Here-And-There-Ing in Portugal in 1929: the Perspective of an American “Impression-Gatherer”

Here-and-there-ing in Portugal in 1929: The Perspective of an American “impression-gatherer” Maria Zulmira Castanheira Universidade Nova de Lisboa Abstract. In 1929 Alexander Lawton Mackall (1888–1968), an American journalist, author, and gastronomy expert, visited Portugal in the company of his wife, “impelled by curiosity to discover what the Place Where Nobody Goes might be like.” The literary result of this seven-week trip was the publication, two years later, of a 354-page travel book titled Portugal for Two (New York, 1931) which includes his impressions on Portugal, at the time under the Ditadura Nacional regime initiated by the election of President Óscar Carmona in 1928 (whom Lawton Mackall actually met during his stay), as well as reflections on the very condition of the traveler and the act of moving between different cultures. Keywords: Twentieth-Century American travel writing, cultural mediation, literary representation, Alexander Lawton Mackall, “New State” Portugal Travel writing, a long-established literary genre and which, in our increasingly global era, has met with growing popularity,1 constitutes one of the most fertile fields for imagologic research. In fact, emphasis should be placed on the cultural mediation carried out by such a textual corpus and on its contribution to the construction of mental images of the Other. These depictions, not infrequently stereotyped (and perpetuating themselves over time), may promote an understanding of that self-same Other or, conversely, lack of understanding, repugnance, and even hatred. Travelers who go abroad and tell the story of their experience of otherness organize their narratives around two major binary oppositions, I/the Other and the Familiar/Strange. The difference that Other represents may be conveyed by a narrative presented as predominantly impersonal, centered on the objective description of places, peoples, customs, and events; or based on a strategy that combines factual data with more personal and autobiographical information. It is important to bear in mind that the reading public may consume travel accounts as faithful representations of reality, unaware that, no matter how factual the account is, it is nevertheless a textual construct molded by the upbringing, ideology, biases, sensibility, interests, and expectations of the author, that is, by his/her subjectivity. Therefore, Imagology, in terms of travel writing, brings to bear operational concepts such as “hetero-image” and “self-image” with which to study the 321 322 │ InterDISCIPLINARY Journal of Portuguese Diaspora Studies Vol. 4.2 (2015) representation of the “foreigner” in a given text. Moreover, it analyzes the dynamics between “self-images” and images of the Other, addressing the fact that interpretation will be crucial not only regarding what is said about the Other but also what the observer/I says about him/herself when confronted with a space of geographic and cultural difference, which very often the traveler endeavors to grasp by means of analogy and contrast. Looking at the history of travel writing allows us to understand that, from the nineteenth century onwards, recreational traveling became increasingly widespread, after centuries of travel based essentially on utilitarian and functional factors.2 This evolution is closely related to the development of the means of transport and the increase in disposable income, which made traveling more comfortable, quicker, and now accessible to the middle classes. This democratization of travel—allowing for an ever increasing number of individuals to satisfy their curiosity about the diversity of the world, and the ensuing growth of the tourist industry—impacted the demand for and production of travel writing. As argued by Casey Blanton, starting in the Romantic period, travel writing stressed the subjective dimension of the personal response to the world: Indeed, both European and American travel writing after the Romantic period becomes resonant with the interactions between traveler and world. This complex interplay between self and world, between the empirical and the sentimental, signals the beginning of the richest period of travel writing: the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (Blanton 19) Blanton signals the apogee of travel writing between 1850 and 1930, a period that covers the traumatic events of World War I (bringing leisure travel to a halt), after which Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966), Graham Greene (1904–1991), and Robert Byron (1905–1941) would publish their landmark travel accounts. These authors were analyzed by the late North-American historian and critic Paul Fussell in his groundbreaking study of travel writing, Abroad: British Literary Traveling between the Wars (1980). If during this period countless Europeans set out in exploration of other continents, Europe too was widely visited by many American travelers (intellectuals, writers, journalists, and others) who admired the culture of the old continent and who traveled as on pilgrimages to the places and monuments accounting for Europe’s civilizational riches, namely