Paul Theroux - Riding the Rails with Paul Theroux

The Great Railway Bazaar First Mariner Books edition 2006

Copyright 1975 by Paul Theroux

Portions of this book appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and Oui.

The Old Patagonian Express copyright 1979 by Cape Cod Scriveners Company

Introduction copyright 1997 by Paul Theroux

Maps by Richard Sanderson

The author is grateful for permission to use excerpts from the following works: Shanghai Lil 1933 Warner Bros. Inc. Copyright renewed. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Dry Loaf, copyright 1942 by Wallace Stevens. Reprinted from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star copyright 2008 by Paul Theroux

The lines from Tom ORoughley by W. B. Yeats are reprinted with the permission of AP Watt Ltd on behalf of Grinne Yeats. The lines from plato told. Copyright 1944, 1972, 1991, by the Trustees of the E. E. Cummings Trust, from Complete Poems: 19041962 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation. Excerpts from Aubade and Water from Collected Poems by Philip Larkin. Copyright 1988, 2003 by the Estate of Philip Larkin.

Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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Cover image Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Author photograph Yingyong Un-anongrak

e ISBN 9780358003977

v1.0518

To the legion of the lost ones, to the cohort of the damned,
To my brethren in their sorrow overseas...

AND TO MY BROTHERS AND SISTERS,
NAMELY EUGENE, ALEXANDER,
ANN-MARIE, MARY,
JOSEPH, AND PETER,
WITH LOVE

Marian had just caught the far-off sound of the train. She looked eagerly, and in a few moments saw it approaching. The front of the engine blackened nearer and nearer, coming on with a dread force and speed. A blinding rush, and there burst against the bridge a great volley of sunlit steam. Milvain and his companion ran to the opposite parapet, but already the whole train had emerged, and in a few seconds it had disappeared round a sharp curve. The leafy branches that grew out over the line swayed violently backwards and forwards in the perturbed air.

If I were ten years younger, said Jasper, laughing, I should say that was jolly! It inspirits me. It makes me eager to go back and plunge into the fight again.

GEORGE GISSING, New Grub Street

frseeeeeeeefronnnng train somewhere whistling the strength those engines have in them like big giants and the water rolling all over and out of them all sides like the end of Loves old sweet sonnnng the poor men that have to be out all the night from their wives and families in those roasting engines

JAMES JOYCE, Ulysses

... the first condition of right thought is right sensationthe first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it...

T. S. ELIOT, Rudyard Kipling

E VER SINCE CHILDHOOD , when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it. Those whistles sing bewitchment: railways are irresistible bazaars, snaking along perfectly level no matter what the landscape, improving your mood with speed, and never upsetting your drink. The train can reassure you in awful placesa far cry from the anxious sweats of doom airplanes inspire, or the nauseating gas-sickness of the long-distance bus, or the paralysis that afflicts the car passenger. If a train is large and comfortable you dont even need a destination; a corner seat is enough, and you can be one of those travelers who stay in motion, straddling the tracks, and never arrive or feel they ought tolike that lucky man who lives on Italian Railways because he is retired and has a free pass. Better to go first class than to arrive, or, as the English novelist Michael Frayn once rephrased McLuhan: the journey is the goal. But I had chosen Asia, and when I remembered it was half a world away I was only glad.

Then Asia was out the window, and I was carried through it on these eastbound expresses marveling as much at the bazaar within the train as the ones we whistled past. Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good nights sleep, and strangers monologues framed like Russian short stories. It was my intention to board every train that chugged into view from Victoria Station in London to Tokyo Central; to take the branch line to Simla, the spur through the Khyber Pass, and the chord line that links Indian Railways with those in Ceylon; the Mandalay Express, the Malaysian Golden Arrow, the locals in Vietnam, and the trains with bewitching names, the Orient Express, the North Star, the Trans-Siberian.

I sought trains; I found passengers.

The first was Duffill. I remember him because his name later became a verbMolesworths, then mine. He was just ahead of me in the line at Platform 7 at Victoria, Continental Departures. He was old and his clothes were far too big for him, so he might have left in a hurry and grabbed the wrong clothes, or perhaps hed just come out of the hospital. He walked treading his trouser cuffs to rags and carried many oddly shaped parcels wrapped in string and brown papermore the luggage of an incautiously busy bomber than of an intrepid traveler. The tags were fluttering in the draft from the track, and each gave his name as R. Duffill and his address as Splendid Palas Hotel, Istanbul. We would be traveling together. A satirical widow in a severe veil might have been more welcome, and if her satchel was full of gin and an inheritance, so much the better. But there was no widow; there were hikers, returning Continentals with Harrods shopping bags, salesmen, French girls with sour friends, and gray-haired English couples who appeared to be embarking, with armloads of novels, on expensive literary adulteries. None would get farther than Ljubljana. Duffill was for IstanbulI wondered what his excuse was. I was doing a bunk, myself. I hadnt nailed my colors to the mast; I had no jobno one would notice me falling silent, kissing my wife, and boarding the 15:30 alone.

The train was rumbling through Clapham. I decided that travel was flight and pursuit in equal parts, but by the time we had left the brick terraces and coal yards and the narrow back gardens of the South London suburbs and were passing Dulwich Colleges playing fieldschildren lazily exercising in necktiesI was tuned to the motion of the train and had forgotten the newspaper billboards I had been reading all morning: BABY KRISTEN: WOMAN TO BE CHARGED and PLAN TO FREE STAB GIRL AGED NINE none lettered NOVELIST VANISHES, and just as well. Then, past a row of semidetached houses, we entered a tunnel, and after traveling a minute in complete darkness we were shot wonderfully into a new setting, open meadows, cows cropping grass, farmers haying in blue jackets. We had surfaced from London, a gray sodden city that lay underground. At Sevenoaks there was another tunnel, another glimpse of the pastoral, fields of pawing horses, some kneeling sheep, crows on an oasthouse, and a swift sight of a settlement of prefab houses out one window. Out the other window, a Jacobean farmhouse and more cows. That is England: the suburbs overlap the farms. At several level crossings the country lanes were choked with cars, backed up for a hundred yards. The train passengers were gloating vindictively at the traffic and seemed to be murmuring, Stop, you bitches!