My
current work in progress takes place in a lost world, a time and place I have
never been and never will be, of which only the dimmest, rustiest shadows
remain, almost all of them at the bottom of the dark sea.
I am well
challenged. I’m trying to imagine myself in the minds, the skin and clothes and
time of others who are not much like me at all, a Waspish white male and baby
boomer (and outsider in his own tribe).
I’ve been
told repeatedly that I should write what I know and only what I know. But where’s the challenge in that? But the world
has read plenty of O’Neill, Cheever and Updike, and I’m neither driven nor
inclined to add another provincial saga of white-male bourgeoisie decline. (Oh,
sure you might shed a poignant tear, but you’re more likely react as I do when
I reach page fifty: yawn and then send in the black helicopters, guns blazing. A
guy can only grow up so much.)
Research into
the 1920s carries me afar. I skim here, read closely there, mining, dredging
facts, then wring them through the sieve of my imagination. From there, I slowly--very
slowly with his book--weave the strands into colorful, picturesque (sometimes
grotesque) exciting narrative—hopefully stitching is so skillful that I fool us
both into thinking I was there, ninety years ago.
With you
right there alongside my imagined self, the smells of salt air, coalsmoke and
oil filling your mind, as you brace yourself on the swerving deck, leaning
against the cold wet wind, as storm rises ahead, as white froth breaks upon the
black sea.
“Hark! Gunfire
from the bridge! A pirate ship on the horizon! Mutiny below! And who’s that fair
gal beckoning me through her cabin door . . . ?”
It all
beats exploring the dusty corners of my living room or detailing my war against
the fruit flies clouding my tiny kitchen, the one the size of a ship’s galley.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Among my towers
of research sources are travel books written in the early part of the twentieth
century, written by those who were
there; or at least passed through.
Only in
the last hundred years or so has travel become “fun”, or a source of
intellectual, personal or spiritual growth, at least in the West. Before then, most
traveled only out of necessity. Primitive, rough, uncomfortable, and dangerous,
to travel was to take your life in your hands, a voluntary venture only for the
rough and ready (This excludes the countless enslaved ones who wouldn’t call their
experiences “travel” at all.)
Starting
in the late nineteenth century, thanks to technological and economic booms,
travel became safer and with safety, pleasure was added like frosting. So it came
within reach of the mass of Westerners and the genre of travel writing moved
beyond the scope of Marco Polo and Lewis and Clark.
“Travel
is cheap and rapid,” writes Aldous Huxley in Jesting Pilate (first published in 1926) said by some to be the
first of the “modern” travel adventures. “The immense accumulation of modern
knowledge lies heaped on every side.” (He should live so long, especially now.)
Huxley is
best remembered as the author of Brave
New World and The Doors of Perception,
which is one of the first personal accounts of psychedelic usage (that other
kind of travel).
Huxley
was a pioneering thinker of his times: a socialist, atheist, pacifist whose
influence is still with us (though he seems to have sloughed off his atheism in
later years in favor of an Eastern spirituality). Much of his fiction is satirical,
a genre out of fashion in our age of self-serious novels.
Huxley
also suffered from poor eyesight for most of his life. But that didn’t stop him
from writing three travel books. Pilate,
the first of them, tells of a year-long journey through India, Burma, Malaya, and
Japan, before winding up America, to which he would return to live out his
life, dying the same day as C.S. Lewis and President John F. Kennedy, his final
request an injection of LSD.
The cover
of my copy (Paragon House, 1991) depicts a sportily dressed English tourist lounging
on a spindly chair, suitcase by his side, his feet up on the clouds (as only
the English seem to be able to do). Far far in the distance, across an expanse
of water, in the lower corner, sits the Taj Mahal, an image almost like a
tchotchke made for a doll house.
The cover
turns out to be an apt picture of what’s inside, a journey through a world from
afar. Mr. Huxley is still a great writer and thinker. His observations on his
travels are detailed, thoughtful and undoubtedly well-meant and you’ll find
eloquent pleasures on every page. His opinions are strong, witty, articulate .
. . and maybe even sometimes spot on.
I got a special
kick out of his razor-sharp takedown of popular Hollywood filmmaking of the
1920s, and how American movies grossly, absurdly misrepresent the West to Asian
audiences. He makes the highbrow conservatism that seemed oppressive in my anything-goes
youth seem refreshing and rebellious in this age of musclebound, muscle-headed
Marvel Superheroes. (Maybe I will write about that cloud of flies hovering
around my sink after all! Make them a Metaphor for Everything! Nobel here I
come!)
But I
can’t pass too much judgment on Huxley’s opinions, except to wonder how much
the world he passed through then has changed in ninety-years. He was a man of
his time, seeing through his own poor eyes as I see through my better ones. And
modernity was still shiny and new. Air travel had not even begun.
Still,
Huxley makes his judgments. In fact, opinion is what we mostly get for a large
part of this trip (for one, he despises the Taj Mahal down to its foundation; and
don’t get him started on Indian politics!). Huxley is not always a descriptive
or detailing writer. Except for the constant oppressive heat and tropical
greenery, I only occasionally got a vivid visual sense of his journeys (for
example, during as voyage down Burma’s Irrawaddy River). I sometimes
encountered a great gulf between observer and observed.
Modern
readers whose politics are delicate will find Huxley insufferably English, a
snobby son of the Empire, down to his wellies. He tends to carpet his
sensibilities over the sweltering poverty of the world he travels through. Instead
of the greedy craven Capitalist, we have the totalitarian Socialist, equally
sure he knows what’s best for these people.
Me, I
didn’t really mind (which may also be cause for alarm). The writing is so
wonderful throughout, so acute, every sentence perfectly pitched, his opinions failed
to goad me much either way, even if I didn’t capture much in the way of palpable
detail, but for an incident of attempted murder by a ship’s crew member while
passing through Malaya (now Indonesia).
Though I
didn’t get a strong-enough sense of the world Huxley traveled through, I got a strong
feeling for one man’s mind in his time, a peek through another door of
perception, into another time, another space. Useful enough.
Copyright 2015 by Thomas
Burchfield
Photo by author
Thomas Burchfield’s latest
(yet to be published) novel is Butchertown,
a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up. He is also the author of the
contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark, winner of the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book
festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original
screenplays Whackers and The Uglies (e-book editions only).
Published by Ambler
House Publishing, those three are available at Amazon
in various editions. You can also find his work at Barnes
and Noble, Powell's
Books, and Scribed. He also “friends” on Facebook, tweets on Twitter,
reads at Goodreads and drinks at various bars around the East Bay. You can also
join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern
California with his wife, Elizabeth.
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