Today, two more gifts: Jean Genet's Thief's Journal and Evelyn Waugh's When the Going was Good, which is subtitled 'Everything the author wishes to preserve from his pre-war travel books'. This seems revisionary.
It has a fabulous beginning, from 'A Pleasure Cruise in 1929':
In February 1929 London was lifeless and numb, seeming to take its temper from Westminster, where the Government was dragging out the weeks of its last session. Talking films were justbeing introduced, and had set back by twenty years the one vital art of the century. There was not even a good murder case. And besides this it was intolerably cold...People shrank, in those days, from the icy contat of a cocktail glass, like the Duchess of Malfi from the dead hand, and crept stiff as automata from the draughty taxis into the nearest tube-railway station, where they stood, pressed together for warmth, coughing and sneezing among the evening papers.'
In his introduction of 1945 Waugh says pessimistically that 'There is no room for tourists in a world of 'displaced persons'. Never again, I suppose, shall we land on foreign soil with letter of credit and passport...and feel the world wide open before us.'
Simultaneously, I am reading Gulliver's Travels, in which each of his trips (at least so far) are about estrangement, isolation, oddity, partial communication, and exploitation. So is Robinson Crusoe. Travelling is adventure, aventure, chance. It is about the perenially displaced.
It has a fabulous beginning, from 'A Pleasure Cruise in 1929':
In February 1929 London was lifeless and numb, seeming to take its temper from Westminster, where the Government was dragging out the weeks of its last session. Talking films were justbeing introduced, and had set back by twenty years the one vital art of the century. There was not even a good murder case. And besides this it was intolerably cold...People shrank, in those days, from the icy contat of a cocktail glass, like the Duchess of Malfi from the dead hand, and crept stiff as automata from the draughty taxis into the nearest tube-railway station, where they stood, pressed together for warmth, coughing and sneezing among the evening papers.'In his introduction of 1945 Waugh says pessimistically that 'There is no room for tourists in a world of 'displaced persons'. Never again, I suppose, shall we land on foreign soil with letter of credit and passport...and feel the world wide open before us.'
Simultaneously, I am reading Gulliver's Travels, in which each of his trips (at least so far) are about estrangement, isolation, oddity, partial communication, and exploitation. So is Robinson Crusoe. Travelling is adventure, aventure, chance. It is about the perenially displaced.
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