Moreover, this is a world which still exists. Visitors would still find life in a Trappist or a Benedictine monastery relatively unchanged. But the world through which PLF journeyed as a young man of eighteen, walking from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, has changed almost entirely. He would not recognise much of it now which is what makes his classic accounts so precious. A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water are unsurpassed as travel books; page after page transport the reader to worlds so strange that they, and the people who inhabit them, might come from fairy tales. The place names are magical – Transylvania, the Carpathians, Constantinople – and this world seems far removed from the one which became the Eastern Europe of the post-war communist regimes and which is now divided, re-named and, in the aftermath of other wars, rapidly becoming part of a homogenised Euroland. But the glories of the blue mountains, fast-flowing rivers and the deep, dark forests lying across the hills like animal pelts which Leigh Fermor describes will not have changed, and besides, within his pages, as within those of all great travel writing, the world remains as it was then, and also timeless.
There is something about travellers and travel writers, some faraway look, some set of the eyes, some restlessness in their long legs which are so accustomed to walking. You could tell that Bruce Chatwin was a traveller and a nomad the moment you set eyes on him, which I first did when he loped into a BBC Studio in 1986, to record an interview for the Radio 4 programme Bookshelf which I was then presenting.
Everyone has said it. He was astoundingly good looking, with blonde hair and bluer than blue eyes and he had erudition coming out of his ears, and the arrogant manner of a man who has been adored all his life.
The book he was promoting was called The Songlines, and was about Australian aborigines, in whom I had then, as now, little interest. But when Bruce started to talk you were spellbound – he could have been lecturing on the manufacture of brown paper bags and you would still have been spellbound. If I did not take to that particular book – which was criticised as well as praised for its thesis about the Song Lines of the outback – it sent me to other Chatwin titles and I fell in love with his writing, both travel – In Patagonia – and fiction. He was a remarkable novelist. No book of his is remotely like another and every one convinces the reader that here is someone who knows as much about this story, these places, these people, as it is possible to know – poor farmers of the Brecon Beacons in On the Black Hill, a nineteenth-century African mogul in The Viceroy of Ouida, a Czechoslovakian porcelain collector called Utz … Chatwin was a maverick and a genius.
After the recording we chatted a bit and he mentioned in passing that his parents lived in Stratford-upon-Avon – which turned out to be half a dozen doors from where we had a small house. His parents were the charming couple I often used to stop and talk to, when I was going up the street with my daughter in her pushchair. They were thrilled to know that I had met Bruce, listened to our radio interview, and were clearly immensely proud of him.
He walked out of the studio that day, tiny rucksack on his back, en route for the South of France – and from there, who knew? I used to hear news of him when I bumped into his parents – he was always somewhere exotic, somewhere of which I had barely heard.
The next time I saw Bruce himself I barely recognised him. I had met his father, who had said that Bruce was ‘rather ill’, but nothing more, and I had forgotten about it. At that time, around 1988, I was attending the Churchill Hospital, Oxford, every month, having de-sensitising treatment for my life-threatening wasp allergy in the dramatically named Venom Clinic. On the ward to which the clinic was attached, I was to learn later, Bruce had been looked after during the critical days of his diagnosis with AIDS, which was just beginning to wreak its havoc. It was, then, invariably fatal and it carried a great stigma. Nobody knew he had it – he put out a variety of weird and wonderful stories about the rare illness from which he was suffering, including one about having been poisoned after eating a one thousand-year-old egg in some obscure part of the Far East.
Well, why not? It was a good story, an utterly Chatwin story, romantic, rare, glamorous.
But the day I saw Bruce being wheeled down the corridor, I had no notion of any of that. It was simply quite clear to me that here was a man dying. The blue eyes burned out of hollow sockets, there was only a thin paint of flesh on his bones, his frame was bent over in the chair. He seemed very small. But when he saw me, his voice rang out as piercingly as ever, drawing attention to itself so that he was instantly the focus of everything. I don’t remember what we said but it was a brief exchange. He told me that he and his wife had been all over the place, shopping, buying up ‘dozens of beautiful, beautiful things’. It sounded slightly manic.