to countries such as the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Spain.3 In “Americans in Europe from Henry James to the Present,” however, William Merrill Decker draws our attention to the changes brought about by the Great War of 1914–1918 in the way Americans began to view Europe: Those who crossed the Atlantic between the wars did so with an attitude altogether different from that of previous generations. Formerly even the best-prepared Americans had traveled as the overawed students of an old and sophisticated civilization, but the notion that US entry into World War I had “saved” Europe diminished the American’s sense of cultural inferiority. (Decker 136) Maria Zulmira Castanheira / Here-and-there-ing in Portugal in 1929 │ 323 Portugal, situated in the extreme southwest of the European continent, was not on the so-called beaten track sought by Americans.4 For this very reason, the occasional choice of this Iberian country as a tourist destination—rather than for professional reasons as had been the case, for instance, in the late 1800s, of the diplomat George Bailey Loring (1817–1891), the author of A Year in Portugal: 1889–1890 (1891)—was a major novelty, although it was not unknown.5 Alexander Lawton Mackall (1888–1968), an American journalist, writer, and food critic who visited Portugal in 1929, is well aware of this fact:6 In miles on the map, Portugal is the country of Continental Europe that is nearest to North America. Yet when we announced our intention of going there, it was as though we had said Borneo or Baluchistan. “Portugal? Of all countries on earth, how did you happen to pick that one?” “Portugal! Why, I haven’t heard or thought of that place since I gave up collecting postage stamps.” “Portugal, eh? That’s going off the beaten path with a vengeance. I suppose, though, it must be quite picturesque—early-primitive hotels and that sort of thing. But not for me, thank you! When I travel for pleasure I prefer countries that are ‘spoiled’ with a few modern comforts.” And so on. But we went—impelled by curiosity to discover what the Place Where Nobody Goes might be like. We were bound for Seville, and we decided that we would land at Lisbon, which is geographically on the way; stopping there a few days, even at the hazard of Visigothic discomforts, we would have a look at the Unknown Country. (Mackall vii) These opening lines of the 354-page work which resulted from Mackall’s seven-week visit, supposedly with his wife, titled Portugal for Two and published two years later (1931), conjure up an image of Portugal as a backward country, excluded from progress, exotic in its primitiveness, which had become fixed in the Anglo- American imaginary to a large extent through the abundant British output of travel writing on Portugal.7 Mackall does not, however, maintain his readers’ suspense as to a possible confirmation of this stereotyped image. Rather, he immediately declares how untrue it is: We did so—and hardly got to Seville at all! For Portugal proved to be the most entrancing country imaginable: a colorful garden land with a Riviera climate; with medieval castles, superb Gothic abbeys (among the finest in the world); with delightful bathing beaches and smart pleasure resorts, and glamorous, clean cities that one could linger in forever. As for expected discomforts, we encountered none! The hotels were good: in some cases even sumptuous. The railroads were excellent, with well-appointed trains which ran on time. And the reasonable cost of everything was a revelation. (Mackall vii–viii) The individuality of his gaze thus takes over from the beginning of the narrative when he brings to the fore the danger of badly informed received wisdom with respect to mutual perceptions among nations. Throughout the text Mackall constructs a positive and at times enthusiastic representation of Portugal, deploying a suggestive and humor-laden prose which inscribes him in the tradition of jocular 324 │ InterDISCIPLINARY Journal of Portuguese Diaspora Studies Vol. 4.2 (2015) American travel narratives like The Innocents Abroad or the New Pilgrims’ Progress (1869) by Mark Twain (1835–1910). In Portugal for Two, the traveler-narrator even defines himself and his female companion as “pilgrims from America” (Mackall 84). Although he was writing at a time when literature—and not just travel writing— reflected, in the aftermath of World War I, “an ironic vision of the modern world as disconnected and fragmented” (Blanton 22), Mackall’s humor is seldom bitter, and never where his vision of Portuguese reality is concerned. We are more likely to find sly irony at times of self-reflection such as, for example, when he acknowledges, on visiting an industrial Exposition in Estoril, that the Portuguese are great craftsmen and realizes that burgeoning Portuguese industry may harm American economic interests. Mackall is also aware of the hypocritical interests of tourists in search of the picturesque of under-developed societies but whose conviction it is that theirs is the superior civilization: Yes, the Portuguese have the instinct of craftsmanship; and they are now applying that skill to the machine.

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