Breaking Open Japan: Commodore Perry, Lord Abe and American Imperialism in 1853.
By George Feifer.
Collins Smithsonian Books.
389 pp. $25.95.
Reviewed by James Dalglish
( is a freelance writer and university lecturer living in New York State and the Middle East)
“The bay of Uraga lies beside a town of the same name that controlled the entrance to far larger Edo--now Tokyo--Bay... five thousand warriors waited on the smaller bay's shore at dawn of that day July 14. All were riveted by the source of their dread, now clearly discernible in the advancing morning light: four giant war-ships of America's East Asia Squadron." (page 4)
Such is the breathless cinematic debut of George Feifer’s Breaking Open Japan, a new and comprehensive study of the crucial events in which an American naval commander, in the mid-nineteenth century, unlocked the heretofore secluded nation of Japan to relations with America and the rest of the world -- famously, without “firing a shot.”
The author puts you believably into the scene, then switches to a series of key background topics, social, historic and economic, that illuminate and explain the coming conflict between the two nations, as well as filling in the basics about the book's principal actor Commodore Matthew Perry, sent by President Fillmore with a powerful squadron of warships to establish relations with Japan.
Then back to the story:
“Dashing up the Uraga waterway, the ships ignored a large sign in French on a native boat: ‘Depart immediately and dare not anchor!’ Anchor is what they proceeded to do, obeying their commander’s flag signal to form a line of battle outside the town and to conduct no communication whatever with the shore.”
I quote these lines because the sense of suspense, bolstered by existential detail, is necessary to get us hooked on the strange, faraway story, and Feifer succeeds brilliantly on this level. Though there is little or overt violence, there is plenty of menace and drama in the tale of Perry’s critical two visits, enough to spread the story through some seventeen chapters.
Anti-imperialists and doves may be embarrassed by the arrogance of Perry’s tactics and his “keep the natives down” mentality, but no question: his strategy succeeded in spades. He meant to frighten the Japanese by the sight and sound of naval guns and ships larger and more menacing than anything they had seen before; the steamer-sail hybrids (the “black ships”) were novelties to the Japanese whose country had been for centuries deliberately cut off from technical and mechanical progress. The ships could maneuver with frightening speed, a quality that Perry exploited repeatedly to rattle Japanese nerves. His psychological warfare consisted in refusing to compromise on the tiniest detail and creating a personal mystique of inscrutable authority, not even coming out of his cabin to talk to low-ranking Japanese emissaries.
Perry’s view was that as the president’s plenipotentiary he was entitled to the respect due a sovereign; personally offended by the disrespectful treatment meted out by the Japanese to a U. S. commodore sent six years earlier, he insisted on absolute compliance with his demands which he saw as reasonable: "To demand as a right and not to solicit as a favor those acts of courtesy which are due from one civilized nation to another; to allow none of those petty annoyances which have been unsparingly visited upon those who have preceded him." (67) Paradoxically, he also offered “friendship.”
There is high drama and low farce in Feifer’s portrayal of the main episodes of this painful, ambivalent tale: besides the opener already quoted are the intricate negotiations before the first landing, the initial tense violation of Japanese soil by Perry, his troops and a 40 piece orchestra (at which time Perry handed over President Fillmore’s personal letter to the Emperor, offering the same dubious “friend-ship”), Perry’s notorious visits to Okinawa (marked by “pomp” and “insults”), and the final signing of the treaty in which the Japanese abjectly caved in to every demand.
Feifer’s intention however runs deeper than simply retelling the story. He also aims at providing deep cultural and historical contexts for the American intrusion and claims to be the first to have included the Japanese point of view of this event by means of extensive on site research.
Breaking Open Japan indeed provides an impressive picture of the social, economic and historic precedents of Perry’s nonviolent aggression. Some of the topics dealt with are: Japan’s principal encounters with the outside world, starting with the failed invasion by Kublai Khan in the 13th century, Japan’s curious and self-defeating policy of sakoku (seclusion), based on fear and distrust of Christianity (the Japanese believed the religion presaged western conquest), the evolution of the Tokugawa shogunate and Japanese society up to this point, as shaped by sakoku, and the character of Perry’s main adversary, the acting head of the shogunate Abe Masahiro.
Though seemingly forgotten by Japanese today, Lord Abe, as he was known, is built into a major figure in the narrative. The acting shogun being ill and the em-peror old and feeble, the top administrator’s role was magnified in the course of the unprecedented disaster that had beset his nation. Abe knew and worried about Perry’s plans which he had heard about from Dutch informants but accomplished little in the way of preparing defenses against the enemy, his efforts trammeled by warring factions in the feudal power structure. Still, Abe is an appealingly flexible figure, cultured, magnanimous and scholarly, in contrast to the single-minded commodore. Feifer gives him more credit than he does Perry for the nonviolent outcome of the showdown.
