POETS OF TRAVEL: SEGALEN, MICHAUX, BOUVIER

French travel writing, unlike French cooking or deconstruction, has been slow in

gaining appreciative readers on this side of the Atlantic. Recently I heard about a conference on the art of travel writing at the Sorbonne that carried the title “From Segalen to Bouvier.” Few Americans would know of either Victor Segalen (1878-

1919 or Nicolas Bouvier (1929-1997), let alone the main link between them, the almost equally neglected Henri Michaux (1899-1984). Yet all three are brilliant craftsman, writing what has every right to be called major literature.

The Breton Segalen, the Belgian Michaux, and the Swiss Bouvier differ too markedly to constitute a school. But as travelers who write—a different species from writers who travel a lot—they do share certain features. Travelers who write tend to discover their art and themselves simultaneously, as they plunge into territory new to them. Their forays into the unvisited carry an experimental quality, their structures as mutable as the institutions from which they derive. The ground they are breaking is as much a literary one as it is a travel one. I suspect that the experimental burden of travel writing has led the academy to undervalue its achievements. By what standards do you assess a genre whose realm is the exceptional? Joy and the unique are given pride of place by writers and readers of travel prose; unlike, say, autobiography where writer and audience are constantly groping for common ground. I choose to travel; the choices that govern a life are more obscure. Unfortunately, the exceptionality of the genre limits the readership, as do issues of education and class: for most of the world, travel is a luxury. There may also be, after centuries of colonial exploitation, a resistance to the literature of exploration;

1 we all know too well where the exoticism leads. No wonder the writing struggles to earn a small following. The real wonder, commercially speaking, is that work that

features private sensibility ever finds its way into print. (The same, of course, holds true for memoirs; the distillation of sensibility is what both forms have to offer.) What makes them, editors ask, noteworthy? Are the experiences, the prose

that exceptional? What drew me to Segalen, Michaux, and Bouvier was the compression and poetic condensation of their writing. Bouvier describes his method as “polyphonic”

reporting. By “polyphonic,” he means a musical multi-layered prose, the voices ringing out one over another; a writing addressed more to the conveying of memory than to definitiveness, or completeness, or some final closure. Sentences that

enchant with their complex polyphony, that asked to be reread and mulled over, may stand a chance of capturing something of the ongoing mystery of a new place. Writing prose from a poetic bias can seem an excess of artifice. That’s not what

Anglo-American poets typically permit themselves. But prose allows a poet space, and with it a flexibility not available in the more condensed, diamond-like medium of verse. In providing a more discursive narrative underpinning, prose furnishes the ground from which a poetic upwelling can rise, stretching the reader and yet returning to him. It is here, too, that compression comes into its own. The finer the interwoven mesh, the more inclusive the core of “essences” a sensibility may call up. An upwelling all the more important when the traveler is, as Michaux, Segalen, and Bouvier are, a seeker. They each evoke images of ascension

to move from the world of discursive prose into a metaphorical realm of insight, transcendence, and self-realization. As Bouvier remarks in a comment that Segalen and Michaux would corroborate,

“You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you—or unmaking you.” That “unmaking” creates a tension, the dialogue that occurs when your car breaks

2 down in the middle of a trackless desert, when the truck in which you are hitchhiking loses its brakes and you are almost killed, or when you unexpectedly

find yourself in jail. Their Francophone confidence in their mission as travelers is one that, as an American, I can’t help but envy. When young Americans take to the road, it is often

America itself, and Crèvecoeur’s question, “What is this new being called an American?” they want to explore. Since F. O. Matthiessen, it has been customary to read the classics of our literature as preoccupied by the same concerns of identity.

From this perspective travel writing can seem, in the notion of another foreign home that it seeks, a betrayal, the work of a would-be revenant. What is it about the form that makes serious readers regard its content as peripheral to themselves, a truly

minor genre? The anticipated handling, the anticipated programmed answers? Or is it the conviction that, for an American, elsewhere can only project the lure of an entertainment, a vacation, an escape from one’s obligations? Hence the view of

the traveler as someone masked from whom we expect a masked response. For a Francophone, hailing from a culture dominated by such icons as Watteau’s “Voyage to Cythera,” and Baudelaire’s double-sided response, “L’invitation au

voyage,” and “Le voyage,” travel may almost seem a cultural imperative. Yet in taking off, Bouvier reminds us it may not be a personal liberation one is seeking— better achieved, he suggests, in familiar surroundings, but the more revolutionary

aim of shaking up the status quo. Nor are the revolutionaries exactly minor figures. Take the painters: in Provence, there is Van Gogh, in Tangier, Matisse, in Tahiti,

Gauguin. Travel provided the license they needed to transform their media and, with it, our perceptions of what represents reality. *

I have been speaking about travelers who write. Among the other lot, of writers who travel and write about it, I’d place my uncle, James Merrill. A man constantly

3 on the move, he never regarded himself as a traveler. His gadding about had something diverting about it: the lure of a different venue, of new spectators on

whom to try out his personal opera. He did not seek self-transformation as much as a confirmation of his own civility. He believed that Tokyo and New York, two cities in appearance so different, both danced to the same cosmopolitan tune. It was not

diversity, but resemblances that fascinated him. In his book, similarity of pattern always trumped difference. Yet Merrill read travel writing with avidity, out of curiosity and for the storehouse of sensibility it offered. I owe my acquaintance with Henri Michaux to a letter he sent from Sri Lanka where he happened to find himself in 1956, while fleeing the consequences of a recently published tell-all family novel:

“One marvelously good book was put in my hands in Tokyo—

Henri Michaux’s A Barbarian in Asia. I do not know the French title, it was published there in 1933, and by New Directions in 1949, said to be out of print. With the slightest of touches he draws the noblest conclusions—in a preface to the American edition—to wit,

his advice to the world: Create Civilizations!—like the prologue to Les Mamelles de Tirésias: Faites des enfants! Every page is a joy to read, and the style, even in English, contagious, as you will see if you compare my

travel notes with it.”

Not everyone would associate creating “civilizations” with fathering children! Yet one can see how such an injunction might have resonated for the future author of

The Changing Light at Sandover. At twenty, I was far too inexperienced to harbor such ambitions. But a writing in which “every page is a joy” sounded irresistible, and it wasn’t long before I, too, was entranced by the brio of Michaux’s observations,

4 a comic panache that, well caught in Sylvia Beach’s sprightly translation, would revolutionize my notions of travel.