He waved a lordly hand and was gone. I knew that I would not see him again. But I had the books. They are here. I pick up In Patagonia. The cover has a quote from Paul Theroux: ‘He has fulfilled the desire of all real travellers, of having found a place that is far and seldom visited, like the Land where the Jumblies live.’
Yes, that is exactly right, for Bruce would never have found anywhere that was ordinary or of our world.
The best travel writers make everywhere longed for, of course, a magic kingdom, for every one of them somehow invents their own places, so that when others go there, they are never quite as expected.
Colin Thubron has been everywhere – into the Lost Heart of Asia, by car, alone, from St Petersburg and the Baltic States south to Georgia and Armenia, by foot, bicycle and train from Beijing to Tibet (after having learned Mandarin), to the romantic ports and villages of Lebanon, into Siberia. Like Bruce Chatwin he has written novels, too. Like Leigh Fermor’s, his travels are partly travels into depths of himself. Like both of them, he writes like an angel, and, the first time I saw him, I thought he was one, the most beautiful young man I had ever set eyes on.
I was eighteen. I had wanted to be a writer for as long as I could remember, and having filled the inevitable exercise books with bad short stories and worse poems, had written a novel. Looking back, I see that it was not a very good novel but it did have one merit – it was not in the least autobiographical, which many first novels are. Perhaps that was why it found a publisher. Which is why I was about to walk into the hallowed portals of Hutchinson, in London, to meet one of the great names of twentieth-century British publishing, Sir Robert Lusty, and the woman who was to be my editor, Dorothy Tomlinson. Her father, the novelist H.M. Tomlinson, had been a close friend of Thomas Hardy, which to me was like saying he sat at the right hand of God. Dorothy remembered him, though not well as he had died when she was a girl. But that she had met him and remembered him was enough for me.
Publishers’ offices have not changed very much since 1960. There was a reception area, with some of the firm’s books on display, and a girl behind a desk, with a typewriter and a telephone.
She said, ‘Miss Tomlinson’s assistant will come and fetch you.’
And a few moments later, Colin Thubron did.
I told Dorothy Tomlinson I thought her assistant the handsomest man I had ever seen and she agreed but she also doubted if he would be with her as a junior for long. He wanted to travel, she said, and write.
He did.
Colin has barely changed in fifty years. He has the same mane of hair, the same bony frame, the same long, striding traveller’s legs, the same good looks, the same charm. He is still travelling, still writing.
How delightful. And somehow, very reassuring.
Laughter in the Next Room
… AS OSBERT SITWELL called one of his volumes of autobiography. There they sit. I am not sure quite why, but thousands of households in the immediate post-war period had this set – Left Hand, Right Hand, The Scarlet Tree … people who could barely have heard of the Sitwells, and whose lives were a million miles from the lives they led, their ancestors, the people they knew. My relatives had them. People who had almost no other books had them. It is a tribute to – well, to wh
at? To a nifty piece of marketing by an early book club, I shouldn’t wonder.
My year of reading from home may or may not include them, but it will have to have some books that are guaranteed to make me laugh and those are always just to hand, in the next room. I try to keep them together but one is always upstairs or downstairs or on the bedside table.
Humour in books is a very personal thing and not a subject about which to be superior. I am always overjoyed when my recommendation of P.G. Wodehouse is successful. Only recently, when I recommended a friend start with The Mating Season, the next e-mail I got from him was headed ‘What ho!’ But it ain’t always so. Another friend said he couldn’t see the point of spending time with such silly asses. You can’t convert someone like that, you just have to let it be.
People have occasionally asked me what book a teenage daughter might read when she has grown out of children’s books but not yet grown into those for adults, and I often suggest one of the most magical books on my shelves, as well as one of the funniest. It has rarely failed.
Here’s a clue.