Abe’s inaction makes him less dynamic than Perry, but his dilemma in trying to ward off Japanese defeat was perhaps more challenging: “...the threat that colonial domination would follow such defeat -- just look at China cut up by the British [during the Opium Wars] --doubled the foolhardiness of attempting military salva-tion with so inferior a force, which would be worse than betraying Japan’s sacred seclusion.” (135)
Feifer is also good on the “heart of the matter, “ America’s powerful expansionist impulse during this period (of which Perry was perhaps the most singular but not only expression). As the author shows, there was plenty of rationale for “breaking open” Japan : “Americans' individual mixtures of religious. commercial, and patriotic priorities...” [that] “...usually included humanistic ones too: most who thought about it were genuinely convinced Japan would benefit from being lifted into the family of trading nations." (187)
The temper of the times in which these motives developed is well portrayed: the young democracy, fresh from the “conquest of the West” (i. e. California), setting out to compete with European imperialism -- which at that time was greedily dividing up the world (“the conquest of the East”) -- while showing its moral superiority in contemning the excesses of colonialism (as seen in England’s brutal “carving up” of China in the Opium Wars). America’s version of this triumphalism, Manifest Destiny, had just been fashioned, and a burgeoning economy urged expansion to the East; Japan lay precisely on the main route to China, perhaps the main reason for Perry’s mission, as he freely admitted.
A lot of cultural baggage also entered in: vulgar Darwinian racism (that proclaimed the “superiority of the White race”), religious cant (the Japanese were supposed to become aware of their “Christian obligation to join the family of Christendom”!), and an almost messianic belief in the rightness of America’s mission to civilize, enlighten and proselytize the world (echoes of which we sense in certain events going on today in Iraq) and, well, the “breaking open” of Japan became inevitable.
The issue of castaways, shipwrecked sailors whom Japan had treated mercilessly at times, locking them up in cages, also loomed large in American eyes, though Feifer implies that it was trumped up to justify the aggression and name-calling. The corresponding issue of Japanese refugees, refused by the mother country, also was used to exacerbate the situation, though one, the plucky Manjiro, became a key translator in the negotiations.
The essential passion however was not conquest but an optimistic belief in pro-gress, an ideology profoundly alien to late Tokugawa social and political stasis, but which we find still impinges problematically on US foreign policy over a century later.
(note: the order of the last two paras was switched)
The morality of the situation is by no means easy to judge. On the one hand we have the distasteful image of stronger society defeating a weaker, preindustrial one by means of superior mechanical force. The bigger guns won period. On the other, Japan was fortunate to be rid the self-defeating policy of sakoku without too much bloodshed. Had the U. S. abstained, a less scrupulous European powers might well have stepped in. In any case, Perry’s bullying ended Japan’s state of denial con-cerning the rest of the world, and she quickly turned course, instituting the Meiji reforms and becoming a major world naval power in just a few decades.
So perhaps Perry’s visit was of direct, short-term benefit to the Japanese in that it goaded them into quickly becoming a major power, yet the long-term consequences of that militarization could hardly have been desired by the original aggressor.
Hence, in his Afterword, Feifer questions the standard American appraisal of Perry. “Years of asking Americans about Perry,” he writes, “confirmed for me that the vast majority more or less agreed with an admirer who called him ‘the surgeon who operated ... on the suppurating sore of Japanese isolationism.’”(329) Asking Japanese about their opinions, however, (as he did with Japanese historians) produced a different image of Perry. Though the commodore is honored with a statue in Shimoda, some Japanese still resent him (the nonfiring of guns was a form of violence), and point to the some 100 years of unhappy relations between the two countries after the incident to argue against the style and substance of Perry’s intervention. Feifer cites the militaristic Prussian form of government adopted by the Meiji reformers shortly after Perry’s bullying visits as evidence that Perry triggered a basic shift in Japanese society that led to militarism on land and sea and eventually to Pearl Harbor and the War in the Pacific.
In view of this, how smug should Americans feel about Perry’s triumph? It is an important point and one that deserves our attention when our country finds itself involved in several new military adventures in the Middle East that flaunt the same kind of rationale: American cultural and political supremacy.
Feifer concludes that “casting off the destructive myth of the Commodore’s wise and benevolent mission would be a blessing.” (334) This may be difficult for readers who vicariously enjoyed the picture of Japanese pushed around by Perry (I was one of these on the first reading, I must admit), but for other readers with more open minds, Feifer’s points may be more than just wishful thinking.
The author ultimately doesn’t square the circle of these difficult historical and political issues but that’s a minor flaw in a work admirable for its syncretic sympathies, narrative verve and creative history writing. In an age of new imperial out-reach, this book should be required reading for thoughtful Americans who wish to explore a key episode in the history of their nation’s foreign relations with the “Far East.”