The travel writers who had come my way previously, the Sitwells, the Lawrences, H.V. Morton, H.V. Lucas, Freya Stark and their like, were all experts with a claim to know the people, the geography, the great sites they were portraying. Michaux is an unapologetic amateur and The Barbarian represents an on-the-spot recording of an eight-month trip that he took in 1930-1931 to Calcutta, Madras, Colombo, Katmandu, China, Japan, Malaysia, Bali, and Java. Michaux conducts it in essay form, a series of provocative vignettes that he tosses off without a when or a where that might indicate a place, a perspective, a time of day. “If you can’t generalize,” he had written earlier, “how can you claim to have had any experience?”

The Barbarian’s overstated opening works to the same line, “I know some twenty capitals. Bah!” Travel credentials thus disposed of, Michaux submits us to the Calcutta on offer, “the most crowded city in the Universe.”

Whereupon, having gathered all those foreign swarms together, invention rises, bristling, to the occasion. “Imagine a city exclusively composed of ecclesiastics. Seven hundred thousand ecclesiastics (plus another 700,000 inhabitants indoors— the women).” The sally we recognize from farce. And, like farce, everything follows from that first “exclusively.” Michaux is not describing the Bengali in his multi-faceted humanity, but a spiritual state of mind so omnipresent that it threatens to sweep him away. Cornered, he lashes out:

“The Bengali is a born ecclesiastic, and ecclesiastics with the exception of the very small ones who are carried, always go on foot….The most naked ones are perhaps the most

dignified. Some are dressed in togas with two folds thrown back, or with one fold thrown back—mauve, pink, green,

5 wine-colored togas—or in white robes. They are too numerous for the streets and for the city. All of them are self-assured, with

a mirror-like expression, an insidious sincerity and the kind of impudence that comes from meditating with the legs crossed.”

The speed and obvious punch of the short sentences, the exaggerations of the thick satiric outline, the scarifying outrageousness, “What can I get away with?” all belong to a mode of comic writing, caricature.

Michaux hones this edge throughout The Barbarian. Its Spanish translator—Jorge Luis Borges, no less—notes that the reader often mistakes Michaux’s aim as either attack or apology. “It’s neither,” he adds, “but both simultaneously. And much else

besides.” The Michaux we encounter in India is an embattled figure, threatened to his roots and firing back from every conceivable angle, with all the rhetoric he can command.

But there is more than a grudging respect fueling the caricature. “People,” he writes, “are surprised that, having lived in a European country more than thirty years, I never happened to speak of it. I arrive in India,

I open my eyes and I write a book. Those who are surprised surprise me. How could one not write about a country that has met you with

an abundance of new things and the joy of living afresh? And how could one write about a country where one has lived, bound down by

boredom, by contradiction, by petty cares, by defeats, by the daily humdrum, about which one has ceased to know anything?”

If the Indian portrayal is a little exaggerated for some tastes, China gives Michaux the chance to make amends. But the paean to a people of unsurpassed cleverness

6 that he offers carries a tongue-in-cheek, too-good-to-be-true quality. In this light the epigraph from Lao Tzu, Gallic as it may seem, “govern a country as you would cook a fish,” serves up a warning. Not that Michaux fails to find much to applaud in a world where “you have nothing that is not clever.” But when he repeats it over and over, the remark should set off an alarm bell. Likewise his sexist portrait of that paragon of female lovers, “like ivy, always twined around you,” is one calculated to raise certain hackles. The chapter culminates in an ode to a willow, “not the weeping willow,” he stoutly maintains, “but the straight willow, the Chinese tree par

excellence: “The willow has something evasive about it. Its foliage is impalpable, its movement resembles a

meeting of breezes. There is more of it than one sees, more than it shows of itself. It is the least ostentatious of trees. And though always shivering (not the brief and

anxious shiver of the birches and poplars), it does not look as if it were contained in itself, nor attached, but always sailing and swimming so as to maintain its place in the

wind, like fish in the river’s current. It is little by little the willow educates you, giving you its lesson each morning. And a repose made of vibration

seizes you, so that when it ends, you can no longer open the window without feeling a desire to weep.”

Such carrying on over a tree! And that opening of the window—to weep!—what could be more Pierrot?

*

7 One can perhaps see what delighted a would-be traveler, something of the same verve I found in Nietzsche and Lawrence’s Classics of American Literature. It may not seem surprising then that, as I set off on my first trip as a writer to Cuba, Haiti, and Jamaica, after graduating from college in 1958, I should borrow my uncle’s copy of Michaux’s earlier traveler journal, Ecuador, intending to translate it as I read it.

Ecuador records a year-long trip Michaux made in 1927-1928 at the behest of the poet Alfredo Gangotena. In Abroad, Paul Fussell’s seminal study of British travel writing between the wars, he remarks on the realistic scaffolding that makes for a commercially viable genre: the reader always knows where he is. Michaux dispenses with this journalistic crutch (as does Segalen). It is not Ecuador, but the traveler’s subjectivity that holds center stage, the way external reality invades and challenges, and what measures you can take to defend yourself. Michaux knows he is going to be defeated, violated and in some way transformed. But he refuses to be taken in by something bogus.

His combatant is one of us, an everyman “who knows neither how to travel nor how to keep a journal.” At 28, he will be discovering both as he proceeds. By temperament he is a loner, with few funds, and dependent on others for his locomotion and accommodation. When, midway through the year, his friend Gangotena dies, the stranded Michaux has to make his way back to France on his own. He does this by the most difficult of routes, crossing the Andes and descending the Amazon to Iquitos in a two-man pirogue. As if all this were not matter enough, he is addicted to ether which he drinks.

That, basically is the plot: the traveler at the mercy of events and his own self- destructive predilections. Like an addict he is looking for something to which he can attach himself: a horse, a dead monkey, his liner, the sea, mountains, all are fair game. Hence his nostalgia for repetitive routine: imagine, he says, the hermit returning for the 50,000th time to the door of his hut—doesn’t such repetition carry

8 a grandeur? The heroes of Ecuador are the parasites who succeed, the orifice- invading fish, “about as big as a thread of wool—pretty, transparent and gelatinous.” or the Matapalo killer vine that “little by little gets fat and encircles the tree, little by

little strangles it, steps on it, kills it, Matapolizes it.” And it may be why Ecuador’s final entry concerns a visitor to the Para zoo who has succeeded in making a chimpanzee dependent on his visits. All are examples of contact, of reaching out into another dimension. There are moments when the Andean reality comes through, as in the perfect little poem: Ecuador is barren and poor A few mounds! Ground the color of a blood sore

Or black as a truffle. Paths, feather-lined, steep. Overhead a sky of mud

Then suddenly in the air the purest white lily Of a tall volcano

But, by and large, it is the “lointain intérieur” that calls out to Michaux, and most of

Ecuador takes place in a subjectively conceived landscape. As a young man, Michaux chose the life of a sailor when prevented by his father from joining a monastery.

