Geoffrey Weill - All Abroad: A Memoir of Travel and Obsession

This is not a travel book per se; it is a memoir of how an obsession was fashioned. Memoirs are often about celebrities or politicians or generals or royalty or about those who have a claim to some measure of fame. Other memoirs are of interesting nobodies who, at times, because of the charm or uniqueness of the story or the writing, become notable. This is a story of an English boy then man in desperate need of escape from a childhood and adolescence that were outwardly charmed, all calm and happiness, yet inwardly all of these were laced with claustrophobic insecurity, regimentation, blame, and torment. Others might have turned to crime, to booze, to drugs. But because my need to escape started earlylong before any of those avenues would have been remotely achievableI sought solace elsewhere, ultimately in travel.

My fancies were not about touring the Taj Mahal or climbing the Matterhorn or admiring Iguaz Falls. My fascination, like Robert Louis Stevensons, was about the actual journeys. Briefly, I also flirted with theater, ballet, Zionismeach a kind of escapebut those all paled in the wake of traveling. It wasnt about the sights. Mine was and is an obsession with the conveyances, the planes, the airports, the ships, the trains... and the hotels that await journeys end.

Moreover, there was no dream of actually being a pilot or being a train driver or being a Basil Fawlty commanding a quaint hotel on the English shore. No, it was all about being a passenger. About being a guest. There were no diagrams of engine rooms or locomotives: it was a torrent of timetables, schedules, hotel guides, and glossy brochures. There was not the slightest interest in the sort of travel that required hiking boots, backpacks,and tents. It was the getting there, the staying there, the feeling at home on six continents. Ultimately, I was able to turn my curiously eclectic obsession into a career.

It is a memoir that is thematic rather than chronological. Yet to assist the reader in keeping pace with what and how and where, each chapter is titled not numerically or with a name but by the year to which much of it refers. It is perhaps a somewhat curious tale, made even more curious by the torrent of eccentric characters with which it is inundated. It is an account full of events, distresses, injustices, joys, friendships, relationships, discoveries, sexual awakenings, illnesses, deaths, histories, and happeningsof which many are tangentially, directly, or literally associated with travel. It is a twentieth-century story, but one that has lashings of the Victoriana and Edwardiana that had expired long before my birth. And it is a story whose crucial escape is, at the age of twenty-three, my move to the United States. Which is where and how and when, in 1973, this actual story takes flight.

Several but by no means all names in this memoir have been changed so as

I am immensely grateful to Joel Gonchar, Raphael Kadushin, Dennis Lloyd, Janet K. Rodgers, and Asher Weill, without whose support this book could never have seen the light of day.