-proportioned composition of inconsiderable aesthetic appeal”), the interior of Hagia Sophia (“a majestic shell full of vile Turkish fripperies”) or the dubious majesty of Etna at sunset (“Nothing I have ever seen in Art or Nature was quite so revolting”). Volcanoes are a particular source of the author’s contempt, as is the “unremitting avarice of the Egyptian race” and the inhabitants of Naples, on whose shores he is reminded of the “admirable phrase” of Baedeker, “always extortionate and often abusive”.

But Waugh could be generous too, and his memoir is notable for the freshness with which he describes his interactions with the locals. There is the Egyptian madame on whom he regularly drops in for “a glass of beer and a chat”, the “restless and unhappy” chauffeur in Palestine who regales the travellers with his opinions and aspirations, the “intoxicating sense of vitality and actuality” to be found in the seedier quarters of Port Said (“After dinner, inevitably, we sought out the houses of ill fame”). Waugh almost slips into superlatives over Gaudí’s Barcelona, is pleasantly surprised by Lisbon and full of admiration for the easy mingling of Jews, “Mohammedans” and Europeans in Algiers. “What is it, I wonder, which gives the Anglo-Saxons, alone among the colonists of the world, this ungenerous feeling of superiority over their neighbours?” he asks, with questionable regard for other occupiers past, present or future.

One generation on, a new kind of occupier had taken hold: the trail-blazing hippy. The author and flâneur Duncan Fallowell caught the 1970s wave of this movement and partially revisits it in How To Disappear, sifting through his old jottings to create a kind of chronicle remembered. The separate chapters jump the decades from Hyderabad to the Hebrides and take in several of the Mediterranean destinations visited by Waugh, including Malta (both writers are charmed), Venice (Waugh is too wearied by the weight of history to wish to dwell on it; Fallowell even to visit it) and Pompeii, where Fallowell displays a rather more wild-eyed reaction than that of his literary forebear: “sex . . . was simply everywhere”. Sex, generally, is a feature of How To Disappear. Where Waugh’s bisexual urges are submerged beneath a thick veneer of wit, Fallowell’s frequently bubble up to the surface, whether he is admiring a tousle-headed farmhand or gaining a “sympathetic erection” at the sound of a copulating couple in an adjacent room. Assiduously avoiding pretence, though not pretentiousness, Fallowell is much concerned with authenticity of experience, like both Waugh and Walpole, whose report of Herculaneum he quotes.

Fallowell does make use of gimmickry, which, along with his rambling eccentricity, takes the form of various MacGuffins, both narrative and real, threaded through each chapter. In the Maltese section, set on the island of Gozo, the object of his quest is a mysterious man whose path Fallowell keeps crossing before finally catching him in flagrante behind a rock. In India, Fallowell comes across the story of Bapsy Pavry, a social-climbing Marchioness whose meetings with the famous and infamous (from Adolf Hitler to Dan Quayle) span over half a century and who remains elusive until her death in 1995. A chapter set on Eigg is based around Fallowell’s futile attempt to interview the island’s despised German owner; and another chapter, beginning in the early 1980s, features his attempts to gain an audience with Evelyn Waugh’s former lover, Alistair Graham.

Fallowell does at least speak to Graham, having bumped into the ageing recluse in the small Welsh town of New Quay. Though the latter refuses to confirm his relationship with Waugh (“he was older than me, you know”), still less that he was the model for Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited (“No, not me, not me – er, it was a friend of mine”), Graham does cheekily suggest that Waugh “wasn’t well-endowed”, which may or may not have been a reference to the young author’s financial straits. Like his former lover, Graham took the “sensual sunshine” tour of the interwar Mediterranean, but later appears to have suffered from “the curse of Sebastian Flyte . . . . [A] failure of nerve in the face of life’s demands and opportunities”. Retiring to the countryside with a large inheritance, he kept himself to himself and did little of public note, though he did throw good parties, was allegedly visited by Edward VIII and eventually became president of the New Quay branch of the Lifeboat Association. For Fallowell, Waugh too failed to live up to his early brightness, his books going “terribly downhill” and the quality diminishing along with the levity.

Unfortunately, the same could be said of How To Disappear, which, for the large part a vivid and highly pleasurable memoir, veers into mawkish self-indulgence in the final chapter, in which Fallowell recalls the days following the death of Princess Diana. Here his snobbery (“I do remember being repelled by the cyclamens that were red and knowing that white . . . was the only and proper colour”) merges with a peculiar interpretation of the demotic (Diana was “practically Newcastle upon Tyne on a Friday night. Fabulous”) to produce a hollow reappraisal of a period in British history that Fallowell at least has the decency to admit stoked his more ignoble passions: “The drama of Diana’s death had invigorated everyone’s sense of mortality and this usually arouses the finest eroticism”. He then reports that he took more than forty lovers in the subsequent month. This is a very different sort of tourism, no less hackneyed than a trip to Venice or Vesuvius, and certainly more vicarious.