That spiritual yearning persists. In Ecuador it is not the “blood sore” earth that attracts, but “the white lily of the tall volcano.”

Even before embarking on the boat that is to take him to Ecuador, an entry on the Flemish landscape makes the essential distinction: “You can’t look at it without questioning everything.

Those little squat houses that haven’t dared risk an extra story in the direction of heaven, and then

9 suddenly there flames in the air the tall cone of a church steeple, as if there were only that in man

capable of going up, of taking its chances as height.” “What the body needs,” Michaux writes in the same vein, “is a soil and nature of the same color as the sky.” He seems to have chosen Ecuador for the possibilities of

ascendance its Andean terrain offers. Unfortunately there are these volcanos blocking his path—must they too be assaulted? And one by one, in spite of a dodgy heart, he takes them on. On the lip of the Atacatzho crater, at 14,742 feet, we see

him expressing disappointment with these dwarf Japanese gardens This bit of shaved lawn…

This imitation flower bed border… This picnic site, this springtime: We didn’t come here looking for spring

We came looking for a volcano. For the ascension he seeks he needs a vehicle, a shamanic mount. The two poems Michaux addresses to the little horse that has gamely carried him over the

mountains mark the turning point of his journey. In this “beautiful white horse” he recognizes a Pegasus, “whose plumes are the milk and the wind;” when the horse dies, he imagines it reascending, Pegasus-like, into an aerial realm. This insight allows him to revisualize his “gran caballito’s death—the clouds, the blotted terrain below, and it prepares us for the achievement of another poem, “Remembrances,” with which Michaux concludes his land journey, the poem of a human condor veering over a world of surreal encounters. By now the events of the journey have taken on a compelling logic of their own.

Michaux’s final rush down the Amazon in a two-man pirogue reads as a descent into the internal hell of the blood amid all the dangers to which blood in the tropics is

10 subject: mosquitoes, vampire bats, malaria, leprosy, gangrene; a land of the living dead where the few white authorities they encounter are ghost-like, making strange noises and laughing incessantly. Floating through it in their coffin-like pirogue Michaux and his companion, André de Monlezun, keep themselves sane by swearing. They are running high fevers when they finally arrive at Iquitos two weeks later, and Michaux has been reduced to an ashamed, blubbering child. The shame extends to his diary, “It was stronger than I—a kind of debt toward my childhood. I know me.”

The resentment resonates; Michaux will never again submit to a diary’s tyranny. Self-certainty is one thing for a beginning writer; courage quite another. What I admired in Michaux was his courage. Hemmed in by fear, he nonetheless managed to proceed. To a young man eager to throw himself into worlds very different from his own, Michaux’s aggressive prose offered a vehicle. Differences that, in my innocence, I saw as overwhelming could be confronted.

* All the same, the seminal figure of twentieth century French travel writing is not Michaux, but the visionary poet Victor Segalen. His importance stems from his essay on exoticism with its celebrated substitution of the “diverse” for the “divine,” and from the stunning sequence of writings on China he undertook in the last ten years of his short life.

While studying to become a doctor in the French navy, Segalen acquired a literary mentor in Jules De Gauthier, Jules de Gaulthier, whose Le Bovarysme explores the paradox of alterity, the soul’s search for itself as another. While preparing an article, on “Synaesthesia and the Symbolist School,” he was taken up by Rémy de Gourmont who introduced him to the circle associated with the review Mercure de France. They included André Gide, his fellow Breton Saint-Pol-Roux and Claude Debussy, for whom Segalen wrote three opera libretti. Among these is a pre-Hermann Hesse

11 Siddartha (1905), followed by an Orphée Roi (1915) that Debussy reportedly envisioned as his musical testament, a project he did not live to realize.

The French navy posted Segalen to Tahiti, where he arrived in 1902, three months after Gauguin’s death. At the sale of the artist’s effects, he acquired for only seven francs, Gauguin’s last masterpiece, “Breton Village in the Snow” (now in the

Louvre). It hung over his desk while he worked on Les Immémoriaux (1907), an evocation of Polynesian life at the time of the first missionaries. Like Gauguin, Segalen is less interested in rendering a contemporary scene than in reconstructing a timeless civilization, and like Gauguin, he wants that civilization to challenge us. In France, it is the first work that attempts to depict native people from a non- colonialist point of view.

Once this ethnological narrative is finished, Segalen embarks on the study of Chinese. In less than a year he qualified as a “élève” interprète in China, where he was paid to learn the language, while still nominally in the navy. In June of 1909 he arrived in Peking, the city that would make him into a poet, where he would spend five of his remaining years.

By then Segalen was well launched on his well launched on his Essay on Exoticism:

An Aesthetics of Diversity, on which he would continue to work until 1918. It was not published until1955 when the poet and bellettriste Pierre Jean Jouve discovered it and ran it in two issues of the Mercure de France. It is now available in an excellent translation by Yaël Rachel Schlick that includes a helpful apparatus of notes (Duke, 2002). It is uncertain whether Segalen intended his series of jottings to be more than a scaffolding for the work that would pour out of him in China. For all their unfinished quality, they come as close to a manifesto as travel writing is likely to get and were immediately seized upon by a variety of writers: ethnographers like Levi- Strauss and Michel Leiris and poets like Michaux seeking an “exit” from the self. The

12 issues Segalen foresaw, such as globalization, still remain. Where in a shrinking world do we go to find a life uncontaminated by our own?

“Exoticism,” Segalen acknowledges, is an unfortunate term. “Nature” would be preferable, if it did not exclude the human aspect. By the exotic, he means an identity separate from one’s own, and which remains one. The point of view is crucial: what I regard as exotic may not hold for another. The essay is less concerned with the exotic in space and time than in making a case for diversity in its many guises: “Unnamable lord of the world, give me the

Other! The Div….no, the Diverse. The divine is merely a human game.” For Segalen, the exotic and the erotic share more than a few letters. Where they differ is in the continual separation on which the exotic depends; empathy, but not possession. The barrier between the traveler and his hosts and their way of life is a delicate one; any infraction can’t help but destroy the mystery and, with it, the power of the “other.”