Colorful cramped Old Delhi
Friday, August 13, 2010
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Colin Thubron: Interview, London, June 2008
INTERVIEW WITH COLIN THUBRON: London, June 2008
BY JAMES DALGLISH
The door opens to the first floor apartment in a West London neighborhood so full of sycamores and shrubbery that it seems at first some kind of urban-rural utopia. This is the address of Colin Thubron who in his books at least prefers a more austere landscape. And now the novelist and travel writer is standing in front of me with a friendly smile that allows time for recovery from the discrepancy between photos and reality. Mostly it’s the shock of white hair and a face that is neither as intimidating or ruggedly Asiatic as some recent author shots suggest. He looks very fit for his age, however, and I can easily imagine him scaling the Assassins mountain barehanded as described in Shadow of the Silk Road.
His invitation to enter comes in a voice that my dull American ear hears as a RP intonation of perfectly pronounced syllables. The same refined sounds introduce me to the author’s life partner, Margreta de Grazia, a professor of English literature at the University of Pennsylvania. We sit in a spacious living room graced by a fireplace and lined with bookshelves (which I’ll later find include few travel titles and none of Thubron’s books). A wide window looks out on a garden/lawn.
Colin Thubron began his literary career with four travel books about three small countries – Syria, Cyprus, Lebanon -- and the city of Jerusalem. (Out of print in the US, they can be ordered from the UK.) More ambitious in 1978, he took on giant Russia - then the USSR - in his first big publishing breakthrough Where Nights are Longest. He turned to another giant, China, just opening in 1986 (Behind the Wall), then pushed into newly independent states of central Asia (The Lost Heart of Asia), then reencountered a post-communist Russia (In Siberia). His latest, reviewed in these pages, improves even upon that. His parallel novelistic career includes seven titles of concise, intense fiction.
Born in 1939, Thubron comes from an illustrious British family that, he acknowledges, gave him a number of privileges in life – but not including wealth, he insists. He’s always had to earn his own way as a fulltime author.
His half-American father was a descendant of Samuel Morse, the inventor of the Morse code. His mother descended from John Dryden, the first English poet laureate – which “fed into my feeling that writing was important.” He himself, unmarried, has no children.
His father’s foreign postings as military attaché provided Thubron his first travel experiences and stimulus to roam later in life. In a typically English colonial pattern, the young boy was educated at boarding schools in England while his parents served their nation abroad. On holidays, he would fly across the Atlantic in old Stratocruisers (Boeing’s first long range commercial aircraft) to visit them. “I think I got an early feeling of excitement about travel because of these transatlantic journeys which I would undertake alone.”
After Eton, the traditional incubator of British prime ministers, he went directly into publishing instead of first going to university (“which always amazes Americans,” he quips). Why the unusual career choice? “I already wanted to be a writer. I never had any doubt about what I wanted to do....It was a passion.” Soon after taking his first paying job was with Hutchinson publishers, he lit out on his own.
Modus operandi [could be a sidebar?]
As his readers will already know, Thubron carries very little into the field. Only what will fit into a small rucksack: one change of clothes, minimal bad weather gear, four-to six moleskins and a ball point pen. No recreational reading—only a phrase book or dictionary. As for money, he hides that somewhere. Plastic and ATM machines are making that aspect of travel easier, he notes, even in Siberia. He takes no camera or recorder.
Each project, he informs me, takes about three or three and a half years to complete. He spends as much as a year researching the country and studying its relevant languages, which prepare him for his most important sources, the people he will meet. Although his travel narratives seem scholarly, even donnish, in their factual backgrounds, Thubron not only attended no lectures at Oxford or Cambridge but is also not a trained specialist in any of the areas about which he has written. “The great material for the travel writer is his experience on the ground,” he insists. “That’s where such originality as he may lay claim to exists.”
Two interviews were not enough for me to discover at which stage of his writing Thubron injects his famous stylistic brilliance - or as a friend put it, his obsession with avoiding ordinary linking verbs. But I did learn that his post-travel production begins with processing his “densely packed notebooks,” the source of each travel book. He then transcribes by longhand the notes while fleshing out the narrative into what he regards as the real first draft.
Q: Between that and the published version do you make any revisions?
CT: Yes, umpteen. First, the notes... are very full. In a way, I’ve got the whole journey there in impressionistic splashes of words. Those get disciplined, you hope, shaped into something by longhand. When it’s eventually on the screen it seems suddenly to have lost the personality it had in handwriting. In handwriting it has a certain energy, but once in print it loses something. Then I start to smash it up. I have to reenergize it and also, paradoxically, to prune it down because it’s overwritten.
Q: Is it tough earning your living as a fulltime writer these days?
CT: As for economics, I'm secure now, but only became so after the publication of my first book on Russia (Among the Russians). Before then it was very tough.
Q: Does it help commercially to work in more than one genre?
CT: I don't think the writing of novels as well as travel books helps much commercially. My publics for each genre are very different. But it does help creatively. When I'm worn out by one genre, I go for the other!
Q; Why has Great Britain produced so much good travel literature?
CT: I have no ready answer. But I suspect it may have something to do with the institution of the boarding school: a peculiarly British phenomenon. It's not a fluke that almost all British travel writers are middle class and have been the victims of boarding school since the age of about eight. I think it inures us to a certain kind of self-sufficiency and isolation, and gives a sense of being able to cope alone. It's a very tough initiation into the world. I don't think it's altogether beneficial I could go on about this! But it does encourage a sometimes dangerous sense of invulnerability.
