• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

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.

Load more

  38

Copy Link