Segalen’s eroticism does not strike me as excessive. You can fall just as deeply in love with a landscape, or a people, as with a single person. More problematic is Segalen’s insistence on a fixed central point that incarnates order and stability— what the idea of the Emperor was to the Chinese, that unmoving figure seated by the central palace’s southeast window around whom the kaleidoscopic life of the nation revolved. Segalen’s biographer Henri Bouillier argues that, without some such hieratic principle, the vision of diversity fragments into so many contradictory slivers. Is that so bad? Why not instead, like Walt Whitman, embrace each and every contradiction, “I contain multitudes?” Segalen shares with Michaux a need to liberate travel writing from the imperialistic narrative of “exploration” with its tourist goals and monumental sites

that invite annexation. They seek an internal transformation, through a broadened sensibility.

13 A more substantial challenge comes from travelers like V.S. Naipaul who see foreignness in its wretched, misgoverned, overpopulated aspect. For them, diversity can seem merely reactionary, an impediment to the re-thinking needed if an interdependent global society is to survive. Segalen saw his essay as a polemic directed against the colonialism exemplified by the popular novelist Pierre Loti and the French ambassador to China, Paul Claudel. In Loti’s novels the foreign presence serves merely as a backdrop; it is there to be ripped off. His objection to Claudel’s brilliant, if occasionally repellent

Knowing the East (available in James Lawler’s excellent translation) runs deep in that Stèles is dedicated to Claudel. In portraying China Claudel believes he can pick and choose, singling out what fits in with his own proselytizing Catholicism. In ignoring Buddhism, Claudel inevitably distorts what China is about.

Segalen’s personal response to Claudel is Stèles (1910-1913), a strange, meticulously cadenced volume of prose poems arranged as a set of funerary inscriptions. In all of travel literature there is nothing quite like it:

THE PASS

Here two worlds come together! To climb to this place, how many hardships on the way! how many caravans turned back! Ah,

the repeated gains! The hopes! I have arrived you say? Catch your breath. Look:

through the gate in the long Wall, all grassy Mongolia spreads its winnowing fan on the sky’s sill,

Promising everything: the trek, the gallop in the plains, the lumbering journey with its endless

14 stages, the boundless release, the soaring flight, the dispersion.

All that? Yes. But look back once: the steep climb, the rocky desire, the joyful and un-

burdening exertion. You will not experience them on the other side of the Pass. This is a fact.

This particular stèle is about the intersection of different worlds: the one it looks out to (Mongolia, the future, the prospect of travel) and the mortality from which the monument has risen. Through a series of halting exclamations the traveler gasps his way up to stand with a dubious sense of “I have arrived, you say?” In the thin air come two expansive assertions of what Mongolia and travel each in their way promise: a vision of abundance as seen from that rare point on the “sky’s sill” that the stèle occupies. But the spatial point is also a moment of time (between pain and joy, expansion and contraction); one that is already vanishing as it is being acknowledged. It is the sacredness of the momentary that Segalen emphasizes in his grim reminder, “You will not experience them on the other side of the pass.” Nor, I would add, in another poem. The stèle is a whole edifice, exquisitely balanced.

For Segalen’s editors, catching the balance between “the empire of China” and “the empire of the self” has never been easy. For a long time Segalen toyed with the notion of presenting Steles as the translation that it is, of a non-existent original. In the addition that he made in China in 1912, Stèles has a deliberately “exotic” appearance, with an epigraph in Chinese characters in its upper right-hand corner, and a text in French, all on a page that takes its form from that of a stèle, twice as tall as it is wide. Each page is bordered by a black line that seals the Chinese characters

15 in the upper right-hand corner and gives the prose its condensed form. Chinese (Calligraphy in various boldnesses of stroke separates the six sections.)

The question of what importance to accord the epigraphs is a legitimate one, as none of Segalen’s readers to whom he sent the privately printed book would have been conversant with the Chinese. Even in Henry Bouilhet’s 1982 critical edition it is assumed that the epigraphs are merely decorative mystification. This imbalance has been finally rectified by a sumptuous new critical edition of Stèles, with the French text translated and annotated by Timothy Billings and Christopher Bush (Wesleyan

Press, 2007). They see the Chinese text, and the sources it evokes, as the ground out of which the poems are generated. For them, Segalen is a proto-modernist, spinning poems out of Chinese in a way comparable to that of Ezra Pound.

To have Stèles made available in facing pages accurately translated, with the Chinese explicated in nicely nuanced interliner notes is no small boon. All the same, I prefer the translation Michael Taylor made in 1987 for the painter Sam Francis’s

Lapis Press, for the fuller context that it brings. Nor are the editors immune to the academic temptation to over-complicate. Is it true, as Haun Saussy remarks, that only “after the many determinations—thematic, rhetorical, historical, allusive, exegetical, and so on—that affect the transformation of an original (Chinese text) into its translated avatar (Segalen’s poem) have been accounted for that we can begin to read a stèle?” That begin sticks in my craw. By the time we’ve wheeled the apparatus into place, we may lose sight that, unlike the Cantos, Stèles is really about something else: china, travel, diversity, the exotic.

Catching that balance is not easy. One has only to compare the botched job that Andrew Harvey and Iain Watson make of the volume of prose poetry that followed

Stèles, Paintings (Quartet 1991) to appreciate Michael Taylor’s 1987 translation (done for the painter Sam Francis’s Lapis Press). This volume reproduces the exact format of the 48-poem edition Segalen himself designed in China in 1912. The most

16 radical design element, the page format, captures the frontal look of the stèle on a page twice as tall as it is wide. Each page is bordered by a black line that seals the

Chinese characters in the upper right-hand corner and gives the prose its condensed form. Calligraphy in various boldnesses of stroke separate the six distinct sections (entitled south-facing, north-facing, east-facing, west-facing, Steles by the Wayside,

Stèles of the Middle) Of the 1912 edition all that’s lacking are the unfolding accordion-like pages that invite the reader to juxtapose one stele in a section with another.

The poems come on the heels of a preface in Segalen’s traveler’s voice describing the kind of site we, too, might chance upon in the course of a Chinese journey:

“They are monuments narrowed down to a stone slab, standing tall, bearing an inscription. They thrust their flat surfaces into the Chinese skies. One stumbles upon them unexpectedly: on roadsides,

in temple courtyards, in front of tombs. Marking an event, a bidding, a presence, they force one to a standstill, face to face with them. In the decrepit irresolute Empire, they alone bespeak stability.”

A few hundred words later comes a passage on the “Wen” mode of writing. At the same time in Japan Felix Fenellosa is pursuing a similar quarry. It is not surprising to see Segalen undergoing the tugs of lexical possibility that will enrapture Ezra Pound and give birth to Michaux’ dream of a universal pictographic

Sign system: Wen is a symbolic system wherein each element has the capacity to be everything, yet draws its function exclusively

from the position it currently occupies; its meaning depends solely on the fact that it is here and not there.