Q: How did you write your first book Mirror to Damascus?
CT: I’d traveled there with my parents, actually, when I was a student. And became fascinated by the inland cities of Syria… It’s always been the desert Bedouin that people have romanticized. But to me it was always the urban civilization. I was fascinated by cities like Damascus, Aleppo, and Hama. You wander these streets and you see nothing. You’ve got mud walls on either side, a door is left open, you look in, there’s a little marble paved courtyard and a lemon tree. You don’t know what is going on. I didn’t even know what a mosque was really. And so like all my books, it was a journey of discovery for myself. It wasn’t something I felt I knew about and was telling the reader [as an expert]. It was like taking the reader into the experience of my own astonishment, discovery, sometimes disillusion, whatever it might be.
Q: Could you describe your interest in a travel writing as a geographical or cultural passion?
CT: It’s both really. I think would put it like this. The actual business of traveling is exciting to me, being on the move in solitude, cut off from everything familiar. That has a certain geographical excitement. But I’ve always felt at least that I traveled not for its own sake but for an object, for a place. As you noticed, I do a lot of research, and get a strong sense of what a place is going to be like, and then get a passionate desire to go there. So there’s always this feeling the first thing is the place rather than the journey.
Q: How do you create vivid scenes in which the reader feels he’s reliving your journey?
CT: My style is sort of automatic now. I don’t really think about it. I don’t think: How am I going to say this? At least I try not to. I think about what I’ve got to say and hope that the writing will follow. So I go back to the notes... The notes have an immediacy, which a recollected journey would not have by itself alone. And it’s possibly from that the sense of lived immediacy comes from...
Q: The color of the sky, the weather...?
CT: Yes, all that’s gone down in great detail in the notes. Because those are the things you forget. After a few weeks, I find that the early experiences have faded. I mean you can usually remember how a conversation normally went. Or what a landscape looked like, or what a building looked like, but you can’t remember the precise expression someone used, or the texture of those rocks, or the exact color of that church wall... or whatever it is. That’s what I get down in notes and that’s often what gives life to the description. Those vivid little details, which bring things to life and those of course you forget unless you get them down in notes. People think that I must have a good memory but I don’t.
Q: Do you have a stylistic ideal?
CT: I do. I suppose I can only say that I’m trying to get simpler. A little bit more economical now. Which I think is a typical product of getting older. When one’s young, one’s very exuberant, everything gets poured in ... I’ve noticed with people who get older there’s a kind of economy creeps in, sometimes a dryness. Fortunately, I began with a super abundance of imagination and color so I can well do with a little pruning down that my instinct is to do now... My drift, if you will, now is toward something a little simpler and starker.
Q: How do you as a travel writer deal with the point of view that we are all culture bound and therefore can’t escape our own cultures or really understand those of other people?
CT: I think these two things: One is that in travel writing, as opposed to academic work, you introduce this person into the drama which is the “I” figure, walking across the landscape, having these conversations. How he reacts, how he feels is all going to be implicit in that narrative. ... The traveler is out there holding himself up for judgment whether he wants to or not. He’s this person who’s being staged, and his idiosyncrasies, his tastes, his values, are all up for the judgment of the reader.
The second thing is that, particularly in American academe, there’s an idea—maybe this comes from Foucault--that it’s all about power. The traveler has power. He is visiting a culture that he has some understanding of. He comes from a culture that the people he is traveling amongst don’t know at all. Presumably he is in most cases middle class and educated, traveling among peasants, factory workers and fishermen. Who knows? Anyway the power balance is unequal. But I don’t go with this extreme idea that this therefore makes encounters with the foreign country in some way invalid. This would turn all human contact into paranoia. So those two things I would weigh against the Orientalist argument from the travel writer’s point of view. They don’t eliminate for me the very obvious idea that you can’t lose your own culture. Of course you can’t but you can begin to be conscious of it and even use that in the travel narrative.
Q: Compared to some travel writers you keep yourself pretty much out of the narrative. Any reason for that?
CT: Maybe I’m very English, I don’t know. It’s not an intended technique, it just happens. I don’t have anything very interesting to say about that. I’m concentrating very much on the country I’m in. And I tend to take my discomforts for granted. Whatever I happen to be feeling or thinking is pretty secondary to the fascination with the country itself where I am. And my personal reactions and thoughts tend to get lost in that process. That may be a fault because I know people want a little bit more of me very often.
Q: OK. What about the creative element in your writing?
CT: Is that a polite way of saying do I make up things?
Q: No, what I meant was...
CT: The answer is no quite firmly. I don’t believe in fictionalizing. Certainly in England there’s a kind of literary---not exactly a movement but idea-- that it’s all right to turn your travel book into fiction and to make up stuff. I think the ordinary reader—and that’s the huge majority -- takes it on trust that what happened happened. And in my case, it seems a failure of imagination or a failure of the journey if you’ve got to make a lot of stuff up to make it interesting...Usually the experiences you have are so extraordinary you don’t have to make anything up.
