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10 With Harry Franck in China Nicholas Clifford I If we want an American equivalent of Isabella Bird Bishop (not that we are likely to find one), Harry Alverson Franck might be a candidate. Like her, he roamed through much of the world, often alone, though sometimes with his family parked nearby; like her, he was a prolific writer, publishing some twenty-three books on his travels between 1910 and 1943; and, like hers, his books promise his readers a direct apprehension of the reality of the lands through which he journeyed, seen through the eyes of a dispassionate observer. In this last, of course, he and Bird fit into a particular tradition of travel writing. Their promise, implied or explicit, is that the travelers will report their observations directly and accurately, escaping the blinders of those whose long familiarity or experience with a foreign land — as settlers, expatriates, colonial servants, missionaries, or scholars — might actually impede them in their quest for truth. Travelers land unencumbered by any such baggage, enjoying the freedom to report the evidence of their own senses: what they see, hear, feel, and smell in the streets of Cairo or Kunming, Baghdad or Beijing, unmediated by research in dusty archives, untroubled by the earnest goals of missionaries, sacred or secular, by the desire to explain economic and social structures, or the need to wire home good copy for tomorrow’s paper. Or, indeed, the need to produce “literature” (a question to be examined later). On her return from China, Bird, in a phrase far more ambiguous to us than it is for her, promises her readers “a truthful impression of the country,” while Franck, without quite saying so, lets his audience know that the China he will show them may be quite different from the one they expect. Here the resemblance ends, not simply because three thousand miles of open water separate the New World from the Old, but also because a catastrophic quarter of 134 Nicholas Clifford a century divides the two travelers. Bird was one of many journeying abroad in those still confident years before the West turned on itself in the sudden fury that left millions of dead scattered across Europe, ending forever the comfortable Whig dream of an enlightened and untrammeled Western advance. To her the British empire was a great agent of progress, and there was nothing ironic in her dedication of The Yangtze Valley and Beyond to Lord Salisbury for his services to that cause. A few years after the guns fell silent, Franck had no such framework within which to order any easy prescriptions for the salvation of less fortunate nations, and the idea that his books should be dedicated to, say, President Calvin Coolidge, or Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, would have seemed quite as absurd to him as it does to us. (Wandering Through Northern China, in fact, was dedicated, in a nice domestic touch, to his daughter, born in Beijing in 1923.) II Harry Franck probably draws few readers today, and the plans of a British publisher to bring out reprints of his two books on China (at £125 and £135) no doubt reflect the recent respectability of travel writing as a subject of scholarly study. In his own day, however, he was not only a prolific but a widely read author (“the most notable traveler of our time,” as a publicity flyer called him).1 “His book is as interesting as the story of Marco Polo,” wrote a reviewer in a Boston newspaper of Northern China. “Like the great Venetian traveller, Mr. Franck goes among the people and notes their manners, their habits, and their customs . . . [H]e has deservedly won for himself a reputation as the author of some of the best books of travel that have come from the modern press.”Along and flattering notice of the same book in the Nation regretted the absence of an index, for its inclusion would have made Northern China even more valuable as a reference work. Some, however, wished on the author a less complaisant editor. “Can one sit down and read through practically 700 pages of close-printed words of detailed travel in a foreign land?” asked a reviewer in the New York Herald-Tribune. Yes, she concluded, “if one is a student of the matter and grasping out for everything on the subject. Otherwise, I fear the task will pall . . . As you progress you have much the same sensation...

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