17

While alerting us to the care that has gone into the poetic arrangement, Segalen

is speaking of Chinese orthography where it’s the position of the word that determines its meaning. Like Chinese syntax, the poems articulate a way of life that operates by contrast and juxtaposition.

Segalen goes on to enunciate a lapidary ars poetica; one that its dedicatee, Claudel, would lift, almost verbatim, for the introduction to his 1927 collection of haiku imitations, One Hundred Sentences Written on Fans:

“Connected by laws as limpid as the thought of the ancients and as simple as musical numbers, the

Characters hang from each other, grip, and mesh in an irreversible network, refractory even to the man man who wrought it. No sooner are they embedded

in the slab—which they suffuse with their intelligence than lo! they slough off the forms of man’s shifting intellect and become the thought of the stone whose

grain they take. Hence that hard style of composition, that density, that inner balance, those angles….Hence the challenge to whosoever would make them utter

what they guard. They disdain to be read. They require neither voice nor music. They spurn the mutable tones

and syllables that garb them differently in the different provinces. They do not express; they signify; they are.”

Hard to conceive of a medium more at one with the message, to use McLuhan’s terminology. Remarkable, too, how Segalen anticipates imagist

18 poetry and MacLeish’s dictum, “A poem does not mean, but is.” By “Characters,” Segalen is clearly invoking something more than the ideograms themselves.

He is envisaging the entire sequence of a poem born “of the stone whose grain they take.” By “stone,” he means nothing less than the embedded cultural history of China in all its hardness, remoteness and aristocratic reserve, offered to us without compromise. I know of no travel poetry more consciously willed. In the first Stèle, “The Sealless Reign,” Segalen sets forth his program:

Alert to what has not been uttered; obedient to what has not been decreed; bowing down to what has not yet come into being

I devote my delight and my days and my piety to proclaiming dateless reigns, dynasties without accession,

names without faces, faces without names

All that the Lord Heaven overarches and no man encompasses.

Nor does timelessness preclude writing in the present

of this unique, dateless and unending era, with its inexpressible characters, which every man founds in

himself and salutes

On the dawning of the day when he becomes Regent and

Sage upon the throne of his heart.

19 Note the reconciliation Segalen achieves between those two imperiums, “Regent and Sage.”

Yet Segalen is fully aware of the futility of an enterprise that proposes

to lose daily noon; to wander through courtyards,

under arches, across bridges; to venture down forked paths; to go panting up steps, ramps, inclines And by a reversible winding at last to confound the

fourfold logic of the Points of heaven.

The “reversible winding” by which Segalen lifts us from despair to nothing less than “the points of Heaven” is no mean sleight-of hand. His basic dynamic proceeds through a series of assertions, often grounded in a translated source, followed by a small counter-surge and a resolution that tosses us back into the exotic’s resistant mystery. The travel experience Segalen is evoking goes far beyond that of parsing one’s way in a new and bewildering land. Stèles takes us on a journey to a realm that combines the remotest, most timeless aspects of history with the outermost boundaries of the spiritual self. In “Advice to the Discerning Traveler,” the Stele that Initiates the “Wayside”section, Segalen warns us to beware of electing retreat. Do not put your faith in the power of a durable virtue; but break its hold with a strong spice, one that burns and bites and gives pungency even to that which is tasteless.

And thus, without a single false step or pause, with neither stable nor halter, nor any special merit of hardship, you will attain, my friend, not the marshland of immortal delights, but the intoxicating eddies of the great river diversity.

In French, through the magic of almost total rhyme, the eddies “plein d’ ivresses” fall into the tonal completion of the river “Diversité.”

20 The Rimbaldian echo is not fortuitous. The goal of travel, for Segalen, is not the quaint, the monumental, or the merely delicious. Instead he is stripping the limits of selfhood in the ecstatic understanding he has reached of a way of life alien to the self. In the “Stele of the Soul’s Path” the sight of “eight large characters” arrayed in a backward, left-to-right progression provides Segalen with an occasion to defend his enterprise against the charge of “unholy eccentricity.” Those “eight great backward signs are not meant to guide living steps.” Instead they demarcate the realm of “the return to the grave and THE PATH OF THE SOUL.”

If, turning their backs to the air that is so

so sweet to breathe, they delve into stone; if scurrying from the light, they look down into solid darkness

Clearly it is to read from the other side of space—from the place where there are no roads

and the eyes of the dead journey without blinking.

Steles is Segalen’s masterpiece, but by no means does it sum up his achievement.

I’m not a fan of René Leys, his much translated novel about a foreigner who succeeds in penetrating the Forbidden Palace or for the overly abstract travel writing of

Equipée. But Paintings (1916), Segalen’s homage to Taoism, is a celebration of movement, change, ephemerality, written in a prose as light and witty as it is exuberant.

An appraisal requires more space than I have. But I can end, as Paintings does, with Segalen’s thanks to his “companions,” his “accomplices:”

21

you have allowed me to steep in unconfined air

these paintings folded too long in my innermost self. They obsessed me with their will to be seen. Now I can look elsewhere.

It’s for you to carry them off in the depths of your eyes. And do not believe that the words I said contain

all that Light and Joy sketch in the place that is the world—whether it be in China, or elsewhere, or here around you…

So many things, half-seen, can never be seen.

*

The scope and variety of Segalen’s Chinese output can make it seem almost a

misnomer to call him a travel writer. Nicolas Bouvier, by contrast, is a travel writer, albeit far from prolific. In his lifetime he published only three travel books:

L’usage du monde (1963), published in English as The Way of the World (Robyn Marsack, trans. Marlboro/Northwestern, 1992), a polished account of a trip made with Thierry Vernet in 1953-1954 from Zagreb, Yugoslavia, to the Afghan-Indian frontier; an expansion of Japon (1976) that became Chronique Japonaise (1975), in English The Japanese Chronicles (Anne Dickerson, trans., Mercury House, 1992); and a slim volume of travel reports, Journal d’Aran et d’autres lieux (Editions Payot, 1990), as yet untranslated. Despite the relatively small size of his oeuvre, Bouvier has recently become a

22 major figure in the French-speaking world, enshrined in a 1400-page Collected (Gallimard, 2004, ed. Jean Starobinski and Elaine Bouvier). Since his death in 1997,

two collections of his 1953-1954 travel photographs have appeared, Dans la vapeur blanche du soleil (Editions Zoé, Geneva, 1999) and L’oeil du voyageur (Editions Hoebeke, Paris, 2001) Bouvier supported himself as a photographic editor and

iconographer; both collections are worth acquiring, if only to see his exquisite prose coupled with the visual moments that inspired it.