Q: Actually I wouldn’t have questioned your veracity. But it’s a good issue...
CT: The other thing is that in my case, I’m traveling among cultures I don’t feel I sufficiently understand, and if I were to make up, say, what a Chinese reaction to something would be, or even a Russian one, I would go horribly wrong. What I have done sometimes is to conceal people’s identity... in almost all the books it’s been necessary to safeguard someone’s privacy, even their safety politically.
Q: And the dialogue?
The conversations are condensations of what was spoken and what was important to me rather than literally word for word [transcriptions]. A whole lot is left out.
Q In Shadow of the Silk Road, is the ‘intermingling of cultures,’ as you put it, the lead idea?
CT: Yes, I think so. In looking back I realized whether it’s a product of the Silk Road or not, the book was all about interfusings and the rich impurities of cultures, that were seen as discrete, just as at the end of the book where I describe the borders as being so porous, some of the political borders were almost meaningless. Whereas other borders that meant more ethnically such as the division between Turkic and Persian peoples, were not on the map. That was exciting of course. That gave it a certain a bit of buoyancy that the book on Central Asia didn’t have.
Q: If we look at Lost Heart of Asia and then at Shadow of the Silk Road, I wonder why you retraced many of the steps made in the earlier book.
CT: I was keen on going back because I’d become fascinated with the Silk Road, because I had an urge to go back into what I’d felt was the heart of Asia and ...to revisit those cultures which had always fascinated me over forties years of travel. In other words China, Islam, Central Asia, the ex-Soviet Union, the Middle East, all these old fascinations for me, and something that was able to unite them which was the Silk Road.
Q: Does Shadow of the Silk Road summarize your previous work?
CT: It seems like that. Because it is based on so many of my interests that have been with me always since I started to travel, both Islam and the ogres of the Soviet Union that I wanted to visit and humanize. The subjects of my books are not often chosen from any very intellectual thought. It was a sort of gut desire to go back to these places and look for a unifying theme.
Q: When you’re out in the wild on one of your austere trips, what do you miss the most?
CT: Well, it’s irritating to those who are close to me, but I miss very little. I’m very inspirited by where I am. I’m very curious. There’s a constant tension of not understanding. All the time I’m traveling in o rder to write like this, I feel I’m not understanding, I’m not making enough contact. So there is a continuous strain, which is preoccupying you. So you’re forgetting--or trying to forget--your own culture, your own home, your own background... but I sort of leave it behind the moment I’ve taken off in the air. I find those things drop behind very fast. So I don’t on the whole miss people. When it comes to creature comforts, I find that I don’t mind the discomforts of travel or accommodation. You’re usually so exhausted you could sleep anywhere. Probably, if there’s a physical thing I miss, it’s the idea of a good rich Indian meal or something like that, but there’s not much I miss.
Q: Do you ever take trips purely for pleasure to tropical islands with blue skies and seas?
CT: Yes, but not quite the ordinary pleasure ones. I enjoy scuba diving, so I’ve been in places like Sulawesi, Jamaica, Mauritius. This has been pure holiday. I learned scuba a long time ago on Heron Island in Australia on the Barrier Reef.
Q: In one of your imaginary dialogues with the Sogdian trader (In Shadow of the Silk Road), there is a strong hint that you may quit traveling. He asks you, haven’t you ‘seen enough’ for one lifetime? So are you finished?
CT: These are dialogues between my cynical self, and my romantic self. But no, I have no intention of quitting...I don’t think I’ll stop writing travel books. I already have another one in my head. ... I want to make a short journey in Western Nepal over the Tibetan border to Mount Kailesh, the Buddhist and Hindu Holy mountain. This will be a very different journey from the last one. This will be short and focused, almost a pilgrimage. It’ll be more personal... I don’t know if this will work as a book. It may resolve into articles. But that’s my plan in September.
Q: Finally, what is it about the travel genre that attracts you?
CT: As for the form of travel writing, I think it's the sheer flexibility of the medium I find most attractive. A travel book is a very personal blending of the author's interests, so it can be a license, perhaps a dangerous one, to indulge in all sorts of passions and preferences - in my case the interaction of past and present, and the probing (in personal encounters) of people's beliefs and values, above all. The 'first person' narrative allows uniquely--outside autobiography--for the author to air his own feelings and thoughts, sometimes quite transient ones, and this gives a living texture to the work that appeals to me. But of course it's not only the form of the travel book that appeals to me, but the travel itself. The two are inseparable. Sometimes I even get a sense that it is the travel writing the book.
Q: Thank you, Colin Thubron, so much for your time.
First published in and reprinted by permission of Bloomsbury Review vol. 28: issue 5 (2008): pages 3, 18, 22.