‘We are not moving to another Villa,’ said Mother firmly. ‘ I’ve made up my mind about that.’
‘She straightened her spectacles, gave Larry a defiant glare, and strutted off towards the kitchen, registering determination in every inch.
PART TWO
The new villa was enormous …
My Family and Other Animals never fails. It is one of the very few books whose television adaptation was exactly right. So often the plot may be there, and some pretty pictures, but the language, the style, is missing, and a casting director’s idea of a Dickens or George Eliot character is rarely like mine. But this they got right. Hannah Gordon was Mrs Durrell, Brian Blessed was Spiro …
It is a wonderful story, and a true one, about the springtime of Gerald’s life when he and his family ‘fled from the gloom of the English summer like a flock of migrating swallows’ to the magical island of Corfu. The family are the heart of the book but into their dotty, squabbling, variegated net are drawn others, mainly Corfiots as well as Gerry’s menagerie of odd creatures from odd sources, including a vicious gull given to him by a convict on parole, a young Scops owl rescued from an olive tree, stray dogs called Widdle and Puke, and two magpies always known as magenpies.Mother is the lynchpin of the family, gifted cook and gardener, tolerant and vague, forever deciding where she wants to be buried, forever teetering on the verge of insolvency. Gerry has the animals, Leslie hunts, Margo cares for her person, her clothes and keeping out of the sun, and Larry, of course, writes. The humour is far more than just a series of jokes, it arises from the characters and the situations. And Durrell writes so beautifully, especially of summer nights drenched in moonlight, wine, cicadas and the gentle wash of the sea, that he makes you want to fly off there too, like the family of migrating swallows. Actually, we once did, to a villa almost on a beach round the headland from the White House in which the last part of the book is set. I read the book again, sitting in the shade overlooking the emerald and turquoise sea so that my memories are somehow interwoven with Durrell’s – and you can’t beat that.
If the best books of humour emerge from characters and situations, the ones I always return to make me cry as well as laugh and how perfectly balanced are laughter and sadness in Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love. I know it almost by heart, and hardly even need to fetch it from the shelf in the next room – know Davy telling Uncle Matthew that all the rare stones in the passage are diseased, and Uncle Matthew sobbing over his gramophone; know Linda, whose heart was so tender she could be made to cry for a lonely matchbox; know them all and never fail to laugh and cry alternately. But not every book that used to be funny goes on being so. It is rather chastening and I don’t understand what happens. It happens to the reader not the book, of course; the book does not change. But somehow, what seemed hilarious can fall flat. I re-read Three Men in a Boat recently and it wasn’t funny at all – well, the bit where they get lost in Hampton Court Maze was, though not quite as funny as it used to be. The Diary of a Nobody is no longer funny either, apart from the chapter in which they paint the bath red. Funny-ish. Why?
But P.G. Wodehouse never lets me down and it is only a question of whether I feel like Jeeves or Lord Emsworth. As Evelyn Waugh said, ‘Mr Wodehouse’s idyllic world will never stale.’ It is timeless and the set pieces are magnificent – perhaps the scene of the village concert party (The Mating Season) or Gussie Fink-Nottle’s speech at the school prize-giving (Right Ho, Jeeves) get the top marks but others might disagree.
The point about every single book that I re-read in order to laugh is that every one is so much more than funny because the authors write so well. Wodehouse uses the English language to perfection, Durrell evokes scenes so wonderfully, Nancy Mitford’s prose is so elegant, so arch. One could learn to write from any of them and I wish more people would. No matter what the genre, good writing always tells. Crime novels? Look at Raymond Chandler, master of style. Spy novels? How many do you know who write as well as le Carré? Style wins every, every time.
Amis, Père et Fils
THERE IS A very good reason why Elizabeth Jane Howard’s novels are sitting on a shelf next to a couple of cookery books by Elizabeth David, and that is because of an association between the two of them in my past which goes back to 1961. I have never cooked from Elizabeth David’s recipes but I have sometimes read her for the way she describes places associated with eating – the Mediterranean, the countryside of France.