*

Around the globe these days there is a growing movement devoted to “slow food.”

Bouvier, by such standards, might claim a place as a proponent of “slow travel.” A journey, he maintains, is less about getting somewhere than about getting lost; only then, he felt, do the real discoveries begin. In going from Tokyo to Kyoto in 1956, a

journey that may be accomplished by bullet train in a couple of hours, he walks, taking six weeks to follow the ancient imperial road. After many nights spent beneath the roofs of little temples in the countryside, in hamlets and lonely rice

fields of the Ki peninsula he remembers arriving

at the outskirts of the capital an amazed vagabond

which is how you should approach a city of six hundred temples and thirteen centuries of history. I remember

it as if it were yesterday: warm June rain, tall pale-green foliage swaying against a luminous gray sky.

Such exact evocation takes time: the journey Bouvier made in 1953-1954 will not appear in print for another ten years. The Japanese Chronicles are even more time-

23 layered, the result of three multi-year sojourns between 1955 and 1970. This slow maturation gives his prose its density; not a magnum, but the alcohol has been

exquisitely aged. For Bouvier, as for Michaux, the great intoxicant is space, the “immensity” he experiences in Central Asia and, late in life, in the American West. But, unlike the

alienated Michaux, the quest driving his wanderings is a pastoral one; a search for a “good life” composed of essentials. The quest for “Simplicity” draws him to the deserts, monasteries, and wind-battered islands where he feels most himself.

Traveling, he writes,

provides occasions for shaking oneself up, but not, as

people believe, freedom. Indeed it involves a kind of reduction: deprived of one’s usual setting, the customary routine stripped away like so much wrapping paper, the

traveler finds himself reduced to more modest proportions but also more open to curiosity, to intuition, to love at first sight.

We do not normally think of travel writing as a genre that mines pain in the way autobiography does; perhaps, pace Tolstoy, because pain is the one condition we all share. In Bouvier, the self-searching aspects meld with the adversity he

experiences to allow a transcendence as fully earned as Michaux’s.

* Bouvier was born into a cultured Genevan family. His father, a specialist in the picaresque literature of the Thirty Years War, was the head librarian at the University of Geneva. His mother, the daughter of a popular composer, was a distinguished pianist. From her he inherited the ear that allowed him to

24 pick up Persian and Japanese on the fly. At the University of Geneva, he studied with two great scholar critics, Marcel Raymond and Jean Starobinski, a sustaining friend who introduced him to the work of Stendhal. With his background, an academic career might have seemed in the cards, perhaps teaching the German culture in which he was steeped. But at an early age a travel gene kicked in:

From ten to thirteen I had stretched out on the rug

silently contemplating the atlas, and that makes one want to travel. I had dreamed of regions such as the Banat, the Caspian, Kashmir, of their music, of the glances

one might meet there, of the ideas that lay in waiting… When desire resists common sense’s first objections, we look for reasons—and find that they’re no use. We really

do not know what to call this inner compulsion. Something grows and loses its moorings, so that the day comes when, none too sure of ourselves, we nevertheless leave.

At fifteen, as the war was ending, he goes on a bicycle trip with some friends through Burgandy. A jaunt to Florence follows. But it is the third trip to a war- devastated Finland in 1947 that will give his travel its decisive Asian orientation. It may seem odd to discover the East in the far North, but the Finns are a Siberian people and Bouvier was intrigued by the Lapps’ shamanic culture. Could Asia be the mother of much of what we regard as Western?—a notion all the more appealing in that so little at the time is known about the intercultural influences of this enormous land mass. In this context, it helps to see Bouvier’s work aiming at a Matisse-like

25 reconciliation of East and West. In both, an underlying mysticism is evoked through musical pattering. Where Matisse achieves it through the play of textile pattern and

a distancing eroticism, Bouvier wants the layering of voices to distill the mystery of place. While pursuing a double degree in history and law at the university, Bouvier

spent his vacations preparing for a long eastward journey. The first stage took the form of a jaunt to Algeria in the company of a young painter and musician, Thierry Vernet. Other trips with Vernet followed, across Greek Macedonia, Bulgaria, and

Pontic Turkey, all spent collecting gypsy music. Why not reverse the path of gypsy migration and pursue the subversive thread eastward? Vernet had an invitation to exhibit in Belgrade. Without waiting for the results of his final exams, Bouvier set off to join him in one of the most unlikely of travel vehicles, a several year-old Fiat Topolino, whose 6,000 parts they both knew by heart. Their plan, as Bouvier later wrote was “to go on to Turkey, Iran, India, perhaps even further…We had two years in front of us, and money for four months. The programme was vague; the main thing was just to get going.”

The Way of the World remains a tribute to an uncommon friendship, and one from which Bouvier’s prose couldn’t help but benefit. “Traveling with Vernet,” he wrote, “was like traveling with Van Gogh.” A level-headed Van Gogh—not once did they quarrel.

Traveling through the Balkans, the two find a cultural entry in the “passion” for music. Music, Bouvier writes, is a “password” for the traveler. “If he loves it, he’ll make friends. If he records it, the whole world—including the police—busies itself touting for the musicians.” No sooner have they reached Tabriz in northwest Iran than they are marooned by a two-foot snowfall. Michaux, no doubt, would have chucked the car and set off on foot across the frozen pass. Instead the travelers use their four-month confinement

26 to explore a life very different from what they would have encountered in Tehran.

With time at his disposal Bouvier sets down the first sixty pages of The Way of the

World. At midday he repairs to a local tea-house frequented by the poorest of the poor, Tabriz’s porters. A less receptive traveler might have been put off by the squalor. But the historian sees anther dimension:

Around midday, the porters arrived in two and threes, stooped and shivering, their ropes slung in coils over

their shoulders. They settled down at the wooden tables in a sort of rumble of well-being, steam rising from their tatters. Their ageless faces, so bare and shiny with use

that they let the light through, would begin to glow like old cooking-pots. They played draughts, lapping tea from saucers with long-drawn sighs, or sat around a basin

of warm water and soaked their sore feet. The better-off puffed away on a nargileh, and between fits of coughing recited one of those visionary stanzas for which Persia

had no equal for over a thousand years. The winter sun on the blue walls, the fine scent of tea, the tapping of the draughts on the board—everything had such a peculiar lightness that one

wondered whether this bunch of horny-handed old seraphim might lift off in a great flapping of wings, bearing the tea-house

away. It was admirable, and very Persian, the way they were able— despite their miserable lives, their worn bronchial tubes and open chilblains—to hack out a little segment of well-being.