BY JAMES DALGLISH
The door opens to the first floor apartment in a West London neighborhood so full of sycamores and shrubbery that it seems at first some kind of urban-rural utopia. This is the address of Colin Thubron who in his books at least prefers a more austere landscape. And now the novelist and travel writer is standing in front of me with a friendly smile that allows time for recovery from the discrepancy between photos and reality. Mostly it’s the shock of white hair and a face that is neither as intimidating or ruggedly Asiatic as some recent author shots suggest. He looks very fit for his age, however, and I can easily imagine him scaling the Assassins mountain barehanded as described in Shadow of the Silk Road.
His invitation to enter comes in a voice that my dull American ear hears as a RP intonation of perfectly pronounced syllables. The same refined sounds introduce me to the author’s life partner, Margreta de Grazia, a professor of English literature at the University of Pennsylvania. We sit in a spacious living room graced by a fireplace and lined with bookshelves (which I’ll later find include few travel titles and none of Thubron’s books). A wide window looks out on a garden/lawn.
Colin Thubron began his literary career with four travel books about three small countries – Syria, Cyprus, Lebanon -- and the city of Jerusalem. (Out of print in the US, they can be ordered from the UK.) More ambitious in 1978, he took on giant Russia - then the USSR - in his first big publishing breakthrough Where Nights are Longest. He turned to another giant, China, just opening in 1986 (Behind the Wall), then pushed into newly independent states of central Asia (The Lost Heart of Asia), then reencountered a post-communist Russia (In Siberia). His latest, reviewed in these pages, improves even upon that. His parallel novelistic career includes seven titles of concise, intense fiction.
Born in 1939, Thubron comes from an illustrious British family that, he acknowledges, gave him a number of privileges in life – but not including wealth, he insists. He’s always had to earn his own way as a fulltime author.
His half-American father was a descendant of Samuel Morse, the inventor of the Morse code. His mother descended from John Dryden, the first English poet laureate – which “fed into my feeling that writing was important.” He himself, unmarried, has no children.
His father’s foreign postings as military attaché provided Thubron his first travel experiences and stimulus to roam later in life. In a typically English colonial pattern, the young boy was educated at boarding schools in England while his parents served their nation abroad. On holidays, he would fly across the Atlantic in old Stratocruisers (Boeing’s first long range commercial aircraft) to visit them. “I think I got an early feeling of excitement about travel because of these transatlantic journeys which I would undertake alone.”
After Eton, the traditional incubator of British prime ministers, he went directly into publishing instead of first going to university (“which always amazes Americans,” he quips). Why the unusual career choice? “I already wanted to be a writer. I never had any doubt about what I wanted to do....It was a passion.” Soon after taking his first paying job was with Hutchinson publishers, he lit out on his own.
Modus operandi [could be a sidebar?]
As his readers will already know, Thubron carries very little into the field. Only what will fit into a small rucksack: one change of clothes, minimal bad weather gear, four-to six moleskins and a ball point pen. No recreational reading—only a phrase book or dictionary. As for money, he hides that somewhere. Plastic and ATM machines are making that aspect of travel easier, he notes, even in Siberia. He takes no camera or recorder.
Each project, he informs me, takes about three or three and a half years to complete. He spends as much as a year researching the country and studying its relevant languages, which prepare him for his most important sources, the people he will meet. Although his travel narratives seem scholarly, even donnish, in their factual backgrounds, Thubron not only attended no lectures at Oxford or Cambridge but is also not a trained specialist in any of the areas about which he has written. “The great material for the travel writer is his experience on the ground,” he insists. “That’s where such originality as he may lay claim to exists.”
Two interviews were not enough for me to discover at which stage of his writing Thubron injects his famous stylistic brilliance - or as a friend put it, his obsession with avoiding ordinary linking verbs. But I did learn that his post-travel production begins with processing his “densely packed notebooks,” the source of each travel book. He then transcribes by longhand the notes while fleshing out the narrative into what he regards as the real first draft.
Q: Between that and the published version do you make any revisions?
CT: Yes, umpteen. First, the notes... are very full. In a way, I’ve got the whole journey there in impressionistic splashes of words. Those get disciplined, you hope, shaped into something by longhand. When it’s eventually on the screen it seems suddenly to have lost the personality it had in handwriting. In handwriting it has a certain energy, but once in print it loses something. Then I start to smash it up. I have to reenergize it and also, paradoxically, to prune it down because it’s overwritten.
Q: Is it tough earning your living as a fulltime writer these days?
CT: As for economics, I'm secure now, but only became so after the publication of my first book on Russia (Among the Russians). Before then it was very tough.
Q: Does it help commercially to work in more than one genre?
CT: I don't think the writing of novels as well as travel books helps much commercially. My publics for each genre are very different. But it does help creatively. When I'm worn out by one genre, I go for the other!
Q; Why has Great Britain produced so much good travel literature?
