Radicals on the Road: The Politics of English Travel Writing in the 1930s

Notes

Name /V1921/V1921_END 09/11/01 06:12AM Plate # 0-Composite pg 187 # 1 N O T E S P R E F A C E 1. As Laurie McMillin observes, ‘‘from James Hilton’s Lost Horizon to Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard, something significant was supposed to happen to Western travellers in Tibetan lands’’ (49). 2. For a detailed account of these events and their political aftermath, see Ronald D. Schwartz’s essay ‘‘The Anti-Splittist Campaign and Tibetan political Consciousness’’ (1994). I N T R O D U C T I O N 1. Referring to the Victorian age, Andrea Lewis insists that ‘‘travel discourse during this time helped to accomplish and maintain Britain’s empire because it gave voice to the actual geographical movement of British citizens through colonized territory’’ (47). 2. Fellow traveler is a translation of Trotsky’s Russian term popútchik. A popu ́tchik was someone who supported the general aims of the communists without specifically endorsing all of their policies. In his book Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany, 1933–39, Richard Griffiths applies fellow traveler to fascist sympathizers. 3. See Mark Cocker’s account of the intelligence work performed by Eric Bailey. 4. From the comprehensive bibliography of travel books compiled by Michael Kowalewski, one can derive the following distribution of English travel books published per decade: 1900–1909: 23 titles; 1910–19: 29 titles: 1920–29: 52 titles; 1930–39: 72 titles; 1940– 49: 22 titles. 5. Among the ten authors Fussell discusses in depth, only D. H. Lawrence and Norman Douglas wrote travel books before the 1930s. Name /V1921/V1921_END 09/11/01 06:12AM Plate # 0-Composite pg 188 # 2 6. This very ambivalence is the subject of Auden’s poem ‘‘A Voyage’’ (1938), where the search for a ‘‘Good Place’’ is no sooner invoked than it is branded as an ‘‘illness,’’ a ‘‘fever’’: Alone with his heart at last, does the fortunate traveller find In the vague touch of a breeze, the fickle flash of a wave, Proofs that somewhere exists, really, the Good Place, Convincing as those that children find in the stones and holes? No, he discovers nothing: he does not want to arrive. The journey is false, his unreal excitement really an illness On a false island where the heart cannot act and will not suffer He condones his fever; he is weaker than he thought; his weakness is real. 7. Richard Johnstone comments that ‘‘Communism and Catholicism were increasingly singled out in the thirties as the alternative cures for the sickness of a generation’’ (3). 1 G E O R G E O R W E L L 1. Paul Fussell points out that ‘‘etymologically a traveler is one who suffers ‘travail,’ a word deriving in its turn from Latin ‘tripalium,’ a torture instrument consisting of three stakes designed to rack the body’’ (39). 2. According to David Harvey, the geography of capitalism is ‘‘strongly differentiated . ‘Difference’ and ‘otherness’ is produced in space through the simple logic of uneven capital investment and a proliferating geographical division of labour’’ (6). 3. The Means Test allowed every household a fixed total income. Everything —savings, relatives’ incomes, casual earnings—was counted toward the total sum allowed to each household, a sum that was barely above starvation level. 2 E V E LY N WAU G H 1. ‘‘The world outside the Roman Empire was, in the eyes of the Imperial citizen, a sort of waste. It was not thickly populated, it had no appreciable arts or sciences, it was barbarous’’ (Belloc, 23). 2. Although Marxist critics such as Terry Eagleton (e.g., in Literary Theory: An Introduction) have consistently attacked the ideology of liberal humanism, they have not recognized that its opposite (i.e., antihumanism) may foster even more noxious social attitudes. 3. Samuel Johnson’s first book, A Voyage to Abyssinia, is a translation from the French of Jerónimo Lobo’s travel narrative. Lobo, a Portuguese Jesuit, entered Ethiopia in 1625 and stayed there, on and off, until the expulsion of the Jesuits. 4. The Ethiopian section of Remote People is clearly the central and most coherently developed part of the book, although Remote People is not only about Ethiopia. Waugh also visited Aden, which at that time was a British 188 N O T E S T O C H A P T E R 2 Name...