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7: Travellers to War
- Hong Kong University Press, HKU
- Chapter
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7 Travellers to War China 1938: Auden and Isherwood As he went through the passport check at Heathrow airport, in the summer of 1973, at the beginning of a journey that would take him to the war in Vietnam and Cambodia, James Fenton glanced at the Sunday newspapers and saw that the poet W. H. Auden had died.1 The conjunction of the beginning of his journey, and the end of Auden’s, seemed significant in some obscure but important way. The young Fenton had recently dreamed of his own death. Auden was the poet he most admired. Fenton in the summer of 1973 was setting out on a journey to see and write about a war in Asia. In the new year of 1938 Auden had embarked on his own journey to an Asian war. Kipling, Conrad, and Clifford, Maud Diver and Flora Annie Steel, Paul Scott, John Masters and Graham Greene all wrote about war in the East. War is a particularly potent figure in the representation of the Orient as a place that must often seem to an outside observer ‘replete with problem and tragedy’ (in Auerbach’s haunting phrase).2 In this chapter I will juxtapose the literary record of two journeys to observe war in Asia. The first is that of Auden and Christopher Isherwood, travelling to report on the Sino-Japanese war in 1938, and the second is that of James Fenton in Indochina in the early 1970s. Both journeys produced a body of prose reportage and poetry by writers of strong political convictions, which can speak to each other in revealing ways. Auden, Isherwood and Fenton at the time of their travels had no stake in the colonial East. They were left-wing and anti-imperialist, and solidarity with the Asian victims of aggression was a part of the luggage of mixed motives for both journeys. They were tied to no 1. James Fenton, All the Wrong Places: Adrift in the Politics of Asia [1988] (London: Penguin, 1990), 6. 2. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Task (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 41. P159-190 08/4/23, 16:11 159 160 Eastern Figures imperial, commercial or missionary enterprise, and so were free, it seemed, to observe with disinterested sympathy. But how possible was it for the Western observer and outsider to make common cause with Eastern suffering, or triumph? And were the pitfalls of modality in 1938 different from those of 1973? Is it in any case decent to make literary copy out of someone else’s war, when the reporter may share some of its dangers but always has the option of going home and leaving it behind? The abjection of the Orient (in Fenton, of the Third World) was dramatized in the tragedy of war, but how, and by what right, could a Westerner, with a colonial history on his back, record its story? And how should the traveller represent himself in his account? The journey to war might be a figure of solidarity — fellow-travelling, indeed — but the journey could also be construed as an ego trip, the traveller a holiday-maker, a privileged thrill-seeker, even a voyeur. Of the figures considered so far, the journey to war involves the highest degree of self-consciousness — ironically enough, since the reporter of a war is supposed to be an ancillary character in someone else’s drama. In his ‘Second Thoughts’ prefacing the reissue of Journey to a War in 1973, Isherwood saw the risk of his narrative being mockingly entitled ‘Little Me in China’.3 Fenton was to be accused, by Benedict Anderson, of ‘political tourism’.4 Auden omitted his own figure, and the pronoun I, from his China poems; but he omitted China from many of them too. How does the travel writer relate to his or her counterpart, the ‘travelee’ or people travelled to — especially in the case of war reporting when the travelee is more than likely to be a soldier, victim of war or refugee — as well as to other writers, other travellers?5 And what image of Eastern people and places emerges from the war report? In the summer of 1937, Faber and Faber and Random House had offered a contract to the poet W. H. Auden and the novelist Christopher Isherwood to collaborate on a travel book, a genre which had been enjoying a vogue since the Great War.6 The outbreak of the Sino-Japanese...