CT: I have no ready answer. But I suspect it may have something to do with the institution of the boarding school: a peculiarly British phenomenon. It's not a fluke that almost all British travel writers are middle class and have been the victims of boarding school since the age of about eight. I think it inures us to a certain kind of self-sufficiency and isolation, and gives a sense of being able to cope alone. It's a very tough initiation into the world. I don't think it's altogether beneficial I could go on about this! But it does encourage a sometimes dangerous sense of invulnerability.
Q: How did you write your first book Mirror to Damascus?
CT: I’d traveled there with my parents, actually, when I was a student. And became fascinated by the inland cities of Syria… It’s always been the desert Bedouin that people have romanticized. But to me it was always the urban civilization. I was fascinated by cities like Damascus, Aleppo, and Hama. You wander these streets and you see nothing. You’ve got mud walls on either side, a door is left open, you look in, there’s a little marble paved courtyard and a lemon tree. You don’t know what is going on. I didn’t even know what a mosque was really. And so like all my books, it was a journey of discovery for myself. It wasn’t something I felt I knew about and was telling the reader [as an expert]. It was like taking the reader into the experience of my own astonishment, discovery, sometimes disillusion, whatever it might be.
Q: Could you describe your interest in a travel writing as a geographical or cultural passion?
CT: It’s both really. I think would put it like this. The actual business of traveling is exciting to me, being on the move in solitude, cut off from everything familiar. That has a certain geographical excitement. But I’ve always felt at least that I traveled not for its own sake but for an object, for a place. As you noticed, I do a lot of research, and get a strong sense of what a place is going to be like, and then get a passionate desire to go there. So there’s always this feeling the first thing is the place rather than the journey.
Q: How do you create vivid scenes in which the reader feels he’s reliving your journey?
CT: My style is sort of automatic now. I don’t really think about it. I don’t think: How am I going to say this? At least I try not to. I think about what I’ve got to say and hope that the writing will follow. So I go back to the notes... The notes have an immediacy, which a recollected journey would not have by itself alone. And it’s possibly from that the sense of lived immediacy comes from...
Q: The color of the sky, the weather...?
CT: Yes, all that’s gone down in great detail in the notes. Because those are the things you forget. After a few weeks, I find that the early experiences have faded. I mean you can usually remember how a conversation normally went. Or what a landscape looked like, or what a building looked like, but you can’t remember the precise expression someone used, or the texture of those rocks, or the exact color of that church wall... or whatever it is. That’s what I get down in notes and that’s often what gives life to the description. Those vivid little details, which bring things to life and those of course you forget unless you get them down in notes. People think that I must have a good memory but I don’t.
Q: Do you have a stylistic ideal?
CT: I do. I suppose I can only say that I’m trying to get simpler. A little bit more economical now. Which I think is a typical product of getting older. When one’s young, one’s very exuberant, everything gets poured in ... I’ve noticed with people who get older there’s a kind of economy creeps in, sometimes a dryness. Fortunately, I began with a super abundance of imagination and color so I can well do with a little pruning down that my instinct is to do now... My drift, if you will, now is toward something a little simpler and starker.
Q: How do you as a travel writer deal with the point of view that we are all culture bound and therefore can’t escape our own cultures or really understand those of other people?
CT: I think these two things: One is that in travel writing, as opposed to academic work, you introduce this person into the drama which is the “I” figure, walking across the landscape, having these conversations. How he reacts, how he feels is all going to be implicit in that narrative. ... The traveler is out there holding himself up for judgment whether he wants to or not. He’s this person who’s being staged, and his idiosyncrasies, his tastes, his values, are all up for the judgment of the reader.
The second thing is that, particularly in American academe, there’s an idea—maybe this comes from Foucault--that it’s all about power. The traveler has power. He is visiting a culture that he has some understanding of. He comes from a culture that the people he is traveling amongst don’t know at all. Presumably he is in most cases middle class and educated, traveling among peasants, factory workers and fishermen. Who knows? Anyway the power balance is unequal. But I don’t go with this extreme idea that this therefore makes encounters with the foreign country in some way invalid. This would turn all human contact into paranoia. So those two things I would weigh against the Orientalist argument from the travel writer’s point of view. They don’t eliminate for me the very obvious idea that you can’t lose your own culture. Of course you can’t but you can begin to be conscious of it and even use that in the travel narrative.
Q: Compared to some travel writers you keep yourself pretty much out of the narrative. Any reason for that?
CT: Maybe I’m very English, I don’t know. It’s not an intended technique, it just happens. I don’t have anything very interesting to say about that. I’m concentrating very much on the country I’m in. And I tend to take my discomforts for granted. Whatever I happen to be feeling or thinking is pretty secondary to the fascination with the country itself where I am. And my personal reactions and thoughts tend to get lost in that process. That may be a fault because I know people want a little bit more of me very often.
Q: OK. What about the creative element in your writing?
CT: Is that a polite way of saying do I make up things?
Q: No, what I meant was...
