Travel is one of my chief pleasures. I am single, financially independent, and can mangle several languages well enough to be understood. The world is my oyster. Except when it’s not.
It’s been over two years now since I was last overseas and while it has been VERY exciting to get to travel a little more this year, I’m still sticking close to home and following government advice to avoid non-essential foreign travel. I have yet to find any essential excuses.
This leaves me with plenty of beautiful places to still explore but there is only so much pleasure to be got from trees and mountains and ocean. This is where books come in.
Armchair travel is one of the finest forms of travel. It is accessible and affordable, requires little planning and leaves you with no jet lag. Ideal really at any time but especially during Covid.
And one of the chief pleasures of armchair travel is that it lets you travel through time – an experience no airline or cruise ship can match.
I travelled back in time recently via Travels by Jan Morris, a collection of essays published in 1976, making this an ideal choice for this week’s 1976 Club. Morris was by then already a well-established travel writer and this was her first book following the very personal Conundrum (now available as a Slightly Foxed edition), a memoir of her transition from James Morris to Jan Morris. While Morris’ personality is a vital part of these essays, her gender is not – something that was probably reassuring to her conservative readers who weren’t quite yet done processing their feelings about the change.
The opening essay – “The Best Travelled Man in the World: the example of Ibn Batuta” – was to me the best one in the collection. In considering the 14th century traveller, Morris captures the romance and adventure that call all travellers – and all readers of travel writing. We all long to see something that is truly new but none of us will ever experience it the way Ibn Batuta did. On a similar biographical bent there is “A Profitable Exile”, about nabobs who went to India to gain fortunes and ill-health.
“Through My Guide-Books” is also a delight, as Morris walks us through her collection of guidebooks and picks out some timeless advice:
The heyday of the guide-book was the nineteenth century, when steam had made travel relatively easy, but the average tourist was still an educated person, able to appreciate Murray’s donnish quirks or Baedeker’s obscurer allusions to the principles of Gothic fenestration. There are felicities, of course, to be found both in earlier and in later examples. My favourite guide-book chapter, on the whole, is Chapter XII of Horrebow’s Iceland (1758), which is entitled “Concerning Owls in Iceland”, and which consists in its entirety of one phrase: “There are no owls of any kind in the whole island.” The guide-book advice I most admire is given by E.M. Forster in his Alexandria (1922) – “The best way to see it is to wander aimlessly about” – while one could hardly improve the opening to Chapter IV of Mrs. R.L. Devonshire’s Rambles in Cairo (1931): “Of all the medieval rulers of Egypt, Saladin alone enjoys the privilege of being remembered by Western readers.”
The specific portraits of places – Dublin, Bath, Edinburgh, Washington, DC, Singapore, and Hong Kong – were less successful for me, though the Asian destinations were clearly written about with more engagement and enthusiasm. The piece about Hong Kong is quite long and, having just put down Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera to read this, the colonial mindset felt a bit jarring. It is absolutely what one should expect of Morris (indeed, Sanghera refers to Morris’ Pax Brittanica history of the British Empire in Empireland) but there are comments about the British rulers and the obedient Chinese residents that sit uncomfortably when reading today.
And then there is “On the Confederation Trail”, about Morris’ experience taking the train from Toronto to Calgary. The entire essay reads like a pat on the head – kind but dismissive, which is a pretty accurate synopsis of how Canada was treated circa 1976. Morris doesn’t show any particular admiration for Canada – not the way she delights in the bustle and energy of Hong Kong, for example – but can admit it has its good points:
The twentieth century, Canadians had been told, would be Canada’s, but they did not interpret this prophecy in any bombastic sense. They would be rich, but they would be good. They would be American in vivacity and inventiveness, but British in style and conscience.
It’s hard to be Canada: people are always saying nice things about you, just never with much enthusiasm.
The Captive Reader 