Not since 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell, has Granta devoted an issue to travel writing. The bipolar world that existed before the fall has ceased to be, as much an alteration in the world’s circumstances as the climate change brought about by relentless tourism stoked by cheaper air travel.
At the heart of Granta 94 — On the Road Again: Where Travel Writing Went Next (Granta), edited by Ian Jack, is a profound awareness of the ethics and aesthetics of travel, tourism and travel writing. It is fascinating to follow the intelligent conversation between the pieces here, and at least as absorbing to compare it with Granta 26 — Travel (1989).
Turning to my much-read copy of the latter, I see the then recently deceased Bruce Chatwin lionised on the back cover blurb.
“Five years ago, the most influential travel writer was the one who showed that the best travel writing is not about the exotic or travel at all, but, borrowing from history and fact and the imagination, about something else entirely,” it reads.
Chatwin, it is now known, exaggerated and invented much of his work — as proven by victims of his prose in the then universally acclaimed In Patagonia. Ian Jack, the current Granta editor, delicately points out where travel writing is going from those heady days of 1989, when the magazine was under the editorship of Bill Buford. (Whose inherently swashbuckling nature is revealed by his recent incarnation, a testosterone-charged apprentice to a famous chef and master butcher, all egotistically recorded in his culinary memoir, Heat.)
Jack writes: “Still, it seems to me that if travel writing is to be more than a persuasive literary entertainment — if it’s to have some genuinely illuminating and perhaps even, these times being what they are, some moral purpose — then the information it contains needs to be trustworthy. How else do you justify the carbon emissions spent in research?”
For James Hamilton-Paterson, there is no need to justify. His touchingly elegiac essay in Granta 94, The End of Travel, laments the destructive and self-destructive age of tourism, and bids farewell to the world of travel: uncomfortable journeys, proper human relations and horizons that could remain lost.
Such intimations of innocence are wonderfully evoked in Todd McEwen’s Cary Grant’s Suit, which mischievously ponders the uncreasable, dust-repellent, rip-proof and indestructible nature of the suit Grant’s character Roger Thornhill is blessed to wear in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. Indeed, the film’s biggest mystery is how the suit maintains its unruffled demeanour. (And, gleefully, McEwen notes that the suit is Cary Grant.)
There is also an engaging and sometimes awkward conversation between this Granta and its travel predecessors (1989 also saw Granta 29 — New World). Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s The Extravagance of the Italians (26) speaks over the decades to Trenitalia by Tim Parks (94); Tia Wallman’s memoir We Went to Saigon (94) is a companion piece to Saigon Dreaming by Tela Zasloff (26).
If anything, number 26 has “bigger names”: Chatwin, Colin Thubron, Bill Bryson, Ian Buruma, Timothy Garton Ash, Rian Malan and the late, unquestionably great Ryszard Kapuscinski, who died last month. But it’s the credo that travel writing should be conscientious and truthful (which Kapuscinski and Thubron always are) that elevates Granta 94 to the plane of moral purpose to which its editor aspires.
While it’s nothing new that writers are inventive about locations in travel writing and fiction, there has been a storm of debate this past week about Stef Penney, whose debut novel The Tenderness of Wolves has just won the Costa First Book Award (formerly the Whitbread). Marcel Berlins expresses one opinion on these pages: “To achieve full veracity, the writer has to have been there.”
Saul Bellow did not agree with that sentiment when he was lambasted for his novel about Africa, Henderson The Rain King. Bellow, a habitué of Chicago (indelibly evoked in his books), had never been to Africa. One of his responses to that debate is captured in his interview with The Paris Review: “Years ago I studied African ethnography with the late Professor Herskovits. Later he scolded me for writing a book like Henderson. He said the subject was much too serious for fooling. I felt that my fooling was fairly serious. Literalism, factualism, will smother the imagination altogether.”
The interview is one of 16 collected in The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. I (Canongate). They were chosen from an archival trove of more than 300 by the magazine’s current editor Philip Gourevitch. Individually and collectively they constitute a liberal education in The Art of Fiction (as interviews with novelists are headed in the Review), as well as the arts of poetry, non-fiction, screenwriting and editing.
Those interviewed include Ernest Hemingway, TS Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges, Rebecca West, Dorothy Parker, Truman Capote, Billy Wilder, Joan Didion, James M Cain, Kurt Vonnegut and legendary editor Robert Gottlieb. And these are no ordinary interviews. Conducted and edited over time, with sensitivity and intelligence, they are unique collaborations between interviewer(s) and subject.
Often, there were multiple meetings with each writer. The Vonnegut piece, for example, emerged from four sittings over a decade, resulting in a peerless maturity. Much of that richness without doubt arises from the Review’s standard practice — sure to provoke journalists’ shudders — of giving the interviewee the final draft to revise and correct. On reflection, this is far from startling. Who better to clarify, amplify and weigh those words than the writers themselves?
Readers will savour this collection. But it is writers and aspiring writers who will find it not only a movable feast but, an inspiring and instructive companion that should be on hand at all times. Importantly, it offers a corrective to the attitude of many South African writers, who appear to venerate speed of composition while ignoring the importance of rewriting and the influence of a good editor.
Here’s Hemingway on redrafting: “I rewrote the ending to Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, 39 times before I was satisfied.”
George Plimpton: “Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?”
Hemingway: “Getting the words right.”
Read them and rejoice in rewriting.