27 Bouvier, here, is layering different sensations—the visual “winter sun,” the olfactory tea-scent, the tea-slurping and clicking of the ongoing checker game—to

build an image of radiance, one as open as it is compassionate. Then, with a sleight-

of hand worthy of The Arabian Nights, he lifts the “seraphim” into another realm of memory and transcendence. Every account I know presents Central Asian culture

as an elitist one, ramifying from the highly refined life of the court. Bouvier is more interested in the down-and-out, the dignity of their continuance. As a traveler it gives him an enviable accreditation. Having touched bottom, the entire society is open to him. It’s instructive to compare Bouvier with his compatriot, Robert Frank, who was also on the road with a little camera in a second-hand car shooting his ground- breaking The Americans at the same time. Both are drawn to the under- represented, the unreported, and the underclass too. But Frank with his seemingly casual, often blurry, askew compositions, is basically a satirist wanting to capture what his subjects are revealing unawares about the culture. They are caught, surprised, and in their moment stripped. Whereas with Bouvier, in remaining concealed they retain their dignity. (Speaking of photography, the American writer who comes closest to matching Bouvier in his social concerns and the density of his poetic prose is James Agee of the Walker Evans collaboration, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; a work written under assignment, and for a documentary, it is travel writing nonetheless. But English was not one of Bouvier’s languages and he seems not to have read Agee.)

Cadence, too, exerts its pull, the sound of what he writes. Reading his carefully weighted French is a much slower undertaking. You feel the phrases being stitched, added to, amended, sharpened and, not least, opened out; a prose that wants to slow you down, stop you in your tracks and make you reflect. Like poetry, it is written to be memorized.

28 After leaving Tabriz, their new language skills come in handy when they find themselves incarcerated “for their safety” in a Kurdish jail. There they befriend a murderer who has killed the wrong man in a vendetta. Then, while riding around with a lonely Kurdish landlord—they are free during the day—they get a course in post-Mossadeq practical politics, Corruption 101— how bribery actually works and how venality at the local level is invariably preferable to ideological righteousness. In Tehran, they finance the next six months of their journey with a show of

Vernet’s paintings and a series of lectures by Bouvier on the ever-appropriate Stendhal. Tehran, he notes, offers an ambiance Stendhal would have appreciated:

“plenty of sensitive minds, a few out-and-out rascals, and in the bazaar, cobblers spouting maxims, whom he could have gossiped with happily. There was the shadow

of a court—full of intrigues, bad coffee and dark revels—a little more corrupt than Parma’s, which also went in fear of the liberals it imprisoned and where the Fiscal Rossi

would have cut the figure of a choirboy. The people had finesse and to spare, commenting on excesses with bitter humour; they were regretful rather than remorseful,

and nonchalantly immoral, heavily reliant on divine indulgence. Not to mention the discreet religious circles and the groups

of Sufic adepts, concealed in the bazaar, which added an essential dimension to the town and buzzed with the most bewitching speculations about the nature of the soul. Stendhal, who was

basically so concerned with his own, wouldn’t have remained indifferent.”

29

Stendhal gives Bouvier a way of filtering experience, a voice as personal as it

is inclusive. Equally important in finding a voice is the Comte de Gobineau whose delicious

Asian Tales Bouvier came to know in Quetta, Baluchistan, while coping with an authorial disaster. An overly efficient room cleaner had discarded a large portion of his diary, among it the sixty pages he had written in Tabriz. In the process of reconstructing the lost pages almost a year later in Sri Lanka, Bouvier experienced what he called,

the subtle shift of the pendulum from seeing on

one’s own to making others see, the writing rising, not out of exoticism (which proves nothing more than a misunderstanding), but from the submission

to a distinct geography that has taken one over. (Reflections on Space and Writing,” 1989)

By “exoticism,” Bouvier is evoking Segalen: less to refute him, than to go beyond such fragmentariness. The key point here is “submission.” The journey itself is what speaks in Bouvier’s prose.

The submission to a “distinct geography” gives a depth unusual in a cultural portrait. Driving along the road to Isfahan, through a ghastly, glare-filled opacity,

Bouvier recognizes a moment of unexpected insight when,

About five o’clock the sky turned red and, as if holding a

torch up to a misty window-pane, you could then see the desert plateau with marvelous clarity; it might have been

30 the one over which the angel led Tobias by the hand. It was yellowish and scattered with pale tufts. Aubergine-

colored mountains surrounded it with strange indentations; they were distinguished mountains. That is exactly the word: over thousands of miles the landscape of Iran spread out with

a lean, supreme distinction, as though shaped by a puff of air from the finest ashes; as though bitter, immemorial experience had long ago arranged the incidental features—the water, the

mirages, the columns of dust—in such a way that, whether it was exalted or discouraged, the country could never disturb it. Even in the desolate south-eastern expanses, where there is nothing but

death and sun, the contours remain exquisite.

Bouvier is celebrating a landscape that most would find deeply forbidding; a reality almost too amorphous to name. Then, in a stroke of inspiration, he comes up with an epithet worthy of Segalen, “distinguished.” At that moment you feel the completeness of Bouvier’s “geographic submission.”

Bouvier’s great gift lies in the way he can encapsulate his moment within a vast historic time frame. Take his riff on that most familiar of topics, the color blue:

Above all, there was blue. You have to go that far to discover blue. The eye is already prepared for it in the

Balkans; in Greece, it is not only the main colour but also an overwhelming effect—it is an aggressive blue, as restless as the sea, but still it encourages a positive outlook, adventurous

plans, a sort of intransigence. But here—in shop doorways, on horses’ halters, in cheap jewellery—everywhere there is an

31 inimitable Persian blue which lifts the heart, which keeps Iran afloat, which attains a light and patina with age like the

palette of a great painter: the lapis-lazuli eyes of Achaemenian statues, the royal blue of Parthian palaces, the lighter enamel of Seljuk pottery, the blue of the Safavid mosques and then the

blue that sings and flies away, at ease amidst the ochre of the sand, the gentle, dusty green of the foliage, at peace with the snow, with the night.

Here the almost musical recapitulation of their journey, all the different blues they have come to know—he couldn’t be more accurate about Greece!—becomes a summary of what an entire civilization may be all about. Michaux admits to not having found the center of the Indian personality. In this passage Bouvier may well have located its Persian equivalent. In the love of blue (actually two blues, one turquoise and the other a far darker lapis-lazuli), it is more than possible to behold the miracle that has kept Persia “afloat” above all the vicissitudes that have plagued it.

