Eric Newby and the Literature of Travel

Accounts of travel arouse nostalgia for lives not led and for that time when entertaining possibility was possible. Often travel books provoke dream. Maybe the most memorable moments in life occur when a person dreams and, slipping the bridle of common sense, acts irrationally. Because such actions are out of character they are remembered, becoming artifacts that can be pulled from the mundane years and displayed, convincing a person that he did not waste his life as a commonplace. Of course travel itself is often irrational. Anxiety and sickness banish the comforts of home and routine. Last month, wracked by fever as my plane flew through the night over the South Pacific, I shivered and wept, longing for my bed in Connecticut, blankets and Christmas piled warm about me.

As I traveled I was pursuing not an elusive fountain of possibility but that drier thing—a chapter for a book. Few travelers write more than postcards, however, and most cart home visual memories that a week scrubs into dust. Indeed the vow I will always remember is the first step toward forgetting. Of course travel books themselves are blends of experience, forgetfulness, and embellishment—or lies. Travel writing is, as the traveler Tom Bissell has put it, "of any genre of nonfiction save memoir, the most similar to fiction." Because they don't belong, travelers get things wrong, occasionally on purpose. Rarely do travelers expose the fabric of a society. Instead of moving into communities, travelers slip through them. Travelers resemble the college student who spends a night sleeping in a cardboard box in order to experience homelessness or who forgoes dinner in his dormitory in hopes of understanding the pangs of hunger.

Travel books can be tinny as happenings clink one atop another. Seldom do accounts of travel mirror the texture of actual place, if such textures exist. At their best travel books provide respite, enabling readers to escape the unnecessary people—that is, celebrities and their hangers-on, the sort of folks who appear in glossy magazines such as Vanity Fair. On the other hand just walking out of the house is traveling. If well done, a record of what happens after the screen door bangs could be as entertaining as an account of jitterbugging with snake charmers or being chased by cannibals through a forest bristling with nettle trees.

Travel at home and abroad have occupied my mind since October 2006 when Eric Newby died. I had read Newby for years, and his anthology A Book of Travellers' Tales had once transported me far from Connecticut and a tedious schoolbound winter, his excerpts guiding me to a library of travel books, the books blowing me over the snow to Africa and Asia—not transporting me beyond the classroom but quickening the imagination so my classes shone and seemed green as spring.

This past November I read six of Newby's books, beginning with The Last Grain Race, first published in 1956. For two years after leaving school at sixteen Newby worked at an advertising agency. The work consisted of planning advertising campaigns typically for "the Cereal Account," not matter that could easily be mulched into dreams. One day after riding the underground from his office to Hammersmith, Newby emerged "sticky and wretched from the train." "I found," he wrote, "that we had been so closely packed that somebody had taken my handkerchief out of my pocket, used it, and put it back under the impression that it was his own." He never returned to the office, and shortly afterward signed on as an apprentice on the four-masted barque Moshulu, a steel square-rigged sailing vessel. In late October 1938 the Moshulu sailed in ballast from Belfast to Australia to pick up a load of 4,800 tons of grain. This Finnish ship could fly 45,000 square feet of sail. Twenty-eight men composed the crew, of whom Newby was the only Englishman. In June the next year the ship arrived back in Queenstown, having circumnavigated the globe. At the end of the voyage Newby left the ship and got into a taxi...