CT: The answer is no quite firmly. I don’t believe in fictionalizing. Certainly in England there’s a kind of literary---not exactly a movement but idea-- that it’s all right to turn your travel book into fiction and to make up stuff. I think the ordinary reader—and that’s the huge majority -- takes it on trust that what happened happened. And in my case, it seems a failure of imagination or a failure of the journey if you’ve got to make a lot of stuff up to make it interesting...Usually the experiences you have are so extraordinary you don’t have to make anything up.
Q: Actually I wouldn’t have questioned your veracity. But it’s a good issue...
CT: The other thing is that in my case, I’m traveling among cultures I don’t feel I sufficiently understand, and if I were to make up, say, what a Chinese reaction to something would be, or even a Russian one, I would go horribly wrong. What I have done sometimes is to conceal people’s identity... in almost all the books it’s been necessary to safeguard someone’s privacy, even their safety politically.
Q: And the dialogue?
The conversations are condensations of what was spoken and what was important to me rather than literally word for word [transcriptions]. A whole lot is left out.
Q In Shadow of the Silk Road, is the ‘intermingling of cultures,’ as you put it, the lead idea?
CT: Yes, I think so. In looking back I realized whether it’s a product of the Silk Road or not, the book was all about interfusings and the rich impurities of cultures, that were seen as discrete, just as at the end of the book where I describe the borders as being so porous, some of the political borders were almost meaningless. Whereas other borders that meant more ethnically such as the division between Turkic and Persian peoples, were not on the map. That was exciting of course. That gave it a certain a bit of buoyancy that the book on Central Asia didn’t have.
Q: If we look at Lost Heart of Asia and then at Shadow of the Silk Road, I wonder why you retraced many of the steps made in the earlier book.
CT: I was keen on going back because I’d become fascinated with the Silk Road, because I had an urge to go back into what I’d felt was the heart of Asia and ...to revisit those cultures which had always fascinated me over forties years of travel. In other words China, Islam, Central Asia, the ex-Soviet Union, the Middle East, all these old fascinations for me, and something that was able to unite them which was the Silk Road.
Q: Does Shadow of the Silk Road summarize your previous work?
CT: It seems like that. Because it is based on so many of my interests that have been with me always since I started to travel, both Islam and the ogres of the Soviet Union that I wanted to visit and humanize. The subjects of my books are not often chosen from any very intellectual thought. It was a sort of gut desire to go back to these places and look for a unifying theme.
Q: When you’re out in the wild on one of your austere trips, what do you miss the most?
CT: Well, it’s irritating to those who are close to me, but I miss very little. I’m very inspirited by where I am. I’m very curious. There’s a constant tension of not understanding. All the time I’m traveling in o rder to write like this, I feel I’m not understanding, I’m not making enough contact. So there is a continuous strain, which is preoccupying you. So you’re forgetting--or trying to forget--your own culture, your own home, your own background... but I sort of leave it behind the moment I’ve taken off in the air. I find those things drop behind very fast. So I don’t on the whole miss people. When it comes to creature comforts, I find that I don’t mind the discomforts of travel or accommodation. You’re usually so exhausted you could sleep anywhere. Probably, if there’s a physical thing I miss, it’s the idea of a good rich Indian meal or something like that, but there’s not much I miss.
Q: Do you ever take trips purely for pleasure to tropical islands with blue skies and seas?
CT: Yes, but not quite the ordinary pleasure ones. I enjoy scuba diving, so I’ve been in places like Sulawesi, Jamaica, Mauritius. This has been pure holiday. I learned scuba a long time ago on Heron Island in Australia on the Barrier Reef.
Q: In one of your imaginary dialogues with the Sogdian trader (In Shadow of the Silk Road), there is a strong hint that you may quit traveling. He asks you, haven’t you ‘seen enough’ for one lifetime? So are you finished?
CT: These are dialogues between my cynical self, and my romantic self. But no, I have no intention of quitting...I don’t think I’ll stop writing travel books. I already have another one in my head. ... I want to make a short journey in Western Nepal over the Tibetan border to Mount Kailesh, the Buddhist and Hindu Holy mountain. This will be a very different journey from the last one. This will be short and focused, almost a pilgrimage. It’ll be more personal... I don’t know if this will work as a book. It may resolve into articles. But that’s my plan in September.
Q: Finally, what is it about the travel genre that attracts you?
CT: As for the form of travel writing, I think it's the sheer flexibility of the medium I find most attractive. A travel book is a very personal blending of the author's interests, so it can be a license, perhaps a dangerous one, to indulge in all sorts of passions and preferences - in my case the interaction of past and present, and the probing (in personal encounters) of people's beliefs and values, above all. The 'first person' narrative allows uniquely--outside autobiography--for the author to air his own feelings and thoughts, sometimes quite transient ones, and this gives a living texture to the work that appeals to me. But of course it's not only the form of the travel book that appeals to me, but the travel itself. The two are inseparable. Sometimes I even get a sense that it is the travel writing the book.
Q: Thank you, Colin Thubron, so much for your time.
First published in and reprinted by permission of Bloomsbury Review vol. 28: issue 5 (2008): pages 3, 18, 22.
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