*

In Central Asia, Bouvier remarks, religion has made travel a respected undertaking. Nearly everybody is, or was, or thinks he should be a traveler. The longstanding tradition makes for lively exchanges and a hospitality and welcome traditionally concomitant with pilgrimage and trade. It helps, too, to travel with a distich of Hafiz lettered in Persian script on their car’s left-hand door:

Even if your night’s shelter is uncertain

32 and your goal still far away know that there doesn’t exist

a road without an end. Don’t be sad.

For months, Bouvier writes,

That inscription served as password and safeguard in

corners of the country where they had no cause to like strangers. In cheap restaurants….you sometimes came across a ragged diner whose eyes were closed in pleasure,

his face lit up as a friend whispered poetry in his ear. Even in the depths of the country, people knew by heart lots of ghazals…Among students and artists of our own age, this

taste often amounted to intoxication. They knew hundreds of these dazzling stanzas which abolished the world even as they illuminated it, and quietly postulated the ultimate identity

of Good and Evil…They could take turns at reciting for hours, vibrating ‘in sympathy’ like the low chords of a lute…

Such receptivity contrasts with the Japan he encounters where barriers of xenophobia can discourage access and understanding. The Bouvier who arrives in Yokohama, with a camera and a few dollars made working as a kitchen helper on a French cargo boat, is a much diminished version of the author of The Way of the World. For one, he is considerably thinner; more crucially, he lacks Vernet’s positive companionship. The years on the road have taken their toll, especially the recent eight months in Sri Lanka where he came down with hepatitis, dysentery, and

33 malaria simultaneously and almost died. Yet Japan impresses him in a way that neither Iran nor India could, and over the next twelve years he will return twice.

His problem is how to present a people and a culture that both draws and repels him. He hits on a method appropriate to his gifts as a researcher: alternating segments from his notebook with historical exposition. As a summary of the

Japanese talent for self-reinvention, I know nothing as accurate and as fun to read. But I wish he had included other journeys than the one to Hokkaido in the desolate north. The long-distance view, gathered from documents in a library, lacks the immediacy of images seized and embraced on the road.

*

I met Michaux just once. When in Paris in 1963 doing research for my doctoral thesis, I sent him a copy of Voyage Noir, my Caribbean journal, thinking he might be pleased to see what Ecuador had given birth to. The next day, at my Ile St. Louis hotel, he called anonymously. I happened to be out, but guessing from the concierge’s description who it was, I stayed the following day. Sure enough, there he was: a head, bald like a seagull; piercing blue Arctic eyes; and, for a man my size, wide surprising shoulders. For the next two hours, as we talked along the Right Bank quais, we talked about travel, about the various journeys that had occupied his life until 1940, and about the trip I had been planning for several years to the country of poetry—Iran—which

I would make in a few weeks. Michaux had never traveled there, but he could fathom the attraction of a people so susceptible to beauty, whether a horse or a twelve-year-old boy.

In Anathemas and Admirations E.M. Cioran describes the intensity of Michaux’s conversation, the microscopic details, the pulverizing metaphysical leaps. I

34 remember Michaux regretting that his poor health, his inability to drink even tea, had curtailed his travel. I brought up the subject of joy. As an American I

wanted to understand the social ritual by means of which various cultures experience moments of communal elation: at a bullfight, over lunch, at a panegyri, whatever. So I asked Michaux where he had been happiest. “In the Sudan,” he

replied, “one place I never wrote about.” Then, catching himself, he recalled, “Actually, that’s where I started “Au pays de la magie!” It’s one of his “imaginary” travels, published during the war, about a people who are masters of the intuitive

encounter. “Was there, “ I asked, “a country to which he would like to return?” “India,” he replied, “the completeness, the density of thought is very impressive.”

That same respect for a resistant complexity appears in the vignette on Gandhi in which he salutes the mahatma’s insistence that “India is one. If others,” Michaux goes on, “see a thousand Indias, that is because they have not found the center of the

Hindu personality. Nor perhaps have I found it, but I feel sure it exists.” Reason enough, one would think, to go back.

*

Segalen I discovered later, in my forties. While living in France in the nineteen

seventies I came upon the Rougerie edition of his rediscovered writings and thought

him someone I might translate. Once I read the Essay on Exoticism, I saw that it went straight to a number of central issues of my travel writing. Ten years later when I published a first collection of travel essays, I posted his great defense of diversity as an epigraph, alongside Goethe’s “Niemand wandelt unbestrafft unter Palmen” (No one walks unscathed under palm trees). The two remarks set the parameters for what my travels seemed to be about: the hope of self-transformation that fueled my

35 chasse au bonheur. The fusion of voices, the audacity and beauty of the historical evocation, all that

stunned me: a poetry every bit as interesting as Mallarmé. And Segalen did manage to write the ”book” about which Mallarmé dreamed—not one, but several.

*

As for Bouvier, our paths almost crossed. I happened to be in a travel bookstore that had opened on the Ile St Louis in the mid-seventies and was showing my

Persian Notes to the proprietor, when she said there was a travel writer, Nicolas Bouvier, whom I would enjoy meeting living upstairs. But when she went to find him he had stepped out. To my lasting regret I did not seek him out another day. All the same, his name remained in my memory, and when Marlboro published

The Way of the World in a translation that owes a lot of its verve and accuracy to the publisher, Austryn Wainhouse, I sought it out. I had spent time in Iran in the 1960’s and in 1989 I had been commissioned to write the text for a book of photographs

about Central Asian cities of Samarkand, Bukhara, and Khiva. So little was available in print about the region that Bouvier’s account of the Iran of the mid-fifties became

my essential reading. Of course, The Way of the World is a great deal more than that. The more I reread it, the finer seems its accomplishment . My previous

companion all through Iran had been an out-of-print copy of The Road to Oxiana, almost literally strapped to my side. I even tried to re-enact parts of Robert Byron’s journey that I did not realize were fictionalized, so plausible did it seem that another might undergo his delicious encounters.

I don’t think anyone would want to undergo much of what Bouvier experienced. But that may be an index of how Bouvier adds to, and at times surpasses, Byron’s

36 achievement. His Central Asia includes much more than an effort to reach the five or six surviving marvels of architectural sublimity that motivate Byron. Because

Bouvier is less pretentious, and less interested in himself, he is less comical. He makes up for it in democratic depth, in the depiction he offers of an entire society. As for his prose, it is far more moving and even more exquisitely crafted than

Byron’s, an instrument that can expand to tell us what we need to know. I know of no finer travel writing.

37

38