Fussell - Abroad: British literaty traveling between the wars

ABROAD

By the same author

Theory of Prosody in Eighteenth-Century England

Poetic Meter and Poetic Form

The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism: Ethics
and Imagery from Swift to Burke

Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing

The Great War and Modern Memory

Editor

English Augustan Poetry

The Ordeal of Alfred M. Hale

Co-Editor

Eighteenth-Century English Literature

British Literary Traveling Between the Wars

PAUL FUSSELL

Copyright 1980 by Paul Fussell
First published by Oxford University Press, New York, 1980
First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1982
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Fussell, Paul, 1924
Abroad.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. English prose literature20th centuryHistory
and criticism. 2. Voyages and travels in literature.
3. Authors, English20th centuryJourneys.
4. British in foreign countries. I. Title.
PR808.V68F8 1980 820.9355 80-12810
ISBN 0-19-502767-1
ISBN 0-19-503068-0 (pbk.)
UK ISBN 0-19-281360-9 (pbk.)

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to quote material in copyright:

B. H. Blackwell Ltd., for excerpts from When Its Over, 1917 from A Lap Full of Seed by Max Plowman. Jonathan Cape for excerpts from The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron, 1937; for excerpts from Ones Company: A Journey to China by Peter Fleming, 1934. Chatto & Windus Ltd., for excerpts from It was a Navy Boy, so prim, so trim, 1974 from Wilfred Owen: A Biography by Jon Stallworthy. James A. Decker, Publisher, for excerpts from Your Passport Picture, 1931 from The Crannied Wall by Laura Simmons. Gerald Duckworth & Co., Ltd., for excerpts from Labels: A Mediterranean Journal by Evelyn Waugh, 1974. Faber & Faber Ltd., for excerpts from The Waste Land, 1936 from Collected Poems by T, S. Eliot; for excerpts from The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding, 1943 from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot. Farrar Straus & Giroux for excerpts from They Were Still Dancing by Evelyn Waugh, 1932. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich for excerpts from The Waste Land, 1936 from Collected Poems by T. S. Eliot; for excerpts from The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding, 1943 from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot. Harpers Magazine for The Stationary Tourist and Border Crossings by Paul Fussell, reprinted from the April 1979 and July 1979 issues of Harpers Magazine; all rights reserved. William Heinemann Ltd., for excerpts from Sea and Sardinia by D. II. Lawrence, 1956. Henry Holt and Co., for Poem XL (Into My Heart an Air that Kills), 1940 from Collected Poems by A. E. Housman. Houghton Mifflin for excerpts from Cinema of a Man, 1952 from Collected Poems: 1917-1952 by Archibald MacLeish. John Lehmann Ltd., for excerpts from The Station by Robert Byron 1949. New Directions Publishing Corp., for excerpts from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, 1926 from Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound by Ezra Pound. Oxford University Press, Inc., for The Passport Officer, 1978 from Collected Poems by Basil Bunting; for excerpts from Autumn Journal, 1967 from Collected Poems by Louis MacNeice; for excerpts from It was a Navy Boy, so prim, so trim, 1974 from Wilfred Owen: A Biography by Jon Stallworthy. Random House, Inc., for excerpts from Dover, 1976 from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden, ed., Edward Mendelson; for excerpts from In Memory of W. B. Yeats, and Passenger Shanty/ 1977 from The English Auden: Poems, Essays, and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939, ed., Edward Mendelson. Illustrations from The Valley of the Assassins by Freya Stark, John Murray, London, copyright Freya Stark. The Viking Press for Giorno dei Morti, and excerpts from The Middle Classes, Snake, and Bavarian Gentians, 1964 from Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, ed., Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts.

Printing (last digit): 9 8 7 6 5

Printed in the United States of America

To Betty
fellow-traveler

This book is about travel writing, but it is also about travel, so I have dealt not just with books but with ships and trains, passport photographs and national borders and small French seaport towns, hotels and cafs and beach resorts, architecture ancient and modern, food and drink, nude sunbathing, and sex, both procreative and recreational. I have dealt with icy trenches and sunny patios, West African and Brazilian chiggers, touts of all nations, suntan oil, oranges and palm trees, the symbolic status of weather, the psychology of the sense of place, the spatial dislocations characterizing modern writing, and the once indispensable vade mecums of Baedeker and Tauchnitz. I have even had to talk about the difference between 15- and 18-inch coast-artillery guns. But I have done all these things to imply the context of travel writing from 1918 to 1939, to suggest what it felt like to be young and clever and literate in the final age of travel. Because the most sophisticated travel books of the age are British, I have focussed largely on them, although now and then I have considered an American example as well. And I have not scrupled to include occasional personal reflections on travel, so that the book aspires at once to the condition of literary criticism, social and cultural history, and autobiography.

I have talked about the 20s and the 30s without reposing much faith in the intellectual usefulness of such designations. More important than discriminating those two decades from each other is understanding the whole ages sense of having barely squeaked through one war and its gradually augmenting awareness of the approaching menace of another. It seems to matter less that an event occurred in 1921 or in 1936 than that it did not occur in 1912 or in 1963. The period I want to illuminate is the whole time between the wars.

For their advice, interest, and other favors I am grateful to Kingsley Amis, Malcolm Bradbury, Jeffrey Burke, Alfred Bush, Peter Conrad, Vivienne Crawford, Edwin Fussell, Daniel Garrison, Samuel Hynes, George Kearns, Norman Klein, Suzanne Mantell, John Mc-Phee, Jeanette Mirsky, Harry T. Moore, John P. Pattinson, Richard Poirier, Peter Quennell, James Raimes, Edward Said, John Shakeshaft, Roderick Suddaby, and Christopher Sykes. John Saumarez Smith, of Heywood Hill, Ltd., has been so assiduous in locating out-of-the-way books that he has been a virtual research associate. Mrs. Lucy Butler has given generous assistance. Steven Helmling has kindly read the proofs. As usual, I am grateful to Rutgers University for many kindnesses. I must thank the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for a years Fellowship, and the Harris Foundation of Northwestern University for inviting me to present some of these materials as lectures under its auspices. And I want to thank the editors of the Spectator and Harpers for permission to re-appropriate those parts of this book that first appeared in their pages.

Christ Pantocrator, mosaic, dome of
convent church, Daphni, Greece / 89

Norman Douglas at eighty, contemplating
a bust of himself at ten / 126

rieda and D. H. Lawrence with Giuseppi
(Pino) Orioli in Florence, about 1926 / 156

Evelyn Waugh with his brother Alec at
Villefranche / 173

Christopher Isherwood and W. II. Auden