D. H. Lawrence: From wartime Sussex, April 30, 1915: "How dark my soul is! I stumble and grope and don't get much further. I suppose it must be so. All the beauty and light of the days seems [sic] like a [sic] iridescence on a very black flood ... I wish I were going to Thibet—or Kamschatka—or Tahiti—to the Ultima ultima ultima Thule. I feel sometimes, I shall go mad, because there is nowhere to go, no 'new world.' One of these days, unless I watch myself, I shall be departing in some rash fashion, to some foolish place" (Letters, vol. 2, 1913–1916, edited by George Zytaruk and James Boulton, 1981).
T. E. Lawrence: "We export two chief kinds of Englishmen," he wrote in the Introduction to Doughty's Travels in Arabia Deserta,
who in foreign parts divide themselves into two opposed classes. Some feel deeply the influence of native people, and try to adjust themselves to its atmosphere and spirit. To fit themselves modestly into the picture they suppress all in them that would be discordant with local habits and colours. They imitate the native, and so avoid friction in their daily life. However, they cannot avoid the consequences of imitation, a hollow, worthless thing. They are like the people but not of the people, and their half-perceptible differences give them a sham influence often greater than their merit. They urge the people among whom they live into strange, unnatural courses by imitating them so well that they are imitated back again.
The other class of Englishmen is the larger class. In the same circumstances of exile they reinforce their character by memories of the life they have left. In reaction against foreign surroundings they take refuge in the England that was theirs. They assert their aloofness, their immunity, the more vividly for their loneliness and weakness. They impress the peoples among whom they live by reaction, by giving them an ensample of the complete Englishman, the foreigner intact.
Doughty is a great member of the second, the cleaner class.
And T. E. Lawrence was a member of the first, the gone-native class.
W. Somerset Maugham: "To me England has been a country where I had obligations that I did not want to fulfill and responsibilities that irked me. I have never felt entirely myself till I had put at least the Channel between my native country and me" (The Summing Up, 1938).
W. H. Auden: "England is terribly provincial—it's all this family business. I know exactly why Guy Burgess went to Moscow. It wasn't enough to be queer and a drunk. He had to revolt still more to break away from it all. That's just what I've done by becoming an American citizen ... I also find criticism in England very provincial. In the literary world in England, you have to know who's married to whom, and who's slept with whom and who hasn't. It's a tiny jungle. America's so much larger. Critics may live in New York, but the writers don't" (quoted in Charles Osborne, W. H. Auden, 1980).
GeraldBrenan: "It will naturally be asked how I came to make my home in such a remote spot"—the tiny village of Yegen, in the Sierra Nevada of Andalusia, Spain, in 1920. "The shortest explanation would be that I was rebelling against English middle-class life ... The England I knew was petrified by class feeling and by rigid conventions, as well as, in my case, poisoned by memories of my public school, so that as soon as the war was over and I was out of uniform I set off to discover new and more breathable atmospheres" (South from Granada, 1957).
Bruce Chatwin: "I've decided to leave England. As Richard Burton said: 'The only country in which I do not feel at home'" (Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin, edited by Elizabeth Chatwin and Nicholas Shakespeare, 2010).
12. When You're Strange
A TRAVELER IS A STRANGER. ONE OF THE DELUsions of the tourist, usually buffered from reality, is that he or she is a friend and even perhaps a benefactor of the locals. "We're putting money into the economy," is a common tourist observation. The traveler, ever the outsider, always moving on, would never say that. "Tourism is a mortal sin," said the film director Werner Herzog. And yet it is the rough traveler, not the tidy tourist, who confronts—and needs the goodwill of—the native of the land. This is often a recapitulation of a recurrent human event in history that has always fascinated me—First Contact, meeting The Other. The most vivid examples come from the history of exploration and discovery. Usually, First Contact is construed as Columbus meeting his first Arawak and calling him an Indian, because Columbus believed he had reached the coast of India. But consider the opposite: the Arawak meeting a fat little Italian clutching a copy of Marco Polo's Travels on the deck of a caravel.
In the year of contact, 1778, the Hawaiians believed Captain James Cook to be the god Lono. The Aztecs, in 1517, took the Spaniards to be avatars of Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent, god of learning and of wind. The polar Inuit assumed that they were the only people in the world, so when they saw their first white stranger, the explorer Sir William Parry, in 1821, they said to him, "Are you from the sun or the moon?"
Until I went to live in Africa, I had not known that most people in the world believe that they are the People, and their language is the Word, and strangers are not fully human—at least not human in the way the People are—nor is a stranger's language anything but the gabbling of incoherent and inspissated felicities. In most languages, the name of a people means "the Original People," or simply "the People." "Inuit" means "the People," and most Native American names of so-called tribes mean "the People." For example, the Ojibwe, or Chippewa, call themselves Anishinaabe, "the Original People," and the Cherokee (the name is not theirs but a Creek word) call themselves Ani Yun Wiya, meaning "Real People," and Hawaiians refer to themselves as Kanaka Maoli, "Original People."
As recently as the 1930s, Australian gold prospectors and New Guinea Highlanders encountered each other for the first time. The grasping, world-weary Aussies took the Highlanders to be savages, while the Highlanders, assuming that the Aussies were the ghosts of their own dead ancestors, on a visit, felt a kinship and gave them food, thinking (as they reported later), "They are like people you see in a dream." But the Australians were looking for gold and killed the Highlanders who were uncooperative. The Lakota, who called white men washichus, Nathaniel Philbrick writes in The Last Stand, "believed that the first white men had come from the sea, which they called mniwoncha, meaning 'water all over.'" In an echo of this accurate characterization, and at about the same time, the historian Fernand Braudel tells us, "To West Africans, the white men were murdele, men from the sea."
Otherness can be like an illness; being a stranger can be analogous to experiencing a form of madness—those same intimations of the unreal and the irrational, when everything that has been familiar is stripped away.
It is hard to be a stranger. A traveler has no power, no influence, no known identity. That is why a traveler needs optimism and heart, because without confidence travel is misery. Generally, the traveler is anonymous, ignorant, easy to deceive, at the mercy of the people he or she travels among. The traveler might be known as "the American" or "the Foreigner," and there is no power in that.