In 1961, when my first book was published, I was sent off to Manchester to do an afternoon books programme which was fronted by a rising star of television called Brian Redhead, who later became a much-loved prop and stay of Radio 4’s Today programme. Back then, a younger and more streamlined Brian ran a bright and lively TV series in which not only did he interview authors in the usual way, but had Elizabeth Jane Howard in a regular new-books review slot. So off I went on, believe it or not, the sleeper train to Manchester Piccadilly from London – I hardly believe it myself. Sleeper trains are the most romantic form of travel in the world, far more so than cruise ships once the epitome of romantic travel. I have taken sleepers across Europe and there is nothing, nothing in the world so exciting as waking in the night, drawing up the blind and finding oneself in the small hours at some remote mountain village station, where a couple of porters are smoking and watching the milk churns being loaded. ‘Domodossola’ says the sign. And the station is lit by a strange, dim light. It is a Graham Greene scene, or one out of an early Orson Welles movie, with someone sinister in a mac and trilby standing in the shadows, waiting, watching. Three hours later, wake again, and the blind snaps up to show Lake Montreux outside your window and children get on to the train for a few stops to school carrying bags of books – and skis. But this time it was only Manchester after all, in the company of Katharine Whitehorn, Elizabeth David and Elizabeth Jane Howard, grand-seeming ladies all, and terribly grown-up beside a student in a Marks & Spencer V-necked sweater. Elizabeth Jane was very kind about my book, and then I talked about student-cooking-on-a-gas-ring, with Katharine, who had written a book about just that, and Elizabeth David, who had not. She was a prickly lady, difficult to talk to, and she turned up her nose at everything on offer at lunchtime in the BBC canteen. Well, anybody might, but in those days I babysat for Arnold Wesker’s children which made me an Aldermaston-marching sort of student who stood outside the college gates with placards about feeding Africa, so posh ladies being sniffy about the food that was set before them was never going to impress. I understand it all now, of course, and yes, the canteen lunch was awful and Mrs David had a pre-war and very refined palate and was one of the great cooks of her day. All the same, I still half-think she could have found some cheese and biscuits and an apple to eat.
Elizabeth Jane Howard was a fine cook, too, as I later discovered. She was extremely kind and encouraging to a starter-novelist and one never forgets that sort of generosity. I was
lucky. I don’t remember anyone, however eminent, who was not kind and encouraging. W.H. Auden, face creased like a map, was holding court to a circle of the great and the good one evening at the Snows. I had studied his poems for A level and it so happened that now, in my second year at King’s, I was writing an essay about them. I told him so. In a trice, he had taken my hand, pulled me down to sit on the floor beside him and asked if there was anything he could help with. I remember my tongue cleaving to the roof of my mouth, I remember him blowing cigarette smoke all over me as he asked me, in his Anglo-American drawl, if there were any of his poems I found difficult to understand. I managed to name one. He sat back, narrowed his eyes, and expounded and I tried desperately to retain his words, wished I had brought a notebook, longed to follow his explanation. But it was generous, especially when important people, brought there to meet him, stood waiting by. Perhaps he preferred the company of a tongue-tied undergraduate to the literati after all.
It was in that same drawing room that I next bumped into Elizabeth Jane Howard, by then newly, and scandalously, married to Kingsley Amis. They dazzled everyone in the room: the beautiful people, the glamorous centre of attention. I met Kingsley, with whose handsomeness and charm I naturally fell in love. I had not read Lucky Jim, but thank goodness omitted to say so and borrowed a copy the following day. I never gave it back and it is here still, a battered old Penguin, and a novel I have never really found as funny as I know I should. I seemed to admire Kingsley’s novels alternately – one on, one off – and Lucky Jim was off. I think, perhaps, it is a book for as well as about young men. At any rate, a lot of my male fellow students went about with copies, laughing heartily and quoting bits at one another, and none of the women did.